Posts by katrinab

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

No. I was responding to the fact that JHU's website is absurdly resource intensive and it takes ages to look at anything on it.

Half the people I see have their mask around their chin.

Grab the data from their GitHub

https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/

and do your own analysis on it. That's what I do.

If you want to cross-reference it to vaccine numbers, get them from

https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/

If you need instant calories, a sugary drink is the best option.

While alcohol has a lot of calories, it is very difficult for the body to make use of them.

Re: Ok, I'll bite

The percentage of the vaccinated population experiencing "side effects" from the vaccine is lower than the percentage of the unvaccinated population experiencing the same effects.

No, they vaccinated all their resident population, all of their non-resident citizens, everyone who travels across the border to work there, and people living in homeless shelters near the border.

The Vatican sky fairy is very much in favour of vaccination, and while there are no official figures, as far as I can see, the Vatican has given out more doses of vaccine per head of population than any oher country in the world. Gibraltar leads the official figures with 116% of the population vaccinated. Vatican looks like it is somewhere in the order of 500% to 1000%.

Get ready to make processes fit the software when shifting to SAP's cloud, users told

The whole point of going with something like SAP is that you can configure it to work with your business processes.

Otherwise you are getting just another off-the-shelf package, and if that is what you are looking for, there are better ones out there.

Customers warn Gartner of AWS's high-pressure sales tactics in latest verdict on public cloud providers

What's the difference between a "private cloud region on-premises product", and a computer in your own server room?

Is the i7-3770 that lives under my desk, and runs NextCloud and a few other things a "private cloud region on-premises product"?

Credit-card-stealing, backdoored packages found in Python's PyPI library hub

Snyk Advisor tells me there's "no known security issues" with this package. Fortunately I've never relied on their advice before, and I won't be doing so in future.

Microsoft's Cloud PCs debut – priced between $20 and $158 a month

Re: Not great pricing, but they'll get the Office people.

You can get pretty much the same on Azure for $30 per month - 64GB hdd rather than 80GB. The next size up is 128GB, and that will take the cost to $33 per month.

AWS adds browser access to its cloudy WorkSpaces desktops – but not for Linux

Re: This is getting a bit Meta

You can run Windows 95 inside a browser, and you can run Internet Explorer in that.

I definitely don't recommend it as a daily driver, but it can be done.

I've also seen MacOS from around the same time running in a browser.

Redpilled Microsoft does away with flashing icons on taskbar as Windows 11 hits Beta

Re: Nicely played on the screenshot there, Tim

The next stage will be to rename it as "Launchpad" and have it present a full-screen grid of icons.

Re: This is complete crap

You can configure Skype to beep at you if you think it is extra-important.

But, does anyone actually use Skype anymore?

Can you still hit the Windows Key and type the first few letters of the program you want to run?

Re: Finally.

Windows 1.0 was released almost 36 years ago. 29 years since Windows 3.1 was released which was the first version that most people used. The computers at school had Windows 2 on them.

Re: " ... make finding what you need easier."

And you have to remember which £$king control panel to use to complete the task you want to complete.

Following Torvalds' nudge, Paragon's NTFS driver for Linux is on track for kernel

Re: What's the use case for NTFS?

Portable HDs, yes; but network shares use Samba.

I'm feeling lucky: Google, Facebook say workers must be vaccinated before they return to offices

Re: Liability

It the UK at least, it is only given to priority groups, not everyone. Would it be possible to give it to everyone? Given how long it has taken to distribute the coronavirus vaccine with an unlimited budget, I'm not so sure.

Re: Liability

From starting the research to vaccinating everyone is going to take, best case scenario, about 2 years. That's with two doses. For one dose, maybe you could do it in 18 months. That is using venues which would normally be used for other things. Not a problem in the case of coronavirus, because those other things can't restart until everyone is vaccinated anyway, but it would be a problem for a flu vaccine deployment.

Even so, 18 months is way too long for a successful flu vaccine deployment; so that's why I'm not sure it is viable.

Re: Liability

Your risk of transmission is lower. Not zero, but a lot lower. If you can get the number of people you infect to below 1, then the virus eventually dies out.

Re: Liability

One of my qualifiers is “there is a vaccine available”.

