* Posts by katrinab

6353 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2016

Microsoft still prohibits Google or Alibaba from running O365 Windows Apps

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: re: How this is not monopolist behaviour?

They pretty much have a monopoly on desktop operating systems and office applications, and they are using that to get into a different market.

Same as when they used their monopoly on Windows to push Netscape Navigator out of the way in favour of Internet Explorer.

Bodhi Linux 7 brings Enlightenment to Ubuntu

katrinab Silver badge
Linux

Re: Tell me that Linux is never going to be a mainsteam option without telling me....etc.

Is it more difficult to use than ChromeOS, which is, after all a Linux distro?

For most distros, I think that actually the only thing that is missing is a better curated App Store. Sure, they are all better than Microsoft's but the difference is that on Windows, people already know what to look for.

Intel seems to think Wi-Fi 7 is too cool for old-school Windows 10

katrinab Silver badge
Windows

Or: I have to wait a whole second for the computer to respond to a keystroke when entering text in a Word Processor.

Maybe not by the Pentium 4 days, but certainly that was the case on my 486 back when I was at college once I had more than one image in the document.

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

No that isn't the point.

An Ivy Bridge i7 3770 runs about 1/10th of the speed of a modern flagship, but that means for things like spreadsheets, word processing, web browsing, etc; that things that take 10ms on the modern flagship take 100ms on the Ivy Bridge, and you are unlikely to particularly notice the difference.

Gaming, video editing, 3d modelling, stuff like that, you will for sure notice the difference in speed, but if you are not doing those things, you really don't need the extra performance.

Going back 1 decade before the Ivy Bridge (Pentium 4 or thereabouts), your 100ms tasks took 1 second, and then you will notice a difference, and it will slow you down.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

I think it is still just as obtrusive now, the only difference is that application developers have learned not to ask for admin privleges unless they really need it.

katrinab Silver badge
Trollface

Yes, but one of those updates is an update to Windows 11.

Hope for nerds! ChatGPT's still a below-average math student

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: Below average is a bit generous...

Bing Chat:

Yes, you can make 147 using only 396, 200, 16 and 519. Here’s one way to do it:

(396 + 200) / 16 + 519 - (396 + 200) = 147

Is there anything else you would like to know? [smiley face emoji]

Dropbox limits ‘all the storage you need’ unlimited plan, blames abusive users

katrinab Silver badge
Windows

Re: the company saw more of this abusive behavior

Or, going even further back in time, when you had to pay by the minute, some providers offered unlimited minutes, and were then shocked that the people who took them up on it used more than the average number of minutes.

katrinab Silver badge

SD Card?

A 128GB Samsung Pro Plus Micro SD card costs £15 at Currys. You can probably get it cheaper, but if you buy if from Currys you can be sure it isn't a fake.

Amazon (Actual Amazon, not market place) charges £17.99, the Samsung Store charges £16, Amazon Marketplace / Ebay charge about £10, but a £5 saving for a potential fake isn't worth it, it is going to cost a lot more than £5 of my time to test it.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Only YouTube left with infinite storage?

They compress the videos you upload in a variety of formats, and I'm sure they will pick the maximum efficiency settings on their compression engine.

Presumably you could upload a sequence of qr codes and modem-type noises with sufficient redundancy and error correction that you are still able to recover the original data, but I'm not sure what the effective bit-rate would be.

Microsoft teases Python scripting in Excel

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Pandas and Anaconda

Kind-of, but Python isn’t that good for front-end programming.

You can use Jypyter, and I frequently do. Otherwise it is going to be a web application with a JavaScript front-end which is not really beginner-friendly as far as programming goes.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Pandas and Anaconda

And, at least for some tasks, there is Numpy. That’s what I generally use. I find it to be about 30-100x faster than Pandas for the things I do.

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: Nice in concept but...

Excel recently introduced, the world’s least popular programming language, JavaScript, and that runs locally.

Maybe you could integrate Python stuff into that using Brython or Pyodide?

As for whether you should, we’ll we are talking about JavaScript, and clearly nobody ever stopped to ask that question, because lots of people use it.

You can now fine-tune OpenAI's GPT-3.5 for specific tasks – it may even beat GPT-4

katrinab Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Prompts are everything

Google translate, Deepl, and Reverso may not be perfect at translation, but at least they do manage to translate into the correct language.

SEC fines fintech crypto fund that promised 2,700% returns

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: Break a leg

That isn't pure profit though, because you will have to spend a lot of the money on baseball bats and on people to take them to your customers.

Lesson 1: Keep your mind on the ... why aren't the servers making any noise?

katrinab Silver badge
Flame

Re: The timeline doesn't add up

My residential circuit breaker can be "held in", and I do need to hold it in for about a second after a power outage because the initial in-rush current of all my stuff is more than it is rated for.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Good encryption by default

The important thing here is that just because you have something to hide doesn't mean you have done anything wrong.

Need a decent dining spot in Ottawa? Microsoft suggested a food bank

katrinab Silver badge
Windows

The human involvement in the article was the human asking Bing Chat to generate the article, and copy-pasting the output into their content management system.

Humans stressed out by content moderation? Just use AI, says OpenAI

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: Oh, that is an edge case, we'll have to retrain on that

My favourite is when analysing medical images, instead of recognising the actual medical condition, it learned to recognise the markings made by the doctor on the image to indicate where the problem was. Whereas a human using those images as reference material would realise that that was where they needed to focus their attention.

'AI-written history' of Maui wildfire becomes Amazon bestseller, fuels conspiracies

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Jane Friedman

Do you think you would have any luck getting such a book onto the shelves of Waterstones/Barnes & Noble?

Boffins reckon Mars colony could survive with fewer than two dozen people

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: Why do people call a small outpost a colony ?

