Posts by Wayland 923 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Feb 2016
"Applying Moore's Law, that's about 25 cycles of exponential performance improvements. I.e. today it took 4 days, but 18 months ago it would have taken 8."
That's pretty good. The fastest hashing AMD GPU 18 months ago was an R9 390x with half the hash rate of the VEGA which came out about then. VEGA also uses about half the power to work twice as fast.
There are farms of these VEGA cards mining crypto. Even a 4 card rig could probably do it in a day.
"Why are people running the old one?" in the article it said that the new VM may not run on the old hardware. Yes people should have spotted this coming but probably were timing it with their hardware refresh cycle. 'when we get the new hardware we will install the new VM ware'. Microsoft has forced their hand.
I expect they will be able to fix this by fitting new CPUs but it's a real hassle.
"Because Businesses run on Word, Excel and PowerPoint."
People love their MS Outlook 2010 even though it's a really poor IMAP client compared to say Thunderbird. Familiarity has locked them in more than any actual functionality.
There are features of MS Office that if you need them then you have no choice. For most people these probably aren't features they have ever used. Look how much people seem to be able to do on Smartphones these days. I personally feel like the phone is far too basic compared to any personal computer.
"When was the last time an important customer (not like you or me) ditched Windows in disgust and sent a note to Microsoft to let them know about it ?"
Pretty much everyone who surfs the Internet does so on a non-microsoft OS.
Many people using Windows don't need to, their computer came like that.
I downloaded a little Autocad DXF-PDF tool so my client can see Autocad drawings as PDF. My client does not use Autocad which I think only works on Windows but this little Windows tool downloaded, installed and ran on my Linux Mint PC just like it would on a Windows PC. WINE did it all without me doing anything.
It is the software developers keeping people on Windows but they don't even have to learn Linux to write programs for Linux. They just gotta make sure WINE can handle them.
Windows is living on it's fading legacy. Windows 7 is the last Windows for many people.
"Are you too young to remember Vista? Or the original release of Win'95?"
With Vista we still had XP and then Windows 7. With Windows 10 we have Windows 7 support ending soon and no sign that Windows 10 will ever be fixed. It's well established that Windows 10 works this way. Get some updates and loads of things stop working and require time and effort to fix. You can't even control updates any more.
Windows 95 was a massive upgrade from Windows 3.1 for workgroups. but was eventually replaced by the NT4 line of OS.
Windows 10 offers nothing that cannot be done in Windows 7 except those things imposed on us. It takes away things which used to work fine such as storing files on a LAN server, much more difficult and frequent problems.
Now they are trying to screw it up some more.
It's interesting how a company is an entity in it's own right like a person but IR35 is to undermine this.
A company is able to offer it's resources to the client such as computers and software it owns as well as perhaps more than one person able to work on the project.
The problem is the client really just wants a talented person to come and be an employee for a while.
With Windows 10 the drive is often encrypted.
If it was by default them most people would encrypt their laptop drive. Different on a server as someone has to be there to unlock it, which they already are with a laptop.
The desktop is less of a problem since less opportunity to steal it. The password in RAM is a lesser problem with the desktop because you cannot suspend to RAM and then steal it.
"I know plenty of people who are on the Aspergers' spectrum and who are perfectly social, friendly people without the sort of ideas that Stallman has not been able to shake his whole life." hardly an argument, there are plenty of smokers who live to 100.
"Since it is fraud: why not also report it to the police."
That idea is not as stupid as it first appears. The police have a sworn under oath to God and the Queen to issue the victim with a crime number. This is then an official record that it was reported. It will then come in handy when you take the case further.
It seems to be a thing with organizations these days to assume you're only in it for selfish reasons. They will whittle down your complaint to just that which affected you personally. I think that's why so many complaints we read about are were the person was traumatized. It's the only way you can get them to listen is if you threaten to sue them for mental anguish or racism or something else that's trendy. Sue them for money and they give you your £15 back.
The biggest selling point of the new TLDs is not to widen the choice but to increase the risk to existing businesses. The idea was isellfridges.co.uk would have to buy isellfridges.uk isellfridges.biz isellfridges.me and so on seemingly without limit. They shot themselves in the foot because in the old days you might have bought 3 others if you were paranoid but there are so many now that it's not a viable option. No one is going to buy isellfridges.tv and claim they are the real one when isellfridges.co.uk exists.
I would say it's OK to operate this as a business but as the comment below puts it they are operating it like a mafia. As well as the service which we are happy to pay for they are generating situations where we are forced to buy something we don't want just so no one else can have it.
It could be worse. They could put your domain name up for auction to the highest bidder. There you are running your shop but every few months you have to out bid your competitors for your domain name.
