* Posts by katrinab

6353 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2016

Parts of UK booted offline as Virgin Media suffers massive broadband outage

katrinab Silver badge

O2 only very recently became owned by Virgin Media, and Virgin Media don't have cable service in my area.

The cell tower is on top of a big pole that comes out of the top of the street cabinet. Any environmental factors that affect my BT line are going to affect my O2 line as well.

Many years ago, O2 was spun out as a separate company from BT, previously they were known as BT Cellnet.

Orange, now one half of EE, now owned by BT was at one point owned by NTL who were one half of Virgin Media.

If you trace the corporate musical chairs of all the players in the market, you will find they are all linked to each other at one point or another.

katrinab Silver badge
Unhappy

My 4G connection (via Virgin Media O2), and my cable connection (via Plusnet/BTEE) both connect to the exact same street cabinet outside my house. There aren't really any other options.

Euro privacy regulators sniff Italy's ChatGPT ban, consider a pizza the action

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

I have asked all of them if London England is further north than London Ontario, and they all gave me the same wrong answer.

I asked Bing Chat for bus times, and it told me to ask Google Maps, which I suppose is a reasonable answer.

Google Bard completely messed up, telling me to take school buses that don't go to the requested destination, and getting the location of the bus stop completely wrong.

Google Maps gives me the information from the GTFS feed supplied by the local bus operator, which doesn't necessarily reflect actual operations, but I can't really expect any better than that.

Paid and legacy Twitter verification now indistinguishable

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Anyone can pay $8 to get a blue tick and put it on an account called "The New York Times" or whatever, so it doesn't verify anything.

In the battle between Microsoft and Google, LLM is the weapon too deadly to use

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: War between Google and MS?

Yes I would say it does pass the Turing Test, as there are plenty of over-confident idiots out there who respond in the same way.

It also demonstrates that the Turing Test isn't fit for purpose.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Shitty Clippy

Isn't it better to just look at the css file for the webpage you are interested in?

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: What have you been smoking?

ChatGPT is exactly 0% of human intelligence. It may be able to spout some very convincing BS, but it does so in a very different way to humans.

School principal resigns after writing $100,000 check to Elon Musk impersonator

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Usenet

The one big difference back then is that almost nobody used their real name.

katrinab Silver badge

That scam mostly works when some has recently ordered something from outside their customs area, and is expecting a carrier to ask for import taxes and fees. Generally they won't know which carrier their supplier chose, so even if it is the "wrong" carrier, it could still work in that situation.

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

If you were actually investing $100,000 in something, you would get lawyers to handle the paperwork, and they would be dealing with Musk's lawyers.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: "I am very smart"

For romance scams, you could well be contacting them on a dating site.

katrinab Silver badge
Windows

Re: "I am very smart"

Not sure how relevant experience in 1980s BBSes is to social media today.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

They are generally very good at whatever it is they are selling to customers. Not so good at business management etc.

Psst! Infosec bigwigs: Wanna be head of security at HM Treasury for £50k?

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: "successful candidate will have access to a cycle-to-work salary sacrifice scheme"

No, what it means is they buy a bike for you, and dock the money off your gross pay, so you get the bike tax free.

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: Top-up

Presumably someone with a BTEC Level 4 Diploma in Information Security Professional Competence will apply for the job?

They will know about installing anti-virus software and stuff like that.

Do you use comms software from 3CX? What to do next after biz hit in supply chain attack

katrinab Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Misunderstood the assignment

Teams has a desktop app, as does Zoom. Neither of them could in any way be described as self-hosted.

katrinab Silver badge
WTF?

Apart from the fact that 3CX is mostly cloud, surely cloud PBXes are slightly more vulerable to this sort of thing than on-prem?

Only slightly though, in the overall scheme of things, it doesn't make much difference either way.

FTC urged to freeze OpenAI's 'biased, deceptive' GPT-4

katrinab Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Hallucinations are quite scary

Imagine you were in an English class, and you were asked to write an essay about something.

In that scenario, the facts wouldn't matter, you would be marked on your grammar, spelling, sentence construction and so on.

That seems to be where ChatGPT is.

Outside of the English classroom and exam hall, you would be expected to combine your language skills with other skills learnt in other classes; and I'm not convinced the ChatGPT model is capable of doing that.