And "cheese" in England is equivalent to "plastique orange" in France.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Why do people call a small outpost a colony ?

"City" in the US is equivalent to "Parish Council" in England, or "Commune" in France.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Why do people call a small outpost a colony ?

For an off-earth colony, surely water and oxygen are the most important resources?

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Why do people call a small outpost a colony ?

For mars, supply runs are about once [or an arbirary number of shipments] every 780 days. It isn't really practical to send a shuttle there when it is on the other side of the sun to us.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has a left wing bias – at times

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Yes, people are more likely to shift right when they become homeowners, and they used to be more likely to be homeowners when they got older. That is no longer the case for a lot of people.

katrinab Silver badge
Boffin

Re: An undesirable objective

Killing all humans wouldn't eliminate disease though.

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: Is that Left from a USA perspective, or Left from a Scandinavian perspective?

Biden's healthcare policy would be ultra-extreme right wing lunatic nutfringe territory in Europe.

Google opens up Chrome 117 Developer Tools box, drops in a few spanners

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: Chrome

If you are doing web development, you kind-of need to test it on Chrome.

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: What next for security now?

It doesn't benefit Amazon if I get so frustrated with the c*** search results that I end up going elsewhere.

katrinab Silver badge
Flame

Re: What next for security now?

Amazon's search facility most definitely doesn't work though.

Can you raise $100M+ from AI investors with no product? SEC says yes

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: SEC said it would be seeking injunctive relief, plus civil penalties

Or steal $700m from important people [Theranos].

Theranos did at least spend the money on researchers and stuff to try and actually make the product.

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Florida%20Man

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: Whataboutism↓

Someone in St Petersburg I think?

Oracle, SUSE and others caught up in RHEL drama hit back with OpenELA

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: I'm against this, but wait...

I agree with you.

Genuine question:

Why do people choose Red Hat these days over say Debian?

When I first got involved in Linux about 25 years ago, Red Hat was easy(ish) to install, Debian was really difficult. Debian had a much better package management system, Red Hat's was a dependency hell nightmare.

These days, Debian seems easy enough to install, I would imagine about the same level of difficulty as Red Hat. And Red Hat now has a package management system that from what I can gather works much the same way as Apt, and any other package management system that isn't called winget, or snap.

I mostly use FreeBSD. Debian is my go-to when FreeBSD isn't able to run my workload. I haven't used Red Hat since about 1999. My knowledge of it is massively out of date, so that is why I'm asking.

Cumbrian Police accidentally publish all officers' details online

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: For all the billions spent on giant...

Well there might be some people out there using Google Sheets, or Apple Numbers; but other than that everything ultimately runs on Excel. Including, I imagine, Google and Apple.

Curiosity finds evidence of wet and dry seasons on ancient Mars

katrinab Silver badge
Alien

Re: Life's history

If an alien life form visited us, would be even recognise it as a life form?

HashiCorp's new license is still open source-ish, just with less free lunch

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Ah, Open Source

Depends.

But if you already had the last open source release, then they can't retrospectively impose new terms on it.

They can stop distributing the previous version, or they could distribute it under new terms. Then you would have to get a copy from someone else who received it on the old terms.

Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

katrinab Silver badge
Windows

My Canon printed a transmission report when it had a full page of transmissions to report, so something like 15 transmissions.

Maker of Chrome extension with 300,000+ users tells of constant pressure to sell out

katrinab Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Like what happened Adblock plus on Firefox (I think that's what it was called)

Yes, any adblocker that fails to block ads gets investigated very quickly, and likely replaced.

Electoral Commission had internet-facing server with unpatched vuln

katrinab Silver badge
Flame

Google does that as well.

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: "highly privileged Active Directory accounts by default"

Will it?

You could run a server as root, and pipe query parameters directly to the shell.

Obviously you shouldn't, but you could, and that is essentially what MS was doing with Exchange.

New Zealand supermarket's recipe-generating AI takes toxic output to a new level

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: Second level nerfing

Water is an invalid ingredient

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: Woah there !

"Product may be hot when cooked" on just about everything

and,

"may contain traces of meat" on a pack of lamb chops, though I suppose that one is legitimate saying as normal people would expect it to contain more than a trace of meat.

Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Perhaps facial recognition isn't the issue

But that is because the auto-exposure is tuned to white faces.

katrinab Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Perhaps facial recognition isn't the issue

British police mostly don't have guns, so they don't murder quite as many people. But other than that, they are just as bad.

4 in 5 Chromebooks sold to US students in Q2 as demand rises

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Yes, but these days, a 10 year-old laptop is very useable for anything except things like gaming, video editing, and 3D modelling.

If you want to do some spreadsheets, send emails, write word documents, and stuff like that, then while the new laptop will be faster, possibly 10x faster, you likely won't notice the difference, because it is the difference between it taking 20ms to do something and 2ms to do it.

Google, you're not unleashing 'unproven' AI medical bots on hospital patients, yeah?

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: "Med-PaLM 2 is not a chatbot ..."

Essentially how this works is that it looks at the most common answers doctors give to a particular medical question, and prepares an answer based on that.

The problem is, the most common answer may not be the correct answer for this particular patient, and that seems to me to be a fundamental flaw of this technology.

Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor

katrinab Silver badge
Pint

Re: If it doesn't live up to it's hype...

We have people streaming science experiments on Twitch, and lots of people watching them. That surely is a good thing?

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

No it is not worth the extra complexity.

On my hardware, Debian boots in about 1 second, not including POST time which is about a minute. FreeBSD boots in about 4 seconds, and Ubuntu takes about 20 seconds.

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

katrinab Silver badge
Windows

Re: functionality

Also, spillable functions are not supported in Calc. I use them very extensively.