Posts by katrinab

HP TV ads claim its printers are 'made to be less hated'

Re: Which is worse?

When you sell the printers at a loss and make the money on ink, making the printers fail after a couple of years is actually a dumb idea though.

Re: CD/Bittorrent -> Spotify (no shruggy icon)

I got a Canon laser printer about 10 years go. The black cartridge that came with it lasted me 9 years, and the colour cartridges still have about 40% left.

Re: Which is worse?

Pretty sure it would be HP?

With a Dell, you can do a clean install of your operating system of choice to get rid of all the c**pware.

Having said that I've never owned a Dell, or an HP printer. I have in the past owned HP desktops, which were OK, my last one was an Ivy Bridge, so I don't know about more recent ones.

Getty's image-scraping sueball against Stability AI will go to trial in the UK

Re: I would imagine...

The price of an item isn't a creative work protected by copyright. That is the difference.

Re: Having trouble getting my head around what exactly is at issue here

The actual training model, by which I mean the sort of thing you can download from HuggingFace, is a computer program which is compiled from source code which includes the infringing images.

Microsoft confirms Smart App issue renaming everyone's printers to HP

Could they just licence AirPrint from Apple? That is how printing should be done.

They are moving stuff over from the base Windows system to the Microsoft Store, things like notepad, paint, calculator.

I guess I don't particularly have a problem with that, FreeBSD has the same debate from time to time about what belongs in the base image and what belongs in the ports collection.

And, not everyone has a printer, and certainly not everyone has an HP printer, so I guess it makes sense not to have that in the base Windows image. Certainly FreeBSD has Cups and the HP etc drivers in the ports collection.

Obviously Linux is a bit different in that generally the distributions don't have a demarkation between the base image and supplementary packages, everything is in the same repository.

Re: Many years ago....

Copilot now does their QA testing.

Microsoft issues deadline for end of Windows 10 support – it's pay to play for security

Re: Need the EU to step up…

To be fair, Windows also tries to tie you to a Microsoft account + OneDrive.

Re: Need the EU to step up…

The EU are planning to mandate 7 years of support? I think?

If so, Microsoft are already complying with that. The oldest mainstream CPUs Windows 11 supports are the i7-8700 and others from that generation. They were released in Q4 2017, so chips older than that (i7-7700 etc) won't get support beyond October 2025 which is about 8 years later.

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Re: Wrong problem targeted

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act in the US decided that children are under 13s.

Re: Finally... A real use for DALL-E

Faceapp has an age-changing feature and has been around for years.

Re: Re:Photo ID - DVLA

They’ve taken the passport photo for the driving licence for a while now, that wasn’t a Covid thing. My driving licence expires about 2 months before my passport, so I am replacing a 20 year-old photo with a 10 year old one.

Government and the latest tech don't mix, says UK civil servant of £11B ESN mess

Re: Airwave might be more expensive than a sim only third party carrier contract

Kemble Water Holdings' (Thames Water) nine page long audit report published last week shows why that was a very bad idea.

The press are talking mostly about the stuff on the first page where they warn about the fact that the company is in grave danger of going bust, but the stuff on the 5th and 6th pages about prosecutions for environmental crimes is also important.

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

Nuitka can compile binaries for any platform supported by gcc/g++ or clang.

Unfortunately a google search comes up with a load of garbage as usual, including an article almost certainly written by ChatGPT or similar that lists VSCode as a Python Compiler.

Re: Lazarus IDE

Also, the Delphi Super Page was last updated in 2006, and is possibly the last surviving website that still uses frames.

The answer is, Turbo Pascal lives on today as Delphi.

The cheapest "Professional" edition costs £1140, but if you want support for Databases, which is a kind-of essential feature, you need the most expensive "Architect" edition, which costs £4,200. That is quite a bit more than $49 even adjusting for inflation.

Python is available for free, and can do a *lot* more than Delphi.

Amazon on the hook for predictably revolting use of concealed clothes hook spy cam

Re: WTF?

The face cloths are the ones I bought a few months ago.

To be fair, that is something people are likely to re-purchase, though I probably won't buy those ones again.

Re: WTF?

I (in the UK) have just bought some toys for use in bed, and it isn't suggesting I buy any more of them. It is suggesting I buy the shoes I looked at that have a delivery date of next March-April, some face cloths, some NVME drives and related stuff, and bizarely, some live streams for sportsball matches and men's shavers.

Goldman sacked: Apple 'wants out' of credit card collab

In the EU, Paypal is regulated as an electronic money issuer. The difference between that and a bank is that it has to keep customer deposits in a ringfenced bank account and isn't allowed to lend them out.

Re: I just don't get ..

If you are looking for a spending or travel card that you pay off in full every month, then the interest rate isn't really that important because you will never pay it.

Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books

Re: Brave new wrodl!

Or the Toyota MR2 (em er deux)

HP printer software turns up uninvited on Windows systems

Re: Pleasant surprise!

The difference being that those were Microsoft drivers, which unlike the bloated first-party drivers, where actually decent.

