Posts by theblackhand

East London council blurts thousands of residents' email addresses in To field blunder

Re: Apology accepted

I admire your optimism that only one level of categorisation is necessary...

Home office setup with built-in boiling water tap for tea and coffee without getting up is a monument to deskcess

"... than poorly heated Legionnaires' disease coffee made from a warm tap."

How can you get Legionnaires' from a tap that's been broken since 2017?

And if you're fast enough to get to it in the few seconds between the maintenance people "fixing" it and it breaking again, I suspect what ever gave you superhuman speed likely also gave you an improved immune system.

Turns out humans are leading AI systems astray because we can't agree on labeling

Simples...

We need another standard....

And an AI to create the standard of course.

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

A little harsh

Having supported Adobe/Coral products on Windows and Mac's in the 90's, the differences were night and day in terms of what you could produce.

Windows was fine as long as you didn't run into memory problems (i.e.you weren't doing anything large) and didn't require clip art or fonts. And even support for things like lartge capacity removable storage (i.e. Zip drives) was significantly more reliable on Mac's. And if you wanted to get material printed externally, the printing bureau was probably using a Mac so guess option didn't require IT support.

Over time those differences disappeared as Windows hardware overtook the PowerPC platforms and by the time I next had to deal with mixed Windows/Mac environments it was 2007 and the differences between the platforms were largely down to user familiarity with an OS rather than genuine differences - it was not uncommon to see high end Windows servers doing the heavy lifting with a mixture of Mac's/Windows boxes scattered through studios depending on user choice. That presented other issues, but they weren't unsolvable.

Groupware is not dead! HCL drops second beta of Notes/Domino version 12 and goes all low-code and cloudy

Re: Teams, obviously

Consistently the worst may give the impression that is unchanging (particularly if you used competitors and just wished it would do X "that" way - you could never accuse Notes of being just another clone...) there were changes.

Honest - maybe even some that were positive. Oh...those were bugs. Ignore me.

Bill Gates on climate change: Planting trees is not the answer, emissions need to be zeroed out to avoid disaster

Here's Mr Gates key statement about planting trees:

“It has obvious appeal for those of us who love trees, but it opens up a very complicated subject ... its effect on climate change appears to be overblown.”

30 million trees is able to capture the CO2 produced by 100,000 "average" people on this planet.

The UN believes that global population growth over the next 10 years will be 1.2 billion people. So 360 bn additional trees to offset population growth before we start looking into an overall reduction.

For the UK's part, the Tories are proposing an estimated 50 million trees a year or 0.5bn over 10 years for a population rise of 3.5 million in the same period. Approximately half the amount required.

Realistically, the UK would need a population decline of 3.5 million and planting 50 million trees a year to have a real effect. Or just the population decline...the trees are a rounding error even if they look pretty.

Linus Torvalds labels Super Bowl 'violent version of egg-and-spoon race'

Re: As an American, I can tell you some Super Bowl secrets

Can I offer you some broccoli?

UK Cabinet Office spokesman tells House of Lords: We're not being complacent about impact of SolarWinds hack

"If those vaccinated can still become carriers of the virus then the risk of the long gap before the booster jab is that it may make it more likely for vaccine-resistant mutations to develop."

While this is possible, the question is how do you deal with a limited supply of vaccine? Do you dose only the people you have two doses for or do you give lower levels of coverage to the largest group possible and hope that supplies increase to allow you to reduce the gap between doses?

Ethics/fairness suggest providing the greatest coverage is more important than "what if" risks givel the 40%+ mortality rates in the over 80s. Particularly when the "ideal" situation isn't possible.

As an approximation to the UK rollout (i.e. ignoring slow starts/acceleration as doses increase) of 2m doses a week, the "second dose within 12 weeks" delivers 65% coverage of the 13m target population within 7 weeks and 2nd doses within 8 weeks for a completion in 14 weeks. The "ideal" situation delivers 65% coverage of this same population within 14 weeks and completion in 16 weeks. Combined with patient transport/vaccine storage issues/scaling up vaccine supply chains/contingency in the event of vaccine shortages, I'm not sure there is any real argument for an alternative to the current method.

"The scientists' role is to provide the best estimates of numbers on the basis of knowledge available at the current time. Ditto the economists. "

The problem is that for most experts in any chosen field, there will be those with alternative views.

