Posts by cyberdemon

US chip stocks undeterred by export ban to Russia

Re: Considering all the supply chain issues ...

Yes quite - I am sure that they are quite relieved to be selling to actual customers and not price-gougers

What is it with cloud status pages not reflecting reality?

Re: Was MUCH larger than even reported here

A cyber attack may be likely, but what makes you think the aggressor was the USA, rather than say, Russia?

Fancy some new features? Try general-purpose Linux alternative Liquorix

Re: I'm guessing that Devuan might [not] be able to use the Debian kernel?

Eh? Why should the kernel care about which process it spawns first?

Ukraine invasion may hit chip supply chain – analysts

It's not just manglement of one company though - any company will always choose the cheapest supplier, because in capitalism, profit trumps everything. So when they all choose the same cheap supplier, there is barely anybody to say Oi, you lot are all using the same supplier, therefore collectively, you are a risky investnemt. (maybe a very dilligent investor might say that) and there is certainly nobody to say "Oi, diversify your suppliers, or else." That would be considered highly communist.

This stinks a bit..

It is starting to seem as if WWIII is really about China's dominance of tech.

According to an earlier story apparently three companies in Ukraine - iceblick, Ingas and Cryoin, manufacture 70% of the world's neon gas supply (I guess it leaks out of rocks there? or do they condense it out of the air with cryopumps?) and 90% of the world's semiconductor-grade neon that is needed for making the DUV and XUV excimer lasers that are used to make semiconductors.

Then last year there was a mysterious fire at ASML, and apparently a Chinese company ran off with the designs for their XUV lithography machines.

What next? Will we see European and US Cryopump manufacturers hit with "mysterious fires" and the odd "stray" missile?

'Hundreds of computers' in Ukraine hit with wiper malware as conflict continues

Re: And this is why you should turn off all updates now

> Yeah, because lots of unfixed security vulnerabilities are just what's needed.

I'd rather have unfixed security vulnerabilities on my firewalled system than be constantly pulling inscrutable updates from sources whom I do not know and therefore cannot trust. And even if I did trust, could be compromised.

This "update immediately" mentality is the problem tbh. It makes developers too lazy to test for, and fix security vulnerabilities BEFORE they release software, and it makes users too complacent so as to simply trust whatever updates are put on their plate.

Re: And this is why you should turn off all updates now

Please let us know, how to completely disable updates in Win10 or 11 without disconnecting entirely from the internet?

I think Windows users are basically forced to have them on at all times. Although I think it's possible to suspend them for a while. But I'm not sure if that applies to updates that describe themselves as "critical"

We should definitely stop using Steam for a while, too.

Any developer (especially a russian one) could be 'persuaded' to issue a dodgy update..

Re: "Of course you realize, this means war"

Even if they don't have any working warheads or ICBMs, (which is extremely unlikely, IMO) Who says China haven't/won't sell them any? I'm sure China are just itching to test out their latest & greatest hypersonic nuke tech.

Google kills download-shrinking Lite Mode browser tech

AMP

> Although Lite mode is going away, we remain committed to ensuring Chrome can deliver a fast webpage loading experience and subsequent data slurping returned to us in a timely manner on mobile

Yeah exactly, they're not going to kill off AMP any time soon, even though its use case for saving mobile data and improving page load speeds was just as dubious.

Big banks will blaze the enterprise GPT-3 AI trail

Financial Services

Yes, I am sure this would be extremely useful for people who wish to automate fraud and 419 scams without any human call centre operators involved, who might speak in a foreign accent or (worse) might turn out to have a moral compass. They could even apply the perfect "conversion optimisation" to their automated calls, and soon we will have AI that learns how to blackmail people.

US imposes sanctions as Russia invades Ukraine

Re: re. more blankets

You'd have thought that if they had degrees in PPE, they could've at least manage to buy the proper stuff at a decent price..

I'll get my PPE..

Joint European Torus more than doubles fusion record with 59 megajoules

Yes, exactly. But I bet that the resulting compound will be highly useful as fuel. How do you stop people using it as such, when the economics clearly says that they should?

And Now, what to do with all these Biomass plants that are burning trees and/or food for energy, effectively undoing sequestration?

Sadly, if you ask the IEA, they still believe in the madness of Biomass..

I suspect that if you "Follow the money" you would find that the anti-nuclear lobby leads back to the fossil fuel industry. :(

Cost of Fusion

We do know that the cost to build a fusion reactor big enough to stand even a small chance of actually working would be orders of magnitude more than a fission plant of a similar capacity.. The last 50 years have taught us that.

