Posts by Zippy´s Sausage Factory 1766 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2018
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.
“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.
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.
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...
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.
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)
"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"...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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.
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.
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).
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.
"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.
"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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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