Posts by Curious

Oracle's $40B Nvidia hardware haul may be too hot for OpenAI's Abilene, Texas DC to handle

Besides LLMs and proof-of-work crypto coins, are these GPU farms of potential use for anything else?

Many of us think that the future demand for monster scale LLM farms is overblown;

Those that care to will be able to get adequate-enough and cheap models running on our own local hardware for common tasks interacting with our data. (If the client side setup is user friendly enough)

And the likes of Amazon are running custom application specific ICs.

If that's the case, what type of money earning computer tasks might these monster GPU farms be put towards, if they're selling a rack for a pittance in 3 years? Something that needs very fast and widespread model changes like security scanning against AI, and doesn't benefit sufficiently from the latest nVidia CUDA Compute Capability version?

Resellers may be sitting on costly pile of regret after US smartphone shopping spree

"In February, Apple said it would invest in US manufacturing and R&D, announcing plans to spend $500 billion".

I think Apple usually phrase it as "contribute to the US economy" rather than spend. E.g. tax payments, payments to suppliers.

They make a similar announcement at the start of each presidency.

17 Jan 2018 — Contributions will exceed $350 billion over five years, adding US jobs, investments in domestic suppliers and fueling the App Store economy.

26 Apr 2021 — Apple plans to make new contributions of more than $430 billion in the US and add 20,000 jobs across the country over the next five years.

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

Re: what's the deal with retaliatory tariffs?

A large portion of the goods deficit are attributable to Trump's 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs act, which rewards US pharma for moving IP abroad, and availing of the 10.5% tax on intangibles.

Entirely within US Congress power to fix their tax incentives.

If the pharma tariffs planned are done competently, they could make a large dent in the practice of US companies importing at greatly inflated prices.

The pharma companies are happy to manufacture in Puerto Rico, a US territory but considered offshore, for minimum wage, and get proportionally huge tax breaks for moderate employment gains.

Fix that + Ireland's transfers would but a big dent in the US eastern ocean import deficit.

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

Re: Security risk

Perhaps because the HP CEO believes that HP has not coded the printer's interface used to communicate with the print cartridge with sufficient input sanitisation.

"

A researcher found a vulnerability over the serial interface between the cartridge and the printer. Essentially they found a buffer overflow. That's where you have got an interface that you may not have tested or validated well enough..."

"

https://www.action-intell.com/2022/10/05/hp-bug-bounty-program-finds-reprogrammable-chips-open-printers-to-malware.

Nope. You probably can't cash in by turning your office or farm into a datacenter

Re: AI datacenters that require 230 kW of available energy per rack.

Nvidia mentions a max of 4 x DGX B200 in a 52U Rack.

Each 14.3kW max.

with higher than normal cooling and power delivery required.

They'd need something very specialised for 100kW, you'd think.

El Reg has had articles before about datacenters like Colovere advertising 200 kW potential per rack using liquid cooling. Not equipment actually drawing that power though.

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

Local LLM support will end up used for games, the likes of Unreal engine will incorporate support for it in it's existing "Neural Network Engine", end up as a tickbox like raytracing or headset support is in games settings.

Will it be more? A high price for some teams background blurring and unused dictation capability.

And how much will it mess up all the applications that assume that a users's password/key entry is a legally binding verification of a person's action. E.g. docusign.

Europe hopes Trump trumps Biden's plan for US to play AI gatekeeper

Re: No limit for the Netherlands but for EU?

The manufacturers, distributors and very large end users are expected to report every 6 months on the quantities of compute that they deliver to what countries, what data centers, otherwise their license to buy and receive hardware will be at risk.

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-00636.pdf

page 28

"

The UVEU [Data Center VEU: Universal Validated End User, headquartered in an exempted country ] is responsible for ensuring it complies with the

applicable AI TPP geographic allocations. To receive UVEU status, a DC that owns its advanced

computing capacity must certify that it will follow the guidelines outlined in supplement no. 10

to part 748 and go through an intensive application process"

page 35

"

As discussed, BIS and its interagency partners have

identified a set of destinations where (1) the government has implemented measures with a view

to preventing diversion of advanced AI technologies, and (2) there is an ecosystem that will

enable and encourage firms to use advanced AI models activities that may have significant

economic benefits. Those destinations, which are listed in paragraph (a) to Supplement No. 5 to

Part 740, are Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy,

Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the

United Kingdom, and the United States. For end users headquartered in these destinations, listed

in paragraph (a) of supplement no. 5 to Part 740, BIS is providing a license exception for export

or reexport to entities located in all destinations except Macau and those in Country Group D:5.

