Posts by druck

Next versions of both Fedora and Ubuntu head into beta

The only time I've used zram is in a 1MB Raspberry Pi to prevent it swapping to SD card. On something which much more RAM, it hardly ever swaps and when it does I'd prefer it to go to a NVMe SSD.

Blockchain powered stock market rebuild started in 2017 delayed again

April 1st already?

Blockchain in COBOL on Itanium - really?

CEA sees future in waferscale quantum computing chips

Re: Endless quantum hype cycle

Quantum; you must invest in this now - what if someone else was to make it work first?

Endless quantum hype cycle

Has this startup demonstrated a working quantum chip at any scale? Or is this yet another article in the endless quantum hype cycle.

In the graveyard of good ideas, how does yours measure up to these?

Re: Comics in any electronic format...

Years ago I was driving in the Salisbury area and pulled out of a side road and found myself with a Challenger 2 in front and behind. My passenger was worried that if we had to brake suddenly the tank behind would just roll over us. I said I was more worried about the one in front, as they can stop almost instantly on tarmac, tipping up on its tracks, and we would just slot in underneath as all 70 tons of it came back down.

Unit 42: Ransomware demands we're aware of averaged $2.2m last year

WTAF

"Entity A indicated the FBI prioritized investigating those responsible for the attack over helping Entity A respond and secure its network — the top priority for Entity A."

Does Entity A expect the police to stay around after a physical break-in, clean up the broken glass and change the locks for them, instead of going after the perps?

10x prices, year-long delays... Life as an electronics engineer in global chip shortage

Re: Advanced Features

Touch screens should also be banned from cars, which will liberate a few chips. Manufacturers know they are dangerous to use while driving, but are coming up with idiotic alternatives such a gesture control, which still involve looking for visual feedback and having hands off the wheel for longer than conventional controls - just put knobs on the dash, you knobs!

Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 is here

Re: quis procurat ipsos procurates?

Well that's 4 people that don't know the difference between a package and a snap/flatpack.

Re: quis procurat ipsos procurates?

Forgetting that there are two entirely difference concepts at play.

Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?

Re: Turbo Pascal - Missing Semi-Colon at line 454

With BBC BASIC you couldn't edit the line either, but there was the copy cursor so you could just copy a line from anywhere on screen and correct it as you went, without retyping the whole thing.

China declares a new era of digitization has begun

Blockchain?

The plan is for the card to run on a mooted "big platform" that uses blockchain

Could there be any less reason to use blockchain than in the world largest all encompassing bureaucracy?

Qualcomm reveals it's not selling to Russia during Twitter spat

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

any more than you do a PR announcement stating that your not going to murder the last person that pissed you off.

Best to leave them guessing.

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Re: One step too few

You get the same problem with SD cards for the Raspberry Pi. A 16GB card can be anything from 14.6GiB to 14.9GiB, so if you want to be able to clone the card easily, don't let the last partition go past 14.5GiB.

Saudi Aramco links arms with Pasqal to try out quantum computing

There's one born every minute.

Internet backbone provider Lumen quits Russia

Re: Hire a few hundred thousand biplanes.

A modern jet doesn't need to use any weaponry to bring down a biplane, just do a close pass at a high speed, and it will disintegrate in the wake.

Ragnar ransomware gang hit 52 critical US orgs, says FBI

That might make you a target for other types of malware. Maybe use one of the dozen other European and Asian countries the article neglected to specify.

Russia’s invasion kicks Senate into cybersecurity law mode

Re: Air gaps don't work

There seems to be a very effective air gap - between AC's ears.

Amazon Alexa can be hijacked via commands from own speaker

Or if another Bluetooth device within 10m has been hacked, and can be commanded to pair with Alexa.

Construction starts on another Asia-Europe undersea cable

Many cables, one canal.

Redundancy doesn't seem like a bad idea here

Bit of a single point of failure at Suez though.

UK starts to ponder how Huawei ban would work

Re: Who's the UK?

