* Posts by Zippy´s Sausage Factory

1766 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2018

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

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Unhappy

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

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Facepalm

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

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

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

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

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

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Devil

“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

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Re: Number games

Marklar won, 450-450

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

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

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

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

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

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Re: Light bulb moment

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

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Meh

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

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

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

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Meh

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

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Unhappy

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...

LLM providers on the cusp of an 'extinction' phase as capex realities bite

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Re: Conclusion probably right, comparison probably wrong

Yeah, I suspect LLMs will probably continue as niche products and/or in particular use cases where they make sense I'm thinking back to how blockchain was going to change everything and then... didn't.

The one thing I don't see being justified in the long run is the massive investment in data centres and power stations. I can't imagine that more energy efficient and capable algorithms aren't being developed that are more specific rather than general purpose, and I suspect those will displace LLMs from general use very quickly once they come along.

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Meh

Re: Conclusion probably right, comparison probably wrong

The question, I think, isn't whether the LLM market can sustain three players, but whether it can sustain any players at all. When Microsoft are thinking of buying a nuclear reactor to power their AI needs, you have to question whether the ROI is going to be there. And I suspect the chances that anyone investing in AI will make a profit out of it are getting slimmer by the day.

(Except Micros~1, who'll upgrade everyone to the "CoPilot" version, then when the AI bubble bursts they'll stealthily shut down CoPilot but not reduce the price of Office again)

UK threatens £100K-a-day fines under new cyber bill

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Devil

"If, for example, a managed service provider (MSP) – a crucial part of the IT supply chain – failed to patch against a widely exploited vulnerability within a time frame specified by a government order, and was then hit by attacks, it could face daily fines of £100,000 or 10 percent of turnover for each day the breach continues."

Why was I hearing in my head the words "Microsoft products and services are no longer available in your region"...

Microsoft is redesigning the Windows BSoD to get you back to work ‘as fast as possible’

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Facepalm

This feels like the Seymour Skinner meme:

"How can I make errors better? Maybe I should work on overall system reliability?"

"No, it's the error screen that needs work!"

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Devil

Given that the Microsoft account forces you to use OneDrive, I do wonder why Dropbox aren't making a monopoly complaint. Would have to be in the EU at the moment to have any chance of success at the moment I'd think. Although if they did, I wonder if Windows Defender might suddenly designate Dropbox as malware. Purely by accident, of course, I mean - after all, typos do happen, don't they?

When even Microsoft can’t understand its own Outlook, big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Devil

All infuriate, all are lazy insults to users, and all should have no more place in 2025 than cassette tape data storage.

I disagree. Cassette tape data storage is alive and well and living in the retro computer scene, as it should be.

DoNotReply email messages, however, should be classed as crimes against humanity.

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Re: PS/2?

I keep checking eBay for vintage keyboards. My best find so far is a PS/2 keyboard that's built like a battleship and great to type on, but it's not an IBM, sadly.

Microsoft patches patch that broke USB printing in Windows 11

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Windows

Re: Speedy!

So it took almost two months to fix a bug that disabled a critical business workload function.

Imagine how long it would have taken them to fix it if it wasn't business critical. I mean, there's pagination bugs still in Word that have been there since Word 2.0c for Windows 3.1. Well, I say Word 2.0c, that's just the earliest place I remember finding them.

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Devil

Re: Even if it is "ok" ...

CoPilot will reply with whatever the Micros~1 marketing department tells it to, I expect.

Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Unhappy

You may be more demotivated by the pointlessness of the demand, in which case Microsoft can expect fewer bug reports, an odd way to make software better. You may find more profitable ways to exploit your vuln-sniffing skills. If there are problems with poor quality bug reports, then teach people to do them better, improving productivity, instead of imposing a blanket tax.

This assumes that the actual motivation behind the change was to get better bug reports. Whereas the more cynical amongst us might say that it was intended to get fewer bug reports. I know which of those two categories I find more plausible.

Microsoft ducks politico questions on Copilot bundling and lack of consent

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Re: Wipe Out

That's weird because I have been using Libre Office constantly since the 90s and the only time I've really had anything strange happening was because of a spreadsheet that was too big for the memory in my PC to handle properly.

GitHub supply chain attack spills secrets from 23,000 projects

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Re: Really ??

Wait, Microsoft and HP are vetting staff?

As Chromecast outage drags on, fix could be days to weeks away

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Unhappy

A cynical person might say that it feels like the delays will continue until the backlog of product gets sold.

Of course, that would be absolutely cynical and I couldn't condone such thinking.

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Unhappy

Re: Just who do you think you're talking to?

It seems to me that not only can they not fix things, they're actually actively trying to prevent the issues from reaching the developers* in the first place.

* all both of them, probably

City council rejects inquiry into £130M Oracle IT disaster

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Re: Heads should roll

If it was a private company, they'd sue the consultants for botching it, Oracle for producing the system in the first place, and the auditors for not warning them.

And they'd go broke due to the lawyers' fees.

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

I do love Which. There are counterfeits on the market though, which is annoying. The amount I print a subscription would basically be a total waste of money, to be honest.

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Rossmann also noted that Brother's support recommended switching to OEM toner to deal with quality issues, although that sounds an awful lot like a scripted step in a tech support fault tree: "Is the customer complaining about print quality using official products?"

To be fair, if they're not made by Brother how do they know the composition of the ink? They could be knock offs refilled by some Del Boy off the market who grabbed a couple of bottles of Quink from W H Smith and thinks he's now an IT mogul...

Microsoft quantum breakthrough claims labeled 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Joke

Re: In other news...

