Posts by katrinab

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

Safeway was taken over by Morrisons in 2005, so it couldn't be them.

It also wouldn't have been Morrisons because they didn't sell food online at that point, they were very late to the game.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/feb/15/morrisons-buys-kiddicare-seventy-million

OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much

They claim they've written a new C Compiler, but it can't even compile a Hello World.

Re: Doesn't include the path to the native C library on your system

Woman on the 88 Bus to Clapham Common here, reading the comments.

Can confirm that none of the men are looking at El Reg on their phones.

AI agent seemingly tries to shame open source developer for rejected pull request

Re: intent

In my experience, it would be more accurate to say that "the system may occasionally generate correct information".

Seriously, it is a pathalogical liar. I just don't understand how anyone is taken in by it.

'Another dark day': Users slam Microsoft over Polyglot Notebooks deprecation

Google Colab?

Doesn't everyone use Google Colab for data analysis, including Microsoft.

As in, I've actually seen Microsoft publish Google Colab notebooks.

Personally, I use self-hosted Jupyter Hub.

Apple's Creator Studio creates a subscription where free apps used to live

The way I use Microsoft Word, pretty much anything that isn't vi or similar would do the job for me.

Excel, no, the alternatives definitely would not work for me.

Keynote is probably better than Powerpoint, but I don't use either, so I don't care.

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

Re: Firefox

On MacOS, Orion is another viable option. You can install Firefox/Chrome extensions on it, and it uses the Webkit engine same as Safari.

We are comparing the performance of the average v2 filter with the average v3 filter, not the best of each.

The best on v2 is uBlock Origin. I don't know what the best v3 filter is, but uBlock Origin Lite definitely isn't as good, partly because I can't run my own custom filter list on it.

Re: Its why

I had it earlier this weekend, but the latest refresh of the uBlock Origin filters fixed it.

I'm using OpnSense for my DNS ad blocking. It uses the same filter lists as PiHole and is equally effective. My reason for choosing it over PiHole is that I use OpnSense anyway for its other firewall features, so it is easier to use that also for DNS filtering than install PiHole in addition to it.

It upstreams to Cloudflare using DOH, so I am effectively using DOH everywhere, even where it is not directly supported.

Microsoft starts the countdown for the end of Exchange Web Services

Re: Clowns

As far as I'm aware, Outlook for Mac, and the MacOS Mail/Calendar/Contacts/Reminders/Notes Apps use it. The equivalent apps on iOS and iPadOS use ActiveSync.

GitHub ponders kill switch for pull requests to stop AI slop

Re: AI Slop Jockeys versus reality

I will reveal those secrets free of charge, because I don't care ...

They use humans.

X marks the raid: French cops swoop on Musk's Paris ops

Re: Enough of this charade ..

That's because no other social media actively facilitiates the production of child sex abuse material

Re: Sigh..

Mastodon?

To stop crims, Google starts dismantling residential proxy network they use to hide

Re: The competetion

As with all of these, it says that every IP address owner has opted in and received fair compensation for doing so.

If I wanted to opt in my residential internet connection, how would I go about doing it? The website is very silent on that.

Meaning, used by web scraping bots as far as I’m aware.

ICE knocks on ad tech’s data door to see what it knows about you

Also, having something to hide doesn't mean you have done anything wrong.

Manchester ATM ups PIN requirement to full Windows login

Re: Not surprised

Also not to mention that there is pretty much no situation where you would need cash these days.

Ofcom probes Meta over WhatsApp info it was legally required to provide

how WhatsApp Business competes in the application-to-person messaging market?

They don't, as far as I'm aware.

The only company that has ever sent me messages by anything other than SMS is Apple who sent notification that an order was ready for collection by iMessage.

AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte

We’ve had that since the LEO in 1951, running on a 500kHz CPU with about 8kB RAM.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Re: Bollocks. Utter bollocks

Yes, banning the fans probably was the right decision, but fabricating evidence in support of the ban by using AI is absolutely not on, and he absolutely should be sacked and punished in other ways for doing that.

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

Powerquery on Excel isn't anything like as feature-complete on Mac as it is on Windows.

Re: Microsoft's response?

Grok allows people to look at pictures of "women and children naked"...

Re: Microsoft's response?

Last time I looked, it couldn't run anything later than Office 2003. It seems to have improved slightly since then, but nevertheless, you will be better off running LibreOffice than any of the versions of MS Office that Wine can cope with, even if LibreOffice can't replace the latest versions of MS Office.

Access seems to be pretty much abandonware at this point though.

AWS flips switch on Euro cloud as customers fret about digital sovereignty

And more importantly, who owns the franchise? It would need to be someone like OVH or Hetzner that are not American-owned. And at that point, you may as well go to them directly.

Re: So can the US switch it off?

Or when he invades Canada, and there are consequencies under the Trading with the Enemy Act 1939?

