* Posts by YARR

605 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Nov 2008

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As above, so below: El Reg haunts Scaleway's data centre catacombs 26 metres under Paris

YARR
Coat

I've got an in-Seine-ly great idea about how to cool those servers.

Boffins' neural network can work out from your speech whether you'll develop psychosis

YARR

OK, so I wasn't entirely right there.

A tautological identity statement indicates a tautological identity statement.

... and Brexit is the new Remain.

YARR

* is *

A tautological identity statement as a riposte indicates that a prior statement about the same subject is not entirely true.

TPM now stands for Tiny Platform Module: TCG shrinks crypto chip to secure all the Things

YARR
Boffin

TPM = Ring -4 ?

So given the known hardware vulnerability at ring -3 with the Intel Management Engine / AMD TrustZone, is TPM really trusted?

Twist my Arm why don't you: Brit CPU behemoth latest biz to cease work with Huawei – report

YARR

I'm not sure that Risc-V has suitably advanced replacement CPU cores available yet. However MIPS is already supported for Android.

You're on a Huawei to Hell, China tells US: We'll fight import tariffs, trade war to bitter end

YARR

PC assembly in Ireland ended years ago...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/08/dell_closing_limerick_manufacturing/

Japan on track to start testing Alfa-X, fastest train in the world with top speed of 400kph

YARR

Carbon emissions

So how do the carbon emissions per passenger mile / kilometer compare for high speed trains? Will they help to achieve zero-emissions target by 2050?

Veteran vulture Andrew Orlowski is offski after 19 years at The Register

YARR
Trollface

&& ||

Cheers for censoring my best comments over the years !!

Backup bods Backblaze: Disk drive reliability improving

YARR

He He He

Do they replace the drives at the first S.M.A.R.T. pre-failure warning, or when they actually crash? What if different makes of drive sense pre-failure differently? Sometimes all a drive has to do is overheat slightly from intense activity. Custom designed drive racks could influence this, and perhaps Helium drives dissipate less heat?

If you were a drive manufacturer, would you set the pre-failure criteria to be more sensitive, so customers buy more replacement drives?

MoD plonks down £2m on table in exchange for anti-drone tech ideas

YARR
Boffin

... and return them safely to the Earth?

What they require is an artificial chameleon tongue to reach the target, and artificial gecko-toes to cling onto it. OTOH if safety is less of a concern, another quadcopter flying above could induce vortex ring state on the target.

Only one Huawei? We pitted the P30 Pro against Samsung and Apple's best – and this is what we found

YARR
Stop

Money || Life

It seems terribly wasteful to me, to invest so much money in a high-end device that promises no software updates beyond 2-3 years. After then, your fancy phone with all your personal data become a hacker's paradise. This must also reduce the second hand value of smartphones to effectively zero over that time. Apple seems to have the edge in this regards.

So how long before we finally get a phone OS with hardware abstraction and unlimited software updates like desktops? My money is waiting. A forward-looking reg article on this subject would get a thumbs up from me.

This is not, repeat, not an April Fools' Day joke: 5 UK broadband vendors agree to pay YOU daily rate for fscked internet

YARR
Holmes

April rises

Cost will be passed onto the customer. The worse the service, the more you'll pay.

Croydon school rolling in toilet roll after Brexit gift deemed unfit for the Queen's Anus Horribilis

YARR

The Brexit upside...

A loo-roll shortage is an ideal opportunity for British innovation to lead the world again. The Dyson Loo-Blade (patent pending) will blast your behind with a high velocity airstream that will leave it fresher than it's ever felt before, all while saving the lives of countless trees. I sheet you not.

We can do this the easy way or the Huawei, US tells Germany with threat to snip intel over 5G fears

YARR
Big Brother

I don't buy it

Do security agencies normally publish such things?

There are backdoors, and then there are just bugs which can be exploited to remotely attack comms infrastructure. Individual endpoints can be quickly replaced, but if your network infrastructure is inherently vulnerable you can't quickly replace it. To remain operational in all circumstances, you must have the ability to independently patch bugs for which you need the source code. Which OEMs of network hardware provide the source code for their products and allow you to roll your own patches?

