Posts by Sudosu

Orbital datacenter gold rush needs an environmental review, FCC told

I wonder if they will chain themselves to helicopters and hover over the launch sites in protest.

Court tosses Microsoft's appeal in pre-owned software licenses spat

Re: With a bit of luck...

I think he will be putting more focus on the new Minecraft enforcement division.

Re: Moving customers to the cloud means we can screw them over for a subscription.

Now do Power Platform...

DRAM it! Cheap PCs being priced out of existence as memory cost bites

Re: My suggestion being implemented?

20 years ago we still bought games, music, video etc on physical media.

I wonder if any PlayStation users who had their media stolen by Sony are going to go retro and buy physical from now on.

Games are a bit tougher as they pretty much force you to connect to a service to open and work.

Canonical sends Ubuntu into the AI agent era

Re: AI

I was recently making some Impress (PowerPoint) slides on a fairly dry topic that I wanted to convert into a video with narration.

Tried several times to do the narration myself but I don't think anyone wants to listen to my, error filled, allergy-graveled, runny nosed, sniffing with coughing rendition of the content. (I can now admit that my career in audio books is over before it began, sigh)

Fired up speech note and found a cheery sounding female voice with British accent.

Now even I can listen through the videos without nodding off.

We don't make people type out our documents, we don't have to make humans read them out loud.

PS - Speech Note actually has the SAM voice I used to play with on my C64, and I am pretty sure was adopted by Stephen Hawking.

It looks like it can capture your own voice as well to use, but I did not play with the feature too much.

To paraphrase the elderly lady from the Frank's RedHot Sauce commercial "They put that $%#@ on everything!"

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

Likely have you hold your ID up to your face in front of the camera.

Re: STASI

Does the encryption help when they are watching what you type on your screen?

Disgruntled 0-day hunter 'humiliated' by Microsoft pledges 'bone shattering drop' as Redmond calls cops

Re: Security?

Source code is obviously commented by the developers;-)

You sure bout that?

AI sackings reach New Zealand, which will use it to eject 14 percent of government staff

Pay outs

I remember years ago talking to a government staffer who mentioned he was being packaged out.

I asked "So what are you going to do now? Do you have a job lined up?".

He laughed and said this was his second time being packaged out (he actually jumped on the option when presented) and would enjoy his two year vacation before they asked him to come back again.

...and he was right, saw him a few years later back at the same office doing his old job.

A lot of the rest who get let go start the next day at large vendors supporting the gov, same job, different side of the table.

GoDaddy customer claims registrar transferred 27-year-old domain without any security checks

I'm not even sure my old provider was not long dead

I registered my domain in the dark ages of the DNS provider wars of the early 2000's.

One company got bought by another at some point with no impact. They still had the early 2000's web page for management that worked fine.

I usually did my renewals at 5-10 years for some stability.

On the last renewal, which I attempted about three weeks before expiry, my card would not process on the web portal, the provider contact emails would not respond and the phone went to complete silence (which is odd on its own).

Through some web sleuthing I eventually found out that my DNS domain was under Enom's "control" but was acquired along with my last provider and the provider still had distribution rights for the group my domain suffix fell under.

I reached out to Enom and got an actual human to help me by chat who immediately escalated the case.

It took about a week with constant communications for them to both A- agree that their distributor was no longer contactable within their contractual time window and B- for them to collect my documentation, have me send emails from the expiring DNS email to confirm identity and get things changed over.

The experience was stressful due to the potential impact (in the background I was moving everything to another DNS just in case), but getting things fixed and moved to Enom proper was processed with a great deal of professionalism and followed the plan they communicated at the start.

I am a few 1 year renewals and one IP change in on Enom and its been so much better. I now have 2nd factor login which was not even an option on the old system.

What a racket my old provider had, they may have been dead for all I know and that website was still collecting money until something finally broke with card processing.

Trump to UK: Stop taxing our big beautiful tech corps or face tariff tsunami

The initial tariffs were applied under the incorrect law for the purpose, they should have been applied under another law, which I think they immediately did after the ruling. Though they could still be on the hook for reimbursements of funds collected under the incorrect law they used initially.

IIRC

Using the password 'admin123' wasn't as bad as sharing it on Slack

Re: I'm surprised...

My password goes to 11.

Microsoft beefs up Remote Desktop security with ... hard-to-read messages

I bet

They accidentally ran it through their EULA writing tool.

Governments on high alert after CISA snuffs out Firestarter backdoor on fed network

It started in my head...

... as soon as I saw the name.

I'm a fire starter, twisted fire starter

Happy Friday!

NASA working on 'Big Bang' upgrade to keep the Voyagers alive for longer

Re: Big Bang

I have no #&*" idea.

California ghost-gun bill wants 3D printers to play cop, EFF says

Re: Why 3D Printers?

Titanium and a kilowatt of CO2 laser

That should be the title of a heavy metal song...or maybe a light metal one.

Re: Why 3D Printers?

You just need a 4D printer to print things that were printable in the past before the laws passed and the firmware was updated.

Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs

Re: Windows circles of hell

Yeah I took the mostly full plunge last September when I switched my main gaming rig to Bazzite and left Win 10 (I refuesed to upgrade) on a second partition.

I kind of dread the day I have to boot back into Windows...and yes I was bit by that dual boot "bug" on another machine when that patch came out.

Re: This and more

Grabbing all of your private data to feed Copilot takes a long time.

If an AI agent screws up while running your business, there's nobody to sue

There is Definatly someone to sue

Unfortunately it is the business that was using AI by those who were impacted by its errors.

