* Posts by hitmouse

519 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Dec 2008

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Australia has no next-gen HPC investment plan and clouds can't fill the gap

hitmouse

This has been a known problem in Australian research circles for a long time, with infrastructure further crippled by a decade of the LNP desire to punish universities for being idealogically unsound. Any money they appeared to give (usually medical) research was robbed from another part of the pre-existing pie. Also there's no way for researchers to contribute their funds to a HPC pool so theyy go and buy something flashy ad put it under a desk and hope that nobody realises that the building heating, aircon and physical security aren't equipped to manage these.

Researchers basically have to courier hard drives between research institutions and HPC resources because they can't move mult-TB to PB data sets over the wires fast enough.

University chops students' Microsoft 365 storage to 20GB

hitmouse

Re: "over half of all data stored by organizations not serving a useful purpose"

The actual valuable research data with lifespan protection controls is supposed to be kept in managed research storage, not students personal accounts.

If a warrant's coming, then it's for leaking data to unauthorised people.

hitmouse

Individual storage for stufent accounts is quite a different thing to the storage actually needed for teaching and research.

Students mismanage data to about the same degree as most academics, and it's frankly dangerous to have it available on unmanaged devices.

20GB is more than adequate for .most students and prevents the inevitable use of it for storing pirated media and backups of their personal files.

Microsoft Forms feature request still not sorted after SEVEN years

hitmouse

Date with destiny to be never actioned

There's also no way to make your date-fields follow a mask like DD-MM-YY

The date data collected is thus completely at the mercy of user browser language settings (which are usually defaulting to English(US) and 0.00001% of users know how to change browser settings).

That has also been a user request since forever.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-forms/date-formatting/m-p/632288 gives you an idea of some of the pain

Digital memories are disappearing and not even AI or Google can help

hitmouse

Re: A strikingly important article

At one point I had over 3000 music CDs. Now I have maybe 200 collectable/memorabilia-grade CDs amd everything is digitised, booklets and all.

One of the reasons I accelerated that move was finding so many of the CDs (and a good few DVDs) had degraded beyond recall. As often as not, the nice collectable box-sets rather than the cheap compilations.

Between local backups and the cloud, I don't think I've lost anything in 20 years and the metadata makes everything very findable. In fact with cover scans and PDFs of booklets being searchable I often turn up interesting details that may have been lost of on a shelf.

It would be nice if the algorithms that Google and Microsoft employ for photo management allowed such recall, but they have a lot of problems with dates even when the EXIF metadata is correct, so I invariably rely on subfolders with dates to locate stuff.

From Joaquin Phoenix to Rowan Atkinson, we enjoyed your Musk movie casting calls

hitmouse

Stephen Root in a mashup of his roles as Jimmy James (NewsRadio), Milton with the stapler* (OfficeSpace) and late-stage Monroe Fuchs (Barry) would capture it all.

Maybe the next Xitter logo should be a red stapler.

Soundtrack song: "Musktwat Love" opening with the America version, closing with Captain and Tennille.

X/Twitter booted out of Australia's disinformation-fighting club

hitmouse

Waiting for Muskspace to be relegated to the /usr/bin/dust of history.

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

hitmouse

Nick Furry leading?

Telco CEO quits after admitting she needs to carry rivals' SIM cards to stay in touch

hitmouse

Re: DR Strategy

Given patchy Optus coverage even near the centre of large Australian cities, it's also a way for Optus execs to avoid slumming it with their users.

Ocne you're more than a few Belgiums away from a capital city there's no Optus coverage,e ven on highways.

Major telco outage leaves millions of Australians disconnected

hitmouse

Re: No cash?

Optus has perpetual dead-spots in areas within 5km of downtown Sydney CBD that get no attention.

Reporting them to Optus (with signal-strength analytics) is about as effective as writing it on my forehead in crayon.

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

hitmouse

Re: Cognitive dissonance

YouTube is pushing through with huge hikes to premium rates this year "to fund new features". I told the YouTube staffer that the only feature I want is "no ads".

"But the music you get included" he whined.

"-every streaming service is throwing in music already". I'm not paying for it again.

So I cancelled my family subscription. The only way I could make it slightly feasible would be to convince friends who are paying for YouTube already to join my family plan.

So YouTube either loses some subscribers entirely, loses some to a cheaper plan or I use my time better and watch less ad-supported content.

