Posts by katrinab

Post Office threatened to sue Fujitsu over missing audit data

Re: Blockchain

The correct way to make sarcastic comments is to use this icon.

Re: Somewhat elementary?

Usually it is a copy on write type system though, so the deleted invoice is still there and marked as deleted, along with the date/time and user id of the person who deleted it, and the amended details, if any added as a new invoice, with some sort of cross-reference between them.

Then, a regular supplier/customer account statement would exclude the deleted items, but an audit trail query would show them.

Ban on Apple watches with blood oxygen sensors confirmed after failed appeal

Re: Opportunity for people to personally export to the US ?

You would be breaking the law, but you might get away with it. I think they are more interested in making sure Kinder Eggs don’t get into the country.

Re: Opportunity for people to personally export to the US ?

You are banned from importing such a watch into the US.

BT to spell out contract price hikes in pounds and pence

Re: Where the fuck did UK journalists go to school ?

The rules change every year, but, when you deduct £125 in year one, it is now worth £875 for tax purposes in year two. Then you deduct whatever % of that the rules for that year say you are allowed to deduct.

The actual valuation is only relevant if you sell it. If you sell it for more than the tax valuation, you have to pay back the difference. If you sell it for less, or dispose of it, you might be able to claim back the difference, or the difference might be treated as a residual asset that you can continue to claim allowances on over time.

Generally we alternate between years when the allowances are really generous and years where they are not.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

Surely back in the 1950s and 60s when a lot of banks were introducing computers for the first time, there would have been a lot of people around who were born in the 19th century. Now, there isn't anyone left who was born in the 19th century, the last one died in 2017, but plenty of people who were born before 1924.

Re: The Y2.1K Bug

Excel thinks 29th February 1900 is a valid date, because Microsoft wanted it to be bug-compatible with Lotus 123 in that respect.

However =DATE(2100,2,29) does return 1st March 2100, so they thought about that one.

I had one so-called expert warn that you needed to air-gap the compliant and non-compliant systems, because otherwise the millenium bug would spread back onto the computers that had already been fixed.

Sure there were some genuine problems that needed to be fixed, but it was mostly doomsday cultists trying to make money from snakeoil fixes.

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

That's what I thought too. Amstrad was sold to Sky, and lives on, I think, in the form of the Sky Box you get if you subscribe to their service, though maybe they now use Roku stuff? They were one of the early investors in it, though they have since offloaded their stake.

Going green Hertz: Rental giant axes third of EV fleet over lack of demand

Those might be the ones rented to Über drivers.

SAP to cough up $220M to drag bribery charges into recycle bin

Re: CoB

It is the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It doesn’t cover bribes to US officials.

Adios, dead zones: Starlink relays SMS in space for unmodified phones on Earth

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

They orbit the earth apparently every 90 minutes, and will be presumably be visible in your location for an amount of time during that 90 minute cycle.

So 90 minutes would presumably be a reasonable worst-case scenario and 7.5 minutes (90/6)/2 less the amount of time the reasonable best-case scenario?

That added on to the time it takes the emergency services to reach you obviously isn't ideal, but probably not the end of the world, and certainly a lot better than them reaching you about a month later when people figure out you are missing.

Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession

Re: Missing the point....again

You will be pleased then to learn that Unix newline support has been added to recent builds of Notepad.

You can't save a new file in Unix format, but if you open an existing file, it will tell you in the status bar that it is Unix (LF) rather than Windows (CRLF), and save in the existing format.

The Hobbes OS/2 Archive logs off permanently in April

Re: IBM's doomed operating system

You can right-click on a Magic Mouse, and on the Mighty Mouse before that. It has been about 20 years now since they shipped a 1 button mouse. Microsoft mice are still better though.

Top LLMs struggle to make accurate legal arguments

Re: "they don't understand law and can't form sound arguments"

The one thing that is more specific to law than to other areas though is that it can be changed.

You could have millions of cases and other reputable legal texts that genuinely support one particular argument, but if your parliament or equivalent passed a new law last week that contradicts it, then that takes precedent.

