Posts by mark l 2

AI PC is just a marketing gimmick Intel and Microsoft have dreamed up as a way of trying to flog you a new PC, because now your 12 month old PC doesn't have a NPU and copilot key so isn't AI.

No doubt all those early adopters who do rush out this year to buy an AI PC will find out come 2026 that they actually need one with the latest V2 AI chip to run most of the stuff that actually comes out as those original AI chips had huge security vulnerabilities because they were rushed out to ride the AI wave and had to be patched later which made them run the AI stuff like a potato..

"Speaking to The Register at the time, a spokesperson for the House Energy and Commerce Committee said there were no publicly available examples of enemies purchasing US data from brokers."

Does the spokesperson really believe the scum that are these data brokers won't happily take money from anyone who is willing to pay them for the information? I suspect you could be contact them as 'We love taking drugs and beating our spouses organisation' they would still sell you the data if you offered them enough $$$. So some foreign entity who sets up a shell company will have no problems with obtaining US citizens data from them.

Tesla has been over valued for a long time, on share price they are worth more than several big car combined yet sell a fraction of the vehicles that those other companies do. Eventually the bubble was going to burst on the Tesla share price once all the none die hard Musk / Tesla fans realised the cars are actually pretty shoddily built for something your paying £40k to £130k for.

Whether Roku implements this on their TVs or not, if the patent is granted - which if its been filed in the US patent office it probably will be considering previous patents they have allowed. Then some company is bound to consider licensing it from Roku to implement in their own TVs so either way Roku will be making money from it.

Yet another reason to leave your smart TV's unconnected from the network. As if i am watching some 'adult' content from a device hooked up via HDMI, i don't want my TV analyzing what im watching and sending it off to their ad servers to show me targeted ads based on what im watching in private.

I've not noticed a problem with SmartTube on my Fire stick when I was watching videos on their earlier. But i do use the intra app so I can use my own encrypted DNS with Adguard and this also blocks some of the Google ad and tracker domains. I am not sure if that will help bypass Googles attempt to block 3rd party YT apps?

"Górny argued for an AI ban for three major reasons: potential copyright infringement, quality control issues, and ethical considerations over AI's high power consumption and the role of major corporations in shaping the technology."

Surely if power consumption were really a huge issue for the Gentoo team they would also look at how their distro operates? As running a system with Gentoo means your using more power to install and update a Gentoo system over something like RHEL or Ubuntu. Since with Gentoo you have to compile most apps yourself from source which means your CPU load is higher, the system draws more power and needs to be running for longer than if you were just downloading a precompiled binary.

FYI i do have a system that runs Gentoo at home, which acts as a freeview DVR, so i know how long an update can take to do.

Ive never bought a new car ive always had used, and I know EVs are going to be the best option going forward to wean ourselves of oil but they are ridiculously expensive so im not paying £30k for a new EV. If BYD can sell cars for $10,000 im all for buying a Chinese EV, as once they get to a couple of years old that puts them in the price range of what am willing to pay for a car these days.

And i don't care if a Chinese car is spying on me, as with all the tracking online and the huge number of CCTV cameras we have in the UK, im already being tracked by people who I consider equally as untrustworthy as the CCP.

Depending on how well it performs for 16 Euro + tax per month you would struggle to get a dedicated X86 or ARM server for that price, so it could well be worth the while if you really want the benefit of running on bare metal over a VPS. Assuming what you want to run on it supports RISC-V

Of course it will start with digital ID for buying alcohol to protect underage kids, and end up with it being required for doing everything from claiming benefits, open bank accounts or sign up for a social media account before a decade is over once the mission creep kicks in.

He revealed in the interview that he largely avoids "the social web," but gets a lot of fun out of watching TikTok "even if it's just for rescuing dog videos and stuff."

My sister works for a animal rescue charity (Four Paws) and I hate to break it to Woz but unless the video is posted by a verifiable animal rescue charity, there is a high chance that those viral animal rescue videos on he likes to watch are fakes, just done to purely get views and donations. And often the animal is deliberately put into peril just so they can then make a rescue video.

Did Tinycorp really expect AMD to open source their firmware just because some AI startup had issues with the speed they fix bugs with their GPUs?

"...which means it is capable of downlink speeds of up to 4.2 Gbps on 5G networks, rather than the 5 Gbps or 10 Gbps supported by the Snapdragon 8 series."