If you buy from the US you're supporting NSA spying, if you buy Chinese you're supporting their government mandated spyware / great firewall of China. Perhaps an ethical agency should choose neither?

Ready for another fright? Spectre flaws in today's computer chips can be exploited to hide, run stealthy malware

YARR

Re: Too many cores

If we made faster cores instead of just throwing more of them at workloads that can't use them, we wouldn't need speculative executions and thus, no spectre

The reason for speculative execution is to make a single core execute code faster. Faster meaning more IPS rather than raw clock speed. It's a trade off with diminishing returns, of throwing an order of magnitude more hardware / CPU die area / power consumption to run a single program thread with a linear speedup. The alternative would be to have many more slower non-speculative cores, or a mixture of the two.

Manufacturers may fix known Meltdown / Spectre / L1TF variants in their next generation CPUs, but speculative execution in general requires shortcuts which could expose them to as-yet-undiscovered issues. They could be forever fixing new speculative execution issues with each generation, which is an argument for including a non-speculative core in every CPU with hardware memory encryption that can be used to run critical secure code.

Crypto crash leads to inventory pile-up at Nvidia, sales slaughtered

YARR
Facepalm

beneficiary even. (Doh-ble pst).

YARR

Bitcon falling but not fooling

What a suprise that BTC is still falling, given the inherent ponzi-scheme design whereby later coins require (exponentially?) more work to produce. There ought to be a law against that sort of thing.

Therefore the gradual fall in value must disguise a severe fall in demand. Get out while you still can, I'd say.

We've heard from the benefactors, but the losers seem rather quiet. I wonder, could Crypto loses trigger a global recession?

I'm a crime-fighter, says FamilyTreeDNA boss after being caught giving folks' DNA data to FBI

YARR

Q: does the ends (identifying a criminal) justify the means (violating data privacy rights)? For people who agreed to having their DNA searchable, perhaps not. For relatives who can be identified as a close match, yes this is a violation of their privacy. How serious would a crime have to be to justify a violation of privacy on this scale? I don't think this privacy right should be routinely abused, if ever. If law enforcement agencies already abuse the power of DNA databases by retaining DNA for innocent people, then they should not be entrusted with any further powers.

Re. to allow the agency to create new profiles on his system using DNA collected from, say, corpses, crime scenes, and suspects.

Q: Do the FBI own this DNA (personally identifiable information)? I think not.

Corpses - do human rights end when you die? If law enforcement are entitled to retain DNA from any corpse, they could eventually obtain everyone's family DNA history. Unidentified corpses that are obviously a victim of a crime, perhaps.

Crime scene - an innocent person's DNA could be left at a crime scene (if they were there before / after the crime). Can law enforcement retain this DNA indefinitely, or should it only be retained while that crime is under investigation?

Suspects - are innocent until proven guilty, so again there must be strict rules for how long their DNA can be retained. Once eliminated from an investigation, their DNA should be deleted.

En garde! 'Cyber-war has begun' – and France will hack first, its defence sec declares

YARR

If war's so glorious, why aren't politicians falling over themselves at election time to promise war more and more war?

Winning wars may be glorious (if the cost to you was worth it), but starting them generally isn't.

The strategy of avoiding war but encouraging / money-lending to others, then siding with the victor just before they win can be materially beneficial.

YARR

Re: Britain's " muted line about its offensive cyber capabilites"

For the same reason nuclear states are generally quite happy to have that status be publicly known

... but with nukes you win by not using them.

Apparently "cyberwarfare" is being conducted by agencies representing democratic tax-payers, without their consent. So-called "ethical" hackers are involved in this undeclared war against unspecified "enemies", and the taxpayers don't even know who started it, how it was started or if they themselves might be an "enemy" or a target of an "enemy". How will the tax-payers know if their representative agency loses said cyberwar?

What benefit is there from engaging in offensive cyberwarfare as opposed to purely defensive measures? Is neutrality a choice?

Core blimey... When is an AMD CPU core not a CPU core? It's now up to a jury of 12 to decide

YARR

They're different but they both look the same to applications.

