Posts by Nelbert Noggins

AI connector for Google Calendar makes convenient malware launchpad, researchers show

Again??? RCE and “not our problem” seems to be standard operating procedure for Anthropic.

Bots are taking over the internet and AI users are to blame

“ Pew Research found that 62 percent of US adults use AI in some form at least several times a week, suggesting that, if it's not gaining traction in the enterprise, consumers are at least lapping it up.”

Or companies have stuffed AI features into their apps and search engines and consumers are unaware.

It also seems to completely ignore that many search sites now have an on by default AI summary, so even if people are still using web search the site does a rag request which will be a multiplier on requests to return the result.

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

Re: It also needs centralized management

Along with the centralized management and integrated mdm platforms, now provide the external auditing companies who understand them and will sign off audits on Linux desktops that you need to provide to regulators and clients.

I’ve worked at multiple companies in highly regulated industries and we had external audits every year. Some were commissioned by us, others by our clients. Where our security team accepted that I could run Linux as my primary OS, the week of audit I would be asked to work from home because it caused too many headaches with auditors when my machine showed up in the network.

Auditors I have had dealings with, barely understand Windows and Mac based desktop systems. Trying to get them to sign off Linux desktops is extra pain nobody needs or wants when audit time comes around.

AI-authored code contains worse bugs than software crafted by humans

Is there going to be a report next week claiming the AI review platform made up responses and introduced errors in its assessment of code generated by the ai code slingers?

If AI can’t be trusted to generate quality code, how can an AI code reviewer be trusted to generate quality reviews?

Which LLM provider does the review platform use? Do code from agents using the same provider get higher ratings than code from someone else’s LLM

Maybe we need another AI platform to assess the quality of the code reviews and that it is unbiased in its assessment.

Micron says memory shortages are here for the foreseeable future

Re: Until AI pops

AI is just the current convenient excuse, for any industry, not just IT.

Memory is too cheap. We can blame AI and keep very quiet about our statement earlier in the year saying we”re cutting production.

We need to reduce operating costs. We can blame AI for layoffs and saying we are all in on AI will also bump the share price nicely before our next bonus payout.

And so on, until the next scapegoat comes along.

The memory cartel will have another reason already lined up and waiting for why they can’t reduce the prices once the AI excuse has run its course.

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

Re: Quantum AI

“ Only problem is, every time we open the door to look at any of the results, the whole thing collapses - and we have to start all over again. It appears that we can know that the AI is running, ready to accept our prompt, *or* we can know where to type the prompt, which terminal is active, but never both at the same time.”

Schrödinger's AI?

Guess it’s been so long it’s probably safe to assume the cat is dead by now without opening the box. AI to the rescue.

AI superintelligence is a Silicon Valley fantasy, Ai2 researcher says

Re: Ah, Porsche

Ah the power of brand and marketing. You’re talking about Volkswagen’s in different clothing. If I owned a high end Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, Bugatti or Rimac, I might be wondering if VAG have the same control over my car.

I was talking about the Porsche who actually made their own cars and nearly went bankrupt until they found they were very good at gambling on the finance markets

“From what I've read, OpenAI isn't even using all the RAM yet, is getting it in the form of RAW wafers(!) and it's not entirely clear how much this is driven by need and how much it's a paranoid attempt to retain a lead by choking off the supply of RAM their competitors require.

That being the case would make the amount of money such a huge purchase would involve even more unbelievable and a massive risk.”

Or given the state of ram price increases, provide them a stockpile of wafers they can sell to the highest bidder for a tidy profit. A deal of that size is likely going to come with a far lower unit price than others will be able to negotiate when their current supply contracts end.

Being know as a company selling product A, doesn’t mean that is where you make your money. For example, Porsche had become a very profitable hedge fund company that happened to sell a few cars in the late 2000s. The hedge fund side was responsible for ~$11 Billion of the ~$13 Billion pre tax profits in 2008. If they hadn’t wrecked their finances trying to buy VW they have been laughing all the way to the bonus payouts for years.

