* Posts by Jon 37

618 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2009

Page:

Broadcom boss Hock Tan acknowledges 'some unease' among VMware community

Jon 37

Re: Way to go : Tan

You might not need it. The extension pack was essential for USB support, but that is built in to more recent versions of VirtualBox.

'Chemical cat' on the loose in Japanese city

Jon 37

Re: Catzilla

Want to upvote.... But the post has 6 upvotes ... I cannot destroy perfection.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

Jon 37

Re: Post Office

Never happen. They are going for the ideal "run out the clock" solution. Wait for the victims to die of old age and the perpetrators to be either dead or retired on a fat pension, and for all the evidence to be lost due to time passing.

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

Jon 37

Apple iOS has shown what corporate IT departments have long known: the only way to make an end-user device secure, is to remove the user's root access and block software installations. Apple iOS has a really good reputation for security. And part of that is because the only way to get software onto it, is via the App Store, which gives Apple the chance to stop malware before it gets onto a phone.

Google Android can be used in the same way. Don't sideload, and your device will be secure. Android has a worse reputation for security - but still far better than consumer Windows PCs. But the attack vector is usually someone being persuaded to install an application from an .APK from a dodgy site. While malware in the Play store does happen, it's not as risky as installing things from outside the store.

It is really sad that the only options are "horribly insecure" or "monopoly control". I really don't like either of those options. I wish we lived in a world where we could have security without monopoly control. But the world we live in isn't perfect. And the people in it aren't perfect either. And it looks like those are the options.

The EU law will change the current balance. It will reduce security, as well as reducing Apple's monopoly control. Anyone who claims otherwise just doesn't understand the Apple security model, or believes users are far less gullible than they have repeatedly been shown to be.

There has, for a long time, been an alternative to Apple that lets you install your own software. That's Android.

My Aunt has an iPhone and (until this law comes into force) I know she can't be tricked into installing malware on it. I have an Android and I could install my own apps on it if I wanted to, but I know enough to make it much less likely I'll fall for the scams. The security decision was made at the point of purchase. I was OK with that.

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

Jon 37

Re: Who are their lawyers?

In response to all the down votes: Maybe I should have said "less likely", not "unlikely".

The Leave campaign made lots of impossible claims, that were not delivered. For example: We'd still have full, easy access to the EU markets. The extra millions for the NHS. We'd take back control of our fisheries. We'd sign great trade deals with other countries.

It's now a matter of record that the UK government couldn't deliver on those things.

If another country considers leaving the EU, then their "Remain" campaign could use that evidence to support their case.

There are some UK Leave supporters who are happy with what was actually achieved. However, there are plenty of Leave voters who believed those claims and voted Leave because of it. Bearing in mind how close the vote was, that information would have changed the UK referendum result to Remain.

It's still possible for politicians to persuade people to do stupid things. But given evidence of what will happen, that does make it harder for the politicians to do that.

Jon 37

Re: Who are their lawyers?

I think they meant that UK citizens are no longer EU citizens. We were EU citizens protected by EU law, but we aren't any more.

Jon 37

Re: I hope they get sued out of existance

No, it doesn't work like that.

Though laws don't usually apply outside of the country that made the law, they can. The law just has to say it does that. And as a practical matter, there has to be a way to enforce the law.

E.g. If a US citizen travels abroad, they still have to pay US income tax on their foreign earnings. Depending on the law of the country they are working in, they also have to pay local taxes.

As another example, the GDPR applies to personal details of EU citizens, regardless of where the data is being processed, even if the EU citizen is travelling outside the EU.

Now, there are practical difficulties enforcing that on companies that don't have an EU presence. But Apple does have an EU presence and can have judgements against it in the EU.

Jon 37

Re: Who are their lawyers?

It's unlikely that the voters in any other country will fall for that, now they have seen how Brexit worked out.

Dutch government in panic mode over keeping ASML in the country

Jon 37

US export laws are draconian. Once some design or software has been developed in the US, and is exported from the US, it remains subject to US export controls forever. Even if it is a small part.

Part of their technology was developed in the US.

