Posts by FIA

Microsoft unveils swappable SSDs for Surface Pro 7+ but 'strongly discourages' users from upping their capacity

I agree that it's not fraud, but most of your suggested reasons for the statement are invalid.

No, that's a fair comment, I'd overreacted at the hyperbole (which is what angered me), and hadn't adequatly considered the business use case as you pointed out.

I must learn to be less triggered by cries of things like 'Fraud' (a serious crime, and one MS have been guilty of in the past), when it's 'A business decision I find baffeling and don't agree with' (which is something you change suppliers for).

Yes, that's dangerous and tricky on basically any OS. Just because you can make your software break isn't sufficient reason for them to change their support system. After all, I can break Windows in a variety of ways but none of that would cancel my warranty with the hardware manufacturer.

Surely in a business context the warrenty is defined by the manufacturer? MS aren't changing it here are they?? (I thought surfaces had never supported this kind of replacement?)

I don't know, but whatever interface they're using for their 128 GB drive is the same one they're using for their 256 GB drive. They go in the same machines and have the same reported speeds. Thus that's not going to intrinsically change the speed. Only if they've built the firmware in such a way that it can't handle other sizes will speed change.

I was meaning the cases where an entirely different brand is used. All the caveating in the guide suggests the connector is non proprietary.

If they've done it, it's either malicious tampering to break upgrades or really lazy.

If they've enforced it at a firmware level, then yes, I'd agree. That is much different from a policy change.

Lazyness however, is often much cheaper. ;)

F'ing mobes and tablets are pretty shitty incarnations of a computer.

This.

They're not computers, when a lot of IT folk realise that they'll be a lot happier. ;)

It should be illegal to say that. That sentence is a fraud against the consumer.

<sigh> why is it fraud?

Messing about with your primary SSD can be a recipe for disaster, reinstalling can be a 'bit of a pain', all they're saying is 'good luck with that... we won't support you if you do'

I once thought I'd been right clever migrating Windows 10 to a larger SSD, converting to UEFI boot from an old style bios boot. It worked great too. Then the bi-annual upgrade rolled around, the installer took one look at the partion layout and went 'what the jeff is THIS??'. Now, had I been an unscrupulous IT pro doing that as a paid upgrade for a customer the result is most definatly an 'unsuported configuration'.

Misalign your partition accidentally on resize/move, or go to a device with a different logical block size and you'll get 'reduced performance'. Go to a bigger capacity but SATA bridged M.2 will give you 'reduced performance'. (Assuming here they have full speed M.2 in?)

Microsoft announces a new Office for offline fans, slashes support, hikes the price

What innovation?

MS got big by licencing DOS. This allowed them to leverage Windows, the rest is history.

Windows wasn't that good though, and I'm not sure what else they innovated before XP? Not the browser, not office suites (evolved sure, but they're not new ideas)... what else? NT is a decent little OS and could be argued as 'innovative' maybe, but it then got Windows bolted onto it.

I'd say modern MS is better, although I think they're technically competent, but still not necesseraly 'innovative'. (What I mean by this is actual technial things, whilst being a bit complex, because MS... are usually pretty clever. Some of the things they're doing to actually make good on the insecure 'singe user pc' roots of Windows are quite cool).

Re: I think. although maybe harsh

Erm, isn't this whole article about a paid for once copy?? I'm confused.

Also, there seems to be an offline installer for Office 2019. It looks like it's a disk image, you could probably burn it, or it's contents to an ISO.

Big Tech workers prefer 3 days at home, 2 in the office. We ask Reg readers: What's your home-office balance?

Can't you just ping a message? I find that works much better, people can respond when they have the time. Also, if you ping me a note about something and we end up on a call I've had chance to refresh my brain or do some investigation.

Mind you, I often find the way I'll message someone a question and they'll instantly ring me back to chat about it slightly irritating, so I expect I'm not in the majority here. :D

Looking for the perfect Valentine's gift? How about a week of retro gaming BBC Microlympics?

Re: Age ranges

It's about encouraging kids.... not kicking their asses. :D

Although if you do set it up can I suggest 'Daily Thompsons Track and Field' for round 2, that'll at least give the young a physical advantage....

(Then a week or so later, a certain demographic gets to coin the term 'Claw hand').

Foundation thrillogy: Rust programming language gets new home and million-dollar spending account

Re: Abandoned???

For years many (including myself) have asserted that C and it's like are just fine, because if you're careful, and skilled you can avoid problems.

Unfortunatly, time has told us this is not true.

You may be able to write perfect bug free C, but I certanly can't, and nor can many many others if the bug lists for, well, pretty much every OS, are to be believed.

Syntactic sugar and language enforced safety (that you have to conciously override rather than accidentally misuse) are not bad things. We're not running on 70s era hardware anymore, bloat is one thing, but we can afford a little more processing power at the expense of safety, surely?

