Posts by Chz

Attention data hoarders: Alexa loses its Plex appeal as voice feature gets canned

Jellyfin and Tailscale if you need to stream outside your house.

Your next car might need 300 GB of RAM, and so will autonomous robots

Re: New cars, I've seen them

There's a commonly held opinion on the petrol-head forums that up to around the mid-teens is the last "golden era" of automobiles. They have just enough tech to help out, but not to get in your way. Most of them are not reliant in a way that causes the car to be undriveable if they fail. And it predates the race to the bottom of tiny little turbocharged engines to try and squeak around the EU carbon taxes. No one really expects a 1.2L 3 cylinder turbo powering a 1500+kg car to still be running well after 15 years (though I'm sure some will). Added bonus of course is that they're all now 10+ years old and affordable. There are still high end cars with tech that gets in your way, and smaller cars with explosive turbochargers (google "Ford Ecoboom") so buyer beware, but a lot of great automobiles fit into the category.

Apple's budget-friendly MacBook Neo is bursting with color and compromise

Re: Is it 2012 again?

I suppose the question here is if Apple have done something to fix the issues with the original 8GB M1 Airs swapping all the time (which wasn't terribly noticeable with a fast SSD) and absolutely hammering the lifespan of the disk. There are quite a lot of 8GB M1s out there with failed disks. The calculus is that so long as you're a light user, you're not going to make the disk fail before the rest of the laptop is junk. But heavy users saw how responsive the 8GB units could be and tried to get away with saving a bit of cash. That tended to end poorly.

AIs are happy to launch nukes in simulated combat scenarios

Re: So I guess Gemini was trained

Not just Trump, and not all his tweets. It sounds rather a lot like the back and forth "Peace today, war tomorrow" nonsense between Trump and Putin that could be described as schizophrenic if you were feeling really mean towards schizophrenics.

Brit dual nationals grounded by border digitization drive

Surely you mean they save £1750 on naturalisation, plus whatever incidental costs, plus the £100 for a passport.

I have ILR myself, and I swear the Home Office has done everything possible to make it such that it's better for me to remain so than become a British Subject. Despite whatever complete piffle Reform is spouting this week. As a Commonwealther, ILR is almost *better* than citizenship. We get the vote, but can't be drafted. (Though I may be a wee bit grey at the temples for that now)

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

Re: HS2 then

I think you need to add "in an airliner" to all of those for it to be true.

Most of that was old hat to the USAF at the time.

That doesn't discount how impressive Concorde was. Using these things in the civilian realm for the first time was a Big Deal. Some still not in common use today, though that would be because they're unnecessary for subsonic flight.

Windows 11, not AI, kick-started the PC upgrade cycle

At some point, I'm fairly certain that Windows 11 will end up requiring AVX2 (so Haswell minimum) for newer versions. Core 2 machines have already been given the heave-ho due to requirements for a newer instruction set than they support. Not something a registry trick will get you around.

UK backtracks on digital ID requirement for right to work

Re: We already have National Insurance numbers.

"Actually, everyone born in the UK has an NI number. It's harder to not have one than it is to have one. It's pretty easy to lose it if you're clumsy though."

First statement provably false, as a quick check of past newspaper articles will show. I'd agree with the second though - it is hard.

I suppose the 16% of the population not born here don't count? I didn't have a problem getting an NI number, but I was young, educated, and quite employable.

Done right, digital identity would mean sharing less information, not more. Think about proving your age as an example. Your passport or driving license does this with your date of birth, but that's a key piece of personal information. If I was buying a knife or some pornography online, then an "over 18" check through your digital identity provider would only give a yes or no. It would limit the information you share.

Re: We already have National Insurance numbers.

You'd almost think there aren't birth certificates, though they're rubbish as ID for historical reasons. Changing that wouldn't affect everyone who's already been born, so not a useful exercise.

You're not a Freeman, are you? Your average child has been added to at least a dozen different official databases by the time they reach majority. That ship has sailed. The problem is that they don't get any benefit from that, and it's useless as ID. ID, as identification, is bloody useful for everyone. It's what successive governments keep trying to tie it to that's the problem.

