Posts by joed

GM parks claims that driver location data was given to insurers, pushing up premiums

Re: My old chariot is as dumb as a log

No need for them use legal steps. All they need to is dump more salt on roads. Now it makes perfect sense.

China to probe US chip subsidies as export curbs rattle allies

Re: No problem!

well, most of US consumers will start blinking the moment we have to pay the price of artisan patriotic chips.

otoh, I'm surprised that counties like China keep underwriting our debt. it's time for the White House to block sale of government bonds to our enemies.

Parallels brings back the magic that was waiting seven minutes for Windows to boot

So basically they've done no better than my attempt using the qemu (couple years ago soon after m1 came out). With some massaging of config files it used multiple cores and was usable (for patient users). The only way to run w10 with Bex excel adding for the user that claimed to desperately need it. I was hoping for Parallels to do better. We've virtually (no pun intended) given up on using their otherwise decent product.

Pornhub lockdown and fact-free Zuckbots – welcome to 2025

Re: It's an easy go to

Also a "perfect" way to advocate for tax increases. No one will dare to vote against our "future". Right.

New Outlook marches onto Windows 10 for what little time it has left

bundlede with security update?

This makes sense. Just like when they pushed news and interests adware. Since they can't convince users, they just shove it onto their machines. In good old times users could pick updates.

First Foxconn, now Microsoft: Wisconsin town dissed by big tech

Or maybe just a tactic to weasel out some taxpayers' money. Or else they'll move. Corporate welfare.

Schneider Electric warns of future where datacenters eat the grid

If only the sources of electricity depended just on availability of coal or nuclear isotopes. Let's not forget that nobody really wants smokestacs or nuclear reactors in their backyard (power plants are expensive). Power transmission is another issue. And then there's an issue of water scarcity. It's needed for both power generation (nothing has changed here, it's just primitive other than more efficient turbines) and data center cooling. If only the AI could put food on our tables. I'd rather have electricity supplied to my fridge that AI blowing hot air at me.

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Re: Reality will bite in the end

The quick fix of 5g internet access wears of just as quickly when you have to pay for bandwidth usage and nobody offers unlimited access (the same applies to cable but the pricing would likely be lower). And lets not forget about standing in just the right spot for this promised 5g to pass the test. "AI" has lots in common with 5g hype. Plenty of gimmick use cases but majority of population is unlikely to want or be able to afford to pay for it. We'll see what businesses do with it (and how much of the "benefits" will they pass down in prices of their products).

Microsoft Edge takes a victory lap with some high-looking usage stats for 2024

Technically their BS new tab page can be trimmed of the nonsense (easy) or completely disabled using fake mdm reg key (to default it to good old blank page or url of choice).

Still, what a crappy browser. Full of shit that MS slings onto their users/hostages (and some of it will stick).

And what other usage stats one could expect when all Windows users are constantly nagged into using it or forced by corporate IT. It's like celebrating communist party winning elections in Soviet Russia.

BTW, does anyone remember good old days when one could designate default app/browser with single click for all extensions and protocols? Sure that was too easy and bad user experience.

Microsoft investigating 365 Office activation gremlin

Re: If only anybody would unterstand that licensing.

I don't think they needed to understand. They don't need to care themselves and the onus is on customers to prove they're in the clear.

Even Netflix struggles to identify and understand the cost of its AWS estate

snake eats its tail?

At what point the effort exerted to measure the cloud spend becomes equal the usage it's trying to evaluate. Win win or lose lose?

Microsoft won't let customers opt out of passkey push

a vendor lock-in trap

MS surely hopes to "safeguard" all your secrets even if against your will. Hard to leave their walled garden when they keep all your keys. Apple's copycats.

And while offering no portability, I bet that they serve their passkeys with AI.

Apple Intelligence summary botches a headline, causing jitters in BBC newsroom

Re: iPhone improvements???

Not unique to Apple. Samsung does the same BS.

Just give me simple list of photos, no albums, no "helpful" grouping. Actually the same in Windows Downlads folder, some decider keeps fixing default file sorting.

Japanese orgs now paying salaries direct into e-wallets

Next will be company store.

What could go wrong.

As major web browser makers snuggle up to AI, these skeptical holdouts remain

Re: A.I ?

What Al stands for? Automated logic, if that much.

Google is a monopoly. The fix isn't obvious

And what about MS?

Too big to deal with? Hypocrites.

