Posts by Richard 12

UK Home Office dangles £20m for national gun licence database system

Five working days!?

So they've already chosen which Tory donor is getting the contract.

Only 29% of techies truly want to stay in current job

Re: Fantasy meets reality

It's about whether they're "actively looking" for a different job.

Just because someone is looking, doesn't mean they'll find one.

However, even if most don't leave:

More of the "best" workers in that cohort will leave than the mediocre or poor workers. So companies lose important expertise and suffer reduced productivity.

Most of those workers will spend some of their "at work" time actively searching for new employment. Regardless of whether they find anything "worth" applying for, those workers will be less productive.

Just two die for: Apple reveals M1 Ultra chip in Mac Studio

Re: I like the look of it but…

Read some Apple documentation.

Look at the specs and licensing agreements.

The only possible explanations are that Apple are utterly incompetent, or that professional content creation and application development (beyond single hobbyist dev) is so low down on their list that it may as well not be there.

I don't think Apple are incompetent.

Re: I like the look of it but…

Because you don't matter.

Apple want consumers. Preferably consumers with large egos and larger wallets.

They don't care about content creators and they actively despise developers.

For example, it's impossible to legally build for iOS or macOS in a rackmount machine. Let alone a blade server. Everything is desktop or worse, laptop.

Re: Mac Studio

RAM is fixed forever by fundamental design of the Apple ARM M-series system-on-chip.

Same as you can't upgrade the RAM in your TV remote, it's all on-chip.

The sad part is that the storage is all soldered in too. It's a single-board computer, less upgradable than a Raspberry Pi.

UK govt signs IT contracts 'without understanding' the needs

It is good

For the large contractors.

They get the taxpayer to assume all the risk, while helpfully taking on all the profit.

Re: Stupid educated people in government

Not quite. While a manager doesn't need to be able to do any of the stuff themselves, they must know what everyone (including other departments) can do, and what the company needs doing.

The whole point of management is to line up the stuff that needs doing with the people who can do it sufficiently well.

If you don't know what needs doing or who can do what, and worse, don't care, then the only question is how much damage you'll cause.

Europe's largest nuclear plant on fire after Russian attack

Re: Like primitive man putting his hand in fire

And if no one defends it, expect it to be lost.

What should the Ukrainians have done? Left the place completely undefended and just hoped the Russians wouldn't kill all the plant workers?

Amazon Alexa can be hijacked via commands from own speaker

Too many zeros there.

They've got roughly the intelligence of a dead hamster.

The "skills" are simply pre-programmed trigger words. Useful, but no intelligence at all. It's just doing speech-to-text followed by an I'm Feeling Lucky search.

Purchases are effectively enabled by default

As shipped, you can enable voice purchases by voice.

My 3 year old daughter ordered several things and very nearly started a subscription before we found the setting to disable it.

While I was able to cancel them before they shipped, it was rather shocking.

Possibly I should have let them ship then returned them at Amazon's cost.

Saving a loved one from a document disaster

Re: Imperrfect

Perforce does that too.

At least git is configurable

Linux-on-an-SBC project Armbian releases version 22.02

And buildroot

Though buildroot is perhaps more industrial. Settop boxes and car infotainment systems tend to be buildroot unless they're Android.

Maxar Technologies: The eye in the sky tracking invasion of Ukraine

Re: Image quality

The granny knot twists as it is tugged, causing it to loosen - while also becoming more difficult to untie.

The reef knot lies flat and does not deform.

Ukraine asks ICANN to delete all Russian domains

Re: Block the internet?

Several million ordinary Germans were indeed victims of the Nazis - the purges and murders started "at home", some time before they invaded Poland.

Similar here - a lot of ordinary Russians have been imprisoned or worse for protesting against Putin's kleptocracy

Apple has missed the video revolution

Apple dumbed down and threw pros under a bus

Professional video and audio is the only reason Mac survived the days before the iMac and the switch to Intel x86

Sadly, nearly all those tools are now gone or ripped asunder, continuing in name only by Apple's focus on consumer consumption.

