Posts by Nifty

Asian tech players react to US tariffs with delays, doubts, deal-making

"It appears to be because some sly importer might claim their goods originated there"

Shrink-wrapped Linux?

Anyone like to comment on why 'Penguin Islands' (human population 0) were included in the tariffs?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump-tariffs-antarctica-uninhabited-heard-mcdonald-islands

System builders say server prices set to spike as Trump plays customs cowboy

Re: muppet show

Is that the Social Truth?

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

Anyone wanting a bit of light entertainment should watch Apple TV's Prime Target, a nice little conspiracy series about a Cambridge academic who's working on a proof/algorithm for predicting primes.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

All Safety systems...GO

Air traffic control... GO

Emergency lighting and arrivals/departures boards... GO

Booking terminals and IT systems in general... GO

Duty free shops display units and heated loo seats in the VIP suite... STOP!

OK let's close the airport for 24 hours.

Google begs owners of crippled Chromecasts not to hit factory reset

Roku still Ok at 10 years 4 months

Bought my Roku puck in November 2014. Still in daily use, all needed apps still supported. It got past the 10 year barrier without a certificate expiry.

Eutelsat in talks with Euro leaders as they mull Starlink replacement in Ukraine

Re: OneWeb $10,000 per terminal?

A beer for actually talking about the subject in question.

Firefox 136 finally brings the features that fans wanted

I'm trying to have my work PC double up as a light home computer for evening use at it's sat here on the desk and connected to my main monitor. I set up a personal Firefox profile, very nice. But it won't play nicely with Zscaler, the reason being that rather then pass on proxy certificates that are needed for any part of a page, it unpredictably hangs. Zscaler is due to become permanently on so I'll need to ditch FF for personal browsing. Chrome and Edge meanwhile work as normal with Zscaler turned on. While it's commendable to have this extra privacy with FF, it was confusing behaviour until I found out why. I need a simple option in FF to make it work like Chrome.

Two arrested after pensioner scammed out of six-figure crypto nest egg

AI Daisy picked up the phone. "Open my crypto wallet?, now where did I put it? Ooh the kettle's just boiled. Now what was that you said? Must let the cat in. Oh yes crypto. Well would you believe it, I was at the cemetery visiting my late husband's crypto just last week. Now where were we?"

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Old. HMRC has been doing this since the pandemic was invented. Except it's 40, not 15 minutes.

RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101

"Punched Card Reunion in Stevenage"

Priceless!

Re: Computers in the 1960/70s

"The only method of cooling was to have all the windows wide open. Not good for thermionic health and men in white coats went round with trolleys replacing those who had blown."

The valves or the staff?

UK armed forces fast-tracking cyber warriors to defend digital front lines

"no arrests for smoking the evil weed have never been photographed at a demo and who were born in the motherland"

Which motherland?

Only 4 percent of jobs rely heavily on AI, with peak use in mid-wage roles

Well, Zoom and similar conferencing tools have automatic minuting now. I troubled to read through some and while it's mostly correct, the most common mistake was for the transcript summary to attribute 'next step' actions to the wrong person. This will undoubtedly be improved on in the future - so long as anyone bothers to complain to the tool makers about it.

DeepSeek or DeepFake? Our vultures circle China's hottest AI

Re: Anthropomorphizing AI

"We are attributing human characteristics to AI. This is probably not wise"

To which you could say that nature in its efficient way has made the human brain a machine-like thing anyway. So the parallels made between 'AI' and human behaviour may be fair points after all. Are humans prone to overrate themselves?

Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra, says Microsoft

"Launched back in September, Intel's Lunar Lake chips were its first to exceed the 40 NPU TOPS performance requirement for Copilot+ PCs set by Microsoft last spring."

My suspicion is that no proper AI will be running locally anyway (well, maybe a better spelling/grammar corrector and file search). So all you need is ARM for a web front end.

Why Microsoft's Copilot will only kinda run locally on AI PCs for now https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/31/microsoft_copilot_hardware

How's that coming along?

Apple Intelligence turned on by default in upcoming macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3

In Europe turning on a new cloud based feature without an opt-in will contravene GDPR.

IT job market is still shrinking but not as quickly as last year

Re: Don't worry....

"she complained that turning up for work was interfering with her social life"

Ah yes, work is the curse of the social media classes.