OpenAI seem to be having trouble making money selling AI, but selling memory in volume could be quite profitable for a while.

Half of exposed React servers remain unpatched amid active exploitation

Re: The web stack - let's see . . .

It’s easy to write bad code in any language.

There is no sensible reason SQL injection should still be a thing or in the OWASP top ten. Yes I know, it’s been folded into the general “injection”, which is even worse. It was an issue when I started in IT and has been an understood problem with known solutions for years.

Yet here we are, far too many years later, still stuck with people churning out slop with minimal or no input validation.

To ensure momentum continues the same slop people have been publishing for years and sharing online will have been in the LLM training data, likely with far more occurrences than safe high quality code. So in the same social media/forum reinforcement of 100 similar things “must be right and better” than 1 actually correct thing, we’ll be lucky if LLMs spit out average code vetted by button pusher without a clue in the future.

Disney turns to dark side, licenses IP to OpenAI for videos, images

Re: The Mouse that roared

Given the “investment” comes with warrants allowing them to acquire more equity in the future, Disney seem to be hedging their bets in case the bubble doesn’t burst.

Will end up an odd ownership mashup if all the recent “investment” announcements with Open AI actually follow through.

A future where Disney could end up with part ownership of AMD.

Re: Err?

Well, more like all the other circular announcements that will boost share prices. There is no agreement to sign yet or concrete approvals and plenty of vague wording that they can change their mind without any money moving anywhere.

From the linked press release

“The transaction is subject to the negotiation of definitive agreements, required corporate and board approvals, and customary closing conditions.”

On the one hand it’s not a bright outlook for future Disney work, but on the other it’s not like AI could destroy the Pixar IP and brand any more than the current mediocre slop they create under the Pixar brand with the offshore teams.

Bezos-backed Unconventional AI aims to make datacenter power problems go away

Re: But this time they've got funding

Ah, the everlasting delivery time of 20 years away

Am surprised in the modern mantras of deliver fast, break fast that hasn’t been replaced by “tomorrow”

Cloudflare blames Friday outage on borked fix for React2shell vuln

Your whole cloudflare Java rant falls apart in your first sentence by having no clue what React is.

React is JavaScript not Java, and it’s a library for web and native UIs, not a framework.

Next.js is an example of a framework which uses React. Next.js provides the server stack, routing and is commonly used with server side rendering enabled so web clients don’t need to run code just make requests and receive pre-rendered content back to display.

You are likely to be eaten by the MIT license: Microsoft frees Zork source

Re: Life forming

I think there are quite a few games that teach relevant skills, but rarely the cash cow AAA games.

Satisfactory and similar go through a whole series of start simple then get more complex as they progress.

This requires observing what you have, work out how to refactor/optimise it as the game moves along and you need to setup more complex supply chains to build the final item.

Early on you can get by with the inbuilt tools and paper notes, but it has also spawned online tools to help you find optimal solutions.

While that is a game that springs to mind because I play it, I’m sure there are plenty more popular modern games that haven’t lost the need to think, plan, solve problems.

I never really got on with Zork, don’t know why.

Did enjoy most of Infocom’s releases.

Hitch hikers guide was always my favourite… the amount of time spent trying to get that damn babel fish in my ear… :D

Always thought that has to be one of the most difficult puzzles across all their releases surely :D

Claude code will send your data to crims ... if they ask it nicely

Not sure why anyone is surprised. Is basically the same response they provided for their SQLite mcp server

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/25/anthropic_sql_injection_flaw_unfixed/

Bose kills SoundTouch: Smart speakers go dumb in Feb

Re: You'd be amazed...

I buy my music DRM free as Flac and download it from the Qobuz store.

Download straight to my NAS and shuffle across disks as time goes on. Far less bulky than the boxes of CDs I have from before.

Day to day even though I own them so won't loose them anymore than I would a CD, I still stream music more often than play from my server along with internet radio. Similarly I have DVDs, Blu-ray and a blu-ray player which I rarely use.