However, it certainly would be easily "turn off and on-able" as you put it. There is no very little decay heat to worry about, and no self-sustaining chain reactions. At least not in the plasma itself. The machine still has to be very big, still has to boil water, and has a lot of thermal mass. So maybe more suited to baseload as you say.

But fusion will never work for two reasons: 1. Because it has to be so big. We're talking about components weighing 80 tons that need to be moved around by robots for maintenance (in the current DEMO designs). And that's when they are not filled with liquid lithium-lead primary coolant. 2: Because the energy has to be transferred across a vacuum, from the plasma to the walls, by sheer intensity of neutron flux. Neutrons destroy matter by turning it into unstable isotopes of itself. So the only way to avoid making the whole machine into a radioactive mess is to make it out of low atomic number metals like lithium (too soft) or beryllium (too rare and highly toxic). No material on earth can withstand the 10MW/m2 of neutron flux that would be needed for a gigawatt-scale fusion plant.

I think if we had spent a bit less time and money on the pipe-dream that is fusion, and more on better fission designs, then we would be in a much better place.

The reactor that I think is most exciting though, is the subcritical fission reactor (aka fusion/fission hybrid), which uses a controllable neutron source (which can be a very small, very cheap 'fusor') to create the neutrons for a fission reactor. There is no 'chain reaction' necessary. The big advantage of these designs is that they don't require enrichment (and so cannot be used as a fig leaf for weapons development) and can use spent fuel from other reactors - most fission reactors only consume about 3% of the fuel before it is considered spent.

Because the reaction is subcritical there is no chance of a runaway. And it is extremely easy to turn it on and off, and adapt it to different load conditions, by varying the neutron intensity. It's not as fast to react as a gas turbine, but faster than a standard fission reactor because there is no chain reaction. It should be as fast as a traditional coal, oil or biomass-fired power plant.

Re: MegaJoules? Watts?

The BBC's units of energy are boiled kettles. JET has produced a fairly piffling 60 of them.

But, as someone who used to work there, I can tell you this is not really news. JET is already the world's biggest operational fusion reactor so they can easily set the record. And it is very soon going to be decommissioned, sadly, so it doesn't matter anymore if they break it. They just "turned it up to 11".

Linux Snap package tool fixes make-me-root bugs

Re: Snap is a bad idea

Yes! Just distribute the source and build it on the end-user's machine! They have plenty of computing power for it on any desktop or laptop, especially if the operating system includes `-dev` packages for libraries that you can just pull in. Even my phone is powerful enough to run a compiler.

It's open source software, after all! So show us the bloody source!

If not: What are you trying to hide? Maybe it is not so "open source" after all

I have a similar gripe with "manylinux .whl" files from PyPi. These are 'zip' archives, containing compiled binaries. I didn't know until recently that not all packages on 'pip' have source available. Some are under proprietary licenses.

> Easy on developers. Tough on users.

Even tougher on developer-users.

Snap, like other "app store" models seems to exist for the purposes of consolidation in the world of tech. Make it easy for big players to publish software, make it easy for the general public to ignorantly use that software in the way the developers intended (and only in the way the developers intended), but make it very hard for anyone to do something new that they want to do and the developers hand't envisaged (except install rootkits, apparently..)

The whole reason I like the Linux world is that I am not hostage to the will of some software developer (whose boss wants to monetize me, with a z) - most free software is designed for a flexible use case - take this software and do whatever you like with it; inspect the code, modify it, plug it into something else, run it on a microcontroller if you really want.

Whereas free (as in beer) software, sometimes with a token "open source, but not really" repo that lets you build absolutely nothing useful, and certainly not the distributed binary package that the developers offer to the public, is highly unscrupulous IMO. The tech world have been taking advantage of open source developers for years, consolidating their power and getting away with it.

The worst part is where this encroaches into education - I think that children are being prevented from learning how to code independently of some tech company's walled garden. Teach the kids how to use GCC, not bloody Android.

Facebook is one bad Chrome extension away from another Cambridge Analytica scandal

Re: "VP of Integrity at Meta"

---> see icon

It reads a bit like how Orwell explained the government departments in 1984

The Ministry of Love, is responsible for hate

The Ministry of Truth, is responsible for lies

The Ministry of Peace, is responsible for war

The VP of Integrity, is responsible for ... Corruption?

Hong Kong Watch says its website suddenly can't be seen in Hong Kong

Re: Exodus to Singapore

Please explain why it is nonsense? It makes sense to me that people might flee the advance of totalitarian rule..

Not wishing to watch a youtube, I'm not sure what Hamsters have to do with it though..

China's top chipmaker pivots to domestic sales, struggles to satisfy demand

Re: Is it me?

