* Posts by Dan 55

15310 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Huh?

It makes no sense.

"Businesses that don't want to be screwed about by constant feature changes made only to justify a cloud subscription" and "Businesses that have realised cloud subscriptions cost much more" makes more sense.

Dan 55 Silver badge

"The future of work in an AI-powered world is on the cloud"

Nice words, but MS' actions state otherwise.

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

Hopefully the first signs that the wheels are falling off this particular bandwagon.

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Lack of McDonalds Staff

McD's don't pay so high in the US, they only get paid slightly over the federal minimum wage which hasn't risen in over a decade... but their jobs are getting automated away anyway. They do get paid $22/hr in Denmark. Source

By the way, Denmark has no minimum wage.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Alert

Are you sure you prefer the touchscreens?

Poo found on every McDonald’s touchscreen tested

Mmm, finger lickin' good.

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

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: What do you want to buy today?

copilot> Ah, so you're a waffle man.

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

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: As expected

Not Brave because it entertains planet-burning blockchain nonsense.

Not Chromium because it still phones home to Google.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: As expected

Wouldn't Vivaldi be better if you really need a Chromium browser?

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Coincidence...

Not ever, not on Windows, not at all. Don't run anything you just got off a random website. Don't download programs from websites.

If you are typing commands, you are doing it wrong. If you Googled for how to get apps, learn to just trustworthy websites from bad ones, because no site that can be trusted will tell you to type commands.

I can't help feel that the hobbyist developer writing programs that will never get in a distro/app store but are useful nonetheless is unwarrently besmearched by this advice.

E.g. NirSoft which hosts small useful Unix-like utilities (do one thing and do it well) for Windows which will never be allowed to get into the MS Store and which also often end up blocked by the Antivirus Industrial Complex in its constant quest to find easy low-hanging fruit justify its continued existence.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Coincidence...

Most Linux distros have a GUI package manager or a "store" now. You just search and select what you want to install and it'll do it.

Developers beware, Microsoft's domain shakeup is coming soon

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Why break things with gratuitous change ?

OTOH it's to avoid loads of domains like this which surely must be something to applauded. It has to be done sometime and it should already have been done by now.

AI and wearables are scaring the wellbeing out of workers

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Wellbeing over productivity

Where might one find such a company in 2020s late-stage capitalism?

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

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It's already here...

How do you think they're going to get people to willingly move to the new one? Fuck up the old one over a period of years and then they will have achieved the "feature parity" KPI.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It’s Like Outlook Web Access

When was the last time MS cared about what customers accepted?

Customers will accept it too, look at Teams.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: drag emails between providers

Either they give you a grace period or you pay for continued access for a while or you can't.

And if you can't you'd download to local before access is cut like you would with POP3.

Not seeing the insurmountable problem here.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: POP3 is horrible

And THAT'S the huge issue. If you change providers (change ISP, for example), you lose your emails, don't you? With IMAP, unless you make a local repository and manually copy all your emails to those folders, you lose your emails, correct?

If you wanted you could just drag e-mails from the old provider to the new one, as it's IMAP.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I need classic outlook

You don't have to use the Outlook, Thunderbird can download from an IMAP account to a local mailbox if you don't want to sent up anything more fancy.

I have been known to be sarcastic from time to time.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Pirate

Re: I need classic outlook

I don't see why you can't archive IMAP mail to a local folder/mailbox and then it doesn't matter who deletes the original mail or when it happens.

As for lack of PST in the original post, the work around is to keep paying that subscription (see icon).

Microsoft forges One Teams App To Rule Them All

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: The worst offering ever by Microsoft.

There is a way to disable personal logins, if your company hasn't done this then your BOFH isn't on the ball.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Enterprise grade security to protect your data :o

Don't worry, it's just that he doesn't trust you one inch and is covering his arse with a paper trail.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Too little too late

You don't need a Teams client or account to join a call, you can use the meeting ID from the e-mail and web Teams, so that's job interviews at big soul destroying corporates sorted.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

"with separate icons on the taskbar"

So still really still two Teams instances then.

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

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Opera?

They dropped the ball when they gutted features with the transition to Chromium.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

now that web devs no longer need to make their websites work on Safari

There are still places outside the EU (marked with Here Be Dragons on maps) where Safari's engine is the only engine allowed.