The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality

Yeah, but that's at work.

Home sysadmin can sometimes be done drunk, or with interruptions, or simply 'ah, feck it.... I'm sure it'll be fine'.... usually it is... however sometimes that 'I'm just rebooting the net to install upgrades, it'll only be 5 minutes....' can really get you in the dog house. ;)

Also, it's the interactions that get you, you reboot service a when you upgrade it, then do the same for service b, but unfortunatly that stops a starting for some reason. These are the ones that get you on a reboot.

LibreOffice 7.1 Community released with user-interface picker, other bits and bytes

Re: Mixed messages.

Erm... where are you getting your ingredients from? ;)

Troubling news for JSON tinkerers? Windows Terminal unveils The Settings

Re: I sense a sea change at MS. And I'm not sure it is all swells from here on....

I suppose it depends on how you view things. For years MS got criticised for not being scriptable, so they made Powershell, it's most definatly not bash, but it is very powerful, and very Microsoft, which is kind of what you'd expect really. (clever, but ever so slightly over complex. ;) ). It also shouldn't be bash, Windows isn't unix, it has a diferent mindset. I'm not really that versed in their other languages, (although the C/C++ standards support has improved a lot recently), but there's many many languages out there, all with their own quirks and idioms, I'm not sure I can blame MS for C# any more than Mozilla for Rust or Google for go.

As for WSL, I'd never really considered it as the 'embrace' part, but yeah, you're right, it is, embracing Linux, isn't that a good thing? Doesn't it help change the 'incompatabilities'? I mean I can run the linux build of Firefox on Windows, using nothing other than MS supplied software and a copy of mobaxterm. You'd not believe me if I said that 15 years ago.

It's the extend and extinguish part that is the problem, and I don't really see that being the MS of today. For example if that's their plan why not stick with WSL 1 and make it more compatable, that keeps the source in house and extensable. Instead they took the quickest route to fixing the issues and basically now run Linux in a specialised VM. Including contributing their changes back to Linux. How do they 'extend' and 'extinguish' with this?

Meanwhile they've made no attempt to support other filesystems than NTFS (and FAT, obviously).

Why should they? There's nothing stopping anyone else writing one, unlike 20 years ago the Windows DDK is a free download, as is the compiler and toolset you need for it. (It even works with git these days, another thing they contribute to). There's example file system driver code here.

Right, after writing my second post defending MS in the last 2 days I need to go and wash off the shame.

Re: I sense a sea change at MS. And I'm not sure it is all swells from here on....

After all the IT world has seen from MS in the past 30+ years,

Such as? All the really egregious examples I can think of happened a long time ago now. (DR DOS 'incompatabilities', Monopolising the PC market, trying to destroy Netscape, trying to extend the internet with a raft of incompatable protocols...)

What terrible thing have they done (ie, more so than any large corporation) in the last 15 years?

To assume that things can never change must make the world a bleak place?

Linux maintainer says long-term support for 5.10 will stay at two years unless biz world steps up and actually uses it

Huawei's Hisilicon subgroup in particular are one of the largest linux piracy operations in the world

I always think this is a shame, it's not like there aren't alternatives that they could use without falling foul of the GPL.

I wonder if this will come back to bite them 10-15 years down the line? As I understand it the whole concept of 'copyright' is still fairly new in China, but as they're now starting to lead the world in various areas I suspect the concept of IP may quickly be learnt. :) :)

It isn't just a tech problem though, the (gloriously un-ironically named) CCTV (China's state broadcaster), found itself with a very large bill recently for similar reasons.

That's all down to the vendor. There are vendors like NXP and Xilinx that are actually working on mainline trying to get all of their stuff in, ...

You're confusing the collaborative nature of the GPL with a decent interface. It's good that vendors are contributing, the colbaration is a good thing in general.

However, that is not the issue. You can have everything in tree and still have a well defined interface.

>stable for an amout of time that would make my life much much easier.

No it wouldn't.

Why wouldn't it? Hardware doesn't change that often, your argument seems to boil down to things change? If I have a driver for a network controller for example, why can't the underlying interfaces be kept stable or versioned? Why do I have to currently know what the kernel 'looks like', so long as I know interface version X is there, I'm good... so long as interface X is there in future then you can just load my driver... no fuss.

NetBSD and FreeBSD provide good example of how this can be done at the kernel level. Their binary interfaces, whilst still less exposed as a windows style fixed ABI are much cleaner and well defined. (So you can just generally use the same network driver on whichever machine you're running on as the underlying bus discovery and communication is handled at a lower layer, with a well defined and consistent interace).

As a driver writer you would like to have all of the new helpers and generic code that has been added to make writing drivers easier and reduces the duplication for hardware that does the same function with a slightly different hardware implementation.