Intel prepares to cut 'thousands' of workers

your tax money at work

No meager handouts to proles, only golden parachutes will be provide to the worthy

Smartphone is already many folks' only computer – say hi to optional desktop mode in Android 15 beta

My experience differs. Dex may not be the best experience but way ahead of what iPhones could offer (unless something has changes since they got forced to use usbc). Dex works with any usbc/tb dock. Supports all attached peripherals (input devices, monitor, Ethernet port) and works pretty well. It may not offer 1 to 1 pixel mapping I'd expect on proper desktop (or maybe other graphics limitations made this impression) but it's more than usable.

No way I'd give up real desktop though. So many other things are crippled on mobiles. Thank you very much for the walled garden mentality.

And calling a bt mouse a non proprietary solution is msomewhat isleading. It's not not an open standard, just a common one. And it suck for mouse/keyboard and even audio (lipsync issue renders it unusable for most video media).

Tesla shareholders agree to pay Musk staggering sum of $48B

This were definitely not shareholders who agreed to pay the confidence man. This looks more like you'll scratch my back, I'll scratch your back deal (and what else to expect from boards where members are usually entitled pricks with with all the formal and informal connections to support this sort of dealings). Or is this an exit scam for our space hero? Hopefully with this, he'll be able to afford one way ticket to Mars or other distant place.

when one has a gun

everything looks like a foot.

shoot, it had to be said

Intel, AMD take a back seat as Qualcomm takes center stage in Microsoft's AI PC push

Re: Not necessary to beat Apple

"As anyone who has run Windows under Parallels on an Mx Mac knows, performance and emulation should be fine." - not to a pedant, but afaik Parallels does not support emulation, hence once MS had pulled the rug on W10 for arm64 so was W10 done for on new Macs. I setup W10 x64 vm in QEMU - after some tweaks I had it running but nowhere near arm64 W11 speeds. Proof of concept for sure and it worked if someone really needed tools available for x64 platform but this was about it.

There's quite some hype about Mx performance. Some of due to MS' choices to cripple Windows with useless crap. Otoh, trying to use Mac as media center proves how much necessary plumbing (and resulting CPU overhead) Apple platform was missing. Probably the same in more aspects than this one.

Apple says if you want to ship your own iOS browser engine in EU, you need to be there

Re: Cunning move?

Hopefully they'll get a taste of the Streisand effect.

As for me, I jumped the ship onto platform that let's me use proper firefox. I like green bubbles.

CoreWeave debt deal with investment firms raises $7.5B for AI datacenter startup

renting to Ms and open ai?

No idea why MS (or even open ai) would like pay the middleman. Embrace and then extinguish is not exactly best business strategy for a startup.

Rivian crawls out covered in $1.5B of red ink, panting that it's still alive

Leccy car maker ships bunch of vehicles, losing around $39K on each one

And so so their customers.

And let's not forget about taxpayers chipping in to help the rich "save" the planet.

Lose lose seems to be the name of the game though in the end, an invisible hand of the "free" market has to funnel that money into someone's pocket.

Intel's green dream is chips without any dips in Mother Nature's health

yet another example of greenwashing

There's no way an energy and resource intense process left no mark on environment. The process can be less dirty but even "green energy" use means that another business processes (or just common people) have to resort to not so clean energy. Not to mention that building energy capacity is not green, no matter the final energy source. Even something as mundane as transmission lines result in huge swaths of deforestated areas with power companies giving zero f...s for the impact and esthetics of "trimming" greenery along lines (them EVs get even greener as result of this).

The whole talk of net zero while aiming for economic growth is just BS. Sad but true.

Microsoft catches the Wi-Fi 7 wave with Windows 11

Re: does anyone

more like - has everyone even moved on to wifi 6 (or cared to move)? It's not like an expensive and often huge "spider" of fancy wifi router would magically upgrade ones internet connection (definitely not without addition outlay of money). Not only this, some of the promised speed can only be realized within short range/same room and even then, anything past 50Mbps is irrelevant for normal use. I bet that tech giants would love if everyone was on Ggps+ plan but most have different priorities.

Microsoft adds more AI to Photos in Windows 10 and 11

but does it even matter any more?

Some time into 22h2 update cycle MS has made most of their crApps removable (with no need for powershell). Why would anyone keep any of them is beyond me. One can't even trust the old Notepad either (now also hijacked by "search with bing"). At least there's the option to just run LTSC build and forget about most of the nonsense MS it trying to trow onto their hostagebase (I could care less for the watermark in the corner of the screen).

