Posts by diodesign

Stock market blizzard: Snowflake set for £33bn IPO as valuation bubble keeps on expanding

Confused

Eh? That Forbes article is from Feb 2020, which isn't 18 months ago.

Email [e-mail] if you think we've made an error.

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Worried about bootkits, rootkits, UEFI nasties? Have you tried turning on Secure Boot, asks the No Sh*! Agency

Linux

Linus owns the trademark and has owned it for many years.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/linux-mark/

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Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

International Organization for Standardization

Yeah, it's fixed. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong.

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That long-awaited, super-hyped Apple launch: Watches, iPads... and one more thing. Oh, actually that's it

Re: understatement of the new decade

Well, TBF the very next paragraph goes into the A14's leap in performance over previous generations.

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Re: Something isn't making sense

The power adapter / cable isn't included. You get the wireless charging gizmo that you place your watch on, but there's no USB power adapter in the box to feed power into that gadget.

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Battery lives

In the words of Apple, "battery life varies by use." ie: here's a number, maybe it's what you'll experience.

In short, according to Apple, the Watch Series 6 has an 18-hour battery life; the 8th-gen iPad has an "all-day" battery life; and the iPad Air has an "all-day" battery life.

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Nvidia to acquire Arm for $40bn, promises to keep its licensing business alive

Re: China ARM and a leg

The deal was said to hinge on the China Arm brouhaha. Softbank considered the matter resolved, but I'm not sure it is. It's something we'll check in with over the week -- this broke on Sunday night.

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AI in the enterprise: Prepare to be disappointed – oversold but under appreciated, it can help... just not too much

"Thus it will no doubt generate a great deal of heated discussion"

Yes, that was the point. It was deliberately loosely defined. I didn't want it to be something like: "Backups are good for your business. Discuss." That's a bit dead end.

I wanted to spark an argument over what exactly is AI, whether it has a place in business, and whether it's previous software routines with better PR.

This is El Reg, not Cambridge.

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AI in the enterprise: AI may as well stand for automatic idiot – but that doesn't mean all machine learning is bad

"It's badly worded"

I've fixed those minor issues -- software has little bugs, articles have slightly wonky grammar from time to time. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you want to report things like this.

Also on the point of facial recognition being simple -- the end result is, yes. It mostly works in a lot of production systems (hi, China). The process inside isn't simple.

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Desperately seeking regolith: NASA seeks proposals for collecting Moon dirt

Re: Confused

By the sounds of it, it's left there on the Moon for NASA to deal with as it needs. From the announcement:

"...conduct an 'in-place' transfer of ownership of the lunar regolith or rocks to NASA. After ownership transfer, the collected material becomes the sole property of NASA for our use."

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Microsoft to charge $200 for 32 GPU cores, sliver of CPU clockspeed, 6GB RAM, 512GB SSD... and a Blu-Ray player

Re: Wait a minute

The headline picks out the difference between the machines. FWIW the article originally said the Series S had 6GB of RAM -- it's 10GB and the difference is 6. So the headline was right, the article was wrong. It's now fixed.

Also, some people are getting the all-digital Xbox Series S teased this week confused with the Xbox One S from last year. The specs in the article are defo for the all-digital Series S coming out this November.

Don't forget to report any errors to [e-mail] - ta.

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US senators propose yet another problematic Section 230 shakeup: As long as someone says it on the web, you can't hide it away

Censoring conservative viewpoints

Well, out of the top 10 trending news topics on Facebook, pretty much 7-10 are right-wing outlets, like Fox News, in the US, typically.

"Consistently, Roose found, conservative pages were beating out liberals’ in making it into the day’s top 10 Facebook posts with links in the United States, based on engagement, like the number of reactions, comments, and shares the posts receive."

(source)

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As Amazon pulls union-buster job ads, workers describe a 'Mad Max' atmosphere – unsafe, bullying, abusive

"A very USA oriented story"

Yes, it's about people and warehouses in the US, as the article says. People in non-US locations are welcome to drop us a line.

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UK utility Severn Trent tests the waters with £4.8m for SCADA monitoring and management in the clouds

"Hopefully the description here has been over-simplified for IT people?"

No doubt there's gear on site. Where exactly it goes off-premises, we're relying on the tender document's vague wording -- what do you make of it?

