Posts by simonlb

Iran has something America can only dream of: cheap broadband

Re: Consumer protection, lack thereof

"effective consumer protection"

In the US? No such thing. At one point they were considering going for something similar to the EU where the consumer has clearly and broadly defined rights and you cannot ride roughshod over them, but the well funded lobbyists got in and pleaded that it would cost far too much and could potentially bankrupt every company so they ended up with 'forced arbitration' which is essentially, "write a complaint letter and we might get back to you at some point with a convoluted process to follow."

And this is why, in the US, companies sell you an electronic device, arbitrarily obsolete it a year later then deliberately brick it with an update and you are forced to either buy the newer one or go somewhere else. That or changing the T's & C's after you've bought it and putting most of the normal device functionality behind a subscription paywall to ransom you. It also doesn't help that the DCMA makes it illegal to use a software tool to bypass a software lock to re-enable a deliberately bricked device, or to restore any functionality you paid for that is now under subscription. You can create a tool to do it, but cannot actually use it.

So, for example, you have new 'Smart' TV's that must be connected to the internet for you to set them up, that will harvest data about everything you do with the TV and send it back to the mothership, and that the only option to complete the setup is an Agree button. No options for airgapping the device, no way of opting out of certain T's & C's and no way of turning off data harvesting, you WILL accept every restriction the manufacturer wishes to impose on you before you can use the device that YOU own. Even if you are only using it as a monitor for playing back content. That is completely insane.

French cops free mother and son after 20-hour crypto kidnap ordeal

Re: Nice to hear the husband didn't pay the ransom

Apparently this guy was a "cryptocurrency entrepreneur", which basically means he starts crypto Ponzi schemes so must have all the money. Allegedly.

Red Hat RHELocates its Chinese engineering team to India

Re: “graduated” – ironic Chinese slang for being fired

"Wake up, time to die!"

BOFH: If the meatbags can't agree on aircon, AI will decide for them

Re: The only real solution is...

Upvote for the Brazil reference. Have one of these ------------------------------------------>

Break, no fix: Apple and Samsung make repairs hard

Damn European Socialists

Heaven forbid it actually adopt the EU system, of course – that would be madness.

The US consumers already have forced arbitration as a major consumer right, so why would they need anything as communist as fixable devices or even decent right-to-repair? It's the companies and their profits that need protection from these socialists. These consumers should be glad we allow them to buy our devices and need to shut up and buy the newer one which comes out next week after we EOL their current model and deliberately brick it with a software update!

Intel gets trapped in Elon’s reality distortion field as it joins in megafab delusions

Re: Partnerships don't work

Generally, partnerships do work pretty well, it's just that if the person running the larger of the parties involved is incapable of holding a cogent thought in their brain for more than seven microseconds the whole enterprise is doomed to fail pretty quickly because you just can't trust them.

About the only thing Musk is capable of is promising things that almost always fail to materialise, or that sort-of work, but just not anywhere near as well as they were supposed to.

Anthropic reveals $30bn run rate and plans to use 3.5GW of new Google AI chips

And when this bubble bursts explodes you can virtually guarantee that somehow, all the trillions of dollars being thrown at AI will suddenly become 'our' problem debt and we will all be hit way worse than the 2008 financial crisis by orders of magnitude. Except the tech bros, they'll somehow still be 'earning' billions every year for 'reasons'.

'Uncle Larry’s biggest fan' cut by email in early morning Oracle layoff spree

Re: The US employment hellscape

Oh, shall we also count the seven Bank Holidays as well?

Re: The US employment hellscape

How do they cope? By having a whopping 10 days a year vacation time, which is more than enough for anyone. I'm disgusted to have to take the 25 days my employer gives me here in the UK as I could be so much more productive with those extra 15 days. Bloody socialists and their employment legislation.