As a driver writer I want a consistant interface so I don't have to rewrite the driver every time a new kernel is released. If I know I need to trivially re-engineer my driver every x years as that's the life of the ABI, that's fine. Doing it every few months becomes a less practical use of my time, especially if I'm being paid, which just compounds the problem of out of date software running when it shouldn't be.

For example: Would you want an ABI where you can present an block disk to the OS when you're writing an SD card host driver? No. Because that would mean you now have to rewrite the whole Linux MMC layer in your driver.

I don't see your point here... I would like an ABI that I could present a block structured storage at if I'm writing a driver for one, as these are quite common and I could write a driver to support a new one easly. If I'm implementing a new class of hardware then of course I need new interfaces. But your argument would seem to suggest that supporting a new hardware and having a decent driver interface isn't possible. Windows/macOS would suggest otherwise. So in your example, I'd have a stoarge class driver that implements the MMC layer, and exposes a well defined interface to the SD card host driver.

You could then not only be sure your drivers would work going forward, but you could swap out my MMC layer with your own if you so chose, as the interfaces would be well defined and remain consistant. This is just good software engineering, It really has absolutly nothing to do with open source or the GPL.

It's also a lot of work that noone want to do for free.

This goes back to my point of loading SATA drivers on Window XP, that had no concept of SATA. Can you not see how that is a good thing? Most USERS of Linux don't care about the GPL or 'upstream source' or vendors being good citizens, they just want their hardware to work, and be secure.

Like I said, it's hard.

What you actually want is for someone else that actually understands the SD card spec to have come along and carved out all of the pieces needed to write an MMC layer driver for an SD host so you can write a driver by filling in the 5 or 6 callbacks it needs to drive your specific hardware. Actually having to look after your code after that is the payment for having someone else make your life easy in the first place.

Yes. That's exactly what I want, but as well as that I want STABILITY... so those interfaces are well considered and extensable and either versioned or unchanging (lets be fair, versioned...)

(You do see that the 5 or 6 callbacks are a driver interface? JUST KEEP THEM STABLE).

A driver layer is exactly that, it's having someone else look after the bits I don't care about and not having them change all the time. This is why I say it's hard, it _does_ require a lot of work to make other peoples lives easier.

I can load a WDDM1.0 driver written for Windows Vista on Windows 10, I can't load a WDDM2.0 driver on Vista as it supports newer features that the Vista kernel doesn't know about.

Don't get me wrong, I understand your point of view (I think you conflate well designed code with open source, but hey), but unfortnatly it will be the death of Linux.

Google are writing a replacement OS for android, they're also working on a binary driver layer for Linux to SOLVE THIS EXACT PROBLEM. (I wouldn't be at all suprised if this is a Fuscia driver layer ported to Linux, that would be the smart thing to do from their point of view...)

And I can't be arsed to respond to the rest of what you wrote.

That's okay, I never asked you to. It's a forum on a tech news site, we're all just angrily shouting into the void really. No one cares what either of us think.

If vendors want their shit to work with mainline and LTS kernels coming off of mainline they need to work at getting their stuff upstreamed. It's simple as that. No one is going to waste time making their lives easier for the sake of it.

Just read that last sentance again. THAT is the problem. (Hint: Massivly reducing the workload of a lot of other developers isn't a waste of time).

He added that he does not recommend using a single kernel version for more than 2 years "on systems that you actively support and maintain". He blamed "customer-unfriendly SoC vendors" for providing "millions of [lines of] out-of-tree code" that is specific to that kernel.

It'll probably never get done due to the nature of Linux (It would rquire the kind of colaboration that would not only be mutually beneficial but would benefit non-contributers and people who activly disliked the GPL, so probably won't happen), but a decent, well specified driver interface would really help here.

If, as a driver writer, I knew I could target an interface that was guaranteed stable for an amout of time that would make my life much much easier.

However, writing and maintaining such an intereface is hard, especially in the face of many competing interests and possibly with the decentralised nature of Linux development. It would require a well defined and stable spec to be created and then adheered to; would it be in the best intrest of all parties involved to make this happen? I dunno. I suspect it would take a Google or similar to actually do it. But would they fund such a thing, knowing it was going to be available for all, or would they put the effort into something they'll control? (They do have Linux to tide them over).

There was comment on a Windows article here once, where someone laughingly referred to the time when you had to use A FLOPPY to install the SATA drivers as part of the Windows XP setup,

This really stuck with me though. The first SATA spec was released in 2003, Windows XP late 2001.

So you were able to install an OS from 2001 on hardware that didn't exist when it was written, simply because of a well defined and stable driver interface. Can you imagine how much easier Android would be to upgrade if this was the case? How many more devices wouldn't be udinh olf vulnurable kernels as they could receive kernel updates in a timely manner because it would just be driver qualification needed rather than actual source code changes.

