Posts by Mark 124

Ignorance really is bliss when you’re drowning in information

Reverse sabbath

One day a week I look at some trusted news websites to see a) what the press is obsessing about this week just in case it's actually relevant to me and b) what's going on with important things like wars and pandemics.

The rest of the time I limit myself to El Reg and sports news. Sports have lots of corruption, but at least the players on the pitch are genuinely trying to win (well 99% of the time) and the outcome can't be predicted

by applying rules like "might is right" or "money talks and b******t walks."

WINE 10 is still not an emulator, but Windows apps won't know the difference

PortingKit has bundled WINE with some other bits already for Apple, but mostly for games. https://www.portingkit.com/benefits

I was playing Civilization II on an M4 Mac a week or so back. Miraculous that a x86 32-bit game written for Windows 95 was running 30 years later on a different OS and instruction set. I could see the binaries were Intel i.e. using Rosetta2 in Activity Monitor and either that or the OS emulation was a bit heavy on the CPU but otherwise it was great.

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

Re: "What developers do when they don't have that capability is quite conservative,

I took that statement to be about developers being less conservative/more confident when they have access to formal proofs, as per the example of Rust's optimisations. Like an extension of the confidence to refactor we'd get from good unit+integration tests.

Nothing directly about anyone (developers or not) using LLMs to write code, or Rust being better than C, or anything else that everyone gets upset about around here. It's an inference on the part of readers, and clueless management, that this means LLMs will replace everything "because formal proofs make it safe."

Telco security is a dumpster fire and everyone's getting burned

Thanks for the laugh

> may harbor tiny pockets of incompetence in much the same way that herds of bison may contain bison

Classic El Reg

How US Dept of Justice's cure for Google could inflict collateral damage

Re: break them really up !

I've been playing with this idea in my mind for a while, it'd be perhaps hard to enforce and probably some downsides, but humour me if you will...

There should be a minimum price for on-selling user data, that must be paid to the user, plus a minimum price for holding user data for that purpose. Something like 10c per fact held and maybe 0.1c per fact sold. So if Google, or importantly Facebook, know my age, postcode, gender, and which football team I support, they owe me 40c per year. They might then infer other facts like my martial status and a political viewpoint. When they make those facts available via an ad auction they owe me 0.6c (for these six example facts). This wouldn't apply to order fulfillment e.g. when I buy something online and the vendor gives my address to a courier.

Given the number of facts actually held and inferred, and their number of users and ad auctions as they search and scroll, this should have meaningful impact on their bottom line. Likely they'd charge advertisers per fact, which would make the advertisers also think twice about how much they need to know all this stuff about their target consumers.

Another nice side effect is that having to pay Russian troll accounts for their (presumably fake) facts would violate laws about financing terror and/or sanctions, so the number of such accounts might finally drop.

I'm not super comfortable about giving payment details to a big tech platform, especially from a privacy perspective, but on the other hand they already know who I am. Requiring a credit card would also make age verification trivial.

Datacenters bleed watts and cash – all because they're afraid to flip a switch

Re: one situation that may be common

It's not unsolvable though. In finance, economic numbers or company results are released at known times, so crank up the performance a few minutes before and leave it up until the market settles. Similar for Black Friday in retail or betting on or streaming the Superbowl.

For the average web based system with unpredictable demand but a defined response time target the trailing indicator should be OK. If the target response time is say 750ms then reduce power saving as response time goes above say 500ms. Yes it's an impact to response times but that should be OK if the feedback loop from them to power settings works fast enough.

AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care

Re: Is now the time for the return of…

Exactly, the solution to AI (at least the LLM hype) *has* to be Blockchain, right?!

Would the financials of two overhyped energy-guzzling techno-fads colliding be like the physics of black holes colliding?

(/sarc)

Intel's effort to build a foundry biz is costing far more – and taking longer – than expected

Re: Intel is Busy Digging Holes ...

Huh?! I don't see TSMC selling chips. I do see Apple being "rather" profitable by designing chips for TSMC to fab.

I think Samsung use Qualcomm chips, forming a "sandwich", if you will, where quite likely the fabless "filing" of Qualcomm makes more of profit than the Samsung "bread".

Virgin Media to stand up rival network operator to BT Openreach

Consolidation con-soil-ation

Please no... Would hate for semi decent fibre-based providers like Hyperoptic to be borged into VM uselessness!

Two of India's most prominent startup tech giants are in deep trouble

Re: "pointing to past efforts to curtail money laundering"

Have the City of London, or the UK govt, or equivalents in many other "developed" nations really tried it? I mean the stopping, not the laundering...

The 15-inch MacBook Air just nails it

Re: Cost as reviewed?