Because this is a tech news site. Guess where 90% of the UK's Tech comes from.

(ok, fine, it's not 90%. We do get some tech from Europe too...)

UK pins hopes on 'latest technology' to whittle down massive National Health Service waiting lists

The doctor will see you now.

See icon --->

UK science stuck in 'holding pattern' on EU funding by Brexit, says minister

Re: Funding

> The main problem that the UK Government currently has is an enormous cash crunch.

Yes, who'd a thunk it.

This morning on radio 4, some government Bod was arguing against a pay rise for public sector workers in line with inflation. His argument was that if you raised a wage bill of 200-odd Billion by 5%, that would cost 10 Billion, which we don't have.

Almost exactly as much as you wasted on inept/corrupt/outright fraudulent PPE contracts for your "VIP Lane" chums, you unscrupulous bunch of c***s. Not to mention 4-5 times that on the worse-than-useless Test & Trace that did far more harm than it ever did good, (IMO).

This tory government is starting to make the dictators of central Africa look fair and virtuous.

I can't expect Labour to be much better given that they have been so weak in opposition, basically arguing for more shutdowns and more covid spending (and remember the days of PFI under Tony Blair..), and "The lib dems will never get elected" is a grim self-fulfilling prophecy that I can't see ever changing (and have therefore just perpetuated) but I will vote for them anyway. Their biggest mistake was to allow themselves to be manipulated and shafted by the conservatives, and it's one that I hope they will never repeat.

We have literally pissed away all of the UK taxpayers money, mostly to China, via fat cats and companies with political connections to the tory party, who will all be partying on their boats to their offshore tax havens, while the rest of us can starve and freeze to death. We "took back control", and the tories simply used that control to line their own pockets. The EU had rules about corruption, which don't apply anymore.

But there will be no revolution, apparently, because Priti Patel has outlawed protesting.

> it was not going to end well when the EU named Barnier

Agreed. But nor could it it ever have ended well when we named lord dickhead f**ing frost. Though I don't know who came first.

Brocade wrongly sacked award-winning salesman who depended on company insurance for cancer treatment

Re: Intrigued

Are you a cat with a piece of black/yellow hazard tape tied around your rear appendage?

Human Remains

HR people usually start out their careers as wide-eyed cuddly 'caring' types who love hiring, love to help people, and have never had to fire anyone.

But as they get more "experience" they quickly learn that this is not a "caring" profession - quite the opposite, and their job is to be heartless, soulless bastards. The role of HR is to protect the company from its employees. Nothing more.

And what happens when you take a "cuddly caring person" and make them shoot puppies and drown kittens over and over? You turn them into psychopaths. That's what big corporate HR is, and is the reason that I only work for small companies whose HR are still (mostly) human.

Hands up who ISN'T piling in to help Epic Games appeal Apple App Store ruling

Re: Apple is getting shafted by very guilty parties

I'm not normally one to defend Microsoft, but your argument stacks up about as well as "Britain can't criticise China over slave labour, cos it used slave labour in the past"

The point is: Apple clearly have an antitrust problem: Banning all in-app purchases outside of their app store which takes a 30% cut is anticompetitive. Microsoft would want to highlight that, because they don't stop developers from making money outside of the Microsoft Store. (yet)

Google on the other hand, are indeed conspicuous by their absence. Arguably they have an even worse antitrust problem than Apple, but at least they aren't suing developers for having their own ways to offer paid content.

I don't even want to know what Amazon and Facebook are thinking..

UK government responds to post-Brexit concerns and of course it's all the fault of those pesky EU negotiators

Sir Bill Cash, European Scrutiny Committee chairman..

Couldn't make this up..

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel green-lights Mike Lynch's extradition to US to face Autonomy fraud charges

Re: Let the Lynching Begin

Who? What? Your post makes no sense.

I assume you're talking about this guy: https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/01/leo_apotheker_autonomy_trial/

(Due Diligence? Isn't that Dilbert's job?)

But what do you mean by "Too many californian criminals got hurt by leo's blunders"

Meta trains data2vec neural network to grok speech, images, text so it can 'understand the world'

> I believe they are using the same model for different data types and that's the new thing.

Don't neural networks require the input to be of a given shape (i.e. dimensionality) and size?

And wouldn't trying to train a general model be horrendously inefficient?

I wonder how much leccy zuckerborg has spaffed on this pointless exercise, at a time when we are struggling to heat our homes, and (presumably) California is struggling to generate enough power on its grid to run the air con in summer, the poor buggers.