Jon 37

Re: "policy decisions that would restrict its ability to hire skilled staff"

You forgot to add:

We support small businesses.

Except we just exempted all the big businesses from this change, now it will only penalize small businesses.

Jon 37

Re: The deindustrialisation of the West

That's just words from politicians.

That does not mean anything will actually happen.

See: https://youtu.be/ZwD1kG4PI0w?si=BRYTOzSea1ZWKrxR

EU takes a bite out of Apple with $2B in-app purchase fine

Jon 37

It's not a similar function.

Apple provide the App Store. That is a store that sells apps. For a physical store selling physical things, 25% can be reasonable (more on this later).

And let's be clear, the fact that an app is sold using an in-app-purchasing model, or a subscription model, does not change the facts that you're buying it. Apple have QC'd the app and distributed it, so it's reasonable for them to take a cut.

Yes, Apple also distributes free apps. They do this as a loss leader. That is, they lose money on the free apps and make it up on the paid apps.

I'm not saying that 30% is reasonable. It's grossly excessive. They do not have the overhead of selling physical items. And they have huge scale. The fee should probably be somewhere in the 7-20% range.

But they do need to cover more than just the credit card processing fees.

(Obviously an app developer would rather get Apple to distribute the app free of charge, then go elsewhere for in app purchasing so they can just pay the credit card processing fees. But Apple, quite reasonably, does not want to distribute apps on those terms).

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

Jon 37

Re: Does AMD

HDMI has become the default for TVs. But DisplayPort is in the lead in the computers market. Most high end graphics cards and monitors support both.

Jon 37

Re: DisplayPort works

There are several USB speeds. Up to USB 3.0, they were:

* "USB 1.0" or "Low-Speed": 1.5 Mbps.

* "USB 1.1" or "Full-Speed": 12 Mbps.

* "USB 2.0" or "Hi-Speed": 480 Mbps.

* "USB 3.0" or "SuperSpeed": 5 Gbps.

Note that "USB 3.0" is ambiguous, since all the above comply with the USB 3.0 specification. So shady marketers would advertise computers with "USB 3.0 Hi-Speed" ports, which is technically correct, but you're only getting USB 2.0 speeds. Even shadier marketers would advertise those ports as "USB 3.0", which is again technically correct but misleading.

Similarly with "USB 2.0 Full Speed" ports that were advertised as such, or as "USB 2.0" ports.

I'm not even going to go into the mess that is USB 3.1 and newer speed naming. But, it is much worse.

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

Jon 37

Re: why is there not a single countrywide system for councils, that has been vetted by experts?

Or... Standardize. Things are split like that for historical reasons. Split them consistently across the country. Or better, take some of the functions away from councils entirely and make them national services.

Traffic enforcement does not need to be a council by council thing, a single organisation could do that, or better make it a police function.

Bin collection does not need to be a council by council thing, a single organisation could do that nationwide.

Social care does not need to be a council thing, make it a new department of the NHS.

And I am sure there's more.

Some things do make sense to have locally, run by local politicians, such as planning permission for buildings, and improvements to local transport (roads, busses, etc).

Jon 37

Re: Priceless ..

Developing custom software is hard. No-one will give you that kind of guarantee unless you are giving them a spec. Even then, you will get a guarantee that it works to spec, not that it actually does what you want.

Save the Mars Sample Return mission, plead Congresscritters

Jon 37

Re: Beserk

No, they didn't have to do it that way.

A sample return mission needs to land a spacecraft on Mars, that is capable of launching itself back to Earth. It also needs a way to get the sample.

Just sticking out a robot arm and scooping up a sample near the landing site, is relatively simple technology. You don't need multiple different complicated rovers.

If you want to collect samples from multiple places, which would be better science, then have a rover go fetch the samples and bring them to the return capsule.

If you can't afford that, then you can do a cheaper sample return mission, that only samples the landing site, and develops and proves the return vehicle. Then ask for funding for a mission with a rover later, to return more samples.

The idea of dropping the samples on the floor, and having another rover go pick them up, is incredibly complicated. It also tries to fix the scope of future missions. Scientists think they can say "we have to go pick up those samples!" But ... we could just cancel the mission and leave the samples there.

