Posts by katrinab

Buying a Chromebook? Don't forget to check that best-before date

Re: Buy carefully

Apple are generally better than everyone else.

My mid-2010 macbook didn't get Mojave, but it is still getting security updates for high sierra. My iPad Air 2 will get the iPadOS 13 update.

If there is a security update for SSL, as there have been in the past. Websites will install it, and you will also need to update your browser. If you don't, then a lot of websites won't work.

Re: No problem!

Has this happened? My ancient printer still works with Windows XP 64 bit drivers.

I have a pair of i7 3700s which are about 7 years old. Nvida and AMD are still providing the respective graphics drivers. Everything else works out of the box with Microsoft provided drivers.

Here's a top tip: Don't trust the new person – block web domains less than a month old. They are bound to be dodgy

On iPad, a long tap gives you a menu, with the URL at the top.

Re: .xyz is on my postfix header check rules

abc.xyz is Google's parent company, but other than that, I agree.

Microsoft Chrom... Edge hits beta as new browser prepped for biz testing

Re: That's illogical Captain

On the other hand, people use Edge as a Google Chrome downloading tool. If Edge is basically the same thing, then all they would need to do is change the default search engine.

I think it will be Ubuntu rather than Android.

It will never be safe to turn off your computer: Prankster harnesses the power of Windows 95 to torment fellow students

Re: More chaos

If you are the Duke of Edinburgh, then that will be a reality.

Re: sad mac

Or Barrier is a fork of it that is still free.

Re: W98 was OK, but W95 and USB ..

Windows 98 will run a lot faster on a virtual machine than on bare metal on a modern computer, and anyway, you won’t be able to use more than one core/thread on your CPU, or more than about 384MB of RAM. Graphics performance will be particularly bad because there aren’t the drivers to support modern hardware. For best performance, you want a computer from mid-2000s.

Re: sad mac

There was an Intel graphics driver that let you do that by pressing ctrl+alt+arrow keys. I presume for monitors that you can rotate to portrait mode.

Microsoft Notepad: If it ain't broke, shove it in the Store, then break it?

Re: Leave the 'pads alone

The most recent version of notepad does support unix end-of-line characters, and it tells you in the status bar whether your file has Windows or Unix line endings. It doesn’t however allow you to save a new file in the Unix format though.

Re: Notepad subjected to Store updates - even on Windows Server?

Windows Store isn’t even an option on Server 2019

Dry patch? Have you considered peppering your flirts with emojis?

There is no universally accepted emoji, but some of the options include:

Peach, though this more usually represents the rear opening rather than the front one

Cat face, as in pussy

The "OK" hand gesture - in some cultures this gesture has a very different meaning representing the body part you are looking for

'Hey Google, remind Greg the locks have been changed, and he should find a new place to live. Maybe ask his mistress?'

Re: Hey Google

You remember correctly.

An intelligent person who sees someone looking at pictures of women would not conclude that they are looking for a boyfriend, but Google does it every time.

Re: Hey Google

There was such a thing, called Google Now, which was completely useless

- "You should jump out the train window, walk to the nearest bus stop, and take various buses to get to some retail park that you sometimes visit, never by bus".

- "You parked your car in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, here are the times of the buses back home"

Hey Google

Remind katrinab to:

Sign up for a heterosexual dating site

Buy a pregancy testing kit

Book a nursery school place

Buy food and farming equipment for the herd of cows that apparently resides with her in her 2nd floor apartment

Buy baby clothes

Sign up for all the blockchain investment scams that are going

Buy a funeral plan

How long before this happens?

We're not going Huawei even if you ban our 5G kit, Chinese firm tells UK

Re: US trade Deal

That's assuming you know what you are buying. One of the requirements will be that retailers won't be allowed to label it as such.

WeWork filed its IPO homework. So we had a look at its small print and... yowser. What has El Reg got itself into?

Sorry, your buzzword generator is about 20 years out of date.