Also, just to be clear, I'm advocating a well defined, well specified binary interface, that remains consistant and is supported. None of this precludes the GPL, the 'in tree' drivers could slowy be updated to call the interface as required. (I've often heard GPL and in tree as an argument as to why a driver binary interface is a bad thing, but the reality is it's just bloody hard to do.)

Aside: I write all that as someone who's recently reinstalled linux to use as a PVR... and the flashbacks as I had to compile just the right version of the kernel to get just the right version of the hardware drivers to work were unpleasent. At least I only have 1 TV card in now, when I used 2 that required finding the just right kernel version that would compile against the new and old drivers.

I was installing in a VM with hardware passthrough for the card, and I so nearly just put windows on as I suspect that would have just worked... this made the young version of me extremely sad, but the reality is, the older I get the less time I have to spend 'make menuconfig'ing for fun.

In 1995 I put a SCSI podule in my then computer, it just worked... the drivers were on the card. In 2021 I put a TV card in my computer... 3 days later... it worked. That's the wrong way round!

Hey, AT&T, you ripped off our smartwatch-phone group call tech – and we want our $1bn, say entrepreneur pair

Re: What am I missing?

As for why it was patentable at all, obviously I don't know enough about the details to say anything for sure. But it does seem as though a system to group multiple normal phones as a single number, while also allowing them to behave as individual numbers when required, could require a very different solution from doing it for VOIP phones, so there may well be something deserving of a patent in there

It's confused me has this. It sounds like they have a case, AT&T has failed to do due dilligance, got stung signing an over priced contrac (oh, the irony) and is now trying to screw the little guy.

However, the patent, unless I'm missing something, seems to be 'Lets have 2 groups of phone numbers that can talk to each other based on these rules and some as yet unspecified software and hardware'.

How you actually go about any of this, ie, the implementation details, seem to be sorely lacking, which, surely is the actual point of an invention? (If not I have an idea for an invisible car....)

"The activity handling rule configuration module 316 may determine sets of one or more rules that implement telephone service activity handling policies including grouped telephone number call policies such as grouped telephone number incoming call policies and grouped telephone number outgoing call policies and similar policies for other types of telephone service activity such as SMS messaging. "

According to diagram, 316 is a black rectangular outline with the words 'Activity Handling Rules Configuration' written centrally within. Or, with my work hat on... one of those diagrams where someone has gone 'Here's the magical thing', and you're sat there thinking 'Oh... great.. I've got to make that actually work now'.

Cisco intros desktop switches, one with USB-C to power your laptop

Problem with wifi, is it gets everywere and mixes with all of that other wireless stuff too.

I live in a 'standard size' 3 bed house, I need 2 APs to give reliable wifi to all the devices.

One of those APs is about 6 foot away from the 'working from home' desk.

That desk has a hard wired ethernet port, because, when you get a computer, with wifi, and a work laptop, with wifi, and a cordless mouse and keyboard, and maybe a bluetooth speaker or 2 nearby you find that previously 'rock solid' wifi is virtually non-existant.

Fedora's Chromium maintainer suggests switching to Firefox as Google yanks features in favour of Chrome

Heh, I was going to cut and paste a bad joke about AWS becoming the new Microsoft (with suitable s/AWS/Google/g of course), but it's so common these days I can't be arsed.

It's a good job no-one's looking at any of these big cloud companies too hard for things like anti competative behaviour!

If they were then actions like this could be seen as hubris, perhaps even arrogence! That wouldn't look good, would it?

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Re: GNU's not Unix

As a user of both Linux and BSD (cli only though generally), I've not found much difference in 'ease' between the two. Kind of depends on with which you're more familer I suppose?

Systemd seems to do what it does, but it does always feel a bit like having an F16 fix the issue of a slightly annoing moth.... Sure the mess of RC scripts and runlevels was awful, but there's simpler alternatives out there... I mean you could look at RC in NetBSD, simple, easy to set up and works... although there's probably something to do with having lots of them in a cloud somewhere I don't really understand. :)

The reason for Linux's rise over a BSD is probably more to do with momentum and lawyers

And just like that, Amazon Web Services forked Elasticsearch, Kibana. Was that part of the plan, Elastic?

Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the Elastic License (which limits how it can be used) or the Server Side Public License (which has requirements that make it unacceptable to many in the open source community).

Especially the takers. :)

In order to ensure open source versions of both packages remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.

Wow, how nice of you AWS!! I hope you gave them a big cuddle first before making it bigger.

Hmmm, what's that smouldering over there? You should probably go put that out.....

Bows before the new Microsoft; The circle has fully turned

To any other startups listening. CHOOSE YOUR LICENCES CAREFULLY.

