* Posts by diodesign

3253 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011

Badges for Commentards

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: @ 1980s_coder (was:Aww! Jake)

"ElReg refuses to allow me to answer the vi question directly"

A lot of El Reg staffers are vim users (me included.)

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Bill Nye's bonkers LightSail spaceship unfurls solar sails at last

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Energy vs momentum

You must be fun at parties.

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Silicon Valley, episode 8: Larping, mogging and losing its way

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Thank you ElReg!

Thanks. We're interviewing people this week for an extra proofreading-fact-checking-editing role in our SF office, so long may the typo-free-run comtinuee.

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Android M's Now on Tap cyber-secretary is like Clippy on Class A drugs

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Ambiguiity.

Up to you, friend.

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Google spins up 'FREE, unlimited' cloud photo storage 4 years before ad giant nixes it

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Nonplussed

What Google giveth, it taketh away. Google Code, Glass, Reader, Wave, Talk, etc etc, projects axed when Google gets a bit bored of them.

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That EVIL TEXT that will CRASH your iPhone: We pop the hood

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Sadly, it's already full disclosure.

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EMC to open-source ViPR - and lots of other stuff apparently

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: openstack tools?

"these are all stand alone applications/platforms."

Yeah - our mistake. Meant "plus" not "such as". It's been fixed. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister if you spot anything odd.

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In a galaxy far, far, far away ... Farthest ever star system discovered

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: Far Out, Man!

I've fixed it.

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Intel raises memory deflector shields in Xeon E7 processor refresh

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: 1980s_coder

Yes - now made it clear in the story.

PS: Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.co.uk if you spot anything odd in a story - we can fix it immediately.

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Stubborn 'won't fix' Google U-turns on Chromecast vid judder twitching-eye blunder

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Bad Article Title is BAD.

"I... um... what? This headline is just terribly confusing."

Oi, that's our business model. Confuse the crap out of the reader into clicking on it to find out wtf is gong on.

eg: Rap for rap chap in crap rap app flap

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Finally, Mozilla looks at moving away from 'insecure' HTTP. Maybe

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

re: hilmck

We're working on site-wide HTTPS.

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Age guessing with Microsoft is FUN! Now give us your metadata

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Really, there were no other massive photos?

"you grab the most provocative photo of a lady in her pants"

As others have pointed out, it's Paris Hilton. The Reg has had a long-running relationship with the hotel heiress. We named our space-plane after her, put it in space, and broke a world record. She's a trope.

Working in the tech press, let alone the IT world, I've seen sexism first hand, and it's awful. I've seen PRs think it's a good idea to take women journalists out shopping rather than give them interviews. I've seen execs shut women out of conversations at the bar. I've seen inappropriate touching at dinner.

Running Paris Hilton through an AI algo isn't even close to it.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: "... to help Bill Gates sell his services ..."

It's tongue in cheek.

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You can now play thousands of classic DOS games on Twitter. Goodbye, productivity

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: VinceH

Mate, you can play them on twitter.com or even this Reg article page because the games are embedded automatically. Have you disabled JS? What browser are you using?

I spent a few minutes this morning playing Wolfenstein 3D on this very site. It works.

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What is Apple's idiot tax on Watch these days? 'About $265 or 80%'

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Idiot?

ZDNet is that way ----->

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Idiot Register

Oh dear. A sense of humor bypass in the comments on an Apple story. How unexpected.

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Intel has ambitions to turn modems into virtual servers and reinvent broadband

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Cite ?

Good grief; not everything has to come from a press release. In fact, we hate taking stuff from press releases. This was sourced from well-placed people familiar with Intel's plans, speaking on condition of anonymity to The Register. Y'know, journalism. Finding stuff out, reporting it, not waiting for the emailed press release.

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Visual Studio running on OS X and Linux for free? SO close

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: I can't find it...

It's right there on visualstudio.com.

(edit: code.visualstudio.com seems broken now; was working earlier. visualstudio.com works fine. Weird.)