Flu vaccines exist, yes, but is it possible to produce and administer enough in the required time frame to cover the whole population? If it is, then I would support doing it. Otherwise the limited resources have to be targeted where they are most effective.

Re: Liability

"Should I be vaccinated against every disease that could kill someone, just in case I pass them on too?"

Generally speaking, yes.

If, it is an infectious disease, there is a vaccine available, and the disease is in active circulation where you are.

Probably no need to get the Ebola vaccine if you aren't in a place where it is active and you aren't planning to visit such a place.

I don't think they do smallpox vaccinations any more, because it has been eradicated from the planet, thanks to vaccines.

Re: FREeDomZ

We ban smoking in indoor public places to protect others from them.

Re: Liability

Will the employers who *don't* require vaccinations be responsible for the far greater adverse effects suffered as a result of that decision.

Can someone explain the workings of rhte anti-vaxxer brain to me? I just don't get it.

Re: Acid test

2 cases out of 6 people in my department.

Giant Tesla battery providing explosion in renewable energy – not as intended

Re: 300 MW

Also, concerns about lack of capacity can be solved by building more of them. You have to start somewhere, and you probably don’t want the whole country or even a whole state relying on one battery.

Sysadmins: Why not simply verify there's no backdoor in every program you install, and thus avoid any cyber-drama?

That’s easy, in most cases, the third party library will be better and more secure.

NFT or not to NFT: Steve Jobs' first job application auction shows physically unique beats cryptographically unique

Just one question

Can they legally sell an NFT of this thing?

Surely the copyright is owned by Steve Jobs’s heirs? They can sell the physical document thanks to the first sale doctrine, but I’m not so sure they can make additional copies of it.

Communism never looked so good: China cracks down on pop-up ads

Re: China?

I think you will find the US has a far larger prison population than China, and prison labor[sic] is a thing there.

HP Inc slurps Teradici to get better at delivering remote PCs

Having read various articles elsewhere on this site, I would be extremely nervous about selling my company to HP.

We have RPD for remote desktop access. That's what most people use. I'm sure if I asked people here what the problems with it are, they would be able to come up with something.

Does Teradici solve any of these problems? Would people be willing to pay whatever it is they are charging to have these problems solved? Does it introduce any new problems which might discourage people from going wtih this solution. How does it compare with the other alternatives to RDP? Does the expected and actual revenues justify the price paid for the company?

Euro watchdog will try to extract $900m from Amazon for breaking data privacy laws

Re: But will they actually have to pay?

You can't write off fines against your tax bill.

Intel scoops out five flavours of Ice Lake Xeons for workstations

Re: These don't seem to compete with exiting AMD!

Get a Mac Mini or a Ryzen 5900X if you want single thread performance.

The Register just found 300-odd Itanium CPUs on eBay

Re: Optimised in compiler

Or, it takes someone like Apple to sucessfully migrate to a new CPU architecture. They've managed it 3 times.

If Microsoft do manage to switch over to ARM, and get the rest of the developer base to move with them, it will most likely be due to lots of people wanting to run Windows in Mac virtual machines.

Hard drives at Autonomy offices were destroyed the same month CEO Lynch quit, extradition trial was told

Re: Lynched?

It wasn't just you. Plenty of people in the comments section here were saying the same thing.

Oracle had a look at it and came to the same conclusion.

London class-action sueball against Google is a lot like Epic's case except fandroids might win enough for a pint

Why are they picking on Google?

Unlike Apple, you can install alternative app stores on Android, and you can sideload apps that you obtain directly.

Gambling apps used to be, and possibly still are, distributed this way, because Google wouldn't (doesn't?) allow them on their store.

[edit] I checked, they are now available on the Play Store. They weren't at one point.

We can't believe people use browsers to manage their passwords, says maker of password management tools

Doesn't store website passwords. Chromium Edge I think stores them in OneDrive.

Are you a 1%er? Windows 11 turns up in the usage figures

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

Invoke-WebRequest -uri https://aka.ms/wsl-debian-gnulinux -OutFile Debian.zip

Expand-Archive .\Debian.zip ./Debian

No need to use the Windows Store

The UK is running on empty when it comes to electric vehicle charging points

Maybe, but most of the miles driven in Britain are driven by people with high mileage, and most vehicles on the road at any given time are vehicles that do high mileage.