I even have CDs and Movies I've bought and still haven't bothered ripping yet because I just stream them for now. One day I'll get around to it. Probably find my usb dvd drive has given up and the discs are unreadable by then anyway :D

Was interesting to hear my Son's view. While he occasionally buys films, he doesn't see why anyone would buy music when so much is available to stream free or paid online or failing that via an aerial. to him it's just transitory noise to listen to, not something he's attached to.

I don't mind apps using external services for products if they're providing extra functionality above the core features, where I draw the line is when the app is just a remote for a cloud control centre to talk to a device in my own home. If something won't operate locally and can't be configured without the internet, then it's either not coming in the house or it's cheap enough for what it does that I don't care when it becomes a brick.

Re: Sounds like a lie

When MIT is the majority owner, you'd think they might have some understanding of what is involved and the future issues when tethering their products functionality to the cloud.

Then again, they might just want rid of the peasants buying soundtouch now they have the bottomless pockets of McIntosh and Sonus Faber buyers to empty. $1500 for a McIntosh mono streaming speaker is likely the more profitable market to want, along with McIntosh's car audio business.

Unless there is a completely different sounding set of Bose Products only available in the US, I have no idea why anyone raves about Bose sound quality. Apart from the Noise Cancelling headphones I've not heard anything I'd spend other peoples money on, let alone my own, with a Bose badge on it.

My current car has a Bose sound system, it is supposed to be a Bose premium sound system. It is one of the worst things about the car and I'd be ashamed if that's what I created as a sound engineer. Both my previous convertibles had much better sound systems even with the roof down

There is blame both sides.

Manufacturers tethering products to the cloud, for whatever reason, without understanding/caring about long term costs/implications and not informing buyers.

Buyers spending significant money on internet connected products without finding out what happens when there is no internet.

The EU Petition to stop killing games, really needs something similar for products which depend on cloud services to work and cannot provide their primary sold purpose without the cloud.

Or maybe manufacturers need to be legally required to put large warning messages making it clear no internet servers = useless product or what stops working when they decide to stop supporting the product.

Re: I have like $3k invested in these.

When did "investing/invested" become a replacement for "buying/bought"? Or are people in denial that they spent money on an item that depreciates faster than a car as soon as they buy it and try to make themselves feel better it's an investment and might increase in value?

Saw the same rubbish all over the Sonos forums when they messed things up. People claiming to have invested in X amount of Sonos products and demanding Sonos fix it.

No.. you bought some electronic things that may or may not do what the marketing claims when you bought them, with no guarantee things "coming soon" would arrive or the software would continue to provide the current services.

You didn't invest in anything unless your idea of investing is giving money away in return for items.

Dirac audio glitch finally silenced in Windows 11 24H2

Re: Elephant...

“Dirac founded in 2001 is a Swedish based, research and software company, focusing on DRC, Digital Room Correction of audio in homes, cars, studios and for mobile devices.

Their name is supposedly derived from the famous French/English mathematician Paul Dirac”

https://www.drc.one/dirac/

Re: Elephant...

Definitely not snake oil and should be welcomed as it brings competition to the near monopoly position Audyssey have in affordable home theatre room correction as well as the wider audio digital correction market. They even made PC and tablet applications available to those who like to tweak.

In recent years, apart from Yamaha, who continue to develop their own room correction system, it wasn’t until getting into the expensive end of the market that bespoke and usually expensive alternatives to Audyssey were options.

Unfortunately Dirac in the home theatre market suffered from the click-bait, ad revenue driven reviews when it came in and was over-hyped in most cases by reviewers.

Welcome and healthy competition in the audio correction market? - definitely

Over Hyped out of proportion by reviewers? - definitely

Snake oil? - not at all

Inventor who encouraged Elon Musk to make Optimus says most humanoid robots today are 'terrifying'

Maybe scary robots are an American thing. If it can’t carry an arsenal of high powered rifles, guns, armour piercing shells etc for “hunting and self-defense” then it’s rights as an American robot would be being violated /s

In terms of non threatening robots operating around humans, Honda beat them to it 25 years ago with Asimo.

