* Posts by Refugee from Windows

303 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2010

Page:

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

Refugee from Windows

Re: Linux Mint

It's sudo apt autoremove when you run it.

Yes it does need to be addressed, the issue of filling up the boot partition with redundant kernel versions, as it's been an issue for far too long.

Mint, Lubuntu and Raspberry Pi OS here.

Microsoft 365 Copilot 'generally available' – if you can afford 300 seats

Refugee from Windows

Re: Hardware Requirements

Is that in a larger company there's enough meat for it to sample? The AI needs to expand its language model.

So lets say Eisenhower was using this in 1944, and then Copilot suggested Normandy to a Mr Rommel as it had seen more references to it than Pas de Calais.

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

Refugee from Windows

Re: I thought they already had.

Can't possibly think why major fell running events in the Lakes rely on volunteers with VHF radios to provide the communications then. My rucksack will shortly be packed for one, the phone's for taking pictures with, rarely a sniff of a data connection.

Goodbye Azure AD, Entra the drag on your time and money

Refugee from Windows

Re: Time to rename it and make it just part of the Entra brand

Still what I'd call a bad concept anyway, no matter what you call it.

Amtrak back on track after server breakdown forces dozens of cancellations

Refugee from Windows

Familiar territory

Transpennine Express beat them to it, with similar problems causing widespread chaos. The main difference is that they are managing to cut off the East Coast here and in particular to Scarborough.

North Korea hits new low by using Seoul Halloween tragedy to exploit Internet Explorer zero-day

Refugee from Windows

Eliminate the zero

Surely the weak link is the now orphaned Internet Explorer. I remember Adobe Flash being killed off, is it time for this to be removed?

Will a Tuesday set of fixes contain a tool to remove it and either point at another browser of your own choice that hasn't been abandoned or install the dreaded Edge.

Its North Korea, they're probably still using IE6 anyway.

Square Kilometre Array Observatory construction commences

Refugee from Windows

Re: What, no technical data?

They look like log periodics to me, crossed ones at that. They don't need to be too directional as they are using interferotemetry, I did hear a talk about this project several years ago.

Mozilla drags Microsoft, Google, Apple for obliterating any form of browser choice

Refugee from Windows

Stop embedded browsers

Of course they'll make you have their browser, it's baked into their OS. It's always lurking there in the background, with possible security issues (IE?), even if you only used it to install another browser to set as default.

Google Maps just got lost for a few hours

Refugee from Windows

We survived

So did millions of others. A few people might have got temporarily lost, the odd "South American River" packages will have been late, and even fewer will have gone hungry, unable to locate anywhere selling food.

Even so, as someone has already said, the HPS backup will have been used. However here in Yorkshire the landmarks often used - churches, pubs, and now missing landmarks - plus sometimes unpronouncable place names ("Slowit" - is that Slaiththwaite?) and a thick accent besides, may have sent some in the wrong direction.

5G frequencies won't interfere with airliners here, UK and EU aviation regulators say

Refugee from Windows

Re: A small proposal

Of course the antenna pattern of 5G sites will be primarily horizontal, as airborne 5G use is not to be expected, their users are on or near the ground.

Radio altimeters will send their signal pointing at the ground, and the receive antenna will be pointed at the ground to receive the reflection. Also radio altimeters will use a narrow band signal, whereas 5G is broadband, so less spectrally intense.

They're not likely to clash unless you briefly fly over a 5G site, even then you'd have a lot of discrimination between the two signals and they are not exactly the same frequency.

Shocking: UK electricity tariffs are among world's most expensive

Refugee from Windows

Re: Electric should be cheaper, gas more expensive

The driver for the pricing is the "wholesale" price, which isn't a free market. There's subsidies towards "renewables" ie intermittents, and loading on prices from gas generation. It would be that we should have an energy security policy, but we've not had one of them for decades.

Last century there was a policy of not using gas for electricity production as it was seen to be too valuable to use for this (encourage gas heating to move away from dirty coal fires).

We're still sitting on a lot of coal here, at this rate it'll soon be economical to mine it to make hydrogen.

Phone jammers made my model plane smash into parked lorry, fumes hobbyist

Refugee from Windows

Re: 2.4 GHz? Sanity check, please?

Was it the 27th April? Possibly in the evening? It could be that a licenced operation desensed its receiver. The SHF UK Activity Contest may be the cause.

What a clock up: Brit TV-broadband giant Sky fails to pick up weekend's timezone change, fix due by Friday

Refugee from Windows

Their boxes run on an embedded Linux. That poor outdated tzdata file is the culprit.

