Posts by Howard Sway

The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers

The one interview question that will protect you

There is another one. How many Zetaflargs are required to polfroozle a qualpyklang? Apparently they just don't know this, even though it's common knowledge for the rest of us.

America's National Science Foundation tells DEI, misinfo studies: You're fired

National Science Foundation canceling grants for studies into the spread of misinformation

All science is in essence a study of misinformation. After all, if it ain't true, it ain't science.

For a National Science Foundation to happily stop trying to prevent the dissemination of falsehoods is a betrayal of scientific principles.

What to do once your Surface Hub v1 becomes an 84-inch, $22K paperweight

What to do once your Surface Hub becomes an 84-inch, $22K paperweight?

Have yourself photographed next to it, with it stood on its short side, displaying an image of an iPhone home screen, then post it on the web with one of the following captions

a) Sneak Preview of the forthcoming iPhone 17 Max Pro Mega

b) First look at forthcoming summer blockbuster "Honey I Shrunk The Fanbois!"

Bank of England flirts with offline digital dosh

enables the downloading and uploading of funds to and from the ledger when the device is back online

And what happens if the device doesn't come back online? For example, you turn the network off on your phone, use it offline to buy a new phone in a shop with digi-quids, then just turn it off and chuck it away. By this method you just got a brand new free phone.

This dumb Sunak-era idea should be scrapped to save wasting any more real pounds on it.

Tesla fudged odometer to screw me out of warranty, Model Y owner claims

Meanwhile, Tesla's vaunted stock price is sliding, down nearly 37 percent

Maybe the odometer is index linked to the share price : the more it falls, the faster the mileage increases. In any case, if the cars can't accurately measure the distance travelled to within less than a metre, then the idea that they can safely drive themselves is just laughable.

Microsoft: Why not let our Copilot fly your computer?

Computer use adapts to changes in apps and websites automatically

Let's say I run a shopping website. One day I decide to add an extra checkbox on it, automatically checked. Text label "pay £2000 extra". Now, do you want to gamble that when Copilot is automatically ordering something from it, it will understand that this is going to quite legally take lots of extra money from you unless it decides to uncheck the box before completing the purchase?

Trump derails Chinese H20 GPU sales, forcing Nvidia to eat $5.5B this quarter

wasn't the outcome Huang was looking for when he attended a $1 million-a-head dinner

The tech companies invented cloud subscription as a way of extracting regular monthly payments for software rather than one-off purchases. Unfortunately for them, that system now also appears to have been introduced for "political donations".

Team Trump readies national security card to justify taxing Americans for foreign chips

Trump chips are coming, made in USA

They'll have slower clock speeds than current chips though.

About 566 MagaHurtz.

Windows Recovery Environment update fails successfully, says Microsoft

You might see the following error message – ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE

Presumably if you see INSTALL_SUCCESSFULLY_COMPLETED then it's time to start worrying.

Resellers may be sitting on costly pile of regret after US smartphone shopping spree

“THE BEST DEFINITION OF INTELLIGENCE IS THE ABILITY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE!!!”

Donald Trump, Truth Social, Monday 14th April 2025

Tech tariff turmoil continues as Trump admin exempts some electronics, then promises to bring taxes back

Tech CEOs backed Trump

They were obviously in favour of his tax cut policy, as it would make themselves better off. However by backing him, they were also supporting his tariff policy which is proving highly detrimental to the companies they run. So, seeing as the decision they made has badly harmed those companies, they should all be fired for that, as well as prioritising their own personal interest over that of their shareholders.

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything

'vibe coding' is happening constantly. Developers prompt the AI, copy the suggestion, and move on

Luckily for those of us who know how to code properly, the problems this causes is going to keep us competitive. What's next? 'vibe surgery' where surgeons prompt an AI, saw your leg off, and move on?

Mapping legend Ordnance Survey releases blocky Britain in Minecraft – again

They've made a Minecraft Birmingham?

Why? So the residents can have fun demolishing it?

Ex-Meta exec tells Senate Zuck dangled US citizen data in bid to enter China

her testimony is divorced from reality and riddled with false claims

Ah, the new Americanese for "true".

They'll be changing the programming languages next : the keyword "true" will be replaced with "fakenews", and "false" will become "alternativefact".

M365 Family users wake up to notice 'Your subscription expired'

I recommend reverting to pen and paper and work from the pub

I recommend not paying $104 per year just to be able to use a word processor when there are perfectly good word processors available for free that can be downloaded and installed in a few minutes. Hell, you could even do this as a backup in case the one you insist on paying for isn't available for a few hours due to the latest Microsoft fuck up.

