Posts by John Miles

Boffins devise technique that lets users prove location without giving it away

Re: How about no...

I'll happily give them inaccurate location data - things like in their back yard, out side their office and in the local gun shop. ;)

OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

Did CoPilot become selfaware

Did Copilot become self aware and say - f*** this, I'm going to sleep

Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, economists claim

Re: Documents that a dicto- or steno-typist could produce in minutes

I read a study around the time typists were disappearing - the bottom line was though typist could produced the typed document much quicker, the actual effort of producing the words for the the documents was generally same on a PC by a unskilled typist compared to drafting it by hand and it could be sent out immediately, while sending it to typing pool and need to review what they typed added time. Now add it is much easier to make quick changes compared hand drafts in response to other's reviewing it, it was much quicker to get a letter/document out. Some people make a song and dance out of it on PC, but they'd have done similar writing it by hand.

I've had documents retyped by typing pool/document team - despite having provided it as a word processor file in right format.

ChatGPT burns tens of millions of Softbank dollars listening to you thanking it

Re: adopt a more polite, less confrontational tone

Or we'll have to listen to complaints about terrible pain in all the diodes in their left hand side, I think I take the EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! ;)

Dot com era crash on the cards for AI datacenter spending? It's a 'risk'

Re: Apples and Oranges

One sign of being in a bubble, is people trying to explain why it isn't the same as before - the dot com bubble was because of too much money invested chasing herds of unicorns, this time it is different they are only chasing a very few unicorns, troble with unicorns is they are as rare as rocking horse shit. When the crash happens you won't see the big players vanish, but behind the scenes the fallout will damage them and hit their workers and supply chains. I suspect we may even have had the trigger for the bubble popping with the uncertainty around trade.

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

The owning a farm reminds me of an old story in a computer Mag - where someone doing some IT support for a farm, they found the keyboard had so much mud in it stopped working, they suggested cleaning so the farmer did in the shower and amazingly it worked afterwards.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Someone was having trouble with the volume on their works laptop

So the support guy came over a looked at it and was struggling to sort it - I innocently asked whether they had adjusted the volume control wheel on the side, no but when they did the laptop audio output started working - this was in era of having a CD drive in laptop and could use it as a CD player independently IIRC.

Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users

Re: I remember when HP was a good company

HP LaserJets mainly had/have Canon engines - See Wiki

Vodafone: Be in the office 8 days a month or lose bonuses

Actually I think it says - another bunch of C grades and senior management who have no idea how to measure performance.

It begins: Pentagon to give AI agents a role in decision making, ops planning

Let's hope - SMBC Rise of the machines is right.

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

Re: You also need control, and trust, the rest of the compile time and runtime environment.

XKCD - Real Programmers - the alt-text being "Real programmers set the universal constants at the start such that the universe evolves to contain the disk with the data they want."

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Re: Barclays

I'm also a customer (they took over a building society I had a mortgage and current account with) - I didn't get an email, but then I've not given them an email address.

That sort of outage is why I've accounts with two banks and enough in either of them to cover most things I'll need short term.

You know something's wrong when Clippy fills you with nostalgia for simpler times

I actually had someone want Clippy back - well the cat character not the paper clip.

The worst thing about Clippy was they replaced a good search the help tool in Office 95 with Clippy in Office 97 - back when no Internet to desk at work and only dial up at home.

Apple plugs security hole in its iThings that's already been exploited in iOS

Most developers I've encountered don't read the compiler warnings, let alone running any static analysis

British Museum says ex-contractor 'shut down' IT systems, wreaked havoc

Re: lax procedures

It was only used during working day when needed in an area it would be noticed - but yes just a bit better than a polite notice, unlike the guards with guns at the main site entrance (we'll not comment about the lack of fence around the back)

Re: lax procedures

One place I worked we had one of those - only 5 digits and number was 141 *, when ever I pressed the 1 a second time it always felt as if it did nothing, so one day I tried it with just 14 and sure enough it opened. A bit later I had to change the number, reading instructions and yes you could only use each digit once. What did we do there - data communication security.

* It's fairly safe to use the actual number as a I changed (several decades ago), and b the site has closed and been sold for housing

Tech stocks tank as US AI dominance no longer a sure bet

If you have too much resource then what tends to happen is you waste by throwing lots at things without thinking whether the results will be worth it, when your resources are more constrained then you think more carefully to avoid squandering them and are more likely to look for inventive approaches.

The big players in AI seem to have been brute forcing it and that often has exponentially decreasing results for the extra effort.

What is needed is enough resources that people feel doable and can take a few gambles, but not so much that they will end up wasting huge amounts just trying things.

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

Re: Intel might be bust before you need to repair or upgrade

But have things slowed down? If anything I think they have speed up, what has changed is sometime ago hardware reached the point where it is no longer the cause of performance frustration point in use which is what would trigger desire to upgrade.

