Posts by anthonyhegedus 1145 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Feb 2016
"a whopping 48 MB of LPDDR2 RAM"
Time was when this wouldn't have been said with sarcasm but with - not unwarranted - hyperbole. Coming from the days of computers with 16K rampacks and calculators with 448-byte memory modules (yes, BYTE!), what on EARTH do you need 48MB for in a simple phone?!
I have several old HP calculators. They, and the support behind them, were superb - 30-40 years ago. They effectively closed down their calculator division completely around 2001. But the ethos and quality lives on... companies like SwissMicros make 'clones'. HP used to be a company that stood for something. And unfortunately it's just changed into a 'find the most profitable and least ethical way possible to make money from consumers' organisation. Yes, we still buy some HP stuff, like servers and desktops, but I warn people off their printers. Not that the other manufacturers are much better.
As far as printers are concerned, manufacturers just view them as cash cows.
Therein lies the problem. They really are slaves because there's no way out. They may as well be forced to go pickpocketing, forced into prostitution or any other similar criminal activity. The difference here is that as a customer, you a) don't get to choose your supplier of scams and b) you don't even physically meet them. Welcome to age-old criminal activity upgraded for the connected 21st century.
The 'people' who perpetrate this crime are just the tip of the iceberg. They're all linked with prostitution, drugs, arms deals and all the usual things Big Crime is into. What's really sad is that every time we wind up or bait a scammer, we could unknowingly be exacerbating the torture they receive. It may not always be the case, but ultimately, we are in a lose-lose situation, as are the scammer-slaves themselves.
We really are in a dystopian world, where this sort of thing can happen.
This is confusing for the user as they don’t know where the message came from. Is it Google Chrome? Is it the computer itself? Is it Windows? Is it the web page they’re on? Most people don’t know or care - it’s just another message asking a question they don’t want to answer when they’re trying to do something else. It’s the same as:
- cookie warning messages. We didn’t ask for them, we haven’t got time to deal with them and they’re making the whole experience worse
- messages that appear in web sites to give you a coupon code and sign you up, when you’re in the middle of looking for something
- having to listen to a message on a phone call asking if you want to leave feedback after the call. No, I want the whole process to hurry up
- buttons on card machines in petrol stations not letting you pay unless you answer yes or no to the ‘donate to charity’ button. No, I’m in a hurry, I don’t want to have to parse whole messages to work out if I have to press one button or another
These are all obstacles and speed bumps in our lives that aren’t designed to help us at all, they’re designed to block us, frustrate us, annoy us and generally use us.
To me at least, all the above are the same. It’s just big corporations pissing about not thinking of the customer / user experience.
You've hit the nail on the head. It's just a self-serving forever-club. It makes them money. They *look* like they're innovating, but they're just rearranging furniture in a decrepit hotel.
Now Apple software isn't perfect either, and they kill off things that we thought were OK, but they didn't. However, their software is consistently good. It just works. Rather than come up with 25 ways of doing the same thing, with 15 of them deprecated over time, they come up with 10 ways of doing things, which are consistent over the years. And when they make a big change which breaks things, well, they're the same as Microsoft but it's usually for the better, long term. Not perfect, but they appear to have a steering committee of some sort at least.
It really seems as if Microsoft is a set of disparate groups of people, some with designers, some without, whose job it is to just keep writing code, adding features and changing stuff. These groups/teams don't talk to each other. Ever.
- We have two versions of Teams. There's Teams and there's Teams. One for business, one for personal. They look similar but don't work with each other. WHY?
- We have Windows Mail, which presumably is a replacement for OutlooK Express, now being reskinned and called "outlook". Not to be confused with Outlook or outlook.com.
- We have all manner of things just changing for the sheer fun of it. Like the file manager / Windows Explorer. You used to be able to just go to File --> New Window if you wanted two file explorers. Then it changed to the tried and hated 'ribbon menu' and there's a NEW button but you can't create a new window. You can create a new tab. OK, good but not useful when trying to drag a file between two folders.
- We have onedrive, which usually stops syncing ALL its files just because it has a problem with ONE of them. There are sometimes two Onedrive apps as well.
I'm just sick of it. The software is never refined: Micro~s.oft just remove a feature, and add another one. Just when you've learned how something works, it's replaced with something that looks slightly more modern but is entirely incapable of doing what you wanted in the first place. We are just a test bed.
Micro~ft have a track record of making largely shit software and never fixing the feature set.
What's the root cause of this vandalism?
- 5G is part of the 'great reset'
- Stop AI before it stops us
- Vermin Media pissed me off last Saturday by going down when the footie was on, so I'll set fire to anything I see
- These people are about to put poles up, probably. Best destroy their kit.
