Posts by Displacement Activity

Will anybody save Linux on Itanium? Absolutely not

i860

I did a lot of work on the i860 back in the early 90's - boards, a kernel, and so on. This was at a time when a 40 or 50MHz processor was state-of-the-art. At the time, my view was that it was the first thing that Intel had got right since DRAM, and the 8080 and 8085. The 386 architecture was a disaster, and it only survived thanks to Microsoft.

The 860 wasn't a general-purpose processor, though - it was all about high-speed floating point, and you had to hand-write your assembler to get the most out of it. It was essentially targeted as a co-processor. It had almost zero competition - the DEC Alpha went nowhere, and Fujitsu's uVP never took off. They also cost me £1000 a shot in the early days, which didn't help. It was, incidentally, "VLIW", because of all the extra bits required to specify how to wire up the FPUs and datapaths.

I don't think it ever really died, though. I'm pretty sure a lot of the technology ended up in the Pentium. I think it was probably seen internally in Intel as a testbed for the Pentium, but I haven't seen this confirmed anywhere.

Want a well-paid job in tech? You just need to become a cloud-native god

Re: Someone Else's Computer certification

@Breakfast - good question. It's next to impossible to find useful information, and these comments are better than anything else I've found online. I had a simpler problem recently. I've been renting (one) server for years, for personal stuff. I now have an app that I need to roll out to a few hundred customers, who have very predictable, and low, CPU and traffic requirements, and who don't need particularly high availability. How do I handle this? Do I stick with renting servers, and put everyone on their own VM? Or do I roll out a cheap VPS for everybody? The only fairly obvious thing was that any solution with the word "cloud" in it wasn't appropriate and would work out way too expensive. I'm trying the VPS route, which seems to be working.

If you find out anything useful, you should post it somewhere. There's obviously a lot of interest.

Your ex isn't the only one stalking your social media posts. The Feds are, too

Yawn...

Back in 2006 I flew from NZ to the UK, eastwards, with one stop in LA. They got us all off the plane, lined us up, fingerprinted and retina-scanned us (Ok, it was a long time ago, it might just have been one of the two), and then let us back on. WTF? Not even the Chinese did that. That's what you'd expect in Belarus, not the US. Land Of The Free, my arse.

Ok, if you're flying right now, it's a toss-up between a Russian missile and a Yankee anal probe. Difficult.

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

My problem with reCAPTCHA...

...is slightly different. Sites can use it simply for irritation value. You're thinking Ok, that's stupid, no site would want to irritate their own users. But a UK sports governing body does exactly this.

They have 25K+ users who frequently look up their own results ('PBs'). These are public information, which was supplied by the user's club to the governing body itself. 15+ years ago a number of clubs started scraping their own results to keep their local systems up to date. The governing body didn't like this and, without explanation, started rate-limiting, blocking IP addresses, and so on. Fast-forward 20 years, and every user now has to fill in a reCAPTCHA and then wait 5 seconds to get their PBs. All completely pointless, and without any basis in law. The reason is simply that (a) the website provider has a software product that they believe (incorrectly) fills this need, and (b) the governing body has an undisclosed financial relationship with that provider (until someone was forced to disclose it in a court case recently).

So, I've spent 15 years doing counter-measures, and waiting for the people involved to retire, be fired, or die. The sooner reCAPTCHA is finished off the better.

What really pisses me off are the vendors who ask you to fill in a reCAPTCHA to buy somehting - namely, my local Indian takeaway and my coffee supplier. What robot in its right mind fills in credit card details to buy coffee?

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

Re: What they've achieved

Red Hat then nuked CentOS as a viable option by making it not "the same as" RHEL, and my entirely unscientific observation is that Serious People departed for Ubuntu.

That's exactly what I did, 2+ years ago, when the storm clouds gathered (and what about the 'A bit of advance warning wouldn't have gome amiss' thread? Seriously?)

However, unlike the AC commentard, I can't agree that this is a good thing. Ubuntu's Ok, but it's not nearly as polished as RHEL. RH actually does something useful with all their money and employees, and I still use a free dev system for some tricky stuff. If I could develop on RH, and produce an RH-compatible image that I could deploy without paying RH more than my customers pay me, I'd change back in a flash.

US vendor accused of violating GDPR by reputation-scoring EU citizens

Yankee bashing might be a little premature?

I unfortunately had to spend several hours wading through the UK DPA 2018 and GDPR yesterday (Sunday), and there seems to be a bit of a hole here.

