* Posts by Sandtitz

1853 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2010

Chinese snoops tried to break into US city utilities, says Talos

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WTF?

@Author

"apparently there are still enough IIS instances in the wild to make it worth exploiting, even though Microsoft hasn't released a major new version since 2018."

What an odd thing to say.

Apparently there are still enough Apache instances in the wild to make it worth exploiting, even though Apache hasn't released a major new version since 2012.

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

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Re: Press X to Doubt

But there's absolutely no way that operating 18 petabytes of storage could cost "less than $200,000 a year". In salary alone, having the competent workers operating it would cost probably five times that.

$1M in salaries to run perhaps a couple racks of storage in two (or more) physical locations for HA? After the initial design and set-up, taking care of the storage should not be a full time job at all and I'd expect the storage admins to also partake in other infrastructure work or vice versa.

Now, if the devs and other users are constantly asking for changes or new file shares, object storage, block LUNs and such then it could be full time for a single person, but at that point automating a self-service portal or carving out a limited management to their own piece of storage could be arranged. That hardware itself requires very little work.

"I doubt they'll have S3 SLAs with their in-house solution"

Amazon Computing & S3 SLA's allow several minutes of downtime each month without giving back any credits.

Reaching 100% with mid-range storage with proper infrastructure in place (power, cooling, cabling, monitoring etc) is not hard at all.

It's annoying on both side: the cloud sycophants and the on-prem nuts.

Agreed.

90-second Newark blackout exposes parlous state of US air traffic control

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Re: Bare wire

"The majority of infrastructure is kept in service far beyond any reasonably expected asset life[...]Victorian sewers"

Those brand-spanking-new sewers will be fine as long as they are maintainced.

Cloaca Maxima has been in use for over 2,500 years.

Zuck ghosts metaverse as Meta chases AI goldrush

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Re: Rebrand (again) as....

Remember the AIamo!

TAKE IT DOWN Act? Yes, take the act down before it's too late for online speech

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How fat is Kim Jong-un?

Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks

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FAIL

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

and he has never written a line of code professionally

Well, you are wrong.

https://www.economicclub.org/sites/default/files/transcripts/Economic_Club_Satya_Nadella_Transcript.pdf

"MR. NADELLA: I was a developer at Sun. I worked on, interestingly enough, a lot of their – when I joined Sun in the – in 1990, the ambition there was to be a desktop computer business. And so I worked, in fact, at Sun. I even spent a summer at Lotus doing a bunch of their software for the Sun workstations."

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Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

"Satya has no technical merit, his only virtue is his ability to spew lies."

According to Wiki he has BA in electrical engineering and Master's degree in computer science.

What to do once your Surface Hub v1 becomes an 84-inch, $22K paperweight

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Re: its not at the end of life.

If a company splurges $20k+ on something like Surface Hub...then they likely are within MS ecosystem and volume licensing -> upgrade the OS to Win10 LTSC with updates until 2032.

Introducing Windows on arm. And by arm, we mean wrist

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Re: Windows on Arm has been around since the Surface RT

"Windows on Arm has been around since the Surface RT"

Except, you know, not in a smartwatch form that attaches to one's arm.

"Just when it was working so very well Satya took over and it went steep downhill."

"When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount, not to provide additional funding to increase the dead horse’s performance."

Windows Phones were Ballmer's project and he probably would have continued pouring money into it.

Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad

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Re: Oh that BASIC code....are you ESL?

"Is it beyond your reading comprehension level perhaps?"

Not at all. Maybe you were there or not. To me you're just another AC here. Maybe I am the Postmaster General.

I asked for references to "line for line translations of blocks of code" as you put it.

I can now see that you are not going to address that part and you're just bullshitting your way out. HAND.

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Re: Oh that BASIC code....yeah, some of us were actually there..

That's a big wall of text not related to my question at all.

Since the Altair BASIC code is now out: can you or can you not point out the "line for line translations of blocks of code"?

"He was a crook who should have went to jail long ago."

For the alleged copying of BASIC?

"Some of us actually work in the business."

Sad attempt at belittling me. I'd say most of the active Reg forum dwellers are in the business, moi included.

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Meh

Re: Oh that BASIC code....

"Like line for line translations of blocks of code. But hey, Microsoft would never ever do anything like that. Would they."

I'm somewhat curious why a purportedly 70-ish-year-old geezer still decides to post anonymously instead of his forum handle.

Can you substantiate your claims now that the source code is published?

Windows Server 2025 locking up after February patch, no word of when a fix will land

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Holmes

Re: Question

"...within the session..."

