Posts by druck

Alibaba to upgrade its Hong Kong listing to parity with New York

US delisting hedge

Another reason is the possibility of Chinese companies being delisted from US exchanges if they fail to be transparent about their company ownership https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/05/sec_delisting_china/

Cyber-mercenaries for hire represent shifting criminal business model

export LANGUAGE=en_gb

First US spellings, now "$1.000" European thousand separators - please can we just standardise on the correct British way of doing things for a British website.

Aviation body wants views on rocket plans of Virgin Orbit

Cornwall Spaceport

We stayed just behind New Quay airport last year, and dropped in to the Spaceport on the way home. Worth a quick visit if your are in the area.

Upgrading what might be the world's oldest running Linux install

Notes from the master

I've upgraded the OS which ran on the original 256MB Raspberry Pi all the way up to Bullseye now running on a Pi 4B, but I now want to take it to 64 bit without reinstalling. There is some stuff out there about how to migrate x86 Debian from 32 to 64 bit, but some notes from the master would be much appreciated.

DARPA seeks portable muon-making machine to see through almost anything

Safety

While muons are created in the atmosphere constantly, how safe would it to be inside a building being scanned by a directed beam of these things whizzing about at 10GeV or more?

Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

There are very competent developers in out sourced companies, but their primary role is to front each new contract and move on to the next, leaving you with the far less competent ones.

We had a great developer come over from India to do a proof of concept for a contact that would involve one on site role and a team off shore. He was as sharp as a knife and exceeded expectations. After they were awarded the contract, we we told this developer would not be available for on site due to family commitments back home, but would be leading the off shore team. Which he did for about a week, after which he would still answer questions on the phone, but had had been moved on to the next project and the one after.

What were left with was another on site guy who had to clear every breath he took with the out sourcing company manager, so preferred not talk to anyone. The off shore team produced very poor quality cut and paste code, the company was only interested in ticking the boxes on a spreadsheet, and not delivering anything close to a useable product.

Luckily we only wasted 3 months of money before pulling the plug.

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

Re: Ambivalence

The copy prevention doesn't look at wavy lines or phrases, but a pattern of 5 dots called the EURion constellation.

Re: Years ago....

Since the mid 90s copiers detect the EURion constellation pattern which is printed on most bank country's bank notes, and various other documents which shouldn't be copied.

London Stock Exchange CEO still aiming for dual Arm listing

Re: GIVE THE US CONTROL OVER ARM... and you get INTEL II

The UK is not a Tech leader. Europe is a tech leader,

You forgot the joke icon, unless you are talking about the EUs litigation against tech leaders.

But anyway you really need to get that chip off your shoulder about ARM - it's really tedious.

Ex-Coinbase manager charged in first-ever crypto insider trading case

Re: Just few bad actors?

Good guys don't do crypto.

Microsoft Teams outage widens to take out M365 services, admin center

M328.5 strikes again

When a company making $168bn in revenue over 365 days can't manage more than a single 9 in reliability.

BASF looks to quantum computing to improve weather modeling

Re: "once quantum hardware matures to a point where we can actually leverage these algorithms."

It means quantum snake oil salesmen are now chasing green handouts

Israel aims to build its own upgradable quantum computer

Re: How much money is the United States giving them to do this?

Well the money has to go somewhere, its not like quantum computing will ever work.

Russia fines Google $374 million for letting the truth about Ukraine be told

Re: Gosh, really ?

It looks like VoiceOfTruth has created another account to collect all the downvotes.

India's central bank calls for cryptocurrency ban

Good

Lets hope the India government follows their central bank's recommendation and bans these wasteful crime tokens.

Bogus cryptocurrency apps steal millions in mere months

Re: "legitimate cryptocurrency investments"

There are only two types of crypto users; criminals, and victims of crime but don't yet know it.

Smart thermostat swarms are straining the US grid

Clock drift of up to a couple of minutes a week of the old thermostats takes care of that.

OpenShift engineering guru Matt Hicks becomes Red Hat's CEO

For or against systemd?

The big question is will he allow the systemd madness to continue now Poettering has been given asylum at Microsoft?

NYC issues super upbeat PSA for surviving the nuclear apocalypse

Re: Standard Operating Procedure upon Encountering a Nuclear Attack at Close Range

The same where I grew up, with the prospect of being fried a few microseconds after GCHQ.

PC sales take double-digit tumble in Q2 amid economic downturn

Re: "things are blaming down"

And with Windows 10 or 11 on those new PC's, it may well be the last one consumers ever buy.

Microsoft's Dublin datacenter to help take pressure off Ireland's renewable energy

If you've got 200% of the UPS capacity required, you can either let the grid fail and use it to shut everything down with plenty to spare. Or you could use that spae capacity to shore up the grid, and it might then not fall over - it has to be better for business to keep the lights (and servers) on.

Microsoft rolls back default macro blocks in Office without telling anyone

To hell with security

The only security Microsoft is interested in, is of their bottom line.

Getting that syncing feeling after an Exchange restore

A company I worked for in the 90s needed to restore their Exchange sever and found every single backup was corrupt too. It turns out Exchange kept it's database open and the backup software couldn't cope with that. So just like the article, it was start again from a clean sheet.