After a long time in the Apple Store we chose the 15" Air over the 14" Pro. The bigger screen is so much more comfortable. We can live without the extra ports of the Pro

Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail

Re: I hope they fixed the one glaring omission: carddav support

CardDAV has been in since version 109 or something. I only just upgraded my server to something with good enough CardDAV and TB looks to have connected perfectly. (I still haven't got around to moving all my contacts in from the "Device" account on my Android phone though.)

UK becomes Unicorn Kingdom, where AI fairy dust earns King's ransom

Re: How many times?

Sorry to hear your plight.

If "you" means the 100-200k swing voters in marginal seats that actually decide elections in the UK's bonkers First Past The Post electoral system (see also USA) then yes, have at them.

But the UK population as a whole hasn't voted more than 50% for any party since pre-WWII, and is majority non-Toey. Any system of Proportional Representation would have forced sensible compromise government for as far back as you wish to look - 2019 where Europe-friendly parties got 56% of the vote, 2005 where Labour dropped to 35% after Iraq (and imagine how low if there was a viable alternative on the left). Etc etc

Boffins think they've decoded mysterious 819-day Mayan calendar

Re: "and have yet to return to a sense of normalcy"

Good luck to you on your tod if you get long COVID and struggle to even make breakfast, let alone work a full day, for a number of months. How's your savings balance?

Lebanon's IT folks face double trouble as leaders delayed Daylight Savings Time

Re: keep days short???

The number of hours doesn't change (obvs), but what you're doing when does. If you're sleeping through sunrise, starting work when the clock says (with the sun higher in the sky), and fasting by skipping breakfast and lunch, it feels like getting to eat dinner an hour earlier.

Re: keep days short???

I'm *guessing* a lot of people fast by not eating at all until sunset. Thus having an hour less daylight at the end of the day would make a difference.

Still a stupid idea to change it in a hurry for a one-off. I'm not well versed at all in Islamic calendar calculations but I'm pretty sure the date Ramadan starts is known at least six months in advance.

PS I've heard that in some places it doesn't officially end until the new moon is visible in the sky, so a long cloudy stretch can mean a extra month of fasting...put that in your tzdata!

Watch Reg vultures wrap their heads around Silicon Valley Bank collapse

Calling the...

From "kettle" I was expecting something like a bunch of bankers from household-name bailed-out investment banks calling out SVB's poor risk management.

Or Microsoft folk complaining about Google trying to arbitrarily impose "standards" on the web.

Uncle Sam greenlights first commercial nuclear small modular reactor design

Re: Timing is everything

https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/30/chinese_battery_vrfb_us_patents/

The technology is ready, just not the politics, it seems

Binance robbed of $600 million in crypto-tokens

"Fiat" generally means "the government has said so", while in most cryptos* there are various mathematical rules meant to stop anyone just saying so. They call it bitcoin "mining" precisely because you can't just say "look, I've got a new bitcoin" in the same way you actually have to dig for and refine gold. Last week on the other hand the Bank of England simply said "look, I've got £65 billion to help out pension funds."

That most people believe the Bank of England and a lot of people believe the pope, and not so many people believe in Scientology or will accept bitcoin for groceries is, however, all down to human belief not inherent reality. "Fiat" is referring to the process for creating of new units of currency, not its utility for buying and selling stuff.

Anything based on belief can be workable and appear "real" for a long time, but that doesn't make it actually real. Compare with things based on real physics, like that 100 grams of gold dropped on a bare human foot from 1.5 metres will hurt said foot, no matter who's head might be stamped on the back.

* "Most cryptos" is important because to that extent I agree you that crypto coins are invented like fiat: nothing stops anyone saying "hey, I've invented XYZcoin and I'm a trillionaire." That's not likely to be a popular or useful coin though, but again that's down to human belief.

In the context of a crypto article I think saying "fiat" is entirely justified. Anyone who's into crypto has thought a bit about what "money" really is, and that tenner in your pocket (or more likely these days the circuit in your NFC chip) is ultimately just an idea that a lot of people believe in.

Crypto people just believe in some different ideas. Maybe a bit like notionally Christian nations still spend a lot because of santa and get excited about eggs at Easter time.

If you want money that's not an idea, you need gold, as J.P. Morgan famously said: https://www.milesfranklin.com/gold-is-money-everything-else-is-credit-jp-morgan/

There are entire schools of economics (OK, not the most cult-free space!) where the distinction between "fiat" and "real" money is a fundamental principle, the Austrian School one being most prominent.

60 million in the Matrix as users seek decentralized messaging

Re: Signal + google

Signal used to do that, but the number of possible phone numbers is low enough compared to compute power today that they gave up and just store the actual numbers on their servers.

