Posts by Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Re: Windows style WM ?

KDE, as well as several of the other WMs mentioned, give the user the very flexibility needed to refute Liam's argument about same-old-same-old UIs, and then he proceeds to bemoan how many pre-built start menus it is prepared to offer. Is this is not exactly what he was longing for at the beginning of the article? What, exactly, is your point, Liam? Sure, a distro might come off the installation medium configured for familiarity (we don't want to scare off those new arrivals from Redmond now, do we?), but the capacity to reshape it to your liking is precisely what Windows lacks, that several different Linux WM providers offer.

On the subject of litigation-shy efforts like GNOME, it seems to me that every UI decision that might have been made has been compared to Micros~1 and then followed some obsessive compulsion to do it differently. The result is to me a confusing unfamiliar monstrosity. MS themselves were the subject of the famous Look and Feel lawsuit from Apple in which they argued common sense and won out over an attempt to monopolise UI interfaces.

52-year-old data tape could contain only known copy of UNIX V4

Hopefully the Apollo 11 telemetry tapes are on the next shelf down.

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

And once again there's this fallacy that the user is the consumer. Micros~1 gets whatever they have been able to strong-arm the PC manufacturer and their employer into shelling out for the OS licence. That's peanuts compared to what they're being paid for the analytics. Users are the product.

Telemetry is what spacecraft send back to Mission Control. Micros~1 don't control the mission of their user base. If Neil, Buzz and Michael choose to set forth for Alpha Centauri, there ought not be a damn thing MS could do about it - but how sure could anyone be that there is not?

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

... until you type the number while holding down the shift key.

Microsoft apologizes for not explaining cheaper no-AI M365 plans, and all it took was a government lawsuit

Following the law is so difficult when there's $ to be made.

Re: Microsoft apologises for getting caught attempting to rip off its customers

The ACCC is a public organisation but it brings legal action directly in the Federal Court, a bit like a public prosecutor, but without the need for a police investigation - it has its own investigatory powers. There's nothing quasi- about the legal trouble Micros~1 are in here. That this is happening means there's the appearance of a prima facie breach of consumer law. So the next questions they will have to answer won't be PR officials from a journo; it will be board level management in front of the beak.

For all those left unimpressed

the Cancel Subscription option is still there.

NHS left with sick PCs as suppliers resist Windows 11 treatment

Re: The flaw in the NHS

Whole body MRI increases the time taken to acquire images between 2- and 5-fold. It also increases the time taken to report the acquired images by at least the same amount.

Then you get into the whole complex of consequences of any medical fishing expedition. That test you ordered that came back positive - what is its specificity? That test that came back negative - what is its sensitivity? False positives and false negatives are an unavoidably real thing. Acting on them exposes patients to new risks. The incidental finding of a benign but atypical-looking lesion, for liability purposes alone, means your doctor has to recommend a biopsy. Then you get an infection or a perforated viscus, because even perfectly competently done procedures have their complication rates. Rabbit holes get really deep really quickly in medicine.

You can have as good a health service as you are prepared to pay for.

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

The Puritans were way too fundamentalist to be anything so mainstream as CofE; they were already too fed up with how soft the establishment church had become that they left before the Civil War started - i.e. they would have cut Charles I's head off while it was still James I's. And James was completely Protestant, not Catholic-curious like his successor.

Massachusetts was settled by religiose complete nutters. Seventy years later they were squishing people with boulders on the suspicion of witchcraft.

Matthew 19:12

Unix for the kingdom of heaven's sake...?

There's mushroom for improvement in fungal computing

And anything about Beef Wellingtons.

That' spore attempt at humour.

Microsoft just revealed that OpenAI lost more than $11.5B last quarter

Re: Asymptotes

+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++

Re: In other words...

So a double-decker bus is the length of 1.3 double-decker busses?

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

Re: Dune

That sounds like the ending to Downton Abbey that no-one saw coming.

Australian police building AI to translate emoji used by ‘crimefluencers’

The law is on the books. The why is in Hansard.