Asimo was a non-threatening biped robot that Honda operated daily for 20 years. A long term R&D project into building and operating an autonomous biped robot to help people that would be accepted by people. Over the 25 years they have been performing research they learned a lot and while they stopped the Asimo project, everything they learnt from it is being used to further research in both biped and non-biped robots to help people

https://global.honda/en/robotics/asimo/

Let's Encrypt rolls out free security certs for IP addresses

Re: why are we using dns?!!

You’ve missed the part whether the developers share the credentials in plain text over slack/teams/whatsapp/whatever with their team members and other teams who also need a credential even though the company has its own servers running privatebin.

A quick search for secret/password or similar in your companies messaging system can quickly make you want it to be Friday afternoon

So you CAN turn an entire car into a video game controller

Maybe Elon watched too much of the original death race 2000 growing up

Tuxkart?

Seems he missed a trick. Should have used Ridge Racer and created a modern version of Namco’s 1993 Ridge Racer Full Scale. Bet it would still have been cheaper than the originals £150,000 price tag even with a modern mx5

Was one of my favourite arcade games when they installed one near where I was living 31/32 years ago. how time flies.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Ridge_racer_full_scale_stockton.jpg

Remembering when NASA stuck a Space Shuttle on top of a Boeing 747

Oh dear, I'd hoped after Artemis Lego might have given up on trying to shrink too far.

The Rover, Discovery, Apollo Lunar Lander, Perseverance, even Saturn V are a good size. There is even a small Lego City set space shuttle that looks better than what is in this set. :(

Thankfully the new Pixar Luxor Jr set is very nice (and cheaper)

Hopefully Lego will return to sensible sized NASA sets in future and not these odd looking attempts.

Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz

There’s no need to switch in 10 months. I’ll be running win 10 for a bit longer.

My gaming machine is basically Win 10 to run the various store launchers, mostly steam, with the occasional Gog game and no other purpose.

Mine is TV connected and when I switch away from windows my preferred Linux will be Bazzite so I can make it more console like, booting into game mode, depending on whether the current niggles get sorted by then. If I want more of a tv connected desktop that can play games, then I’d probably use Tumbleweed or Fedora.

There are a couple of only reasons I’ve not switched yet which are distro independent

Hdmi org preventing AMD merging their HDMI 2.1 support code in the open source driver, so no VRR and no 4K > 60Hz, until I replace my video card.

The games I play most have audio issues/glitches/static running in multichannel surround. It’s distro independent and only an issue if I select 7.1 audio output. Not an issue with stereo output, only multichannel.

There are also a couple of Bazzite specific issues, no support for the xpad-noone module and gamemode always defaults back to stereo audio on boot, which may get fixed.

An external nvme usb-c drive makes it very easy to test the state of Linux and gaming as you can just do the install and boot from the usbc drive.

How well Linux will work for gaming depends very much on what you are wanting to build imo. If I was building a gaming pc with stereo audio, display-port connected to a small screen then the issues I have wouldn’t exist. Unfortunately my gaming PC has been a living room PC for years, so I want large screen (75”+) with vrr and 7.1 or Atmos multichannel surround audio, which means HDMI only video connections and no currently owned/available AMD video card.

AI Jesus is ready to dispense advice from a booth in historic Swiss church

Time to start building Electric Monks

In the words of the late Mr Adams

Electric monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe... The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors

Mine’s the coat with a towel in the pocket

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

Re: Plug in hybrids

One reason for that in the uk, is they have favourable tax incentives on company schemes, so people have been using it as a cheap way to get a car on the scheme with no intention of charging it.

Microsoft finally releases a direct-download Windows 11 on Arm ISO

Re: Arm SystemReady

Considering one part of Apple spent the best part of 7 years (2011-2018) burning cash to sue Samsung over mobiles while another part of Apple relied on Samsung as a component supplier and the only supplier for some of the chips in the iPhones they made at that time, I’m not sure unlikely is the word I’d choose.

