Posts by Cuddles

Microsoft's Chinese chatbot inspired by images to write poetry

They're just worried for their jobs

"“It disgusted me with its slippery tone and rhythm. The sentences were aimless and superficial, lacking the inner logic for emotional expression,” said Yu Jian, a poet based in the Yunnan a province in southwestern China."

It's well known that 90% of everything is crap, but poetry and modern art seem to go out of their way to overachieve. I guarantee that if you showed a selection of poetry with a mix of human and computer generated, no-one would be able to tell the difference.

Criminals a bit less interested in nicking Brits' identities this year

"..Though given that trying to report "minor" crimes in UK is nigh on impossible these days then I would imagine its massively under reported."

Unlikely, this has nothing to do with crime reports. As the article notes, CIFAS is essentially a data aggregator for member organisations to share information about fraud. Those member organisations include basically every bank as well as most significant companies dealing with financial stuff - insurance, telecoms, and so on. It doesn't matter what the police might be doing with crime reports, if you've told your bank or whoever about something suspicious, or if they've detected it on their own, then CIFAS have a record of it.

Australia's Snooper's Charter: Experts react, and it ain't pretty

"Therefore I believe it's not possible to do what they want without a back door."

That is correct. From what the article says, it appears the government is arguing that because they don't want a back door in the encryption process, everything is absolutely fine and dandy. Because who could possibly have a problem with legally mandated back doors on all communication devices? You can send messages with no possibility of them being intercepted, it's just that anyone who likes can read them at either end. Surely that's fine, right?

Eye eye! DeepMind teams up with doctors to ogle eyeballs for illness

Re: So it's wrong 6% of the time

"Why is AI in medicine, in particular, not being held to the five nines standard expected of technology in critical systems?"

Because five nines has never been the standard expected for diagnosis of diseases. No human doctor has ever come close to that kind of accuracy, so it would be utterly insane to demand a computer must be that good before it can be used. If a machine learning system can assess scan as accurately as a human expert, what exactly is the problem? It frees up the humans to spend more time doing jobs the computers can't do, and brings essentially zero risk since no-one is going to start removing eyeballs based on a single scan without further tests regardless of who or what made the initial diagnosis.

Faxploit: Retro hacking of fax machines can spread malware

Probably not that common

"tens of millions of fax-capable devices globally, such as all-in-one fax-enabled printers... The NHS in the UK alone has over 9,000 fax machines in regular use"

In my experience, fax machines in the NHS are literally just fax machines. They're used for sending copies of medical records to other hospitals faster than a folder full of bits of paper can be posted. Not only are they not clever all-in-one devices, but even if they were they'd never be plugged into a network because there's simply no point - there's no use for making local copies or scanning them in for email or anything, so it would just be more work setting them up than it would be worth.

On the other hand, I suspect the vast majority of those tens of millions of devices have exactly the opposite problem that also keeps them safe - they're bought only as scanner/printer/copiers and are never plugged into a phone line to use them as fax machines. That's certainly the case for the printers at my current workplace.

So overall I'm not seeing a lot of risk. The vast majority of the time someone is actually using fax machines it's because their system is set up in a way that prevents them using email and the device won't ever be plugged into a network, while the vast majority of the time someone is using a multifunction device on a network it's not set up in a way it could ever be used for faxes. The number of people using such a device for both faxes and networked functions is probably rather tiny.

Google keeps tracking you even when you specifically tell it not to: Maps, Search won't take no for an answer

It's really not that complicated

"And if you want to turn off web and app activity, you need to go to Google settings - although where precisely it's not clear."

It's entirely clear - exactly the same place as all the other settings you mentioned. Settings -> Google -> Data & Personalisation. There you will find all the options mentioned in the article, plus a few others - "Web & app", "Location", "Voice and audio", "Device information", "Youtube search" and "Youtube watch". Each one has a handy "learn more" link that tells you exactly what it does. "Web & app" saves things that you actually type into search boxes on maps, Google search, and so on, and hence includes some location information. Location just records your location through the normal location services on your device. Device information records, you know, device information such as battery life and app use. It's all clearly labelled and explained, and gathered in one, entirely logical, place to be managed.

