Re: “On the software from” ?
It's been fixed. Click on some ads and we'll hire more proofreaders :-P
There's always corrections@thereg if you want to point out typos. We don't have time to read every comment, so those emails are appreciated.
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3493 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011
Yeah, I guess supply is an issue. It's also what to do with one of these ODROID SBCs in a way that can stretch to 2,000+ words, personally speaking.
I bought a Pandaboard and got burned when TI dumped OMAP, so I'm hesitant to trust another manufacturer (outside the usual) unless I've got an interesting project or two for it.
No, not a media center (I don't own a TV). No, not a NAS. I don't have a home network to speak of.
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systemd
on Monday
Internet Explorer in the Windows 10 Preview and Windows 8.1 was/is flagged up as vulnerable on freakattack.com. It is the same problem. Microsoft warns:
"Our investigation has verified that the vulnerability could allow an attacker to force the downgrading of the cipher suites used in an SSL/TLS connection on a Windows client system. The vulnerability facilitates exploitation of the publicly disclosed FREAK technique, which is an industry-wide issue that is not specific to Windows operating systems."
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Very good question. One way is to guess or work out the version of the Linux kernel allegedly used by Vmware in its vmkernel, compile that Linux kernel for x86 and compare common blocks of code between the two binaries – looking for shared function signatures.
It's happened in the past with Linux: people who spend hours looking at compiler output can spot similarities in other code. Obviously, there will be some small blocks that are the same (start and end of similar functions, for example), but chunks of copied code are easy to spot.
That's just one way. But essentially, you don't always need the source code. Binary analysis is possible.
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The Platform is our new sister site, launched by former Reg writer Timothy Prickett Morgan and co-editor Nicole Hemsoth, both expert journalists in the field of HPC.
The site focuses on supercomputing and other really big iron. Don't take my word for it – it's all explained here :-)
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Those websites are completely wrong. The uniques are way off, it's not even funny. How can they record our traffic better that our internal analytics when we're the ones with the log files?
siteanalytics.compete.com is off by at least 3 orders of magnitude. It also thinks the Daily Mail website, the most-read news site on the planet with 150m uniques a month, got only 20m uniques in January. That would make us about as popular as the most-read news site on the planet. I'd be bathing everyday in champagne if that was the case.
And the Google thing is about searches. People don't get to us by searching for "theregister." They get to us through aggregators, RSS feeds, a bit of social media, or searching for stuff and us coming up top in Google. Eg, right now, Google search for "OpenSSL". Link 1 is openssl.org, link 2 is Wikipedia, link 3 is the news story we published 7 hours ago about the FREAK attack.
This is seriously pathetic trolling. You don't like the design? Let it go, let it go. Can't hold it back any more. Let it go, let it go. Turn away and slam the door.
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"A year-to-year basis isn't exactly germane in this conversation, now is it?"
Actually it is. It's a phenomenal increase.
"Old techie adage: If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Screw that noise. That's how you end up sleeping in a dumpster wondering why you can't afford a bag of rice. 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' applies to airport runways, motorway bridges, and third-hand COBOL code you've convinced an IT boss you can maintain when everyone knows you barely know how to install a Win32 scanner driver.
If a redesign means there's more money to be made, bank it. Our traffic is up: people love our redesign, and so they should.
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"Why not run a poll and see what the users of the website tell you?"
Or we could look at something far more accurate, non-self-selecting, and valuable: our actual traffic stats, which are showing increases in individual unique visitors across the planet, on a year-on-year basis.
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"Why is ElReg in denial?"
There are 1,100 posts, but nowhere near 1,100 individual people posting. I reckon a couple of hundred people tops, maybe 300? 400? 500? Frankly, that's not even a rounding error compared to our monthly pageview/uniques tally.
Or let me put it another way, 99.999...% of individual unique readers in January read our stories without commenting on the design tweak.
Not everyone will love the new design, and that's a shame, but you can't please everyone all the time. We're still motoring on nicely in terms of traffic, shifting ads, paying the bills, causing mischief, having fun.
"persistent navigation-bar"
It's pretty cool, isn't it? The rollover expansion is balanced so it doesn't get in the way unless you pause your pointer. Other sites expand immediately, which sucks. We're way better than that.
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"Just fix the "layout for the illiterate" and tone down the ads."
It's not going to happen.
"What in the name of Sam Hill gives you the idea that this site isn't for me?"
You just seem really unhappy. I mean, we work really hard to fill the site with quality techie but fun and entertaining copy, pick nice pics to go with it, all for free (we just ask you view some ads) and yet you're unhappy.
It's sorta like wandering into a Chinese restaurant and expecting pasta, no?
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"Traffic" as in page views and unique visitors. It's a general term. Bandwidth is not used in readership analytics.
Unique visitor count is the number of people we can identify as, well, unique, using IPs and cookies. If 5 people visit the site 10 times in a month, that's 50 visits or 5 unique visitors. (Yeah, we know, by the nature of the web, it's not going to be super-super-super-precise, but when you get into seven-figures, the noise barely moves the needle; it's good enough.)
"Growth in vocal user-base has not been exactly staggering"
Have you seen the Daily Mail article comments? We'd much rather have quality over quantity.
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"Out of interest, what site has everyone gone to?"
FYI, looking at the latest stats, Register traffic was up globally in January 2015. US unique visitor count was up 18% compared to the year-ago month; other regions (UK, Canada, Australia) experienced same order of rises.
(No Reg badge for boring reasons - posting via public site from home rather than logging into the backend)
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"On the other hand, you limit both yo–"
10: If you don't like it, don't apply. The Register is a face-to-face organization. We communicate electronically across continents. if it's important, we fly to meetings.
"It seems a bit odd that a journal that covers the cutting and often bleeding edge of technol–"
Proper engineering and boffinry is something to celebrate. But, generally, technology sucks. That silicon chip you designed or bridge you built? Brilliant. That web chat toy? Your fancy web app? It's bollocks. You know it's bollocks. I know it's bollocks. Everyone knows it's bollocks. You're swallowing the hype.
Goto 10.
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You must be able to come into the office, yes. In some circumstances, we work from home, but most of the time we're in the office if we're not at conferences, etc.
Why? Because it is vastly more convenient and productive to discuss ideas and bounce around headlines, puns, contacts, background info, and so on, if the team is all physically present. Although we have a staff IM system, actual face time is much, much preferred at The Register.
Our office is quite all right. We don't have a whisky bar or a pool table, but we're in a nice part of The City: Maiden Lane.
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"Are you kidding? It might cover most of here, but we're just scraping the barrel compared to the average Joes out there who don't know IP from cheese."
We're a site for professional techies. We're not Samsung's tech support ;-) If you can follow the instructions, great. If not, hammer Sammy – they should be fixing this.
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It's assumed if you know what Nutanix is, you'll be interested in this story. If not, you're probably not working in the converged storage-compute world.
But I'm always up for spreading and sharing information, so I've added in a par and a link to a very long and detailed story about Nutanix.
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"A hard drive is a dumb storage device that has no way to transfer data to a host with out the host requesting it. Hacking a drive's firmware with some kind of virus would allow you to do nothing."
You are so wrong it's not even funny. If the OS requests data from the disk (such as files for the boot process) and you, the malicious firmware, modifies that data, you can make the OS execute code it shouldn't.
So if Windows requests important_startup_file.dll, you change the content to include code that loads other malicious programs from the disk. Take a look again at the diagrams in the article.
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