Posts by goldcd

After nine servers he worked on failed, techie imagined next career as beach vendor

Re: Sorry, is it just me ?

Author Matthew JC Powell

Matt JCP..

Can you squint at pronunciation?

Intel's PC chip ship is sinking with Arm-ada on the horizon

The fact that Intel

is having to pay TSMC to make their GPUs, isn't a great sign.

Nor their just released and homegrown generation of x86, being almost indistinguishable from their last.

Still, got to be worth a punt on their currently collapsed share price - they're on the ropes and if this doesn't help bump them out of their decades-long-complacency, nothing will.

UK civil servants – hopefully including those spending billions on tech – to skill up in STEM

The cynic in me

Can't help but feel that the type of people available for a 9 month secondment, might skew towards those from groups wanting to extract money from government.

Even putting aside the cynicism, experts in a field make money from the field - if there's not a conflict, then maybe not the right expert.

Seems a little odd that "employing people with domain expertise and separating from those without" wasn't considered.. seeing as it's how most jobs work.

Apple races to patch the latest zero-day iPhone exploit

I agree

but Apple could easily solve this issue by simply paying more as a bug-bounty than NSO does.

Apple owes Brit iOS app devs millions from excessively high commission, lawsuit claims

Re: Why does Google get a pass?

You don't even have to use an alternative market place - nothing stopping you sticking your APK on your website (or even email it to your users).

They might have to click through a couple of warnings - but absolutely no reason you'd have to pay anybody else to distribute your Android app.

Similar to PC where you might choose to give Valve a heft % for them to host it on Steam and enable you to use their services - but entirely optional.

Chinese balloon that US shot down was 'crammed' with American hardware

Made in America?

Really?

Well I suppose the US can pat themselves on the back for still making all the parts required to create a spy-balloon on-shore.

Can noise-cancelling buds beat headphones? We spent 20 hours flying to find out

If you've got an old decent pair of wired IEMs

You can relatively cheaply pick up the 'the necklace part' of those and plug them in.

Quite handy as codecs evolve, batteries wear out, wires snag - you just replace the cheap bit and can transplant your beloved earbuds across.

Hyundai and Kia issue software upgrades to thwart killer TikTok car theft hack

Re: Wait.... they did not have that?

Can't find the source, but pretty sure the issue was that in the US where the immobilizer isn't mandated, it was sold as an optional extra.

I think all these cars were available in Canada - but there they have a mandated immobilizer, like here.

Craig Wright's crypto wallet claim against Bitcoin SV devs back before judges

Am I reading this right?

"I invented Bitcoin, have a massive wallet, but unfortunately lost my keys to it"

"You forked bitcoin, forking my wallet (which as I said, I've misplaced the keys to, sorry about that) - but would you awfully mind just giving me that wallet on your block-chain?

Warren Buffet cashes out of TSMC, which splashes cash on fabs

It's not a bad problem to have

"Buffett and Co. don't typically turn over stocks in a hurry, preferring shares with long term growth and revenue prospects."

"Unfortunately the stock jumped a third to a price we consider to be an over-valued, so with regret we have no option but to offload this over-priced stock for a gargantuan immediate profit"

Weep for the cybercriminals who fell for online scams and lost $2.5m last year

*whistles*

The Farmer's in his Den

LinkedIn study suggests it's not your best pals who will help get you that next job

LinkedIn concludes

the best relationships are the ones they have a lot of.

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

Re: Bow down before the market god

If you want to get pedantic - they've been zero-rated for over 18 months:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tampon-tax-abolished-from-today#:~:text=The%20'tampon%20tax'%20has%20been,today%20(1%20January%202021).

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

If you really want to 'fix' your start menu

Stardock have their "Start"<windows version> app, which pretty much lets you choose which start menu you want on whatever version of windows.

(The correct answer of-course being the Windows 7 one)

BT accused of 'misinformation' campaign ahead of strikes

You forgot my favourite "Stock buybacks"

Which are pretty much "We're going to use our money, to buy our own shares, solely to support the price"

Or "The quarter isn't looking good, so instead of investing to earn more money and raise the price by adding value - we'll just hand you our investment pot and worry about next quarter later"

Downfall: The Case Against Boeing - (on Netflix) is excellent for showing how this works out.