Memory-makers' shares are down. Some RAM prices have eased. Blaming Google is not a good idea

Re: Not convinced

It because of 'Feathernomics', where the price of an object is very very loosely tied to a feather so a gentle breeze makes it shoot way up in the sky, but then it takes weeks to gently drift back down again. There's no rational explanation for it, that's just how it works. An economist could explain it, but they'd also be lying.

US PC shipments to fall 13% as memory and storage crunch hits budget systems

Re: Does this mirror the cost of US cars?

It's not just the US, the UK is the same for new cars. But just like Nvidia never reduced the price of their budget cards to pre-pandemic levels when the 'supply chain issues' eased, it seems the car manufacturers are using those price increases to ease more people into leasing renting their car instead of buying it outright, normalising the increases.

And do you think PC prices will tumble when the AI bubble explodes and there is a vast glut of storage media that is no longer needed? I'm convinced they'll hoard it to themselves to keep the prices up as there's more profit in a $1,500 PC than a $500 one, plus they will still need to recoup the Billions of dollars borrowed to buy that memory and storage.

Security contractor blew the whistle on support crew's viral indifference

Re: Lazy by design.

In a previous role I've seen the queue assigners preferentially passing the easy tickets to their mates and doling out the harder or time-consuming one's to the people they didn't like. Fortunately, the senior manager liked to check the stats and saw the trend so told the assigners to stop it.

I also once had a block of about fifteen tickets dumped in my queue in the middle of a Friday afternoon that had been assigned to someone the previous Friday but hadn't even been looked at. It was someone who'd been there for donkeys years and was marking time until they could retire, and they hadn't touched them all week. As I'd done around ninety tickets that week already, I kicked off and got them put back in his queue. Wasn't doing that lazy bastards work for him.

DXC staff to strike in Australia after some go without pay rise for five years

Re: I bet

“We respect the right of our employees to participate in protected industrial action. We continue to bargain in good faith and look forward to finalising the new agreement.”

Or to put it another way, "Yeah, we know they can strike but they have bills to pay so we know they'll come back to the table to talk."

To think this was once one of the best companies you could strive to work for (HP) and actively want to commit to having a career there.

US foreign router ban criticized for being ‘industrial policy disguised as cybersecurity’

Re: "hiding behind the religious banner of national security"

Anyone with half a brain could see this ban was complete rubbish from the start, serves no real purpose from a security standpoint and doesn't benefit anyone at any point. However, I fear the professor might now face the real prospect of being punished somehow and his university having their funding pulled for his pointing out the lie in public.

Microsoft tells crusty old kernel drivers to get with the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program

Re: Detection tools?

There isn't an applet in Control Panel or Settings that specifically lists all certificates in use on the system so you can check this without knowing a PowerShell command? If not, that's dumb as fuck.

Windows 95 let installers trash its files then fixed the mess behind their backs

Re: Explains a lot

But at least it shows that there were proper software engineers who came up with a clever solution (or kludge depending on your point of view) to try to keep the system in some form of a functioning state.

Today, the only way to fix things would be for a ground up rewrite from scratch as it's so broken it's beyond any form of reasonable repair. Oh, and some proper testing and QA validation wouldn't go amiss either.

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

Re: Peak Musk...

Perhaps I missed it, but I only remember the BBC ever broadcasting it once when it originally came out when I was a kid. I'm also currently going through the DVD box set for all 4 seasons, and season 4 has gone all camp and space opera like, with everyone overacting in each scene, which is a shame.

Re: Yeah.... right...

“confident will work. It's just a question of when.”

Finally, the words he has never once uttered in all his bullshit bingo talks over the years - "Just a question of when." This is why there are no monorails hyperloops in existence, because although technically feasible, our current level of power generation and the materials science needed are not at a large enough scale to build them. He wasn't lying about it, we just can't do it yet. But by the time we do have that level of technology available to do it, we will already have built the next generation of high-speed trains and supersonic aircraft so the hyperloop will not be needed.

And 135 Starship launches a day? Well at least a couple of them might finally get to orbit instead of having a dip in the Indian Ocean, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

No, as with anything with this guy, if he's 'confident' it can be done, you can guarantee it will always be in about two years possibly before the heat death of the universe. Probably.

