Posts by diodesign

The Register translates VMware's VMworld Europe 2018 news into plain English – our free guide for every reader

Re: you missed the REALLY important bit

I auto-tune out 'blockchain'

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Mything the point: The AI renaissance is simply expensive hardware and PR thrown at an old idea

"there is something truly amazing"

FWIW it is an opinion piece by Andrew.F. Think of it as an antidote to all the hype.

While there is a hell of a lot of nonsense around AI at the moment, there are some interesting, and some rather crap, research projects and products, which we write about on a daily basis.

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Fight AI with AI! Code taught to finger naughty deepfake vids made by machine-learning algos

Re: frank ly

"Did they test the final product with real deepfakes?"

Yes, see the paper. They tested it against DeepFake-generated videos including a fake one of Nic Cage as Harrison Ford from YouTube (fig 6). It correctly pointed out the Nic Cage one as fake.

As the article points out, it's not perfect as it's built from their carefully curated dataset, and needs to be tested against a much wider set of forged videos.

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'Pure technical contributions aren’t enough'.... Intel commits to code of conduct for open-source projects

Re: James 47

"the definition of 'being an arse' is entirely subjective"

Well, it's not too subjective - it's about not excluding someone unfairly, and treating each other with civility, etc. I dunno if you've noticed but the laws of the land are also subjective in places.

Where or when does defamation begin? Threatening behavior? Disorderly conduct? Assault? Life isn't black and white; programmers love seeing things in black and white, and, well, there's the rub.

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Re: DavCrav

"you describing people with varieties of autism"

I did no such thing. Making shit up isn't helping your argument.

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Re: Some twat

"the same disconnect here between the writers of this publication and its audience"

Well, its audience that likes to comment, perhaps. The number of people who comment on articles is a small percentage of our overall readership. That's not to say we don't appreciate comment posters - we really really do, otherwise we'd just turn comments off - however, they are a vocal subset of overall readers.

I'm confident from earlier reader surveys, and feedback outside the comments, that there is interest among Reg visitors in fostering diversity and inclusion and civility in the tech world. In fact, I have a feeling people are put off commenting positively on the matter because of the strong feelings from a vocal minority who are against CoCs and equal opportunities in hiring. Essentially, if it seems nearly everyone posting comments is against CoCs and diversity, why bother contributing to the discussion?

"the writers utterly despise gamers and seem hell-bent on telling them how fucking awful they are"

I really don't think that was the case - why would you wake up in the morning to write for an audience you hate? sure there are bitter hacks out there, but an entire industry of hateful scribes? - and anyway it's not the case here. The whole point of El Reg is to share info and be useful to its readership in its own unique way. I fucking love our readers, and I think you're jumping to rather unfair conclusions.

Let me give you two personal anecdotes. First, even I've been accused of breaking a CoC and I'm still in favor of them because, on the whole, they are a good idea. They draw a line in the sand that says if you want to participate as a team member, you have to follow the team's rules. And those rules are basically: don't be an arsehole to others. CoCs were introduced because discrimination and harassment was, in some eyes, getting out of hand - and house rules needed to be set down.

And sure, people say it's hard to define exactly what is "being an asshole", however, I don't know if you've been keeping up with current events, but the laws of the land are similarly loosely defined. There are certain things that are fixed - such as the maximum blood-alcohol level allowed for drivers - but quite a lot isn't. Defamatory statements, threatening behavior, disorderly conduct in public, assault, etc, are all kinda up to society and judges and cops to weigh up. It's not so radical to see this in CoCs. If you're unhappy with this language in CoCs, presumably you're just as fired up when folks suffer injustice at the hands of poorly applied laws.

In my case, a particular CoC forbids people from using sexualized language on and offline in and around an event. It's there to stop sex pests from being creepy to others, especially women. I happened to have written some of El Reg's racy headlines that had sex puns in them - we're sex positive, after all. Someone tried to claim I was breaking the CoC with my own sex-based headlines. In the end, the accusations were considered and dismissed. The event went on as normal. I still have a job. My career is not ruined.

Secondly, I bailed out of the world of electronic engineering for journalism for a couple of reasons. One, at 25, journalism looked a lot more exciting than debugging embedded systems. Back then, I had no patience or ability to focus on long-term projects, and 10 years on, I think I could probably manage it.

The other thing was that I didn't want to work in an industry that was 99% blokes with the same interests and same backgrounds. It's not that I wanted to meet women at work; I just wanted to work around different people every day.

