Posts by Chris Evans

Nvidia to acquire Arm for $40bn, promises to keep its licensing business alive

Are you talking of ARM I'm unclear

I've not heard of ARM employees being upset about their workplace. Though AIUI they weren't overjoyed with Softbank buying them. Or am I getting the wrong end of the stick?

You had one job... Just two lines of code, and now the customer's Inventory Master File has bitten the biscuit

Who in there right mind would...

Who in there right mind would mass edit a key database without making a backup. If it still has to accessible to be viewed lock it then copy it. Work on a third copy, test, swap back in. Doing it after hours would make it less disruptive.

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

The new guidelines are where?

The new guidelines only seem to be available to Nature subscribers

I found out of date info at:

http://www.hugo-international.org/HGM-News last news item 2018

https://www.genenames.org/about/guidelines/ seems to be the 2002 version

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

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

Presumable there is also a list of those genes that have been renamed but I didn't find it.

To be useful they need to disseminate the info as widely as possible.

NASA trusted 'traditional' Boeing to program its Starliner without close supervision... It failed to dock due to bugs

anomalies?

"...every early space company goes through these anomalies and you learn from it,"

The trouble is that in rocket science 'anomalies' often equals deaths!

From unmovable boot screens to dead certs, neither are what you want to see in a hospital

Re: Signed Certificates are only as good as...

The problem is money! Someone has to pay for the servers etc. that confirms the certificate.

Companies offering perpetual services for a one off fee have a limited life expectancy.

Xiaomi Mi 9 owners furious after dodgy Vodafone software patch bricked their mobes

Blood boil!

If I was effected then "we apologise for any inconvenience " would make my blood boil.

PR 101 says it should be: ""we apologise for THE inconvenience" and given the severity of the problem they need to grovel much harder.

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

Please show your workings.

Raspberry Pi goes 2GB for the price of 1GB in honour of mini-computer's eighth birthday

Re: Ten dollars for a couple of gig of ram eh?

I remember when 32MB FPM SIMMS first came out, they were £995 inc VAT.

We didn't sell many!

Internet's safe-keepers forced to postpone crucial DNSSEC root key signing ceremony – no, not a hacker attack, but because they can't open a safe

How long before things would stop working properly?

If this 'signing' has to be done regularly and it doesn't happen for what ever reason what happens?

What if both safes were inaccessible?

The 'override protections' seem to be ways to access the vaults.

I'm surprised there isn't at least a third safe!

With backups, father grandfather son is standard for normal data.

Built to last: Time to dispose of the disposable, unrepairable brick

Circular Economy

The Circular Economy movement is all about building stuff that can be repaired

https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/concept

Tech can endure the most inhospitable environments: Space, underwater, down t'pit... even hairdressers

No one was born knowing...

How stupid the user was depends on how long ago this was. I remember someone who went on a 'computers for beginners' course at the local college a few years after mice became common.. They started off in a room with no computers and were told to go through to the next room, sit down at a computer and pick up the mouse and move it about and see what happened. So they did as told... yes they moved it about in mid air. She told me that she felt very stupid after being told she had to move it around on the desk. But my response was no, no one is born knowing that and the lecturer had assumed some knowledge.

Thunderbird is go: Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest

Re: "Around 0.5% of emails opened in the 'bird today, apparently"

The question is what is the default setting of say the top 10 ways people access email?

Also what are the top ten ways they found people are accessing emails?

How far down the list is thunderbird?

This page is currency unavailable... Travelex scrubs UK homepage, kills services, knackers other sites amid 'software virus' infection

Planned! Maintenance

Calling it "Planned Maintenance" makes them look very very stupid.

They should call it something like "Emergency Maintenance"

Many big companies seem to make the same stupid mistake!

In tribute to Galaxy Note 7, BBC iPlayer support goes up in flames for some Samsung TVs

Re: Sorry but...

Sometimes the facility is not easy to replace. If the wall mounted TV in our breakfast room stops working with the built in iPlayer, etc. we have limited options as we don't want any trailing wires. A FireTV stick doesn't quite offer what we want. Anyone know of a good site that compares the FireTV and its rivals? (For use in the UK)

Close the windows, it's coming through the walls: Copper Cthulu invades Dabbsy's living room

DIY gone mad!

This reminds me of my sons flat. Before he moved in about 15 years ago we removed about half the electric wall sockets! In the lounge each of the three corners had four or six double 13Amp sockets so over 30 in one room and looked ridiculous. I suspect the previous owner had an aversion to power strips.

He also had in the modest flat a full alarm system with remote monitoring and a printer that recorded every event!

Loose tongues and oily seamen: Lost in machine translation yet again

Banning cryptocurencies on environmental grounds?

I suspect countries will start to ban cryptocurencies on environmental grounds. I wonder which will be the next significant country to do so.

China already bans them!

Weather forecasters are STILL banging on about 5G clashing with their sensors. As if climate change is a big deal

And in the UK and Europe...

I presume there is the same problem?

