Posts by Pirate Peter

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

only 3% willing to pay to use AI slop

"or come up with uses for AI that excite more than the 3.3 percent of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who are willing to pay for Copilot?"

so all those billions pissed down the drain on AI Co-Pilot SLOP and only 3.3% are willing to pay for it?

and how many of those are internal users at M$ vibe coding all this crap and bugs

90+% of the small number of people I know use co-pilot only for 1 thing, teams transcription summarisation and that's it (oh, it can produce some funny images of trump spitting his dummy out and losing his shite :) )

Azure outages ripple across multiple dependent Microsoft services

Vibe coding strikes again??

I have heard (off the record from someone who worked at MS ) the internal MS staff have to use AI tools for all coding, and not allowed to write code by hand

so I wonder how much of this is relying on AI to generate the code for these updates and patches, then using AI tools to test it before deploying

if it is the case, my answer would be that if they can't make it work reliably why should we use it

I have already seen the mess one of our devs is making using various "AI coding tools" and how much longer it is taking to clean up when it all goes wrong, as it does more often than not

Sat Nad declares Windows 11 has a billion users – just don't bother asking for details

Re: The real reasons?

I bought a Lenovo without an OS to avoid the Microsoft tax (saved £120 on the PC) and just loaded mint onto a blank disk :)

FTC tries to un-Zuck Meta's grip on the market by dragging it back to court

he's running the place like a mob boss

you can just see it

hey vance, Zucks kicked me off arse book, but he let me back but now won't pay his dues, won't give me a skim, or kiss my fake tanned arse

that's bad boss, what you got on Im

nothing vance, that's the problem, no government contracts, I can't threaten a billion lawsuits as he would laugh and sue me for more, even if I won he would pay it out of petty cash

vance asks, want me to try sending the FTC boys round again boss

they failed last time, tell them failure not an option this time or I'll sue them

Europe's cloud challenge: Building an Airbus for the digital age

there is a lot more to this than meets the eye

its not only the cloud compute stacks like Azure, AWS, G-Cloud etc

its the office suites that got with holding data in cloud drives, its the email in office 365 / gmail etc

its the desktop OS which phones home with all sorts of data due to AI / Co-pilot

then don't forget mobile phones running android and IOS controlled by google and Apple

and if the EU politicians are involved they will still be arguing about it in the next century, add to that Hungary who will tell Putin everything and block many things (yes there is Russian influence inside the EU as well)

so my view is the EU will never get its shit together and it will be yet another project that becomes a financial black hole with EU commissioners just on the gravy train for what they can get

which is why many brits voted to leave the EU

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

2038 is the next fun date

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

2038 is a time computing problem that leaves some computer systems unable to represent times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.

The problem is systems which measure Unix time—the number of seconds elapsed since the Unix epoch (00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970)—and store it in a signed 32-bit integer. The data type is only capable of representing integers between −(231) and 231 − 1, meaning the latest time that can be properly encoded is 231 − 1 seconds after epoch (03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038)

so that will be the next big party time for IT

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

"They probably get it from ChatGPT."

don't you men "Co-Pilot"

sound like they used their own ROI calculator

as per the title

it sounds like someone asked their AI generated ROI calculator how long to rewrite the windows code base using AI tools

and they got the answer which as normal is as realistic as a unicorn prancing through their office

mind you it depends what they have been smoking they may well have seen said unicorn in their office :)

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

Re: I recently 'dined' at Luton Airport

its not "mission creep"its a data grab by marketing / advertising departments

anything that "requires" me to create an account I walk away from, if an account is optional but offers time benefits in the future I "MAY" consider it, but its a cost benefit analysis

e.g. my coffee vendor of choice gives me free drinks every 6-10 orders as points depend on order value, that is a fair trade, other vendors nope, not enough benefit for me