From the outside looking in, it would seem like an odd thing to do, but it wouldn’t be the first time Apple poured money into their army of lawyers for something that may look unlikely.

Tesla asks customers to stop being wet blankets about chargers

Re: Er, Global Standard?

Nope, the US Tesla connector has been adopted as the North American standard, NACS. It has been standardised as SAE J3400. Outside North America nobody really cares.

The rest of the world quietly got on and sorted their own out, with most of Europe settling on CCS. Chaedmo is an alternative but certainly in the uk there are only a couple of new vehicles available which still use it.

My 800v EV platform has no issues with the ccs connector handle feeling hot when charging at its max rate ~225Kw.

As I understand it, the technical specs for the connector are fine for ratings much higher than the current superchargers provide. Whether the charger manufacture builds something suitable for it’s intended environment is a different question. There are trade offs with materials, cooling requirements, usability which all impact cost.

Tesla sales, market share dip in EU while other EV makers grow

Re: First mover bonus no longer enough

At least you took the time to find out.

There is still too much generalisation from all sides when in reality it is currently more specific to an individual’s usage and location.

The general price difference is shrinking and for anyone with access to a company EV scheme, that can still skew things quite heavily in an EVs favour.

I had always dismissed getting an EV on the grounds that I had no access to home charging so it would be a nightmare and expensive to own one.

Last year I replaced my car with an EV. It took some time, effort and realistic honesty about my vehicle usage. The trigger was I’d been looking at cars in general and one of the few I actually liked happened to be an EV.

The public charging infrastructure around me has expanded significantly over the past few years and is rarely busy. The car I liked was available via the company scheme and even public charging is cheaper to run than my previous petrol car for my usage needs.

I had worked out based on pessimistic EV range figures, price parity for charging vs petrol would be ~85p/Kw with petrol at £1.40/l

Reality is I get better than pessimistic range driving normally so have lower monthly running costs and no need to keep a slush fund for those unexpected repairs.

Without the company EV scheme it would been more expensive as a private purchase, but having taken the risk which could have backfired, the extra vs my previous car would still have been cheaper than the various age related costs I knew were coming.

As for my next car when the company scheme ends, who knows, depends what is around and what takes my fancy. There was so little I actually liked on the market last year, it could be even worse when I need to think about it. On the bright side I do know any EV platform that matches or exceeds the Ioniq 6 is an option.

Windows: Insecure by design

Re: how much punishment are you willing to take?

My households gaming pcs are the only ones stuck with Windows at home, partially due to software and partially due to the hdmi org licensing racket.

While Linux gaming has had a huge leap forward, it’s still not there for the games I play but hopefully it will reach a point where it is a “just works” situation.

The other expensive change is a new graphics card for VRR and 4K/120 support. With the HDMI org making the hdmi 2.x spec closed license (got to keep their money coming in somehow now they have run out of features to add) and refusing to allow Amd’s open source driver with 2.x support the only solution I can realistically see is an expensive graphics card replacement. Displayport isn’t a workable option for me as the AV world uses hdmi only, so there is no AV receiver with VRR & surround sound or large screen display using displayport to buy, nevermind be affordable.

Aside from seeming to live in a different reality to end users, the Microsoft divisions seem to be in their own different worlds. I find it unlikely the Xbox/Gaming division who provide and supply the Windows PC gaming market and Windows on handhelds would want either OneDrive or Recall on by default if ever.

My Legion Go is running very well with Bazzite, the only downside is Lenovo haven’t added the firmware to the Linux firmware repository and release it as a Windows only install.

Work is just whatever. Regulated industry, external auditors, centrally machine management, so that’s a Windows/Macos environment. Almost all of the development/engineering side of the business would have an easier life on Linux given our toolchains, workflows and target environments, but the large scale device management tools and external auditors understand/target windows and macOS.

