* Posts by Jimmy2Cows

2434 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Feb 2015

Microsoft has reached $1M giveaway levels of desperation to attract users to Bing

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FAIL

Re: But somehow I expect this will only be valid for Bing users in the good ole U S of A!

TFA says no.

Windows 11 continues to creep up behind Windows 10

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Yeah, the hyperbole isn't helpful here. Mainly it's a question of who will blink first: MS when Win11 is the only supported version and it still isn't growing enough, or enterprise and institutional users getting to the end of Win10 support and refusing to needlessly and expensively upgrade perfectly functional hardware just to meet an artificial OS imposition.

If enough people hold out, MS might just feel pushed relax their hardware requirements. Yeah yeah, it's a pipe dream. It would take a concerted global effort, one I just don't see will happen. Plus MS win either way, since ent's and int's usually must use a supported OS, so they'll have to pay either way. Although it's still a far lower cost than junking perfectly good hardware.

One way that might work is if governments refused to upgrade their estates, on environmental grounds. They're about the only orgs with sufficient might to force MS to relax it's hardware requirements. And of course, if MS did relax them, all the people forced to upgrade beforehand would be rightly pissed off. Some class action potential there.

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Re: Well...

Many of us didn't have a choice. Against my objections, and despite Win10 still be very much in support at the time, my "upgrade" was forced on me by the company's IT dept.

Windows 10 given an extra year of supported life, for $30

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who can't because their PCs aren't capable of running Windows 11

As has been said a million times, it's nothing to do with capability, but permission. MS chose to shoot themselves in the foot by applying arbitrary hardware requirements that blocked otherwise perfectly capable machines. Talk about not being able to read the room.

Dropbox to shed another 500 staff, CEO takes 'full responsibility'

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cuts were needed where the company had underperformed

Oh yes, cutting staff in underperforming units always helps those units perform better. What a twat.

US Army should ditch tanks for AI drones, says Eric Schmidt

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WTF?

Re: Tanks and drones are obsolete

This has to rank as one of the dumbest things I've ever read, on oh so many levels.

Ford CEO admits he drives a Chinese electric vehicle and doesn't want to give it up

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Re: The future is electric

Battery swapping is a great idea. Car makers will never go for it though, their batteries are usually structural and part of the their protected IP. Too many manufacturing secrets.

Solar charging on every home is hopelessly impractical. Many homes have no suitable roof surface for solar panels, or a roof that is too small to hold enough panels to effectively charge a car, and who is going to buy, build and install that many panels anyway.

That problem multiplies for things like grocery stores, since you need to provision solar charging for all the store's customers at any one time.

Could cover all the world's car parks with solar panels, and park the cars underneath, but again that is hideously expensive.

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Re: chargers that won't connect with the app,

Can't harvest and sell juicy user data just by letting them swipe or tap a card. This and making their marks, sorry, customers, feel like they're part of an exclusive club instead of just buying a basic commodity.

Well ok, that's a bit cynical. In theory an app can tell you the nearest available charger on the network. Or, governments could just mandate use of open charging standards and then every car can query every charging network to find the nearest available chargers. No app required.

Regardless, I'm pretty sure mose people would like to just pay for their energy and go. They certainly don't want the privilege of being harvested.

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Trollface

Re: what do the rest do when EV's are being forced on us all

The poor people who can't afford a property with offroad parking will of course be expected to use oh-so-reliable public transport, and put up with the increased travel times, unreliability, overcrowding, and general misery that often goes hand in hand with public transport.

The primary goal of forcing EVs seems to be to reduce the amount of traffic on the roads.

[Icon = only slightly trolling on this. EVs are not a singular solution to everyone's private transport needs, but they're being pushed hard as though they are ]

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Re: :)

It ain't the electrons, it's the batteries. Their chemistry just doesn't like getting that cold (hmm so maybe it is the electrons). The batteries still work, but drain much faster and don't hold charge as well. It's like having 30% less capacity.

The reason the Beetle run while other cars didn't is probably because they're air cooled, not water cooled. Don't need a block heater or antifreeze, because there's no coolant to freeze. Oil would be pretty gloopy to start with, but would soon warm up and flow freely. Petrol doesn't go waxy like diesel at those temperatures, to the engire will run ok.