Smugglers busted sneaking tech into China

katrinab Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Wouldn't it be easier

False walls seem to be a common technique for drug smugglers that get caught, so I don't think that would be a good idea.

Obviously I have no idea what the smugglers that don't get caught do.

Broadcom-VMware merger probe to enter deeper second stage

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Questions:

Also Intel and others will give VMWare embargoed details of upcoming products so that they can work on VMWare as soon as they are launched. That would be a problem as Broadcom is a direct competitor in their market.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Questions:

Are Dell’ servers any different to HPE or Lenovo from a device driver perspective?

Their ILO / remote management solution will be different, but I don’t think that is relevant to VMWare.

RIP Gordon Moore: Intel co-founder dies, aged 94

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: And I had just bought some more Xeons, too…

Own brand products tend to come from the same factories as branded products. Not necessarily from the same production line.

Price differences come from different quality standards - eg Tesco Finest will generally have higher standards than the branded products and cost more; Tesco Value will have lower standards and cost lest; and also from lower marketing costs.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Has anyone ever wondered

Plenty of tomatoes in supermarkets, just not British ones.

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Has anyone ever wondered

Yes, and before computers got involved in telephone exchanges, phoning someone meant more noise than signal on the analogue lines, and asking a lady at the exchange to physically connect your line.

Calls cost more per minute then than they do now, even before adjusting for inflation.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: And I had just bought some more Xeons, too…

I would compare a 1980s Golf to a modern Up! in terns of size if you want an equivalent car.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: And I had just bought some more Xeons, too…

You can get a 1TB WD Green SSD for about £50, or a 1TB Cruical MX 500 for about £70. The MX500 is the cheapest one I would consider buying.

For mechanical drives you can get a BarraCuda for about £36 or an IronWolf for about £53.

ChatGPT, how did you get here? It was a long journey through open source AI

katrinab Silver badge
Alert

Re: What about borrowing (stealing) the code?

"Incidentally, blockchains offer powerful means for recording sequences of attribution, these along with points of bifurcation; this along lines of citation indices."

But blockchain offers no verification of whether the original claim recorded on the chain is real or not.

Amazon to shutter Digital Photography Review

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

That is only a problem if there’s cameras that Amazon doesn’t sell.

Amazon obviously want you to buy your next camera from them, but I don’t think it makes much difference to their bottom line which one you buy.

Watchdog: Broadcom buy of VMware may be bad for competition

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: NSS: "Broadcom buy of VMware may be bad for competition"

Broadcom doesn't, as far as I'm aware, currently sell any virtualisation software. So them buying VMWare won't reduce the number of options in the market, therefore from a competition perspective, it won't have any impact.

However, at the moment, VMWare customers can choose to run their software on a wide range of different hardware, including Broadcom's. There is a possibility that they could make VMWare run best on Broadcom hardware, and that is certainly a competition angle they can look it.

How the Internet Archive faces potential destruction at the hands of Big Four publishers

katrinab Silver badge
Linux

Re: I don't feel too sorry for the publishers

I prefer Jellyfin, as there is no subscription cost to use the full features. Not sure if it is available on Synology, I have it on a Debian virtual machine with the actual media files shared via NFS to it from a FreeBSD storage pool.

katrinab Silver badge
Gimp

Re: I don't feel too sorry for the publishers

It is an option you select in the OBE set-up process. If you don't select it, I usually don't, then anything you purchased is marked as purchased in the App Store, and you can just download it again.

katrinab Silver badge
Gimp

Re: I don't feel too sorry for the publishers

Also, when you buy your new iPhone, all the App Store / iTunes etc stuff that you paid for on the old phone gets reloaded on to your new one for no additional cost.

Watch Reg vultures wrap their heads around Silicon Valley Bank collapse

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Shock horror: asset and liabilities mismatch can lead to funding problems

Still sort-of the wrong way round: Long term assets (government bonds) funded by short term liabilities (bank deposits from their banking customers).

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Make it harder, please

But SVB weren’t providing the funding, they were providing the bank accounts that the VC funds were paid into before being spent on the start-up’s activities.

