Posts by Jim Mitchell

DRAM prices to drop 3-8% due to Ukraine war, inflation

"Prices drop due to inflation" is on the order of "Man bites dog" of unexpected headlines. Have a drink on this commentariat member!

Declassified and released: More secret files on US govt's emergency doomsday powers

Re: I want to be in the crater

The Tsar Bomba wasn't a deliverable weapon, so that wasn't quite reality. You would die to a smaller device, if that matters.

Anyways, I grew up in the early 80s just outside of Washington, DC. We still had duck and cover drills in elementary school.

Elon Musk needs more cash for Twitter buy after Tesla margin loan lapses

Re: Genuine question

We don't have rules about "covert buying" for physical goods, why have them for equity in a company? Buying land in a way that disguises the true final purchaser and their intent to combine the plots is a thing that is done.

Beijing needs the ability to 'destroy' Starlink, say Chinese researchers

Re: On a more serious note....

If we can't have monkey butlers, can we at least get trunk monkeys?

Foxconn factory fiasco could leave Wisconsinites on the hook for $300m

I'm confused. If Foxconn agreed to pay these costs, why is the town on the hook for the $300 million?

Virginians sue to block rural Amazon datacenter

Its two Vatican Cities, what does that make the pope?

Calling 230 acres a "spot" seems rather disingenuous. For our European audience, that is almost a square that is 1 km per side.

Palantir summons specter of nuclear conflict as share price collapses

"But a genuine discourse in this country has all but withered, in significant part because so few are either willing or able to say what they actually think."

This seems backwards. The internet has shown that plenty of people are willing and able to tell us what the actually think. Repeatedly. It is rather quite annoying. Discourse may have withered because people don't listen or are unwilling to countenance different thoughts.

Elon Musk wants to take Twitter public again 'within 3 years'

Re: WTF

Maybe the article was updated, it says "million" now.

Samsung unveils hardened SD card that can last 16 years if you treat it right

Re: capable of surviving a five-meter fall

There is probably an actual max acceleration/deceleration number that somebody has helpfully converted to human understandable units. What is the official El Reg unit for this, anyways?

Putin threatens supply chains with counter-sanction order

As I understand it, neon can be made anywhere. Its just that people who currently have the equipment to extract and sell it are all currently involved in a war. China is probably already working on plans to take over that market.

Meet Moeco, Ukrainian-led biz using IoT trackers to follow supplies into invaded land

Re: I thought this was ...

You need to put a tracker on the guy who is going to put a tracker on your stuff so you can track him before he tracks you. Unless your opponent then puts a tracker on your tracker tracker so the tracker knows the tracker tracker is coming to track him.

Hiring a tracker hacker to just track the other guys tracker directly does seem easier.

I thought this was going to be an article about attaching trackers to Russian supplies, so they could be bombed.

Google tracked record 58 exploited-in-the-wild zero-day security holes in 2021

Is that due to zero-days in other products not being detected, not being disclosed, or not existing?

Beanstalk loses $182m in huge flash-loan crypto heist

I'm confused. Was an actual crime committed here?

It sounds like they put forth a proposal, then had the votes to make it pass and execute its code.

Twitter preps poison pill to preclude Elon Musk's purchase plan

"The poison pill, or "Rights Plan," the biz said, "will reduce the likelihood that any entity, person or group gains control of Twitter through open market accumulation without paying all shareholders an appropriate control premium or without providing the Board sufficient time to make informed judgments and take actions that are in the best interests of shareholders.""

If the current shareholders don't think Musk is offering enough $, they can just say no and not sell them? Poison pills are to protect the current management, not shareholders.

Apache says Struts 2 security bug wasn't fully fixed in 2020

"They're very popular, get inspected more than other contribution projects"

I think this is called damning with faint praise.

HCL and HP named in unflattering audit of India’s biometric ID system

Re: Fingerprints

Multiple people might have the same fingerprints, and multiple people might have the same iris scan patterns, but how many have the same fingerprints, the same irises and the same face? If the system actually worked as intended, it seems designed to cope with that fact that us puny humans aren't as unique as we think. Its just that it doesn't work.

Re: Where is the data stored? Or more importantly, where is the data accessible from?

Providing a subsystem for this project and having access to the data in that system are not the same thing.

Russian media watchdog bans Google from advertising its services

Re: Fascism 101

"When you see "liberal" Canada freezing people out of their bank accounts and having them sacked because they donated a few $$ to a trucker freedom protest"

The counter argument is that people who give money to criminals to fund their criminal acts should risk getting their fund frozen.

Fish mentality: If The Rock told you to eat flies, would you buy my NFT?

Halestorm video? Alestorm seems more likely to have a song about fish.

First Light says it's hit nuclear fusion breakthrough with no fancy lasers, magnets

You can't call your fusion company "First Light" without having lasers be involved. Can at least there be sharks swimming in the liquid lithium sea?

French court pulls SpaceX's Starlink license

Re: Not quite...

Hmm. "most people". For some of us from before the Sky TV, etc, era, a "satellite dish" was something about the size of a small car.

Red Hat gets RHEL 8.2 certified for high level US government security

Re: Common Criteria

I think most releases of Red Hat get this certification, not just 8.2. So no, they haven't "finally caught up to" Solaris.

This article isn't really news.

