Posts by Sykowasp

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Re: Eh?

Unwanted insults/verbal assault based upon a person's physical characteristics.

I.e., if you use them against someone, you've clearly already lost the argument.

gimp is a stupid name for a premier piece of linux software.

AMD agrees to cough up $35-a-chip payout over eight-core Bulldozer advertising fiasco

Re: What does that mean for current lineup?

Nope, those are clearly full cores and the interconnect between them doesn't change a thing. Also the performance is good.

Re: Advertising

TBH in this case 8 core was fair - it did have 8 integer cores. It just had the module design where two of these were paired with a lot of shared front-end and back-end, and shared FPU. The multi-thread scaling (let's ignore that single threaded performance was, let's say, 'poor') was pretty good, at a time when Intel barely got anything from SMT, AMD was getting 80%.

This is just a shut-up-and-go-away payment. But AMD did leave themselves open with this design and how they marketed it.

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

You can't have a fascist police state with the plebs having encrypted communications.

BOFH: On a sunny day like this one, the concrete dries so much more quickly

3000 quid back in 2004, that would be at least 1000 pints, over 250 work days, and 2 BOFHs, is 2 pints per day, each.

So there should be a few more dodgy entries in the financial database IMO. Clearly they should have put the Post Its under the Blue Posts, and the Staples at The Gun.

DeepNude deep-nuked: AI photo app stripped clothes from women to render them naked. Now, it's stripped from web

I don't get it.

It's not undressing the woman pictured. It's just applying some AI painting algorithm that knows a lot about flesh tones and female body parts to render a potential naked body for the woman. What's the flipping point? What do you get out of this? Just find a similar looking woman on one of those naughty video sites and let off your incel issues there instead.

What ever happened to the old fashioned sneaking around the bushes outside their house with a camera eh? Or the more modern Drone with Camera outside Bedroom Window? Sheesh! People these days! No get up and go.

Imagine being charged to take a lunch break... even if you didn't. Welcome to the world of these electronics assembly line workers

Re: "the cost of which would be automatically taken from their wages"

That'll be what post-Brexit Britain ends up like, for workers rights versus giant bastard businesses.

This company was banking billions each year, and didn't have the common decency to pay for their workers' lunchbreaks (or indeed give decent breaks in the first place, 30 minutes is a joke, I wonder how much holiday these workers got? Annual bonus?).

I can say this quite safely with this article as evidence to back me up. Tyco is a business run by utter bastards.

Open-source chat plat toasts rival after picking up $50m in funding: 'The better Slack does, the better Mattermost does'

The key feature is being able to host it on the premises, rather than relying on a cloud hosted (usually in the US) service.

Mattermost is okay, to be fair. It could do with some more theming/font/configuration, and better/simpler threading/conversations but it does the job.

IT pro screwed out of unused vacation pay, bonus by HPE after judge rules: The law is a mess but it's still the law

Americans loves being slaves.

That's all I can take from that.

What's the point of living to work when you have no time off to have a proper holiday?

[Non-Ruling-Class] Americans Are Slaves. Prove me wrong.

Are you sure you've got a floppy disk stuck in the drive? Or is it 100 lodged in the chassis?

Re: One, OK, hundred, I have my doubts

More like 1mm per floppy, for those old 5.25 inchers.

Also, if there was an empty drive bay above the HDD bay they could easily have fitted in there.

Also, I'm certain after 30 years there's a certain amount of exaggeration in this story. It's probably more likely to be 20 - 30 floppies.

Samsung slings the skinny on its 12GB GötterDRAMmerung for next-gen smartmobes

Android Q has a desktop mode, albeit it might be ready until Android R or later. Obviously some Android front-ends already support this, but having it officially in the OS and therefore supported by developers will be the game changer.

I can see a future where docked mobiles replace casual laptop purchases. And this will be used to justify the higher mobile phone cost - you don't need that laptop anymore! Saves you $400-$1000 on a new laptop!

UK's ICO slaps £120k fines on Arron Banks' insurance biz and Leave.EU campaign

Re: No Complaints?

Yes, she did. If that doesn't count as a complaint then what does?

Also her data got into their systems from using an insurance price comparison tool, so how she ever gave permission to the terms and conditions supposedly applied is beyond me.

This is a very small fine, especially if they did abuse data received for price comparison purposes only.

