Posts by katrinab

What Microsoft's Windows 11 will probably look like

Can I suggest a couple of improvements:

Move the clock and task tray to a bar along the top, and stick some menu items on the left of that bar

Have the task bar on the bottom shrink to fit the items on it

Tech contractor loses IR35 tribunal appeal: 'Right' to substitute didn't mean he could, say judges

Re: Substitution?

If you sell yuur work on app stores then definitely yes. If you are working on part of a bigger project, then probably not.

Re: A couple of things here I'm surprised about

"Hypothetical" means a contract that actually represents what is happening on the ground rather than some legal fiction drafted by a lawyer that nobody pays attention to.

Re: Typical

I think they mean

"Here's £8.91 per hour in salary [minimum wage] + plus £40,000 or whatever to cover your expenses in doing the job, without any explanation as to what those expenses might be.

In other words, they didn't spend the money at all.

I don't think you even need to take the day off yourself. Taking on additional staff at busy times qualifies. I know one person, who would occasionally get a student in for a day to help with testing network cables.

Re: Substitution?

If your consultancy specialises in small business, you will likely be fine, because you will have lots of customers, and while you might have regular appointments with some of them for routine maintenance, mostly you will be called out as and when needed, for example when things break down, or they want to install new software or set up a new user etc.

Deluded medics fail to show Ohio lawmakers that COVID vaccines magnetise patients

If it is LED lighting then she probably is ...

Thailand bans joke cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens

In what way is Bitcoin a "more legitimate" coin than Dodgecoin or Bananacoin?

I'm curious, because I see them all as equaly useless.

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

If you are looking for a chicken-related name, then how about "Kentucky"?

We have "Java" as a coffee-related name for a programming language.

Norton dodges UK courts after telling Brit watchdog it will be nicer to consumers

Re: Eh?

Windows Defender is a perfectly decent anti-virus solution, better than Norton or McAfee anyway.

The AN0M fake secure chat app may have been too clever for its own good

Re: Criminality

Do any of them have buildings named after them or statues in Oxford University?

Re: Criminality

They are dealing with that. The students voted 89% in favour of removing the name. But that doesn't stop them focusing on Rhodes as well, in fact it is probably better to deal with all of them in one go.

Re: Criminality

You have to remember that you only read about the ones that get caught. Despite all the massive drugs busts you read about, it doesn't really seem to impact the supply lines at all, people can still get them.

Want to keep working in shorts and flipflops way after this is all over? It could be time to rethink your career moves

Re: Not only Brits!

It's not as simple as that:

In the UK:

183 days or more, definitely resident

Fewer than 16 days (ie a typical 2 week holiday), definitely not resident

Between 16 and 182 days, it depends on a number of other factors

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

Re: Windows 10 is the last version of Windows,

Or Microsoft Azure Desktop, client edition

Pakistan's Punjab province tells citizens to get jabbed or have their SIM card blocked

Re: Momento mori

If you look at the age demographics of people getting infected in this wave compared to previous waves

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=nation&areaName=England

You will see that this time round it is affecting young people, mostly school-age children and their parents. Both groups who have either not yet been called-up for vaccination, or have only recently been called up for their first dose.

The risk for 70 year-olds has always been lower than for pretty much every other age group except the under-5s, probably because they are retired but still relatively healthy. But this time round, people over that age are mostly not affected, when previously they were affected the worse.

That appears to show that the vaccines are working.

Cloudflare network outage disrupts Discord, Shopify

Re: CDN useless

DOS Protection, load balancing.

Even if the servers are faster, doesn't mean the pipe connecting it to the internet is.

BT promises firmware update for Mini Whole Home Wi-Fi discs to prevent obsessive Big Tech DNS lookups

Re: So how can we push this up the chain?

The equivalent here is OFCOM. Good luck getting them to do anything about it.

Amazon exec's husband jailed for two years for insider trading. Yes, with Amazon stock

Re: Got too greedy yet.....

Gamestop "investors" weren't acting on inside information, or, indeed, on any information at all.

Ireland warned it could face 'rolling blackouts' if it doesn't address data centres' demand for electricity

Re: Lucky Ireland

Wind farms are good when the wind is blowing, which isn't all the time, so they don't replace other generation sources, they just mean you don't have to turn them on as often.

Ransomware-skewered meat producer JBS confesses to paying $11m for its freedom

Re: Whoa there

I do full image backups as well, but they are only for rolling back if I börk an upgrade or configuration change.

Re: Whoa there

My backup strategy is:

Document all the software that is installed, and the configuration options etc that are in use

Backup the data

Then if I need to restore, install the software from scratch, which, if the procedure is properly documented, shouldn't take too long; and restore the data from backups.

I've tested it when migrating to new hardware, so it does work.

Student Loans Company splashes out on 20,000 cybersecurity training courses – for just 3,300 employees

You need to look at the number of accounts rather than the value.

Having said that, Wonga's individual account balances are likely to be a lot lower than SLC's. Probably the same to a lesser extent at Blackhorse; so looking at the value of the loan book probably understates the difference in work load.

Re: "Mastering GDPR, Governance Security, and Compliance in Office 365" at £3,260 per head

20 year's experience of a 5 year-old piece of legislation. Exactly what the HR drones are looking for...

EE and Three mobe mast surveyors might 'upload some virus' to London Tube control centre, TfL told judge

Re: Roof space

Looking at the Google maps link provided in the previous post, they already have.

Six years in the making, Vivaldi Mail arrives alongside version 4.0 of the company's browser

Re: Vivaldi/Thunderbird

Evolution looks like it might be a good replacement for Outlook 98.

'I put the interests of the country first': Colonial Pipeline CEO on why oil biz paid off ransomware crooks

Re: Er ...

