Posts by cyberdemon

Britannia should rule the (cyber) waves, minister tells Singapore event in bid to drum up Commonwealth support

Re: echoing the Cold War

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Excel Hell: It's not just blame for pandemic pandemonium being spread between the sheets

Re: What should I use instead

I think they should be teaching GNU Octave in schools instead of Excel. Or better yet, teach "How to make a database in Python". Django is a nice starting point! Very simple to make a good database with minimal code.

The problem isn't "what should a non-programmer use" but instead "why are there so many people who call themselves non-programmers"

It's a bit like asking "what type of boat should a non-swimmer sail?"

CSV import?

Has anyone asked why in gods name did they have a CSV file with 32k+ "columns" in the first place?

CSV itself is really not optimal for "large" numbers of columns. I think this farce goes beyond simply abusing Excel. Clearly the task was given to some poor overworked underpaid clinical admin clerk, without anyone realising that they are dealing with a large scale data management problem that should have warranted the services of an experienced database engineer.

"using a nutcracker to demolish a wall" springs to mind.

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

VBA implicated yet?

The only way I can imagine such a howler of an error going unnoticed for so long, is if this poor abused spreadsheet was wrapped in an evil VBA front end, perhaps with the four words of VBA damnation:

on error resune next

which translates to "fail silently please"

but ffs. EXCEL IS NOT A DATABASE! Argh. When will MS Excess & VBA shuffle off into the dustbin of obsolescence..

UK, US hospital computers are down, early unofficial diagnosis is a suspected outbreak of Ryuk ransomware

Re: 37% increase in attacks since the mobilisation of call centre staff.

I believe it is nation-states.. And judging by the way nation-states around the world (including the UK) are behaving right now, I am predicting WWIII in the next year or three.

There are not enough resources to go around. The human population has to shrink. What happens when the human population is shrinking? We kill eachother so that we might survive.

> the lengths these low lives will go to questions the evils of the human race.

s/questions/extols/

Mine's the one with the sandwich board saying 'THE END IS NIGH'. (If I were religious, it might also say "REPENT, ALL YE SINNERS" but i'm not. An empty void is all we can look forward to, as far as I'm concerned. Sorry.)

Flying camera drones, cuddly Echo gadgets... it's all a smoke screen for Amazon to lead you gently down the Sidewalk – and you'll probably like it

Manhacks

Indeed. No telescreens in here, until they become mandatory. And even then, over my dead body.

But my personal suspicion is that yes, this is a smokescreen, but not for what TFA suggests.

I think Amazon are being quite clever about developing technologies that he world's militaries would be interested in, without advertising as such, for else they would create a PR brouhaha.

Bezos & co don't really care if this little drone is a big fat flop. They have already developed long-distance "delivery" drones that were a big fat flop. But GPS-denied, comms-denied, autonomous vision-based navigation & target identification is something that militaries around the world are enormously interested in.

They will develop this to the point where "it works" (but nobody wants it) and then wait for the calls from President Assad, Lukashenko, The Combine, etc.

Top 5 billionaires find that global pandemics are good for business – and their wallets

The road to Hell

And to quote Chris Rea:

And all the roads jam up with credit / And there's nothing you can do / It's all just bits of paper / Flying away from you // Look out world take a good look / What goes down here // You must learn this lesson fast / And learn it well.. // This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway / Oh no, this is the road to Hell..

Yep, at the end of the day, it really is all just bits of paper. (if you're lucky! If you're unlucky, all your accumulated wealth is no more than a database row).

A billion or ten in the bank might buy you a nice remote island, complete with self-sufficient farm & family-sized nuclear bunker complete with a good Internet & global knowledge archive, with every book ever printed. And enough weapons to sink a flotilla of refugee ships. But only if you buy it NOW, before the shit hits the fan.

Shall we have a sweep-stake on how long it will be before WWIII is declared? (or until the next nuke goes off in anger?) Will Britain or the US or the Balkan states have civil wars first? What will global populations do when the lights go off and the food runs out?

We have a pandemic which (as TFM says) simply shifts all the wealth upwards, while the poor drop off (dead) - we have wildfires & human activity pushing up global temperatures, driving crop failures and insect plagues, and we have a geopolitical and economic system that is reaching breaking point.