Telcos fear Big Tech will bleed them until they can’t afford network builds

Indeed

Bit like how it use to be buying stuff from amazon.

Your order would have a charge for the item you bought and another line charge for the price going to the shipping company to get it to you.

Similar to how your eyeball pays google a fraction of a cent for the search service and then your phone/internet bill pays a similarly small fraction for getting those results to you.

Amazon could beat down the courier prices to the bare minimum as there was competition between them - but in the end worked out it was cheaper to cut them all out for most deliveries and do it themselves.

Telcos hate being called dumb-pipes, but there's absolutely nobody other than themselves who wants to them to anything more.

The end of the iPod – last model available 'while supplies last'

I think the original ipod was the last gadget that blew me away

Whole racks of CDs moved into that satisfyingly small (and annoyingly scratchable) little brick you could easily drop into your pocket and later drop into a little dock nestling on-top of a speaker. Latter was also maybe the 'death of the hifi in most homes'

iTunes (especially on my PC) was never perfect - but a quantum leap ahead of previous music management software.

Also allowed podcasts and audiobooks to really take off and sit alongside music.

Continuing my defence of the slighted, the Zune wasn't bad, but just that bit clunkier and late. Did do some interesting things around music subscriptions and sharing, whilst Apple was still wanting to just sell you CDs, but digitally.'

Chromebook sales train derails as market reaches saturation

I was more shocked at how high the numbers are

I knew "Chromebooks were a thing in education", but 2 large vendors still shifting 34 million still feels pretty significant.

AMD Threadripper CPU supply severely low, PC makers say

I'd be a little more more forceful in my displeasure than:

"I think I can speak for everyone that we're weary of product launches that not everyone can participate in,"

I'd be apoplectic - not just that it's a launch of something you can't buy and sell, but it's an announcement that you customers are best going elsewhere, through no fault of your own.

Google to sell replacement Pixel phone parts via iFixit

I think you're being over-cynical

Providing ifixits guides with google's parts - gives a pretty damn good mechanism to let you repair your phone.

My guess is that repairing phones has never been a profit centre (even for apple with their battery swaps) - the fight within the coporations has been between planned obsolescence and buying the latest version.

Pendulum has been swinging back against this for numerous reasons - there's the right to repair lobby, there's the decreasing levels of progress between the yearly updates - and maybe more importantly the shift from making money from the hardware to the services that can be sold over it.

Amazon warehouse workers in New York unionize in historic win against web giant

Not an unequivocal union fan - but I applaud this

I like the idea that amazon has to deal with a unionized workforce.

Mainly as I like and want to use amazon, but I don't want that to be part of a system that legally has to grind down workers to legally appease their shareholders.

Where I think the tech-bros are missing a trick, is harnessing their customers as part of the justification.

Email me and give me a button to press, that lets me say I'm prepared to pay say 2% more to cover better benefits for their workers that fill the box and deliver it to my door.

Axed data scientist sues IBM claiming he was discriminated against as a man

I'd agree that there's plenty of competition out there for bad employers

Maybe IBM stands out as they had the history of being the "job for life, benevolent employer, in IT"

The name carries a lot of baggage with it - they were never really a dot.com darling, nor a bonus-shitting FANG today. But neither were they considered an off-shore-centred, body-shop.

They held the position of being the sensible, small-c conservative, back-bone of IT - makers of both mainframes and the thinkpad you wanted in your bag.

A partner that would outlive you the customer - a safe pair of hands.

My feeling is that all these stories about "IBM being dicks" are really just shorthand for "the old industry being dicks"

Play Store class action has £15m budget for defeating Google in London court

But it's a bit like short-sellers in finance.

They're doing it for selfish reasons - but they perform a useful service 'outing' and 'punishing' illegal behaviour/fraud.

Of course it would be better if this was all handled by the regulators/governments, but knowing they're out there with their giant pockets, sniffing for blood in their water - well it's not going to make anybody behave worse, and that benefits us all.