In principle it would be nice to shorten co.uk to .uk and that's how it was marketed. I thought that 123-reg would simply mirror anything I did on .co.uk into .uk without me having to do anything. I thought that practically they were the same domain.
It turns out they are entirely separate and the .uk names were mass generated based on .co.uk domains. I've not seen them do this before except when you seek a name and it offers alternative top levels like .eu and .biz.
It really is nothing more than a scam based on the threat of losing the name. Had they never created .uk in the first place no one would have missed it.
Yes they made it easy to find oneself owning a .uk domain name for free. It made sense to stop cybersitting but should one actually make use of this handy free service? I have one customer who preferred the .uk name but generally .co.uk is an established tradition. Now do I let them lapse and hand them to the cybersitters or do I keep them?
I think you need to update yourself on that. Your IP maybe dynamic but your ISP provides a hostname to that IP. That hostname is not dynamic, it's yours, you can use it in place of having a static public IP which is handy. It also means since they can idividually ID your connection they can gather more and more info about you from where that hostname pops up. You will see it in the headers of emails so anyone will access to emails will be able to build a picture.
"2) They are the only game in town for most businesses. Linux just isn't there yet for most of them."
It's a case of weighing up the costs and benefits. For some people Windows is the only choice but even for them they may not have to use Win 10. For other people it maybe that they think it will be too hard to move to Linux but it would actually be worth it.
When it comes to working with other people then it depends if you're calling the shots. If you can say "We're using Libre Office, get used to it" then other people can fairly easily switch to Libre whilst staying on Windows.
Effort needs to be put into WINE to make important programs work perfectly. The developers themselves could do this more easily than a 3rd party. However I suspect there is some kind of Microsoft Developer lock-in that prevents them from making their DLLs available under Linux WINE.
"They don't what you to put your data on the HDD but in their cloud."
This is shown by how hard it is to network Windows 10 compared to Windows 7.
1. In Windows 7 they have something called Home Groups, not something I use but it's there to assist normal users with file sharing over the LAN. They've got rid of it in 10. I don't even think WORKGROUPs work any more.
2. If Windows 10 machine crashes or is turned off when running then the next boot it has a major fit. It will attempt to repair and then fail, losing users data and OS. This was a problem in the days of DOS but was fixed with NTFS so why is it back again?
"Type anything you want, you can't break it." was true of the home PCs where you could not save data or programs accidentally.
I think you can actually set fire to some computers by typing something. Like a crypto-mining rig that needs an instruction to lower the power usage before hammering the GPUs at 100%.
...because preventing misuse of person data was why it was created.
Yes the companies being scammed were bad before GDPR but it actually gives the scammers a tool. As explained in the article there is pressure on the companies to comply which would not have been there so much before GDPR.
It's a mindset. In order to be worthy of benefits you need to feel entitled to them and know that there is a game to be played to get them. It sounds like she approached the system in the wrong frame of mind.
She should at lease have expressed how difficult getting to the assessment would be for her. Explaining that although she could make herself do these things that it took a lot out of her and she needed several days to recover. Also that she would need to take extra painkillers to do so and that these affect her ability to think straight and that she is not normally this ditzy. Gotta lay it on thick but honestly. No point in putting on a brave face and hiding the problems.
I reckon if some of the DNS servers started supporting a 2nd TLD system in conjunction with the current one then the porn sites could use it and the football TV piracy servers. The people interested in those subjects can solve any technical issue if their favourite sport is involved.
Where Tim Apple sells easy to use smartphones to lefties Su AMD sells kick arse processors to computer builders from corporates to basement dwelling techies.
The techies have mostly replaced their i5 systems with RYZEN 5 systems. The latest RYZEN are superb but not so much better than the original that you need to upgrade.
The lefties continue to put their smartphones in their back pockets and then sit on them, thereby keeping Tim Apple happy.
The reason I say Apple users are lefties is because right wing content does not show up reliably on an iPhone. The Telegram App for instance is censored and you can use Apple for Cryptocurrency. OK so there are ways round these problems but you don't have these problems on a PC.
"The idea behind languages like rust is you accept that mistakes happen and any performance hit you take is a worthwhile tradeoff for less debugging and reduce risk of these catastrophic bugs."
I hope that's not the idea behind Rust. There is no reason why correctly written code should run slower than buggy code. The code should not be bug fixing itself at run time, it should be correct at compile time.
I remember using C on a system that did not have memory allocation malloc(). Programs were far more reliable with static structures and arrays. Systems would run for 12 months or more and never crash or need a reboot.
Pointers and memory allocation are the devil.
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