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Win 95 code gaffe nearly made Stuxnet Suxnet, say infosec blokes

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: Luck, or Unicode? Neither - just accurate coding to the API.

Sure, but the point is: we were told this worm would try to install itself on Windows 9x, when the shown dwPlatformId check clearly stops that.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Interesting bug. Too bad it wouldn't have had the results described.

Indeed – we've added a bootnote.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Luck, or Unicode?

Thanks, fellas. We took a closer look at the code – and something's not right. We've added a bootnote.

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Windows 10 Device Guard: Microsoft's effort to keep malware off PCs

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Kernel has control

"Of course, the kernel can stop the Device Guard VM and replace it with another."

No, that's not possible according to Microsoft's design. Read the article again, please, I think you missed an important point.

There's an always-on hypervisor, which runs under the kernel and Device Guard. Device Guard is allocated its 'secured' corner, the kernel gets the rest. The kernel controls the vast majority of the machine as a result, but the barrier between the kernel and Device Guard isn't controlled by the kernel. That separation is enforced by the hypervisor.

I didn't want to bog down the story with an OS development 101 class, so I kept it simple. But I think it's all clear if you read it through.

This is all in theory: as linked to in the article, previous secure execution environments on other platforms have been popped by bugs in the interface between the two sandboxes.

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FBI alert: Get these motherf'king hackers off this motherf'king plane

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Either

This is also the same FBI that thinks North Korea hacked Sony Pictures.

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One small shot for Man, one espresso maker IN SPAAACE: Dragon snatched by ISS

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: No cappucino of course

That's a hell of a first post, artificial bitterness. Welcome aboard!

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Google drives a tenth of news traffic? That's bull-doodie, to use the technical term

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Whatever you wish to measure, you will

Sorry for any confusion: when we say search traffic, we mean people searching for things like "hp notebooks", and Google pushing news articles about HP netbooks to the top of the results. People click on those, and that's your traffic.

For example, if you Google search right now for "Nvidia's GTX 900" the top hit is The Register's article on the open-source Nvidia Linux driver faff. If you search for "Miliband Cameron poll" you may get a Guardian article about the UK election campaign. That's search traffic. A stupid number of people use Google so getting even a tiny slice of that each month is valuable to publishers.

Ultimately, it's about ads. You could shift 50 million page views a month but if you can't extract any ad impression cash from that then you're just another VC-funded blog burning through money.

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Someone PLEASE stop patent trolls' stroking their favorite tool, cries Google and friends

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: ratfox

Microsoft isn't on the list – sorry.

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Nvidia's GTX 900 cards lock out open-source Linux devs yet again

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: JustNiz

"I actually am a professional Linux dev"

Brilliant – post the URL to your software's bug tracker so I can file some bugs that don't exist. It's only fair – you lied about our headline, I get to make stuff up about your project.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: JustNiz

Sigh, the article + headline are fine. If you don't care about software freedom, fine. But some people do.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Terminology issue?

My understanding is that the firmware must be uploaded each time to the card when the driver starts. If this firmware isn't present or signed, it breaks.

Grep this page for firmware: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/InstallDRM/

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Videogame publishers to fans: Oi, stop resurrecting our dead titles online

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: very fair and balanced

BryceP gets it. We're rude about everyone. And Google has given the foundation a million dollars here or there. Small beans for Google, but a big chunk for the EFF.

And I'm speaking as someone who thinks the EFF mostly does good. But giving people a shoeing is why we're here.

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Why is nobody here?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Why is nobody here?

Everyone's in the article comments, and perhaps not aware separate forums exist. Or everyone's too shy to talk ;)

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Urine for a treat this Monday, ISS 'nauts: SpaceX to launch pee-powered coffee pot

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Friday... beer o'clock.

Yeah, well, pee-powered coffee pot was too good to pass up.

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comments moderation or censorship?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: Censored too

Email corrections @ theregister.co.uk if you spot any issues with stories, ta.

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Who is the fastest-selling phone maker of ALL TIME? Samsung? Apple? No, it's Xiaomi

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Register spin..

