* Posts by Richard 12

6047 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2009

VMware recalls full vSphere update over driver dramas

Richard 12 Silver badge

Did they test it at all?

This one feels like somebody hit the ship button without giving to QA at all.

It's not like this is rare hardware - and there aren't many supported NICs, anyway.

Web trust dies in darkness: Hidden Certificate Authorities undermine public crypto infrastructure

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Was web trust ever really alive in the first place?

Would you pass your credit card details to some unknown guy just because someone else you'd never met told you remotely that the guy could be trusted?

You do this every time you use a credit card in person, too. It's actually the entire point of all payment systems.

You don't know the cashier and you don't know anyone at Visa Mastercard or Amex either.

You might possibly know a bank manager at the bank who issued the card, but probably not.

The trust comes from your contract with the bank, and any applicable law that requires the bank to refund fraudulent transactions. It doesn't come from actually knowing any of the individuals concerned at all.

Which means ultimately it comes from living in a country where the Government respects the rule of law.

Amazon tells folks it will stop accepting UK Visa credit cards via weird empty email

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: lets wait and see when (not if) mastercard is changing

Seems they already did.

Yay Brexit!

Richard 12 Silver badge
Holmes

Perfect for buying from Amazon!

'We are not people to Mark Zuckerberg, we are the product' rages Ohio's Attorney General in Facebook lawsuit

Richard 12 Silver badge

This is the USA

Money is the only thing really taken seriously.

The case alleges that Facebook hid information from shareholders that materially affected the value of those shares.

This is illegal for any publicly-traded company.

As evidence, they have shown that when this information became public, Facebook/Meta shares dropped hugely - indicating that many didn't want to hold shares in a company that knowingly did these things.

Thus Meta definitely have a case to answer.

Is your Apple Mac running macOS Monterey leaking memory? It may be due to mouse cursor customization

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Who still uses swap/vm these days?

I'd love to, but 16GB is the absolute maximum physically possible.

Shared with the GPU, too, so it's actually 4GB less than my previous Mac.

SAP patent not inventive enough to get legal protection, judge rules

Richard 12 Silver badge

There's quite a few JVs that worked

But you never hear about them, because they just build the thing, make lots of money and toddle off into the sunset.

Tech bro CEOs claim their crowns because they fix problems. Why shirk the biggest one?

Richard 12 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: @jpo234 - I wish...

The problem with capitalist efficiency is it currently manages to externalise most environmental costs.

If the cost of pollution were somehow priced into all purchases of raw materials and energy, then a "full-blown capitalist" would immediately work to minimise it.

This is actually how health and safety happened in the USA. Employers were required to pay fixed levels of compensation whenever an employee was harmed - regardless of fault - and suddenly they magically started providing safety kit (guards etc), requiring it to be used properly and training their workers.

That system replaced the previous "sue them if you're able", which didn't work as fault had to be proven. The lawyers didn't like this of course, so "sue 'em" came back.

There's something to be said for delayed gratification when Windows 11 is this full of bugs

Richard 12 Silver badge

Could be worse

Seems like macOS updates are always that size of download, regardless of what changes.

I would really appreciate it if Apple could learn about incremental updates.

Richard 12 Silver badge
Angel

Re: Is it normal that when I try to download the Server 2019 patch it does it using HTTP only???

Or you know, download the signatures via a secure channel and use that to confirm it wasn't tampered with.

It's not difficult.

Quite a few things do that. The main reason being that it means proxies can cache it, torrent-style protocols can distribute it, local dedicated caching can be set up (WSUS) and you can even use sneakernet to get the update onto machines that don't have much bandwidth.

This means offices can continue working when every machine starts updating itself, as it only gets downloaded from "outside" once, instead of utterly saturating the block's bandwidth so nobody gets to do any work for a couple of days.

Phone jammers made my model plane smash into parked lorry, fumes hobbyist

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Failsafe?

A basic failsafe is built into all the 2.4GHz receivers. It sets all control values to pre-determined values.

