* Posts by hairydog

150 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Oct 2011

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Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

hairydog

Re: unsupported browser

There are two approaches. You can build to web standards or you can cobble websites together and tweak them until the seem to work.

If you choose the latter, your wobbly pile of poo will only work on some browsers so ypu need to warn the others off.

If you codebit properly, it works. IE.2 is long gone.

Windows 11 market share stalls ahead of Windows 10 cutoff

hairydog

Re: Has anyome seriously tried Zorin OS

I upgraded a laptop that was running XP to Zorin a year or two ago.

The non-technical user says it's fine once you get the hang of the apps having different names. Faster to boot, more responsive than XP had been, and the cooling far runs cooler. And updates are easier and less disruptive.

Right now I have five PCs running Win10 but they also have 0patch running so I'm not sure which will go to Zorin and which will stay on 10.

None will go to 11, that's for sure!

There may be better distributions than Zorin, but it seems to work just fine, and happily runs any peripherals plugged in, including an HP scanner that has been 'dead' since Windows 7.

The main problem with desktop Unix is all the choices and the nerds picking holes in one distribution or another in a very unhelpful way.

Zorin seems fine to me. There may be better, but it'll do.

VPN Secure parent company CEO explains why he had to axe thousands of 'lifetime' deals

hairydog

What does lifetime mean?

I have never worked for BT, but I have worked at BT.

There I noticed an offer to employees of a service (may have been mobile or broadband, I forget) that was very good value, and was for life.

In the (very) small print, it said thst lifetime was defined as being as long as you worked for BT.

I'm not sure if that was corporate arrogance or a death threat. Quit or retire and your life is over.

With that company, either or both were possible.

Does UK's Online Safety Act cover misinformation? Well, that depends

hairydog

Re: Speed?

Other users may be as nasty as the original poster, or be part of the same bot farm. Down voting and reporting is a routine task for peddlers of misinformation

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

hairydog

Re: OK, not exactly the same

In the UK, where electricity prices are astronomical, running a device 24/7 has a cost.

Every 10 watts less saves £20 per year.

Firefox 136 finally brings the features that fans wanted

hairydog

It seems as if Windows devices only use the primary dns if it works. If it doesn't work, they switch to the secondary dns until that doesn't work. Stupid, but this is Windows.

I used to run two piholes, but now the primary is Adguard Home, backed by a pihole secondary. Not yet sure if that's better, though.

Mega city council's Oracle finance fix faces further delays

hairydog

Exceptionality fails again

What, exactly, does Birmingham Council do that every other council in the country does mot do? I accept that Birmingham is bigger than other authorities, but they don't seem to have more responsibilities than smaller authorities.

So why can't they buy/lease/hire a clone of a working system, rather than reinvent the (square) wheel yet again?

You're going to do what to the feature? Microsoft defines what it means by 'deprecation'

hairydog

Re: Status quo.

...for how long?

hairydog

None of my computers meet Microsoft's requirements for Windows 11, so even if I wanted the extra surveillance and intrusion. I couldn't have it.

When Windows 10 is no longer safe enough,they will all switch to Zorin or similar.

Not a single new Windows feature in the last decade has been of any interest or use to me.

Clearly I'm not their target demographic. I wonder who is.

App stores unconvinced by Trump's TikTok ban pause, which may itself be on shaky legal ground

hairydog

Re: TikTokTakToe

It seems more likely, possibly more acceptable, that Trump's America will die a horrible death. Hopefully not taking the rest of humanity with it.

WordPress drama latest: Leader Matt Mullenweg exiles five contributors

hairydog

Hard to Fork? Why?

This is a genuine question.

How is it hard to fork a project?

I thought you just do it. At first, you have a precise copy of the forked-from project. That's not hard.

OK, I accept that it would be difficult (OK, near impossible) to turn Wordpress code into good software, but the forking bit looks really easy.

What am I missing?

hairydog

Re: how "incredibly hard" it is to create great software

I really don't understand why Wordpress is so popular. It is slow, bloated, insecure, difficult to use well. And it's from a mini-Musk.

But it is definitely popular. I stopped hosting it on our servers because of its security holes (or its plugins' security holes) many years ago, and some clients have chosen to go elsewhere rather than use something else.

