Posts by petef

After 3 years, Windows 11 has more than half Windows 10's market share

Think of the copilot

For many, Windows 10 is just fine.

But, but AI.

Microsoft rolls out one Teams app to rule them all

Re: Why can't they fix

You are being kind in limiting your list of Teams failings.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Re: The fault's with Microsoft

People who normally watch Sky?

EU's renewable hydrogen plan needs a 'reality check'

Re: Full circle?

You can think of it as an energy store. Electrolyse when the wind is blowing.

Latest Ghostscript vulnerability haunts experts as the next big breach enabler

Obligatory XKCD

Perseverance pays off as Mars rover's SHERLOC brought back from the brink

Obligatory XKCD 695

Biden bans Kaspersky: No more sales, updates in US

Consider what you are paying for, especially in the context of security of your machines. Can you be certain that you are getting a bona fide product? Likely != certain.

Tiny solid-state battery promises to pack a punch in pocket gadgets

Re: Capacity

My comment about Rayovac 13 was a reply to the figures for a CR2032 and so I adopted the same parameters.

Battery University is an extensive resource for all things about batteries.

Re: Capacity

A Rayovac 13 zinc air button cell is typically used in heading aids.

Its data sheet has 136 h at 2 mA and average 1.25 V giving 340 mWh. Volume is 0.26 cc implying 1300 Wh/L.

Venerable ICQ messaging service to end operations in June

Obligatory XKCD

Bing and Copilot fall from the clouds around the world

DuckDuckGone

Microsoft, Google do a victory lap around passkeys

"As of 2023, that number had increased 3,378 percent to more than 4,000 per second." [from 115]

So it could have been worse, it might have been 3379%.

Torvalds intentionally complicates his use of indentation in Linux Kconfig

Postel's Law considered harmful

Postel's Law which whilst admirable in 1980 has since become discouraged for reasons of security.

Judge refuses to Ctrl-Z divorce order made by a misclick

What AC says.

My take when I read about this in The Times was that (a) a divorce was being sought, they intended to establish finances before completion and (b) the computer made it easier but it would also have happened if shifting papers.

Some 300,000 IPs vulnerable to this Loop DoS attack

TFTP on the public Internet. That's a thing?

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

Re: They have a point...

Earlier this morning they let me register with my surname of '); DROP TABLE Students;--

Psst … wanna jailbreak ChatGPT? Thousands of malicious prompts for sale

"We have not yet detected any malware operating in this manner" - sounds like the bad guys are doing a good job then.

Microsoft admits issues with Windows 10 patch almost 2 months after release

Re: My system is slow. …

A slightly less hairy solution is to add a couple of registry keys to turn off Copilot.

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

> Instead pilots will see through what NASA calls the "eXternal Vision System," a 4K monitor fed by a set of high-resolution video cameras.

The SPV (admittedly a land vehicle not available until 2068) used a video screen for the backward-facing driver.

Windows boss takes on taskbar turmoil, pledges to 'make Start menu great again'

Windows?

You would hope that a product called Windows would do a half decent job remembering where Joe user had positioned them. Windows 11 does a marginally better job than its predecessors but that is still rubbish. Worst is Teams which continues to select its own size and monitor regardless of where I last put it.

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

Re: Great. We're getting there

Denmark apparently. I use ISO 8601 as a matter of course and get some way there with a ~/.i18n containing

LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8

Wot, you mean it's not interpreted as octal for 83?

Researcher bags two-for-one deal on Linux bugs while probing GNOME component

libcu*.so

libcurl and libcue. Watch out for vulnerabilities in CUPS and curses next.

Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard

Reduced battery life

The lifespan of the car battery will be lessened by the extra charging cycles.

It is also a waste of energy compared with a Powerwall type solution. You can apportion some of the car battery's weight to V2G and it is not efficient to be lugging that around with you.

Microsoft Edge still forcing itself on users in Europe

I'm no Microsoft apologist but in my recent firing up of Windows 10 (22H2) I notice that Settings has stopped bugging me that my browser settings are sub-optimal. I forget the exact wording but the essence used to be that M$ thought that I should be using Edge instead of the preference I had set for Opera.