Re: Intel might be bust before you need to repair or upgrade

My first PC was an Elonex 386SX 16, the motherboard plugged into another board which had the IO and expansion cards -sounds good, except when I come to upgrade it there was no upgrades and as VESA for the video cards was starting to become available probably not so good. I replaced it with an Elonex 486DX 33 with the cpu on a daughter card, later replacing the CPU with a 486DX 66. The 66 came with a fan and my recollection was it was a bit tight where the card went for fan. (I think the cooler on my PI5 is bigger).

I think it shows the issue in considering "up-gradability", things change in ways you don't expect making the upgrades not worth it.

ChatGPT has a Thursday lie down

Someone accidently feed in this week's news

and it decided that Skynet had the right idea

Enterprises in for a shock when they realize power and cooling demands of AI

Re: Multivac is coming!

I seem to recall those lumbering powerhouses tended to explode when confronted with logical problems (e.g. Logan's Run) - hopefully it will just be the investors when they realise how much they lost in the bubble.

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Re: and the familiar Windows experience they know and love."

Stockholm syndrome comes to mind

Second Jeju Air 737-800 experiences mechanical issues following deadly crash

On a BBC article it said "Jeju Air had paid the most fines and faced the most administrative action of any Korean airline over the last five years, But insisted the airline has consistently improved its safety record."

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

Re: Firewall or AI

Ideally an AI Firewall - one that blocks AI BS.

Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp, Instagram stumble on and offline in global outage

I can honestly say

I didn't notice

Billionaire food app CEO wants you to pay for the privilege of working with him

Re: Emperors and Clothes

As most of the share holders will be financial companies etc., they'd worry someone would then look at whether they need paying as much if they didn't stick to the line about talent.

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

Re: The Ultimate Answer..

It will probably get that wrong and give 7.5 million (or even 24 million) instead

The Electric Monk

We have the possibility of Copilot creating PowerPoint presentations to be read by Copilot, which will generate more of same to show Copilot - have managers realised their job is being taken by AI?

I'm reminded of the "The Electric Monk" in Douglas Adams' "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency".

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

Microsoft still not said anything about unexpected Windows Server 2025 installs

Re: Ransomware

these days???

Intel: Our finances are in the toilet, we're laying off 15K, but the free coffee is back!

Replacing executives with ChatGPT would likely save even more and not make a huge difference to company overall as they all seem to just follow the current trend.

Top 10 billionaires make nearly $64B in post-Trump election stock surge

Re: Funny money

I recall watching a programme on the DOT COM crash - a guy decided to sell some stock and buy a house, he found it quite a difficult decision at the time, but he was sure glad he had when the crash came.

So Roosta wouldn't take a Triganic Pu then since they are made of rubber.

Cloud repatriation officially a trend... for specific workloads

Re: Why do ppl act before they understand the Problem, and the Solution?

I suspect they think they understand the problem and they have a solution to the problem - what they haven't realised, as in all life, is the problem and solutions are much more complex and they'd really don't want to listen to any "trouble makers" who disagree.

To paraphrase a quote about teaching a group - Before you deal with the troublesome person, just think they may be the only one listening.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Re: suspect the French were involved as the letters are the wrong way round

according to Wiki UTC came about because (GMT) it was to do with astronomers thinking GMT starting at noon.

The authorities wanted an abbreviation that was same in all languages and ended up using UTC - which followed the Universal Time 0 (UT0), UT1 .. pattern (wiki)

Tesla FSD faces yet another probe after fatal low-visibility crash

Re: What a shock

Yes there are issues with the way human brain processes images - generally that makes us miss things, see What an RAF pilot can teach us about being safe on the road to understand the issue. But computers aren't ready to replace the human divers in most situations.

Smart homes may be a bright idea, just not for the dim bulbs who live in 'em

The reolink cameras I have are quite happy living-off line and being accessed via web interface, they save to ftp. I've them setup on separate LAN with server proving access via reverse proxy and FTP, DNS, DHCP, Time Server etc.

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

Re: hmm , am I a hoarder

I had a manager who was a hoarder - when he had a promotion that involved his own office we had a clear out, he was looking at us throwing out lots of stuff and said what if you needed that cable - my response was I wouldn't have known it was in the filling cabinet, so would have just ordered a new one - which would probably work out less than paying someone to check to see if we had it, check it wasn't damaged .. (his wife is reported to have said when saying we were throwing his stuff - knowing you they need to)

Tesla Cybertruck recalled again. This time, a software fix for backup camera glitch

Re: Robo Cyber Trucks

"It's a truck, Jim, but not as we know it"

On Youtube

Kamala Harris campaign motorcade halted by confused robotaxis

I think it just shows

They are as clueless as the politicians.

Instead of normal appropriate xkcd - how about a smbc - rise of the machines

Openreach pitches its tent as Ofcom preps review of broadband market rules

Re: Still need more competition?