It's fair enough to question whether Google should be collecting all this information in the first place, and whether it should all be enabled by default given that they do. But the idea that this is some kind of shock revelation that had to be uncovered by dedicated researchers is just ridiculous. Just open the settings and read the fucking manual descriptions and Google openly tell you exactly what they're doing and which option controls what. The only way to be confused about this is if you never bother attempting to understand the software you're using and just blindly assume that a setting that happens to contain the word "app" must control anything and everything even vaguely related to apps.

Samsung Galaxy Note 9: A steep price to pay

Will it really?

"a large secondary display will deplete your battery"

Why would it do that? Instead of powering a high resolution display directly from the phone, all it has to do is send some data to a separately powered, almost certainly lower resolution (most likely still 1080p) display. Unless you're trying to run both screens displaying different things at the same time (is that even possible?), using a monitor with the phone simply acting as a very small PC tower will give huge savings in battery, not deplete it more.

Space, the final Trump-tier: America to beam up $8bn for Space Force

Which raises the question

"The first American rockets in space were launched by our military. The first American satellites to orbit the Earth were on reconnaissance missions behind the Iron Curtain. The first Americans to step forward and venture into the unknown were the world’s greatest aviators and test pilots from the Navy, Air Force and the Marines."

If all that was possible anyway, what exactly is the need for a new department with a stupid name and a shitty clipart logo?

The last phablet? 6.4in Samsung Galaxy Note 9 leaves you $1k lighter, needs 'water cooling'

Madness

"Significantly, Samsung touted the audio quality of its three-legged companion, rather than its AI smarts."

A company advertising a speaker boats about how good it is as a speaker instead of waffling on about some unrelated bullshit? Yeah, I can see why that would be considered a bad idea, they didn't even mention blockchain once!

Almost 1 in 3 Brits think they lack computer skills to do their jobs well

Re: Cloud Storage

"By this do they mean that 16 to 24 year olds subscribe to a cloud storage system like Amazon's..."

I was wondering about that too. I would assume it refers to people who knowingly signed up to a dedicated cloud storage service, since otherwise it would be basically anyone who uses the internet. The report just says "Use of services to store data on the internet (cloud computing)", which doesn't really clear things up.

Funnily enough, no, infosec bods aren't mad keen on W. Virginia's vote-by-phone-app plan

Sounds entirely secure

"a scan of the photo on your government ID has to match a selfie taken by your phone"

How exactly do they guarantee it's an actual selfie, taken by the correct person correct time? Even aside from the all the potential ways a compromised phone could push any random picture to the app, what's to stop someone just printing out a picture of whoever they fancy voting as and taking a photo of it?

Top Euro court: No, you can't steal images from other websites (too bad a school had to be sued to confirm this little fact)

Re: if the kid would have even been allowed to enter into the license agreement

"It is indeed necessary to reeducate people about public use of copyrighted images."

Which is kind of sad really, given how simple copyright is the vast majority of the time. Essentially - does it exist and is it possible for you to copy it? Then you need permission to actually do so. It only seems complicated because the cases that people hear about are the rare edge cases where there is actually some question of who has permission to do what. For some reason "Business pays license fee to use copyright image" isn't often considered interesting and important news.

New age discrim row: Accenture, Facebook sued by sales boss for favoring 'new blood'

High-tech industry?

The words "high tech" tend to put me in mind of building computer chips and space rockets and the like. Facebook is an advertising company that happens to run a few servers to host said advertising. It's like describing Tesco as a high-tech industry because the CEO's secretary types up letters on a PC. And it's not as though the person in question has any kind of tech related job regardless of what the company does - he's a middle-manager in marketing.

Obviously I have no idea whether there was age discrimination here or not, but when a sales management consultant fails to get a job with an advertising company there really is no justification for the words "high tech" being involved at any point.

Game over for Google: Fortnite snubs Play Store, keeps its 30%, sparks security fears

Atypical approach?