I've tweaked the article to reflect the fact the tender document leans more toward wanting a system than can perform analysis and predictions in the cloud by integrating with physical, on-location SCADA systems.

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You're stuck inside, gaming's getting you through, and you've $1,500 to burn. Check out Nvidia's latest GPUs

"You forgot this new techno for decoding SSD traffic"

It's added. RTX IO.

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As promised, Apple will now entertain suggestions from the hoi polloi on how it should run its App Store

Nah mate

We can use whatever words we want. You're not my real dad.

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Happy birthday to the Nokia 3310: 20 years ago, it seemed like almost everyone owned this legendary mobile

Chunky, then.

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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a 56-year-old satellite burning up in the sky spotted by sharp school kids

Image source

That's a video of the same thing in the sky. Our still image was sourced from NASA (see the link at the end of the page). I've now included the vid in our page, anyway.

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Zuck says Facebook made an 'operational mistake' in not taking down US militia page mid-protests. TBH the whole social network is a mistake

Police spin

"he reached for the knife that he has admitted that he had in his possession"

No, the police said he admitted he had a knife and one was retrieved from his car -- you're just retelling the post-shooting police spin. Him reaching for a weapon is an assumption. He was visibly unarmed and beaten up while trying to go his car. Him resisting arrest is not good, and trying to evade the cops made it worse. The whole situation is not good.

Shooting him seven times was the cops giving up and executing him. They didn't even know what he was wanted for. That's why people are a bit miffed.

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Re: Re: Wow -

Let's put this stupidity to bed. Medical examiners have ruled it was homicide, and he died from "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression." Yeah, he had drugs in his system, and was in a bad way: he tested positive for the COVID-19 virus. So, perhaps the last thing he needed was a knee on his neck.

By your logic, terminal cancer patients are fair game to the police -- they're just dead people walking, huh?

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"if Jacob Blake had been white"

I think you're overlooking the fact people of color are targeted by police disproportionately to the population mix, and that Blake's shooting was taken as another potential example of this. It's not clear the officers arresting him knew exactly what he was wanted for. It's not great he resisted arrest. I don't think shooting him 7 times was the answer.

And yes, what happened to Miller was terrible.

I guess what I and others find distasteful here is the whiff of outrage at people daring to protest or get upset at inequality, injustice, and prioritization of policing over education, community, and health. It's as if you want them to go back to their lower-paid jobs in their lower-valued homes, keep quiet, and stay out of the way.

Presumably so that you can take to the streets to protest against the killing of people like Miller.

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Propaganda

"a protest (riot of thugs)" ... "Trump had to send federal agents in to cities because the local force wasnt dealing with the issue"

Please stop watching Fox News. You're kinda forgetting that a lot, or most of, the violence on the streets was escalated or instigated by police intolerant of those with the opinion that the police aren't doing a great job.

Which is sorta like the definition of a police state.

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Hrmmm

"ElReg writes"

This kinda makes it seem like we're making it up, putting a spin on it, or were wrong to mention it. But games were called off in protest FWIW. The point is: the shooting wasn't low key. People at Facebook would have been aware of it and the protests, in all forms, that followed.

"Apparently white guys don't matter."

Ah c'mon man, this whataboutism is pretty weird. A violent encounter with the police doesn't get widespread attention so no violent encounters with the police should get widespread attention?

Why didn't you take to the streets or boycott sports fixtures over Miller's death? Are you envious of those who did take action after another clash with the cops?

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"done their duty and stepped in"

By shooting people at a protest?

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Edit: There's an argument the gunman shot in self-defense. I'm gonna leave it to the courts to decide.

"Was the militia pro police or pro protest?"

It was very much pro-police and the police were OK with the militia. I can add that in.

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Nutanix CEO and co-founder Dheeraj Pandey to step down

Furloughs, layoffs, ...

FWIW we've reported Nutanix's layoffs and furloughs. But OK, point taken. We'll review the article.

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"Nutanix built a great product, and was selling it at a great price"

Yeah, that was the basis of Simon's comment. What you've said and what he's said aren't mutually exclusive. The product impact versus the financial strategy.

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Facebook apologizes to users, businesses for Apple’s monstrous efforts to protect its customers' privacy

Feedback

Hey thanks for offering, on behalf of Facebook, an explanation for its spin. Its blog post literally stated:

"We work with more than 19,000 developers and publishers from around the globe and in 2019 we paid out billions of dollars."

