Posts by Gordon 10

'Beyond stupid': Linus Torvalds trashes 5.8 Linux kernel patch over opt-in Intel CPU bug mitigation

Re: Obligatory Covid-19 analogy

@slim. I think you maybe confused. Can you provide a link to research to substantiate?

It’s possible But I don’t believe it’s been proven that it happens at scale for Covid.

Re: Obligatory Covid-19 analogy

@_LC_

Immunity means you do not get sick. It doesnt mean you cannot carry and spread it.

Think of it as picking up poo with gloves on. You dont get it on you but you still stink.

Re: Real Fix

Hmmm - AWS may be primarily intel (along with everyone else) but they have AMD and ARM and weird FPGA's as well. So fail icon.

All our stuff moves to Graviton instances in 2 weekends....

Xiaomi has such Huawei with words: Our two new phones have 'easy access' to Google apps... unlike that other guy

Now if only they made a phone under 6"

Watch an oblivious Tesla Model 3 smash into an overturned truck on a highway 'while under Autopilot'

Re: It is autopilot but not autonomous

Both your questions can be answered with the phrase "Meatbags are stupid". In Tesla's case the driver meatbag in Airplanes cases always the passenger meatbags and some times the pilot meatbags.

Re: Makes you wonder about Dragon.

Why will it be more complicated? By your own admission there will be less things whizzing around Earth-Moon transfer orbits than LEO.

FWIW said transfer orbit is no more or less complicated than rendevous with a space station, possibly less as the Moon is a bigger target :D. (Probably the same as Lunar Gateway would be the target)

NHS contact-tracing app is best in the world, says VMware CEO... whose company helped build it

Re: Not true

This shouldn't need saying on such a data aware forum as El Reg, but just for Anomentards everywhere (yes the fail is for you AC).

His data (if he genuinely works at a trust) <> centrally collected data.

Hence both, either or neither could be "good enough" for this purpose. As external observers on a public forum we will never know.....

DBA locked in police-guarded COVID-19-quarantine hotel for the last week shares his story with The Register

Re: What a shit hole

Actually my understanding was that the UK was proposing 14 days Self-Quarantine - which will work as well as the person complying to it....

Waste of time IMO. Mandatory and enforced or not at all.

Re: What a shit hole

There there calm down. Nursey will come with your shot soon and make it all better....

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: Of course, being centrally controlled

We dont trust them. But in this case they are the lesser of the 2 evils.

Since this is primarily a tech. & user trust problem who has the least likelyhood of screwing this up either deliberately or accidentally - the UK Govt or GooApple?

Google for all its evil user monetisation is a "trusted brand" compared to UK.GOV

Apple-Google COVID-19 virus contact-tracing API to bar location-tracking access

I hoped for a second

That this meant the UK app was going to be blocked as they have made a big deal of doing GPS access as an addon. In reading the details looks like they can still go ahead as long as they dont access the Google or Api contact tracking API in the same app.

I think this then puts a lie to the fact that the Data Guzzlers at NHSX and friends can use the Google/Apple API's.

I do wonder what happens if Scotland say decides to develop a separate app based around DP3T - do either Apple or Google have a separate AppStore for Scotland?

Re: one app per country?

And how precisely do you expect countries to agree to that? Get a UN resolution and then half of them ignore it.

The ultimate 4-wheel-drive: How ESA's keeping XMM-Newton alive after 20 years and beyond

That is the frikkin' coolest Satellite/Telescope I have ever seen

It looks more like some sort of interstellar starship.

Why wasn't I informed of this before?

Nine million logs of Brits' road journeys spill onto the internet from password-less number-plate camera dashboard

Alert Alert conflation detected

@Cynic.

Direct conflation from you here :

"I don't care what colour arm-bands they wear, if they have the power, then they are part of the government."

I'd stop digging. Otherwise all your downvotes will cause a negative reality inversion and before you know it you'll turn into Jake*

*Insert other contentious commentard of your choice.

Somewhere, way out there, two black holes, one large and one small, merged. And here on Earth, we detected the gravitational wave blast

Question

Are these "point in time" measures as the waves pass us or can we see a longer period than that ie do Gravitational waves travel at different speeds? Presumably these mergers happen over thousands or milllions of years hence why they can see so many, but also presumably they are seeing a tiny snapshot of the process.

Three years ago, IBM ordered staff to work in central hubs. Now its new CEO ponders mid-pandemic: Is there a better way of doing things?

In what way was Ginny a good CEO? Compared to say any historic IBM CEO or even the dross that is the IT Mega Corp industry average?

Europe publishes draft rules for coronavirus contact-tracing app development, on a relaxed schedule

I have a suspicion

That NHSX is where all the wankers cock wombles knob jockeys corporate shills hipsters went when GOV.UK / GDS and/or CARE.DATA got quietly sidelined.

Ex-TalkTalk infosec exec's equal pay and unfair dismissal claims tossed out at tribunal

Re: Basic Salary

Yes. But I would have thought you could argue that the CISO role is very similar to a Divisional CTO role.