The remote connection freezes - not the client computer - so you just close the connection by pressing the X button on the RDP window. If it's a full screen connection, then the connection bar on top of the screen has the X button.

In any case, the three-finger-salute will always show the local Windows Security screen where you can start Task Manager to kill the connection.

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

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Happy

"Just show some of the kids the 3 different connectors on 1980's hard drives: MFM, RLL and SCSI"

MFM/RLL was just the encoding type used in ST506/ST412 drives. ESDI used the exact same cables, but is a different standard. Let's include ATA (IDE) as the third cable standard.

You're also skipping the fun part where you need to select the correct drive type from the list of standard AT BIOS hard disk types - and what to do if your drive is not listed but your BIOS is modern enough to accept custom drive geometry. You also need to guess the proper Landing Zone and Write Precomp values which were not written on top of HDD.

Also ask the kids to low level format the drive first with optimal interleaving and to type in the bad sectors.

Feds charge three over Molotov attacks on Tesla sites in multiple states

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FAIL

Re: Double standards?

It was in 2020 and the protesters attacked and injured law enforcement.

Let me repeat the question from my previous message about looting, bombing and violence: "Can you show the passage in 1st Amendment where that is allowed?"

"I assume you mean the pipe bomber which they've never been able to track down despite clear video and cell records. Odd that."

It wasn't a clear video. Non-descript hoodie and face mask on a average height person. No-one picked up the $500k bounty. Odd that.

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Facepalm

Re: Double standards?

"What isn't in any US law is the right to throw a tantrum and randomly destroy private property because the wrong person won the election.."

The Capitol Attack included assaults on police officers, attempted bombing and looting furniture and art. Can you show the passage in 1st Amendment where that is allowed?

Are you game if the same was done with White House?

Why do you post as AC? I thought the Pride Boys and Oath Keepers were not shameful in their thinking, on the contrary.

Apple hallucinated Siri's future AI features, lawsuit claims

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Re: Are you sure?….

"I don’t think any of the examples you cite are beneficial or useful."

Neither are they beneficial or useful for me, but they are for some.

I have seen an LLM (ChatGPT) producing working python code to solve a specific problem a user with no coding skills had.

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Re: Are you sure?….

"I’m not convinced that anyone rushes out to buy ANY product based on the threat that it includes (or will include) any kind of “AI” (no such thing)"

"Anyone"? Categorically denying people's buying habits is rather risky - hallucinatory even. Some people buy refregerators and washing machines just because they have internet connectivity. If you don't think the AI hoopla of last several years has not affected people positively at all then you are mistaken.

Whether you like current state of AI or not - some people feel it brings benefits, be it better school grades due to AI generated answers, AI generated images/videos/sounds/novels/translations and such. Or as a chat partner for the introvert.

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Re: Introspection deficit

"What is Vista-like[...]"

I took the Vista comment in the article as a reference to Vista Ultimate edition which cost ~50% more than regular Home versions and Micros~1 promised it was worth it because of availability of future extra features included in the price.

In reality, those extras were screensaver and couple simple games, not worth it at all.

US Space Force warns Chinese satellites are 'dogfighting' in space

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Re: ICBMs

You're mistaken. Outer Space Treaty:

"states shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner"

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

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Re: Brain drain

Citation for the coward?

https://www.energyprices.eu/ - Highest price today in Switzerland with 12.8 cents /kWh. Lowest price 0 cents in Sweden.

For the last year my monthly average price has been around 7 cents /kWh her in Europe.

In the US you'll never know when Canada is going to rise the electricity export tariffs.

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FAIL

Re: Brain drain

"If you hadn't realised it already, Europe is broke"

Yes, the Russian AC's and fifth columnists have trotted this for years now. Ludicrous comment. SAD.

"has horrendous energy prices"

Electricity is way cheaper in Europe than in US.

Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement

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Boffin

Re: RDCMan

As explained in the article, the built-in Remote Desktop Connection client (mstsc.exe) is not going anywhere.

The older Microsoft Remote Desktop in the article is a Microsoft Store -only app that provides access to (Azure) VDI infrastructure.

Micros~1 has developed 'Microsoft App' last year, which has feature parity with the aforementioned Microsoft Remote Desktop app and that's the reasons the former app is now to be discontinued.

The naming of both Microsoft Remote Desktop AND Microsoft App is atrocious, no question about it!

RDCMan is a connection manager/frontend for the mstsc.exe, part of Sysinternals and supported. (I guess it's feature complete since last version was 2 years ago - works for me as well)

ASML will open Beijing facility despite US sanctions on China

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Re: Not a huge China fan…

"You can't spy on the Eu and mistreat Muslims, that's our job"

Who's job?