However, exporters and reexporters may not take advantage of this exception unless they ensure

that the end user has instituted specific security measures that will reduce the risk of diversion,

specified in paragraphs 14, 15, and 18 of supplement no. 10 to Part 748.

"

Nvidia snaps back at Biden's 'innovation-killing' AI chip export restrictions

Re: Going Dutch?

Exemption is for

"Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States" for all transactions involving certain types of end users.

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-00636.pdf

Supposedly these countries have a low risk of diversion that Poland, Israel and many other NATO countries don't meet.

Linus Torvalds: 90% of AI marketing is hype

Re: I agree

Private health clinics are doing comprehensive body skin photography for a history of mole and lesion growth for ~£500.

And apparantly "AI" plays a part in highlighting changes.

https://onewelbeck.com/tests-diagnostics/mole-mapping/

"

Our mole mapping machine allows a full 360 degree view of your skin. This will document all your moles in great detail and the images will be stored for mole monitoring purposes. Individual moles can also be examined in greater detail using a microscopic light called a dermatoscope. All the images are examined by a dermatology consultant and stored securely. The mole mapping machine then uses artificial intelligence to flag up any changes to moles when mapping is repeated at a later date.

"

If Dell's Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PC is typical of the genre, other PCs are toast

Re: Can I just have a normal Latitude?

What price are you seeing?

€946 for a 16GB Memory , 512GB SSD, 8 core snapdragon 5455 is about 100 quid cheaper than the similar intel 5450

OrderNum : s009l545014ukie_vp - Intel €1,060.31 excluding VAT

compared to gctol5455emea_vp - Qualcomm €945.77 excluding VAT

on the Dell premier site for SME.

Re: Can I just have a normal Latitude?

There's the Latitude 5455 and 7455 on the site.

Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die

Re: Yes, Settings is missing bits

In the author's trashing of the control panel, he seems to miss that the windows registry is the closest we have to a "shared, structured way of describing internal settings" that we use control panel, settings, local and group policies, powershell and regedit to fight with (the "stable" registry plus the "volatile" in-memory registry). From Windows 3.1 days.

However many applications such as .net applications have reverted away from the registry to unix-alike usually human readable config files, altered by non-standard application specific configuration tools.

Out of the list of possibilities above, which would I choose to walk a teacher through enabling ease of access configuration over a phonecall?

The control panel Ease of Access at least makes an attempt at using the whitespace to describe the tasks someone arriving on that page might use it for.

There will probably be a microsoft store app at some point to store and offer the user preferences along with the Microsoft account to push the rented cloud windows.

CrowdStrike president cheered after accepting 'Epic Fail' Pwnie award

They've added internal canary testing and customer control for staging release versions of template instances.

The content validator with mitigation improvements is scheduled to have deployed on August 19th.

Probably enough done to stop Crowdstrike from being replaced by CTOs.

https://www.crowdstrike.com/falcon-content-update-remediation-and-guidance-hub/

and root cause analysis PDF

"Significant work remains for the Windows ecosystem to support a robust security product that doesn't rely on a kernel driver for at least some of it's functionality. We are committed to working directly with Microsoft on an ongoing basis as Windows continues to add more support for security product needs in userspace."

Patch management still seemingly abysmal because no one wants the job

When will software companies stop bundling "features" and "ui changes" (requiring redocumentation and full revalidations) with their security fixes?

And Microsoft, trying to push new Teams and new Outlook as per-user-profile maintained apps does not help with these huge-attack-window applications (Teams shows as the highest impact threat in MS defender m365 Inventories despite it's autoupdate.).

Life, interrupted: How CrowdStrike's patch failure is messing up the world

What's the bet..

Whats the likelihood that Crowdstrike will announce on Monday that in future they will use AI to prevent this from ever happening again.

And the stock price will go 'oh, that's better.'

Cancer patient forced to make terrible decision after Qilin attack on London hospitals

Re: Hackers are responsible for what they do, but not solely.

In healthcare and medicine, there's audits on managing documentation and seen as a management failure to have old hardcopy available, which won't be looked on well in a court trial / investigation

Many managers take the digital only option, because it's easier to control that employees have only the current edition. Most employees won't have easy assess to print.

