Posts by simonlb 817 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Nov 2015
I can't help thinking that the car manufacturers will be happy to jack the prices up to justify the "increase in storage and memory costs", as it will help to normalise the leasing renting of new cars as they are becoming more unaffordable as time goes on. Plus, who wants a car that might 'forget' what it's supposed to be if it's parked up for a few months and the built-in memory leaks all it's data away so it no longer works?
Yeah, my sixteen year old Skoda diesel estate car with nearly 240,000 miles on it is still working just fine thanks. AC still works and the 6 CD head unit with SD card reader covers the entertainment side of stuff. SatNav? Have a phone holder for that when it's needed.
I could change it for a new car tomorrow if I really wanted to, but this does everything I need it to so while it works I'm keeping it.
A long, long time ago I found out that a work 'colleague' had been regularly connecting remotely to my work PC (running XP), trawling through the hard drive and copying stuff to his machine without asking or mentioning it to me. I therefore added the explicit 'Deny All' permission for his userid to the entire hard drive on my machine. Took about 45 minutes to apply, but when I checked the event viewer the next week I found multiple attempts from his machine to try to connect to mine. He also tried logging in to my machine one day when I was on leave but couldn't understand why it wouldn't let him in.
"R&D and production costs are very high, alongside a price tag that makes it unattainable to the majority of consumers."
By all means make a proof of concept so you can see potential iterations of the design but if you want to take it to production that will cost a lot of money that you will have to try to recoup later on.
As for "unattainable to the majority of users", that's probably because it's stupidly priced - to recoup some of that massive R&D cost - as well as being something that most people just have no interest in owning. Trying to spin it as a sort of 'limited release' device after realising there is no real market for it and people aren't buying it sounds a bit desperate.
"Since 2022, the corporation has run three savings programs aimed at cutting £54.2 million, largely by reducing services and staffing."
And at that time they also gave out contracts for £50M to various market research groups to identify ways of trying to make more money in the future, all of which seem to have come to the recent suggestion of making the royal charter open-ended (which can't happen unless the legislation is changed in parliament), as well as a compulsory 'Universal Media Tax' for everyone in the UK to replace the TV License - good luck with that one!
Irrespective of whether you like the BBC and use their services or not, their current business model of the TV License is outdated and increasingly disliked every year by more and more people who refuse to buy one as they don't watch or use the BBC. They need to face up to reality and go to a subscription model just like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV, You Tube Premium etc. as they work. Put everything they do behind an online account - er, iPlayer anyone? - and people login and consume everything they want to. It isn't difficult.
Yep, and it was only a few short years until those same companies started closing 'final salary' pension schemes leaving employees less well off in retirement, sometimes considerably worse off.
Imagine the good you could do for your country's workforce if you had a better regulated financial industry so that pension funds were heavily protected, stock market crashes like 2008 would be far less likely to happen, and people in charge of organisations which failed went to prison.
Hmmm.... So allegedly, someone who worked for DOGE pocketed a load of social security data and has used it in their current job for a US Government contractor. Considering the type of data described, wonder if that contractor might be working with ICE at all?
Remember, this is alleged, so didn't really happen. Allegedly. Probably. Possibly.
So you make sure that anyone trying to access the old site can only get to the landing page, then you make the changeover and have someone from the internal IT team test access from both the internal network AND via whatever method they access the site from externally so that you know the new site is live. You don't wait for staff start rolling in and assume it will work. As for the old site, archive it if you have the capacity rather than delete it as that makes sense. Delete when absolutely sure it is no longer needed.
And hardcoding? Avoid if at all possible. I've never done it myself. Nope. Never. Honest.
After first checking the date to see it wasn't April 1st, I'd say this is pretty much on the money. After 30-odd years of working in corporate environments the level of bullshit bingo you have to plough through on a regular basis is just staggering, and I have never understood why there is this blind insistence on using such shitty wording in the first place when using plain English is just more straightforward and less vague. It really does look like a lot of the people using this bullshittery are only doing it to make themselves seem better than they are without actually saying anything. And yes, the work colleagues who lapped this word salad up were pretty mediocre in their jobs as well.
