Posts by ThatOne

Google wants to target you – yes, YOU – with AI-generated ads

Nah, that's just automatic ad creation engines, it's quite common. Make a search for "Higgs Boson" and chances are you'll see search results like "Buy cheap Higgs Bosons at ...".

_{Where do you think CERN found it? On Amazon, free delivery.}

All Microsoft Surface Pro X cameras just stopped working

Re: "...We sent you a DM to maximize the characters' usage."

Nah, they sent people a trained Dungeon Master to improve the PC/NPC interactions.

Re: Certificate!

> it wouldn't start to boot due to and expired certificate

Planned obsolescence paradise: Costs nothing to set up, and can't be bypassed by the (l)user short of re-flashing the firmware (which would require an unlocked firmware for that hardware...).

Lenovo profits sink 75% as PC demand continues nosedive

Knee-jerk economics

> demand for personal computers continues to melt

Don't they teach anything in business schools about that strange notion of "demand"? Hey, guys, the so-called "market" is not a bottomless pit ready to swallow as much product you're able to throw in. "Market" actually stands for a finite (!) amount of people, who will mostly buy what they need, and mostly when they need it. Unbelievable, isn't it.

With this simple phrase you can easily explain those seemingly incomprehensible PC market fluctuations we keep hearing about for years, and you can even predict the future: Most people have bought new PCs in those last 2-3 years, so they won't buy any more for a while (yes, that's how it works, they clearly don't teach you that in business school, do they!)... Jeez.

The Hubble Space Telescope is sinking! Two startups want to save it for free

Re: But why...?

> (funded in 2016, launch 2027)

Sorry, I for one am still living in the past (in 2023), so I will only believe it happened when I reach 2027 and see it happen. Please remember the James Webb telescope was initially scheduled to launch in 2010 -- it actually launched in 2021, just 11 years later...

Re: Simples. Ask ChatGPT

LOL. Well, one has to admit you asked about a "safer" orbit, without specifying for whom and in what way it should be "safer"...

I especially like the "gravitational forces" scenario. Just wait till Mars passes close to Earth and let it pull Hubble to a higher orbit! Voila! Jeez, why didn't anybody think of that obvious solution...

Re: But why...?

> If we're going to drop a billion dollars on a space telescope, maybe spend it on launching a new one?

Unfortunately a Hubble 2.0 wouldn't cost a billion, nowadays most likely 3-4 billion, and then there is the big issue of putting it in orbit and fixing any problems (remember, Hubble has required 5 service visits so far since its launch, it's thanks to them it's (still) working). We might potentially get a Hubble 2.0 in the right orbit, but service visits would be impossible...

But most importantly, don't forget the Hubble project started around 1970 and it was launched around 1990, that is 20 years later... If you start working on Hubble 2.0 tomorrow, it might, potentially be operational around 2043 (or later)...

_{Now some Grinch will certainly say stars aren't going anywhere, we can wait 20 years. Please tell that in person to the young astronomers just leaving college. Make sure to bring a bag to put your teeth in...}

Re: Feasible and potentially profitable.

> increasing the fees charged for the use of Hubble

Ladies and gentlemen, on this side the Starlink evangelists who say we don't need terrestrial telescopes anymore since we have Hubble, on this side somebody who suggests increasing Hubble's fees: Fight!

Astronomers spot Earth-sized exoplanet probably 'carpeted' by volcanoes

Re: What a time to live in

> detecting the atmosphere of planets

Actually they didn't detect anything, they assume, because close, hefty neighbors mean tidal kneading, which means volcanoes, which means lots of gasses, which spell atmosphere. Mostly CO_x.

We regret to inform you Earth will not be destroyed by an asteroid within 1,000 years

Your link to the specific picture doesn't work, but the whole page is quite interesting to read for those not familiar with the subject, and who still reason Hollywood-style (i.e. "we ask 'The Computer' ("Danger, Will Robinson!"), and get a certified 100% exact result about anything, anywhere, anytime"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_prediction

Re: The great Boom Dustcloud Fire Silence

And don't forget you won't really feel the difference if only your country/state/county/city gets hit. Smaller asteroids can do a lot of damage too, don't underestimate them.