Having Quality Control people constantly searching each room in huge premises and replacing out paper folders isn't a task that management aren't willing to pay the overhead on.

Oracle Java license teams set to begin targeting Oracle users who don't think they use Oracle

Re: Legal in the EU?

The salespeople will be shooting fish in a government provided barrel in Ireland. Just phone the accounts department.

Ireland's revenue service provide "ROS Online Application" which bundles Java6 u15 for downloading revenue forms and filling in revenue declarations.

Probably every accountant has it installed.

It fails when the enclosed JRE is replaced with a modern JRE, even Adoptium 8 JRE isn't great.

Oracle Java police start knocking on Fortune 200's doors for first time

"

Oracle defines employee for Java licensing purposes as all of the employees of the organization, regardless of employment status, plus all of the full-time, part-time, and temporary employees of agents, outsourcers, contractors, or consultants that support the business.

"

Visions of Oracle auditors having to walk through US and Chinese prisons taking a headcount.

IMF boss warns of AI 'tsunami' coming for world's jobs

Would employees pay for our LLM manager?

Would a substantial proportion of employees pay their own money for a quality checking LLM 'manager' under their own control, which has the purpose to advise the employee that the work they are about to submit is garbage / problematic / land them in legal hot water; point at remedies and improvements that can reduce later hassle and rework?

i.e. industry specific Grammarly that makes us look better and more competent to others.

or Soar Scribe that assesses the words used by meeting participants and assigns a sentiment to the participant's contributions overall. And can be useful to revise a remembered sentiment which can be misleadingly skewed by personal dislikes such as tone of voice, or mishearing, or having-a-bad-day distortions.

In the IMF post, 60% of jobs are described as exposed, 1/2 improving value, 1/2 at risk of reduction. Isn't that the same ancient mantra of 1/3 of society are for Ark B?

There's loads of jobs that could be done by million quid robots at vastly improved speed but the bottlenecks feeding the robot, setup and protection costs around the robot would mean it's wasted investment and cheaper to pay a person to apply a bottlecap and put in a box.

Palantir's CEO calls 'woke' a 'central risk to Palantir, America and the world'

Re: What is “woke”

"The woke define people by one charaterisitic (that person is black, that person is gay, etc) and group them based on this single charateristic, then assume that they automatically have a lot in common with others who share that single characteristic (which they may not), and then put these groups into hierarchies, and sets them against each other."

How should we read this...

If this (flawed) definition is true only for "The woke" then the writer 43300 defines himself as being woke using his own definition.

It's inaccurate because the default for human brains is to instantly assign dozens of group presumptions and probabilities on the people they encounter.

Then in the second lump of the post, wokery is defined as "seeking equality of outcome, based solely on the basis of which arbitrary groups they have assigned people to"

No. That's taking the legal "action based on a particular protected characteristic". e.g. Public Sector Equality Duty 2010 in the UK.

Instead of poorly thought out versions of 'wokery' perhaps you can look up definitions.

Better yet, consider that overuse of muddled collective nouns like "the woke" which have original, modern expanded and pejorative understandings make a mess of your post.

for example

One of Oxford's definitions of woke is "alert to injustice in society, especially racism.". If you assess the equality duty act to be a cause of injustice, could your own post be considered as a woke alert?

Re: What is “woke”

That's not limited to those "infected with the wokeness"?

It's a primate brain thing dividing other people and creatures into multiple in-groups and out-groups; and being less forgiving, more reactionary, having "viscerally negative feelings", less respect for their thought process, less inhibited in commiting violence in those that we perceive as sharing fewer groups.

( Robert Sapolsky's book Behave suggests it hits in fractions of a second when measured under MRI, and requires prolonged neutral-to-positive individual contact and experience to train other parts of the brain to balance this out, or create positive in-groups to slow hostility.)

"Woke" bouncing against "socially conservative" are just two more groups where all the common positions are temporarily forgotten when two mobs stand in front of each other, and the common society is weak at holding them to rules of decorum and debate.

And in any large group we'll have those people with poorer impulse control, worse reactions than the normal.

Microsoft gives Hyper-V ceilings a Herculean hike

For SMEs, is the windows server cost per core having much of an effect on the server hardware that they buy?

i.e.buying dual 8 core CPUs rather than dual 24 cores, to avoid +10K in per core Datacenter licenses?

Broadcom has willingly dug its VMware hole, says cloud CEO

That was also the announced intention for Symantec products.