110k is low for a CISO role. Remains to be seen if she was actually in A CISO role of course....

There’s some evidence to the contrary :D

IBM age discrimination lawsuit suddenly ends, suggests Big Blue was willing to pay to avoid discovery process

Re: Europe, land of radical ageism.

Your point and relevance being?

OnePlus 8 equals buttery-smooth refresh rates, water and dust resistance, but an inflating price tag

Is it just me

Who thinks any manufacturers that is outside of the 2-3 players that can command north of £500 dollar prices for a marginal improvement in specs is dreaming?

Surely we are at Peak Smartphone?

From Amanda Holden to petrol-filled water guns: It has been a weird week for 5G

Re: Unqalified 'Z' list Celeb talks rubbish

My thoughts exactly make the celebutards pay for their stupidity.

Zoom vows to spend next 90 days thinking hard about its security and privacy after rough week, meeting ID war-dialing tool emerges

Re: To be honest you can't blame people for going to Zoom

The same way Cisco made Webex such a turd?

Zoom isn't by any means perfect. It just a damn sight better in UX than any other of the Virtual meeting tools out there.

Zoom's end-to-end encryption isn't actually end-to-end at all. Good thing the PM isn't using it for Cabinet calls. Oh, for f...

Re: To be clear ...

@Dan.

Since both Webex and Zoom do it I presume there are reasons beyond the ken of an El Reg commentard.

Re: To be clear ...

To be completely fair to Zoom the standard version of Webex does exactly the same thing. Webex has a dedicated client to client encrypted service with lots of functionality missing - zoom doesnt appear to offer an equivalent.

The rationale is that screen recording and other "in meeting" functions require interception and decryption of the stream.

TL;DR - 99% of use cases will be fine on Zoom - fine being defined as "similar functionality to webex"

So move along nothing to see here other than a convenient headline to bash the victim of today.

That awful moment when what you thought was a number 1 turned out to be a number 2

Re: PD?

Since when as professional development (or even basic MS office training) even been a thing for low level office types?

After 20-year battle, Channel island Sark finally earns the right to exist on the internet with its own top-level domain

Re: Glad they didn't overthink the process....

Genuine question - why does it annoy you? There are far worse models for Head of State - the US and France both come to mind.....

Your Agile-built IT platform was 'terrible', Co-Op Insurance chief complained to High Court

Whitebox

Did the COOP not do their due diligence?

Surely if you are the only customer in a country alarm bells should have rung?

I reckon there were probably several techies and middle managers that were ringing those alarm bells that were ignored prior to the deal with IBM being done.

Education tech supplier RM smacked by UK schools closure

Re: Garbage

Funnily enough there are times when the nerdiest techy solution isn't the best. This is one of them.

PI's only satisfy an edge case in schools.

For most kids all they will need is a Windows PC - harsh but true. Keep a couple of PI's in the corner for the kind of use cases a BBC Model B was used for in our days - Programming and controlling robots etc...

Microsoft Teams usage jumps to 32, no, 44 million as Windows-slinger platform slides onto home workers' PCs

Thats a key point but not entirely fair. Its also at least no2. (to slack) in the UI/UX stakes. Its genuinely nice to use (imo)

Freedom of Information coverup clerk stung for £2k after deleting council audio recording

Re: There is muck to be raked here

I think you're right. Sounds like the judge had a fair amount of sympathy for her.

Also looks like she might have a claim against the council if they try take things further as she was not trained to handle FOI requests.

Also the foi request was made by a Councilor! This stinks to high heaven.

Million dollar question

Did the clerk delete the recording because they couldn't be arsed to deal with the FOI or to protect themselves or someone else due to what the recording might have revealed?

British Army adopts WhatsApp for formal orders as coronavirus isolation kicks in

Is this Standard WhatsApp?

Or some dedicated mil-net version.

If standard the mind boggles. Isn't that a massive infosec risk?

Microsoft Teams gets off to a wobbly start as the world and its cat starts working from home

MS have also pretty much offered Teams free to anyone who wants or needs it.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/03/05/our-commitment-to-customers-during-covid-19/?_lrsc=f74c6300-b7ff-43da-a7ba-516498432368

New product afaik and pretty decent imo. Certainly for those of us who are forced to use the abomination that is Webex Teams, which is some kind of pan-dimensional horror from beyond space time.

(Edit - there is a post below that suggests MS Teams is based on Skype consumer version - no idea if that is correct)

(Icon:Nuke Webex Teams from Orbit - its the only way to be sure)

Control is only an illusion, no matter what you shove on the Netware share

Re: Export-Delete-Load-Calculate

I did the exact same once or twice myself, fortunately was able to recover also. Also exported a blank cube over a good backup once or twice too. Usually came about when hacking build scripts for other purposes.

Essbase how I loved and hated you.