Mike Lynch loses US extradition delay bid: Flight across the Atlantic looks closer than ever

guilty or not, I don't fancy his chances

Yes, he can expect to be, er, Lynched.

Shut off 3G by 2033? How about 2023, asks Vodafone UK

Re: Not only phones

Mine's a good old Bakolite -encased electromechanical meter. They can pry it out of my cold, dead hands, frankly.

That one doesn't over-read by a factor of five when driving any DC load without active PFC.

The 'smart' meters, especially the old ones, weren't "True RMS" - they had a single sample point, at the top of the AC waveform, and made an assumption that the current was sinusoidal and in-phase with the voltage.

But what happens when you have a bridge rectifier and a capacitor on the mains-end of your load? All the current is concentrated at the top of the voltage waveform, where the diodes are in conduction. So you could be severely overcharged for LED lighting, as well as a lot of IT equipment.

Don't your smart meters ultimately use 2G/3G?

Yes, they do.

As usual, another ill-thought-out policy..

Privacy is for paedophiles, UK government seems to be saying while spending £500k demonising online chat encryption

Open source??

That's for paedophiles, terrorists, and liberal democrats.

(I predict that soon it will be illegal to have a jailbroken phone.. And not long after that it will be illegal to run any software that wasn't signed by a megacorp. It will be considered theft to fail to send your data to Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, or Google)

For those worried about Microsoft's Pluton TPM chip: Lenovo won't even switch it on by default in latest ThinkPads

Re: What's the real function?

Even now, Linux Distros tend to require a signing key from Microsoft to boot on EFI.

Secure boot and "trusted computing" was always (IMO) for the purpose of locking down the hardware against "unauthorised modification" by its tenant "owner", and that included making it difficult to install an operating system other than Microsoft Windows (or Apple OSX in the case of Apple hardware, which IIRC was first to adopt TPMs).

And for those users who have modified their PCs, microsoft and chums would like to lock them out of DRM'd software and digital content, including games (where it will be under the guise of anti-cheat measures).

I fully expect Microsoft's recent purchase of Activision/Blizzard to introduce mandatory TPM checks. You can certainly forget about future compatibility with Wine/Proton.

Version 7 of WINE is better than ever at running Windows apps where they shouldn't

Re: More like milk

Goes rotten - and not even particularly slowly

Predictive Dirty Dozen: What will and won't happen in 2022 (unless it doesn’t/does)

Re: I predict .....

Doesn't seem to be the case in Germany...

And even if they all changed their minds, it'll take decades to reverse the damage done by knee-jerk decommissioning. And I predict the next major energy crisis in er...

EOF - connection terminated

a ban on line drying laundry

That's ridiculous. Surely you must be mistaken!

.. Nope. Welcome to the USA.

ASUS recalls motherboards that flame out thanks to backwards capacitors

Re: Does no-one do ERC these days?

Errr, when an electrolytic capacitor is connected backwards, it usually explodes pretty much immediately after applying power..

Nowhere in TFA do I see it mentioned that they were "happily working in users' systems" but I haven't checked Reddit, obviously.

Although it DOES say "may cause debug error code 53, no post, or motherboard components damage" - all of which can be detected by testing at least to POST, at the factory.

Does no-one do ERC these days?

Never mind ERC (electrical rules check is a schematic analysis that would not have caught a capacitor fitted backwards by the pick n place machine) but does nobody apply power to the boards before they leave the factory? Aren't they supposed to have a self-test in the BIOS that would at least say "no CPU or RAM installed, but i'm otherwise OK" ?

The Ghost of Windows Past haunts a street corner in Bermondsey

Re: What I want to know is

Heh. You are right about the pagefile, it is indeed possible to ask Windows not to use one (but apparently performance degrades if you do - according to Microsoft you're supposed to leave the pagefile enabled, even if you have an SSD and plenty of RAM).

But one thing windows CANNOT do is to run with a read-only C: drive. There is a horrible hack in the so-called "Windows Embedded" to try and disable most disk writes by copy-on-write to RAM, but the physical disk has to be read-write otherwise windows panics.

Whereas in Linux (especially embedded) it is perfectly normal to set all file systems read-only. There's even a handy shortcut key (alt+sysrq+u) to do it.

Why in gods name would you put Windows on an Eee PC? Weren't they supposed to come with Linux?

Re: What I want to know is

Not really, no.

Android still needs endless updates for stuff that would never be used by a digital signage system, is a right pain in the arse to build, doesn't easily support external framebuffer devices, and has too many features that would need to be turned off e.g. power management, lock screen, home screen, notifications, telephony, user accounts.. etc. It could possibly be even worse than Windows.

