Posts by mark l 2 2561 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
I have no intention of moving to Windows 11 so don't know what won't work without a TPM, but since you can fudge a Win 11 install on a PC without a TPM, then its clearly NOT a requirement is it?
And if its just bitlocker that won't work without it, i doubt that will both the majority of home users and quire a lot of business would forego it to save having to buy a whole new PC.
Wasn't there a similar case in the US where someone died who drove off a bridge that had been removed or damaged a few years ago?
I don't understand how its possible to be able to do that, there should be something there physically stop anyone being able to get near a bridge that doesn't exist with lots of signage on the way. Heck even a couple of concrete blocks or a pile of hardcore would do the trick. Then hopefully your only grievance might be that you need to send your car off for some bodywork repairs after running into them.
(The definition of an "age-restricted" platform covers services that allow users to post material, to interact with two or more people, and to interact with some or all other end-users)
I hope El Reg are getting ready to implement age checks then for their Aussie users, as surely any website with a comments section or forum allows users to do all of the things that the AU gov now deems to be age restricted?
"In case you have difficulties opening Kent Overstreet's blog, Patreon has protective measures in place, which gave us problems on some browsers. When we were using Waterfox, it didn't believe this vulture was a human (we assure you, the FOSS desk is an entirely LLM-free zone). You may have to try a few different browsers or machines."
NOPE NOPE NOPE! im not installing another browser just cos some shitty devs can't be bothered to test their website in anything other than Chrome. Fsck you Patreon!
Well my worry is that someone like Zuckerberg or Musk would end up buying Chrome and making it an even worse privacy nightmare than it already is.
But with a new administration due to take office in a couple of months with a lot of very dodgy appointees in high positions and with America now electing a convicted criminal who has shown time and time again that he can be persuaded by money, then im sure Google will be able to grease enough palms to make all this go away at least for another 4 years.
I am not convinced Microsoft will ever get Windows fully ported to ARM, some of the code is still from the NT days and I suspect there is no one left at MS was around when it was originally coded to know how it really works, and none are brave enough to start to clean it up for porting to another platform when they can just let emulation handle it.
As for the Adobe suite not working properly, this is often the same sort of excuses you hear about why most people can't switch from Windows to Linux as Adobe apps don't exist and won't work under WINE.
But in reality that software is only used by a small percent of Windows users. By Adobe own figures they have a total of 33 millions subscribers to their Creative cloud platform as of 2024, (of which some will be using MacOS) So lets say that 2/3rds are using Windows so around 22M. That is still just 1.5% of the estimated 1.5bn Windows PCs in active use.
I suspect there are way more PC gamers than Adobe users who will be effected by trying to use one of these ARM PCs and finding games don't run properly and there are no native ARM ports of popular games, even ones from Microsoft owned studios.
Id say the AI PC hype is more akin to the marketing hype around 5G when it was first launched, and the telcos really were struggling to come up with reasons why people needed it. Coming up with silly demos such as being able to run an air traffic control centre from someones living room. Great real world example there EE!
I still don't have 5G all these years later and im not feeling like im missing out on anything that can only be done on a 5G network, and i recon for the foreseeable future it will be the same with AI PCs.
"Or perhaps this is just a cheap way to make it seem like Intel is giving something back."
Intel says they spend $100 million PA on free and discounted food and drink then that's no exactly what i would call cheap. It could be used for pay the salary of 1/10th of the laid of work force if they were on an average of $65k a year.
Well if in another weeks time - god help the world - the orange one gets back in, then Elon 'pedo guy' Musk won't have to worry about any state or federal charges for his voter buying, as it will just get appealed all the way to the supreme court where Trump appointed judges can declare it was perfectly legal.
There is nothing new about MS charging for patches when the OS goes EOL, they have been doing it for decades for business users, its only this time that they are offering it to home users as well.
So how is this time any different than when Windows XP or 7 went EOL but MS continued to develop patches for business users willing to pay for extended support? No one successfully sued Microsoft for that back then and i doubt they will this time either.
As for the year of the Linux desktop, Normal people don't want to start downloading Linux ISOs, burning them to USB sticks, working out how to access the boot menu to be able to install another OS.
Windows wouldn't be the dominant PC OS if users had to do that to get it working on new PCs. (BTW im not normal so im happy to do that to get rid of Windows)
So for mainstream Linux adoption It will require large PC manufacturers to offer Linux pre-installed on computers that end users can go and buy from stores or order online. Look how successful the stream deck have been is because you bought it and it already had Linux (Steam OS) installed. if it had come with Windows by default and you needed to download and flash it with Steam OS from a USB stick, only a fraction of buyers would bother doing that and just go with what came preinstalled. The same can be said for Chromebooks which sell in 10s of millions of units a year because ChromeOS is preinstalled and they are widely available to purchase.
BTW im typing this on a Lenovo laptop which they were happy to ship with FreeDOS instead of Windows preinstalled, but no Linux option available when i purchased.
