Posts by maffski

Latest in WordPress war: Automattic says it wanted 8% cut of WP Engine revenue

Re: I wonder if those servers are being run for and by Automattic...

...or if they are run for and by the WordPress Foundation

Neither, turns out Wordpress.org is completely controlled by Matt in person. Which means every single Wordpress site in the world updates solely on his whim. Which came a surprise to me as I thought that wordpress.org was the foundation.

He claimed that this is because the foundation is non profit and as .org provides updates to commercial organisations it wasn't allowed to control the site, however he also explained the foundation owns a for profit (WordPress Community Support) so there's no reason it couldn't run the .org in a similar way.

WP Engine hits back after Automattic CEO calls it 'cancer'

Re: Not the first time....

Yep, wouldn't be hard to do a licence that required time/code contribution or direct payments to the foundation once you get over a revenue threshold. But you do it by the licence, not by trying to bully or shame.

Apple is coming to take 30% cut of new Patreon subs on iOS

Re: That is an absolute dick move

To the down voters. Go click on some Spiffing Brit videos at random and then come back here and apologise.

Raptor Lake microcode limits Intel chips to a mere 1.55 volts to prevent CPU destruction

Re: From Intel...

You should be careful. There have been some reports of horse migration causing plane instability.

CrowdStrike hires outside security outfits to review troubled Falcon code

Re: Zero Content File

I guess it only had 20 zeros. If there had been 21 it would have been fine.

AMD stalls Ryzen 9000 launch over poor chip quality

Surely they've come up with a test that will identify the at risk chips and allow them to return the rest to the vendors, they won't be 'fixing' any of them in the time available

Although the 9400f or something may have just moved forward in the schedules

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

The answer is test what you're shipping and roll it out slowly.

'...The answer is test what you're shipping and roll it out slowly....'

The answer is to sue CrowdStrike into the ground so that every other security company decides hardening their drivers is a good investment.

Game dev accuses Intel of selling ‘defective’ Raptor Lake CPUs

This was due to a specific failure in the AGESA code for the motherboard BIOS. Ensure your motherboard is running the latest BIOS and potential overvolt that causes it should be blocked.

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

Re: Thank you Liam

"a teetering stack of dozens of layers of flakey unreliable code, which in turn needs thousands and millions of people constantly patching the holes in it, and needs customers to pay to get those fixes fast, and keep paying for them for years to come."

Guess what. Things are made of things. And very complex things are made of many complex things.

Doesn't matter if it's code, chemistry or joinery. It's all loads of imperfect stuff cobbled together.

Brain boffins think they've found the data format we use to store images as memories

Re: What about the people who can't visualize?

I have aphantasia, I get really nervous arranging to meet friends at somewhere a bit vague (e.g. 'meet you outside the cinema') because until I'm actually looking at them I have no idea what they look like. People that I've known for years and I couldn't describe them better than a police report.

FFmpeg 6.1 drops a Heaviside dose of codec magic

Remarkably terse release notes

hmm, you have a point:

503 - The load average on the server is too high

not bad,

503 - average load too high

would have been terser

The UK government? On the right track with its semiconductor strategy?

Re: pile it high, sell it cheap

Another way of putting it would be that we have a very successful track record in generating and exporting IP.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

In 20 years time we will be mining landfill sites for metals.

What do you think a scrapyard is?

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

Re: I see this a lot

You're not thinking meta enough. Get ChatGPT to write tests to validate the tests written by ChatGPT. Add enough layers and the chances of the same errors being in each tier approach 0.

UK hospitals lose millions after AI startup valuation collapses

Re: Shoddy reporting

The company isn't being closed. It's simply being delisted from the public exchange. The NHS trusts are having to list them as zero value as there is no public price for them to trade at, they could still be sold but it would be up to the trust to find a buyer and agree a price.

So this is mostly just a quirk of the accounting process. They haven't lost millions, mainly because they never had those millions to start with.

Or, in other words. The article is clickbait.

European watchdog: All data collected about users via ad-consent popup system must be deleted

Re: Generates annual revenues of €41.9bn

You're right, poor people getting access to services subsidised by advertisers is a much worse deal for them then having to pay the cost to provide the service.

And if this is 'generating nothing' why are people paying to advertise?

Crack team of boffins hash out how e-scooters should sound – but they need your help*

It rings a bell

So, how to alert people to a small two wheeled personal transport that moves silently through mixed use spaces?

I can't imagine anyone has ever had to solve that problem.