Avoiding AI-capable PCs will be impossible by 2027

Re: Power Use

If it is anything like the Apple Neural Engine, or Google Tensor Core, not that hard at all.

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

Re: 7kW

Indeed, these are the same people who are going to hook up car chargers to the street lighting circuit, and expect it to somehow just work.

Also, 300,000 chargers, 6 per motorway service station; these numbers are nowhere near sufficient.

Every single parking space needs to have a charger if we are to go 100% electric.

Re: "comes from renewable energy, we're told"

And of course nuclear is considered to be "renewable", even though it most definitely is not.

It may be zero carbon, but that is not the same thing as renewable.

Re: From what I can recall ....

That is definitely the case where I live, probably because the cables can run in three directions from the cabinet. You definitely wouldn't be able to leave your car there to charge.

How many watts does the kit in a street cabinet require?

I've no idea, but I'm pretty sure it is not a number that makes 7200 look like an insignificant addition.

Likewise, a typical residental lamp post was designed for a 50W sodium lamp, and will likely have a 35W LED replacement in there. The 15W left over will be enough to charge a phone, not a car.

Open source's new mission: To boldly go where no software has gone before

Re: Only for a specific type of open source, and only from a certain viewpoint

There is a FreeBSD variant that is good at gaming, it is called PlayStation OS. The BSD license means Sony can keep that non-free. Whether that is a good thing is something the BSD and GNU camps have been arguing about since 30+ years ago/

Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor

It was Write on Windows 2 back when I was at secondary school. Obviously I’m showing my age now.

The school’s server had a hard drive with one whole megabyte of storage.

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

Lazarus is the free Delphi clone, still in active development.

Here's a list of thousands of artists Midjourney's AI is ripping off, creatives claim

Re: Disclaimer:

> what exactly does accessing images available on the open internet have to do with "lifting", or "copyright" for that matter?

Getting the image from some other internet server to your server involves making a copy.

Re: I don't think copyright law can handle this...

The first thing you need to know about Artificial Intelligence is that it doesn't exist.

The next thing you need to know is that as these things are not intelligent, "training" doesn't mean what it means when you train an intelligent being.

What actually happens is that they take a vast amount of data, perform some statistical analysis on it, and produce an output based on these statistics.

The training data is the source code. The training model is the binary. The training algorithm is the compiler.

If you take the source code of Adobe Photoshop and compile it without their permission, that is illegal whether you use the same compiler that Adobe uses, or a different one. And the resulting binary is illegal to distribute even if it looks completely different to the one Adobe sells.

Same applies if the source code is photos you copied from the Getty Image Library without their permission.

Re: Don't put it on the Internet

They mostly put them on stock image libraries, with the expectation that they would get royalty income everytime someone used it.

Not that an AI would scrape the sample thumbnail and use that in its training set.

Re: Piles of styles

Someone who is an expert in art, ie not me, would definitely be able to explain in great detail what an artists "style" is, and the techniques they use to achieve it.

Formal ban on ransomware payments? Asking orgs nicely to not cough up ain't working

Re: A simpler solution…

The problem is more that you need an address to send the bills to, and once you have the address, you could send something else there instead of the bills.

Re: A simpler solution…

Ban the holding of any bitcoins that have ever been used to pay a ransom.

Re: A modest proposal

Some actually has to make the payment, and someone has to approve the payment file.

A ship carrying 800 tonnes of Li-Ion batteries caught fire. What could possibly go wrong?

There is no separate tax rate at the moment. But the way things are being done allows them to do that in the future.

In the UK, electricity from a car charging point is taxed at a higher rate (20%) than domestic electricity (5%), and if you want a domestic car charger, that has to be connected to a separate meter, which allows them to apply a different tax rate to that part of your bill in future.

While you can charge a car from a regular 13A socket, the amount of mileage you can get out of that isn't huge in the overall scheme of things.