Re: Peak Musk...

Well on the way? That guy started the jump over ten years ago and is still in mid-air.

Jaguar Land Rover's cyber bailout sets worrying precedent, watchdog warns

Re: What bailout?

"suffered massive reputational damage"

That was already done over the past few years due to their complete lack of quality control and massive unreliability. If you're spending the kind of money they are charging for a vehicle, then it should be properly screwed together to start with, and critical things like the engine and ancillaries should work properly and reliably.

If they can't manage to assemble their own products correctly, how can you expect them to manage their IT infrastructure properly?

Microsoft breaks Microsoft account sign-ins in Windows 11 with latest update

Re: "What a time to be a Windows user."

It's coming to something when the server version of an OS is a 'better' option than the consumer version; 'better' here being a matter of degree or use case.

Your next car might need 300 GB of RAM, and so will autonomous robots

Re: 300GB of RAM

I can't help thinking that the car manufacturers will be happy to jack the prices up to justify the "increase in storage and memory costs", as it will help to normalise the leasing renting of new cars as they are becoming more unaffordable as time goes on. Plus, who wants a car that might 'forget' what it's supposed to be if it's parked up for a few months and the built-in memory leaks all it's data away so it no longer works?

Re: My next car, should I need one

Yeah, my sixteen year old Skoda diesel estate car with nearly 240,000 miles on it is still working just fine thanks. AC still works and the 6 CD head unit with SD card reader covers the entertainment side of stuff. SatNav? Have a phone holder for that when it's needed.

I could change it for a new car tomorrow if I really wanted to, but this does everything I need it to so while it works I'm keeping it.

Microsoft publishes a workaround for Samsung's C:\ drive woes

Re: Oh, did we skip a step?

A long, long time ago I found out that a work 'colleague' had been regularly connecting remotely to my work PC (running XP), trawling through the hard drive and copying stuff to his machine without asking or mentioning it to me. I therefore added the explicit 'Deny All' permission for his userid to the entire hard drive on my machine. Took about 45 minutes to apply, but when I checked the event viewer the next week I found multiple attempts from his machine to try to connect to mine. He also tried logging in to my machine one day when I was on leave but couldn't understand why it wouldn't let him in.

Samsung folds the Galaxy Z TriFold after just a few months

High Cost?

"R&D and production costs are very high, alongside a price tag that makes it unattainable to the majority of consumers."

By all means make a proof of concept so you can see potential iterations of the design but if you want to take it to production that will cost a lot of money that you will have to try to recoup later on.

As for "unattainable to the majority of users", that's probably because it's stupidly priced - to recoup some of that massive R&D cost - as well as being something that most people just have no interest in owning. Trying to spin it as a sort of 'limited release' device after realising there is no real market for it and people aren't buying it sounds a bit desperate.

BBC World Service digital switch backfires as online audience drops

Re: And at that time they also gave out contracts for £50M to various market research groups

Here.

They have no clue

"Since 2022, the corporation has run three savings programs aimed at cutting £54.2 million, largely by reducing services and staffing."

And at that time they also gave out contracts for £50M to various market research groups to identify ways of trying to make more money in the future, all of which seem to have come to the recent suggestion of making the royal charter open-ended (which can't happen unless the legislation is changed in parliament), as well as a compulsory 'Universal Media Tax' for everyone in the UK to replace the TV License - good luck with that one!

Irrespective of whether you like the BBC and use their services or not, their current business model of the TV License is outdated and increasingly disliked every year by more and more people who refuse to buy one as they don't watch or use the BBC. They need to face up to reality and go to a subscription model just like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV, You Tube Premium etc. as they work. Put everything they do behind an online account - er, iPlayer anyone? - and people login and consume everything they want to. It isn't difficult.