I'm referring to the top panel of Settings whose three remaining buttons are OneDrive, Windows Update and Rewards.

The computer in question is dual boot and spends most of its time in openSUSE Tumbleweed / KDE Plasma which I find to be an altogether more pleasurable experience.

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

I recall the advent of spam on USENET in the 90s. Early on I found that my list of 40 odd domains sufficed to filter it out. Happy days.

I'm still a regular user, Gnus/emacs to Eternal September and gmane since you ask.

Toyota Japan back on the road after probably-not-cyber attack halted production

Perhaps they entered a French flight plan while NATS got a spanner from Toyota.

The ZX81 finally gets the keyboard it deserves

For me the worst aspect of the ZX81 membrane keyboard was that your fingers moved a bit leading to you pushing at dead space and then being eaten by Rex. We mitigated that somewhat by taping things over the keys but that only improved the action marginally. As others have mentioned programs could come to an abrupt end when the 16 KiB (count 'em!) RAM pack perched on the back was breathed on.

Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem

Guilty as charged. I have more experience under my belt now. I'll accept your bhaji, though.

Many years ago a colleague ask me to clear my files to free up space on their workstation. I duly removed my /home but left an entry in /etc/passwd so that I could still login but with a home of root. After I'd informed the owner they blindly followed a remove user script, part of which was a question that asked are you sure you want to remove the user's home? A box full of floppies was needed to reimage.

The future of digital healthcare could be a two-metre USB cable

When I was recuperating in a hospital bed after surgery I was glad that I'd the forethought to buy a longer USB charging cable for my phone.

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

Even now my optical mouse occasionally does not move as I would like. Not wildly but just annoyingly. Inverting it for a second or so recalibrates it into compliance.

GitHub publishes RSA SSH host keys by mistake, issues update

The GitHub blog instructions said that there might be one RSA line in .ssh/known_hosts to delete. I actually found half a dozen because the name github.com resolves to several IP addresses.

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

Apps make encrypted communication convenient. There many ways for the bad guys to encrypt and then send via other channels.

What you need to know about the real-time capable edition of Ubuntu 22.04

Re: The key question maybe?

Real time does not mean that it responds quickly but that the time is deterministic. The OS provides guarantees that an event will be processed before a time limit is reached.

It is not something that you would want in a general purpose desktop.

Roses are red, algorithms are blue, here's a poem I made a machine write for you

After some deeply unrepresentative search it turns out that roses are #e4011d and violets are #a24fd2. That might have complicated the rhyming but for 2 and you. Scansion then goes out of the window.

Lurve is colour blind.

Roses are #FF0000

Violets are #0000FF

All my base

Are belong to you

Experts warn of steep increase in Java costs under changes to Oracle license regime

Re: Right, but do all those businesses...

In this case it is Oracle pointing their middle finger at you.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: duodecimal my arse

I don't have any Spanish Fascists on my fingers. They do have 3 phalanges each though ;-)

Re: duodecimal my arse

If you put your mind to it you can count to 31 on each hand.

20 US fl oz is 4% more than an Imperial pint. A British pint in a brim glass may contain 5% head. This is making my head hurt, I need a beer.

Canadian owes bosses for 'time theft' after work-tracking app sinks tribunal bid

Same old

This software is similar to the older practice of time and motion monitors with their stopwatches and clipboards. Yes it does provide metrics but at what cost to employee motivation.

Microsoft Defender ASR rules strip icons, app shortcuts from Taskbar, Start Menu

Removing all shortcuts and apps will leave your PC more secure, albeit at the expense of usefulness. It leaves the elephant in the room of the Windows OS.

Non-binary DDR5 is finally coming to save your wallet

Is this PC gone mad?

University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

So can't teachers use AI to spot the AI?

openSUSE makes baseline CPU requirements a little friendlier than feared

SIMD is not just for number crunching. Humble operations like strcpy() use it too.

I'm happily running KDE on Tumbleweed on a Sandy Bridge Core i5.