"Every AI 'help' bot I have interacted with has done bugger-all".

I was having a conversation with the helpbot for my Windscribe VPN. Wasn't expecting much, however as I fed it context and the error message it got more precise and spot-on, replying within 250ms. So there are some companies with a clue. Ironically I work in a helpdesk role too and am waiting with curiosity to see AI streamline my role. I know with certainty that if a basic support role like mine could be streamlined, there's higher value work I would be doing.

UK businesses eye AI as the cheaper, non-whining alternative to actual staff

"The use of AI needs to be taxed significantly"

As does the wheel and the electric motor, and the word processor...

Now Trump's import tariffs could raise the cost of a laptop for Americans by 68%

"Trump's tariffs could result in the loss of 400,000 US jobs"

What was the population of the US again?

Digital Isle of Man: For all your connected tax haven needs?

Isle of Man bank accounts: £50k of protection in case of bank failure vs £85k in the UK. However the entire funding of the scheme seems to run to £300m.

https://www.iomfsa.im/consumer-material/isle-of-man-depositors-compensation-scheme-dcs

"This means that in the event of a very large covered bank failing, or in a systemic crisis, the DCS is unlikely to be in a position to provide the full amount of compensation due to you in a timely manner."

That's of some concern to those considering offshoring.

Microsoft confirms there will be no U-turn on Windows 11 hardware requirements

Rufus is the one stop tool of choice to install W11 on a noncompliant machine. It includes/supports Bitlocker.

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

I'd initially thought this was about building security and the way companies spend thousands on e-security only to leave themselves wide open to a 'people hack'. As in a recent BBC podcast on this topic. There's a book too.

People Hacker: Confessions of a Burglar for Hire https://www.amazon.co.uk/People-Hacker-Jenny-Radcliffe/dp/1398519014

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

I had a BASIC program published in an Amstrad PCW hobby magazine. The program allowed you to write structured BASIC with not one GOTO or line number in sight, it would 'compile' your structured program with it's named subroutines into a BASIC program that the PCW would execute. But my first and fond memory of learning and using BASIC in earnest was the BBC Micro, which if memory serves, did manage structured BASIC.

Polish radio station ditches DJs, journalists for AI-generated college kids

It works! Or has since the advent of MTV on satellite TV in the 1980s.

https://youtu.be/cYdpOjletnc

Seriously though, Tommy Vance's voice is now licensed and used regularly on Boom Rock:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Vance (RIP)

Boom Rock only has a couple of hours of live programming per day, the rest is jukebox.

It would be nice if during jukebox hours there was at least an intro and an outro on the artist, song & album and maybe even a micro-wiki on the track. It will happen with AI.

San Francisco billboards call out tech firms for not paying for open source

Re: Fools

"Count the assumptions being made here"

or the downvotes

AWS boss: Don't want to come back to the office? Go work somewhere else

Re: Cloud

"The guys got his head in the cloud"

Cloud cuckoo land? And to think that in Switzerland and Bavaria since the 1700s, a great farmer's winter work from home job was making cuckoo clocks.

Re: Inverted subtitle logic?

"need to include employee commute in company’s carbon footprint"

Perhaps a scheme where the biggies could trade carbon credits between their server & AI farms and employee commuter miles?

Re: So why?

"Several people here keep being contacted by AWS. Why?"

Not always directly but there's an army of approved recruiters constantly trying to fill devops-type positions for AWS. I think they've sort of industrialised the recruitment process. Will this end well?

Who hasn't been approached by desperate-sounding AWS recruiters? I get approached about every 6 months. Not really a good look for the product or its owners.

TSMC revenue up 36% as world+dog demands AI and smartphone chips

Gold is useless. Invest in shovels instead.

It's true, social media moderators do go after conservatives

Re: Who is the judge ?

"Who fact checks the fact checkers? How are they funded?"

In the UK, by the near-compulsory TV tax.

Correspondent Marianna Spring was allegedly caught embellishing her CV when applying for a job in 2018. The paper alleges that five years ago Spring wanted to work as a Moscow stringer for the US https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/bbc-disinformation-correspondent-accused-of-lying-on-her-cv

Marianna Spring is the BBC's first disinformation specialist and social media correspondent.

BBC revenue: Approx £4BN/annum.

