Errors
Yeah, we fixed up the article. Lessons learned.
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3495 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011
And yet here we are.
Your other comment was rejected for anti-vax disinformation. You said: "the vaccine does not prevent someone acquiring and subsequently transmitting COVID. This is particularly true of the overwhelmingly dominant Delta variant."
Which is disingenuous bollocks. The CDC says:
"Infections with the Delta variant in vaccinated persons potentially have reduced transmissibility than infections in unvaccinated persons, although additional studies are needed."
Not quite the picture you painted. Yeah you can still get the virus and spread it if vaccinated, but the vaccine is not totally powerless in this situation; there are signs it has an effect and we'll know for sure with more science.
On the one hand, we're trying to lightly moderate these forums so people can argue it and figure it all out without us policing individual points. On the other hand, we can't flame Facebook for spreading anti-vax nonsense and then turn a total blind eye to it on our own boards.
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but but but what about...
It doesn't matter. Go complain to The Register equivalent in teaching or nursing if you think there's a problem there.
We're here to raise the bar in IT and engineering, not taking a look at another industry and thinking, "well if they're dropping the ball, I guess we should as well."
Weird.
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That's the whole problem, anon. There is usually something stopping them. Assumptions, biases, etc.
That's why it's called equal opportunity. People should be given equal chances to succeed. If you suck at cooking, or coding, or bricklaying, you shouldn't get the job. But it shouldn't be assumed you can't cook, code, or build. If you have an industry that actively or passively puts up barriers to entry for certain people, that's a problem.
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Just to clarify: from what's been reported, part of the generator fractured causing fuel to leak. The root cause of the leak, and subsequent failure of the generator, was what eluded them for a few months: they eventually found the break.
The ship was reliant on the generator to get through rough conditions; solar power wouldn't be enough. So without the genny, it had to go back home.
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"the US had no legal authority over what happened"
Given that it apparently involved American HP IT gear going into Iran and some part of $100m in sanctions-busting financial transactions, keywords US dollars, Uncle Sam disagrees.
FWIW she pleaded not guilty in a virtual hearing with a NY court on Friday, though did not dispute the accuracy of the US prosecution's claims made against her.
Bit of a 'agree to disagree' situation, perhaps, to resolve this increasingly ugly situation.
Don't forget, Huawei's CEO was banging on about how he wants foreign scientists settling in China to work on 6G in cities that look just like home. Kinda hard to persuade people to come into the mainland if they risk end up being pawns in the next political fight Beijing finds itself in.
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"The fact that the creator of the inventions in this case was a machine is no impediment to patents being granted to this applicant."
Is exactly what the Lord Justice Birss wrote (97.v). While the other LJs are arguing the law clearly says a patent inventor has to be a person or persons, LJ Birss is arguing it doesn't matter either way for the reasons given.
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It's amusing that Loongson's architecture is MIPS64-RISC-V fan fiction. FWIW it's thought Loongson will eventually get on board with RISC-V but it's not a given.
Counterpoint seems to have based its view on that "over 70% of RISC-V premier members" are in China.
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Windows 11 runs, officially, on the specified Intel and AMD x86 processors and Qualcomm's Arm-compatible system-on-chips.
If you try to run Windows 11 on anything other than the specified Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm chips, it's unsupported.
The Apple M1 is thus unsupported, with or without a hypervisor like Parallels.
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It appears Microsoft considers anything outside the specified x86 + Qualcomm chipsets is unsupported, so yes, even W11 within a Parallels or VMware hypervisor on an M1 Mac would be unsupported.
Edit: We specifically asked about Windows 11 on Parallels on an M1 and were told this is an "unsupported scenario."
What happened was this: Parallels 17 on M1 ran W11 Insider build. Then W11 stopped working as it declared the hypervisor unsupported hardware. Then Parallels 17.0.1 came out and W11 started running on it again. We asked Microsoft if this setup is supported or not, and MS said W11 on Parallels on an M1 is an "unsupported scenario". Parallels didn't say what it changed to make the OS work.
So in fact, we asked the question you wanted. Job done.
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That's according to the mayor's office, FWIW. We'd be happy to break down the figure.
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An internet user was under fire today after likening Register readers to an "online riot."
In a wide-ranging attack on those who seek out information online and post comments, Imhotep suggested they were easily manipulated by the media. The answer? Censorship.
"Let them moderate the comments," said Imhotep.
