* Posts by katrinab

6999 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2016

Oracle starts laying mines in JavaScript trademark battle

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: What’s in a name?

But JavaScript is now doing all the things Java promised to do (write once, run anywhere), whereas Java isn’t.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: EcmaScript

Google made a variant / improved version of Java and called it Kotlin.

Maybe do something like that?

Microsoft makes sweet, sweet music with Windows MIDI Services

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Cutting Edge Crap

Unless you need > 192GB RAM, in which case Apple no longer has anything to offer you. The old Intel Mac Pro maxed out at 1.5TB.

But yes, while on paper, my Threadripper should beat the pants off my 16” Intel MacBook pro, in reality it is the other way round when it comes to real-time audio stuff, and also real-time video processing. The Threadripper is much better at batch processing workloads.

US datacenters in for shock as Canada mulls cutting the juice over Trump tariffs

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Erm

Match it with decreases in tariffs on competing products from other countries, then hopefully Canadians can buy those instead at the same price. NAFTA does generally mean that the US has lower tariffs than other countries at present.

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

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Status quo.

Windows 11 will run just fine on an Ivy Bridge if you do the required registry hacks to get it to install.

BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: There a starman....

Starlink is a lot better than previous satellite internet services for sure. But a ground-based service is always going to be better than a satellite service where it is available. Anything you can do to make satellite better, you can also do to make ground-based services better.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Ah, yes, those altnets

The same thing happened to NTL / Telewest etc (now Virgin Media) back in the early 2000s.

The investors will lose their money, but the infrastructure they paid for will still be there.

South Carolina's abandoned nuclear reactors positioned to fuel the AI datacenter boom

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Are Westinghouse still around, as an actual company rather than some zombie brand that gets attached to various things?

If it is designed to take things that are no longer available to be bought, then it is probably going to be cheaper to demolish what is there and start over.

AI chatbot startup founder, lawyer wife accused of ripping off investors in $60M fraud

katrinab Silver badge

But was it 600,000 people investing $100 each, or 60 people investing $1m each?

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Fiscal Reporting

Most accounting software allows you to set up bank feeds so that the bank transactions get directly imported in, and that works with most banks.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Fiscal Reporting

Depends on the bank, but sometimes, yes. I have read-only access to a lot of company bank accounts at work.

katrinab Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Sounds like a meeting at Mar-a-Iago would solve their problemo.

Somehow I don't think The Orange One would be interested in 37 cents though.

Microsoft's London 'Experience Center' packs up and goes home

katrinab Silver badge
Unhappy

I'm sure it will be replaced with another American Candy Store ...

Though to be honest it didn't really do anything you couldn't do at the John Lewis across the road.

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

katrinab Silver badge
Gimp

Re: "How many "R"s are in the word strawberry?"

Run it on a Mac Mini or Mac Studio?

It definitely won't be the fastest, but with the unified RAM, it will at least run, if it is appropriately compiled to run on that hardware.

Linux rolls out the welcome mat for Microsoft's Copilot key

katrinab Silver badge
Happy

Re: Microsoft makes keyboards?

Yes. Their keyboards and mice are generally pretty good.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Can I be really boring and suggest it opens the virtual desktop switching interface. Obviously what that is called and what it looks like depends on which desktop environment you are using, but most of them have something along those lines.

Exchange update refusenik? Consider yourself warned by Microsoft

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Bear in mind that Cumulative Updates have to be installed manually, as far as I'm aware, at least I've always done that.

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Even on desktops, I've never actually replaced a CPU without also replacing the motherboard. I've replaced pretty much everything else at one point or another.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: I remember seeing a stat years ago

I think they are still around, but mostly focus on the business market.

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Intel might be bust before you need to repair or upgrade

Yes, definitely. An Ivy Bridge i7 3700 from 12 years ago is still a very usable computer for many use cases, except maybe games and video editing.

10 years ago, a 12 year-old computer would be utterly obsolete.

We are now at the point where most people replace their computers when they break rather than because they want new features. Phones are probably at that point as well now.

WINE 10 is still not an emulator, but Windows apps won't know the difference

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Soooooo....

As far as MS Office is concerned, anything later than Office 2003 is likely to have problems, and LibreOffice is better than Office 2003, even if it isn't better than a more recent version of Office for your specific use case.

katrinab Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Fat Shaming

MacOS has that too. They call them Universal Binaries.

ChatGPT has a Thursday lie down

katrinab Silver badge
Trollface

It being down would lead to reduced error rates surely?

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Is 1 charger for every 100 cars enough ?

Rental car would be more expensive and far less convenient because it isn't sitting outside, I would have to go somewhere else to pick it up.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Is 1 charger for every 100 cars enough ?

Road Tax is £0. Insurance is about £250 - the gap between women's and men's car insurance got even bigger after they banned sex discrimination. MOT is about £200.

The 3 mile trip would be a lot more inconvenient by bus, so it is worth it for me.

Taking a taxi would mean being alone in a vehicle, with a man, who if the weekly report of local magistrates court cases is anything to go by, probably doesn't have a driving licence or insurance. In common with all women, I choose the bear.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Is 1 charger for every 100 cars enough ?

But when you are looking at averages, one thing people forget is that most miles are driven by people who drive lots of miles, and it is the miles driven that determine charging needs, not the cars.

