Posts by diodesign

Affected products

It's at the end of the linked-to advisory.

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Ah, shucks

No, thank you for reading and commenting!

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Like a broken record, baby, round round

Yeah, it did occur to us to do some kind of 'you spin me right round' reference but we may have worn out that gag. Shocking, I know, for a Reg editor to admit that. Exhibits A through E:

You spin me right round, baby, right round like an exploding asteroid, baby, right round round round

You spin me right round, storage, right round – like a ferrous-based platter baby, round round

(Picture caption in a Lara Croft game) You spin me right round, baby, right round...

(Picture caption of a galaxy) You spin me right round ... an artist's impression of the Milky Way

(Crosshead in an Audacity review) You spin me right round....

Plus, I've had many variations of Dead or Alive's smash hit on loop in my gym playlist so I don't think I can take any more spinning right round, like a record, baby, round round, you spin me right round, like a....

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Re: Handler

> crucial information is missing

It wasn't given, FWIW. We're not impressed by the info-lite approach to this launch.

> This Tensor chip, will I be able to buy it on Mouser or Digi-key? Is documentation going to be available?

Seriously doubt this all round. It's an SoC for this one product line.

> What kind of telemetry it is going to be sending to Google and what this chip is going to be doing with it?

The usual Android telemetry.

> How independent that third party is?

No idea.

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Re: Two tier Britain

This is income after taxes. Microsoft set aside $9.8bn for tax on an annual pre-tax profit of $71.1bn.

Microsoft had a global tax rate of 15% in Q4 FY2021, down from 17% a year ago.

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Re: I'm a bit sceptical

There's such a thing as "all publicity is good publicity" but I think this is an exception in this case.

The final YouTube video on this saga is here. It's all in French. If an English-speaking YTer picked this up, I would expect this to be all over the news more.

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Re: Is this really news?

Bringing up someone's immigration status and home government in an argument over APIs and copyright seemed newsworthy enough to the Reg team, nothing more, nothing less.

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'What is this rambling train-wreck of an article even about?'

It's a fictional history, a what-if piece. As in, what if history went another way in the 1980s.

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Re: Something doesn't add up...

Yeah, there was a math failure. It's been fixed. Thanks to those who wrote in via corrections@ to let us know.

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"the main computer is borked"

The main computer is fine, it seems, it's the instrument/payload computer that's halting. So they hope to turn off the payload computer and turn on the backup payload computer.

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"This is one pointless debate"

So pointless you contributed to it -- thanks!

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Kernel

Yeah, sorry, mea culpa. I hastily wrote the headline at the end of the day and used kernel and not service. It's fixed. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong, though.

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Re: OpenRISC

The advantage of RISC-V over OpenRISC is that it has more momentum, more financial backing, more corporate and enthusiast interest, and (I'm pretty sure) more hardware available now or on the horizon. It's an Arm rival that seems to have gained traction.

OpenPOWER and OpenSPARC just seem out of reach. We do keep an eye out for them. I can imagine folks feel OP and OS are a little encumbered by their parents, IBM and Oracle, respectively.

Also, Intel just reportedly tried to buy a RISC-V startup for $2bn+. I don't see that happening with OR, OP, and OS outfits.

If there's a screw-up in the RISC-V world, then let us know if we don't spot it, and we'll write about it. We're pro-competition and we like tracking things that may challenge the status quo (eg, Arm). RISC-V is still so young that it's not in widespread use and the opportunity for that community to blow it hasn't come up yet.

There may be some technical limitations to OpenRISC v RISC-V. The people who created RV complained that OR still had branch delay slots (ew), the architecture and its software stacks weren't fully 64-bit ready, and the ISA encoding space gave too much room to immediate values, which is awkward.

Sure, I hope one day we get a chance to do a technical look at RISC-V v OpenRISC v OpenPOWER v OpenSPARC, but for now, the reason why we write about RISC-V is because we like an underdog. As Arm's CEO said, RISC-V keeps Arm on its toes, which is good for everyone. OpenRISC and OpenPOWER ain't doing that.

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Traditional algorithms

The neural network, Google says, outperforms human and industry automated tool placement.

So when you see in the article "beats humans" read it as "beats humans using their brains and their automated tools". I'll try to make that clearer.

Google's argument is that the neural net places macro blocks better than humans and their tools, and does it in hours, and not in a process that can take months to juggle around blocks and cells. Also, the AI can place the blocks in an unconventional manner: it seems to scatters them as needed, which some humans might not be so brave to do. The design looks like a mess but it's optimal.

FWIW it's been 15+ years since I've done any kind of chip design. In researching this piece, I read a pre-publication analysis of the paper by Andrew B. Kahng, a VLSI professor at UCSD, and for instance he mentions:

"The authors report that the agent places macro blocks sequentially, in decreasing order of size — which means that a block can be placed next even if it has no connections (physical or functional) to previously placed blocks.

"When blocks have the same size, the agent’s choice of the next block echoes the choices made by ‘cluster-growth’ methods, which were previously developed in efforts to automate floorplan design, but were abandoned several decades ago.

"It will be fascinating to see whether the authors’ use of massive computation and deep learning reveal that chip designers took a wrong turn in giving up on sequential and cluster-growth methods."

In other words, the AI works differently to humans and their automated tools, and that difference can be seen.