And that 30% commission has now been normalised across the board so nobody stops to actually think just how much money Apple, Google and all the other App store owners are making in commissions purely for hosting a download. They could easily reduce it and still make a decent profit, but there's no incentive unless they are forced to.
I was asked by a friend a few years ago which company I'd recommend for a laptop for his wife so I said, "HP." Three months later that same friend - who knows nothing about computers - went to a local branch of Currys and bought the first HP laptop they showed him, then called me up a few days later when it couldn't update Win10 because the 32Gb eMMC storage was full. I told him to take it back and he just said, "You told me to buy that one!" I just reminded him that I recommended HP as a brand but that he never called me for more information prior to buying something he had no clue about so that wasn't my fault. If he had asked me, I would have made the time to go with him and advise him on the best option for his budget, which he was very flexible on so he could have got a half decent machine. Instead, he got a complete POS that should never have been on sale in the first place.
We have two Chromebooks in our house which don't get used a lot, but are great when we are travelling as we can tether them to our phones and use them just as we would use a tablet but with a larger screen, plus it's much nicer typing on a keyboard than on a screen. There are valid use cases for these devices but they aren't for everyone.
It's usually the same people who blindly follow satnav and drive off a cliff because it told them too.
Mind you, I can't help thinking that the people who are writing these scripts would probably be better off working for M$ as they do seem to understand how to actually write code which works. Can't be any worse than the one's who are already there.
"It will do little to reassure administrators or end users already skeptical of Microsoft's quality control."
There's been no quality control there for well over a decade and that shows when just about every product has numerous issues and is less usable than previous versions with a more incoherent user interface. That and the abortion which is CoPilot being rammed into everything make all their products total garbage.
I'd like to think that if M$ really wanted to, they could actually put a logical, well thought out and usable UI and menu in Windows - like Win 7 - as well as a switch to completely disable the web search and CoPilot, as well as add themes for Win2000, XP, Win 7/8/8.1 etc. so that it was actually properly usable again. However, I'm convinced the entire design of Windows is so badly designed and built that this is just not possible as it would break too many other things catastrophically so is not an option. Why else does making a minor change to a service necessitate a complete reboot of the entire OS, rather than just a restart of that service? It seriously cannot be that hard unless the OS design is so completely and fundamentally flawed that it cannot function in any other way.
I'm so glad I moved away from Windows on my home PC over a decade ago and reckon I've saved a couple of hundred hours of stress over that time by not using it.
In the EU and UK you are allowed to make a backup copy of the source media - both software or recorded music - to cover you losing the source media. You do actually own it. However, in the US the DCMA prohibits that, but as the majority of legislation there seems tailored to protecting companies and industries and screwing over the consumer at every level, that is no surprise.
As for other countries, not sure.
"55 percent of HR leaders preferred to see saved time applied to projects outside of core job roles"
OK, so lets see how that works: You have your core job roles and that is what you are paid to do. Period. Any 'projects' outside of that are either alternative project time already agreed with your manager that is included as part of your job role, or you are given extra tasks not in your job role that need to be done due to staff previously being laid off due to 'efficiencies' gained already by adoption of AI.
It's highly unlikely the majority of workers who are actually saving any time have agreed anything with their manager, so in reality this just trying to force the remaining staff to pick up the work left behind when whole teams have been fired for various business reasons.
It's no coincidence HR is short for 'Human Remains'.
"that could bring down the whole LLM marketplace"
And when that bubble finally bursts it would be nice to think that consumer level hardware prices might sort themselves out due to the glut of memory, storage and graphics devices hitting the market as they are no longer needed by the AI lunatics, but I can't see that happening due to the greed of our late stage capitalism. Let's face it, Nvidia normalised the doubling of the prices of consumer graphics cards by just never reducing their prices after the pandemic and have kept on jacking the prices up since then when they could have easily been done the decent thing and brought them down. Are leather jackets really that expensive?
And how long before your ability to download any content you've created via the thin client to store offline is blocked for 'reasons' and all your data is belong to us? All your company's data and IP sitting in someone else's datacentre and your level of 'ownership' only extends to creating content and accessing it. You might - for a very steep fee - have an option to download, but knowing how these cloud companies like to change the terms and conditions to be egregiously in their favour, do you want to take that chance?
"Never gamble more than you can afford to lose."