Just have to live with it I suppose.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W: Nippy stocking filler for the nerd in your life – if you can get one

Refugee from Windows

Re: Why...

You could always live in rural Britain, where buses don't venture.

Of course forget about using AI to catalogue all those images, why not use the unsuspecting users?

Nobody cares about DAB radio – so let's force it onto smart speakers, suggests UK govt review

Refugee from Windows

Happens too often. Too many stations play the same selections of tracks for a week, but in a different order.

Travelling around I default to FM, although there are some interesting dead spots even on the M6 through the fells, as DAB would often repeat itself often repeat itself when switching back and forwards.

BT to phase out 3G in UK by 2023 for EE, Plusnet, BT Mobile subscribers

Refugee from Windows

Re: Rural coverage is still very poor

Keeps us in business here, and of course provides a supply of lost walkers because they can't find their way using on line mapping.

United, Mesa airlines order 200 electric 19-seater planes for short-hop flights

Refugee from Windows

Re: I wonder

You could of course embed a linear induction motor in the runway, so the acceleration is done without draining the batteries on board.

What Microsoft's Windows 11 will probably look like

Refugee from Windows

Same underlying code, just a different GUI, there won't really be much change under the bonnet. Absolutely.

I'm sure that it'll regularly break anyone's other than Micro~1's software and give us all a new generation of undocumented features and orphaned devices.

Vodafone building world-girdling hybrid analytics apps capable of slurping 50 terabytes a day

Refugee from Windows

Re: "quickly offer its customers new, personalised products"

You are the product. They'll be "sharing" your data with anyone who'll stuff up for it.

Space station dumps 2.9-ton battery pack to burn up in Earth's atmosphere after hardware upgrade

Refugee from Windows
Happy

Re: Hypocrisy

Degrade? Do look out for all the blossom on the roadside apple trees over the next few weeks.

Memo to scientists. Looking for intelligent life? Have you tried checking for worlds with a lot of industrial pollution?

Refugee from Windows
Coat

Krikkit perhaps? Have we missed the Douglas Adams connection?

Linux Mint users in hot water for being slow with security updates, running old versions

Refugee from Windows

Re: Could they pick a better example than Firefox?

Of course I delay Firefox XX.0 updates until at least XX.0.1 is available, after all they're bound to have missed something obvious "whoops we missed that" comes to light. That's usually within a week.

UK watchdog fines two firms £270k for cold-calling 531,000 people who had opted out

Refugee from Windows

Re: Spoofing unused codes

I've found they use real STD codes but the numbers are fake, that they start with number combinations that aren't valid such as 151.

There may be not one but two new air leaks in International Space Station: Russian boss tells us not to panic

Refugee from Windows

Re: Slow Leak eh?

How are we going to get a big enough bowl of water into space to find the leak?

UK network Three hikes pay-as-you-go rates by 400% to push punters to buy 'bundles'

Refugee from Windows
Happy

Has to be said

3-2-1-Goodbye.

Windows 10 ends the year with more than half of PCs on a 2020 flavour

Refugee from Windows
Stop

Modern standby

Sounds like a bad idea to me, plenty of chance for processes to continue, could you still be bitcoin mining or sending emails? Could your computer be dreaming?

I prefer my standby to be that, and zero power shutdown "Double Pole Single Throw".

UK comms regulator: Could we interest sir in a bespoke broadband speed estimate?

Refugee from Windows

Speed guess?

I've found that if you take their "Up to" figure and divide it by three and you'll be pretty close to what you get.

UK competition watchdog fast-tracks investigation into mega-merger of O2 and Virgin Media

Refugee from Windows

Re: Viring media Positioning for 5G

Very long term thinking then, especially out in the sticks. Any 5G coverage will no doubt be just before they announce 6G round here.

You're going to need to unwrap and rewrap those Pi-400 holiday gifts. There's a new Raspberry Pi OS Update

Refugee from Windows

Re: Never too young....

Add to that everybody else trying to get devices to work on Christmas morning.

After demonstrating a facial recognition system that works on cows, moo-chine learning pioneer seeks growth funding

Refugee from Windows

Re: Why?

You may have one herdsman, but you'll have someone in on a regular basis to come and fix the robots. Nothing like a message telling you at 1 am that the milk filter on Robot #3 needs attention.

Dairy cows like their contact with their people, beef cattle have left contact and therefore are a little more antisocial.

Angus? No you mean Ayrshires, and don't forget Shorthorns - they do better on supplemented grazing rather than Formula-1 Holsteins.

Refugee from Windows
Coat

Must have been a slack day

Hmm. Cows wander round with unique ear tags, also activity monitoring collars with connectivity and may even have a passive tag in an ear for the parlour feeder to identify them. Has this project really been necessary? However with all these backups you can easily see how well it's working.