As above, so below: El Reg haunts Scaleway's data centre catacombs 26 metres under Paris

Insurance for the inevitable?

Considering the risk of water damage I suspect they will have a problem getting Insurance and then there is the cooling problem. I fear a catastrophic failure is almost inevitable!

Ex-Arm execs' upstart Agile Analog palmed $5m to sink into AI-driven chip design

I half agree!

But they need to look to their target market. I suspect over 95% will expect the American spelling.

TalkTalk returns to the email hall of shame as Pipex accounts throw weekend-long wobbly

Re: So, to confirm:

Some years ago in a server upgrade they lost all old emails. I don't think users lost any recent ones but we used to send as off site backups some data to an email address that we never downloaded. There was several years worth that disappeared. n.b. The files were backed up to a number of other places so no problem.

TalkTalk Lie!

They had another outage four weekends ago for about 24hrs. But their status page said everything was working.

I can't recall the status page ever admitting a fault when I know there is one.

I'm trying to persuade our customer to switch A.S.A.P.

Uber won't face criminal charges after its robo-car killed woman crossing street

But who was the driver?

Still not clear who the 'driver' was and what the humans responsibilities were.

If the human was told the automatic system would be driving the car and he was only to monitor the system and should never take control, then Uber guilty human driver not.

Was the human told he should always monitor the road ahead and take control if necessary.

Or what?

Not enough information to decide culpability.

Mini computer flingers go after a slice of the high street retail Pi

Re: The Raspberry Pi Foundation is an official charity

I think the trading part of the Foundation is a limited company. They may though be able to get small business rate relief.

Holy planetesimal formation, Batman! Ultima Thule's no snowman – it's a friggin' pancake

CSI missing a trick?

I've often wondered why CSI (Fictionally and in real life) don't use NASAs type of image enhancement, like they are using here!

Rather than stupidly zooming in by ridicules amounts.

Not cool, man: Dixons spanked over discount on luxury 'smart' fridge with wildly fluctuating price

Digging a hole for them selves!

To try and pull a fast one like they did is bad enough but to try and defend it to the ASA is just stupid and makes them look much worse.

Techie finds himself telling caller there is no safe depth of water for operating computers

Re: Header pic

Thanks for the tip about searching for images displayed in Chrome.

I note ElReg's article is on the first google page! ElReg must be crawled at least hourly.

On more than one occasion I've googled a subject mention in an ElReg article, and the ElReg article itself was top of the results!

Raspberry Pi Foundation says its final farewells to 40nm with release of Compute Module 3+

Re: Good & Bad news

I'm trying to work out how I can get a side gate to unlock as I cycle up to it!

The gate latch will be on the outside wall of my garage which has power. Low power Bluetooth has been suggested.

I've got some spare Pi 1's.

How weird/stupid is that?

The aim is to be practical! Even SODIMM sockets in small quantities can be IIRC up to $20 each, depending on mounting. I hate to think what uncommon DIMM sockets would cost.

KISS!

Court orders moribund ZX Spectrum reboot firm's directors to stump up £38k legal costs bill

Re: Two words for you ...

" (not even SSD due to $ to Gigs ration and mass storage needs) " I just a couple of 32GB mSATA SSD's £10 each! I think you could fit every speccy game ever made on 32GB multiple times!

A billion-dollar question: What was really behind Qualcomm's surprise ten-digit gift to Apple?

Re: Missing figure?

"That's about 800 million or so, so that's $24 billion for the chips" If my maths is right that is $30 per phone. Where did you get the figure from? I see no mention of it in the article.

Missing figure?

The vital missing figure is how much Apple ended up paying Quallcom after allowing for the $1B upfront payment and $7.50 "rebate" on each phone?

FCC tosses aside rules, treats Google to a happy ending following request for handy tech

Re: Confused!

Thanks for the info lads. All is now clear.

Confused!

This is an area I know nothing about but I can't see how you can have a negative output unless it is a comparison?

If it is a comparison, what to?

"...peak transmitter conducted output power of +10 dBm, rather than -10 dBm..."

I had a brief look at the (Section 15.255(c)(3)) link but it goes way over the top of my head.

Qualcomm lifts lid on 7nm Arm-based octo-core Snapdragon 855 chip for next year's expensive 5G Androids

A76 L1 cache size?

"Each A76 has 128KB of L1 cache (64KB four-way instruction cache with four-cycle load-use latency, 64KB for data), 256 or 512KB of 1280-entry five-way L2 cache, and shares up to 4MB of L3."

I've often wondered why the L1 cache size on modern CPU's are so small. ARM3 back in 1989 had a 4K cache I'd have expected more than a 32 fold increase in nearly thirty years. Later CPU's now have two extra levels of cache and I understand a little bit about cache coherency. I'm sure there must be a good reason. Anyone know what it is?

How much slower is L2 and L3 I wonder?

Do not adjust your set: Hats off to Apple, you struggle to shift iPhones 'cos you're oddly ethical

Ethical?

