Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me
“Never buy priests’ socks from an ordinary shop, Dougal.
They’ll shaft you every time.”
Posts by David 132
5507 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
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Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor
Barclays Bank signs 100k license Copilot deal with Microsoft
Friday 30th May 2025 16:36 GMT 
Re: 15,000 spare seats
"Your new bundle with CoPilot is an extra $30/seat/year. Of course, we're flexible and don't want you to feel pressured - if you don't want CoPilot, your alternative is this bundle, which omits it, as well as use of the letters on the left-hand-side of the keyboard except on Wednesdays, and is very reasonably priced at an extra $100/seat/year. Entirely up to you."
Firefox 139 arrives for non-Chromium browser fans
Wednesday 28th May 2025 17:22 GMT
I won't miss Pocket
Obviously I can't speak for anyone else, but the Pocket integration was always the first thing I turned off on a new Firefox installation - along with CloseWindowWithLastTab, DoH, Sponsored Shortcuts, Recommended Stories ("Exceptional content curated by the Firefox family", blegh), Suggest Search Engines, and one or two other tweaks. Which might seem like a lot to have to change, but a) it's really not, compared to the bear-wrestling that I have to do every time I am mandated to use a new Windows box, and b) at least in Firefox, I can change these settings. Forced to use Edge recently, I was shocked-not-shocked to see just how much of its blatant user-monetisation behaviour was hard-coded and out of bounds.
OpenAI model modifies shutdown script in apparent sabotage effort
Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz
Tuesday 27th May 2025 21:22 GMT
Re: Thieves.
To (mis)quote an old Fry & Laurie sketch,
"I thought I saw something dark, vivid, and unpleasant"
"It was probably just your imagination."
(wandering off-topic, I know, but their best line was: "It was a warm summer's morning and I stopped to pick a buttercup. ...why people leave buttocks lying around, I'll never know."
Europe warns giant e-tailer to stop cheating consumers or face its wrath
Tuesday 27th May 2025 18:06 GMT
Re: Hmm, maybe not Amazon.
That's an old trick used by vendors on Amazon marketplace. Start off selling some cheap tchotchkes, accrue lots of positive reviews ("it does everything I'd expect a $1.99 'Hello Katty' knock-off pen to do, arrived promptly"), then swap products to something that has a lot more margin. As long as the listing ID doesn't change, the existing reviews and ⭐ratings will remain with it - bang, instant reputation for your $59.99 "20TB external SSD".
I thought Amazon had closed that particular loophole, but as Upton Sinclair so memorably put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’
Sunday 25th May 2025 17:33 GMT
Re: Run wires
For any readers in the Portland Oregon region - Surplus Gizmos is always awash with cheap fiber, switches, and SFP modules, not to mention surplus electronic equipment of the most esoteric sort (the fact that it's a mile down the road from several Intel manufacturing plants, an ASML site, and a half-dozen other semiconductor companies, is a clue). It's a veritable Aladdin's cave for the tech geek. I mention it because a good friend of mine works there.
Sunday 25th May 2025 17:23 GMT
Re: Just....
Yeah, I've seen - and used - that stuff on interior corners when plastering them, but having every square inch of the wall covered in it was a new one for me. The previous owner of the house was, um, eccentric - very paranoid about security, to the extent of fitting a keypad-equipped deadbolt lock on an interior door leading to the bedrooms. Let's overlook that the door in question is a flimsy 1.5"-thick interior panel one that could be punched through by a toddler.
Thursday 22nd May 2025 23:54 GMT
Re: Just....
I am currently helping a friend with some home remodeling. His 1960s house has, in place of modern paper-backed drywall/plasterboard [delete as applicable depending on which side of the Pond you are on], something analogous but using a fine metal mesh (think chicken-wire with a ~2mm aperture) as structural backing. How he gets any wifi signal whatsoever, I don't know. The previous owner of the house had run CAT5 throughout; I am beginning to see why.