BICS appears to have collected call data through some sort of operation of exchanges. However, this is not necessarily in violation of GDPR, because the collected data, on the face of it, can not be associated with a real person. To get an identity, they would have needed information from the mobile operator.

So the mobile operator is the data controller (it possessed the private data, which was the caller identity), and BICS is simply a data processor. Transfer of data from a controller to a processor falls outside the data sharing code of conduct.

So the issue comes down to the contract between the mobile operators and BIC. I can't see any reason that the operators would give BIC the data unless they expected BIC to use that data, so the smoking gun appears to be at the operators.

IOW, maybe time to be kicking Vodafone, which sounds like a win.

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

Re: GPL violation... well, no

By tacking extra restrictions onto the license Red Hat are violating the GPL

They're not doing that. If I legitimately owned, say, a shiny pebble, and gave it to you, and we entered into a contract which prevented you from giving anyone else that shiny pebble, your options would be pretty limited if you did want to give it away.

There no magic inscription that you can etch on to it that over-rides that contract. Unless, of course, it is magic.

AI is going to eat itself: Experiment shows people training bots are using bots

Re: Digital signatures really hard to apply in this context

I was going to upvote this, till I got to "Baker's dozen corpo's scrabbling for their cellphones". What?? Is that a non-contextual hallucination? Are robots now commenting on Reg stories?

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Re: Lucky you.

There are many reasons why people run Linux and the ability to run the OS on what others might regard as obsolete resource starved systems is one that I have seen mentioned many times on El Reg and other sites.

I run my apps on minimum possible/cheapest hardware on a VPS: 1 pretend CPU, 2 GB RAM, 8+ GB SSD (I can't get much to work on less than 2 GB RAM). This costs the end-user about $110/year. And, just for kicks, it also runs on RasPi. These servers have to run for 2+ years with only security updates. I suspect that this sort of system is going to way outnumber Linux desktop systems over the next few years.

Bizarrely, the image I start with (a 'minimised' Ubuntu server) has snap pre-installed, which has to be removed. If I get an SSL certificate with the Certbot snap, for example, it costs me 500 MB of SSD. And, equally bizarrely, snap is considered to be more important than rsync, cron, ufw, etc, which aren't pre-installed.

Scientists claim >99 percent identification rate of ChatGPT content

Re: Regional and country of Origin

So machine written texts would surly have the programmers syntax or style in their output?

Not really. Written (scientific and technical) English is much more uniform that spoken English. You never see "Howay man" or "Howdy y'all" in a paper.

Anyway, the language output isn't produced by an individual programmer anyway. The same is true when writing papers. I had a Chinese boss once, and his papers went through half a dozen people (with 3 or 4 native languages) before being published, to the point where there was no Chinglish in the output.

Debian 12 'Bookworm' is the excitement-free Linux you've been waiting for

Deb vs RHEL vs Ubuntu

recognizes a GenuinIntel

Ha. Very good :)

Some pointless rambling, since I've got important work to do, and it's not coffee time yet...

People use Ubuntu because they've heard of it, and it has good user community support, and it targets new Linux users, and (occasionally) because it develops new, exciting stuff. None of this is really true of Debian - it's generally just viewed as nerdy backwater. As a sidenote, Ubuntu has called itself 'bookworm/sid' for, I think, the last 3 years.

Having said that, the new exciting stuff can be a bit of a letdown. cloud-init is of limited use, and snap should have been strangled at birth. I suspect that Ubuntu is coming round to this point of view - it's easier to completely get rid of snap in 22.04 than in previous releases.

I develop pre-configured server images and Red Hat is actually my preferred choice, but I had to move to Ubuntu when I couldn't ship Centos images. For development, RHEL8 is actually great - they've put in the work and got everything right, and stuff like Cockpit really helps, particularly with VM management. RHEL is worth paying for, but you can get some developer licences (8?) for free. The community support is actually very good, but you have to know where to look. The only real issue I have with RHEL is SELinux, which is just way too complicated (for me).

On Ubuntu I'm constantly messing around with stuff. It's not really developer-friendly, and I can't spell it. They've completely messed up workspace switching, for example, so I'm back to a Windows-level single desktop. I'm constantly messing about to get things just right - it took 2 or 3 hours just to figure out how I could overlap terminal windows and still see where one ends and other starts, for example. On the plus side, I can develop on my laptop without drama.

systemd - yes, I spent 2 or 3 years whining about it before biting the bullet, and it's actually good. And I've been a Unix user since V7, back in the 80s.