I think you mean West Britain's thoroughly embarrassed parent.

Food for thought on the return to the office

Re: Douglas Adams

Back when I had to use Windows, being faced with having to set up a new computer with all the development software, useful tools and customised settings, it was easier to just change jobs -as at least the pay increase covered the hassle. Now I use Linux the list of packages and the configuration from git can be transferred in seconds.

'We gave it our best shot' Nvidia CEO tells Wall Street after failed Arm deal

Nvidia are moving on nicely...

...but ARM have been in satis for the last 2 years while the deal has been on hold, and many of their customers have been seriously looking at RISC V as an alternative, in fear of the enviable licencing squeeze by Nvidia.

Dido Harding's appointment to English public health body ruled unlawful

A shameful lapse in reporting standards by The Register.

This data center will be Europe’s first with hydrogen backup power

Re: A Step In The Right Direction

Coal plants around the world are burning dirty low quality high CO2 lignite coal, where as lots of high quality lower CO2 anthracite coal sits under the ground in the UK, and climate change activists want it to say that way.

Toshiba reveals 30TB disk drive to arrive by 2024

As much as I want to agree with you, I suspect someone has said that about every increase in drive capacity since the 10MB Winchester drive.

UK, US, Australia issue joint advisory: Ransomware on the loose, critical national infrastructure affected

Re: Obviously

We must ban encryption - no internet scam coins, no viable business model.

Geomagnetic storm takes out 40 of 49 brand new Starlink satellites

Read the damn weather forcast

If the space weather was known about in advance, why wasn't the launch delayed by 48 hours?

Into x86 servers? Apple seeks 'upbeat and hard-working' hardware engineer

Re: Predominately Unix not Linux

Sun hasn’t been a thing since 2012

But it would stick in the throat to give the current owner any credit for Solaris.

Whistleblower claims NSO offered 'bags of cash' for access to US phone networks

Re: oops

I don't know, maybe just the once!

UK government told to tighten purse strings or public will have to foot the bill for nuclear decommissioning

Re: why can't they just do some upgrades instead?

Cracking of the graphite core of the AGRs is the main restriction of the reactors lifetime, and it isn't realistically possible to refit or upgrade these. You would basically have to build an entire new reactor, but first having to wait until the old one is decommissioned. It's quicker and cheaper to build the new one next door, and take the time to decommission the old one, which is what is being done.

When forgetting to set a password for root is the least of your woes

Re: Hitting Enter....

Amateurs!

I used to tap in a little program that disabled both the escape and the break keys, waited 60 seconds, then used the BBC Micro's ENVELOPE command to make the same trim-phone ringing sound as Boot's own phones. I would withdraw to a safe distance to watch the staff running around first trying to find out which phone was ringing, then trying to stop the computer but failing as none of the buttons on their cheat sheet worked. Eventually they would set off the theft alarms when they had to move the computer to find the power button.

Very childish I know, so sorry if any former Boots staff are reading.

Crypto outfit Qubit appeals to the honour of thieves who lifted $80M of its digi-dollars

Good luck with that

creating a website on which they can download records of their holdings being stolen, for presentation to police

Just been reading that the police are now only solving about 3% of burglaries - a crime where a real person breaks in to someone's home and steals something real. What do you think the police are going to be able to do about theft of made up virtual scam coins?

British naval food doesn't look half bad... so we're going to try it out for ourselves

Re: re: F35 vs Farey Swordfish

Just about any fighter from the 1950s onwards can go supersonic at low level, they just tend not to due to the damage caused on the ground.

US Navy in mad dash to salvage F-35C that fell off a carrier into South China Sea

Re: Sunk costs

We had a dried out Harrier at RAF Cosford for engineering training. That one had run out of water needed for engine cooling during the hover alongside the ship, suffered an engine surge and quickly got a lot more water.

Not Azure thing: Using MS's Quantum to schedule chats with spacecraft on the DSN

Microsoft can't even get conventional computing to work deterministically, never mind magic quantum fairy dust.