Re: scientists can reliably track asteroid paths about 100 years into the future,

> track KNOWN asteroid paths about 100 years into the future

And that's because uncertainty (tiny little rounding errors) gradually increases, till at some point it becomes pointless to calculate any further, you could as well roll some dice.

So I don't know where they got their "reliable 1000 years precision" from, especially if they only focused on a tiny portion of the orbit (hint: Stuff which influence an orbit can happen at any point of it...).

My assessment: Quite brazen headlines-hunting...

Boffins interrogate sodium ion battery stability mystery

> This technology is still in its infancy.

So, to be taken with a grain of salt?

_{Sorry, couldn't resist...}

Microsoft will upgrade Windows 10 21H2 users whether they like it or not

> good or bad a version is/was

Win11 is actually Win10 SE, so they count as one version.

Re: Just give me my Quicklaunch bar back!

> gives me back the Quicklaunch bar

Have you tried ExplorerPatcher?

Re: Forced upgrade

> "users can choose a time for the upgrade that is convenient to them"

> So, 25 o'clock on the 12th of Never?

Sorry, you misunderstood: "Them" refers to Microsoft...

Hey Apple, what good is a status page if you only update it after the outage?

Re: I've seen this before...

Putting something on their status page is admitting they have a problem. No company ever wants to admit to that. They will say it, off the record, but never ever officially, it's bad press.

Also, as everybody knows, ignoring a problem long enough makes it go away eventually.

FTC sues VoIP provider over 'billions of illegal robocalls'

*Sigh*

> XCast knew it was breaking the law and didn't hold back

Because they knew the law was toothless, and breaking it would earn them a stern look and a telling off. At worst.

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

> After all, who doesn't have twenty grand to splash on an ethernet cable, eh?!

That's military procurement level prices...

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

Keep in mind tape hiss is much easier to filter away than wax cylinder cracks and pops: Their issue is that there is actually a little information missing, so when you remove the noisy bit, you necessarily leave a hole. Of course you could average and stuff, but you can hear that, it's more natural sounding to leave the cracks and pops.

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

Why compare to Spotify? That's putting the bar pretty low, anything would sound better than that...

I had vinyl, (reel to reel) tape, compact cassette, and eventually CDs. I finally stuck with CDs. I handle them like I used to handle vinyl (carefully!), so I'm pretty confident they will outlast me.

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

On the other hand chances are CDs will resist better than vinyl records. (Although I admit I don't know what they're made out of nowadays. Could be some extra solid, scratch-proof modern polymer.)

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

Well, some old blues and jazz records only exist as quite bad direct-to-disk engravings (or even worse, wax cylinders!)... You can't and won't ever get anything better than that noisy, bandwidth and dynamic range limited take, that's all that's left...

I have some of those on CD, they sound, well, they sound like they must have sounded back then I guess. The only difference is they don't deteriorate each time you play them.

Re: What Do Cisco's Support Contracts Say?

There is the mere technicality of "discovering" that vulnerability only after the EOL. Not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure since you can't prove it was known before EOL they don't need to fix it anymore.

Re: Typical Lazy Solution

Lazy solution? It's a genius trick to get people off old kit!

Make sure your EOLed appliances have a severe vulnerability, ideally one actively exploited "in the wild", and everyone obediently renews his kit as he should. Shareholder value!

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

> I am flabbergasted by the renaissance of the vinyl LP format

It's hip, it shows you're not one of the herd and all that crap. What brought vinyl back was scratching - try doing this with a CD!... So, by extension, "rappers=hip" became "vinyl=hip" with the yoof, the rest is history.

YouTube's 'Ad blockers not allowed' pop-up scares the bejesus out of netizens

> The stuff that's recommended generally has no relevance to stuff you might actually be interested in.

Obviously they don't give a damn about what you might be interested in. What interests them is to sell you specific stuff, and they'll going to brainwash you into buying it, even if it kills you.