"You've behaved ethically, putting long-term consumer concerns first"

If they were ethical they'd make them easier to repair and whilst they may support their obsolete products better than most, they don't support them long enough to entice me, I would call it "Mid-term consumer concerns first" at best

Sacked NCC Group grad trainee emailed 300 coworkers about Kali Linux VM 'playing up'

Article unclear!

In this context what does "protected disclosures' and 'suffered detriments" mean?

Consultant misreads advice, ends up on a 200km journey to the Exchange expert

'Slab in'

"They USED to invert the left & top with bottom & right to visually indicate clicked or held down. "

I've heard that being called 'Slab in' i.e. trying to visually show that the button has been pressed in. The strange thing is I sometimes find Windows does change the icon to 'Slabed in' but doesn't do the action!

Data-nicking UK car repairman jailed six months instead of copping a fine

Great idea, BUT.

Currently many companies won't talk to you even about non specific account questions without asking three or more security questions including your full address. I keep telling them that asking so many questions is I believe a breach of the law! One company even insists on the full address saying that postcode and house number is not enough adding the road name still doesn't satisfy them.

My hoard of obsolete hardware might be useful… one day

Re: Freecycle it!

"Downvoted for being behind the times."

Maybe in your area, but around here it is still very effective. In the past year nearly everything I've offered (A dozen or more items) have been collected, mostly with little hassle. I've also picked up a few things. Last week I picked up an EPROM eraser I needed!

Freecycle it!

If you can't bare to take it to the tip or the bother of ebaying it why not Freecycle it?

https://www.freecycle.org/

People come and take your rubbish away for you!

The Retro market is big!

Quite a bit of our sales are 20-35 year old BBC/RISC OS etc kit. Just sold yesterday a BBC micro with no disc interface! I'm on the lookout for old network hubs with 10b2 (BNC) and RJ45. Network intetfaces for some early RISC OS kit are now rare but I have some old but unused 10base2 interfaces that could be used if I can track down some suitable hubs to allow connection to a modern network.

Microsoft promises a fix for Windows 10 zip file woes. In November

Re: In the good old days....

I've got a down vote which presumably means I've got something wrong, please enlighten me.

Re: In the good old days....

"if only the file system knew a list of all the files it has stored...."

But a database could massively speed up finding a file that I can't remember where it is.

I just did a test on an SSD drive with only 167GB of data on it, it tool over 2 minutes to search for a file.

I hope a database would be two orders of magnitude quicker.

Re: In the good old days....

I don't understand, surely it only needs to scan the whole disc once to create a database. Then it would update it as files are added, removed or moved. The initial scan could take quite a while but the updating should be hardly noticeable.

I must be missing something!

Two weeks before Chrimbo? When Dell V-Class shareholders get to vote on THAT deal

Chrimbo!

Chrimbo is such an ugly word, I wince if I see it. Please don't use it again. I doubt many people would mangle the name of any other religions festival!

Roughly 30 years after its birth at UK's Acorn Computers, RISC OS 5 is going open source

Re: Not So

The Titanium was designed with RISC OS in mind.

http://shop.elesar.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=51

rcomp's ARMX6 uses the iMX6

and 4Ds RapidO Ig uses an IGEPv5 motherboard

http://www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/products/rapido/rapido-ig.shtml

Whilst the Raspberry Pi wasn't designed with RISC OS as its sole OS. I know one of the key Broadcom BCM2835 designers was a RISC OS fan and did the initial porting of RISC OS to the Broadcom chip. Thanks Adrian!

Re: Eproms?

Theoretically yes. I've certain seen copies of Arthur (RISC OS 1 by another name) and RISC OS 2 in EPROM. They only needed 2 x 500K or 1MB ROMS/EPROMS. I'm not sure if they ever made any 16bit wide 2MB EPROMS that RISC OS 3 and 4 needed.

RISC OS 5 is available in one time PROMs.

RISC OS 4 was available in FLASH using chips on a carrier PCB but as they couldn't be flashed in situ (No read/write connected on the 40 pin socket) PROMs were a cheaper/easier solution.

Re: Observations

ROM versions of RISC OS can be patched, though users on Modern hardware (Raspberry Pi, Titanium, RapidO Ig, ARMX6 etc) do use a boot loader to load the 'ROM image' of the OS' so it can now easily be changed/patched, which can be a good and also a bad thing.

Re: The more things change...

"Pretty much everyone got rich off the breakup of Acorn... except the community of enthusiasts and developers that had bought into and supported Acorn products for a decade or more."

Dealers also lost out. My company which specialised exclusively in the RISC OS market had just invested significantly when Acorn canned the desktop division:-(

Great news about the licensing and a very good informative article!

Where can I hide this mic? I know, shove it down my urethra

The first USB pen drives were 8MB

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive. That sounds much more the sort of figure I remember seeing available.

Psion used to have much smaller flash memory cards. I've a S/H 256K card for a Psion 3 for sale on my website!