* Posts by katrinab

6393 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2016

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

katrinab Silver badge
Gimp

Outlook for Mac talks to my Exchange Server just fine. You do need to enable Exchange Web Services on it though, and don't activate the "new" version of Outlook.

katrinab Silver badge

It no longer has to be.

katrinab Silver badge

Banks, shops, car show rooms, dental practices, hospital receptions; are all use cases where the cheapest iPad could do the job just fine.

Increasingly in shops I do see iPads being used. Haven't been to a car showroom recently, but that seems like a perfect place to have iPads instead of desktops, because they can carry it around with them rather than have to go back to the desk to use it.

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Trollface

Re: Strategy

Intel Core i9 15900KX Ultra Max, Extreme Edition

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

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Meh

Re: No shit

My place is reasonably new and it has a 100A main fuse. Older places I lived in had a 60A main fuse.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

About 34.5p/kWh excluding VAT for the fuel. [source: Boiler Juice, which says the average price of red diesel today is 86.34p/l. Dividing by 2.5 to get from litres to kWh].

Given the current prices including 20% for electricity from a public charger, you would make a gross margin on that. I don't know if it would be enough to cover the transaction, maintenance, and capital costs.

But mostly, if you have a large warehouse, and you want to fast-charge all the lorries while they are unloading/loading, it is probably the only way to do it.

katrinab Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

This is all absolutely true. I am just looking at the amount of electricity required to power all our road vehicles.

Another thing: Public service bus operators can claim back the fuel duty. I'm not sure if this is shown in the HMRC figures as a reduction in tax revenue, or somewhere else as an expense.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

9kWh in a litre of petrol, 10kWh in a litre of diesel. Slightly more diesel sold than petrol, but it is pretty close to 50:50.

Electric cars are somewhere between 2-3 times more efficient than petrol/diesel, because the efficiency losses mostly take place before the electricity reaches your meter.

So somewhere in the order of 180TWh per year, in addition to the 300TWh we currently use.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

I think it might have been true in the US. Definitely not in the UK as they were all council-owned and therefore not for sale.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

I definitely wouldn't rate Wales as good for railways. Maybe it will improve now that Trafnidiaeth Cymru is in charge of it, but it will need a lot of work over many years.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

HMRC collects about £2bn per month in fuel tax. At 52.95p/l, that is about 3.8bn litres of petrol and diesel every month. Replacing all that with electricity is a lot more than just a few kw per vehicle per night.

Yes it may be true that "most" people only drive a few miles per day. But it certainly is not the case that most fuel is purchased by people who only drive a few miles per day.

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: No shit

The vast majority of miles driven are driven by people who drive lots of miles. If you want to do something about pollution, those are the people you need to target, not the people like me who drive about 3 miles per week.

katrinab Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: No shit

I really don't think so. The wiring will be designed to cope with 50W sodium bulbs, and likely those bulbs were replaced with 35W LEDs. That is barely enough to charge a laptop, nevermind a car.

Amazon Ads rolls out generative AI for ad image composition

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Alert

Not if you are shopping on Amazon, and the photo of the product you are considering isn't a genuine photo of that product.

Pope tempted by Python! Signs off on coding scheme for kids

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Angel

Re: Let's hope so

Yes, surely they should be teaching Holy C?

Wayland heading for default status as Mint devs mix it into Cinnamon 6 bun

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Trollface

You can miss the door, due to it being completely flush with the wall, no colour contrast, and no immediately obvious way to open it.

SBF on trial: The Python code that allegedly let Alameda hedge fund spend people's FTX deposits

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Let's not forget

I think what you are describing is a pyramid scheme?

In a Ponzi Scheme, the person at the top receives all of the incoming money, and pays out new money as "returns" on older money.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

One for each of their coin holdings maybe?

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

katrinab Silver badge

Surely the advertising department's performance is measured in terms of sales numbers?

If I, living in the South of England, get adverts for Northern Rail as I sometimes do, they are not going to get any sales from me, so they won't get their sales related bonuses.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: I've always been curious...

Or indeed tobacco in the UK. Legal to sell, not legal to advertise. Same with baby milk and prescription drugs.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: I've always been curious...

Because then they would have to target the ads to the content of the video rather than the viewer. Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Traditional TV ads are targeted that way, and they seem to make a lot more money.

katrinab Silver badge
Flame

Yes, I got recommended a load of flat-earth debunking videos as well.

Of course the earth is round, and anyone who says otherwise is either an idiot, or someone trying to make money off idiots; but I'm really not interested in watching loads of 15 minute videos of people explaining that to me.

Firefox 119 unleashes PDF prowess and Sync sorcery

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Megaphone

If you don't like snaps, don't use Ubuntu. Other linux distros exist. Vanilla Debian or Linux Mint are good choices if you are migrating away from Ubuntu.

Ubuntu LTS kernels will get one decade of fixes … still

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Black Helicopters

"Oracle adds Btrfs to its CentOS rebuild, but not ZFS, even though Oracle owns all of Sun's original Solaris code – including ZFS. One would think it could find some way to grant itself rights to things it already owns."

Maybe it doesn't want to give other people those rights? If it released a version of linux with zfs, it would be releasing it under a GPL-compatible licence, or alternatively releasing a pirated version of the linux kernel.

CEO Satya Nadella thinks Microsoft hung up on Windows Phone too soon

katrinab Silver badge

They made more money from Apple, and from Google, for licensing fees for Exchange ActiveSync, than they made from Windows Phone.

