* Posts by phuzz

6709 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

phuzz Silver badge

I'm pretty sure the title of this article should have read "Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris because they wouldn't buy a real server".

You don't get rich by spending money on the little people. (/s)

Intel's $699 Core i9-14900KS turbos to 6.2GHz – assuming you can keep it cool

phuzz Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: 6 gigs

It's the highest frequency (out of the box) CPU ever sold, so by definition everything else must be currently running on 'slower' CPUs.

It's irrelevant though, because AI stuff typically uses GPUs or other dedicated silicon, and cloud servers get their speed from running many (slower) CPUs across many, many, servers. It's like comparing a Bugatti Veyron to a fleet of trucks.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: "...the x86 giant now has a...processor...that it says will do 6.2GHz right out of the box..."

To put it in perspective, a 14900K (6.0GHz) could compress a bunch of files in WinRar in 14.95s, the previous 13900K (5.8GHz) could do it in 15.21 (based on this review). So the 14900KS is probably a similar increase (or decrease I suppose, depending on how you look at it).

I'm not sure I'd could even notice a quarter of a second speed-up. I would probably notice the difference in my electricity bill though.

Font security 'still a Helvetica of a problem' says Australian graphics outfit Canva

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Nomenclature

I saw an email the other week from one of our French customers which started: "Juste un petite follow-up"

Copilot pane as annoying as Clippy may pop up in Windows 11

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Can someone please tell them to stop?

I had a roughly ten minute routine for XP, which took a fresh install to a state that I felt was 'acceptable', disabling animations, un-needed services etc.

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

phuzz Silver badge

Re: We only just got Windows 10 settled....

Better not move to Ubuntu then. LTS releases only get five years of support.

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

phuzz Silver badge

Re: I was amazed…

That was definitely an early advantage for HDMI (just one ,thin, cable between device and screen was a revelation when I first used one), but DisplayPort carries audio too.

Health system network turned out to be a house of cards – Cisco cards, that is

phuzz Silver badge
Unhappy

I had a similar "this should be fine, ohshit" moment, moving power connections on an HP blade enclosure. It could hold up to eight hot-swappable power supplies, this one had six, but IIRC could operate on as few as two with the small number of blades in this particular unit. I'd already moved the power lead of one PSU to a different UPS, so I wasn't expecting anything different when I pulled the kettle lead out of the next one down. Instead there was a click, and the entire blade enclosure powered down, taking with it several important servers. Cue my boss charging into the server room asking what I'd done.

After some testing, it turned out that one of the PSUs seemed ok, right up until it had to draw any significant load, whereupon it would completely fail. If the enclosure had chosen to spread the load onto a different PSU we'd never had noticed, it was just sheer chance it picked the bad one.

Microsoft catches the Wi-Fi 7 wave with Windows 11

phuzz Silver badge

Re: "Applications that struggle with latency [..] will also benefit"

Latency and bandwidth are two different things. The simplistic explanation is that bandwidth is how much data you can transmit/receive at once, latency is the time it takes between you sending a packet, and it reaching it's destination.

Latency is mostly noticeable in online games, or VoIP/video calls. eg when you talk, but it takes a noticeable amount of time before the other person hears you.

(Of course, if you don't have enough bandwidth, your latency is going to go way up, so they are somewhat linked)

phuzz Silver badge

Of course, if it's blocked by walls, you need to have an AP in every room. I've lived plenty of places where the internal walls were as solid as the external ones. (And places where they were just as flimsy).

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Oh and the smoke

I've seen someone get a DIMM in the wrong way around, but not deterred by the notch being in the wrong place, they managed to jam it in hard enough to engage the latch on both ends.

Kind of impressive in it's own way. IIRC it worked fine once the DIMM had been re-inserted correctly.

Microsoft veteran on how to blue screen your way to better testing

phuzz Silver badge

Re: "PS/2 keyboard support turned up in Windows 2000, USB keyboards were added with Vista in 2007"

Clarification

When I first read the article, it wasn't clear that it was the crash-inducing key combination that was introduced in Win2k (etc.). I used the corrections form, and got a reply from the author, Richard Speed* promising to make it clearer, and then another email from elReg staff also confirming the clarification. The amended article makes it much clearer, always use the Corrections form folks, the take their jobs seriously :)

Sorry for accusing you of being Ai, elReg :(

*name checks out ;)

phuzz Silver badge
Stop

Re: "PS/2 keyboard support turned up in Windows 2000, USB keyboards were added with Vista in 2007"

Yep that sounds, well, wrong.