For fixed-wing you'd usually set engine idle or stop, ailerons and elevators zero'd and rudder a little left or right. That makes it glide down in a circle near the club.

Hopefully it lands without much damage

For rotorcraft it depends. Some have return-to-takeoff, some just cut everything and drop.

Boffins use nuclear radiation to send data wirelessly

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: a small step

Oh, they do. There's several neutrino detectors, including one that (mistakenly) measured them going slightly FTL.

They aren't exactly portable, though.

Richard 12 Silver badge

I for one welcome our

0.00028 Å overlords.

100 terahertz WiFi sounds fun!

Just don't stand too close to the router, m'kay?

Brit analysts formed pact to crash Autonomy's market valuation, ex-CFO tells US court

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: WTF

Deloitte are currently marking the UK government's homework on Covid. Also their own.

It remains to be seen whether the attempted whitewash will, erm, wash.

Apple is beginning to undo decades of Intel, x86 dominance in PC market

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Speedbump

7 years is very short for software support for a desktop/laptop class device.

My last PC was seven years old when I decided I'd like a new one four/five years ago. So I gave it to a friend.

They're still using it and it's still supported - albeit only until 2025, as it won't run Windows 11.

My current laptop is a decade old and still runs a supported OS. It's on its third battery, but that's a trivial clunk-click swap.

Hardware on-site warranties are usually 5 years for non-apple desktops. That's free physical repairs, not software updates.

Weird how Mac users are grateful for only 5-7 years of support, while PC users are disappointed if it's less than a decade.

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

Richard 12 Silver badge

How do you find those sites?

Ah yes - Google.

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

Richard 12 Silver badge
FAIL

Off-grid is a tale told by an idiot

Think about how many batteries that would take.

It's genuinely impossible, the raw materials don't exist.

The grid is absolutely necessary, and far far far far far more efficient as you can generate from "elsewhere" when local generation isn't possible.

Plus storage gets more efficient as it gets larger.

That aside, most countries (and much of Australia) aren't the Australian outback/suburbs. Homes are small, roof space is limited.

Also it's dark a lot of the time and total insolation is quite low.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Survivor

We need the nukes now or we are utterly screwed.

Let's just look at gas:

As I write this the total UK electricity demand was 40GW. 50% of this supply is from burning gas. (54% from fossil fuels).

So we need to double non-fossil fuel production capacity, just to meet current demand.

Note that solar can't play any part in that because right now, it's dark, and the pumped storage is running...

Wind is providing under half its nameplate capacity, which is at the upper end of what it's ever done. Yesterday it generated roughly half as much.

We need to replace gas heating too. That's another 60GW extra electricity generation, give or take 10GW.

So we need to double the total current capacity, using something that works when it's dark and not windy.

So we need nuclear, purely to let us stop burning gas.

Then there's oil for transport...

Richard 12 Silver badge

They have, and they do

The highly radioactive stuff is either fuel - by definition, that is reprocessed and stuffed back in the reactor - or it's very short half-life (because it's highly radioactive) so you stick it in a pond for a couple of years and it's gone.

Or we would, if the so-called "green" lobby would actually let the plants get built.

It started at Pixar. Now it's the Apple-backed 3D file format viewed as HTML of metaverse

Richard 12 Silver badge

USD is ****ing awful

There is exactly one implementation.

One.

It's Pixar's. Everything else is a wrapper around the Pixar implementation.

As an example of how it's awful:

The container is ZIP. So far, so normal.

But all the files inside the ZIP must be non-compressed (STORE), and aligned.

So you cannot use any of the existing ZIP implementations to save or edit USD, you have to write your own to enforce the alignment.

And of course, if a user ever uses any ZIP software to alter the ZIP in any way, the file is corrupted and cannot be opened by compliant software.

Except that it's still a ZIP and still has all the data in there, it's just that Pixar decided you can't.