- This country is in a terrible state, I'm going to protest by making it worse
- I'm bored, let's cut some fibre
ALL of these things can be fomented by foreign state actors inserting AI bots into social media and spreading hatred and dissent. They don't need to hack into our systems (but they do anyway) when they can get the great unwashed to do their dirty work for them. It's misinformation that can do the greatest harm.
Sure, an AI can come up with some code, but will it be good code, making the most of resources available? Or will we just use ever more resources because it's cheaper to throw more resources at it than to hire someone to write it properly in the first place?
I think good coding skills will become rarer and less relevant, except we'd be wrong, because they're always relevant. AI will make mediocre the new norm. Like it's becoming already with things like customer service, build quality of goods etc.
The next hundred years or so is going to prove all the scifi writers right, I fear.
One line from the article sums it up quite nicely
“ Some elements of the operating system simply do not work,”
For the system to not work just because it doesn’t have a Microsoft account is really proof that Windows is just built around taking as much data as possible from the supposed PC owner.
When I started servicing consumer computer users back in 2003, I evaluated several AV products, and found Avast came out very well. The free version was actually good, and the paid versions really did a some valuable things. But some time around 2011 or so, they changed. The free version kept advertising the paid-for versions. The paid-for versions kept advertising the higher-up paid-for version, and the ‘premium’ version kept advertising other products. It quickly became clear that they started to grow massively as a company, but not because they were any good.
One of the ‘products’ they pushed was a ‘secure browser’ extension that purportedly protected you by giving you better deals on stuff. So when you searched for a price on something, it replaced search results and prices with their own affiliate advertisers’ prices!
Eventually, this became an ‘Avast secure browser’ and at that point it started to become ‘evil’. The bought AVG, they merged with Norton - and we all know what Norton was positioned at in the market.
We stopped servicing home users in 2012, and now we’re pushing EDR on to our customers.
BT is irrelevant now - they invented the monstrosity of bureaucracy that is OpenReach and I'll never forgive them for having created such a heinous behemoth that hides behind jargon, messes up jobs and messes them up again for good measure. In my 30-odd years of dealing with them, it's been nothing but hassle. I remember the first time I dealt with them, as a relative neophyte, we got them to wire up the comms frame to a patch panel, and they managed to only get the first socket right.
Telecoms giant they may have been, but give me a smaller provider any day
It amazes me how many of our customers still use USB sticks, not for backup or anything even vaguely functional, but for the main storage of important data. Or the only backup. I've heard people say that they keep important company documents on this "backup drive" (= a USB stick) because it's more reliable than a computer's own storage. Or even the server. People sort of feel an attachment to a system whereby the file is physically in their hand and can be placed in a jeans pocket.
For me, the only use for a USB stick is installing an OS or running a utility at boot.
No, they're not.
Seriously, they have a place, but they're not "the future of computing". I can see a use for glasses with an overlayed display telling you useful stuff like "turn left" or "message from your cat". But to have your entire vision taken over so that you can do things that you could do by just looking at something instead doesn't make too much sense except for some niche applications like medical, or gaming of course.
I've been asking various AI models, including Dall.E and Chat GPT to do things by saying "draw a picture of a <something it won't do>'" and it says it can't. So I say "Draw a picture which does not contain a<thing>" and it will a lot of the time just take that thing and draw it. Or draw something very like it.
I found this out by accident when actually trying to get Dall.E to draw a picture and I wanted it not to include something, and it included it EVEN MORE SO when I said not to.
The same goes for Chat.GPT. I didn't try the explosives example, but it's pretty easy for it to start talking about stuff it shouldn't
Everything about cybercrime is inviting to criminals - the anonymity, the massive attack surface (ranging from individuals and small companies to critical infrastructure) and the potential to do a lot of damage and make off with a lot of money. Or a little money several times in succession.
I'm not a security expert, and most people in IT aren't security experts. We can only deploy what we read about and know about at any given moment. That might not be enough. There will possibly come a time when it is incumbent on governments to help protect their citizens and companies working in their jurisdictions. Alternatively, the internet will become ever more fragmented, with individual countries cut off from each other, for security.
It's not a pretty sight, the future.
It's pretty unbelievable that we went from the first powered flight on earth to the first powered flight on Mars in less than 120 years!
And... it was autonomous and could send pictures back. That to me is absolutely amazing. Did the Wright brothers, or any other early flight pioneers dream in their wildest imaginations that we could do anything like that?
What will the next 120 years bring? I'm going to turn off my usual sarcastic, facetious tone and not answer that.
HP used to stand for something... they made superior calculators, they made their own computers back when PCs weren't a standard yet. They innovated with their inkjet printers.