Ofcom: More spectrum for all the good boys and girls. Except you, EE. You've had your fill

And this is presumably why EE are so rubbish indoors - they only have 10MHz of low-frequency spectrum, despite having loads of higher frequency spectrum.

The winners of the old TV spectrum will have some pretty good penetration into buildings and also long distance.

Space policy boffin: Blighty can't just ctrl-C, ctrl-V plans for Galileo into its Brexit satellite

Re: Strangely in the last week or so....

Tomorrow we will find out from the EU courts whether the UK can revoke Article 50.

The current ruling is expected to be Yes, But ...

Where the Buts are

* Full agreement of the EU parliament leaders (not the nations themselves)

* Likely some terms and conditions (no re-invoking Article 50 for N years ; payment for certain EU costs incurred at a state level)

* We would retain everything we had before (veto, rebate, etc)

Yes, there's plenty of Galileo satellites up there providing a 1cm accurate signal. I think there are some more to be launched to complete the constellation, but we are pretty much pulling out in the final straight of the race.

As Wikipedia says: "As of July 2018, 26 of the planned 30 active satellites are in orbit.[8][9] Galileo started offering Early Operational Capability (EOC) on 15 December 2016,[1] providing initial services with a weak signal, and is expected to reach Full Operational Capability (FOC) in 2019.[10] The complete 30-satellite Galileo system (24 operational and 6 active spares) is expected by 2020.[11]"

I'm so so sick of unicorn based politics these days.

What a meth: Woman held for 3 months after cops mistake candy floss for hard drugs

Well if the police thought that a $1M bond was required for this charge, then it should go both ways - their mistake should cost them $1M. Maybe that would make them think first.

Also this 'phishing' vehicle search seems horribly suspect to me in the first place. They had no reasonable basis to perform a vehicle search, but maybe Americans don't have any personal rights anymore in their nigh-on police state these days.

Big Q. Tch, what could have persuaded Intel to bring forward 5G chip production six months?

I'll believe this when I see it.

Just because there is demand for unicorns doesn't mean that they exist.

No silicon shown either - just photoshops. Qualcomm has been showing working silicon and working devices for many months now (remember Qualcomm put the non-5G modems on the main SoC so the lack of multimode is far less than Intel's claims).

To enable this product to occur, they need a working 10nm-ish process. It's a huge risk to make it on their own. Therefore I predict this is either 14nm Intel, or TSMC/Samsung 7nm.

Decoding the Chinese Super Micro super spy-chip super-scandal: What do we know – and who is telling the truth?

Re: 'None of the actors can be taken at face value

With silicon thinning (already used for HBM stacks, for example), you could easily stick the silicon into the motherboard substrate, between standard layers. The bulge would be imperceptible, and the thin silicon might not register for x-rays or other hardware scanning solutions.

I presume this chip is installed onto a serial data link to the flash memory, and on power on it intercepts the serial bitstream from the flash, and adds enough to install its payload.

The hardware security solution to this is on-board flash and memory on the server management processor, preferably on the same die, made with security hardening techniques.

Sync your teeth into power browser Vivaldi's largest update so far

Installed to try it out, and it somehow deleted all of my stored logins in Chrome. What's that about?!

Buried in the hype, one little detail: Amazon's Alexa-on-a-chip could steal smart home market

What's so amazing about a small cheap chip or module incorporating wifi/bluetooth, a simple low power processor, some DSPs, maybe a Neural Net accelerator, I/Os for microphones and speaker, SPI/I2C/UART to connect to the rest of the system, some standalone firmware to provides a high level interface, and code samples on how to use that high level interface?

Vodafone hounds Czech customers for bills after they were brute-forced with Voda-issued PINs

Well, that's me not considering Vodafone for any future switch.

Such weak security arrangements are simply not acceptable. You don't allocate '1234' as a pin. You don't allow '1234' to be set as a pin. Where is another piece of information, such as the mentioned email address, or a standard password, or even those crappy questions about your first school or pet?

For Vodafone to hide behind its ToS when it is to blame, to save a few grand, is simply disgusting.

Your Twitter app stopped working? Here's why

Well my ancient Tweetcaster application on Android is still working in terms of showing a timeline in reverse chronological order (although I guess the live streaming is dead now).

