Posts by katrinab

Version 5 of the Endless OS enters testing

Re: Looks like Windows 11

Looks like a cross between MacOS and iPadOS to me.

But then, Windows 11 is just a knock-off copy of MacOS.

Heata offers free hot water by mounting servers on people's water tanks

How efficient is this thing going to be?

Obviously the "heating element" will be 100% efficient, like any electric heater, but how much of that heat is going to make its way into the water? If you strap a heating element to the side of the boiler, my guess is, very little, which is why the heating elements for electric water heaters tend to be inside the water rather than strapped to the outside of an insulated container.

If it was a water-cooled system with the hot water tank as the pump reservoir, then that might be more efficient, but would you want to run regular tap water through it without any additives?

IBM shifts remaining US-based AIX dev jobs to India – source

Re: Redundancy relocation

Especially given that IBM owns Red Hat ...

Swiss Army's Threema messaging app was full of holes – at least seven

Re: Crypto Virus Writers

The shady side only needs to get lucky once, the legit side needs to get lucky every time.

Re: "infested with bugs – possibly for a long time"

Switzerland is no longer a good place to hid dodgy money, and hasn’t been for many years now.

Microsoft to move some Teams features to more costly 'Premium' edition

Re: "Another security feature lets admins control who has rights to record a meeting."

My capture device is an hdmi-USB adapter that presents itself as a camera at the USB end, and I can record from the “camera” using my preferred video recording software.

I say “camera” here, but usually I use it with an actual camera. I could do the same thing with the hdmi end plugged into the display-out of a computer. I’d probably need to run the audio separately to be able to record and hear it at the same time - audio jack to splitter, one end to earphones, the other end to a mixer. The mixer would go to the recording computer and also bring in a microphone feed. I’d either have two microphones, one attached to each computer, or one mic with a splitter.

Re: But what about fixing what people want?

Of the three I've tried in anger - Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet; Teams generally has the best video quality, and Google generally has the worst. In the case of Google, the actual resolution and frames per second may be OK, but the latency seems to be about 15 seconds, which makes it unusable for real-time interaction.

"Another security feature lets admins control who has rights to record a meeting."

I can record it using a video capture card, on to another computer if necessary?

Presumably they can't stop that.

Draft climate law threatens fines for datacenters that don't cut their carbon count

The most obvious flaw

with this bill is that it doesn’t appear to incentivise them to reduce the number of megawatts they consume, which is surely the best way to reduce emissions.

Salesforce: There's no more Slack left to cut

Tableu

Re Tablaeu, people are likely to think about something like that when their Excel spreadsheet becomes too unmaintainable. Microsoft offers PowerBI for that purpose, so surely most people would reach for that?

OpenAI is developing software to detect text generated by ChatGPT

Re: Sources

I'm pretty sure the "source" for most of my student submissions, certainly in the earlier years, was what I learned in the classroom.

Corporations start testing Windows 11 in bigger numbers. Good luck

Office 365 is not "just a browser window", with the possible exception of Teams. There are web versions of the stuff in Office. They don't have all the features of their desktop equivalents, though they are improving.

Re: We're running Win11 at work, no problems (except with old machines)

98 -> 2000 was installing a completely different operating system.

XP was mostly a cosmetic upgrade to 2000.

7 was basically a bug-fix release of Vista

10 was basically a big-fix release of 8/8.1, the bug in this case being the entire UI design.

Re: ".. more like their phone..."

To me, it looks like a knock-off version of MacOS. And, when I am using it alongside a real version of MacOS, this gets confusing. The different look reminds me to do Windows stuff to get things done rather than Mac stuff.

Fancy a quick tour of DragonFly BSD 6.4?

Re: Loving the series, but...

Generally speaking, you are more likely to have success installing obscure operating systems in a virtual machine than on bare metal. The developers will probably be doing most of their work in a virtual machine, and most of the users will be trying it out in one.

For anything other than Linux and FreeBSD, give Hyper-V a miss, it is probably not going to work; but QEMU, VirtualBox and VMWare are good choices.

AMD follows Intel's lead with alphanumeric soup of new Ryzens

That's easy. It is something you should pass over in favour of a Threadripper or Eypc.

Maybe the really low-end Xeons might have a use-case if you need the memory channels or PCIe lanes and don't care about performance, but other than that, I don't see any reason to buy them.

The other thing is that Apple just has Regular, Pro, Max, and Ultra chips, in binned and non-binned variants.

You don't get Ultra in laptops. You don't get Pro (for whatever reason) in desktops. So you only have to compare 3x2 different options.

I say 3x2 rather than 6 because there isn't that much difference between the binned and non-binned variants of each chip.

Twitter data dump: 200m+ account database now free to download

Re: Uh-huh, right

I tried that. The domain wasn't white-listed apparently.

No, AI can't tell if you've got COVID-19 by listening to your coughs

I thought the point of this was that peer review did spot it?

Some engineers are being paid between $250k and $1m, says salary survey

Re: Yet Another BS "survey"...

Private health insurance in the UK is way cheaper than the US though.

PyTorch dependency poisoned with malicious code

Re: Logical extension of a ML package

Aren’t Microsoft responsible for curating npm there days?

If you want a secure, trustworthy package management system, look at what npm are doing, and do the opposite.

Elon Musk's cost-cutting campaign at Twitter extended to not paying rent, claims landlord

Re: 126 page PDF to get the overdue rent?

You need a court order to execute the seizure surely? In England, that is the oldest surviving law still in force.

SEC: Startup had 'no functional streaming service', raised $1.3m anyway

Re: How far did they get

You can do a Jellyfin server quite cheaply. Scaling that up to support more than 1 simultaneous user; that’s a lot more challenging.

Should open source sniff the geopolitical wind and ban itself in China and Russia?