We have thousands of people here in the UK who are about to be made homeless as the ban on evictions is lifted tomorrow, while the second wave threatens to send even more ordinary folk into economic ruin..

In a few months we will have Brexit (again, great for Billionaires, terrible for the rest of us), so we won't be able to call on our friends for help, since we just spat in their faces. Our food will rot in the lorries as it takes the long way round via northern Ireland (some of it may be blown up by a resurgent IRA along the way) and we are likely to have severe power cuts, if the connectors from Europe that we rely on suddenly become too expensive..

And to top it off, we will most likely need to crown a new King next year. I can't see the poor old Queen living to 96. We will have new division lines & conflict between royalists, anti-royalists, and those of us who don't really care one way or the other except please can we avoid accidentally making Dominic Cummings the new King.. Our armed forces (what's left of them) might not agree on who they work for anymore.. Our legal system would be open to even more usurp by an increasingly corrupt government..

Someone stop the world, I wish to get off.

Mark Shuttleworth to revive Ubuntu Community Council after body shrinks to single member – Mark Shuttleworth

Re: Oh how the mighty have fallen...

> Now... hadrly anyone is still using Ubuntu. Mint, Debian and Fedora are the most popular distros these days .

Can someone please tell Nvidia that?

Their Tegra devkits ONLY support Ubuntu, will refuse to install on other distros such as Debian, and break if you try to hack around the check.

As to jumping ship to Debian - Yes please - Like many places in the Linux world, they are short on maintainers. It's becoming a big problem..

Down with DeadRat though.. ;)

Don't pay the ransom, mate. Don't even fix a price, say Australia's cyber security bods

Re: I agree with every word

> Such a shame about Australia's stance on backdoored encryption.

But since they've banned strong encryption, all an Aussie needs to do is ask the government to decrypt his files, right?

Forget Terminators, says US military, the next-gen AI battles will hinge upon net infrastructure, not killer robots

Re: Short-term thinking

Yes, but as you say it'll be a good few decades until that REALLY starts to bite. Meanwhile, the elderly despots currently in charge will continue making the world their playground while they are still alive.

What I fear most is that "man's inhumanity to man" will become brutally apparent over the next few years.

It's (sadly) an ecological certainty that the human population must reduce significantly over the next decade or few, since our numbers are inflated thanks to to this oh so fragile global economy that we have set up, based on oil and other finite resources.

The struggle for survival will be brutal, but our current leaders will be dead by then.

Personally, I think nuclear war is optimistic. It would be nice to be humanely vapourised as in the opening of Battlestar Gallactica. But more likely, we will be stabbed by our neighbours for the last tin of baked beans in the cupboard.

Mine's the one with the Bug Out kit sewn in.

Server buyers ask Lenovo for made-in-Mexico models instead of Chinese kit

Re: Agreed

Perhaps, but I'd be skeptical about those two. Not all of the NSA hardware has to actually -work- in order to achieve the desired effect. In fact, I'd hazard to say that the ones that they leak to the press are probably the ones that never actually worked, e.g. the radio link is too unreliable - but they still serve as a useful deterrent against those who might otherwise try to hide stuff from the NSA.

But your point stands, and I'd expect that the Chinese secret service has a hell of a lot more resources than the poor old NSA. The Chinese are well known for inserting chips into your laptops as you enter the country (perhaps a simple keylogger, perhaps something else) and then removing them when you leave.

It's scary that they are departing from western-made technologies even faster than we are trying to boycott theirs. That just feels like a precursor to War, if I have ever felt one.

Apple to Epic: Sue me? No, sue you, pal!

Re: Microsoft Has anyone else noticed...

> they've been careful ever since.

Oh really? Like when they bought Nokia to kill their Maemo and Symbian platforms, and push their god-awful Windows Mobile in their place? (by setting them up with a stooge CEO to tank their share price first, no less!)

Or when they bought LinkedIn, to give them effective control over everyone's job prospects?

Or when they bought GitHub and NPM, to tighten their deadly embrace of those pesky open source projects?

Microsoft have a monopoly on Evil, as far as I can tell. They always had, since the 90's. If they can see a beneficial precedent from this case, they won't hesitate to try it, is all I was saying. ;)

Microsoft Re: Has anyone else noticed...

Never mind Google, what about Microsoft?