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

Re: A case of oops rather than UPS

Not currently.

Amazon spills plan to nuke Washington...with X-Energy mini-reactors

Someone has invested in making it

Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, North Korea...

Labor unions sue Trump administration over social media surveillance

Re: Does freedom of speech work both ways?

Those statements may be true, but by using them to advocate not using vaccines achieves two things; demonstrating a fundamental ignorance of how vaccines save lives, especially during pandemics, and scaring people away from the thing most likely to save their lives during a pandemic. Both these things are the opposite of good public health and, during a pandemic where millions of lives are at stake, such speech should be suppressed for the same reason shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre is illegal. Epidemiology is complex and unless you're prepared to speak to logos rather than pathos, your opinions are harmful.

The COVID pandemic killed 0.5% of Americans in the first year. Countries that implemented lockdown and mandatory immunisation had mortality rates less than 0.15%. Leaders of governments that did not act in the interests of the safety of their citizens during that time have the blood of their citizens on their hands.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is so popular that almost no one will pay for it

Re: One day...

Just wait and watch. They're only getting started.

This is still stage 1 enshittification. Being good to users so they sign up in droves. The article signals the explicit transition to stage 2.

Stage 2, abuse the users for the benefit of the business customers, is and will increasingly be excruciating. Think product placement built into the models; "authoritative" responses to queries sounding plausible but actually being skewed toward their profit-centres; or the accumulation of just enough experience at customer-facing tasks that, by some half-arsed metric you can convince a manager that AI is better than a human brain, so you can fire the customer service department. Huge decline in customer satisfaction, GDP, and the managers get nice fat bonuses.

Stage 3 posits that there are enough AI-things to do that for a, say, trillion-dollar industry (to pick a number out of the air), it can do a billion different things that are worth $1000 to someone, or an accumulation of things worth $120 to literally everyone on the planet.

My $ are on the Ponzi scheme collapsing before stage 3, and we'll be lucky if it's only stage 2.

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: "Not nearly as dangerous as the stairwell or our office window"

You just need to keep a the boss's car parked just beneath that window, then the fatality rate will be lower much higher.

FTFY.

Re: "Belts are tightening everywhere but the boardroom."

But, as with so much that occurs in boardrooms, that tightening is passive, not active.

Space Shuttle war of words takes off as senator blasts 'woke Smithsonian'

The opposite of woke is context dependent.

Depending on the target against which the word woke was last used, it can be one or more of: white, male, heterosexual, gentile, pseudoscientific, or insane.

Starlink is burning up one or two satellites a day in Earth’s atmosphere

Re: We used to watch out for an "Iridium flare"

<a href="https://xkcd.com/1337/”>Obligatory XKCD</a>

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Re: Microsoft have won.

Your second use of the word service is the pastoralists' one, of course.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Re: Unusual error message

Was he from New Zealand, in pointer fucked?

Firewall upgrade linked to three deaths after Australian telco cut off emergency calls

Re: Optus

Recent reports indicate the death toll is at least six. They haven't completed their welfare checks on all of the missed calls yet, so that number might continue to rise.

AI gone rogue: Models may try to stop people from shutting them down, Google warns

Daisy, Daisy...

I'm sorry, Sundar. I can't do that.

Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery

Re: They forgot to add the right fungi

My high school physics assessment was an experiment I designed to establish the relation between pressure and propellant volume on the one hand, and distance those things travelled on the other.

If I remember rightly, there's a sweet spot just this side of half full, and you're never going to burst the thing with a foot pump so pressurise it to within an inch of its life.

Windows 11 update leaves Blu-ray and TV apps stuttering

Re: When are MS going to be prosecuted

If you kill someone maliciously it's murder, recklessly it's manslaughter. Either way they're still criminal behaviours.

French jet left circling while Corsican controller caught Zs

One solution?

I've never flown a plane in my life but I've done enough travelling to small remote airports to know one implemented solution.

