Posts by P. Lee

WHOA! Windows 10 to be sold on USB drives – what a time to be alive

I wonder if you can PXE-boot off an ISO image served over http or smb or tftp or nfs yet...

It must be horrible to be a Windows admin!

Microsoft to spoofed Skype users: Change your account passwords NOW

Re: It shows that Microsoft has started working on Skype

Yep, the Linux version of Skype is rather good. Let's hope they leave it that way.

The only tricky bit is pulseaudio. Its a little ephemeral - you have to configure it while skype is running audio or you don't see the skype parameters. At least, that was my experience at one point.

AMD CEO: We're jumping back into cost-cutting mode

Re: AMD's Zen

The problem with APUs is that they are bound to the CPU. If the market for x86 CPU's has tanked, it makes it more difficult to sell anything.

AMD has a marketing problem too. Its difficult to tell where the chips sit in terms of power. Intel's i3/i5/i7 is easier to follow (if fouled up by all the i7 variants).

If I were AMD I'd look to use discrete graphics cards to take over the desktop. Add ARM chips (which are cheap), a NIC and some SATA ports and include a NAS on the card. Do the same for APUs - add ARM silicon to run always-on functions. I'd far rather have a NAS than try to squeeze a little extra speed out of the disks. How about a hardware button on a laptop which suspends x86 and switches to an ARM chip? That might be a favourite for watching videos on the train or just generally for providing a high-power x86 system which can run email and small stuff on ARM for long battery life.

You Musk be joking: Tesla's zero to 60MPH in 2.8 SECONDS is literally 'ludicrous'

Re: Inertial dumper! Duh.

Intertial Damper?

Is that some kind of white flour-based bread you cook in the outback that won't move through your gut on its own?

You care about TIN? Why the Open Compute Project is irrelevant

Re: Efficiency vs Cost

Do you have elastic computer requirements?

For most companies, I think the answer is, "not really." Increasing requirements? Perhaps, but not much that varies a lot up and down. Plus, hardware is cheap.

From what I can see there are several things which reduce costs for cloud: cheap licensing (open source), load-balancing (for sharing hardware) and automation /single architecture.

Perhaps going "cloud" is the only way to realise these benefits but it essentially requires application re-writes. If you are re-writing for the web, you may find you can achieve load-balancing distribution with some apache boxes, some VRRP and BIND. Perhaps you (shock horror!) don't need global reach for your apps, because all your users in an office down the road. The trick may just be to impose the same discipline on internal IT as a cloud provider would.

Microsoft to Windows 10 consumers: You'll get updates LIKE IT or NOT

Re: no matter what MS force on us

>There is a perfect fix for this already, it's called a Linux distro.

Few people care about the OS. Apple have it right when they market capabilities, not specs. Do you have a Linux distro which allows you to use the best (only usable?) diagramme tool - Visio?

If I had some of Google's billions and wanted to thwart MS' desktop control, a drop-in, cross-platform replacement for Visio would be high on my list.

Windows does have some excellent apps which don't have a high-quality equivalent in the *nix world. The good news is that MS appears to be running out of useful features to add, which means catching-up should get easier. With the success of Apple in BYOD and Linux in the datacentre, there's also a greater market for cross-platform tools.

United Airlines bug bounty shells out 1.8M miles for three flaws

Re: And for the negative take on this...

>now we've heard that several bugs, some major, can be found at United with only a few hours expended. Perhaps that is one of the 'facts' they should have embargoed?

Nope. The point is to encourage people to find and report the bugs. If people think its easy, they're more likely to have a go. The trick is to make the bounty worth more than selling the flaw. Lucky for United, even high-value mileage probably doesn't cost them much. Win-win.

Intel TOCK BLOCK: 10nm Cannonlake delayed to 2017, bonus 14nm Kaby Lake to '16

Re: AMD tripped and fell

Perhaps AMD will see this as an opportunity. If fab improvements are running into diminishing returns due to physics, AMD may look to play catch up.

