* Posts by Zola

317 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Nov 2012

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Guilty: Sister and brother who over-ordered hundreds of MacBooks for university and sold the kit for millions

Zola

Re: laptops – codenamed "ingots" for a short while

I guess they realised it was pointless and not worth the hassle using codenames once the buyer wanted to know the model numbers and screen sizes of the "ingots" that were on offer.

Realme 7 5G: Parents, this is the phone you should have got your kids for Christmas

Zola
Unhappy

Wireless Charging is a real deal breaker for me

Honestly, I'd be all over this if it had wireless Qi charging.

The only budget/mid-range phone with decent specs (ie. better than 720p display) and built-in wireless charging I've found is the Ulefone Armor 7 for £211 (current price on banggood.com) - I've ordered one even though physically it's a bit of a beast. It should even come with Android 10, once it arrives from China (ordered 21 December, tracking suggests a late January/early February delivery to the UK).

I hope Qi charging starts to become a standard feature on more mid-range devices in the next 12 months. Withholding Qi - which is pretty much the last means of market segmentation other than in terms of individual component quality - isn't going to magically cause me to drop an extra £400 (or more!) on a higher-end device that does have Qi charging (which in reality is a $2 BOM cost). Instead, I'll find cheap alternatives, even if they are beasts from the previous year, or stick with my current phone.

Ransomware masterminds claim to have nabbed 53GB of data from Intel's Habana Labs

Zola
Meh

And no shits were given because... Intel.

The victim here is Intel and they've made a victim out of many other companies in order to succeed (and likely continue to do so to this day).

So this is all just a wafer thin slice of karma.

Me? I'll just grab myself a large bucket of popcorn.

AMD performance plummets when relying on battery power, says Intel. Let's take a closer look at those stats

Zola
Joke

I wonder...

Have Intel hired Trumps legal team to help produce these stats? They do have a similar way with numbers.

Zola

Re: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Oh the irony - didn't Intel announce a few months ago that benchmarks were not a good way of determining processor performance? Oh look, yes, yes, they did...

(I tried to find the same article on anandtech.com but surprise surprise the Intel shill site didn't think it was worth covering, just as they don't talk about Intel vulnerabilities, or any Intel performance problems from the resulting mitigations. They're more than happy to discuss the merits of benchmarks - and their abuse - on ARM, however.)

I wonder if Intel - by using possibly flawed and/or contrived benchmarks - are simply trying to prove their rather untenable point?

No such thing as a Three lunch: Hutchinson CK to sell tower biz to Cellnex

Zola

Re: surprised

> as plenty of places I go 3 reception varies between dire / non existent.

It's like that at my 80+ year old parents place, where they have no cellular signal at all (no 3, O2, BT/T-Mobile or Vodafone coverage) so I got them both on 3 SIM only deals (as I am, at about £8-£10/month) and ordered them a 3 Home Signal femtocell (provided free of charge due to the total lack of network coverage) which is connected to their broadband - a just about usable 20-30Mbps from Sky "Fibre" FTTC - and it works great.

The Home Signal is 3G only, but to be honest for voice and text that's totally fine, giving the full 4 or 5 bars of coverage around the house, and - which is why I demanded it - it will work with any smart or dumb phone (once the phone number has been registered with the femtocell) unlike the "WiFi calling" option they'd rather non-service subscribers use but which really needs a smartphone. My old parents don't need/want iPhones, they're much happier with dumb phones.

Zola
WTF?

Doesn't this mean 3 is now (or will be) effectively just an MVNO?

See title.

Excel is for amateurs. To properly screw things up, those same amateurs need a copy of Access

Zola
Meh

This brings back a bad memory!

I worked in the London branch of a US investment bank, in the IT department, and the Ops department had hired one of the Y2K COBOL "consultants" we had been using prior to Y2K to "knock them up a system to help record certain compliance issues". So this all took place just before Y2K (Oct/Nov 1999) as the consultants were all looking for their next gig by then and had obviously convinced one of their old users (who had been system testing Y2K) that they could help them out with some of their more mundane reporting issues.