So anyway, my point is: El Reg doesn't hate its readers (that's so ridiculous), we see the problems with some CoCs but on the whole, think they're pointing in the right direction, and we appreciate diverse work forces and the mix of backgrounds and insight they bring. That includes us, too. We used to be very white British and blokey, then we started to tip the balance to 50-50 men and women - and it made us better. Some of our rudest and sarcastic headlines are written by a woman.

If this is freaking you out, don't lash out at the things you like. Think about why you're upset. It's on you.

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Re: Spurious conflicts within open source projects.

"the feminazi movement"

You kinda destroy any point you make by using this sort of language, like something straight out of a tragic 4chan manual. It makes you sound bitter and nonconstructive - basically, someone others wouldn't want to work with, anyway.

"will end up driving away top developers"

Yeah, nah. No it won't. CoCs lay out what is and isn't acceptable behavior in a project team. The only folks, in my view, getting really upset with them are the types of people who'll regularly break the CoC by being an arse to others.

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Which scientist should be on the new £50 note? El Reg weighs in – and you should vote, too

Re: Michael Faraday did so much more

"I'm astonished that the article section didn't mention..."

That's why we have a comments section.

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Re: astrology????

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

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Re: Eh? Come again?

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

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Re: Astrology??!!

Yeah, Friday night pub o'clock editing strikes again. It's been fixed.

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It's been a week since engineers approved a new DNS encryption standard and everyone is still yelling

Re: Trixr

Tsk - why leave a comment right at the end of the thread when you could have dropped us an email and had it fixed immediately? Only just seen your comment by random chance.

Email [e-mail] if you see anything wrong.

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Google logins make JavaScript mandatory, Huawei China spy shock, Mac malware, Iran gets new Stuxnet, and more

Re: Wait

Nah, just a typo, mate. Obvious. Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong.

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Re: "uranium subterfuges", O Joy

Friday pub o'clock editing strikes again. Sometimes the mind wanders after editors have a few pints or tequila shots. Oops, I've said too much.

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Web domain owners paid EasyDNS to cloak their contact info from sight. It was blabbed via public Whois anyway

Re: tachyonhorse

Actually that's explained in the article. The affected domain owners paid to have their personal info obscured, but it was revealed anyway. See the linked-to EasyDNS page for more information on domain owner privacy protections.

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Behold! Blocks and Files is born again as storage tech website returns

Soo... you're OK with 'maybe' on our reader satisfaction survey?

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Re: Still on El'Reg too?

Most of Chris's writing will be on B+F - that's the site for hardcore storage news followers. A selection will appear on The Reg: mainly articles that are relevant to IT pros and software devs in general, such as hard disk developments, scandals, firings, etc.

A Blocks and Files box is on the homepage with the latest links in case you forget to check B+F while looking at El Reg. Hope to see you again soon!

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I'm on the naughty step

re: onefang

"not particularly broad-minded"

Look, dude. On a story about NIPS being insensitive for some, cracking jokes about freeing the nipple isn't terribly productive. Kinda makes you part of the problem. There's being broad-minded, and then there's not being a pillock. Some people might want to discuss it seriously. There are or have been plenty of bootnotes stories for that kinda thing.

"not that consistent either"

Report any comments you think are inappropriate, and we'll remove them if necessary.

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"What did I do wrong this time?"

Nothing - you posted in a thread where everyone gets moderated (the Google sex pest one) and your comment was approved.

Some articles are marked for manual moderation on all comments either because: legal issues, or to stop it turning into a shit show with trolls.

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Re: onefang

"if you don't tell me what I did wrong, there's no chance I can correct it."

It's too much of a time sink to get into discussing it with everyone who ends up being rejected or put into the moderation queue. Maybe one day we'll have a drop down menu of reasons. Our primary goal is writing articles.

"The email I sent asking why didn't get a response."

If you sent it over the weekend, we haven't read it yet. We all need time off at the end of the week.

"I promise to not post corrections as comments"

That'll help you get out of moderation. Generally, people are in the queue until someone cracks and takes them out of it and back into normal auto-moderation.

It's just really annoying having an article sit on the site for a few hours with a mistake it in, especially a mistake others have seen but decided to post a comment about it rather than get it fixed.

It's like getting a 1 star review about a bug that a bug-finder didn't report.

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This revolution will not be televised – but it will be sanctioned: Googlers walk out over 'sex pest' executive scandals

Re: Chocolate

Definitely "Googly" - it's an internal term. If you're doing things right, it's called being "Googly". What right is, depends on the context - ethical stuff with a project, optimizing for particular use cases, etc.

