Posts by Michael Strorm

Re: Whose images?

> The individual photo become advertising and loss leaders.

If he's an established photographer, his reputation should be good enough by now that he shouldn't still need to be doing it For The Exposure any more.

I mean, that's the whole point that it's supposed to justify- you accept this early on for exposure to gain a reputation you can build your career on.

So if someone in that position is still having to give away their best, most commercially-appealing work for peanuts, what's the point?

Assuming- as I said- they *are* genuinely doing it for a living, and not just a hobbyist bolstering their ego by kidding themselves they're a professional because Getty/Alamy/whoever has their image on their site.

Mini atomic reactors are the answer to all our power needs, or my name's not Ford Nucleon.

There's a creepy Fallout-esque "Atomic Age" vibe to the whole thing.

Are they going to be running the software on an IBM 650?

Re: Ah, the 80's...

> Why quit? Just say no.

Exactly what I was thinking. Why do the boss a favour when you can put the onus on him?

The worst he can do is sack you anyway, the outcome of which would likely be a case for unfair dismissal he'd almost certainly lose. (Unless such risks had been already clearly and explicitly-agreed in advance as part of the job contract, something I assume OP- and most other people- would refuse in the first place unless they were promised danger money).

Similarly, even if they were a contractor rather than an employee, I doubt even the most reasonable ones would go along with that unless- again- it was already an agreed part of their contract.

Re: I'm happy

Amazon is already ten feet deep in metaphorical chicken shit, and has been for a long time. The only question is when- or if- this will eventually start to hurt their profits. Doesn't appear to have done so yet, unfortunately.

I'll admit that I always preferred the VW Beetle to either- at least in looks, have never driven one- but regardless, I have to be point out... you *are* talking about cars that are three quarters of a century old! (*)

(*) Almost precisely; according to Wikipedia, the 2CV and Morris Minor were first publicly exhibited on 7 October 1948 and 27 October 1948 respectively, putting them within weeks of both their 75th anniversaries.

Re: Welcome to the new corporate Register

In short, they're monopolistic rent seekers.

They "understand" well enough...

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get Big Tech to "understand" privacy when their entire business models are built upon wilfully "not understanding" it.

Re: PCs? That's nothing

It's not real if it's not plugged into a MicroVitec CUB.

That aside, isn't the problem with connecting 8-bit computers to higher-resolution, pin-sharp displays in general that it simply emphasises the lower-resolution blockiness of the graphics that was hidden on smaller displays and by analogue artifacting and degradation?

I find that games often look *worse* under emulators for this reason.

Re: Freight train

Or an American or Association Football field?

Apparently it *did* run in 32MB (just)

Couldn't remember off the top of my head, but a quick check confirms my suspicion that while the minimum RAM for regular XP was implausibly low but not quite *that* low- 64MB apparently- I'd have expected the embedded version to work with less.

And indeed, the minimum RAM for Windows XP Embedded *is* apparently 32MB.

(Side note; though I notice "Windows XP Embedded" apparently isn't the same thing as "Windows XP for Embedded Systems" or any of the other embedded versions of XP?

Then again, MS wouldn't be MS if their marketing department ever stopped giving confusingly similar names to different things. Or, for that matter, 27 confusingly different names for the same thing.)

BT doesn't even really count in the first place- it's less than forty years old in anything like its current form as a privately-owned business.

It's only over a century old if you include its entire history dating back- ironically- to the nationalisation of the telephone industry. For around half its life it was part of the General Post Office (which as far as I can tell was legally a government department and not even a company, let alone privately-owned) and still under public ownership as part of the reformed Post Office until privatisation in the mid-1980s, just a few years after it was actually renamed "British Telecom".

Re: Where are the backups?

> The customers' customers, of course, will probably complain about CloudNordic's customers (their own service providers) not having their own backups

It's resellers failing to back up all the way down.

Re: Dad Jokes

Did some tumbleweed blow past as the bell of a small church rang in the distance and a dog barked?

Dem girls, dem girls, yeah yeah yeah

According to Wikipedia, Zig was the name of the stupid one, and Zag less so- as far as The Big Breakfast went- but apparently they'd been more the other way round when they first appeared on Irish TV, where they originated.