Salesforce stock buyback to saddle company with debt until 2066

Re: so sad

Yep, and it was only a few short years until those same companies started closing 'final salary' pension schemes leaving employees less well off in retirement, sometimes considerably worse off.

Imagine the good you could do for your country's workforce if you had a better regulated financial industry so that pension funds were heavily protected, stock market crashes like 2008 would be far less likely to happen, and people in charge of organisations which failed went to prison.

Gartner suggests Friday afternoon Copilot ban because tired users may be too lazy to check its mistakes

Re: If it's all that bad ...

If you're having to have your staff validate the work being farmed out to an automated system and then correct it because it doesn't do what it's supposed to, then that automated system isn't fit for purpose and you shouldn't be using it.

Outsourcer Telus admits to attack – may have lost a petabyte of data to ShinyHunters

Social Security?

Hmmm.... So allegedly, someone who worked for DOGE pocketed a load of social security data and has used it in their current job for a US Government contractor. Considering the type of data described, wonder if that contractor might be working with ICE at all?

Remember, this is alleged, so didn't really happen. Allegedly. Probably. Possibly.

Repopulate! Repopulate! Two lost Doctor Who episodes turn up in private collection

Re: Statement from Donald J Trump, President of the USA

What, no mention of tariffs on castors?

Brilliant backups that kept data alive for ages landed web developer in big trouble

Re: And if you do need to keep them both live

So you make sure that anyone trying to access the old site can only get to the landing page, then you make the changeover and have someone from the internal IT team test access from both the internal network AND via whatever method they access the site from externally so that you know the new site is live. You don't wait for staff start rolling in and assume it will work. As for the old site, archive it if you have the capacity rather than delete it as that makes sense. Delete when absolutely sure it is no longer needed.

And hardcoding? Avoid if at all possible. I've never done it myself. Nope. Never. Honest.

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

No Surprises

After first checking the date to see it wasn't April 1st, I'd say this is pretty much on the money. After 30-odd years of working in corporate environments the level of bullshit bingo you have to plough through on a regular basis is just staggering, and I have never understood why there is this blind insistence on using such shitty wording in the first place when using plain English is just more straightforward and less vague. It really does look like a lot of the people using this bullshittery are only doing it to make themselves seem better than they are without actually saying anything. And yes, the work colleagues who lapped this word salad up were pretty mediocre in their jobs as well.

Microsoft veteran Rajesh Jha prepares to retire, triggers yet another reorg

"not lose the great momentum we have"

No mention of starting to release well written, reliable and properly tested software, or of listening to end users and providing for their needs with AI as an opt-in feature on everything. Looks like that momentum is in completely the wrong direction then.

'Are you freaking crazy?' Bot harasses woman, gets led away by cops

"could it be kidnapped?"

Well with the current price increases of hardware, people may well start doing this to harvest the RAM and storage devices from inside them. You could also stick one in your hallway as a nice piece of static artwork once you've removed all the valuable parts.

Apple takes a bite out of app store fees in China

And that 30% commission has now been normalised across the board so nobody stops to actually think just how much money Apple, Google and all the other App store owners are making in commissions purely for hosting a download. They could easily reduce it and still make a decent profit, but there's no incentive unless they are forced to.

BOFH: What physics defines as impossible, sales calls a challenge

Re: 386SX

PHB: What about floating point support ?

About the only real upgrade to those systems would be when you put a 387 coprocessor in that one empty socket on the motherboard. There literally is nothing else you can do.

Musk makes the Macrohard joke again

Re: Musk has a long track record of...

"No other company can yet do this."

Yep, my bullshit meter exploded at that line as it's classic Musk drivel. However, I'm surprised there isn't also something else he reckons they will be doing, "in about two years."

Prince of PDFs, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, to step down after 18 years

Sounds AI generated to me, or the bullshit bingo card was empty. Your bullshit bingo card may vary.

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Re: America's reputational loss will be long lasting

The biggest. The bigliest.