Re: Yes

Uh yes, there are plenty of places that took covid as a chance to deny entry to anyone without an e-ticket. You may not go to gigs or nightclubs much, but you will be barred from entry without the ID of their choice - which is a very limited selection - and often an e-ticket that you must have a smartphone to use. Your dystopia already exists, and it's spreading.

Re: We already have National Insurance numbers.

Ah, the arrogance of someone who's always worked for a living.

No, everyone does not have an NI number. And I'm not talking about the homeless, either. I think you'll find the number of adults who have no driving licence, no passport, and no NI number and still have a (semi) permanent address to be surprisingly large. It's not a huge percentage of the population, but even single digit percentages of 70 million adds up. There is also a reasonable need for children to have some form of ID in the 21st century, and that adds several million to the list.

That doesn't mean that *this* scheme is the answer, but a blanket statement of "We have NI, and that's good enough" doesn't fly.

Re: Yes

They don't have to make it a requirement to make it a requirement, if you know what I mean.

98% of people will end up with one within ten years because it will be a giant pain in the backside to not have one. It's not required to own a computer (even the one in your phone counts), but it's a massive ballache if you don't.

Windows 2000 rusts in peace by the sea

I do wonder what the driver issues were. I used Win2k as my primary desktop from shortly after launch until well after WinXP showed up. To about 2006 or so, I think. I'm both a techie and a gamer, and the only driver issues were some lack of availability at the launch date. It all cleared up within a few months and was sorted out before WinXP launched. MS could have easily pushed Win2k as an end user solution, but someone wanted to play with the crayons and produce XP instead. When I did move to XP, I used a theme to make it more Win2k-like.

'Largest-ever' cloud DDoS attack pummels Azure with 3.64B packets per second

Re: Rather self inflicted

I'll take you up on that. I would wager a round of drinks that the largest contributors were unpatched Internet of Shit devices and old routers handed out by ISPs. Then probably Windows machines.

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

Re: More to come

The woman has an immense talent. It just isn't in songwriting.

There's "business" in Show Business for a reason. She's a businesswoman, and really quite good at it.

Cybercrooks ripped the wheels off at Jaguar Land Rover. Here's how not to get taken for a ride

Is the market hot for used Jaguars? It's a brave buyer that chooses a used car from a manufacturer that hasn't made anything in over a year!

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

Re: A little shortcut...

Applied to the operating system's commands, as well.

lO "$",8 was perfectly valid. (though unshifted "L" was a capital and shifted "O" was a weird graphic of some sort...)

Microsoft wares may be UK public sector's only viable option

Re: Grand Enshittification

Have to agree with that. No dual login here, so the work laptop is up and logged in in around 20 seconds.

I do not recognise the OP's take. It certainly *was* like that, once upon a time, but that was the days of spinning rust and Linux didn't boot too quickly either.

Network scans find Linux is growing on business desktops, laptops

Re: Can't wait to see the figures...

The newest machines that can't (or rather, won't) run Windows 11 are 8 years old. I don't think it's going to affect the Commercial sector all that much; any given company rarely has anything that old. That being said, converting the users over to 11 is still an ongoing headache where I am. Home users are unlikely to give a damn whether or not they still get updates, to our detriment more than theirs.

Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server

Re: Yanking the power out?

Our security team forbids labelling servers, should any ne'er-do-wells get in and head straight to the backup server or domain controller.

Process is to look things up in the rack elevation tables, which are kept *pretty* well up to date and have someone flash a light on the thing to be doubly sure. Which sounds ridiculous, but I never trusted labels in the first place so it really just eliminates step one of three in identification with the other two steps above now being canon.

iFixit gives new Fairphone 6 top marks for repairability: 10/10

Re: How much?

It's got ages of support, and any commonly failing bits can be replaced by the user. It's not bad for the money, especially since it's not pretty much obsolete at release like previous Fairphones were. This is the first time I can say it's a decent spec, albeit on the pricey side for said spec.