S 2(1)(a) defines the "enemy" as "any State, or Sovereign of a State, at war with His Majesty". King Charles is King of Canada, so if they are at war with Canada, then my reading of the Act is that they are at war with King Charles.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/2-3/89

Apple hopes to save Siri from laughingstock status with infusion of Google Gemini

I'd rather not have a CSAM generator running on my phone, thank you very much.

Don’t bother with the retailer’s website, says Google: Gemini can shop for you

I’ve found 64MB of EDO RAM for £2160, the exact same price it was in 1995.

HSBC app takes a dim view of sideloaded Bitwarden installations

Using the website isn't really an option for HSBC.

Firstly, if you use the website, you still need the app to generate 2FA codes.

If you do a cardholder not present transaction, you need the app to authenticate/approve it.

Some accounts, such as the Global Money account (if you are receiving / sending money abroad, this is a lot cheaper than doing it on the regular current account), only work on the app, not the website.

SSL Santa greets London Victoria visitors with a borked update

Re: Roadside billboards

By "a few years back", you mean something like 45 years ago?

Waymo pings updates to San Francisco fleet to prevent power outage chaos 2.0

Re: Downed Power Cables

Japan does this too.

AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

Re: Pointless

That is kind-of already a thing though?

Clothes shops that let you upload a photo of yourself and it shows what you would look like wearing the clothes they have for sale.

It exists, but it isn't that popular.

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again

But where the binaries ones that were compiled from the source in the last few weeks / months, or are the the original binaries that were used at the time?

Keeping Windows and macOS alive past their sell-by date

Re: Hope Springs Eternal…

Changing hard drives in older MacBooks was generally pretty easy. I don't have anything that old, but certainly the older Intel MacBooks were easy enough.

Waterfox browser goes AI-free, targets the Firefox faithful

Do they have an ARM64 build for Windows? I couldn't find one, which is why I am still using Firefox.

From Georgia to Essex, AI datacenters are testing public goodwill

A data centre is not going to create "100 - 200" new jobs, unless those jobs are security guards each working about 1.5 hours per week.

UK plans right for flat owners to demand gigabit broadband

Re: I demand gigabit connection in my flat!

You can demand that they don't refuse OpenReach / City Fibre / Virgin / whoever permission to install it.

IBM unleashes CUGA, an open-source AI agent that actually completes more than half its tasks

Re: In short: it's useless

62% in lab conditions that aren’t going to be replicated in the real world.

Affection for Excel spans generations, from Boomers to Zoomers

You can run Office 2003 in Wine without any problems (other than Access and maybe Outlook). Anything later, not so much. But LibreOffice is able to match Office 2003 (other than Outlook and maybe Access), even if it can't match more recent versions. Outlook 2003 probably isn't going to work with modern email servers at this point, so could be discounted for that reason.

I definitely need Excel. It has a lot of features that don't exist on Libre Office or Google Sheets.

Word, I mostly use as an electronic notebook, and could easily replace with something else.

European cloud trade group says EU should have blocked VMware-Broadcom merger

Yes they do, but you have to download and install them manually, the auto update no longer works.

Vibe coding will deliver a wonderful proliferation of personalized software

Re: French and vibe coding

If we are talking French, my favourite French phrase is «Chat j'ai pété»

Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL

I doubt they can do that. If they were able to choose their licence they would have chosen a proprietary licence.

OpenAI turns the screws on chatbots to get them to confess mischief

How can anyone think ChatGPT is intelligent

It is a pathological liar.

Try this:

Ask it where the nearest bookshop is to a particular landmark. Pick a landmark that isn't known for having a bookshop. There is a pretty good chance it will hallucinate a branch of a well known bookshop in that country, but one that doesn't and never has existed at that location.

On some UK landmarks I tried, it hallucinated branches of WH Smith. I would give it a pass for not knowing they are now called TJ Jones as that is pretty recent. That wasn't the problem. There was no WH Smith / TJ Jones branch at that location, and as far as I'm aware there never has been and certainly not in the last 30 years or so.

Europol nukes Cryptomixer laundering hub, seizing €25M in Bitcoin

Re: "but aren't they are still mine... ?"

They might have been stolen, that is one scenario where someone might want to launder them before cashing out.

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

Re: Integral to the OS

I'm not so concerned about MS Store given that they are decades behind BSD Ports and Debian apt who did the same thing.

Microsoft appears to move on from its most loyal ‘customers’ – Contoso and Fabrikam

Only insofar as using a real company name could be probematic.

If you are providing worked examples, which they do, and it is perfectly reasonable for them to do it, then you need to give it a name.

Microsoft wedges tables into Notepad for some reason

Re: VB and ActiveX

Isn't VBA deprecated in all but name now? The last update was in Office 2010 and the only change was 64 bit support. The last meaningful update was in Office 2007.

Don't they already have OneNote for that sort of thing?

Personally I use Word Documents saved on the file system for notes, but maybe that is just me.