Ex-Microsoft engineer believes Azure problems stem from talent exodus

Re: Boeing Disease?

My guess for the cause is three letters - MBA.

Want to be the IT Crowd for the BBC? An £800M contract beckons

I have a prob...Have you tried turning it off and on again? No but I can't...Goodbye! Click

We can do this with an AI help desk now.

ServiceNow allegedly says salesman 'overachieved' and is not entitled to comp

Re: The Oracle gambit

Are they easier to tip than cows?

PS- I had to look up what a fly tipping site was

Starlink sprays debris into orbit following another satellite 'anomaly'

We need a Harry Broderick

...and apparently a cement mixer.

"Salvage 1" tagline from IMDB "Harry runs a salvage operation, in which he and his partners reclaim trash and junk and sell it as scrap (or as other things). Harry also has a home-made spaceship which he sometimes uses to reclaim junk satellites."

PS - Oh wow, this show actually made it into a second season.

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

Re: Yup....This root user was born on 1-Jan-1906!!!!

Apparently I was seeing from a China perspective :(

Re: Yup....This root user was born on 1-Jan-1906!!!!

How about August 6 1984. To tell them to "86" their 1984 attitude toward freedom.

NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'

Re: You keep using that word…

I think I pasted this before, but they "drove" Endeavour through part of LA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdqZyACCYZc

Interpol cybercrime crackdown leads to 94 arrests, 45,000 IP takedowns

I sometimes watch Scammer Payback on YouTube to see some Karma for these people.

The guy trolls the scammers, breaks into their systems and cameras so you can see them reacting.

He then gathers information, reports them to their government....and then shows the takedown through their web or office cameras.

Unfortunately by then the money is usually gone, though sometimes he tricks them into transferring it out so it can be returned.

Supposedly big-brained execs are outsourcing decisionmaking to AI

Move fast, break everything, leave, repeat.

Re: 62 percent of bosses rely on LLMs

"It's easy to see why so many UK leaders are leaning on AI when making high-pressure decisions. When the stakes are high, AI can feel like a neutral voice that processes information quickly and offers clear recommendations."

Faster, wronger...

RAM is getting expensive, so squeeze the most from it

Re: fortunately my system has plenty

Not exactly related to the compression discussion, but is for the RAM savings one :)

I've got an ancient HP Z800 circa 2011, with an SSD, an NVMe (I always call these "ENVY ME!" drives, is that right?) plugged into the PCIe slot on a card, 100GB of blazing 1333MHz DDR3 and dual X5675 CPU's.

It cost me 90 dollars 5 years ago, which translates into less than 8GB of DDR4/5 RAM today I think.

I originally bought it to run Proxmox, but will run just about anything I toss at it.

It can even run modest LLM's (under Ollama) on just the CPU's, though somewhat slowly...saving up for an RTX3060 for it to help with that.

The power supplies are the greatest weakness, once it dies you toss the computer generally, so mine sips, or maybe gulps, filtered power.

AI?

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

Call it the papers please bill.

Re: IS_ADULT value

Ok, now we need your age group, photo ID and your political affiliation to protect the children....by reeducating you.

Dev stunned by $82K Gemini bill after unknown API key thief goes to town

Re: Bad Business Practice

Yeah, that extra zero, can really cause an impact...been through that once and have to always reiterate the cause of why they don't have any payment type on file when I contact them.

NEVER AGAIN.

Yours Truly,

Harry Buttle

ServiceNow boasts its AI bot is resolving 90% of its own help desk tickets

Re: What do the users think?

When creating prompts I have a catch all that picks upon the user being "angry or frustrated" at which point it will forward to a human.

Hello, I----Have you tried turning it off and on again? I have a proble----Great, ticket resolved, goodbye!

Burger King turns to AI to flame broil employees who aren't friendly enough

Next..

...there will be a teleprompter on the till, or an AI voiced headset.

I just had a flash to the attempted arrest scene at the ATM from Demonltion Man.

That movie is unnervingly accurate on many things.

Microsoft boss on AI content: 'Nobody wants anything that is sloppy'

The integrity of the writes in a rdbms, however, is orders of magnitude higher than a stand alone spreadsheet and can include logging and error capture.

This is like the old, I can buy a 1TB (or whatever size of the era) hard drive at "choose your retailer" for far less than you enterprise guys are charging me for that storage. That holds true until the click click click noise starts, then the real cost of losing your data comes into play.

I find AI is like the old school forums; they seem to start out fairly intelligent, but after about the tenth post that intelligence drops off a cliff.

Re: Sloppy

All we are going to get is a Talkie Toaster...

Pakistan to test students for real-world skills before they graduate from IT degrees

Re: Interesting approach

It's professors all the way down.

Microsoft sets Copilot agents loose on your OneDrive files

Re: 20 files?

Just Store a couple DVD ISO or Blu-Ray files in OneDrive before you put anything else in there and it will never finish the sync.

Re: Microsoft is speed running towards Orwell

So can you call the FBI when we can't find your keys?

Re: Who watches the watchers?

Artificial Intern may be a more apt term for the output.

Re: Who watches the watchers?

...and now that song is in my head for the day, I guess it could be worse haha.

Re: Windows' Search

Oh, how many times I had to kill that damned indexing service to make things work over the years...grrrr.

Sat Nad declares Windows 11 has a billion users – just don't bother asking for details

Re: Tired

Windows Landfi11 edition.

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

Re: Missing one aspect, the customer

....or, from another perspective, let him stay so he can keep doing the good work until it is done.