Mostly there would just be a bit more delay between starting the engine and getting full oil circulation.

Scientists demand FCC test environmental impacts of satellites

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Satellite burnup is small to the point of insignificant, when compared to the estimated 15,000 tonnes of meteors and space debris that enters our atmosphere each year, most of which burns up.

Source: Wikipedia

AI's energy appetite has Taiwan reconsidering the nuclear option

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Holmes

Re: no local nuclear power history

Umm... no. TFA stated they had nukes, just shut them down after Fukishima.

The billionaire behind Trump's 'unhackable' phone is on a mission to fight Tesla's FSD

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Mushroom

Re: "FOCF"?

I suspect it's Fat Orange something something. But then my imagination runs dry. I dunno... Cow Fart?

AWS boss: Don't want to come back to the office? Go work somewhere else

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Re: The missing piece

Remote workers taking the piss are easy to spot. Just look at the quality of the work. Set milestones and see if they are met. Skivers will skive wherever they are. Being in the office won't change that.

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Re: Inverted subtitle logic?

The argument of choosing where to live works both sides. Since an employee can't typically do much else while commuting, they are effectively giving up their time for free to their employer. How is that reasonable?

UK electronics firms want government to stop taxing trash and let them fix it instead

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Holmes

Re: Industry lobbyists...

Bullshit. That's a convenient side effect, which they're hoping enough suckers in government will believe is genuine altruism. Their only real goal is to increase their profits.

(Edit: Upon rereading your post... apologies if it was sarcasm and actually making my point more succinctly than I can).

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Re: Colour Me Cynical

Technically that is still repairing something. Even if that something is considered one of the spare part sources. It'd be ridiculously easy to argue one device was repaired using parts from many many others. Almost impossible to prove it's not the case.

Post Office CTO had 'nagging doubts' about Horizon system despite reliability assurances

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Re: There wasn't any money.

There certainly was money after the SPMs "repaid" money they didn't actually owe as it was never actually missing. Where the fuck has that all gone? Someone (likely several) has benefited from procedes of crime. There was fraud and theft, but it was by Fujitsu, the Post Office, and their executives, not the SPMs.

FCC fines be damned, ESPN misuses emergency alert tones yet again

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Re: you could see people start to pull over thinking it was the law.

Don't those people have mirrors? Or eyes...?

When I hear a siren while driving, I look all around to see where it's coming from, to decide if I'll need to get out of the way.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

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A former boss was a complete parasite, had a penchant for not paying company bills, then trying to squeeze a better deal from what were usually small suppliers who really needed the money. There were a few times that even worked. Until he tried it with the office landlord, who was not a small supplier but a multi- multi-millionaire based in New York (we were in London). Hillariously, our landlord promptly had the building staff change the locks and lock us out. He flatly refused to unlock the doors until the enitre due balance was settled by bank transfer. Couldn't have backfired more appropriately.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

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Re: nothing in the Source Code is secret from the end user

This is the craziest of crazy ideas I've seen for quite a while.

In your world, nothing is protected from being plagiarised by your competitors. Most software businesses hang their existence on doing something few, or no one, else can do. Either - they believe - uniquely, or better than anyone else.

Forcing all software to publish its source code is the death of pretty much every software company. Forget copyright protections, they will take too long to have any preventative effect. It would come down to who has the deepest pockets, which favours large corporations over small innovators.

Analysts predict 85 million EVs on roads by 2025 despite industry speed bumps

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Re: If the Chinese did it, it would... Catch fire

Unlike all those US-built Teslas that never catch fire. Oh, wait. Umm...

AMD downplays risk of growing blast radius, licensing fees from manycore chips

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it's actually more resilient and tolerant as you go up in terms of core counts

Well, you would say that, wouldn't you.

Seems highly counterintuitive that putting way more eggs into way fewer baskets is somehow more resilient when a basket breaks. Unless having AMD CPUs magically makes the non-AMD parts more resilient, less prone to failure. But that's obviously bollocks.