If Apple win this, would that precedent mean that Microsoft can (at any point in future) say that anybody making money from PC software has to go through the Microsoft Store, and pay them 40%?

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

Re: Universities Well it's kind of a good idea but...

I agree with you - but why are the government not funding more of the expensive science & engineering courses? What about funding actual scientific research?? Oops, we just blew the government budget for the next 100 years thanks to Hancock and Sunak. So we can forget about any kind of government subsidies to replace the funding lost under EU grants such as Horizon 2020 (never has that name been more apt)

I studied Cybernetics at Reading just before they closed the whole school, because it was deemed too expensive to run, when compared to a Humanities department where the students simply read books, mark eachother's work and rarely even need lecturing.

Re: Its stupid

Maybe in looking to the continent you picked a bad example. We have much better examples of obviously-corrupt gravy-train projects at home.

Crossrail? HS2?

Wormtongue Re: Transparently corrupt shower of shit

Dominic Cummings makes me think of LOTR's Wormtongue.. He is effectively King, from the shadows. The government does everything that he says, which normally means "give more power to Dom".

This whole thing stinks. "We" want to leave the EU so that we can act like a paraiah state, with more corruption than Zimbabwe, meanwhile the people who arranged the thing (Dom & Mates, Rees-Mogg & Cronies) get all the power & riches they desire. Nobody told us that "take back control" means "hand the country on a silver platter to the Tory brexiteers" (note: NOT the Labour brexiteers, they are the ones who have fallen for the lies and will suffer the most - see: Sunderland) so the 1% can pillage the country for all it's worth, sell it to China and piss off with the profits.

After a vote that could not have been more divided if it tried, the outcome was (very roughly) as follows:

• Tory Brexiteers: 10%: New kings in control, the country now belongs to them
• Tory Remainers: 10%: Purged from government by the brexiteers. Forgotten by history.
• Lib Dems: 10%: Crying into their beer after everyone ignored them. Forgotten by history.
• Labour Remainers: 12%: Tearing their hair out as the country goes to the dogs. Forgotten by history.
• Labour Brexiteers: 30%: Hoodwinked by a bus, doomed to suffer the harshest implications of Brexit.
• Abstentions: 28%: Forgotten by history before they even made their mind up, the idiots who could have saved us

And then the twats have the gall to say "The people have spoken" when in reality, nobody could agree on anything and the outcome was weighted very slightly in favour of "let's give all the power to the richest 10% of the country who proposed this thing in the first place, so they can do whatever the f*ck they like with the UK".

Meanwhile Putin's Russia, who may well have been lending the tory brexiteers some support, are happiest of all, having successfully destabilised Europe just that little bit more.

Universities Re: Well it's kind of a good idea but...

In the old days, the state used to give this kind of money to the Universities..

The idea was, apparently, that funding UK universities will foster the brightest graduates and help them gain funding for tech start-ups (which usually have university or government grant funding in the first instance)

But of course, any new graduates are not Dom's Mates. And universities produce Students, you know, those pesky brats who like to protest about government corruption and all that.

Brexit border-line issues: Would you want to still be 'testing' software designed to stop Kent becoming a massive lorry park come 31 December?

@Cederic: Re: Stockpile your popcorn

Where do you think all the grain comes from to feed our "made in Britain" British Beef, Pork, Chicken & Lamb? What about the wheat for our Bread?

The UK power grid is completely dependent on imported power from the EU. Without those connectors, the national grid would go dark and stay that way.

Shipping from elsewhere in the world is vulnerable to blockade. Power and data connectors are vulnerable to sabotage. Our joke of a Navy would be unable to do a thing about it. At times like these, we really need all the friends we can get. A trade spat with the EU is the last thing we need.

I personally believe we are heading for a new world war. Hopefully not as destructive as WW1 or WW2, but we have already begun a cold war with Russia and China.

Western society is now so dependent on technology that we would have a complete breakdown of society if the Internet went off for two weeks. Shops like Tesco wouldn't even be able to take Cash payments without their ERP system. Logistic companies would find it impossible to operate, if they could even make it through the traffic. Then there's Covid, then there's Brexit.

