Posts by jonathan keith

Microsoft apologizes for not explaining cheaper no-AI M365 plans, and all it took was a government lawsuit

Re: Microsoft apologises for getting caught attempting to rip off its customers

Controversially, I'll assert that big companies shouldn't be allowed to challenge regulators through the courts

Absolutely nothing controversial about that as far as I can see. Corporates have chosen to push the pendulum as far as they can, and we're starting to recognise that we've had enough of their nonsense. We need to sustain the pressure on lawmakers to start moving the pendulum back, to ignore the howls of outrage from the corporates, billionaires, and lobbyists, and to ultimately make sure these greedy swine can't ever do it again.

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

SteamOS

Counting the days for the desktop release of SteamOS.

Digital ID, same place, different time: In this timeline, the result might surprise us

Huh?

Why on earth was Starmer being let in to a conference of center-left leaders? I'd hope they'd have seen through the sheep's clothing by now.

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

Ok... so, how exactly, then?

Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?

In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:

Building THE reference implementation web browser, and

Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.

There is no 3.

I agree wholeheartedly. How do we make this happen, please?

Apple tries get €500M EU fine tossed

So tired of this shit

For far too long now appealing against every negative court judgement has become simply another cost of doing business for multinationals. Penalties - meaningful penalties - must be introduced to put a stop to this.

Want to appeal? Go right ahead, but if the judge decides you're doing so simply to avoid paying the fine, drag the case out, cost the government department (read: taxpayer) you're appealing against, etc. etc., then your fine has just gone up by an order of magnitude, and it's payable in 30 days or the bailiffs get sent round, your operating licenses are revoked and your executives are liable.

Fuck these people. They need to be beaten with sticks until they learn to respect the society we all live in.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

The continuing enshittification of (almost) everything

Yes, 98, Vista, 8 were pretty (ok, very) crappy, but their service packs (98SE, 7, 8.1) eventually fixed them up pretty well. Even XP only really shone after three service packs.

Nobody much likes change, but the big problem with Win11 is that it is actively more difficult and time-consuming to use than previous versions, for no obvious or clearly-explained reasons. Change because it's significantly more efficient once you've adapted? Grumble, moan, demand proof or examples, but all right. But change for the sake of change alone, or more cynically change for the sake of profit alone is not good enough. The only carrot in view is the promise of bonuses (or just continued employment) for those at Microsoft and their satellite businesses, but for the users, Win11 only offers a stick, and that does not make a compelling sales pitch.

Now’s your chance to try Microsoft’s controversial Windows Recall ... maybe

Re: "Chance to try..."

Heroin's the only one of those four that's very moreish.

WinAmp's woes will pass, but its wonders will be here forever

Yes, there are many options, just none you could give to anyone and say "Here, this will play your music, you will understand how, it won't try to take your money nor sell you anything."

The closest I know of is foobar2000.

As major web browser makers snuggle up to AI, these skeptical holdouts remain

Re: The title is too long.

Er... what?

I was going to write that this looked AI-generated, but I suspect that if it had been it would make some sort of understandable sense, wrong or mad as that might be.

At least amanfrommars1 can be relied on to have a point of some sort.

Microsoft PC accessories rise from the grave just in time for Christmas

Sidewinder Strategic Commander to live again?

Hopefully Incase will bring gaming's most misunderstood peripheral into the modern era: the Sidewinder Strategic Commander.

Under-fire Elon Musk urged to get a grip on X and reality – or resign

Re: If the UK was a more authoritarian country

If you want to actively choose to invite Russia Today into your home, then I suggest you seek urgent professional help.

Twitter tells advertisers to go fsck themselves, now sues them for fscking the fsck off

Re: ICON --------------------------------------------->

That's approximately the same number as DCI Barnaby's tally over in Midsomer, so entirely feasible I'd suggest.

The US needs to update their civics teaching...

... so that the lesson includes "The differences between protected free speech, unprotected free speech, and liability to any resultant consequences".

Or maybe just put together a short yet informative public information film and broadcast it everywhere for a month.

Re: He Doesn't Expect Any Response

It's because they had a massive helping of money.

Chrome Web Store warns end is nigh for uBlock Origin

"As an IT administrator, uBlock Origin is a requirement for our users," wrote one individual posting under the name Kendoka on Monday. "As a personal user, I hereby swear to uninstall Chrome the day ad blockers are removed."

As an IT administrator, why is s/he using Chrome in the first place?

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

Correction..?

I assume the subs had a heavy weekend, and that para twelve should read:

Dave was in his manager's office making all manner of excuses for spending time own social media and pleading not to keep his job

Feds sue Adobe and execs for stinging subscribers with 'hidden' cancellation fees

Re: Although....

Can Adobe's reputation get any worse than it already is? Without, y'know, murdering puppies in a TV advert for Premiere?

European Commission may be about to put the squeeze on Apple for its App Store rules

Re: Fines on US companies? Pointless

I've said it before, and I have no doubt I'll be saying it many times again, but c-suite jail terms are the only effective deterrents against corporate malfeasance. Write the laws so that if a regulator decides that a company has knowingly breached them, ALL c-suite executives face a minimum of a year in chokey. Let them pass that off as simply the cost of doing business.

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

Re: How it works in practice

That would be fine if I believed a word that came out of Paula Vennells' mouth.

How will this get fixed?

In exactly the same way as everything else gets fixed these days: despite plenty of detailed warnings about this flaw, nothing will be done at any of these companies until either a) people (by which I mean white westerners) die as a direct result of this, or b) the flaw causes significant reputational damage to a multinational corporate customer, or a (again, western) government.

At that point, something will be done to address this flaw. Nothing will happen right up to that point, however, because any activity would "harm stockholder value" (and bonuses).

