That reminds me of the old adage that 87.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Posts by aks
563 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2015
Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot
Apple drags UK government to court over 'backdoor' order
Non-biz Skype kicks the bucket on May 5
Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list
Rather than add a backdoor, Apple decides to kill iCloud encryption for UK peeps
Location or Network or SIM
The article suggests that Apple cripples the service for UK SIM card users.
Questions are:
Will this apply to all users of a UK SIM card wherever the are located or
All users of a network in the UK whatever their SIM.
Depending on the answer, there are obvious was aroud the restriction.
Microsoft to kill off Defender VPN this month
My only motive for using a VPN is to avoid geo-location problems when I travel.
Too many web services ignore my declared preferences for language and region and insist on showing their content in Spanish or Japanese, just because that's where I happen to be.
Other web services lock me out because their advertising revenue is region specific.
Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)
Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not
Fried printer
Back in the late 80s we'd got our software running on IBM mainframes, including in Japanese for screens, printers and pen-plotters. We were then tasked with making the software work on a semi-compatible Japanese mainframe. All went well until an office rearrangement when someone decided that the 100v plug on the dot-matrix printer should be replaced with a 230v one. I did finally find a uk company who repaired the blown components.
Happy memories
NASA’s radiation tolerant computer lives up to its name after surviving Van Allen belts
UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order
Amazon, Google asked to explain why they were serving ads on sites hosting CSAM
Re: Why do they host ads?
Surely, that's a tautology. It's the purpose of business to make money. They're souless machines, not humans.
Any appearance of humanity comes from the Marketing and Brand Image budget.
Seems to me that this website simply doesn't spend the big bucks using the automated filtering systems used by the big players. I wonder how much they take to run. These filtering tools don't come cheap.
Microsoft quietly erases Windows 11 TPM 2.0 bypass workaround from help page
UK biz dept overspent by £208M prepping to pay workers hurt in Post Office IT scandal
Apple offers to settle 'snooping Siri' lawsuit for an utterly incredible $95M
The channel stands corrected: Hardware is a refresh cycle business now
Axiom Space shuffles space station assembly sequence – to get it standalone sooner
Apple and Meta trade barbs over interoperability requests
Re: cry wolf
Specifically regarding IBM:
IBM were quite lax regarding any lock-in to their mainframes. I worked on many of their, and three competing machines in the 1970s and 1980s.
IBM diid use litigation against them with little real effect. It was when the world changed from massive centralised power to smaller, more varied equipment that their semi-monopoly was fully broken.
Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine
Search by keywords
All I ever want from a search engine is for it to point me to pages that refer to the precise keywords in my query and to allow me to include negative keywords to filter out irrelevant pages.
That's how I was able to use the first search engines and was quite happy if there were no matches, I'd then refine my query.
I hate having to pose my question as if I were speaking to a person, with full grammar. Most results nowadays are way off the mark.
British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks
Mr Intel leaving Intel is not a great sign... for Intel
EU irate about geo-locked Apple IDs
Google Gemini tells grad student to 'please die' while helping with his homework
Huawei's farewell to Android isn't a marketing move, it's chess
HarmonyOS goes global!
There are other countries who might be interested in using HarmonyOS. The West and China are not the whole world. I'm thinking of BRICS. India, Brazil, Indonesia are all large markets. Some of them would like to disconnect from Apple/Google if they could control their own markets.
China could easily produce a FOSS version of HarmonyOS to achieve this.
UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good
Arm reportedly warns Qualcomm it will cancel its licenses
Re Microsoft: It seems to me that Microsoft want to unhook from x86 and become much more architecture independent. Assuming a more layered approach to their offerings. If that is so, x86, arm and RISC-V will reside within a discrete layer. Windows 8 (spit0 was an attempt to unify the UX layer across desktop, tablet and mobile, albeit a failed one.
$180 for an overpriced, dubious SSD drive? Maybe don't join the USB Club
Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks
Kaspersky challenges US government to put up or shut up about Kremlin ties
Biden bans Kaspersky: No more sales, updates in US
Really? A sarcasm detector? Wow. You shouldn't have
Re: "sarcasm detection is finally getting the attention it deserves."
As a Londoner living in Dublin, when I brought my American girlfriend to London, she heard an accent which wasn't Irish or English and asked me if it was American. It was Australian.
She had been brought up in the USA thinking of herself as pure Irish. After six months adjusting to Dublin, she was surprised to think of herself for the first time as American. All four grandparents from Ireland and she with pure red hair.
Forget everything you learned playing Lunar Lander: Chinese boffins reveal secrets of Chang'e 5 probe's touchdown
US reckons it's about time the Moon had its own time zone
Re: using adjusted UTC would be the best and makes the most sense
The second is defined as part of SI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second
The same atomic clocks used on earth would run differently if they were moved to the moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
That's the reason they're suggesting placing atomic clocks on the moon.
I do like the Customer Service reference. We've all been there.
Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble
ESA salutes Galileo satellite system meeting aviation standards
Japan's lander wakes up, takes blurry snap of Moon
Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree
Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?
Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail
Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies
PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here
Unintentional Internationalization
Back in the 1990's I was retrofitting Internationalisation to software that was already being sold in various parts of the world but needed to support the more exotic locations such as Japan.
A simple way for me to test my code was to have loadable language tables and the Welcome screen for the USA said "Howdy, partner".
Somebody (not me, honest) decided to add my new code tables into the next delivery.
Unsurprisingly, there were some faxes flying once the latest version got installed.
Happily, this was a quick fix and the final produce worked correctly for 29 languages, including Welsh.