"Epic's atypical economic approach is what has made Fortnite such a huge success. The game is completely free and runs on pretty much every platform."

It's a free-to-play game with microtransactions. That's not atypical, it's probably the most common payment model these days, especially on mobile platforms where it's essentially the only model that exists.

OpenAI bots thrash team of Dota 2 semi-pros, set eyes on mega-tourney

"the bots do have a number of advantages"

This has always been the problem with setting AI against humans in games. The question you need to ask is not whether you can make an AI able to beat humans, but rather how similar you want to try to make the AI to an actual human. For example, in FPS games bots for simple deathmatches were essentially perfected fairly soon after they were developed - especially when using hitscan weapons with no travel time it's trivial to make a bot that can't miss and has reaction times far better than a human could ever manage. But that's not particularly fun, so the challenge became not to make the AI better at winning, but rather better at pretending to have the flaws of a real person.

Strategy games, even simple ones like MOBAs, need more complicated decision making but still face the same issue. It's easy to make a bot that takes full advantage of all the things it can do better than a human. It's a lot harder to make a bot that behaves in a similar way to a human and is actually fun to play against. The big challenge in this sort of AI isn't making it able to beat human players, it's making it able to overcome the flaws that have been artificially imposed on it and still beat human players despite its handicaps.

'Unhackable' Bitfi crypto-currency wallet maker will be shocked to find fingernails exist

Hmm

"The Bitfi bods were also lampooned for claiming, publicly, that their device doesn't have any storage, prompting people to post images of the actual chip within the device that, you know, stores the firmware."

Forget needing pictures of the chip, the entire point of the device is to store your pretend money. Claiming it doesn't have any storage is literally stating that it's incapable of doing the only job it's supposed to.

Is it OK if we call $53bn-a-quarter Amazon the Bit Barns and Ignoble?

Not really true

"In other words, AWS's success allows Amazon to aggressively run its online souk."

There's no question that AWS has higher margins, but a retail operation making around $1.5 billion profit on $50 billion of sales is really doing very well all by itself. That's basically the same (but swap $ for £) as Tesco.

Google's ghost busters: We can scare off Spectre haunting Chrome tabs

Re: I hate to be the one who pees in the coffee

"I hate to be the one who pees in the coffee, but Vladimir Kiriansky and Carl Waldspurger uncovered two more Spectre flaws in Intel processors. They have been labeled Spectre 1.1 and 1.2."

Given that El Reg reported on it earlier than the site you link, I'm not sure exactly whose coffee you think you're peeing in. I'm also not sure how you think mentioning variants on the same issue is particularly relevant to Google's work on avoiding the whole thing entirely in Chrome - there's nothing to suggest the new variants will break the mitigation, so they're really not relevant here.

BT's Patterson keeps his £1.3m wheelbarrow of bonus cash after all

In entirely unrelated news...

BT have just written to let me know their prices are going up by £2.50/month.

UK privacy watchdog to fine Facebook 18 mins of profit (£500,000) for Cambridge Analytica

Re: Review of the impact of ICO Civil Monetary Penalties - 20140723

"Wait a minute, so some random has linked a random document to a story, with no topical comment, no indication what it's about and you say I should read it to see if it's relevant?"

No indication of what it's about? It's a document entitled "Review of the impact of ICO Civil Monetary Penalties", hosted at the ICO's own site, posted in response to an article about ICO civil monetary penalties and which comments how ineffective they are likely to be. While I can sympathise with your sentiment in response to people posting random links with no comment, in this case it really doesn't take a genius to figure out what the linked document might be about and how it might be relevant.

Re: Review of the impact of ICO Civil Monetary Penalties - 20140723

"What in your estimation makes it interesting? How does it relate to the article at hand? What conclusion did you draw from the document that makes it interesting/relevant?"