I dunno... Adobe owns it now I think? Haven't touched it since the Allaire days... runs away

Microsoft unveils finalized EU Data Boundary as European doubt over US grows

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Unhappy

Microsoft has completed its EU data boundary, however, analysts and some regional cloud players are voicing concerns over dependencies on a US entity, even with the guarantees in place.

They're still an American company, still subject to the CLOUD act, so where it's stored is almost certainly irrelevant.

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
FAIL

The second you install a backdoor, you should really assume that the crims have unfiltered access to everything. Why the British government don't understand that this makes everyone less safe I will never understand.

Payday from hell as several British banks report major outages

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Unhappy

"If you've sent money already or are waiting for money to arrive you don't need to do anything, it's in a queue and will arrive ASAP," its website reads.

"You can still send money, but this won't go through straight away. Direct Debits and standing orders are working normally."

So if direct debits will still go out but money won't come it, when you go overdrawn are they going to waive the £35 (or whatever it costs these days) charge for each failed payment? Because I doubt it.

Dark mode might be burning more juice than you think

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Exactly. One of the problems I have is people deciding "your screen should look this way".

We shouldn't even be having HTML email. I'd rather have everything on my entire screen rendered in Comic Sans MS than that horror that is Aptos. And yet other people might like it.

We're not all the same and companies shouldn't be dictating to users what their screens should look like. Windows 3.1 you could change everything and then the Microsoft idiots decided to ignore the title bar and do... whatever that abomination is they do in Office these days. I'd rather have a proper title bar back than that. Same is true of Chrome and other browsers that think their tab bar is so sacred. Yes, some people might like it, but I'd much rather have consistency back than the angry fruit salad we seem to have nowadays.

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

I don't like Dark Mode, to be honest, and it's always the first thing that I turn off. That said, my monitors are set to brightness about 25%, which is more than enough for "light mode" for me.

Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Re: You heard it here first

Windows 12 minimum requirements will probably be a 24-core Xeon, 128GB of RAM, 4K webcam (required for Windows Hello).

Of course they'll also mandate the smallest possible SSD so that it fills up the first time you try and get to Windows Update and 99% of domestic users start having problems they don't know how to fix, thus killing the netbook market (again).

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Intel are getting desperate for that desktop refresh revenue, clearly.

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Devil

The new motto:

"Windows ain't done 'til Windows don't run"

(for those who remember the bad old days...)

FYI: An appeals court may kill a GNU GPL software license

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Facepalm

As far as I understand it what Neo4J did is basically the equivalent of me writing a plugin for Excel and then trying to resell Excel with the plugin as a different product. I doubt Micros~1 would allow me to get away with that, and I'm amazed the judge ruled in Neo4J's favour in the first place.

Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Unhappy

"Europeans therefore have good reason to wonder how much they can trust data privacy assurances from US cloud providers amid their shows of obsequious deference to the new regime."

You can trust data privacy assurances from cloud and hosting providers exactly the same amount as you've always been able to trust them, i.e. not at all.

Ad-supported Microsoft Office bobs to the surface

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Re: The Old is New again

Or maybe Aureate/Radiate are back from the grave?

Microsoft shows off novel quantum chip that can scale to 'a million qubits'. So far: Eight

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

"We've finally done it - a scalable quantum computer"

"Great, what will it be used for?"

"Mainly for spies to break strong encryption"

"So we might as well not bother with encryption any more then?"

"Well, to be honest... yes. Were it not for the fact that it takes more energy to break a single message than is used by the whole of Germany."

"Why does it take that much energy?"

"Um, well... we need eight million processors to break a single message."

"Right... didn't we buy Three Mile Island?"

This won't end well, will it?

Microsoft declutters Windows 11 File Explorer in the name of Euro privacy

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Facepalm

it warned that an imminent update to Recall will delete a user's existing snapshots - all of them. The company said: "This important update will improve your experience."

So, deleting the only thing that the feature actually does will improve the experience of using the feature? Sounds totally on brand for Micros~1, somehow

Why do younger coders struggle to break through the FOSS graybeard barrier?

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

One of the barriers is employers. I've had contracts in the past that have said that all intellectual property I created, even on my own time, belonged to the company. I do wonder how often that happens and how they enforce it.

To be fair though, I pushed back on it with that employed, citing open source, and they did actually relent and changed it to any IP directly related to my job (which I was OK with; besides which they were in an industry with such high barriers and so few players that taking IP to a competitor would probably get you instantly blacklisted). But the idea that if I wrote a novel or painted a picture, the copyright belonged to them? Nope.

Chinese AI marches on as Baidu makes its chatbot free, Alibaba scores Apple deal

Zippy´s Sausage Factory

It's the race to the bottom now. It's a race of "who can spend the most on AI" now, because fairly soon nobody's going to pay for it.

Microsoft open sources PostgreSQL extensions to muscle in on NoSQL

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Unhappy

My theory is they're starting to realise that it's a bit of a forlorn hope that they can charge a fortune for databases in this day and age. I expect SQL will stop getting feature updates in a year or so; there will be a SQL Server 2027 (or thereabouts) which is just a cash grab for use by banks and other similar types, and then they'll just casually announce an EOL a couple of years afterwards when it's clear the market share is going the way of Internet Explorer. Which is depressing as I use SQL Server every day.

UK government insiders say AI datacenters may be a pricey white elephant

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Meh

Re: AI…. To do what???

Their idea of what they're going to do with it is rent capacity to people. Which works well until there's more capacity available for rent than people wanting to rent it, which is when the race to the bottom* starts.

* - and no, I don't mean employing Richie and Eddie as IT admins.

DeepSeek stirs intrigue and doubt across the tech world

Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Unhappy

I imagine that OpenAI's investors feel a bit like someone who's just spent ten quid a tin on tuna at Harrods only to see the exact same brand for sale in Iceland at a quid each.