Anyone have industry knowledge about whether large customers have remained on those software products?

There are a lot more rivals with better solutions in that and I don't believe any of the theoretical broadcom hardware optimised or accelerated security products have made it to market.

UK finance minister promises NHS £3.4B IT investment to unlock £35B savings

The UK has rejoined the Horizon program, so maybe they'll be contributing to the EEHRxF updates (including FHIR) and EHDS

https://digitalhealthuptake.eu/resources/the-interoperability-of-ehr-systems-and-health-apps-in-the-european-health-data-space/

and allow some other frontrunner to trip over the gaps. And improve medical treatment for UK travellers in Europe.

Let the politicians have a xml tag in the spec for whatever political slogan they must include in "their" system.

City of London ditches Oracle for SAP in search of ERP enlightenment

Re: Frying pan

Is there a reason that a payroll application wouldn't be suited for an open source collaborative project?

Support contracts that finance departments would reliably pay to gain the new payroll rules as they change through the year.

And auditors can insist on 3rd party signed and validated binary build / install.

(Not much different to the way in which small businesses using trade weighing scales have to produce calibration certificates to inspectors )

The core of the application, UI, data storage could be a collaborative platform.

There's questions about how much of the application could be common for a substantial portion of the world to share, but there are plenty of existing applications around the world that can be learned from.

There are businesses writing and maintaining payroll applications for small customer bases within much smaller jurisdictions than the UK, and sustainable for not much money per year.

And there are businesses coping using old ERP systems where the database and rules have had minimal core changes in 30 years. A module offered to add functionality specific to an industry's regulations. And a UI makeover once per decade interacting with the same rules at the back.

LockBit shows no remorse for ransomware attack on children's hospital

The "friend of a mate's brother" or the kid doing computers in uni as a nixer is the most that most SMEs have access to.

The trained and competent consultants want higher billing work.

This year a local factory went to the consultants to get GE Proficy-Historian installed. These consultants have lots of multinationals in their client list. All the big claims about state-of-the-art.

Consultants as a fresh, no-legacy setup installed the GE 2016 version with an ancient OpenSSL / Tomcat that wouldn't have come to IT's attention until too late, had it not been too ancient to work with a recent Intel CPU.

Because it's what suits the consultants for whatever reason.

As for all the companies going to cloud to remove the need for internal It knowledge, especially Microsoft cloud and "Business Premium / E3 licensing" and P1 security which

1. doesn't cover the employees that mightn't use email but are still in the AD Hybrid directory as unlicensed users

2. doesn't allow IT to state the basic demand "these resources are not to be accessed outside this building/VPN and it's fixed ip addresses"

3. requires copying GUIDs into a group policy to get the much trumpted "Microsoft Defender Security " to have any meaningful effect. Abysmal ease-of-security-configuration is an upselling opportunity.

4. Commonly recommended Microsoft MFA authentication methods can be foiled by a QR code pointing at a proxy security page.

5. as microsoft revealed, their own setup can be insecure by some developers misconfigured test environment.

6. When microsoft detects a risky sign-in. you think they'll give IT an alert? Not without the extra P2 licensing. Tough luck cheapskate. You'd better start learning how to query Graph with Powershell and Get-MgRiskDetection. Or sit at security.microsoft.com pressing "refresh". Or pay and trust a third party like Barracuda XDR or similar to use their alert at lower cost than Microsoft (who deny you this alert).

Will AI take our jobs? That's what everyone is talking about at Davos right now

Re: They just can't help themselves, can they, ... trying to alter alternative results

It's software engineering speak for producing software that is reliable and the specifications are designed and followed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods

"correctness of software or other program properties can be guaranteed with mathematics-based assurance." .

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/58790

(A squiggle heavy module from college that only one in a million software devs look at again after school. So will a formally correct LLM be the most likely method to make formally correct software more widespread?)

https://www.moritz.systems/blog/an-introduction-to-formal-verification/

Microsoft creates a new kind of credential: the 'Applied Skill'

Yes, definitely will. It will likely be useful by keeping up-to-date, precisely why a cert becomes un-useful.

Some of the modules are using automation to create them, then they are reviewed.

6 hours to get an up to date walkthrough of where the key menus for a task are in the ever-morphing labyrinth of M365, in a format similar to the guided Microsoft learn tutorials.

e.g. Secure Azure storage

As this site shows time and again, there are plenty of Azure developers that shy away from studying that sort of "IT janitorial stuff".

