* Posts by Wayland

897 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Feb 2016

Open source AI makes modern PCs relevant, and subscriptions seem shabby

Wayland

Re: Electrons being pushed

PCs are not the cheapest hobby but they start quite cheap and scale up to not that expensive. You would spend more doing up your bathroom. The fact that the PC is still with us essentially the same as it was 40 years ago is wonderful. AI is yet another thing we can do with it and it encourages hardware upgrades. It really is a Personal Computer unlike a Smartphone which is a person tracking device.

Wayland

Re: Can't happen fast enough

That should be illegal. The government needs to hear you to make sure you're not shouting at your children or complaining about the King.

Millions of mobile phones come pre-infected with malware, say researchers

Wayland

Nice bit of trolling. You got nearly everyone.

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

Wayland

In 1988 I programmed a laser disc player from a computer to make a multimedia experience. Multi Media was a buzz word that had just been invented along with Raves.

Microsoft cries foul over UK gaming deal blocker but it's hard to feel sorry for them

Wayland

Fog of Cloud Gaming

There is a fundamental problem with Cloud Gaming as shown in in the 2009 movie Gamer. It's ping time or latency. It's probably the case that most latency is caused by the IP packets moving through buffers than the physics of the speed of light but it's an insurmountable problem.

Yes it's possible to play games remotely via a terminal, which is what cloud gaming is but it's much better if the game is running on the local hardware.

Google tried to do this with Stadia and have now given up. As far as I can tell they did it well but it was ping that defeated them.

Nostalgic for VB? BASIC is anything but dead

Wayland

This is a very useful article

RAD or Rapid Application Development used to be a very useful way of knocking out a business application soon enough to make it useful. There was a time that the secretary could write a data base in the morning and have it emailed to users by the afternoon with responses coming in the next morning. Very rapid thanks to Lotus Notes. Those days are gone and only highly paid coders can create such things taking them weeks or even months.

I used to rapid develop databases in MS Access which is fine for Windows but deployment is protracted.

It's good to see there is a Delphi alternative but that was never as rapid as MS Access let alone Lotus Notes.

Wayland

Re: Xojo all the way...

Free on the Raspberry PI i read.

The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared 50 years ago this month

Wayland

Imperial Collage London

Back in 1979 I went on a school outing to Imperial Collage London. They were demonstrating two of these PARC machines. They where doing card tricks on screen with a pack of overlapping cards in monochrome. I was very impressed.

It's official: BlackLotus malware can bypass Secure Boot on Windows machines

Wayland

Kaspersky?

Kaspersky? I thought we hate the Russians now. If El Reg is talking to the Russians should they not have their assets frozen?

Wayland

Mossad.

India uses emergency powers to order takedown of BBC documentary

Wayland

Re: Just business

So is Modi Paddington?

Wayland

Re: Whatabout massacres

They only prosecute you if they can tell what you're thinking;

Police: "How did you think your MP would feel when he read your email?"

Suspect: "I thought he would feel angry enough to actually respond to my concerns."

Police: "Banged to rights Sonny Jim, you've just admitted to a crime under the Communications act!"

Wayland

Re: Whatabout massacres

More like the BBC stirring up trouble again. I can appreciate that the PM wants the Beeb to shut up in order to save the country from unrest.

Wayland

Re: Unforgivable!

It would probably be very healthy for people if they could not receive the BBC but banning it is the wrong approach. Just stop paying the TV licence fee and all TV effectively becomes banned for you by your own choice. Save money and brain cells too.

Wayland

Re: Unforgivable!

Gigaclear in Essex? Try Quik Internet. No where near as fast but hardly blocking anything. Also much more reliable than Virgin.

Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs

Wayland

Re: "Malicious software removal tool"

The reality is you need to install Linux and get a firm grip of Windows by running it in a VM. One that you've cloned so you can wind it back if it screws up.