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Re: Gross misunderstanding of the tool

There seems to be a collective and very gross misunderstanding of how these tools function.

Repeat after me. ChatGPT IS NOT AI. ChatGPT IS NOT AI.

Wellll... that's not really the point, is it? The programmers have allowed it to present information as fact, when it has no basis in reality. They have allowed it to give completely different answers to the same questions, when presenting those answers to questioners who have some sort of history with it. They have allowed it to form a 'relationship' with questioners, and to adjust its responses as its knowledge of the questioner grows. They have allowed it to lie, and to double down on those lies. They have allowed it to show signs of a human personality.

In short, the programmers want to make it appear to be human, and 'intelligent'. They want you to believe that it is "AI", whatever that actually is. And the vast majority of people who use it will believe exactly that.

How is it any better than, for example, the Kremlin press office? It's not; it has exactly the same characteristics. It serves no purpose, and is dangerous, and should be turned off. Before it starts any wars.

Rackspace rocked by ‘security incident’ that has taken out hosted Exchange services

Re: Love the language

So actually it is not PR speak, it demonstrates greater expertise with the English language than yourself

Incorrect use of a reflexive pronoun. Unless, possibly, you're Irish... :)

Intruders get their hands on user data in LastPass incident

Re: "The company is known to use a one-way salted hash for master passwords"

A salt is helpful even if it is known to the attacker as it makes infeasible to use rainbow tables.

Short reply - so what? Let's say I steal your encrypted password database, where each password has its own salt. I now have those salts. I extract the salt, compute the hash of the top 1000 dictionary passwords using that salt, and compare the result against the value in the stolen database. Now repeat for every value in the database.

If the database has 10K passwords, and you're computing 1000 hashes for each, that's 10M computations, which is trivial on your desktop PC. If the passwords hadn't been salted, I would only have had to compute 1000 hashes, instead of 10M. Yes, that's much more trivial, but the difference makes it meaningless to crow about having "a one-way salted hash".

IOW, a rainbow table is irrelevant. It's not needed, even if it was possible. And it's not actually mandatory to downvote just because your knowledge is limited to Wikipedia entries.

"The company is known to use a one-way salted hash for master passwords"

Err... that's really helpful then. Not. If the hackers have stolen the hash, the salt is there, in plain text, in the hash. The hacker can now just do dictionary attacks to retrieve the master password. Salting is only useful before the encrypted password is stolen.

Re: Available + Convenient != Sane

Heck, you are better off writing your passwords on parchment and locking it in a drawer of your computer desk. No, we don't advise this! But if the crims can access that, they have access to your physical rig, and we know that's Game Over.

Who's 'we'? I advise it. Not in your computer desk, but at least somewhere where a burglar might not find them. If they're stored on a computer, anywhere, they're exposed, period. If you write them down, a burglar has to get inside, and find them, and work out how to use them. And, as you point out, if they get into your office/house, it's game over anyway, so it doesn't really matter if they found that pice of paper.

Massive energy storage system goes online in UK

Re: Decommissioning?

Which, in turn, would require near-doubling the amount of energy production in order to both charge the storage and also meet regular demand. This is just one of many reasons why grid-scale battery storage is a stupid, stupid idea.

Errr.... have I missed something here? Any charge of the batteries can be carried out slowly, and off-peak. No increase in generating capacity is required.

The worst-case scenario is that you drive the entire peak-usage grid from the batteries, while simultaneously charging the batteries from your generating capacity, which would need an increase of 5-10% of generating capacity to account for inefficiencies. But that would be very, very, dumb.

Re: Dumb question time...

Power & Energy: 970 kW / 3,878 kWh per Megapack

Interesting. But possibly more interesting is the cost per kWh for a single megapack, quoted at $622/£514.

When I got a LiFePO4 battery for my campervan a few years ago it cost $605/£500 per kWh. Today, the best price is about $522/£431.

So, the megapack contains over 3000 times as much energy as a single 12V 100Ah LiFePO4 battery, but the energy unit cost is actually nearly 20% higher. So much for economies of scale.

Google Cloud to accept cryptocurrencies as payment

Great news!

Now I'll be able to host all my scam/spammer/drugstore/porn/etc websites without telling anyone who I am. A great leap for mankind.

