Posts by Lennart Sorensen

If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn't. Bad news: It's working as intended

I guess apkmirror can come in handy for that. Installing firefox 68 from there seems to be no problem.

Appeals judges toss out FTC win: What Qualcomm did to its rivals was 'hypercompetitive, not anticompetitive'

Re: Future standards

Wasn't that called GSM?

If you own one of these 45 Netgear devices, replace it: Kit maker won't patch vulnerable gear despite live proof-of-concept code

Re: It'd be interesting

I looked up one, the AC1450, and it is from 2013.

Re: Time to check how many on the list support DD/Open-WRT?

Quite a few of them are broadcom based which tends to mean openwrt is not an option due to lack of open source drivers. dd-wrt handles some of them though.

Amazing anyone buys their products anymore given how it seems every year a major security hole is found in just about all their products, and then they fix half or 2/3 or them, and ignore the rest.

Tesla sued over Tokyo biker's death in 'dozing driver' Autopilot crash

Since when is it illegal to be stopped because of a collision? And what do you know about Japan's traffic rules? They could be stopped because the road was jammed with other vehicles, or the car broke down. Lots of reasons that a vehicle can end up stopped. Tesla's autopilot isn't what its name suggests and doesn't work well at all.

I'm doing this to stop humans ripping off brilliant ideas by computers and aliens, says guy unsuccessfully filing patents 'invented' by his AI

Re: Its all binary

All numbers from zero to not a number? Not even sure what that means. Not sure how a number is an invention either. I think you fail big time. Perhaps 2^infinity big.

NASA dons red and blue cardboard 3D glasses to drive Curiosity rover because its GPUs are stuck in the office

Re: Flashback

Or included free with kids magazines or activity books.

Pretty sure all movie sheathes are using polarized glasses these days.

Re: Sounds like they are using old GeForce 3D Vision kit

What does the moon have to do with a mars rover?

They are viewing data so they can plan what commands to send to the rover on mars. They are not driving it live (the latency would be insane).

Samsung calls it a day on liquid-crystal display, says quantum dot is really hot

Re: QLED is brighter than OLED, potentially superior.

Well the OLED is vastly superior in contrast ratio and in viewing angle (which matters to some people's livingrooms). If you care about color accuracy, the QLED even with professional calibration can't actually be made accurate, while the OLED is usually quite close even without calibration, and can be made very accurate. The QLED is over saturated (apparently many people think that looks better so it sells). The QLED also has blooming issues due to the backlight and being an LCD, and often has to severely dim to reduce the visible blooming, which of course OLED never has a problem with. An OLED can do full contrast difference on adjacent pixels. A QLED (or any other LCD) can't because of the backlight zones (and those are only on the higher end LCDs. Lower end ones only have a single backlight for the hole screen so everything has to dim or brighten together).

Now Internet Society told to halt controversial .org sale… by its own advisory council: 'You misread the community mindset around dot-org'

Re: The bloody obvious

Well it is possible that Ethos (and company) came along and said "Hey, how would you like to secure tons of money for your organization? Just keep this our little secret. You sell us .org and we give you all this money to focus on instead. Trust us, we won't harm your members that rely on .org domains, we know what we are doing."

Of course if they bought that then they have no business running ISOC in the first place.

Re: Corruption

Too bad it doesn't even help the pocketbook of the voters. They are harming themselves. It only helps the pocketbooks of the major campaign donors. But apparently a large percentage of americans have been raised to think anything that helps society in general is socialist (or as they think of it: communist) and hence awful. Never mind that there is plenty of corporate welfare to go around, but for some reason that doesn't count given it only helps a few, not society in general, so that's "capitalism" not "socialism" and hence A-OK.

Xerox grabs $24bn from banking titans to fund hostile takeover of HP Ink

Well when Carl Icahn is in favour of it and calls it a no-brainer, then obviously it is a bad idea. I can't imagine a company surviving with a debt load like that, but he is only interested in short term profits for himself after all, not long term viability of the company. I don't even have a clue how many companies he has ruined so far, but it's quite a few.

Chef roasted for tech contract with family-separating US immigration, forks up attempt to quash protest

Re: Flaming idiot, social justice warrior and political hack

Showing up at the border and applying for asylum is not illegal. It is a legal way to enter a country.

Sneaking into the country and not applying for admission would be illegal. That is not what is happening though.

Locking them up and mistreating and abusing and neglecting them to the point of having many die is also illegal.

So it is pretty clear who is doing something illegal.

One teeensy little 13-minute power cut, and WD you look at the size of that chip supply cut!

Re: Maybe I am cynical...

Might be good for the market, but if you don't have any product to sell, it will be your competitors that benefit.

