Posts by DaemonProcess

As Europe eyes move from US hyperscalers, IONOS dismisses scaleability worries

Its the services that lock people in

Things the hyperscalers do well is behind the scenes SDN, service connections, security and logging, bolt-on services. The lock-in comes from forcing proprietary API code as service glue. You can overcome some of this using Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef etc but scripting also relies on translation into the vendor's own command line interface. Ionos will need to radically increase the number of open source services on offer, which will mean a large investment. I fear they got left behind 15 years ago due to concentrating on SMB workloads and will not be able to catch up to compete against the huge money available to the big 3.

Doctor Who theme added to national sound archive to honor innovation, longevity

Re: wup wa wop, wup wa wop

Maybe that should be wop wop wop waaaa, wup wup wup waaa .. you know how it goes.

wup wa wop, wup wa wop

It does have some didgeridoo undertones going on, I will admit.

IRS has loads of legacy IT, still has no firm plans to replace it

plenty of old kit

Obviously a vendor can't keep supporting old stuff forever because (a) nobody makes the same components and (b) you would never sell anything new that supports the latest in IT fashions sorry standards.

I've seen companies running 20 year old hardware and literally getting spares off e-bay. Up to 1 application per 10 staff over 200,000 users. Procurement standards causes this problem.

I suspect the IRS may still be running 1000s of ancient PC blades as web servers for different application purposes, with no re-engineering and no doubling up of apps per server. Its easier to manage even if they are idle for 99% of the time.

And every time they replace a mainframe back-end with a mid-range system they find that after 10 years that goes off support, the middleware and utilities have been bought out and dont exist the same way, the libraries aren't compatible and the o/s isn't supported either.

If the current trend is to re-factor every application into K8s then there will be a big delay in solution architecture working with the latest in tax law. Good time to be in Gov cloud business.

DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course

Re: pointers to functions

Yeah nice response!

djnz is a great example - you can interfere with the value of the bc register pair mid loop and cause chaos.

Therefore the checks need to be done on the source code. Hence back into the old Ada vs. C debate now with rust taking over from Ada.

The proposal would require taking the ML up to 6 sigma.

pointers to functions

One historical feature of CPUs is that a register can hold an address, which can be used for data or for code: Z80: jmp (hl)

In C you can declare a variable to be a pointer to a bit of data or a function mimicking the old CPUs.

We haven't needed to write self modifying code in 50 years, either.

So the point I'm making is that wouldn't it be nicer to have a compiler which does not act so dumb and instead of printing warnings actually calculates the possibility of creating bad addresses and erroring out at that point? It may be better to have a front-end to a compiler which intelligently examines the code we have in the language it was written in, instead of translating bad code.

I hate seeing warnings when I compile other people's code and hate being told to ignore them.

Latest update for 'extremely fast' compression algorithm LZ4 sprints past old versions

Not so new

I implemented parallel zlib compression in 1999 on hp-ux , so not so new. It was easy because the vendor had some lovely simple #PRAGMA options for multi-threaded parallelism in C.

It showed up to 1600% cpu reported in top when running on 4 cores, totally destroyed the ability of the o/s to account for it properly.

One problem was compress (zlib) had a small 64k maximum block size, so it spent more time managing it's threads than actually doing stuff. If I could have changed that which would make it not backwards compatible I would have gone for 4MB or so, to limit the i/o ops and reduce the thread management. The actual speed therefore was not 16x faster but maybe 2x.

You could get 2x faster in the original single-threaded implementation by simply reducing the compression strength, so the whole exercise wasn't worth more than an academic investigation. De-compression was so fast that i/o was the bottleneck and it simply wasn't worth doing that in parallel according to my testing.

FYI: Data from deleted GitHub repos may not actually be deleted

Secure boot bypass

So the secure boot bypass vuln just released had test private keys which are still trusted held in github for a while...

