* Posts by captain veg

2241 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4

captain veg Silver badge

Re: We didn’t ask for them, we haven’t got time to deal with them and...

It was always thus.

I remember "upgrading" to an early version of Netscape from a slightly earlier version and suddenly being assaulted by modal message boxes stating "You have received a cookie". Which was annoying, especially since we say "biscuit" in my part of the world.

They (Netscape) could have done us all a big favour by offering a "fuck off and don't try this crap ever again" option.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: 3% market share

That's bad, but so what? It's free, right?

-A.

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Thank you!

They (the Angry Brigade) used bombs. The "eco loonies" chuck soup.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

> Alternatively you could bill SFR for rent.

I need to take legal advice on that, but I'm not hopeful.

As mentioned, the monkeys took advantage of a hook already embedded in the wall opposite and, on my side, attached to the street lamp which is bolted to my house. Obviously I wouldn't have chosen to have that screwed on, but it was already there when I bought the place.

As for accidental damage while getting the house repainted, the fact is that I could easily lean out of a bedroom window and cut the offending lines with some long-handled gardening sheers. I suppose that would be a bit obvious, but breaking an optical fibre only requires bending it beyond a certain amount, not necessarily cutting through.

Should I do that?

Use the Up-/Down-vote buttons below to indicate your opinion!

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

Could be worse.

In France the government incentivised the roll out of fibre by divvying up the country into municipal parcels and giving a time-limited monopoly to one of the big ISPs in return for connecting everyone.

In my town SFR got the gig. They sub-contract the work to monkeys whose only priority is to get the job done as quickly as possible. They do this by illegally strewing cables along and between buildings. No trunking, no ducts required.

I watched in horror when this started to happen to my neighbours. Then it came to me. One day I noticed the appearance of a cable strung across the road from the upper storey of the house opposite and attached to my own wall. (This is an old town centre where the buildings face directly on to the roads, no gardens or yards out front.) To make matters worse, it wasn't even to for me! The cable was draped along the wall to my next door neighbour. I complained to the town hall. I got sympathy, but not much more. They forwarded my complaint to SFR who replied stating that they were authorised to commit this vandalism where it was replacing old copper wires similarly strung out in the open. That's actually pretty common in France, but wasn't the case in my street. All the old phone wired were underground.

A few months later a second cable appeared next to that first one. It then bounces back diagonally across the road to connect a house on the other side. The street was rapidly becoming a complete mess.

Then one day I heard the tell-tale clank of a manhole cover being lifted and spotted that the monkeys were back. I observed out of the bedroom window, and, once it became clear that they were about to hitch a third cable to my frontage, I ran down the stairs and out the front door to remonstrate. Already too late, the deed was done during those seconds. No wonder it was such a mess.

At this moment the count is up to four. None of them is for me.

All four, plus a few others, come up out of the pavement on the other side of the road and are dangled off a hook that happened to be embedded under the eaves. There's no trunking or protection of any kind. They are not even clipped to the wall.

This atrocious shoddiness seems to be particular to SFR. If you're in France and not yet fibred, be very afraid.

-A.

Microsoft promises Copilot will be a 'moneymaker' in the long term

captain veg Silver badge

Re: A question of policy

Copilot does make anything other than Windows a slightly* better option because you won't have to mess at all to disable it.

-A.

* By which I mean "much".

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Copilot Tattles

I expect that it categorised Titanic and Trump as basically the same, with good reason, and disappeared up its own recursion.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Lies, damn lies and statistics

If it were real, most office workers would use an X percent improvement in "productivity" (however measured) to goof off by that amount. I know I would.

My value to my employer lies in what I am able to do, not (within reason) in how long it takes. I rather hope that most of the rest of you are in that position.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Github copilot is useful for coding

> I've never used Lightningjs before and knew nothing at all about it (or indeed Javascript). Github copilot can be scarily good at times.

If you know nothing about either the library that you somehow decided you needed, nor even the programming language that somehow you decided was appropriate, just how would you judge how good it is?