I think the shit could all hit the fan at the beginning of next year. Second or third wave of Covid, coupled with Brexit induced chaos, around the same time as we will be crowning King Charles III. We will have the most divided, angry, desperate and violent public we have ever had. Even the police & armed forces might not agree on who they work for anymore. There will be blame games, civil unrest, riots, food & goods shortages, and there will be blackouts. There will also be a lot of people pissed off with the rich (like you?) who have profited from this situation like only the rich can.

The likes of Rees-Mogg & co are in a position to bet against the UK - sell short and buy at the bottom - and protect themselves from the angry mob by fleeing to (ironically) Europe.

Re: Stockpile your popcorn

Those idiots will be breaking down your door as soon as the power goes off, to eat the contents of your cupboard and steal your dog. Or maybe the other way round.

They certainly won't be blaming themselves and bleating about the good old days of 2015. They'll be blaming the liberal elite, just like in Trumpland, because of something they read/saw/heard on Facebook.

If I were working in the Kremlin, I would report to Mr. Putin that everything seems to be proceeding to plan, despite minimal efforts - the British just seem to be incredibly good at shooting themselves in the foot.

Open-source database outfit Redis Labs grabs $100m funding as it seeks to be about more than just cold, hard cache

How does redis work if the power goes off?

Same applies to other "in-memory" "databases".

Is all the data lost? partially lost? Does it take 100 hours to restore 50% of it from disk/tape? (with the other 50% being out-of-date on the tape and therefore lost) ?

Uncle Sam to blow millions on getting fusion power finally working – with the help of AI

Re: But how long will it take to get there?

> I reckon that we would have abandoned nuclear fusion research decades ago, if it wasn't for the giant fusion ball in the sky that keeps telling everyone that this technology does work. All science has to do is miniaturise it a little bit. Apparently miniaturizing what the sun does is not as simple as shrinking transistors.

I worked at JET for 5 years. Over that time, some of the physicists killed off my hopes for Fusion power, when they told me that the power density (both gravimetric and volumetric) of the Sun, is roughly equivalent to a healthy compost heap. At the Sun's core it's about 300W/m3, and a similar number per tonne mass. The sun is just so mind-bogglingly enormous that we get so much energy radiated from its surface.

That's why fusion power on earth needs to involve orders of magnitude higher temperatures and pressures than exist at the core of the sun.

Really, I think the earth would have been much better off if we'd spent all the money we threw at fusion, on improved Fission designs instead. Like molten-salt Thorium reactors which eat the nuclear waste produced by other reactors.

Donald Trump thought-bubbles an Alibaba ban as Chinese clouds clam up about Clean Cloud plan

Re: ban Chinese tech giant Alibaba.

> also, declare those US bonds bought by Chinese void and watch what happens.

Yeah, scary stuff.. Every economy in the west is borrowing by issuing bonds.. Who else can buy them but China?

Is anyone else seriously worried about the prospect of all this sabre-rattling nationalism leading to WWIII? Or is it just me?

Also, I fear that WWIII could be a lot more slow-and-painful than simply bathing in the Light of a Thousand Suns. More like enslavement by a swarm of autonomous DJI drones with guns. Half-life 3 except the manhacks shoot you, and you have nothing to shoot them back with. The game wouldn't have been much fun if the resistance were wiped out in the opening levels, and you then had the choice to play on as a good little citizen, or die..

This NSA, FBI security advisory has four words you never want to see together: Fancy Bear Linux rootkit

Re: Modules in Linux?

Correct, but it is possible to turn off support for loadable modules entirely, if you have compiled everything you will ever need into the kernel executable image in the first place.

Distributions never do that, because either the kernel would be huge, or it would not work on most systems.

Huawei running out of smartphone CPUs as US sanctions begin to bite

Re: Cnutism - not a good thing indeed

> I once asked the question: if Russia attacked Europe, would Trump be on Europe's side or Russia's side?

Given their history, it would be "nobody's side" - ie "neutral", profiting as much as possible by selling arms to both sides, and then only weighing in when both sides are weak enough that they can pick a winner, stomp on the loser, and take credit for the victory.

Re: Cnutism - not a good thing indeed

> But the trade spat is simply encouraging China to become less dependent upon US-controlled technology, surely not a good thing for the US in the future.

This.^

It's a bad thing not just for the US, but for UK, Europe, non-Chinese Eastern states.. Basically "the free world" and anywhere where privacy is a thing.