It is 2023 and Excel's reign of date terror might finally be at an end

hitmouse

Re: Optional

The text file import wizard has been around for decades and handles 90% of the issues that people have complained about quite smoothly. I've shown it to a number of people who couldn't be bothered to RTFM and they've generally reacted with "it was that easy????"

SEC boss warns it's 'nearly unavoidable' that AI will cause financial crash

hitmouse

I've already trained my AI trading engine to focus on innocuous subjects like tulips. /smug

HP reveals bonkers $5k foldable tablet/laptop/desktop

hitmouse

As long as you can fondle it, it's a fondleslab.

hitmouse

The "A4" in the title is inaccurate. The device might be A4, but the wide bottom bezel reduces it to 13.3" screen, which is about a 15% reduction in area. When you're playing piano music with a lot of chords or annotations, that makes a difference!

hitmouse

I would like a lower-powered version just for the screen. That gives me one-two pages of music at a piano or on a music-stand.

Unfortunately most fondleslabs top out at less than 14.4" needed for an A4 page (or the aspect ratio is all wrong, optimised for movies). I blame reviewers who now all complain if a device is heavier than a Starbucks grande latte and forget 1990s laptops that weighed as much as a bicycle.

Lost voices, ignored words: Apple's speech recognition needs urgent reform

hitmouse

Microsoft's English recognition is pretty good, but it has made little effort outside of US vocal dialects and spelling. If you switch to British or Australian (for example) in Teams then you have a double issue with reco being poorer and ludicrous homophones being used in transcript e.g. someone thinks that "cheques" is uniformly used where "checks" is uttered. See also "draughts", "philtres" and a number of other default renderings even when grammatically incorrect.

Microsoft promises to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for next decade. Sony believes it

hitmouse

These are not the days of yore with Ballmer's paranoia causing inertia in Microsoft's product lines Today's Microsoft is busy churning out apps and services for Linux, Android and Apple platforms. They're not going to miss an opportunity to make PS bucks as well.

Take Sony's reservations as projection. That is a company that will self-sabotage with whole new hardware platforms in order to retain control.

Microsoft to hike prices in Australia and New Zealand

hitmouse

It's a pity Microsoft doesn't provide parity of service or features with its US product in other countries despite charging price parity.

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

hitmouse

Re: Don't know what you've lost till it's gone.....

But many of these venues manually set the higher fee irrespective of whether you use a credit or debit card.

hitmouse

Run it through Microsoft Speech transcription

If you set your language to English(UK) or English(Asutralia) it transcribes every utterance of "check" as "cheque"

So even if you're just talking about "checks and balances", "check in on someone", "a pattern with checks", it all comes out as "cheques and balances", "cheque in on someone", "a pattern with cheques", ...

Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

hitmouse

I tried to enter words in a US newspaper word puzzle last month. "Cracker" was not permissible, but their lists of allowable words included "titty, titties, ..." That circles back to the issue of why male nipples in photos are permissible but female ones aren't.

hitmouse

Google Photos doesn't allow you to search for photos with words that (only Americans I guess) would find unseemly, even if the photos and albums are labelled with those words. I have photos from European towns that have been labelled automatically (via encoding) with words that have a different meaning in English, but Google slams its "one-size fits all languages and cultures" approach.

AFACIT OneDrive and Dropbox don't have this issue with the same files and words.

Microsoft can't stop injecting Copilot AI into every corner of its app empire

hitmouse

Re: Essentially

Or government departments relying on Chinese walls between them, but they're all in the same tenant.

hitmouse

Re: AI, AI, AI!

Still can't get either of them to consistently recognise that if I'm outside the US then my dates are not mm/dd/yyyy. They keep making inferences which are ABS(12-mm) months wrong.

Academics have 'no confidence' in Edinburgh University's response to its Oracle disaster

hitmouse

You expect a university to practice the skills it sells to students?

Can I interest in an Honorary LOL.D ?

Here's how Microsoft hopes to inject ChatGPT into all your apps and bots via Azure

hitmouse

Data residency

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft manages data residency at national and tenant levels with respect to the overall training set

Latest Windows 11 build shares desktop real estate with, er, Spotify

hitmouse

Re: Just say no

You'll know you've succeeded when your USB devices stop working.

hitmouse

Oh great, a widget that re-installs itself every time I want to use it.

Polish for Windows Spotlight and tabs for Notepad in latest Insiders build

hitmouse

Re: Polish for Windows Spotlight and ...

You're going to love the Vantabold text setting.