Hyperthreaded cores are virtual - 2 HT cores are really just 1 physical core that switches state quickly between 2 virtual core states. This is done to keep the physical core occupied when there is a pipeline stall as a branch prediction fail.

The Bulldozer architecture has two full integer execution units that run two x86 threads in parallel. They share an FPU unit on the basis that in general use a single thread would underutilise a dedicated FPU unit. If both threads need to run a FLOP at the same time, one will have to wait. A shared FPU saves on CPU die area, which could be used to make a better FPU that executes FLOPs in fewer clock cycles resulting in better overall performance than 2 independent FPUs for optimised code.

All Intel x86 chips preceeding the 486SX had no integrated FPU, so would not be a valid "core" by the definition of these plaintiffs. In fairness, AMD probably should have called them integer cores to avoid confusion.

Peak Apple: This time it's SERIOUS, Tim

YARR

As the PC market has matured, the entry level hardware spec has essentially stagnated while high end models continue to improve. The same could happen in the smartphone market, so that entry level phones good enough for light use remain about the spec of an SE. Apple need to think carefully how to set the entry level spec so as not to deter buyers from higher end phones. e.g. Make them look less appealing.

London's Gatwick airport suspends all flights after 'multiple' reports of drones

YARR

Re: Something doesn't fly right with this story

but unshielded electric motors as on most consumer drones aren't designed for use in rain, and operating instructions say not to do so. Also the camera lens wont see anything through the rain drops without a lens wiper. This incident sounds like no ordinary drone - assuming there really did positively ID it at night and aren't jumping to conclusions.

We don't need new laws - but better enforcement of existing laws. Airport security ought to be equipped with jammers to intercept drone operator frequencies, or triangulators to identify the location of the operator.

Is Google purposefully breaking Microsoft, Apple browsers on its websites? Some insiders are confident it is

YARR
Mushroom

Will MS drop IE too?

In a way, dropping Edge makes sense for MS, as there's little point maintaining two different web browsers. If Edge was born as a cut-down version of IE, but failed to gain traction in it's intended market (mobile devices), it's engine and unique UI features can be rolled back into IE to unite MS's desktop browser market share. If they wait 'til after Google have switched to Shadow DOM v1, the Edge engine ought to still work for Google sites.

Should Google continue making their sites incompatible with other browsers, a future IE could include a Chromium rendering engine for Google's sites, and use the Edge engine for everything else. Relying on the Chromium engine outright would give Google the opportunity to screw up MS web apps. OTOH MS could embrace and extend the Chromium codebase and start causing Google some headaches!

Ecuador says 'yes' to Assange 'freedom' deal, but Julian says 'nyet'

YARR

Here's to another six years of Ecuadorian freedom

Maybe if they offered him internet acess in the event of incarceration, that would tip the balance in favour of leaving? If he still refuses, he likely escaped years ago and has a body double hired for balcony appearances.

Openreach hacks full-fibre broadband prices for developers... Property developers, that is

YARR

Funnily enough, not everyone who builds or moves into a new home values FTTP enough to stump up the installation fee. With house prices already out of reach for so many, every extra cost matters. FTTP isn't a necessity to access essential online services.

Roughly 30 years after its birth at UK's Acorn Computers, RISC OS 5 is going open source

YARR

This applies to classic RISCOS up to 3.1, the latest version may work differently, since modern ARM devices have a different memory controller.

http://www.riscos.com/support/developers/prm/hardware.html#marker-886229

"One-to-many mapping is used to 'hide' pages of applications away when several applications are sharing the same address (&8000 upwards) under the Desktop. These pages are, of course, not held at &8000"

Desktop applications run in user mode, and see an address space starting at &8000, the MEMC translates this to the real address in physical memory. When the 'desktop' switches between tasks, it changes which memory pages are mapped into address &8000 and upwards, which isolates / hides those memory pages from other tasks.

Code that runs in a privileged processor mode (like relocatable modules) can access the full memory address space. Relocatable modules are assigned memory in a shared block called the module area which is not dynamically mapped by the MEMC, allowing them to be called from anywhere. Hence the modules must use relative addressing so they can run at whatever memory address they are loaded. If modules were unloaded from memory, this could leave gaps of unrecoverable memory (unless the next module was small enough to load into a vacant gap). The result being that you often had to reboot a computer that had been running for a long time, when the module area was full.

