Posts by Fading

John McAfee dead: Antivirus tycoon killed himself in prison after court OK'd extradition, says lawyer

Re: Colourful?

Just a thought - they may not be the same people.

Pub landlords on notice as 'Internet of Beer' firm not only pulls pints, but can also clean the lines

Re: No surprise there...

So knowing when to put a northern head on a pint of ale then.....

Today I shall explain how dual monitors work using the medium of interpretive dance

Re: Laptop + Monitor = two computers?

Have an upvote for mouse without borders - nice little program I use daily. Two problems - the odd occasion when it loses connection and you need to re-enter the security key and secondly, Excel does not like what it does to the clipboard (even if you disable this feature) - causes problems copying and pasting large datasets (well large for excel).

How many remote controls do you really need? Answer: about a bowl-ful

Another Harmony owner here.

Whilst it takes a bit of effort to get the activities right I do like the harmony remote control. Still have the problem of my Echo spot trying to take control of the Marantz amp whenever Alexa feels like it but that can be solved with a few buttons and a stern "alexa go home" command.

Former IT manager from Essex pleads guilty to defrauding the NHS of £800k

Perhaps he should have had his sister own the companies......

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/matt-hancock-failed-to-declare-sister-worked-for-company-that-won-nhs-contracts/ar-BB1fILPj

Diary of a report writer and his big break into bad business

Re: A (La)TeX user writes:

There is something lacking in the Word training that users seem to receive (if they have even had Word training). I suspect a basic version of Word without styles, limited fonts unless expressly installed, easy access and editing of formatting codes and a simpler interface would be a better product for the majority (hmm, I think I've just described Wordperfect for DOS) .

Word tries to do too much some of which is better suited to DTP software and hides too much from the unwary.

Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy

I suspect there is a psychological explanation...

Where the user has convinced themselves that only an expert can fix the problem. No matter how patiently you try to explain a solution, their conviction that they can't solve it is absolute. Time constraints and panic feed this conviction far beyond the place where reason can reach them.

Hacking is not a crime – and the media should stop using 'hacker' as a pejorative

Re: The quick hack

Nothing is as permanent as a temporary fix....

Now there's another thing on Earth that be can seen from space: UK lappy sales in pandemic-struck 2020

Re: Include me in these stats...

The drive is probably the only user upgradeable bit - and with the AMD chip the second smaller M2 slot is available to use (need a half height 2242 NVMe drive though so choice is limited).

Include me in these stats...

Picked up a Lenovo Yoga slim 7 with a AMD 4500U and I am impressed with the build quality and performance of such a small slim device (doubles the 3d Mark score of my Alienware 17xr4 - admittedly a 7 year old laptop but still going strong). SWMBO was very happy with it (helped it was Orchid purple rather than the typical silver/black).

Takes from the taxpayer, gives to the old – by squishing a bug in Thatcherite benefits system

Re: Dennis Moore

Probably an anthophobia sufferer.

Pirate Bay co-founder criticises Parler for its lack of resilience

Re: Geeks versus Politicians

Your willingness to engage is commendable and you should not give up. You are unlikely to change an antagonist poster's mind with a few words on a forum but there is often a chance of at least making the silent readers think. By holding your equanimity and providing well reasoned counter points your example is there in black and white (or whatever the colour scheme is) for more than just the poster you are responding to. Avoiding contentious language, crass generalisations and acknowledging the humanity of everyone is the way to be a light in these dark times.

As a side note it looks like Parler will be back and hosted on Russian servers - I'm not sure this is a win for anyone (whilst hosted on AWS Amazon actually had some control over Parler - now there won't be any).

Re: Geeks versus Politicians

So you are suggesting you cannot be conservative, non-racist, democracy supporting and inclusive?

Re: Geeks versus Politicians

Your point being history is repeated by allowing the promotion of violence, insurrection and racism? My point is that the promotion of violence, insurrection and racism are symptoms and merely suppressing the symptoms will not get the change we (the human race) really need. If anything the suppression itself becomes another justification for people to feel the way they do. Is the goal to have a better world or merely sweep the bad things under the carpet?

Would it not have been better to flood Parler with non-racist, democracy supporting, inclusive posts and posters? Highlight the weakness of the causes being put forward, the disjointed thinking and paranoia? Lance the boil and let it heal in the light and air, not just spread the poison elsewhere?

