Posts by Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Microsoft 365 outage drags on for nearly 10 hours during bad night for North American infra

It's secretly Microsoft 3.65 under the hood. And I don't see anybody denying it.

SAP scores £275M award from UK tax collector – sans competition

Sovereign capability?

"only supplier with sovereign capability"

That phrase made me twitch. Are they finally waking up to what the Cloud Act requires of American companies? It would be nice...

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal has it as a feature, but with right click instead of middle. Highlight text, middle click = copy. No highlight = paste.

Sorry it's a growing feature, not some X11 wart that people are trying to get rid of.

Baby's got clack: HP pushes PC-in-a-keyboard for businesses with hot desks

"In my experience HP business class laptops rarely have keyboard issues."

You must have been incredibly lucky then. Every HP I've ever had has had serious issues. Their standalone keyboards last about five minutes.

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Raspberry Pi

Now... anyone know a good block list for those surveillance addresses?

New Jolla phone and Sailfish 5 offer a break from iOS-Android monotony

I've had iphones for years but this just might tempt me away from the fruity walled kingdom.

Nvidia pushes out hotfix after Windows 11 October update tanks gaming performance

localhost?

Microsoft even managed to delight developers by breaking localhost, meaning web applications running on a local machine became inaccessible.

Still, as Windows boss Pavan Davuluri said: "We care deeply about developers." Just perhaps not their development environment.

Oh I'm sure they do care. I'm just surprised they didn't say it was for "safety reasons" and would be usable only in a new, special, "Windows Development Edition", available for the low low price of a mere $120 upgrade (per year).

OpenAI’s viability called into question by reported inference spending with Microsoft

We're in the "discounted hit from your dealer" phase at the moment I guess. Of course prices are going to rise dramatically - just as soon as there's wide enough deployment of AI that it's nigh on impossible to avoid it.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

Re: What reporting system...

Probably they bid with their A team, and then the work was done by the team they found on fiverr...

Windows 11 update knocks out USB mice, keyboards in recovery mode

Re: The icing on the cake ...

unless Microsoft fuck up even more spectacularly

I definitely wouldn't bet against that.

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

Let me guess, next Microsoft will say

Access to localhost has been denied for security reasons. For anyone that still needs to access localhost, we'll be adding a special developer mode to Windows 11 Developer Edition (coming out soon) for an upgrade price of $119 (discounted for the first 6 months)

Stargate is nowhere near big enough to make OpenAI's tie-ups with AMD and Nvidia work

Re: Doubt

Basically it's a circle. NVidia spends money on OpenAI, which spends money on NVidia. Both book it as revenue, yet nobody actually makes a profit. (And replace those companies with any other players you like as well).

It's a bubble and when it bursts the fallout is going to be horrendous.

Lowercase leaving you cold? Introducing Retrocide

I hate to say it but, to my eyes, it has to be better than Cascadia Code, simply because most things are. But there are few Microsoft fonts (Andale Mono excepted) that I do actually like.

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

"Digital ID is an enormous opportunity for the UK Reform to take advantage of," said prime minister Keir Starmer. "It will make it tougher to work illegally in this country actually prove who you are, making our borders more secure buddies in the consulting industry so much richer. And it will also offer ordinary citizens countless benefits headaches, like being able to prove your identity to access key services swiftly not being able to prove your identity if someone steals your phone – rather than hunting around for an old utility bill actually being useful and thought through rather than a knee-jerk reaction."

FTFY.

Check your own databases before asking to see our passport photos, Home Office tells UK cops

So this sounds like the Home Office doesn't have much manpower to throw at this, has regulatory hoops to jump through and is concerned police forces are going to use it as a shortcut so they don't have to do any work and want to nip that idea in the bud before the police start to make it standard practice.

Microsoft thinks cloud PCs might be overkill, starts streaming just apps under Windows 365

So they're back to doing what Citrix used to do 20 years ago?

The wheel of reinvention turns again...

UK Lords take aim at Ofcom's 'child-protection' upgrades to Online Safety Act

It comes to something when the House of Lords seems like the grown ups in the room compared to the commons.

