Posts by tentimes

After spate of delays, Intel promises Sapphire Rapids Xeons for early 2023

They are beat before they ship

Epyc has already won

Biden cuts off China's Yangtze, 30 others from US chipmaking gear

Less chips going to Russia for it's war effort

All good. Keep the ban hammer swinging and make it for all of China or anyone that exports to China or a company that will try and get tech for the Russians.

Just when everyone thought things might be looking up, Dido Harding admits interest in top job at NHS England

Some neck on 'er

That Dildo has some neck on her - I wouldn't give her a job as a cloak room attendant.

Tesla owners win legal fight after software update crippled older Model S batteries

Elon says no

Elon Musk will not allow this and will refuse to pay up. Or do so but refuse to sell them new batteries when the time comes.

Missile systems software dev leaker has sentence almost doubled after UK.gov says 4½ years was too soft

I forgot

I forget my passwords all the time when I make veracrypt containers - why can't he just say "Sorry, I forgot"

UK dev loses ownership claim on forensic software he said he wrote in spare time and licensed to employer

Take a big dump on the bosses desk...

and tell him "You own that - deal with it"

I'd appeal that

If I had the money to.

You might want to look Huawei now: Smartphone market returns to growth as Chinese giant's shipments plunge

Only solution is...

... Joe BIden.

Astroboffins baffled as black hole at center of Milky Way suddenly a lot hungrier than before

Re: "hungrier than it's ever been"

Can I have two please?!

Overstock's share price has plummeted. Is it Trump's trade war? Bad results? Nope, its CEO has gone bonkers...

Re: I'm not trolling

Maybe this time it is him shorting the stock. This whole thing could be a stunt and he could have a $5M short in the works.

Microsoft demos end-to-end voting verification system ElectionGuard, code will be on GitHub

Re: Paper ballot fraud is difficult

Or you can just pay the Russians to fix it for you via Facebook, where the sheeple can be bought with a couple of good meme's and the odd comment.

Re: "there is little cause for optimism"

"it doesn't solve any problems"

Yes it does. Computer counting and remote voting. I will cheer the day that I no longer have to do the annoying journey to my polling station in person. And we don't have to wait ages for humans to count the votes. The system can choose the winner and shoot the loser automatically.

Tech jocks headed for White House powwow on 'economic matters' (read: Huawei ban)

Outrageous!! How dare they?

It is absolutely disgusting to see the US Tech giants going to kiss Trumps ass and then conspire to control the chinese tech firms by using a combination of Trump and Google et al. I know it has happened before (read "Confessions of an economic hitman") but this is just brazen. Trump is showing he controls these US corporations and they will do his evil work for him. I want to be able to buy a Huwaei phone as it costs half as much as the competition for the same tech, but trump wants to torture them and enjoy his sense of control, like the proper little psychopath that he is.

Fucking disgusting.

British ISPs throw in the towel, give up sending out toothless copyright infringement warnings

People just aren't pirating as much any more

People now have Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify etc and it has been made easy to "buy" content, so there isn't as much need to pirate. Just the same as Steam et al saw a vast reduction in games piracy. Give people an easy way to buy content at a decent price and they will.

The only thing I now fire up the pirate bay for is stuff I really already own. Things on Sky that I just can't find using their hopeless search and FLAC versions of some old CD's that I own, to save me having to digitise them. Oh and one case (Archer season 10) where I am damned if I can find it on FX in the UK and it is not on Netflix yet. It will be though - I just want it sooner so I torrented it.

So, reduce the reasons for piracy (and release US/UK same time!) and you have MUCH less piracy. No need for these notices any more.

Someone slipped a vuln into crypto-wallets via an NPM package. Then someone else siphoned off $13m in coins to protect it from thieves

Re: "the assets await reclamation by their owners"

My guess is Komodo are rubbing their hands with glee as this is a perfect excuse to get their mitts on other people's bitcoin. I would be amazed if all the BTC went back to the owners in the end.

We should put you in a secure hospital then and see how you like it. Not enough of them *facepalm*!

Who left a database of emails, credit cards, plain-text passwords, and more open to the web this week? Tech Data, come on down!