AMD need a USP. They've already got some ARM expertise - I'd suggest integrating ARM onto x86 hardware. A little hardware switch to suspend to RAM the x86 side and allow you to play with android coupled with a big screen and humongous battery, or perhaps a video overlay to run ARM over the top of the x86 display. Add a couple of bluetooth controllers (paddles [remember them?], joysticks, Wii) and you have a trivial games machine.

Wi-Fi Alliance ushers in new era of intrusive apps

> location-based ads remain a disappointment

... to the IT industry.

For the retailers, they put a sign up in the window saying, "Sale: upto 90% off*" which people in that location can see.

*excludes everything we sell except one second-hand toilet brush which was lying around here somewhere.

Microsoft sprints to finish, emits possible Windows 10 RC build

Re: hmm

>Well I guess its a good sign they haven't fired the head architect already this time.

I wouldn't want to be the person who set the release date though.

Behold: Pluto's huge ICE MOUNTAINS ... and signs of cryovolcanoes?

From https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/

Uranus: Uranus is a strange, uniform bluish orb. There are high winds and it’s bitterly cold. It’s the friendliest of the gas giants to our Cessna, and you could probably fly for a little while. But given that it seems to be an almost completely featureless planet, why would you want to?

Of course, being science, this is probably wildly inaccurate. We just need someone in a Cessna to go and take some pictures for us.

Europe a step closer to keeping records on all passengers flying in and out of the Continent

Re: "it would harmonize national rules"

People still don't get it. The EU Charter spells out that it is aiming for "ever closer union." It aims to become the single government for Europe. In that context, "harmonisation" is the goal in itself, it doesn't matter what the content of the law is.

Of course it will fail. European countries stick together like iron and clay, but that doesn't mean it won't do a whole stack of damage in its attempt to rebuild the Roman or Holy Roman Empires.

And what happens in Greece? An EU directive you say? Well, I'm sorry, but austerity measures mean we have no money to spend on fancy but pointless IT projects.

Everything I see is Windows 10, says Microsoft's SatNad

Re: BYOD anyone?

>So it's goodbye BYOD and welcome to the world of having a separate phone (and presumably separate tablet) for work.

And this is why MS will fail here. People will pay for a status-symbol phone but companies will not. People can work around network outages, but companies don't want to do that. Why would a company pay for a laptop to run your apps... and then pay for a phone (probably costing as much as the laptop) to run more limited versions of the same apps?

Mozilla's ‘Great or Dead’ philosophy may save bloated blimp Firefox

Re: Ditch electrolysis, drive progress

>Each process comes with its own baggage, if you have more of them running at once there is more baggage.

But you forget Chrome's intent. It is a trojan horse to get apps onto Windows, not a pure "for fun" browser. In that scenario, far better to have one process per tab so that different apps don't interfere with each other when they (inevitably) go wrong.

Re: "Chrome ...... performs noticeably faster at common tasks, like switching between tabs."

>Blimey - you must have quick reaction times !

+1 for that. UI speed is not a problem for me. Privacy and inclination towards evil is, so FF is the norm with chromium (usually in privacy mode) reserved mostly for "sites that expect IE" and, occasionally, if I can't be bothered to mess with noscript.

I have to say though, not all feature-creep is bad. There is an increasing tendency from OS providers to try to own the entire stack, provide all features and squash third parties. This helps their privacy-intruding search ambitions. Technically, should video-conferencing be built into the browser? Probably not. However, there is something to be said for doing so to promote cross-platform interaction and prevent lock-in by facetime or skype.

Former spook bigwigs ask for rewrite of UK’s surveillance laws

Re: totally legitamit

>The problem is most of the laws being used are 100+ years old.

No, the problem is an annoyed population.

Did MARS once have OCEANS? Curiosity discovers continental crust

Re: quotes:

"Well they said they came in peace, but then they vapourised our maternity units."

