Posts by AMBxx

Bookings open for first all-electric flights around Scandinavia … in 2028

There were trials in Orkney 2 years ago for the flight to Westray and Papa Westray (shortest scheduled flight in the world).

Not heard anything since, so no idea how successful it was. Looked like a good fit for EV.

They also trialled hydrogen in 2019. Nothing more about that either.

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

Re: Won't someone please think of the fatties!

Or 'proper' British stones and pounds, you could be the size of 10!

What a horrible image - those poor security bods

Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

Just back from Bridge of Feugh in Aberdeenshire. Feugh sounds like a scouser pronouncing the F-word!

Lenovo Thinkpad Z13 just has this certain Macbook Air about it...

You're missing the point. He'd planned the anti-windows rant longer before he wrote the review. The thinkpad is just the prop.

Microsoft to let Internet Explorer 11 haunt Windows some more

Re: programming madness

Still happens I often have to switch from Firefox to Chrome.

First ever 64-bit version of Windows rediscovered … and a C compiler for it too

Re: Windows ME

Windows Meh

Search the web at least once every two years or risk losing your Google account

Solution to MS Bing problems?

Perhaps MS should delete accounts that don't use Bing often enough?

Google sued over 'interception' of abortion data on Planned Parenthood website

Re: Google should get a free pass

There are other ways to track usage. My Wordpress site has a 3rd party plugin that stores the tracking data locally. Doesn't link with anyhting else, just shows me what people view, their device info and their country. No privacy issues at all.

AWS, Microsoft make finding important admin info less frustrating

An then..

As soon as we get used to these changes, they'll change them all again. My biggest frustration with Azure is the complexity generated by constant change. I've ended up just sticking to a very basic set of services.

China again signals desire to shape global IPv6 standards

Re: Dodgy stats

If IPv6 was a project in a private company, it would have been abandoned long ago as not fit for purpose. Even Microsoft give up when they realise they've messed up.

It's a shame it's been so over-specified that we'll not need an improved v7 in our lifetimes.

iPhones hook up with Windows as Microsoft’s Phone Link dials up Apple's iOS

Does anyone use this stuff?

I had this integration on my beloved Windows phones. I now have it on my Moto Android. It's a general nuisance and quickly disabled.

Is there anyone who actually find this useful?

Microsoft may stop bundling Teams with Office amid antitrust probe threat

Re: Edge

That must be why Edge has such a huge market share.

It's a matter of when, not if, customers move to the cloud, SAP tells investors

Same old SAP

It really does stand for 'Such Arrogant Pr!cks'

Unilever claims it's a 'cloud-only enterprise' – now with added OpenAI

Cloud only?

I'll bet that their manufacturing processes aren't running in the cloud. It's fine for email, docs, finance etc, but no way they'd risk having to shutdown all their manufacturing just because Azure has a funny turn.

I hope...

Bank rewrote ads for infosec jobs to stop scaring away women

And carry a clipboard in a convincing manner!

Nostalgic for VB? BASIC is anything but dead

Re: DLL Hell.

I'd like a proper forms based designer for web applications. I shouldn't be worrying about the underlying css anymore than I worry about a gfx card's drivers.

Re: DLL Hell.

I think the thing that killed VB was that MS tried to make it a 'good' language with the introduction of .Net. People were using it because it was a quick way to create GUI applications. .Net put off hobbyists. Any more advanced users, just cross-trained to C# as that gained more respect and higher wages.

Watch for schema design in graph database rollout, business user warns

Old solution

That solution is as old as the hills. If performance is poor, throw more hardware at it!

Are you ready to go all-in, head-first, on a laptop? ASUS's Zenbook Pro 16X asks for that commitment

Arrow keys

My Dell XPS has a keyboard with small arrow keys that are sort of integrated with page up/down. Great way to lose track of where you are in a document. Fortunately, there are macro utilities that allow you to disable them.

That said £3000 for a laptop?

Bing AI feels like ChatGPT stuffed into a suit – not the future

Re: "what makes search useful today"

Search is more useful.

Yesterday, I asked Bing GPT AI thingummy 'How do I set the locale of a Postgres database on Windows server to UK English'

Only answer it would give me related to Linux. The locale strings for Windows have a hyphen instead of an underscore.

All it appeared to do was list the top answer from Stack Overflow.

After nearly two decades of waiting, GNOME 44 brings you... image thumbnails

Re: Whose Informed Opinion?

If you're in 'detail' view like proper grown-ups, you can change any column you like. It's only in the pointless 'list' view that you can't change stuff.

WANdisco suspends shares pending fraud investigation

Re: "potentially fraudulent irregularities"

All the hand wringing about losing them to the US stock exchange. Looks like we'd be well shot of them.

Brit newspaper giant fills space with AI-assisted articles

Re: Spelling Mistakes

Producers of road maps are supposed to do the same with small errors in place names and random changes. Would love to know if there are any public examples.

Re: Artificial plagarism

It will get worse. With the increasing amount of generated content, in the future the source of the generated content will be stuff that was also created by AI.

German 5G network ban said to loom for Huawei and ZTE

I'm guessing

They'll be buying Russian instead.

Microsoft adds features to Windows 11 monthly – managing it is your problem

Re: Did anyone ask for this?