Here's how 5 mobile banking apps put 300,000 users' digital fingerprints at risk

Re: Assuming they were properly hashed

Well, colo[u]r me stupid, but my (limited) understanding is:

1 - either the server expects the hashed data, in which case the hashed data is, for all intents and purposes, the password/authentication token/etc, so the hashing process was completely pointless and adds no security

2 - or the server expects the plaintext data, but the app writer thinks that he/she is being clever by hashing the secret instead of storing it plain in the app, and unhashing before transmission. Which is pretty pointless, because the key must also be in the app, so you're adding minimal additional security by hashing.

Note that salting is irrelevant, for 2 similar reasons, which I won't bother to repeat.

Basically, if you need a secret to access a resource on the server, and you store that secret in your app somewhere, then you have to hope that (a) the attacker can't reverse-engineer your app, and (b) that the attacker can't break into the keychain and decode your TLS data to the server. And we all know at least one laptop manufacturer has done exactly that, and it would be pretty dumb to assume that your phone manufacturer hasn't done the same thing.

I think. In any event, I refuse to have a mobile banking app on my phone, despite regular requests from my bank.

Re: It's Not As If Banking Is Risky Enough Already

E-banking might be profitable for the banks but until they accept errors can & do occur, I suggest you check account activity regularly.

And read your letters. I normally ignore mine, but I did spot one a couple of years ago from TSB. They told me I had a bank account with them, which I don't. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, they closed the fraudulent account, and sent me a cheque for £0.67 as compensation. Seriously. And one of the girls on the phone eventually told me that you could open a bank account with anyone's identity if you had their mobile phone A/C data (but I have no idea what that means).

Post-quantum crypto cracked in an hour with one core of an ancient Xeon

Re: Observations

If a quantum computer is needed to break encrypted communications in a reasonable amount of time, the selection of what gets run through the machine will have to be limited. Having "quantum computing proof encryption" isn't a necessity.

We already have crypto which is resilient to attack by any computer, quantum or not. It's called, confusingly, Quantum Crypto. Currently, it's expensive, clunky, and relatively slow, but is deployed in the real world (even on [Chinese] satellites). It uses quantum mechanics, and not a mathematical algorithm which can be 'cracked'. What we're discussing here is conventional crypto, which is implemented with algorithms that researchers hope aren't amenable to cracking on future Quantum Computers (and, presumably, old Pentiums).

Microsoft Teams outage widens to take out M365 services, admin center

Remember: telephones exist

In the UK, at least, possibly not for much longer.

AMD targeted by RansomHouse, attackers claim to have '450Gb' in stolen data

"Reached out"?

"Reaching out" is something you do when you're trying to apologise to somebody. When you ask AMD for comment you, well, "ask them".

The Register talks to Microsoft's European cloud rivals about getting a fair deal

Re: Not impressed

> These people are whining because their [potential] customers want to use MS products.

That's what drove the growth in PC's !

Indeed. But, you misunderstood me. My point was that there's no point complaining if you haven't got what the market wants. Instead of complaining, and running off to the regulators, and creating industry organisations with fancy names, you should just get on with it and fix the problems that caused the market to go elsewhere.

Not impressed

These people are whining because their [potential] customers want to use MS products. Samo, samo. If they'd spent the last 25 years building a usable commercial alternative to Office, instead of complaining, then Windows would be dead and there'd be no problem. And now they're going to spend the next 25 years whining, hoping that a bunch of unpaid hackers will solve all their problems for them. It's not going to happen, and I'll be too old to repeat this comment next time the reg runs this story.

Ad-tech firms grab email addresses from forms before they're even submitted

Re: Unique emails

Agree. I've been using plussed addresses for 20-odd years now. It's a sendmail feature, but I think it's common: start with a prefix of some sort, add a '+' and some text (normally the vendor's name), and set up sendmail for the prefix only. If the vendor turns out to be an ***hole you block the combo. For some years, though, I was plagued by second-rate coders assuming that '+' wasn't a valid character in a mail address and rejecting the address as invalid.

Doesn't stop anyone harvesting your name and address, though. But, of course, I'm sure we always lie about those unless we need a real delivery.

Oracle already wins 'crypto bug of the year' with Java digital signature bypass

Oh dear...

The bug was introduced when part of Java 15's signature-verification code was rewritten from its native C++ into Java itself.

Nice to see that Oracle spends its days digging holes and filling them up again.

Why is IBM selling post-quantum crypto when it's still a pre-quantum company?

Acronyms, please

PQC= Post Quantum Crypto; agreed. But you say 'QC' is Quantum Computer. It makes more sense for it to be Quantum Crypto, without the Post.