China rallies support for Kylin Linux in war on Windows

Harsh

The {RedFlag Linux} org was ultimately dissolved, and the team terminated in 2014.

Harsh, even for China.

Everyone back to the office! Why? Because the decision has been made

Re: Genius

And fiber FFS!

Crypto sleuths pin $100 million Harmony theft on Lazarus Group

The entire point

Given the large number of scams and thefts involving cryptocurrency and other DeFi projects, many of those groups are working on ways to reverse or limit the damage from theft and scams. However, it's not easy, he said.

It's not easy, as that is the entire point of the whole damn thing.

Intel ships crypto-mining ASIC at the worst possible time

Re: The sooner, the better

I don't consider myself to be much on an environmentalist, but they need to be hung out to dry for selling a chip that's only purpose is to waste vast amounts of energy and ultimately facilitate criminal activity.

HPE unveils Arm-based ProLiant server for cloud-native workloads

Dell, like HPE, did experiment with Arm-based systems about a decade ago but eventually allowed that project to quietly die.

No doubt after receiving a big brown envelope with Something Inside^TM

Misguided call for a 7-Zip boycott brings attention to FOSS archiving tools

Re: I like 7Zip.

I'm disappointed, I hadn't taken you for conspiracy peddling cockwomble.

China's blockchain boosters slam crypto as Ponzi scheme

Re: Blockchains have no use that could not be better served by a database.

Well I don't trust AC's trying to peddle blockchain based snake oil.

We're now truly in the era of ransomware as pure extortion without the encryption

Kill the cryto, stop the scam

Some of these thieves offer discounted ransoms to corporations to encourage them to pay sooner, with the demanded payment getting larger the longer it takes to cough up the cash (or Bitcoin, as the case may be).

Bitcoin (or other crypto currency) in every case - if they could only accept payment in cash or via the banking system, their economic model would disappear over night. Cash requires presence in the country of the victim, and while there are ways to make money vanish in the banking system, it is very much harder to do, particularly if your country is cut off from the electronic payment systems.

Amazon can't channel the dead, but its deepfake voices take a close second

Re: Nothing new under the Sun

It's not even new in the computer world, all natural voices available from companies such as Nuance are based on a real persons speech, taken from a sample recording and automatically broken in to phonemes. All someone has done is stick an AI label on it.

Mega's unbreakable encryption proves to be anything but

Re: Still better than others

Which is great unless she is one of these older folks that go around switching off all the wall sockets every night, in case it should suddenly catch fire.

Mars Express orbiter to get code update after 19 years

Re: Astounding

You forgot the joke icon again ->

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

Re: The bin

That's the sin bin /sbin

AMD to end Threadripper Pro 5000 drought for non-Lenovo PCs

Re: Here ya go, Intel

The strategy is; if there is a shortage of chip manufacturing capacity, use what there is to make the most expensive chips. Favouring one manufacturer so they usually have stock, is better than a dozen who normally don't and will sell out of small batches immediately.

Inverse Finance stung for $1.2 million via flash loan attack

Incompetence or scam?

Either way your money is gone.

Nvidia wants to lure you to the Arm side with fresh server bait

Re: If you can't buy...

What brings you to that conclusion?

Microsoft readies Windows Autopatch to free admins from dealing with its fixes

Auto F***up

A small set of devices will get the patches first before Autopatch moves on to gradually larger sets, gated by checks to ensure that nothing breaks.

That's never stopped them before.

SpaceX reportedly fires staffers behind open letter criticising Elon Musk

Re: Never directly criticise the person paying your wages in public or work time ...

If they enforced that one, Musk would have been out years ago - smoking spliffs in interviews, calling rescuers paedos, and many many more examples of bringing every company he is associated with in to disrepute.

South Korea's space ambitions stuck on the launchpad

It's probably best they don't try for a polar orbit, given him who is to the north of them would probably send them back quite a few of his rockets in return.

EV battery can reach full charge in 'less than 10 minutes'

1000 Charges

That is a very low number of charges, which means it needs to be replaced every year or two, depending on your mileage and the size of vehicle.

Crypto market crashes on Celsius freeze, inflation news

Good

My heart bleeds for all the extortionists and fraudsters who take payment in crypto.

Microsoft forgot to renew the certificate for its Windows Insider subdomain

Utterly unprofessional

openSUSE Leap 15.4: The best desktop on the RPM side of the Linux world

Re: It's a breeze

It's also the only distro which was a breeze to convert from 32 bit to 64 bit, one simple set of instructions and it worked first time.

Warning: Colleagues are unusually likely to 'break' their monitors soon

Re: Consumption

Just about all the streaming services support both standards, although I'm damned if I can tell any difference between them.

Chinese 'Aoqin Dragon' gang runs undetected ten-year espionage spree

Oh for the good old days when you just had to block posts containing claims you had inherited ONE HUNDRED MILLION US DOLLARS.

Dell unveils new XPS 13 devices with Alder Lake CPUs

Re: Not a fan

It's a Dell not a HP!

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Re: Calculating Pi on a Pi

If you are calculating Pi on a Pi just make sure its in Python.

Infosys celebrates first birthday of glitchy Indian tax portal by fixing another bug

The perils of in-sourcing

I bet they wish they could just blame it on some low cost foreign outfit.