You want something along the lines of, "An IA driven, blockchain-native cloud platform, integrating Internet-Of-Things technologies to synergise [something or other, my head is about to explode just thinking about it]".

They are a real estate company

Benchmark them against the likes of Regus. Rental yield and occupancy rates are the most important numbers. All this value-add stuff is only useful if it leads to higher rental yields in excess of the additional costs involved. Good design and decor sometimes does, up to a point, as people don’t like shabby filthy offices. Catering facilities should at least break even in their own right, but can help rental yields elsewhere in the building if there isn’t much outside. This is mainly relevant for buildings in industrial estates, not so much in city centres. Everything else usually doesn’t pay for itself.

J'accuse! Amazon's Rekognition reckons 1 in 5 Californian lawmakers are crims in ACLU test

Re: 1 in 5 lawmakers ...

They are criminals obviously, but not those specific criminals on the wanted list. This camera thing risks them getting away with a less serious crime than what they actually should be up for.

Stuffing your MacBook Pro in a ziplock bag before a flight ain't gonna cut it, say Feds

Re: Just returned from Holiday

A TSA agent will be able to recognise a MacBook. But a specific model-year of MacBook that hasn't had its battery changed; I don't think so, unless they have a way to scan the serial number to check its status.

Apple is a filthy AWS, Azure, Google reseller, gripe punters: iPhone giant accused of hiding iCloud's real backend

And Apple pulled out of the server market quite a few years ago.

It's a God-awful smell affair.... is there life on Mars? Rocks ruled out as source of mystery methane on Red Planet

Re: "we know natural methane is odorless"

Ethyl Mercaptan is added to mains gas to make it smelly so that people can tell when there is a leak.

What do Windows 10 and Uber or Lyft have in common? One bad driver can really ruin your day. And 40 can totally ruin your month

Re: "all the vulnerable drivers we discovered have been certified by Microsoft"

Certified by Microsoft means it was actually published by Nvidia or whoever, and it isn't some trojan driver from a third-party distributor.

Plot twist: Google's not spying on King's Cross with facial recognition tech, but its landlord is

Re: use of facial recognition technology in the UK is largely believed to be illegal

Even if it is legal for the police, doesn't mean it is legal for anyone else. They do have more powers.

Canonical adds ZFS on root as experimental install option in Ubuntu

Re: Lovely.

One of the programs we run requires about 1GB per user, so 8GB for 50 users was nowhere near sufficient.

Re: Wow

Stock FreeBSD works absolutely fine with 6GB of RAM for 4 x 10TB Iron Woolves.I get about 230MB/s transfer speeds, which is double what my gigabit network can cope with. I think I could probably go down to 4GB without significant performance loss, but I haven't tested it. I have virtual machines that perform other duties running in virtual machines with 384MB of allocated ram and 32GB of storage, and they work absolutely fine.

Re: Lovely.

You work in the same company as me?

Where the boss thought that it would be possible to run an RDP server for 50 users on a fairly old i5 with 8GB RAM. Apparently if you run it on a VMWare virtual machine, that means you don't have to buy real hardware for it.

Green search engine Ecosia thinks Google's Android auction stinks, gives bid a hard pass

Re: Users can choose...

Like I said, on the Windows Desktop market, Bing is the default search engine. Almost nobody uses it, they all switch to Google. They could switch to anyone else they wanted to for the same amount of effort, but they choose Google.

Re: Users can choose...

Those very same Android users can usually be very arsed to change the default search engine in Windows from Bing to Google. So if Android had a different default search engine, I suspect most people would change it back to Google.

Linux Journal runs shutdown -h now for a second time: Mag editor fires parting shot at proprietary software

Re: Granny's Portable.

405 line analogue TVs don’t work anywhere outside of North Korea. Actually, they don’t work there either as they use 576 line PAL rather than NTSC.

Re: Yes , there are a few in print

El Reg has been online only since day one. How did we find it?

Re: Yes , there are a few in print

If you want to read about address space isolation in the linux kernel, it is unlikely that the magazine is running the article that month, so you would look it up online, and as long as it isn’t so old that a new version of linux has completely changed it, it will still be useful.