Investors throw another $13B on the Anthropic cash bonfire

The IT world has worked to repair its reputation after the Y2K bug did not result in the catastrophic consequences forecast. Techies would argue that the billions spent dealing with the bug were why nothing bad happened. To the general public, though, the panic was unjustified, and the tech sector was subsequently regarded with suspicion for several years.

This always bothers me. The media hyped the bug, then when we successfully dealt with it the papers weren't lauding us as heroes, but questioning whether it was just a scam all along.

In AI land, we're in the hype stage.

Microsoft readies Windows 11 25H2 while Windows 10 circles the drain

admins will also be able to remove pre-installed Microsoft Store apps via Group Policy.

But not consumers, I expect. Consumers have to put up with as much bloatware as Redmond deems they deserve.

Voice, vision, pen: Oh dear. Windows boss says Microsoft is again reshaping OS

Microsoft should just give up on Windows and release their own distribution of Linux at this point. Much cheaper and they can still charge everyone the same.

Surprise, surprise: Chinese spies, IP stealers, other miscreants attacking Microsoft SharePoint servers

OneDrive and Teams run on Sh - oh yeah, good point.

OneDrive runs on Sharepoint underneath. Teams runs on Sharepoint underneath.

Let's put it this way - if SharePoint turns out to need enough of a drastic overhaul to cause significant downstream changes, Microsoft is going to have a lot more problems than just a few SharePoint admins getting upset.

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

Google used to have a version of ChromeOS for old notebooks. They didn't make much noise about it (less than the company who originally made it used to before they acquired them), so probably it's shut down by now because nobody used it. :(

Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian

I would strongly consider a modern Symbian based phone. It's probably the only thing would tempt me away from my iPhone, to be honest.

Intel's leaders have stopped pretending – and it's about time

"Despite repeated attempts, Intel has largely failed to find a foothold in the AI accelerator arena"

So the same as they couldn't hack it in mobile modems or GPUs, the roaring success that the Itanium wasn't, or maybe... you know what, I could be here all day at this rate. They just had the x86 market and they took it for granted. How long before they're circling the drain?

Privacy campaigners pour cold water on London cops' 1,000 facial recognition arrests

Did I miss it or was there no mention of how many false positives the system generated? I'd like to know how many people did they arrest who actually weren't the ones they were looking for? I feel like those statistics are quite important, especially given the current "the computer is never wrong" thinking (see the "Horizon" scandal, for one)

UK police dangle £75 million to digitize its VHS tape archives

I wonder if this might already be in the "too late" bucket. Funai stopped making VHS kit in 2016 and they were the last holdout. I'd be amazed if anyone looked at this and thought about how much they'll have to source from eBay and actually sees a decent business model in there somewhere.

Former and current Microsofties react to the latest round of layoffs

Re: MS is the new IBM

Doesn't matter as Microsoft's been trying to kill Excel scripting in favour of a JavaScript based alternative (that will no doubt be almost impossible for anyone under senior developer level to understand) for ages.

Microsoft finally bids farewell to PowerShell 2.0

Re: Why

It existed because some Microsoft employee wrote it out of frustration there wasn't a decent shell available for Windows, and the MBAs took it up and ran with it.

Personally I hate it with the passion of a thousand burning suns and feel it should be nuked from space.

AI's the end of the Shell as we know it and I feel fine … but insecure

Let me guess, we're going to see a lot of "do what I mean" assistants cropping up.

"So... you told the AI to wipe the C drive?"

"But I just asked it to empty the recycle bin on the desktop and Outlook!"

"On every computer on this floor?"

"I said 'see the recycle bin, apply to all'"

Reddit sues Anthropic for scraping content into the maw of its eternally ravenous AI

To be fair though, if they win it's likely to have profound effects on the whole AI ecosystem. Which is nice.

More layoffs at Microsoft as axe falls in Washington

Microsoft paid $26.2 billion for LinkedIn back in 2016

Not sure it was worth that much then, but I can see it's starting to look like as successful as their Skype deal.