Mega supermarket spots stock discrepancy of tens of millions amid ERP system migration

Echoes of the Post Office scandal here. That there was a discrepancy is one thing. It's the direction of the discrepancy that's interesting. If a system was being randomly inaccurate due to data entry and software logic errors, you could reasonably expect that the errors would sort out of balance out. With the PO the errors were seemingly consistently adverse to the PO branch managers. How is it with Asda? Let me guess, Asda stock has disappeared. Let me speculate: There is such a thing as the perfect crime.

Harvard duo hacks Meta Ray-Bans to dox strangers on sight in seconds

Finally a solution for my prosopagnosia!

SpaceX faces $663K FAA fine for Musk's alleged launch impatience

Now I'm feeling nostalgic for the only offline time I had - on a plane.

'Hyperscale customer' to take massive datacenter site near London

A new data centre in West London has already been deemed impossible due to grid constraints. I wonder why the idea is being resurrected now?

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/report-home-building-to-halt-in-west-london-due-to-data-center-power-demands/

Japan to put a small red Swedish house on the Moon

I'll need to see the EPC.

Apple AirPods Pro 2 can be sold as hearing aids, says FDA

These iHearingAids will be rechargeable. How many traditional hearing aids are?

UK watchdog fears Voda-Three merger will balloon phone bills for customers

I remember when Orange and T-Mobile merged to become EE. They started closing masts after 3 months and no improvement to coverage. I moved to 3, coverage no better but a great roaming deal at the time. That's the real purpose of such mergers, to close down masts.

Boom Supersonic takes baby steps toward breaking the sound barrier

"landing gear works on one-third size demonstrator"

Weren't people one third of the size in the 1960s?

Google’s Irish bit barn plans denied over eco shortfall

Bribe not big enough?

A quick guide to tool-calling in large language models

Are you calling me a tool?

AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care

"We have compulsory labelling on food (generally speaking...) so we know what we are eating"

Does that include eating your own dog food?

Google's ex-CEO U-turns after saying staff 'going home early' killed winning

Re: WFH increases my productivity

"but the soft skills he basically hasn't been able to learn from office colleagues"

Wondering what 'soft skills' I've picked up during years in the office. Some colleagues couldn't stop bellowing when on the phone or Teams to a customer. Could be heard from one end of the office to the other. Nearby workmates would stop concentrating. We learned that if you're unsure about something, start rambling. A call could last 90 minutes. Others would speak so softly that anyone nearby with need to know had to ask for a summary afterwards.

I've seen a mug chucked, to smash into the wall as a near miss on another workmates head (both programmers). A workmate whose stuff creeps across his desk onto yours as it piles up. Workmates who eat their microwave heated garlic curry at the desk while their desk fan is beaming the fragrance your way.

Almost forgot to mention the period (in the days where indoor smoking was allowed) where half the office was software dev, half sales. Every man jack of the sales team coped with the stress by pacing the office alleyway while smoking. Your eyes would water and in deepest winter all windows had to be thrown open once per hour to clear the air.

And in all of these situations the actual boss was secreted away in a private office.

Security biz KnowBe4 hired fake North Korean techie, who got straight to work ... on evil

Re: The Inside Man

A perfect 'life imitates art' event. It's up there with the time that Amazon remotely pulled everyone's copy of 1984 and Animal Farm off their Kindles and sent them down the 'memory hole'.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

Re: Linux only had problems if the Linux admins were stupid

"Let's not forget it was made a lot more complicated by Bitlocker"

I use Bitlocker on all my Windows machines, in fact I think it's a default on Windows 11. While there's no risk to me from from CrowdStrike, this is a timely reminder to back up the recovery keys. In the past I've used the key stored in a file to access an old drive I'd removed. What I'd like to know is, if you're trying to do a Safe Mode recovery, do you need to enter the Bitlocker key via the keyboard? Really?

Microsoft China staff can't log on with an Android, so Redmond buys them iThings

Apple shares fall as local government and state-owned firms latest to face restrictions on devices at work

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/08/china-iphone-ban-government-state-owned-firms-workers-apple-us

You'd be surprised how many Chinese businesses are state-owned.

Last thing i heard was that iPhones are now officially banned from workplaces in China. How does that fit in?

Babel fish? We're getting there. Reg reviews the Timekettle X1 AI Interpreter Hub

"Or simply rely on Bluetooth and a audio jack".

Multiple segregated Bluetooth connections to a single device? What could possibly go wrong?