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: users quoted in the WSJ want it to be their financial analyst. "And it's going to disappoint"

Employee "My fired what?"

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: It basically just cut-and-pasted it into a pretty shit presentation.

Yes. But to a bystander it would appear amazing that it could do it at all.

I had this experience way back when the first automatic translators appeared online. One was named Babelfish, which was a good start.

I was impressed. I showed it to a colleague, a French national of Lebanese origin. I got it to translate a randomly selected page off the BBC news web site into French. Isn't that amazing, I gushed.

No, he replied, it's shit.

But, interest piqued he asked to try it in the other direction. We got it to translate a page from some French news site (I forget which) into English.

Wow, that's amazing, he opined.

No, it's shit, was my judgment.

-A.

Third time is almost the charm for SpaceX's Starship

captain veg Silver badge

Re: maximising

> So you'll be calling for banning all cars.

As a fairly extensive car driver*, that would be deeply hypocritical.

No. I'm just saying that claiming to be "maximising public safety" whilst launching really enormous experimental rockets into (near-)orbit is much like the oft expressed platitude "we take your privacy seriously" while hoovering up your personal data and storing it on internet-connected servers. It's OK, we use a password.

-A.

Also motorcyclist, cyclist and pedestrian, from time to time.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: maximising

Not at all.

It's the language I object to. Clearly they are not maximising public safety and claiming so is disingenuous.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

maximising

'SpaceX had said: "This new flight path enables us to attempt new techniques like in-space engine burns while maximizing public safety."'

Clearly maximal public safety would be achieved by not chucking five thousand tons of metal and explosive propellant into the sky and letting it fall back to earth.

-A.

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

captain veg Silver badge

Re: You expect it to "know" facts?

I doubt that Contrex has any such expectations. It's the marketing and hype which raises them.

-A.

Raspberry Pi OS 5.2 is here, with pleasant tweaks to Wayland-based desktop

captain veg Silver badge

Re: 800MB

Yes, sorry, of course I meant / (root).

Looks like moving /var to its own partition might be wise, but /usr is the biggest hog (16G)..

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

800MB

> We only had a couple of gigs free before we started, and afterwards, we're down to under 800MB of free space.

I get this from time to time. My system currently has 2TB of storage, but at the time I set it up the delivered SSD boasted a whole 256GB. Out of which I gave 30GB to the root partition, and loads more to home. Seemed like the right thing at the time.

Haven't yet run out of space on /root, but the periodic warnings are worrying.

Commentards are hereby invited to suggest how much of my 2TB I should dedicate to /root.

Is this the right forum to reminisce about my first 20MB hard drive?

-A.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Look Out!

> [Lotus Notes e]mail sucked though as it was not HTML compatible

Outlook neither. I guess you are too young to remember the e-turd named winmail.dat.

It's been a chequered history. Outlook to this day would really prefer that you use Microsoft RTF to HTML, but this has been buried by marketing imperative. Instead everyone else is forced to use an undocumented and utterly non-standard dialect of HTML if they want the output rendered sensibly in Outlook. There was a time when it basically embedded a really ancient version of IE, but they ditched that as it became unsustainably difficult to keep tolerably less than totally insecure. So then they switched to the rendering engine from... Microsoft Word. Oh yes. No idea what they use now. I lost interest.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Look Out!

Some time, a long time ago, my employer adopted Lotus notes for email.

To be fair, there were a handful of other Notes apps deployed, but mostly it was for email.

As an email system it sucked hugely. But not totally.

Years later a management change meant a migration (back) to Exchange. In consequence we had to use Outlook.

As an email client Outlook sucks worse, much worse. It suck totally.

Being worse than Notes is some kind of achievement, I suppose.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Stay calm about COM

Blessed be the moniker of the object.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

laws around records management

Er, maybe it was a bad idea to base it on a proprietary (*.msg) file format?