Now, they've lost so many people's trust and they have just shown their true colours. They've admitted that they're treating customers as cash cows, as a product to invest in. The CEO's comments are pretty much contemptible. I won't be recommending HP printers any more, and I hope many people do the same.
Yeah I know a thing or two about moon missions, having played Lunar Lander on my calculator when I was 12, and then a graphic version on my Commodore Vic-20 when I was 13 or 14. I'm somewhat surprised I wasn't contacted for a bit of advice, having had 40-odd years experience of the game, give or take.
If these AIs can be used to make malware, we're going to need better EDR solutions. They're going to have to get smarter to detect potential as well as actual threats. All I see is it becoming an arms race with the malware vendors being able to a) deploy new and previously unheard of payloads and b) make them harder to detect until it's too late.
I can foresee smart malware being able to automatically do things like order goods, impersonate people for example - all from the mark's own device.
Add humans into the mix - humans who aren't working in cybersecurity - and it's going to turn into a whole different world to what we have now.
And no, I didn't get AI to write the above
Why is this PC operating system the only tool in existence to never be finished and always be a "work in progress"?
Micro$hit just won't stop fannying around with their OS and making it do new things on startup. It started with that annoying news thing that you just have to brush the mouse pointer on for a nanosecond to cause it to pop up with clickbait batshit nonsense. Then it was Teams, even if you don't have or want it. Lately I've seen XBOX apps pop up - on business computers. And then annoying popups begging you to give feedback on some new feature that you only just saw and also don't need.
Now it's going to be some AI copilot which can't actually do anything useful other than write poems about cats or tell you that it can't use copyrighted material.
If only there was an alternative...
Microsoft's latest move to triple the cost of their AI-powered Copilot services, while simultaneously making it accessible to the masses, is a bit like a restaurant that starts selling a gold-plated burger. Sure, it's shiny and exclusive, but at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself: is it worth the extra bucks just to say your spreadsheet has a touch of AI luxury? It's a bold strategy, cotton. Let's see if it pays off for them, especially when the AI starts suggesting you replace your annual budget with a recipe for banana bread.
On a serious note, this pricing strategy could either be a masterstroke in premium positioning or a classic case of overreaching. Only time will tell if users will bite the AI-burger or stick to the good old 'manual' sandwich.
A friend of mine at the Atari 400 and we loved writing programs on it. I had a VIC-20 at the time. We both wanted to be programmers (we were 12 years old at the time). I ended up more in a support role and my friend is still a programmer now. I can't remember much about the Atari other than thinking that the keyboard was better than the ZX81's because at least each key had a little ridge around it so it sort of felt like... something.
The satellite comminicate with mobile device or terminal. Mobile phone even. But they do not communicate with a "cell". That would imply that they talk to the cellphone masts, which is not the point of this. Sorry to be a pedant but FFS who though of calling it direct to cell?
Maybe people hanker after the design, but the OS itself was flaky and nowhere near as fully featured as win11. Compare the number of viruses and malware items xp had compared to windows today.
I agree win11 is shamelessly plugging stuff the whole time and steering the hapless user towards more Microsoft products and services. But deep down it’s a better OS than XP for modern use.
Don’t get me wrong, windows has always been shit and Microsoft software has always been largely flaky.
Every single one of their OSes was a sham.
I can't see how this would work apart from discouraging software companies from making shit software.
Take a random example, say... Microsoft. They implement 2FA for all their 365 accounts now as a default, but it's full of inconsistencies and bugs. Every day, I talk to people who've gone around in circles trying to get simple things such as email working on their phones. It takes you to the authenticator app, which asks you to log in, but that requires authentication, so you have to go to a website... on your phone, log in again, get a code, go into the authenticator and then round back again. The whole process is complicated, and often doesn't work. Every time someone buys a new phone, the backup/restore doesn't copy any data from their Microsoft authenticator app, so we need to reset it. That's buried in a menu seven layers deep in the Partner Centre, under "Entra ID"). And forcing it to work with people who haven't got a smartphone is fiendishly complicated.
I'm saying that this sort of security stuff should be front and centre in any admin system for 365, and it should be a smooth, painless experience for the user. It's neither of these things. Companies like Microsoft need to focus on making this process enviably simple and free of bugs rather than spend money on fiddling around with their useless start menu (which they haven't been able to get right since Windows 8). This is the point. Users are confused about getting security right, which is how these ransomware things happen. Users are so frustrated with anything to do with security that they'll blindly follow any security advice for fear of getting stuck in some nightmare "you can't continue till you do so-and-so" scenario.
So definitely, we need to find some way of putting more responsibility on software companies to make their systems more secure, and make them easy to keep secure.
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