Apparently, development of the system had gone swimmingly and the consultant delivered the system (with no input from IT, this was all done behind our backs) and the Ops department - which had a mixture of UK and US staff - diligently entered their data for a few months, and the consultant left the scene rolling in dough.

Shortly after, early Jan 2000, the system began misbehaving - the reports weren't making any sense. Could the IT department send someone down to fix it?

We had a brief internal discussion within IT, mostly involving the phrases "fuck off, I'm not touching it", "no fucking way am I taking a look" and "they developed it, it's their problem!" until finally I got given the short straw and talked into taking a look, but that if it couldn't be fixed relatively quickly then I should leave it alone as it really wasn't our problem (apparently the Ops department had been warned about this sort of shenanigans in the past - mostly using massive Excel spreadsheets that nobody could support).

So I went down to Ops. Asked to see this system. All based on Access 97 and Forms. I quickly ascertained what it did, and what the problem was. In a nutshell: "A lot of the dates are wrong".

I began looking at the data, and deduced that the Access 97 database being used to store the application data was using a TEXT column for all of the dates.

You can all guess where this is going... right?

Some of the users entering the records had their PCs set to use UK dates (dd/mm/yyyy) and other - US users based in our UK office - had their PCs configured to use US dates (mm/dd/yyyy). Sigh.

"01/04/1999" as stored in the database could have been 01-April-1999 or 04-Jan-1999. Was "01/04/1999" entered by a UK user the same as "01/04/1999" entered by one of our US visitors? Yes? No? Maybe? Who could possibly tell anymore?

And, due to the total absence of any audit trail, it wasn't even possible to know which user had entered which records (and thus dates) so matching US users to specific mm/dd/yyyy records - which might have been the only possible way to unfuck about 50% of the dates back to a sensible dd/mm/yyyy date format - was entirely impossible.

I swiftly threw up my hands and said the existing data was now garbage, and couldn't be saved. In future, make sure everyone has the same date format on their PC when using this system. Bye!

As for how it ended, the US investment bank was bought out by a European bank about a month later, and the Ops team (and their noddy system) were made redundant. That, as it turned out, was a lucky escape!

She was praised by the CEO and promoted. After her brother and mom died, she returned from compassionate leave. IBM laid her off

Zola
Unhappy

A whistleblower from the IBM HR department is required

But that would assume there is someone working in the HR department that has a conscience. Or even a spine.

So, ain't gonna happen. :(

Autonomous robots that can be injected? Not as far off as it sounds, say boffins, thanks to new ion-powered silicon legs

Zola

Cheap?

> The group of researchers estimated a production cost of one US penny ($0.01) per device.

Maybe so, but the end user will still have to pay tens of thousands of dollars per treatment because... US healthcare system.

We've come to wish you an unhappy birthday: Microsoft to yank services from Internet Explorer, kill off Legacy Edge by 2021

Zola
Coat

> If he does, I hope Microsoft respond by creating an email client called Bono.

It it happens I'm sure they'll be Mullen it over.

Intel talks up its 10nm Tiger Lake laptop system-on-chips as though everything is going according to plan

Zola

"Layers a few Angstroms thick"

It all sounds very good, and nice to see Intel actually innovating again (now that they have to). However one can only hope that these new CPUs don't suffer the same fate as the Intel Atom C2000 SoC that died after a couple of years. The cautious may be advised to take a pass on this new unproven design.

Dynabook Portégé X30L-G: So light, you might even forget about its terrible keyboard

Zola
Facepalm

Buy an Intel CPU based product?

Choose the more expensive, less efficient, exploit riddled and guaranteed-to-be-even-slower in 12 months variety of x86-64 CPU?

Are you having a laugh?!

O2 be a fly on the wall during BT and Vodafone's video calls: Telefónica's UK biz, Virgin Media officially merge

Zola
FAIL

Been There?

It's funny how in 2013 the bean counters at Telefonica thought that selling their UK fixed line broadband business (aka Be Unlimited) to Sky for £180 million was such a good idea.

The O2/Be ADSL2+ service was great, particularly if you were an O2 subscriber as you received a discount - decent download speed, Annex M (2.5Mbps upload), great reliability, excellent customer support (Be Unlimited handled the service and support).