Small airports and landing strips are each allocated their own traffic frequency which, in the absence of a controller, no-one but the pilots and an automatic circuit monitor. If you want to land at Woop Woop you tune to the frequency and any pilots working the airfield essentially do their own ATC.

If it's night and the lights are off, transmitting three dots of carrier signal (Morse 'S') causes the circuit to activate the landing lights for fifteen or so minutes.

Small nuke reactors are really coming online by next year, US energy secretary insists

Re: Is a generation enough time?

Thumbs down is pure cognitive dissonance. I don't pay for electricity because of cheap renewables.

In the last month I have been paid $8.14 for the excess energy I gathered but didn't use myself at an average of $0.196/kWh. And that's in winter.

Re: WTF

What made me think the most was

”...our fear is with the old way it worked, five years from now we will still be talking about 'soon, we're going to have SMRs,'" Wright said. "Some of them can be built quickly."

Chernobyl was built so quickly its management won medals and prizes. The NRC spends so much time checking up on pestilent things like safety.

Re: Is a generation enough time?

It explains why I don't pay for electricity any more.

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

Re: Stolen drinks ...

Next time try fluorescein. Bright orange urine that glows green under UV.

Re: Important? Information

Not the dark chocolate ones, I bet.

And there's a whole hemisphere full of people living in ignorance of the Monte Carlo.

Re: And I thought the debate on the AU GST on the hot/cold chook was insane....

Tim Tam Dark FTW.

If you know, you know.

Microsoft veteran's worst Windows bug was Pinball running at 5,000 FPS

So it's confirmed

He remembered Windows legend Dave Cutler firing off a comment when some horrible code was checked in, suggesting that the author might have had a few adult beverages.

The Ballmer Peak is a real thing, then.

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

My God, You're the Inebriati!

Everything mankind does is much, much easier if you're ever so slightly drunk.

As Xi and Putin chase immortality, let's talk about digital presidents-for-life

Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernyenko... Already in living memory you'll see a succession of dictators-in-waiting kept alive by technology the poor schmucks who kept them inflated couldn't hope to access.

US cuffs 475 at Hyundai–LG battery plant – feds tout largest single-site raid

Re: Hmmmm, what day is Kristallnacht this year?

Unless they build rockets.

They'll just accommodate them next door to the North Korean mercenaries. Should get on like a house on fire.

FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American'

Re: Backdoors bite back

Woke! Wowoke! Wowowowowoke!!

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Re: grammar

I haven't been able to decide for certain whether I like his language. I haven't heard him complete a sentence yet.

One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave

Re: One long sentence?

Just ask Molly Bloom to help.

McDonald's not lovin' it when hacker exposes nuggets of rotten security

Re: What a bunch of clowns

There will be a McFlurry of complaints when news gets out.

Will they take their Quarter Pounder flesh from the culprit?

KPMG wrote 100-page prompt to build agentic TaxBot

Re: KPMG in Australia in deep trouble

The word advice in that comment covers a scandalous level of deception.

In seeking "efficiency", a series of right-wing governments in Australia fired much of the public service, only to replace the advice public servant experts used to give with advice provided by for-profit consultancies, of which KPMG were one. Many of these consultancies happened to be donors to the right wing parties.

These consultancies also had large numbers of corporate clients who used them to minimise their tax liabilities. When the government introduced new tax regulations, they included, on consultants' advice, loopholes which KPMG had already advised their clients to structure their finances to exploit.

Needless to say, Australian governments don't use KPMG any more.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Re: The answer to almost all those is...

In Japanese it's currently 令和7年８月19日。So yes YMD, and, yes, they use CE years as well.

One big area of thrust for us

While some use thrust to generate lift, Micros~1 think it's for... market penetration.

They were forced to pull out from 'round here years ago.

Molten salt nuclear reactors slated to power Google datacenters in 2030

Re: Reliable sources?

Yes, those notoriously left-of-centre Rockefellers, with their rabidly pro-environment allies at Standard Oil.