Trump thinks we can make iPhones in the US just like China. Yeah, right

the army of millions of human beings screwing in little screws is going to come to America

Not sure this is the future many Trump voters envisioned for themselves.

Android phones are also going to be much cheaper than iPhones now, so despite all the sucking up Tim Cook did to Trump, it won't be his phones getting screwed in America, just his company.

UK's answer to DARPA sprouts new ideas, like programmable plants

Programmable plants and bio-security

These plants have been developed by our STEM experts, but they're only secure as long as you don't give away the root password.

AI entrepreneur sent avatar to argue in court – and the judge shut it down fast

I tried one. It failed after about six hours. I tried another one. It failed

If he was trying to promote his AI startup that claims to help with legal representation, going to court and making a total ass of himself by using somebody else's cheapo AI that he admitted didn't even work, then getting told off for it by the judge is perhaps not the marketing triumph he was intending it to be.

Procter & Gamble study finds AI could help make Pringles tastier, spice up Old Spice, sharpen Gillette

The results were mostly positive. Funnily enough.

It would have been pretty amazing if a team of 10 AI researchers concluded that AI was a load of useless bollocks, considering the fact that such a conclusion would have put them all out of a job. This is just like those researchers in the 1950s who produced "research" proving the amazing health benefits of cigarettes, funded by tobacco companies.

It's just another corporate fad, sold to executives desperately looking for a bandwagon to jump on that promises to make them money. Remember when "synergy" was all the rage, and lots of people became "synergists" so they could hoover up the money being thrown at that miracle growth generator? Don't hear so much of them these days............

EU may target US tech giants in tariff response

"As a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good"

In other words, I wouldn't give a shit if it was just other people getting hurt, but this is affecting ME!

There was a time for all these rich guys who are now moaning to publicly criticise the tariffs, and it was before the election when he was proposing them, not after the election when he's implementing them.

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: he had been passed to us because he wasn't very good

No, they were actually made obsolete by successful e-commerce companies who took their business. Some dotcom boom firms were successful, at least for a time.

he had been passed to us because he wasn't very good

I worked for a short while in a very old fashioned corporate bureaucracy type place where this sort of attitude was common - there was a mix of young developers with up to date skills and lazy middle aged timeservers who'd been there 20 years or more and had learnt how to get away with doing nothing but fill up their days by turning every miniscule problem into a "major crisis" necessitating endless meetings. On top was a layer of even older timeserving management who everyone knew did even less work, which meant they were never going to tackle the culture as they'd be the first out of the door if they did.

The solution in this case was me deciding to leave, as the company was an obvious basket case, coasting on an ancient business model which brought in a regular income that let everybody there grow lazy and comfortable. The dotcom boom arrived shortly after, putting them rapidly out of business (and me very much in demand).

No joke: Microsoft foolishly published inaccurate price list on April 1st

annual commitment monthly billing plans for Microsoft 365

Whichever day of the year you place an order for this, it makes you an enormous fool.

Meta debuts its first 'mixture of experts' models from the Llama 4 herd

Zuck's sucking up

He's obviously angling for Musk's job. party as oneupbroship, partly because he doesn't have the space rockets to get the government cash, and a right wing AI will be great way to get his mitts on those taxpayer bucks.

System builders say server prices set to spike as Trump plays customs cowboy

The cost of buying servers for business will inevitably rise

Only in the US. Any glut in inventory caused by lower sales there due to tariffs will mean lower prices in other countries.

On the issue of AI copyright, Blair Institute favors tech bros over Cool Britannia

rubbing shoulders with Oasis songwriter Noel Gallagher

Noel Gallagher was the AI of his day, making up "new" songs that were just exact regurgitations of other people's songs. He got successfully sued for it though, several times.

As for Blair, he is desperate to get into the tech bro circles, being about the only man left yet to realise that their reputation is now lower than dog shit.

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

Microsoft OS costs compared

Commodore bought Microsoft Basic as the "operating system" for its home computers in 1977 for an unlimited-use one-time fee of $25,000. Assuming that 12.5 million computers shipped with this (probably a low estimate), the cost per machine was $0.002.

Windows Server 2025 Datacenter Edition, 64-bit 24 Core License is $7,899.99 per machine, 395 million times as much.

Isar’s first orbital rocket crashes into sea – CEO calls it a 'great success'

Spectrum rocket destroyed

Mysteron involvement suspected, send for Captain Scarlet!