Still not forgiven them for introducing IIS in an update, then enabling it by default.

Then there was the SQL Server tray tool that listened on port 80, so was easily hacked.

Life wasn't all roses back then.

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

ChatGPT - help me write

Can you help me write an article that's not about asking ChatGPT to write an article?

Asking for every journalist in the world.

FTX is back in Japan, where users can withdraw fiat and crypto

Re: "Japan’s ability to protect its consumers from huge losses"

It's just an old fashioned 'run on a bank'. Northern Rock and many more have been here before.

Nothing new under the sun.

UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics

Re: Customer?

I use 123-efiling as bridging software. About £10 a year, just a case of exporting some data from accounts and linking to their template.

Unplug that Anker battery pack now: House blaze sparks recall

Re: Argh!

Butane is pretty safe as it's ligheter than air and disperses. We have bottled propane - much stricter for installation as it's heavier than air. We had to have our drains checked to ensure any leak wouldn't enter our septic tank causing a big bang.

Microsoft's new AI BingBot berates users and can't get its facts straight

Re: Apparently it learns....

Apart from Visual Studio, SQL Server, .Net, Visual Code...

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

Re: Old men yelling at clouds...

I recently read 'Intelligent Investor' with the additional updates from the early 2000s. 1930s rhymed with the 1960s rhymed with the dot.com boom. A new update would just include crypto as the latest fad.

There's nothing new!

Salesforce woes continue as Twitter slashes spending with SaaS supermonster

Live by the sword...

When they sell cloud applications, one of the selling points is being able to flexibly change the number of licences you need. SURPRISE!

Musk's view count antics are perfect cover for Twitter's paid API failure

Who's left?

They lost all the right-wingers when they banned Trump.

They lost all the left-wingers when the unbanned Trump.

I can't see there can be that many people other than bots and showbiz remaining!

Thunderbird email client is Go for new plumage in July

Re: See me after class

Are they talking about just mobile clients? I can't see how Outlook is that low either. That Yahoo! figure looks suspicious too - only used in the US these days.

More stats here: https://kinsta.com/email-market-share/

Is this just to do with marketing emails and users not being able to block the tracking?

Chipmakers threaten to defect to US, EU if UK doesn't get its semiconductor plans sorted

Re: Ireland

Ireland has always done well due to very low corporation tax. UK is increasing Corp tax so Ireland will benefit from that.

Question is what will happen in Ireland should the EU decide to have a minimum level of corporation tax?

Meanwhile

ARM have just announced that out of 500 new jobs, 350 will be in the UK.

It's not all bad news.

You can run Windows 11 on just 200MB of RAM – but should you?

Re: 16GB of RAM is the minimum

Another me too. Old Dell laptop with 8GB RAM, runs fine.

I've found the biggest problem is if you only have a single CPU core. Default when creating a VM is 1 core, hence finding the problem. 2nd core and it's fine.

Warning: Microsoft Teams Free (classic) will be gone in 2 months

Oh dear, Microsoft

There seems to be no limit to the ways in which Microsoft's licensing department can make life more difficult for users of their software.

Everyone's doing it: PayPal sends 2,000 workers packing

Re: I'm not sure

Ebay switching away to their own payment service won't have helped either.

Tech job bloodbath comes to IBM, CFO links layoffs to Kyndryl, Watson Health

Over 50s?

Does 1.5% correspond to the percentage of over 50s in the IBM workforce?

Defra 'confident' it has 'handle' on risk for 30% of apps out of support

Re: Hope as a strategy!

It'll be all those ActiveX plugins in IE!!

City council cans ERP project, keeps details of replacement supplier secret

I'll give Leeds title of 'Capital of West Yorkshire'. Definitely not the whole of Yorkshire (the clue's in the name).

That puts Leeds on a par with Driffield (Capital of East Yorkshire) which seems about right.

Capital of Yorkshire? I think the residents of York might disagree.

During the Civil War, York was even the Royal capital of the whole of England. Leeds was just sheep back then.

EU infrastructure risk project to address potential climate, 'resource' shortage catastrophes

Re: Choo choo

It's that wonderful combination of not enough money to achieve anything worthwhile but enough for a good party.

Of course U2 is one of Bill Gates' favorite bands

Re: If Americans are involved

I saw Big Country play Wembley in the mid 80s. They were supporting U2 - obviously a conspiracy.

The Christians and The Pogues were also playing - is this conspiracy larger than we thought?

University still living in the Nineties seeks help with move to SAP S/4HANA

Dodged this bullet!

In 1997, I had the option of 2 jobs, one of which was with Nestlé as part of their big SAP project. That would have pushed my career into SAP ERP.

So glad I went for the other job - I still like playing with data.

For password protection, dump LastPass for open source Bitwarden

Re: +1 for Bitwarden

I switched to Bitwarden when LastPass started charging (I'm half Scottish and live in Yorkshire - wallet is welded shut). Maybe 3 years ago?

I was a bit disappointed with Bitwarden at first - auto fill was very flaky, especially on mobile. Since then, it's continually improved and is now better than LastPass used to be. Recent addition of passphrase instead of plain passwords a great improvement as 20+ random characters is a pain to type.