BT misses deadline for removing Huawei from network core

Re: Two options

Yes, because I think a lot of the embeded stuff relies on it, and doesn't really need anything faster. Also, it does give you voice calls in most remote areas where nothing else is available.

Re: Two options

They have already done option 2

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/19/bt_confirms_nationwide_3g_switch/

3G is to be switched off between January [now] and March 2024.

2G, I suspect will stay around a bit longer.

Irony alert: Lawsuit alleging Chrome’s Incognito Mode isn’t will settle on unknown terms

Maybe, but your browser fingerprint - your specific combination of locale settings, hardware configuration, and all the other suff you can get, is pretty unique, and can be used to identify you.

Amazon already has a colossal ads business and will extend it to Prime Video in January

Re: And people moan...

I call S4C the Welsh equivalent of Channel 4 because it expands to Sianel Pedwar Cymru, which translates to Channel 4 Wales. Yes it is a completely separate entity with its own content.

Re: YouTube

If that happens, just delete all your cookies and other web data and refresh you blocklists, and you will be good to go again.

If you are not good to go again, wait about 6 hours and update the blocklists again.

Re: And people moan...

No, none of the licence fee money goes to Channel 4, it is entirely funded by advertising. Some goes to S4/C, the Welsh language equivalent of Channel 4

Re: No comment on how this has been received by Prime members?

My approach is to stick stuff in my basket as I go along, and order it once I get to the £25 threashold for free shipping.

I actually need next-day delivery maybe once or twice a year at most, so just pay the £5 for that. £10 per year for shipping costs works out a lot less than Prime membership.

Nvidia slowed RTX 4090 GPU by 11 percent, to make it 100 percent legal for export to China

Re: Slower Version

That is not a tale, it is standard practice. Intel for example doesn’t make about 5000 different CPU models, they make a few, and bin the resulting production based on QA test results.

Is it time for 6G already? Traffic analysis says yep

I haven't noticed 5G being any faster than 4G, what I have noticed though is better performance in congested urban areas.

At home, I have a perfect 4G signal and no 5G. Previously, when I went into the city centre, I noticed that download speeds got a lot slower, often unusably so. Now, with 5G in the city centre, speeds are about the same as my perfect 4G signal at home.

California approves lavatory-to-faucet water recycling

Re: Please could you ....

England is about 0.85 of a UK in terms of population, Scotland is about 0.1 UKs, Wales is about 0.05 UKs. Northern Ireland is the rounding error in my approximations, a bit under 0.03.

Artificial intelligence is a liability

Re: A bargain?

There are things that genuinely cost less than that? Or certainly there would have been in the past.

Study uncovers presence of CSAM in popular AI training dataset

Re: This is why doing AI on the cheap will never work

If you want medical diagnostic AI [...], then find everyone that might have any disease,

And also find people who don't have the disease and do the same thing, otherwise it is going to assume that everyone has some sort of disease.

No, because it is too dumb to understand the concept of CP.

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Re: I'm no expert

Yes, if you only need to fix the problem once.

If I need to fix the same problem on 5+ computers, it is quicker to work out the required sequence of commands, and either run a script on each computer, or copy/paste it onto the terminal.

Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies

Re: Why allowances expire

Your network receives an interconnect fee every time someone calls you from another network, or they receive money from the calling party if it is on the same network. So they are getting paid for the incomming call.

“payments to register once conditions like payment on delivery are met" already exists, it is called a letter of credit, and they are widely used in international trade.

The other use-case described sounds very much like the food stamp cards used in the USA to pay benefits to people.

Apple's easiest to replace battery is in... an iMac

I would say they are both about the same in terms of ease of replacement. The difference being it doesn't give you the animated instructions on how to replace it. Not important for people who read this website, but for normal people, it is likely very helpful.

FTC bans Rite Aid from using AI facial recognition in stores for 5 years

Re: The Tories just did this

My driving licence expires about 3 months before my passport, and the photo on it came from my old, almost-expired passport. So it is going to be about 19 years old by the time it comes to expiry.