Posts by Pirate Peter

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

Re: The dark overlord speaks ....

I can't work out if your quoting Micro$oft or trump there :) :)

‘Infuriated’, ‘disappointed' ... Ex-VMware customers explain why they migrated to Nutanix

not the first time VMWare has tried to Roger its customers

I remember 10-15 years ago VMware tried to force through a licensing model change based on memory in the host servers which also lead to eye watering cost increases

that lead to a mass exodus of customers to Microsoft Hyper-V and 6 months or so later the removed the new licensing based on memory, but the damage was done

so they are again trying to bend their customers over again to royally Roger them, that would make me steer well clear and never go near them again

British govt agents step in as Harrods becomes third mega retailer under cyberattack

I.T. and business continuity as seen as costs with little benefit (until the shit hits the fan)

the problem is DR / BC is seen as providing little cost benefit by many companies, its a "necessary evil"

DR/BC don't generate income or value for share holders

I.T. systems are also seen as a cost, with little benefit, but when they break or become unavailable everyone screams "we didn't realise they were so critical"

boards and managers need to get on board with cyber security, staff need to do the training about malware, spyware, phishing and ransomware as many attack start with an email or infected file sent to ordinary staff

until the attitude of staff / boards change companies will be vulnerable

Microsoft goes native with Copilot. Again

Re: users can ask questions about their PC, such as :

same as I am doing ahead of the demise of win 10

upgrade windows to Linux :)

1 of my 3 win10 machines was migrated to a raspberry pi4 (was doing simple stuff with receiving weather satellite images)

2 machine to go, linux Mint seem to be my favoured weapon

Troubled French outsourcer Atos finds pot of gold at the end of UK state bank Rainbow

Re: Rainbow

and the job has been zipped up :)

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

a Post Office?

we lost our last real one several years ago, they are all in a little corner of dubious corner shops where there is a language barrier now and no way am I using them

Re: Confirms my decision...

the LJ4 had a common fault

the lens in the laser assembly used to get filthy leading to faint print

the official HP answer was replace the laser assembly at a stupid cost, mine was undo the screws and clips on the top go the assembly, and with some IPA and lint free cloth clean the lens (NOT the rotating mirror) and they were like new again

I gave up on HP laptops years ago, cheap rubbish, and HP desktops you can see are built to a price to maximise profits, since they bought 3com their networking has gone down hill as well

You begged Microsoft to be reasonable. Instead it made Copilot reason-able with OpenAI GPT-o1

this is why I will never subscribe to any M$ service

"This is just two weeks after increasing the cost of Copilot-infused Microsoft 365 by $3 per month and the release of DeepSeek R1"

I only ever buy a 365 activation once a year, I pay about 75 pounds for an 365 family activation code for 12 months services , I keep getting pestered that "I could save money by paying monthly direct to Microsoft" not going to happen, I made that mistake 20 years ago with an Xbox subscription, it took several months and lots of calls to cancel the charge on my credit card, never going down that route again

it gets better, M$ want me to add a copilot pro monthly subscription as I only get 60 co pilot credits a month shared by all 6 licenses of the 365 family subscription, if I was to do that for all 6 users the additional cost would be 1450 pounds !!!! on top of my 75 pound 365 family, are they mad????

I also got the email the other day "your 365 has just got better with integrated copilot", what a load of BS, first response was to search and disable copilot in all my apps, but its a win win for m$, A:- they can claim another installation of copilot (to justify the eye watering amount of investor cash they have sunk into this POS) and B: - I am not using it so they incur no costs, just more profit

I am slowly repurposing and testing linux and libra office on an old PC to confirm I can replace my aging win 10 devices, as no way I am having Win 11 on personal kit, bad enough work have inflicted it on me

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

shit in = shit out

when you look at the training data, especially if they incorporate post from arseache, x/y/z or what ever its call now how can you expect AI to even come close to a sensible answer let alone a factually correct answer

LLM's are just oversize prabability databases, they break inputs up into tokens, the work out what we are asking (or rather take a wild stab at it) then the output is based on the probability of A following B, B following C etc

they are classed as "non deterministic" i.e. you can ask the same question a. number of times and depending on the optimisations you will get similar but different answers each time

which is why every AI systems answer normally has a tag line of "check the answers for accuracy"

if you have to fact check every answer an AI system delivers why waste time asking it in the first place?