That's what matters, not what the average person does. I mean the average person doesn't even own a car. 32.7m cars in the UK, Population is 66.7m. Some people own more than one car.

Park the car. Plug it in to the charger. Tap your card on the card reader.

... Do your stuff ...

Unplug the car

Drive off

Don't think that's how it works at the moment, but it could be very quick and straightforward.

I don't refuel every time I visit Tesco, whereas I think if I had an electric car, I would refuel more often.

Usually I go to an Asda that is just off the motorway between home and work to refuel.

My point is, with the current market share of electric cars, which is very small, 3 were using the chargers on a very quiet evening, so if I went there at a busy time, probably 4 chargers isn't enough for even current demand.

"The issue is not so much the general lack of charging points as there are more chargers than petrol stations already."

1. Petrol stations typically have more than 1 pump. My local suburban petrol station has 8. My local supermarket has 16.

2. Petrol pumps push out 50 litres per minute, which means that most people do their "charging" in less than a minute, or maybe a few seconds over. The rest of the time is driving into position, unlocking the cap, puting the nozzle in place, removing it, locking the cap, and paying, which is pretty much the same for an electric charing session. But, there is no way you could charge your car in a minute. You would need something in the order of a 10MW charger to do that. Tesla superchargers put out 150kW. Other chargers are a lot less. The ones at my local Tesco are 7kW.

"It's just been announced that as many as 800 Shell electric vehicle charging points are to be installed in up to 100 Waitrose shops across the UK by 2025."

1. Note the use of the words "as many as", and "up to". Both mean "less than".

So, less than 8 charging points per Waitrose. My local Tesco has 4 charging points, and about 500 parking spaces, and the aforementioned 16 petrol pumps. Last time I visited, on a very quiet evening when it was not at all busy, 3 of those charging points were in use. If we want to go all-electric, then all of the parking spaces need to be charging points. That would requite a huuuuuuuuuuuuge upgrade in the mains supply capacity to the store.

Scam-baiting YouTube channel Tech Support Scams taken offline by tech support scam

Re: Always trust Microsoft reports - not

https://www.eadt.co.uk/news/warning-over-british-gas-scam-calls-2650128

Suffolk Trading standards put out a warning about 18 months ago. It is still happening.

Re: Always trust Microsoft reports - not

I've never ever had the Microsoft scam. I get the British Gas scam at least once a day at the moment, and I've had the HMRC scam and Royal Mail scam several times.

A bunch of apps will be able to bypass Microsoft's new store and use own update methods

You could submit a WSL distro to the store, and then push an update that enhances the experience by installing it natively.

For a true display of wealth, dab printer ink behind your ears instead of Chanel No. 5

Re: Ditched inkjets

They sell the printer at a loss, and hope to make the money on the ink.

The printer is poorly made and falls to bit very quickly.

I think there is a problem with adopting both of those business models.

Reserve Bank of India official suggests country may soon have a digital currency pilot

Re: Cool?

Well give them their equivalent of an electronic money licence like what PayPal has, and let them get on with it.

Hong Kong already has a digital currency? It is called the Octopus Card. It is mostly used on public transport, but last time I was there, about 7 years ago, you could also spend it in places like 7 Eleven.

You could put it on Apple Pay, maybe they already have, Japan did it with their equivalent.

UKRI denies pulling funding from Newport Wafer Fab over Chinese ownership concerns

Sure, but we are talking about something that Intel discontinued 20 years ago;. Obviously others used it for longer, and some still do. Apparently Newport's output is mostly used to produce power management chips for cars, and I guess there would be zero benefit from moving them to a 5nm process node as the 180nm chips work just fine. But, I'm sure the Chinese are capable of producing power management chips that are just as good as ours. If you want them in a factory in Wales, shipping from China might most more than the actual product.

Subcontractors working on CityFibre's £45m Derby rollout threaten to 'rip up tarmac' in dispute over payments

I suppose the cronic shortage of materials for the workers to work on is disguising the fact that if the materials were present on all currently active sites, you wouldn't be able to find enough workers.

Of corse the cronic shortage of materials is due to a cronic shortage of workers further up the supply chain.