Climate change is going to result in the end of either late-stage capitalism or humanity. At the moment I don't honestly know which I'd prefer.

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

There are two passages in Three Men And A Boat concerning the playing of musical instruments that are among the funniest writing I have ever read. (Your mileage may vary.)

This and this.

I told Halle Berry where to go during a programming gig in LA

Re: Halle Berry? big deal!

I attended a Dubai cocktail party with the entire cast of Are You Being Served.*

*I was six, far more interested in the Lego, and Dubai at the time was breeze-block buildings alongside a road through open desert.

Oracle ULA audits are a license to bill

I don't understand.

Is their software so good that it justifies the accompanying hell?

Palantir's CEO calls 'woke' a 'central risk to Palantir, America and the world'

Re: Thin pagan religion

Yeah, I don't think I'll bother answering the questions of an Anonymous Coward.

Re: Paganism.

A leftist writes: "You're wrong!"

Re: Thin pagan religion

"I've never seen RWNJs chanting 'death to america'."

They restrict themselves to only the parts of america they don't like. Democrats, for instance. Or women. Or minorities.

Not a Genius move: Resurrecting war hero Alan Turing as your 'chief AI officer'

Re: The normalisation continues....

Always.

Re: Turing misinformation

You also then avoid having to do any difficult critical thinking.

"I'm all right, Jack" (so by extension fuck the rest of you all) is such a poisonous attitude, and one of the reasons we're in our current parlous circumstances.

Sorry for the rant. It's one of those mornings.

European Parliament votes to screw repair rights in consumer toolkits

Yeah, that's the convenient excuse that they'd like you to believe.

Musk burns bridges in Brazil after calling for senior judge to be impeached

The significant problem in that cartoon is that it omits the movement of the political centre (the Overton window) ever-rightwards for decades.

Canva acquires Affinity, further wounding a regulator-bruised Adobe

Re: Adobe is expensive for graphics.

Audition barely has non-cloud competitors

Are you mad? I'll name you one non-cloud DAW off the top of my head and that's the bloody excellent and entirely affordable Reaper, which I can name because I use it daily.

What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it

Re: "berks of the first water"

It's just English english. If it was a translation, it would read "enormous cunts".

You're welcome!

Will that old Vulcan's engines run? Bluebird jet boat team turn to Cold War bomber

Snap! CCF nightops at RAF Laarbruch, late 80s. Got bored with the orienteering, thus me and a couple of mates found ourselves lying on the grass in front of the runway for a far more entertaining hour of Tornado touch-and-gos. Extraordinarily loud (and dangerous, thinking about it now.)

I wonder how many groups of schoolboys did the same over the years.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

I think the Bill Moyers line "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one" is relevant.

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

Re: WTF?

The mattress movement really ratchets up the tension in a game of Jenga.

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

TLDR

I was going to write a long and vitriolic screed about all this, but after stepping back for a moment and taking a couple of deep breaths, I realised that what I wanted to say would condense down to:

"Just Fuck Off, Elon Musk."

Arm grabs a slice of Raspberry Pi to sweeten relationship with IoT devs

Re: No! No! No! No! No!

One of my 'Yes!'s is that ARM could offer its design to Raspberry Pi for a reduced fee or even free, keeping the board price down. Indeed, ARM could consider this discount / free license a marketing cost, as Raspberry Pi's very existence as a powerful computer that needs little electricity because it uses ARM is quite the marketing message.

Not now ARM has shareholder interests to prioritise. By which I obviously mean short-term shareholder interests, which invariably results in the business being squeezed for as much profit as possible as quickly as possible.

Europe bans Meta from using personal data to target ads

Re: And nothing was lost

I'm with Bill Hicks on this one.

Regulator delays Adobe's $20B buy of Figma, derails deal deadline

The full quote* from Field was "This won't happen... until after my Adobe shares have vested."

* not really

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

The legal definition of 'future-proof' is 'obsolete at the moment of end-user purchase or installation.'

Apple finds another use for USB-C – a cheaper Pencil

Re: And will they ....

Nice gag, but f you study the accompanying photo carefully, you'll notice that the stylus tip is actually rounded, to complement the device's corners. (And no doubt Apple have tried to patent the tip design, despite decades of prior art.)

Japan cruises ahead with drive-thru EV charging trial

Re: Very clever, but there is a problem.

By sheer coincidence I ran across this in my YouTube feed yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AdBcTMHG0Q

Go ahead, let the unknowable security risks of Windows Copilot onto your PC fleet

... wanna buy some pegs, Dave?

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Yup.

Same here. If I absolutely *must* load a webpage that FireFox / NoScript / Ghostery throws a fit over, then it's Vivaldi that gets the shit jobs.

European Commission hits Intel with new fine over antitrust findings

Punitive damages?

The EU should also be imposing hefty punitive damage fines on top of the basic financial penalties in all these cases against giant tech companies of whatever stripe, for whom a €350 million fine is pocket change.

Something like €10 billion to start with, and a sliding upwards scale from there on. After all, it seems to be the only language these people understand.

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

There's always a silver lining

In this case, it's that the skip-fire which TwiX has become will keep my popcorn popping while I sit back in my deckchair to watch.

Google exec: Microsoft Teams concession 'too little, too late'

Re: Just... no

Yes, but this is in an area of business that Google doesn't monopolise, so they're entitled to complain about another's monopolistic behaviour. You see?

Microsoft's Surface Duo phone hangs up, drops out of support

And they killed the Courier for it.

*sigh*

Australian court orders Meta subsidiaries to pay $14 million over data use

.. and years of guaranteed jail time for top-level senior execs. No plea bargains.