Well, it's a report by the ICO on how effective ICO fines are, so it sounds like it should be relevant. As it turns out... not so much. The impact of penalties was assessed by interviewing a few organisations who had been fined. Amazingly, they all say that they've totally become more proactive in addressing their information rights obligations. No effort appears to have been made to find out if that's actually true. In addition, out of 14 organisations interviewed, only three were private companies with the rest all being government related bodies of some sort (councils, police, etc.). No mention is made of how big those three companies were.

So the conclusion is that a local council that reports itself to the ICO for a data breach will tell you that a fine made it take data security more seriously. Any impact from fining Facebook some pocket change isn't really considered at all.

Vodafone emits new wearable ... kid-trackers

Hooray for IoT!

As with all IoTat, I have no doubt security is a high priority and there can be absolutely no possibility this will allow random people to spy on your children 24/7.

Google offers to leave robocallers hanging on the telephone

Re: "If the AI detects that a machine is calling you and you don't want to speak to the machine ..."

"So that your phone can cut them off for you and you don't get distracted"

Except from the article:

"If the AI detects that a machine is calling you and you don't want to speak to the machine, the phone app could offer to hang up.

To allay fears, developers suggest the audio file and transcription will remain on the device."

It's not offering to filter out machine callers before you even know they've tried to call you, it's waiting for you to answer the call, then listen in and try to figure out if the voice on the other end is actually a machine, at which point it will pop up a notice asking if you want to press a button to end the call. Which, as the OP suggested, doesn't seem to add a whole lot over just pressing the "end call" button which is already there.

While cutting robocallers off before you know they're there sounds nice, I can't imagine any way for it to be physically possible. A call placed by a machine does not differ from any other call in any way. The only way it can ever be possible to know about it is to answer and see what happens. The only way an app on your phone could do what you suggest would be to have to answer every call for you and listen to see how confused the person on the other end gets. At which point their phone will detect that your phone is a machine and hang up on you before it gets a chance to do anything anyway.

Microsoft might not support Windows XP any more, but GandCrab v4.1 ransomware does

Re: And people still use XP

"How long will it take to kill this thing?"

When I worked in a hospital a while back, there was still a BBC-B in use in the records department (it held the filing system for the microfiche). People worrying that an OS and PCs from this millennium are still in use always make me smile. How long will it take to kill XP? Ask me again in 30 years.

Science! Luminescent nanocrystals could lead to multi-PB optical discs

...Multilevel encoding, conceptually similar to 2bits/cell and 3bits/cell flash, may be feasible "by discretizing the level of valence state switching by adjusting the UV-C intensity for the conversion"....

...which counterpoints the surrealism of the underlying metaphor of the Vogonosity...

Fitness app Polar even better at revealing secrets than Strava

Working as intended

This keeps being reported as a security flaw, but there really isn't a problem. I don't know much about Polar, but Strava, Garmin and Suunto all make it very easy to keep everything private if that's what you want. But that's not what most people want - the entire reason for using these services and uploading everything to somewhere cloudy is to compare and compete with other people. It's a complete waste of time having "researchers" "discover" that you can find out where people do exercise and that happens to often be near home or work, because that's the whole bloody point of these apps in the first place. It's like writing an article about Twitter with the revelation that things you post on it can be seen by other people. Deliberate publication with the intent of being seen by other people is not a data leak.

Universe slipped Milky Way a sausage galaxy to grow a big belly bulge

Artist's impression

It would be difficult for that picture to look much less like a sausage.

UK.gov IT projects that are failing: Verify. Border control. 4G for blue-light services. We can go on

Re: £5.1 BILLION ?

"How the Belgium do you spend £5.1bn on giving the police/fire/ambulance cell phones?"

To be fair, that's not quite how it works. The whole issue with the project being flagged as red is that they're spending £5.1bn on not actually giving the police/etc. anything at all.

High Tech Concern: Struggling HTC to slash a quarter of workforce

Not so different

"The mobe maker has persistently failed to come up with anything that pushes it ahead of competitors"

Unlike all the other mobile makers who are constantly pushing out amazing innovative designs, and definitely not just identical rectangles in a mature market.

The strange tale of an energy biz that suddenly became a blockchain upstart – and $1.4m now forfeited in sold shares

"An energy company playing fantasy finance?"