YARR
Boffin

All processes had to be written as position independent code that could sit anywhere in memory

Are you sure about that? I thought this applied only to relocatable modules, not application tasks which ran in user mode? IIRC the MEMC presented the memory pages allocated to a task as a fixed address space, protected from other tasks. Only relocatable modules run in a privileged mode / ring with access to the full physical address space.

Pixel 3, 3XL, Slate tab launch: Google emits swanky iPad botherer while tarting up mobes

YARR

Re: "no expansion" = more environmental damage

That's a design choice, not a necessity. The only limitation is getting enough address / data lines on a compact card similar to microSD.

YARR
Stop

"no expansion" = more environmental damage

Curious that even at this price bracket, they are designed with obsolescence in mind, yet low-end devices often take microSD cards.

Not only should storage be expandable, but why has nobody created a standard for replacable RAM on mobile devices?

Building your own PC for AI is 10x cheaper than renting out GPUs on cloud, apparently

YARR

This article would have been a lot more informative if it explained why this hardware spec is needed and how spending less / more on each part would affect application performance. Why do you need a 12 core CPU and 64Gb RAM, for something that runs on the GPU? How much would performance be affected using a regular 4 core CPU with 16Gb RAM and the same GPU?

Scrapping UK visa cap on nurses, doctors opened Britain's doors to IT workers

YARR

Is the current immigration cap arbitrary / invented out of thin air? Is the cap not set at a calculated level for a good reason?

Shouldn't permitted immigration be dependent on factors like available housing and services in an area for one? If the cost of living is too expensive for local people, no more immigrants should be allowed.

Also, for immigration to benefit the country, shouldn't they impose a MAXIMUM salary? i.e. immigrants should not be paid more than local workers, but should not be imported to undercut them either (so prioritise local workers first).

I once saw an immigrant (German) dentist who told me the extortionate rate the NHS was paying to have him work here under contract. Expensive immigrants offer poor value to the taxpayer - we'd be better subsidising the education of our own workforce and paying them enough so that we have a sufficient number of talented British workers.

UK.gov isn't ready for no-deal Brexit – and 'secrecy' means businesses won't be either

YARR
Megaphone

Here's my plan...

1. Don't sign any international agreement with arbitrary rules that are intended to make withdrawal difficult or impossible. e.g. Imposing an arbitrary period of 2 years to disentangle your economy is not realistic, therefore this expectation should never have been written into EU law. The rule that says you can't negotiate trade relations with other nations until after you have left the block should never have been accepted since it obviously intended to make leaving difficult.

2. Don't invoke the process of withdrawing from an international agreement unless you are ready to withdraw.

If we had a competent pro-British government in power from the begining, neither of these mistakes would have been made. It's evident that those in power are determined force political integration and global government and to make an example of anyone who defies their wishes.

Nokia reinstates 'hide the Notch' a day after 'Google required' feature kill

YARR

I thought the reason Android phones gained a notch was because Apple's screen supplier had too much unsold stock after the initially underperforming sales of the iPhone X.

In practice, missing the central part of the status bar must be magnitudinally more inconvenient than having a few millimetres of sensors / cameras / speakers along the top of a phone.

OTOH, could it be an industry scheme to trickle-down a retrograde 'feature' to mid-range phones, then re-introduce normal screens back to premium models, to hike up the long term price of a normal, usable phone?

Huawei Mate 20 Lite: A business mobe aimed at millennials? Er, OK then

YARR

Huawei to hell

and the drones are designed to carry phones

which drones are designed to carry phones? You'd need a large drone (probably >1kg) to carry the weight of a mobile phone. Why shift all the extra weight when an action camera is smaller, lighter and has a bigger lens (more light = good for fast motion) ? Drones frequently crash or fly away, which is most undesirable for an expensive phone with your data on it.

The reason GoPro sales have fallen is because many people don't need to upgrade them, cheaper 4K action cameras are improving, and newer drones tend to have cameras integrated. Small cameras make the drones lighter and more portable.