European consumers are mostly saying 'non' to trading in their old phones

There needs to be a worthwhile trade-in

The last three phones to go out of use went like this:

Huawei V20 - Destroyed when the Missus used it for a Pokemon Go "baby" account and dropped it while trying to play on both hands at once. Well, not "destroyed", but a new screen worth more than the phone was needed. Processed at the local Recycling Centre.

Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro - Donated to the Child, who was now old enough for a smart phone. It does not receive updates any more, but he's 14 and it doesn't matter. The Missus got a Note 12 Pro out of the deal. Which will probably eventually go to the Child when she gets a Note 16 Pro or something. Pokemon is rough on the battery and Xiaomis aren't any awful lot more new than a battery replacement is. Note 9 Pro will probably go in a drawer, being far too old to usefully trade in. My mum can use it when visiting from Canada.

Google Pixel 7 - Ah, here's the one. Google offered a Trade-in Bonus and a sale price on the Pixel 9 at the same time. I didn't *need* a new phone, but swapping a 7 for a 9 for £180 after trade in was too tempting to leave on the table. So hopefully someone is using my old Pixel 7 somewhere. Barring another deal like that, I expect to keep the Pixel 9 for 6-ish years.

So to get a useful trade-in, one must offer a useful trade-in deal. I felt slight guilt at swapping out a 2 year-old phone, but it does pretty much ensure it actually gets used, and paying £90/year to stay updated to the latest seems a decent value.

German court parks four Volkswagen execs in jail over Dieselgate scandal

Re: Now can we get these cars off the road?

It's a pity that checking if recalls have been processed isn't a part of the MOT. There are a number of VW owners who've skipped it because it gives them less power and mileage.

Re: Legacy

I mean, I mostly wouldn't buy them because they're turning out bad cars now. VW used to make a pretty decent machine, but their massive cost cutting (partly due to overinvestment in China, where the local carmakers have taken back a large part of the market) has resulted in some pretty poor models of late. Add to that the baffling decision a few years back to make every control in the car touch sensitive that they're only slowly rolling back now due to horrendous feedback from owners. I was in an Audi Q4 a few months ago, and the assembly quality and materials were shocking for what's supposedly a premium model. My Mazda is nicer.

Dieselgate ranks second in my reasons for avoiding them, because as others have said nearly everyone was gaming that system. Just not quite so nakedly cheating as VW was.

Linux kernel to drop 486 and early 586 support

Re: junk like the Celeron

Celerons have see-sawed back and forth between "junk" and "pretty good deal" a number of times over the years. Mendocino and Tualatin Celerons? Brilliant for the money. Anything Netburst-based? Horrible junk. When they first went dual core back in Sandy Bridge days, they were a good deal again. But became junk as they kept the 2 cores only for 10 years. The very last Alder Lake ones with 1xP and 4xE cores were decent again. I suppose there are also the Atom-based ones, which really depended on usage (for a NAS? Great. For a laptop? Junk).

Elon Musk makes another cut – to his time at DOGE

Re: Sticker seen on the back of a Tesla this morning

The signs were always there, people just weren't looking hard enough. And a lot of those cars with stickers are still from post-2019 "pedo" Musk when it became brutally obvious without having to look too hard.

Bug hunter tricked SSL.com into issuing cert for Alibaba Cloud domain in 5 steps

Never you worry!

45 day certificate life will stop this sort of thing in its tracks.

Or perhaps make it more likely. Either way.

New SSL/TLS certs to each live no longer than 47 days by 2029

Re: Are compromised certs really a thing?

The security risks in deploying automation and renewing so often are surely greater than the risk of a compromised certificate. As you say, you almost never hear about such things and it would be rather big news for a major site. Even the rare compromise I've heard of has been at the intermediate/CA level where they have to cancel and then re-issue certs anyhow.