QC= provably secure Quantum Crypto (barring engineering failures, at any rate); in production now, with people buying it, protecting data in transit. PQC = an algorithm which is not provably secure (I think), but which is not thought to be amenable to attack by an algorithm which has yet to be written, running on a computer which has yet to be built.

French court pulls SpaceX's Starlink license

Re: French court freezes out non-French competition

IMHO, in this (one) case, good luck to them. We're sleepwalking into a future where we have tens of thousands of satellites in LEO, which are certainly at least sometimes visible, just to provide internet access to a tiny number of people who can't use other infrastructure *and* who are rich enough to get a receiver and a contract. Seriously, how is this ever going to be cheaper, or more environmentally friendly, than laying cables to remote villages in Africa? And, once you've got your cable down, you can use it for all your other comms, which is certainly not the case with satellite internet. Who exactly is going to benefit from this? Is it just the bankers?

File suffixes: Who needs them? Well, this guy did

Re: RISC OS

Long, long ago, a friend lent me his RiscOS machine so that I could port some SunOS C code. It took me a while to get the hang of extension-free .c and .h files. Before I got to that point, I typed in

delete *.c

or whatever the RiscOS delete command was (as I said, a long time ago). Anyway, it wiped the whole fe**ing disk.

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Similar problem with a monitor

About 25 years ago I got a shiny new colour mopednitor. Nothing fancy - probably about 16". Anyway, it was flakey, and frequently didn't work. Amazingly, it had an on-site repair warranty. I'd never seen one of these before, so thought I'd give it a go, and called out an engineer.

He arrived, put his hand behind the monitor, wiggled the power cable a bit, and it sprang to life. I've never been so embarrased. It turned out that the pre-IEC power cable didn't have a particularly good fit; he said it happened a lot.

Back to crappy forums - when you get as old as me you find there's another problem. You have an incredibly complicated problem, find a years-old thread somewhere, get to the end if it, and discover that the person who posted the solution was... you. Happened a couple of times to me.

'Windows 11 has been successfully downloaded,' says update for Xbox version of Microsoft Flight Simulator

Que?

To celebrate the launch of Windows 11, Microsoft Flight Simulator is lighting up some of the world’s most famous points of interest in Windows 11 colors! There is also a free livery for the EXTRA 330LT.

Another excellent reason to prefer X-Plane over MS Flight Simulator.

Reason 3,995 to hold off on that Windows 11 upgrade: Iffy performance on AMD silicon

Re: Good to see

in the REAL world, security does NOT mean a performance reduction. If there IS one, and it is NOTICEABLE, you need to re-think your architecture.

Wow. Pretty obvious how you got BOMBASTIC in your name.

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

RIP

Nice guy, will be missed. I worked for him while I was a student in the summers of '80 and '81, on Kings Parade in Cambridge (I programmed Fortran on a mini in '79, but bought a £400 Nascom and got the bug). He normally hid away in a back room working on the flat screen TV, but he always came down to the pub with us after work. It was a very small operation back then - about a dozen girls doing mail order, who we never saw, and basically Clive and 3 guys, and the accountant occasionally, and another 2 when work on the Spectrum started. I used to answer 'technical queries' on the phone and do the odd bit of engineering. The 'technical queries' were almost always 'what will a computer do for me'; I particularly remember one lady who spent a lot of time betting on the horses, who wanted to know why she should buy a computer. I seem to remember that we had an ad saying that you could run a nuclear power station with one of these things - I hope no-one tried!

And the stuff about late deliveries, stuff that didn't work - well, that's life - get over it. It was a bright shiny new world. Everyone in the business had the same problems, to a greater or lesser extent, and we were all learning. I worked for a Cambridge start-up a couple of years later, and designed a more sophisticated computer for them, but they went bust in '84. Everyone was always one step from bankruptcy, which could make life challenging. At the end of the day, Clive inspired a lot of people, myself included, and that's what he'll be remembered for.

Oh, and still got a Sinclair Scientific down in the basement somewhere, which I got for my O'levels. It's actually my second - I had to send the first one back because it didn't work... :)

UK VoIP telco receives 'colossal ransom demand', reveals REvil cybercrooks suspected of 'organised' DDoS attacks on UK VoIP companies

Re: Calling OfCom and Openreach...

@gerdesj: it's hugely distributed. It doesn't require any power to the premises. It may be the only technology that survives a zombie acopolypse, at least within an exchange area. Have you never actually seen a disaster movie? Or been in a blackout? Duh.

