Posts by Carlitos911

Zoom incompatible with GDPR, claims data protection watchdog for the German city of Hamburg

It's the one the boss heard about on TV, or from his nephew that "works in computers", so it must be the best thing ever.

In my experience that's how these decisions are made.

Microsoft runs a data centre on hydrogen for 48 whole hours, reckons it could kick hydrocarbon habit by 2030

Re: Hydrogen is not the answer

Not really.

You're forgetting about the important bit: energy availability.

The thing about stand-by diesel generators, or the hydrogen fuel cells Microsoft has been testing, is that you can spin them up quite fast, and on demand.

You see, wind turbines generate electricity whenever there's wind, but that doesn't necessarily match with when you need electricity, so using this "excess" electricity to produce hydrogen, which you can then quickly turn back into electricity when you need more electricity, is actually a pretty clever idea.

TL; DR: Neither is a great use of energy, but diesel and hydrogen are good ways to store energy and have it available as electricity in a moment's notice.

Windows 10 S: Good, bad, and how this could get ugly for PC makers

Re: Blanket Laptops.....

Alcantara is what is commonly called plastic.

Or so says Wikipedia: 68% polyester and 32% polyurethane.

Re: Linux

Well, they don't seem to have a problem with Google doing it, so why not Microsoft?

And if you believe the NSA doesn't have access to all the Google user's data, I have a nice bridge I'd like to sell you.

Re: MS is daft.

Yup, people always talk about the "identical specs" but *always* forget the bit in the laptop that you spend all day staring at.

For USD 999 you cannot get any laptop with a screen that's even close to the one in the Surface Laptop. You might find some with 1980x1080 screens, but not only it that significantly lower res, it's also very unlikely that they're sRGB colour calibrated.

Also, if people only bought stuff they need, our society would crumble in days. The Surface Laptop isn't designed to meet people's needs, it's designed to meet people's wants.

Do I need one? Nope! Do I want one? Hell yeah! That burgundy looks very very sweet.

It's 30 years ago: IBM's final battle with reality

The "fun" takeaway from this is that while "industry analysts" have been consistently wrong for at least the last 30 years, we're still listening to what they say...

Good luck securing 'things' when users assume 'stuff just works'

I'm pretty sure expecting things to "just work" isn't lazyness, it's... er... how things are supposed to work.

When you get in a car, you start it, and it "just works.

When you turn on your TV, it "just works".

When you buy a new fridge, it "just works".

Stuff "just works".

Expecting techie stuff to "just work" isn't lazyness, it's a reasonable expectation.

What we need is *better* techie stuff that is secure(ish) by default and doesn't need any special setup from the user.

And we actually have that for home Wi-Fi routers, it's called "Wi-Fi Protected Setup". Why we're still relying on passwords 10 years after having a much better solution is beyond me.

Windows 8 apps pass 100K, Windows 8 passes Vista

Re: Maybe I'm missing something...

>> "Well, yeah, sure it runs on Windows, but then Microsoft made it, didn't they? Just so they could have a spreadsheet app that runs on their own operating system. The cheating bastards."

The funny thing is, Microsoft actually developed Excel for Mac OS *before* porting it to Windows 3.0 (which wasn't yet ready at the time).

Fukushima one week on: Situation 'stable', says IAEA

5 times stronger?

Isn't a magnitude 9 quake actually 100 times stronger than a magnitude 7?

Because, you know, the Richter scale is 10-base logarithmic...