If you think the supposed CIA backdoors in Intel Management Engine are bad, just wait till China starts making its own chips.

If China decided that it was ready to go it alone in electronics tech, it would be extremely bad (for the West). They could decide to stop supporting US chip designs e.g. "Sorry, that BGA footprint looks like an Intel XYZ - We can't process this PCB for you - new management policy". We could be stuck with expensive and slow western PCB fabs. They could go as far as deciding not to ship parts, only complete products (locked down and backdoors pre-installed).

What's worse, is if China are able to become completely technologically and economically independent from the rest of the world, they could make a bid for domination. I fear that could provide the conditions for WWIII.

Well, what are we waiting for? Three weeks later, Windows Embedded Standard 7 still didn't have the answer

Windows Embedded

Oxymoron for the day

Single-line software bug causes fledgling YAM cryptocurrency to implode just two days after launch

oh noes

those poor, poor crypto speculators who lost a ton of money..

And being zero-sum, the guy who discovered and/or was responsible for the bug probably ran away with most of it!

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

Re: COVID is nothing compared to being hacked to death with a machete over the last tin of beans.

@AC You are right, of course. Have an upvote for your downvote.

But I am quite deadly serious when I say that I fear the breakdown of our economy and society MUCH more than some crappy plague. If we descend into civil and/or world war after economic collapse, then 50k, 100k, 1M deaths will pale into insignificance.

The effects that our societal/political/economic reactions to Covid are having, are somewhat analogous to the immune response of a patient with Sepsis.

COVID is nothing compared to being hacked to death with a machete over the last tin of beans.

Given that transmission rates are supposed to be extremely low for those without symptoms, and symptoms are extremely rare in the young, we should NEVER HAVE CLOSED THE SCHOOLS.

Instead, we should have told everyone over 65 or with a vulnerable health condition to isolate. The vast majority of these people are retired, so it would have posed no problem for them or for the economy. The young people should have been told to stay well away from old people, carry on working, and to isolate only if they developed symptoms. Compensation should have been capped at £1k/month instead of 2.5k to disincentivise older people from catching the thing recklessly. Don't close the pubs, don't incentivise healthy people to skive off work, don't close down travel.

The more young people who catch the virus and gain immunity, the less chance it then has to cause death once the old and/or borked folks emerge from isolation.

Yes, due to unavoidable transmission in edge cases this would have resulted in greater death rates amongst old and otherwise already-dying people. But it would not have screwed the economy and burnt all of the UK's cash reserves just ahead of Brexit, which could pose a much greater threat than Covid. But our hand-wringing, Elf'n'Safety, 'retrospective accountability' culture has meant that we focused everything on minimising deaths, when we should have been maximising stability and minimising long-term socio-economic harm.

You say it's inhumane to have a wagon with someone shouting Bring out yer Dead! But just wait until the economy has crashed to the point where we find ourselves in civil war, or on the wrong side of WWIII, or both.

You have no idea how far inhumanity can go when the majority of people are starving.

University of Cambridge to decommission its homegrown email service Hermes in favour of Microsoft Exchange Online

Re: "Discarded"

Change, is life. And in Tech change is expected. We move on.

True to an extent. But when that change takes something that was entirely free, individual and democratic, and consolidates it into the hands of a few all-powerful corporations, it leaves a decidedly bitter taste.

And these corporations become single points of failure. If Office 365 or Google were to suffer a major outage, then so would all of the western economies. They are that prolific.

Garmin staggers back to its feet: Aviation systems seem to be lagging, though. Here's why

decrypt on access

>It wouldn't be possible since the malware would then need to be installed on every single computer in the firm since otherwise it couldn't decrypt the files transparently.

Wouldn't it still be possible if you have an infected fileserver?

Especially one like we had at work - a bunch of Windows Server instances running under Hyper-V, on a big, monolithic host; with the Hyper-V host being the thing connected to a vast storage array on SAN, which is itself regularly backed up.

If the Hyper-V host were infected, then you and your backups are toast. But can still decrypt-on-access until the backups are flushed

This Hyper-V host had our domain controller, DNS server, various network drives, our Confluence internal wiki, JIRA, Bitbucket (GitHub style repository), Bamboo (CI/CD)..

