Posts by jzl

After-dinner Mint? Stylish desktop finale released as last of the 17 line

Re: Fails to mention blistering fast install time of Linux Mint 17.3

@RIBrsiq That's a strange tic you've got there, adding "CE" to the end of years.

Re: Another highly satisfied Mint user here...

Can you find an open source alternative to Excel that really - really - runs VBA macros? And an open source alternative to Bloomberg would be nice too.

Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!

What is time but the passing of events?

A multi-core Skylake Xeon is something like a thousand times as fast as the Pentium in the article.

So by one measure of it, a modern Xeon server reaches the same uptime in 6.5 days, give or take.

</FatuousComment>

The ball's in your court, Bezos: Falcon 9 lands after launching satellites

Re: Iron Man vs Bezos

15 minute shipments, anywhere in the world.

Re: Iron Man vs Bezos

Bezos's accomplishment was impressive, for sure, although it's important to remember that the man is a bona fide independent billionaire. It's reasonably easy to do things when you don't have commercial constraints.

Aside from the massive technical differences, which you alluded to, what strikes me is that Musk has achieved this on a commercial launch with a company that actually has customers and makes money.

I also happen to think that Bezos is a total dick, but that's just personal.

Re: but how much re-use can you get?

The fuel is kerosene (jet fuel) and the oxidiser is, well, pure oxygen. So there's a certain risk with it but nothing that a pump, a good wash and a bit of care can't handle.

Watched it live last night

From the UK too. I'm knackered.

Wow, what a nailbiter. Crazy. Just crazy. If I had a religious bone in my body, I'd be watching for holes in Musk's hands right now.

SpaceX starts nine-day countdown to first flight of the new Falcon

Raining on the parade

Amusingly, here's an earlier article talking about exactly that from the same author.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/20/us_air_force_x37b_space_plane_in_orbit/

Meet ARM1, grandfather of today's mobe, tablet CPUs – watch it crunch code live in a browser

Shrinkage

By my reckoning, you could fit the entire ARM1 processor in the footprint of just one of its original transistors if you manufactured it at 14nm.

Australian cops rush to stop 2AM murder of … a spider

Yeah but

In fairness, have you seen Australian spiders?

Pope instructs followers to put the iPhone away during dinner

Re: Agreed

@David 45, well done, you. You're clearly a man of superior virtue and worth. Bravo.

And you say you enjoy high-end quality hi-fi? I'd expect nothing less of such a sterling member of society.

Pompous twit.

Re: A little obvious

There is good rigorous evidence that shared family mealtimes improve a number of childhood outcomes. If you don't have a shared mealtime, I would definitely recommend that you consider it.

See https://www.human.cornell.edu/pam/outreach/upload/Family-Mealtimes-2.pdf for example.

Re: The Pope

"Most of them, especially the children DIDN'T sign up....they were indoctrinated from birth"

While I agree with you, our society generally says adults are adults. Either we accept that they have the ability to consciously change their beliefs, or we drop the silly fiction that adults are responsible for all their own actions all the time. Can't have both.

Re: The Pope

"There is little difference between this and what goes on in Muslim Madrassas."

Don't see the Catholics instructing kids that Western education is evil, that the only thing worth doing is memorising a book, that women are property, or that waging neverending war against the infidel is the duty of everyone.

Aside from that, yeah, just like the madrassas.

Re: The Pope

He's not dictating to people. Last time I checked he had no actual power outside the Vatican. He's dictating to his followers and they signed up for it.

Don't like the pope telling you what to do? Stop being a catholic. Simple.

It's come to this for IBM: Watson is now a gimmick app on the iPhone

Re: Lego

Lego is a mass noun. You can have an amount of lego, but not a quantity. The unit of lego (to turn it into a count noun) is the brick or piece.

A large amount of lego is composed of many lego bricks.

The smallest amount of lego is one lego piece.

Etc.

Lego

Bloody Americans, coming over here, stealing our women, incorrectly forming plurals from our mass nouns....

