* Posts by Dan 55

15336 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

Should ISPs pay to block pirate websites? Supreme Court to decide

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It's not quite the same thing...

although it makes me feel dirty, I'm kinda with BT on this, why should they bear the cost of shutting down the rip off?

The blocking infrastructure is up and running, the cost to add a new address is negligible. The big ISPs block websites by categories anyway as a 'service' to the subscriber.

Beat Wall St estimates, share price falls 5%. Who else but... AMD?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Future

You have to define powerful. Any benchmarks you've seen are probably pre-Spectre/Meltdown.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Casino finance

You're not there to build a better chip AMD, you're there to land on the number that you were told to land on.

Well done, UK.gov. You hit superfast broadband target (by handing almost the entire project to BT)

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Maybe

The density in towns and cities is very high, the density between towns and cities is very low. You can cover most of the population very easily.

Spain has the most entries in this table.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Maybe

FTTP pays for itself much quicker in Spain due to the lower rollout cost as everyone lives in flats.

Eggheads: Cities, don't woo rich Amazon with sweetheart HQ deals

Dan 55 Silver badge

Monorail

Obligatory video.

Bezos is in the straw hat.

UK.gov mass data slurping ruled illegal – AGAIN

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: A pyrrhic victory

Pro-Brexiteers talk about trading with other countries as if none of the other countries were in their own trading bloc. None of the other countries have found a need to leave their trading bloc to trade with countries outside it, why should the UK need to leave the EU?

International agreements require arbitration between two parties. Far better to be in a club where you have some say in the rules about that arbitration than not having any say.

In the event of a FTA between the US and the UK, I'll let you guess in which country arbitration takes place.

If that idea is too much and you don't want to lose sovereignty then you could always remodel the UK on North Korea.

The Zuck promises to give you more local news – and so save the world

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Zucker

BT won't (usually) replay other conversations down the phone line at you or record your conversation and play it to other people, or advertise something while you use it, or play news bulletins it has decided you might be interested in but often turn out to be completely wrong though.

Ubuntu reverting to Xorg in Bionic Beaver

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I wonder...

Xorg's problem is it doesn't need enhancing, it needs drastically simplifying.

You can't ignore Spectre. Look, it's pressing its nose against your screen

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Arm A53

And they are way less powerful than an equivalent costing Intel machine!

Was that before or after Spectre/Meltdown patches?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Arm A53

It's all about the parallelism these days. You can make a Beowulf cluster of Pis.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: No shared CPUs

Or why use a public cloud if it's just a server dedicated for your own use? You might as well just use... your own server.

Firefox to emit ‘occasional sponsored story’ in ads test

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Recommended by Pocket

Settings > General > Home > Top Sites > Recommended by Pocket.

Dan 55 Silver badge

So Mozilla should give them options to donate. A built-in tip jar to sponsor content where Mozilla gets a small commission per tip might be a way of reinventing the web instead of just spamming web ads yet again.

Apple whispers farewell to macOS Server

Dan 55 Silver badge

Stupid, short-sighted, beancountery

Everything that's wrong with Apple these days.

And so Macs get strangled a little bit more.

FYI: Processor bugs are everywhere – just ask Intel and AMD

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: AMD doesn't even publish its own CPU erratas... they are hiding the most.

Wasn't that debunked a decade ago?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: AMD doesn't even publish its own CPU erratas... they are hiding the most.

Don't AMD call them Revision Guides? And they're published.

Dan 55 Silver badge

So you can't use SiFive's open-sourced designs based on RISC-V?

(Maybe you can't, but that's what I've understood the news articles about SiFive to mean.)

Dan 55 Silver badge

"The plebs" never have any choice in chips because there aren't any convenient chip foundries to pop out just a few on a wafer. Seriously it's a big undertaking, closed or open design.

RISC-V, it seems there are suppliers already.

Ever wondered why tech products fail so frequently? No, me neither

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Test is part of engineering!

Most of the problems at any stage can be put down not being given enough time to do anything.

QA aren't allowed to deviate from their script as they might find something which could hold things up.

You had one job, Outlook! Security bug fix stops mail app from forwarding attachments

Dan 55 Silver badge

One codebase, they said

That'll be why we've had a few patches now where bugs affect one version of Office and not the other.

H-1B visa hopefuls, green card holders are feeling the wrath of 'America first' Trump

Dan 55 Silver badge

But then again the UK pays less as a percentage of GDP into the NHS than other comparable countries do in their health services. Happy to allow immigration to improve the economy, not happy to fund services. Go figure!

Dan 55 Silver badge

It's easy to avoid the problem. Become a citizen. It is far too easy.

Unless you live in a country where you have to give up your previous nationality to get citizenship, or you come from a country which will revoke your citizenship if you become a citizen of another country, in which case it isn't.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: But the good doctor hasn't been keeping his nose clean!

However he was found not guilty in the domestic violence trial and came to an plea agreement in court for the driving offenses.

When do we consider the debt to society paid, when the judge says so (USAian) or never (foreign)?

it seems he doesn't care much for following our traffic laws

As he's been living in the US since he was five and can't speak Polish, I guess you're insinuating he picked up bad driving habits when he was four?

Dan 55 Silver badge

The US has benefited immeasurably from immigration

Though they did screw up in 1904 when they let in Friedrich and Elisabeth Trump and then she had an anchor baby.

New Sky thinking: Media giant makes dish-swerving move on Netflix territory

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I told you years ago ...

Multicast is rather moot as people now expect an on demand service over the internet instead of a broadcast service anyway.