From the description, it doesn't sound like they were actually an energy company. They just threw out a bunch of buzzwords in the hopes that people would throw money at them :

"The Company was in the business of designing modular, self-contained, fully automated, climate controlled units for distributed production of energy.

The Company manufactures micro-production solutions that may be implemented in a range of contexts, from ethanol micro-production facilities to urban greenhouse gardens to third-world farming communities. The Company has not generated any revenues."

As far as I can tell, they've never made or sold a single product, all they've done is shuffled shares around and play with their name. Given how long it's been going, I'd be inclined to suspect money laundering or something rather than just being a straight investment scam, but there's certainly never been anything legitimate about it. It's not an energy company playing fantasy finance, it's just a fraud playing around with different kinds of fraud.

Startup bank Monzo: We warned Ticketmaster months ago of site fraud

That's not how it works

"there was no evidence that the issue originated with Ticketmaster."

It's your customers entering data into your system on your website in order to use your services, interacting with third parties contracted and approved by you. The exact details of the specific company name on the payslip of the person who wrote the specific bit of code at the root of the problem are not relevant. Blaming a third party doesn't get you off the hook, it just makes things look even worse since it demonstrates that not only did you let your site get compromised, but you were also clearly incapable of understanding how your own site works or auditing it properly when alerted to a problem.

SD cards add PCIe and NVMe, hit 985 MB/sec and 128TB

No micro express?

It already has the same extra pins for the high-speed bus, so why no sign of micro cards using the express interface? I just don't see the point in pushing technology to the limits like this if I'm not capable of accidentally inhaling the result.

Israel cyber chief's 'pants' analogy for password security deemed, well, 'pants'

"Ah but it's encrypted... No-one can read my handwriting!"

Unfortunately that's the fatal flaw with this method - I can't read my handwriting either.

Dot-Africa saga going to jury trial... thousands of miles away in America

Re: How about no .africa

"If Africa creates such a union"

You mean like the African Union? Think they may be a bit ahead of you on that one.

In huge privacy win, US Supreme Court rules warrant needed to slurp folks' location data

Are you sure?

"This argument has been undermined literally this week however when all four major mobile operators agreed to stop selling that data after Senator Ron Wyden wrote a letter to each of them asking them about the practice."

The linked article says that one operator has reduced its selling of location data but not stopped entirely, while the other three insist there's no problem and refuse to change anything. Was the link supposed to go to a more recent article explaining that they all changed their minds later and have now actually stopped, or was the quoted statement just incredibly misleading?

... Aaaand that's a fifth Brit Army Watchkeeper drone to crash in Wales

Re: Thales...so it couldn't be Thales' fault, could it?

"the new Watchkeeper Railway Drone. No more unexpected descents into terrain"

I can't help feeling you're massively overestimating someone's competence.

Re: Savings

"using a new tech"

Remote controlled aircraft date back to the 19th century (yes, seriously), and have been in routine military use since at least WW2. Even this specific model dates back to 1998. It's a regular small plane with long-established design and parts. Whatever clever parts may exist in the electronics (it seems to be utterly standard radar and visible/infra-red optics, but being military they're keeping the full details quiet), the ability to stay in the air should be utterly trivial - this is not some groundbreaking design pushing the limits of new tech, it's about as bog standard and well established as it's possible for an aircraft to get.

The eyes have it: 'DeepFakes' bogus AI-meddled videos outed by unblinking gaze

"There's no reason Deepfakes can't... invalidate visual news as a source of reliable information etc."

It's really not such a big deal. Written media has been around for quite a while now, and it's trivial to make it look like someone said something they didn't by simply writing it down. Somehow that hasn't resulted in all written material being considered inherently false and the collapse of democracy. People just need to learn that videos aren't necessarily any more trustworthy than written articles. Which has been the case for a while anyway, since misleading editing has been an issue for a lot longer than Deepfakes have.