_{I've yet to see once an "suggestion" for something that either was relevant, or even remotely interested me. Not a single time, neither YouTube nor Amazon or any other merchant site (who should know me since I've an account there)...}

Came here to say the same thing: The logical next step is showing ads to the paying customers, because of the "no profit is enough profit™" rule.

India calls for all mobile phones to include FM radios

Re: FM has uses even in the UK

Sure, but then again you're supposed to "follow" on Facebook/Twitter, not listen to grandpa's radio...

FM is uncool, DAB is crappy (and people balk at spending that much money), and things which not so far ago were selling points (shortwave...) have gone the way of the Dodo. Everything has been, or is about to be, replaced by Internet, in the name of profit progress.

Re: It isn't that they don't enable the FM radio

> Those earphone cable antennae suffered badly from the wearer moving around

YMMV, but back when my phones had this feature I've used it a couple times, and it always worked just fine, phone in my pocket, earphone on my ears or, phone on the table, earphones on the table too. No suffering whatsoever.

I miss this feature (and the earphone jack...), I mean I can stream radio from the Internet, but indeed, this adds several additional potential points of failure. Radio station -> my phone was much safer in case of an emergency (hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, whatever your local environment has thought up to get rid of those pesky humans).

Re: It isn't that they don't enable the FM radio

Unfortunately I can only upvote once...

This "we don't sell it because it doesn't sell" self-fulfilling prophecy is one of my pet peeves. It's a random, arbitrary marketing decision, unfortunately very easy to justify afterwards: "See, since we stopped selling it, we didn't sell a single unit! Ergo, we were right to stop selling it, am I not a marketing genius?"...

Exhibit 3,021: Millions wasted on US govt IT due to poor oversight, audit finds

Re: Profitable niche

Yep, chances are those millions aren't wasted for everybody...

_{(We need a "pork barrel" icon)}

Millions of mobile phones come pre-infected with malware, say researchers

Re: Imitating Nature - viruses everywhere - get over it

> I remember doing an XP install some years ago for a friend

Ah yes, heady times... Same here, I had finished the installation of XP for a family member and was downloading all the Windows Update patches, except I had already installed software which controlled which programs were allowed to run, and since it was still in the learning phase, it all of a sudden asked me if some strange alphanumerically named program located in /temp was supposed to start. Nothing was supposed to run at that point, I was still downloading stuff (back then Microsoft still bothered to tell you what it was doing, even to ask for your permission before doing something! Yes, yes, young people won't believe it...).

That was the shortest time before attack I've witnessed. I prevented the program from starting, emptied the /temp folder, and that computer and its user lived happily ever after.

Alien rock causes cosmic disturbance in New Jersey home

Re: Educational Opportunities Abound!

> Assuming it's not radioactive

Very few meteorites are. This one sounds like a standard ferrous meteorite, also called "siderites", which are mostly blobs of iron-nickel alloy. They look quite nice too...

_{Those people can consider themselves lucky their projectile was not that size (60 tons)!...}

Two Microsoft Windows bugs under attack, one in Secure Boot with a manual fix

Yikes!

> CVE-2023-24932 update is disabled by default and requires customers to manually update bootable media

Oh wow, read quickly through that, this sounds like the future problem of choice in all support fora all over the world... Seems from this point on there will be a "before" and an "after" concerning bootable devices, and everything older will henceforth be unable to boot correctly.

Wonder how this will affect dual-booting computers. Very badly I guess... Expect much wailing as people won't be able to boot correctly older OSses, or simply because one OS on their computer hasn't been updated yet, but can't be updated since, well, it doesn't boot anymore...

I sure hope I've misunderstood something.

WordPress plugin hole puts '2 million websites' at risk

What else is new?

> WordPress vulnerability

Also, the pope is catholic

European companies form space jam to secure comms sovereignty with satellites

Re: Survivable High Bandwidth Communications Relay

Nobody cares about what he has, he only cares about what he wants.