Maybe they are just convenient targets, there are plenty of example available but such as deer (wild or farmed) or even badgers, but non-farmed species are the better choice.

I'll get my coat, the calves need feeding and the food mixing for the girls won't happen on its own.

Need a hobby for lockdown? Perhaps check out the CMOS battery

Refugee from Windows
Facepalm

Back to 1980

All those devices conspire to bring back date to that of 01-01-1980 here. They're in league with the gremlins to both deplete my supply of 2032 batteries and hid the minature screwdriver set required to get at the holders.

Then of course you finally open up the device and find it's a PCB mounted one and there's no holder....

Data protection scofflaws failed to pay £2m in fines from UK watchdog – and 68% of penalties are still outstanding

Refugee from Windows

Re: So why not...

Those corporate entities will just respawn as another "brass plaque" enterprise with no assets, to do exactly the same again. Hit the board with the fines, even it just bans them from holding another position until it's paid.

'Mindset reset' contributes to £1bn extra costs and another delay – 2 years this time – for Emergency Services Network

Refugee from Windows
Coat

Re: Who was the priority?

I suggest that the users were never consulted in the first place. The local Police regret losing their private VHF network, that operated independently. You might not have been able to use it for data but it did work.

Airwave never got the PTT function activated and it never talked to the other blue light services, so you could describe it as failed, chances are the ESN will never get it either.

The 4G network becomes the single point of failure, what could possibly go wrong?

Coat, as I'd expect at somepoint a certain national emergency communications organisation will be called out to cover some large scale failure.

Adobe about to pull the plug on Creative Cloud freebie 'at-home' access for students

Refugee from Windows

Re: Transferable skills?

Losing all those students isn't a good idea perhaps? Once you've got them used to using them your products that it's assumed they will move to employers that need to pay for licences, thus generating business. Works with Office software doesn't it?

Are students going to pay up for their own copies at full rates? Perhaps not. Are they going to hold their previous work to ransom then? Maybe someone else can answer that one.

House of Commons agrees to allow Zoom app in Parliament, British MPs will still have to dress smartly

Refugee from Windows
Thumb Up

Get it right

The MP's log in and sit in front of their cameras. The Speaker sits in front of his monitor to see who's there, and use the chat box to say you wish to comment. Then selects those to comment...

Now that's the up side sorted, the down side is using the BBC Parliament Channel, that's how they are seen. Best brush hair (as appropriate) and not be wearing their giraffe onesy. They can scroll the names of those MPs who are actually logged on, and use facial recognition software to make sure that they've just left their Spitting Image puppet in front of the webcam.

Boris is still on his sick note, so shouldn't be working anyway.

That's how it should work, however I doubt if the honourable members would put up with it for long.

Hello Moto! UK Home Office shoves comms giant another £82m to stay on Emergency Services Network gig

Refugee from Windows

Re: going for a record fail.

I've just got a feeling that the military won't be able to cope.

They're be a few containers of DMR handhelds being held in a goverment warehouse somewhere. Late, overbudget and not delivering service anyone?

Father of Unix Ken Thompson checkmated: Old eight-char password is finally cracked

Refugee from Windows

Re: They'll never guess this one.

So much for a password hint - your password is incorrect

Dear Britain's mast-fearing Nimbys: Do you want your phone to work or not?

Refugee from Windows

Re: Higher was better

It might be that the existing mast is in too good a position. If you have more masts but with smaller coverage it means you can handle more users, otherwise sticking a cell on a very good position might go too far. Too many users per node.

Possibly the owner of the existing mast might want too much money to site their equipment, and/or not have enough electrical supply or telecom capacity to service it.

The best locations have already been used, it's been a long period of filling in the gaps and there are still a lot of them.

BT 'UK's most powerful Wi-Fi'? Why, fie, for shame! – ads watchdog

Refugee from Windows

Most powerful wifi?

I dispute this claim, at one point we used a 500mW wifi module into an antenna with 16dBi gain, but then we had a "Notice of Variation" issued by OFCOM and they specified what SSID was to be used. This was for short term use, not in a built up area BTW.

Isn't it a limit of the ERP rather than the power? Came across this with upgrading routers with after market antennas.

Accused hacker Lauri Love to sue National Crime Agency to retrieve confiscated computing kit

Refugee from Windows
Alien

Laws of aquisition

The NCA, being one of those goverment quangos, operates in its own area of the law. In this case that of the Ferengi, out of the Star Trek universe, once they've got it you'll never get it back.