I drive an average of about 3 miles a week and visit a petrol station about once per year. There is barely any difference between me and someone who doesn't have a car; most of the time I'm walking past it to go to the local bus stop, so you probably shouldn't be putting too much of a weighting on my car when considering your average requirements.

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Is 1 charger for every 100 cars enough ?

No. If we want to go all in on EV, every single parking space needs to have a charger, and there are more parking spaces than cars.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Location

The savings from going from sodium to LED are certainly worth having, but in the overall scheme of things, it is enough to charge a phone or low-powered laptop, not a car.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Location

My local cabinet is between the pavement and the road, but it is at the corner on a junction, in the middle of a set of traffic lights, presumably so that cables from it can go in three different directions, so you definitely couldn't park there.

Ransomware attack forces Brit high school to shut doors

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

The register is needed to check that everyone is out safely in the event of an emergency evacuation. As well as for monitoring attendance etc.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

Don't they have a paper copy?

What happens if there is some sort of emergency that requires them to evacuate the building, and that emergency also causes the computers to stop working, eg due to a power failure? How do they check that everyone is out safely?

Apple solves broken news alerts by turning off the AI

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

The usual Apple approach is to implement features years after everyone else, once they get them to actually work reliably.

Maybe they could try that?

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: Age verification

If your child is anything like me, I'm sure they are very good at making you think they only have the access you permit them to have.

Of course they will also have no problems whatsoever in getting round any government mandated restrictions.

On another note, I'm told that 1 year-old me was much better at opening "child-proof" locks than my parents were

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Age verification

Yes, I can buy a PAYG SIM in the same way that I buy a bar of chocolate, and very often from the same shop.

katrinab Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Age verification

Last time I bought a PAYG SIM for a burner phone, the only thing they asked me for was the £10 cost to buy it.

katrinab Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: Age verification

It knows how old you are. It doesn't know how old the person using your internet connection is. Children often have access to their parents' internet connection.

Apple's interoperability efforts aren't meeting spirit or letter of EU law, advocacy groups argue

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Facebook iPhone services!

If the permission to do so defaults to off, and you have to go into the settings app to turn it on, in an option buried several layers deep, so that you have to put conscious effort into enabling it; then I would be OK with that.

Even modest makeup can thwart facial recognition

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

I've noticed in some of these systems that if I tie my hair back, the gender recognition thing goes from eg Female 96% confident, to Male 54% confident.

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

katrinab Silver badge
Flame

Re: gif and video

I prefer to use pdf as a portable document file [yes I know the f means format not file], and use other things for presentations.

Euro-cloud Anexia moves 12,000 VMs off VMware to homebrew KVM platform

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: "The CEO thinks more companies will move from VMware"

Ticket price up 500%, sales revenue up about 10% or so. That tells me most people aren’t signing new contracts. The question is, how many of the people who did plan to migrate before the next contract renewal? I suspect it is >0%, and therefore revenue in future will go down.

And this is why you should look beyond just quarterly earnings reports with number go up.

What happens when someone subpoenas Cloudflare to unmask a blogger? This...

katrinab Silver badge

Re: First Amendment

If Cloudflare was in England, they would apply to the courts here for a Norwich Pharmacal Order to get the details of the blogger. But as they are in the USA, they need to do the equivalent US court action to get it.

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: First Amendment

Using a microwave to make tea is a crime against humanity. This isn't just for tea connoisseurs.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: First Amendment

In England (not the same as the UK), the blogger needs to prove that the statements are true, or alternatively convince the jury that the statements are not libelous[1].

[1] As an example of the latter, if I accused the Deputy Mayor of drinking tea, that might not be true, but people wouldn't think any less highly of him for doing that, so it isn't libelous. If I accused him of making his tea in a microwave[2], that would be libelous, and I would need to provide evidence to back up the claim.

[2] Just to be clear, this is a purely hypothetical example. I have absolutely no idea who he is or what his drinking or tea-making habits are.

New Outlook marches onto Windows 10 for what little time it has left

katrinab Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Why?

Push notifications for new emails when it isn't running, similar to what you get on mobile devices

vs Loads of other missing features, some of them essential features.

Mail-out madness as insurer offers refunds to customers in error

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: Since you renewed your car insurance on, null, we've discovered an error

That would be because they asked Copilot to write the SQL statement ...

katrinab Silver badge
Flame

Re: Telematics?

Then of course if you are driving along the motorway at 70mph, it will probably think you are driving along the parallel all purpose road that has a 30mph limit, and ding you for that.

This scenario seems to happen a lot.

The channel stands corrected: Hardware is a refresh cycle business now

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Pardon my ignorance. . .

Yes, it is the stretch of water between England and France.

It is also the route by which a product, in this case computers goes from the manufacturer to the end user customer. So the wholesalers, retailers, the value added resalers who set up the computer to the end-users requirements.

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

katrinab Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Trump isn't president of the rest of the world

It looks like it is going to end up being USA + Russia + North Korea + Belarus + either Iran or Israel but not both, vs the rest of the world, in another world war.

The unlicensed OneDrive free ride ends this month

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Unlicensed

Person joins the company. You create a Microsoft account for them, and pay for it.

Person leaves. You cancel the Microsoft subscription for them. Then it becomes an unlicenced account.

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

katrinab Silver badge

You can have a database of all legal cases, sure, but you still need to understand whether they are relevant to your situation, and you are likely going to have to ask more questions to get the necessary information.