Thursday 22nd May 2025 23:46 GMT
Re: clustered
When the engine is cold it hardly blows. When the engine gets some warmth it blows hard.
On the third hand, could you please explain that principle to my wife, who, upon getting into our ICE-powered car on a cold morning, will always crank the AC temperature up to MAX, despite my patient explanation that until there is heat in the system, it doesn't matter what temperature she asks for above ambient, she's not getting it?
(And before I am accused of propagating Les Dawson-like "take my wife" humour, I'll point out that she's a former electronic design engineer who really, really should know better.)
Even a humble keyboard is now political in Taiwan
Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond
Saturday 24th May 2025 07:36 GMT
Re: Mad
> Also, it'll take you a minimum of two hours to write anything because the AI assistant will constantly argue about your grammar, spelling, and content.
For some reason this comes to mind…
“Hi there! This is Eddie, your shipboard computer, and I’m feeling just great, guys, and I know I’m just going to get a bundle of kicks out of any program you care to run through me. I can even work out your personality problems to ten decimal places if it will help.”
What would a Microsoft engineer do to Ubuntu? AnduinOS is the answer
Microsoft revives DOS-era Edit in a modern shell
Russia expected to pass experimental law that tracks foreigners in Moscow via smartphones
Thursday 22nd May 2025 19:49 GMT
Re: '"But my other phone is also a Nokia clamshell, officer!"
>If you have ever been to Russia you would not consider messing with the border officers.
Then things have clearly become much, much worse as Putler's grip has tightened in recent years.
I was in Moscow about 20 years ago on business. Passing through immigration - which I don't remember being much worse than in any civilized country, with the possible exception of Heathrow - we were all given an official chit of paper that had to be presented at our hotel when checking in.
We arrived at our hotel and two members of our party realized that they had somehow bypassed the necessary line, and didn't have this paper. One, a fellow Brit, was shitting the proverbial bricks, with mental images of being deported to the Gulag or even forced to eat Borscht.
The other colleague, a Pole who'd grown up under the cruelty and idiocy of the Iron Curtain (and had many, many anecdotes to tell), was far more sanguine. He had them both go back to the airport, pay the necessary bribes^H^H^Hpenalties (in hindsight, I bet that made for an interesting Expenses claim) and within the hour, both colleagues were checked in and free to pursue a life of religious fulfilment, or rather, customer technology training.
VMware price hikes? Between 800 and 1,500%, claim Euro customers
Thursday 22nd May 2025 21:30 GMT
>no one (well, VMware to the reseller) won't give a quote until 30 days prior to the renewal date
Which is such a blatant "get the customer over a barrel" move that I'm amazed trade associations, national competition regulators & similar bodies haven't been screaming blue murder about it.
"We won't tell you how much the ransom is until it's waaaaaay too late for you to do anything about it".
Yes, a prudent customer could pre-empt this by prepping for & rehearsing a move to an alternative, as a fallback solution... but Broadcom clearly count on all too many C-suites vetoing such "speculative" and "unnecessary" expenditure :(
Builder.ai coded itself into a corner – now it's bankrupt
Neptune OS is Debian made easy but, boy, does it need some housekeeping
Freshly discovered bug in OpenPGP.js undermines whole point of encrypted comms
Windows reports two CPU speeds because one would be too simple
Wednesday 21st May 2025 20:47 GMT
Re: I thought..
Yep, hence the (very welcome) move about 20+ years ago, away from fixating on the clock speed as the be-all-and-end-all of processor performance. Which would you rather use, a 3.6GHz “Prescott” Pentium 4, or a 2.0GHz Core i7? On thread count, IPC, performance per watt, cache size, the latter trounces the former, and that’s even before you start looking at hardware video encoding/decoding and other specialist functions now commonly included in even base models. And Prescott, for the young’uns, was the one that pushed the P4P microarchitecture to its limits and as a result needed a heatsink the size of Yorkshire.
