Posts by diodesign 3261 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011
Hi -- yeah, we need as much help with editing as possible. So much so, it would be great to have some kind of subscriber-level feature where people can create 'pull requests' for improvements to pieces and we'll accept them if they're any good and you'll get some sort of credit for it.
If you want to know how this kind of blunder happens, it's when a sentence turns into a bit of a mouthful or is missing some info and then when someone (like me) tries to tidy it up, they push it straight to prod and get distracted by something else that needs sorting out, and they forget to look back to make sure the change is correct.
Mea culpa, I should have previewed the change then made it live. Just got too many other things right now to juggle.
So, it's fixed. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong, please. Like bugs make their way into software, sometimes errors creep in during the edit.
C.
Does seem that way though there's nothing to really conclude at this stage.
Maybe RMS has a bigger-than-expected following in Russia?
The uneven distribution of signatories' location leaves us curious. That's it in a nutshell. If there was an unexpected level of support in another part of the world -- China or Canada or Dubai, wherever -- we would note that as well.
C.
Is there a decent source for this, or is this just your take on it? Because if we've missed a trick on this saga, I'm happy to steer The Reg's coverage in the right direction.
Edit: Never mind -- looked into it, and will insert a note into the article. Basically, automakers cut their orders and are now scrambling for parts.
C.
We've thought about this. The muons decay into electrons or positrons:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Particles/lepton.html
In the case of the muon g-2 experiment, though, they're looking out for positrons specifically:
https://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/muons/g-2/
Pretty much all the academic writing we've seen on the experiment talks about observing positrons. The hardware is set up to observe the positrons.
And it doesn't help that some of the Fermi Lab material refers to electrons at times when talking about muon decay.
C.
You might be interested to know that our wonderful home-made publishing system lets you schedule when articles go live. Pieces can be written on one day, edited, and queued up to appear any time after.
We use this for various reasons, and the reason here is that Kieren is on the US West Coast and the article is ideal for a UK audience. So for things like this, which isn't breaking news and more analytical, we time it to appear as Britain wakes up and checks its phones and laptops for news.
The homepage is mostly a flow of articles, and people mostly come to us via the homepage. If stuff's published overnight, it can be missed by readers as by the time they glance at the page, the headline is way down under many others. Not a lot of people look beyond the first few rows.
We're coming up with an iteration of the homepage in which important articles aren't lost in the flow, but also that people who want a flow of articles can get a flow of articles.
C.
No, I mean links in the articles -- the ones that go in article text that link out to stuff on other websites. Those we try to make open in new tabs. If you click on the tweet, it should open in a new tab or play in the current tab -- it just works for us.
Ultimately, if you reeeeallly want a link to open in a new tab, remember to press Control (or whatever your browser uses) when clicking the link to force it to a new tab.
C.
As my colleague Drew posted below, this wasn't intentional and a bug caused the audio to automatically and unexpectedly play in some cases.
This was spotted pretty early on and fixed. There should be no audio until you enable it. It's not our intention to run ads with audio on by default.
C.
IMHO this is what happened: we reported upcoming OS patches to work around design flaws in today's processors -- Intel's Meltdown being the worst as it was easy to exploit.
Everyone went wild. Markets, media, analysts, vendors. Things were patched before they were exploited. It reminded me of Y2K. In the end, very little went wrong because of all the work beforehand, leading some to say it was a load of hype. I see the same for Meltdown+Spectre.
The obvious Meltdown and Spectre flaws were addressed early on. But as we wrote in early 2018, Spectre will continue to haunt the computer industry for a decade or more as the family of bug is quite large. Google's pointed out that there's still work to be done on the web front-end side, and so released this PoC exploit to make web devs wise up.
There are exploits for Spectre out there but they tend to be in expensive toolkits (Immunity Inc's Canvas IIRC). Now here's one for free.
C.
It's a far-right haven. It's fair comment to call it a far-right-friendly place. It may have non-far-right people on it, but it's known, well known, for being home to far-right internet outcasts.
Are there far-right people on Facebook and Twitter? Sure, but with billions of users total, that's not what they are famous for. Parler is famous for being a haven for the far-right.
Far-right isn't defamatory, anyway.
C.
Yes, we did proofread it and sometimes things slip through just like bugs slip through into production.
The bit at the end was boilerplate from a previous debate, and it's now fixed.
As is clear from the opening and the debate page, the second piece is going live on Friday, and the results on Tuesday. We space them out to give people a chance to read and vote -- most people read us a few times a week, not multiple times a day.
Also, please don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong.
C.
Yes, yes, see the note at the end of the article: we meant KeePass. Though KeyPass does exist and also has no trackers, I'm told.
Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything that looks wrong, please, so we can fix it immediately.
C.
It's going to be mostly (d) all of the above. Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, Xilinx, Intel etc are going to be fighting over TSMC's leading edge and not-quite-so-leading-edge, and similar fabs.
Yes, microcontrollers aren't going to be on 7 or 5nm, they will be on something more chunky, though to me it appears these are either constrained too, to a degree, due to demand - or the things they are going into (cars, etc) are being held up because the control units need the aforementioned Qualcomm, MediaTek, Nvidia, etc chips that are in short supply.