AWS has been doing things that are 'just NOT OK since 2015,' says Elastic as firm yanks Apache 2.0 licence

Re: Not the first time

This is a mischaracterisation. Stallman and the FSF are not against "commercial" software, they are against *proprietary* software; that is, software over which the end user does not have control.

Okay, I suppose these days you can sign and encrypt binaries, but I always thought this attitude was just lazy people not being bothered to learn bytecode. :) :) :)

(My slightly more serious point is the line is somewhat arbitary, is it more work to objdump a simple (but closed source) utility than it is to properly understand and work on a large, complex, but open source, software project, such as a browser for example.

I could probably just about figure what something like 'FORMAT' on DOS does, but I'd never fully understand Chromium, despite having the sources, so I practially have the same level of control over each.

There does become a point where having the source is really no more use to the average person than not as the cost/logistical challenges involved become impractical).

Re: Not the first time

Exactly!

Developing software is hard, and time consuming, so why not spend even a fraction of that considering what licence you use as that literally affects everything that happens from there-on. Elastic search arrived after the rise of AWS and Google so knowing the way cloud providers 'take advantage' of the the open source world isn't really an excuse IMHO. (Although, arguably as it was Apache licenced this isn't true, Apache is very permissive. I do always feel the spirit of the GPL is being violated by the big cloudy people... if not the actual letter.... But then maybe if this was a real ideological problem for people we'd have GPL4 by now.... who knows?)

This happened to WINE years ago. They said 'Here's WINE, do what you want...' (It was initially MIT licenced), then got annoyed when someone did.

Screw you, gadget-menders! No really, you'll need loads of screwdrivers to fix Apple's AirPods Max headphones

... but they're only bought by fanbois.

Isn't there somebody or other's law that says "the more a consumer spends on a product, the less likely they are to admit to being dissatisfied with it"?

Okay, we're talking audio products here..... In this snake oil game Apple are but inexperienced fools.

You can (or could) buy a wooden volume knob for nearly 500 dollars.

You can buy speaker cable for 12,000 a meter if you so desire.

You can buy audio grade (directional) ethernet cables for listening to your MP3s in higher quality if you really want.

To be fair, a friend, who will spend good money on headphones and DACs because he cares about that kind of thing, tells me he's very suprised how good the air pods are, so I can imagine the sound quality in these is fine.

Re: Applecare

Building any product that is either impossible or deliberately difficult to maintain and/or repair immediately tells you the manufacturer is not interested in the purchaser beyond their money.

Are there any that are?

Serious question, which manufacturers do things for their customers altruistically? Do they remain in business? (There's a difference between this and engendering good will to ensure future business).

I woud love to know what percentage of Apple customers would repair their stuff if it was more repairable. If the answer is small then it's probably better not to make things repairable; as that's just extra crap for landfill. (Repairability requires more connectors and sockets than not repairable).

Windows Product Activation – or just how many numbers we could get a user to tell us down the telephone

Still, having your neighbours asking you to fix their pirated OS is a bit of a cheek!

That was the problem though. Most people had just bought a PC.. They didn't know they were dirty pirates until the box appeared.... :)

Microsoft had reached something like mid to high 90% penetration at that point, therefore pirated versions of windows were less 'use' to them (ie, in getting windows everywhere), however, now that windows was 'everywhere' it was financially worth it for them to try and crack down on the pirates to at least get some of them to pay. (Mainly poor unsuspecting victims of 'cheap computer sellers' using pirated versions I suspect).

As for the customers, they have little choice, so.... <shrug>

Ain't monopolys brilliant!

;)

(You could probably argue we've come full circle, computers are less of a 'thing', so few people care as much about MSs monopoly on the desktop anymore, and the nice stable business revenue stream means they care less again about the odd person pirating windows... hence why you get a discreet 'would you mind awfully paying' overlay on the desktop and little else).

Brave bets on the decentralized web with IPFS browser support for a more peer-to-peer approach

This has more subtle implications too, the imutable nature of digital content does sometimes make it hard to contextualise it. (A tweet written 13 years ago 'looks' the same as a tweet written yesterday). So even content that is fine now can be objectionable 10-15 years later, and downright offensive a generation later as public opinions and sensibilities change. It was easy in the 90s to look down our noses at objectionable content from the 70s, as it looked 'old', but now you can quite easily watch something and forget it's 20 years old.

As more content goes digital the problem of contextualisation is only going to get worse.

Plans for Entity Framework Core 6.0 revealed as Microsoft admits it is unlikely to match Dapper for performance

Re: SQL's JOIN syntax is no harder to learn and more precise to use

Nah, don't bother with stored procedures, your app logic should stay in the client where it belongs.

However using something like dapper to avoid the mapping tedium and plain SQL does feel like it makes things simpler?

I suppose it depends how much time you spend analysing queries and optimising higher level code vs how much time you save not writing SQL.