That's it. That's all it said on the matter, which is what Kieren was poking fun of. The lack of detail. We've slightly tweaked that part to reflect this. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything else you think is wrong.

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NetApp trims workforce by about six per cent, SolidFire seemingly not an eternal flame

SolidFire

Ordinarily, five per cent is about SOP for large companies though in this case, it's linked to a specific acquisition, which makes it more interesting.

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Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

"they don't know how to send a plain-text email"

It's more than sending a plain-text email. It's following discussions, submitting formatted code, following feedback and revising parts, and resubmitting it, and accepting it.

Mailing lists have been a place for that. But they're not the only way to do it.

And to stress: this sounds like an alternative interface to the underlying email-based patch system.

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"plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

It's not a barrier to communications -- it's a potential barrier to tracking, submitting, revising, reviewing, and accepting patches. Some people have better ways of tracking patches, submissions, and feedback, and it may not involve a mailing list.

And to stress: this sounds like an alternative interface to the underlying email-based patch system.

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Re: Where's the IT content?

Wha... what kind of IT are you in that doesn't have project management?

And what part is clueless? Have you tried recently submitting a patch to an open-source project that insists on plain-text email lists from a modern client? I have and it was a bit of an unexpected ritual.

Also, attributing the word "clueless" to someone with years of experience working with open-source at Google and Microsoft is rather unkind.

Edit: Before you get the wrong idea, I use plain-text email all the time -- at home and work. As I found out the hard way, no, modern clients don't format inlined patches well. And yes, it turns out there are command-line tools to send the email for you. OTOH GitHub is quite nice for submitting patches and following feedback etc IMHO...

If someone identifies a barrier to entry to a project -- particularly a project whose leader has said it's hard to find maintainers -- it's a bit shortsighted to dismiss those concerns and shoot down attempts to provide alternative means for submitting, reviewing and accepting code.

Keyword: alternative.

The exact quote is: "a text-based email-based patch system that can then also be represented in a way that developers who have grown up in the last five or ten years are more familiar with."

And to head off obvious arguments, lowering the barrier to entry doesn't mean lowering the quality. Being able to use 'git format-patch' and 'git send-email' doesn't guarantee you are a kernel-coding genius.

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Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool

Re: One of the most important bits missing from the article...

it didn't install TCP/IP by default and other OSes had it. And third-party stacks were available previously. I'll add it in anyway, ta.

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This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over

UNIVAC

Yeah, OK. I've tweaked it to avoid confusion. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong.

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C++ still rules the Chromium roost though Rust has caught our eye, say browser devs

C v Rust

"unless the programmer didn't intend it"

Well, yeah, that's the bug. That's what you want to avoid. Stuff happening the programmer didn't intend. I know there are times when a fall-through is useful - Rust lets you do that. You just have to be explicit about it rather than have the compiler assume you know what you're doing.

Rust pretty much never gives you the benefit of the doubt. It's why I say Google has the language of Go and Mozilla has the language of No. With Rust you have to get used to the compiler telling you No a lot, and stopping compilation. It's annoying but you get over it. It's just software; it's not judging you.

"Also, -Wimplicit-fallthrough"

This is just a warning. It's a stop-the-build error in Rust. And without this __attribute__ ((fallthrough)) stuff.

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Re: Kinda sad.

"logic errors and faulty assumptions"

FWIW Rust is strict on trying to stop common errors. For example, Rust's equivalent of a switch-case block (called match) does not allow you to fall through it. You must match one of the arms, and this is checked at compile time. You can put a catch all in ( _ ) but you must explicitly set it up with a handler.

I skipped C++ and went from C to Rust and the thought of writing C now scares me. I've been meaning to do a 'Rust for C/C++ programmers' article for ages now.

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India selects RISC-V for semiconductor self-sufficiency contest: Use these homegrown cores to build kit

Re: Chip design is not enough

RISC-V is supported by the Linux kernel and LLVM and GNU toolchains at least, which feeds into other projects.

You can implement RISC-V cores in VHDL, SystemVerilog, nMigen, Chisel... There are plenty of professional-designed and homebrew open-source cores to look at and see for yourself.

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MediaTek pings Italy with '5G' Internet-of-Things data beam from geostationary satellite 35,000 kilometres up

Re: 5G is not 5G is not 5G

It's 5G in that it uses NB-IoT networking, which is included under the 5G umbrella. I've added some extra detail.