The upper and mid end of content creators are leaving or already left. The lower professional end (youtube, and social media influencers) will be gone soon after, and then what of Mac?

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

99% of modern industrial control kit

Amicus briefs will be inbound from all over the place.

Yes, Mark Zuckerberg is still pushing metaverse. Next step, language translation

Re: Translation tools

The Farcebook translation tools are laughably terrible.

I don't think I've seen a single translated post that kept the actual meaning.

A tale of two dishwashers: Buy one, buy it again, and again

The production team are well aware of this

It's the only reason it keeps getting made. They know that their audience is entirely people who want to yell cathartic abuse at idiots on the tellybox.

GitHub puts prebuilt Codespaces into public beta

The advantage is that you spot issues in your onboarding/dev setup documentation instantly - but breaking the build means nobody can do any work at all...

Taking five minutes for anyone to start work is still a long time.

The big question is when that hit happens. Every time you switch branches would make it basically unusable.

FAA now says 5G airports may interfere with Boeing 737s

So now you do the testing?

Or did you just not bother at all, and waited for the near-misses to stack up?

The FAA really are incompetent.

20 years of .NET: Reflecting on Microsoft's not-Java

Re: Alas poor SOAP!, I knew him

Nice try.

Now add some sub-properties to property, or an array of values. Can't do that at all this way, so you'd have to radically change the schema.

The removal of the tag name from the closing element means JSON is smaller in the vast majority of cases, and it's also easier to parse because you don't "need" to compare the closing tag name with the associated opening tag.

Of course json does not permit open-a, open-b, close-a, close-b, but one shouldn't do that anyway.

AI-created faces now look so real, humans can't spot the difference

Re: Detail and perception

Tell me Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?

European Union takes China to WTO over smartphone patents

Re: Appears Apple don't give a shit about their phones being ripped off

Apple have very little of what we'd consider protected IP. They licence almost everything about how a phone works.

What they do own is the specific embodiment of a few physical items, the OS and the keys used to sign them.

I presume they're betting that any attempts made to clone their phones will fail because they keep the keys secret. A phone that is an exact clone of the hardware won't run iOS unless it's got the right keys burned into some components.

I wonder, could this actually be why Apple are so vehemently against the right to repair?

Alarm raised after Microsoft wins data-encoding patent

Re: Ban software patents.

I read a book where they raise the Titanic that way, published before the found the wreck (the author thought it was in one piece)

So yeah, the balls aren't an inventive step. Getting them down there and into the wreck on the other hand...

Intel's plan to license x86 cores for chips with Arm, RISC-V and more inside

Surely this is for embedded?

A lot of embedded applications need a "powerful" application processor plus one or more microcontrollers running real-time peripherals - motor control and the like.

I've designed a few of these using separate chips and a serial interconnect.

There are now several manufacturers making chips that place an ARM Cortex-A class with a Cortex-M or RISC-V into the same package with some amount of shared SRAM, which makes these much simpler and cheaper - smaller PCB, reduced BoM etc.

This looks like Intel wanting to get in on that market. We'd certainly have considered it for those products, if the price was reasonable.

Arm'd with ex-Apple engineers from Nuvia, Qualcomm hopes to make Apple M1-matching chips for Windows PCs

Re: Who wants this?

Microsoft have been doing amd64 on AArch64 emulation for a long time. They've not made a big deal out of it, and I've no idea how good it is but it's there.

The problem Microsoft have is backwards compatibility. Microsoft built their entire OS business on making sure ancient line-of-business software and accessories still work.

You can still use a 1980s serial mouse on Windows 11, and nearly all the early 32bit software for NT and XP still runs.

A heck of a lot of currently used Windows software is 32bit, and it doesn't appear to be feasible to emulate x86 on AArch64 with good performance - at least, nobody has said they've done it.