Maybe the thick server stopped getting in the way of the good one?

Re: Musk would only stand a chance of winning ..

"Fujitsu"

Re: The infernal spreadsheet

> VisiCalc and Lotus Notes

I assume you mean the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 (as the document seems to imply) rather than Notes.

Lotus were later more associated with the infamous Notes, but Lotus 1-2-3 was their original "big" product until, as you note, Excel ripped it off and used MS's market dominance to replace it in the market.

(1-2-3 had in turn ripped off and taken over from Visicalc, which you also mention).

Re: Am I missing something?

That's a really good, clear explanation of speculative execution vulnerabilities- thank you.

Re: With apologies to Jam "OH YEAH" Tronik

Pffft, worrying about Phil Collins? First world problems...

Oh, think twice.

'Cause it's another day for you and me in paradise.

Oh, OH YEAH, think twice

Oh, think twice, 'cause it's another day for you

You and me in paradise.

"There are centuries of that, mostly out of copyright, that could be used for training."

Someone took up your suggestion, and have announced what they hope will be the first AI-generated #1 chart hit, "Summer is icumen in again".

Re: "Incandescently stupid..."--Miles Taylor.

> Anyone heard anything further? You won't. Typical Musk.

Which proves he's not *quite* so incandescently stupid- or rather, brave enough- to actually put his money where his shite-spewing mouth is.

Of course, it's well-known that he'd have backtracked similarly on his announced purchase of Twitter in the same way, if he hadn't made the mistake of saying something with legally-binding consequences he was forced to follow through on.

Re: AI classifier is no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy

Yo dawg, etc.

Re: Please step away from the rose-tinted glasses.

I don't disagree with that. I was only taking exception with the implication that DOS' "flexibility" made it a good OS when that "flexibility" was really just a result of how primitive it was, even at the time.

Re: Moron alert. Again

The majority have already lost their jobs since he took it over.

He's blaming rival Brexiteers, not

Don't mistake that for an acknowledgement by Farage and his ilk that Brexit was a mistake and they were wrong- quite the opposite.

He's blaming someone else for fucking it up.

In fact, it's essentially another blame-shifting excuse that, back at the time of the vote, I correctly predicted we'd see from Brexiteers once it turned out not to have delivered the promised unicorns and rainbows.

Not that Brexit was fundamentally flawed, but that others had fouled up (political rivals) or sabotaged (e.g. the EU and "Remoaners") their Glorious Vision of Sunlit Uplands we didn't get because they Didn't Believe Enough.

Of course, with a huckster like Farage, where Brexit was always closely tied to his own personal interests, ego and advancement, it's easy- and beneficial- for him to be able to point to the Tories (the ones who robbed him of his power by- in effect- stealing his clothes and becoming UKIP themselves) and blame them.

Warning: Contains mixed metaphors

> if you check Google's conditions, or Facebook's, you will find that you signed away all your rights [to] free content

This assumes that *you* were the one who uploaded *your* content to Google or Facebook in the first place.

But, of course, much- if not most- content will have been posted or reposted to those services by random third parties. The majority of whom likely neither own the content nor had the permission to do so, making any (implicit) agreement to permissions they never had the right to grant irrelevant. (*)

Unless they have some other, watertight way of determining which permissions they *actually* have- i.e. those that are worth the paper they're written on or the digital equivalent- the whole thing is a can of worms, a house of cards built on a loose approach to copyright and permissions that has now come home to roost.

(*) Yeah, they could theoretically sue your Aunt who uploaded that funny cat picture for implicitly agreeing to let them redistribute a tenth-generation copy of a stock-photo without permission, but they won't, and it wouldn't solve the problem that they didn't have that permission regardless.

$55 billion here, $55 billion there.

Pretty soon it adds up to real money.

Lettuce not imply that Truss was a joke.

Re: As someone who does not and will not ever have either a twatter or a zuck imitation account

As I said when they proposed that (PR-stunt) cage fight between the two of them, they needed to set it up like Thunderdome, except with one fewer men allowed to leave.