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Psst, you want us to design you an Arm chip? 'Cause we can do that, says RISC-V processor darling SiFive

Re: What 150 million?

For one thing, Samsung uses SiFive's RISC-V tech in its 5G smartphones, eg in the mmwave RF stage.

Also, SiFive says its SoC IP - keyword IP - has appeared in 150 million shipped parts, which given the scales of chips in embedded electronics, isn't unbelievable. That's basically where it's going: IoT and embedded kit. This was largely inherited from Open Silicon, from what I can tell.

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Open Silicon

Fair point, though the examination of SiFive's motivations and goals was sparked by its rather public announcement of silicon design work involving non-RISC-V cores.

It could have migrated Open Silicon toward exclusively using its own CPUs but has instead kept that link with Arm going -- which is telling in of itself.

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How long does cookie permission last?

Cookie info

FWIW we have a page describing the cookies -- it's linked to from the bottom of every page on the site.

According to my browser, the cookies set by The Register last one year, except:

* Cloudflare's __cfduid, which lasts one month

* Google/Doubleclick's __gads which lasts two years

* Google Analytics' __gads which lasts two years

* Your account session cookie, which lasts one month

* There are a couple of UI-based cookies that last a few seconds

Depending on your browser and plugins, you may have other cookies set by advertising networks and the like, which may have their own duration.

Basically, I recommend you use your browser to inspect the cookie duration if you're interested. If you find yourself being asked to accept cookies repeatedly, it's probably your browser or plugins removing them.

This comment does not in any way supersede, negate nor alter The Register's privacy policies or terms of service and use or other agreements.

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Whatever happened to???

Writers

I gonna respond in general terms 'cos I don't think it's appropriate to comment on specific people.

El Reg's editorial team is made up of staff writers and editors who keep the site ticking over during work hours, and outside freelancers who contribute regularly or irregularly.

When the pandemic started to bite into the economy and tech world, as might be apparent from our article output, we dialed back the use of our freelance pool as a precaution.

I'm happy to say - hopefully without jinxing anything - that we're continuing positively commercial-wise, and I very much look forward to seeing our regular outside contributors on The Reg's pages again, and new people join the full-time team at some point.

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ZX Spectrum reboot promising – steady now – 28MHz of sizzling Speccy speed now boasts improved Wi-Fi

You're welcome

I've added a link to the main site.

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Hardware

Um, yeah, it's all on the website....

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America's largest radio telescope blind after falling cable slashes 100-foot gash in reflector dish

That incident

For England, James?

Bratty Uber throws tantrum, threatens to cut off California unless judge does what it says in driver labor rights row

Re: 100% market share for Lyft

Probably why Lyft is keeping quiet....

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IBM quits facial recognition because Black Lives Matter

Bad citation

That paper was retracted on July 10 because it did not adequately "address racial disparities in the probability of being shot."

See the retraction page:

"Our work has continued to be cited as providing support for the idea that there are no racial biases in fatal shootings, or policing in general.

"To be clear, our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements. We take full responsibility for not being careful enough with the inferences made in our original report, as this directly led to the misunderstanding of our research.

"While our data and statistical approach were appropriate for investigating whether officer characteristics are related to the race of civilians fatally shot by police, they are inadequate to address racial disparities in the probability of being shot.

"Given these issues and the continued use of our work in the public debate on this topic, we have decided to retract the article."

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Steve Wozniak at 70: Here's to the bloke behind Apple who wasn't a complete... turtleneck

"Cue the downvotes"

I don't think this is an opinion that'll get many downvotes in a Reg forum ;-)

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NCC Group admits its training data was leaked online after folders full of CREST pentest certification exam notes posted to GitHub

"Uh... false?"

Well, true in that the offending GitHub repo has been taken down. But I understand it's been forked. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you think something's wrong.

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Peer-to-peer takes on a whole new meaning when used to spy on 3.7 million or more cameras, other IoT gear

"To me that sounds like the exact opposite of a P2P system"

Er, well, even classic P2P networks have a pool of central systems that you connect to initially to find other clients. This is just like that.

The P2P nature comes into play when machines relay connections between each other, and when endpoints talk to each other directly. See the talk for details (it's also covered later on in our article.)

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