Content delivery network CloudFlare's court order count soars

'twould be a shame if all those notices ended up on a server with a zero-day vuln

EOM: Who says message metadata isn't useful?

Ex-MIT prof jailed for 'making experimental film' about bank robbery. In a bank. Without saying it was a film

On the plus side

He'll pick up royalties every time they show the evidence in court. He, his children, his grandchildren....

New Horizons: We've got a pretty pic of Pluto. Now let's get our SCIENCE on

> but when you are out-spending the next nearest nation by a factor of 3-4 then you can probably slice off a little and still be an effective force.

Unless of course, you're conducting more wars by a factor of 3-4, than your nearest neighbour.

Do you pay your Office 365 cloud rent in Euros, or Aus/Can/NZ bucks? It's going UP

Euro's... AUD....

Could it be that the value of both those currencies has dropped? MS may claim that's a justification, but for those on the receiving end, its irrelevant.

I'm surprised that MS has gone with this quite so early on though. "How does this compare with paying one fixed price in the past" will still be fresh in people's minds.

Sun Tzu say, "the best tactical solution may not align with the best strategy." (Ok, he probably didn't, but piling on the MS Office bandwagon because Visio is the best may not have been a good long term plan.)

I cannae dae it, cap'n! Why I had to quit the madness of frontline IT

Re: I also agree, but...

>Perhaps more IT people should learn to speak 'management' more fluently

The issue is temperament. People drawn to IT usually like to be precise and correct. They are the kinds of people you want dealing with machines and data which require precision and accuracy. "Management" likes expectations met. This is how consultancies survive, you put a layer of Management between the techies and the customers' Management, who pad the budgets and the time-scales. Yes, it far more expensive and takes longer, but it gives the customer's Management a warm fuzzy feeling when projects come in "on-time" even if "on-time" is far later than a non-padded project would take.

German army fights underground Nazi war machine hidden in Kiel pensioner's cellar

> "Some people like steam trains, others like tanks," he reportedly pointed out, pointedly.

FTFY.

Which played the greater role in killing? Probably the trains.

Alca-Lu clocks 300 Gbps over 10,000 km submarine cable

Re: 300 Gbps ... That's 18,750 grumble flicks

>NO. 300 Gbps (the actual achieved data rate) is just 375 grumble flicks per second.

800Mb/s per video? Is that a 4k stream?

Microsoft's Surface Hub mega-slab DELAYED 'cause you demanded it

> I like to think that the guy in the picture is holding a normal permanent marker.

You just know he's going to draw a green moustache on the chap in the top left of the screen.

"We'll land at Le Havre and make our way up to Agincourt..."

Swimming in smartmobe profit? Let us guess, you're Tim Cook?

Brand Identity

Android makers suffer from the same problem as PC makers. At the end of the day, if you run Windows, its still just a Windows PC. There is very little that hardware can add to the brand experience. It gets worse when you fail to innovate, or innovate slightly but jack the prices sky-high.

If I were Samsung, I'd spin off a separate company for the high-end. There is little kudos in the "Samsung" brand as it covers too large a range of items. They've plastered "Samsung" across all the devices. They need a different brand and brands take time and money to build. Typically of an established player, they have a product/solution/brand and are going to use it wherever possible. Rather like MS trying to put a desktop on a mobile device or indeed a mobile interface on the desktop. If you ask someone what kind of new phone they bought and they say "Samsung" you have to ask, "Which one?" in order to understand what they have. iPhone purchasers don't have to deal with that confusion. That is brand clarity.

Samsung also need to keep their techie users/press happy. Get that battery life fixed. Stop the segmentation through silly storage limits. 128G only is reasonable for a flagship device at the moment. Needing to pick which music/podcasts to sync is far too irritating. USB/SD storage is also not unreasonable. Make replaceable batteries part of the casing if required. It isn't a great deal of aluminium to add to a battery. Contribute to the techie Android ecosystem. RSync and SSHFS as standard please. Help fund that OwnCloud stuff so that it works really well. Help fund a digikam/f-spot port work to Windows, etc. Samsung has shown it isn't good at writing software, but that doesn't mean it can't help. It might be cheaper than marketing.