Microsoft kills off Windows app installation from the web, again

M$ always leaves barn door open for "business"

On one hand how nice of M$ to not require signing apps by their own CA (for a fee of course), on the other hand how the hell they allowed zero touch installs of all appx packages instead of restricting them to ones signed by specific CA (as defined by a group policy pushed by a business that cared for this sort of app deployments)?

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

4k and no ads. I did see the nag once buy it's been working after brief youtube detox.

Microsoft unleashes Copilot preview on Windows 10 insiders

Everyone on w10 will be snapping theirs taskbar to the right to fix the "feature" that nobody'sasked for.

Could this really be the reason why MS locked the Taskbar position in 11?

Microsoft pushes Azure Government Cloud as homefront defender

Re: "There are a couple of problems that leap out here"

It's worse than "Microsoft sees what you do on your machine." MS can track you between all the systems you volunteered to sign in with your personal account (or were tricked into doing so on more recent Windows versions) and system where you had no choice whether to sign in or not (like your employer's computer that's more than likely running some MS product with - just as likely - misconfigured privacy policies). Managing both work and personal accounts/systems gives MS an opportunity to map true identities (and activities) of users. Google (and others) at least need to work to get that sort of details and don't asks for money for the privilege of being spied on (MS taxes every product and service, including these provided by governments).

Mozilla tells extension developers to get ready to finally go mobile

Re: Finally!

I had to double check phone - I've been running FF (standard channel and beta) for almost a year now with ublock and noscript. None of them has been installed through F-droid. I'd not use Chrome for regular web browsing.

Microsoft's 11-year itch: The uncelebrated anniversary of Windows 8

Re: There's no 'benefit of hindsight' required.

It's worse than that. The whole metro abomination had no place in desktop environment but MS managed to make it also utterly crap in the tablet mode. I gave their useless grove (?) media player a chance to shine as a head/media unit in a car. Absolutely useless UI with buttons fit for mouse cursor interaction but almost impossible to deal with using touch. Pointless exercise that annoyed Windows users. And not like MS has relented since in destroying Windows (sure they'll pretend to restore some user interface features every other generation but the writing is on the wall and so the enshitification continues).

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

rolling blackout on wheels

And yet US - effectively - encourages monstrosities on wheels (the bigger and more expensive, the larger the tax write-off for those who can afford them).

Great for the grid, environment and other taxpayers /s.

Let's just wait till the trickle down economy passes them used but properly greenwashed trucks to dirty masses. One day we may all be driving "clean" electric vehicles but our fridges will be running off gas powered generators (to keep food from spoiling when neighbors plug in their fleet of monster trucks).

Imagine a world without egress fees or cloud software license disparities

Re: Imagine a world without egress fees or cloud software license disparities

On the other hand, network traffic does cost and consumer of the service will pay for this in one way or another. I'd rather have the actual consumer paying than all of us chipping in to secure "free seevice". As much as iinternet access and cloud services are considered essential, I'd argue that they are not (maybe for hipsters).

Look ma, no fans: Mini PC boasts slimline solid-state active cooling system

Re: is that good?

Maybe it has more to do with noise levels than power dissipation itself. Speaking from personal experience power, noise levels and ability to provide smooth youtube playback (1080p or 4k depending on the attached tv) are deal-breakers for mini pcs. I still have an zbox pc and this thing rocked for 1080p media pc (and was fanless). Somehow I've had no such luck with newer celeron based Nuc like systems. Somehow Intel could not 4k deliver video decoding performance in the power envelope required for fanless build. Went through couple newer gen lower end boxes before settling on i7 Nuc (definitely not silent). In the end got a deal for the cheapest m2 mac mini and while this thing is virtually silent, the idiosyncrasies of macOS are not the best match for htpc (limited media playback support, no support for CE and Apple's UI choices), still livable though.

Google offers some copyright indemnity to users of its generative AI services

Re: "Whether or not AI systems violate copyright laws"

Well, Google and MS can offer protection from copyright claims but hopefully they'll become targets of racketeering charges. Their offer is not much different from mob offering protection to their clients, aside from the fact that clients are not coerced into the relationship. It's outsiders who pay the price of potentially villainous clients being sheltered from legal consequences by large corporations with competent legal teams that nobody can afford to challenge (often not even governments). We'll see how far this protection extended.

Microsoft reportedly runs GitHub's AI Copilot at a loss

Re: At one time...

80$ per month per user. This sounds similar to claims of RIAA with regard to loses due to piracy. Either BS or MS' AI is so inefficient as to consume s.load of power and hardware to account for that 80$.

I bet they'll still claim it being carbon neutral.Can we reing in this insanity before all we have is just bunch of hot air over data center littering countryside?