What the duck? Bloke keeps getting sent bathtime toys in the post – and Amazon won't say who's responsible

Enter your child's birthdate for age-based recommendations and more.

Anyone else noticed this insidious piece of dubiously-consensual direct marketing from Amazon?

Also, in one photo, the child is holding a ducky that says 'HOT', indicating that it might be burning her.

It's a Meow-nixed system, I know this: Purr-fect storm of 3,000+ insecure databases – and a data-wiping bot

Re: Better than the alternative

this. But how do we know the databases weren't pilfered before being nuked?

Amazon's auditing of Alexa Skills is so good, these boffins got all 200+ rule-breaking apps past the reviewers

Skills?

Even calling them Skills is a bit misleading, as if they are simply tweaks to a single "AI" system, hosted purely by Amazon and no-one else. When in reality, "Functions as a Service" are employed in the backend, so depending on what you say, your information is routed to someone else's server.

I'd rather call them Taps, like wiretaps. The more you add, the more (scrupulous or not) third parties you are granting access to the things that you (and your kids, your partner, your guests..) say in your own private home. And that's without even considering the privacy implications of "Amazon Spot" camera telescreens.

The Stasi would've loved this thing..

UK smacks Huawei with banhammer: Buying firm's 5G gear illegal from year's end, mobile networks ordered to rip out all next-gen kit by 2027

Re: This will end in tears.

> "We won, get over it."

Yeah, exactly. That's where this all started: Brexit.

The highly cynical borderline conspiracy-theorist nutjob in me says that this has all been a very clever ploy by Russia to weaken the west. They organised Brexit via a very sneaky social media psyop campaign, they possibly organised Trump through similar subterfuge, and now they want China and the West to start a war.

I have no evidence for any of this.

GitHub is just like all of us: The week has just started but it needed 4 whole hours of downtime

Re: Eggs and Baskets

> Gitbucket and gitprep

Don't forget GitLab! - also self-hostable.

I'd be suspicious of GitHub anyway ever since it was subsumed by the armies of satan

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

Argh

The world has gone mad.

O wait, not allowed to say 'gone mad' anymore.

As many have pointed out, this destruction of language is straight out of 1984. I wonder who has really started this and what their vested interests were. It's certainly not going to be good for the stability of Linux, both as a codebase and as a community.

And does absolutely bugger all to help the downtrodden of society, which is its supposed pretense.

Rip and replace is such a long Huawei to go, UK telcos plead, citing 'blackouts' and 'billion pound' costs: Are Vodafone and BT playing 'Project Fear'?

> we voted for brexit

I bloody well didn't..

TBH having seen a street cabinet open and full of Huawei kit, I understand the "plight" of the telcos..

However, for one I don't see what boycotting Huawei achieves - There are hundreds of other Chinese controlled brands out there that will still undercut any NSA-approved device on cost.

And two, I have yet to be convinced of the necessity of 5G whatsoever. WTF is the point of it. I have heard political mouthpieces say that it will "power the internet of things revolution". Well what if I don't want an internet of thongs?

Seriously, why the hell do we need 5G when we have fibre-optic cables?

Microsoft to pull support for PHP: Version 8? Exterminate, more like...

Microsoft

About as relevant and useful to the world as PHP.

No, that's unfair to PHP

.NET Core: Still a Microsoft platform thing despite more than five years open source

Corporate bloatware language

> What's up with non-.NET developers thinking C# is a Windows only, corporate bloatware language?

Ahahahaha.. Good one.

Maybe because it's a windows-only corporate bloatware language? :@

The whole of .NET needs to die in a fire. Why the hell would anyone want to include a proprietary binary dependency in their code, never mind one controlled by Microsoft, of all evil corporations..!

It doesn't even work in WINE. (deliberately?) Normal win32 apps do.

So-called ".NET core" is as useless as Java without a JVM. (that is, useless squared). Doesn't even have a UI toolkit. No WPF without the W.

The only point of ".NET Core" is to lure unsuspecting developers towards Azure Cloud Services, whereupon they submit to the whims of Microsoft.

CEO of motherboard maker MSI dies after plunging from headquarters' seventh-floor

As my Mum would have said..

Dodgy Dodgy..

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'

Re: Thin end of the wedge?