Travel app Kayak offers Boeing 737 Max 9 filter after that door plug drama

Jon 37

Re: When a company

That window case was shocking.

The supplies person knew what bolts were needed, and told the engineer. But the engineer wanted bolts that matched what he'd taken out of the aircraft. The bolts he'd removed were a size too small, but by luck had happened to work. The engineer accidentally picked up bolts that were a further size smaller, thinking they were the same. They weren't, and promptly failed on the next flight.

The senior maintenance engineer was rushed to achieve production targets at the repair organisation.

He never took the time to check the manufacturers instructions for performing any work. It didn't help that finding the instructions would have been a long and complicated process involving checking lots of paperwork to see if there had been changes to the procedure that had not been applied to the main instruction book yet. He considered "not looking up the instructions" to be normal.

He also couldn't see his work area well because of how the plane was parked. Again, getting it moved would have meant a long delay, the staff needed to do that were not working the night shift.

He was also "trying out" a different, unapproved torque wrench, so did not realise he hadn't tightened any of the bolts properly (because they would not tighten, they were just turning in the hole).

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland

Jon 37

Re: Interesting but....????

The fuel tanks are big structural parts of the rocket. Removing them saves mass.

Most modern rockets have 2 or 3 "stages". The reason they do that, is that the weight of the empty tanks is so high. At some point, it becomes better to get rid of the empty tanks, even if that means you have to carry an extra rocket engine up to power the second stage.

If you could get rid of the fuel tanks the way this rocket does, that potentially makes single stage to orbit rockets possible. That reduces costs because you only need one set of engines, not two or three. It also gets rid of the complexity of the staging manoeuvre(s).

Although there are other reasons you might want to stage anyway. In particular, the optimum nozzle design is different depending on the air pressure, so existing designs optimise the first stage engines for use in the atmosphere, and optimise the second stage engines for use in vacuum. But perhaps they can use a design that is good enough in both atmosphere and vacuum.

Note that this is only really better than Falcon 9 if they can make the whole rocket returnable and reusable. Otherwise, Falcon 9 is throwing away a second stage, and this would be throwing away the only stage, so it's not going to be competitive.

How thermal management is changing in the age of the kilowatt chip

Jon 37

Re: Carrying 1,000 amps

They're putting RAM inside the processor package. HBM. It's more expensive and less flexible, but faster. You don't need pads for the RAM bus, so you can make that bus much wider and faster.

High end graphics cards, AI accelerators, and other expensive chips are getting this first, but I expect that in time it will roll out much more widely. The whole "multiple chips in a package" thing is getting much more common, and the RAM chips are just another chip to put in that package.

China bans export of rare earth processing kit

Jon 37

Re: Chinese "Snowden" powerpoint... and Huawei

But all of that is someone buying Huawei technology and using it in ways that you (quite reasonably) don't like. All technology companies compete for big government contracts, especially in their native country. Cisco is keen to sell to the US government. Huawei is keen to sell to the Chinese government. Again, it's quite reasonable to object to what the Chinese government does with the purchased kit, the same way that lots of US technology companies faced protests about their sales to US CBP a few years ago, when Border Patrol was treating migrants badly.

But that's different from the reason Huawei were banned from western infrastructure. Which was that Huawei has some kind of back door allowing Chinese spies access to your data, even if (as the owner of the Huawei kit) you don't want that.

I am aware of evidence (from Snowdon) that the US was intercepting Cisco kit before delivery and adding malware to enable spying. I'm not aware of evidence that Cisco were complicit in that.

I am aware of a UK law that requires UK suppliers to co-operate with the UK spies to do that sort of thing.

I am not aware of evidence that Huawei has been complicit in inserting back doors, vulnerabilities or malware to enable Chinese spying.

But they're probably all as bad as each other. Every country spies. China, America/5Eyes, Russia.

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

Jon 37

Re: is 10x $$$ normal?

OpenReach will fix a leased line fiber fault within 5 hours. Or at least that's the SLA, and they take it seriously.