I hold no candles for Microsoft, but any legal problems are entirely yours, not theirs.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Cross-platform

I wonder what that might mean. Windows 11 and 12?

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

what Outlook?

I gave up on it once I got EWS working in Evolution on Linux, and TypeApp on Android.

-A.

Intel's $699 Core i9-14900KS turbos to 6.2GHz – assuming you can keep it cool

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Now when I was a lad, processors ran at megahertz speeds

Kilohertz?

You were lucky. We had to tap out our clock cycles on an old Morse key.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

time travel

There was a time when Intel's marketing folk dictated that ultimate clock speed was all that mattered.

The result was Pentium 4.

AMD pissed all over them with parts that ran at a slower clock but did more with it, without trying to heat your entire municipality.

Heating your entire municipality might actually be useful for slowing climate change. Nevertheless I await AMD's response with some interest.

-A.

Google gooses Safe Browsing with real-time protection that doesn't leak to ad giant

captain veg Silver badge

Re: "There is no such animal"

Thanks for the clarification.

This is obviously some strange use of the word non-commercial that I wasn't previously aware of.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

non-commercial

"Safe Browsing is a non-commercial Google API"

There is no such animal. Google might make APIs available (temporarily) at no monetary cost, but they always benefit Google's bottom line.

"To date, the Standard version has operated from a locally stored list of suspect sites, which limits the comprehensiveness of the data to whenever the list was last updated."

That will be on Chrome startup, and frequently whenever it's not busy with something else. If you're lucky.

'it sends information to Google – which the tech titan says "is only used for security purposes."'

Do I need to quote Mandy Rice-Davies?

"So in Chrome [...] the Standard tier of Safe Browsing is getting privacy-preserving, real-time protection.

And getting this from Google?

HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa!

HaHaHaHaHa!

Ha!

[My lungs just exploded.]

-A.

Microsoft forges One Teams App To Rule Them All

captain veg Silver badge

People in my org often wonder why I am, apparently unavailable *all* of the time.

It's because the Teams app is running in one VM, but I'm actually working in another.

Just send an email.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

multiple personae

"Microsoft is on the cusp of addressing a major frustration caused by its Teams app by introducing a version capable of simultaneously logging in to multiple personae."

You/they really think that's a major frustration?

Have you ever tried to use Teams?

The best that I can say about it is that it's not quite as hair-tearingly awful as Lync.

-A.

Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient, cuts cost of energy storage

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Nope, not sharing

Oddly enough I didn't know that I touch-typed until I knocked over a cup of coffee on to (and worse, in to) my precious UK QWERTY keyboard and then had to make do with AZERTY while a replacement was ordered.

-A.

Your PC can probably run inferencing just fine – so it's already an AI PC

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Patent rubbish

> Intel's alleged position that application developers will soon infuse all software with AI is patent rubbish.

I would say the same myself, had you not patented it.

The last time anyone* tried to foist it into general productivity software the world got Clippy.

I'm employed to write vertical apps. The problems are mostly** well defined and the solutions entirely algorithmic. Some kind of chatty interface might amuse the more puerile elements of management for, I dunno, maybe several minutes, but would otherwise be a total waste of time.

-A.

* Anyone of any consequence, alas.

** We do find some specific use for NLP, simply because our suppliers are so inexact in the data they deliver.

captain veg Silver badge

the pachyderm in the parlour

That kind of spec is not unreasonable for a desktop, and if you don't have it already then it's easy enough to add a graphics card and some DIMMs.

If my IT department is anything to go by, though, no one is issued a desktop any more. And the laptops that are commonly allocated to office drones don't have proper GPUs let alone a decent amount of RAM (or the ability to add it ex post facto).

-A.

Cryptocurrency laundryman gets hung out to dry

captain veg Silver badge

Re: So....Bitcoin is confirmed to be money

I dare say that no washing powder or fabric conditioner was involved either.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

rule number one

"The operator of the world's longest-running Bitcoin money laundering service faces a 50-year prison sentence after being found guilty in a US court."

