Posts by Tom 38

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

Re: Sign me up

Google Pixel support is 3 years from first sold by Google, or 18 months after last sold by Google, whichever is longer - that's the same, no?

Ports in a storm: The Matebook 14 won't set your world on fire, but it's still a half-decent laptop

Re: USB-C for power

My Dell is (in day to day usage) only powered by USB-C, which on modern Dells has replaced the proprietary dock connector on the base of the laptop. There is still a "standard" power adaptor, but not the same standard that Dell have been using for past 10 years.

Mine comes from a Dell Thunderbolt dock, which provides 130W USB-C PD, as well as two external screens (one 4k, one 1080p), gigabit wired ethernet and a bunch of USB 3 and USB-C ports for connectivity.

It's nice that everything can be done with a standard system, anyone with a USB-C powered laptop can plug in to my dock and instantly use the extra screens, charging etc. It's less nice that USB-C PD only goes up to 100W, so this Dell workstation class laptop (Precision 5540) that wants 130W can only use specific Dell implementations of it :/

If you don't have such extremes, there are a bunch of very nice USB-C docks doing standard USB-C PD that can be obtained quite reasonably.

Oracle Zooms past rivals to run TikTok’s cloud, take stake alongside WalMart and ByteDance investors

Re: This has nothing to do with where data is stored

I don't keep up with US politics, which candidate is the one who won't give a DNA sample to prove he didn't rape a 13 yr old girl?

Should we all consolidate databases for the storage benefits? Reg vultures deploy DevOps, zoos, haircuts

In my experience, you have to design your database to answer the questions you need to answer. A wide variety of questions will undoubtedly require several different ways of organising your data in order to answer different questions. Consolidating all your data in to one form leads to sub optimal design or performance as you try to make "one size fits all" work. One big lake where all your data lives, multiple exports of that data in to the formats required for your use cases.

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

Re: Sorry, I don't understand

Its The Cloud, its magic, it never has tech problems because the rainbow pixies make everything Just Work and customer applications run smoothly for all eternity without the same kind of issues the useless overpaid do-nothing hobgoblins in the old company server room said they had to cope with.

Its the exact opposite of that. Running things in the cloud, everything can fail all the time, and designing your applications around that fact is what allows your hobgoblins to manage more applications with more resilience than they could curating pet servers in their server room.

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

Rosetta

Two thoughts:

* Rosetta will run most everything fine anyway. Apple have good experience of doing this, plus the transition this time is not such a large step - most holdout software that didn't work on the original rosetta were "Classic" apps (eg, for OS 9)

* Most app developers will release newer versions that work on both intel and arm, its not going to be as significant a porting effort as ppc -> amd64.

Court hearing on election security is zoombombed on 9/11 anniversary with porn, swastikas, pics of WTC attacks

Re: What?

Nuh-uh - it comes down to permission vs ability. Every participant had the ability to share, but only specific people were given the permission to share. In a traditional courtroom, everyone there has the ability to say anything, but only specific people have permission at any point.

To use your analogy, only the decorators were given the paint and brushes, but they are sitting there where anyone can get them. It would be a crime (vandalism) for someone attending the open house to pick up a paintbrush and use it to paint green dots in the kitchen. They were given access to the house for viewing it, not for painting it.

The actual zoom issue is in cost, they have gone with a pro/business license, which is around £10 - £15 per month. In order to have specific co-hosts, you need the webinar option, which is an extra £26 - £32 per month - its not insignificant.

Re: What?

In a real world analogy, "breaking and entering" doesn't require that you actually break anything, just that you are not entering the building for lawful purposes. For instance, if you are invited to your friends house, but steal his dog while you are there, its still burglary. If the front door is wide open and you go in and take valuables, its still burglary.

With respect to "hacking", the CFAA in the US starts off by saying Whoever having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access.... The law doesn't really mention hacking, just that you have accessed what you were not allowed to. The Computer Misuse Act in the UK has similar language.

IBM made ‘top-down’ efforts to fire older workers, says US employment discrimination watchdog

Oh no, not the meetings!

That will scare them straight! What goes on in these meetings? "Now then IBM, I want you to sit there and reflect on how naughty you've been and how this affects others".

China, Russia and Iran all attacking US elections and using some nasty new tactics, says Microsoft

Re: Sorry for Laughing but...

Former NSA boss Bill Binney, who left in 2001, and had his security clearances revoked in 2007, forcing the closure of his business and source of income?

I'm sure he's got neither a grudge nor a financial motive for saying things and getting on TV...

Ireland unfriends Facebook: Oh Zucky Boy, the pipes, the pipes are closing…from glen to US, and through the EU-side

Re: Ummm...

I think you've misunderstood what he's saying (or perhaps Clegg has inadvertently said what he means) - they aren't worried about the safety of the data being transferred, they are worried about the safety of their money whilst they transfer data. "we're going to keep transferring data, and we're working on legal arguments so we can't be fined for doing so".

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

You mean Baroness Harding, aka Mrs John Penrose MP:

Penrose sits on the advisory board of think tank '1828', which calls for the NHS to be replaced by an insurance system and for Public Health England to be scrapped.

Incidentally, Baroness H has just been promoted to be the chairperson for the National Institute for Health Protection, "a new body that will be formed as a result of the merging of Public Health England and NHS Test and Trace".

I'm sure its totally above board.

Re: State Aid????

"Republic" refers to the socio-political power ideology, ie where the power is vested. It says nothing about the source of that power, ie whether it is a democracy, oligarchy or autocracy.

You can have a democratic monarchy, an autocratic republic, and anything in between.

The US is clearly a presidential republic with representative democracy. Saying USA is a republic not a democracy is something low intellect GOP sycophants say because their "enemies" are the Democrats and they don't want to associate with things with "democrat" in their name, but its factually a non sequitur.

It's like saying "That dog is not male, it's brown!".

No Huawei, America: Samsung scores $6.6bn for 5G at US giant Verizon

Re: What about UK ?

Apart from narrow area’s in inner cities, stations, airports, hotels and conference/event centres where tall building will screw with signals anyway the ROI of hundred’s of mini-masts will never allow them to be deployed so mmWave will be just marketing puff

However, those are the places that will truly benefit from it. Pre-covid rush hour, or at sports/concert arenas have been historically poor for connectivity because of all the people. Out in the woop woops, you don't need that sort of service, regular 4G/5G would suffice.

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

Recommendations please

I'm still with 123-reg for a personal domain that I don't really use at the moment - in fact, I just renewed it as it expired this month. I was planning to move it off 123-reg aster t he renewal went through, but my plan was to move it to GoDaddy, which apparently is the same company as 123-reg now.

Any recommendations? Don't need any hosting or email, just domain registration and DNS services.

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

Re: Oh the joys of "cloud"

Codespaces is not code repositories, its an environment for developing changes and running the stack of software you are developing in the cloud. Its an evolution of things like docker-compose to do "local" development, but running the containers you need (and the ones containing the code you are changing) remotely instead of locally.

It solves the problem of "I've just been put on this team, what do I have to do to start making changes to the code and testing it out" - with codespaces, you just start editing code in either a browser based editor, or in a local VS editor, and the changes are automatically run on instances spun up for your work. The idea is to speed up the time before a developer can start contributing, and reduce issues around different environments for different developers.

Snowden was right: US court deems NSA bulk phone-call snooping illegal, possibly unconstitutional, and probably pointless anyway

Re: Come home Ed, all is forgiven.

Two wrongs don't make a right, but Trump might pardon Snowden to smear Biden - "look at all the illegal things Obama and Biden did". I think its unlikely though, I don't think Snowden is well loved by Trump's target demographic.

Former HP CEO and Republican Meg Whitman – who split HP with mixed success – says Donald Trump can't run a business

Re: China

You can see the 46 different things on Biden's platform plans for trade/China, for instance.

Shocking no one, not enough foreigners applied for H-1B visas this year so US govt ran a second lottery

Re: You'd have to be mad -- or desperate -- to come here on an H1B

"Yellow Peril", a term which is just as racist as other designations that are now beyond the pale

Ironically, "beyond the pale" is also an ethnic slur of sorts, it meant going outside the British controlled zone around Dublin and into the wilds of the savage Gaelic Irish where anything might happen.

Docker shocker: Cash-strapped container crew threatens to delete 4.5 petabytes of unloved images

Re: 4.5PB? Is that all?

To me the interesting part of the story is that Docker analyzed the data......

I do not use Docker..so do not know of the TOS.. but.. this means they can snoop on my image? Not what I want in a provider...

Then pay for/run a private provider. The free tier allows anyone to publish public images that anyone can pull. "Anyone" includes the people hosting it.

Why so salty, Ceres? Is it on account of your underground oceans and cryovolcanism?

You heard about Pluto?

That's messed up, right?

At historic Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google CEOs hearing, congressmen ramble, congresswomen home in on tech market abuse

Re: Only Jeff bothered to find an interesting room for the video-chat hearing ...

He didn't actually mention party, apart from when quoting specific congress critters. Are you saying that Debbie Lesko and Martha Roby asked stupid questions?

How Bude: Google's sole-financed private undersea pipe to make a landing in Cornwall

Re: All the more data for Google to slurp

It's a private cable between google data centres - what "more data" could they look at that they couldn't already?

It's been five years since Windows 10 hit: So... how's that working out for you all?

Windows 10 worked out super-great for me

After the "update" auto-installed and broke my dual boot Windows 7 / Linux desktop, it prodded me to finally move my desktop and laptop over to Linux full time, everything has worked 100% since then.

Don't strain yourself, Zuck, only democracy at stake... Facebook makes half-hearted effort to flag election lies by President Trump

Re: why aren't postal votes considered a fraud risk in the US?

Pervasive voter fraud, I never claimed PERVASIVE now did I?

The votes are in, and after a tumultuous 3 months a winner finally emerges from the counts. However a fraud case emerges in 2 states, putting a few hundred thousand votes into doubt.

Username checks out.

Chips for Huawei are fried: TSMC stops shipping parts to Middle Kingdom mega-maker this September

Re: re: becoming more and more like the old USSR

la fête des soya de La Rochelle?

Your industry needs you: Database engineers, sysadmins and developer vacancies revealed

El reg penguin wrangler

You'll become the driver behind the automated trolling...

Or at least, that's how I read it - I knew bombastic_bob was a Special Projects Bureau job to keep the comments lively and us viewing more ads..

Hundreds of forgotten corners of mega-corp websites fall into the hands of spammers and malware slingers

This is an Azure problem

They could prevent this in so many ways, but they continually allow it to happen to their clients - it would be trivial to fix by maintaining a either a blocklist of previously issued names and/or adding a random/client derived prefix in to these hostnames.

It's National Cream Tea Day and this time we end the age-old debate once and for all: How do you eat yours?

Re: Hmmm

Clotted cream isn't actually that difficult to make it just takes time - cook double/heavy cream for 12 hours at 70C for 12 hours, let it cool to room temperature, chill for 8+ hours in the fridge, and then separate the thick clotted cream on the top from the thin liquid (whey?) left behind. Whip it all together to blend in the crust, add some of that liquid if its too thick, homemade clotted cream.

Only problem is that's 3 days until you can have your scones, buying a tub of Rodda's is far easier :)

If you don't have cream why bother making scones?

Re: There is a third option:

There's one kind of jam that goes great with meats, and that is caramelised onion jam.

Smartwatches win the consumer tech sector for Q1 2020 as locked-down folk take up fight against corona-carbs

My personal opinion: too expensive, not enough functionality. I re-took up running again during lockdown, and I don't want to run with my phone, so that rules out any device without actual GPS sensors. Think I'm going to stick to my £7 Casio F-91W

DevOps to DevOops: Docker Hub proves so secure that 430 Docker images out of 2,500 have no vulnerabilities

Re: Age old problem.

You'd think there'd be some kind of automated dependency/security tool by now that realises that a dependency is out of date, updates it and rebuilds everything that was reliant on it (or contains an unannounced copy of it, which is far more likely!). But no.

You mean like dependabot or renovate? Combined with trivy for SAST scanning? Running on a schedule so you're aware of new vulnerabilities in existing code? No?

Docker doesn't hide things behind complexity/obscurity, its simply a tool for packaging an application as an immutable container. Once you've got this container, you can apply things like trivy to it very simply. It actually makes all this stuff a lot easier.

ZFS co-creator boots 'slave' out of OpenZFS codebase, says 'casual use' of term is 'unnecessary reference to a painful experience'

Re: My first thought:

These terms don't come from the ZFS project, but from the Solr project. They have master/slave replication, but they also have a node which checks things - its called an Overseer node., which is a bit close to the bone. Changing these terms to "primary", "replica" and "monitor" doesn't change the understanding of what these roles are, but does remove racially charged terms.

Ironically, in Solr the master does far more work than the slave nodes, as it does all the document ingestion, indexing and searching, whilst the slave just copies the index from the master and does searching.

'One rule for me, another for them' is all well and good until it sinks the entire company's ability to receive emails

At 10 Mb and costing £1,000, we thought we would never ever fill it.

That's just 28 x 360kb floppies, it's hardly inconceivable..

Microsoft unshackles WSL2 Linux kernel from Windows 10 image for future fettling via Windows Update

Re: It's not an OS

It's not an OS, it's just an optimized game playing environment that lets you email occasionally.

Even if it was just that, that is an Operating System. What runs on an Xbox is an OS. Tedious fanboyism is tedious.

Logitech G915 TKL: Numpad-free mechanical keyboard clicks all the right boxes

Re: Backlighting

My cheap TKL mechanical keyboard (Drevo Tyrfing v2 with Outemu switches, £40) has RGB LED backlights, and there is a magic key combo to press to cycle through the different options for that, one of which is just white backlights (and one is just "off").

Huawei launches UK charm offensive: We've provided 2G, 3G and 4G for 20 years, and you're worried about 5G?

Re: The bigger issue is rising Chinese power

In 1898 Britain signed a treaty for a 99 year lease from China on Hong Kong

We leased New Kowloon and the New Territories, which were bits of the mainland with a good water supply. Hong Kong was never part of the lease, until negotiations in 1984 led to the UK exchanging HK island for the "rights" being "enjoyed" by HK citizens right now. It would have been very difficult to keep HK without the NT...

Hoverbikes, Hyperloops and sub-orbital hijinks: Yes, the '3rd, 4th and 5th Dimensions of Travel' are coming soon

Re: Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

The world record was 82mph from 1854 until the 1930s, when the Flying Scotsman and the exquisitely beautiful Mallard got it up to mid 120s mph.

Talk about a control plane... US Air Force says upcoming B-21 stealth bomber will use Kubernetes

Re: I wonder

If you're doing things in k8s and writing logs to PVs (disk) in your pods, you've not quite got to grips with k8s yet.

Bite me? It's 'byte', and that acronym is Binary Interface Transfer Code Handler

Re: Colour me square

As an 18 yr old, I had a summer job as an accounts clerk. One bit of it was boring as fuck, so I wrote something in Lotus 1-2-3 that did it all for me, just had to fill in the rows in the sheet each day; when the head accountant saw it, she went white as a sheet and told me to redo it all again, this time using the calculator.... (and no, not some fancy accounts calculator with a printer outputting an audit log, just a regular desk calculator)

dessous and dessus.

One means below, one means above. Difference in pronunciation is basically the length of the final "oo" sound. Jesus wept :/

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

80 characters is roughly what a brain can read and comprehend both the start and end of the line. If you're blessed with really big monitors, 80 characters means you can have several files open side by side without wrapping - as a developer, nothing I write is in isolation, the more context I can have visible on screen at one time is beneficial.

One thing I've noticed on projects with no line length limits is more complex code - longer lines allow more levels of indentation before a developer is prompted "hey, this is a bit too long now, maybe refactor?".

A lot of my development is in Python, and there is a good trend to use psf/black to format your code automatically. It removes almost every single tedious discussion about code style, and everything looks the same. It has chosen a default max line length of 88; its not clear whether this was accidental or deliberate, but 88 is a white supremacist "hidden number", so I either change it to 80 or 90, depending on whether people argue for longer lines or not :)

I notice Linus is not also suggesting a change in git commit message format from 50 chars for title, 72 for comments, both of which are derived from 80 character terminals.

For the price tag, this iPad Pro keyboard better damn well be Magic: It isn't... but it's not completely useless either

Re: A pokey terraced house in Middlesborough for a month

Now I want parmo :/

Hooray! It's IT Day! Let's hear it for the lukewarm mugs of dirty water that everyone seems to like so much

At our rugby club there were giant tea urns after the game, but they didn't have tea in them.

Coffee is too bitter, and cannot be consumed in the quantities required for refreshment. I like a coffee occasionally, a shot of espresso or even a lungo in the morning. But to sip that swill that is filter coffee all day long like the Americans? No thanks. Similarly, I'm fat enough without adding the filth that is a Starbucks venti latte. I've always found it strange that Starbucks, a coffee company, have so many drinks that are designed to hide the flavour of the coffee.

For me, tea is a total cure-all. Hangover, queasy stomach? Nice cup of tea will make you feel better. Dehydrated? Nice big cup of tea. Cold? Big cup of tea. If you have too many coffees, you can get the jitters and not sleep all night. Too many teas, you're just flushing the loo slightly more frequently. I start each day with 3 or 4 20oz cups of tea (SportsDirect mug size, although mine is a Chewbacca mug).

DirectX comes to Linux (via WSL2): Microsoft unveils tricks needed to flash a GPU at a penguin

This means that the guest needs to be able to "speak" DX12, which is why we pulled DX12 into Linux.

Nah, still don't buy it. For AI, you need CUDA. MS didn't need to expose DX12 API to Linux in order to do that, they just needed to insert a shim between Windows GPU driver and WSL that exposes CUDA. There's no need to expose DX12 to Linux.

MS's demo used a modified tensorflow that used DX12 API to access the GPU. Tensorflow shouldn't be doing that, it should just talk CUDA. This is Extend - "oh just use our API".

Why the fuck would you do this? So you want to expose the native GPU to linux from WSL? Absolutely fine. We need CUDA and we need OpenGL. Are there thousands of linux apps begging for DirectX support? No there are not. Why would you add this layer? (apart from the obvious: its "Extend" time)

Microsoft announces official Windows package manager. 'Not a package manager' users snap back

WinGet is a response to requests for "the ability to script what is required to setup a developer machines"

So, Ansible, but Invented Here.

Easyjet hacked: 9 million people's data accessed plus 2,200 folks' credit card details grabbed

Re: Highly sophisticated

... The incompetent local IT manager who was the 1st line manager before somehow getting the 2nd line managers roll ...

Was it cheese and ham? Any mayo or salad?