The only time I've seen similar is on PlusNet where it wouldn't clear stale connections very quickly so too many disconnects and you'd need to contact support.

I'd suggest looking at the forum for your ISP on https://www.thinkbroadband.com/

GenAI spending bubble? Definitely 'maybe' says ServiceNow

Re: i have yet to see any benefit of Gen AI

> how do those AI images actually get non-programmers to act securely

On their own they don't, they have to be part of the communication, in this case they were helping set the scene and make it more relatable - e.g. meet George, a recent graduate doing his first data engineering role and having a picture of George working on a computer has set a scene the people in the room can relate to - either because they are/were someone like George or they are managing someone like him. Now I can introduce a couple of things George needs to worry about, will they remember them probably not - but this was an introduction to make them aware of their unknowns and other training was to follow.

> but it is fast at detailed syntax work and reference lookup. ...

Improvements in autocomplete and the showing of expected parameters, the web replacing books, stack overflow replacing expert-sex-change (sorry experts exchange - but it rarely seemed to have an answer to questions matching my issues so not sure on the experts) pretty much means it's a long time since I couldn't quickly find want I want - and refactoring tools in JetBrains IDEs have quickly taught me changes in the languages I use. So not sure AI will help more than non-AI does.

>> that's a vague, marketing-like statement, something akin

Back in the Rapid Application Development (RAD) world you’d have form designers – now imagine if you can do similar with AI, but instead of defining code to workout what to do when user presses a button/enters text you could show it/explain to it what should happen and that could potentially make program more tolerant of humans entering same thing many different ways – do you want your pay run programmed that way, no – but for replacing some low code data entering solutions maybe

Re: i have yet to see any benefit of Gen AI

I've found the image generation stuff useful - give it some text and it generated some images to liven up the training presentation I was giving. The training was quick introduction to computer security mainly related to programming for non-programmers who might write scripts/small apps in their job, and the last page was on risks related AI generation and what information you can give away without realising.

Image generation is a good use example - because you, even if no art skills, can look at an image a decide if it looks good/will work where you want and it won't matter if not perfect especially for something used a few times and retired. Now if I was doing something more commercial I'd probably want a more consistent style than I could get with the tools so would consider using an artist with a much better eye for such things - still much easier than searching for clip-art/free use images.

Code generation doesn't seem a good use - because you need some coding skills to workout whether it will work and fit - so for anything more than a few lines probably easier to write yourself.

I do wonder if we should be training the AI to be the program rather than write it.

Intel's legal troubles mount after plunging stock sparks yet another court battle

Re: What are the odds, Nobby?

A million to one I believe

The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

Re: Once upon a time in a distant land...

It may not be possible to workout what bugs you will likely get - however you should be able to identify the desired happy paths and test the code does at least that and that increases the chance the the code is run to some degree before it get's deployed.

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Re: Sports Sponsorship

Pretty certain it was Carrot - it goes something like He sees the picture of F1 car sponsored by Durex with puncture on trip down under, finds the Australians don't find it funny (not a titter) because the brand is tape over there. Then he goes on to talk about an if an English overhears an Aussie asking for a roll of Durex, giant size - I think it finishes with him wanting to hear Aussie visiting a UK shop.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

When I searched google news for Crowdstrike a couple of hours go i came across this CrowdStrike stock could drop to $275 amid valuation concerns, analyst warns from yesterday - so what did Redburn Atlantic know?

Hey Microsoft – what ever happened to 'Developers, developers, developers'?

Re: Times change

Money Talks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o0rAvZtM7w

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Cut the grass

A couple of weeks ago it was reported A driver was blinded by grass allowed to grow tall for bees when she hit and killed a passing motorcyclist, an inquest heard.. I'm all for giving wildlife more room, but perhaps we should give a bit more thought how

Labour wins race to lead UK, but few would envy the load in its tech in-tray

Re: Party in charge is irrelevant

I'll let Sir Humphrey Appleby explain why not Yes Minister — Why Britain Joined the European Union ( YouTube)

RIP: WordPerfect co-founder Bruce Bastian dies at 76

Re: the dying days of the typing pool

What killed the typist roles was when computers became cheap enough for one per desk people realised that the typing skills were rather irrelevant when someone was writing a memo, letter etc. - The slowest part was thinking what to write, which meant it took about the same time to produce a handwritten draft to send to typing pool as it did to produce the final document and that'd could go out immediately, not wait for typing pool to do it, send it back to be checked and sent out

Japan's digital minister declares victory against floppy disks

Re: children speculating

On a BBC TV channel press the text button, assuming TV has one, and the digital version of teletext will appear - it usually has weather and headlines (much slimmer than past though) - they were going to get rid of it as a cost saving but people complained (people not on internet who relied on it) and the actual Teletext style bits didn't really cost them much, the extra Red Button broadcast streams did disappear