DO YOU AGREE? ARE YOU A RIOTER? Like, subscribe, follow, share, click, unclick, retweet and comment below!!!11~
FWIW the study is basically about $100m+ software companies (like Microsoft, IBM, etc) and there was no focus on games developers.
The study looked at the correlation of piracy explicitly mentioned by companies in their paperwork filed to the SEC, and subsequent R+D expenditures and IP creation by those companies. Sure, other factors come into play and it's not 1-1 causal, but that’s a given for this kind of investigation.
It’s not a medical study looking to see if aspartame causes cancer or something like that where the causation is the key thing.
And FWIW, the study was about piracy affecting IP investment and indirectly revenue; it’s not a reversible operation where IP necessarily prevents piracy.
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Yeah sure, though that MITM may not lead to RCE like the poisoned PAC can.
It's not likely to be widely exploited, sure. But I dunno, it personally gives me the heebie-jeebies knowing that an application could be blindly running JavaScript given to it outside of a sandbox by some remote source.
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"An attacker cant chose the code to execute."
They can -- see the advisory and the example in the article. It's not a slam-dunk RCE (it's clear you have to somehow feed a poisoned proxy config to the app) but it's pretty gnarly if you manage to pull it off.
I normally don't like hyping up super obscure bugs (unless there's a fun educational element to it) that aren't going to be exploited in the real world. But this one felt like either a near-miss or something to flag up to developers.
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If the filter works, you'll find Copilot won't autocomplete your code if it involves the forbidden words, or if the source uses them.
Your IDE will still work, but you'll probably find that Copilot doesn't want to play ball. You might get away with it if the words are in data files the IDE/Copilot can't inspect.
As I understand it!
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Yeah, sure. If you can create and use the role, great: you can run some VMs on a Windows Server. That functionality's still there.
But as we understand it, Hyper-V Server might be useful to you if you want to manage and build a hybrid cloud. And Microsoft wants to steer people onto Azure Stack HCI instead for that.
As the Microsoft manager said in the linked thread, "Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2019 is that product's last version and will continue to be supported under its lifecycle policy until January 2029. This will give customers many years to plan and transition to Azure Stack HCI."
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We're talking about orbital period. It's said to be the fastest-orbiting asteroid. It gets around the Sun in 113 days, fewer than any other asteroid in our neck of the woods, apparently.
PH27 is described as "an asteroid with the shortest orbital period of any known asteroid in the Solar System."
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We alluded to the possibility that's more than just Razer affected, and there may be a greater underlying issue. Now that we know more about the vulnerability, I've expanded that part to make it clearer.
The issue appears to be that Windows runs some installers automatically at SYSTEM level, bypassing UAC and the like. Those installers don't care if someone can spawn a PS shell from Explorer during the install process because if the user can run the installer as admin, they can open an admin shell whenever they want anyway.
Razer is at the forefront of this story because it neatly demonstrates the problem with this approach, and how it can be easily exploited. Depending on how Razer responds, and Microsoft, we'll follow up with more coverage.
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I just knew if I left the reference to Rust in, we'd get dinged on it. I've just decided to take that sentence out rather than argue at length over it. We wrote at the end, regarding the BadAlloc hole in QNX:
"Such bugs explain why the Rust programming language, capable of memory-safety and type-safety, has become popular in recent years at companies like AWS, Google, and Microsoft."
Would Rust have prevented this specific bug? Maybe, depending on how it was used. You could use Rust's checked math operations that catch overflows, if you remember to use them; debug mode has them on by default. If the overflow is in a separate C lib, you're out of luck.
Is it a good idea to use Rust to avoid similar memory bugs - like what Google, AWS, and others are doing - yes. We mentioned Rust in a general sense because at least some devs look at bugs like BadAlloc, think, 'there but for the grace of God, go I' and opt to use Rust to minimize similar, related flaws to improve the quality of their shipped code.
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Heh, eh no. I mean, it's all over the NIF site that they do nuke research, with some bits about the cosmos, future energy, and national security sprinkled in.
Thing is, we saw other publications writing about this as if this was useful for fusion. But if you look at the info and the quotes - and Katyanna did speak to them - there's little tying it to sustained power generation.
I am quietly fascinated by weapons testing, and the lengths the US etc go to test their designs without breaking treaties. Eg, primary stage implosion tests, just without the fissile material in it, using x-rays.
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Who's "you" in this context?