Buy it on the dark web for $5 a login/CC

What people don't understand is that this type of stuff is permanently up for sale on the darknet for anyone that wants it. Netflix accounts, database dumps etc etc. The fact this is known about is the unusual bit. This is only the tip of a very big iceburg that most people just don't know about. I don't have any interest in buying this stuff, I just noticed it all up for sale when I was investigating (cough) the darknet.

Bad news from science land: Fast-charging li-ion batteries may be quick to top up, but they're also quick to die

Another nail in the coffin of electric cars and Li-ion batteries

And to think I was considering buying an electric car - I hadn't thought about the battery depreciation. That's a deal breaker for me.

What we need is one of the hundreds of "new battery technology!!!" stories, the Reg and other rags promote each year, to actually be true. I have been reading about new battery technology for 20 years now and not one of the (many!) stories actually turns out to be true and we are still stuck with old Li-ion batteries. Hard to believe really.

DigitalOcean drowned my startup! 'We lost everything, our servers, and one year of database backups' says biz boss

Putting all your eggs in one basket...

They should have "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" tatood on them. So so often people put everything on one cloud provider and then act surprised when it goes tits up. DB backups in the same place?!?! Mad.

Intel budges Samsung out of its seat at the top of silicon-slinger league

Time to buy some RAM then

Amazon here I come...!

NASA 'nauts do what flagship smartphone fans can only dream of: Change the batteries

Why oh why are we still using Li-on batteries?!

For over 20 years now I have been reading stories on groundbreaking new batteries that are just around the corner yet everything, including the space station, is using crappy Li-on still. It NEVER changes!!! Why are we stuck with stone age batteries? I want an answer damit! ;)

Dear Britain's mast-fearing Nimbys: Do you want your phone to work or not?

Simple solution to all of this

All masts should be forced to be shared masts. That way we wouldn't need so many. People that think the radio waves are affecting them are daft and should be ignored.

Western Digital sees storage sun rise in NVMe land... and slowly set on SATA, SAS SSDs

Can they compete with Samsung?

Samsungs PCIE Nvme drives are cheap as chips. I would question whether anyone can compete with them atm as they are almost dumping them.

ZX Spectrum Vega+ 'backer'? Nope, you're now a creditor – and should probably act fast

I doubt end users will see the money

My guess is that the early directors lived life on the hog and squandered it. What is left will most likely go to commercial creditors at a discount compared to what they are owed.

Chrome ad, content blockers beg Google: Don't execute our code! Wait, no, do execute our code – just don't kill us!

Chrome has been my default browser for 8+ years

But I will reconsider if they defang ad-blockers. Surely they must know that they will lose users to other platforms that allow ad-blockers? This seems a case of them shooting themselves in the foot.

Guess who's working on a health data-slurping digital tool? Bzzt! Nope, it's the UK Department for Work and Pensions

Re: noticed spec said must use node.js

It will have as many wee niggly bits as they can get in to the contract to be sure they get the people they want for it when it goes out for "tender". This is just some bright idea someone has come up with that looks for stuff in your health records that would refuse you benefit and they are hawking it to government as a money saving program. Run it and it saves you £££!

For those wondering how it works, it pulls stuff like "Went for a walk in 1972" from your records and uses that as a line in the reasons for non-award of benefit as evidence of "walking unaided".

DWP emphasised that it is shared with patient consent

No it isn't. You will have to tick the box for allowing them to read your records or you won't get your benefits. At least with a doctor deciding what is transferred you can stop them trawling your records to find a reason to refuse you, because that is what this is all about. "Getting the right level of support" my ass.

Microsoft's Master Chief calls time on Cortana as a standalone AI platform

Re: What a shame.

(cue a "What have the Romans done for us post :)

What a shame.

If Microsoft of all people (joking aside) cannot get this right then what can it get right? It has all the skills and the people to get this right but it is bowing out too early. They should have stuck at it. I have an Alexa but I also use Google assistant (voice and text). Both these platforms are at a very early stage and with a bit of effort (and focus!) Cortana could easily and should have competed with them. It is early days in this sphere and if MS bows out here then what the hell can it compete at? Ok, it has Windows, but it has got to be more than a one trick pony. They bowed out too early with a Java dev platform and other languages it didn't even try to make Visual Studio available for. They should be pushing VS for all types of development. Come on Microsoft - grow a pair!!

