Posts by druck

Linux Mint users in hot water for being slow with security updates, running old versions

Re: Could they pick a better example than Firefox?

I would say that anyone still visiting yahoo is likely to be firmly entrenched in the past, and probably well past being able to update their OS. Mint 17 is still a lot newer than Windows 7.

British govt emits fuzzy vision for UK version of American boffin special forces group Darpa

Re: WWW?

Are you now claiming Britain doesn't fund CERN?

Re: WWW?

So working as part of an international team at Cern makes him Swiss and not British?

You want me to do WHAT in that prepaid envelope?

Re: French Tests

In Japan the smart toilet does all those tests for every movement.

Cred-stealing trojan harvests logins from Chromium browsers, Outlook and more, warns Cisco Talos

Re: And bingo !

Unfortunately NoScript isn't available for Microsoft Help, which is what loads/runs .chm files.

Linux as root partition on Hyper-V: Microsoft submits patches for kernel 5.12

Hopefully...

..our PCs will soon have Linux as the HyperV host, and Windows 10 subsystem for Linux will be an ever shrinking guest.

'It's where the industry is heading': LibreOffice team working on WebAssembly port

Re: It's the way the industry is heading

One of the main reason I use Libre Office is that the program is 100% downloaded to my machine and the document is 100% on my machine. As long as I have power, no cloud, and no network gets in the way. Once the document is written I can fling it as far in to the cloud as I like, but I still have my local copy.

Voyager 2 receives and executes first command in 11 months as sole antenna that reaches it returns to work

Re: It's a different world

But back then we had supersonic passenger aircraft which could cross the Atlantic in 3hours, today we don't.

Microsoft issues emergency fix for Wi-Fi foul-up delivered hot and fresh on Patch Tuesday

Re: We used to be able to choose when we update

Unplug the Ethernet, turn off the WiFi, take out the SIM card - although I still couldn't be 100% sure it wouldn't find a way to update.

We imagine this maths professor's lecture was fascinating – sadly he was muted for two hours

Re: Much more embarrasing: hot mic

It would be, but it's a bit too specific to my set up, relying on guessing the video traffic from IP and port numbers in the router's connection table.

Re: Much more embarrasing: hot mic

I've got a Raspberry Pi Zero with a small screen that can monitor the router for video calls to computers in the home office, and display a red "ON AIR" sign.

Better buckle up: Volkswagen puts Microsoft in driver's seat to deliver 'automated' platform

Re: ANY of them. Not.

Then the answer is to make the human driving test harder, rather than to set the bar for AI to be better than a drunk driver.

Re: VW. Not.

Google or Azure? This isn't about your advertising preferences, but putting your and others lives in the hands of that incompetent AI / Cloud provider.

Intel sues former staffer for allegedly stealing Xeon cloud secrets in USB drives and exploiting info at Microsoft

Re: Indeed

It's not on the network, it's on a spare Ethernet port. e.g. the port on the laptop when it is connected to a dock with it's own Ethernet on the company network.

War on Section 230 begins in earnest as Dem senators look to limit legal immunity for social networks, websites etc

Facebook and Twiter aren't the internet I know and love...

...but many other sites which rely on user generate content will be wiped out by the additional costs to comply with this legislation.

Vote machine biz Smartmatic sues Fox News and Trump chums for $2.7bn over bogus claims of rigged 2020 election

It will be a retraction similar to what used to happen in tabloids. After running 144pt headlines on the front page for weeks, six months later they put a mealy mouthed apology in 6pt text at the bottom of page 22, in whichever edition has the lowest circulation.

ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 1: Workhorse that does the business – and dares you to push that red button

Re: Red pointy thing

I mostly use the trackpad, but when you have 3 monitors, the nub is far better at whizzing the pointer 10,000 pixels and back.

Microsoft backs Australia’s pay-for-news plan, risks massive blowback over a lousy $3bn and change

Re: Spite

If google pull out of Australia there will be a massive spike in bing usage, as Microsoft are hoping for.

But it will only last as long as it takes to type google and VPN.

In Rust we trust: Shoring up Apache, ISRG ditches C, turns to wunderkind lang for new TLS crypto module

Re: Valgrind says 'hi'

The defensive attitude as because once you've been in the industry for a while, you see that every five years or so someone comes along, and says "you don't want to use that language any more, its crap, you are crap, look at the dozens of bugs in (several million lines of) your code. You want to use #newshiny instead, its so much better, look I've written half a screen full of code with no memory leaks whatsoever."

Some of these new languages may have significant advantages and become popular, others wont. But you can be sure that in a few years time, someone will be trashing the investment you've made in Rust and suggesting you rewrite everything in #newevenmoreshiny.