Microsoft flashes Win10 users with more full-screen ads for Windows 11

win 11 no thanks

when i upgrade the OS on my 3 devices running win 10 it will be to linux,

i have to suffer that POS M$ call win 11 on a work laptop, and after using it on there, no way do i want it on my own machines

as has always been the case, every other version of windows is a POS

currently weighing up a MAC mini to replace 2 of my aging win 10 laptops that were upgraded from win8.1, as i replaced my surfacebook 2 with a macbook air after seeing win 11 in action on my work laptop

Judge tosses publishers' copyright suit against OpenAI

it comes down to what are LLM''s doing with the information they slurp

if you go into what a LLM does with training data you will find it "tokenises" the data

that is it splits sentences into a series of numerical tokens, a token can be a word or part of a word, or even a comma or other punctuation mark

what it does then is put them in a large data base so it can run queries, but in simple terms the output of the queries is not full sentences its the probability of a word coming after another word in a particular context

if you ask "what colour is a cat" you will likely begin with something like "a cat is" with high probability, then you will get several choices like "most often", "very often", "sometimes" then a colour "black", "white", "ginger", "blue", "green", "red" etc and each option will have a probability of coming after a previous word / statement

so the answers will rarely be classed as a derivative work, as it will bear no resemblance to the training data ingested, so copyright is not the right way to approach this issue

most likely to succeed IMHO is if there is a "no commercial use" clause on the website data, as clearly training a LLM will be for commercial gain

the other option Is if the data / website owner has robots.txt in place with the relevant entries for a AI Scraper bot and they can show in logs the bot accessing and ignoring the entries in robots.txt, although many argue robots.txt is an informal agreement that reputable sites like google etc honour but that it has no legal status, so likely to fail unless the company scraping the site and ignoring the robots.txt file says in their website / terms somewhere they will honour it

but the biggest problem is that due to the tokenisation process once data is ingested there Is no way to remove it from an LLM

Microsoft rolls out AI-enabled Notepad to Windows Insiders

AI infection is turning into pandemic

AI to me is like Alexa or google home

great for a few minutes of fun, then you get bored as not really useful

I have yet to see a real use case for it that makes the cost justifiable

IBM: Insurance industry bosses keen on AI. Customers, not so much

complete fail

after trying to retrieve a quote i had submitted online but at the last page told call this number i had the misfortune to end up with one of these AI bots, after 4 calls going round in circles and it directing me to incorrect options, or unable to understand the numbers i was providing i ended up yelling at it to let me talk to a human

it then dumped me in the general customer services queue who after i told what i needed dumped me back to the queue with the AI bot, after about 30 minutes of going round in circles i eventually ended up with a human in the right department

only for them to say they couldn't locate the saved quote i had completed online

frustrated i told them not to bother as i would find an insurance company that could provide a service

Copilot's crudeness has left Microsoft chasing Google, again

M$ share of openAI worth $80Billion

"OpenAI carries a valuation of $157 billion. That makes Microsoft's stake worth nearly $80 billion."

for now until the inevitable happens and the AI bubble bursts and M$ share of OpenAI drop to 10 cents

MS, Google, AWS etc are all pushing AI like crazy knowing its a POS, but having invested eyewatering amounts of cash in this bubble their investors are demanding to see a return on their investments before it bursts and the cash disappears up the internets tail pipe

currently it is not going to happen,

having recently completed a AI qualification the main use cases are based around chatbots (which annoy the hell out of people) and knowledge bases, and businesses are not going to spend the money required to develop and baby sit / monitor them for the small financial savings

GenAI spending bubble? Definitely 'maybe' says ServiceNow

GenAI is about to enter the dreaded "trough of disillusionment."