Silicon Valley Bank's UK arm bought by HSBC for 1 British pound in rescue deal

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corp

TSB is now a Spanish owned bank. There used to be a British-owned bank called TSB, but the company formerly known as TSB Group is now called Lloyds Banking Group [company no SC095000].

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

I think the London and Birmingham Banking Corporation would be a more accurate name for that bank.

They moved their HQ from Hong Kong to London before Hong Kong was handed back to the Chinese.

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation received £1 for it, which they will use towards paying US customers of the bank.

US government says Silicon Valley Bank depositors can get their cash on Monday

katrinab Silver badge
Coat

In the UK

HSBC has taken over their UK operations.

So hopefully the extended "maintenance" on their online banking service should be completed soon.

Check out Codon: A Python compiler if you have a need for C/C++ speed

katrinab Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Codon ? Colon more like

I'm guessing you own a Mac, where you end up with about 5 different python installations on your computer?

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Quite a lot of my variables come from accessing external web services, and as far as I can see, there is no way of telling from looking at the program what you are going to get.

If I then import it into a Numpy array, then I tell it at that stage what it is going to be, but even then if it isn't it will try to convert it (eg if I tell it it is a float, and it gets a string comprising of the numbers 0-9 + . + possibly a "-" at the start, then it will be able to convert it into a float).

The same I guess applies if you read them from a file or possibly even from a database query.

But really, if you want the speed of a compiled language, then you should probably write it in a compiled language, and a knock-off version of Python probably isn't the best option for a compiled language. People choose Python because of the libraries and general ecosystem that surrounds the language, not because of some magical properties of the language itself. If this only supports a subset of Python, is it still Python, or is it some other language that looks a bit like Python?

Two tech-centric banks strike trouble, spooking markets

katrinab Silver badge
Megaphone

Or why does Über have anything to do with the tech sector?

It is a minicab operator, and should be benchmarked against the likes of Addison Lee, who also have a mobile app you can use to book their cars.

Silicon Valley Bank seized by officials after imploding: How this happened and why

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Re:SVB had about $209 billion in assets

If you were renting a house, $1m would mean you could buy one, and the rent you save would be your return on investment. That would likely outperform the 3.4%. Or if it means you could avoid getting a mortgage, that would be your return on investment.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: Re:SVB had about $209 billion in assets

It is not irrational, because your personal cost of capital is likely higher than 3.4%, and there is also counterparty risk to consider. Will you still be alive and able to deliver on the agreement in 20/40 years time?

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Re:SVB had about $209 billion in assets

OK, you are looking at the position in 10 years time if you put $1bn in now.

That is fine, but isn't relevant to what happened at SVB. What is relevant to them is how much they would get now for an investment that pays out $1bn in 10 years time. And, because interest rates have gone up, the answer is, a lot less than before they went up.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Re:SVB had about $209 billion in assets

$1bn in 10 years time is worth $951,110.13 at 0.5%, but only $664,832.64 at 4% - you multiply by (1-r)^t where r is the rate in decimal and t is time in years. You do the same for each of the interest payments you are due to receive on the bond for the smaller values of t.

So, if interest rates go up, the value of your bond goes down, not up.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: I'm affected - no pay today

Lawyers can put all their client money in a single client account, they don't have to open a new account for each client.

What they can't do is put it in the same account as their own money.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Re:SVB had about $209 billion in assets

From The Financial Times:

The banking group’s troubles stem from a decision made at the peak of the tech boom to park $91bn of its deposits in long-dated securities such as mortgage bonds and US Treasuries, which were deemed safe but are now worth $15bn less than when SVB purchased them after the Federal Reserve aggressively raised interest rates.

katrinab Silver badge
Meh

Re: I'm affected - no pay today

Depends on the company, but probably 2-3 months.

katrinab Silver badge

Re: Live by the ESG, die by the ESG?

They provide banking services for venture capital firms, which is a very different proposition to actually investing in their funds.

Office account receives management fees from the funds invested, pays out salaries, bonuses, rent, all the other expenses. There is a risk that the management fees don't come in, but is that a risk for the bank?

katrinab Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: I'm affected - no pay today

How many employees can you pay out of $250k? Obviously it depends on their salary levels, but it is not that many people in the overall scheme of things.