US willing to compromise with Nvidia over AI chip sales to China

Jon 37

Re: Call them by another name and then what?

Developing a chip at all is high tech.

But the individual parts of an AI chip are fairly simple, it's a matter of having a lot of them. So power and area optimization, while also optimizing for a high clock speed. And having a really fast memory interface.

And then software & driver development.

So China has the skills to make a not very good one, and then improve it over time. But there was no motivation to do that. Now there is a motivation.

23andMe responds to breach with new suit-limiting user terms

Jon 37

A user ID is supposed to uniquely identify the user. It's not supposed to be an extra password. So email address is perfect for that.

Credential reuse is a big issue. The solution is strong passwords stored in a password manager. Anything that can be done to encourage that is good.

Polish train maker denies claims its software bricked rolling stock maintained by competitor

Jon 37

Re: John Deere-ism Goes International

You buy an Apple, you know what you're getting. And Android is an alternative.

(I mean, I agree that you should be able to service it. I think what Apple do is wrong. But it shouldn't be unexpected, and you have alternatives to show you don't like it).

A farmer buys a tractor, or a train operator buys a train, they expect to be able to service it.

GitLab admits IT ineptitude in finance reporting is ongoing

Jon 37

Providing a fairly large, free, cloud storage service is expensive. Server costs, support and moderation costs, development costs.

GitHub is a great marketing tool for Microsoft, so they don't care if it makes a bit of a loss. They can also use the Microsoft cloud infrastructure. GitLab doesn't have either of those backing it.

Adverts? Anyone using GitLab will have an ad blocker. (Except for you, you annoying commentator who is going to reply to this post saying "I use GitLab and don't have an ad blocker". But I suspect you're in a minority).

That leaves selling their professional products. Unfortunately not a great business model, and it's a competitive market. They are squeezed between big companies such as Microsoft at the high end, and free software at the low end.

Well, maybe that leaves an IPO and taking the money as the best business model for the people involved. Which they seem to have done.

LockBit redraws negotiation tactics after affiliates fail to squeeze victims

Jon 37

Re: You write this as if

I don't blame the victims for being hit by ransomware.

I certainly blame the "victims" for funding future ransomware attacks on others, by paying up.

And I do blame the victims for not having usable offline backups. I mean, their computers could have failed for other reasons, so backups, and testing those backups, are essential anyway. Ransomware is a known problem which you can "insure" against by having offline backups, and testing them.

Oh, and I blame the police for not arresting the ransomware gangs,. And I blame the politicians for not making that happen.

SolarWinds says SEC sucks: Watchdog 'lacks competence' to regulate cybersecurity

Jon 37

Re: In my opinion...

There needs to be a balance.

Even the best security can be breached. Putting people in prison for not being perfect, leads to covering up breaches, which is counterproductive.

But in this case, their security failures were so severe that prosecuting the company seems reasonable.

FTX crypto-villain Sam Bankman-Fried convicted on all charges

Jon 37

It helped that SBF asked for a speedy trial. Apparently people have the legal right to do that in the US.

Uncle Sam orders Nvidia to cease most AI chip sales in China 'immediately'

Jon 37

Re: Can you

You can run AI code on any graphics card.

Dedicated AI cards don't have a socket for a display, but are otherwise the same as a graphics card.

The chips used are also optimized differently, so using a GPU chip will be a bit slower. E.g. an AI chip may remove some bits of the chip that are not needed for AI, and add more copies of the bits that are needed for AI. An AI chip may also be designed for performance in ways that would be too expensive or use too much electrical power for a gaming graphics card.

US prosecutors slam Autonomy tycoon's attempt to get charges tossed

Jon 37

The money went from HP to the former owners of Autonomy.

Note that some of the former owners of Autonomy may not have known about the fraud.

The losers are HP shareholders. HP could have given those billions to shareholders via a dividend payment, but they chose to spend it on Autonomy instead.

Jon 37

The problem was that the company was pulling financial tricks to artificially inflate it's sales numbers.

They then told HP that their sales were real. That's the fraud.