So they'll lose all the 32bit software, but unlike the 16bit there won't be a DOSBOX to put it in.

Apple on the other hand have a long history of telling users to go die in a fire if they want to keep that "old" software or accessory.

Microsoft engineer fixes enterprise-level Chromium bug students could exploit to cheat in online tests

Why does this policy exist at all?

It serves no practical purpose whatsoever, and cannot possibly achieve the stated goal.

Better fix is to delete the policy entirely, because it cannot possibly do what is intended. A policy that cannot possibly succeed is a problem in itself, it can only cause confusion and additional problems when it fails to achieve the goal.

Any site asking for this policy doesn't understand the problem domain and is always setting themselves up for failure. Their administrators end up playing whack-a-mole trying to lock down the client, and they will fail!

It's far better to insist that the web developer uses appropriate security measures:

If you don't want someone to see something, don't send it to them. Putting it inside an envelope marked "do not open" isn't going to stop anyone even remotely curious.

It's there by default

curl is included with Windows now.

Sure, you can block it by policy. Along with all the other ways of downloading over HTTPS...

There's a *lot* of them.

Dido Harding's appointment to English public health body ruled unlawful

Re: I need caffeine...

One can dream...

Reality check: We should not expect our communications to remain private

Really bad question, El Reg

Aside from the already mentioned "never use not in the motion":

As the argument specifically states, we SHOULD expect our communications to be private.

Furthermore, this is enshrined in international law.

Arguing to remove an axiom of the debate itself is a non-starter. "Should not expect" is cast down before the proponent even begins their argument - or would be if the question had not been phrased so terribly badly.

Whether we currently DO or technically CAN expect it is a different matter that can be argued over.

As is what can be done to protect this right.

'Boombox' function sparks Tesla recall

They do go like s**t off a shovel.

The styling isn't to everyone's taste, and of course if you do floor it a lot (because it's fun) then you will rather reduce the range.

Once the initial fun wears off then you'll most likely stop trying to find out just how close you dare get to said 1.99s all the time, and the range will increase to something a lot closer to the "optimal driving conditions" figure.

My next car will be full electric. Probably not a Tesla though.

Re: Uh

Yes, it is dangerous.

People are used to vehicles making a certain range of "moving vehicle" sounds.

If it's singing "I've got a loverly bunch of coconuts" at top volume instead, they may initially think it's a preschooler and not realise it's a moving car until it's too late.

Not everyone is fully sighted, and even those that are don't always see what's directly behind them in places like car parks, for example.

Re: "Recall" is NTHSA terminology

Of course.

Because the vast majority of vehicles cannot do an OTA update. Which to be honest, is a good thing.

I rather prefer to be able to choose when my car gets a firmware update. Not just in case it goes wrong and leaves me stuck far from home, but also in case it decides to do it an an inopportune moment, like when there's five minutes left on the parking meter.

France says Google Analytics breaches GDPR when it sends data to US

Re: Watch prices rise

Targeting effectiveness is already worse than pure chance.

Deliberately advertising a one-off purchase to someone you are quite sure has very recently made said purchase is an obvious waste as they'll definitely not buy it again. You'd do better by showing it to someone at random.

Analytics are pretty clearly useless for targeting advertisements. Matching the advert to the content on the page is far more useful.

I suppose analytics are somewhat useful for determining whether your site visitors always bounce away because they followed an advert by accident...

It's irrelevant, sadly

After the US forced Microsoft US to hand over data stored in servers in Ireland, owned by their Irish subsidiary - instead of asking the Irish government for access - all such contracts were clearly null and void.

Max Schrems then proved the case for the hard of thinking.

The only legal options are to use companies that do not have any base in the US and aren't owned by any US company, because the US can, have and will require any US-based company or owner to exfiltrate your data to the US regardless of its physical locations.