Infosys launches aviation cloud it claims can halve lost luggage

Re: 5 days

No supervisors but hypervisors aplenty.

UTM: An Apple hypervisor with some unique extra abilities

I did prove of concept corporate w10 build using standard sccm deployment path (we've had no option to use w11). It worked but at abysmal speed (m1 pro MacBook). The situation improved once I edited some text file to force multicore use but even I'd not use it for any compute heavy apps. Needless to say 1 deployment was all I did.

Still, I can't argue with the price of the tool and number of available options is indeed surprising.

The only way is WebKit: Vivaldi's browser arrives on iOS

Yep, I can confirm proper FF experience on Android with critical extensions available (noscripy, ublock origin) and no Google login implied. Minor gripes would be that mainstream version does not give access to some/all about:config flags (like ability to specify dns over https provider). Still one can install FF Beta to get that option.

Vivaldi fot Android is also fine.

Chrome is there to download better browsers.

Life of iOS users is so restricted (one would wander if they've got paid to suffer like that). I guess it just works, just.

Microsoft suggests businesses buy fewer PCs. No, really

And how do these users will connect to MS' cloud pc? From a PC they'd likely not be required to have otherwise (quite common for folks working aforementioned jobs). So the employers offload their equipment cost onto their labor and MS pockets all the imaginary savings (no way it was cheaper once everything is accounted for) and can make all the greeneashing claims (I bet it'll also ask for some green tax credit taxpayers are complied to hand over to cash strapped corpos and equally handicapped shareholders).

Win win/s

Rivian wants out of Amazon electric van lock-in

I guess Amazon's commitment reflects business sense (or lack of if) for fancy EVs of any kind. To be honest I'm surprised to see these slow rolling blackout that far north in winter. Having said that, these are still better than luxury personal rides subsidized with taxpayers money (and parasitizing grid beyond what's reasonable to move ~200# human from A to B).

Microsoft makes Outlook Mac native email app a freebie

I do not know in what way the Outlook for macOS could be considered a native app. Another Teams like electron thing - sure. The looks of Outlook web access is the 1st giveaway, another are similar limitations not present in Outlook for Windows (like no option to update DL membership etc). No idea whiy MS is trying to misstate facts, though it lines up with bs like x/do not upgrade doing the opposite during w10 push.

What goes up must come down: Logitech sales tumble amid PC slump

Re: Forced market dump

Untill you stumbled onto a non-unify set. All i needed was fairly cheap replacement keyboard. Picked one on sale but little did I know, logitech decided to ship something totally incompatible, not a warning on the box (preferably in big red letters). Now I'm stuck with this crap and i do not really feel like switching 2 receivers between work and personal device. And pricing of their other reasonable kit (mouse with forward/back buttons) seems to have gotten out of hands. It's not like everyone was some hipster keyboard connoisseur. If I have to replace the whole set, i may get some competitively priced but still half decent generic.

Fat EVs may cause 'more death on our roads' – watchdog

Re: Weight is relative...

I do not know that cars, especially heavy one cause little damage to roads and surroundinds (in the event of a crash). Bikes, sure (but not dirt bikes on dirt roads)

Re: American cars are too heavy - solution blame electric cars

Id argue that such limits should be placed on both ice a electric vehicles. And get rid of stupid cafe loopholes for trucks. Only this would force maximizing efficiency. Simple a penalty for each # over total mass/average vehicle occupancy in eccess of standards set and updated periodically would take care of some of the problem. And no shifting co2 credits between gaz guzzler manufacturers and efficient or electric ones. And cars should be sold based on its own merit/value and no tax breaks mudding the water and benefitting those who could already afford theam at the cost to the rest of tax payers.

Re: More mass = more energy, right?

It does not really matter how that electricity is generated. Claiming the use of clean energy only means that others have to do with dirty sources. And all that extra power generation capacity (regardles of the type) has to be built (with signifficant release of co2 and often destruction of natural lands). This fact somehow escapes greenwashing PR).

Re: More mass = more energy, right?

Not to rain on that 1000km parade but most of travelers - at least in US - would skip any but a "pit stop" breaks for such a trip. Not to mention that they'd be done within 10 hours with absolutely no speeding (obviously assuming no gridlock on the way).

And with such a low average speed i could almost make it on just one tank (obviously i drive a euro car with mass nowhere near behemot SUVs, electrics or even worse - electric SUVs).

Parental control apps prove easy to beat by kids and crims

nature will find the way

what did they expect?