And Microsoft's technical pages aren't the nicest to digest.

'Slow AI' needed to stop autonomous weapons making humans worse

Re: Issues to focus on for "AI dev pause"

Vis-à-vis

"CAN do attitude: How thieves steal cars using network bus"

Break a robot tank's headlight and talk directly to the swarm.

It seems that we've a few decades of slowdown needed before we have decent tools and education for managing public / private certificates and permitted roles on all of these previously trusted internal subcomponents. (i.e. communication signed with cert A can call Device B with function C, versions D-E, parameters F and accept response G)

A LLM will be needed for creating the decision tree alone.

The Reg lists multinational corporations humans and alert systems having very public struggles with basic cert rollover on top-tier revenue critical services.

Microsoft enlarges its cockpit of Copilots to include security

Re: Well thank you, Borkzilla

Not an afterthought, a sales opportunity.

You've only got a P1 security license you pleb? You have a a duty to buy a P2 security license, and days of prepaid support instances. And our AI plugin to make sense of our graph api interface.

Anything else would be reckless, effectively handing the terabytes of data that your business sends to our cloud directly over to criminals /s

Hands up who DIDN'T exploit this years-old flaw to ransack a US govt web server...

If the customer's IT doesn't have their own Telerik annual developer subscription for a few hundred per year then they won't have access to Telerik component updates. And IT may lack the knowledge and build scripts to update, run test scripts and deploy themselves, if the development work was outsourced.

How many business .Net apps will never get updated from .net framework 3.5? We were quoted 40 grand to bring a fairly straightforward internal small business azure hosed application from .net core 4 LTS to .net 6 LTS. No feature changes.

Microsoft to enterprises: Patch your Exchange servers

Exchange on premise was part of our insurance company checklist, putting pressure on the company to take it out.

(Even Exchange management tools are listed as forbidden, so we have to manipulate "hybrid identity" user AD attributes such as 365 smtp proxy addresses by other methods.)

The exchange cumulative updates don't display in WSUS, and it's common for people that skip reading the entirety of the CU install recommendations to cause the Exchange server to become non-functional (e.g. having to manually upgrade the permissions of the installing user for the active directory extension changes; IIS frequently needed repairs afterwards as the update program didn't demand elevation )

Intel offers Irish staff a three-month break from being paid

The Irish Dept of Finance says that corporation tax receipts in 2022 Jan to November end has risen by €7.6 billion to €21.1 billion compared to November 2021.

That's what the Irish people are getting back. With pros and cons. Most of the cons are either self inflicted or the usual market forces when a multibillion dollar blob is dropped into a small city.

Not exactly Faustian, it's a deal with the corporate accountants and tax lawyers.

Windows Server to require TPM2.0 and Secure boot by default in future release

Other than Dell, have other manufacturers had difficulties with disappearing TPM 2.0

There are a few cases that I've encountered on Dell business machines of the BIOS losing the TPM 2.0 chip.

i.e.stops appearing in the BIOS, not available to windows (assuming no bitlocker to fubar).

Does this occur for many other makes?

https://www.dell.com/support/article/en-ie/sln305777/tpm-option-is-missing-in-the-system-bios-setup-latitude-precision-or-xps?lang=en

It looks like it's only the server hardware certification that will require it for now in that announcement ; the OS will still run without TPM 2 enabled..

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Peeping Windows 365

Windows 7: Still looking after business (except when it isn't)

No need to go to much effort to find Windows 7. Dell are still selling it on new computers.

e.g Embedded Box PC 3000

Brits may still be struck by Lightning, but EU lawmakers vote for bloc-wide common charging rules

Is there a possibility that this will apply to laptops?

So the motion calls for

"common charger for mobile telephones and other compatible devices" and " standard for a common charger for mobile radio equipment to be adopted as a matter of urgency "

What's the chance that this will be broadened to apply to laptops?

Despite the 100Watt power maximum of USB-C

Dutch boyband hopes to reverse Brexit through the power of music

Re: Why not?

Sorry, you're writing the same generalisations that you complain about.

I'm irish.

Sky and UK based broadcasters, UK owned papers provide a high proportion of our media

The reasons for leave have been poorly communicated. Tabloids spout tabloid headline nonsense, and the other side echo the worst of it in an attempt to ridicule the whole of the opposition viewpoint.

Not unique to the UK, happens here. Only a handful of loudmouths claim to believe all claims by either side, but they get attention.