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

Dan 55 Silver badge

No wonder hardware vendors are on board

This is the next great software bloat.

Something that could be done with Python or Arduino C can now be done by shoehorning a LLM onto a 16GB PC.

Dirty data shocks Indian taxpayers with huge bills

Dan 55 Silver badge

Incomplete/confusing spec

Someone's sending monetary values in paise (= pennies/cents) and reading them in rupees. The kind of error that was supposed to be picked up at the QA stage at the very latest...

Microsoft calls AI privacy complaint 'doomsday hyperbole'

Dan 55 Silver badge

Why the US doesn't get privacy episode 239,203,829,178

MS argued:

Plaintiffs do not plead any facts plausibly showing they have been affected by any of the supposed 'scraping,' 'intercepting,' and 'eavesdropping' they allege.

As this is the US and there is no concept of privacy, you, the little guy, have to somehow prove monetary loss because your individual items of data were scraped, but big tech is allowed to scrape everything and use it all to make a new product which brings in billions.

Where "little guy" means any person or business with a market cap smaller than Microsoft's.

GPT-4 won't run Doom but will play the game poorly

Dan 55 Silver badge
Terminator

"Also, GPT-4 can't reason very well."

That's not true... It can't reason.

If one of the few outputs that a bingo machine has is "fire the bang stick", it will fire the bang stick.

Cisco is a fashion retailer now, with a spring collection to prove it

Dan 55 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Finally

LTT hoodie? --->

British Library pushes the cloud button, says legacy IT estate cause of hefty rebuild

Dan 55 Silver badge

I would expect most servers to use VMs, even in datacenters.

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

Dan 55 Silver badge

The proposed DPDI bill already aims to nobble cookie banners, the ICO is singing from the same hymn sheet, and it looks like they're is sounding out whether or not the Government can go a little further.

Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Reference

Parent post missed out the HTML closing sarcasm tag (proprietary extension, may not display in your browser).

IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

Dan 55 Silver badge
FAIL

Hilarious

Mainframe Skills Depot

Take your skills to the next level

Login below to see all the content

Sign In with IBMid

Log in with Bureaucratic ID™ to see if you like whatever it is we're offering!

I think with that first page alone they've just lost at least half the people who could be interested.

Is Russia using Starlink in Ukraine? Congress demands answers

Dan 55 Silver badge

All this linguistic hoop jumping that Musk does when publishing statements on Twitter about this subject must mean he's not letting the orc army use Tzarlink in occupied Ukraine, obviously. How could anyone even doubt him?

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

Dan 55 Silver badge

Jobs was insufferably arrogant but this is another level. They certainly don't like it up 'em. All the more reason for the EU to carry on.

Microsoft drags Windows Subsystem for Android into the trash

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Just another reason

The only two constant dependable Windows technologies are Win32 and telemetry. Change my mind.

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I hope they get sued out of existance

Citizens of a given country are only protected / subjected to the laws of that country while they are within its borders. Travel to a foreign country and their laws apply.

Not as easy as that. Where do you have residency? Where do you have fiscal residency?

And... since when does Apple get to decide where someone has residency?

Trump supporters forge AI deepfakes to woo Black voters

Dan 55 Silver badge
Alert

Re: Not realistic images

... and the hands... it's always the hands...

YouTube workers laid off mid-plea at city hall meeting

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: These were CONTRACTORS on the Day their Contracts Expired.

Contractors can have fixed length contracts in the UK and employees can have fixed term employment contracts.

But I let myself get carried away by the AC. Of course they're not contractors, they're employees paid by Cognizant. Not that it makes any practical difference in the US of course (unless you're in Montana).

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: These were CONTRACTORS on the Day their Contracts Expired.

Contractors do not get sick or vacation pay.

So what? Neither do many salaried employees in the US and salaried employment is at will too unless you live in Montana.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Why would you even want workers' rights...

... when you've got the American dream?

Ruggedized phone group takes the Bullitt, calls in PWC as administrative receiver

Dan 55 Silver badge

And if a company wanted guaranteed support for a phone of this type they'd just buy a Samsung XCover.