Incidentally, glTF is in process of becoming ISO. And MS 3D Paint edits it.

Truck, sweet truck: Volvo's Chinese owner unveils methanol/electric truck with bathroom and kitchen

Richard 12 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Truck or jail cell

Of course they will.

Someone has to load, unload and hitch the trailer.

Now get back in your box, you've had your fun Mr Driver.

Calendars have gone backwards since the Bronze Age. It's time to evolve

Richard 12 Silver badge
Mushroom

I *need* multiple calendars

I need a work calendar, so my boss and cow orkers can arrange meetings and I can mark myself as unavailable as needed.

I need a personal calendar so I can track birthdays, personal trips, events and similar. I do not want my boss or coworkers to know my brother's birthday or that I'm visiting the STI clinic on Saturday.

I need a calendar for each of my organised hobbies, like the cricket, five-a-side match, synchronised swimming or amdram rehearsals so everyone involved knows to turn up - or that it's cancelled/postponed because not enough people can make it.

If you are working for multiple clients, you'll probably need even more.

Computer misuse crimes in UK surge to high not seen since 2017 even as prosecutions slump 20%

Richard 12 Silver badge

Depends on selection criteria

How would you do it?

Stopping people in the street is inherently biased as it only surveys people who will stop, and who the researchers feel able to ask.

Self-selected (online) surveys like El Reg, newspapers and the like runs are statistically useless for population, as you only survey people who feel strongly about the issue and know about the survey, so you can easily get the result you want by how you advertise it.

Which leaves phone surveys. These have other problems of course, as not everyone has a phone or would answer it.

The ONS are reasonably good at both selection and understanding - and publishing - the errors it creates.

There's also other places to cross-check whether the numbers are plausible, like phishing reporting systems and the like.

Eg they say it's probably an underestimate, presumably because someone who's suffered from a data breach is unlikely to talk to a survey.

Oregon city courting Google data centers fights to keep their water usage secret

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: I don't think we're seeing the whole story, here

It's only a tradeoff if it's grey water.

Using potable water in an evaporative cooling system is simply wrong, as a huge amount of energy went into making it potable.

AI algorithms can help erase bright streaks of internet satellites – but they cannot save astronomy

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Why AI?

Signal processing is now called "AI". For some reason.

That said, it's not simply "remove streaks". There are also real targets that leave a streak, like comets.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Aside from the realities of how exposure works, astronomers don't know where all the satellites are. There's no international - or even national - legal requirement for all the operators to publish and continually update a database of locations (well, orbital parameters) of all the satellites they operate. Let alone the launch debris or dead sats.

NASA advised to study up on what open source, free software, and permissive licenses actually mean

Richard 12 Silver badge

"Introduction to"

Would be useful.

I did several modules that could be considered "introduction to running a business", but nothing on copyright or patents, despite everything I do being affected by copyright and patents.

You can't always ask a lawyer, they'll say both no and yes. Or insist upon a process that literally nothing else on the planet follows.

Waterfox: A Firefox fork that could teach Mozilla a lesson

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: root is the new Administrator

An app that can update itself without asking the administrator for permission is insecure by design.

It is only a matter of time before Electron becomes the primary security hole in every supported system. It may already be.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: root is the new Administrator

Apple assume everyone is either Admin or Guest.

It's one of the things they copied from Microsoft, except they haven't yet learned why MS dropped that concept a decade(?) ago.

Of course, a lot of modern applications have totally broken the OS security models - Electron, anyone?

Linux kernel 5.15 released with new NTFS driver plus an LTS sticker slapped on it

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Slightly confused about samba

This is Linux.

If you don't want a kernel module, you don't even need to give it hard disk space, let alone actually load it.

Everything is optional. That's both the joy and the pain.

What a clock up: Brit TV-broadband giant Sky fails to pick up weekend's timezone change, fix due by Friday

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Compromise

A surprising number of things can't handle 30minute UTC offsets.

Which is sad, especially for the places that have an X hours and 15 minutes offset...