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech

Re: Shout It From The Rooftops

the problem is we have no UK companies with sufficient money to build data centres and the government won't pay for infrastructure, they only want the private sector to built it, then lease to them at an extortionate cost

vey short sited and then open to a foriegn company / investor buying it then back to square one of data sovreignty

the only way is for the UK gov to build and run it, but. that will never happen

Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud

the problem is although the data is held locally have a look at where all the authentication traffic goes

the directory service behind it all is global for resilience, even though the company I worked for only had data in UK data centres the authentication traffic was going world wide

and one an EU cloud takes off it will be targeted for buyout

so having a NON US (EU) cloud providers makes wonderful sense until it grows to the point Google, AWS, M$ see it cutting into their margins and see it as a threat

then one of them will try and buy it to remove the competition

even if the EU say no US company could by it, all AWS,Google or M$ will do is set up a separate company and base it in the EU, then with a loan from the parent buy it and marge it someway

add to that no doubt the big 3 clouds would probably try and find a way to make it not cost effective by using data export charge etc

personally I think the US has had to much influence and control over IT / Cloud etc and its time for that to change

the main benefit of cloud infrastructure is the ability expand and contract your compute estate while only paying for resource consumption

if you own your own systems, then your costs are constant regardless of the amount of resource consumption, and once you hit the limit of your resources you have to go through a CAPEX tender process and al the delays associated, all of this leads to poor performance due to over provisioning to sweat the maximum out of your assets (as demanded by the bean counters)

you then have to put in place expensive security and monitoring systems to fend off attacks, which in a major cloud environment are shared amongst all the customers so you get best of breed security and monitoring for a fraction it would cost on your own systems without any long contracts and escape penalties

so cloud does make sense so long as you can keep all the costs in check

Jassy taps 27-year Amazon veteran to run AGI org, which is now definitely a thing that exists

Re: Why is quantum computing being bundled with AI?

and makes it easier to split off and bin when the bubble bursts (hopefully soon)

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

somewhere a village is missing its idiot

its just the US found him and made him their president (not once, but twice!!!)

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

yep, roll back all the codebase to the last win10 version without all the AI enshitification and start fresh

ditch the crap win11 UI and all the advertising and monitoring

fix all the security issues and bug

add the AI features back slowly as "OPTIONAL features"

I suspect they know if AI is optional then the majority of people won't use it as its crap, so won't be able to show shareholders massive numbers of people having it installed / using it and the shareholders will ask why they should keep providing more and more money into this AI blackhole

Re: Apple

I have done that on my several Mac machines and phones,

I do wonder if they collect stats on how many devices have siri and Apple UNintelligence diasabled

it would be an interesting stat to know

95% of our tech team ditched win 11

we were recently taken over and as part of a tech refresh our tech team was given the option of new win11 laptop or MacBook pro's

95% took the MacBook pro's due to enshitification of win 11 with constant working features being broke with AI or AI forced into places it wasn't wanted

personally in the last year I have removed all M$ OS and applications from my machines (6 of them) for a mix of Mac and linux

One-fifth of the jobs at your company could disappear as AI automation takes off

Re: Running Schedule

we are already in the minefield of fixing projects created with VIBE coding 6 months ago and trying to fix issues or update due a customers new requirements, and its is taking 2-3 times the time it would normally

added to that customer dissatisfaction when confronfronted with agentic AI systems trying to get simple things done with banking / insurance etc

but C Suite execs still keep falling for the AI snake oil (koolaid) pedalled by the salesmen that knock their doors

they won't gaslight people, they will just move on to a new company and put on their CV what a wonder job they did rolling out AI and snake oil and likely get a bonus / pay rise at the new company until found out then move on and rinse/repeat until the AI bubble finally explodes

Retail giant Kingfisher rejects SAP ERP upgrade plan

Re: That should be where you start

all the vendors have ROI (return on investment) calculators which produce results about as real as unicorns

Re: At what point --

seems SAP are the latest to follow the

1:- try and force customers off legacy systems and onto cloud base SaaS platforms

2:- once on cloud insist on subscription models which are only available at discount with long multi year deals

3:- once customers are tied in to multiyear SaaS deals hit them with eye watering price rises disguised as AI services

4:- if customers resist AI costs then force customers to accept price rises by removing all the cheaper non AI options

you mean the supermarket is learning what its like to be one of their own customers?

seems kingfisher are finding out how it feels to be a customer of there's

things that don't work, hidden costs, price rises, websites that are frustrating to use, a take it or leave it approach

as with customers they have the option to take their money and business elsewhere

Apple knits up $230 sock for your iPhone in time for Christmas

early april fool?

i had to check the date, this sort of thing is normally an April fool joke

a fool and their money ..........