Is anyone actually getting anywhere near to the maximum 4.2 Gbps 5G speed never mind 5 or 10 Gbps on their phone?

And the next question is even if you can get 5Gbps or 10Gbps what do you need that speed for?

Even if you're uploading a live stream 4K 60fps video that only really takes about 50Mbps of upload speed and watching a 4K video stream on your phone you can get away with half of that bandwidth.

And the largest mobile games are usually around 8GB which on a 50Mbps connection you could download in less than 3 minutes.

Maybe if you were using your phone as a wireless hotspot to provide internet to several devices then i could see having GB speeds useful, but this is surely the exceptional use rather than what most people are needing when out and about with your phone?

Since Trump publically stated the other day that he doesn't think Tiktok should be banned in the US because it will just give Zuckerberg's social networks more power, I suspect Trump to announce he will kill this bill if he gets re-elected and he can campaign on that promise to try and get the youth votes. And then all the Republicans that now support it will suddenly disown it for fear of angering the Orange one.

Isn't it odd that Republicans and democrats can agree on a bipartisan bill to stop the evils of Tiktok, but on actual threats to Americans such as the environment, gun control, affordable healthcare they are poles apart.

A friend of mine was given a Amazon gift card for their birthday but didn't particular want anything from Amazon at the time, but saw they had Costa gift cards for sale on Amazon and as they regularly went into Costa they figured it they could make use of that.

But apparently buying another gift card with an Amazon gift card balance goes against their T&Cs, so Amazon cancelled their order and refused to refund the amount back to their Amazon account, so they lost £20 worth of money from their gift card.

The moral is if wanna give someone a gift card they can spend on Amazon? Don't! Just give them cash which they can spend in pretty much ANY business without specific T&Cs on what is allowed or not.

And if you must buy from ScAMazon at least if you pay with a credit or debit card so you can contact your bank if you have any issues, but using an gift card leaves you high and dry when the company that issues the card set the rules on how to use them.

While i think Trump is an idiot, he might be clever enough to realize hes much better off staying off Twitter and just posting on Truth social. As if he does become president again that surely going to drive a lot more eyeballs onto his own platform where he can't get kicked off no matter what he says or his posts marked as unverified information (or whatever it is they do for complete bull5hit that he usually posts about election fraud and conspiracies)

And if he fails to get elected all the MAGA numpties can use Truth to organize storm the capitol part 2, and buy some Trump merch while doing it.

Considering at one point you could prompt Chat GPT to generate Windows activation keys which were obviously scraped from publicly available sources, but then as soon as MS got wind of that they shut down that function to replace it with a notice on how piracy = bad.

So MS clearly don't like their own works being in Open AI's LLM if it might loose Microsoft money, but are happy with other peoples work being scraped without permission.

Am I correct in the wording of he article that you now cannot directly message a another user on Twixter unless you pay for a subscription or the other part has paid and message you first?

I mean if Elons goals is to drive all the free users off the platform to another one where you can message for free, then hes doing good work with that. Maybe he just wants only the die hard Musk fanbois left on Twixter as surely they would be dumb enough to pay a monthly fee to use it?

If i recall Partition magic was nuked when Symantec bought out the developers Powerquest, they also aquired the PQDI drive imaging software which they rolled the tech into Norton Ghost, but removed some of the handy facilities such as the ability to boot a PC directly into the drive cloning software from a restore floppy or CD to create the drive images.

But then that seemed to happen a lot in the early 2000s, Symantec went on an acquisition spree buying up several companies and making the products that eventually came out worse than they were before Symantec got involved.

I am guessing iOS must phone home to the Apple mothership informing them on how many PWAs iPhone user install then? Considering they seem to know how many people make use of that feature?

Not that i don't expect Android does the same back to Google and a lot more besides. Although at least you can go down the E/OS or Lineage route to get rid of Google from Android where as there is no Apple free iOS device.

My first experience of QNX was around the turn of the millennium, they had a demo which had the a whole GUI, with TCP/IP stack, web browser, text editor and file explorer which fit on just one floppy disk.

You could also down a free ISOs for QNX 6.1 and I remembering burning that to a CDR (i still probably have the disc somewhere) and trying it on a Pentium 3. It was a fully functional OS that you could use as a daily driver, although the number of applications were limited as I think it was mainly aimed at developers looking to write programs for QNX.

So does this mean that the promise of being able to rid Windows of Edge in the EU is down gone with this chance in ruling, and it will still be there trying to force its way as the default browser after every Windows update?