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: By the time I noticed it, it was too late to return.

Timezones are political, using GPS to figure out your timezone is impractical, and in some cases impossible as there's cities that have two timezones depending on who you are, not where.

The rules also change fairly often, sometimes at very short notice.

I'm not surprised that Ford decided "stuff that for a laugh".

My Citroën is the same. It figures out UTC automatically (presumably via GPS), and I manually set the offset.

Upcoming Intel GPU to be compatible with Arm

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Marketing incentive

It's entirely possible that Intel could eventually make a good GPU.

Or at least, one that's better than the others at similar price and/or power points when hosted on specific ARM and Linux.

Power consumption is certainly one place that has a fair amount of space for competitive improvements, and that's more important in a supercomputer and datacentre environment than gaming and workstation.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: "Intel will once again become a ARM licensee"

I always assumed it was to use the M-class ARM silicon to handle CPU startup and chipset tasks, as it's probably cheaper to buy those designs in than to build your own microcontroller.

New World: Grindy? Check. Repetitive? Check. Fun? We hate to say it... but check

Richard 12 Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Avoid this game like the plague

Whoosh as the point flies over your head, crack as it rips your hard drive from it's slot and splat, as it buries it in jelly.

Sanitised means "prevented from running code in other clients".

Given that sending the "wrong" message can crash other people's game, it can probably can also be made to cause everyone else in the chat to run a cryptominer on their lovely fat GPUs until further notice.

Or something more dangerous.

It doesn't mean preventing swearing. Or Scunthorpe.

Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done

Richard 12 Silver badge
Boffin

VR doesn't rely on binocular vision

Binocular vision basically does nothing beyond a foot or two away. Past that, your brain figures out distance from scale.

We've mostly got two eyes for a backup - losing all vision would be immediately fatal for any animal hunting using sight, and eyes are fragile.

Having two means you don't starve to death if an antelope kicks sand in your eye.

VR is pretty likely to work just fine for you. A friend of mine has a wonky eye and she's still pretty damn good at Beat Saber.

However, it does appear that anyone who's partially sighted in both eyes is not considered a person by Zuckerberg. Rather a lot of people being left out of the Metaverse.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: It's Such a Beautiful Day - Asimov

Also, if the VR headset is properly designed and adjusted then your eyes will be sat at neutral focus, the most relaxed they can be.

Assuming the backlight isn't emitting any UV, then it's probably better for your eyes than looking out of the window.

Not all that great for your neck though, as they're all relatively weighty. Not to mention nausea, for that matter. Motion sickness is absolutely a thing.

It's that time of the year again when GitHub does its show'n'tell of features – some new and others kinda new

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: The Releases page is butchered

I can only assume you're supposed to have a million Releases.

Richard 12 Silver badge

What's included?

The real question is what's included in that setup time?

Installing your IDE-of-choice and source control only happens once per machine. Updates are fast, barely notice them.

Cloning the repo is anything from a few seconds to an hour, depending - but again, you only do that once per project. Pull/push are fast.

The only plausible real gain is that using this Codespaces thing forces you to write and maintain dev bootstrap scripting. Unless your employee turnover is so high that half an hour is actually visible - and there's no project documentation they can be reading.

Dev setup docs and scripting (where extant) tend to be fragile and break without anyone noticing for months, so I guess forcing everyone to start from scratch more often would help with that - but at what cost?

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W: Nippy stocking filler for the nerd in your life – if you can get one

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: A Linux PiC for the developing world.

A UPS for something Pi-class is trivial. Heck, you can do it with a few capacitors stolen from a broken motherboard.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Nice

A power cut is only likely to corrupt the SD card if it's being written to.

There's no reason for that kind of application to write to any nonvolatile storage at all so the risk is miniscule. Plus it is easily swapped out anyway.

- If you want to keep logs then they need sending elsewhere via syslog so you'll actually get the last few log lines where the problem happened.