MariaDB takes a dip into Angel Pond to clean up and go public

Well I hope that the inevitable next free fork

has a better name than "Maria"

New York Times outlays seven-figure sum for 1,900 lines of JavaScript – yes, we mean Wordle

I am very happy for him

Maybe what got overlooked isn't so much the game though - as is endlessly mentioned it's quite simple and could be knocked out by any competent dev and isn't even that original.

My thoughts:

1) It's the absolute antithesis of any recent game. No ads, you can only play it once a day, still no ads and not an f'in "best value gem pack" to buy.

Each day you have fun for a few minutes - and hope to see you again tomorrow.

2) The UI is slick. It gives me pleasure just interacting with it. The keyboard that auto-marks your burnt letters, even the feeling of commitment pressing enter gives (despite a lesser designer thinking it would be pointless as you've entered 5 letters, so "let's remove that extra click" - that click extra click makes it better)

3) Everybody gets the same word each day. I'm not sure if we have the oft-desired 'water-cooler comments' we used to back in the day. With everything being optimized and customized on every refresh, it gives you the opportunity to say "Don't you think that word today was a complete bastard?"

4) The game is for everybody - can't think of many games I'd happily point my grandmother to (Unless Raid:Shadow Legends had promised me a gem-pack and a 50% cooldown boost, if she spent $50 on Ork powder)

5) The ability to share your results/show-off, without spoiling the game or making you feel like a shill. This is the thing that I suspect drew most people in.

Not some cookie-loaded URL - you can literally just paste it into anything. People are intrigued, they click and happily go through my previous points and become 'one of us'

Really glad to see it's paid off for him and glad to see it's found a home that seems like a good fit.

My real point, if I had one, was that whilst Wordle was small and simple - it shows that's all you need if you're prepared to polish it until it shines.

Intel R&D spending surges after years of neglect as Gelsinger pledges to make Chipzilla great again

I wish Intel all the best

I'm sure it was noticed that AMD's recent renaissance neatly aligns with the rise of their "technical CEO" in Lisa Su - I hope Gelsinger can do similar for Intel.

Being vertically integrated, Intel has a riskier path ahead - but with that risk comes the potential to reap greater rewards.

There seem to be some promising noises about their return to the discrete GPU market - currently an over-priced duopoly constrained by TSMC.

If they can nail that (or get close enough) and then crank out the wafers 'at cost' - they'll be untouchable as they can pick their retail price by just adjusting some internal budgeting to their desire to destroy their competition.

Maybe 5 years of crushing - before they decide to reappoint a bean-counter and the cycle will continue.

You're fabbing it wrong: Chip shortages due to lack of investment in the right factories, says IDC

Sounds like a fine business model

Historically we're had leading-edge manufacturing making goods to a higher and higher quality.

Then in parallel we the movement of production going off-shore, allowing us all to buy the high-end for less.

Last few years have shown us that the two progressions above have left holes on our manufacturing.

Whereas previously a skilled person with a machine lathe could have made your required legacy widget for a handsome markup, there are now holes. You could offer $50 for that $5 chip your car needs - but nobody can make it for you - they're now making $500 parts and don't feel the urge to answer your RFP.

The motor manfacurers (as an example) have now learnt that battering down suppliers on price doesn't work for high-investment parts, like it maybe previously did injection molding the plastic on a wing-mirror.

My guess is that this is a "one time" lesson - long term availability will be baked into contracts going foward - or like Tesla they'll design a product with replaceable components.

Weed dispensary software company's ambitions pruned after Spotify trademark clash

Idal was the best I could come up with

(Tidal and weed-related laziness)

But prefer your Weedwork

Logitech Signature M650: A mouse that will barely emit a squeak or a clickety-click

It's most definitely the surface breaking down (in some cases)

I had a cheap infrared thermometer that's got black rubber over-molding over yellow (looks like a DeWalt tool) - randomly picked it up a week ago and rubber stuck to my hand (consistency of a thick caramel). Didn't slowly deteriorate - was fine for years and now I can pull bits off it with my fingers.

Much older real DeWalt stuff like my drill - still absolutely fine.

No idea what the difference in the chemistry is - but there is one.

Db2, where are you? Big Blue is oddly reluctant to discuss recent enhancements to its flagship database

Re: Throwaway society mentality comes to IT

As an opposing/devil's advocate - you must remember the hell of a customer asking you which very expensive machine to buy based on some vague "transactions" and then a vague "number per second with some order of magnitude high/low random numbers".