It's - to our knowledge - typically used when things aren't 'right' - "that's not very Googly", "you're not being very Googly", etc.

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People outperform computer programs for 'compressing' pix

Re: "the whole thing still makes absolutely no sense."

Ah well, thanks for the feedback. It's just research we thought people would find interesting. To be fair, we do say it is impractical - it's just an amusing way to 'compress' images.

I've added more background to the piece to it's more obvious to folk who don't read the paper or the code.

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Re: "Can anyone explain better?"

Here's how it works: take an image, then have one person describe to another person what can be removed or reduced from the image without turning it into garbage. This works better than have a computer compress the image using an algorithm.

Just added a bit more to the piece to explain it.

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Veeam holds its hands up, admits database leak was plain 'complacency'

Re: He Gawn

It's on our sister site, Blocks and Files:

https://blocksandfiles.com/2018/10/30/veeam-co-ceo-and-president-peter-mckay-off-to-new-endeavours/

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If you saw a Google ad recently, know that it helped pay off one of its 'sex pest' execs $90m

Re:"That is an absolutely meaningless comparison"

No, it's quite obviously not - it's for context. Compare a company kicking out 48 of 300 employees versus 48 out of 85,000. It gives you an idea of how many people, as a percentage of the workforce, were booted out.

F'king hell. I know it's Friday, but that's no excuse for leaving your common sense in the glovebox after parking your car in the office parking lot ;-)

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Intel: You'll get 10nm next year – now witness the firepower of this fully armed cash machine

LMGTFY

Look up 'after-hours trading'

https://www.fool.com/knowledge-center/how-does-after-hours-trading-work.aspx

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Amazon is at this point a money-printing cloud machine with a grocery store in the parking lot

Re: Indeed

Tech stocks as a whole have been generally down this week in the US - although Microsoft was all right.

Witness AMD: sure, small revenue increase (4%, missed estimates) and weak Q4 guidance with GPUs, but +67% profit and whoosh there goes 25% of the company value as traders hit 'sell'.

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This two-year-old X.org give-me-root hole is so trivial to exploit, you can fit it in a single tweet

Re: And this is news how?

1. If you're providing a shared system - such as a university lab of Linux PCs - it's bad news.

2. It's an amusingly trivial bug to exploit.

3. Lurk more.

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Should a robo-car run over a kid or a grandad? Healthy or ill person? Let's get millions of folks to decide for AI...

"a bit of intellectual masturbation, innit"

Yeah, in the office we were saying: just hit the brake. Stop. Slow down.

It's like saying: you're nosing diving into the ground in a 747 - do you hit the hospital or the school?

Er, pro-tip: don't nose dive into the ground with a 747. It doesn't happen that often...

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AI clinician trained to save humans from sepsis – and, er, let's just say you should stick to your human doctor

Re: MarkB

Thanks – it's fixed. Don't get to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong. It means we can patch up mistakes immediately, rather than hours later. We don't have time to read every article comment.

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Roughly 30 years after its birth at UK's Acorn Computers, RISC OS 5 is going open source

Re: "Dealers also lost out."

True. true, just added that to the piece.

I remember buying a Viewfinder from you, Chris. Much appreciated at the time.

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Skype bot airport action, Retpolining into 2019, old Kubernetes versions for the chop in Azure, and much more Microsoft

"Where did you get it from?"

From you, you doofus. You submitted it to us as an example BSoD - see the image caption link.

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Is the LOHAN project officially dead.

Re: Is the LOHAN project officially dead.

Fenke ^ is our project lead on LOHAN, and I echo what she says.

It has been dormant, due to legal and paperwork issues – it's hard getting the permission to fly the thing through multiple airspaces as both a balloon and as a drone-ish rocket.

However, a plan is coming together, slowly, involving a launch site that thinks it can get us the necessary permissions. Stay tuned! Bear in mind we're still trying to run a news website at the same time.

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London flatmate (Julian Assange) sues landlord (government of Ecuador) in human rights spat

Re: TheUnregister

I see you've got your internet access back, Julian.

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F5: Don't panic but folks can slip past vulnerable firewall servers, thanks to libssh's credentials-optional 'security'

Re: Clickbait title?

"allows SOCKS-proxy connections via SSH"

Yeah, we've updated the piece to clarify the impact. Ultimately, the bug can be exploited to reach backend systems, depending on the configuration.

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Apple to dump Intel CPUs from Macs for Arm – yup, the rumor that just won't die is back

Re: Rosetta-a-like is absolutely necessary

Dunno, dude. Gonna have to disagree. Applications could ship with Arm and x86 inside, with the right one running depending on the underlying hardware. It's not that hard to understand.