I have found personally, centralising the repository and therefore decoupling the objects from the storage. does mean that you don't have to worry when someone uses them in a way that makes an ORM blush. Also, because you have a nice well defined boundry to the data storage you can expose an interface that is designed to be as performant as possible, which will also have the effect of making it's consumers at least consider this insofar as they're constrained by it.

The hour grows late, the enemy are at the gates... but could Intel's exiled heir apparent ride to the rescue?

Engineering is supposedly based on science but I believe the engineers go beyond what the scientists are able to theorise. This is done by trying things and seeing what works.

That's pretty much what science is. :) Engineering is a science too.

Also, it's probably worth remembering that one fabs nm is not quite the same as anothers.... (they measure different features when quoting gate size).

There's no need to downplay his faith. Super unlikely you'd do it with any other one.

How does that downplay his faith?

As someone without faith, if it's any help, I read it as 'Pat Gelsinger is a Christian, he is also a decent human being. These things are not connected'. Which seems pretty fair. (Evidence would suggest that not all decent human beings are Christian, just as not all Christians are decent human beings).

I took the 'morals from a book' comment as a statement of his inate decency, as it was ingrained rather than affected, or learnt.

Thing is with faith, it's deeply personal, so, like musical tastes, it's best not worrying what other people think; that way only leads to trouble.

Re: Intel's new CEO check list

Define 'equivalent'?

It's often the frameworks that take up the resources, less so the language.

Cost applies elsewhere too, you've got to find developers to write and maintain the code you run. There are fewer pascal developers than Java ones. (Or at least there are round here, I work for a place with a pascal legacy, and we have issues finding devs to maintain it).

Scottish Environment Protection Agency refuses to pay ransomware crooks over 1.2GB of stolen data

Re: How much ?

I wish I still had that sense of innocence.

It is not innocence - it's just how the world works.

I wish I still had that sense of innocence.

(I believe the popular phrase is 'Some people never learn...').

Debian 'Bullseye' enters final phase before release as team debates whether it will be last to work on i386 architecture

Re: I'm finding this hard to believe...

But does i386 actually support i386 any more? I don't follow Linux particularly closely but I'm sure I remember it actually needed at least a Pentium nowadays.

This... i386 support and x86 (i686?) are subtly different. There was chatter recently on the FreeBSD lists from someone trying to get FreeBSD 12.1 running on a 386. (Or maybe some 486 derivitive), only to discover that some pentium specific instructions had crept in to the pre built binaries.

The response was basically.... you'll have to compile it yourself if you want support for hardware that old... it should work.... good luck.

Mind you, the 386 was produced until 2007, but I suppose if you're sitll using one by then you'll have the skillset to make things work yourself.

Another Rust-y OS: Theseus joins Redox in pursuit of safer, more resilient systems

Re: "There are others, but most are not very active"

When Torvalds unleashed Linux on the world

Via the internet....

, he had no idea he was the guy who was going to allow the Internet to function, most IoT crap to exist and be the father of dozens of similar distros.

I suspect some of the GNU contributers might be worth a mention too....

He just did it, and thank God he did.

Well, that depends on your views on things like the GPL. :) I'd've been equally happy to see one of the BSDs fulfil the same role,and were it not for lawyers, one probably would.

I think there's a strong argument to make that Linux is where it is now, from a technical point of view, due to the feedback from it's popularity; 20-25 years ago you could argue the BSDs were better designed, and perhaps back then 'better *nixs'. As someone who cut their teeth on NetBSD I remember constantly being annoyed at the poor linux man pages for example. (These are now fine, but are they fine because...... Linus.... or because momentum made a boat load of people put in the effort (and money) to make them fine.)

Had the BSDs had the same momentum they'd be in a similar position now.

Ubiquiti iniquity: Wi-Fi box slinger warns hackers may have peeked at customers' personal information

Re: Alternatives

What alternatives are people using, I'm thinking of going for PFSense for the firewall/router. I'm a home user with three switches and a couple of APs and I use things like VLANs and various firewall rules.

It depends what level of config vs what level of pissing around you're willing to tolerate. I used NetBSD for years, and have moved to FreeBSD recently. Both times using pf as the firewall for nat/routing.

This has served well for years, currently running PPPoE to an old style VDSL modem on Plusnet. (so the server gets the external IP).

However, all the config is done on the command line (I expect there's web options, I just don't use them), and as I've used it for years I probably have a level of acrued knowlage that I'm not considering.

It runs all the services I need on the network (It does all home servering duties, eg media via plex, files via samba), gives me nice, configurable firewalling and is flexible. (eg, I have pihole running in a small debian VM, and another windows VM running a minecraft server for the small person). It allows me to support 3 people and a gob load of devices without issues.

I don't use the server for WiFi however, I have a TP-Link and an old repurposed plusnet homehub doing wifi duties (seperate SSIDs, but on the same network), these are just acting as bridges though, things like DHCP is disabled in the wifi kit, all handled by the server.