Then it was sold to Sky for chump change, Annex M ended immediately, the speeds dropped overnight and reliability became a repeating issue. They employed the Be Unlimited customer support people but you could tell from talking to them that they knew it was now a total shit show.

Eventually I could stand it now more and moved broadband (and O2 mobile) to BT who were better than Sky, but not as good as Be There. Funnily enough I'm now with Hyperoptic 1Gbps which is run by old Be Unlimited people, so I've come full circle (and 3 for mobile). Both have been excellent.

Anyway that was the end of the O2 triple play, for chump change. And now they're having to get into bed with Virgin Media, which has a very limited network (if you're not covered by Virgin already, you never will be) which limits their future potential. With the debt that both Telfonica and Liberty Global have it's difficult to see where the investment will come from.

Oh what could have been for O2, if Telefonica weren't such utter fsckwits. I really don't see this merger ending well, assuming it goes ahead at all.

Western Digital hands chief exec seat to boss of Cisco's networking and security biz

Zola
WTF?

"Cisco" & "Security" in the same sentence?

See icon.

Get in the C: Raspberry Pi 4 can handle a wider range of USB adapters thanks to revised design's silent arrival

Zola

Re: Power to the Pi-ple

You can power all Raspberry Pis via the GPIO pins, so rigging up an alternative DC input of your choice should be a piece of cake.

Latest battery bruiser Android from budget Moto G range appears ahead of MWC after an Amazon whoopsie

Zola

Still no wireless charging that costs pennies to include?

Shame. No sale, I'll hang on to my existing device in that case.

Caltech takes billion-dollar bite out of Apple, Broadcom for using its patented Wi-Fi tech without paying a penny

Zola

5... 4... 3... 2.. 1...

Until the inevitable Apple appeal. They can afford to keep this going and avoid paying out for a few more years yet.

Kiss my ASCII, Microsoft – we've got one million fewer daily active users than you, boasts Slack

Zola

I use Slack, but I'm not an Office 365 user

What relevance has Teams to me? None, as far as I can tell.

Bus pass or bus ass? Hackers peeved about public transport claim to have reverse engineered ticket app for free rides

Zola
WTF?

Why have the Plod become involved?

Hopefully it is to investigate the financial fraud committed by Corethree after flogging - no doubt for top dollar - their amateur hour software as if it were a professionally developed and secure product.

The only crime committed here is that by Corethree, and nobody else.

Virgin Media promises speeds of 1Gpbs to 15 million homes – all without full fibre

Zola

Re: 202?

> when Openretch start putting fibre in for people with phone lines that arrive overhead.

Don't forget ADSL users stuck on Exchange-only lines for whom Openreach have no fibre migration plans whatsoever - you'd think these users would be a shoe-in for Openreach fibre, particularly when the exchange is less than 200 metres away. But no.

Not that I care any more - the development where I live (Exchange-only ADSL lines, 20Mbps down/1Mbps up) recently had Hyperoptic installed so now I'm on 1Gbps up/down with VoIP telephony for about the same price I was paying BT for a landline and their 20Mbps/1Mbps service. It's like night & day.

Take the bus... to get some new cables: Raspberry Pi 4s are a bit picky about USB-Cs

Zola

Just to remind everyone... it's not a PSU issue, it's a cable issue (caused by the RPi design error).

The irony is that a cheap non-e-marked cable is going to work (regardless of PSU) while an expensive Apple e-marked cable won't work. This is really is not a big deal, just get a cheap non-e-marked cable and you're done.

Quick maths refresher: Intel CPU shortages + consumer stock bottleneck = no computer sales growth in EMEA for 2019

Zola
Facepalm

Good news for AMD

AMD CPUs are cheaper, better designed/more secure, and now, faster than Intel equivalents (particularly once all the mitigations are applied to fix the vulnerabilities in Intel gear).

Win, win, win.

If only HP and Dell weren't so far up Intels contra-marketing arse they might be offering some superior non-Intel alternatives to make up for the shortfall.

Anyone buying over-priced, insecure (and, apparently) hard to source Intel CPUs these days needs their fricking head seeing to.