In the past, I suppose you would have gone to the library to look at back issues.

Re: Linux Mag

Mandrake merged with Connectiva in 2005 to become Mandriva.

You can easily secure America's e-voting systems tomorrow. Use paper – Bruce Schneier

Re: Sure there are potential exploits against paper

If the auditors are appointed by all of the candidates, then, they will be individually biased, but it won’t be possible to corrupt all of them.

So you would have one democrat, on republican, one libertarian, etc, all attending the sealing of the ballot box, and attending the opening of it and the counting of the votes.

Talk about unintended consequences: GDPR is an identity thief's dream ticket to Europeans' data

Re: Thorny issue indeed

If an American Company asked me for my Social Security Number, I would probably give them something along the lines of AB123456C and see if they accept that. Or maybe, for example, if I was at a car rental desk, I would show them my EHIC (European Health Insurance Card) and let them take the number from that.

A birth certificate is a public document, and is not ID. It doesn't prove anything about the person who has it in their possession.

Microsoft blocked TSO Host's email IPs from Hotmail, Outlook inboxes and no one seems to care

Re: What I do not understand is...

Because something in the order of 90-99% of all emails sent get blocked, and if they didn't reject it at the gateway, they would be over-run with spam.

Xbox daddy bakes bread with 4,000-year-old Egyptian yeast

Re: Eh?

We have 30A ring mains with 13A at each socket, so the kettle will work anywhere in the house. Obviously a kettle and two electric heaters on the same circuit would be a problem, but generally it is not something I have to think about.

Re: Eh?

This is my kettle, it is 3kW

https://www.johnlewis.com/sage-the-soft-open-kettle-silver/p489241

Almost all of them are 3kw

https://www.johnlewis.com/browse/electricals/kettles/_/N-aht

You can filter by wattage, the lowest powered one is 2kW

Re: Eh?

My kettle is 3kW. Lower powered ones are available. Mine came from John Lewis (high street department store chain with big electrical section). Currys, our equivalent to Best Buy out on the retail park, also has them.

Re: Eh?

Here in the UK, a kettle is way quicker than an electric oven for boiling water. I get boiling water from my kettle in about a minute, and if my recipe calls for boiling water in a pan, eg pasta, vegetables or whatever, I will fill the pan with boiling water from the kettle rather than heat up a pan of cold water.

FBI, NSA to hackers: Let us be blunt. Weed need your help. We'll hire you even if you've smoked a little pot in the past

Re: I can understand why the NSA is hard on drug use

Or, having no password on the administrator account, and port 3389 wide open to the world.

Transport for London Oyster system pulled offline after credential-stuffing crooks board customers' accounts

Re: Who logs in to an Oyster card?

To download your journey history for the day to use as a receipt for an expense claim?

More Linux than Windows: El Reg takes Docker Desktop for WSL 2 preview out for a spin

Re: @elReg

WSL, at least the currently shipping v1 of it, doesn’t run in Hyper-V. It is like Wine, except the other way round. I have it running in Hyper-V Windows machines that don’t support nested virtualisation, and on a Windows Machine that has Hyper-V disabled so I can run VMWare instead.

Thunderbolts and lightning very, very frightening as loo shatters, embedding porcelain shards in wall

Flavoured condoms are a thing

Re: So that's why

Or, apparently, 30-50 feral hogs ... Apparently the country is over-run with them.

Condoms on everything you use for penetration

Googlers hate it! This one weird trick lets websites dodge Chrome 76's defenses, detect you're in Incognito mode

Re: Everything is for the Best in this Best of All Possible Worlds

"This is about the differing performance of disk stores vs memory stores on the same computer, whether lightning fast SLC SSD or a 5400rpm slow laptop HDD. The speed of even the fastest SSD available pales in comparison to memory,"

The performance of disk stores on a computer with lots of spare memory will be just as fast as memory stores, even with spinning rust, due to something called cacheing.