More cores = more power consumed = more heat in a confined space = more chance for themal stresses and instablities to make something go pop. Hard to see how it could be any other way.

VMware settles securities fraud class suit with $102.5M payout

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Shouldn't be allowed

How do they (and other megacorps) keep getting away with settling out of court? That's almost as criminal as the actions that precipitated this.

Digital River runs dry, hasn't paid developers for sales since July

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Re: How do you screw this up?

Simples... embezzlement.

Pentagon stumped by mystery drone swarm flying over Langley Air Force Base

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Just shoot them down

Surely a military airbase has air defences, no? Wait, this is the US military. Never mind.

RAC duo busted for stealing and selling crash victims' data

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Re: Wait a second...

Agencies always pass the DBS check cost on to the candidates. They never foot the bill themselves. The candidates are mostly willing to pay it, because not paying it means no chance of work with that agency.

Crypto-apocalypse soon? Chinese researchers find a potential quantum attack on classical encryption

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Holmes

Something's fishy...

Surprised the Chinese government would allow this to be published so openly, since, if real, it would give them a huge asymmetrical advantage over the rest of the world.

Unless the true goal is to spread some fear around the world's intelligence agencies.

Starlink was offered for free to those hit by Hurricane Helene. It is not entirely free

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Holmes

Re: Misleading article

Funny how almost all the commenters here saying it's fine are anonymous, while the commenters calling out a "free" service that needs 400 bucks up front are not.

Almost like there's a pattern here somewhere. I just can't put my finger on it.

Google brings better bricking to Androids, to curtail crims

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Re: Wrong problem

Didn't RTFA properly. Factory reset is addressed at the end. I shouldn't have skimmed that bit.

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Re: Wrong problem

In a mugging or robbery where the target isn't specifically the phone, but the victim's cash, jewellery, or other possessions... sure. But that's only one side of the problem. There are also a huge number of direct phone thefts where the phone is just snatched from the owner's hand, bag, pocket etc.

At least this could be a step in the right direction, although factory reset would seem to bypass these protections. They need something that persists beyond factory reset, and that's prety hard to do for a general purpose OS across a huge variety of phones where the hardware might not be up to the task.

If Dell's Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PC is typical of the genre, other PCs are toast

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WTF?

the touchpad – another matte expanse without visual or tactile clues about its extent

Who the hell makes a laptop with a trackpad you can't visibly locate? Looks like Dell are as bad as MS for firing all the grownups and letting design interns make usability decisions.

SpaceX accuses 'meme-stock' rival of 'misinformation' over Starlink signals waiver

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Nah it'll be African Blackwood, since that's the most expensive wood in the world. Nothing but the BEST EVER for Emperor Trump.

Cruise fined $1.5M for failing to report right away its robo-car dragged a pedestrian

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Re: law enforcement finally noticed the crimes being committed

Hyperbole much?

This fine is not about hitting the pedestrian (arguably not Cruise' fault, the pedestrian was knocked into its path by another driver), it is all to do with not properly reporting all details to the NHTSA within the mandated time window.

Self-driving is still nowhere near fully autonomous, but the accident rates are still lower than regular human drivers.

AI agent promotes itself to sysadmin, trashes boot sequence

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Re: Not so sure about this....

Came here to say a similar thing. Shouldn't have to tell the AI to stop once it's done the thing you asked it to. It's only been asked to do that thing. It should always stop afterwards. It should definitely not be following up with a bunch of random, unassigned tasks. Would be interesting to know why it carried on. Some cumulative product of previously assigned tasks?

Watch your mirrors: Tesla Cybertrucks have 'Full' 'Self Driving' now

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Re: FSD

Come on, dude. Those are assistive technologies that step in when you need them, they don't instantaneously abdicate control and expect you to seamlessly take over with no warning. Any driver aid that switches itself off at the moment you need it most has no place on the public roads.

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Re: "sudden, dramatic and dangerous"

What do you mean by "consumables"? To most drivers that's things like oil, filters, brake pads and discs, tyres. And a lot of those are still needed for hybrids and EVs.

I suspect you might mean fuel. If so, that's a hell of a lot of mileage for the fuel cost in one or two years to exceed the purchase price of a new EV. And surely you mean purchase price, not build price, since that's the only relevant price for drivers.