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

it'll all end in tears

all the banks ( bank of England, the fed etc) are warning of a crash in the market due to the extreme levels of investments, and circular investment in AI, warning that are very similar just before the dot com crash

they are warning that extreme percentage of investment in indexes like the FTSE100 / Fortune 500 is all going into a handful of tech companies, and that companies like OpenAI are taking out huge loans then lending that money to customers to pay for OpenAI solutions, so the money goes back to Open AI (circular lending)

added to that general public seem to be resisting AI services and agents, as causing a negative experience, I have screamed at a number of them "let me talk to a human"

so I am hoping the bubble burst sooner rather than later

Twist in Tesco vs. VMware case as Computacenter files claim against Broadcom, Dell

Broadcom unload both barrels into feet again

as per the title

they are trying to railroad all their customers into the cloud foundation service, as massive increase in cost, they want to do away with any perpetual licensing and replace with expensive subscription licensing to keep their income streams in a very healthy state

Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told

silly question time

what is the reason to have to move it from Virginia to Texas?

Forget vibe coding - Microsoft wants to make vibe working the new hotness

Re: How accurate is Excel

unless the auditors are using AI to speed up the audit :) :) :)

Re: "and produce somewhat accurate results."

my new work machine will be a MacBook Pro, virtually everyone in my office was given the choice, a new MacBook or dell win 11 laptop, and over 90% went for MacBook

we are slowly moving away from all MS services due to snooping / advertising and seeing a similar trend with customers

at least with apple you can disable Apple UnIntelligence, you can't do that with office or co-pilot

Salesforce users grumble after Agentforce AI replaces search on some help pages

I have yet to see an AI agent implantation that don't piss off users

I actively avoid any company that takes an "AI First" approach or don't give an easy way around it as I always end up going round in circles when AI is involved

VMware bungles cloud management portal upgrade, twice in two weeks

square peg into round hole springs to mind

step 1:- if it won't fit easily, get a hammer

step 2:- if it still won't fit get a bigger hammer

step 3:- if it still won't fit, get bigger hammer and repeat step2 (until it fits or you smash it to bits)

Healthcare lags in Windows 11 upgrades – and lives may depend on it

shocked (NOT)

it is common for health care to have out of date IT

the problem has several parts

some diagnostic machines cost huge amounts of money and are supported, but the time and effort required to certify patches and updates , let alone a new OS is huge, so it takes time and money so update / upgrades tend to lag behind consumers versions

some of the smaller machines / systems run embedded OS's with limited space for updates etc so as long as no known vulnerabilities they are left in place until they fail then are replaced

add to that some old equipment may no longer be produced and supported or even the manufacturer has been bought or ceased trading

and with budget cuts so long as no risk to life the hospital etc have to get maximum value out of the equipment rather than keep replacing it every time the manufacturer tries to force an upgrade

welcome to the world of upgrades for the sake of it, not because its needed

Microsoft rewarded for security failures with another US government contract

tangerine tyrants "art of the deal"

for a guy who recons he is a shrewd business person (only he believes that) he makes some terrible decisions

as in the article, 1 year contracts give enough time to migrate to a new platform and be locked in with rip off prices you can't avoid in later years

it seems a lot of his MAGA followers are having "buyer regret" mid term elections should be interesting to see how much support he has retained

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

2nd hand NPU anyone?

so if the AI bubble bursts what ill happen to these NPU's in co-pilot PC's? and other kit

will they become redundant paperweight sucking power for nothing in your PC?

but in balance

from what I have seen the bigger LLM's get the faster they degrade and the worse the results are, it seems the one area that does't fail is the very small tightly focused models that seem to be trained on narrow datasets