'It's dead, Jim': Torvalds marks Intel Itanium processors as orphaned in Linux kernel

We had a few different Itanium variants in a test lab all with everything else under the sun (groan), They were all stupefyingly slow compared to contemporary SPARCs and POWERs, and of course left for dead by Xeons.

Perl-clutching hijackers appear to have seized control of 33-year-old programming language's .com domain

Re: I loved Perl so much...

Twenty years ago Perl was still popular and there wasn't any problem finding devs. These days we were relying on half a dozen crusty and costly contractors who had Perl and luckily also Python skills. No one who had been in the department less than a decade had any real Perl experience, but all the perms knew Python. So the choice was either to train everyone up on a declining and difficult to master language just follow an old corporate standard, or turn the ship around and develop new code in something that matched the skills set, and could be supported in house for at least another couple of decades.

Re: I loved Perl so much...

I did automate most of it, with a Python script containing an absolute obscenity of reg-ex's, but it did 95% of the donkey work so I could concentrate on debugging.

I loved Perl so much...

...I singled handedly ported 36,000 lines of Perl to Python, while it was still being actively developed. I was at it day and night for 3 months, everyone thought I was mad, myself included at times. But they thanked me for it in the end, as the development rate increased by at least 50%, and the number of migraines halved.

How embarrassing: Xiaomi and Motorola show up to high school prom both wearing remote-charging tech

Waste and saftey

Not only is wireless charging very wasteful, but what about the safety? No matter how good the beam forming, to get 5W charging at several meters away, how much total microwave energy is emitted, and how much are the occupants of the room going to be subjected to?

Very little helps: Tesco serves up 3-for-1 borkage special to self-scanning Tesco shoppers

Re: WinCE - The memories...

Back in the early 00's it was easy port full Windows apps to CE, if it used to run on NT4, then only a minor bit of fiddling required to get it up and running. Of course it would be running as a full desktop app, with dialogs far larger than the CE screen, so the real challenge was modifying the UI to sensibly work on 240x320 with pen input.

Microsoft's Gooseberry is a dish best served really, really cold: Progress made on silicon quantum computing

Re: Interesting what Intel is doing

Everyone is throwing money at QC just in case anyone else gets it to work. I'm quite confident it will not result in the advances people think it will.

Samsung Galaxy S21: Lots of little downgrades, but this phone is more than the sum of its parts

The most important reason for an SD card is so that if the phone dies your photos and videos are salvageable on the removable card. Yes I know everyone and his dog wants you to instantly upload them to their cloud, but I don't want them ending up gawd knows where.

Tesla axes software engineer for allegedly pilfering secret Python scripts after just three days on the job

Re: Investigator?

Microsoft might be able to freeze a One Drive account, but not a Dropbox one - I hope.

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Re: Yes. Hit meet nail head

I'd been using OpenSUSE for years but then it wanted to upgrade to Leap which was 64 bit only. Unlike other distros which just told 32 bit users they would need to reinstall the 64 bit version from scratch, or hang around on the last 32 bit version until it goes out of support, OpenSUSE had a n upgrade path. Admittedly it was a page full of instructions, rather than an automated option, but it was fairly painless and it worked.

Android 10 ported to homegrown multi-core RISC-V system-on-chip by Alibaba biz, source code released

Re: Worth making a note of.

ARM has had more than a decade to mature, they produced their first CPU 36 years ago.

Re: Worth making a note of.

With the UK gone from the EU, there is also now nothing stopping the EU from following down the same route for the same reasons.

Yes! Now the UK has gone the EU can move swiftly ahead with their plans for a new common CPU by 2030, offering full compatibility with the 6502, Z80 and 6809.

Laptops given to British schools came preloaded with remote-access worm

Re: Question

Once it's on the home network, they'll be able to see whatever the parents working from home are doing too, one or two of them may be employed by someone of interest.

One minute you're a peripheral maker chugging along nicely, the next the world can't seem to get enough of Logitech's kit

Out of stock

It does seem people can't get enough g them - I was going to treat myself to an MX Keys and an MX Master 3 mouse for Christmas, but everywhere was out of stock, and still is.

Under that pile of spare keys and obsolete cables is an IoT device: Samsung pushes useful retirement project for older phones

For me it's not the battery, but the micro USB port which goes stopping me charging the battery. My Galaxy S7 just like the S5 before it, is becoming increasingly difficult to connect. It will eventually stop charging, despite having a battery with plenty of life, and otherwise working perfectly.

At least with the S7 I could get a wireless charging pad, but then I'd also need one for the car, assuming there is ever a need to go anywhere again.

International Space Station scores powerup with solar panels that 'roll out like a tape measure'

Building the kit in zero-G might be a challenge, with all those small parts floating off.