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

And more importantly, not having all the apps that get around 100,000 downloads on Google and Apple.

Individually, their absence only affects about 200,000 potential customers, but collectively, pretty much everyone has at least one of them.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is now available ... if you pre-ordered

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Also, the kids who got the first Pis have now grown up, got jobs based on what they learned from using it, and are now applying that knowledge in the workplace.

UK to crack down on imported Chinese optical fiber cables

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: What?

Don't think a piece of glass presents any security issues, though of course that won't stop them trying to claim it anyway.

French IT behemoth Atos facing calls for nationalization as it tries to restructure

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Flame

Re: Sovereignty??

Not the UK, given that the Department forWork and Pensions is run by a French company, called ATOS.

Teens take a million metaverse Ryanair flights in Roblox

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Thumb Up

Re: Bathroom?

Yes, saying as the flushing toilet was invented by Thomas Crapper, that is as good a name as any.

FreeBSD 14's RC2 dances to the tune of OpenZFS 2.2

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Alert

Re: ZFS on Linux

Linux can't be easily re-licenced because the copyright is owned by the individual contributers not all of whom are contactable, or even still alive.

Martin Goetz, recipient of the first software patent, logs off at 93

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Black Helicopters

The difference with copyright is that I can look at how your program works, without looking at the source code, and write my own implementation of it, maybe changing some stuff where I don't like the decisions you made, whereas a patent stops me from doing that.

Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: So have we reached, forty years on...

I use the example of a washing machine, where there are actual updates that make a difference to performance, but nobody cares, they buy a new one every 10 years or so when the old one breaks.

AMD gives 7000-series Threadrippers a frequency bump with Epyc core counts

katrinab Silver badge
Happy

"I have no idea how you might keep all those cores busy."

That's easy, run lots of virtual machines. And the 2TB of RAM will help there as well.

Corner cutting of nuclear proportions as duo admit to falsifying safety tests 29 times

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Headmaster

Re: Errrr

A successful attempt is still an attempt…

In-memory database Redis wants to dabble in disk

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: to make Redis "more like your classic database,"

Well if you definition of "database" is the likes of Postgres and MariaDB, then yes.

But a key-value store is a type of database, and sometimes, not always, it is the right choice.

Indian authorities raid fake tech support rings after tipoff from Amazon and Microsoft

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Black Helicopters

If you watch some of Jim Browning's videos, I guess you will find the number. Or there's a few other YouTube channels that do similar things.

First Brexit, now X-it: Musk 'considering' pulling platform from EU over probe

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Best argument for rejoining EU

Don't the male equivalents like 4chan prove the same thing about men?

I totally agree that the Prosecco Stormfront (Mumsnet) an extremist website though.

US prosecutors slam Autonomy tycoon's attempt to get charges tossed

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Lest anyone forgets who the real criminals are ...

Indeed. I knew they overpaid. All the other commentards on here at the time knew they overpaid. The other companies that considered buying them and walked away knew it was too expensive.

Apple finds another use for USB-C – a cheaper Pencil

katrinab Silver badge

Re: "The gen-2 Apple Pencil charged wirelessly..."

If you are in the UK, Argos sells them, and my local branch has them in stock right now, or if you can wait for delivery, places like CPC Farnell sell them a lot cheaper.

katrinab Silver badge
Gimp

A USB-C to lightning cable would be a better option than the adapter surely?

You may already have one, possibly the one that came with your iPad. If not, it will set you back £19 for the genuine Apple one, or cheaper third party ones are available elsewhere.

Take Windows 11... please. Leaks confirm low numbers for Microsoft's latest OS

katrinab Silver badge
Windows

The centered task-bar and fake Teams are both things you can fix post-install.

However, if you like your taskbar somewhere other than the bottom of the screen, that isn't such an easy fix.

X marks the bot: Musk thinks spammers won't pay $1 a year

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Thanks for the belly laugh, I needed that

The UK introduced direct debits in 1964.

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Alert

Re: Thanks for the belly laugh, I needed that

Probably Ireland isn't popular because they generally treat it as being part of the UK, which, of course, it is not.

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

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Mushroom

Re: Capacity

Hydrogen can leak through the gaps between the atoms of other materials. The only really viable way to stop that happening is to combine four of them together along with a carbon atom and use that as your fuel.

Down and out: Barclays Bank takes unplanned digital detox, customers not invited

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

I'm guessing the main danger is that they have already provisioned an Apple/Google Pay card on a burner phone, and they are spending on that? And the debt collectors will be round at some point seeking payment.

Raspberry Pi 5: Hot takes and cooler mistakes

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Flame

Re: Thermodynamics

No, because if you double the clock speed, I think you more than double the power consumption?

British boffins say aircraft could fly on trash, cutting pollution debt by 80%

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: more BS university studies

The "Looney Greens" don't want people flying at all. They want them to use electric trains powered by renewable energy.

Certainly some routes could be replaced with train services, but not all of them.

The people promoting this sort of stuff are greenwashers and people who's business plan is to raise money in investment rather than deliver an actual product.

As it prepares to abandon its on-prem server products, Atlassian is content. Users? Not so much

katrinab Silver badge
Windows

Re: The John McCarthy award?

Does anyone actually use LISP? Surely Excel would consume most of the worlds parentheses resources purely on account of how widely it is used? With Javascript a distant second place?

TaxWatch finds astute scheme minimizes Big Tech's UK tax bill by over $2B

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Megaphone

Re: Amazon “indirect taxes”

The VAT is the indirect tax, and the PAYE is the direct tax.