AI code helpers just can't stop inventing package names

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Re: I wouldn't trust AI to correctly...

I wouldn't say that. It mainly points to the fact that most high quality code is not posted freely on the internet. Mostly it's a mix of dubious SO questions and their varied resplies, and stuff on some random's public githuib. Hardly representative of the best coding humanity has to offer.

Windows 11 Patch Tuesday preview is a glitchy disaster

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With respect, you are one user, with 3 PCs. Hardly representative of the Windows world. Even if it doesn't bork everyone's PC, I'm not sure that's actually better.

Forget the Kia Boyz: Crooks could hijack your car with just a smartphone

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Re: Connectivity

Even with all those functions, you could still handle it with multiple wires feeding individual functions. A multiplug. Like cars used to have. Zero need for it to be on the canbus.

Can't really be about saving weight... how much is actually saved by replacing some wires with a module (which has to be hardened to survive vibration and exposure)?

Saving time during the build perhaps? But then whether your techs route one wire or a thicker bundle following the same path doesn't really make any difference either.

So... just because...?

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Re: Connectivity

Gotta wonder what it would actually take for manufacturers to stop putting the common functions like ventilation and AC in the touch screen. Go back to physical buttons. And not just in the screen, but elsewhere on the dash - VW, I'm looking at you with your dumbass touch sliders for heater controls. Which don't illuminate at night! (Although in the some of the newest models they have at least illuminated them, but it's still a stupid idea).

A few are maybe starting to get the message, and removing some of the more stupid touch functionality, but it's not enough. Anything you have to take your eyes off the road to operate is outright dangerous and ought to be banned. And I'm not usually in favour of banning things, but this insanity has to stop. It can't be much less distracting than reading a short text message on your mobile, and we made that illegal.

How hard is it to mandate that all new cars sold must have physical, non-touch-sensitive controls for essential functions? Controls you can find by feel and muscle memory, and must be illuminated.

Recall the Recall recall? Microsoft thinks it can make that Windows feature palatable

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Re: Targeting users with Alzheimer?

What makes you think AI, with its tendency to make shit up just so it "answers" the prompt, is remotely suitable for fact checking?

Altman reportedly asks Biden to back a slew of multi-gigawatt-scale AI datacenters

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Nuclear hysterist

You might have had a point about TMI, were it the same TMI reactor that melted down. It is not. They just want to reinstate one that was perfectly functional when it was deliberately shut down.

SK hynix begins mass production of 36 GB 12-layer HBM3E

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Re: Moulded Underfill

While I agree with the sentiments about the futility of and pointlessness of current AI, this improvement has the potential to benefit computing in general. It's just that right now the GPU manufacturers are hoovering up all the HBM they get their grubby little paws on.

NASA's Astrobees need a new buzz – any ideas for the space-dwelling bots?

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Re: Can they bake a cake?

Gret British Bake Off... In... Spaaaaaaace!

Ok, they couldn't fit all the contestants up there for a normal contest, but how about an ISS version of Bake Off - Stand Up to Cancer?

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Re: Cat AI?

You forgot "Sit on anything rectangular that's about A3 size or less, especially if you happen to be working on it"

Victims lose $70K to one single wallet-draining app on Google's Play Store

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Exploiting the mechanics of smart contracts allowed the attackers to authorize transfers

Thought "smart contracts" were supposed to prevent exactly these kinds of shenanigans, not be an enabler.

AI PCs will dominate shipments by 2026, but not because of demand

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Re: Corporate IT Managers worldwide

What a strange outlook. All these businesses have to have their accounts audited, and sometimes again by the tax man. The board's collective arse is well and truly on the line if the tax man finds any irregularities. Don't know where you've worked, but everywhere I've worked has been anally strict about properly filing of expenses. I can easily see that being the norm. Can't say the same for your perspective.

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A chilling vision of things to come.

I'd say "Shhh! Don't give them ideas!" but I'm 99.99999% sure they're already planning exactly this. Gotta get their AI ROI somehow, and since the hype carrot isn't generating much actual interest, it's way easier to beat businesses with the stick.