PS/2 keyboards were the norm when Windows 1.0 came out, and definitely worked out of the box with Windows 3. They're still supported on Windows 11, if you happen to have a motherboard that has a PS/2 port.

Win95 could just about handle USB keyboards with additional drivers etc. Win98 was the first version with USB support out of the box. (Although you'd still encounter motherboards which required a PS/2 keyboard to access the BIOS).

Oh, and Hyper-V was first added to Server 2008 and Win8.

Have elReg been letting an AI write articles?

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

phuzz Silver badge
Meh

Re: Running internal applications and services in the cloud

Most data centres have multiple network and power connections, specifically picked to run nowhere near each other to reduce the chances of one JCB taking out multiple connections.

Of course, you can run applications internally, but most offices don't have redundant power or networking, so all it takes is one JCB to bring everything scratching to a halt.

phuzz Silver badge

Well, it is very thin, so it probably dosn't come with much ground.

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

phuzz Silver badge

According to The Sun, had this been a real mission rather than a test, the launch would have been successful. The MoD is, unsurprisingly, remaining tightlipped about such matters.

So reading between the lines, they're claiming that when they removed the nuke and replaced it with ballast/telemetry, someone broke the rocket?

LockBit ransomware gang disrupted by global operation

phuzz Silver badge

Good news in there:

The [NCA] has obtained over 1,000 decryption keys and will be contacting UK-based victims in the coming days and weeks to offer support and help them recover encrypted data.

Intuitive Machines IM-1 heading for Moon on SpaceX rocket

phuzz Silver badge

The Nova-C is slightly taller than an old British Police Box

This needs to be added to elReg's list of standard measurements. For spacecraft if nothing else.

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

phuzz Silver badge

Infosys enjoyed a boom in UK government invoices in 2023

phuzz Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Ethics & Conflict of Interest Training

"Good news! We're not going with Capita!

Instead our new supplier will be Fujitsu."

phuzz Silver badge
Meh

Re: Humour

To put that £7M in context, Fujitsu billed for £36M in November 2023 just for their support of the Horizon system.

I can't be bothered to tot it all up myself, but in 2023 Fujitsu likely took at least a billion quid in contracts fro the UK government.

Broadcom terminates VMware's free ESXi hypervisor

phuzz Silver badge

I'm not entirely sure how it works, but apparently you can take out a loan to buy a company, and then make said company liable to pay back that loan. eg

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Musk? Who trusts this guy?

SpaceX won't be the single point of failure for Artemis, NASA has also contracted Blue Origin to develop a lander.

It's a more conventional design, but it's from a company that so far has only launched sub-orbital rockets (and is also owned by a potentially volatile billionaire).

Still, I'm not a US citizen, so it's not my taxes being wasted :)

PiStorm turbocharges vintage Amigas with the Raspberry Pi

phuzz Silver badge

Re: a totally non-Unix-like system

The Amiga had my favourite case sensitivity in it's shell, which was, 'some'.

If you wanted to, you could have FILE and file in the same directory (or any combination of cases)*, but assuming that just File existed, then you could use any combination of case to refer to it and the command line would just interpret what you meant.

* I've yet to find a case when I'd want to have both FILE and file as separate files, but apparently it's important to *nix.

phuzz Silver badge
Meh

This looks interesting, it might even prompt me to go find my A1200. The question is, if it's been sat in an attic for twenty years, how likely is it to work?

Closure of Windows 10 upgrade path still catching users by surprise

phuzz Silver badge

Re: In my misbegotten youth....

I'm still technically using the same license I bought for Vista, which got upgraded (in place) to 7, then 8>8.1>10>11. I think I did a fresh install on Win 10, but otherwise it was the same install, upgraded several times, and cloned to a newer SSD at least twice.

And yes, I too spent many hours on the phone to MS activation back in the XP days :(

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Simple solution?

In a way Amazon are liable for defective products, because they're the ones giving you a refund.

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

phuzz Silver badge
Devil

Re: I only see 2 options: (though this is only a quick look)

3) Just reboot them anyway.

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

phuzz Silver badge

Re: sort of on topic...

There's also many stories of pilots training on such simulators, and being surprised by 'giant' spiders on the runway.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

phuzz Silver badge

You know how every bit of Microsoft documentation about setting up AD has always said to use a specific domain which is not your web address?

Well whoever set up the AD at my last job never read it. Nope, they'd set it up as companyname.co.uk, which was already causing problems when I started there, let alone during my job :(

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Oops!

How many times per day do you run backups on your systems?

At my last job I was creating a new snapshot every hour during business hours on the file server, keeping (I think) the last 12 hourly snapshots. (And then daily/weekly/monthly rotations, backing up to tape etc.). That was for normal user files (spreadsheets and the like) and worked well, and give me very quick restores for the "oops I just overwrote a file I need in five minutes" type requests.