If we take Coronavirus, there have been scientists saying we aren't locking down fast enough based on very little evidence (that may later prove to be correct) and scientists that are saying we should lock down gradually as they want overwhelming evidence that it is the right thing to do.

While the tendency has been to blame the Government/SAGE, the role of the media where the are choosing multiple options and then pointing at the one that is viewed as most correct is easy.

I'm not trying to give the government a free pass - I think they have clearly made mistakes all through the handling of this crisis. Where I am a little more lenient is in distinguishing between being presented with evidence, letting departments/minsters discuss it and producing a resulting action. Historically this would have taken weeks or months but is being done in days or sometimes even hours.

Saying things has always been easier than doing them, particularly when many layers of bureaucracy is involved. And that is backed up by countries with devolved power doing better than those with centralised power.

File format conversion crisis delayed attempt to challenge US presidential election result

Re: baby eating Satan worshippers

And baby-eating Satan worshippers would seem to be an oxymoron based on rule #9

After 11 years, Australia declares its national broadband network is ‘built and fully operational’

Re: Fibre to the Premises

"5G...they can only install Antenna masts where there is Fibre... your essentially sharing a Fibre connection"

It doesn't have to be fibre, there are other backhaul options - microwave/radio are common and capable of significant speeds.

But yes, you will be sharing that backhaul connection. As you would with pretty much every Internet connectivity option.

Dutch officials say Donald Trump really did protect his Twitter account with MAGA2020! password

Isn't it a bit risky using you net worth as your lugguage combination?

Uri Geller calls off 20-year ban on Pokémon trading card that 'stole' his 'signature image'

Re: being willing to be involved in making yourself look a fool

Or the funniest thing you will ever see...

Who among you can resist an eight-core, 2.9GHz mini-PC or thin client that drives four displays?

Re: Not really embedded ready

"We looked at AMD embedded processors as a replacement for our Intel processors."

Is this with the latest designs or older units? AMD's embedded options have trailed the desktop/server CPU's in both core versions and process. 2020 embedded are the first ones that are likely to be competative with Intel (theres a similar story on the mobile side)

i.e.

2020 generation embedded: Zen 2 cores/5th gen GCN GPU/7 nm

2018 generation embedded: Zen+ cores/4th gen GCN GPU/14 nm

2015 generation embedded: Excavator cores/3rd gen GCN GPU/14 nm

Of those, it's only really the 2020 versions that are likely to be competative with Intel as they move to 7nm and start to outperform Intel 14nm+ or later chips.

And if you were testing against the 2015 generation chips, maybe AMD will give you a freebie 2020 version to make up for wasting your time.

"Since nVidia own ARM, that kind of makes them allies of Apple for the time being."

Being an ally of nVidia hasn't been a good thing historically - they tend to drive prices up until their allies start to struggle. Or run to an alternative.

Linus Torvalds hails 'historic' Linux 5.10 for ditching defunct addressing artefact

Re: bye bye 2038

Shhh - if they perfect stasis in our lifetime I was planning to use Y10K to fund my retirement

Everything's falling apart. The Moon is slowly rusting up – and it's probably Earth's fault

It's 2020

You really think the moon crumbling and falling from the sky will get more than a shrug and a "it doesn't surprise me"?

Remember that backdoor in Juniper gear? Congress sure does – even if networking biz wishes it would all go away

Re: Backdoor scorecard

So many downvotes....

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NSA_HALLUXWATER.jpg

If you are downvoting security references based on limited knowledge, maybe it's not knowledge but just biases and rumour? The NSA TAO leaks aren't exactly secret.

Re: Backdoor scorecard

Correction:

Cisco - yes

Juniper - yes

Huawei - YES

All part of the same NSA TAO group exploits revealed by Der Spiegel. Just because Huaweis firewall products aren't as popular in the west doesn't make them invulnerable.

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

Re: There must be a simpler fix...

Your fix is changing the target of the attack from application space (i.e. browser or ash session keys) to the kernel - deduce the code encryption keys at the kernel via a timing attack and you're back to the original issue

SD cards hop on the PCIe 4.0 bus to hit 4GB/s with version 8.0 of storage spec

Re: So not full speed on any Intel platform then

I'm wondering about power as well - while the standard may support 4GB/s there is also a lower 3GB/s option versus SDXC maxing out at 1GB/s which is much higher than you would typically see on an SDXC card reader.

The interface appears to be rated at 1.8W vs current cards that are under 100 mW.