ChatGPT, write a report about database glitches that crashed you today

Re: ChatGPT - help me write

Maybe Arthur asked it how to make tea

Google's Pichai tells underlings exec bonuses will be clipped

30,000 managers in 187,000 staff?

I can see a prime target for where those 12,000 redundancies should hit and could well save them even more money than the ones they’re likely getting rid of.

British monarchy goes after Twitter, alleges rent not paid for UK base

Re: The fundamental problem with the business

I would expect it’s related to some outdated view point that may still exist in advertising companies and some look at us, aren’t we amazing nose thumbing.

I did some work at a client many years ago, who was an ad agency with contracts for global brands. Most of their workforce and actual design/production work was done 250 miles away from their small, fancy London office, but the London address was seen as vital to be taken seriously in the industry and for the sales team to schmooze their clients. They had a similar office in Switzerland.

I doubt the advertising industry has changed that much in the years since then.

Hey, online pharmacies: Quit spreading around everyone's data already

Re: URIs visited

The site names themselves seem like a red flag and best avoided.

Sound more like the dodgy names used in email spam than legitimate websites to me.

“Google last year pledged to update its location history system so that visits to medical clinics and similarly sensitive places are automatically deleted.”

So the big black holes highlighted by mapping the location history will stand out like a sore thumb?

Sounds about as useful as putting a “nothing to see here” sign over the area.

Twitter tweaks third-party app rules to ban third-party apps

Re: Leeching off a leech

Don’t understand the downvotes, maybe it’s just the wording.

If your business relies on a single supplier, whether that’s for virtual or physical goods/services, then you either have a major flaw in your business plan or accept your survival has a single point of failure outside your control

Twitterific has been around since 2007 and isn’t a charity or operating on donations and has had 9 years to ensure they have a working business that could survive a supplier loss.

If your contract with your paying clients allows them to request a refund because you aren’t providing the service/product you sold them, why shouldn’t they?

Feel Luckey, punk? Oculus designer builds VR murder headset

How long before the US DoD starts supplying its current ‘friends’ military hardware which requires a new improved headset operators must use?

Got to have a plan for the day they unfriend them.

Strong support for Snap and Ubuntu Core as Canonical meet IRL

And how many of those downloads are because people opened Ubuntu’s version of the store/discover/whatever it’s called, searched for steam and Ubuntu returned their snap version as the default?

It’s a pointless metric because people who aren’t knowledgeable about .deb, snap, ppa repos will just take the path of least resistance to get steam

Canonical should just accept it’s not wanted, drop it and join the rest with flatpaks. I guarantee nobody will want to resurrect it like they did with unity. Unfortunately as mentioned this will be about walled gardens, control and money. After their inject adverts backfired on them they need something else to cling on to for future monetisation attempts

Unlucky for some: Meta chops 13% of global workforce

I think a large part of the explosion wasn't so much about the not believing he'd stick to employment laws, but the whole way it was done. As more details came out he's clearly got the firing in order with local laws, but as usual was a dick about how he did it.

Closing offices, ex-employee's reporting their machine was wiping before they had even received an email, waking up to find out you were fired because it happened while you were asleep, etc...

Zuk's announcement seems to show a level of empathy he's not known for, maybe he's been doing a Musk and having a smoke, or maybe Meta's PR team weren't fired and could put together a better worded announcement about the redundancies and package, highlighting they'd thought a bit first and not wanting to end up on global news broadcasts for being completely heartless dicks.

It's not good that any company needs to mention employee's will still have access to email to communicate after their remote machines are wiped, but after the way twitter handle things I expect most companies will now.

As already mentioned, the severance is above and beyond legal requirements, certainly here in the UK.

There is never a good way of announcing layoffs and in the run up to christmas with living costs spiralling nobody looks good for it, but there are ways of announcing and breaking the news which don't involve setting fire to everything you touch.

Microsoft mulls cheap PCs supported by ads, subs

Re: PiHole

Or they'll just continue the current trend of tracking endpoints and put the ad-slinging endpoints behind the same domain name as the necessary endpoints, so trying to block ads stops the OS working.