And that's what I want - a plain, reverse chronological ordered timeline of all my followed tweets. TBH I don't care if Twitter put ads in that timeline, just that it's in order, and where I got to is maintained, so I can dip in and catch up a little whilst on the toilet or in the pub waiting.

Also the font has to be small, and it's got to be light on dark theme.

What if tech moguls brewed real ale?

Ales:

"Continuous Drinkegration" - 5% IPA

"Wobbly Vector" - 6% extra strong ale

"Java 8" - 8% Coffee Porter

Ciders:

"Agile Scrumpy" - 7% Cider (or maybe "Scrumpy Master" is a better name)

"Quad (apple/pear) Core" - 4% Session Cider/Perry

Have YOU had your breakfast pint? Boffins confirm cheeky daily tipple is good for you

What measure of 'drink' did these Americans use?

What is a drink? Why can't they use units like every other sane study?

I'm going to assume it's a British Imperial pint of a DIPA such as https://gipsyhillbrew.com/beers/hepcat-hepcat/

That is about 4 units.

So I need to drink 8 to 12 units a day to improve my health. Maybe I'll skip a day here and there, and move the units to another day, I'm sure that is recommended too.

No lie-in this morning? Thank the Moon's gravitational pull

Just think, in another 1.4B years the day could be 30 hours long! Perfect!

Even waiting another 400M years would get me another two hours in bed.

What's up with that ZX Spectrum reboot? Still no console

You would think they would ship it without any of the contentious games then, as these are easily updatable later on, I would hope.

The truth would appear to be from the facts we have: there are no devices.

Not even a photo recently of the stacks of boxes of devices ready to ship!

Did you guess 2019 for Intel's 10nm chip ramp up? Congratulations

Re: Wow

Intel is 3 years late on 10nm now. It looks like it may be 4 years late if it isn't fixed by mid 2019 - it's clear from the CEO's comments that there is little confidence that they can fix the yield issues easily, even though he claims they understand it. This is very similar to how Intel gained that 3 year lead in the first place - when everyone else got stuck at 28nm for a couple more years than they would have hoped for.

Their statements already clarified that they have to do 10nm before 7nm, because of sunk costs and their fab upgrade methodology. Going to 7nm would just introduce even more risk, if they cannot multi-pattern 10nm reliably still, as 7nm requires even more of that.

Intel have historically used their fab advantage to push their CPU clocks higher than the competition (or lower power consumption), whilst having good [CPU] designs. This is evidently no longer the situation. In the future they may make up lost ground, but right now it looks like they will be behind in volume for a year (versus TSMC) and likely come in behind Samsung and GlobalFoundries as well. Also note that gate and interconnect width is not everything there is to a process - Intel use simple 1D routing that costs density even though the individual transistors are very nice, and there are other aspects as well.

TSMC's 7nm looks very strong by the way, there is no guarantee that Intel's 10nm is going to equal it, never mind beat it.

Data watchdog fines Brit council £120k for identifying 943 owners of vacant property

Re: Excel

Does Excel have an "Export only directly visible data in this view" option, or similar?

"Pivot Tables are Bad for FoI Requests" is the lesson learned here.

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, off you go: Snout of UK space forcibly removed from EU satellite trough

Re: The Swiss are in it

The Swiss option is not on the table for Brexit negotiations because of Theresa May (and the far-right Brexit mob) and her red lines.

Leaving the EU, the Single Market and the Customs Union makes us a third party to all these.

Once the UK goes beyond the point of no return at the end of March next year, we will finally see how the EU treats a third party in negotiations. It won't be pretty for the UK.

Pharma bro Martin Shkreli to miss 2024 Paris Olympics

Diddums.

Sueball smacks AMD over processor chip security flaw silence

AMD's share price went up since the disclosures, because Intel's performance was affected to a far greater degree, especially in the profitable server market.

AMD's Spectre v2 firmware is an optional thing for paranoid users who want to be definitely non-affected. It's a peace of mind thing.

Responsible disclosure of security flaws is more important than alerting shareholders at the first possible opportunity.

This needs to be thrown out now.

As does any aspects of cases against Intel that are whining about the non-disclosure. However the performance complaints and devaluation of share price complaints here are valid.

UK's Just Eat faces probe after woman tweets chat-up texts from 'delivery guy'

Re: A single case of a creepy...

