Posts by Champ 178 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2013
...if anyone disagreed with my view, which is there's no "I" in AI, and LLMs are just predictive text in a nice frock.
And it seems I'm not only not alone, everyone is of the same view.
I know we're pretty cynical here in Reg Forum Land, but when this many IT professionals think something is a crock of shit, then it probably is
I'm from the other side of the pond, but when I read:
'and a broader partnership with Golden State Warriors Stephen Curry, signed on as a "performance advisor"', I had to fire up my search engine of choice (not Google, as it happens)
This didn't help much. WTF is a basketball player going to contribute to using a phone and smart watch?
...you get kicked
I know we're all professionals here, but I find it almost impossible to imagine what the world would have been like *without* Microsoft (free downvote for first person to say "better"). Sure some stuff was bad (my personal nadir is Win8), but some stuff was incredible. Visual Studio was pretty revolutionary, to name just one.
But over and above individual 'good' or 'bad' products, they went a long way to inventing the modern software industry. They realised that having a strong application ecology would be mutually beneficial to them and countless small (some becoming huge) software producers. And they never thought to take a slice of that income (I'm looking at you Apple - still seems unbelievable to me that Apple take 30% of every iPhone app sale)
Full disclosure: I worked for Microsoft for a couple of years. They were exactly how you'd imagine a huge international company - some amazing and brilliant bits, some terrible and mad bits)
Enjoyed skimming all these "I remember..." comments, so time to add mine...
I was a developer on a VMS app in the 80s (the whole thing in VAX BASIC) and have fond memories of DCL - Digital Command Line. And I was blown away when I found it was extensible, and you could write your own command line interface for your own app, piggy-backing on the underlying system capability.
I still much much prefer typing (abbreviated) commands to clicking a mouse
I had a play with Perplexity myself yesterday. I'm unconvinced
Elsewhere on the internet, someone referred to "Chemical Igor". Typing that into DuckDuckGo gave a first page of hits about General Igor Kirillov (assassinated by Ukrainian forces).
Asking Perplexity "Who is Chemical Igor?" yesterday only gave results about chemists called Igor. But this morning it does identify Kirillov first.
Asking a factual question about myself also gave a wrong answer, even though the right answer was immediately visible on the source it said it had used
This is a really depressing story. Surely these employees were employed to actually produce something, which no amount of fake mouse jiggling is going to replicate. Can Wells Fargo really not tell when staff aren't producing the output that they're employed for?
Really? Wow! I started the Comp Sci course at Imperial in Oct 1981 too! Unfortunately I flunked the exams at the end of the first year, and at to figure out how to make my way in the world...
... which started with BASIC on a CP/M machine, and then morphed to Turbo Pascal on DOS quite quickly. And the Pascal (and associated skills) I'd learnt in that single year did come in useful
Under my telly is the PC I built 10 years ago, in a hifi style case, which records TV for me, has all my music, a library of 100s of films, etc
I'm probably one of the last hold outs still running media centre, but I like it and there's no obvious replacement that does everything I want, so I'll be sticking with it, and Windows 7, for a while yet
...to check out how many dinosaur "of course Micro$oft is evil" posts, and wasn't disappointed
I worked them for a few years in the SatNad era, and they're just another big corporate. No evil to be seen
I'm way way more suspicious, and in some cases genuinely scared, of Amazon and Facebook nowadays.
There are a gazillion shitty websites that I've had to create an account on over the last 20+ years. Of course I'm not going to use a different password for each [1]. On precisely none of these do I care if my details get hacked. Say the crims find I bought some questionable furniture from Ikea last year - so what? Even sites that persist credit card details still need the CVV to complete the txn.
For anyone with any sort of online life, the only options seem to be password re-use, or use a password manager [2]
[1] and, yes, I have tried password managers. Haven't found one that gives me a compelling use case yet
[2] see [1]
Can you list any of these "rafts of EU bureaucracy and Brussels red tape", please? Compared to the now well-understood red tape involved in shipping anything from the UK to the EU?
It's not unusual for large multi-nationals to seek subsidies to set up in a particular jurisdiction. If the UK were still in the EU, it might well have benefited from such an EU subsidy for Intel to build a fab in the UK
>I, like the OP above am getting a little wary of what's >happening to the El Reg, it has never been so impartial... >And that means it is becoming an echo chamber, just like >Twitter, Parler and FB....
You might want to check the meaning of impartial, before you make yourself look silly
Looks like I'm not going to be migrating my music to YouTube, then...
I found Play Music very convenient; I ripped new CDs I bought [1] my CDs via a desktop to my NAS, and then uploaded them to Play Music, which made them available on my phone and other portable devices. And I could 'pin' favourite albums to the phone, so could play them when I had no connection.
<sigh> So now more research and tech implementation required
[1] I'm definitely of the generation that buys, not rents, its music. Spotify? Fuck off
As in this feature, Agile is mostly the current whipping boy for stuff going wrong.
Firstly, "Agile" is a catch-all term for multiple working practices. These can be used brilliantly to deliver high quality, useful systems. But they are no guarantee, and you can definitely produce garbage with them too.
If this project had been run under Prince 2, would anyone be blaming the methodology?
>But Microsoft isn't a normal company. All evidence suggests they haven't listened to what their customers actually want[0] in a couple of decades.
As a former Microsoftie, I really marvel at comments like this. In 35 years in the industry, with 3 at Microsoft, I never worked *anywhere* that paid half as much attention to its customers and what they wanted than Microsoft.
But, I guess it's easier to just keep slagging off the old big bad wolf rather than realise the world might have turned a little.
Where "Leave win #1" was a pretty finely balanced 52:48
Where "Leave win #2" was the UK electorate gaming the UKs FPTP electoral system to deny May the very mandate she went to the country to seek.
Where "Leave win #3" resulted in Remain advocating parties getting a bigger share of the popular vote than Farage the Fascist.
How's those lessons in counting coming along?
Of all the places for the "technological means" unicorn to rear it's head - not the Reg! Nooo! Here the forums are full of people who actually understand IT, and what it can, and more importantly, can't do.
I'm now very depressed that even here, amongst "my people", someone should seriously promote this nonsense
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