Posts by lurker

That page works fine for me, and I disabled flash in chrome years ago.

AMD's bulldozer cores are not 'full' cores either, though they are "more of a core" than hyper-threading (which is essentially 'simulated cores') admittedly.

But none of that really plays into the issue of gaming performance - for gaming you just want two or more actual physical cores (so that your OS can dedicate one core full-time to a game) and the best per-core performance you can get.

Re: Kicked in immediately

@dwarf To truly make use of cloudflare/similar you need to hide your DNS behind theirs, which is the 30 minute job, and then move onto a completely different network so that the attackers can't simply bypass cloudflare and continue to attack you directly. (an attacker launching a large organised attack is likely to have done some preparation which would include making note of network addresses etc). This process will take more than 30 minutes.

Re: 2 years

@David Webb

I could have written almost exactly the same, except no heart attack (yet, touch wood). 2 years here also. My lungs feel much better for having switched from tobacco to the vaporiser, and my wallet is very happy about it too.

Obviously, the healthy option is to not smoke at all, but as someone who smoked for 15 years (habit acquired in university) I found it very easy to switch, and am very glad that it was an option. Plus it doesn't stink like 'real' tobacco, so the other half is all in favour too.

"Are people pulling in 290K of CSS for every page?"

A lot of that will be CSS frameworks, more CSS supporting javascript plugins and the like, yes.

@hans1

The comment was in the context of business usage of VMs really. You won't find much slackware or gentoo in use in large companies, Debian is very popular because it has a very stable release and update cycle and is widely supported.

I've been using linux for a long time, my first install was slackware from crapload of floppy disks onto a 386, and I have tried many distributions since, and I opt for debian normally for my VMs.

So it depends what sort of 'hardcore' you are looking at. Slackware, gentoo, arch etc are good for hardcore enthusiasts but less popular when you are looking at running very large numbers of servers/VMs.

Yeah nice idea, except that unless the DDOSer is a total moron it's basically impossible to identify them. It's all done with bitcoins, anonymised email addresses, and typically from a basement somewhere on the other side of the earth.

Re: Nothing new?

I think the article is talking about x86 architecture PCs, for current-gen gaming and similar. Atom based devices have very low TDPs, yes, but I assure you that while your tablet can run the tablet version of XCOM, it doesn't have the grunt needed to run the newer XCOM-2.

Re: Earlier coverage...

Everyone knows wikipedia is not perfect. However I'd be interested to hear of an alternative online and free repository of information which is better. ("Citations needed").

Let's face it, it's easy to criticise, and harder to 'do'; a fact which generations of mediocre middle management have turned into careers.

There is definitely some truth in this. All the progression in CPUs is in the field of efficiency / TDP properties (due to increased prevalence of mobile and rack-mounted devices to support 'the cloud'). The difference in IPC between a 2500k from 5 years ago and a 6600K from the current gen is negligable, but the latter draws a lot less power and consequently has better thermal characteristics.

Perl has all the things*. Not for nothing is it known as the swiss army chainsaw of programming languages.

*Somewhere in the bowels of CPAN, if not in core.

Re: Superb at computer science...

Well, looking at his history he seems to have issues with 'traditional' accountancy practices, which in fact might make him an ideal candidate for the inventor of a cryptocurrancy. The fact that he runs a company which owns one of very few privately owned supercomputers on the top 500 tables suggests he can't be all that bad at bean counting in at least some way.

It's wait and see at this point, but he's certainly an interesting candidate.

It would be nice to see updates to nethack, I can understand that they are conservative in not wanting to radically change the game 'design', but it would be great to see it given a UI overhaul similar to that recently applied to ADOM (now available on steam!), i.e an 'official' NotEye release.

I know ASCII purists will scream at the thought, but there's a lot of depth in nethack and it's a shame that no kid in their right mind today would give it a second glance.

Re: PHP

This hasn't been an issue using the frameworks I have commonly used, perhaps I have been lucky.

And if one takes care to use both input filtering and a structured database interface, it would be necessary for BOTH sets of methods to have exploits in order to inject SQL, which seems somewhat unlikely. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of SQL injections found result from programmers not even making an effort to program defensively, rather than cases where the effort has been made but a library has subsequently been found to be vulnerable.

You're right that it's a risk though, and having such features built into the core language to some extent would be preferable.

Re: Bloody Emacs...

Emacs a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor.

:wq!

Re: Clueless and pointless

I work at one of the retailers concerned (and was very directly affected by these attacks).

Judging by the language in the email my guess would be that the attacker is almost certainly not from the UK, quite likely eastern Europe somewhere - so $4000 dollars might go a bit further. Unfortunately it would be very difficult to track them down, email communications were through an email anonymising service in Switzerland, the bitcoin wallet address we received has zero transaction history and was likely created for the purpose.

Naturally we didn't and won't ever pay up for something like this. Apart from anything else, although the attacker promised that when paid they would 'never come back', we have no reason to believe them, and you have to suspect that if you coughed up once your name would be passed around as a target which 'might pay up' in future threats. Plus, damn the little greedy script kiddies, not giving them any satisfaction.

The attacks on us at least were quite significant and caused some major headaches not just for us but for upstream providers, and likely had knock-on effects on others connected to the same infrastructure. The disturbing thing really is how easy this kind of thing is for someone with relatively little technical ability to instigate, relative to how much work is involved in defending yourself from it.

Re: Another standard?

"Seconded. Kill JS and CSS as many times you fancy -stake them, behead them, burn them, slice them, in sequence and in parallel."