Tales from the crypt-oh: Nvidia accused of concealing $1bn in coin-mining GPU sales as gaming revenue

Re: More long term than any other?

^C^V

If at first you don't succeed... IBM finds Watson a new job: IT ops and cloud-to-the-edge computing in the 5G era

"solution in search of a problem"

What?

Concerning the Ulta premium chess playing doorstop market isn't enough for you ElReg?

Such high standards at Vulture towers

Vodafone chief speaks out after 5G conspiracy nuts torch phone mast serving Nightingale Hospital in Brum

For the UK "celebrities", a little bit of community service helping out the NHS would be appreciated.

I'm sure Amanda would do a fine job washing dirty scrubs.

Amir maybe a little harder - I'm not sure which job he could do without quitting halfway through.

Internet samurai says he'll sell 14,700,000 IPv4 addresses worth $300m-plus, plow it all into Asia-Pacific connectivity

Re: In 3.. 2.. 1..

Microsoft people put the gateway on .1 or .254.

Cisco people understand you can allocate subnets other than /24 and allocate the gateway accordingly.

'Azure appears to be full': UK punters complain of capacity issues on Microsoft's cloud

Re: Interesting

Intels q4 server CPU sales were off the charts - up around 49%

I know Nvidia contributed a chunk of that with their Geforce Now DC's, but hadn't hard which of the other big cloud providers took the rest.

AWS/Azure/Google had all been delaying spending waiting for new chips, any evidence that it was AWS that won?

Bad news: Coronavirus is spreading rapidly across the world. Good news: Nitrogen dioxide levels are decreasing and the air on Earth is cleaner

And with all this "working from home" and general boredom from beinglocked in, I've polished the bathroom mirror to the point where I can now see my bottom.

I strongly do not recommend this...

Data surge as more Brits work from home? Not as hard on the network as their nightly Netflix binges, claims BT

You really think moving the mouse occasionally so Skype shows you online while you watch Netflix will use that much more bandwidth than just watching Netflix?

Think your smartwatch is good for warning of a heart attack? Turns out it's surprisingly easy to fool its AI

Re: Lies and statistics

"you just never know when they might decide to kill you."

We know they have already decided to kill us. What we don't know is when.

Chips that pass in the night: How risky is RISC-V to Arm, Intel and the others? Very

Re: Been here before

"I well remember the RISC anxiety at Intel when I worked there 35 years ago."

And when Intel moved from pure x86 CISC to x86 CISC instructions decoded to µops to run on a RISC like architecture with the P6, what happened to that anxiety? Sure, Intel hedged it's bets with Itanium/VLIW but reality wasn't kind to that...

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

Organised prostitution usually has some morals and ethics.

Sophos was gearing up for a private life – then someone remembered the bike scheme

Overpaid juniors?

"the process that sees hordes of overpaid junior lawyers and accountants poring over every tiny detail of a business before going ahead with a merger or takeover."

In most accountancy or legal firms, overworked is more accurate than overpaid. The juniors do the donkey work (usually with significant amounts of travel and unpaid overtime), the senior managers are paid well to apply the whip to keep things going and the partners rake in the money and put the entertainment on expenses.

Oh...and the juniors are responsible for all mistakes.

AMD takes a bite out of Intel's PC market share across Europe amid microprocessor shortages, rising Ryzen

Re: Accidental shortage

"they can't _buy_ enough outsourcing capacity to catch up because it's all booked out."

To address outsourcing high performance chip designs to another fab - you will likely take 1-2 years to redesign a working CPU operating at >2GHz if you take a working design from one fab to another.

Intel/TSMC/Samsung all have significantly different processes - a working design for one fab does not instantly translate into a working design at another fab, and if you are dependent on a design that is outside of the conservative fab design rules, you risk low yields and poor performance. For examples, look at AMD/nVidia GPU's on identical TSMC processes where one card substantially under-performs or has low availability - typically the first GPU or largest GPU does not clock as highly as its rival because of design issues. A year later, we see a decent boost as the updated chip addresses the issue.

Re: Accidental shortage

"Being able to replace a full rack of Intel with two AMD boxes is music to the ears of any data center professional."

The "rack full" of dual CPU Intel boxes MAYBE being replaced by "less than a rack full" of AMD boxes.

Licensing makes high core counts hard to justify for Enterprises unless they have applications (like HPC) that aren't licensed per core.