Linux kernel patch from Google speeds up server shutdowns

Re: It's Linux

I can't find the El Reg github repo.

I don't quite understand how this article starts off talking about a kernel patch then segues into kexec and then into an Ubuntu package not working.

Will Chinese giants defy US sanctions on Russia? We asked a ZTE whistleblower

Re: I don't think many Chinese companies will defy the sanctions

There is the geologic view of the world, in which Russia is on the European continent, and the reality view, in which Russia is part of Pariah-land, not Europe.

An open-source COBOL contender emerges

Its a reference to Trump reportedly flushing documents while President. Perhaps I expected to much from the audience.

I learned today that Trump was a COBOL programmer.

Driver in Uber's self-driving car death goes on trial, says she feels 'betrayed'

Re: Software to arbitrate between two soldiers -- haven't they heard of rank?

If you are infantry in a proper foxhole, you're supposed to let the tank run over you. That lets you either attack its more vulnerable areas or attack the infantry supporting the tank. That is, if the Russians sent in supporting infantry with their tanks....

AMD confirms Ryzen chips' stuttering performance on Windows 10, 11

Re: Yuck.

You mean "interactive", not "real time". Batch processing is a non-interactive workload, processing based on user input while running is interactive. Neither is necessarily real-time.

One could argue that a system that guarantees a defined set of batch workload will be done within a certain window of time is a real-time system, but that is not how the term is usually used.

Re: Yuck.

You are probably not running real-time software on Windows in the first place.

Work chat app Slack suffers services outage

Re: Is Slack still a thing?

Well, somebody is paying them $900 million a year for something.... I guess that doesn't actually mean people use it, though.

UK regulator 'broke international law', says Facebook

Which International Law? As I understand it, outside things like treaties, most "international law" is just what nations agree that it is. Facebook, not being a nation, doesn't get much say in that.

Reality check: We should not expect our communications to remain private

Re: Before someone starts to talk about Orwell again ..

If people have to contact you before getting access to your contact information....

Joint European Torus more than doubles fusion record with 59 megajoules

Re: Lookup...

Lookup, the answer's staring you in the face (weather permitting)!

I am interested in your birds as power plants proposal and would like to know more!

Amazon stretches working life of its servers an extra year, for AWS and its own ops

Re: AD Revenue

Shows are a lot cheaper to produce when your only large expense is Stig rental fees.

Re: AD Revenue

For comparison, The Wheel of Time, a recent Amazon fantasy show, cost at least $10 million per episode, $80 million for the 1st season (possibly not including pre-production and post-production costs). And people thought it looked cheap.

SUSE announces 'tech and support' product Liberty Linux

Possibly more $SOB than $JOB, it sounds like.

European Space Agency whittles wannabe astronauts down from 23,000 to 1,391

Re: Could there be a South Korean TV show somewhere in this?

I think I would have liked it more it it didn't tell a two hour story over six hours or so. Part of those excess 4 hours was a "homage" to past shows that have had to much footage of people running down anonymous space station corridors (is that a Doctor Who thing?).

Re: Could there be a South Korean TV show somewhere in this?

I watched that on Netflix. I regret it.

5G frequencies won't interfere with airliners here, UK and EU aviation regulators say

Re: Odd safety standard

Is that actually true? There were lots of steam ships and lots of icebergs prior to the Titanic.

What begins with a 'B' and is having problems at tsoHost? Hopefully not your website

Re: "On-prem", or "Off-prem"?

Ooknotes is the title of the Librarian's memoir.

Re: "On-prem", or "Off-prem"?

The only filing category distinction that matters is "Bootnotes" and "not Bootnotes".

North Korea says it's launched a third hypersonic missile, this time reaching Mach 10

The thting is, North Korea and China don't actually get along. China sees NK as a necessary evil, as a unified Korea on it's border is a worse scenario. It really is not happy about a hard-to-control state with nukes, and now possibly hypersonic non-ballistic delivery devices that can hit most of China, being next door.

AT&T, Verizon delay 5G C-band rollout over FAA fears of passenger plane radars jammed by signals

Why only major airports? If this is a real issue, that makes it seem OK if planes crash at smaller airports.

Also, if I die due a radio altimeter failing due to interference, my ghost is suing the airline for not getting a better radio altimeter, not AT&T.

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of fraud: Blood-testing machines were vapourware after all

Re: Now, if only ....

In the US, lying for money is fraud, and a crime. Lying to gain political office is free speech and unfettered. Lying to gain contributions to your political campaign funds is an interesting case that I'm not sure has been litigated yet, but this being the US, is probably fine as well.

Don't make an iOS of yourself – Apple's patched its OSes, you know the drill

Re: Digital Legacy

"2) Your death certificate."

This means I can't just roll up to to 1 Infinity Way with a body in a wheelbarrow and their iPhone and get access? Bummer.

Log4j RCE latest: In case you hadn't noticed, this is Really Very Bad, exploited in the wild, needs urgent patching

Re: This is why . . .

I don't know about Microsoft, but you seem vulnerable to [ sarcasm ] based attacks.

Intel's mystery Linux muckabout is a dangerous ploy at a dangerous time

Re: FaaS

"How Linus and Linux respond is another question."

As far as I can tell, the article contains no responses from the Linux team (ie Linus) on the topic and presents that no attempt to get a response was made. This makes it feel more like an anti-Intel hit piece without such information.