After home office requirements for stupid stupid covid I am now also running 3 switches, and 2 APs. I've not made any use of VLANs though.

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

Re: Proof reader

It apparently is all to do with the skill we learn as children, to read the whole word as one rather than individual letters, which makes us so bad at spotting transposition or even missing letters.

After having a detached and torn retina a year ago I've become acutely aware of how much of this the brain actually does.

Whilst my vision is now back, it's not quite 'the same' and as my brains been figuring it all out I have has several instances over the last year where I've simply 'seen' the wrong word, in a much more prominent sense than I ever used to misread words in the past.

Generally this is just a 'wuh' moment, but every once in a while the unintentional substitution can be a deeply disturbing insight into the inner workings of my brain that I'd rather not have. (I'm just happy that me and the folks at the local fishing club have agreet to put the incident behind us and never speak of it, or to each other, again).

Amazing thing the brain when it comes to language.

Re: Proof reader

And being the first time writing in C I had lots of syntax errors. After fixing most of the errors I got down to fixing "Error - lable is not defined". And I kept thinking why doesn't it tell me which label is undefined.

So, if you paste a message from Microsoft Lynq¹ (and a suprising other number of programs once you know to look for it) into a unicode aware text editor it will helpfully put one of the non printable unicode code points in the output.

These, as implied, don't print, even on screen, and are zero width.........

It took a day to work out why the pasted code snippit wouldn't compile, and it was basically down to someone noticing that the cursor didn't move right occasionally when single stepping along the line with the cursor keys.

To be fair, the compiler tried it's best to help, but 'unexpected char' errors don't help if you can't see it. :D

_{^1. <Spit>}

Loser Trump is no longer useful to Twitter, entire account deleted over fears he'll whip up more mayhem

Re: An elephant in the room

Remember, it was the USA that bailed you folks out in WWII.

Oh, ffs, are people still trotting this tired old trope out? Why do people reference history whilst never learning the lessons it should be teaching us.

Just to be clear, the parents and grandparents (and great grandparents, and probably great great grandparents in some cases) of the people here banded together to defeat a common enemy, many of them died doing it (most of whom were Russian). Most of these people are now dead and I'd be damn suprised if the Register had any in it's commentards. :) No-one here bailed anyone out of much in WW-II.

It's understandable in the aftermath of such a tragic event that nationalistic pride will shine through. (Who pours their derision into the next generation of school children after all). Hell, I'm British and I was certanly taught how we won the war at school. However much more time has past and a more balanced perspective is probably now due, lets celebrate the efforts of the people involved, not where they were born.

WWII was won by colaboration, and to reduce that victory to 'My country's better than your country' misses the point of all those people dying, on both sides.

It's also the reason the damn thing kicked off in the first place.

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

Re: Not Just IT...

Cats don't like being pestered, so they like hanging around with people who don't pester them.

This isn't quite true, as per Section 4, Subsection 2(ii) of the Feli-homo contract:

"The Large Warm Moron (hereafter LWM), should provide the requisite amount of pesterting as required by her/his Lady/Lordship. Failure to provide sufficient pestering will incure penalties; over pesterting or incorrect pestering will also incur penalties. Occationally, the correct amount of pestering will incure penalties."

I believe the specific penalties are tied in to your service agreement, but there are some leaflets that can help. Look out for: "Birds, mice and other morning treats", "Euwwwww.... what's that smell?", and my personal favourite "Claws: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!! YOU BASTARD!!!"

Seagate says it's designed two of its own RISC-V CPU cores – and they'll do more than just control storage drives

Re: Embedded SQL?

I once asked a Microsoft guy what happened to the database filesystem that was meant to replace NTFS. He said "reality happened".

That's quite succint considering it took them four attempts to realise this. (OFS, the first, is available in some betas of NT according to youtube). As for the rest.... I think there might've been a vista beta with WinFS in but who knows???

Filesystems are not databases, even if parts look superficially similar.

You know this.... I know this..... (I mean FOUR attempts..... I'd still not try it now and computers are much quicker.....)

Mind you, the Be File System had metadata level indexing, which was supposed to be quite good, but still, that's a far cry for trying to fit a DB in there.

Reading El Reg while working from home? Here's a pleasant thought: Kaspersky says 1 in 10 of you are naked right now

Has agile made it to the criminal underworld now? Will wonders never cease.

Apple appears to be charging Brits £309 to replace AirPods Max batteries, while Americans need only stump up $79

Apple will gladly sell AirPods Max customers an extended two-year AppleCare warranty, which covers battery replacements.

Surely in the UK if you buy from apple you're bound by the consumer rights act, and if my 600 quid headphones stopped working after 2 years (battery or otherwise), I'd be expecting a much cheaper or (if in the first 12 months) free repair or replacement.