Seems to me that if you must try your hand at international crime, the first priority must be to make sure that there is no possibility of being sentenced in the land of the free.

-A.

Oh look, cracking down on Big Tech works. Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi surge on iOS

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Be Brave

There their they're.

-A.

First Armv9 automotive CPUs aim to power AI-enabled vehicles

captain veg Silver badge

safety

"Conway said that the company was making tech to respond to the shifts taking pace in the automotive industry, including AI-powered workloads and enhanced security and safety features."

I totally get that ARM has to react to what its customers want. But it doesn't have to like it. And neither do I.

I really don't need "AI-powered workloads" in my car and I seriously doubt that they would have anything to do with "enhanced security and safety features".

Do you know what? I can operate the controls perfectly well all by myself. If I could not then that would be a matter for the licensing authorities.

Do you know what? I can choose what music the ICE plays perfectly well all by myself. Ditto the heating/cooling. Even the sat-nav. If I could not then, frankly, the results are unlikely to be terminal to the human race.

-A.

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

captain veg Silver badge

Re: 320x320 display mostly running 160x160 resolution apps

This was my biggest regret after paying good money for a Handspring Treo, that the K800 had 320x240 against my pocketable computer's mere 160 squared.

I have to report that the pixel deficiency was easily, if not necessarily conveniently, circumvented by the simple medium of scrolling.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: That is true, but they did have both of them in a year.

Apple brilliantly consolidated on their initial success.

It wasn't because the hardware was better. It still isn't.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: 8088 & 8086

80286 still had 64k segments. The difference is that they were accessed via a selector rather than a real-mode segment.

Of course 64k is 2^16, so they were all "16-bit". The fact that 8-bit processors could also, generally, address 65k is because they had 16-bit address buses. The bitness is a measure of word size, not addressability.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: 30 years later...

> the demo of OS/2 2.1 that IBM presented on their stand

Would that be the one where they played a clip of a Michael Jackson song while simultaneously formatting a floppy disk? That certainly impressed me at the time.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: curated app store

No. When the iPhone was introduced there was no app store (curated or otherwise) and no SDK for third party developers.

In my view there were three things that Apple brought to the party.

1. Brand recognition from the iPod line.

2. Using 1. to beat carriers into offering data plans at a sensible price -- or they didn't get any iThings.

3. A touch screen you could operate with your fingers comfortably*.

-A.

* Well, I can't. But I've got short fat stumpy digits and virtually no stereo vision.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Very Different

It's worth mentioning that Windows NT was, at one point, called OS/2 version 3.

-A.

Font security 'still a Helvetica of a problem' says Australian graphics outfit Canva

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Nomenclature

When a Brit writes "font" they don't realise that it is spelt "fount".

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: WTF!?

Better than an unsevered fingernail.

-A.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

captain veg Silver badge

Dentharthurdent

- What's your name, Earthman?

- Dent. Arthur Dent.

- Well, late as in the late Dentarthurdent. It's a sort of threat. You see?

-A.

Linux 6.9 will be the first to top ten million Git objects

captain veg Silver badge

Re: a billion?

Space wraps.

-A.

FOSS replacement for Partition Magic, Gparted 1.6 is here to save your data

captain veg Silver badge

the author's name is an anagram of APRIL VENOM

It's also a play on Billy Liar, assuming that Liam is short for William.

-A.

Spam crusade lands charity in hot water with data watchdog

captain veg Silver badge

grandeur

I'm laughing. Thanks.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Don't give money charities you cry...

> And for the record, you don't need to sign your posts. Literally nobody gives a shit whether you're A, B, Z or The Poster Who Used to Call Himself Q.

Does that annoy you?

-A.

Microsoft sends OneDrive URL upload feature to the cloud graveyard

captain veg Silver badge

'warning for users to be wary of anything from Microsoft prefixed with the word "Preview."'

Or, it has to be said, anything whatsoever from Google.

-A.