No spin – just pointing out that the mobile world isn't just Apple, Samsung, Blackberry and Nokia. I've made it super clear in the story that we're talking about online sales.

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Intel, Cray bag $200m to build 180PFLOPS super for US nuke boffins

diodesign Silver badge

Re: Coincidence

Yeah, we're on it...

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Marvell: We don't want to pay this $1.5bn patent bill because, cripes, it's way too much

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Blasphemy

Changed the headline to make it slightly shorter (for design reasons, layout nerds; it now fits in just two decks in the article view). I'm pretty sure your omnipotent deity can cope with an enterprise tech newspaper using his son's name flippantly.

(Original headline.)

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Bone-tastic boffins' breakthrough BRINGS BACK BRONTOSAURUS

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Biological accuracy

Uh-oh, here comes the fun police.

It's a couple of grown dinos skinny dipping on a warm summer's day, officer.

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Mobile 4G spectrum investors actually spent $12.4m on walkie-talkie frequencies – US SEC

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Peter2

Your wish is my command. I was too busy chuckling at the thought of some poor sods spending $12.4m on two-way radio frequencies.

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Popular crypto app uses single-byte XOR and nowt else, hacker says

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Unclear

"Not sure where the AES128 comes in."

I believe the app makers are saying AES128 is used for messages, contacts, call logs and other things are encrypted using AES with a 128-bit key. But in the hacker's test, a simple PNG file was 'encrypted' using a single byte 'key' and plain XOR. And only the first 128 bytes of the PNG. Bizarre. So maybe images aren't encrypted in any meaningful way?

I've tweaked the story here and there to make it a bit more clearer.

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Don't be stiffed by spies, stand up to Uncle Sam with your proud d**k pics – says Snowden

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: YouTube Error

Works for us in northern California – sorry.

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Bloke faces 25 years in the cooler for upsetting Thai king on Facebook

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Warning to The Register

"your whole domain will get blocked completely in Thailand"

Our global readership is increasing year on year, but I suspect it is not being propped up by Thailand.

Sorry, sorry – I mean – excellent April Fool comment :-)

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The internet IS a series of tubes. Kinda: A Reg 101 guide to cabling

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: Errrr

Thanks for the corrections. I've been through these with the writer and a second source, and made tweaks. Not every change you've suggested has been made, mainly because they're outside the scope of this intro to cabling, but I hope all the factual problems have been fixed up. Let me know if not.

It's worth pointing out the problems caused by a misplaced 'the' changing the meaning of a sentence:

"Unlike the other Ethernet standards, 10GbE provides the only full-duplex, point-to-point links for connecting network switches"

v

"Unlike the other Ethernet standards, 10GbE provides only full-duplex, point-to-point links for connecting network switches"

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Europe could be drowned in 'worthless pop culture' thanks to EU copyright plans

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: So... The Reg editorial line is in favour of geo-blocking? Didn't see that one coming.

Chill out, mate. It's Friday.

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(PS: We don't do 'editorial lines'. And the above article is a comment piece.)

Bye bye, booth babes. IT security catwalk RSA nixes sexy outfits

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Levente Szileszky

Keep digging.

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Google-gate: 'Toothless' watchdog FTC nibbles furiously on journalists

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Mark 85

We do it to annoy you.

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Snowden dump details Canadian spies running false flag ops online

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Wow!

Meant blobs, blocks of data, not literal bits :P

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New Forum Wishlist - but read roadmap first

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: BBC has just stolen el-Reg's website design!

Where do we send the consultancy invoice?

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Winning a brand new BOFH T-Shirt is as simple as...

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Clean Desk Policy!

Proof that our London office is very shiny (and posh).

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Kaspersky Lab hits back at Bloomberg's Russian spy link hit piece

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Bloomberg

Kaspersky (the bloke) has written a long response to Bloomberg.

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Hackers prove security still a myth on Windows PCs, bag $320,000

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Destroy All Monsters

The Windows kernel does font parsing in ring-0 on x86. Register passim

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