Now you can ignore all that - customer can burn as much money as they like to get the performance that they want and you still have the option of re-writing the odd asinine query - but now you get to produce some gargantuan opex saving for your 30 minutes of work.

Shocking: UK electricity tariffs are among world's most expensive

Re: 70's electricty

"The day the wind stopped" - a new blockbuster

Battlefield 2042: Please don't be the death knell of the franchise, please don't be the death knell of the franchise

Re: I was looking forward to this one... :(

*small voice* - I'm quite enjoying it.

I've bought everything from VietNam onwards, although 1 and V only got a small amount of play.

I like the modern-ish periods and BF4 is still filling servers to this day.

I feel a lot of the criticisms out there are unfair. Hiking across a map is part of the game (and punishment for letting your squad die). I don't need a bazillion weapons and mods.

Now easier to get useful addons (no week of trying to snipe with ironsights to get a useful scope, while being picked of by those already with it etc).

Being able to swap from a set of gun mods in game is a great improvement.

Portal has the scope to be incredible.

Some stuff I'm ambivalent about, like the new class/specialists.

I like the flexibility - but it's now harder to at a glace work out what the people around you can do.

The special skills is fun (but clearly a mechanism to screw more money out of us later)

Some stuff I hate, but can be fixed. Big gap for me is the lack of tighter/smaller maps (and low number of maps in general in the main game), end of match stats.

The bugs - last patch managed to prevent you from looking left and right.. (until you deleted your local config, which forced you to sit through videos and intro-bot-mission again).

Some stuff I hate they're not going to fix (the f'in 'specialists' posing and catch-phrasing between rounds) - actually the general menu system is an unintuitive mess.

If you want to give it a go, signing up for a month of EA Play gives you 10 hours - which is enough to decide if it's for you.

Qualcomm makes its own mobile gaming rig, hypes new Windows 11 chips

Can we all out 5G as BS yet?

*not* for the technology itself - but for the increasingly insane and ever more obviously ridiculous edge cases, such as this.

So.

You can plug your VR headet (you probably don't have) into this device (rather than the high-end PC you have if you did have a headset), and it can use the near non-existent, blocked by a leaf, mm5G to connect you to the *acutally* non-exsistent edge-GPU compute, to allow you to stream a VR experience that doesn't exist.

As a though experiment, imagine how much you'd pay per month/minute for the above - the number you're thinking of, isn't enough to make it nearly happen.

I'm old enough to remember the excitement of 3G video calls - which cost some ridiculouus price per minute and even once we'd both bought 'high-end phones' barely worked and were flakey-a-f cross-network.

But at least with 3G, there was a real sunny-day scenario demo that was 'real'

*nobody* wants their mobile operator to be anything over than a big dumb pipe, that gets faster and cheaper.

Amazon India execs questioned after sellers allegedly use site to smuggle marijuana

Re: Always wondered who buys those £4K books

Also handy way to inflate the price of something obscure.

List it on a few different sites for an outrageous sum (maybe even fake a sale to yourself)- then offer it to sale to a third party at half the price. They then check what it's going for and think they're going to be able to sell it for a profit.

Microsoft surpasses Apple as world's most valuable biz, by stock price at least

That's just because

if you miss your revenue prediction you get a massive kicking, whilst if you exceed it you get a pat on the back and ability to award each other another bonus.

So everybody low-balls their forecasts, so the analysts ignore them. Instead they come up with a figure that they think you should be making and it's on this the market prices your shares.

Or looking at it another way, unless you miss your projections as often as you exceed them - your projections aren't accurate and are pointless.

Informatica UKI veep was rightfully sacked over Highways England $5k golf jolly, says tribunal

Re: What about the Highways England's IT director?

Indeed.

If say the director is taken out for a golfing trip each year by Informatica, then he might even subconsciously want to ensure a relationship is maintained with them. Might not be handing them work, but maybe just asking whether they made the shortlist or were considered for RFPs

Element celebrates The Great Facebook Outage with a Signal bridge for Matrix

Re: How does Signal fund itself?