Its mainly because even when services do allow better forms of 2FA such as TOTP they still require you provide a mobile number to 'prove identity'.

Paypal do this even though i have 2FAset up with TOTP they often still require i prove i am 'real' by having them send me a SMS which considering i don't get a phone signal in my office means i have to go outside an wave my mobile about like a madman to do something i have already done by logging in with a much more secure 2FA method

AFAIK security patches still work if you are running an unactivated Windows 10 install, as I have a VM with unactivated Windows 10 and it still works with Windows update to get patches. I know this because i only usually boot it up every few months and there is always a fsck ton of patches to download every time I do.

I think Microsoft do this to stop huge botnets of insecure PCs getting created because they didn't activate Windows.

Microsoft's ability to give themselves an advantage when it comes to licenses for their own software, is the main reason they are able to be successful with Azure and so they won't want to give that up anytime soon to see AWS and others start to take away a slice of their cloudy pie.

My father bought a 64GB Integral USB memory stick from a Tesco at Christmas so I could copy some videos from my PC onto it for him, and it was terrible!

I was trying to copy about 60GB of videos to it and i was getting max of 6MB/s transfer speeds, sometimes down to 3MB/s so it took me hours.

For a while I was even wondering if it was one of those dodgy ones that would report an incorrect capacity and start overwriting data after it filled up a couple of GB, but all the 60GB of data was accessible once it eventually copied over

If i compare it to my few year old 32GB Kingston Datatraveller G3 on the same PC i can get in the region of 70MB/S write speeds on that.

I have been trying to find a reliable USB stick with quality NAND to use a portable SSD, as the M.2 enclosures are a bit to big for my needs but not found one yet.

"it looks like there will be at least one more hurrah for Windows 11 before the operating system moves to maintenance, and something with a less toxic brand takes center stage."

The only way the next version would be less toxic brand is if they dropped the Windows brand name altogether, which tbh i wouldn't put it pass MS marketing dept to do at some point, after all they have already dropped the Office from Office 365 so maybe it will just be 'Microsoft Copilot 12 Professional'

It the issue that there is zero cost to Microsoft to provide Azure customers with Windows, Office or any other Microsoft software license, even if they put it down as a cost for accounting purposes they aren't charging themselves a license fee for their own software. Where as any other cloud provider is having to charge that fee or absorb the cost themselves to stay competitive.

Now sure other cloud providers do this with their own software too,but the problem i MS have a huge monopoly on the desktop and office productivity software space that other cloud providers can't compete with on a level playing field.

Windows 2000 was the only time in the last 24 years when Microsoft Windows naming conventions made sense, you had Windows 2000 server and professional editions.

Since then its been a complete mess of names, numbers and dates, and its about time they just settled upon a standard naming convention for both the desktop and server versions.

I am surpised to took Google so long to get an Arm version of Chrome onto Windows ARM, unless they thought the user base was just too small to bother with the effort?

"The base tier will run you $31/mo and gets you access to 2 vCPUs, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage"

Cloud PCs are ok if you only need them for a short term usage, but after a couple of months worth of cloud PC subscription fees you could have just bought a refurbished ex business PC such as a Dell Optiplex or Lenovo Thinkcentre which would have much better, CPU, RAM, GPU and storage.

And if you need the ability to it access it remotely then install something like Teamviewer or Chrome remote desktop on it.

I guess all Huawei need is for Wechat to get ported to Harmony OS and that will probably be enough for a lot of Chinese users to consider it, as that has its own app store inside it.

I doubt its going to make much in roads outside of China though, iOS and Android are too entrenched in the west for a 3rd ecosystem to be able to get a large enough market share to encourage devs to port their apps over.

I really hope my 15 year old Epson carries on for a while longer, as its from a time when printers didn't require an internet connection, and it works with 3rd party inks which i can pick up for less than £3 a cartridge on ebay. And it still prints great quality photos after all these years and I have it plugged into a router running OpenWRT so i can print over the network to it.

If the TPB and other torrent sites can be blocked for piracy and copyright infringement for merely linking to where to download copyrighted materials, then surely slurping up vast quantities and spitting it out from your LLM is clearly a infringement on the original artist copyright if you did not pay to license the content?

And OpenAI have admitted that a public domain only trained AI would be sub par, so they therefore should have paid to license the copyright content they are training it on if they wish to make it a commercial product.