Statutory rights are worth knowing.

Battery longevity isn't the only thing that will determine the useful lifespan of the AirPods Max. Remember: they're tied to Apple's wider device ecosystem, and will only work on specific versions of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS.

Is there a source for this? The AirPods are bluetooth, and can be paired with regular bluetooth equipment. It would seem odd to change this for the Max??

The Ghost of Windows Past gains spooky second wind as the October 2020 Update nears double digits

Windows can certainly be a little resource-hungry nowadays,

What do you mean 'Resource hungry'??? It's only using 300GB of memory to play Minesweeper.

HP CEO talks up HP-ink-only print hardware and higher upfront costs for machines that use other cartridges

Re: The problems:

If you don't print often, don't get inkjet.

This.

I treated myself to a decent laser about 6 years ago, as I print very infrequently (but the ability to do so, and scan is a godsend every so often), and am still on the toner that came with it.

It is an HP though, so I am having to suffer constant 'your toner is empty' messages, and did have to prod it into printing colour a few months ago due to 'no toner'. (however once prodded it still does).

I suspect I also suffer from getting a SOHO one; with the expected duty cycle that they assume that will come with.

Knowing what HP are like and that they're only getting worse I talked my mum into getting a Brother laser recently, which she's really happy with. Although that did just stop printing the other day as the toner was 'empty'. A simply youtube and a few button presses later it's all working again, but it was much more abrupt than my HP, and more 'service menuy' to fix than I expected.

Mind you, as mine is built like a jeffing tank I'm hoping I'll not have to replace it. (and I expect when I finally drop the few hundred quid on replacement toner that'll last me for life. :D )

Re: Dictionary

For my next server, likely to be built early next year, I'm just going to buy commodity hardware instead.

For a home server, it's pretty much the way to go.

It is worth getting decent commodity hardware though. Since my home server has gone from 'desktop castoff' to having a bit more money spent on it the 6 month 'why has it crashed' episodes have decreased. (You still get issues if it's on 24/7, but pay a little more and these are lessened).

Also... ZFS... :)

Geekbench stats show Apple Silicon MacBook Air trouncing pricey 16-inch MacBook Pro

Re: Unsurprising results

Shirley Intel, IBM and AMD also have the best people and a ton of cash??

They do (although Apple have nearly 4 times the cash of Intel, IBM and AMD combined), but they also have the baggage of x86, which is very CISC, and arguably not particularly great. AMD simply extended this when creating x64.

Arm on the other hand was initially designed by a small team based on lessons learnt from the MOS 6502, this lead to a simple and lean architecture, which (possibly due to some other work Acorn had at the time) also happened to have nice low interupt latency. The initial ARM was so power efficient it could run without power. :)

Also, when it came to the 64 bit transition, Intel dropped the ball with IA64, which left AMD to capitalise with it's 64 bit extensions to IA32. However, this still leaves the legacy of the old ISA, whereas Arm, coming to the party a lot later, were able to design a 64 bit instruction set that learnt from the lessons of others, and also removed some features that whilst useful at the time were less helpful when designing a modern out of order superscalar CPU.

Apple Silicon all built on ARM licenced technology.

It's built on an Arm licenced architecture. Apple have an architectural Arm licence, they design the CPU and GPU themselfs. (As oppose to a core licencee who uses an Arm core design with their own surrounding IP). There's speculation that they have a particularly special licence too, which considering they were one of the co-founders of Arm is not entirely unlikely.

Apple have been slowly building up to this for some time now, they bought a chip company years ago to design the (increasingly powerfull) CPU in the iThings and Arm on Mac has been one of those things that has been about to happen for years now.

I'm curious to know if there's any multi CPU support in these?

Their use of stacked memory limits the expandability, hence we're only seeing 16GB as the max for now.

But if you're going to have a 'pro' version of this that's not going to cut it, so it'll be interesting to see how they solve that. Could you for example put 4 M1s together to get 64GB in some kind of NUMA style layout?

Interesting times ahead.

Test tube babies: Virgin Hyperloop pops pair of staffers in a pod, shoots them along 500m vacuum tunnel

Re: A curious thing...

The pictures on the BBC report showed a streamlined nose cone. If the tunnel is evacuated, why?

Maybe it's to cope with it suddenly not being evacuated?

(What does happen to a pod travelling at 600mph if it hits a wall of air coming the other way?)

Super-antique-fragile-and-it's-XP-alidocious, even though the sight of it is something quite atrocious

Re: Dreadful?

Haven't a clue how big a minimal 10 install would be as that drove me to get off the Redmond wagon. Starting Windows sandbox shows a C drive with about 3gig used, so it's possible to have a small lightweight VM......

I expect a proper install is much larger though.

Re: To be fair...

So you're saying now is the time to change it?