When i first got the laptop im typing this on in 2022 it had 8GB as standard and i was running Linux Mint Mate and the OS was using about 700MB of the system RAM before i launched any programs. But as soon as you start opening lots of browser tabs that 8GB can soon be eaten up so i ended up needing another 8GB in to double my total RAM usage.
Thankfully i had bought a laptop with upgradable RAM unlike those who bought the current generation of Apple Macs which will only ever be able to support 8GB due to it being integrated on the board.
"The Perplexity crew points out that it already has content-sharing deals in place with Time, Fortune, and Der Spiegel, and would have been happy to work with News Corp on a similar deal. "
How many millions of other peoples content have they harvested without having a content sharing deal in place though? Have El Reg checked to see if Perplexity will regurgitate The Register articles with the right prompts?
Exactly what i was thinking, I was surprised that they were still installing 5.25" drives as late as 1998 as they were already obsolete even then.
My first computer that used floppies rather than cassettes was an Amiga 500 in the late 80s and that had 3.5 inch floppy drives as standard from its release in 1987.
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I suspect when people buy a bands latest album on limited edition coloured vinyl for £35+, it just as a collectors items and a large percentage never actually play it on a record player. So i guess thats the market 20th Century Fox are aiming this VHS release at, for fans of the Aliens movies to buy it to sit along side their Aliens DVD box set.
While RISC-V is almost certainly being investigated by Qualcomm for future SOC, the fact that at current Android and more importantly the millions of Android apps are not RISC-V compatible means that they will need to play ball with ARM or risk loosing their market share.
Plus Microsoft have bet big on Windows on ARM and im sure they aren't want to get to a situation where their largest Windows on ARM chip supplier is moving to another incompatible ISA.
Do you think that a Chinese based company is concerned about if they are using GPL code in their closed source OS?
Even if Google or another western company tried to take them to court in China of breach of the GPL the Chinese courts would just find in favour of Huawei and probably tell Google to pay their court costs for wasting their time.
"The Dpsv6 instances offer VMs ranging from two virtual CPUs and 8GiB of memory at list price of $51 a month..."
That seems expensive when you consider Oracle offer a 4 vCPU 24GB instance with ARM Ampere on their always free tier, even if it is not on the latest chips, and its also with Oracle so not the best company to get into bed with.
Still ive had mine running for zero costs for over 2 years now with virtually no downtime, but its obviously nothing mission critical i use it for as Oracle could pull the plug on it any day.
It sounds like this phone with 10000 lines of code is only going to be able to do basic stuff so calls and perhaps email/messaging. So when the orange one wants to post on Truth social, or watch videos of himself on Fox news etc he will no doubt revert back to a regular phone and therefore be using insecure devices for most of the time.
My question is how much money has been paid to ICL/Fujitsu over the decades this was going on for 'support' on something that from the sounds like it was written by idiots and was not fit for purpose?
As don't forget the Post Office is a government run company, so its our money that they have been paid.
So Fujitsu should be on the hook to pay the compensation to the affected postmasters.
I read an article on Compare the market about what download allowance you might need
https://www.comparethemarket.com/broadband/content/what-is-a-download-allowance/
That article recons that 100 GB per month is very heavy usage, i just checked the stats on my router and ive done 92 GB in the last 6 days!
FYI i live alone so i can imagine if there were several people in the household all wanting to stream 4K or HD video on different devices this could easily be heading toward 1TB monthly usage.
"The US government has long had a policy, we don't negotiate with terrorists," Hahn told The Register.
In the real world governments including the US do negotiate with terrorists if that is the only solution to resolve a problem.
Most police forces have specially trained negotiators whose job it is to get hostages freed unharmed (and they are government employees). And even if we discount those situations as not 'terrorism' then there are the negotiations that went on between the Reagan administration and Hezbollah in the 1980s to get hostages freed in return for arms sales. Or for more recent example when the Democrats were in power. In 2014 the Obama administration released 5 Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo bay in exchange for an American soldier held hostage in Afghanistan. Both of these groups were deemed to be terrorist groups by the US at the time of the negotiations.
These are just the ones general public know about, I suspect there are many others that we won't be privy to what negotiations have gone on over the years, probably as negotiations broken down or they were able to use other means to achieve a resolution.
And besides are ransomware scumbags terrorists? Probably not by the definition as they aren't using violence or instilling fear in their victims, they are just to line their own pockets. So they are really just old fashioned crooks.
I remember when i got my first job in IT in the late 90s and we were installing PCs with a hard drive capacity of only 6GB for the entire OS of Windows NT 4, MS Office plus some other specialist software. And there was still probably 5 GB free after all that was installed.
I really don't see how Windows has grown to need that much drive space from the NT/2000 era, as Windows 10/11 is basically the same OS with just a fancy coat of paint on top
I had the top package of NTL cable broadband back in the early 2000s so that would have been 1Mb or 2Mb at the time. And this was faster than what we had in the office which was a 128Kb ISDN line connected to a proxy server and shared between around 40 staff.