Many restaurants are family businesses, and the delivery drivers are often related to the restaurant owners.

I think the only real solution here is that the visibility of the phone number is restricted, and communications should go via Just Eat (or HH, etc) - texts if late, etc, or a SIP call routed via Just Eat when the driver needs to find the address.

However, the driver still knows the customer's address. But that's a lot more effort than trying to get a date by messaging all the women you deliver to that you fancy. But there is always someone, somewhere...

Boffins foresee most software written by machines in 2040

If this was a study by experienced software engineers ... but it's not.

I can see it taking over some aspects of business processes that are currently achieved via programming against a dataset. For example reports, etc, are manually programmed or configured, yet in the future AI will understand 'give me the KPIs on this XYZ' and do things automatically.

But real programming? When nobody can specify anything clearly when a bit of software engineering is required?

At the worst, current programmers will migrate to being 'specification engineers', i.e., turning the vague useless specification a business provides into something concise and specific, that a code generator - AI or not - will turn into a working system, removing all the drudge work (but IDEs and Frameworks seem to halve the drudge work every 5 years anyway already, without AI) and filling in the actual code to achieve the end aim.

So yeah, better tools to remove drudge work for programs that don't need much flexibility. But that isn't what anyone understands by 'AIs will write software'.

Btw, we'll need twice as many 'specification engineers' to do a certain amount of work in 2040 than we need 'software engineers' to do a certain amount of work today. That's how these things seem to work, so why would it change?

Digital Entrepreneur Awards help UK tech cop an eyeful of... WTF?

If we look at the original photo that sets this all off, we can see some bloke on the stage is clearly groping one of the dancer's bums.

Whilst I fail to see why this event needs scantily clad dancers, if they have to have them then they could have a mixed show put on, surely? But let's be honest, the only reason for scantily clad dancers is for eye titillation for the mainly-male audience. If those men want that, there are other venues.

In the end, the issue is that this industry has difficulty bringing in women, and stuff like this really does not improve the image of the industry. Which is a real shame, because I've found that it's often the women that work harder and generate better results, at least in businesses that allow them to get on with things without worrying about dodgy male bosses, etc.

Level 5 driverless cars by 2021 can be done, say Brit industry folk

That's pretty much my use-case for driverless cars - going to pretty countryside pubs, getting absolutely shatfaced, and getting home nice and safely afterwards. None of that crap city centre pub 'fun' on a Friday night followed by public transport 'fun' or wallet emptying taxi 'fun'.

Could do wonders for pubs that are a bit out of the way of the main routes.

Funnily enough, when Qualcomm's licensees stop sending in their royalty checks, profits start going south

They'll probably use the massive drop in profits as evidence that the fees they are asking for are fair.

And it seems that Qualcomm likes to stiff all of its clients over, so that's fairly non-discriminatory! Not very reasonable maybe...

I'm not losing tears over two massive bully companies having a tiff. I feel for the people involved, patent/license cases are not the most exciting.

What is the probability of being drunk at work and also being tested? Let's find out! Correctly

Re: Another thing you forgot

Indeed. Assuming testing first thing in the morning (before you drive your train/bus/lorry into people), you will merely ensure not being too tipsy for these activities at that time.

Which leads to inevitable lunchtime drinks, and afternoon drinks, and then getting home and not drinking, because you've got to get your liver to process six pints in the next twelve hours.

This is actually a far better way to do drinking than the British 'neck a load in the evening until 1am' methodology, that guarantees a nasty hangover the next day.

Equifax's IT leaders 'retire' as company says it knew about the bug that brought it down

I'm going to guess that patching Struts on hundreds of internal applications was decided to be too difficult in a short time.

So they patched their external-facing routers/firewalls to remove #cmd=xyz strings from http headers.

And it went wrong or wasn't applied everywhere, regardless, the attacker found a way past this to an affected server.

123-Reg customers outraged at automatic .UK domain registration

Names Co sent the same type of email as well.

Atlassian releases 'Stride', because HipChat isn't hip enough to whack Slack

The integration with other Atlassian products could prove very attractive to potential business users.

A lot of custom work in businesses is done integrating notifications from CI/Wiki/Build tools into the business chat systems. This sounds like it will be native now (I guess with a plugin for said CI/Wiki/Build system to tell it where to send the notification).