And in the USA it's on a whole different scale of divide and conquer.

There are some suggestions that the UK can reach more favourable trade deals with the rest of the world, than the EU did. The alternative possibility is that trading partners like China and India might press their advantage ( UK trying to negotiate trade deals with everyone simultaneously, otherwise struggling to trade on painful WTO terms ) and give the UK worse deals.

There's complaints about over-regulation. I'd guess that we'd agree that some of that is about agricultural protectionism to avoid political fallout. Will that not be present in a non-EU Britain?

For Ireland / NI the effects of UK - Continent trade restrictions will be magnified. There will likely be increased opportunity for criminals and ex-militants to profit from border running, harming both countries.

Most of the issues raised by the media regarding inter-EU immigration have been choices by our 2 governments. E.g. allowing eastern EU workers to work here while other EU countries had a temporary delay, or non-EU to patch some industry desire. Ireland have more workers from Poland than the UK, more from Brazil than France. And they integrate pretty well.

And Ireland has seen the difference since the 80s that open EU trade makes to an economy. The main two British political parties seem complacent.

It won't be a nuclear explosion, but a gradual dropping off in living standards outside the cities.

Clock blocker: Woman sues bosses over fingerprint clock-in tech

Our office had the GDPR legal consultants in, their advice was that collecting biometrics for time management was a lawsuit waiting to happen and that the employer must offer an opt-out / alternative path for employees.

Too many bricks in the wall? Lego slashes inventory

Lego Classic boxes?

They sell the "lego classic" boxes. 480 pieces for 25 quid.

They just don't push them in the shops or their web site, there might be one box of the stuff in a wall of short-term branded lego kits.

Dell makes a loss, but the trend lines look promising for profits

Re: Prices are High

regarding the price of accessories, used to think that too but,

it's a piecemeal business that they are only too happy to leave to their distributors. The price is high because they find that people are willing to pay that rather than go to the hassle of finding an alternative source.

In the same way that Dell used to be all about high levels of customization, choice and dealing direct with customers. Now there's fixed options take it or leave it, which makes sourcing, assembling and shipping easier for them. Their 'partners' can do the one-off stuff.

17" screens are only really demanded by a small audience. Though I'm sure you could cut a few hundred from the price by using refurbished almost new, 3 year dell warranty stuff, like many of us.

Aspen solutions or similar.

Apple looks forward to wiping $47bn off its overseas profit tax bill – thanks to US shakeup

" Apple agreed to pay €13bn (£11.5bn) in unpaid taxes in Ireland on the order of the EU."?

Heck no. they didn't. It's going into an escrow account while it's contested / stalled in court. A very different setup.

WhatsApp, Apple and a hidden source code F-bomb: THE TRUTH

"There used to be a C library/preprocessor that logged every single line as it executed"

rr for recording a program execution and gdb for replaying, with the ability to break at whatever point?

US Congress blew the whistle on tax-dodging Apple, claims Europe

Re: If the USA...

The US allows the big pile of cash from international sources to remain untaxed by US taxes if the money will be re-invested back into international projects.

If the US puts a time limit on this cash-cache, then that might give the multinationals a kick to "use it or lose it". Otherwise they have unlimited time to lobby for the next tax holiday. As Cook put it at his Senate testimony, they're waiting for the US tax rate to drop into single digits. And all the investment return from the big pile of cash is paid to Apple Inc in the States after US tax.

From the property pin (http://www.thepropertypin.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=66347)

"

Margrethe Vestager is telling Apple to choose between:

(a) Irish Taxation (€13bn + €6bn fines) = Apple Ireland was always really in Ireland, and owes 12.5% Irish tax.

(b) US Taxation (c €40bn + no fines) = forget Apple Ireland, it was always going back to the US and owes 35%+5% US tax.

(c) EU taxation (c. €40bn + €20bn fines) = Apple Ireland is "stateless", used EU TP system illegally, owes range of EU tax.

As we will see, Apple have already decided to lock in (a) (when they moved Apple Ireland "onshore" as part of the "Leprechaun Economics" moment a few weeks ago), and have also announced a commitment to (b) in paying more US taxes (against which they will get a credit for any Irish taxes paid in (a) - hence why (a) is an immediate no-brainier). Apple have also decided to invest in global data-centres in Ireland (allows you to permanently avoid (b), so another no-brainer). Apple are not going to spend the next 6 years appealing (a), they are going to accept (a) soon, to protect against (c) which they will be fighting for years.