Legal bombs fall on TurboTax maker Intuit for 'hiding' free service from search engines

Re: A lot of commies in here

Why is the US tax system so complicated? In Canada doing it on paper for most people should take less than half an hour. Doing it with software is perhaps a 5 minute job (and the software to handle an entire family is like $20 (Canadian) so vastly cheaper than the US rip offs, although the same software will do it for free if you make less than a certain amount too, are a senior, etc). I used to do it on paper, but all that writing the same numbers on multiple pages and punching the numbers into a calculator gets annoying, and with the software you can even download the contents of most of the forms from the government too (after all they already have the data in most cases), making you have to enter very little at all. I think it took me 15 minutes to do a family of 4 (I was verifying that it had done it all right).

Of course the same tax software companies are lobbying to make sure the tax system isn't made sane and simple enough in the US for people to just do it trivially. They don't want to loose their lucrative business after all.

Seems the US tax system is like the US election system. Too complex, too incomprehensible, ineffective and has lots of companies trying to make money of it while claiming they are helping. Canada does elections on paper, can have results counted in a few hours, can do recounts when needed in a few more hours, and are verifiable. It is just so much simpler and it works. Of course it helps to not make people have to vote for hundreds of things at the same time (and really, why do you even get to vote for judges and sheriffs and who knows what anyhow?)

Trust the public cloud Big Three to make non-volatile storage volatile

Re: Will we soon be reading about...

I believe a single TRIM command to the drive should wipe it, so I doubt they haven't implemented that properly. Issue wipe command before attaching to new instance.

Really not any different than the all other storage for the cloud.

Time for a cracker joke: What's got one ball and buttons in the wrong place?

Re: You can also get...

That sounds like an eSATAp connector. Not that weird, other than not being an official standard. Many systems have had them.

What's big, blue, and short on Intel? The supercomputer world's podium: USA tops Top500 with IBM Power9

The core counts for the Power9 boxes look to be totally wrong. I suspect they were counting threads instead of cores given they mention 4600 nodes with two 22 core Power9 chips each, which does not equal over 2 million cores. At 8 threads per core though (if that is the version of the power9 they are using) it gets close. The numbers for the second place machine don't even divide by 22 evenly, so that's just more wrong. Someone somewhere goofed.

Do not adjust your set, er, browser: This is our new page-one design

Well it has been quite clear that every time the register changes the layout, they ask for feedback, get lots of it, and ignore 99.9% of it. The opinion of the readers simply doesn't matter here.

Nokia reinstates 'hide the Notch' a day after 'Google required' feature kill

The notch is an indentation in the screen where the speaker (usually) is. So the screen is not actually a complete rectangle. Hiding the notch is done by not using the part of the screen next to the indentation so that you only use the part of the screen that is a complete rectangle.

Oldest swinger in town, Slackware, notches up a quarter of a century

Re: Cheers, Slack

Yeah I went:

SLS 1.03 (Wow something better than DOS)

Slackware 3.0 (Wow shared libraries but same dreadful package system as SLS)

Redhat 2.0 through 6.0 (Wow useful package management)

Debian 2.0 through today (Wow package dependencies that actually work, upgrades in place, and packages that aren't full of bugs)

I haven't seen anything improve on Debian yet, so no need to switch.

You wanna be an alpha... tester of The Register's redesign? Step this way

As if it matters what we think.

Maybe you could just undo the previous change and go back to a proper page width? I don't want the page to look the same on my phone and my desktop. They have vastly different screen sizes and shapes. I still want my screen width used properly.

And I am not convinced by the idea of highlighting anything. I go daily to read the days stories in order and don't care to have them shuffled around since that just makes catching up a pain.

But well what we thought didn't matter last time I have little hope it will this time either.

Oh and having the area outside the articles on the home page be a clickable link to some add or other sponsored content should be punishable by death. I have only ever clicked on it by accident when changing focus of my windows. If it doesn't look like a button it should not be a button.

Well at least so far the new layout doesn't seem obviously worse than the current one, unlike the last update. Of course it also doesn't fix any of what the previous update screwed up.

Intel confirms it’ll release GPUs in 2020

The term GPU is much older than nvidia making it popular (in 1999). The i740 was 1998. So GPU was a thing, and the i740 probably qualified (as a bad one) even if people tended to call them graphics accelerators at the time instead.

Sysadmin's PC-scrub script gave machines a virus, not a wash

Re: a Mac SE FDHD installed as a gate guardian

The amiga got 880k and 1.76MB, so there. Of course while it could read floppies from other machines, no one else could read the amiga ones because they had no sector gaps.

Industry whispers: Qualcomm mulls Arm server processor exit

If the chip makers wanted there to be an arm server ecosystem, the first thing they should do is actually sell the stupid things to anyone that wants to buy one. So far it has been just talk with pretty pictures and lots of specs, but just about nothing anyone could actually buy if they wanted it.

If you think you can stick with only talking to the large cloud providers and people doing custom designs, well then you are not going to get any ecosystem going because the people that would actually play with it and get it working with lots of software can't get your system.

Mum? Dad? Can I have a 3D XPoint disk for my birthday?

Re: What is the market for these

I thought the 960 EVO was a conventional SSD, and hence the claim of 640MB/s is nonsense given clearly conventional SSD outperforms the intel.

Bright idea: Make H when the Sun shines, and H when it doesn't

Re: carbon monoxide as byproduct???

So yet more stuff released we are trying to make less of.

This sounds like a far from clean method for making clean energy.

So far I have no hope at all for hydrogen as a fuel source because there simply is no good way to make it, store it, or transport it.

AI smarts: IBM pushes out 'faster than X86' POWER9 servers

Re: Price-performance

No IBM makes PowerLinux 7rX machines that only run linux and not aix or i. I have never heard of Lenovo having anything to do with those.

There are other non IBM systems out there though. The Talos workstation for example.

Intel Management Engine pwned by buffer overflow

Re: WTF?

Certainly none of what they listed is required and many people would rather not have it.

Sure Microsoft wants you to use secureboot, and it does have some good features. So why is it in the same environment as remote management which clearly is not required or desired in most cases? Do not combine useful local stuff with optional risky remotely accessible stuff.

Re: Who is behind all this bashing against Intel ME , uh?

Actually they don't. Some AMDs have something similar. IBM power uses a different chip outside the CPU for management and it has its own network interface that you are not required to connect if you don't want to. No idea what sparc has (are they still doing anything?). ARM supports running trustzone code, although not all of them use it, so it is certainly possible to buy arm systems that don't have it enabled at all. \

Intel's big mistake is putting optional stuff and essential stuff together in the same place. The essential system startup stuff has no reason to have network access at all, and the optional stuff that does have reason for network access should be able to be turned off so it should have been an independent device from the essential startup stuff. Secureboot and remote system management have no reason to share the same CPU and OS.

Want a new HDMI cable? No? Bad luck. You'll need one for HDMI 2.1

Article is wrong

Well the article is wrong. You will need a new cable to use HDMI 2.1's new higher resolution and refresh rate. Your existing cables are fine for VRR, eARC, dynamic HDR and the other features that are not using the new higher resolutions. Only the higher resolutions require the new 48Gbps capability, which is the only thing that requires new cables. Since every feature in HDMI 2.1 is optional, a device that implements just one of them can call itself HDMI 2.1 and it doesn't have to be the 48Gbps feature.

So for the features that might actually be relevant anytime soon for most of us, existing 2.0 compatible cables are fine.

A cable meant for 1.4 might handle 2.0 in some cases, and it might also fail at the edge cases (when you go pushing the full 18Gbps, not just 12 or 15) in the case of 10 bit HDR at 60Hz 4k resolution. Fortunately premium certified cables can be bought for about $5 and work great for HDMI 2.0 stuff.

Now, now, Qualcomm... Don't play hard to get, grins Broadcom

Re: Next, hostile

I suspect Qualcomm is very correct about regulators. Broadcom and Qualcomm together own the wifi AP chipset market. Everyone else combined makes up almost nothing in that market. I am sure there are other markets where they would be totally dominant.

So at least some parts of the business would need to be split out, and many of Qualcomms advantages is that they provide all the bits needed so splitting wifi from cellular or processors just doesn't make sense.

Card shark Intel bets with discrete graphics chips, shuffles AMD's GPU boss into the deck

Re: Great for competition

Oh yes the intel i740. Let's offload all video memory to system memory over the AGP bus. Sure it makes geometry move faster, but sure didn't help the texture performance.

$10,000-a-dram whisky 'wasn't even a malt'

Re: Carbon dating ?

Things have been radioactive forever. It's part of reality.

Some things are just more radioactive than other things.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor

Tesla share crash amid Republican bid to kill off electric car tax break

Maybe someone is assuming Tesla will actually make 300000 model 3s in 2018 and sell them all in the US. Or they expect the Bolt to sell a lot of cars.

I believe the requirement is that the electric range has to be larger than the non electric range (this affects the BMW i3 with range extender for example which has an artificial fuel tank limit in the US). Regular hybrids (like a prius and such) does not apply since the electric range is much shorter than the non electric range.

US voting server in election security probe is mysteriously wiped

Re: "Low level format"

Actually there is, and you haven't been able to do one for about 25 years now. It is not something done on modern drives, but used to be required on old drives a long time ago.

Magic hash maths: Dedupe does not have to mean high compute. Wait, what?

Re: unique mathematical hash

Yes hashes are clearly not unique (and hence the article is just plain wrong about that).

Any dedupe system that assumes they are unique and doesn't verify the data is the same after getting a hash match is insane and should not be used. It doesn't matter how low the probability is, I do not want to risk my data getting destroyed because it just happens to have the same hash as some other data.

And yes there are programmers out there dumb enough to assume the hashes are effectively unique because the probability is so insanely low of them having a collision and then treat them as if they were actually unique. Some day their customer is going to pay for that mistake and they might not know it for a long time after it happens.

Bill Gates says he'd do CTRL-ALT-DEL with one key if given the chance to go back through time

No he meant the keys to hit to get the login prompt in Windows NT. Not to reboot the machine. It happened to do that when running DOS because that is what the BIOS did with that interrupt. Windows NT and newer does something else with the interrupt.

Re: O la la!

And amazingly control-shift-esc did the same thing 20 years ago too.

Core-blimey! Intel's Core i9 18-core monster – the numbers

Re: Nice L3 cache you've got there

No on UEFI systems they start in 16bit mode then the firmware rather quickly switches to 64 bit mode and that's the mode it starts the OS in, unless you enable legacy boot mode, in which case it switches back to 16 bit for booting.

Done and done: BlackBerry ties up $940m settlement with Qualcomm

Re: Who's their Lawyer?

The article was wrong. It has been fixed after it was pointed out. It is Blackberry that is getting a nice pile of cash.

Netgear says sorry four weeks after losing customer backups

Re: "the outage lost all of his photographs"

It sounds like they had a brilliant design where the local ReadyNAS you can hold in your hand would wipe itself if the ReadyCLOUD account was marked as closed. So if the cloud server makes a mistake and decides the account is closed and wipes the data and then the local NAS gets told that the account is closed, then the data is wiped everywhere. If it really does work that way, then it is a mindbogglingly stupid design. Essentially you are not in control of your local NAS at that point and it can only be considered a backup device, not primary storage, which it seems a lot of people thought it was with cloud backup.

Crafty Fokker: Norfolk surgeon builds Red Baron triplane replica

Re: I wish him well

The rotary has a much larger mass rotating than the radial, which is not a good thing in an airplane. Tends to make things want to turn when you don't want them too, especially when changing power settings. Some of the high power WWII planes had enough trouble with the mass of the prop when increasing power quickly. Doing that with essentially the entire engine spinning is a bad idea. But that is what they did early on.

It does seem terribly wrong to put a 4 cylinder in a Fokker DR I though.

The DR I replica that my dad flies sometimes in Brampton, Canada at least has the right type of engine in it.

Inside Intel's Optanical garden

Re: NAND SSD are crap! Stop with the lies against 3D XPoint !

Based on the endurance numbers intel is providing, XPoint isn't looking a whole lot better than NAND, which is rather contrary to the original claims about the technology.

So either intel's specs are wrong, or they are having early production problems causing endurance problems.

Certainly 30 complete writes per day is not a lot more than the 17 complete writes per day that the intel NAND SSD is rated for, especially if it is for 3 years versus 5 years. Certainly based on intel's hype I was expecting 1000 complete writes per day instead.

The latency is rather impressive though.

Inside OpenSSL's battle to change its license: Coders' rights, tech giants, patents and more

The openssl advertising clause is so obnoxious that if you even say:

Our product has secure connections.

You actually have to do something like:

Our product has secure connections (using OpenSSL copyright x, y, and z, blah blah blah).

Every single time you talk about any feature that relies on what OpenSSL provides. Does everyone do that? Well no, but the license does appear to say exactly that. It is very hard to comply correctly with that license.

It is not just the documentation that has to list the copyrights, or the about info for the application. It's documentation, advertising, discussions of product features, etc.

Microsoft loves Linux so much, its OneDrive web app runs like a dog on Windows OS rivals

Re: Fixed now

Except as the last few comments there say, it isn't actually fixed for many linux users.

Devs bashing out crappy code is making banks insecure – report

Re: Agile Payoff

Wait, you mean there is a step to the process after fast and cheap?

So 40% had bad security and 40% were written in Java-EE. Just a conincidence, right?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee refuses to be King Canute, approves DRM as Web standard

Re: All the whining in the world...

DRM does not stop piracy.

What would help piracy is to make buying it legitimately actually be more convenient than pirating.

If you could buy it easily, in a format that would be yours forever (so no server shutdowns to worry about), that you could play on whatever device you wanted when you wanted, could re-encode into a format needed for your device easily, then that would be what one would do. As long as a legitimately bought version is less functional than the pirated version, people will be willing to go through the hassle of finding a pirated version.