Posts by Robert Grant

OnePlus to drop slightly better version of latest flagship next month ... and that's the T

Given they're dual-SIM phones, they're actually pretty useful for BYOD. Just plug in a work SIM.

Imagine working for GitHub and writing a command-line interface for the platform, then GitHub makes an 'official' one

Microsoft flexing its peerless ability to discourage any third party contributions to its ecosystem.

We're not getting back with Galileo, UK govt tells The Reg, as question marks sprout above its BS*

It's built using the Metric system. We demand Imperial measurements! We will pay in Groats.

Microsoft forks out $3m in back pay settlement to make Feds' hiring discrimination probe go away

Re: No it doesn't

For every sane person whose legal philosophy amounts to "no smoke without fire", sure.

Proof is a bit old-fashioned.

Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of 'Advanced Night Repair' skin cream helping NASA to commercialise space

Re: Who wouldn't

It's a line from Aliens, mate. Remember, every time you say "some people" you sound like a fishwife character from a 70s comedy.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 debut derailed by website glitches, bots, lack of supply

But efforts to pass federal legislation to ban bot-based buying, such as the Stopping Grinch Bots Act of 2018, have yet to be approved.

The problem is getting them to define what the wrongdoing actually is. A web browser is software acting on your behalf to purchase things, for example.

Alibaba wants to get you off the PC upgrade treadmill and into its cloud

PCs are lasting pretty long these days.

Apple takes another swing at Epic, says Unreal Engine could be a 'trojan horse' threatening security

Re: They tried to cheat their way out of payment system they knew upfront about.

Maybe it is to you, but I'd hardly call the cost of a Mac and iPhone (and maybe iPad) a "tiny up front fee".

Did you think Apple let you develop, test and release iOS apps from a Windows or Linux box?

Do you think Windows and Linux boxes are free? And the devices are optional, and while you should have them, they are not the registration fee.

The registration fee for the app store is something like $80 to register a dev account.

Re: They tried to cheat their way out of payment system they knew upfront about.

It's not just that. The entire development ecosystem is created and maintained by Apple as well, and they only charge a tiny up front fee to register to use all of that. It's not just a shop (although that will also cost a reasonable amount to maintain and run).

Never mind that you can run Meet on any old computer, Google unveils specialised hardware for vid-chat plat

I'd pick it over Webex. Webex is terrible.

Not content with distorting actual reality, Facebook now wants to build a digital layer for the world

Re: Lanyards...

Note: must be personally identifiable.

AWS Aurora PostgreSQL versions vanish from the mega-cloud for days, leaving customers in the dark

Re: Sorry, I don't understand

It's neither.

Lost time with these database instances will never be recovered but with some explanation, closure and healing may be possible.

Wait - isn't this a tech outage? Have I missed a hideous psychological tragedy?

You won't need .NET Standard... except when you do need it: Microsoft sets out latest in ever-changing story

"I want to believe. I just hope we're not hearing about yet another story in a few years," said Microsoft program manager Glenn Block, who works on Microsoft Graph. If that is an internal perspective, what are the rest of us to make of it?

This is guaranteed. As soon as a new UI/device/abstraction comes along, MS will do a massive amount of effort supporting it through introducing abstraction layers and other things that will later need to be rationalised.

Brit MPs to Apple CEO: Please stop ignoring our questions about repairability and the environment

Re: Erm

Yeah, I agree. Targeting due to outrage is a bad idea.

That long-awaited, super-hyped Apple launch: Watches, iPads... and one more thing. Oh, actually that's it

Yeah a $399/mo mortgage? I hate to say it, but I must.

OK, boomer.

Now marijuana is legal in most states, it's helpful to know how high you are.

TouchID remains stubbornly present in the iPad Air

You mean it'll work when I'm wearing a mask? What a good idea.

£2.5bn sueball claims Google slurps kids' YouTube browsing habits then sells them on

Sure. But kids' tv has always had toy adverts. I don't think that displaying toy ads in between content is somehow new and horrific.

And the tracking case is hard to understand. How does that work when the child is using a parent's device? Not exactly a clean data set, and youtube kids is there to restrict tracking. From the Youtube Kids privacy policy:

The app does not allow interest-based advertising or remarketing.

YouTube Kids does not allow your child to share personal information with third parties or make it publicly available.

I guess we're going to find out exactly what that means, which is a good thing.

I mean, come on. If a kid clicks past an agewall on a pornographic site, that isn't suddenly a felony. What evidence do they have that Google knew the children were under 13?

Who cares what Apple's about to announce? It owes us a macOS x86 virtual appliance for non-Mac computers

"...It owes us... ...deserve another option...."

Can we talk like adults? No one is owed; no one deserves. I would definitely like them to do it, and I think they'll lose money if they don't, but we don't need to talk like jealous siblings. Nor like chocolate adverts.

Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches for a 'complete virtualization stack' with Linux and Hyper-V

Re: Forking their business

I wonder how far Steam's got with converting games to OpenGL.

Re: The way forward?

That's on the server. Not the desktop.

Re: The way forward?

Maybe we can all soon run Linux, with Windows in a VM for Office :D

As if you needed another reason not to use Visual Studio, C++ extension for Visual Studio Code is live

Then I'll stick with a silly IDE.