"

c) is the 'stateless' option that Tim Cook told the Senate they were operating under in 2013, though he and Irish revenue object to the 'illegally' description.

Microsoft: Give us better staff

Well.. in schools Microsoft OS and software dominate classrooms.

This software has it's merits in business and the home, but it's a poor environment for learning about how computers work; going out of it's way to hide detail on how it works and alternative methods to solve tasks, no easy method anymore to connect up lights and motors.

As for actual development, Microsoft's tools have had an unnecessarily high barrier for newbies in their complexity since VB 6. After kids start hitting the limitations of Scratch, either they start coding for web pages or they stop. Few teachers can keep up to date with Microsoft's constant changing complexity between windows forms, wpf, gdi, silverlight, xaml, mvc, mvvm, directx all with their own limitations and dead ends.

Microsoft, seriously, just pick something, get it to cover the common cases and stick with it. And as you've no qualms about forcing that Xbox thing and other garbage on all Windows 10 users, maybe you could give VS Code / Studio & Xamarin pride of place in the windows store with an introduction manual and classroom friendly samples by Charles Petzold or the other bright people Microsoft have hidden behind their walls, a few code katas to help teachers have a starting plan.

RIP ROP: Intel's cunning plot to kill stack-hopping exploits at CPU level

Re: It'd be nice to have a system...

Nope, don't think that's sufficient, with so many long-running systems.

The vulnerable applications should be virtualised, in their own bubble where they don't ooze all over the operating system core and registry, nor other applications, and interaction with the file system / network is through an application specific proxy that looks for unusual patterns of traffic.

The major vendors all have their technology for this (App-V, Xenapp,Thinapp),

Microsoft in particular has failed to popularise this capability, only now looking at building the client into windows 10. Currently it's only for deployment by large enterprises that have bought access via the vileness of microsoft's software assurance volume licensing to get MDOP.

It should have been the cornerstone of their Windows Store, alongside or instead of the App-x throwaway stuff.

Intel's 6th gen processors rock – but won't revive PC markets

Intel Wifi card reliability on 'Tier 1 laptops'

Any chance that Intel could work with dell/ hp / lenovo on the Skylake prototypes to make their wifi cards more reliable?

There's little value in a faster processor if the wireless card keeps becoming an intermittent worker on modern latitude and elitebooks; whatever combination of bios / firmware / wifi standards or laptop heat is causing issues where older batches of laptops are rock solid reliable.

49xx, 5100, 5300 in particular developing problems over a couple of years.

Imation ejects its removable disk biz, hands it to Sphere 3D

Re: I'm puzzled..

The rdx cartridges are slightly modified 2.5" drives, but the cartridge casing and plastic container give a little bit more shelter from damage and liquid, the proprietary 'similar but not quite sata' connector is recessed.

They've got a read-only switch on the cartridge.

Swapping the drives can be entrusted to any conscientious employee, as with tape, to bring off-site each day, without drive letter issues etc.

Some of us are really annoyed by small business LTO tape drives failing us when they are needed.

The 3K entry pricing for LTO4 is just too steep for many; let alone having a second drive in case of failure.

With RDX, it's only the media that needs to be replaced when the backup set grows, the media is more reasonably priced now than it was.

Transfer speed is lacking though.

Dwarfworld PLUTO may not have a real DOG on it - but it does have a TAIL

Sounds that it would be of more value put into service as bulk radiation shielding for a habitable structure, Dense, corrosion resistant, fairly low toxicity, and could mop up stray hydrogen.

Another day, ANOTHER Windows 10 build for us Insiders

On a related topic,

do others still have the issue of the windows 7 and 8 patches that are "update(s) that enables you to upgrade to a later version of Windows." still damaging the performance of their PC with high CPU use?

It shows in process explorer as

rundll32.exe appraiser.dll,DoScheduledTelemetryRun

And run by windows scheduler. It's supposed to stop after 30 minutes, but doesn't appear to.

Installed by the updates KB 2990214 patch for Windows 7 (and KB 3044374 for Windows 8.1) in February and purpose is recording application telemetry.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_update/rundllexe-using-whole-cpu-to-run-appraiserdll/b29bdffd-56e2-418f-b0c5-a7f3dfbab2b5?page=1

Sneaky hamstringing of computers on the old OS? Surely not.