Re: Keep politics out of open source

Open Source and Free Software is political.

Non-free software is political.

There is no way to avoid politics.

TSMC ramps up 3nm chip baking at Taiwan plants

Re: Is it just me?

A for Ångström possibly? Certainly that’s what Intel plans to do.

Nexperia calls in the lawyers to save Welsh chip fab deal

Re: ASML

As far as I’m aware, their 7nm is achieved by pushing DUV to its absolute limits, while TSMS’s is achieved using EUV which has a lot of headroom to spare.

But that of course means that perhaps they use those techniques on EUV to achieve something better than TSMC?

Intel settles to escape $4b patent suit with VLSI

And also, for now anyway, fellow subsidiaries of Softbank.

Big Apple locals hire Russians to game New York's taxi system

Re: Hobson's Choice?

Because:

The queue isn't an actual line of cars.

This means the driver doesn't need to advance one car length every time they move up a position in the queue.

Perseverance rover drops off first sample tube on surface of Mars

Re: Covered by dust storms

But rain is very common in the English Lake District. That can carry dust particles in it, and over time, those get deposited where the rain lands.

Obviously not relevant to Mars, but leaves tend to fall on things as well, and rot. And that leads to stuff getting buried.

FCC calls for mega $300 million fine for massive US robocall campaign

Re: And the operators that allowed the spoofing?

Is that still the case?

As far as I can see, call minutes are basically free, and telcos make their money from line rental charges.

Being one of the 1% sucks if you're a Rackspace user

Re: What an rsole

They charge £8.79 per user per month.

https://www.rackspace.com/en-gb/applications/microsoft-exchange

Re: Customer count

Also, 1% of revenue is not the same as 1% of customers, because presumably those customers would also buy other products from Rackspace.

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

Re: How could you

It is the one promise she actually delivered on though.

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

If you are going to produce hydrogen using electrolysis, then would it not be better, in most cases, to just use the electricity directly?

It is a lot more efficient to distribute the electricity over the grid and use it for heating in a resistive heater or heat pump.

The range of a vehicle with a battery pack or a hydrogen tank is about the same, and the battery pack is a lot more efficient.

Google datacenters use 'a quarter of all water' in one US city

Re: It is a lot of water ...

Watercooling is cheaper than aircon, I think?

And probably has a lower carbon footprint?

Apple preps for 'third-party iOS app stores' in Europe

Re: long support

Yes, if they follow normal practice, iOS15 updates will be available for 2 years from the release of iOS 16.

It includes Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK.

Re: This massively reduces the value of an iPhone for average users

The value to me of an iPhone is that lasts a lot longer than a typical Android, so the cost per year is lower in exchange for a higher up-front cost.

My 8+ is still a very useable phone that is getting the latest software updates. Probably there will be another year of feature updates followed by 2 years of security updates before it becomes obsolete.

It could be like MacOS, where it is buried in system settings, and every time you install something, you have to go back into system settings to unblock it. No problem for the average El-Reg reader, but probably a barrier for normal people.

Re: Thanks for nothing EU

The actual reason why you make more money on the Apple store is because iPhone users tend to have more money than Android users.

I believe there's some people who only have the choice of the Huawei store, and not the Play Store, and obviously you would lose them by not being listed there, but where people do have a choice between Play and some alternative, they probably installed the alternative to get software that isn't available on Play or is cheaper somewhere else, but they would likely look in both places.

Re: Thanks for nothing EU

Although there are alternatives to the Play Store on Android, most developers don't use them, and I imagine it will be the same on Apple devices. But you will have a choice.

NIST says you better dump weak SHA-1 ... by 2030

Re: Trusted for deduplication too

Or more to the point, 1 in a million chances turn up thousands of times per second on modern computers.

On the 12th day of the Rackspace email disaster, it did not give to me …

Re: Only insofar

Well the re-purposed gaming desktop under my desk has had outages, but never a 12 day outage.

Even if there was 1 hour of outage per day, which there hasn't been, that doesn't have anything like the same impact as a 12 day outage.

There is usually about 30 minutes of outage per month when I reboot to install Microsoft security updates. That is planned downtime, so has less impact. Then there's been some unplanned downtime of up to 4 hours, maybe once every two years.

Airbnb hosts less likely to accept bookings from Black people than Whites

Re: Active, passive or no racism?

But how can they use AirBNB more if their bookings aren't accepted?

What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations?

Re: It would be wonderful if some of this now-obsolete enterprise software were made open source

Lotus Smartsuite was never open-sourced as far as I'm aware.

The second incarnation of Lotus Symphony was based on OpenOffice, so they kind-of had to open source it.

Bahamian rap: Crypto villain Sam Bankman-Fried arrested

Re: Hopefully his punishment will be of Madoff proportions

Maybe, but:

1: I'm not sure he's that smart.

2: I'm not that certain Bitcoin will still be worth anything in 10 years time, regardless of how blockchains as a whole progress.

Re: Hopefully his punishment will be of Madoff proportions

They only loved him for his money. Now he doesn't have any of that, they will happily throw him under a bus.

Desktop OpenSolaris fork OpenIndiana shoots fresh version – Hipster

More specifically, is there any reason why you would choose it over FreeBSB? zfs used to be the reason, but FreeBSD’s support for that is now very mature and stable. zfs on linux is probably stable now, but not quite so mature.

Five British companies fined for making half a million nuisance calls

Re: Eh?

Would you call a law passed by Joe Biden a "local law". Or do you consider local laws to be the ones passed by your city mayor?

Cloud customers are wasting money by overprovisioning resources

Re: cloud architecture is the problem

On Hyper-V, resource pooling works for Windows and Linux, unless you have nested VMs, but not FreeBSD under any configuration scenario.