Bank reverses decision to replace 45 customer service staff with AI chatbot

Re: On choices

“deliver more personalised services for CommBank customers.”

let me correct that for you

“deliver more personalised services for CommBank customers. to annoy the hell out of them as we try and upsell services they don't want until they leave us”

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

whack-o-mole meet the great firewall of UK

the government will be playing whack-o-mole with this for years and basically make the internet unusable for the majority of the public

kids are tech savvy and if they want to see or do something on the internet then there is very little the government can do with legislation, all it will do will be to make the UK as restrictive as china and we will end up with a "great firewall of UK"

having worked in education I.T. I have seen how devious and tech savvy kids are, I have seen them work out if as soon as they hit "enter" to logon to a school network the pull the network cable until the logon is complete none of the group policies get applied for up to 90 minutes, this was spread via the current social media / messaging app to the majority of the school

staff then tried to prevent the kids from downloading game emulators and game roms, the kids just renamed them until storage policies were put in place that prevented certain file extensions and several terabytes of game rooms deleted form home folders

its a constant cat and mouse game with kids, and because of the way policy is made and announced in the press before it becomes law the kids have the work around in place before the law is written

totally pointless, apart from handing scammers and hackers a mass of info for identity theft if they break into one of the ID verfication providers

and don't get me started on the fact that they all seem to be in the US so the government is handing all out ID's to companies that can be forced to hand the info over the US law enforcement

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

What do i want to see

Bin windows 11 and start again with all the snooping, advertising and AI shite

The £9 billion question: To Microsoft or not to Microsoft?

businesses are all now dependant on SaaS solutions now

big tech have managed to convince the majority of businesses (and individuals) SaaS is the best way forward, and subscriptions are the way to go, and once they have you in their software ecosystem there is little you can do to escape because the cost of re-engineering solutions, deploying the new products and retraining staff is far more than the invoice big tech is bending you over the barrel for

gone are the days of purchasing a CD of office for a one off price then using it for 5-10 years, not you have to pay a monthly / yearly subscription for virtually all software for the provider to hold your data hostage

bean counters love subscriptions, as they get a regular monthly invoice that looks a small figure and comes under OPEX, and no big unexpected CAPEX purchases they have to write off over 3-5 years and maintain as assets, makes their forecasting and budgeting a piece of cake

IT departments love the fact no need to keep track of all those box products and paper licenses, it has been a triumph of marketing my big tech who now have eye watering sums of money rolling in each month and the big tech bean counters love MRR (monthly recurring revenue) from subscriptions

Californian man so furious about forced Windows 11 upgrade that he's suing Microsoft

this proves its all about a data grab

" you get this year free if you use Microsoft Reward points or sign in with a Microsoft account and sync your data to the cloud"

so basically "give us your data to scrape and we will give you another year of win10 updates"

Windows 11 leads as October looms, but millions still cling to Windows 10

Re: Abomination

You were lucky! We only had Lotus CCMail in't middle of road!

AI don't know: Enterprises slow to pick up on Copilot+ PCs

Re: Snapdragon

welcome to windows 8.1 and windows phone

back 10 year ago Microsoft had its first go at using arm processors with a cheap surface model using ARM processors (and the Nokia Windows phones) and introduced the concept of "universal apps" which were coded to run on ARM and INTEL processors, they never took off as software houses wouldn't produce apps for yet another platform / standard

and we know what happened to Nokia Windows phones

history seems to be repeating itself with co-pilot PC's being ARM based

this NPU debate reminds me of the Maths co processor debate with the 386 SX/DX and 486 SX/DX processors

also the GPU debate

bottom line to me is very few people need them as they only make a useful difference for a very small number of users in the short term, mid to longer term (3-5 years time) programmers will make use of the additional compute power (watch malware etc authors make use of it first) as they learn what functions can be sped up besides AI

personally I have escaped the AI crazy train and jumped to linux for all my workloads, and replaced my daily laptop with a Mac book (still has Apple unIntelligence but it can easily be disabled) as I still need office and teams as there is no linux program compatible with MS Teams yet