I really do wonder whose money these "investment" outfits are gambling with as this bubble is going to burst and a lot of the value of these investments will disappear very, very quickly.
As for Micron, when I read about them shutting down Crucial I bought two 4Tb SSD's which have now more than doubled in value in less than three months. I might stick them on eBay later...
Jesus, TalkTalk. What an absolute shower of shit they are. I had them for broadband for a few years for various reasons and when anything went wrong - due to their being an intermittent fault in their kit in the phone exchange - their contact drones would only ever follow the script and you could almost never get past one of these untrained and uninterested twonks to speak to someone who could actually do anything technical. And this was for a normal phone line with a 12Mbps connection. At one point they even had one of their own engineers visit who confirmed the fault and showed me the test equipment displaying the fault in the exchange, and who said they would get it fixed. The following day, TT called me and said the engineer found no fault and asked "how did we do?"
I had Virgin Media for a short while as they could provide me with 65Mbps and then finally our area was cabled up for full fibre so I switched to Sky and have never had any issues with my Gigabit connection.
Curiously enough, when I'd put the order in to Sky, TalkTalk called me up and said they could give me full fibre at my address cheaper than Sky, despite me knowing for a fact that they didn't have any fibre kit for our area in the exchange so it was impossible for them to provision any service for me. You could even go on their website for well over two years after our area was cabled up and try to order it but as soon as you go to the connection test page it would fail with an error. I do feel so sorry for anyone who has to use TalkTalk and could never recommend them for anything.
"Clearly not so, hence, how?"
Because it's all pretend money like in Monopoly. Quite why grown people choose to use crypto as a mechanism to invest gamble their money instead of having a savings account or share portfolio is beyond me. It's as if crypto makes Ponzi schemes seem more acceptable than outright theft.
And anyone who's shoved an AI agent into an automated process without some form of logging deserves to be fired with prejudice. Just because it's been assigned a label with 'AI' in it doesn't give it a free pass; if anything, it should be monitored a lot more stringently than normally developed code.
"With Starship's ability to deliver unprecedented tonnage to orbit..."
Citation needed. Last time I checked, it's only managed to get a single banana to the Indian ocean. This is no different to the Tesla, "We'll build a million Optimus robots a year," bullshit. Also, no mention of who is going to fund these launches as SpaceX have already burnt through over $3Billion of taxpayers cash developing Starship to it's current stage for supposed Moon and Mars missions. At this rate, the sun will be going nova by the time Starshit Starship is ready...
He missed out adding, "I'm confident that..." at the start. Mind you, as he professes to know more about manufacturing than anyone else currently alive on Earth, he probably knows what he's talking about so we need to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Or more ketamine. Probably.
That's a good euphemism for, 'further enshittifying our cloud offerings.'
“reflects low customer demand for standalone offerings, increased instances of unintended or nonstandard usage, and higher operational costs associated with maintaining these plans.”
'Low customer demand' is probably because these plans weren't pushed as aggressively as the suites so people missed them.
'Unintended or nonstandard usage' will be people choosing these as it's just cheaper cloud storage, not because of the quality of the service.
'Higher operational costs associated with maintaining these plans.' Nope, it's because MS have identified an area where customers product aren't getting price gouged yet, and that needs remedying.
There's probably also not enough AI rammed into these areas either, so naturally this also needs addressing paying for so just sit back, shut up and enjoy the new offerings. We're doing you a favour mate.
Well he said the usual Musk Bullshit Bingo master phrase, "I'm confident that...", which means it's never going to happen. Why the hell do people still, after fifteen or so years of this, hang on to his every word as if he's some sort of genius or messiah? He isn't, and that has been proven time and time again when numerous of his prophecies have never materialised and most never will.
A million Optimus robots a year? That will never happen. Perhaps, at some point, if they keep plugging away at it for a while, they may assemble a million of them, but every year? Not gonna happen. And stopping making two models of car this next year, but replacing them with what? The 'new' roadster touted as 'in production' eight years ago that they took $2.5B dollars in deposits for but that doesn't exist? The one which has performance and range which breaks both the laws of physics and all existing battery technology? Jesus, give me a break.
The only thing I can see are class action lawsuits, and these are well overdue.
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