Although it was far better that the first consolidated version of OBIEE that included it. That had so many poorly documented interdependencies between components that the UAT system accidentally got connected to Prod and wiped during one memorable tenure at a major bank. That was a 4 day outage in financial reporting. My team weren't responsible but as the Ops team we had to fix it. I had to write up the RCA. TL:DR only full network segregation between UAT and Prod would have stopped it, and since it took 6 months to get approved ports open between UAT and Prod networks we never went down that route. The concept that there may have been good reasons (DR and Prod Copies) to pass data and config between networks never seemed to occur to our Info Sec team.

Still I had the pleasure of my resident tech genius giving Oracle product development (we actually got to the product developers!) a good shoeing on the technical ins and outs of their own product.

Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 2 earbuds: They're good – though for close to £300, they really should be

Err Size & convenience perhaps? I often have a full rucksack for my commute and there is no room for a set of full size cans.

Re: A pedant writes... WH-1000 XM3

There reviewer was making the point that you get a lot more bang for your buck with the fullsize headphones. The commentard was confuzzled and admitted so.

I have the V1 of these

They are great for music, providing you remember the final twist to fix them in your ears.

Connectivity slighty iffy sometimes but I'm 99% sure thats the iffy Huawei bluetooth stack on my Honor 10 as they are fine on my Ipad.

Nice to hear the Mic quality has improved - the V1's are friggin lousy for this - almost guaranteed to break up at some point during a 1hr Conf call. Although some reviewers claimed the V1's were ok for call too....

Getting more bang for the same buck - as the V1's were the same price - albeit slightly eye watering.

I also have a set of Jabra 65t's that I use for calls which are amazing, but absolutely lousy for music - sound like the bottom of the well.

Butterfly defect stripped from MacBook Pros, Airs by Q2 2020, reckons Apple analyst

Re: I liked the butterfly keyboard..

I like the butterfly keyboard on my late 2018 MBP.

I prefer the typing experience to any of my other laptop keyboards and its also more satisfactory than the Apple wireless keyboard which I believe it scissor. I certainly dont have a problem with the travel.

Plus I quite like the clatter unless one of my colleagues is taking notes on a call....

Broken lab equipment led boffins to solve a 58-year-old physics problem by mistake

agreed

Its really suspicious the world started turning extra-pants after the Large Hadron Collider got switched on. I think we're in the "bad" fork and only just noticing....

US prez Donald Trump declares America closed to those flying in from Schengen zone over coronavirus woes

Re: Well

Agreed and far more widespread than official numbers probably as well. The US has run a fraction of the tests any other country has, AND aren't even counting them centrally, which means that there are probably hundreds of un-diagnosed Americans wandering around.

OPPO Find X2: Top-tier cam and 5G, so who needs a fold?

So what makes it worth 800 notes then? 5g and a marginally improve camera?

How does Monzo keep 1,600 microservices spinning? Go, clean code, and a strong team

Re: Optimise for readability

I agree. Or as I would put it - essentially optimising against the prima-donna effect. We've all met that guy - and its usually a guy - who thinks the most obscure code with a fractional performance advantage is the dogs nuts.

See also optimising for the future engineer who doesn't have the N weeks/months of sprint/planning context needed to support/extend the current solution.

Axiom signs up with SpaceX to fly private astronauts to the International Space Station

What happened to Bigelows inflatable space hotels?

Computer, deactivate self-destruct system requirement, says Sonos... were it on a starship in space, and not a smart-speaker slinger

Did they actually brick anything? Or did they just give their customers the choice to do so?

My understanding is that they borked the integration of older kit with the rest of the network but that it could still be used seperately AND that this is seperate from the recycle mode.

Just because you have a gun doesnt mean you have to pull the trigger AKA mustnt press the big red button marked "Do Not Press"

No joy for all you Rover McRoverface fans: NASA's next Mars bot is christened Perseverance

Re: Ok then...

Schiaparelli McSmashface

Beagley McSmashynopejustcouldntphonehomeface.

Can you hear me now? Roadtesting Anker's first Bluetooth speakerphone

Re: a touch bigger than a hockey puck

Yes is it one of the round yellow ones with a hole in the middle or the smaller blue ones that look like the offspring of an ice cube and those packing chips?

HMRC claims victory in another IR35 dispute to sting Nationwide contractor for nearly £75k in back taxes

Rigged definition of an employee

Its helpful when HMRC have basically rigged the definition of an employee to be be "anyone we think should have paid tax at an employees rate".

Wankers.

Brexit Britain changes its mind, says non, nein, no to Europe's unified patent court – potentially sealing its fate

Benoit Battistelli

Dear El Reg

Looking back in your article history it appears we missed a final update of what happened to the EPO after the loon departed? Is it all sunshine and roses now? I have popcorn going stale....

Sincerely

Inquiring minds

Our 'solution is killing us in a number of areas' IBM said about doomed £175m Co-Op Insurance project

Re: Oh look, another failed megaproject

But but - I thought they ditched most of their Hardware and Software lines to focus on "services".

Surely that means they are brilliant at it?