The A in AMD stands for 'Aaaaannnyway...' Q2 is gonna be good, chip biz vows, after dismal Q1

Zola

Buy now, upgrade the CPU later?

At least AMD support their sockets for years, rather than the Intel habit of introducing a new socket with every minor CPU revision which then requires a new motherboard, RAM, maybe even heatsink in addition to the CPU.

Behold, the insides of Samsung's Galaxy Fold: The phone that tears down all on its own

Zola
FAIL

iFixit have taken down their teardown at Samsung's request

Link

Samsung are in Cupertino-esque damage limitation mode, but only making things worse for themselves... So you fscked up? Just deal with it - there's no point getting all p1ssy and trying to censor/hide it from the world & dog hoping we'd all forget.

Disco Dingo fever: Ubuntu 19.04 has an infrastructure bent, snappier GNOME and another stupid name

Zola
Joke

Hey dad...

You might want to stop your son from posting nonsense on the Register as well!

Zola

Still got the systemd-udev bug pegging CPUs at 100%

launchpad

Basically, apply this patch to /lib/udev/rules.d/97-hid2hci.rules and reboot.

Scare-bnb: Family finds creeper cams hidden in their weekend rental by scanning Wi-Fi

Zola
Big Brother

How many other renters complained and were ignored before it finally went public?

> Our original handling of this incident did not meet the high standards we set for ourselves, and we have apologized to the family and fully refunded their stay.

Funny how these firms always trot out this excuse once an issue goes public.

Ethiopia sits on 737 Max report but says pilots followed Boeing drills

Zola
Go

Boeing have finally accepted responsibilty for the two crashes

> The chairman of Boeing acknowledged Thursday for the first time that its new maneuvering system was responsible for two recent plane crashes that killed almost 350 people and apologized to the families and friends of the victims.

USA Today

That's a good start. Now for the FAA to admit to it's role in this disaster, and then the healing can begin for the industry and families, with jail time for those guilty of corporate manslaughter.

Zola

Re: Ralph Nader's niece

I watched the Stumo family conference video earlier today and, assuming the two crashes did occur due to the MCAS failing, it seems a bit harsh for the family to now be suing the airline as they are just as much a victim as those who died as they were duped by Boeing and the FAA into believing the aircraft was safe, even after the first Lion Air crash, and that pilots did not require additional training.

As for Rosemount, unless they guaranteed their sensor was safe to use with no redundancy in a safety critical system then again that's harsh, but maybe just part of the legal process, as it's a bit like Ford selling a car with only 3 wheels instead of 4 (but available as an optional safety extra) and suing Pirelli when the car crashes because it's not driveable on 3 wheels when one has a puncture.

It may be that by suing all parties, whether initially justified or not, will ensure that all the evidence - testing data, internal memos, cover-ups, FAA collusion etc. - required to determine justice for the victims and that further accidents are avoided will be revealed.

Samsung Galaxy A9: Mid-range bruiser that takes the fight to Huawei

Zola
WTF?

Wireless charging should not be high-end

The receiver coil costs under $2, much less in volume - probably sub-$. It's a joke that manufacturers use this feature to differentiate high-end products - it just goes to show they're running out of ideas. Or penny-pinching bastards. How long until Qi wireless charging is common on mid-range devices from more innovative manufacturers?

Put your tin-foil hats on! Wi-Fi can be used to guesstimate number of people hidden in a room

Zola
Mushroom

Good grief that voice...

Had to mute the video.

Have to use SMB 1.0? Windows 10 April 2018 Update says NO

Zola
Mushroom

ASUS are another one.

Currently shipping "top of the line" ASUS routers are being shipped with firmware that includes Samba 3.0.33, which is a decade old for crying out loud, riddled with security bugs, and supports only SMB1 (which is being deprecated everywhere, fast). And ASUS have no plans to update their current (let alone legacy) products to a modern, (more) secure version of Samba, such as Samba 4.

You can use third-party firmware alternatives for the ASUS routers that do include a more recent version of Samba 3, which would at least get you SMB2 support, but apparently the devices don't have enough flash storage to allow Samba 4 to be included.