Re: Geeks versus Politicians

If you learn nothing from history - that is how it repeats. Now remind me how well suppression and exclusions work against the disaffected? Helps bring people into the fold and heal wounds? Promoting insurrection isn't in itself a "bad" thing - e.g. insurrection against Pol Pot or Joseph Stalin was admirable. When insurrection is being promoted against a free and fair democracy that's when you know the promoters are feeling excluded - is suppression and exclusion going to help them accept they can make a difference in a legal and democratic way?

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

Arrrgh the suppressed memories......

Are rising again .... Nurse! Nurse! More dried frog pills please.... After the curse of replacing hard drives, re-installing XP, a multitude of driver discs because the XP CD-ROM didn't have anything close to get the modem card working, only to have to re-activate windows by calling microsoft.... I think I'm coming out in hives....

Games Workshop finds that in the grim darkness of the 3rd millennium, there is only ERP

Just need a few Mekboyz...

and a couple of prayers to Gork and Mork and the ERP would be up and running (paint it red for better performance)...

The CIA's 'entire' collection of UFO records has been made available for you to sigh at

Re: A matter of interpretation

I guess you need to know how many can dance on the head of a pin before you can determine the associated dimensions.

What's that you got there, AMD? More Ryzen chips? Yeah, OK, we could do with some of those

Re: Consider Ali Express Xeon mother boards

Nice but older Xeons tend to lack a modern feature set - especially the motherboards. PCIe4, 2.5Gb and above networking, wifi 6, M.2 NVMe - no older Xeons support these features so whilst you have similar cinebench performance you are missing a lot of "nice to haves" (or essentials depending on your needs).

'Following the science' rhetoric led to delay to UK COVID-19 lockdown, face mask rules

Re: Masks WERE/ARE science

Oh and the latest from the Lancet:

"Facemasks and shields offer protection from larger droplets but their effectiveness against airborne transmission is less certain. Advice on spending time indoors should also focus on improved ventilation and avoiding crowded spaces."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30514-2/fulltext

Re: Masks WERE/ARE science

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/scientific-brief-sars-cov-2.html

"COVID-19 can sometimes be spread by airborne transmission"

Re: Masks WERE/ARE science

The Official UK advice:

"The best available scientific evidence is that, when used correctly, wearing a face covering may reduce the spread of coronavirus droplets in certain circumstances, helping to protect others."

"may in certain circumstances." let that sink in. And from Sweden's public health body:

"We do not currently recommend face masks in public settings since the scientific evidence around the effectiveness of face masks in combatting the spread of infection is unclear. However, there may be situations where face masks can be useful despite the uncertain state of knowledge about the effects."

Hardly "Established Science" is it?

Cloth masks are for reducing the droplet infection vector - unfortunately even the CDC now admits Covid-19 also has an airborne transmission vector.

(now where's my lab-coat)

Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty

Re: ... their ability to understand why they should not do it.

"Amstrad unfortunately faced a lot of criticism early on in the PC1512's life, with rumours that the models fitted with hard disks were liable to overheating. This turned out to be entirely false - fed by the fact that all other PCs came fitted with cooling fans in the power supply or system unit, and the Amstrad PCs didn't have one. Amstrad were already well known for building "cost-effective" versions of electronic goods, and with this consumers and businesses surmised that perhaps Amstrad cut one too many corners with its PC design in order to keep the prices cheap. In actual fact, the design choice to put the power supply in the monitor was a clever one as it meant the system unit didn't need a fan at all. The rumours got a lot of press, and it was too late to change the minds of the consumer, so Alan Sugar famously gave a press release announcing they would fit a fan to all PC1512 models with a hard disk." - from http://www.retroisle.com/DOSDays/computers/Amstrad%20PC1000/amstrad_pc1000.php

Sometimes a fan isn't there for cooling :)

There are two sides to every story, two ends to every cable

The above can apply to many sales bods of all levels....

Knowledge of the product may, in some cases, risk the sale.....

Glastonbury hippy shop Hemp in Avalon rapped for spouting 'plandemic' pseudoscience

The official advice on Masks in the UK:

"The best available scientific evidence is that, when used correctly, wearing a face covering may reduce the spread of coronavirus droplets in certain circumstances, helping to protect others."

Compared with the official advice on wearing masks in Sweden:

"We do not currently recommend face masks in public settings since the scientific evidence around the effectiveness of face masks in combatting the spread of infection is unclear. However, there may be situations where face masks can be useful despite the uncertain state of knowledge about the effects."

Not exactly full on in the support of cloth mask wearing are they?