Will 2025 be the year satellite-to-smartphone services truly take off?

hairydog

Am I missing something?

Starling provides data connectivity. Why not use that to use a form of VOIP? Is there some technical issue (latency?) that prevents people using the blindingly obvious way to make voice calls over Starlink?

Boeing busted by employee over plans to surveil workers, quickly reverses course

hairydog

Seems to me that Boeing is like a lot of other businesses who have offices but are not too clear how much of the office space is needed. Monitoring occupancy makes sense, as long as it's monitoring desks, not users. I've worked in offices crammed to the doors with desks, but never enough chairs. I've worked in offices that had my team huddled in one clutch amongst vast swathes of empty desks. And that was long before the pandemic.

Amazon accused of cheating low-income Prime users out of two-day deliveries

hairydog

Re: Exactly what the AG is doing

Amazon offer next day across Europe, which is not that much smaller than the USA. They fly stuff from hub to hub where necessary. I'm not convinced it's a good idea, but it could be done.

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

hairydog

Yet again, they've messed up on the power supply.

Why on earth do we need to have a 5.2v 27w USBC power supply?

Every other mobile device is fine with a standard USBC PD power source, so the chippery must be uniquitous.

hairydog

Re: Pictures, pictures, pictures

That's what a Pi5 is. The whole point of the 500 is to be all in one

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

hairydog

Im not sure where to find a secondhand thinkcentre for less than £20, but assuming you can, I can tell you what a Pi can do that a thinkcentre can't: be frugal on power.

I have an HP Microserver Gen8 downstairs, switched off because it uses too much power to be left running 24/7. You can run loads of Pis and still use less power (and make less noise).

Microsoft tries out wooden bit barns to cut construction emissions

hairydog

Timber not really a long-lasting construction material?

Well, the wall behind me is timber framed. We know when the timber was felled, and can safely assume the wall was built that year or the next.

Less confident about whether the watle and daub infill is original or not, but it may be.

The timber was felled in 1531.

Boffins explore cell signals as potential GPS alternative

hairydog

Re: Cell?

I don't think soc In the UK, our mobile phones have always connected to mobile base stations, each with one or more cells.

The system has always been referred as a cellular network, because it is.

The handsets have never been referred to as cellphones, because they are not.

To call a mobile phone a 'cellphone' displays a misunderstanding (or, more likely, a total obliviousness) of how it all works.

Someone's finally taking on £10M Hull City Council ERP deal to replace Oracle

hairydog

Utterly crazy!

All local authorities do much the same thing.

The sensible approach would to have them all chip in to fund developing a system that they can all implement (collectively or individually), instead of re-inventing the wheel

Green recycling goals? Pending EU directive could hammer used mobile market

hairydog

How hard would it be to bundle an adapter that has usbc input to match the phone's port?

Windows 11 users still living in the past face forced update, like it or not

hairydog

Zorin seems to fix this issue

NASA engineers play space surgeon in bid to unclog Voyager 1's arteries

hairydog

Re: Stunning engineering....

Miele

Writers sue Anthropic for feeding 'stolen' copyrighted work into Claude

hairydog

All AI seems to be is automated plaigiarism. Yes, there are issues about paying for the input, but it goes deeper than that.

Already any google search returns loads of web pages that are clearly AI summaries of someone else's work.

Soon the copied summaries will drive the original works into extinction, and so machines will almost entirely feed on the output of other machines.

It would be good if Google could identify AI content and provide a way to exclude it from search results.

Telegram founder and CEO arrested in France

hairydog

Re: I hope Musk travels to France

The services are not charged for at the point of use, but they are not free.

We pay for them throigh advertiser overheads, but more importanlty we pay for them in social cost.

The damage to society of unaccountable, hidden manipulation of the information peope are presented with is incalculable, but huge.

hairydog

The comparison with phone calls is odd. The issue is not what is sent in real time, like a phone call. It is with the stored record left on the server, like on a noticeboard.

UK's 'electricity superhighway' gets green light just in time for AI to gobble it all up

hairydog

Excess renewable power drives down the price.

Making and storing hydrogen is really inefficient, but that's not important if it is running on a cheap byproduct (excess energy).

