Posts by katrinab

Debian 11 formally debuts and hits the Bullseye

Change is immediate but at risk of being overwritten later.

Re: Benefits vs. features

The aforementioned Tesla owners would benefit from being able to cook pizza on the move,

... and suffer a greatly reduced range should they choose to make use of that feature.

Much as I like to take the opportunity to recommend FreeBSD as a SystemD-free alternative, I checked one of my Debian deployments, and the DNS servers are in /etc/resolv.conf.

However, I am aware, that unlike FreeBSD, should you want to change your DNS servers, it isn't as simple as just editing the aformentioned /etc/resolv.conf; you have to edit /etc/network/interfaces then do something else to get it to update /etc/resolv.conf

US watchdog opens probe into Tesla's Autopilot driver assist system after spate of crashes

Re: A solution looking for a problem

The problem is that with an autopilot system, you lose situational awareness.

With a human drivan car, you know what the car is doing and why it is doing it because you made the decisions.

If you need to take over because a computer made the wrong decision, it takes 23 seconds to figure out what the car is doing and how to fix it. If you are driving down the motorway at 70mph (speed limit in the UK), it would have travelled 716 meters in that time assuming it doesn't encounter any obstacles in that time.

BOFH: 'What's an NFT?' the Boss asks. In this case, 'not financially thoughtful'

Re: I expect Simon the PFY to split the proceeds

Or even fairly large businesses. McDonalds was their largest customer. I don't think they use it any more.

Re: I expect Simon the PFY to split the proceeds

Are SCO still around?

Last time I looked, they had ditched their old code base and were selling a re-badged version of FrreBSD. FreeBSD is good, but as the name might suggest, it is free.

Re: NFTs

Not quite. What you do is put the url

"https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/13/bofh_2021_episode_15/"

on a blockchain, and sell that token-containing url to someone.

And because it is on a blockchain, rather than a common garden email or tweet or something like that, then somehow through the magic of blockchains it is worth a lot of money.

Tired: What3Words. Wired: A clone location-tracking service based on FOUR words – and they are all extremely rude

Re: Not my kind of humor, but

If you wanted, for example, to direct someone to El-Reg Towers in London, you could say

WC1X 8HN

51.51890°N,0.11156°W

shovels.zooms.vibrates

cumrag.manslut.femdom.muppet

or, The WeWork building next to Rymans and opposite Argos on Greys Inn Road, nearest Tube Station: Chancery Lane. Bus Stop High Holborn C is just outside.

Most people would pick either the 1st of 5th options.

I have to say though, "shovels.zooms.vibrates" sounds like something you might find on OnlyFans.

It's time to decentralize the internet, again: What was distributed is now centralized by Google, Facebook, etc

I was with you until you started mentioning blockchains as a solution

Elementary OS 6 Odin released on a 'pay what you want' basis

I don't use Linux much these days, mostly FreeBSD.

Re: You say it’s easy

Have an icon labled "App Store" on the desktop, and put things like LibreOffice on the front page (shop window?). Not the Windows way of doing things, but people would get it based on their experience with mobiles.

Re: Too Easy?

I think FreeBSD is very easy to install. Takes me a few minutes from bare metal to fully functioning system.

But you do definitely need to know what you are doing.

Anything even remotely complicated in Windows requires verbose Powershell incantations to achieve, when in unix/linux you would usually edit a text file.

If I was to walk someone through installing an office suite, then frankly getting them to copy/paste some text into the terminal would be much easier than explaining the Windows installer process.

An App store would be even easier still, and most distros have that, with LibreOffice available in it.

COVID-19 cases surge as do sales of fake vaccination cards – around $100 for something you could get free

Re: A long way still to go

Around 99.96%

El Reg talks to Azure Data veep as Microsoft flicks the switch on Azure Arc for SQL Managed Instances

This Azure Cosmos thing. Does anyone actually use it?

It claims compatibility with MongoDB, which I use a lot.

But it also apparently doesn't support date fields?

Literally every single document I have on my Mongo server has a date field in it somewhere. The only exceptions are a few that have more than one date field.

Is there a use-case anywhere that doesn't require dates somewhere?

Yes you could store the dates as a string, but then you wouldn't be able to query documents with a particular date range. Or use an integer I suppose?

Or spin up a FreeBSD instance and do "pkg install monogodb50"

Perl's Community Affairs Team chair quits as org put on ice by code language's foundation

Re: FFS

Is anyone using Raku? It was dropped from the FreeBSD ports collection in 2014.

Re: FFS

Anyone remember Perl 6. That was even worse than Python 3 in that department.