Assange psychiatrist misled judge over parentage of his kids, US tells High Court

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: What is a Judge's role here?

This expert was hired by the defence.

The judge is required to evaluate their evidence and compare it with that provided by the prosecution.

That is quite literally their job, and they do not like it when expert witnesses "lie by omission"

Richard 12 Silver badge

Jumping bail is a criminal act

It doesn't matter whether or not he's actually guilty of the alleged rape.

He jumped bail, deliberately and explicitly to "run out the clock". The charges were only dropped because time ran out to interview him. Sweden can't charge you until you've been interviewed.

If he'd actually thought himself innocent then he'd have faced questioning in Sweden and never travelled to a third country in the first place, and if he was genuinely worried about being extradited to the USA then he certainly wouldn't have gone to the one with the most one-sided extradition treaty with the USA.

Either he's incredibly stupid, or he really did rape one or both of those women. There aren't any other likely possibilities.

I'm quite willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's one of the most idiotic idiots ever to stupid, but he still broke the actual law and is a convicted criminal.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Option 3

A country in which they could probably claim citizenship, if one can be determined - or guessed.

So anyone with multiple citizenship can be deported "back" to any of those countries, even if they've never actually been there in their lives. Even if they've given it up.

Ms Patel has deported quite a few people to countries they've never visited, let alone have any ties or even speak the language on the basis that their grandparents were born there so they have a right to citizenship.

Under her rules we should deport her to Uganda, and Boris to the USA.

It's insane, and inhuman.

UK science suffers as lawmakers continue to dither over Brexit negotiations

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Negotiating... @Dan 55

That was exactly what Boris and Frost agreed upon and signed.

Perhaps it was bloody stupid of them to do so. They did it, nonetheless. That only makes them both idiots, by their own admission.

They now argue that they didn't really mean it.

This further indicates that any and all other bilateral agreements will be torn up too, at any moment.

This mean they are negotiating from a position of absolute weakness, where no other party has any reason to give the UK anything at all because they cannot believe anything Boris and Frost might say.

Thus, the UK will fail, upon the hubris and lies of these utter fools in Downing Street

Product release cycles are killing the environment, techies tell British Computer Society

Richard 12 Silver badge
Terminator

Re: S & M

486 to RPi is a no-brainer, when practical*. It's always true that replacing hardware that old will save energy overall, including manufacturing, unless the old kit is powered for less than around 10minutes a day (might be less)

However, that 7-year old machine is very likely Just Fine. Sure, a newer hardware platform probably will use a little less energy to do the same work, but that's probably lost in the cost of manufacture and disposal.

* It often isn't simple, as the 486 is probably running some form of custom hardware and software that would need porting or emulation.

Singaporean minister touts internet 'kill switch' that finds kids reading net nasties and cuts 'em off ASAP

Richard 12 Silver badge

Cut one off

And another shall grow in its place.

Though perhaps it's worth a go anyway

If you're using this hijacked NPM library anywhere in your software stack, read this

Richard 12 Silver badge

WTF is anyone paying?

I mean, let's assume the decryption works, and is faster than restoring your backups - both really long shots.

There's no way you can't possibly actually trust any of the data you "get back" anyway.

They could - and almost certainly did - put further unwelcome surprises in there. Or change a few important numbers - it's not like spotting "things that look like bank details" is hard, for example.

Online harms don’t need dangerous legislation, they need a spot of naval action

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: There are worse things than abusive tweets.

FPTP ensures that basically never happens, and both Tory and Labour know it.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: There's still the old problem

I'm reasonable and you're unreasonable?

It used to officially be along the lines of an average man on the Clapham omnibus, but that's rather outdated now for several reasons.

It is a rather moving target, yet turns up all over the place.

Eg almost all Health & Safety law revolves around the term "Reasonable".

There is quite a lot of precedent, but again, precedent lags culture and the law by a very long way. Mostly because politicians seem to lag culture by about fifty years - when they're not actively destroying it, of course.