EU takes a bite out of Apple with $2B in-app purchase fine

Dan 55 Silver badge

Apple charge 27% commission for reviewing an app and storage... 27% because that's the figure they arrived at in the Netherlands and South Korea for apps which use a third-party payments processor. Obviously it's an extortion racket.

GitHub struggles to keep up with automated malicious forks

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I don't get it

That's not an open source problem, that's a horrendously stupid way of distributing software problem.

I mean who would think that automatic updates to the production environment is a good thing apart from web developers?

EU-turn! Now Apple says it won't banish Home Screen web apps in Europe

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Illegal under the DMA

“That’s what a sandbox is”. Is it really? Because *Apple customers* think that by far the most important bit of the sandbox is the review process of what is allowed onto the Apple App Store in the first place. It’s *you* who has too limited a technical understanding to understand what the sandbox is. Process wins over technical guardrail every time. And you know this perfectly well (or should do) as an IT professional.

Except when it doesn't.

Process is not perfect, which is why we (should) have defence in depth.

For employers that give their staff locked-in laptops, who have an IT policy as to what programs they can install…..how impressed do you think they would be, if a user decided to install a “sandbox” on their laptop? “But it’s a sandbox, it should be able to contain any malware”. That employee would get fired. Because it’s insecure.

In 99.999% of cases it's a perfectly reasonable policy, but once again there should be defence in depth.

And I own *my* iPhone. *I* should have the right to install whatever *policies* I like to ensure my own security. And I’ve chosen to outsource hire Apple as my IT department, to vet the security for stuff I don’t want to waste my time with. What business is that of yours, to decide that I’m not allowed to do that?

You are. Who said you couldn't? You can stick to the App Store and stick with the clunky albatross that is Safari.

We've already seen Apple's review process is not perfect and now we know that security in iOS is not as good as it should be because they daren't let 3rd party browsers run PWAs and they want to make third party app stores economically unviable, but carry on insisting that the Emperor's clothes look great.

The DMA will be good for Apple if they follow it instead of trying to fight it because it means they will have to up their game instead of relying on Steve Jobs' fading RDF.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Illegal under the DMA

Ah, the guy who thinks he knows how somebody *else’s* software should be architected.

That's what a sandbox is. For a poster who calls themself "Justthefacts" you seem to be remarkably fact free.

Or, and it’s just a thought, why not let consumer choice take care of it?

Er, yeah. That's what the DMA is about.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Illegal under the DMA

Because that’s technically required by IOS architecture.

Because you designed it right?

And if that's true then it's a crappy architecture and should be updated. The sandbox should be good enough to deal with any and all security problems, that's what a sandbox is for. Instead it seems Apple don't trust it and they're hoping WebKit promising to behave nicely is good enough to catch everything and they won't allow other browser engines to run a PWA. In that case you might as well not have a sandbox.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Not the last poster, but yeah, I will be happy to say it.

If iOS were so secure you couldn't jailbreak it, but you can, all the way up to the very latest version.

If iOS were so secure there wouldn't be malware in the App Store but there is.

If iOS were so secure then they wouldn't be unforced errors like "goto fail" but there are.

All you're doing is repeating the same comforting words which may have been true 5 years ago but there's barely any practical difference now. People without a clue loudly going into the ins and outs of a security model as if they designed it themselves or pontificating about how Google wants to put an insecure browser on iOS so they can destroy it from the inside or whatever of nonsense they can think up.

A PWA is just a bunch of APIs, there's no real difference between a PWA and a web page. If they can allow third party browsers to open web pages using this permission model, they can allow browsers to run PWAs. Any security problem which affects web pages will affect PWAs and vice-versa.

So Apple either don't trust their own permission model or are afraid to relinquish complete control over applications on the App Store or PWAs. It seems like a bit of both and neither is a particularly good reason for using an iPhone.

Tiny Core Linux 15 stuffs modern computing in a nutshell

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: investigating whether it can turn some geriatric laptops into useful tools once again.

Browsers have become as bloated as a complicated OS in their own right. You probably have a mobile phone or another computer with a browser so if you are willing to forget about running a browser on a low-powered PC, or perhaps just Lynx for LAN use, then the whole machine becomes more useful once again.