From facebook (indirectly) - setup by one of the creators of Whatsapp, who got an awful lot of money when Facebook bought Whatsapp - and he walked away from his Facebook job and even more money as he didn't like what they were doing to his baby.

Scalpel! Superglue! This mouse won't fix its own ball

and me

Took apart the mouse on the very expensive new family PC and after a bit of experimental poking, managed to break one of the o-rings.

Quietly shitting myself, I reassembled and whilst it seemed to work, was anticipating the bollocking to come.

Penny only dropped when the o-ring re-grew.

Beige pencil stockists on high alert as 'Colouring Book of Retro Computers' hits the crowdfunding circuit

Re: Data centre

And was it?

You can't just leave us hanging here.

What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell

I prefer

That I am not immortal and I fear that this job will consume my limited life without providing me the opportunity to make a lasting mark on the path of humanity.

Oh - and sarcasm in the face of pomposity.

I've got a broken combine harvester – but the manufacturer won't give me the software key

I think the problem is the outsource of manufacturing

All brands want to have that full set of white-goods for your kitchen, but a whole lot of them just outsource to different manufacturers - this one'll do my microwave, this one by dishwasher, this one my fridge - and they're all branded to look the same.

And once you've opted out of manufacture, then managing spare parts is an over-head. Oh, and then the next year you might switch to a different manufacturer - front panel looks the same, but all the innards are now based an entirely different OEM pattern.

One plus side of this all though, is that a load of the spare parts are now interchangable and widely enough used for OEMs to provide pattern parts. Thing I'd find most useful is simply if all parts had a unique ID number on them - so when I'm squinting at the picture of a dishwasher pump that "works with Bosch and looks the same" - I know it's a drop in replacement to the broken one next to me.

I do wonder how much it would cost

to just build redundancy into the cheap sensors - as in stick another one in the other wingmirror and if they don't match, throw a sensor error.

The backlash seems to be building nicely though

I think manufacturers are finally understanding that making products made to last or be repaired is a good marketing point.

Currently looking to replace a fridge, so looking at Miele (as previous white-goods from have been faultless) - and was just looking at https://frame.work/ for my next laptop (although might follow them for a bit, before taking the plunge).

Remember the bloke who was told by Zen Internet to contact his MP about crap service? Yeah, it's still not fixed

Re: Write your MP

That doesn't sound too unreasonable.

For a true display of wealth, dab printer ink behind your ears instead of Chanel No. 5

I've just rolled over and gone with HP's Instant Ink

£1.99 a month for 50 pages (and I think you can roll 100 over between months) - and easily covers my occasional printing needs.

I know I could print pages cheaper using 3rd-party carts and a less draconian manufacturer - but it nicely shifts annoyances with one colour running out before the others, blocked nozzles etc onto HP.

I pay £24 a year - and I have one less thing to worry about.

Teen turned away from roller rink after AI wrongly identifies her as banned troublemaker

Bit hard to comment without more details

Looking at the pictures in the linked story - the girls to look pretty similar, so I could see the same mistake being made without AI

(However, I'm white, and we're all notoriously poorer at differentiating people of different races than our own)

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

Indeed

Seeing them get all snippy, makes the whole Virgin thing worthwhile.

New mystery AWS product 'Infinidash' goes viral — despite being entirely fictional

Entirely sensible

Enables you to select for the more modest time-machine inventors - I mean can you imagine having to work next to the guy who invented the time machine, and likes to drop that into every conversation?

Ganja believe it? Police make hash of suspected weed farm raid, pot Bitcoin mine instead

Is massive amount of excessive heat still a sign of cannabis cultivation?

From casual research, LED panels are now available which have a way lower power consumption than the traditional sodium grow-lamps.

Now I don't for one moment think criminals have 'gone green' (well not in that way) - but excessive, even if 'free', electricity consumption generates a lot of heat. A lot of heat needs to be disposed of - and lights up the building to IR cameras and requires venting which puts out that distinctive smell.

Also, whilst definitely not condoning theft of power - I'm always a little dubious of the legality of getting a search warrant for one suspicion and bagging the criminals for another crime entirely. I'd have thought in this case the difference between the observed heat radiation and paid for power would have been enough.