FTFY

Sorry, kids. Memory crunch threatens to kneecap Chromebook shipments

Re: Cruelty

I was asked by a friend a few years ago which company I'd recommend for a laptop for his wife so I said, "HP." Three months later that same friend - who knows nothing about computers - went to a local branch of Currys and bought the first HP laptop they showed him, then called me up a few days later when it couldn't update Win10 because the 32Gb eMMC storage was full. I told him to take it back and he just said, "You told me to buy that one!" I just reminded him that I recommended HP as a brand but that he never called me for more information prior to buying something he had no clue about so that wasn't my fault. If he had asked me, I would have made the time to go with him and advise him on the best option for his budget, which he was very flexible on so he could have got a half decent machine. Instead, he got a complete POS that should never have been on sale in the first place.

Re: Cruelty

We have two Chromebooks in our house which don't get used a lot, but are great when we are travelling as we can tether them to our phones and use them just as we would use a tablet but with a larger screen, plus it's much nicer typing on a keyboard than on a screen. There are valid use cases for these devices but they aren't for everyone.

Critical Microsoft Excel bug weaponizes Copilot Agent for zero-click information disclosure attack

If Access is still available on-prem and without a subscription, it's because M$ haven't got around to it yet. Expect it to be made available purely in O347.2 - with extra gobs of CoPilot obviously - and the standalone version retired with no replacement at all within the next year.

Musk admits Starship V3 launch date has slipped as Super Heavy booster rolls into place

Re: Add to the list of words or phrases I never wish to hear again. . .

BINGO!!!

Musk's Grok sparks outrage after chatbot makes offensive jibes about football disasters

Re: without agency there is no offense

Well if the guy behind it is an autistic, ketamine addled idiot, you'll get an autistic, ketamine addled idiot LLM, as to him, it's 'normal'.

Microsoft spots ClickFix campaign getting users to self-pwn on Windows Terminal

Re: What kind of people would copy-paste some random PowerShell command into a Windows Terminal ?

It's usually the same people who blindly follow satnav and drive off a cliff because it told them too.

Mind you, I can't help thinking that the people who are writing these scripts would probably be better off working for M$ as they do seem to understand how to actually write code which works. Can't be any worse than the one's who are already there.

Bug that wiped customer data saved the day – and a contract

Well they did get to the route of the problem.

Microsoft finally gets around to fixing Windows 10 Recovery Environment after breaking it in October

Quality Control? Nice Concept...

"It will do little to reassure administrators or end users already skeptical of Microsoft's quality control."

There's been no quality control there for well over a decade and that shows when just about every product has numerous issues and is less usable than previous versions with a more incoherent user interface. That and the abortion which is CoPilot being rammed into everything make all their products total garbage.

I'd like to think that if M$ really wanted to, they could actually put a logical, well thought out and usable UI and menu in Windows - like Win 7 - as well as a switch to completely disable the web search and CoPilot, as well as add themes for Win2000, XP, Win 7/8/8.1 etc. so that it was actually properly usable again. However, I'm convinced the entire design of Windows is so badly designed and built that this is just not possible as it would break too many other things catastrophically so is not an option. Why else does making a minor change to a service necessitate a complete reboot of the entire OS, rather than just a restart of that service? It seriously cannot be that hard unless the OS design is so completely and fundamentally flawed that it cannot function in any other way.

I'm so glad I moved away from Windows on my home PC over a decade ago and reckon I've saved a couple of hundred hours of stress over that time by not using it.

Microsoft kicks new Outlook opt-out deadline down the road to 2027

Re: Anyone else remember the days...

In the EU and UK you are allowed to make a backup copy of the source media - both software or recorded music - to cover you losing the source media. You do actually own it. However, in the US the DCMA prohibits that, but as the majority of legislation there seems tailored to protecting companies and industries and screwing over the consumer at every level, that is no surprise.

As for other countries, not sure.

Re: Anyone else remember the days...

I also remember the times when a 'productivity tool' actually worked and made your life easier. Pretty sure M$ used to make more than one or two of those...