The difference now from the Rosetta era (2005) is the Apple Mac App Store (introduced in 2010). Just have the app store push Arm builds (or fat binaries) to Arm Macs. The iOS App Store at least deals in LLVM bytecode submitted by developers, which Apple compiles and optimizes for various different targets. Same could be done for Mac apps.

If you're downloading apps direct from developers, then you'll have to get the Arm rebuild or use Rosetta. If you're building it yourself, then just recompile.

So basically, the App Store, as a central repository, this time around is why the reliance on Rosetta won't be quite so heavy.

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As angels, rich dudebros suck: 1 in 5 Y Combinator women tech founders say they were sexually harassed

Re: What level?

"I would think that most people would consider that a bloke asking a woman out for a date is fair game."

Not in a work environment.

"On the other hand if the woman is asked twenty times over by twenty different men"

Correct - you think you're the only person who's asked her out for a drink, and asked nicely so what's the harm. But she's probably sick and tired of colleagues and bosses trying to ask her out every week, sick and tired of trying to let them down gently, sick and tired of worrying about saying no.

"To be honest I probably wouldn't have done that if it had been a male. I yes, I'm aware that even referring to a member of staff as a "girl""

I think you're starting to slowly work through and see the problem here.

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Re: Nazz

Not now, mate. This is a story about women complaining of sexual harassment and you turn it around to ultra-rare scenarios in which men are falsely accused.

It's not always about you.

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Party like it's 1989... SVGA code bug haunts VMware's house, lets guests flee to host OS

Re: A standard dating back to 1987?

Yeah, VGA appeared 1987 and SVGA cards* arrived that year, too, although it wasn't until 1989 that a standard for programming them was defined. It doesn't help that what exactly SVGA is isn't formally defined like VGA was.

Maybe it should be 1989.

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* eg: Cirrus Logic CL-GD410.

RIP Paul Allen: Microsoft cofounder billionaire dies at 65 after facing third bout with cancer

Re: devtrail

I think you're skipping over the word "promise", here. And finances. The guy didn't have a Scrooge McDuck style vault of gold coins. If someone's worth $20bn, they don't have that cash in hand.

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Re: Nit picking

He donated more than $2bn of his $20bn fortune, and pledged to give most of it away – until cancer stopped him.

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Samsung’s flexible phone: Expect an expensive, half-bendy clamshell

Re: Unworthy patent

It's a patent application – not an actual patent grant (yet). Sorry for any confusion.

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Astroboffins discover when white and brown dwarfs mix, the results are rather explosive

Re: Cygnus, which is shaped like a swan

All right, grumpy. To the people who first clocked it a few millennia ago, it looked a bit like a swan. Y'know, hence the name Cygnus.

This is why we don't have time machines. Otherwise, we'd have people from the future coming back in time to give us an ear-bashing all day, every day.

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I find your lack of faith disturbing, IBM: Big Blue fires photon torpedo at Pentagon JEDI cloud contract

Re: "I think you are confusing your universes."

In the unforgettable words of Admiral Adama:

"Shut up, Wesley."

;)

Microsoft has signed up to the Open Invention Network. We repeat. Microsoft has signed up to the OIN

Re: Android?

Microsoft has, TTBOMK, wound down its Android patent shakedown.

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It's over 9,000! Boffin-baffling microquasar has power that makes the LHC look like a kid's toy

Re: LHC = 27Km circle

It's just for reference. It's like saying Jupiter is a gas giant: it can fit 1,300 Earths.

Y'know. Sense of scale. You people are never happy.

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Re: 25 TeV vs 14 TeV

"That's not much of a difference"

The hundreds of TeV at the source is the main jump.

"LHC is a mere human made contraption"

It's just there for reference as the world's largest/most power particle accelerator.

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On the seventh anniversary of Steve Jobs' death, we give you 7 times he served humanity and acted as an example to others

Look up "hagiography" in the dictionary

Whoooooooooooooooooooosh.

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The Register's 2018 homepage redesign: What's going on now?

Re: Given up and opted out

There's always...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/Week/

...which displays a list of articles in date order from the past seven days.

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Decoding the Chinese Super Micro super spy-chip super-scandal: What do we know – and who is telling the truth?

Re: Anonymous coward

"The Reg article missed a few things"

Actually, we discussed the fact that the companies may have been ordered to lie.

"Some of the chips were better hidden"

We mention that, too.

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