Clock speed is an irrelevance. In around ‘96, I built my first PC, with a Pentium 75MHz; with judicious and nerve-wracking adjustment of jumpers I was able to overclock it by a colossal and impressive-sounding 62%… or, more prosaically, a now-rather-piffling 45MHz. What’s 45MHz these days but a rounding error? If your shiny new multi-gigahertz CPU ran 45MHz less than its nominal speed (never mind the aforementioned built-in opportunistic underclocking) would you even notice? Or care?
Wednesday 21st May 2025 16:50 GMT
Re: The explanation is simpler, and far less sinister
Addendum, because I missed the edit window.
Just to be clear, what I wrote above is the explanation for the seemingly-random second speed that the Task Manager displays.
In other words, what your system has might be a "Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-11520K 3.8GHz" (numbers made up because I can't be bothered to pick a real example from ark.intel.com); that is the brand string returned by the CPUID instruction. The current speed of the processor, averaged across cores, is appended to that, giving something like "Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-11520K 3.8GHz 800MHz"; a moment later, as system load increases, it might be "Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-11520K 3.8GHz 1400MHz", for example.
Wednesday 21st May 2025 16:37 GMT
The explanation is simpler, and far less sinister
FTA: Chen put forward some suggestions as to why a manufacturer might include the number in the string. "Perhaps they do it to make it easier to detect overclocking," he said, "or systems being marketed as faster than they really are."
Far be it from me to contradict Raymond Chen, whose metaphorical tea I am not worthy to fetch, but the explanation for the two speeds is that modern CPUs rarely if ever run at their "nominal" speed. At least in the x86 world, most have built-in, opportunistic overclocking and underclocking.
As an example of the former, suppose that a two-core CPU is running one very demanding thread, maxing out one core and leaving the other idle. The CPU will choose to boost the speed of that busy core temporarily above the "maximum" speed; as long as the total power envelope of the package isn't exceeded, no harm done.
On the flipside, why keep a 3.6GHz CPU ticking along at that speed if it's running nothing more demanding than Notepad? Dropping the frequency of underused core(s) down to a bare minimum to save power consumption makes sense, whether on battery or AC platforms.
Intel calls this combination of behaviours Turbo Boost & SpeedStep - probably with lots of (TM)s and (C)s and (R)s, this being Intel - and it's been around for years; certainly since latter generations of the Pentium 4. And I'm sure AMD has an equivalent.
A real-time CPU frequency monitor like CPU-Z will make this clearer and show the actual speed(s) as processor load changes.
SEC SIM-swapper who Googled 'signs that the FBI is after you' put behind bars
Monday 19th May 2025 23:55 GMT
Re: I'm an Author
That’s reminiscent of the famous fuss about the words “Swordfish”, “Omaha”, “Juno” etc - all names of landing beaches - appearing in a Daily Telegraph crossword very shortly before D-Day in 1944.
OTOH, there is a shopping mall not too far from me here in the States named “Market Centre”. I pointed the signs out to an in-law (born and raised in the area) a few years ago and she admitted that she’d never even noticed the spelling.
Noah Webster has a lot to answer for!
Apple to add fresh accessibility features for 2025
Monday 19th May 2025 06:20 GMT
Re: "Lie-nucks"
For some reason when I say “colour”, Siri transcribes it every single time as “Kulla”, complete with the capital letter. Is that even a word? It’s certainly not a word or name I have ever deliberately used.
Whilst ranting on the topic, indulge me with a related one… I live just outside a town whose name ends with “-berg”. I can have a route to it open in Apple Maps on my phone, and yet when I dictate a message to SWMBO along the lines of “nearly home, just approaching ~-berg”, Apple transcribes it as “-burgh” - again, every single time.
So I don’t quite share the author’s sunny appraisal of Apple’s assistive features, no.
Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search
VPN Secure parent company CEO explains why he had to axe thousands of 'lifetime' deals
Microsoft facing multibillion legal claim over how it sells software
You think ransomware is bad now? Wait until it infects CPUs
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