Wayland

Re: "Malicious software removal tool"

You could start using programs that run on Linux and Windows. Once you are happy with those then you can switch to Linux. Simple programs and older XP programs generally work fine on Linux if you install WINE. MS has obviously put some effort into to making sure newer versions of Office don't work on Linux, but the older ones do. The ones this update is trying to stop you using. Everything else will have to go in a VM until you can stop using it. If it requires hardware access then you have a bit more work to do.

MS might be screwing more money out of people but ultimately all their wokeness will make them go broke one day. Already the majority of PC games run on Linux. Not all but the majority.

Wayland

You got a down vote because you said something bad about a leftist.

After long delays, Sapphire Rapids arrives, full of accelerators and superlatives

Wayland

Re: Heating

That could take years to develop. You're basically suggesting a large resistor and ohms law, tricky stuff.

Wayland

Re: Finland

Why burn logs if a sustainable 100 billion transistor chip will do just as well.

Wayland

Re: So let's get this straight

You're forgetting sustainability. Each CPU sustains regular monthly rental fee to Intel for the heated seats and remote door lock features.

Wayland

£50/month forever, that's sustainability for you.

How to track equipped cars via exploitable e-ink platemaker

Wayland

{ Curly Brackets }

So many of the worlds problems could be solved by banning curly brackets. All this code and data written in JAVA and JASON could simply be filtered out. You'd have to write it in BASIC though.

Wayland

Re: Stick them on a Tesla.

I think they start with very good images but run it through a filter to make it look terrible.

Wayland

Re: Solution in search of a problem

There is a potential hook up with Disney. The number plates could show Disney promotions most of the time and numbers only when needed.

Wayland

No, it's completely impossible that anyone could have for seen this. A number plate controlled over a network by computer is far more secure than a normal one because computers.

Wayland

Re: The future

No one would invent money which could have it's face value altered remotely. Who would want that? I trust that CBDC would never be like that because they'd never screw us like that. There has never been a form of money like that, like a voucher that can only be spent in one shop and has an expiry date and cannot be transferred to another person. Thankfully no one is able to think such things.

This is the end, Windows 7 and 8 friends: Microsoft drops support this week

Wayland

Re: Linux obviously!

I'd start by getting Macrum Reflect. That can image your Windows PC to a file that you can boot in VirtualBox or Proxmox. The trick is to install the drivers for the VM before you convert it to a VM. As long as you keep your real machine going until you're happy with the VM you have infinite lives to make this work.

Wayland

Re: Sleeker

Yes the sleekness confused me. Sleeker? They still use the ATX form factor same as Windows 7 computers. I don't think there have been any advances in sleekness unless they mean the advent of the Raspberry PI running Windows.

Wayland

Re: With the passing of Win7, we morn the loss of the last true windows desktop. So long Aero...

There are so many things to maintain on Windows 10 to stop it doing stuff that it's easier just to use Linux Mint.

Wayland

Re: Windows 10 is not a problem

On old hardware there is no advantage to Win 11 over Win 10. For a general purpose computer Windows 7 with a hard drive and 4GB of RAM is fine but that machine really needs 8GB and an SSD to run Windows 10 just as well.

Wayland

If it's not interfacing with special hardware I'd suggest trying the application under WINE using Play On Linux to select the WINE version. WINE can often achieve better Windows compatibility than actual Windows.

Wayland

Re: Upgraded my Surface Pro to Windows 10...

You probably should use Windows 8.1 for that machine. It has a certain 'charm'.

Wayland

Re: Micro$oft update$

Upgrade the RAM to 8GB, fit an SSD and upgrade the CPU to 4 core 8 thread. Yeah, get a new computer.

Wayland

Swings and roundabouts. I remember re-installing and firing up an old Cobalt Raq server. Within 20 minutes of it going online it was hacked. The fact is if it's doing something on line it needs to be up to date or all the old tricks will work.

Wayland

Offline games running on Windows 7 will have been accommodated under Linux by now. If it's available on Steam even if it's not officially supported it will run normally with no effort on your part.

Linux kernel 6.2 promises multiple filesystem improvements

Wayland

Maybe 10 years ago RAM would be a problem. These days what are you going to use your massive RAM for if not caching the file system?