Microsoft fumbles zero trust upgrade for some Asian customers

hitmouse

Microsoft can't even handle non US dates for most of its services these days, so double-byte issues is just the tip of the technical-debtberg.

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

hitmouse

I vote for Iago, Jafar's offsider from Aladdin.

"Personality. Iago is very stingy and typically allies himself with whoever benefits him the most. He's characterized with a frequent useage of biting sarcasm as well as a sharp wit."

Having his tweets read in the voice of the late Gilbert Gottfried is a bonus.

The IT decision-maker that really matters? Your pet

hitmouse

Re: Why?

1. Add kitty collar with temperature sensor

2. The entire neighbourhood receives quotes for under-floor insulation.

hitmouse

"My dog goes absolutely mental when you say "Alexa" "

So does Jeff Bezos

France says non to Office 365 and Google Workspace in school

hitmouse

It's more the sheer antipathy of French office workers to the concept of productivity (which I've heard expressed quite emotionally in customer market research groups) and the clear desire to avoid any electronic paper trail of decisions or accountability.

hitmouse

"There is no reason to."

University staff and students literally squirrel inappropriate data into any IT storage system available to them. The only rhyme or reason given is "for backup".

Email is commonly used to route copies of sensitive data despite explicit instructions against it. Students learn this from the example of senior academics and Medics. Universities don't discipline this sort of behaviour.

hitmouse

This is notably a problem where university students involved in medical degrees may be given Google accounts which means that they can be illegally transmitting patient-related medical information to the US.

Microsoft leaves the Office, rebrands everything as 365

hitmouse

That was a penetrating observation.

hitmouse

Re: Survey missing option

You must spend a lot of time evaluating 20 years' worth of new features in a dozen applications!

When are we gonna stop calling it ransomware? It's just data kidnapping now

hitmouse

Re: Not Data KIdnapping but Datanapping.

That's going to pose problems when i explain my afternoon catnapping.

Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister

hitmouse

Re: Is the UK Government still a thing?

New policy is to erode the cliff until the entirety of UK is at sea level.

There can be only one... Microsoft Excel Champion

hitmouse

Re: Excel is why we can't have a simple "quick'n'dirty" database app in Windows

User inability to conceptualise relational databases is the main reason, or their desire to treat every problem as the nail matching the hammer they've mastered. Hence the resourceful person who haunted user forums in the 90s with the relational database they built with Word tables and WordBASIC.

Users mostly want tables with some cleverness, hence so many focused tools for table management.

The sins of OneDrive as Microsoft's cloud storage service turns 15

hitmouse

OneDrive has to sync to multiple client OS, so path length, allowable characters etc are lowest common denominator for those and various web standards.

The number of files limits are well documented. There's a single page (easily locateable via web search) detailing limits.

"a customer couldn't restore a file because it said she had it open. She didn't. Then it wouldn't let me view files online because the option just disappeared from the right-click menu." Probably created files or folders past the path length limit. I've seen this behaviour.

Microsoft tests CD ripping for Media Player in Windows 11

hitmouse

Let me introduce you to the concept of a "driver"...

hitmouse

Lame MP3, FLAC and other add-ons for WMP have been around for free for many years. Anyone who can string two search terms together would have found them. It's the codec licensing issues (copyleft in one case) that have precluded shipping with Windows in the past

hitmouse

Re: Centred start

Microsoft had prerelease builds of Windows in the late 90s with a centred start button. It's not as if it's such a blindingly unobvious design choice as to require copying,

The movement from mouse-centred to pen/finger-centric selection in the intervening decades is more relevant as Fitt's law issues are weighed differently.

hitmouse

Microsoft did have a tool focussed on ripping LP and cassette in the late 90s. It had some UI for how gaps and tracks were mapped, and to deal with audio books.

First-ever James Webb Space Telescope image revealed

hitmouse

Re: Larger still

And then have a referendum to vote ourselves out of contact with them

UK Info Commissioner slams use of WhatsApp by health officials during pandemic

hitmouse

Re: Here's a clue bozos!

If you use Teams chat (as mandated in many regulated environments) it's rated for medical privacy and content is not cached locally.

However you can't tell a doctor that they've made a choice showing they aren't brilliant in technology understanding...as they just stare you down and say "people will die" .... mic drop.

hitmouse

They gave their data to everyone. If they used WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger then the transmitted images land in local phone storage where they are freely available to any backup provider plus random image app vendors

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