> There is no scientific evidence for the claim that the 'black' in 'blacklist' and in 'black person' select the same concept.

exactly. Can we stop wringing our hands and get on with life now plz? :@@

Re: Thin end of the wedge?

Lib Dem, then?

<ducks>

Loudness War

(continued in a new thread!)

Re: I am obviously a horrible person and possibly racist...

Yes, it's a sonic sin.

If only audio files were distributed as the raw microphone inputs along with a DSP settings file so that all mixing and signal processing could be done (and reconfigured) at the listener's end.

Even mobile phones are powerful enough to do the required mixing and DSP in real time.

I sometimes wish that on TV, background noise tracks could be broadcast separately from dialogue, for example.

Yes I know that no recording ever clips, but in the old days, this was done by someone looking at a VU meter, asking the guitarist to twang really loudly, and then adjusting the gain so that it doesn't go too far into the red. The gain knob is then left in the same place for the duration of the performance/recording. There is no automatic adjustment of that gain knob in real time by some software to try to make the whole track sound as loud as possible.

That's what I meant by 'recordings should obey the superposition principle'. Your mixer should produce a linear sum of all the input channels, at different (but time-invariant) amplifications. That way it can be decomposed into its original sources, by my ears. If the different channels keep changing their volume based on what else is going on, I find something else to listen to because I find that nauseating.

Shove that up your side-chain and smoke it.

Re: Loaded words replaced by euphemisms

"Something must be seen to be done"

Whether or not something is actually DONE is apparently irrelevant.

Loudness War: @Androdgynous_Cow_Herd, I challenge you to a thread!

Loudness War: @Androdgynous_Cow_Herd, I challenge you to a thread!

I submit that "Audio Engineer" is a parasitic non-profession that should be eradicated. Along with PPI claim agents, ambulance chasers and telephone sanitsers (ok maybe telephone sanitisers could be necessary for the time being). And that "Mastering" of audio tracks should be banned (for reasons unrelated to slavery)

See: previous off-topic discussion

Ideally, every audio track sold should include all source recordings (mic inputs etc), using software at the listener's end to do the mixing and DSP, with a text-based settings file for the suggested "master" which the listener can change according to his/her tastes or mood.

More practically, I think that mixing of audio source material in a non-linear way (such as compressors or limiters designed to maximise "loudness" of the overall track, and "side-chains" designed to maximise or flatten the loudness of a subset of the sources) should be banned.

While I appreciate that for some it may be an artistic effect, it is also (mathematically) a one-way transformation, a bit like one of Damien Hurst's bisected cows. OK from one angle, grotesque from another.

Therefore, I ask that recording artists please supply us with the living cow, and we can chop it in half with a chainsaw ourselves if we choose. Stop paying quack "audio engineers" to butcher it before we can even hear it moo.

High-flying Microsoft exec jumps to Magic Leap as CEO. No, we haven't got that the wrong way round

Re: Show me the money

Stock options? At Magic Leap??

A company inflated by beeeeelion-dollar investments that has nothing remotely approaching a product..?

Maybe if she and her Microsoft chums open short positions, crash it to the ground, and then buy it for the IP?

Illegal, maybe, but hey we're Microsoft.

> But wouldn't that be illegal?

Hahaha, that's what I thought about Stephen Elop (see post below)

You'd have thought so..

Microsoft exec joins as new CEO of Nokia. Immediately announces that Nokia will be ditching the successful line of Linux (Debian)-based phones (N900, N950) and Maemo OS that they spent the last 5+ years developing - it would have been a serious competitor to iOS and Android.. N900 was the best phone you could wish for.

Also they would be ditching their Symbian platform, and most people working on Phones for Nokia would be laid off. From now on, Nokia will only sell Windows Phones, because that's the future.

Anyone would think that Microsoft were trying to kill off two competitors to Windows Mobile, by driving Nokia into the ground with an inside man as their CEO, and as a triple-whammy, dump their share price so they could buy them at a bargain price.

Shurely that would be illegal, until they did it.

July? British government could decide to boot Chinese giant Huawei from the UK's networks by this month

Of course! But they're not a 5G threat, so that's fine. 5G will be powering the Internet of dodgy-things revolution, don'tcha know.. Can't have that being snooped on by the reds.

We'll be buying 5G routers from Weihua in future.