NPU , GPU, CoProcessor

this NPU debate reminds me of the Maths co processor debate with the 386 SX/DX and 486 SX/DX processors

also the GPU debate

bottom line to me is very few people need them as they only make a useful difference for a very small number of users in the short term, mid to longer term (3-5 years time) programmers will make use of the additional compute power (watch malware etc authors make use of it first) as they learn what functions can be sped up besides AI

personally I have escaped the AI crazy train and jumped to linux for all my workloads, and replaced my daily laptop with a Mac book (still has Apple unIntelligence but it can easily be disabled) as I still need office and teams as there is no linux program compatible with MS Teams yet

Re: Corporates running enterprise systems don't want to be beta testers for MS.

"Recall and AI are problems, not solutions."

let me correct that for you

Recall and AI are PROBLEMS LOOKING FOR solutions.

Microsoft bolts Copilot Mode onto Edge to chase AI-browser crowd

Re: what you MIGHT want to do next

let me correct that for you

"Like targeted advertising only shows you what it thinks you have want BUT HAVE ALREADY RESEARCHED AND BOUGHT OR DECIDED AGAINST".

Trump AI plan rips the brakes out of the car and gives Big Tech exactly what it wanted

Re: "[..] AI that pursues truth, fairness and strict impartiality."

the tangerine tyrant has sign his latest executive order

orange / tango is the new white

free tango spray tan for anyone who can satisfy ICE they are allowed to be in the US

lies (posted on truth) are the new truth

US citizens don't pay for his tariffs

epstein was a misunderstood good guy

everything that is not from trumps mouth in the last 5 minutes is fake news (even if he said it 6 minutes ago)

etc etc

Copilot Vision on Windows 11 sends data to Microsoft servers

I am glad I completed my win10 upgrade to linux

so all my win 10 pc's. have been replaced with raspberry pi, or new PC's Lenovo PC bought OS free (saving £110 Microsoft tax)

a few niggles in the migration, but mostly resolved now, but I do use some fairly niche software which involve multiple USB sound interfaces and multiple serial over USB for ham radio

basic browsing, Libre office etc worked seamlessly out of thee box

now working on getting my work to replace win11 with apple, as a number of the team have MacBooks, fewer windows laptops are being bought, mainly only if people object to Macs

no more AI slop, snooping from M$'s latest snooping / advertising / user monetisation platform that can do some desktop tasks

VMware reboots its partner program again – and it looks like smaller players are out

Broadcom is doing to VMware what trump is doing to America

title says it all

neither care about the people they are causing hardship to, so long as they get their way

Re: 80/20 Again

but also as small clients grow and staff move to larger companies and careers progress and staff move the introduce the reseller to new / larger customers

the company I work for one of our customers went bust (no fault of theirs) and 4 of the senior IT staff have now brought large new customers to us,

as they say from little acorns large oak trees grow

and history repeats its self as Broadcom unloads both barrels into both feet again

back in 2011 they tried changing the licensing model from per CPU to ram based

it lead to a mass move from VMware to Hyper-v, the sudden loss of revenue caused a rethink and rapid back pedal https://itassetmanagement.net/2012/08/26/vmware-vram/

seems broadcom are repeating history by playing with a licensing model to increase income and profits without thinking what their customers will think and do

last time the haven was M$ and hyper-v as no other real alternative, this time there is KVM on Linux as well as several other open source alternatives so I think Broadcom will pretty much kill VMware if they persist

and as to stripping all the small consultancies out of the partner network I think that is a reload and fire both barrels a 2nd time, its the same as IBM and java mass exodus time to open source

C-suite sours on AI despite rising investment, survey finds

Re: What CTOs Think

also they need to figure out

Just because its possible don't mean to say you should do it,AND does it represent value for money / is it a positive RoI

I see AI being sold like snake oil (will cure all ills) as consultancies want nice case studies to submit to the lords and master at google, M$, AWS etc

I see a single digit percentage that actually perform well and make it past POC stage due to cost, or issues found in testing