Re: God help the academic sector

I work for a University. It's going to suck. Data Security have decided that an internal CA is not good enough for them, and we need commercial (because they also demand OV certs) certs for every bit of network kit. It's not so much the cost - Universities have a bulk buying power through JISC and GEANT - it's the headache of dozens of appliances that *cannot* have their certs renewed in an automated manner. Eventually everything will get updated to play nice, but I humbly predict that will happen after the certpocalypse these changes will bring. We're already paying extra for some commercial code to make certbot and the Citrix frontend play nice together and it's going to get worse. The contractors will be laughing.

VMware sues Siemens for allegedly using unlicensed software

Re: On the 72 core minimum..

To give an example, VXRail recommends a separate cluster for Vcenter. 3x16 core servers (one per site, plus witness) is more than enough just to run Vcenter, but now it's going to need a 72 core license.

Nvidia wants to put a GB300 Superchip on your desk with DGX Station, Spark PCs

Stylish

That tower looks like an Ultra 10's younger sibling in their goth phase. Someone's nostalgic for Sun Microsystems.

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

Agreed, but for the TCO of running an ink jet for photos (given that I rarely need to print them) I can print the things at Costco for less. A bit less convenient perhaps, but it's exceedingly rare that I need a photo quality print of an image *right now*.

Apple dares users to fix 'budget' iPhone 16e themselves

Re: I'm not sure....

"Do the SE / mini and they'll sell a mountain of them"

It's a common opinion, but the actual fact is that both the SE and the Mini are poor sellers - the discounted previous year's iPhone usually sells much better than them.

You could argue that this has a lot to do with Apple's pricing model rather than the devices, but that's just how Apple is and they're not going to change.

Microsoft: So what if it costs 4X as much to run Windows Server in AWS, Alibaba, and Google?

Re: Buy / License the OS

You're going to hear from Oracle's patent lawyers any moment now....

AMD looks to undercut Nvidia, win gamers' hearts with RX 9070 series

Re: OK, might as well ask.

You can still find 3060/4060 Ti cards for not horrifying prices on Ebay, if you're okay with used. Should be well over 100% faster than an RX580. I have a 3060Ti and it's fine for 1440 gaming if you're not too into the whole ray tracing thing. DLSS3/4 is a massive, massive advantage to Nvidia cards because you can run in Performance mode with DLSS4 and still get great visuals and it really ramps the performance up.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

It's the same (DNS block only) on Community Fibre, which I imagine is hugely popular with any London-based readers here. Given that setting my DNS to something else is one of the first things I do on an ISP's new router I've never seen any of the pirate sites blocked. I actually set the router to 1.1.1.3 (for the kiddies) and 1.1.1.1/8.8.8.8 directly on any devices where I care about such things being blocked. I keep saying I should make a PiHole, but I never get a round tuit.

Just how deep is Nvidia's CUDA moat really?

Grudging admiration

As aggravating as Nvidia can be at times, I do have a grudging admiration for their ability to execute their plans over the past 10 years or so. Sort of like Intel was 15 year ago. AMD and Intel can't get into the market not because their products are particularly inferior (though you could argue lack of CUDA makes them so), but because Nvidia hasn't put a foot wrong in a very long time in IT years. Even with a *better* product, when the market leader has 90% of the market it's not enough. They have to make a mistake. And I think one thing that Nvidia has and the other two don't that helps them not bugger it up is that they actually know where they're going. CUDA's dominance is the result of a near-20 year campaign to put it where it is. I don't see anything out of AMD that indicates that kind of vision on the GPU front.

I did mention Intel before to point out that it's not inevitable that Nvidia continues to eat all the pies. Hubris is a thing in IT, and Intel was certainly guilty of it. They still dominate the market of course, but they've shown their weak side and AMD continues to nibble away at their marketshare. And this is exactly the sort of boost that the ARM-based companies need to get their foot into the lucrative consumer desktop/laptop world. Maybe finally become a general purpose option in the server room, too. One wrong step out of Nvidia when AMD or Intel are having a good year could cause a seismic shift in the GPU market. Let's see what 2025 brings us.

Linux 6.12 is the new long term supported kernel

Re: Anyhow, a good reason to use Ubuntu Server.