The numbers were clearly "too good to be true", but HP didn't notice and/or didn't care.

HP was clearly an idiot, and clearly negligent in its responsibilities to it's shareholders.

However, it's also true that Autonomy was illegally cooking the books.

Fears China could trash Broadcom's VMware nuptials as revenge for sanctions

Jon 37

If you want to sell your products into the EU/UK/China, then you have to abide by the laws of the EU/UK/China.

That includes the laws that stop you from buying all your competitors to become a monopoly, and then abusing that monopoly.

The merged company wants to continue selling its goods into those countries.

Also, the two companies likely have subsidiaries in the EU/UK/China, so the change of ownership of those subsidiaries is subject to EU/UK/China law.

So the merger agreement includes a clause that says the two companies will ask all the relevant authorities for permission. If the two companies can't get permission for the merger, then the merger agreement says that the merger will be cancelled.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Jon 37

Re: I'm curious...

You joke, but if they were trading on the electricity generation market, then measuring the mains frequency could actually be useful. It is the same across the whole grid, and corresponds directly to the difference between generated supply and consumption at that instant in time. Slightly high if there's too much electricity generation, and slightly low if there's not enough electricity generation.

Unity CEO 'retires' in the wake of fee fiasco

Jon 37

Re: Promise

Some programming tools charge for the runtime, and that can be a completely reasonable thing to do.

However, developers hate it. They would much rather pay for the tools and have a royalty free runtime. It avoids a whole bunch of complexity, regarding counting installations and paying the vendor. It also avoids the risk that the vendor will increase the runtime price.

So it's understandable that they promised never to charge for the runtime. It was a major feature.

One thing developers hate more than paid runtimes, are tool vendors who try to change the deal after the developer has invested a huge amount of time and money building programs with their tool.

Decades-old Home Office asylum system misses EOL deadline, no new timetable in place

Jon 37

Re: Why why why

There's a migration path from VB6 to VB.net. They could migrate the code to a modern development platform, while making no other changes to it.

That would solve the issue with an unsupported software stack.

If they wanted an even better software stack, they could port that VB.net code to C#. That is a widely used programming language, making it easier to recruit developers.

Then they could spend some time cleaning up that VB6-style C# code.

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Jon 37

Re: Offline backups??

This is sadly common. It makes backups easier and faster. It makes restoring from backup easier and faster.

It also means that your backups offer no protection against ransomware or a hacker.

Microsoft wants Activision so badly, it's handing streaming rights over to ... Ubisoft?

Jon 37

After 15 years they can go on as they wanted to originally.

See: the EU web browser antitrust case against Microsoft. The remedy that was imposed. And the fact that as soon as that remedy expired, they started pushing Edge and Bing hard.

AVX10: The benefits of AVX-512 without all the baggage

Jon 37

Re: flags

Intel's libraries and compiler are great if you only care about Intel chips.

There have been documented cases in the past where their libraries/compilers would specifically detect that they are running on non-Intel chips and deliberately run a slower version of the code, despite the CPU supporting the faster version that they use on Intel chips. This gave Intel an unfair advantage in CPU performance comparisons. I have no idea if they are still doing that or not.

For example, see this post from 2009: https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49

Hold the Moon – NASA's buildings are crumbling amid 200-year upgrade cycles

Jon 37

What do you mean by "built to last"?

If you mean "built to last forever", well that's not really possible. Some examples of long-lasting buildings: The Pyramids are significantly damaged. Westminster Abbey (the UK parliament building next to Big Ben) needs major renovations.

If you mean "build each part to last for as long as possible", that's just a waste of money. There's no point paying extra for a roof that will last 100 years, if the frame holding it up will only last 50 years. When you replace the frame you're going to have to replace the roof anyway. So it's better to get the cheaper roof that will only last 50 years. And if you're building for a project that's only supposed to take 10 years, then even that is a waste of money - you should go for the roof and frame that are cheaper but will only last 25 years, or 20 years.