FWIW I would imagine a self-sustaining reaction in this lab would last a fraction of a second -- no one's given any lengths of time beyond the 89ps this one shot lasted.
It's pretty clear this is science experimentation for things like nuclear weapon stuff rather than experimentation for making power reactors, as I thought the article was at pains to point out.
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FYI: Congrats – you are the 150,000th comment I've manually moderated in the ~10 years I've been at The Register. The comment has the ID 4309021, so about the 4.3m'th comment we've shared.
When I started, we had to manually mod everything. Then automatic moderation was built, and still some had to be manually checked (mainly new and naughty users).
Phew.
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Yeah, it did occur to us to do some kind of 'you spin me right round' reference but we may have worn out that gag. Shocking, I know, for a Reg editor to admit that. Exhibits A through E:
You spin me right round, baby, right round like an exploding asteroid, baby, right round round round
You spin me right round, storage, right round – like a ferrous-based platter baby, round round
(Picture caption in a Lara Croft game) You spin me right round, baby, right round...
(Picture caption of a galaxy) You spin me right round ... an artist's impression of the Milky Way
(Crosshead in an Audacity review) You spin me right round....
Plus, I've had many variations of Dead or Alive's smash hit on loop in my gym playlist so I don't think I can take any more spinning right round, like a record, baby, round round, you spin me right round, like a....
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> crucial information is missing
It wasn't given, FWIW. We're not impressed by the info-lite approach to this launch.
> This Tensor chip, will I be able to buy it on Mouser or Digi-key? Is documentation going to be available?
Seriously doubt this all round. It's an SoC for this one product line.
> What kind of telemetry it is going to be sending to Google and what this chip is going to be doing with it?
The usual Android telemetry.
> How independent that third party is?
No idea.
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The advantage of RISC-V over OpenRISC is that it has more momentum, more financial backing, more corporate and enthusiast interest, and (I'm pretty sure) more hardware available now or on the horizon. It's an Arm rival that seems to have gained traction.
OpenPOWER and OpenSPARC just seem out of reach. We do keep an eye out for them. I can imagine folks feel OP and OS are a little encumbered by their parents, IBM and Oracle, respectively.
Also, Intel just reportedly tried to buy a RISC-V startup for $2bn+. I don't see that happening with OR, OP, and OS outfits.
If there's a screw-up in the RISC-V world, then let us know if we don't spot it, and we'll write about it. We're pro-competition and we like tracking things that may challenge the status quo (eg, Arm). RISC-V is still so young that it's not in widespread use and the opportunity for that community to blow it hasn't come up yet.
There may be some technical limitations to OpenRISC v RISC-V. The people who created RV complained that OR still had branch delay slots (ew), the architecture and its software stacks weren't fully 64-bit ready, and the ISA encoding space gave too much room to immediate values, which is awkward.
Sure, I hope one day we get a chance to do a technical look at RISC-V v OpenRISC v OpenPOWER v OpenSPARC, but for now, the reason why we write about RISC-V is because we like an underdog. As Arm's CEO said, RISC-V keeps Arm on its toes, which is good for everyone. OpenRISC and OpenPOWER ain't doing that.
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The neural network, Google says, outperforms human and industry automated tool placement.
So when you see in the article "beats humans" read it as "beats humans using their brains and their automated tools". I'll try to make that clearer.
Google's argument is that the neural net places macro blocks better than humans and their tools, and does it in hours, and not in a process that can take months to juggle around blocks and cells. Also, the AI can place the blocks in an unconventional manner: it seems to scatters them as needed, which some humans might not be so brave to do. The design looks like a mess but it's optimal.
FWIW it's been 15+ years since I've done any kind of chip design. In researching this piece, I read a pre-publication analysis of the paper by Andrew B. Kahng, a VLSI professor at UCSD, and for instance he mentions:
"The authors report that the agent places macro blocks sequentially, in decreasing order of size — which means that a block can be placed next even if it has no connections (physical or functional) to previously placed blocks.
"When blocks have the same size, the agent’s choice of the next block echoes the choices made by ‘cluster-growth’ methods, which were previously developed in efforts to automate floorplan design, but were abandoned several decades ago.
"It will be fascinating to see whether the authors’ use of massive computation and deep learning reveal that chip designers took a wrong turn in giving up on sequential and cluster-growth methods."
In other words, the AI works differently to humans and their automated tools, and that difference can be seen.
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