Aussie bloke wins right to sue Google over 'underworld' images

Interesting defence

"Google's legal eagles Down Under argued it would have been "irrational" for someone to assume that pictures of people returned against a search for underworld figures are all criminals, partly on the grounds that the mugshots displayed by the search engine for such a search included Marlon Brando."

Google's defence appears to be that their search engine is shit and users should not assume the results bear any relation to what they were looking for. Have their lawyers been taking lessons from Ratner?

No fandango for you: EU boots UK off Galileo satellite project

Bollocks

"What the UK government will be most upset about is that the fact it will be no longer be allowed access to the highly secure military-grade signal Public Regulated Service (PRS), a huge blow that will put the UK, and its military, far behind other Western nations when it comes to using the latest global technologies."

For some reason I keep using that title when articles on Galileo crop up. The UK and it's military will not be left behind anything. As apparently needs pointing out every time, the PRS is identical in function to the commercial service which is available to anyone regardless of whether they're in the EU or not. The only difference is that the PRS is guaranteed to keep operating during emergencies while the commercial service can be switched off. Unless the UK goes to war with the EU (and Brexit hasn't quite gone that far yet), there is no reason for the EU to disable the UK's access to the regular commercial signal. Obviously the military would prefer the extra guarantee, but in practical terms it's not actually going to make any difference.

The reality is simply that it's all about money. The UK wants the contracts for building the things. Importantly, failing to get the contracts now will likely mean losing a lot of companies and expertise to Europe and so failing to get more contracts (not just EU ones) in the future as well. The UK has done pretty well at building up our satellite industry, and there's been a lot of talk (which may or may not be considered realistic) about developing much more local space-related stuff including launch systems and even manned missions. Seeing a significant portion of that industry up roots and move somewhere else would be a serious blow to those ambitions.

So no, the UK government is certainly not "most upset" about losing access to the PRS signal, they don't give the slightest shit about it. It's just a handy thing to point at and shout about national security rather than admit it's actually about money and thinking that having our own rockets will make them look good.

OnePlus 6 smartphone flash override demoed

"This is in contrast to a phone that requires the user to unlock it and turn on USB debugging and jump through other hoops before flashing it with a new OS image."

Perhaps I'm missing something, but what exactly is the difference? The linked video shows someone using an unlocked phone with full access to everything. They already need to jump through hoops such as going through the Android settings menu to activate developer mode. What exactly does this "vulnerability" allow that couldn't already easily be done given the access required to exploit it? If someone has physical access to your unlocked phone plugged into their PC, exactly how much worse is it possible for things to get?

UK! watchdog! slaps! Yahoo! with! £250k! fine! for! 2014! data! breach!

"Not even half of what could have been demanded"

It's exactly half of what could have been demanded.

Google plots death of inline installation for Chrome extensions

Re: Big Brother much?

"By routing everything thru the store"

If you read the article, you'll note that this is regarding thing that are already routed through the store. The only difference is that now anything routed through the store will have to do so by visibly sending the user to an actual store page where they can click an install button, rather than being able to trick people into installing something via a link without realising what's happening. The ability to install things without using the store is not affected although, as others have noted, that's not going to stop Google knowing what you have installed in Chrome anyway.

Done and dusted? Vast storm gobbles NASA's long-lived Mars robot

Re: Mission at end?

"It is useless in a hostile, if not deadly environment, where every scrap of material has to be imported against a huge gravity well"

The thing about planets is that there's already quite a lot of material already on them. Early explorers may need to take everything with them, but any kind of long term presence will have to figure out how to make use of the resources already there. Which means at no point is there any use in dismantling a rover or two - either you have everything with you and relying on salvage means you've already fucked up incredibly badly (The Martian was fiction, even the author happily admits that there would have been no hope of survival in reality), or you're using an entire planet's worth of resources and the stuff in a single rover is meaningless.

Astroboffins trace mysterious noise from hard rock in space

"The radiation must represent a loss of energy so their spin should slow. Is there a mechanism to spin them up again?"

They seem to be mainly in protoplanetary discs, so the source of energy will be gravity - as the disc contracts gravitational potential energy is converted into kinetic energy, and some of this can be converted into spin (still kinetic energy, but individual rotation rather than bulk movement) through collisions.