ZX Spectrum Vega+ blows a FUSE: It runs open-source emulator

YARR

Re: GPL

IANAL, but I don't see how bundling a GPL emulator with some emulated games does not require the entire thing to be GPLed

IANAL, but I believe the convention is that Copyleft only applies to statically linked code, not separate executables.

The age of hard drives is over as Samsung cranks out consumer QLC SSDs

YARR
Stop

re. "all the studies I've seen .. the service life of SSDs is comparable to enterprise HDDs"

Well those studies must be based on SSDs that have been in use for 2/3+ years, which probably means they are SLC or MLC (2 level), not TLC / QLC. Even the manufacturers of TLC / QLC admit their endurance is less, which is why they are targetted at consumers rather than production systems. The other worrying trend is that these short lifespan SSDs are increasingly being integrated into devices, so when they fail the whole device is a write off.

Using voltage levels to cram more data on a comms link doesn't justify doing the same for storage devices. A comms link only has to get the right data once, if an error is detected the data is re-sent. A storage device needs to store the right value indefinitely, if an error is detected, an algorithm must guess what the correct data was.

UK.gov commits to rip-and-replacing Blighty's wheezing internet pipes

YARR
Stop

More needless government interfering...

What reason is there that new builds must have FTTP installed? Why not adopt the norms of a free market, let those who want something pay for it? FTTP is hardly a necessity when there are alternative ways of getting internet access.

If I build a new house and intend to live there for many years, I'm forced to pay for an FTTP installation that I already know I wont use? Anyone building a house has many more important priorities on which to spend their limited budget.

If there is a specific issue with rented accommodation not having FTTP connections, then pass legislation that landlords must permit the installation of FTTP if tenants want it.

Up in arms! Arm kills off its anti-RISC-V smear site after own staff revolt

YARR

My prediction if RiscV has significant market impact...

Expect OpenARM (TM) welcoming you back with open arms.

Shared, not stirred: GCHQ chief says Europe needs British spies

YARR
Boffin

Post-Brexit border crossings

If the EU insists on a hard border with Northern Ireland, what about (Greek) Cypriots who have to cross Dhekelia? Will pre-EU border arrangements apply, or will they face a double border-crossing each way? Will goods have to be transported by sea to avoid paying double tariffs?

No fandango for you: EU boots UK off Galileo satellite project

YARR

I appreciate the constructive replies. High precision Galileo is accurate to ~10cm while the standard precision is about ~1 metre. So what new applications does this precision offer? What current applications are improved?

1. Cruise missiles / Precision-guided munition

- Guided weapons will destroy everything within 10's of metres, so targetting more accurately than 1 meter makes negligible difference.

- Mobile targets require weapons with localised target tracking

2. Avoiding collateral damage - eg schools being blown up rather than the nearby military target

- 1 metre precision is sufficient to avoid this.

3. Surveying

- building surveyors need much greater precision than 10cm, so conventional survey equipment must still be used.

- surveying natural geography could benefit - but isn't worth investing £billions

4. Transport system & autonomous vehicles.

- 1 metre accuracy is sufficient for route planning

- high precision positioning cannot replace the need for lidar / camera sensors to respond to surroundings

5. mapping minefields and paths through them

- 10 cm is better than 1m, but is it sufficient to guarantee avoiding mines without the use of other sensors?

6. "Power of a state / country is measured against their capability (and resolve), and without precision gps, UK's already lost."

- It's up to every state to decide their own priorities. I disagree that higher precision GPS (below 1m) offers much advantage. Ownership of a satellite positioning system does not guarantee access. Dependence on satellite positioning should be avoided.

> "people who disagree with me are even allowed to express their opinions"

I don't advocate censorship, but respected opinions should be founded on accurate information and reasoning.

YARR

Re: In perspective, Galileo isn't important

We voted to leave the EU, not ESA or Galileo or access to high precision Galileo.

Britain is a founder member of the Galileo project, the EU is not.

The EU later joined Galileo and changed the participation requirements so only EU members can have access to high precision positioning. Why did lawyers representing the original participants accept this?

If lawyers failed to guarantee participant's rights, could another international organisation join ESA, claim control over a project like Galileo then bar access to the EU or another member if they left said international organisation?

YARR
Megaphone

In perspective, Galileo isn't important

I've concluded that this forum is being used to spread anti-Brexit opinions without basis in reason. The same appears to be the case with the attempt in the wider media to link Brexit with Russia using political actors. This may be to discourage other EU members from leaving or to manufacture a false narrative for reversing Brexit.

Galileo is a minor issue in perspective, but regaining the political independence to control our borders will significantly benefit the lives of the majority of ordinary British people, if implemented effectively.

I remain ignorant - of a practical application for why we need high precision (sub-1 metre) satellite positioning. It's claimed our military or emergency services need it, but why? (Seriously)

Without a reason, high precision Galileo is no loss, nor is there much to gain by creating yet another satellite positioning system. The costs to the taxpayer of the Brexit transition are significant, therefore non-essential costs such as this should be avoided.

The lesson to be learned from this is that in any future international co-operation, lawyers must clearly set out guarantees to continued participation in a project from the outset. Allowing another partner to join a project at a later date, then change the terms to exclude an an existing partner is NOT ACCEPTABLE.

The fact is political union is not required for international co-operation. In reality we and the rest of the world can "have our cake and eat it" but a cabal who want to centralise political power globally are determined to deny us this. They attempt to convince us with false arguments that it's not possible. If we were to hypothetically create another satellite positioning system with non-EU partners, must we surrender to a new political union to achieve this?

PS. Rather than downvote, please reply with facts and reasoning.

You've heard that pop will eat itself. Boffins have unveiled a rocket that does the same

YARR

It's only rocket science

Could one of these carry a cubesat all the way to geostationary orbit?

... and fit within the missile launcher of a submarine?

Ongoing game of Galileo chicken goes up a notch as the UK talks refunds

YARR
Meh

If the EU claims to own Galileo (rather than each ESA nation according to contribution) what happens if more countries leave the EU? Does the last member of the EU get to inherit all the assets?

The public Galileo system provides accuracy of 1 metre. Why do we need more accuracy than this?

If the military applications are classified, why would the EU deny us access when they are more dependent on us for defence? We are one of the few nations in Europe to meet our 2% NATO budget commitment despite being in the safest position (having a sea border + the rest of Europe to buffer us from hostile regions). Maybe we should take it easy, cut our defence budget and let the EU take up the slack?

In summary, getting back control of our borders is far more important.

UK's Royal Navy accepts missile-blasting missile as Gulf clouds gather

YARR

Seawolf's major shortcoming was that it was a line-of-sight system, restricting its practical range to around seven or eight nautical miles

but in the confines of the Gulf where your ships are permanently shadowed by fast boats, Seawolf is all you need.

Sea Ceptor - Developed by EU defence conglomerate MBDA

MBDA's website says they're "European". Let's hope it's not dependent on Galileo or we're screwed.

think about the physics involved in trying to hit something coming at you at over 2 miles per second

Maybe we should have built submaries that can dive very quickly?

Microsoft patches problematic OS to deal with SSD woes

YARR
WTF?

It's 2018 and...

storage devices aren't hardware abstracted.

How is it even possible for a software update to break one specific storage device? If a custom interface is required, shouldn't this be the domain of software drivers provided by the manufacturer, rather than Microsoft?

Honor bound: Can Huawei's self-cannibalisation save the phone biz?

YARR

Captive honor

I hear the Honor has a captive market.... or is that just their workers?

Britain to slash F-35 orders? Erm, no, scoffs Lockheed UK boss

YARR

The sixth generation fighter will be a drone controller

The F-35 will eventually have this capability.

As for cheaper 4G fighters, they'll be sitting ducks against drones without effective stealth.

YARR

If the F-35 remains our only fifth gen fighter, we'll need them all, even if some are kept as spares ( i.e. not in active service).

Carrier fighters only have a short lifespan so the QE-class carriers will need a replacement air wing or two. The only likely replacements will be more F-35's or F-35 derivatives.

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