The obvious solution would be embedded Linux (e.g. Yocto), with the signage application (perhaps based on a HTML5 renderer) writing directly to a raw framebuffer device. And I suspect/hope that the only reason we don't see any of those, is because they don't display hilarious giant size error messages when they go wrong, and so do not go on to be featured in "Bork! Bork! Bork!" (or indeed the 12 Borks of Christmas).

When they do (rarely) go wrong, the screen would just freeze with the last displayed advert or go blank, and nobody except the service technician ever notices.

What I want to know is

Why do people insist on using Windows for public signage?

If the output is a framebuffer device separate from the administration console, then it doesn't need to splurt all the gory details of its latest hardware/software error for all and sundry to point and laugh at.

It also helps if you don't use an OS that needs constant OTA updates (lest it splurge a reminder on your bork screen), can't live without a swapfile and never, EVER stops thrashing the disk.

You geeks have inherited the Earth, but what are you going to do with it?

Re: What do we do? More or less what today's lords demand from us

Amanfrommars1, it's amazing how you never cease to amuse me, even though I know you are nothing more than a bucket of statistics about the English language that some twerp scraped from message boards and then had the gall to call it 'intelligence'.

Too busy feasting on meatballs, Windows struggles to update itself in IKEA

Why would you need this?

If you really need to make an insurance claim?

Yule goat's five-year flame-free streak ends ignominiously

Re: > Please, not a remainer pretending to be a leaver, we had that with the slimey toad May

I can't argue with that. The post of Home Secretary seems to be one that is only attractive to megalomanaical psychopaths (much moreso than PM).

But my point was, such a person who wishes to push Britain in the direction of a totalitarian police state resembling soviet-era east germany, would certainly NOT want the oversight of the European Parliament, the ECJ, the ECHR etc. as they are all set up primarily to prevent that kind of corrupt, oppressive system from ever being possible again.

Therefore I can only conclude that Ms May must have been a Leave supporter in disguise.

And before we stray too far off-topic: Under Priti Patel's new regime, it will soon be illegal even to protest peacefully against government corruption.

So if peaceful protest is made illegal and the crony governent are free to abuse their "sovereign" powers to line their own pockets at the expense of the nation, then future would-be peaceful protestors will have nothing to lose and everything to gain, by "setting fire to the goat" (or parliament) and escalating to violence.

> Please, not a remainer pretending to be a leaver, we had that with the slimey toad May

No, the "Slimey Toad" May was a Leaver pretending to be a Remainer, as far as I could tell. "And look where that got us." indeed.

(I firmly believe that the only reason that Theresa May joined the Remain side was because she knew full well that everyone hated her. All her policies as Home Sec prior to Brexit time were aimed at establishing a police state in Britain, and removing that pesky Human Rights Act)

I don't know what the hell Truss is nor what she is pretending to be.. Except a clown pretending to be a government minister. She could be a Russian stooge for all I can see (along with cummings, Raaaab Gav, Mogg et al). She and her 1922 Brexit chums are certainly furthering the Russians' goal of destabilising the west very nicely indeed.

Windows takes a breather in London's Spitalfields

Re: Correct way to script timeout on Windows

I have also observed (to my horror) this rather strange implementation of the sleep command in Windows.

AWS power failure in US-EAST-1 region killed some hardware and instances

Re: Elastic

You can't "blame the customer for being stupid enough to believe our marketing drivel / lies" - The reason that there is a chronic lack of IT expertise / clue amongst small business owners is BECAUSE c*ts like Bezos' Bozos are pretending to have a magic wand that fixes all IT woes, when they don't. So nobody bothers to get proper IT training - the IT training colleges just tell them how to set up a bloody EC2 instance!

Re: Ever heard of a UPS?

see icon. don't come back.

Re: Ever heard of a UPS?

I think UPS failover (or supply failover in general) is a good case for DC power distribution instead of AC tbh. I often worry about the stability of our AC electricity grids.

I don't know if Amazon had DC or AC distribution in this case, but I'd place a bet that it was standard 50/60Hz AC.

The big problem with AC is that your sources all need to be in phase, so you can't easily have multiple UPSs holding up the same busbar. Normally you end up with one big inverter somewhere, which is a single point of failure.

You can still have smaller UPSs on individual servers though, and you can have redundant PSUs inside the servers themselves which use diodes as a failover mechanism. But you can only do that after it has been rectified to DC.

Any 'mission-critical' server like a disk array would "shurley" have double, if not triple redundant PSUs with separate AC busbars and separate UPSs though, so I'd be surprised if this outage was just a UPS failure. If so then some IT/electrical engineering heads could roll at Amazon.