Saved by the Bill: What if... Microsoft had killed Windows 95?

Re: For me it was a one-off, quickly discarded.

For me it went this way, but as quickly discarded.

Acorn Electron, BBC Master, Acorn Archimedes, Acorn A5000, Acorn Risc PC (with 586 second processor running Windows 95), Castle Iyonix, generations of Raspberry Pi's...

Re: Windows 95 + a few service packs

I had to reboot WIn95 every few weeks.

Rebooting was many times a day, reinstalling was every few weeks.

Re: Windows 95 was more masterful marketing

As Windows was nothing more than a complete rip-off of the Macintosh OS in the first place I think you have things back to front.

Windows 95 was a rip-off of RISC OS, but by someone who had seen screenshots, but not actually used it.

Running Windows 10? Microsoft is preparing to fire up the update engines

Re: Old hardware though...?

I have a perfectly good AMD FX PC which runs 10 very well, but doesn't meet the requirements for 11. Wonder what will happen when they stop updating 10?

You'll find it runs Linux like it was new again.

Throw away your Ethernet cables* because MediaTek says Wi-Fi 7 will replace them

Re: I'll Believe It When I See It

You may want to check your door seals, or just buy a new one before you cook yourself.

Australian Prime Minister's WeChat Shanghaied by Chinese patriots

Please send picture

That verbiage suggests the PM might yet regain control of his account.

Probably about the same time as I get a refund for non working crap bought from AliExpress.

'95% original' film star Spitfire could be yours for a mere £4.5m (or 0.05 Pogbas)

Re: One of the best 5 minutes of my life

I'm a fan of the "back room boys" but I'm not too sure how you go from single prop engined local air defence fighter to eight jet engined long range nuclear nasty delivery platform.

The Vulcan only had 4 engines, maybe you are thinking of a B52. But if you'd seen the Vulcan doing a full air display in the 70's or even the more limited displays after the return to flight from 2007 to 2015, you could try telling the thing it was just a delivery platform and not a fighter, but it wouldn't have believed you.

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

Re: Inrage and outrage

No, with end to end encryption, you are one end, the bank employee (who may be working from home) is the other, the bank (as the service provider) does not have access - that's the entire point.

Re: Inrage and outrage

In your position I'm really surprised you don't know the difference between encryption and end to end encryption.

Re: Inrage and outrage

End to end encryption is only needed when you do not trust the service provider of the communication. If you are using your bank's video communication (rather than Zoom or whatsapp) and you don't trust them, what are you doing with that bank?

Re: Inrage and outrage

You don't actually want end to end encryption when communicating with someone from your bank, because I assume you trust your bank. With end to end encryption your bank would not have access to the communication, and if their employee advised you badly, there would be no record of it. What you want is the traffic encrypted between you and the bank, and the bank and their employee, but for the bank to be able to access that communication in case any advice is disputed.

Billionaires see wealth double during pandemic as tech bros lead the charge

A rant made with absolutely no knowledge of demographics or facts.

From the Commons Library the figures for 2019/20 for personal income vs UK income tax raised:

Bottom 50%: 9.4%

50th-90th percentile: 30.1%

90th-99th percentile: 31.4%

Top 1%: 29.1%

Microsoft poaches Apple chip expert for custom silicon

ARM on Azure and...

Could the next X-Box be Series A for ARM?

Linux Mint 20.3 appears – now with more Mozilla flavor: Why this distro switched Firefox defaults back to Google

Brand new Thinkpad Carbon Extreme, powered up once with the default windows install, download Linux Mint to a USB stick, installed Mint with full disk encryption. No more Windows ever, in under half an hour.

DIY Sinclair clones: Left it too late to back the Next? Build your own instead

Re: Great article

My parents could only afford to by me an Electron. It ran at about 40% of the speed of a Beeb in high res modes, so while everyone else was writing BASIC, I had to learn 6502 assembler to get enough performance out of the little machine. 18 months later I spent my first university grant cheque on a BBC Master 128.