BlackBerry Priv: After two weeks on test, looks like this is a keeper

Meh

Still prefer the iPhone. Less complicated.

Intel Xeon chip ban? Pfeh. China triples top 500 supercomputer tally

The tyranny of the discontinuous mind

What is a supercomputer anyway?

I'd bet that Google's compute power makes Tianhe-2 look like a pocket calculator, but they're not saying and - for reasons that escape me - large cloud facilities don't appear to count as supercomputers.

Which is odd because Google is demonstrably capable of running arbitrarily complex compute loads at enormous scale on their infrastructure.

All this is by way of saying that an increasingly large proportion of the innovation in high performance computing is happening in areas that aren't even recognised as such.

Aircraft laser strikes hit new record with 20 incidents in one night

Re: mirror

Defeated with a mirror? But, but, but, but that's HACKING!

Thanks for playing: New Linux ransomware decrypted, pwns itself

On Linux?

I thought that was secure?

(joke. JOKE...)

Microsoft capitulates, announces German data centres

Re: How is this different?

The devil will be in the detail, but if the setup is done in such a way that T-Systems's permission is required under German law, then it should be safe as Microsoft Germany will not be able to break German law to satisfy Microsoft US's requests.

The devil is in the detail though. I'd be interested to know how they intend to prove compliance.

iPhone, Windows 10, lonely nights – sound like you? Dump Siri and have a date with Cortana

Re: Will the boobs attract us????

You know that women are people too, right?

Hmmm

The advantage of Siri is that it's baked in. It runs by holding down a button wherever you are, or saying "Hey Siri". It has access to the device's core functionality.

Cortana is going to be an app that you'll have to open. Basically, a voice web search app.

Met makes fourth TalkTalk arrest, this time a London teen

Re: How much evidence do they expect to find?

People like to boast. They probably told people.

Alumina in glass could stop smartphones cracking up

Boring

Tell me when someone invents a time travelling warp speed spaceship and uses this glass to make a whale tank.

Google roasts critical twin Android bugs in new Marshmallow OS

Re: Better to be broke than sorry ...

I understand the SD card point, but replacement batteries?

Really?

External USB batteries are so much more convenient - they are potentially much larger, they can be charged directly, and you don't have to power down the phone or fiddle with the case to use them.

Re: Really?

"It is up to customers to vote with their feet and just walk away if they don't like an OEM's patching policy"

Really? What percentage of Android consumers do you think are honestly tech-savvy enough to even know what a patching policy is, let alone have any idea before purchase about their vendor's policy?

None. Or as close to none as makes a rounding error.

Google should be ensuring compliance from end to end as part of their CTS and play store policy.

Really?

Google haven't squashed the bug. All they've done is patch it on a handful of phones and update the source tree.

Until they can properly organise a centralised patching system for all OEM's, they don't get to say they've squashed any bugs.

Patch this braXen bug: Hypervisor hole lets guest VMs hijack hosts

Re: C

If you think that algorithms are the domain of libraries, or that they're not relevant in day-to-day development, then think again.

Re: C

C and C++ are not *very* different. What an asinine thing to say. First, C++ is a superset of C. Second, the reason that C++ is dangerous come down to point 1.

Inferring that I know nothing about them from what I said is ludicrous. I have twenty years of professional development experience under my belt, a number of them in C++. I know what I'm talking about. Also, you might want to look up the phrase "Ad hominem attack" on Google.

If you want two very different languages, how about C and Haskell?

Re: C

I'm not exactly saying the language is "at fault". I'm not even sure that "at fault" is a meaningful concept.

I'm just saying that most of the major security flaws uncovered in code are down to two specific things: buffer overruns and pointer mismanagement. No matter how bad a developer is, most languages don't allow the first and make the second much less likely.

It's not like I hate C. I don't. I enjoy writing in it - it's powerful, expressive and fun. I just don't think the risks of using it in production environments are worth it.

Re: C

My concern there is that any solution which requires that people change their behaviour en masse is doomed to failure. So "having people create *easily* repeatable tests" is doomed.