RIP Ursula K Le Guin: The wizard of Earthsea

Dan 55 Silver badge

Seems it's been made available.

Mobile point of sale gets a PCI security standard

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Too late

Any standard this late is just going to document current practice, whether it's good or bad.

Microsoft whips out tool so you can measure Windows 10's data-slurping creepiness

Dan 55 Silver badge

Certainly not on Windows 7 as it's a Windows Store app.

But everyone here's removed/never installed the telemetry KBs already, right?

IT 'heroes' saved Maersk from NotPetya with ten-day reinstallation blitz

Dan 55 Silver badge

But Office! But Outlook!

NHS outages KO Welsh GP services and Manchester A&E

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Please state the nature of the medical emergency

Chronic underfunding brought about due to a minister with a privatisation agenda.

Maverick internet cop Chrome 64 breaks rules to thwart malvert scum

Dan 55 Silver badge

Advertisers sort your shit out

This is why people adblock.

If there must be advertising platforms and brokers, they should:

1. use simple text and images, no JS.

2. transfer the ads to be shown to the website showing them so the website is in control of serving them.

Because at the moment for a few quid anyone can fling any script which does anything at the browser and when there is malvertising it's impossible to trace.

Electric cars to create new peak hour when they all need a charge

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Off peak?

They would pause if the frequency drops below 60/50Hz, the only problem is the user interface would need work as they might signal that they've paused by going up in smoke.

29 MEEELLION iPhone Xs flogged... only to be end-of-life'd by summer?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Ultimate Play The Game

So you waited until it came out on Firebird or Mastertronic...

It's 2018 and… wow, you're still using Firefox? All right then, patch these horrid bugs

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Dear Mozilla, there's more to life than security

Any page on The Guardian's website will make it crash while rendering, at least on my mobile.

OK, who had 'Montana' in the net neutrality state pool? Congratulations

Dan 55 Silver badge

and what happens if all the providers refuse to play ball?

It's America, I imagine they get sued by the state for lots of money.

Dan 55 Silver badge

QoS is a reasonable management network practice.

'WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?' Linus Torvalds explodes at Intel spinning Spectre fix as a security feature

Dan 55 Silver badge

The problem is that you (or rather your OS' kernel at boot) has to opt in because marketing says fake benchmarks are important.

I'm sure anyone can design a CPU with none of the expected protection that runs like shit of a shovel, but that shouldn't be benchedmarked in the same way as other CPUs which does have it.

The benchmarks between AMD Ryzen vs Intel i7 8th Gen (Boring Extra Security Mode Which Isn't Really Needed) are too close for comfort, they want people to look at AMD Ryzen vs Intel i7 8th Gen instead.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: All of this makes me long for...

It makes me miss the Z80... Almost anything is better than x86.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Mr T is oh so good

Does Linus make CPUs?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: higher than expected reboots

What ever it is, it's "by design".

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: The right time - for a change

It's only what anyone technical wants to say, but as he's not beholden to a corporation run by marketing and sales he can say it.

The Reg visits London Met Police's digital and electronics forensics labs

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Are these the stitch up people?

No, that was Scotland Yard.

Also, what stops the 'backup' being altered after it was taken? The sha256sum (or whatever) doesn't appear to be signed and logged centrally, if everything's done at police station level.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Alert

Currently the Met cannot access remotely stored data – for example, on the Dropbox service. In order to do so, it would have to go through a Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) – the controversial Act that regulates the powers of public bodies to carry out surveillance and investigation, and the interception of communications. This process can be lengthy, he says.

So they can access it, they just don't want to go through the paperwork.

RIPA is pretty generous act anyway. What are the police asking for, a back door to Dropbox?

Firms pushing devices at teachers that let kids draw... on a screen? You BETT

Dan 55 Silver badge

Well if anything the Raspberry Pi isn't particularly short of online teaching resources, five seconds with Google will tell you that.

The Pi foundation has projects and there are third party projects, but should teachers expect absolutely everything on a plate? Should test tube suppliers come up with a chemistry course, sports kit suppliers come up with a PE programme, or dictionary publishers come up with an English course?

No, so why should IT be any different or self-explanatory?

If teachers who teach IT are only regurgitating stuff they learned from 10 years ago with different hardware or if kids think six copy-pasted lines are programming then there's obviously something wrong, but it's not with the Pi. Next you'll be blaming Bunsen burners for bad science results.

And the fact that your Pi is gathering dust in the attic is not really the Pi's fault either, it's only doing what you've decided to do with it.

Dan 55 Silver badge

And there still won't be flying cars.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Raspberry Pis are the best thing to show kids that it doesn't have be Wintel and Office.

Mercifully free from MS software, it gives them a chance to see that non-MS software can do the same thing and you don't have to rent a word processor.

Unlocked: The hidden love note on the grave of America's first crypto power-couple

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Enigma?

A/B headline testing?

In Soviet California, pedestrian hits you! Bloke throws himself in front of self-driving car

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: re: A lamppost fell over

Just watch where you're holding your little stick of Blackpool rock, you wouldn't want to burn it.

You may not be a software company, but that isn't an excuse to lame-out at computering

Dan 55 Silver badge

"Banks have always understood IT well enough to gorge themselves on it"

Really? There isn't two months that go by without a bank going down. It's what happens when they outsource everything half-way across the world and cut their own staff to the bone.

The most successful companies (Facebook, Amazon, Google, Amen) have it all in-house.

I think there's a lesson for us all. And the lesson is, let's not get on our high horse and preach to businesses about software because they're not software-y enough, because those that do make software their businesses (i.e. consultancies) do it worse than everyone else.