"In Gartner's latest Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, the global consultany noted that GenAI is about to enter the dreaded "trough of disillusionment."

i think for many who are not still high on the GenAI koolaid its at the bottom of the trough and out the plughole

i have yet to see any benefit of Gen AI apart from poorly written text or code

GenAI dominates the narrative in ERP, but what is it good for?

and what happens if you don't want or trust AI products / vendors

too many stories like the maccy D one where AI has had to be pulled as not fit for purpose as putting bacon on ice-cream and adding 100's of chicken nuggets to orders :), google recommending people eat glue (could be one way to stop politicians spouting BS), M$ co-pilot screenshot system, the list goes on

i have notice a definite reduction in accuracy of search results from google, bing etc since AI has been added

currently the new open AI deal with apple is not hitting the EU just yet but i will be steering clear of IOS18 for now until the dust settle, or go and dust off my old nokia 6310i :)

At Apple, AI stands for 'Apple Intelligence' – and it's coming to everything

Re: I have one question

for one will be avoiding IOS 18 and MacOS. 15

I want nothing to do with anything ChatGPT, whether apple says its disabled or not

search engine results from google, bing etc are less accurate since the search engines have been inflicted with "AI"

Windows 10 users report app gremlins after Microsoft update

time to start investigating linux installs :)

i will not touch win 11 with anyone else's 10 foot barge pole

when my surfacebook 2 failed i looked at win 11, and said NAH and replaced it with a mac book

same will happen with my couple of old machines running win 10, once i can no longer use them they will get wiped and Linux installed, had enough of M$ forcing changes on me

Raspberry Pi on IPO plans: 'We want to be ready when the markets are ready'

And what could possibly go wrong

what could possibly go wrong once you have to keep share holders on side :(

surely the dividends the shareholders get paid would be better used for R&D, educational support etc

Keep the Pi as not for profit as it currently is

Ford seeks patent for cars that ditch you if payments missed

Re: Shrieked

how long before there is a mass market in wheels clamps owners can fit to block their cars driving off for repossession etc?

so easily foiled

a plan as well thought out as Wile E Coyote's plans to catch the road runner :) :)

What could possibly go wrong???

a computer and remote control are involved what could possibly go wrong

human error of entering wrong reg?

automated systems we all love them and the way they never get it wrong (how many times have we had incorrect automated decisions?)

or the car being sold on and the system not updated

then if cameras are remotely activated in the car where does that leave privacy laws? as you can't tell which way a vehicle is pointing and what may be visible outside the vehicle

the list of potential issues is endless

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Re: Elon never wanted to buy Twitter in the first place

I think the most appropriate icon is a foot with a shotgun pointing at it

because musk has unloaded both barrels several times into his feet :)

most seem to have taken 3months pay and headed for the exit

looking at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63672307 it seems less than a 1/3 of staff left and many critical areas have none at all

the article suggests twitter has a short time before a critical system outage takes the platform offline with none one in the company to fix it

need a "foot shooting" icon, or a "foot in mouth" icon :) both would appear to be highly appropriate for anything musk does

Stop calling, stop calling... ICO goes gaga after home improvement biz ignores warnings

only way to do this is make the directors liable for the whole fines and banned from being a director, and each time they commit the same offence (regardless of company name) the previous fine is doubled and length of the ban doubled

while they can hide behind a company and walk away and start up again the same day under a different name they will not stop

too much lip service is paid to data protection with just the odd "look what we did" big fine published to justify the ICO and make it look like they are working for the people (B******ks)

It's [insert month] of 2016, and your Windows PC can still be owned by [insert document type]

kb3519398 / MS16-072 breaks group policy on a domain

Just found this one while onsite today

http://windowsitpro.com/patch-tuesday/patch-tuesday-security-update-group-policy-breaks-group-policy

group policies fail to apply with “unknown reason” if you do a gpresult /v

peter

Windows 10 won't come to old WinPhones until some time in early 2016

Re: Just got a 950XL

@shaun2

you will love it, the email client and calendar on wp10 is far better than 8.1, I have an old Lumia 520 run winphone 10 on the insider fast track it is a big improvement over 8.1

Re: Almost as good

"Just kidding. iCertainly don't have a windoze phone!"

