Re: New Group Policy option to disable upgrades
The link to the instructions is already in the story.
Did anyone read the article?
C.
3495 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011
"Will I get sued if I publish this info on-line?"
This is my personal 2p. This is not a Register corporate final say. If you're making legit HTTP requests like any other browser, and rendering the HTML/CSS in your own way, you're no different to any other browser.
Attempts to circumvent security or other protection mechanisms in the website wouldn't be very nice; we'd take a dim view of that. But if you're fetching and submitting stuff via vanilla HTTP, and rendering it in your own way, then how are you any different to the huge range of bots and user agents that hit us every day? Even if 1,000, or 5,000, or 10,000 people used your tool a day, it wouldn't be noticeable.
Having said that: your tool sounds like it's ditching adverts. Don't forget that we are entirely independent and advertising funded. We're not backed by a magazine giant, nor a VC consortium, pulling the puppet strings on our output. Some ads piss people off; we try our best to not let that happen. Our ad ops guys are superb at responding to complaints about ads.
My rent, the food I eat, the vacations I take with my wife, are paid through advertising. Same goes for everyone contributing. Give that at least a little thought as you browse the site through a text terminal. It's not about the numbers - some people use ad-blockers and that's just the way it goes - it's the principle I'm talking about.
Thanks for reading.
C.
One other thing to mention: ARM and Thumb are fixed width instruction sets – instructions are either 2 or 4 bytes wide. X86 is all over the place: instructions can be various widths.
This is why xor eax, eax is so attractive to tight assembly code, because it's just two bytes (0x31C0), rather than than mov eax, 0 which is five bytes (0xB800000000). You save 3 bytes with the exclusive-OR. And you avoid using NULL bytes, which is handy if you're trying to inject code into another program's buffer...
On ARM, it doesn't really matter: the instructions are the same length anyway.
C.
"It's as if you were going to sell out."
I don't wake up in the morning to write and edit boring articles. There is scandal, death, cockups, lies, and firings every step of the way in technology - that's what we want to uncover. The Reg started out as the Private Eye of IT and that's what we're gonna be.
It means more stuff like this, this and this, among loads of other original writing, and less stuff like this and this.
Of course, we're still going to have fun with headlines, and of course, we're still going to stand up to corporate goliaths and governments.
PS: no, we're not doing video reports (TTBOMK) because most of us have faces for radio, as they say.
C.
Yes, it would be nice if {accounts|forum}.theregister.co.uk were TLS'd. Thing is, the cookie is carried over to the www site too, it appears. Our techies are working are hard as they can.
As for the ad networks – we use a mix of them. Not all of them do HTTPS.
Believe me, we do want to get encrypted.
C.
~~ My chip articles bring the pedants to the yard. And they're like, our knowledge is better than yours. We can teach you but we have to charge. ~~
It's fixed, ta. Once upon a time I used VLSI design software to layout gates and doping regions and cells and metallization layers and, arrgh, I thought I'd erased all that from my mind.
C.
No, perhaps you're thinking of other complaints from non-IT staff earlier this year?
The IT bods were let go in January, complaints are being filed to the commission, the deadline is almost up, and then we wait to see what happens.
C.
The Weekend Edition had a good fun run, it must be said. Nothing like a little downtime at the end of the week to cover non-IT stuff.
Having said that, we've rejigged our output to better focus on the weekdays, essentially pouring as much of our energy into what we do during the week when most people are looking at the site.
Dabbs, On-Call etc that used to appear on Saturdays and Sundays now appear on Friday before everyone fscks off to the pub/family/suburbia/mountain-top-HQ. Doctor Who review appears after its airing on Saturday evening BBC TV.
Of course, if anything big happens over the weekend - devastating earthquake in Silicon Valley, Facebook hacked, etc - we'll be here to cover it.
C.
Dabbsy is published on Fridays now. Latest one here. It's in the top stories on the front page :-)
C.
Ah - ok, I see what you're saying. I'll add some more context. By 2018, the US will have all the top spots. That's what's meant by China catching a break during the upgrade cycle – there's a lull as America builds its next-gen machines, and before they come up, China's picking away at the weaklings lower down the table.
C.
"Oracle-bashing is getting a bit tired"
We bash everything, mate. We don't have quotas on companies. "Oh man, we've said five non-nice things about Oracle, better make the next one nice." No, that's not how life works.
There's plenty of nice things about Oracle on oracle.com.
C.
Oops - meant to include a note about ARM: Apple looked at ARM's 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set and designed a chip from scratch compatible with it, then later licensed the instruction set.
None of this is ARM's problem: it was Apple's custom system-on-chip design that infringed the uni's patent.
I've slung a sentence or two about this on the end of the article.
C.
Oddly, this wasn't at first pitched as "an end-user retail thing" for normal people. It was aimed at architects at work, CAD users, surgeons, and so on. Serious uses with serious budgets and serious prices.
The dev kit costs $3k (as the article says) but we were kinda expecting the final thing to cost in the area of $1k anyway.
C.