Zorin OS 16 Pro arrives complete with optional 'Windows 11' desktop

The average persion can pick up a ChromeBook and use it, despite the UI theme looking nothing like Windows.

So I don't think that is the barrier to Linux adoption. ChromeOS kind of is Linux anyway, maybe not GNU/Linux.

Most people, the problem is, they ask if it runs $x which is very important for their workflow, and the answer is very often no.

Wine usually doesn't help. I can think of very few things that work reliably on Wine and don't have a better native alternative.

I actually think that making Linux look like Windows would make it more confusing. Go into one of the many Windows control panels, which are not the finest examples of software design, and try to administer a Linux system in the same way as a Windows system. It won't work, because Linux isn't Windows.

Normal people don't do that anyway, they ask people like us for help.

Desktop 17 for Mac: In a Parallels universe with Windows 11 on M1 silicon

Re: What happens if...

MacOS in a VM is basically unusable in any type of deployment.

I use VMWare Fusion on my Mac. WSL in Windows 10 works fine.

Server 2019 inside HyperV inside a VMWare instance of Server 2019 works fine for everything except graphics, but if you RDP into the second level VM, that works the same as RDP anywhere else.

Re: For the majority who need it for that one weird app (apparently Excel)…

If you want to pull in external data for your Excel spreadsheet, that doesn't really work on Mac.

A typical use case might be that you use a proper database system for your actual data stuff, and use Excel to produce some pretty charts and stuff for it.

Even where it does work on Mac, it doesn't do so in a way that is compatible with Windows.

Re: windows on M1 8GB afster than surface ProX

Bootcamp was introduced during the second Jobs era, so I don't think he would have a problem with that.

Elastic amends Elasticsearch Python client so it won't work with forks then blocks comments

Re: I don't see Elastic winning.

On Windows, I think most people would get the library from pip or conda, and I guess they would get it from GitHub. Windows probably doesn't have a huge market share in that segment, but presumably there are some people that use it.

It was called a "time-sharing service" back then, but it was exactly the same as cloud computing now.

Activist raided by police after downloading London property firm's 'confidential' meeting minutes from Google Search

Re: Met police cybercrime unit ?

For "serious" matters yes. I think it is City of London Police that do the actual investigating. The Met does terrorism for the whole country, including Scotland.

But someone downloading "confidential" board minutes isn't that serious when there is a huge epidemic of ransomware attacks going on, so I guess it would be done at a very local level.

Re: I wonder

Even if the password was "password", that would be sufficient for a CMA prosecution.

The fact that it was indexed on Google and directly accesible means that no password was required at all to access the data.

Apple responds to critics of CSAM scan plan with FAQs, says it'd block governments subverting its system

Images tend to get re-compressed when imported to mobile devices. How would that work?

Re: Who creates the hash?

And of course there is that picture of Pooh and Tiger alongside a photo of Preseident Jinping and President Obama which upset the Chinese.

Apple is about to start scanning iPhone users' devices for banned content, professor warns

Re: re: this seems like a sensible middle ground.

GDPR doesn't apply to law enforcement activities.

Re: re: this seems like a sensible middle ground.

Picking up on this, anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that children from Thailand and other countries in the region are more likely to be victims of this particular type of child abuse. Children elsewhere do get abused, but it appears they are less likely to be photographed while being abused.

Does the "AI" decide that any child who looks Thai must be a victim of child abuse; and therefore reports any Thai familily taking perfectly normal photos of their children doing perfectly normal things that children do?

Re: Actually it's a cunning Apple marketing ploy ...

Or in England, not having sufficient numbers of Union Flags in the background of every photo ...

Please, no Moore: 'Law' that defined how chips have been made for decades has run itself into a cul-de-sac

Re: Moore's law expired in 1975

Well, a human can, with varying degrees of success, complete tasks that have never been defined before. They can, again with varying degrees of success, identify that such a task needs to be completed without being prompted or asked to do it.

Once you’ve identified the task, you can probably program a computer to do it.

Also, think for example how a human identifies whether a picture is a cat or a dog, and how a computer does it.

Does the human need a library of millions of photos of cats and dogs? Do they need to look through all of them to see which is the closest match? The computer is probably faster, and might even be just as accurate. But it is not doing it anything like how a human does it.

Re: Transistor physics

I have Windows 98 running in VMWare on an i9-9980HK machine with 64GB RAM

Other VMs(except MacOS) give me about 95% of native speed.

Only 1 CPU thread allocated to the VM, because Win98 doesn’t do SMP, you would have needed NT4 for that, and 256 MB RAM. I believe from memory the maximum it could cope with without crashing was 384MB, but that was waaaaaaaaaay more than any computer of that vintage could dream of having. I had 96MB at the time, and typical machines in that era had either 8 or 16.