Chinese database details 2.4 million influential people, their kids, addresses, and how to press their buttons

This article isn't great. Lots of mentions of CHINA, lots of insinuation, and mock horror at the CHINESE database that no doubt many countries have the equivalent of, but the CHINESE one is the bad one. Did we mention it's CHINESE?

CHINA!

Consolidating databases has significant storage benefits – and therefore everyone should be doing it

Re: De-instance rather than dedupe your data

It's consolidating databases rather than data, although the latter is a side-effect:

that’s not a patch on the sin of failing to consolidate databases that are inherently different but whose contents overlap. Although some of your databases will have no data in common (the HR database tends to be pretty exclusive, for instance) you’ll often have pockets of the same data in different systems – customer data, product data, pricing data, the list goes on

Stop asking for Amazon, Google and Microsoft cloud with 'no justification': US Library of Congress told to drop its 'brand-name'-tastic RFP

Re: Even without RFPs

We Brits should be shouting loudly over the Tannoy about this stuff.

VMware staff in Silicon Valley can leave a pandemic, wildfire-ridden zone – if they're willing to accept less pay

Re: They may be in for a nasty surprise.

Employer then punishes you for no longer living where you claimed?

Employer's not a parent; it's odd to characterise in such terms. If you don't know why the salary was so high for that location (hint: it wasn't your parent rewarding you) then maybe check that out before responding on here.

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

Just need some Blockchain in there.

ByteDance rebuffs Microsoft's TikTok purchase proposal

I'm no lover of Oracle

But this seems more like an anti-Oracle rant than anything.

What an IDORable Giggle: AI-powered 'female only' app gets in Twitter kerfuffle over breach notification

Re: Twits

The main lesson is that Twitter is a mind-numbingly awful communication medium.

Fixed.

Microsoft releases kernel for unique (but critically panned) Surface Duo phone

No wireless charging? Who cares?

Cops called to Singapore golf club after 'wrongdoers' use scripts to book popular timeslots

Apparently it is “impossible” for humans to complete the course booking form online within two seconds as doing so requires inputting names of players and their membership ID numbers and selecting tee times.

Welcome to browser autofill.

The power of Bill compels you: A server room possessed by a Microsoft-hating, Linux-loving Demon

Re: Power!

Binary search for cable failure? Efficient!

DPL: Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers

Have they tried banning plain text emails?

Now that's a somewhat unexpected insider threat: Zoombombings mostly blamed on rogue participants, unique solution offered

Why aren't they just managing this with requiring students to be logged in? Then they could easily just invite the right people to the session.

Nutanix says next CEO to come from outside the company

while Nutanix has “pretty good talent on the inside”

Must be nice to work for someone who thinks so mediumly of you.

Angry 123-Reg customers in the UK wake up to another day where hosted mail doesn't get through to users on Microsoft email accounts

Re: Recommendations please

I was with BlackCat, which got bought by Mythic Beasts. Good stuff.

Tech ambitions said to lie at heart of Britain’s bonkers crash-and-burn Brexit plan

China, of course, appears to give an affirmative answer to that question, with state oil and gas firm Petrochina beating Apple to hit the golden $1 trillion in 2007

I'm not sure it's the state aid that got you there when you can just dig free money out of the ground.

UK electricity and gas regulator Ofgem puts up £30m 'to respond to urgent requests to complete projects'

it worked with Valtech on a supplier Secure Data Exchange to support energy customers in switching suppliers, built in Azure, based on the Hadoop file system, using an Apache Spark cluster with jobs written in Python

GCP, anyone? :)

The Wrath of Amazon: JEDI wars rage on after US Department of Defense affirms Microsoft contract

Re: A Worrying Trend Is Starting...

Well if the president hates the CEO of one of the companies, and another company gets awarded it when they didn't meet all the criteria, one should be suspicious.

Re: Let's be honest - they are the leader

Not really. They recently prioritised Teams workload over their non-government customers in various regions. We experienced it.

Let's be honest - they are the leader

I'm not a particular fan of theirs, but if the US are going to have a (ridiculous) one-vendor deal, it should be with AWS.

No, Kubernetes doesn’t make applications portable, say analysts. Good luck avoiding lock-in, too

Re: Not just Kubernetes

SAAS is genuine lockin, for sure.

This seems a bit unfair. I've moved an app between two of the big three, and also a third provider, and it's been relatively painless. All terraform, all kubectl and helm for deployments - just change URLs and secrets. All logging and most monitoring goes to Datadog anyway. Network setup, non-Datadog monitoring and IAM, sure. They need to be redone. But it was pretty painless.

AI in the enterprise: AI may as well stand for automatic idiot – but that doesn't mean all machine learning is bad

Deploying machine learning models still requires traditional hardcoded techniques

What are traditional hardcoded techniques?

Apple commits to support human rights - 'We believe in the critical importance of an open society'*

Re: Place your bets...

And its human rights record?

There can be only one: Visual Studio Codespaces 'consolidating' into GitHub Codespaces

I can't wait for the inevitable Azure Codespaces rebrand, until it finally becomes Microsoft Codespaces in 2022. Lots of breathlessly excited blog posts from MS management to come!