So please, give ASUS routers a very wide berth as ASUS don't give a fsck about basic security, or their users. Alternatively, disable the outdated and insecure ASUS Samba server entirely, and use something else (Raspberry Pi3+?) for your Samba file sharing.

Blood spilled from another US high school shooting has yet to dry – and video games are already being blamed

Zola

Re: spectacular coverage

> what exactly do you expect the mass media to do?

Watch this Charlie Brooker video featuring a forensic psychiatrist and decide if global wall-to-wall coverage of every mass shooting in America is really the best and only option available to the media outlets.

Mental health issues, inadequate gun control, and the instant "fame" from mass news coverage is a powerful and dangerous combination but at least one of those factors could be addressed fairly quickly, although we know it won't be either of the first two.

Sysadmin’s worst client was … his mother! Until his sister called for help

Zola

Fingerprint scanners... and brothers.

My brother just bought a Yoga 520 i5 laptop which has a touchscreen, and also a fingerprint scanner just below the keyboard. It's actually a very nice laptop.

Anyway, after he'd had it for a day he brought it round to me so I could finish setting it all up and I enquired if he'd set up the fingerprint scanner.

Brother: "No, I couldn't get it to work".

Me: "Why not, did you put your finger on the scanner?"

At this point I pointed at the anonymous looking fingerprint scanner below the keyboard.

Brother: "That's the fingerprint scanner? I spent an hour yesterday touching my bl**dy finger on the screen...!"

Oh how I laughed. Hahahaha. Families. I swear he's not related to me, there must have been a mix-up at the hospital. Yep, that's got to be it.

Nokia tribute band HMD revives another hit

Zola

Might get one in yellow for my step father

as he keeps losing his phone, currently looking to get him his 3rd phone in 12 months... figuring the yellow might make it easier to find, and the low cost less of an issue if/when he loses it (first two were iDevices).

Nokia also announced a new Nokia 6 with wireless charging for €279. Sold!

RIP, Swype: Thanks for all the sor--speec--speedy texting

Zola

Re: Familar pattern

Don't forget Logitech killing Slim Devices. W@nkers.

Qualcomm moved its Snapdragon designers to its ARM server chip. We peek at the results

Zola
FAIL

So why bother with Kyro?

It doesn't seem like Kyro is that critical to their mobile roadmap if they can swap out their fully custom design for off-the-shelf IP without any obvious impact on the bottom line, yet it's undoubtedly a damn sight cheaper/faster to use the off the shelf ARM cores.

I always thought Kyro was a case of NIH, and never really justified the additional design cost given the marginal performance gain over stock ARM IP.

At best Kyro is just a dick swinging marketing exercise - no real gain or benefit for the end user, but look how clever we are to design our own stuff.

Nokia's comeback is on: The flagship 8 emerges

Zola

Re: No wireless charging? No sale.

Too many times I've received a call on a phone charging while tethered to a USB, picked it up and had the phone shoot out of my hands once the cable reaches its full extent. User error? Most certainly. Annoying as hell? Absolutely. USB-C might make charging ever so slightly easier but it's still no match for put down, pick up convenience.

Does wireless charging take longer than a tethered fast charge? Sure, probably. To be honest it's hard to tell as my phone is now almost always fully charged most of the time thanks to having multiple charge plates at home/office, and putting a near empty phone on my bedside cabinet at night I awake to a fully charged phone in the morning as if by magic! Fast charging becomes irrelevant when charging is something you no longer have to even think about (and if I ever did need it, I can always find a cable somewhere).

Zola
FAIL

No wireless charging? No sale.

20 years ago I bought a TiVo Series 1 (still have it, in daily use) and tried to explain to people the convenience of HDD recording, the typical response was "Why would I want that when I can just put a tape in my machine?" It only took them another 5-10 years until Sky (I'm in the UK, after stabbing TiVo in the back) "invented" HDD recording and for the penny to finally drop among the masses.

Similarly, a lot of people just don't "get" wireless charging, but it really is so much more convenient and puts an end to "battery angst". Once you've tried it, why would you want to go back to fumbling around with USB connectors?