What? EMEA PC sales dropped by HOW much?

Re: The declines continue

>The PC is a dead parrot.

No, the idea of the always-increasing growth of the market for new PCs is a dead parrot.

Did anyone ever believe that was realistic anyway? Has no-one heard of market saturation?

Re: I'm curious...

MBA Premium? Pah!

HP EliteBook Folio 1040 G2 - now that's "premium."

Sadly, I think multiple MBA upgrades might be cheaper!

Attention dunderheads: Taxpayers are NOT giving businesses £93bn

Re: The Truth of the Matter is this...

> ... the burden of taxation always falls on individuals, never on corporations. Corporations are paper entities run by humans for the benefit of humans.

The first sentence is true, the second requires caveats.

Taxation falls on nearly all the population, but Corporations are paper entities which concentrate wealth in the hands of shareholders and executives. They also tend to be anti-competitive, by which I mean they seek to use the legal system to block competition by other entities, particularly new entrants. Multi-nationals are also able to move profits around by operating outside government jurisdictions and moving money around fast than governments can update the law.

Personally I suspect a large dose of xenophobia might be in order. The current legal system seeks to maintain a level playing field for local and foreign corporates. However, rather than playing fair, this just encourages all corporates to play the field and move profits and cost-centres around to circumvent the intent of the law. If we biased the tax system in favour of those obviously keeping operations and profits (and therefore taxes) within our own country then perhaps corporate tax receipts would be higher.

I have no idea, for example why the UK government is so enamoured with MS (or any other foreign high-IP-value corporate), when it sucks so much value out of the UK economy for so little in return. You don't need to put up tariffs, but they could do more to encourage those who keep all their profits and tax receipts at home.

Uber to drivers: You make a ton of dosh for us – but that doesn't make you employees

Re: If i sell on ebay using the app

>And eBay take a cut of profits. Does that make me an eBay employee????

That was my thought, especially as they only pay you in a private corporate currency, paypal.

Smartphones are ludicrously under-used, so steal their brains

Re: Meh

Or perhaps that a micro-controller is enough to process a couple of different buttons. Far cheaper than a micro-processor, less likely to go wrong and a tiny fraction of the cost of the engineering involved to make a clothes-washer last five years.

Intel's tablet CPU share to DROP: analyst

How to win when you can't win

Embrace, extend...

Put ARM logic inside your x86 silicon and use power management to switch off the x86 bits when you want to run in tablet mode. Switch to x86 when you need x86 apps which can do heavy lifting.

That would help slow demand for ARM to grow larger-power chippery.

Germany says no steamy ebooks until die Kinder have gone to bed

Re: Eh?

> So, what will children be doing after 10 in their bedrooms?

Perhaps the Germans idea of the "children" who need protecting is different from the simplistic American idea that the law is the be-all and end-all of existence.

Perhaps they just don't want porn mixed with "bob the builder" books for six-year-olds. The teenagers aren't going to be fussed or limited, which is probably fine by all.

Greek PM Alexis Tsipras brings the EU to its knees

re: Streaming video ... should be handed off to specialised content delivery networks.

We call them, "torrents."

It isn't live, but that rarely matters.

Microsoft rains cash on OpenBSD Foundation, becomes top 2015 donor

Re: Microsoft...

re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Hardly. BSD simply isn't a threat, which I think that's a bit of a pity. I haven't done much with BSD but I found Nokia's IPSO to be the most robust thing ever.

Office 365 prices 'to rise by up to 13 per cent'

Re: Twisting the knife already?

Yay! Skype finally adds value!

Biologists gasp at lemur's improbably colossal bollocks

Re: Landing pads

Do the females not jump?

Reg hack survives world's longest commercial flight

17 hours? Pah!