Where Signal differ massively from WhatsApp, as I understand, is that they encrypt everything in your messages. WhatsApp servers can see, or at least store permanently, the content of pictures etc - everything that's not text.

And they *may* have a user graph, but as a charitable entity they aren't going to be able to sell it

Docker Desktop for Apple Silicon is here, but probe a little deeper and you'll find Rosetta 2 staring back

Re: threading and performance

Apple gave the M1 the ability to support "Intel" strong memory ordering in hardware. That's why Rosetta 2 is so much faster than other x86 emulators running on ARMs.

If you're a WhatsApp user, you'll have to share your personal data with Facebook's empire from next month – or stop using the chat app

Re: Does this apply here?

Signal *used* to send just a hash of your phone number (plus those of your contacts), which I liked the idea of. However they realised the number of possible phone numbers is too small for hashing to provide much if any defence these days, so now they do in fact upload phone numbers.

I still use Signal though, because it's a non-profit and because I take Ed Snowden's word that it's the most private/secure. I uninstalled WhatsApp the day Facebook bought them - or at least as soon as the suspiciously-timed 24hr outage after it was announced was over.

Roma, we've had un problema: When every flight's final destination is a date with Windows Boot Manager

I WinCEd at that

I once flew from NZ to London while the in flight "entertainment" consisted of watching WinCE boot up and crash, over and over and over. They said they'd fix it during the refuelling stop in L.A., but no. I've spent better days in flying tin cans...

Even the reading light was controlled from the IFE so to read I had to move to a seat where the light was switched on during the brief period when it was working enough for the light button would do anything.

Whaddya mean, 'niche'?! Neo4j's chief scientist schools El Reg on graph databases

Ooops, I stand corrected. I'm working in Gremlin so I thought it was "the other one". My brain conflated the "Cypher to GQL" as "SparQL to Cypher"

Cypher is the new name for SparQL, which is much more SQL-like than Gremlin. Remains to be seen which one turns out to be VHS and which Betamax...perhaps both will be Betamax! :-)

Astroboffins may have raged at Elon's emissions staining the sky, but all those satellites will be more boon than bother

Re: This is where we are now

How would LEO beat microwave links at ground level? The signal via satellite has to go all the way up and down, so unless a) the microwave relay hops slow it down so much that a lower number of satellite relay hops is worth it or b) the thinner/no atmosphere means is going closer to c, I don't buy it.

LEO definitely wins against fibre though.

The Foot of Cupid emits final burst of flatulence in honour of fallen Python Terry Jones

Re: Captain Buzzkill

Python the language is named after these Pythons, not the snakes. The documentation has "spam" all through it, e.g. https://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html#module-contents. That's relevant enough for me!

If I've killed your buzz-killing buzz with an injection of facts.... tough!

1Password won't axe private vaults. It'll choke 'em to death instead

Re: So, how many credit cards do I need now?

From the 1password FAQs:

"What happens if my subscription lapses?"

Don't worry, you will never be locked out of your account or your data. If your subscription ends, your account will be frozen but you will still be able to access, view and export all your data.

...So presumably all you need is a working phone with mobile internet, or an internet cafe, or a friend's PC?

British IT consultant talks of his three years as an Iraqi hostage

Well done on surviving

Well done Peter Moore on surviving an horrific situation and living a balanced life afterwards. "Living well is the best revenge."

I'm a little disappointed and surprised that it's only the 15th and 16th comments (as I write this presumably-17th) are basic congratulations from Register readers, given that we are probably the closest website-peer group of his. Only a little, since this is The Register, and what would it be without cynical comments about IR35, the cynicism of the US and UK governments, etc etc? But FFS he was chained up for a whole year and went through mock executions!! I've been in London for 10 years and would quite happily be forced to stay inside the M25 for the rest of my life rather than be put through a mock execution. How many of us can honestly say we would come through anything like that without being a gibbering wreck for the rest of our lives?

So, enjoy the holidays, Peter!

Anonymous crashes Formula One site over Bahrain protests

F1 in Bahrain = sports tours to South Africa during apartheid

"No history of South African Rugby would be complete without mention of apartheid and although some would suggest that there should be a seperation between sport and politics they are inextricably linked."

http://www.rugbyfootballhistory.com/south_africa.html (search for Apartheid, there isn't a contents table - don't blame me I didn't write the page).

Sport and politics are linked. Grow up and deal with it. That repressive regimes like Bahrain's (and China's) can _still_ gain legitimacy, and profit, from deluded people who are too focussed on winning to see that life is more important is disgusting. In 20 years will Sebastian Vettel be happier with one more race win than making a stand for freedom and equality?