Brace yourselves, Virgin Media prices are going up AGAIN, people

I might be moving house soon.

I've had Virgin service since 2001 (when it was NTL, and 600kbps) in various houses.

The price rises in recent years (anyone got a graph?) will make me look elsewhere when I move. Certainly unlike the past where access to Virgin Media in a house was a definite plus point, I feel it's just an option now.

Hotel guest goes broke after booking software gremlin makes her pay for strangers' rooms

Abysmal showing from the hotel.

At the very least, they need to repay her money, plus interest, as soon as possible.

They also need to cover any incurred fees.

They also need to restore her credit rating back if it has been affected by their actions.

They need to contact the people she couldn't pay to explain that it was their fault.

They need to provide a decent good will payment ($thousands, not $hundreds) in compensation.

They need to explain to their merchant bank just what they are doing with credit card numbers for this to occur.

Gravitational waves permanently change spacetime, say astroboffins

Re: So,

More like a stretch mark.

Fancy a relaxed boozy holiday? Keep well away from Great Britain

Re: How about taxing other "sins"?

It's not as if you can do those in public in this country either without someone complaining!

Rich professionals could be replaced by AI, shrieks Gartner

I think five years is quite optimistic, even at current development rates.

However in 5 years we could have triage AI in many different aspects of professional work. For example in healthcare, this could keep GP load and A&E load lower, which will help the NHS greatly. In IT, it could investigate all the common causes for IT faults and only require expert assistance once it has exhausted all the tedious reasons.

The long term issue is that people don't become experts themselves without going through the process, and in the future that won't be possible. So all there will be is the AI experts.

Former RCL director: It was me who cancelled their domain names

So let's get this straight.

One guy wanted to get his name disassociated from the domain names that technically he should no longer have had any right to since leaving the company that owns them.

Nominet (a useless entity in general) told him to cancel them rather than transfer the ownership?!

He cancelled them, and the other guy picked them up as he had a watch on them.

These are fully grown men apparently.

Male escort forgot pregnancy protection, scores data protection instead

Seven years?!

It's a long time to wait to try and get child support.

I wonder what the in-between story is such that she only recently went after him.

Oh snap! UK Prime Minister Theresa May calls June election

Re: Who to choose?

The only way to avoid hard Tory Brexit under the skilled watch of Gove, Johnson, etc, is to vote to the most viable party to the left of the Tories in your particular constituency.

So if it's Tory-Labour-LibDem, vote Labour. If it's Tory-LibDem-Labour, vote LibDem. If it's Labour-Tory-whoever, vote Labour. If it's LibDem-whoever, vote LibDem.

Doesn't matter if that goes against all you believe in (apart from opposing Hard Brexit), you don't have to say who you voted for, and if Brexit is cancelled then imagine not having years of Brexit news in the media! So you deal with it. Tactical voting.

If you want hard Brexit, then you cannot trust Shifty U-Turn May, so vote UKIP.

"April, May: June."

Was the best summary I've seen.

The polls make this look like a sensible (if u-turney) move. But there's a lot that can happen in 7 weeks.

Tory MPs in remain areas are at high risk. In addition Tory MPs who scraped a win at the last election (South West in particular). Lib Dems could win 30-50 seats if they get their act together consistently (and that seems likely).

Tories are hoping for Labour to collapse, and whilst that looks likely, it's one thing polling a disillusioned lifetime-Labour voter outside of the election cycle, and what they do when pencil comes to paper at an election. Assuming that Labour actually work together now this has been dumped on them (instead of sniping at Corbyn until he is unseated), maybe they could limit damages. Never mind UKIP's zombie corpse taking critical votes from the Tories (and Labour in some areas).

So 50 SNP, 50 Lib Dem, 200 Labour, some others - enough to mean May could have a majority that isn't that dissimilar to now - i.e., all for nowt, and it would look pretty bad for her.

But she'll dodge the election fraud by-elections.

Why is the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega+ project so delayed?

Re: Mmmmmmmmmmmm

Well there's a crowdfunding idea.

A mobile gaming device that accepts a Raspberry Pi Compute Module.

So a PSP-shaped shell with gaming buttons, a display, a battery, a slot for a compute module, and some break-out I/O (SD card, etc) and charging.