Colonial1!

Has upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols.

Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

Re: Credit where it's due

The whole point of Fastly and similar services is to provide decentralised design?

Obviously it failed.

Apple ditches support for pre-2015 MacBook Air, Pro laptops with macOS Monterey

Re: Linux?

On Safari / High Sierra, or Hackintoshed Mojave, mine runs well enough for any sort of browsing.

The thing is, my Mid 2010 MacBook Pro is still a usable machine. You can run Office 2019, Zoom, Teams, etc. Modern websites still load on it. You can connect to modern wifi networks. Nothing like as fast as my 16" MacBook Pro, but it works fine, and the speed when doing these things is usable.

The latest VMWare doesn't work, but the latest supported version will boot up Windows 10, though not at a usable speed. Windows 8 is just about usable except for the UI disaster zone, as is XP. Vista & 7 not so much, unless you go for the imbedded version.

This is an 11 year old computer. in 2000, the laptop the released was the first to have AirPort. iSight wouldn't come to the lineup for another 5 years. That model certainly would not have been remotely usable in 2011.

The increase in speed over the 2010s is probably about the same as in the 2000s, but the ability of software other than games to make use of that extra performance hasn't. But if you are looking for a gaming machine, don't buy a Mac.

Proof-of-space cryptocurrency Chia triggers HDD sales boom in Europe

Re: GPUs

Sadly there are a lot of complete idiots out there.

Even if you did buy the right kit, how long would it last before it is obsolete, and how many bitcoins would it produce in that time net of electricity costs?

That would be the OneCoin, or, allegedly, Tether.

No, apparently a consumer grade SSD which would normally be good for about 10 years will wear out in 6 weeks if you use it for Chia mining.

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

Surely xkcd 908 is the correct link

https://xkcd.com/908/

Seems someone tripped on the network cable ...

Ethernet standards wonks eye up speeds beyond 400Gb/s

Re: In the meantime 10Gb/s has been available for years now ...

Well my NAS with 4 mechanical hard drives can saturate a 1Gbps link.

Not particularly amazing hardware:

i7-3770 with 32GB RAM running FreeBSD.

Antivirus that mines Ethereum sounds a bit wrong, right? Norton has started selling it

Re: I didn't need any more reasons to avoid Norton

By setting up shop in places with cheap electricity, or by buying old power stations and using their entire output for mining.

They are not paying domestic retail prices for their electricity.

Windows Defender seems to work OK, if you really must run Windows on your computer.

I didn't need any more reasons to avoid Norton

But I have one anyway.

In most parts of the world, the money you could make from mining imaginary money is far less than the retail cost of the electricity required to do it.

Linux 5.13 hits rc5, isn’t yet calm, Linus Torvalds is only mildly perturbed

Re: Still brickin'..

That’s down to the distro. Unlike FreeBSD or Windows, Linux isn’t an operating system, it is a component of the GNU and Android operating systems.

For server deployments, I find FreeBSD is the easiest/quickest to install, but I do it a lot and know what I’m doing, Linux takes slightly longer but not much more difficult, and Windows takes me by far the longest,

For desktop deployments, I find Linux is the easiest to get a working system, though if you select the easy install route you will end up with more bloat than I would maybe like, but certainly a far better out of the box experience than Windows where you have to hunt down loads of third party drivers. FreeBSD is probably on par with Windows in that respect, though you end up with a much better system at the end of it.

Report commissioned by Google says Google isn't to blame for the death of print news

Re: Partly true

I have indeed heard of it.

Compared to other places, including outer London, central London is a ghost town.

Re: Partly true

Sales at local shops would be FaceBook I think? I don't know, I never go there.

Have you been to London recently? It is a ghost town. On the Bakerloo Line at Oxford Circus in the morning peak, previously people would have been packed in the carriage armpit to armpit. Now you share the carriage with about 5 other people.

Google's diversity strat lead who said Jews have 'insatiable appetite for war' is no longer diversity strat lead

Re: But but

Yes, but only if those views are compatible with a more diverse workplace.

Freedoms are not absolute, there is a balancing act.

There is a big difference between criticising the former Lukid Party government, who lost the most recent election with only 24% of the vote, and ciriticising Jewish people, many of whom don't even live in Israel.

Yair Lapid's coalition, who successfully won that election by criticising the former government, are they anti-semitic?

The policy of truth: As ransomware claims rise, what's a cyber insurer to do?

Re: What about theft?

They don't pay the thief to hand it back. That's the equivalent here.

Android banking malware sharply increased in the first chunk of 2021, reckons ESET

Re: How many Android devices are secure in any case?

Or:

The malware authors only need to get lucky once.

Google and the smartphone vendors need to get lucky every single time.

This AI could save a firefighter's life

Do real-world buildings have these heat sensors that can be used to provide the required information? And do they work outside normal room-temperature ranges?

Stack Overflow acquired for $1.8bn by Prosus (no, me neither)

Re: Hopefully they learnt from Freenode

I think you selected the wrong icon. This will very likely happen.

US slaps tariffs on countries that hit Big Tech with digital services taxes ... then pauses them immediately

Re: About bl**dy time

The "shareholders" live in a filing cabinet in a trust lawyer's office in the British Virgin Islands.

Bribery charges against Apple's global security boss dismissed in iPads-for-gun-permits case

Re: "he is carrying a concealed weapon"

If you are working in the police or in a military base, I don't know why the weapon needs to be concealed. Having it openly attached to your belt is surely more effective? There would be less chance that you would need to use it.

Hyper-V bug that could crash 'big portions of Azure cloud infrastructure': Code published

When you are on-premises, you can deploy other measures to protect access to your vms. On The Cloud, you can only protect your own vms, not those of other customers on the same physical host.