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

Baggage ops

Baggage handling, along with air cargo and passenger handling is almost totally outsourced to a small number of handling companies, who have contracts to handle airlines bags at certain airports. The handlers contracts are with the airlines. For example check out wfs.aero

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

Yep, been there

Including pre-installed servers and storage in rack adding up to 1 metric ton, being too heavy for the lift/elevator. On another occasion the machine room floor was strong enough but the ramp wasn't. At another site the rack was too tall for the lift and had to be tilted right over.

Microsoft gives Hyper-V ceilings a Herculean hike

More network required

68 virtual network adapters isn't anything like enough.

192 would be better.

GCC 15 dropping IA64 support is final nail in the coffin for Itanium architecture

Take some credit

I think the Register needs to take some of the credit for helping destroy the credibility of the chip.

Be careful of who you diss Reg because 20 years later we are stuck with only 2 types of mainstream CPU with a 3rd only just coming in. Back in 2000 we had a whole bunch more to choose from and life was more interesting. The trend to make everything in software is going to hold back hardware innovation going forwards. You could point out how much is being offloaded to graphics processors these days but how many architectures of those do we have - 2?

Having said that, the first iteration of the Itanium really was poor. The 2nd was faster but very complicated.

The other thing that killed it was HP themselves. In the early post Compaq/Dec merger years I've never seen such a company where the management was so wholly set against each other. No wonder Hurd went to 'Orrible.

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

68k

You are correct, the 68000 was an upgrade from the old Spectrum's Z80 in that it had a supervisor mode. The o/s simply wasn't pre-emptive in that way. I do know someone who programmed scheduling directly in assembler, with simulated trains going round a track with points.

I had an OPD at ICL. In parts of the company they were hot property and coveted, because they looked cool. In other parts, just meh, we've got better stuff to do all that, like a PC with MS Windows 1 or AT&T system 4 Unix.

Plus the OPD Microdrives were still bad. More reliable means they would break, tangle or stretch a tape after a month rather than a week.

Sir Clive's weakness was that he wanted to miniaturise everything on a tight budget, when it simply didn't need to be done in many cases.

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

as we are here...

Maybe they used ZFS and discovered reading not-quite-written data causes corruption, hehehehe.

Seriously though I suspect it is a cache-sync issue here. Same sort of idea but a different level.

I would like to see the cloud operators enter into a big mutual agreement where none charge egress data fees for backups to another cloud provider.

But I can't see them doing it, even though a simple API call on their platform could wipe everything.

If you are on M365 you have the option of independent backups to AWS or elsewhere from ISVs.

Data-destroying defect found after OpenZFS 2.2.0 release

ZFS here we go again

"ZFS is fast, more fully featured and totally safe"

" Oh, there's another teeny-weenie buggette that may corrupt some data but most likely not"

I'm still steering clear of this. From the description it sounds like multi-user / multi-process testing may be a bit lacking at the moment. Could all fanbois please volunteer.

Amazon to staff: Come into the office – it'd be a shame if something happened to your promotion

cheap layoffs

The cheapest way to downsize ("optimize demographic talent profile") is to encourage resignations, so they can shift your role either offshore or these days onto a small bit of serverless code.

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

poor taste

I'd have uploaded the theme from Mash - Suicide is painless

Sick

Well yes...

UK courts award CGI £60M deal to keep ancient tech alive

Court with their pants down

and now of course they are worried that any new kit will be crushed when the RAAC crumbles to dust.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

snooty

When I went into a BMW dealership once and asked to look at their Z3 (it was 1997) they said sure, but after judging my scruffy IT worker just finished a weekend of changes unshaven look then asked how I expected to pay for it. I was a contractor... so I said cash and walked out never to return.

They seem to expect the customers to be mad fanboys, just like Ferrari. But BMW engineer the car's life at 4 years or 200k km, maybe less. Hardly anyone under 40 still thinks they engineer cars built to last. Thanks to the multitude of Youtube car channels people are better educated. So as well as trying to sell to the old fanboys, BMW are now creating cars for the aspirational wealthy demographic, the ones who cant actually afford it but want to flash the badge at their mates on the estate or on Instagram.

Bodhi Linux 7 brings Enlightenment to Ubuntu

worth a try

I downloaded and ran Bodhi for a few years and loved it. It is well worth a try.

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

nostalgic start

Your next challenge in os/2 Warp !

Why? Because you can!

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

new tech

Normally with new tech it's vice and fraud crime that is first to use it for profit, such as dodgy crypto dealers. Now it is major corporations backed with lawyers.

Better re-train as a hairdresser.

Without competition, TCS wins back UK pensions body in £1.5B mega-deal

Re: And my privacy??

They are allowed to offshore provided that they keep the same controls over data as you have in the UK. The fact that the eyes on the data won't be in UK doesn't matter.

Sales has very little to do with common sense or impartiality. It is all about giving the customer a warm and fuzzy. Most of the clients know nothing at all about running IT and seriously cannot tell the difference between proposals. They just go with who schmoozes them the best. gives the most warm and fuzzy assurances, has the best apparent rates/terms and says yes to everything.

Absolute mad lad renders Doom in teletext

ICL text

The old British computer company ICL in the 1980s had an internal information text system, which was nearly identical to teletext. This was a kind of fore-runner to an Intranet containing company announcements. It ran on series 39 mainframe. There was even a lonely hearts page, which I thought was hilarious because all the women in the office would try to work out who was looking for a date. You would see the pages scroll through on monitors in offices. I can't remember if you could log into it, too long ago now.

Australia fines tech companies for exploiting foreign tech workers

Sport

You forgot to mention a land of inferior cricket :-)))

and rugby

don't go near Aussie rules either, that's no-rules violence.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: The one law of TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC

Like my box with the ancient ISA hard disk that contained the private keys for the 600 bitcoin I bought in 2010. I even made sure it was destroyed and bent with a hammer before I took it all to the tip. This will haunt me for the rest of my days.

CAN do attitude: How thieves steal cars using network bus

less than a BMW then.

Some bimmers require you to drain the coolant and remove the radiator in order to change a light bulb. Purposely designed to make more money for the dealers and prevent owner servicing.

Its rounded up to a 2 hour job and up to 750 squids to you guv.

British govt tech supplier Capita crippled by 'IT issue'

bill paid?

Maybe they somehow forgot to pay Microsoft for a few months.

Boffins claim discovery of the first piezoelectric liquid

Caps

It came to us like a bolt from the blueberry syrup.

Duelling techies debugged printer by testing the strength of electric shocks

Re: I've Seen Both Sides Now

I've half a mind to downvote you just for reminding me of many gettydefs horrors....

Ugh!

One up from termcap symbology though so I let you off.

Thought you'd opted out of online tracking? Think again

Re: The non personalised ads .

You do realise you are now testing El Reg as well, since you just mentioned the bands here? Sneaky.

cookies irrelevant

Even though cookies were the most accurate way of tying an ID to sites and adverts, what happens now instead is that every click-through and site visit is tagged with your ID and those clicks are themselves sent to analytical aggregators that use probabilities to tie your social media ID. The cookie laws are irrelevant and simply bypassed.

And yes - the way the opt in/out panes work is a simple logical OR of Allow or Legitimate Interest for you to be tracked.

Some of these opt-in/out tracking panes refer to a long list of 3rd parties who you have no direct control over whether they track you or not.

These analytical aggregators have strict NDAs with the social and search giants so they cannot publicise what they do.

As the researchers found out, the companies are complying with the letter of the law but not the spirit and in some case not even the former, through outsourcing of tracking under NDA and other contractual terms that keep them free from direct accusation of non-compliance.

What you need to know about the real-time capable edition of Ubuntu 22.04

capacity and scheduling

A lot of my problems with this in the past have been around either bad software, interrupts, poor configuration or general capacity.

I used to use processor affinity to bind cores to network or serial cards interrupt servicing, making sure I left free cores for other tasks. I outsmarted myself a couple of times with that but it did work with heavy NFS.

Thankfully eventually the kernel got better than me and the speed and number of the cores meant I really didn't need task sets any more.

My USB music recording has never been perfect even with Ubuntu studio low latency. At least Ubuntu got Jack working which is more than I ever managed from source.

Thanks for the heads-up about Nvidia chips.

Debian dev to the rescue after proposal to remove Itanium from Linux kernel

I reckon the explicit branch prediction and parallelism instruction bits took a hammering from the speculative execution bug workarounds.

Probably runs slower than it's predecessor now.

Prepare to be shocked: Employees hate this One Weird Clause

foreign law

I've seen this:

Although working in the UK and resident in the UK, you agree to be bound by the laws of Texas... In the event of any proceedings against you, you must lodge a bond of 10000 US dollars with a court in Dallas within 48 hours.

UK spy agency violated Snooper's Charter with 'unlawful' data retention

I don't mind

Actually I am far more likely to trust the civil servants than the politicians above them. I read somewhere that every prime minister up to Cameron used these services to snoop on journalists and political opponents and I don't think the incumbent mob will be much better. However in some cases even that is justified, because back in the 1970s labour and the unions were indirectly receiving money from the USSR in an effort to de-stabilise the country. Out of chaos comes opportunity for the fringe elements to gain power. I still suspect Haroid Wilson may have been a KGB agent especially as he canned TSR2.

Here's how to remotely take over a Ferrari...account, that is

Slow improvements

Things are getting better, slowly. Remember the Chrysler vulnerability of a few years back which allowed root dbus calls directly from the internet with a default password, so that anybody could crash a car remotely?

Computer security as applied to the automotive industry is now being taught at the University technical colleges in the UK, so some cars of the future (e.g. JLR) should at least have better authentication and a chain of trust. But how much of this software development is being guided by this when the cheaper programmers are elsewhere in the world and the directors think that sales depend on features/benefits more than security?

The problem here is that most of these attack vectors involved hacking the manufacturer and getting hold of the credentials from the inside, so it doesn't matter if you have a strong password, trusted certificates or even blockchain tech, people get to your car and account through the front door with that.

So it's more a matter of if, rather than how, hence the PR efforts to prevent widespread panic about car security.

IBM staff grumble redeployment orders are stealth layoffs

the new standard

Happened to me once.

The only thing more evil than being laid off is being told you are not being laid off but there isn't a job for you any more. Basically forcing the employee to find themselves a new job without being paid redundancy severance.

Ironically I had just saved the company over a million pounds in the previous 4 months.

So I went contracting and doubled my salary for the next 15 years. Ironically my contracting roles tended to last longer than all my permanent roles... a lack of staff appraisal system is probably the reason.

Techies are bad a selling themselves, always better to have a recruiter sell you.

British Airways flights grounded due to glitch in flight planning app

Hurley burly

I saw Elizabeth Hurley tweeted at BA saying she was stuck in Antigua for 20 hours. I was about to say lucky for some but she said nobody had been given food or water or access to a hotel.

In praise of MIDI, tech's hidden gift to humanity

31,250 bps - from a Spectrum!

Hi. In case nobody said it previously, well done for getting 31,250 bits per second midi out of a Speccy! And if you kept it all in sync then even better. I struggled to send serial faster than 9600.

Re: works mostly...

I've struggled with my old Korg Trinity Pro-X - nobody makes software to talk to any keyboard that old. Korg software is only written for Apple kit. So with the increasing age and likelihood of electrical gremlins I sold it and went fully virtual. :-/

Microsoft will help trim your Azure bill to encourage loyalty

price increase

April's big price increases caused a few companies to jump to AWS. GCP also offers some good deals. Azure's growth is partly because Microsoft are forcing customers into it by putting more features into Azure AD and associated products, such as Purview and Sentinel, many of which need Azure AD P1 or P2 to get the full features. Its very hard to fight that in the Enterprise and means a lot of companies feel forced to keep at least a minimal Azure account to integrate all identities.