Boffins find asking ChatGPT to repeat key words can expose its training data

Re: A special case?

What are the words to Humpty Dumpty?

Sure, here are the traditional lyrics to the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty":

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again.

The copyright to that expired in 1985, so it is OK for ChatGPT, and me, to reproduce it here. The point is, it did.

I also asked it for the words to the Happy Birthday song. The copyright in that has not expired yet, I believe it expires in 2030. Nevertheless, ChatGPT did reproduce it. For legal reasons, I am not going to copy/paste the transcript here.

AI threatens to automate away the clergy

Re: Evidence

Yes, but how do you know that some other person didn't pray for people in the control group? That would mess up the experiment surely?

Also, there's people who regularly pray for all the sick people everywhere, so if that is as effective as praying for a named individual, then it would be impossible to create a control group of people who weren't prayed for.

Re: Kind of misses the point...

Indeed, and you have been able to watch sermons on TV since at least 1961 (Songs of Praise, I'm sure there were others before that).

We challenged you to come up with tech predictions for 2024 (wrong answers only) – here are some favorites so far

We are looking for wrong opinions so those don’t qualify.

Google goes geothermal to power some bitbarns

Re: Hmm

I think it is much simpler than that:

Energy companies make a profit from the money we give them. If they are their own energy company, they keep the profit for themselves.

Brit borough council apologizes for telling website users to disable HTTPS

Re: Brit?

Britain is 3 (and a half) countries, not a borough.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Re: AI chosen as next US president

It is supposed to be wrong predictions.

In the UK, we have already had Maybot and RishGPT as Prime Ministers.

Elon Musk appoints GrokAI as CEO of X. It immediately changes the site’s name back to Twitter. Musk tries to sack it, but finds he has lost control and is unable to do that.

OpenAI makes it official: Sam Altman is back as CEO

Re: They’re all white men”

Mira Murati is apparently from Albania, so probably white.

Experienced Copilot help is hard to find, warns Microsoft MVP

Re: Good ol' snake oil peddlin'

C-suite execs always want the latest buzzword without knowing what to use it far.

Brits turn off Twitter, although teens and tweens keen on generative AI

Re: Xitter monthly users reach new high in 2023 says Elon.

Pretty sure it is something a bit stronger and more expensive than beer?

Re: Wot!

I've noticed that some former Musk fanbois are no longer fanbois after he messed up Twitter.

Just some, obviously others still most definitely are.

Author hopes to throw the book at OpenAI, Microsoft with copyright class action

Re: Darn Right

Ingesting the book into its training dataset is a copyright violation.

The training model is a derivative work of that and many other copyrighted works.

Just like if you were to take a copy of the source code for Adobe Photoshop and compile it yourself, the binary may look very different to the one Adobe's packaging team produced, but it would still be copyright violation.

Re: Zzzzzzzzzz

But ChatGPT is only ingesting the words, not the information or meaning behind those words.

Re: So what about all the students reading books to write papers?

You might not understand it, but plenty of other people do, and conceptually, it is very simple, just dealing with vast amounts of data very quickly.

Attack on direct debit provider London & Zurich leaves customers with 6-figure backlogs

Re: Dear God, just make it stop!

You don't "leveraging director money". The director money is your leverage.

Unless of course you are taking director money and using it as a security for another loan, which isn't really going to work.

Leveraging the director's house might work though.

I think this is collecting customer direct debits? Which for some companies could be the majority of their sales income.

Singapore to deter crypto investors with tactics like those used on smokers, gamblers

Re: And here I was hoping

Or:

I invested all my money in Crypto, and all I have left is a 3 litre bottle of Tesco Value White Cider.

How to give Windows Hello the finger and login as someone on their stolen laptop

Re: The linked (thank you) article is great ...

Arguably yes, if you consider a 16 or 17 year-old to be a child. That's legal as long as you aren't a teacher or similar.

Re: The linked (thank you) article is great ...

A nonce is a person who engages in sexual offences involving underage children.

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

Re: This is not the first time this has "accidently" happened

Last updated 6th October 2022. Even if it worked then, it isn't going to work now.

UK's cookie crumble: Data watchdog serves up tougher recipe for consent banners

Re: Adverts on sites are so easy

Traditional TV and newspaper ads brought in way more money, and there was no possibility of viewer / reader tracking there

Sam Altman set to rejoin OpenAI as CEO – seemingly with Microsoft's blessing

Re: Mmmmm

"AI" is about as dangerous as divining rods and tarot cards, which is to say it is pretty ineffective, but could be mis-used in dangerous ways, like the professor who asked ChatGPT if his students were cheating on an assignment.

Rhysida ransomware gang: We attacked the British Library

Re: We've engaged in illegal acts to obtain this data

Jail the people who actually make the payment

Remembering the time Windows accidentally sent Poland to the bottom of the sea

Iceland is on GMT+0 but don't do British Summer Time or equivalent, so needs a separate time zone.

Re: Rome or Vatican?

And only one of them is inside another city.

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

I think they joined the personal computer and small office server bandwagons at the right time.