Russia appears to be 'live testing' cyber attacks – Former UK spy boss Robert Hannigan

Ha!

""Nation state attacks using criminal group as a proxy" is a "fairly new issue""

Nation state attacks using criminal groups as proxy goes back to the first existence of nation states and criminal groups. I'm pretty sure the head of GCHQ knows that, so I'm baffled why he'd make such an obviously stupid statement.

Motorola extends modular phone adventure for another year

Re: Is anybody listening?

"For people wanting to continually use a phone throughout the day, a Moto Mod battery pack is a better option than a removable battery"

But a non-Moto Mod battery pack is much better again, since it's cheaper, compatible with any phone (or any other device it can be plugged into), and comes with a much wider range of capacities/sizes/etc.. There's really no benefit in gluing your spare battery to your phone, so paying extra for a proprietary battery that has that as its only selling point really doesn't make sense.

As for removable batteries in general, I really don't understand why people make such a fuss about them. Replaceable batteries make sense, so that you can swap in a new battery after a couple of years when the original can no longer hold as much charge. But for something that only needs doing on a timescale of years, there's no reason to worry about needing to take a few minutes with a screwdriver to do the job. As long as it's not glued or soldered in place (sadly all too common these days), there's absolutely no point in worrying that you can't just pop the back off whenever you want. Spare batteries have exactly the same problem as Moto Mods - you're forced to use a single size and shape from a single manufacturer that's not compatible with anything else, instead of just using any of the huge choice of power bricks available.

British egg producers saddened by Google salad emoji update

Not good enough

The new emoji is still highly offensive to fruitarians. And no, simply replacing it with fruit won't work, that will still offend the breatharians. I will not be satisfied until it shows nothing but an empty bowl.

Hey, Mac fanbois: Got $600,000 burning a hole in your pocket? Splash out on this rare Apple I

Re: Did the Reg really ...

"It’s not something I’d want to buy myself, but there are plenty of folks out there who are prepared to pay vast amounts of money for rare, obsolete technology"

True, and I don't see El Reg slagging off the idea of doing so - the first part of the article regarding the Apple I just gives a nice rundown of what the device is and why it's significant. It's only when it gets to the part about spending $10k on a crappy 3 year old watch that no-one wanted even when it was brand new that it starts getting a little snarky, and with rather good cause really.

It's also worth bearing in mind that there's nothing particularly charitable about a "charity" auction. If you want to support a charity and have the money to do so, you can simply do so. Refusing to give money to charity until given the opportunity to acquire valuable goods in return for your payment is not, in fact, charity at all.

Monday: Intel touts 28-core desktop CPU. Tuesday: AMD turns Threadripper up to 32

Meh

20+ core CPUs have been around for a while now. But there's a reason hardly anyone uses them, and we've been stuck at 2-4 cores for consumer parts for so long - most regular tasks just don't benefit from being massively parallel. Indeed, many programs still only run on a single thread because there's so little benefit from trying to use more. Even for workstations there are very few cases where throwing as many cores as possible at a task is actually the best approach; you're almost always better off with fewer, faster cores, and will often end up limited by RAM or drive I/O anyway.

People complain about Intel not increasing cores until pushed by AMD, but there were 6 and 8 core i7 CPUs parts around nearly a decade ago - no-one actually wanted them so they stopped making them. Meanwhile Xeons have been happily in the teens and into the 20s, and even those were never anywhere near as popular as those in the 10-12 core range. AMD haven't pushed Intel to do anything useful, they've just started yet another pointless willy-waving exercise where everyone tries to boast about how big their number is with no regard for whether it's actually useful. Which can be clearly seen by the mention of gamers - there isn't a game on the market that will actually benefit from having a 32 core CPU (for the most part they're GPU-limited anyway and as long as you're not doing something stupid like pairing a budget mobile CPU with a 1080 Ti they won't even notice what CPU you have), it's just a big number for people who don't understand what they're doing but want to have a big number.