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Re: Not a huge China fan…

"…but remind me why Europe has sanctions on China?"

Cyber attacks on EU, providing weapons for Russia, mistreating the Uyghurs.

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

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Facepalm

Re: I couldn't give a monkeys

"I use uBlock in Firefox."

Excellent.

"Plus I have an IP filter list on top of that."

Which filter is that? IP filter sounds somewhat pointless on a browser where DNS based addresses are used ~100%.

"Sorry guys that does include El Reg. I don't know how to exclude you from the filters."

And you have wandered on a tech forum - do you happen to have pointy hair?

Click the uBlock icon and press the big power button. That's it. The mouseover tooltip literally says the uBlock will stop functioning only on the site you're currently on, not elsewhere.

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

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Re: OK, might as well ask.

The wimpiest of budget cards still available may be older than your RX580 - and much slower. Nvidia GT710 and such are still for sale. Fine for 2D games such as Monkey Island or for extra monitor output but woeful for any current 3D games even in lowest settings in 720p resolution.

Latest GPU's kinda require Resizeable BAR support in chipset and BIOS for optimal memory access.

Intel Arc B570 or B580 are something to consider, and they're supposedly good choice for budget AI. But without the ReBAR support they really lose a lot of performance. If that Ollama requires CUDA then you're obviously limited to just Nvidia products.

Don't worry about using PCIe 4.0/5.0 cards in a PCIe 3.0 slots - the loss of performance is not that great.

Techpowerup.com has good reviews about graphics cards and PCIe version scaling.

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Re: Reality

Nah, can't be bothered, That game has always been pay-to-win.

Also the full-body haptic suit has its nasty downsides.

US Dept of Housing screens sabotaged to show deepfake of Trump sucking Elon's toes

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Facepalm

"This is a tech blog, not a place to add to post endless childish comments about politicians."

El Reg is just a blog now?

Why don't you set an example and stop your own political commentary? Your own 29 post posting history consists of roughly 20% political comments with plenty of childish comments:

"...Guardian politics that have created this and countless other problems we face today in society"

"remoaners"

Gary Lineker, Chris Evans and Zoe Ball paid huge salaries

"Boris good, Corbyn bad"

More EU bashing

Brexit banter

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

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Happy

Re: Another franchise to be milked to death

"I had to pretty much translate the 2000 TV series Rebus' John Hannah's dialogue for the other half and Hannah delivery was pretty much standard English."

The only Scottish TV show that screams for subtitles for me was Chewin' the Fat. And you'd still need a Glaswegian<->English dictionary for many odd words.

Laptop makers stalled on repairability improvements

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Re: Dell

"Hard to replace batteries on laptops have been a common feature for years."

Everybody started copying Macbook Air and making thin laptops. Until then the chunky battery was in most laptops was held by a couple latches, but the thin laptop designs of course required the battery to be much flatter as well and needed to be secured under the bonnet.

I have some history with repairing HP laptops and HP has consistently published good service manuals for their laptops with complete part numbers and illustrated instructions. They also have a Youtube channel with lots of videos where laptops are disassembled completely. The parts are not glued inside the laptop, the only adhesives are used in sticking the display panels to the bezels.

I've stumbled upon Lenovo and Dell service manuals as well, look to be on par with HP manuals.

The report says that the manufacturers have stalled on improvements but what exactly is expected - everything held by latches with zero screws? Removal of a "kingpin" causes all parts to detach?

"In some laptops, replacing the battery will actually brick the laptop."

Why aren't you naming and shaming such abominations?!

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

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Happy

Oh, those are the modern icons! Check the moricons.dll next time.

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Boffin

Re: Marketing

"Windows NT 4.0 (released a year after Win95 and far superior in every respect) needed 4 boot floppies, before it would read from the CD."

Windows NT 4.0 CD was El Torito compatible from the beginning - you can boot from it and install it from there.

If however your BIOS didn't support booting from CD drive, then you needed the boot disks - all three of them. They included the IDE ATAPI driver and few usual Adaptec drivers a well, but if your system had some unorthodox SCSI / sound card / parallel port CDROM interfaces for which the boot disks didn't carry drivers, then yes - you needed a separate driver diskette for that one as well.

As Trump slugs Canada, Mexico and China with tariffs, industry groups hope trade war weapon isn’t pointed at their feet

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Re: It's all in how you look at it

Conversing with yourself gain, AC?

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

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Re: The term bootstrapping, or booting for short ...

Münchhausen pulled himself - and his horse - out by his pigtail.