Open source maintainer threatens to throw in the towel if companies won't ante up

Re: 'CFO's

Hopefully someone near the core of the opensource project was smart enough to run a commercial business offering support and/or remote hosting.

If you don't fit in with a commercial businesses way of viewing the world then you're not going to get any kind of engagement from them. Perhaps opensource projects should sell entirely optional licences, I suspect a lot of the time if techs went to their bosses with a quote for a licence it would get signed off without a problem.

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

Re: "Updated to add"

I don't understand how it is taking them so long to fix this.

They're probably still trying to work out why anyone thought it was a good idea to distribute virtual instances over physical servers alphabetically.

Meanwhile customers starting with a letter Q report performance has always been excellent.

UK's Newport Wafer Fab now under Chinese ownership

Hot bed of capitalists

I never realised there were so many shareholders of the company here. It's not *ours* and except for a few very specific reasons it is literally none of our business who they sell it to.

8 years ago another billionaire ploughed millions into space to harvest solar power and beam it back down to Earth

Asimov described so many things you'd think he was making them up.

Tesla battery fire finally flamed out after four-day conflagration

Re: Extinguishers...

Aus is big. The safest, cheapest and easiest solution is to do exactly what they did. Space the batteries out and let it burn.

Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

Re: Fastly 'fesses up'

I notice they don't bother to mention what the 'customer configuration change' was. If I was cynical I might be inclined to think it was something so simple they'd be embarrassed by revealing it.

Why did Johnny and Jenny's exam grades yo-yo over the summer? Here's some of the code behind UK results chaos

Re: it would have been interesting to see what was in those "final codes"

Unless, of course, they have previous data of predicted vs actual grades that show teachers of larger classes are more likely to overestimate predicted grades.

It may date back to 1994 but there's no end in sight for the UK's Chief customs system as Brexit rules beckon

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

How about we dress it up as 'People were asked a question and those that answered gave their preference.'

In the same way you could title this article 'It may date back to 1994 but there's no end in sight for the UK's Chief customs system as Brexit rules beckon' or you could go with 'System from 1994 is still capable and so will be maintained'

Linux kernel's Kroah-Hartman: We're not struggling to get new coders, it's code review that's the bottleneck

Re: Linux and more

// This is a skanky hack!

That strikes me as a very useful comment - a warning that you should think about it rather than read it.

The ones that annoy me are things like:

// Check that the customer has sufficient balance to place the order

That shouldn't be described by a comment. It should be described by a method name.

Google contractor HCL America accused of retaliating against unionized techies by shifting US jobs to Poland

Re: United, together

But the union has management as well. Who are, by your own reasoning, in it for themselves.

Someone not only created a comment-spewing Reddit bot powered by OpenAI's GPT-3, it offered bizarre life advice

"We tried to contact thegentlemetre over Reddit for comment"

Be honest, you wanted to offer it a job.

Another reminder that bias, testing, diversity is needed in machine learning: Twitter's image-crop AI may favor white men, women's chests

Surely the most important question is...

Why prat about with this AI learning to crop an image when you could just scale it to fit?

Amazon gets its tax excuses in early amid rising UK profits – but leaves El Reg off the press list. Can't think why

Re: You can add another

And yet contractors get paid more than permanent staff? Your work is worth what it's worth.

That can be wages, taxes, sick pay, holiday pay, a staff canteen, stock options, free bagel Thursday, whatever.

And you demanding an extra £8000 per year depends entirely on relative costs - can you really leave or is it an empty threat? Can I replace you with someone else for less? Will that cost more in productivity than I save in wages? Can I replace you with automation? How much investment will that take?

Re: You can add another

'It isnt paid by amazon , its taken from the money amazon pays its employees...'

Nope. Just cos it's your name on the cheque/check doesn't mean it's at your cost.

Amazon itself is just a legal construct, it doesn't bear the cost of anything as it has no desire to consume (the only cost of anything being the opportunity cost).

All taxes are ultimately paid by some combination of the customer, employee and shareholder.

At the very last Moment.js: Time-and-date JavaScript library fetched 12 million times a week ends development

I suspect Goodhart's law applies here

'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure'

Once library size becomes the target I can see lots of libraries becoming nothing but a plugin framework, replacing an 80kb library with a 10kb library and 100kb of extensions.

Another week, another dual-screen phone, this time a T-shaped LG thingamy

Top Tip

Save money on the new LG dual screen rotata phone by joining your old phone to your new phone with an elastic band.