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Re: The world’s most-populous nation

Thanks -- it was fixed. But don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong so we can fix it straight away.

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Re: UTC

Thanks, it was fixed. Please consider dropping corrections@theregister.com an email if you spot anything odd so we can take a look straight away.

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Incident

Yeah, apologies: it's fixed. Was a bit more than an incident.

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'What kinds of mobile phones would these be then?'

Mobile phones that can't make calls. There's a demand among drug traffickers for handhelds that have had their voice call capabilities, and other functions, removed for security and privacy reasons -- preferably physically removed, if possible. See Sky ECC, which was bundled on devices that had their microphones, cameras, and GPS receivers removed.

From the AFP announcement:

"The app AN0M was installed on mobile phones that were stripped of other capability. The mobile phones, which were bought on the black market, could not make calls or send emails. It could only send messages to another device that had the organised crime app. Criminals needed to know a criminal to get a device."

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Not quite like Tor

Yeah, you kinda have to take Apple's word for it for now when its people say "no one, including Apple, can see both who you are and what sites you're visiting."

Presumably the Apple security guide [PDF] will be updated with details of Private Relay for cryptographers to study and assess. That guide is usually detailed enough to determine the viability of a design.

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Re: Note to El Reg

Sure, OK, I'll see what I can do.

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'I wonder if anyone has checked to see if these are still his views.'

We've asked him. We'll let you know if he responds. Google PR and HR are going to be all over him, though.

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Re: Are the forums broken?

We did some upgrades to the backend of our systems over the long weekend and that held up the processing and publishing of comments.

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California

You mean Florida, right?

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Re: ARM A710 or ARM710

Yeah I know. The A510 kept making me think of the Acorn A540, too.

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"This is an advertorial for Databricks"

No, it's not. Please don't accuse us of passing off sponsored copy as editorial -- paid-for articles are clearly marked as such.

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Re: I didn't know El Reg was US-chauvinist

Yeah, yeah. It's now noted in the piece.

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Timelines

'IEEE 802.3at-2003' is just a typo on their end on their sales webage. The standards are: the original IEEE 802.3af-2003 and the updated 802.3at-2009.

Our article just uses 'at' (newer) and 'af' (original).

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Disinterest v uninterest

Hi -- yeah, it's just a tick some writers and editors have, that they mean uninterested and they write disinterest. It's fixed. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong, ta.

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Very grouchy

Yes, it's in the tail end and it's now fixed. The piece does also say that it's impossible exploit in the wild, and it's more an interesting hack than anything else. If it was going to make planes fall out of the sky, we would say so.

We're not perfect. We make mistakes just like everyone else.

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Dual screen

Nah mate, when we say dual-screen laptop or slabtop, we mean a laptop that has 2 screens and folds up, like two touchscreen tablets hinged together --- not a multiple monitor PC.

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"Bill had a relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein"

Yea, it's in our article, my guy.

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Time

Yeah, that's at 11.13pm UTC today. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com please if you spot anything wrong, ta.

And thanks to those who did -- it was fixed straight away.

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Re: Clarification please

The latter (the M1 MB Air has no fans FWIW). From the blog post:

"I have 7 ARM VMs booted at once… 2 are CLI only (Photon and BSD), the others are full desktops… each is configured with 4CPU and 8GB of RAM. 6 different Linux flavors and 1 FreeBSD… MacBook Air. On battery. No fans. Yep."

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"Does it have trapping arithmetic operations?"

Rust performs overflow checking and panics if it happens for debug builds of projects. Non-debug release builds do not panic.

You should use the built-in checked_ methods for things like this, eg checked_add. They're available for all the primitive types, at least.

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Re: Counterpart

We're not Russian media but this right here is perhaps what it may look like -- coverage of 5EYES piling into Russia.

And here. And pretty much everything written about Edward Snowden and the CIA Wikileaks materials.

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4,409 to 4,408

It's not a typo: the FCC's reduced the max size of the constellation by one and allowed some of them to operate at a lower altitude. There's about 1,200 in orbit now, and 12,000 or more planned eventually, which will be launched in stages.

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Narrative

For the avoidance of doubt, we're being flippant in the framing of this article.

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Re: Why is DevClass a separate website?

There's a group of readers and advertisers heavily into just DevOps, CI/CD, software development, and containerization, and DevClass is there to serve them. El Reg isn't everyone's cup of tea, so we created a space for them.

Having said that, we'll be more closely integrating our sister sites (like DevClass) into The Reg sometime soon, which means your Reg account will work across them, allowing you to post comments, etc. And make DC stories easier to find on the Reg home and section pages.

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Re: Twitter

It was more to show that there was a wide respect for Dan.

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Re: Doom on a pregnancy test

Ah yeah, that's true -- I've tweaked the story to reflect this.

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Infection vector

I've asked QNAP how exactly are vulnerable boxes being found by the ransomware. Presumably it's by scanning the internet for public-facing NAS machines, though I hate to assume that's the only way in.

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Code commits

Off the top of my head, some code was committed to development trees but nowhere near branches for release.

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Headline

As in, 'land a serverless app a $40k/month bill'. Just keeping the headline snappy. Too many 'a's make it a mouthful.

If you can't parse a headline, the good news is that the article will immediately explain it.

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