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Happy

Re: Mental

"I never have owned or used an electric toothbrush, let alone a computerised-, or Internet-connected-toothbrush. What possible consumer benefit is there from using such a thing?"

(Old) dogs have a higher pH which helps keep their teeth healthier and brushing is very much optional for them.

To answer your question, electric tootbrushes "remove more plaque and reduce gingival inflammation more than manual toothbrushes."

Intel has officially missed the boat for AI in the datacenter

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Re: Intel Graphics

"AKA not very good graphics. Intel graphics on any laptop was not just a deal breaker, it wouldn't even make the short list."

Perhaps if you're a gamer and prioritise 3D.

For most office work and outside of casual gamers, Intel graphics are perfectly fine. They sip less power than Nvidia/AMD offerings which on a laptop is a big plus.

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WTF?

Re: Intel missed out on AI

Wrong.

Nvidia didn't miss out on AI - and have had tremendous success selling as many $25,000 GPU cards they can make because of the huge demand. Similarly Nvidia made a lots of money when crypto mining was hip thing a decade ago. (still is?)

AMD is making money with their own data center GPU's.

Intel isn't because they missed out.

Whether there's any point in AI itself is another debate, but Intel would rather be making money than hemorrhaging it. It wouldn't be unhealthy to them at all - akin to smoking cigarettes - to sell more products for profit.

You're going to do what to the feature? Microsoft defines what it means by 'deprecation'

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Re: Status quo.

"If Microshaft truly ends Windows 10 - won't that just make people who don't want to play join the Linux revolution?"

Did that happen when XP and Win 7 support ended?

Zyxel firewalls borked by buggy update, on-site access required for fix

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Thumb Down

Re: Zyxel?

What...?

Zyxel 1496E was a rock solid external model of the day, an excellent choice if you couldn't afford a Courier.

Someone is slipping a hidden backdoor into Juniper routers across the globe, activated by a magic packet

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Stop

Re: Where Is That "Someone"? Guess!

"Anonymous for obvious reasons."

Of course - so much easier to write gibberish as an AC than with your real handle here.

How to leave the submarine cable cutters all at sea – go Swedish

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Re: which way is NATO moving?

"Jellied Eel himself isn't even an American- he's British."

He's perhaps claiming to be a Brit, but spells some words in American English.

Then again William Joyce was Brit as well.

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"Finland has a slightly more complicated and contentious historical relationship with Russia."

Since the start of 20th century, sure. Just go further back in history - Sweden and Russia has fought many wars between them, there's a handy list of them at Wikipedia.

FCC to telcos: By law you must secure your networks from foreign spies. Get on it

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Re: And the corollary...

How do you know these mass intrusions are due to whatever possible access the TLA's had to different systems instead of previously unknown vulnerabilities and/or user errors?

My money would be on the last option - bad security practises; credential phishing; plain ol' stupidity and laziness.

Microsoft eggheads say AI can never be made secure – after testing Redmond's own products

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Facepalm

Re: Say no to PyRIT software

"Microsoft has been hacking away at Windows for 30+ years now and it still isn't complete or secure."

Linus has been hacking away at Linux for 30+ years now and it still isn't complete or secure.

Ransomware crew abuses AWS native encryption, sets data-destruct timer for 7 days

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Pint

Re: Ignorant Old F**t Here....

What is this old f**t missing in 2025?

Well, read the article again.

Once the attackers get access to the victim's Amazon infrastructure, they encrypt the data at rest using Amazon encryption APIs.

Something, something, old man yells at cloud, something.

Is it really the plan to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal? It's been a weird week

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Facepalm

Re: Putin will be pissing himself laughing

"Are we to assume that "Ace2" is your real name, and allows us to know who you are?"

Ace2 did not seem to ask for the poster's name, address and shoe size. Only to post under his/her real account.

Is there a reason you don't select the anonymous button in all your messages, "Phil"?

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

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Re: Majored in grey

"Well you would when only high-end systems could render 256 colours"

You have years mixed badly there. Amiga had 4096 colors since 1985. True color (24-bit) graphics for PC was first introduced back in 1984.

OS/2 2.0 was released in 1992, and every new computer had at least VGA - that's 256 colours. My cheap-and-slow Trident 8900 SVGA bought years earlier had 256 colours on higher resolutions and it was "low-end fodder". (I should have opted for Tseng Labs...)

In the same year (1992) Cirrus Logic came out with their quite affordable true color cards.

Miro, #9, and several other high-end cards (IBM XGA as well) with 24-bit colours had been available for years by then.

First launch of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket slated for January 10

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Facepalm

"beast666"

'lame' x2

How's the puberty going?