No help for IT contractors on IR35 tax errors

Parliament relies on the Members

As roughly 340 of them don't want to enforce the rules of the House, there's nothing anyone can legally do until at least 37 more Tory MPs realise they're probably going to lose their job in 2024.

I'm still confused as to why my MP isn't bricking himself. Unless he's decided that he's out next time no matter what?

Apple tweaks AirTags to be less useful for stalkers, thieves

Re: What the hell ?

So stalking your partner is just fine, according to Apple?

Further enabling abusive and controlling relationships are the number one risk of these things. Even more likely than tracking a car before stealing it.

Re: So to clarify

I expected that from Facebook. It is after all how it started.

So to clarify

In order to detect that I may be being stalked or tracked, I have to add myself to the stalking network?

So to protect myself, I must put all those around me at greater risk?

Think different, indeed...

Use Zoom on a Mac? You might want to check your microphone usage

Re: Oh, you're so clever.

One might even think Zoom were trying to keep the microphone on and just hide the macOS indicator.

Oh, hang on. I do think that.

5G masts will be strapped to lampposts and traffic lights – once £4m project figures out who owns them

Re: Eating your equipment - DON'T

California insists we put that cancer warning on all our products, including the ones that aren't edible.

Microsoft says the internet is the nicest it's been since 2016. Obviously they didn't look at The Reg comments

Congratulations!

Also - damn you, that's the entire year of Visual Studio user reports done with. No point until next 1st Jan.

I hope it was a big one.

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

"Anything that..."

Is a very, very stupid position to take.

Starting WW3 would close down Facebook too. Let's not do that.

"Challenge"

Task that must be completed to gain the respect of your peers.

This is going well: Meta adds anti-grope buffer zone around metaverse VR avatars

Re: Seems to not go far enough

That's a far right-wing "solution". Try a bit harder.

Re: My first though...

They have included a "block" setting which causes the blocked user's avatar to cease to exist in your world.

Though they didn't mention what happens from their point of view - if you block some evildoer and they see you vanish, they know you blocked them and (as has happened elsewhere) take revenge via another means.

And if your avatar doesn't vanish from their POV, they can still do bad stuff. You just won't know about it until the screenshots turn up.

Seems like a public common area isn't possible. Rather like in a real life nightclub, it needs a security team watching the punters, staff to directly inform and real-world consequences.

Even then a lot gets missed, "spiking" happens far too often.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Re: users eh?

Day 2: file arrives with one date

Day 3: file arrives with two dates

Day 4: file arrives with three dates...

What's that cattleprod for, it's consistent!

US Senate to vote on stopping Big Tech extracting 'monopolist rent' from app developers

Re: The Chamber of Progress

I am thinking of the children.

Wouldn't it be lovely if I could disable the Apple or Google App Store entirely, and replace it with a curated, child-friendly App Store that only contains apps that meet my specific requirements on what my child should be able to access?

No in-app purchases, only from my specific locale (so it teaches the right English), only these general themes etc.

When they get a bit older, maybe enable specific types of purchases with a pre-defined (but not prepaid!) budget, so they start to learn about electronic transactions.

Currently the Amazon "Kids+" thing is the nearest there is to that, and it sucks because there's no competition whatsoever.

Privacy Shield: EU citizens might get right to challenge US access to their data

True in every way in fact

For privacy, for jobs and for tax take.

It does seem that a few EU nations have now realised that being a really big and valuable bloc means they can tell the US to get stuffed, and ensure factories and datacentres are both built and owned by local businesses, paying actual tax instead of exporting all the profits to some overseas conglomerate.

Shame the UK decided to be a tiny minnow instead. Minnows get eaten.

Jeff Bezos adds some more overheads to his $485m yacht by taking down historic bridge

Re: No problem... just as long as Bezos is paying for it

And the mantling, of course.

And a load of necessary bridge maintenance, while it's in bits.