The literal Rolls-Royce of EVs is recalled over fire risk

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Glue?

Or added too much and it's squeezed out somewhere it shouldn't be

Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission

phuzz Silver badge

Re: GDPR breach here we come

Unless the URL/names of your tabs contain data covered by GDPR , this isn't really an issue.

And I'm not sure that using Google Chrome would be much better in any case.

BOFH: Looks like you're writing an email. Fancy telling your colleague to #$%^ off?

phuzz Silver badge

"Ah yes, the try-before-you-get-addicted strategy – as used by Class-A drug pushers everywhere. Nice."

I've never been offered free drugs by a dealer, I must be doing something wrong :(

Users now keep cellphones for 40+ months and it's hurting the secondhand market

phuzz Silver badge

Re: No real surprise

And if you find a better deal from another company, chances are your current provider will match it

YouTube video lag wrongly blamed on its ad-blocking animus

phuzz Silver badge

Why does Firefox need to rethink it's UI, when it's already basically the same as Chrome?

Both have tabs along the top, under that you have Back, Forward, and Reload, then an address bar (that's also a search bar). Then the icons for whatever addons you have installed.

There some differences when you go into the menus, but that's 99% of most people's interactions with their browser.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

phuzz Silver badge

Re: "speach"

Bristolian?

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

phuzz Silver badge

Re: 2038?

We'll find out before 2038, when (eg) a poorly programmed system in 2028 tries to schedule an event in ten years time and runs out of bits.

Need to make some 3D models but lack the skill and talent? Say, have you tried... AI?

phuzz Silver badge

I guess this make a good training tool, because it's often easier to learn from someone else's mistakes, and I'm sure the AI will make plenty of those.

NASA's Artemis Moon missions take a rain check until 2025 and beyond

phuzz Silver badge

Re: You don't have a clue

The number of refuels required depends on the efficiency of the Raptor engines, not how much thrust they produce. I'm sure the efficiency has been increasing, but probably not linearly in-line with the thrust produced. And it doesn't just depend on the engines. If the design of Starship has to change to add (eg) one kilo of extra self-destruct equipment, that's a kilo of fuel they won't be able to carry (on every single trip). Currently the design of Starship is very much in flux, let alone the currently non-existent lunar variant.

It's just too early to say how many refuelling trips will be necessary right now.

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

phuzz Silver badge

Re: A scandal of epic proportions

el Reg have been following the story for over a decade now, which is how I first heard about it.

America's first private lunar lander suffers 'critical' fuel leak en route to Moon

phuzz Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: They may have to lower their goal

Not even the first private lunar 'impactor', just the first US one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beresheet

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Hot air

I don't want to defend the shower of bastards, but police budgets have only faired slightly better than other public services in the last decade

phuzz Silver badge

Re: No Justice

It's worth noting that some MPs did their job and tried to intervene on behalf of their constituents, and the PO just lied to them and told them everything was fine.

Windows boss takes on taskbar turmoil, pledges to 'make Start menu great again'

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Too late ..... much too late !!!!

I suspect they meant it unthinkingly as 'those damn kids', but now that most millennials are in their late 30's/early 40's, chances are that it's managers around that age who are in charge of pushing new 'features' at Microsoft, so it might not be that far off.

Crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried spared a second trial

phuzz Silver badge

I think if he'd donated as much to republicans, and they were in power, he probably wouldn't have been prosecuted for any of the charges.

Although I suppose once they realised he was broke and they weren't going to get any more donations off of him, they might have gone ahead. Not with the campaign 'contributions' charge of course, that might make people look at who he made 'contributions' to.

(Most US 'lobbying' would be considered straight up bribery under UK laws. To me the whole system seems rife with corruption on all sides)

phuzz Silver badge
Thumb Up

I asked for info, you provided it, thanks. I don't feel that you deserve those downvotes.

phuzz Silver badge

Out of interest, which politicians/parties is he alleged to have supported?

UK government lays out plan to divert people's broken gizmos from landfill

phuzz Silver badge

Re: disposable vapes

I feel like OP missed out the word lit cigarette butts, which would make a better analogy.

And while it is possible to reuse the batteries, that's not much practical use if the majority of them are thrown in with general rubbish (or just chucked on the street). At least specific 'electronics' collections might hopefully make it easier to find reusable components without digging through a mound of mixed rubbish, and also reduce the fire risk somewhat.

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Customers are the security liability

In the 90's it wouldn't have been much harder than, download the attachment and double-click.