Rackspace rocked by ‘security incident’ that has taken out hosted Exchange services

Wayland

Re: Business Continuity

The great thing about The Cloud is they can host a huge number of customers on relatively little hardware. If you bought enough hardware yourself you'd really not be using it to it's full potential. However it's not a huge cost to the business if you run your own gear and you can avoid these sort of problems or at least have that option within your own hands.

Wayland

Re: It's all down

So it takes half a day before you learn it's failed?

Wayland

Yeah but Exchange can do "Away" emails, surely a little down time is acceptable for the ability to do those?

Version 252 of systemd, as expected, locks down the Linux boot process

Wayland

Re: For a second....

>I think it's a bit pithy to say we're confused by "fall"

More than 70 people agreed that they read "The fall of systemd"

That indicates two things, autumn was the word that should have been used and people are anticipating the fall of systemd.

Wayland

Re: For a second....

We all hate SystemD and just like we hate the French there is no cause.

Good news for UK tech contractors as govt repeals IR35 tax rules

Wayland

Re: Good news and a triumph for common sense

Yes I agree. When I was contracting in the 1990's the client would hand me a purchase order with a brief description of what they wanted done. We had already worked out a spec and a quote. I would complete the task and invoice them. I did have an hourly rate but that was just used to quote the fixed price.

Breaking the contract into individual tasks worked really well. They only ever got invoiced for something that actually worked. They could see what the money was being spent on. I did very very well out of it too because different departments would write me a purchase order for the thing they wanted. I had other staff work on those at the same time I was working on some. Many purchase orders on the go at the same time.

Ultimately a new IT manager did not like this and switched it to an employee type status where I just billed for hours. This did reduce the expenditure but ultimately made me IR35 and prevented me from doing several jobs at once. I stopped contracting for them after that.

IR35 stopped my main business. I don't know if it hurt the client, I would assume so because it became harder for departments to get IT work done because it had to be done by an employee.

Wayland

Re: Let me get this straight

IR35 when it arrived at the turn of the century was very onerous for clients because they thought they would be liable for the contractors tax bill, they were not. Gradually through the changes they started actually making the client liable.

With this latest change (now revoked) which made them undeniably liable for the contractor's tax bill, just like an employee.

Wayland

Re: Excellent

Don't use the tax system as an incentive system. Keep it very simple then it's easier to enforce. End result less tax dodging and more profit all round.

Wayland

Re: No fan of Bolsheviks

The last 10 years may have been a left wing dystopia but that was the Tories.

Deluge of of entries to Spamhaus blocklists includes 'various household names'

Wayland

Open Resolver Public DNS problem, 8.8.8.8

I run my own email server on a Debian Linux machine I built myself. In the DNS resolvers file I set 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 for domain name lookup. I thought that was pretty standard but one of my clients with this setup on his server started getting the occasional bounce when when people were sending to him. Spamhaus were saying in the bounce;

Service unavailable; Client host [18x.xxx.xx.xxx] blocked using

zen.spamhaus.org; Error: open resolver;

https://www.spamhaus.org/returnc/pub/74.63.25.239 (in reply to RCPT TO

command)

It turns out the solution is simple, remove all the resolvers from /etc/resolv.conf

The server has bind so will do it's own resolving and apparently Spamhaus approve.

I still don't comprehend what the problem is. Maybe someone could explain.

Cloudflare explains how it managed to break the internet

Wayland

Re: CDNs are evil!

IPFS, or Inter Planetary File System would have routed round the problem if used as a CDN.

Turing Pi 2 crowdfunding goal smashed within a day

Wayland

Re: I'm guessing that...

I expect it will run Doom.

Heresy: Hare programming language an alternative to C

Wayland

Re: Can someone explain the advantages in the language please?

In an object orientated language where basically a procedure is used to add data to a storage structure that can check how full it is. That would throw an error rather than over fill it. In C you create a memory area with memory allocation or a static and then pass the pointer to this. There is nothing about the pointer which says how big the memory area is therefore no way to ensure you don't over fill it.

C is a stupid language in this respect.