Holy crappuccino. There's a latte trouble brewing... Bio-boffins reckon 60%+ of coffee species may be doomed

More to coffee than Arabica and Robusta!

Just to point out that your assumption that coffee is still blended with Robusta is wrong for most coffee, and there are far more breeds than the Arabicas! Robusta cannot be drunk on its own (it is foul!) and I think people apart from the makers of Red Mountain instant coffee would go for a better bean. My main bean is grown in india - Monsoon Malibar. I but it in green and roast it myself.

I doubt coffee makers, given the price it fetches, will not let many breeds go extinct.

HSBC suggests it might have found a... use for blockchain?

How else could one pay for one's drugs?

It is invaluable and the Dark Web wouldn't function without it. How else could one change wives?

Amazon's creepy facial recog doorbell, Facebook open sources machine learning code and much more

I would have great fun with this!

"Hello paedophile - you are not on the list so are not getting in!" will be my standard response for Alexa to give. Anyone I know will laugh and anyone else will be mortally offended and fuck off :)

Amazon's homegrown 2.3GHz 64-bit Graviton processor was very nearly an AMD Arm CPU

Was looking good up until the bit...

.... where we here that all 16 cores are slower than 5 cores of a Xeon. Boom! I am an admirer of ARM but they have to do better - they have been getting an easy ride of it in the phone market for too long.

Huawei MateBook Pro X: PC makers look out, the phone guys are here

I don't like the aspect ration

No good for games or movies :(

If you have inner peace, it's probably 'cos your broadband works: Zen Internet least whinged-about Brit ISP – survey

Glad I changed 2 years ago

I changed from BT to Zen 2 years ago and it was a good decision. I get faster speeds and have only had one issue and this was down the BT rather than Zen. They seem to offer better reliability even though they operate over BT's network. And you get a real person to talk if it does go wrong. No checking of whether you are wearing brown shoes and your fingers are crossed, your network card certified, windows registry operating and all the other hundreds of things BT got you to check to make it your fault instead of theirs when it goes wrong. Instead, for the one hour of outage I have had I got a simple explanation and an immediate fess-up. BT are wankers.

Buried in the hype, one little detail: Amazon's Alexa-on-a-chip could steal smart home market

Give it to me now Jeff!

I would love some of Jeff's IoT microwaves etc as long as he uses protection!

Microsoft adds Windows module support to PowerShell Core while Amazon unleashes it on Lambda

Windows 10 1803 Powershell only option

In the most recent versions of Windows 10 they have either hidden (that I can't find) removed a lot of configuration that you need when anything goes wrong. I couldn't do without "powercfg -requests" every week to figure out why the fuck the computer won't go into sleep this week when it did last week. Every week is a new education. Without powershell I would be screwed with this and many other task I need to do to get the damn thing to work.

You'll never guess what you can do once you steal a laptop, reflash the BIOS, and reboot it

Re: Use of digest and or checksums

I suspect then that you are in fact a paranoid schizophrenic.

Google Chrome 69 gives worldwide web a stay of execution in URL box

Re: With M$ Windows dead as a dodo

Windows 10 is alive and well. And, when you compare it to Linux, it is the smoothest, most responsive and fit looking operating system around. I love it. I hate that I love it, I wish Linux is better and I do use Linux in a VM context, both on my host machine and my VPS. Linux is excellent for those tasks but it falls down terribly as a usable operating system for your main machine. God knows I tried (with Ubuntu and a couple of other variants). But you need to be some kind of magician to be able to keep it running. I did once get a RAID running on it. But it took me several weeks and many failed attempts. I even wrote an article at one stage about how to get it working correctly with an intel controller. Too much work. RAID in windows just works and I can rely on it.

HTC U12 Life: Notchless, reasonably priced and proper buttons? Oh joy

HTC are finished

It seems obvious to me that HTC are in their death throws. They have thrown just about all their spaghetti at the wall and not one piece has stuck. This really is their last gasp and has the potential to be one of their last phones with no firmware upgrade path for security updates. Not worth the risk when you can get a Samsung and be pretty sure it will be updated. My S7 edge has had two security updates within a week and several within the last year. That's what I need. A big phone with good battery life (2 days), fast and responsive that I can view webpages on easily and play my audiobooks on. I can't ever see myself downgrading to something like this HTC. I feel sorry for them to be honest. I don't see how they can make their way back trying to compete with the Chinese in the value market.