I do, and like it, for me the lesser of 3 evils

all major phone OS's are trying to grab you data and monetise you and encourage you to buy apps etc

winphone may have the smallest app store but it is not full of the rubbish of the other two, the phone does what I want , make calls and does texts and the few apps I needs (trains and weather) are there

the interface is easier to use than android, and I don't have to suffer apples tax because you can only use their brand of things like the apple watch will only charge from an apple branded wireless charger etc

Win10 PCs still stuck on slow boat from China, warehouses empty

windows 10 is an improvement on 8.1

I actually quite like 10, BUT you have to turn off so many settings to stop M$ from snooping more than the NSA it takes a while to set it up

Even runs nicely in my 7" tablet,

But all the cool features like Cortana are not available unless you sign in with a Microsoft account and gift them all your web history, location and soul

Still a lot of niggles in it

Also all you seem to get in windows update are a single rollup package, so if that is the way they are going to play it with the business version I can't see many adopting it and 7 will become the new XP

EE turns up speed knob EVEN FASTER on 4G spectrum

but no nokia 925??

so, 3 and vodafone have had the nokia 925 for several weeks, the EE store in lakeside claimed not even to know of the 925 despite posters outside their shop for the 925 on vodafone

and they wondered why i walked?? if they are not aware of the latest phones how can i be sure they know their latest tarrifs??

i am disappointed at EE and T-Mobiles offerings so will probably not upgrade early, but wait til i can jump to 3, cheaper tarrif, no download limits £31/month and 925 is free, t-mobile judging by 920 tarrifs £31/month gets me less than GB data and around £149 cost for phone on top

speed means nothing, if the basic amount of data is so small and then punative excess usage charges apply

Motorola minimum-wage sheriffs ride in to SAVE the HIGH STREET

assuming anyone uses instore wifi

the price comparisom scenario depends on customers accepting instore wifi,

i know i never will due to the snooping etc that can and does go on, but surely as is already known burying a clause about " you agree to be monitored" in the small print of T's and C's does not constitute "informed consent" and the EU already made that clear regard BT's contract changes to try and make phorm legal

also you have the issue "same as phorm" about website content being used for commercial gain as the website such as amazon has not given permission for their data to be intercepted and used against them in a competitive market

and yes i agree with the poster above, the badges are more likely to be used as a stick to beat the employee with rather than drive up customer service as they are design to do

all the time you go in pc world with there carefully layed out mechandise with cheapest on the left and more expensive on the right and the sales person is paid commision you will not get good advise for the customer, only good advise for the sales person commission and rarely are the two the same

problem is more and more people are becoming tech savy, or take someone tech savvy with them and the BS spouted by the sales team leads to a loss of confidence of the customer and a lost sale

i have corrected sales people in various stores and even been asked to leave after one lost a sale of several thousand because i exposed the lies he was telling the customer, good fun though

Want your social media to swing? First, get the staff onboard

and how do you stop your competitors using the information against you

the more information you put on social media, the more leaks out for your competitors to use against you

unless you have closed groups with everything locked down you provide head hunters, competitors and every man and his dog access to your skill base and internal information

putting anything other than marketing information of social media is commercial suicide

imagine if you had uploaded a number of PR photos onto something like instagram, you then find out they have sold your images to a competitor because they changed the T'c and C's

the company i work for tried something similar with a closed system which was outsourced so the management could trawl it for skills etc, when asked if we had to put all details in we were told it was not compulsory so 90+% put just the minimum name and address in

the data was offshore with no safeharbour agreement and outside EU DPA area, sorry not going there and HR could not answer questions on data security, at which point BIG fail

the only people interested in these sort of things are those with a vested interest in getting their hands on your personal data

Amazon: Pay more for Kindle Fire, smoke ads from slabs

£15 for no ads hmmm!!

and how many ads would they have to serve to make £15 from a single users??

lots and lots, and if users are happy to stump up £15 up front how is that going to affect their bottom line ?

quite nicely up me thinks

so users get no adds for what they think is a small price and amazon get a nice chunk of wedge for basically doing nothing,

question is are they still gathering data, just not serving the ads? if they are they are still winning even more

time to check small print me thinks

Windows 8 to grab iPad market share wrested back from Android

Windows 8 to grab iPad market share wrested back from Android

Windows 8 to grab iPad market share wrested back from Android

goes along with other classic one liners

the world is flat,

moon is made of cheese

if you sail over the horizon you fall off the edge of the world

just about sums up what i think of M$'s chances

'Google's crap for business' - CIOs give ad giant dose of reality

Google needs to change its cost, licensing and privacy fineprint to bag more enterprise clients

so "According to the Forum, Google needs to change its cost, licensing and privacy fineprint to bag more enterprise clients "

shock horror, problems with a big global outsourcer privacy detail, costs and licensing

thats the problem when your data is held by an overseas company with data centres all round the world (not just having a go at oogle here, many others as well),

in the EU we have DPA, if the data is in the US it can be held under "safe harbour" agreement ( but that is a voluntary agreement), many other countries you have to just your chances. for instance look at the instances of off shored call centre data breaches when they were the big thing until consumers voted with their feet / money

problem is when your data is held in the cloud, who owns the data, who can access the data, and who controls how long the data is retained for on backup after you leave the cloud?