If people were going to do that, they already would. Some do, lots don't and probably never will.

As for the idea of D being not suitable for use after 1999, well that's just silly. D is in strong, active development.

"C is the worst programming language, except for all the others."

Most modern programming languages make it essentially impossible to create a buffer overrun vulnerability, for example. All languages are not equal.

Re: C

"But the primary purpose of a handgun is to kill people."

Well, as we all know, C is short for "Confuse". The primary purpose of C is to confuse developers and produce security holes. Software is a side effect of code written in C.

Also, I wasn't comparing guns and C. I was comparing argument styles. You might want to brush up on your language comprehension skills.

Re: C

You people defending C remind me of Americans defending guns.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people.

C doesn't cause security holes, people cause security holes.

Whatever.

Re: C

If something as difficult and rocket-sciency as a hypervisor, presumably written by the best of the best of the best, can still contain these sorts of problems, what hope for the vast bulk of C software?

Most of which - unlike, perhaps, a hypervisor - could happily be written in any number of safe languages.

As for the hypervisor, well what about D? It's a mature, robust language. Or if you insist on going all dawn-of-computing, how about Ada?

Re: C

And for non-OS kernel use cases, for the most part, performance comes from good algorthims and good algorithms come from developer productivity.

Re: C

D?

Re: C

"But it's not the language, it's the bad developers!" they cry.

Fine, whatever, but does it matter what the cause is? Safe libraries for C have been around for a very long time. Why hasn't the situation improved yet? If we could fix the bad developers, we would have already done so. We can't. So let's engineer it so they can't do so much harm.

C

C is like heroin. Powerful, addictive, incredibly dangerous and users will go to any extremes to keep on doing it despite the costs and the damage.

C (++) needs to die.

We're not killing Chrome OS ... not until 2020, anyway – says Google

Chromium

Chrome may be dying, but Chromium could yet continue to live.

Deutsche Bank to axe 'excessively complex' IT, slash 9,000 jobs

Re: Colin Computer Scientist comes crawling from Uni.

I've met him and his clones several hundred times in my investment banking development career.

Raspberry Pi grows the pie with new deal allowing custom recipes

Charity

Isn't the Raspberry Pi Foundation supposed to be an educational charity? This seems to be some way from their original remit.

Oracle's Larry Ellison claims his Sparc M7 chip is hacker-proof – Errr...

Re: Can we ditch the silly political correctness in reg articles

@Anonymous Coward

OK, even though you're arguing against me I'm giving you an upvote. Well argued and I like the way you brought virtue signalling in.

Re: Can we ditch the silly political correctness in reg articles

That's not political correctness. It's just not. You have a misogyny problem.

99.9% of hackers are not men. Most surveys put it at 85% at most.

So you'd expect to see at least 1/8 articles referring to "she". But then given that the human population is 50% women, why should the default be "he"?

And it's not going to get any better all the time there are grumpy, sexist trolls like you in the industry.

Re: More Bandaids from America

"in the hands of competent programmers".. There, that's the bad assumption right there.

Firstly, it's not just incompetent programmers that are prone to fits of forgetfulness and/or stupidity.

Secondly, many - perhaps even most - organisations do not exclusively employ only competent programmers. Clearly.

If they did, we'd never hear about buffer overrun exploits, would we? But we do hear about them. So something needs to change. If we can't change the people - and it appears that we can't seem to manage that - then maybe we need to get defensive with the technology instead?

Finally, with W10, Microsoft’s device strategy makes sense

Markets?

Never understood analysts who talk of markets, segments, partners and the like. You're over complicating it.

It's all about product. Either you sell stuff, people buy it and you make money, or you don't. Microsoft clearly believe they can have a good chance of selling stuff. Hence, they're making stuff.

Let's see if they're right.

Got an Apple Mac, iThing? Update it right now – there's a shedload of security holes fixed

Just read your "Acme Splaffer" thing. You have waaaaaay too much free time.