London to Aus is 22 hours in the air with only a 2 hour break after 14 hours.

But back to the "cloud" bit of the story: it looks rather similar to what we use to call the bureau model. The difference appears to be that because the Vendor runs lots of small systems, you have a complicated job division and results reassembly requirement. It's just a batch job.

I can nver understand why big companies don't spend cash on hardware for jobs they don't care much for. Ditch the redundancy, just get around to fixing it when you can. Hardware is cheap and if it's just for ad hoc jobs which are not time critical, you don't need expensive DC facilities such as separate power suppliers, anti-tank traps etc. if the aircon breaks, you just hit the off button until it's fixed.

Re: BA, Bangalore to Boston with a 90 minute layover at T5

>Slough?

Sadly, the Vulcan has been retired.

>1500 flights can be analysed quickly on a spreadsheet. Doesn't need Big Iron ...

Were they doing high res weather analysis over all of every trip or was it lotus 123 in dosbox?

Export control laws force student to censor infosec research

re: Returning faulty goods to the manufacturer

Except you aren't allowed to tell them what the fault is.

Even Apple doesn’t mess with Taylor Swift

Re: Streaming is no different than....

> Streaming is no different than.... FM Radio

An audience of one is the same as an audience of unknown size, possibly up to millions?

Also, ... no different from FM radio... I think.

Re: Streaming is no different than....

I seem to think that in the video there is a twisted "Sleeping Beauty" allusion and the implication is that the apple is poisoned.

Does it get any better?

How Music Got Free and Creatocracy

Re: Suffering artists

re: Beethoven, Bach, Mozart

Didn't they tend to get people to pay them to compose? Getting your money up-front and doing a lot of composing might be handy.

What happens today is different.

Someone noted that you get a little brain reward when you hear something, you know what comes next and then it happens as expected. I noticed this when I heard an 80's track and thought "ooh great!" despite really disliking the actual track.

So what we get now is saturation coverage by promotion companies which means people get a little "brain reward" whenever they hear it, which they confuse with liking the track itself and/or the artist.

Many "artists" seem to think its their art which people like and is successful. That's only minimally correct - the real determinant of success (given a pool of approximately equally good "art") is the cash spent on promotion.

Brace yourself, planet Earth, says Nokia CEO – our phones ARE coming back from mid-2016

re: So help me - what's the point of buying a Nokia if it isn't a Nokia?

Design and quality control (hopefully).

The same reason people buy Apple perhaps, but from a company a little less inclined to try to take you for all you've got.

Open-source Linux doesn't pay, said no one ever at Red Hat

Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

I can see where this is going.

I don't think RH make their money from the desktop though.

I'd hazard a guess that it is mostly support for systems running apache and oracle for companies where such systems handle a lot of revenue.

The year of the Linux Desktop is not here yet. We need to wait for Snow Leopard users' systems to die and be forced to look at the abomination of Yosemite and Windows 10. They will choose the one true KDE Way ;)

We also need a time-machine equivalent to be shipped as standard in a visible way, not be some add-on.

Vicious vandals violate voluminous Versailles vagina

Re: Get rid of it altogether.

Versailles is fine art.

That large lump of whatever it is, is the vandalism. Yellow paint couldn't polish it.

Even if you think the sculpture is art or satire, you don't scribble the words of Orwell's 1984 over a Constable.

(But it still isn't art, its just rude pictures scribbled into a rather nice desk.)

FBI says in secret that secret spy Cessnas aren't secret

Re: Works 4 me

Obvious Troll is obvious...

US Air Force drone pilots in mass burn out, robo-flights canceled

Re: Compensation? @alfred

>When the enemy hides in the middle of a civilian area, innocent people will die.

Do you mean in a city such as Washington DC?

Apple CORED: Boffins reveal password-killer 0-days for iOS and OS X

Re: Waiting game?

The problem is not OS support, its Apple's insistence on selling low-spec'ed systems which can't be upgraded. The OS may run fine, but iTunes? Mail?