Google says Australian pay-for-news code means it can’t quit the country

Google and Facebook need to up their bribery, sorry, funding.

'Australia doesn’t want Google or Facebook to leave, it just wants them to pay news organisations on terms set by Australia'

Or, more accurately, those with political influence want to extract a rent

Can I get some service here? The new 27-inch iMac forgoes replaceable storage for soldered innards

Of course Apple cares. A custom CPU package would cost more.

Amazon gets green-light to blow $10bn on 3,000+ internet satellites. All so Americans can shop more on Amazon

Re: Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis.

'When I was young it was the dog that ate your homework'

It's the giant mutant star goat you have to watch out for.

Nvidia may be mulling lopping Arm off Softbank: GPU goliath said to have shown interest in acquiring CPU design house

Re: What is the point ?

'Lots of brains at ARM have the skills that could boost Nvidia's ranks'

It could go the other direction as well. NVidia are extremely good at market segmentation and they might think that while Softbanks 'just charge more for everything' approach will drive customers from ARM some careful technology segmentation might see specialist industries paying up.

Nominet shakes up system for expiring .uk domains, just happens to choose one that will make it £millions. Again

From the 'consultation'

'In order to provide the exact time and date an expired domain name will be become available for registration we will need to introduce a time period of certainty where the domain cannot be renewed by its previous registrant and has not yet been deleted and made available for registration by a new registrant (i.e. a Pending Delete period). We would consider a Pending Delete period of around five days.'

Brilliant, so if you forget to renew your domain you'll be blocked from purchasing it to make sure the squatters have a chance to bid for it.

Don't strain yourself, Zuck, only democracy at stake... Facebook makes half-hearted effort to flag election lies by President Trump

Re: why aren't postal votes considered a fraud risk in the US?

They are. The results of elections have been very carefully analysed and there have been a number of studies that conclude the risk is fucking tiny.

So you agree with Trump that an increase in mail in votes will lead to '...the MOST CORRUPT election in our nations history...'

This is the issue I have with all these 'truth checkers' - they seldom seem to be actually checking what was said and instead going off an OMG interpretation

UK formally abandons Europe’s Unified Patent Court, Germany plans to move forward nevertheless

"Not one non-hole driller has been able to explain what tangible benefit they think they have by not drilling a hole in the bottom of this boat". The answer is, of course, not fucking everything up.

Not terribly relevant but almost all boats have at least one hole in the bottom.

NASA delays James Webb Space Telescope launch date by at least seven months

You don't seriously think that the PM hasn't been sacked (or quit) several times already ?

It's government funding. The PM(s) will have been promoted.

You've think you've heard it all about automation in technology? Get a load of this robot that plugs in cables

Re: USB

To be fair it was the USB A socket that finally proved the existence of 720 degree quantum spin.

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

Re: Wishy washy

'ALL Lives Matter!'

What, exactly, do you have against zombies?

Re: Wishy washy

Lord and Serf?

One does not simply repurpose an entire internet constellation for sat-nav, but UK might have a go anyway

'unless they can convert the satellite from Ku-band to L-band, then they cannot be configured to operate with existing GPS receivers.'

Why would you want to do that? Do you expect billions of existing perfectly good GPS receivers to be updated to support an additional standard?

There's no reason why these satellites can't provide navigation, comms (the British military currently buy commercial bandwidth I believe), and emergency location beacons.

I don't think we need another GPS, but if you're going to do it you may as well get all the services you can.

Machine-learning models trained on pre-COVID data are now completely out of whack, says Gartner

Try reading it as 'people who sell models insist you need to buy models'

Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length: macOS shifts from x86 to homegrown common CPU arch, will run iOS apps

Re: "Intel never thrilled me" - "x86-64 isn't at all bad"

x86-64 isn't Intel. It's AMD.

Amazon's not saying its warehouse staff are dumb... but it feels they need artificial intelligence to understand what 'six feet' means

Re: It's almost as if...

...people are capable of calculating the opportunity cost from being sat at home for three months

We cross now live to Oracle. Mr Ellison, any thoughts? 'Autonomous self-driving computers eliminate human labor, eliminate human error'

Re: Fill the void

'...eliminate human jobs...'

Which is, of course, what increased productivity is. The elimination of human work. Otherwise 99% of us would still spend our days digging in the fields with hand tools.

Hey Mister Prime Minister ... Scott! Can you get off my lawn please, mate?

Re: I salute that man!

Hang on, is this trebuchet going to be operated by Koalas or launch Koalas?

Typical customer specification. Always leaving out the details.