Posts by Steve Knox

Intel uncloaks next-gen 'Braswell' Atom, 64-bit Android KitKat kernel

Re: How many mentions of Microsoft can you on the front page

Sounds horrible.

Until you realize that there are 54 articles (not counting highlight spots) on the front page, meaning they're only mentioned upfront in about 24% of articles. Since for some of them (like this one) you'd have to read the subtitle to get the MS reference, Microsoft probably figures prominently in only about 16-20% of articles.

Considering how much Microsoft affects the IT world, that's not surprising, except that it might be surprisingly low.

'Good job, NSA! You turned Yahoo! into an encryption beast'

I'm sure

all sixteen of Yahoo's users appreciate this effort.

123-reg shrugs off customer complaints over stealth domain transfer charges

The real point of this

123-reg has more than 1 million customers and has seen discussion on this from a very small number of them.

Translation:

We don't care because not enough of you will care enough to impact our bottom line.

Hey, Michael Lewis: Stop DEMONISING Wall Street’s SUPERHUMAN high-speed trading

Oh, LOL, now explain what all of these things you just mentioned has to do with HFT?

Okay, all of those things were perpetrated by the same group of people who are running HFT systems.

And despite Tim's simplistic explanation, the algorithms used in HFT don't just perform time arbitrage. Time arbitrage is always brought up by supporters of HFT; they rarely bring up the fact that the algorithms aren't restricted to that and there is already evidence of the algorithms manipulating stock prices in ways totally unrelated to time arbitrage (beyond frontrunning).

To go back to Tim's gun analogy, would you give out guns to people who had used them to murder in the past?

Aw, SNAP. It's too late, you've already PAID for your storage array

Re: Aw, Snap???

"Oh? How very unfortunate for you."

Assange not running in new Australian election

Re: Prohibiting eligible people running for election -- a banana republic tactic

Prohibiting eligible people running for election is a banana republic tactic.

True but irrelevant. The key is the word "eligible". That was the entire point of the article.

Rule of law: Turkish court nixes government Twitter ban ... for now

Tsk, Tsk...

When will these governments learn?

As any good tyrant knows, you want people complaining that you're corrupt. You want it to happen frequently, and with as much vitriol as possible. The correct counter to these complaints is to balance the economy so that the proles are just comfortable enough that they won't actually act on this information.

You need to inure the general populace to the idea of your corruption, so that new reports of your evils appear to be old hat. When the general population react to your ever-widening net of influence with complete apathy, you're ready for the next stage.

Gr8, it's the new M8! Ideal for that celebrity funeral selfie

The battery isn’t removable

QUICK! MAKE WAY FOR APPLE'S PATENT LAWYERS!

As WinXP death looms, Microsoft releases its operating system SOURCE CODE for free

Trend?

MS DOS 2.0 ... began a history of even-numbered versions of Microsoft's DOS operating systems being poorly received by the developer community – a trend it finally broke with the sixth version of the operating system

So two data points is a trend now?

Google slashes cloud storage to $0.026 per GB. Your move, Amazon

Re: Winners?

Long-term, Google and the NSA win.

HP exec: 'It's our GOD-GIVEN right' to rule the world of biz fondleslabs

Based on past performance,

I'd expect HP tablets to be heavy, noisy, and to die from overheating suspiciously close to warranty expiration...

Microsoft Australia slashes price of Surface Pro 128GB by $AUD400

Neither.

I spent less on an Acer Aspire v5-171 last year.

Better i5 (3337U) than the Surface Pro, 6GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, all in a light and compact 11" form factor. (Oh, and FYI, the Radeon HD 8400 graphics are decidedly low-end; the Intel HD 4000 in the Aspire performs better.)

None of these three devices is a performance device, which is why I might buy a new machine this year -- but it'll have to be better than the Surface Pro 2 at a lower price. Fortunately, that too is not too hard to find.

AMD: Why we had to evacuate 276TB from Oracle DB to Hadoop

"row limit for query results [of] 100,000 rows on the Oracle system" - !?

Can someone who works with Oracle's software confirm, deny, or qualify this?

I cannot believe a modern database system of any kind would have such a tiny row limit...

The Reg's guide to cursing in Mongolian

So what you're saying...