Also applies to other "law enforcement" agencies who don't want any external scrutiny.

LG's beer-making bot singlehandedly sucks all fun, boffinry from home brewing

Refugee from Windows

Re: To brew American beer.....

and 100,000 gnats of course.

Exiting DWP digital boss Mayank Prakash switches to energy biz Centrica

Refugee from Windows

More thinking rat, sinking ship etc. I've worked for a company whose high profile boss left before the big changes were actually implemented - they never happenned - and it finally sold out to another company.

Maybe he knows it's a failure, best to get out before everyone else realises this.

Sure, Europe. Here's our Android suite without Search, Chrome apps. Now pay the Google tax

Refugee from Windows

Ignore and continue as usual

The ad revenue, even if it's undeliverable, is too much of an incentive for them to leave these out of Android. Neither would Google want to be seen to lose significant market share. The commercial plan is to make sure that the competition doesn't grow significantly. Other browsers, mail clients and mapping services are available, but Google would like theirs to be the default on the majority of users.

It'll be like the browser choice fiasco, they are so deeply baked into their services they can't untangle them. Lip service will be paid that's all. The slurp will continue unabated.

SpaceX blasted massive plasma hole in Earth's ionosphere

Refugee from Windows

Phooey?

Bigger rockets have been launched in the past (notably Saturn V), and in the days when HF communications were more important commercially, there were no problems reported with the ionosphere recorded. If there had been, I am sure the FCC would have picked this as having been noted by members of the ARRL. Surely there would have been plenty of reports of the effects of launching through the various layers, indeed various governments (including the UK) have carried out experiments and regular measurements of the ionosphere.

The frequencies used by GPS are c 1.5GHz - these pass straight through largely unscathed. There may be some odd rotation effects for instance very occasionally, but unless you're trying to thread a needle from space, largely insignificant.

Not so much punching a hole, more just a minor ripple.

Putting the urgency in emergency: UK's delayed emergency services network review... delayed

Refugee from Windows
Coat

Typical Government Contract

Can we possibly expect that this one will be over budget, late, and of course not meet the specification called for. That is assuming that they have made their minds up, but having changed it several times, the end result will not look anything like the end users wanted in the first place.

Piggybacking the whole lot on a public network I won't comment on, but the phrase "single point of failure" comes to mind. Network coverage is nowhere near universal on 4G with EE, and of course there are marginal propagation changes between the current UHF and the 4G Band V so that existing sites may not provide the required service.

Can we expect further delays in the deployment? Of course. I also expect the odd call-out when Plod, Trumpton and the ambulances find out their radio comms are out of service.

Coat - there's a PMR/DMR handheld in the pocket.

Windows slithers on to Arm, legless?

Refugee from Windows

Playing catchup

This is a game that Microsoft haven't put much effort into, and I'm afraid to say that they are so far behind I don't think they'll ever catch up. Being tied down to x86 has turned them into a one trick pony, and their speciality is wearing thin. ARM is likely to become the most popular platform from both embedded through to servers, if it hasn't already overtaken already, and so they are primarily in a declining market. They're playing second fiddle to Google.

They've not even woken up to this, let alone smelt the coffee.

We already give up our privacy to use phones, why not with cars too?

Refugee from Windows

Genii meet bottle

It's going to be a case of when all this connected information gets into the wrong hands, in which case it won't go back into the bottle. My phone can only guess about how I'm travelling about. In congested traffic I could be on a bike (with pedals), bus or car - and I'm sure that would be information that would happily be used for marketing purposes.

There's so much they could work out from the travel data already available - where you work, shop and where you visit - already and tracking it down to one vehicle is possibly one step too far.

Maybe the on board accelerometer could identify the exact location of the pothole that bent my wheel, but it's unlikely. They'd have to make the incentives to have these in place pretty good for savvy users, and no I'm not in the market for a brand new car with any connectivity.

As for most of the populace, they'll just accept this data slurp as they're not made aware of any reasonable alternative.

No Windows 10, no Office 2019, says Microsoft

Refugee from Windows

Missing something

We cannot of course predict disruptive technology. Possibly by then the office desktop PC will be a relic, with just thin clients and server based applications where no-one actually has a office suite installed locally hence no sales. As existing solutions are all browser based, then it won't matter what platform they are on.

TalkTalk banbans TeamTeamviewerviewer againagain

Refugee from Windows

Let them pick up the bill

Most of my customers are out in the sticks, off the beaten track, and their only regular visitor is the milk tanker. If we can't use Teamviewer to connect and sort out their systems, can they bill Talk Talk for needing to have someone travel out to them rather than it being done remotely? What about subsequential losses incurred?

Page: