Destroy All Monsters • User • The Register Forums

And we return to Munich's migration back to Windows – it's going to cost what now?! €100m!

Thursday 4th January 2018 11:57 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: 10 years to migrate 16000 PCs and they're going to go back to Windows ?

The pro-Linux faction didn't do their due diligence and promised things that - for whatever reason - they couldn't actually deliver, so the transition failed.

WHO says it failed?

The german report (the part released to the public; created with LibreOffice 4.1 on 2017-10-19; somewhat infected by SJW style of writing) says:

- They have trouble managing both LiMux and Windows clients (well, why not fix that)

- Their LibreOffice version is kinda old and not being maintained (well, why not fix that)

- They fail to properly open MS documents (well, take MS to the cleaners for that instead; open documents and all that)

How come the solution is to move to Windows 10 and Ms Office?

Additionally:

- They are in deep shit due to various unmaintained old applications that they need to access "old data" (this ain't gonna fix that)

- Lack of IT Governance (well, welcome to State!)

- No roadmaps for major solutions (by SAP and AKDB)

- They haven't even managed to make all the applications Unicode compatible yet

So there are other problems than "Linux".

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Thursday 4th January 2018 11:26 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: Just remind the germans of...

Microsoft and the US Opioid Crisis have much in common.

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Thursday 4th January 2018 11:24 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Makes one regret the roaring 30s when German Juche was the Leitwort

Now Rest-Germans don't even have the courage to trust in their own skills.

Yet another symptom of Late Merkel Age Collapse.

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Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs

Thursday 4th January 2018 11:14 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: Yeah sure.. AMD and ARM the sweet angels..! PLEASE!

How's the weather down in Santa Clara?

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Thursday 4th January 2018 10:29 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: Has the collective IQ of the tech world hit rock bottom?

Seems like we're sleepwalking to the greatest clusterfuck in tech history. Smart devices everywhere but no actual Smarts. Is there something in the water / air lowering IQ? Speaking of air, mines the PC getting air-gapped.

Well, people are suffering from infocrap overload everywhere and a sociopath and Wall-Street driven sales cycle. But also...

The population-weighted cross-national mean IQ-score is 89.03, with SD of 12.89, for 123 nations. There are roughly 550,000 individuals in the included samples.

So people overall may not be as smart as they think.

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Thursday 4th January 2018 08:23 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Good stuff!

Maybe there will be a Hollywood movie.

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We translated Intel's crap attempt to spin its way out of CPU security bug PR nightmare

Thursday 4th January 2018 09:32 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: Old is new again?

From BBC FONUIZ: Rush to fix 'serious' computer chip flaws

Typically, both parties agree not to publicise the problem until a fix has been implemented, so that criminals cannot take advantage of the issue.

This time it looks like somebody jumped the gun and information was leaked before a software fix was ready for distribution.

I haven't heard about anyone "this time" mysteriously jumping any gun, what do they mean by that?

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Thursday 4th January 2018 09:21 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: For shame!

...if the grave is bug-free.

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Thursday 4th January 2018 09:16 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: And Nothing about Google?

Those twats are responsible for this late night patch frenzy that my company and countless thousands more, are dealing with. Their excuse for releasing the details is thin at best.

Messenger, blamed, much?

You seem to be upset. Your company may exhibit panicpants syndrome. Maybe IT is not for you.

We find that The team said in a blog post that it discovered the vulnerability in May 2017, and quickly notified Intel, AMD, and ARM.

Sounds like more than 90 days. And what is this "out of band release forcing" you are talking about?

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Tsinghua Unigroup: We don't need Hynix chip tech, we have our own

Thursday 4th January 2018 03:15 GMT Destroy All Monsters

I predict the West will be done in by SJW sillyness and low-IQ, low-productivity immigration within 20 years, basically resembling Upper Volta, not with nukes, but with unmaintained decaying windmills...

..and THEN China will eat the world.

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Open-source civil war: Olive branch offered in trademark spat... with live grenade attached

Wednesday 3rd January 2018 10:08 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Hippie fight!

Seriously, what are these noises coming out of the commune!

Can't we all get along, there is software to write!!! At least we don't get any Twitter fight yet (or do we? I don't get near that blue-checkmark brainrot crap)

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Nvidia: Using cheap GeForce, Titan GPUs in servers? Haha, nope!

Wednesday 3rd January 2018 10:00 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: Note to Nvidia:

Yes, this all sounds like Legal Department Rot and the Search for Faster Money has set in.

Inexorably, Entropy wins.

Then someone else takes over.

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Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

Wednesday 3rd January 2018 10:00 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: Genetic Diversity?

Nah.

National Semiconductor's 320X CPUs were pretty nice. And if Moto had finally succeeded in doing the 880000, who knows.

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Wednesday 3rd January 2018 02:00 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: A pretty good writeup I think

That's why "it's being dragged along".

But yes. Same as with parser. If you parse text from the Internet, it's the text from the Internet that's in charge, not your parser...

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Wednesday 3rd January 2018 00:52 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: Ahhh, the beauty of a monoculture! Everyone suffers equally.

But people will be looking at optimizing code again.

This *could* be a big deal in interesting applications that have real time constraints. Maybe.

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Wednesday 3rd January 2018 00:52 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: Can you hear it?

And apparently the earth's core (magnetic, not DDR) is slowing down enough to cause massive earthquakes in 2018.

Oh hey, someone found another copy of "Nostradamus' Terror Predictions That Are The Same As Last Year" while cleaning the attic on the 1st?

I predict war with Iran on behalf of Israel btw. My bookie says odds are good.

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Wednesday 3rd January 2018 00:52 GMT Destroy All Monsters

GURU MEDITATIONS! PRESS LEFT MOUSE BUTTON TO SLOW DOWN 30%

IANAL but surely the chips we have, once patched, will no longer be performing as advertised?

I don't think it said on the box "Guaranteed Security At Top Performance For Any Possible Kernel"

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Wednesday 3rd January 2018 00:52 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: Hmmm...

Someone just took £50 from my cpu!

Suddenly your CPU is like Bitcoin.

Or the EURO

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Wednesday 3rd January 2018 00:39 GMT Destroy All Monsters

A pretty good writeup I think

Except for this part:

Whenever a running program needs to do anything useful – such as write to a file or open a network connection – it has to temporarily hand control of the processor to the kernel to carry out the job.

Not a good way to think about this IMHO.

The way to think about this is that the CPU is in charge, but gets dragged along by the code (alternatively, there is a token being handed down the instruction path) (alternatively, the CPU plays "parser" of the code, leaving a foliation of the changing memory state along the time dimension). The switches between protection rings just follow a small finite state machine, where the transitions occur on kernel call, interrupt or return-from-kernel.

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Wednesday 3rd January 2018 00:38 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Holy Shit

Literally an Outside Context Problem.

With the UFOs.

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Astroboffins say our Solar System could have – wait, stop, what... the US govt found UFOs?

Saturday 23rd December 2017 07:02 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Guys!

We already had Project Blue Book and Project Sign before that. Not sure what they cost though, AFAIK, it was an understaffed office of people classifying reports and possibly sometimes taking a plane to check out Encounters of the First or Second Kind (back then 3rd Kind Encounters were rather rare, whereas back in the late 20th one had to progress to Encounters of the 4th Kind. Today, we have Boris and stuff).

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UK Foreign Sec Bojo to tell Kremlin: Stop your cyber shenanigans... or else!

Friday 22nd December 2017 22:43 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Madness. Madness everywhere

Did you know that Jill Stein is now being given the Stalinist show trial treatment for "collusion with Russia" (i.e. for stealing the votes that rightfully belonged to Hillary?)

I'm really having a jolly good time.

From the ~~Democratskaya Pravda~~New York Times:

Jesse Ferguson, a former Clinton campaign spokesman, said Americans ought to know if a presidential nominee, no matter how minor, had become a Russian asset or was simply boosted in an effort to chip away Democratic votes from Mrs. Clinton.

“Russian operatives were not promoting Jill Stein because they thought she would win,” Mr. Ferguson said. “They were promoting her because they thought it would hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.”

Maybe we can bring back public hanging/burning/whatever? What a time to be alive.

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Where did all that water go? Mars was holding it wrong, say boffins

Friday 22nd December 2017 22:43 GMT Destroy All Monsters

[Citation please]

Random Commentard suffering from delusions of adequacy (and who probably can't even solve a differential equation) believes that magically, a single body in the solar system did not get hit by the very abundant H20 of the early solar system. It's not like any of the balls out there show revelatory signs of water abundance. Not at all, right?

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Friday 22nd December 2017 22:43 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Your point?

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WordPress captcha plugin on 300,000 sites had a sneaky backdoor

Thursday 21st December 2017 00:58 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: Checking

Turing?

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CSS and Javascript on GOV.UK page take early Christmas holiday

Thursday 21st December 2017 00:58 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Oh yeah.

A government legal aid eligibility checker has been without Javascript and CSS for a fortnight

And this is bad because... ???

Ceterum censeo, all JavaScript developers should be abducted by aliens and probed for sanity.

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How Google's black box Knowledge Graph can kill you

Tuesday 19th December 2017 19:07 GMT Destroy All Monsters

You know that Pearl Harbor was a total surprise attack, right?

Nick Carr raises the biggest issue: "Is it OK to run an AI when you know that it will spread falsehoods to the public – and on a massive scale? Is it OK to treat truth as collateral damage in the supposed march of progress?"

I don't know, but why should anyone care in a world where the NYT exists and is read by les thought-leaders bienpensants while CNN exists and is watched by les rubes bienpensants?

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Fridge killed my baby? Mag-field radiation from household stuff 'boosts miscarriage risk'

Tuesday 19th December 2017 10:19 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: MF - EMF

Actually, I think it's the magnetic fields that the researchers seems worried about.

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Google ramping up AI in China, Nvidia's Titan V, Intel's hip-hop misstep

Saturday 16th December 2017 12:50 GMT Destroy All Monsters

No Europe?

No Europe!

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Russia could chop vital undersea web cables, warns Brit military chief

Friday 15th December 2017 13:37 GMT Destroy All Monsters

It think this is called "really reaching"

Sadly, being a complete clown doesn't have consequences.

"I'm getting my way of life through the the undersea web cables!"

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Checkmate: DeepMind's AlphaZero AI clobbered rival chess app on non-level playing, er, board

Friday 15th December 2017 12:26 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: This is NOT AI

The way to think about NN processing is: It's compression (throwing away "irrelevant" details):

Totally readable with a large picture of the bottled dog of John Bull:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-theory-cracks-open-the-black-box-of-deep-learning-20170921/

Also check out the Youtube video.

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Thursday 14th December 2017 18:22 GMT Destroy All Monsters

GOGGLE RAGE == GOOGAGE!!

A spokesperson from DeepMind told The Register that it could not comment on any of the claims made since “the work is being submitted for peer review and unfortunately we cannot say any more at this time.”

This not being legal proceedings or an IPO manoeuver, I call utter bullshit by the usual suspects.

Of course Google is at liberty to discuss AlphaWhatsists. The peer reviewing researchers certainly wont mind and one hopes that they evaluate the paper on its merits, and reject it if they hear the show was rigged.

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Trump to NASA: Fly me (or some other guys) to the Moon

Thursday 14th December 2017 01:48 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: The world never has been better ...

I think Russia has dealt with ISIS.

Meanwhile, for some reason the US is still in Syria. I wonder why.

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Thursday 14th December 2017 01:48 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: Obviously this guy wants to emulate JFK

Bombastic Bob gets 3 downvotes?

Yes, we are in a HuffPo forum, now.

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Thursday 14th December 2017 01:48 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: Black to the moon?

NAZIS RECOGNIZING JERUSALEM AS ISRAEL'S CAPITAL.

It's practically a Shoah.

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OK, OK, MIRA-I DID IT: Botnet-building compsci kid comes clean

Thursday 14th December 2017 01:47 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Not even Putler?

So russian text strings in the Mirai code were nothing. “The Jester” (either another of those insufferable self-promoting "hats", of which color I dunno, or else a CIA op) had become all moist about that.

But Brian Krebs did good: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/who-is-anna-senpai-the-mirai-worm-author/

"Creating a company", eh? "Studying computer science", really? The correct action against such people is to send Serbian Muscle have a look-see and send the skilled haxxors nicely folded and ironed back to their mom's basement.

The worst thing is these guys will probably get hired after Club Fed because they are an "IT genius" in some PHB's deluded braincell.

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Auto auto fleets to dodge British potholes in future

Wednesday 13th December 2017 22:55 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: Why?

Usually around the driving routes of those who have power and influence.

Ley Lines!

"Winston Smith was not living on a Ley Line. He was not even outer party. All he had was Newspeak."

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Wednesday 13th December 2017 22:55 GMT Destroy All Monsters

THIS IS THE FUTURE!

Roads decaying to Franco-era spanish levels in spite of all the immigrants hitting town, as practically planeless aircraft carriers circle the globe on diplomatic missions to wreck someone's shit so that the immigrants keep coming so that the economy stays stronk?

Problem solved: Buy a robobutler so that your expensive deluxe car swerves effortlessly around any hole that might have escaped the nonexistent repair crews. You will yet arrive to your lobbying rendezvous in time, don't keep your parliamentarian waiting!

Britain 2020 - We have ideas!

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Put down the eggnog, it's Patch Tuesday: Fix Windows boxes ASAP

Wednesday 13th December 2017 18:07 GMT Destroy All Monsters

All very well, but...

Why is this story illustrated with a disgruntled brat with attitude who to all evidence needs a good spanking to get back into line?

Is it an allusion to the Blue Wonder of Redmond?

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Language bugs infest downstream software, fuzzer finds

Monday 11th December 2017 10:49 GMT Destroy All Monsters

You don't need to go that far (i.e. hiding injected code in the compile and regenerating it from there)

It's about making sure that "undocumented features" don't exist.

One of the major points in any high-assurance software that will get your arse kicked sideways by an audit if you don't show code review, coverage metrics and signed-off justifications for any feature suddenly uncovered.

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Hitchcock cameo steals opening of Oracle v Google Java spat

Monday 11th December 2017 10:44 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Google has since moved to using OpenJDK as the basis of their JVM

I don't think so. The JVM that comes out of a compilation of "OpenJDK" and the Dalvik successor sound VERY different indeed: https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik/

One is a stack machine, the other a register machine, for one.

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Monday 11th December 2017 10:43 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: Concur

The language syntax, key patterns, etc are deliberately designed to ensure that what is perfectly kosher in pretty much any other language would look like a copyright violation to a non-specialist.

To a non-specialist, anything can look like anything.

I don't see how Java is deliberately designed to trigger copyright minefields? It's bog-standard stuff from the early 90s, though Gosling apparently had a dumbass attack and forgot all about proper modularization which could be had in Modula-2 about 10 years earlier no problem.

If you think C/C++ header files are "clean" you are wrong (they are also medieval but that's for another discussion). In fact, a good part of the "SCO owns Linux!!!" discussion was exactly about certain kernel header files containing apparently copied constants like "1" or "2" and suspiciously similar lines beginning with "/*" and other weird symbols (ok, I'm simplifying a bit here)

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Monday 11th December 2017 09:02 GMT Destroy All Monsters

They clearly made a crappy insecure OS by stealing Oracle's crappy insecure Java!

Well, I just hope this is "ironic" or you are really Homer Simpson.

Otherwise, I hope for the sake of mankind that keep far away from IT. Or a jury. Or anything else for that matter. Don't push that button in front of you either.

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Monday 11th December 2017 09:02 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Re: The solution for Google

DO you mean "Microsoft couldn't sell any Android devices"

Ok, ok, I'm going back to Haskell..

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SpaceX to try reusing both rocket and spacecraft for historic ISS mission

Saturday 9th December 2017 22:26 GMT Destroy All Monsters

"Musk unfazed as Boeing vows to beat SpaceX in Mars race"

When asked whether he or Musk will get there first, Muilenberg responded: “Eventually we’re going to go to Mars and I firmly believe the first person that sets foot on Mars will get there on a Boeing rocket”

These Americans.

"You make ONE velly small mistake!"

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Saturday 9th December 2017 22:26 GMT Destroy All Monsters