Upgrade now to avoid a cluster-suck: Microsoft wields the breaking change stick over Azure Service Fabric laggards

Re: You will obey or be exterminated!

And the if the upgrade isn't done, and a companies Azure infrastructure is compromised by the unnamed security issue, how many staff will be needed then?

Boeing will cough up $2.5bn+ to settle US fraud charge over 737 Max safety

Re: The software isn't the main problem

Have all those new redesigned and repositioned engines resulting in an admitted and fully recognised inherent catastrophic flight instability been replaced? Or does the catastrophic deadly weakness still remain with software attempting to correct it?

The engine propositioning does not lead to catastrophic instability, it can be dealt with by training the pilots that the MAX has different handling characteristics from previous 737 variants. The catastrophic instability comes from trying to make it handle like previous 737s using buggy software working from a single faulty sensor.

Re: nothing happening here then

This is the icon to use when want the heads of board members on stakes outside the factory to remind everyone of their commitment to safety.

Titanium carbide nanotech approach hints at hydrogen storage breakthrough

Re: 700 bars ! Yikes !

There is hell of a difference between a few millilitres of diesel squirted in to a cylinder at 2500bar, and large heavy tank at 700bar. One might take off the end of your finger, the other could level a block.

What happens when a Chrome extension with 2m+ users changes hands, raises red flags, doesn't document updates? Let's find out

Re: Who still uses extensions in Chrome anyway?

For the other 9% that can run 64-bit they should offer an migration path. I managed to upgrade a 32-bit OpenSUSE VM to 64-bit relatively painlessly by following a page of instructions, so it can be done, and it could be automated fairly easily.

JetBrains' build automation software eyed as possible enabler of SolarWinds hack

The good news is...

...I've not noticed JetBrains' PyCharm sneaking in any

from Russia import backdoor

U-U-turn: New York Stock Exchange backtracks on previous backtrack, will de-list China's biggest telcos after all

NYSE Anthem

You spin me right 'round, baby, right 'round

Like a record, baby, right 'round, 'round, 'round

You spin me right 'round, baby, right 'round

Like a record, baby, right 'round, 'round, 'round

Explained: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32

Re: Future proofing size constraints

RISC OS's Filecore format mitigates the waste of an entire cluster (Large File Allocation Unit for Filecore) for a small file, by allowing several small files to share the cluster with their parent directory.

About $15m in advertising booked to appear on millions of smart TVs was never seen by anyone, says Oracle

Re: Wait...

Doesn't seem to be any adverts in the UK 2020 model.

Top tip from the original Task Manager taskmaster: Don't put your phone number on that debug message box

Dave's gone

"If you corrupt its registry data, it can effectively uninstall and reinstall itself silently behind the scenes to repair itself. If system resources aren't available, it does without. Most applications are content to, at most, validate that their assumptions are true. Task Manager adjusts and adapts to the reality of the situation, which is a step beyond."

Dave was obviously long gone by the time of Windows 8.1, where it removes it's registry entries while running, so if shutdown unexpectedly (which is expected often), it starts backup having lost all the user settings.

Reading El Reg while working from home? Here's a pleasant thought: Kaspersky says 1 in 10 of you are naked right now

Re: "toiling away in the buff"

Well I'm now working from home for a company which makes video conferencing systems, and we use them all the time, so being in the buff isn't an option, not even below the waist as you never know when you are going to have to get up to answer the door to an Amazon delivery.

I've got enough equipment warming the home office not to have to have the heating on, but gawd is it cold in the rest of the house. At least it removes the temptation to go and have a break in the living room.

Arm at 30: From Cambridge to the world, one plucky British startup changed everything

Re: Anyway - this makes for an excellent afternoon read:

I forgot that Acorn created their first SOC back in 1992 with the ARM250 for the A3000 computer, 3 years before the ARM7500.

Apple's M1: the fastest and bestest ever silicon = revolution? Nah, there's far more interesting stuff happening in tech that matters to everyone

Re: Except the Cloud is going in the same direction

Exactly, the M1 makes Apple products better, but for something that is going to change the world, chips such as the Graviton 2 are the place to start looking.

Robot drills hole on Moon, employs robot arm to clean up mess to bring home

Re: Is that it?

I was 15 months old, and being bathed on the living room table while my parents watched man set foot on the moon. A few months before was the first flight of Concorde, the engines of which my father worked on. It's 48 years since humans since humans left the moon and 17 years since the end of supersonic passenger flights.

I grew up with those dreams of space travel and that anything was possible, I really don't know what my children have got to inspire them.

Bixby users. Yes, both of you! Samsung's unloved voice assistant now works with its unloved DeX desktop mode

It's more the other way around for me, I've got a Raspberry Pi in my shed, but no monitor or keyboard, so I remote in from the phone.