Posts by Apprentice Human

Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

I use ad blocker at home but....

I feel guilty using an ad blocker for The Reg, and a few other sites but it make the articles easier to read.

I don't have an ad blocker at work as the machines are managed elsewhere and installing plugins are frowned on. That means I see the ads on el Reg, and elsewhere. And most are so tuned to grab your attention that they are an obnoxious interference to point of making me cry. Between autoplay, colour saturation, and other techniques it makes me want to raze the ad mediation services.

And even with ad blockers we still have data exfiltration. Even with my custom rules in my firewall I still know, from what I'm presented with, that blocking is not perfect.

Alas, I do not see an end to this issue.

That home router botnet the Feds took down? Moscow's probably going to try again

Re: Ubiquiti used to be my go-to source...

For people who are new, or are now just looking at updating their hardware, what else is in the price range of Ubiquiti?

A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value

Re: Left the country.

I left Oz for the USA in 2000, having finished three Y2K projects over the previous 2 years.

From my experience Australian managers are martinets; the worst sort of micro-managers who refuse to take responsibility and refuse to give any sort of guidance. And the pay is abysmal, as noted. While I have worked for several "evil empires", here in Silicon Valley, the jobs have been challenging, the pay great, and the teams have people who are highly competent. I would encourage anyone who has good IT skills to look at moving to the USA.

While I'll be heading back home for retirement, and I do miss a good meat pie, I'm under no illusion that management practices have improved in the last 2 decades. If anything, under conservative governments it's become worse with the employee having less rights, and less ways to redress unfair work issues.

Silicon Valley weirdo's quest to dodge death – yours for $333 a month

Must be a fan of Lady Cassandra

While watching Dr. Who I think he missed the part where she makes the demands to be moisturized. He's not looking very good for someone in their mid-40s.

The Register's 2023 in gaming had one final boss: Baldur's Gate 3

20+ years playing Kingdom of Loathing

Not all games are FPS or RP games. After a few decades of playing Nethack, I moved to Kingdom of Loathing. Not for everyone but I'm amazed that a game that's been a commercial success for almost 20 years never gets mentioned.

Ransomware payment ban: Wrong idea at the wrong time

WTF

All the comments seem to base on implantation issues, and sometimes mention the moral imperative.

Just on a moral standpoint nobody should pay. Should you pay the bully in school?

AWS staffer shows off the workplace that used to be a prison

PUNishment

is deserved for all the bad jokes. It's bad enough being a cube-slave without highlighting the obvious.

Amazon has more than half of all Arm server CPUs in the world

Gravitons deliver by YMMY

As an example we was using a c4.2xlarge and max CPU was 12%. When we moved to c7g.large the response time was faster, max CPU is 9%, and only cost 20% of the Intel based CPU.

However we did test before making the move.

Dell down under dinged for dodgy display discounts

3 years of following a compliance plan?

So 18 months of staying compliant. The state that the plan is no longer relevant. And in December 2026 the game starts again.

Get your cheap memory while growing stockpiles push prices low

The image is a hard drive interface

Well, not much else to say.

I feel someone should be embarrassed using this for a RAM story, so I'll ram the point home.

My God, it's full of tabs: Vivaldi's coolest new features shine on phones and cars

But what cost?

Ok, the basic level is free, and that's clear from the article.

The Vivaldi website makes the tiers and extra functionality clear.

But nowhere does it talk about how much the extra tiers cost, or if the tier upgrades are device locked or are portable.

Still a great review. When I tried Vivaldi years ago, I was not impressed. The new version looks like it may get me to move over if the pricing and device portability was easier to find.

Tesla hits the brakes on rollout of Full Self-Driving code to new users

What could possibly go wrong?

Or may be more correctly: Darwinism at work in the rich but dumb.

What's really up with data disconnects in the deep blue sea?

Re: Excellent opinion piece

If you've followed politics or intelligence information: blatantly obvious. Plausible deniability can only be used a few times before it's implausible.

But, as you say, an excellent and succinct item.

APNIC warns members to watch out for fake election phone calls

Chinese astroturfing?

Not too surprising. If it's not the PRC behind it then it's for monopolization and being able charge rents.

A great bit of investigation. Even though I have many issues with APNIC, I doubt Lu Heng running APNIC is a solution that I would think is sane.

Apple releases Lisa source code on landmark machine's 40th birthday

WIMP: pointer?

I remember the time well and I thought the P was for "pull-downs" driven by the mouse pointer.

A minor nit-pick but in the magazines I could get at the time "pull-down" for menus was a big thing.

Enterprise IT giant layoffs happened because 'some CEOs got ahead of their skis'

A few more to the company list.

What about Cisco, and Amazon? And, too late for this article, but obviously Micro$loth too.

However it seems there are lots of smaller companies with many vacancies so I hope people are not out of work for extended periods.

Twitter data dump: 200m+ account database now free to download

What dump?

The URL gives 404.... is the URL correct?

I was expecting a DDOS error, so "not found" was surprising.

Logitech's MX Mechanical keyboard, Master 3S mouse

Logi Bolt is no replacement for Unify.

I got the MX Mini keyboard (TKL type) and the 3S mouse last week. They are brilliant to use BUT I was under the impression Logi Bolt would be like the Unify transceiver, in that you only need one to connect multiple devices.

Ouch: you need one transceiver per device if you want to use Logi Bolt for your connection. This would have been a deal breaker if I'd known before buying.

Caveat emptor.

Demand for GPUs used to mine crypto 'disappearing', says ASUSTeK

Only the young?

"young people consider an important piece of home entertainment kit"

Err, my wife is younger than me and in her late 50s. She'll be very flattered to be considered in the 15-30 age demographic!

Cable giants, ISPs, telcos end legal fight against California's net neutrality law

I'll believe it when I see it.