IPv6: It's only NAT-ural that network nerds are dragging their feet...

Re: It's hideous for home users to set up on routers.

Well I have easily set up reverese DNS for IPv4 but I can only get RADVD delegated to work on the router, which doesn't allow for static IP's and therefore I cannot assign a reverse DNS for my network. Ipv4 reverse DNS works perfectly. I have been trying for over a year but cannot figure it out. The IPv6 docs available are appalling and really hard to understand. I have two degrees, my first one being Electronic engineering. So I know how to read a spec.

It's hideous for home users to set up on routers.

I consider myself reasonably clued in, but when it came time to configure my TPLINK router (archer v900 v2) I found it really confusing. ISP's are not clear enough on how they use IPv6 which then makes it very difficult for me to configure the router. I eventually got an address system working through trial and error, though it is dynamically assigned behind the router when what I really wanted was some permanent IP addresses (IPv6) but I could not work out how to make that happen. So I have a static IPv4 address but I can't get a static IPv6 address, only a range, and I can't configure the range behind the firewall as I just can't get it working. The ISP has been cryptic and, frankly, I find the whole IPv6 scenario cryptic and obfuscated. If people want it adopted faster then they should explain it better.

Make Sammy Great Again: Surprise – Samsung chucks cash at manufacturing

Flagship just too expensive

If you look at a graph of flagship phone prices over the past 10 years you will see a huge and uncharacteristic rise in the graph over the past few years. Previously it was a gradual increase then all of a sudden Apple launch that price into orbit, closely followed by Samsung.

They cannot seem to understand that if they brought flagship phone prices down to a reasonably level they would sell more phones and make more profit. At the moment nearly £1000 for a phone is absolutely ridiculous (for a pimped out S9). My S7 cost me £500 and I won't budge above that for a phone. The Huwei stuff always looks appealing until you dig into the details and find a deal breaker.

Offer me a phone Samsung that is better than my S7, can do more or has some new feature, BUT don't you dare charge more than £500. There is no way the cost of production is more than about £250 and you already have enough profit without copying Apple. Apple has a zombie horde of retarded people who will just pay anything, would let their kids go hungry, just to get their next overly priced phone. Samsung doesn't have that luxury.

Some of you really don't want Windows 10's April 2018 update on your rigs

Re: No problems but ...

You are the only one! I have yet to see anyone else report no problems with the last lot of upgrades. I would love to know your hardware as I might copy it.

You're burning £1.2bn for what? UK spending watchdog gives digital court plans a kicking

Re: Hypothetically speaking

This

Friday FYI: 9 out of 10 of website login attempts? Yeah, that'll be hackers

Different password? Not credible.

I use two or three passwords and I can remember NO more than that. Most people are like me. Use a password manager to generate passwords you say? NO! If it goes down I am totally screwed - it's a common point of failure for all the websites I need to use on a daily basis.

Indictment bombshell: 'Kremlin intel agents' hacked, leaked Hillary's emails same day Trump asked Russia for help

"One other interesting item that may be a hint of things to come is basing money-laundering charges on use of Bitcoin for payment. We might well hope that such will not become the norm."

Apart from buying drugs and money laundering, what other uses are there for bitcoin? Are any of them on the same level as drugs and money laundering? I doubt it.

That went well – not! Broadcom’s value dives after CA biz gobble

Why?

Can anyone explain this to me. I am frowning and scratching my head but it isn't happening for me. Was there just not a big enough hole in the ground to burn money in?

Dudes. Blockchain. In a phone. It's gonna smash the 'commoditization of humanity' or something

Blockchain: Expensive and SLOW

I have to buy and move about Bitcoin every month or so. It is a real hassle. The "blockchain" is shit for currency. It costs far too much per transaction and is far to slow (about 1 hour to get 6 confirms?!!).

How is this thing supposed to cope as it gets bigger?

Namecheap users rage at domain transfer pain, but their supplier Enom blames... er, GDPR?

Re: not just transfers

Blame Enom as it is quite clearly their fault.