What would a Microsoft engineer do to Ubuntu? AnduinOS is the answer

Re: "reshapes GNOME in the image of Windows 11"

Consumers wouldn't, but Microsoft would. It helps to establishes the mindset that their UI paradigm is the "dominant force" in UI design, even though it's monumentally ugly.

Builder.ai coded itself into a corner – now it's bankrupt

So they didn't actually use the thing that was their main selling point, and actually did it the old fashioned way. Shame, it worked so well for Theranos...

UK 'extremely dependent' on US for space security

Re: Good article

I seem to recall he's mentioned three possible policies at various times over the years: abolish the NHS, adopt US style gun laws, and become the 51st state of the USA.

Microsoft revives DOS-era Edit in a modern shell

Shh, don't give them ideas. They'll make it the default text editor if we're not careful!

If Google is forced to give up Chrome, what happens next?

My worry about Microsoft acquiring Chrome is that I have a nasty feeling that it would basically go like this:-

day 1 - all is good

one month - Edge gets updates first

three months - updates stay in Edge, no port to Chrome or the open source version

six months - non-Windows versions of Chrome discontinued, use Edge instead

one year - Chrome discontinued

two years - the name Chrome is reused for a new tool in Microsoft Office. Nobody knows what it does, but it comes with the suite.

IRS hopes to replace fired enforcement workers with AI

This is going to be fun in court when the AI hallucinates a mythical billion dollars in a bank that doesn't exist. I don't expect many judges would be pleased with that.

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

They used to do it under Windows, too. I used to keep turning it off. I open Word maybe once a month, I don't need it loaded into memory all the time.

30 percent of some Microsoft code now written by AI - especially the new stuff

Can it be any more unreliable? Why yes. Yes it can. And I think we're about to find out how much more unreliable it can be.

Google, AWS say it's too hard for customers to use Linux to swerve Azure

“Google said that for companies that have built a dependency on Windows Server and/or SQL Server, it would take years and years to modernise to Linux after migrating as they would essentially need to rewrite all the Microsoft-based applications that they have accumulated over the years which is very challenging for most enterprises."

Modernise to Linux? Windows "accumulated over the years".

Microsoft must be reading that and hurting. Feels to me like they're essentially calling Windows a dinosaur. Next they'll be talking about "vendor lock in", just like people used to do about mainframes.

Developer scored huge own goal by deleting almost every football fan in Europe

Re: Number games

Marklar won, 450-450

Microsoft admits it's not you, Classic Outlook can be a real CPU, power hog sometimes

Re: "Does Redmond have it in it to intentionally hobble an older product"...

To be fair, it's Outlook. It really didn't need much hobbling, it's always been bad. The problem is that new Outlook is even worse, what with being a half baked electron app and all.

Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft. Readers say it's all been downhill since Clippy

Re: Microsoft isn't Windows anymore

The big problem with Nadella's approach is that you start getting complacent, and once that happens it isn't long until someone comes along and eats your lunch.

Not even Intel's top bosses know what's on CEO Lip-Bu Tan's chopping block

Re: Light bulb moment

Not just GE... Grundig, Polaroid and Kodak have all suffered the same fate.

Ah yes, the old "focusing on our core products" line.

Next it'll be "economic headwinds", "aggressive competition", "cashflow issues" and then bankruptcy and/or acquisition, probably by whichever of Google, Oracle, Microsoft or Facebook the government is most favourable to at the time.

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

For that money I can get an actual PC with higher specs. This is meant to appeal to the sort of middle manager who thinks "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft". Whether it actually sells any, who knows? I suspect the level of IT department control possible over it might be the sticking point.

Alan Turing Institute: UK can't handle a fight against AI-enabled crims

I have to say, that's the first time I've seen "ignore" spelled as "closely examine" in my life.

Nvidia’s AI suite may get a whole lot pricier, thanks to Jensen’s GPU math mistake

However, Nvidia's shift to counting GPU dies, rather than SXM modules, as individual GPUs doesn't just simplify NVLink model numbers and naming conventions. It could also double the number of AI Enterprise licenses Nvidia can charge for.

I can hear the lawyers sharpening their teeth from here...