I manage rolling out Ubuntu with ansible, and one of the first steps in main.yml is uninstalling snap. I still prefer Debian, but there are a few things installed in the past that preferred Ubuntu for various reasons (eg: GitHub) I think most of those will now work on Debian as well, but you know how it is with these things hanging on.

Windows 11 24H2 rolls out to more devices – with a growing list of known issues

Re: switch to something better

There are quite a large number of Macs the same age as PCs that *can* run Windows 11 that aren't getting updates any more.

AMD aims latest processors at AI whether you need it or not

Re: Flavor of the week

There's a decent enough reason for the death of the manual transmission at least. It doesn't work too well with proper (not this "mild" nonsense) hybrids, and electric vehicles don't have gears at all.

The connected nonsense is exactly that, though. I know someone with a new RAV4 who gets a big reminder that they should sign up to Toyota's connected services every time they turn the car on.

Arrow Lake splashdown: Intel pins hopes on replacement for Raptors

I appreciate that there's always a painful price increase for the best of the best, but $200 extra for 200MHz and 4 E-cores really can't appeal to that many people. Or is the intent to make the $70 jump from 245K to 265K (2 more P-cores, 6 more E-cores, *and* 200MHz) look even more appealing than it already is?

Windows 11 migration? Upgrade engine revs up, enterprises have no choice

Re: Big if

While the hardware requirements at launch were perhaps a bit demanding of newer equipment, by the time Windows 10 support ends the oldest supported CPU will be 8 years old. Most companies are keeping their PCs for longer, but few of them are stretching out past 8 years.

Samsung and pals Hyundai, Kia team for software-defined cars, IoT integration

Re: Two words for any of those things...

We already have some of the downsides. I know someone with a 2024 Toyota and the first thing it does when you turn the engine on is pester you to subscribe to Toyota's "Connected Services", whatever that is. Yes, *ads* in your car. Truly the end times.

Japan to put a small red Swedish house on the Moon

Re: Spelling nazi here...

English is a bit of a bully that way.

Same as we call it Sweden and not Sverige. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it is the status quo. Whether railing against this is productive for the future or old man yelling at clouds, I don't rightly know.

Veeam debuts its Proxmox backup tool – and reveals outfit using it to quit VMware

We have zero doubts about the capabilities of ProxMox, it's the support we're not too sure on vs. Nutanix's offerings.

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: Flogging a dead horse

"purchase store-sold software"

My inner 13 year-old is aghast. The closest we ever came to paying full price for software was pooling our money together to buy one for the five of us and then tearing apart the codewheel and photocopying it five times. I'm not even sure I grokked what piracy *was*, but I certainly didn't pay for any of my software. I had well over 100 floppies to go with it when I finally sold my C=64 onwards.

(NB: I'm not proud of this, it's simply how it was for a kid with no job)

AMD spills the beans on Zen 5's 16% IPC gains

And a lot of generational gains in the old days were purely on the clockspeed advantage a new process would bring. A 286-16 and a 386-16 were not too far apart in performance, but that was the fastest 286 and the 386 eventually hit 40MHz. Clockspeed is pretty much at a standstill now. Zen 5 is not running any faster than Zen 4 and has to rely purely on architectural advances (which are a lot harder to employ than cranking the clocks up) to be faster.

Clockspeed could work both ways, of course. I had an outrageously overclocked 486 that ran at 160MHz, which kept it competitive with the Pentium 75. The Pentium was an absolutely massive upgrade over the 486 and I'm not sure Intel ever had a generational gain that large ever again.

Smartphones sales bounce, Xiaomi biting at Apple's heels

Re: Xiaomi FTW

You would think someone clued in enough to be posting on The Reg would be able to google the 5 minute procedure to turn off all ads in a Global ROM. In my experience, the EU ROMS (eg: you bought it from the Xiaomi Store UK and not AliExpress) come with the ads already disabled.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Urm...

The camera trumps the GPS in all cases. If the camera can't get anything either, it just doesn't display a limit.

Japan's digital minister declares victory against floppy disks

Re: Icon

We have a Victorian bellows-style camera as an icon for speed cameras and you think a floppy disk is out of date?