That's why most people have several pieces of redundant kit, and won't hesitate to buy yet another one because it pretends to be "better" in some way.

The grass on the other side of the fence is always greener.

Indeed. Facepalm.

Here's what the US Army picked for soldier-worn tactical USB hubs

World Peace, at last

> has embarked on for Nett Warrior with partner Microsoft

"To access this rifle please sign in with your Microsoft account"

Why do I see pictures of soldiers playing Candy Crush on their gear, at least those who are not currently updating and/or rebooting, while the enemies try to not disturb them?... I see officers trying to give orders through Microsoft Teams ("Sarge, your mike is muted!"), I see squaddies desperately searching the setting for firing their guns, I see assaults being interrupted by an imperious yet exiting offer for Office 365, while others desperately try to ask Cortana for artillery support, only managing to order BBQ charcoal, lots of it.

Re: Wearable USB hubs

> What a time to be alive.

Indeed. That I've lived to hear somebody pronounce the words "Tactical Assault USB Hubs"...

New York AG offers law to crack down on backfire-happy cryptocurrencies

Re: I think...

No, in roulette you normally have a very slim but nevertheless real chance of winning, while here you're just a sucker to be fleeced.

.

^{1. Create coin. Give it an attractive name, make reassuring but hard-to-verify claims. Pay some "influencers" to say this is the best thing since sliced bread.}

^{2. Sell coin to as many suck investors as possible.}

^{3. Before the novelty wears off and people start getting tired, claim breach, shut operation down.}

^{4. Profit! Lots of it. Retire with your new fortune in some tropical paradise.}

Eta Aquariid meteor shower peaks this weekend, and will be one for the ages

Something must have scared them...

Zoho creates browser with 'Open Season Mode' for when you don't care about privacy

I did, but considered it useless to elaborate.

> why would anyone use the open season mode

Obviously because they don't know they're using it, or even what it is!

Most people are no IT specialists, they barely even know their browser's brand, they just "click on stuff" to get to the 2-3 places they want to go. Put them once on Open Season, and they will gleefully keep using it till kingdom come...

To put it differently, those privacy features are most likely just a marketing stunt. Probably locked in the proverbial lavatory.

Four out of five Uranus moons likely to have ocean under crust

It's okay, just rename them Brown Flags. People won't see the difference, and as long as it's certified it's okay.

_{You might even hear the occasional cry: "Hey, that one is mine!".}

Re: This is so cool (no pun)

> you've basically got the same atmosphere to breathe

I'm afraid it's not that simple: First of all, a hypersaline ocean would be a quite different thing from an ammonia saturated one (not to mention any other chemicals dissolved). Even if you can "breathe", it won't help you if the water dissolves the flesh from your bones...

Then there is the already mentioned issue of what do you actually breathe: It's definitely not water, it might be oxygen which would be lacking down there, it might be another oxidant which wouldn't necessarily exist in other places. There are a lot of totally incompatible ecological (in the original sense) niches inside an ocean. Take a creature from our own oceans and put it in some Uranus' moons' ocean -- Chances are it will die instantly, despite the water.

Ten-day optical burst shows star eating giant planet, scientists say

Re: "click to enlarge"

Never believe those "enlargement" claims...

American, British monopoly watchdogs probe AI to make sure we don't get screwed

Re: Meh

"probe AI to make sure nobody who matters gets screwed"

Fixed it for you.

Saturn's rings are shrinking and boffins will use the Webb 'scope to find out why

I guess the erosion started right the instant they got created. As about their initial size, rumors have it that their origin is due to the unscheduled disassembly of one or more moons, in which case they initially were just a diffuse cloud of debris of which part immediately fell inwards, the rest settled into what eventually became the rings as we know them.

I've seen things you wouldn't believe, like an atom about to photosynthesize

Wait a minute -

> Zapping the cyanobacteria with the laser and measuring the diffraction patterns

They actually just zapped the Photosystem II protein, didn't they?

_{I mean, cyanobacteria, albeit small, contain a lot of other unrelated things, and zapping them whole would be rather pointless, wouldn't it.}