So perhaps the answer is to have far more renewable sources, generate green hydrogen with the excess and use that to power datacentres, heat homes and be fuel for trucks as well as powering standby generation for times of grid shortfall

hairydog

Excess renewable power drives down the price.

Making and storing hydrogen is really inefficient, but that's not important if it is running on a cheap byproduct (excess energy).

So perhaps the answer is to have far more renewble sources, generate green hydrogen and use that to power datacentres, heat homes and be fuel for trucks.

American interest in electric vehicles short circuits for first time in four years

hairydog

The issue isn't simple CO2 per mile driven. It's more matter of embedded carbon in making, running and disposing of the vehicle.

Even on that metric, a small EV is good, particularly in comparison to the ludicrous tanks Americans choose.

However there is also the environmental impact of the raw materials mining and the tyre dust emissions.

Comparison with ICE vehicles is a bit silly, though. Private cars are completely unsustainable, and we as a species urgently need to find an alternative we can accept - or we shall face extinction in one or two lifetimes.

UK inertia on LLMs and copyright is 'de facto endorsement'

hairydog

Going Equipped for Theft

The only usual way of taking action for cases of copyright theft is to prove that your content has been taken.

AI makes this proof almost impossible by anonimising what it steals.

For offences of theft of physical objects, there is the offence of "Go Equipped For Theft". So your gloves, jemmy and swag bag can get you arrested.

Why isn't the equivalent used for copyright theft?

After all, AI almost always depends on stealing other people's work.

Why isn't this prosecuted?

ChatGPT starts spouting nonsense in 'unexpected responses' shocker

hairydog

AI is Artificial Intelligence, but 'artifice' meaning 'dishonest' not 'made' "intelligence" meaning 'espionage', not 'thinking'.

A more accurate description would be 'Automated Plgiarism'

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

hairydog

This is the time ro switch to Zorin 17.

One of the snags with beoling told "swiich to Linux" is there are so many different sorts.

Zorin is the one I heartily recommend for a Windows refugee.

Microsoft offers rollback for those affected by Windows wireless futility

hairydog

If your device connects by wifi, how will it get the rollback?

Openreach hits halfway mark in quest to hook up 25M premises with fiber broadband

hairydog

I find it hard to believe they care. There is fibre to the manhole 230 metres away from my house,

Unfortunately, the fibre does not do the final leap to the pole feeding our connection, even though poles in the opposite direction get fibre.

The pole after ours gets fibre from the other direction. Just our pole is without fibre.

How hard would it be to let us have fttp? Too hard for Openreach, it seems.

Fairphone 5 scores a perfect 10 from iFixit for repairability

hairydog

Re: If only an official Qi backcover would be available.

Wireless charging is hopelessly inefficient. Far better to use a cable. A magnetic connected one is OK, unless you have metal shavings in your environment,

Amazon unveils new drone design, plans liftoff of aerial delivery in UK, Italy

hairydog

Re: Not viable in UK

The drone rules are far less onerous for drones that weigh no more than 250g - and the DJI mini drones in that category are excellent.

Google rebrands 'android' as 'Android' to remove any doubt about its affiliations

hairydog

So now it's announced: android (sorry, Android) is now officially obese.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

hairydog

This ridiculous scenario is played out up and down the country. Councils are suckered into expensive, complex bespoke systems that probably won't work.

The reality is that Birmingham council may be bigger than the others, but their functions are the same as every other council.

Yes, Birmingham may have more dustbins, but the task of arranging to empty them is only different in scale.

What is needed is to find a LA with a working system and replicate that (with local data and scaled to suit). Not to reinvent the bespoke wheel at huge cost and risk

Bad times are just starting for India's IT outsourcers, says JP Morgan

hairydog

I keep reading about AI. It is supposed to stand for Artificial Intelligence. But that's intelligence in the 'espionage' meaning, not the 'thinking' meaning.

All AI seems to be good at is Automated Plagiarism. It steals other people's work and anonymoses it.

Without people to steal from AI will end up stealing from AI.

Keir Starmer's techno-fix for the NHS: Déjà vu disaster or brave new blunder?

hairydog

The issues were not technical

Having worked on two parts of npfit over several years, I could see not only that it was going badly, but why.