MS aren't the only guilty party for this.

Re: @AC - And good luck with that lockdown

If you look at the global support pages of the major OEMs you'll find they have non-windows SKU's

Just because the US/UK/Western Europe accepts a market where a non-windows machine is limited or hard to buy, that isn't true everywhere. Your friendly search site and PC manufacture website doing their hardest to make sure you land on their local region helps with the charade.

Off the top of my head, HP, Dell, Lenovo, not 100% about Acer + Asus all have SKUs with FreeDOS and Windows versions of the same hardware. This isn't 1 or 2 specific models, this is a wide range of their models. HP, for example, do this for all-in-ones, mini pcs, desktops and laptops including their Omen Gaming brand.

The public voted with their wallet and the corporations sell what people will buy.

The Western world has been a sucker for a long time, accepting what the corporations decide/steamroll/lobby and if no government/regulatory body stops it, the general public just pay the extra.

This goes way back, not just in PCs either, while the music/video industry was demonising divx dvd players and mp3s in the western world, those same companies were shipping dvd players with divx support and even retailing mp3 filled CDs of their albums on shelf beside regular CD versions.

Windows 11 runs on fewer than 1 in 6 PCs

Re: Windows 11 chose not to accept me.

So far having fTPM disabled on my perfectly capable amd machine has been enough to keep MS deciding I'm not worthy or need nagging.

Even better was the recent announcement about no more 'feature' releases for W10, just security until the EOL date.

I'm hoping by then Valve's current push of steamdeck and proton means my only need for windows can finally go away :)

Bad news, older tech workers: Job advert language works against you

Alternatively, the language isn’t ageist, it’s that those of us with a few years around the industry understand what the bollocks phrases are hiding and don’t bother applying.

When your advert reads we have not got a clue what we’re doing or who we want to hire and our pay is so low we claim it’s competitive, nobody with a clue would apply unless completely desperate

Psst. Hey kid. Want a lipstick? Huawei slips new earbuds into cosmetics case

Re: Still surprised

For meeting use maybe look at some bone conducting headphones.

I have a pair of airshockz that have an all day battery, hang on the ear, and are all day comfortable.

No use for music listening other than as background music, but because they don't cover or obstruct the ears can listen to music using normal speaker in the room.

Unexpected side effect was even with limited hearing due to a cold can hear fine with them being bone conducting.

Ex-org? Not at all! Three and a half years after X.Org Server 1.20, 1.21 is released

Re: Refresh rates

And probably something to do with Ubuntu and many games still using xwayland to run, especially if using wine/proton.

Unless you have an Nvidia card, from what I was reading Wayland, Nvidia and gaming is a bit of a mess atm. How it all changes as Nvidia used to be the goto option for 3d on Linux and amd was the mess.

I recently experimented with arch and fedora to see if I could get rid of windows on my gaming pc.

Didn't have any frame rate limiting issues or other problems with wayland, just usual level of wine/proton support and games using proprietary codecs, eg media foundation.

Next year after steamos 3 is released I'll investigate again, but for now there's too much messing around with my game libraries and the multiple stores to be able to just switch on and play.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the BBC stage a very British coup to rescue our data from Facebook and friends

Re: the BBC worries about these things

No idea whether it changed but the strangest part of the iPlayer account when all my devices eventually said I needed an account to view, was it wanted to create a BBC store account, not an iPlayer account.

Sorry, there is no reason my viewing habits need to be connected to the shop I never use so never signed up.

I think it was around this time I saw c4 presenting at one of the early Aws events in London.

They were talking about how Aws had helped reduce the cost and time of their c4 player data harvesting.

Back then they were talking 10 million items of data per day to analyse and that was before c4 wanted login accounts.

I'm sure the BBC will have been doing similar analysis so they have definitely enjoyed making hay while the sun shines.

Now maybe they feel public opinion is turning against the daily ransacking of data and want to get ahead of things.

Alternatively the R&D guys are just continuing to do interesting things, but it doesn't mean the organisation will care enough to implement it