FCC fully staffed and a majority of the board being Democrats: I'll believe it when I see it.

Transparency in pricing: I'll believe it when I see it.

Competition between incumbent ISPs: I'll believe it when I see it.

etc....

Final PCIe 6.0 specs unleashed: 64 GTps link speed incoming... with products to follow in 2023

But what about my wife's gaming rig?

No really....

The major users are the people that pay me. So data centers, cloud computing, etc.

But when will this turn up in the domestic equipment for gamers is the question I have. It's much more peaceful hearing my wife button-mash to "Fuck, fuck, fuck" that the angst of slow loading games.

Assange extradition case goes to UK Home Secretary as High Court rules he can be sent to US for trial

I believe the US government would make a formal request to the Oz government to have Assange serve his time in his home country. That doesn't mean Australia has to agree and that would leave the man of the hour in the tender care of the USA.

It is possible for Australia to start the proceedings too, but I don't see why they would take the costs of caring for a second class hacker, should a custodial sentence be the final outcome... probably in 2026 or 2027 at this rate.

Microsoft signs settlement with US Justice Dept over 'immigration-related discrimination' claims

Microsoft being a bit of bastard?

Gambling going on here? Err, is that movie on again? No, it's just the normal practice out of Redmond.

Look at how M$ are starting to tie the browser back into the OS. The corporate culture seems to be "We are Microsoft, we do what we want." and laws are for others.

This latest case is just another example of why I have never, and will never, applied to work for them.

The nub of the issue: Has your ThinkPad's TrackPoint gone TITSUP*? You aren't alone

Re: A Windows-only problem?

I'm on a P73 and it's fine under Ubuntu 20.04. :-)

Alleged Brit SIM-swapper will kill himself if extradited to US for trial, London court told

Being a black hat is now correlated to risk of suicide!

But only after being caught. Funny about that.

Google loses appeal against $2.7bn EU antitrust fine for distorting competition in price comparison websites

The pun deserves an elephant stamp...

"Was going to buy a spider from a pet shop, then realised I could pick one up on the web. Here all week"

The pain of this pun deserves an elephant stamp, and an elephant to stamp on the sub-editor that added it, or allowed it to go through!

As Johnathan Harris emoted: "The pain, the pain".

Do you want to become a vulture? Now's your chance to join The Register's news desk

Choose no life ...

Hmm, sounds a lot like most of my previous roles:

Work to deadlines.

Daily reports, in depth monthly reports.

Cover a variety of technologies and give an in-depth report after investigation.

I think I'll stay where I am and retire in a few more years and leave this for a younger generation and continue to wonder what sort of masochist becomes a journalist. It makes the credo of alt.sysadmin.recovery look like a step up to easy street.

After staff revolt, Freenode management takes over hundreds of IRC channels for 'policy violations'

Entitled douchebag, much?

Quote: Lee lamented the “cancel culture mob who has actively infiltrated major FOSS projects"

Soon as I read the term "cancel culture" I take Lee to be an entitled, right-wing, USA based, Donald Trump supporter. So it's not surprising people left, or that his actions would make others, like me, consider him a fool.

Not that I've used FreeNode but I can see it now disappearing, not unlike the Titanic.

Insurance startup backtracks on running videos of claimants through AI lie detector

Apart from the USA being the only place that believes lie detectors work, as they have been proven to be rubbish (even in the US)... any 2nd year psychology student should be able to say why this sort of AI will be bad.

To your favourite chat: "What a load of rubbish."

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

I've been using Micro$oft and Micro$sloth for ages. Now, with an expanded character set I've started to use Mi¢ro$oft.

In usage:

Mi¢ro$oft - bringing you cutting edge OS technology from the 60's, only a decade behind linux.

Dot-com price rises on their way over the next four years: ICANN approves Verisign contract, walks off with $20m

And they don't mind slashing .org's community registration remit when there's money to be made for lining their own pockets.

California emits latest layoff statistics. March's numbers are ugly. It's 19,000 total, including many in tech

We'll I'm still getting paid more than I was in Oz

Moved over to Silicon Valley in 2000, just in time for the crash, from Melbourne.

I've had much more interesting jobs than I ever had a chance while back home.

Regular cuts are part of California, a "right to work" state, more like a right to kick you out because the boss has a hangover. But if you're any good you don't have any real issues. And there are so many IT vacancies I don't see anyone being unemployed for a long time, we're all desperate for more people on our teams.

'Tech troll' sues EFF to silence 'Stupid Patent of the Month' blog. Now the EFF sues back

I'm a little surprised that Linked-In wasn't checked in the research. It get to be a better story when the CEO 's only credentials is a Bachelor's in "Real Estate" from a university in Texas (Hondros). This makes me want someone to have the time to resurrect GrokLaw!

LASER RAZOR blunted by KickStarter ban

Back to soap and water.

It shows how much people hate shaving but want a clean shave.

I signed up knowing it was externally powered but believed the money needed would make a viable device in mass production.

Alas, back to the water, soap and a sharp blade for me. Still the modern blades beats the hell out the single blade safety razor I started with and I'm really glad I didn't need to learn how to use a cut-throat razor like my old man showed off with. Yes, he used a safety razor most of the time.

Doctor Who returns to our screens next week – so, WHO is the worst Time Lord of them all?

Errr, have people forgot the abysmal movie with Peter Cushing. A great, great actor but an abysmal movie!

Reckon YOU can write better headlines than us? Great – apply within

Re: MS Word

I suppose OfficeLibre (or OpenOffice) is beyond your price. Is Google's Docs too easy? Then may I suggest spell(1)? Pity there isn't a grammer(1).

I'm a MicroSoft hater for decades, for personal reasons so I couldn't resist the dig at Word.