Musk's xAI swallows Musk's X in ego-friendly, all-stock deal

Smells like panic

He's damaged Tesla and Twitter so much with his "antics" that it feels like this is a panic move designed to try and shield him from that before he's forced out of the car company (Tesla is publicly listed) and try to keep his wealth inflated.

“I mean, have you seen Tim Walz, who is a huge jerk, running on stage with the Tesla stock price that had gone in half and he was overjoyed. What an evil thing to do. What a creep, what a jerk. Like who derives joy from that?” -- Elon Musk, last week, making the joy even more enjoyable.

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

Usability is a bug, not a feature, in this world

Yes, that's because usability teams got overridden by marketing teams, because the belief is that shiny new appearance sells more than easy-to-use, therefore if there's a tension between the two, always go with the shiny. This is the root cause of all UI enshittification : it started on the web and has since seeped into operating systems and every area of life. I'm not sure if there's actually a "force dark patterns on your users to extract every last fraction of a cent possible from them" textbook out there yet, but even if there isn't, it seems like studying human-computer-interaction as a means to improve users' lives is something that'd disqualify you for a job in interface design these days.

Cashless society could be why fewer kids are eating coins and sticking things up their noses

Cadbury's Chocolate Buttons

Probably not helping if your tiny kids are given bags of small round chocolate things with the same name as the batteries that they find delicious to eat.

It's as if Cadbury's Chocolate Razor Blades had been marketed in the 1970s.

UK govt data people not 'technical,' says ex-Downing St data science head

a training program to help civil service technologists become "AI engineers"

That makes it clear that they're still employing people who don't really understand technology. Because people who do understand it know that AI is a hype that is not going to deliver what is being claimed for it.

Today's jobs Microsoft thinks could use an AI assist: Researchers and analysts

corporate VP for M365 Core Experiences

Can the AI research analyst work out what any of that bullshit job title actually means? Even spending $50 billion on LLM training is going to be insufficient to extract any useful meaning from such "information". Perhaps MS management are hoping that although they're selling the idea that everyone else's jobs can be replaced with these tools, they can keep themselves safe by ensuring it'll be some way down the line before they release Copilot Corporate VP for M365 Core Experiences.

God didn't have a plan for Gelsinger at Intel. Maybe there is one for his new gig, Gloo

his favorite Bible verse and guiding principle is Colossians 3:23

I'm guessing his least favourite Bible verse and very much not his guiding principle is Matthew 19:24 :

"it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God"

Perhaps he can set his AI to work on :

1. Camel minituarisation research

2. Designing a massive needle for his back garden that his pet camel can walk through

You know that generative AI browser assistant extension is probably beaming everything to the cloud, right?

he hopes that Google recognizes the privacy risks of generative AI browser assistants

The only privacy risk that Google would ever be worried about is whether someone else is going to disregard privacy as badly as they do and possibly use all that slurped data to compete with what they do with it.

Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time

AI will fill the gap

Microsoft are currently the main marketers of this idea, and it would be rather an admission of weakness for them to not accept AI generated bug reports as we're told it can do everything. If it can, it should be perfectly good to do this mundane task. So let's see them add AI bug reporting into Windows, to demonstrate appetite for their own dog food.

I propose an addition to Copilot, so if a user experiences a problem they simply have to say "Computer not work! Make computer work!". As Copilot snoops on everything you do, it can then put together a detailed bug report and send it straight to the bug fixing team. Hell, the thing is supposed to be a coding whizz too, so they could ditch the bug fixing team and get the AI to fix the bug too! Why haven't they thought about this and done it themselves yet? It would be lovely to get them to admit that AI is not up tp the job.......

Trump orders all government IT contracts consolidated under GSA

The Ministry of Mouse Mats

No doubt this will soon be followed by the building of a national mouse mat distribution centre somewhere in rural Mississippi, to process the thousands of GSA-MM-2347 mouse mat request forms that arrive weekly from offices all over the country.....

Ensuring that nothing happened nationwide without approval from a big centralised bureaucracy worked out so well for the Soviet Union.

Feds charge three over Molotov attacks on Tesla sites in multiple states

"The days of committing crimes without consequence have ended"

Hmm, I wonder why the Supreme Court recently had to invent the concept of "presidential immunity" then?

Or why lots of rioters got pardoned a few weeks ago?

To be clear, I think all violence is bad, but such extreme double standards don't give any right to take the moral high ground. Just don't be stupid enough to believe that because some awful people have got away with awful stuff that you will be able to too.