Is that, in order to please your more prudish users, you had to develop a system which couldn't give a fuck?

Microsoft alters Hotmail policy amid blogger inbox probe outcry

Typical Microsoft

Create a complicated and opaque process to replicate the functionality of an already existing simple and relatively transparent one.

If the bar is "sufficient to warrant a court order", then why not just get a court order!?

IBM PCjr STRIPPED BARE: We tear down the machine Big Blue would rather you forgot

Re: Floppy drives

A 5 1/4" double-density disk had a 360KB formatted capacity per side. If your drive read only 360KB, then it was a single-sided drive. If it read 720KB, it was a double-sided drive.

You could, of course, use a 5 1/4" disk as a "flippy" in a single-sided drive, either by using a double-sided disk or by punching one or two (depending on the drive mechanism) additional holes in a single-sided disk. But 360KB is double-density single-sided (not single-density double-sided, because IBM didn't do a single-density 5 1/4" format.)

Ah the 7400 series ICs...

Time was you could count on 3/4 of any logic board being covered in these beasties. Now consolidation and miniaturization have pushed most of this functionality into the CPU and the south bridge, leaving but a few lone survivors, even these remnants just miniscule surface mount versions of the original, tiny shadows of the vast herds which used to roam motherboards.

Soon entire generations will grow up having never seen these majestic beasts, except possibly in archives such as this.

NSA 'hunted sysadmins' to find CAT PHOTOS, high-level passwords

So the NSA is destroying network systems?

What isn't clear about the ascertain that in order to spy on the target they seek to compromise the sysadmin and the entire network. That's like taking down a guy by first taking down his misses and then levelling the block.

Yes, that makes sense, if the point of spying were to destroy everything you come in contact with.

This is more like getting information on a guy by first getting info on his missus, and then staking out the places they go.

In other words, common spying techniques translated to a digital world.

UK.gov! frets! over! Yahoo! exodus! to! RIPA-free! Dublin!

The reasons [for moving to Ireland] have as much to do with access to a skilled pool of English-speaking technologists...

Well, sort-of English speaking...

Facebook hacks out PHP alternative

Re: Great

This has nothing to do with Web2.0 and everything to do with computer programmers.

There are as many languages as there are programmers; some just haven't seen the light of day yet.

MPs urge UK.gov to use 1950s obscenity law to stifle online stiffies

Re: In other news,

Context is key.

For example, from the very file you linked:

"The age-standardised abortion rate was 16.5 per 1,000 resident women aged 15-44, 5.4% lower than in 2011, and 2.7% lower than in 2002 (17.0); the lowest rate for 16 years."

There are several more statistics, each pointing to a trend of decreasing abortion. I won't bother to list them here, as anyone can simply follow your link.

The point being, anyone can throw out a number and call it big. It takes effort to analyse the number in context and determine what it actually means.

In actuality, the abortion rate has been decreasing for 16 years. Wouldn't you consider that heading in the "right" direction? What would you prefer, a big ON/OFF switch?

NASA: Earth JUST dodged comms-killing SOLAR BLAST in 2012

Interesting Science Fiction Take on this

Flare by Roger Zelazny and Thomas T. Thomas

Scotland Yard defends single supplier IT gig with Insight

If you're going to lie, lie big.

...claiming it could yield cost savings of up to ten per cent over the contract's lifetime.

If you're making unverifiable claims, why not say "up to ten thousand per cent"? It's just as meaningful.

WTF is … the multiverse?

Far too simple

If we have infinite space and energy, there are an infinite number of universes, some finite number of which would be able to attain inflation.

From this it easy to work out that the mean percentage of universes which did undergo inflation is zero, meaning that any inflationary universe you happen to observe is merely the product of a deranged imagination.

No matter how much worms evolve in the future, they will never understand how a steam engine works.

This is not necessarily true. If worms evolve to a degree similar to our own evolution, they may well understand steam engines. Or they may evolve in a completely different manner and end up oblivious to steam engines but with a better understanding of quantum physics than we can imagine.

Win XP holdouts storm eBay and licence brokers, hiss: Give us all your Windows 7

Nope

a Window-8-capable PC requires beefier hardware – to handle touch – than a machine for Windows 7.