also how can a company audit access controls to their data when they don't control the infrastructure it runs on?

to many questions for me with cloud based apps,

Volkswagen Up!

what about the skoda citigo - same platform and better if you are not a badge snob

no mention of the other VAG cars based on the same platform, that are cheaper if you are not a badge snob

look at the Seat Mii, or the Skoda Citigo

the skoda is better equiped, cheaper and has been available in 5 door format since launch unlike the VW up which will not have a 5 door variant until q4 2012 or even q1 2013

in the auto express group test the skoda was more economical than the other 2, better equiped and cheaper like for like factory fit options

Microsoft hands out tools to sneak Skype onto new PCs

install skype and surrender your bandwidth

i do not allow skype on any pc in my house as i do not wish skype to use my bandwidth or computing power for their profit

if you have skype installed, sufficient bandwidth and a average or better pc it will use you as a super node to route other people calls so they do not need to invest so much in their own infrastructure

and it has complex code to avoid blocking by firewalls, will use high ports, then port 80 (http) then port 443 (https) to establish connections and bypass firewall filtering / blocking

you have been warned, remember their is no such thing as a free lunch

BT, TalkTalk lose final appeal against Digital Economy Act

lets put this through the bullshit detector !!!

<b>Though we have lost this appeal we will continue fighting to defend our customers’ rights against this ill-judged legislation," the telco added.</b>

good god the detector overloaded and exploded

lets put it through the isp speak translator now

result:-

"we can't make any money out of enforcing this and it will cost us a fortune in time to respond to request, not to mention the cost of sending out all those letters

and if we are forced to disconnect any customers we have lost all that revenue that we have fought so had to lock in with unfair long term rolling contracts with no easy get-out options.

we also reserve our right to be the only company to exploit our customers"

i think that says it all

Would you go to Facebook for mobile tech support?

faceache or offshored call centre???

dont have a faceache account so the leaves only offshored call centre

but i would rather give my credit card number to an offshored call centre than give any information to faceache

basically you would be screwed by both but at least the offshored call centre you might be able to order a good takeaway or have a laugh at them trying to see how far you can get them off their script

Spotify tethers future to Facebook

how will facebook use the data collected??

wil they use it to remove fake accounts where the spotify information does not match the faceache information??

you can just see them rubbing their grubby hands and wonder what new fields to put in their database to accomodate this new treasure trove of information, and once they have all of it they will ditch spotify and find another mug company to data rape of their customer information

never trusted FB, never had an account, never will

RIM share price nosedives following stinky numbers

playbook failed for same reason as hp fondle slab

poor spec and over priced

i looked at both and decided i could buy a decent laptop for what they wanted me to pay for a oversized media player / web browser with little capability for expansion or connecting to anything useful

HP's UK PC boss: We're going nowhere

could this indicate people thought it was over priced??

at more than the price of a reasonable laptop wit little if any more functionaility than a smart phone what do they expect?

it is basically a wifi enabled browser that doubles as a media player and photo frame, you can download a few "apps" which are gimicky and you will easilly get bored with

no expansion with SD cards etc, no 3g, tied to HP branded docks and keyboards and WEBOS which is proprietory to HP until andriod is ported over shortly TOTAL FAIL

poor product which was over priced in the current climate, HP do not have the appeal of apple where people buy it because it has the apple logo on, HP and other manufacturers have to build worthwhile product at a reasonable price

HP failed until the price fell to a level people though was reasonable for the product

Rescue privacy before it vanishes forever

when will people learn

when will people learn that with these "free" services like google+, twitter, facebook etc, THEY ARE THE PRODUCT FOR SALE

simples,

the idea you give as much information as possible to the system, and ideally share it with the world and his dog, the the system (G+, faceache etc) then uses it for income from adverstising (in effect sells it to the highest bidder)

they even go out of their way to create API's for pay customers (eg advertisers) to be able to data mine YOUR information, so this is the reason they want you to share stuff publically, as if you say it is private thay are not able to make it public to their customers the paying advertisiers

that said unless they had paying customers (the advertisiers etc) the service would not be free

you can't have it both ways

but you do have a choice of using it or not putting information on it you do not want made public

Facebook growth slows in stalkerbase heartlands

invasion of privacy and viruses

invasion of privacy and viruses is how i sum up facebook to people who ask me about it

when you look at all the recent news about FB it has all been about how new settings/ feature have been quietly turned on to enable more data to be grabbed and shared before you realise

and most of the viruses i have had to clean up off friends pc's i am told by them came from FB (mainly games most seem to think)

never seen the need to share my life with the FB , the world and his dog so never had an account, nor do i plan to

i do have a twitter account but it is locked down and i refuse all followers, just use it to look at a few people

what we are seeing i think is people getting bored with the toy of FB, relialising there is no such thing as a free lunch and working that FB is selling their data to the highest bidder

i noticed the other day the HM GOV plans to allow you to log into government websites with your FB account,

thats great, gift all your personal / medical details to a US company that can be compelled by the FBI to release any data it has on you

it just gets worse

Best Buy slams brakes on UK stores amid spending freeze

seen better kit and deals at a computer fair

i visited the essex store a month or so ago,

it was poor;y lit, i was looking for laptops and what i saw was very limited and little current models instock, most seemed to be end of lines and i thought prices were high even compared to pcworld (now that is bad)

e.g. only had iPad 1, no iPad 2's in sight

not inpressed i have seen better gear and prices in a dodgy east end computer fair

needless to say walked in, looked for less than 5 minutes and walked out without buying a thing

if that is their business model, can't see them being around to long

ISPs and Vaizey set to bump heads over default porn filter

and how long??

"This approach is rejected by Safermedia, which takes the line that an opt-in system, verifying that a user is over 18, is a simple common sense protection for children."

and how long before a teenager gets a freing to set up a profile so they can access adult content?

the same friend who goes into the local off licence and buys the drinks using the money provided to them by the under age drinker so long as they get a free bottle or two

its another case of low hanging easy fruit that makes big headlines but actually achieves bugger all of the objectives

just puts yet more holes in the rights of UK citizens and then the list of filtered topics / material will increase until we can only see tesco and asda's websites

Oh noes – they've stolen the internet!

let me guess

let me guess, the tea leafs were after copper cabling due to the scrap value being high at the moment

ho hum, now have to wait for the signal cabling to be nicked on my local branch line as it was twice last time copper prices were high

Creepy as hell: Facebook developers get to know you better

and why do advertisers or developers need an adress or mobile no?

why do advertisers or developers need your home address or mobile number?

not to provide any legit service on faceache,

the only thing i can see is to sell it on for profit to other ad agencies or address lists, but hold on if you believe all the carp about faceach, then every man and his dog is listed (bar me and a few other sane people and non sheep)

or to link online and offline data to create a mega profile for people

seems like yet another reason (to add to the already massive pile) to not having a faceache account

mines the one without faceache watching me

ICO makes mincemeat of nativity data protection piffle

dpa excuse is old had

more often "child protection rules" are now used not DPA as the excuse to be kill joys at the school play or any other events where parents like to take photos,

the photos to be used to embarass said child when they get old enough to have a serious boyfriend or girlfriend

i have had this where a child is from a single parent environment and that parent does not want photos taken as the other parent may find them during an ongoing court case or for other legal reason

but that is a rare case

Chinese telecoms giant furiously scrubs links to Phorm

NO BUT !!!

@will

it only makes lots of money for the ISP (although peanuts as far as their total income) at the expense of the privacy and data interception of the ISP customer

there is absolutely no benefit to the ISP customer, it is all one sided in the direction of the ISP

NASA's new 'Bullet' airship to fly from Moffett Field

a new el reg unit of measurement

so instead of horse power are airships rated in cattle?

whatever next, plastic bags rated in goldfish (like when you win at the fair)