Basically the core "spine" and database part was terribly badly designed simply because it was based in a 'quick and dirty' demo setup that wasn't designed for scaling to production, but 'the authority' insisted in using that.

They also insisted on regular version releases so close together that there were two separate development streams leapfrogging each other. An utter and complete waste of resources.

The implimentation of the system at endpoints was mostly a matter of integrating it with one of a handful of existing systems.

The sensible approach would have been for a given contractor to integrate all instances of one system no matter what the location.

Instead it was done regionally, so each contractor had to cope with all the systems as well as accommodating varied (and contradictory) requirements for each trust - and sometimes for each hospital!

It could have been excellent. It should have worked, but it was crippled by inappropriate administrative restrictions.

Since then, technology has moved on, but political incompetence is still the same problem

No more feature updates for Windows 10 – current version is final

hairydog

Splendid!

I like Windows 10. It seems to be fairly dependable and fast, tolerably secure.

I'm sure there are people who love the idea of tabs in notepad, but I've used notepad++ for many years.

Most of the major features announced for Win10 seem to be about things like live tiles, which I disabled in the first five minutes after installation.

If MS wants to leave Windows 10 features unaltered and just have security updates, that seems perfect. Thank you, Microsoft

Huawei masters the great vanishing act as UK sales evaporate

hairydog

Their routers may well be pants. Certainly the firmware in thier mobile modem/routers is a bit clunky.

But my goodness thier RF stuff is way ahead of the competition. Huwaei phones work where other brands can't even connect to the network,

And my experience of ther laptops and tablets is that they are way better than anything else on the market.

I'm told (but have no evidence) that Huawei telecoms kit (such as FTTC cabinets) is far more reliable than the other brands.

Seems to me that Huawei have committed the sin of being successful but not being American.

UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics

hairydog

Income from online or other sources that is over £1000 is taxable, not taxed.

If you have no other income, tax is not due unless your income (after allowing for expenses) is over £12,500.

However, it does have to be declared on a tax return.

Surprise! China's top Android phones collect way more info

hairydog

How many readers of the Reg actually buy their phones in China?

This article would be more informative if the same research was also done on what is snooping on the same models of phones bought in the EU or the UK.

BT keeps the faith in 'like fury' fiber broadband buildout as revenues dip

hairydog

Weasel Words

Yes, the fibre passes my house. What a pity it isn't possible to be connected to that fibre. Seems that the fibre feed goes to poles in either direction, but not to the pole feeding the houses where I live. So it passes, like an express train. I'm not allowed to be a passenger.

Yes, they have rolled out 5G, though not to here.

Where I can get 5G on EE, it seems to be exactly the same speed as 4G in the same place. Where's the advantge?

Beijing grants permit to 'flying car' that can handle 'roads and low altitude'

hairydog

Leaving aside the dangers from the rotors, the carbon cost, and the sheer silliness of this, it's pretty obvious that it will only be able to use "normal" roads that have no pedestrians and no other traffic.

Anyone who has cycled along as a vehicle has passed by closely knows the power of the slipstream. Roads are twisty, hilly, and pass shelted sections then sections where wind is funneled in. Vehicles' grip on the surface is an assumption inherent in the design of roads.

Basically, this is a big passenger-carrying drone, and drones are not happy travelling along the ground. It won't work. It will have to fly up higher.

Uncle Sam OKs vaccine that protects honeybees against hive-destroying bacterium

hairydog

It would be even more effective if they stopped doing the things that cause the problem. Re-siting hives, huge areas of monoculture, lack of biodiversity, toxic sprays on crops, robbing the honey and replacing it with HFCS.

Brit MPs pour cold water on hydrogen as mass replacement for fossil fuels

hairydog

Re: Politicians have lost the plot on this one

GWh is a total amount, not a rate and your figures are just plain wrong in any case.

Last week, consumption varied between about 45GW ans 25GW.

A rough average would be about 30GW, so over the week, the total consumption would be 5,040GWh

hairydog

Re: Politicians have lost the plot on this one

Coffey has said that there is currently 16GW of solar capacity in the UK (I thought it was nearer 12GW) and that the government intends to increase this to 70GW.

Now I am not advocating belief in anything a Tory politician says, but that's a lot more than three times as much

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