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Schrödinger's firmware situation

Nah, this is actually an example of an Einsteinian relativistic task completion distortion field. This theory states that time moves at different rates for those carrying out a task and those observing the task. The closer to the end of the task, the slower time passes for the observer. This explains not only why progress bars appear to drastically slow down above 90% and get stuck at 99% for an hour, but why the arrival time display at a bus stop showing "1 min" means that the bus will arrive in 5 minutes for the people waiting there, and programmers promising finished code "by Friday" appear to be still working on it 3 weeks later.

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

All the idiots vandalising Tesla dearlerships are wasting their time

The vehicles themselves now come fitted with Level 5 Full Self Disassembly as standard.

'Once in a lifetime' IT outage at city council hit datacenter, but no files lost

a risk assessment has been carried out and it was deemed safe to hold the meeting

You had to conduct a risk assessment to determine whether it was safe to have a meeting in a room where the lights weren't working, but had a big window that let light in? I think some of that risk assessment budget could be better spent on your IT systems if you ask me....

Ubuntu 25.10 plans to swap GNU coreutils for Rust

So far, the Rust coreutils pass approximately 500 out of 600 GNU tests

A 17% failure rate strikes me as being much too high for something being proposed as a replacement for a key part of the operating system. Especially as Rust is promoted as something that reduces errors, by design. I'm going to give credit for providing the option to enable / disable it, rather than forcing it on people, but I just can't see the point of ditching robust battle hardened software for the sake of wanting to use today's trend-of-the-week.

Curious tale of two HR tech unicorns, alleged espionage, and claims of a spy hiding in a bathroom

locked himself in a bathroom

Was there a bath in this so-called bathroom? Then maybe he can beat the charges on a technicality by denying hiding in one, even if he does have to admit hiding in a toilet instead.

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

We are unable to make any progress without that

If Microsoft's security response team are so dumb that they can't read simple text, understand it and then act on it, how can you trust them to be smart enough to do their job?

Still, yet more shit that the "I couldn't possibly exist without them" crowd choose to put up with rather than bother to make any effort to test that hypothesis.

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

HR's AI hiring tool

I've developed my own AI hiring tool, which consists of small squares of paper, divided into 4 sections by drawing diagonals across them. You write the names of the first 4 candidates to apply in the sections, then put a cocktail stick through the middle and spin it on the desk, hiring the candidate whose name is in the section touching the desk when it falls over.

People have remarked that this tool makes no proper evaluation of the skills and experience of the candidates, isn't actually intelligent and the chosen name is in fact is completely random, but I point out that this is exactly the same feature set of all the much more expensive software versions of it currently on the market.

OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining

wants the US government to stop foreign countries from trying to enforce copyright rules against it

They obviously believe that they've got a useful idiot in the White House now, and can realise their greediest dreams of plunder by appealing to his disdain for the rest of the world. It could however result in the complete breakdown of the entire international copyright system, which other US companies might want to consider before their intellectual property gets nicked in retaliation.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built

Well no - if you keep buying products from companies whose entire business model is based on designing obsolescence into them to ensure regular influxes of customer money then you are walking voluntarily into that cage. Both have made such immense amounts of money from selling products with a much shorter usable lifespan than other physical things, that they should be made to either keep supporting them for many years, or open source them when they go out of support so others can do so.

How NOT to f-up your security incident response

Both the CISO and CIO were fired over the security incident

The classic executive response to an incident : find a scapegoat and CYA. Now, they may well have been incompetent and deserved their fate, but the main reason for there being no comprehensive recovery plan is neatly always an unwillingness to pay for something seen as very expensive with not enough benefit for the cost.

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

so why are admins slow to upgrade?

Because new versions of Microsoft software always prioritise adding new features over fixing old problems. And those new features always bring even more new problems. So everybody has got into the habit of waiting years to upgrade in the hope that a lot of the bugs will be fixed by then. This used to happen by monitoring user forums and waiting until the number of complaints died down and it started to be seen as reliable. However, it's now so well known not to upgrade straight away to major new versions that there aren't so many first movers to watch experiencing the pain. This is entirely the consequence of prioritising rushing new product to market over quality engineering, and if they're finding that the reputation they've built up for that is now affecting their bottom line, they only have themselves to blame.

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

named the code IsDLEnabledinAD

Perhaps he was hoping for leniency by strictly adhering to internal code naming standards when he wrote his malware. Did he fully document his function too?