Plus also the stuff mentioned in the article about rare earths and batteries.
In other words, supply chains and manufacturing are complex, with inter-dependencies and knock-on effects.
C.
Apologies, we thought it was obvious that when talking about links to news articles that it includes the titles and summaries that Google, Facebook, Twitter etc automatically generate when presenting the link.
The link text has to have some part of the publisher's content in it - the headline or the opening sentence - to be simply visible on the page.
The article also did note that "both Google and Facebook feared Oz's bargaining code would embolden publishers in other nations to demand royalties for using headlines, snippets of text, and article links in search results." So, yes, it's more than just links.
BTW Microsoft etc left it open ended on what exactly should be paid for. I've now made it as clear as I can that we're talking about more than just simply a link, though.
C.
Thing is, VxWorks is a staple of NASA missions. It's a given that it's running on the thing.
As journalists, we're here to highlight what's new -- it's called news, right -- and what's new here is the use of customized Linux and FFMPEG. As someone above pointed out, NASA name-checked FFMPEG in their briefings, so that and the Linux side is newsworthy. We've written about VxWorks in the past on space missions.
FWIW we're working on a separate piece describing the chips and OSes on the rover in more details, and I'll add a reference to VxWorks to this article.
C.
Even though ERCOT has some connections to other grids, it doesn't typically use them to draw power, as it fiercely guards its independence. Instead, it exports power.
On a normal day, Texas would proudly argue its grid is independent - an electrical island, no less - and that it don't need no federally regulated network, thank you kindly. But then this storm hits, and at the suggestion it was perhaps wrong to have an entirely independent and isolated grid, suddenly here come the apologists arguing that it's not actually truly independent and could tap into other networks any time it wanted (but couldn't or didn't). Sheesh.
Ultimately, the Texas grid wasn't built to withstand the storm that hit, its power generation failed, and it couldn't or didn't use whatever links it had with the Eastern Interconnect, and people went without power.
C.
Edit: From CNBC: “Texas has chosen to operate its power grid as an island,” noted Rice University’s Cohan, which means the state can’t import power from other states when it’s most needed. He added that the impacts are also felt in the summer, when Texas has an abundance of power that it can’t export.
From the indictment:
"On October 27, 2018, having gained unauthorized access to the computer network of [Pakistan's] BankIslami, the hackers caused fraudulent ATM withdrawal requests to be approved, which caused requesting ATMs to dispense approximately $6.1 million to money-launderer co-conspirators, including co-conspirators acting at the direction of unindicted co-conspirator Ghaleb Alaumary."
Uncle Sam says they had money launderers in Pakistan waiting to pick up the cash.
C.
Yes, apparently so. The bad one got taken off the Play Store but not people's phones. So people went to the Play Store to complain about the pop ups in the software still on their device, and trash the wrong app.
Bit of a mess.
C.
Oops, we swapped out that tweet with one that has more context. The above comment is referring to this tweet, which was originally embedded in the article.
C.
I've added some extra context and a link to more info on it all by Microsoft if that helps. It's tools to manage (and monitor) work and non-work time, pool together internal documentation and training, and inject references to that corporate material into your chat conversations in some attempt to be more helpful.
Personally, this looks like Microsoft trying to add tools to make up for the fact that we can't bump into colleagues in the corridor anymore (due to the pandemic) or catch someone after a meeting or at lunch or while getting a coffee and ask a question and get an immediate answer or feedback. Asking on instant chat or email feels like you're bugging someone rather than taking advantage of a spontaneous encounter.
So instead, you, I dunno, bump into Teams and get it to answer your Qs without bothering anyone or waiting for them to reply. If possible. Also, you might see notices and posters up in the office about stuff you need to know, which you can't do if you're stuck at home all the time, so these tools fill in that gap online.
Something like that. This isn't an endorsement of it.
C.
Ah yes, we got the 7 right. It's easy to think the 1990s were last decade sometimes. It's fixed.
Don't forget, please, to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong. We fixed this within a minute of someone emailing this slip-up to us just now, whereas it takes hours to get round to reading all the comments on stories after editing and writing articles etc.
C.
No, but we're not aware of a NetApp NAS that requires NetApp-only drives above a certain capacity. 'Cos that's the situation with Synology.
Yes, certifying drives is a thing in enterprise. But this article is about a very specific move by Synology.
C.
That's not the way the FAA tells it. In an email to the media, the agency stated:
"Prior to the Starship SN8 test launch in December 2020, SpaceX sought a waiver to exceed the maximum public risk allowed by federal safety regulations. After the FAA denied the request, SpaceX proceeded with the flight.
"As a result of this non-compliance, the FAA required SpaceX to conduct an investigation of the incident.
"All testing that could affect public safety at the Boca Chica, Texas, launch site was suspended until the investigation was completed and the FAA approved the company’s corrective actions to protect public safety. The corrective actions arising from the SN8 incident are incorporated into the SN9 launch license."
This non-compliance is the reason why a January 28 test of the rocket was delayed, and why Musk went off on one on Twitter about it.
C.
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