Wrong.

If you want to run Windows 8.1 on your PC, here's what it takes:

Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster with support for PAE, NX, and SSE2 (more info)

RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit)

Hard disk space: 16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)

Graphics card: Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM driver

Source: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/system-requirements

If you want to run Windows 7 on your PC, here's what it takes:

1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor

1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)

16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)

DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

Source: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/system-requirements

The only differences are in the CPU area: PAE (for RAM > 4GB on 32-bit systems), NX (for security), and SSE2 (for graphics, primarily). I believe some if not all of those are actually required by Windows 7, but just not listed explicitly on the page.

Don't stare: SHRUNKEN Mercury lost 7km, but only 'cos it's COOLING

Re: I give it one week

Meh.. 7km in 4 billion years = ~ 1.75cm per 10,000 years. A little too slow for most dieters, methinks.

Nipper rolls up at nursery with 48 wraps of HEROIN

Young is pretty certainly off the "New Jersey Father of the Year" nominations list

You haven't been to New Jersey, then, I take it...

Is the World Wide Web for luvvies and VCs – or for all of us?

Re: Depends on if you mean when it was designed or built?

Does life begin at conception, or at birth...?

Five unbelievable headlines that claim Tim Berners-Lee 'INVENTED the INTERNET'

Re: Idiots

No, they both invented slightly different versions on different sides of the pond at around the same. That's why we have TCP and IP.

How to shop wisely for the IT department of the future

It might be hyper-efficient, but it would probably be of absolutely no use to the business

Reminds me of this Dilbert cartoon.

If Nerds ran it, it would be bloody-well efficient, its non-nerd, know-nothing tw*t managers that cause the inefficiencies.

Nerd do run IT, in spite of managers' attempts to manage* IT.

* manage: n (IT) to stick your nose or other jutting appendage where it doesn't belong; to make arbitrary decisions based on insufficient knowledge or understanding; to generally obstruct or eliminate efficiencies.

Example:

"We need to manage our IT infrastructure in strict accordance with our business principles." said the CIO.

Softbank boss promises 'massive price war' if he can buy T-Mobile US

T-Mobile US HAS to compete on technology and price.

Because they don't have a network worth shit in this country. Put it together with Sprint and you may have half of what you need to compete on network coverage, but there's enough overlap that I doubt it.

My work-from-home setup's better than the office. It's GLORIOUS

HP Laptops and Heat

I've owned 5 different brands of laptops over the past decade: Dell, Lenovo, HP, Toshiba, and Acer.

The Acer is my current one, so doesn't really figure in my comments -- yet.

All of the others I replaced because I wanted a newer machine. They were all functional, and I sold them for a good price to offset the purchase of the replacement.

Except for the HP. The HP always ran hot, and one day (just a few weeks past warranty expiration; go figure) decided to die from heat exhaustion (specifically, the CPU overheated -- all other components tested out fine.)

I've had a few other friends with HPs of various ages, all of which suffered similar fates.

Satisfy my scroll: El Reg gets claws on Windows 8.1 spring update

The one Modern App

I consistently use is the Weather app. It provides more detailed information that I've seen from any iOS or Android weather app, and is easier to navigate than most weather websites.

eBay rejects Carl Icahn's board nominees as 'inexperienced'

Preposterous!

How could you even imply that "Icahn Enterprises employees Daniel Ninivaggi and Jonathan Christodoro" would be beholden to Carl Icahn for anything!?

I'm sure they're just some promising new talent he discovered, and that "Icahn Enterprises employees Daniel Ninivaggi and Jonathan Christodoro" would always do what they believe is best for Ebay.

VMware unleashes desktop-grade desktop-as-a-service service

Sounds Easy Enough

a SAN device that is not running any Microsoft software may be shared by more than one customer;

So that would be pretty much all SAN devices out there, then. I know plenty of SANs used to store Microsoft software; I know of none that run it.

Boffins build bendy screen using LEDs just THREE atoms thick

And how long before this is ready for market?

Been here before. Many times, over the past 4 decades...

What do you mean there are no Surface Pros? HAND 'EM OVER, yell Microsoft resellers

Re: Which Version?

"Overpriced" means priced higher than I consider it worth, not priced out of my price range. I don't think Ferraris are worth what they charge for them, and I wouldn't pay that price even if I had it.

"Crap" means it has no value. I believe Ferraris have value, just not the value Ferrari assigns to them in pricing.

Re: Which Version?

I consider a Ferrari to be vastly overpriced. I certainly don't consider it to be crap.

Re: Which Version?

I said exactly what I meant. Your inability to interpret my words literally and logically, without inserting your own bias (I never claimed either one was "crap", for example) is the only thing stopping you from seeing the logical conclusions of my statement.

Re: Which Version?

With those 3 lines all you said was both are overpriced for their specification...

No, I didn't. There's a subtle but important difference in how I described each device, and that difference is reflective of the likely source of demand.

Which Version?

Are we talking Surface Pro or Surface Pro 2 here?

This is important to help understand where the demand is coming from, as I find the former to be vastly under spec for its price point, whereas the latter is vastly overpriced for its specifications.

No sex please, we're Twit-ish. Vine bans non-educational nudity

"we just prefer not to be the source of it."

Fine. Don't film yourselves naked and post it online. What does that have to do with censoring your users?

Zaphod Beeblebrox style third arm cyborg prosthesis unveiled

Re: In case you missed the adverts

And not a lot of people know this, but in the 2nd series, Zaphod apparently has has 4 arms? "Hey Ford, put it there....and there...and there....and there.... (Although this is probably the result of Mark Wing-Davey ad-libbing)

I believe that fourth was intended to be something other than an arm...

Botnet masters using Tor to hide control tools for ZOMBIE SLAVES

Re: "Bet you're shocked to hear that, aren't you?"

You were shocked to hear that Tor could be and is used to provide cover for nefarious activities?

Or was it just this specific use case which was particularly surprising to you?

MtGox: Yup, we're pretty sure your Bitcoin were stolen. Sorry about that.

Re: No sympathy.......

In matter of fact, every transaction can be identified in the block chain, although the owners of the addresses involved cannot (that's the anonymous part).

Which is why it's not a full audit. Without knowing source and destination you have no chain of custody and no accountability.

All you have a list that says 'Amount X was moved from arbitrary account A to arbitrary account B'. That means the block chain is dependent upon external information for full audit purposes. Any failure of the systems managing that external information, such as happened with MtGox and Flexcoin, can lead to exploits.

That reliance on external information for full accountability is the weakness of the block chain.

Re: No sympathy.......

...what they [Bitcoin] provide, which is arguably of some value, is a fully audited, globally distributed audit of all transa[c]tions, via the block-chain.

Which is why the missing Bitcoin were found immediately after the loss were discovered,right? If the transactions were fully audited, actual source and actual destination would be known, and this problem wouldn't exist.

About the only thing right about what you said was the word "arguably."

Beta tasting: The Elder Scrolls Online preview

Re: Just an FYI

Huh? Sorry, I got as far as that phrase in quotes, and just stopped there and didn't read the rest of your comment.

That being said, don't assume everyone else reads the way you do.

Re: Congratulations

Seriously, how does one manage to say for sure either way when it's only just been opened for beta?

It's just been opened to the public for beta. Beta testing has been going for about a year (I was invited in August) but the NDA has just been lifted.

Now I'm seeing in the press the exact same range of comments I saw from new beta testers, and they fall into basically 3 groups:

1. Elder Scrolls gamers complaining that the world isn't as open as they're used to. This is correct, but necessary -- you can't adjust the game world for a single player when you have thousands of players;

2. MMO fans complaining that the game was missing common UI elements of MMOs (e.g, combat log, minimap). This, while also technically true, ignored the facts that you can play the game quite effectively (and achieve better immersion) without them, and that there is an add-on API for which add-ons are already being developed to provide these features; and

3. Players who treated the game as a new experience and took the time to learn how it was designed to be played.

Group 3 was invariably the most pleased with the game, and in my experience provided some of the most constructive feedback (which, BTW, I can tell you has definitely been incorporated into the game.) However, even groups 1 and 2 usually ended up liking the game despite their initial complaints.

In short, don't expect "Skyrim Online" or "WoW in Tamriel".