I distinctly remember trying to download a large file of several hundred Mb in the office and the estimated download time was about 4 hours, so i decided to drive home at lunch, download the file on my own broadband, burn it onto a CD and then drive back to the office as that was the quicker option than waiting for the download to finish in the office.
The problem with the Pi-hole approach is that many smart TV's now have hard baked DNS settings which ignore whatever your network sets as the DNS server.
Its not impossible to get around this but requires extra steps that a none technical end user will probably find difficult. On my Firestick i had to install the Intra app and then that allowed it to intercept all the DNS queries and send them to my Adguard installation.
In the US Apple has a larger share of the mobile market compared to Android, around 55% to 60% depending on where you look. Its only when you take in the ROW that Android becomes the bigger install base over iOS. But is the DOJ looking at Google operations on a worldwide scale or just how their dominance effects US based users?
Now if the DOJ does force Google to sell off Android and Chrome who is going to buy them is the interesting question? As we might end up just going from the frying pan to the fire if Meta, Microsoft or Musk end up in control of any of them.
"The server team's focus on those markets means Asus's commercial teams have a chance to learn how to better pitch NUCs beyond traditional markets like digital signage."
A NUC seems over kill for digital signage as its just running a slide show of pictures or video files on a loop, something you don't need a i5 and 16GB of RAM to do. Surely a Raspberry Pi could do that for a lot less upfront cost and power usage?
I fail to see how Microsoft are now the internet police and seizing domains?
Sure if they were impersonating Microsoft owned websites, purchased the domains through a registrar operated by MS, or even used false details so it appeared Microsoft was the ones registering the domains, then i could understand their involvement. But no where in the article does it mentioned any of those links?
My personal opinion is that if Microsoft noticed these domains were used for illegal activities then report it to the police and then its law enforcement who should be going after them and getting them seized, not MS or any other tech company who has no direct involvement.
So if Tesla 'Full Self Driving' still requires a meat bag driver to monitor the road, what does Musk plan on calling it should Tesla ever actually get Level 5 true autonomous driving 'For real this time full self driving'?
Personally I don't really see the point in having this half way house version of self driving, especially as you still have to pay as much attention to what is happening on the road as you would do if manually driving the car, and have to fork out extra money for the privilege.
You can certainly still view posts on Twitter without being logged in if you go on there from a web browser, as ive just managed to view the Elon 'Pedo Guy' Musk and Royal Mail Twitter accounts and scrolled back over their posts going back years and clicked on a few videos and images without it forcing me to login.
FYI This was using Firefox with Ublock Origin installed, so maybe it was blocking something that would have been forcing me to sign in should I had visited the site without Ublock running.
I suspect the patents on a the original 16bit and 32bit x86 designs Intel had have now expired as in the US its only for 20 years. AMD own the patents on X86-64 although that is also probably over 20 years ago now. So either company can probably make a x86-64 CPU without needing patents from the other. But of course they have added all these other extensions to their CPUs SSE. MMX etc which means a patent less X86-64 CPU created today might be fine for running older versions of Windows like XP but a lot of newer software that rely of these extensions would not work.
"Microsoft questions how other providers would be able to validate a license that a customer wants to import under bring-your-own-license (BYOL) and confirm that one was not still being used by that customer elsewhere.."
Well how do MS do it? Cos the other cloud providers could do it the same way if Microsoft gave them access to the tools.
Using a phone with only 376 other users makes you stand out a mile. After the encrochat bust have criminals not realised that these specialty phones are just just putting a massive spot light on themselves.
They are probably better off just buying a pay and go burner phone with a VPN and installing a Signal or even Whatsapp, and changing the phone every few weeks. As at least their illegal conversations will be mixed in with the millions of other users of these platforms and make it hard to detect them.
We all know that Windows Vista, 7, 8, 10 and 11 are all pretty much the same under the hood and a new versions is announced just when Microsoft and the PC manufactures see that the number of units sold starts to fall.
Windows 11 would probably have been announcer sooner if it hadn't been for Covid and WFH which means there was an unexpected uptick on PC sales in 2020 that no one saw coming. But that trend didnt last too long before PC sales started to fall again.
I live in the north of England in an ex industrial area where there are plenty of empty brown field sites that could host datacenters, so why the need to apply to put them on green belt land near London in the first place, Its not like being a few hundred miles away from London is going to cause massive latency problems. Plus brown field land up here is going to be way less expensive than green belt land in the South East.
IE still pawning Windows OS for nearly 30 years now. And even though you can't run it directly anymore its still lurking around like a bad smell for Edge backward compatibly mode so i don't expect it will go away anytime soon.
MS relies so much on the corporate world for their $$$ and big business want to be able to still run their 20+ year old software that works only with IE, on modern Windows. So I feel its going to be another few decades before Microsoft can truly rid the world of the POS that is IE.
I would just give up on the term Javascript and rename it to something else rather than trying to persuade Oracle of all companies to do something that isn't for the benefit of their bank balance.
The fact that the Rust for Javascript people got a cease and desist letter shows that Oracle probably intends to keep the TM until they need to raise some cash then they can start the sueballs for TM infringement.
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