I see a lot of people ranting about removing JS without really appreciating what that would mean. Javascript (or more specifically some form of in-page access to XMLHttpRequest or a mechanism which does the same thing) makes a huge difference to how web applications are built. Without these, we would be back in the mid-to-late-90s world of having to press the big old HTML SUBMIT button in order to have anything on any web page change, and full-page reloads for any change to the page content.

Speaking as someone who has been a web application developer since before either javascript or CSS were things, I'm not a huge fan of either javascript or CSS as a language or markup respectively, but that cat is most definitely out of the bag now and cannot be put back, and if they didn't exist similar functional alternatives (with their own sins and issues) would be required. I can only guess that people making these 'remove JS' requests are either wearing rose-tinted nostalgia glasses or lack understanding of how modern websites work.

The project in question isn't talking about replacing javascript anyway, it works simply by using a single 'amp' javascript library to which it expects developers to stick with the goal of increasing performance.

It's not going to work though, projects like these stem from a naive engineering desire to 'refactor the web', and big as google and it's little coalition of the willing may be, I can't see this succeeding.

Re: Bigger picture

"Their market, their rules"

It should not be the case that companies 'own the market', that's not healthy competition, that's monopolistic. Of course this is the entire goal of the walled garden software/content ecosystem, but it would be short sighted to accept it as 'the norm'.

Re: About time...

Came here to post the same, the BBC is one of the few places I have to right click and run flash player nowadays (have had it set to not auto-run for a couple of years).

Re: Surely the Kremlin would be familiar with rule #1?

True, but when even Putin thinks you're a crazed tyrant, it might be time to stop for a bit of introspection.

Re: 4k vs VR

I don't think VR is likely to replace regular monitors any time soon, whether 4k, 1440p, or 1080p.

The technology is only really suited for / compatible with some games, using it for extended periods is tiring and a little uncomfortable, and apart from anything else it's not really even out yet.

For the near future I see VR headsets being an additional item for enthusiast gamers, something you have on the desk next to your monitors and use when appropriate.

Personally I'm not really sold on 4K though. I'm perfectly happy with 1440p or even 1080p myself, and given the jump in GPU prices involved in effectively using 4K I'm in no hurry to switch.

Re: Nominative Determinism

"If you don't know who he is, you don't develop with Git and you're probably not a developer at all."

Really? I know who Donald Knuth is, and who Kernighan, Ritchie (RIP) and Ken Thompson are, but I'm not a developer because I don't know some (googled this) .NET blogger?

I'm sure he may be a good programmer and a leading light in your personal firmament, but that's a pretty narrow definition of what a developer is.

I'd love to be able to justify an upgrade but like you my 2500K is still more than capable of everything I ask of it, without even needing to overclock it so far.

Re: Sankes [sic] with legs are still around

I feel hidden vestigial pelvis bones and legs are not quite the same thing.

However if your point is that this is not actually news which "upset the applecart in the world of palaeo-snake boffinry" that's obviously correct, that's just El Reg trying to make this more exciting or fit in a colourful boffin-based turn of phrase I guess.

I guess the actual 'news' is that a fossil has been found which confirms something we already assumed to be the case due to circumstantial evidence.

Re: $60.00(USD) difference

Could be worse. Apple charge $125.00(USD) for the same upgrade (16 -> 64) on the iPhone 6.

Re: The best bit is....

There's also a flash banner on the front page of el reg.

I've had flash disabled in chrome for a year or so now, can't say I've really missed it, everything worthwhile runs without it and I can elect to run it in the rare case where I need to.

Yeah HoMM2 was the high point, 3 was 'okay' but since then (and the ubisoft buyout) they have increasing levels of polish but decreasing levels of charm.

Re: How many of these are using Google as their address bar?

"Duh?

Am I the only one who just clicks on a URL in my favourites list?"

That was the norm back in the 90s. But I suspect that most people (like myself) found at some point that ever-growing favourites folders are cumbersome, and become a crutch rather than a valuable tool.

Nowadays I only tend to bookmark very specific pages, usually reference pages which required a bit of digging to search up.

Re: Forestry != woodland

It's due to the 'intellect distortion field' which surrounds the devices.

How else do you think they sell so many at that price?

Re: Actually I think el-reg have the point entirely.

If El Reg really understood the point of terrorism - and in particular the fact that media coverage is what makes it 'work' - they probably wouldn't have written anything at all on the subject.

I'm not saying western media should censor themselves and not cover terrorism. But the fact that the amount of coverage is so completely out of proportion to the actual effect (when you compare e.g deaths through road traffic vs deaths through terrorism) is precisely how terrorism works - essentially people like to be scared, governments like people to be scared, terrorists like people to be scared, and the media like to be profitable and can do by facilitating all of the above. It's just the rest of us who don't profit from this equation of misery.

I do take your point though that if you have to write about it, it's better to write a 'two fingers up to terrorism' article than a 'hide under the bed the terrorists are coming' article.

Re: Maybe I'm ignorant, but?

Thanks a lot, very informative answer, cheers for taking the time :).

However, with SATA, unlike SAS/SCSI, the drives aren't on a shared bus, they are each cabled individually to the controller, rather than being on a chain, so wouldn't a SATA raid controller be able to speak to all drives simultaneously using the full SATA bandwidth? Or do SATA controllers acually share bandwidth between the attached SATA devices?

I can see how it would make sense though in the scenario you initially described, where a controller could maximise thoughput by interleaving the dumping of drive-ram-buffer-sized chunks of data very quickly over a highspeed interface.