Spacecraft are different. And a lot of it is PR. If they put a rover on Mars, that costs a lot of money. Operating it is only a tiny part of the cost. And there's a whole bunch of science that rover can do. So of course they're going to plan to run it until it breaks. However, if they say "we plan to run this for 10 years", and it breaks after 9 years, then the mission gets branded a "failure", which is bad PR. Better to pretend it's a 3 month mission, and keep "extending it" until the rover breaks. That way it becomes a huge success. And it's not possible to predict exactly when the rover will fail - at best you have probabilities, but even that depends on how it actually performs when it gets there, which you can't know in advance.

Jon 37

Re: It is a tragedy...

What science requires putting a man on the moon?

Landers and rovers can do science there, for less money.

If you want to put a man on the moon again because "it's cool", or as a point of national pride, or "to inspire people", fine, but please don't call that science.

And if you want cool engineering challenges to solve, perhaps lets try to reduce global warming a bit? And mitigate the impacts that it's going to have?

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

Jon 37

Re: Hmmm

That is staying, because it is useful. It's just the /bin Vs /usr/bin part that is being merged.

Microsoft’s Dublin DC power plant gets the, er, green light

Jon 37

Re: No SMR?

SMR are not ready for deployment yet.

They need to build a demonstration plant. Which will probably be more expensive than planned and take longer than planned - these things always do. Then they need to demonstrate it working reliably for a bit.

Then, I hope, we can have a large scale rollout of SMRs.

I do really hope that SMRs work, and get somewhere close to their mass production cost and ease of construction goals. Nuclear is important to fight climate change. CHP and district heating/cooling would also be a boost for efficiency, and SMRs would be a good fit for that. But without a working demonstration plant, we don't know enough to plan for real deployments.

Jon 37

Re: more than 150 diesel generators

It is completely normal for a data center to have sufficient diesel generators to keep running if there is a power outage. The generators and sufficient diesel will be on site and wired to start automatically if power is lost.

Once you have a working, tested design, you don't mess with it. Making the gas generators start automatically, and ensuring that is reliable, is just too much work and/or too risky.

So the data center has diesel generators for reliability, when there is an unplanned power cut. And it has gas generators for when running those is cheaper than buying electricity from the grid. But the gas generators are not mission critical, they are just there to save some money. If the gas generators fail, or are down for maintenance, that does not affect the reliability of the data center.

US Air Force burns more money on electric flying taxis

Jon 37
Black Helicopters

I'm wondering if this is a potential special forces delivery vehicle.

Right now, they can use helicopters for some special forces operations. If this really is quieter, that may be an advantage. For a quick trip across a border, or from a Navy ship to some target near the coast.

Europe's USB-C deadline: Lightning must be struck from iPhone by December, 2024

Jon 37

It means that if you accidentally use the cable that came with your mobile phone, to connect your laptop to your laptop charger, it will work and charge at the normal speed for your laptop.

This is good for consumers. If you want things to charge quickly, you still have to make sure you are using the right charger (or a charger that is more powerful than that). You no longer have to worry about "am I using the right cable".

Multi-tasking blunder leaves UK tax digitization plans 3 years late, 5 times over budget

Jon 37

You could move to new systems with better structured internals, without substantially changing the way the rest of the world interfaces with the tax office.

Then start making changes to the interfaces.

German finance minister says nein to more Intel subsidy cash

Jon 37

But The Register was originally British. It was a .co.uk site for a long time.

1. This crypto-coin is called Jimbo. 2. $8m was stolen from its devs in flash loan attack

Jon 37

Re: Interested in whether its illegal

The design is intended to be "no regulations".

But actually, in the US, some cryptos are legally considered securities, and some DeFI stuff is securities or futures. (I think all of them are, but the regulators haven't taken that position... Yet).

Securities are subject to a bunch of rules. They are supposed to be enforced by the SEC. Even though it has done a poor job so far, it has taken some action, and can go after people for things they have done in the past.

Similarly CFTC and the crypto futures.

This typo sparked a Microsoft Azure outage

Jon 37

Re: Cloud values are shall we say rather terse

It was never designed to be human readable. As a way for a program to talk to a web server, JSON is fine. It was only later that it got used for configuration files, where the lack of comments is a nightmare.

Page: