* Posts by AMBxx

2710 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jan 2014

FCC ups broadband benchmark speeds, says rural areas still underserved

AMBxx Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: I'll wait for it

In rural England, I get 20Mbps down and just 1.1 Mbps up. Better than the midband we used to have (2 ISDN lines that sort of worked together),

Oh look, cracking down on Big Tech works. Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi surge on iOS

AMBxx Silver badge

Use a mixture

I use FireFox for general browsing.

Chrome for development work where I don't want script/privacy blockers causing problems.

Edge for anything MS related (Azure/Office), just to keep it separate.

Only plugin I can't get for Firefox is the ad skipper for Amazon/ITV videos.

AMBxx Silver badge

Opera?

>>> in 2010, when Microsoft was required to provide a browser choice screen in Windows in Europe, Opera reported that its download numbers had doubled.

That ended well then - what's Opera's percentage share now?

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

AMBxx Silver badge

Re: Rebranded Mail & Calendar

I'm not convinced it will happen. They tried to do the same with OneNote. They've now abandoned the new shiny version and gone back to the original.

Similarly, they've introduced the replacement for VBA in Excel. It's crap and hard to run on multiple PCs due to the security (even though there's very little you can do with it). VBA will be around for a long time as it's the main thing stopping people quitting Excel for something free.

Sunak's defunct SaaS scheme spent seven percent of budget designed to help 100,000 SMEs

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Re: Hot Air

On the plus side, they can just piss it away on the extension of the NHS app.

AMBxx Silver badge

Re: It was just accounting software, big deal?

Probably find that the voucher covered what would normally be the free initial period!

AI models show racial bias based on written dialect, researchers find

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Thumb Up

Re: Why would people write in dialect anyway.

Where I live in East Yorkshire, it's quite acceptable to say 'I aren't doing that'. If someone wrote it, I'd think they were a bit thick!

Microsoft sends OneDrive URL upload feature to the cloud graveyard

AMBxx Silver badge

Re: Microsoft OneDrive URL upload feature

This is the first I've heard of this. Shame as I have a very slow upload from here and often download large installers that I need to then store in OneDrive. Currently, I use a cloud PC to do the work but this would have been much easier.

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

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Apple must think that having such a huge market share will win the day as Epic will back down.

Not sure which way it will go. Could this be Apple following Nokia & Blackberry into decline? Or, will this allow another competitor to take Epic's spot? I wouldn't want to bet on it.

Trump supporters forge AI deepfakes to woo Black voters

AMBxx Silver badge
Facepalm

Except

Double fail - turns out they're copied from a parody account. Nothing to do with Trump or the Republicans, just some journalists who don't have a sense of humour and fail to do a basic fact check.

He also introduced Michael Jordan to basketball too!

https://twitter.com/Trump_History45

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

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Thumb Up

Re: HDMI is dead

I was cursing the DP ports on my new monitors, not understanding why we needed a new standard.

Now I understand - DP for me in future.

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

AMBxx Silver badge

Re: The option is named following way

Also good for installing Win11 on an 'unsupported' PC.

Microsoft extends Copilot in Windows for Insiders

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Thumb Down

Something else to disable

Recent update made CoPilot appear yet again but in the right hand corner this time. Option to disable no longer in settings. Only choice is to head to group policy.

What next?

Europe's data protection laws cut data storage by making information-wrangling pricier

AMBxx Silver badge

The cost savings appear to assume that there was no benefit to holding the information. Doesn't sound likely.

The missing cost is having to monitor all of this to ensure compliance.

Vietnam to collect biometrics - even DNA - for new ID cards

AMBxx Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Coming to a govt building near you

And people will still shout 'if you've nothing to hide...'

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

AMBxx Silver badge

Re: Query: the timing of ads

From the last couple of weeks, the adverts seem to appear about 5 seconds before you'd expect them to in the normal flow. Mildly annoying but there are only 2 adverts per 40 minutes or so. Less than we were seeing on their FreeVee service.

Targeting is hopeless - considering the amount of purchasing data that Amazon have from our account, I have no idea why they're targeting this 50-something with adverts more suited to 20-somethings. I'd not be impressed if I were paying for the adverts.

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

AMBxx Silver badge

Re: So let's get this straight....

Careful - it was 'his friend'.

Bit like 'asking for a friend'

Whether to move off Oracle is the $100M+ question for Europe's largest public body

AMBxx Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Are there other choices?

Regardless of the fancy stuff, they want everything sent to them in Excel format.

They then print it and rekey it.

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

AMBxx Silver badge

Re: It depends on the use-case

It's a pain if a VPN or other remote connection is secured using trusted IP addresses. I've just changed to Zen (plusnet have scrapped their business service), so been through the change once. Hopefully, I'll be recent enough that they won't be changing my address.

IBM talks up cost savings, including 'workforce rebalancing'

AMBxx Silver badge
WTF?

Re: What does IBM do these days?

I've worked on a few projects with IBM over the years.

First it involved going to their data centres - lots of servers with warning lights flashing as RAID was degraded. Nobody ever bothered to fix that.

To make life more difficult, there weren't enough keyboards to go around all the servers (this was before RDP). If you left the server you were working on, someone would take your keyboard. As these were the old PS/2 keyboards, you'd then have to reboot to make another keyboard work.

More recently, they wanted me to do some very specialised work. Just a few days. My PI only covers me to £1m. They wanted £2m. By the time we'd sorted that out (6 months), the remainder of the project had been abandoned.

No, I don't know what they do any more either!

Apple has botched 3D for decades. So good luck with the Vision Pro, Tim

AMBxx Silver badge

Not convinced

I'm in an apple-free office - Windows/Linux/Android, so no fanboi.

However, Apple have no real history of innovation - they take someone else's nearly great idea and polish it with easier UI and less stuff to worry about. If anyone can get VR/AR to work, it's Apple.

That said, I'm yet to be convinced of a generic need for this stuff that can't be fulfilled on a regular monitor. Is the market for games and porn big enough?

Wanna run Windows on an M-series Mac? Fine, buy a license, but no baremetal

AMBxx Silver badge
FAIL

It's not free at all - it's included in the price of the hardware.

AMBxx Silver badge
Facepalm

If the OS is so free, why can't I be licenced to run it on a Windows PC? I did manage to get it running on a VM once. Illegal and very slow.

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

AMBxx Silver badge
Facepalm

Elite!

I'm still annoyed that I sent off for the certificate when I was merely 'Deadly' rather than waiting to hit the high of 'Elite'.

It's probably in a box at my parents' house!

Atari 400 makes a comeback in miniature form

AMBxx Silver badge
Happy

Re: The bulge

The back of the ZX80 was for supporting the milk carton that was an essential add-on due to the poor heat sink!

Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

AMBxx Silver badge

Re: Not difficult

80% is too vague.

I'm a self employed consultant working through a ltd company in the uk.

My largest customer is normally about 40% of my turnover. In the past, I used to sell software too. A large order could easily take that 40% to 85%. Nobody doubts my self employment.

UK mulls next-gen satellite subsidies for Brit companies

AMBxx Silver badge
Go

C-LEO

I hope they repurpose some of the original LEO code. Cake deliveries by satellite

Trust us, says EU, our AI Act will make AI trustworthy by banning the nasty ones

AMBxx Silver badge

I think they're trying to ban all adverts!

Microsoft to intro dedicated mode for Cloud PCs

AMBxx Silver badge

Re: Windows 365 Boot?

My broadband is slow making uploads a thing to be scheduled overnight. Typically, it's installers that I want to keep in OneDrive.

I looked into the idea of a cloud PC but couldn't make it cost effective. In the end, I just have a Windows VM in Azure that I use for an hour or so each time.

Europe signs off on up to €1.2B in state aid for homegrown cloud project

AMBxx Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Nutshell

That must be why communism led to such productive economies.

Taxing times: UK missed out on £1.75B because of digitization delays

AMBxx Silver badge
FAIL

Digital tax?

Best approach if HMRC want to save money would be to revert to paper system. The more they digitise, the worse they get.

Sam Altman set to rejoin OpenAI as CEO – seemingly with Microsoft's blessing

AMBxx Silver badge

That worked so well with the Nokia Lumia buyout! As a shareholder in MS, I hope they've learnt a lesson there.

Software is listening for the options you want it to offer, and it's about time

AMBxx Silver badge

Getting too old for this

If a gadget doesn't do something to make my life simpler, it's off to the bin.

If my PC software doesn't make me more productive, uninstalled.

Smart TVs are on my 'never buy' list.

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean AI's not after you

AMBxx Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Horses *did* protest

I'm happy to do 90% less work. I'm more concerned about there being 90% less of us and the method of reducing the population!

AMBxx Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Horses *did* protest

How does the population of horses today compare to that of 1880? I'm guessing 90% down at least!

US actors are still on strike – and yup, it's about those looming AI clones

AMBxx Silver badge
Terminator

They might as well take the money while it's available, then get another job. Soon enough, the studios will be using AI to create unique actors/actresses who bare no resemblance to real people, so don't need to be paid.

It's just a new way to do cartoons but with realistic images.

Bad eIDAS: Europe ready to intercept, spy on your encrypted HTTPS connections

AMBxx Silver badge

I'm pretty sure the German privacy laws will prevent this ever being approved. Given their history, the germans are very touchy about government spying.

Dell cosies up to Meta to tame Llama 2 AI beast on-prem

AMBxx Silver badge

That's not a llama

It's an Alpaca.

Good time to search for the llama song.

Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'

AMBxx Silver badge

Re: That sounds about right...

I remember the secretaries in the office where I worked being shocked when we switched from DOS to Windows because the ALT and ALT-GR keys didn't do the same thing any more.

CEO Satya Nadella thinks Microsoft hung up on Windows Phone too soon

AMBxx Silver badge

It's strange to think of all the arguments about whether it would be Blackberry or Microsoft who were the 3rd phone OS in the long term.

Google - yes, that Google - testing proxy scheme to hide IP addresses for privacy

AMBxx Silver badge

I always assume that most attackers are just some script looking for an uprotected target. Your comment is probably valid for the government or large business servers, but home users and small businesses might as well just block whole countries. I can't see me selling much to China, Russia, half of Africa, plus assorted Eastern European and Middle Eastern countries.

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

AMBxx Silver badge

Re: Capacity

It's easy - you just crack existing hydrocarbons. OK, so it's incredibly energy intensive but will keep the greenies happy.

AMBxx Silver badge
Holmes

Re: Capacity

We had a problem after fitting a gas cooker. We have bottled gas, so nice bulky propane. A manufacturing fault in a join led to a small leak. Hard to find and the first time our plumber had ever seen such a problem.

If there are tiny faults that allow something as big as propane to leak,how many more are there that will allow hydrogen to leak?

Buyer's remorse haunts 3 in 5 business software purchases

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Happy

Re: Only 3 in 5

The other half of the question is that 2 in 5 lie about a project's success.

AMBxx Silver badge

Re: Some advice based on my experience

#8 Pray that nothing changes in the business (ever)

You could do #2 until the cows come home, but it's never going to be complete.

Sony, Honda tease EV that aims to be a lounge on wheels

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Thumb Down

Runs Android

Security updates for how long?

Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11

AMBxx Silver badge
Coat

Re: Advert

I just want to know who down voted by post. Was this youngsters who don't like oldies on here, or was it oldies who like their newspapers?

AMBxx Silver badge

Re: Forced upgrade even of machines that pass checks?

My 5 year old Dell XPS was marked as unsupported by Windows 11. Something changed 2 weeks ago and now it's available.

Seems to run fine. One improvement is that suspend works properly for the first time.

Still don't like being forced to have the start stuff at the bottom.

AMBxx Silver badge

Re: Advert

50? More like 70. I'm 55 and haven't had a paper newspaper for well over 10 years.

Lenovo to offer Android PCs, starting with an all-in-one that can pack a Core i9

AMBxx Silver badge
WTF?

Support?

My 2 year old phone isn't getting any more Android updates.

My 6 year old laptop is happily running Windows 11. My 'Grandfather's Axe' PC will continue forever.

I know there are similar long support for 'proper' Linux and Mac.

How long are these Android laptops going to be getting updates?