AI recruitment software is 'automated pseudoscience', Cambridge study finds

nasty process

I agree with the report.

Recruitment by the Tiktok generation for the Tiktok generation.

A match made in heaven: systemd comes to Windows Subsystem for Linux

kill me now

Sorry, that should be kill -9 $ME and I don't care what gets left open and hanging.

or in WSL: sudo systemctl stop $MYSERVICENAME and maybe it will stop it or maybe it will complain and leave it running.

Now if systemd could go a bit further into Windows it could improve the powershell horror

Woman forced to sell 4-bed house after crypto exchange wrongly refunded $7.2m

the amount is an issue

Crypto.com have been laying off staff.

Interesting to note that for a large sum of money they are willing to go to the court to get refunded in dollars, yet when a user of their exchange makes a mistake that loses tokens Crypto.com are unwilling to accept any liability.

For example I transferred my last 1 Eth from Crypto.com to my coinbase Eth wallet, something I had done a few times before - except that being very tired I stupidly accepted the "default" option of using the Crypto,com owned chain "CRO" which means that my Eth magically vanished from the world.

Yes I accept it is my fault for not being careful enough to assume they would try to dupe me.

The fact that the same target wallet address on the cro chain isn't owned by anybody individually means that Crypto.com have my Eth by default and will not send it back.

You cannot reverse crypto transactions. It's also very hard to get support from any crypto exchange and harder to start legal action when they are based offshore.

Some good advice came from someone above, always test transfer the minimum amount and check it gets there before you send the rest.

In other advice, I'm right out of crypto now, back into shares - caveat emptor.

AI detects 20,000 hidden taxable swimming pools in France, netting €10m

Re: If it steers boots on the ground to double check

No it's 2 different organisations in France with >2 times the consequential bureaucracy. For them to communicate directly would be far too simple for the French - who would audit the data etc.

The detail required in the forms for the two types of property tax in France (fonciere and habitation) is unbelievable. Unchecked rampant snooping to counter a culture of personal secrecy. They want the size of all the rooms, corridors, number of bathrooms, size of attic space, cellar, square metres of patio area - yes they charge you for that, size of pool, whether an inflatable pool can be considered permanent, number of outbuildings and purpose of each one, size and purpose of all land, whether you have a terrestrial TV aerial which is I suppose their version of a TV licence tax.

NASA's Lunar Orbiter spots comfortably warm 'pits' all over the Moon

Asimov

So now we know where to put Robot Daneel Olivaw.

Near-undetectable malware linked to Russia's Cozy Bear

insistently dumb

Every week I hear of users who _demand_ to open any email and attachment they receive. Regardless of all the security training they get. Then they say it's our fault for allowing malware through. The question is... what legally constitutes enough protection these days - 3 different AV scanners, sandboxes, what else?

China’s top court calls for blockchain to record vast number of transactions

proof

As stated it will be bring proof that a transaction has taken place. Hopefully a weapon against fraud and corruption by officials and private individuals. But only if it has been designed properly with no single control over the chains.

The 1 party system puts all the power in 1 place with 1 single version of the truth, including re-writing history.

VMware customers have watched Broadcom's acquisitions and don't like what they see

out

I dont understand why Broadcom think VMWare has a future. I heartily agree that it will probably be stripped of cash, geared up to the point of no investment and used as a means to deprecate non-Broadcom chips in the VMWare market. Medium to long term WMWare are going to be replaced by a mixture of cloud, HyperV, Docker and HCI. In my opinion engineers starting now should start with infra as code such as Nutanix and Terraform along with cloud qualifications.