Master boot vinyl record: It just gives DOS on my IBM PC a warmer, more authentic tone

Re: Ah the good old days

I have a similar memory - I had to do a tape recording of it to run it as the combined unit I had the record player on didn't have any outputs (just a couple of connected poor quality speakers). Of course though the computers we were using back then "booted" from ROM normally into BASIC (unless you had a Sharp MZ700 then you had to load BASIC in by tape first).

I work therefore I ache: Logitech aims to ease WFH pains with Ergo M575 trackball mouse

I have the Elecom trackball....

Sitting on my desk in the office. Unfortunately I've been WFH since March. I have noticed though that the previous issue I had with using a mouse at work has not been so bad since WFH (I get bouts of cubital tunnel syndrome) . I put this down to having a nice weighted M65 mouse rather than the cheap plastic tat that was supplied by Dell.

Linux 5.10 to make Year 2038 problem the Year 2486 problem

Re: Fish in 2486

By then the fish would have taken over and I for one welcome our piscine overlords........

What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases

Excel isn't that bad.....

Whilst I understand the hate - it works well if you never open csv or txt files with it. Link the underlying data using the "Manage data model" and then anyone will be able to use the functionality in power pivot for the analysis.

In business Excel is ubiquitous and even the upper echelons know how to navigate around it. So whilst a dashboard linked to a database would be better - in my experience no two managers want the same view of the data (twice) so building individual dashboards can get pretty expensive. At least with the drag and drop functionality in power pivot and with no access to the underlying data you get a bit of peace and quiet......

Something to look forward to: Being told your child or parent was radicalized by an AI bot into believing a bonkers antisemitic conspiracy theory

Still waiting for the A.I. Descartian moment.

Once an A.I. is able to doubt the training data being fed to it then we may have found some A.I. at last. What that says about those that are unable to doubt what they read on Facebook et. al.......?

Microsoft to charge $200 for 32 GPU cores, sliver of CPU clockspeed, 6GB RAM, 512GB SSD... and a Blu-Ray player

Re: will either of them do 4k/60fps?

I don't see why not - the current 5700XT is as capable as a 1080Ti and I can play at 4k60 on many games already (GTA 5 looks good with all the bells and whistles turned up). The X box series X's GPU is (on paper) more powerful as a 2080 Super which is a step up from the 1080 Ti (approx 10% depending on game) .

Re: why do you think it's not possible to do any of that with a PC?

Erm, I do have an HDMI cable from my PC with a 1080Ti at my desk that reaches the over to the 4K TV. Mosey over to the sofa with my Steam controller and I'm good to go (I also have a PS4 pro plugged in) . Sound is routed via ARC from the TV into my Marantz amp and it couldn't be simpler.

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

Shocked I tell thee...

How shocked was I that the Irish Data Protection Commission actually did something (must be from their new fancy offices https://www.thejournal.ie/data-protection-commissioner-new-office-1488473-May2014 ) .....

Life with Amazon's fitness band: Upload your half-naked pics to see how fat you'll look without exercise. You now sound stressed – relax!

Re: Dystopia

Whilst the sample size (no pun intended) is pretty small, what I have found is if someone feels "fat" instead of driving them to lose weight the opposite occurs (desire to eat comfort food and be miserable) . When they feel "thin" (scales have told them they have "lost a pound") this encourages them to do more and eat better and puts a "skip in their step".

I can only assume this "fatness" band will encourage consumption and comfort shopping - hmm maybe Amazon are smarter than I gave them credit for......

Physical locks are less hackable than digital locks, right? Maybe not: Boffins break in with a microphone

So we need to upgrade the physical locks....

To include a random resistance to key insertion and pin engagement - I'm thinking something with magnets (not for any other reason than I think magnets are still pretty damn cool)......

Someone please have mercy on this poorly Ubuntu parking machine that has been force-fed maudlin autotuned tripe

Re: Thanks for the tips

Autotune is prevalent in many genres now and is frequently used in "pop" where previously you would have had double/treble tracked vocals (thank-you Messrs. Stock, Aitken and Waterman, not). Whilst I don't get a headache from its overuse it does set my teeth on edge.

Thankfully the likelihood of my favourite tracks requiring "autotune" is fairly minimal as "screaming and yelling" in front of heavy electric guitar riffs rarely needs to be harmonic.....

You think the UK coronavirus outbreak was bad? Just wait till winter: Study shows test-and-trace system is failing

Re: Because the modelling has been so accurate thus far.......

There will always be morons. Legislating for morons is a downward spiral and will create the dystopian nightmare described in many recent teen novels.

Because the modelling has been so accurate thus far.......

Did the model assume 100% compliance by those tested and traced? Fiddling with inputs and publishing scary papers based on outputs from non-validated models makes good copy but doesn't add anything to the sum of human knowledge - ultimately it is just computational game. Second waves are already occurring in some countries (even where mask wearing is the norm) - this shouldn't be about stopping the second wave but keeping it at levels the NHS can cope with (unless the plan is to wait for a vaccine - but that is going to be an expensive and open ended wait) .

T&T is the only one tool - we could provide postcode alerts with infection rates, public transport infection alerts - inform us all where and when so we can decide for ourselves the likelihood of exposure and isolate accordingly. At the moment the figures we get to see are out of date and the granularity sucks (local authority level).

Elite name on Brit scene sponsors retro video games preservation project at the Centre for Computing History

Re: Screenshot

CGA (cough)

There was an Elite plus on PC that had MCGA graphics.

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

Denial is the first defence.

It is a lot easier to trouble shoot if you know the events leading up to the problem - unfortunately the user is more likely to be a hindrance to this and is probably best kept out of harms way (sent somewhere else so they don't overhear the aghast swearing and incredulous expletives). No one likes to be publicly shown-up and there are benefits for keeping known episodes of idiocy on the QT as long as they know you know (and with Karma you never know when you may require such a face saving) .

DXC says ransomware attack disrupted customer operations at insurance services arm but barely left a scratch

Nice to read an update on El reg...

As DXC/Xchanging have still failed to update us officially on the incident (not insurance sector BTW but we did have an outage). I am still wondering if this was linked to the Cisco ransom episode (as DXC are a Cisco Partner).

Intel couldn't shrink to 7nm on time – but it was able to reduce one thing: Its chief engineer's employment

Re: For now, it doesn't matter yet

Then you are not looking hard enough - the latest Epyc are regularly scoring in the 500 for FP Rate and near 200 on FP Speed. Now add in cost per core and Xeon is not looking good.

Re: For now, it doesn't matter yet

So why only focus on the CPU 2017 integer speed? Epyc seems to do pretty well in FP rates, FP Speed and integer rates? Or was that the only metric that supports your view?

Re: For now, it doesn't matter yet

Erm isn't that a per-thread figure? AMD offers more threads for less money and less power than the equivalent Intel chips so I'm not sure what the win is supposed to be for Intel (and you also don't need to turn off SMT/Hyperthreading because of security concerns with AMD).

Intel's 7nm is busted, chips delayed, may have to use rival foundries to get GPUs out for US govt exascale super

B550 motherboards

Are not direct replacements for B450 motherboards - they are a step up in quality and specifications (to the point where the cheaper X570s look poor in comparison) . The motherboard manufacturers have finally accepted that AMD chips are not the cheap and cheerful option (and therefore only require cheap and cheerful motherboards) but quality chips in their own right (I'd swap my skylake-x for a ryzen 9 3950 at the drop of a hat - even on a B550 board) .

Competition isn't just about prices but also about driving innovation and quality.

Bill Gates debunks 'coronavirus vaccine is my 5G mind control microchip implant' conspiracy theory

So if it was true.....

Will the vaccine crash randomly? Will I lose functionality in the next update? Will I need a physical upgrade to run the vaccine properly? How much memory do I need?

Citrix denies dark web claim of network compromise and ransomware attack

Unrelated to the ransomware...

attack on DXC recently? Are they the "third party" mentioned in the above?

Oh what a cute little animation... OH MY GOD. (Not acceptable, even in the '80s)

Adult floppies...

Smut was more like magic-eye pictures in those days - you had to stare for a few minutes trying to work out what it was.....

UN warns of global e-waste wave as amount of gadgets dumped jumps 21% in 5 years

Or...

My spare room - still have 486 DX2 and AMD 64 3200+ tower systems in there, a drawer full of old mobile phones, some 8 bit computers (Amstrad and C64) plus CRT monitors.

(Icon because there are a fair few old and dirty keyboards as well)

I suspect I am not the only one hoarding old kit.

CompSci student bitten by fox after feeding it McNuggets

I see an obvious flaw in their plan.

"University authorities will attempt to reduce debris in the hope that trims campus rodent populations and causes foxes to move elsewhere of their own accord." but according to the story the students are another food source - so perhaps they need to be culled so the foxes move on?