The high core count chips are power/cooling hungry making it hard to sell them into cloud environments or enterprise blade chassis where density is more important. That's not to say moving from 20 servers per rack to 10 while lowering connectivity costs and increasing core counts doesn't make sense.

IO (typically storage) also kills your per rack density - you are likely limited in the amount of IO you can deliver to each rack. So moving from 20 x 8-cores to 2 x 128 cores likely doesn't unless you can avoid storage/IO/network/memory bottlenecks by scaling up connection speeds cost effectively.

Can you mix your new CPU's with your existing CPU's in a VM environment? Or do you need to start a new farm. That makes switching vendors hard unless your current environment is end of life and ditching it is an option. If you have a larger environment and replace a fixed percentage each year, changing may require considerable planning/budgetting.

And finally, what does it cost all up?

If any of the Super7+1 (or is that +2 now nVidia are trying to compete for mobile gaming?) announce major deals with AMD in 2020, AMD likely double their server market share.

TL;DR: high core counts look great, but AMD's pricing, power usage, low-to-mid range core counts and being able to deliver are more likely to win them this round.

Call us immediately if your child uses Kali Linux, squawks West Mids Police

Re: Whatever next in the UK... reporting our neighbours for harbouring Jews?

Not me!!!!

I'm too far from the sea.

Crazy idea but hear us out... With robots taking people's jobs, can we rethink this whole working to survive thing?

Re: Seriously, how many centuries has this exact debate been going on?

"History is important, I'm not suggesting otherwise, but using it as a barometer against today's employment opportunities is bonkers."

Then I would suggest re-examining post-WWII history (you can go back further if you want but this is likely to be sufficient to see details) to see just how far we have come and how many jobs have changed or disappeared completely.

"We all know that the roles needed in society change and automation and AI (whatever that means in reality) drives this."

Yes...and in general, society as a whole has improved on the back of change. And generally change has improved both the lives AND jobs of the less well off. Look at jobs that had high accident rates 10-50 years ago and how they are done now - machines have replaced people and the people manage the machines with a subsequent increase in rates of production with less injuries.

You look and see Deliveroo and Amazon Fulfillment Centres and I would suggest both are likely to become more automated in the future as the human acts as as a robot. And there are questions around safety/injury.

What I see is an increasing requirement for human education and knowledge and the potential for that to drive future change.

Will people still be left behind by this? Yes and the aging population is likely to require a lot more social care as cheaply as possible. At least until we figure out how to automate that.

Will society as a whole benefit? I believe so. Based on history. Trying to retain the status quo has been where society crumbles and revolution is needed to move forward again. When there is change, those at the bottom have something to strive for. And technology revolutions tend to be a lot gentler than political revolutions.

Re: Seriously, how many centuries has this exact debate been going on?

"It's somewhat disturbing to see how comparisons are being made between working and living conditions today and a 100+ years ago, as if that means anything."

We navel gaze at the future where AI will automate people out of jobs while installing computer systems that allow one person to do the tasks of many or write code or reports that allow businesses to operate more efficiently.

So yes, history means a lot...those that are aware of history are aware of the significant changes that have happened over the last 200 years to get the standard of living above "you'll probably die soon" to "you better plan for old age, you've got a lot of years ahead of you".

I suspect it may also be part of the current generational gap - those brought up in cities where everything is available as long as you had money versus those from rural areas or before much of the current service industry was available who can make do with alternatives or without...

And yes, I'm an old grumpy git before my time.

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

IDE in servers

<random dump of useless information>

Before PCI-bus IDE HBA's, ISA IDE HBA's required an interrupt per channel which limited the number of hard drives you could use (you could usually manage two-channels of 2 drives each once you added a few network cards) and generally multiple hard drives were the only way of expanding capacity in the days where the biggest hard drives weren't big enough. From memory, the Netware IDE drivers weren't great either although that may have been a hardware bottleneck rather than just a driver issue.

SCSI HBA's allowed upto 14 drives per HBA...more than enough.. And the drivers were better. If you could get updates.

</random dump of useless information>

Good: IT admins scrambled to patch 80 per cent of public-facing Citrix boxes to close nightmare hijack hole

Re: sys admin?

"i think these boxen come under a different job title."

It's system administration - it may not be in your job role but I think you're being a little pedantic...

Some may say it's not the pedantic grammar nazi's job to police pedantry but there we have it...

Former Autonomy boss Mike Lynch 'submits himself' for arrest in central London

Re: 10 million GBP bail....

Well Lynch probably made a few million when he sold his company to HP. Looks like it was ~£500 million (source: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3416571/update--mike-lynch-leaves-hp-autonomy.html). It should be relatively easy to find based on shareholdings and bonuses from the sale but I can't find a better source...

You'd never believe how much HP paid for Autonomy...

Fed-up air safety bods ban A350 pilots from enjoying cockpit coffees

I prefer to drink my whiskey from glass - I really noticed the plastic taste when we added it to the children's bottles to help them sleep.

What? It's not as if Airbus pilots are allowed to do anything important so they may as well have a drink while their computers tell them no.

This AI is full of holes: Brit council fixes thousands of road cracks spotted by algorithm using sat snaps

Re: AI 101

Sir Runcible Spoon...it sounds like someone can't handle the truth...

I bet you use base 10 math rather than the one true math.....base 12 math. Its as simple as 9+3=10.

Two startups enter, one leaves: Intel kills off much-delayed Nervana AI training chip, pushes on with Habana

Are you thinking of XScale? They may were acquired for around $700m.

Intel has often acquired companies for IP/licencing rather than improving/expanding the market for the products they have acquired.

Very little helps: Tesco flashes ancient Windows desktop on Scan-As-You-Shop device

Does it count as "nicking everything" if you were just following a Antony Worrall Thompson recipe?

BT: UK.gov ruling on Huawei will cost us half a billion pounds over next 5 years

Re: No more than 35%?

"Clearly 35% by mass is the only objective measure."

How about by the number of LED's?

Blue ones are cooler than red ones so naturally are weighted accordingly with other colours somewhere inbetween.

Gin and gone-ic: Rometty out as IBM CEO, cloud supremo Arvind Krishna takes over, Red Hat boss is president

But what about all the good work the board did with share buybacks to prop up that share price and limit the decline to only 26 per cent? Anyone? Please?

It only cost 47 billion

*tumbleweeds roll by*

For eight decades, IBM created societal wealth by investing in its people, processes and products: it drove down costs; it improved quality; it successfully expanded and extended into new markets; and then it distributed its ever-increasing profits equitably with all its stakeholders—who were its stabilizing foundation during tough times. The 21st Century IBM has abandoned this successful formula and its stakeholder foundation is crumbling. One symptom of a company suffering from this insidious form of corporate consumption—an economic wasting disease caused by an obsessive focus on stock buybacks—is falling sales productivity.

'No BS' web host Gandi emits outage postmortem, has 'only theories' on what went wrong

Re: Chalk one up...

More likely /dev/null filled up and they weren't monitoring it

Curse of Boeing continues: Now a telly satellite it built may explode, will be pushed up to 500km from geo orbit

Re: Spaceway-1

"Is it going UP to a graveyard orbit or being unusually de-orbited into the atmosphere?"

It's going up - there is a significant quantity of fuel remaining (73kg at present) which may account for the life time extension.

Regarding the batteries, the satellite appears to be OK operating on solar panels but the concern is that the coming eclipse season will require battery operation leading to the potential for catastrophic failure. Eclipse season starts on Feb 25th.

Apple: EU can't make us use your stinking common charging standard

Re: "It'll stifle [..] innovation."

"Suggest you look at the successful network forums eg. IEEE802 (specifically 802.3), WiFi Alliance..."

Are you sure it's bollocks? Using the comparison to Ethernet, USB has had to change from 4 pin plus ground via a separate pin or the ground shield to 9-pin including ground in order to separate high power and high bandwidth cable pairs. Ethernet avoided this by already having 4-pair connectors for UTP from the beginning because there weren't cost effective digital modulation methods available to provide higher data rates when it was introduced..

USB was designed to minimise costs in early implementations - while there is an argument that it could have provided a more future proof connector at version 2, the fact is it didn't. Given competing interfaces that didn't minimise cost and failed, I'm unsure if you can choose a single interface that is universally "good" and "cheap".

Is Ethernet or USB able to go beyond 10Gbps with current connectors? Unlikely - they already use QAM256 encoding to achieve those rates and Ethernet has already moved away from UTP connectors beyond 10Gbps with 10Gbps UTP Ethernet having a number of downsides (i.e. high power use, high latency) that make that unlikely to change.

Is 100W/10Gbps sufficient for a general purpose device-to-device interface? I would say yes - marketers will say no...