My VM is fast, much faster than a computer of that vintage. But still overall slower than Windows 10 / MacOS / FreeBSD etc running on the same hardware. Linux boots fastest with Windows in Second place and MacOS a very distant last place. In operation, FreeBSD is fastest, then MacOS (native), Windows 10, Windows 98 and MacOS(vm) a distant last place.

Re: Moore's law expired in 1975

Yes it is a belief. The statement could only be proved wrong, not proved right; but so far, it hasn't been proven wrong.

Re: Moore's law expired in 1975

What I'm saying is that intelligence isn't possible, because ultimate any software you write compiles down to boolean algebra, and it isn't possible to express intelligence in boolean algebra.

Re: Moore's law expired in 1975

I said this 25 years ago, and nothing has changed in that time to change my mind:

In terms of actual intelligence of computers, nothing has changed since Unix came out in the 1970s. Sure, late 1990s computers were a lot faster than early 1970s computers, and that is even more the case now. But not more intelligent.

I don't think human intelligence can be expressed in boolean algebra. I rarely use the word "impossible" but I think it is appropriate here. Computers can do boolean algebra very quickly, and that is useful, but it is not intelligence.

Re: Transistor physics

I seem to remember from my school days back in the dim-distant past when transistor sizes were measured in mm, that transistors were made from three blocks of silicon, each mixed with stuff like germanium and arsenic. Which would suggest an absolute minimum of 6 atoms; and I doubt it would work with that few.

Re: About time too

I disagree.

Most of the time, the third party library will be better written than anything you can write yourself.

Also, why spend all your time re-inventing the wheel rather than doing whatever it is you want the program to do?

Re: About time too

With Windows Server, you kind-of can, because the recommended approach is to run each workload in a separate virtual machine, and you can allocate resources to the virtual machines.

I think Windows Desktop will go the same way. We've seen the first signs of that with WSL-2 running a virtual machine and getting improved graphics performance.

Re: Transistor physics

Fire up Windows 98 in a virtual machine, and see how fast it is.

It isn't actually that fast due to everything running on a single thread. Any IO delays hold up the entire system.

Re: Moore's law expired in 1975

Compare a 10 year-old iPad to the Air 4. Definitely a huge improvement.

Obviously if you are looking at desktop computers, a 10 year-old machine is still very usable, and the reasons you might want to upgrade it mostly relate to IO rather than the CPU.

Sueball over breach of more than 5 million payment cards at Dixons Carphone hit for six

Re: Although I understand the judge's judgement . .

Sure, but they were fined for it, so legally speaking, they didn’t get away with it.

You can argue that the fine wasn’t big enough, and I will agree with you on that, but that’s a different issue.

THX Onyx: A do-it-all DAC for the travelling audiophile

$199 is £143.44. Add VAT to that, and you get £172.13. So they are still overcharging.

What you say was true last year, but the exchange rate has improved since then.

Hey, AI software developers, you are taking Unicode into account, right ... right?

And my favourite, every time Google Translate comes up.

An Italian document that included a list of countries. One of those countries was "Macedonia" before it changed its name to North Macedonia. Google translated it as "Fruit Salad".

You will find tins of macedonia for sale in your local Italian supermarket, but humans would understand the context and realise it was referring to the country rather than the food item.

Spammers have being doing this for years, and spam detectors seem to be generally able to deal with this, probably by treating any email that contains such characters as spam.

SolarWinds urges US judge to toss out crap infosec sueball: We got pwned by actual Russia, give us a break

Or, to put it in a much smaller wall of text:

The shareholders are the company. They own all the assets. The payout will come from the assets they already own. They are suing themselves. The only winners are the lawyers.

Microsoft to require proof of vaccination from on-site staff, pushes back full reopening

I haven’t done that analysis. Oxford University has a dataset with public health measures, eg lockdowns, https://github.com/OxCGRT/covid-policy-tracker

you would need to bring that in as well, and find another dataset for travel restrictions.

Microsoft suspends free trials for Windows 365 after a day due to 'significant demand'

Re: Botnet

Or if it costs $0 and you can mine $0.00001 of crypto-currency, a much more likely scenario.

These machines are definitely not optimised for mining.

Re: Should it not be called Windows 361 or something

I refer to “Office 356”. I’ll do the same for Windows.

Re: How much?

8 vCPUs means 8 threads, so basically an i3. The cheapest Intel Mac Mini will beat it on performance. The M1 will be faster still for some workloads, though not typical Windows workloads if it is something that can’t run natively on Mac.