And for that reason, any device that can't be bothered to include the £2 coil for a wireless charging receiver loses my entire business/interest. Which is a shame, as the Nokia device is quite attractive in all other respects.

A replaceable battery would also have been nice, but I can understand from a design point of view that that is a trickier proposition.

Intel bolts bonus gubbins onto Skylake cores, bungs dozens into Purley Xeon chips

Zola
Go

Early Purley Xeon vs. AMD EPYC benchmarks at Anandtech

Anandtech

Summary:

Purley is best for very large databases and vectorisable HPC code (due to the Xeons superior L3 cache latency), while AMD EPYC is simply great for everything else and whips Intels arse on price/performance.

Seagate SNAFU sees Cisco servers primed for data loss

Zola
Facepalm

Why are Seagate being fingered for this? It's not their SNAFU!

This is 100% Cisco's fsck up because it was Cisco that assumed rather than erred on the side of caution/professionalism by configuring the drives on receipt from their supplier - or on boot up, fancy that! - with the correct parameters/characteristics required to reliably perform the job they will be doing.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with what Seagate did, or did not do!

(Not a Seagate shill, I just think Cisco are entirely at fault here)

In the Epyc center: More Zen server CPU specs, prices sneak out of AMD

Zola

Re: Epyc 7351P @ $700

@analyzer: What I'm getting at - assuming these Epyc prices are accurate - is that this gives a ballpark figure for for the cost of a 16c/32t Threadripper. I can't see AMD pricing a Threadripper (at the same Epyc 7351P base frequency) higher than an Epyc 7351P, particularly as the Epyc 7351P includes a range of technologies that won't be included/enabled in Threadripper. Perhaps if the Threadripper is clocked significantly higher than the Epyc 7351P (while still maintaining sensible thermals) then it might allow AMD to charge a slightly higher premium, but not much more.

@John Pombrio: I wouldn't have thought 2.4GHz x 32 threads (Epyc 7351P or Threadripper) would be too slow for a HEDT, maybe slow for a gaming rig, but for a headless build system that spends all day compiling it could be pretty sweet!

Zola
Go

Epyc 7351P @ $700

At 16c/32t isn't this basically a Threadripper?

Presumably the Threadripper will not have the enterprise features such as memory encryption, in which case it should be cheaper than than the Epyc 7351p, which would make it a fricking steal...

What is this bullsh*t, Google? Nexus phones starved of security fixes after just three years

Zola
Linux

Jolla provide Sailfish updates for their Nov 2013 device

Latest update received April 2017. And that's not just security updates - that's almost 3.5 years of regular OS updates.

Sure, the hardware is a bit long in the tooth but it's working fine and I've no reason to upgrade just yet - not until there's better Jolla hardware on the market.

The Psion returns! Meet Gemini, the 21st century pocket computer

Zola

Re: Sailfish OS

Comment from the "backer" Davide Guidi to someone asking for Sailfish OS support:

Thanks for the comment, very interesting! We are at 4YFN, stand P4, at Mobile World Congress and we will go and visit the Jolla stand tomorrow. We have not considered it so far, but you never know!

Flashy Intel sees the XPoint of solid state

Zola
Meh

“And we've demonstrated on stage"

Sounds pretty desperate if he has to use a stage demo as evidence of their performance! Let's see some independent benchmarks... until then, colour me not convinced.

Ridiculously small Linux build lands with ridiculously few swears

Zola

Re: Which graphics?

The latest 375.26/340.101 nvidia drivers don't yet build with the 4.10 kernel, and need patching (as usual). Funny how the video drivers from the other vendors (AMD/Intel) avoid the pitfalls that befall nvidia with every major new kernel. It's usually the same memory management API changes every time, too. Although this time the changed HOTPLUG_CPU support clobbers them as well.

Samsung share plummets – but it’s not because of the Burning Note

Zola
Flame

What's Elop up to these days?

Pretty sure he can save them - he's got experience of burning platforms, after all...

Czech, mate: Cops cuff Russian bloke accused of LinkedIn mega-hack

Zola
Joke

Can't be long until he tries the Aspergers defence...

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