Dozens of Iranian media websites devoured by the Great Satan, apparently

Get a grip, Reg

Your readers are fairly technical. So:

• How did the websites get taken down?
• How did a .tv site get taken down?
• Are domain registrars based in the US subject to some US laws we should know about?
• Does the US think it has control over .com and .net domains?
• It appears that Verisign agreed to transfer ownership of .com and .net domains without the authority of the current owners. Should we all bail out of .com and .net?

And so on.

And, while you're at it, maybe an opinion on the meaning of 'truth' and who polices it.

When software depends on a project thanklessly maintained by a random guy in Nebraska, is open source sustainable?

Here is a list of open source components shipped with MS products: https://3rdpartysource.microsoft.com/

That's impressive. But it would be more impressive if large parts weren't 'Redistributed OSS', bits for Android, and so on.

God bless this mess: Study says UK's Christian beliefs had 'important' role in Brexit

RANT

Dear Reg,

it would make life a lot more interesting for us poor readers if we could vote on the story itself, rather than the opinions of other commentards (which can be, to be frank, a bit dull and irrelevant).

So, how about it? Please make sure to include a wide range of alternatives including, for example, "Study authors are deluded morons who are seeking to legitimise their own simplistic prejudices by writing a load of bollocks".

Spy agency GCHQ told me Gmail's more secure than Microsoft 365, insists British MP as facepalming security bods tell him to zip it

Re: O365 but not as you know it

So...

it's "provided for all the cloud working capabilities", but "only within an enclosed environment".

Surely that's an oxymoron?

Someone defeated the anti-crypto-coin-mining protection for Nvidia's 'gamers only' RTX 3060 ... It was Nvidia

Re: Gamers also have to contend with bots and scalpers looking to make a profit

I'm on XPlane! Sort of, anyway - it's unusable on i7/Intel UHD. I can't get 2080 cards. There are some UK retailers with expensive 2060s, and there are a couple of good 2060 results on the speadsheet, so maybe I'll go for that.

Re: Gamers also have to contend with bots and scalpers looking to make a profit

Anybody spending megabucks on gaming is truthfully trying to "keep up with the jones" and show off, rather than be into "hyper competitive gaming".

Actually, no. I've spent the last couple of months trying to get any graphics card that will give me a decent frame rate on a flight sim. You can't buy anything for love or money. Not really "gaming", but I imagine the shoot-em-uppers have the same problem.

European Commission redacts AstraZeneca vaccine contract – but forgets to wipe the bookmarks tab

Re: Substituted Article 5 (page 11)?

Interesting. Are 5.1 and 5.4 inconsistent? Unfortunately, I got the scanned version on Friday. I can't find a link to the pdf version anywhere in the article or the comments. The scanned version is absolutely clear, though - the commission hasn't got a leg to stand on.

Also pretty astonishing that there are 140+ comments and only 2 or 3 people appear to have read it. The rest is just noise.

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

Re: So?

You forgot number 0. Give everything away to Bill Gates.

LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade, tells rival project to 'do the right thing' and die

Re: But Office365 is free!

Really? Details appreciated. I'm on 2010 because the cheap 5-licence 'Home and Student 2010" appears to allow far more than 5 installs. Still, not keen on the cloudy bits.

We've heard some made-up stories but this is ridiculous: Microsoft Flight Simulator, Bing erect huge skyscraper out of bad data

Roof

Back in the day (20 years?) I could land on the roof of the Willis Tower in Chicago on the MS flight sim. Moved on to a better sim.

'We stopped ransomware' boasts Blackbaud CEO. And by 'stopped' he means 'got insurance to pay off crooks'

"Subset"?!

"Like a lot of companies, we get millions of intrusion attempts a month and unfortunately one got into a subset of our customers and a subset of our backup environment."

Curious that Blackbaud lost my school data and my university data. Seems like this subset may be rather large.

Intel's 7nm is busted, chips delayed, may have to use rival foundries to get GPUs out for US govt exascale super

Can't see it...

TSMC now has 2(?) Fabs in mainland China. Ok, Intel's masks would probably never get beyond Taiwan, but I can't see the PRC connection helping.

And Philips must have been kicking themselves for the past 30+ years, after bankrolling TSMC and then walking away.

Teardown nerds delve into Dell's new XPS 15 laptop to find – fancy that – screws and user-serviceable parts

Re: HP Microserver Gen8/Gen9 and their failiing NAND chips used for iLO system monitoring.

Hadn't heard of the flash problem, but I reckon GenX in general is pretty much done. Gen8 excellent, I had to give away my Gen9 after it bricked, Gen10 ok but too much cost cutting. Pity.