* Posts by ibmalone

1414 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2017

Chip makers aren't all-in on metaverse hardware yet – we should know, we asked them

ibmalone

Indeed, the whole idea sounds very one-size-fits-all. Rock concert? Maybe, they've done it in fortnite, but once you've done a few bobbing around alongside other avatars it's all going to get samey, and you're still listening on the same tinny speakers. Cinema? You go to a cinema for completely different reasons, we've been able to watch movies at home for decades, we can now watch pretty much whatever we want, cinemas are still open. Doctor's appointment? Remote consultations are more common now, sure, but they need to look at your actual rash or whatever, your cartoon avatar is pretty useless for diagnosis.

What a lot of this favours is companies with the clout to employ the big teams needed to create 'experiences'. From nvidia's point of view it sells chips.

Fedora 35 is out: GNOME 41 desktop, polished UI, easier-to-install closed-source apps

ibmalone

Re: Gnome 40/41

The big ones aren't really amateur, KDE supporters include Qt, SUSE and Canonical.

Unlike the AC below I'm pretty happy with Plasma. Menus at the top of things, sensible task bar (which on my laptop lives on the side to eke out screen height), nautilus interacts with files generally sensibly (though I often use the terminal anyway, because being able to instruct the computer what I want done is part of why I use Linux). Not as clunky as the "lighter" ones like XFCE, not as mad as Gnome Shell. Happily also using MATE on RHEL7, I'd probably get along with Cinnamon if I tried it, but I really try not to care to much about the desktop manager so long as it's not Motif-clunky or Clippy-infuriating.

I really don't care that much. Windows 8 I just made sure I could get desktop mode and got along with it for the times I had to use it. Gnome has been the only one that really insisted on tripping its users up.

Apple's macOS Monterey upgrades some people's laptops to doorstops

ibmalone
Coat

Are you a builder's merchant?

Juno what? Jupiter's Great Red Spot is much deeper than originally thought

ibmalone
Alien

Re: By Jove!

I'm told they think it's a bit too dry.

Apple arms high-end MacBook Pro notebooks with M1 Pro, M1 Max processors

ibmalone
Devil

Re: Performance claims

(The one thumb down trusts Apple's marketing department to draw squiggles on graphs.)

ibmalone

Re: Performance claims

I'll happily believe it can be more power efficient, but 32 GPU cores? Intel's 11th gen chips have onboard Iris Xe, some of these have 96 execution units (and also share system RAM, unlike discrete graphics). An RTX 3050 has only 20 compute units, but 2048 floating point units, so just what a compute unit is worth varies. You'd have to look at benchmarks, but I'd like to see more than just a graph drawn by the art department.

Scoot on over for a wheely tricky mystery with an electrifying solution

ibmalone
Alert

I can tell you that our office is not, every time I use the exit button I get a shock generated by the walk from my seat to the door. Have taken to using an implement to press the thing!

Apple warns sideloading iOS apps will ruin everything

ibmalone

Re: Tesco

Absolutely, the number they use to track you is the first part anyway. The second bit will tie to the card, whether they use it or not (in other contexts most on here would be criticising them if they didn't include some way of doing that). There's nothing more creepy about that than the first part, unless you believe it's some kind of qabalistic spell. They've got your details in a database they can tie to that card number anyway.

Not keen on the increased pricing for non-clubcard users. While it's not a part of GDPR I'm familiar with, I'd thought this was a questionable practice.

"Customers might get tired of these eventually, so you’ll need an incentive. Luckily, everybody loves discounts and a personalised experience. Therefore a lot of customers are willing to supply their data and opt-in for a wide variety of business communication to get a little bit of extra service, or to be a part of loyalty programs and promotions including discounts. Do note that if consent is made to be a precondition to the service, but the tracking is not necessary for that service, consent is deemed to be invalid."

https://blog.privacyperfect.com/gdpr-for-retailers

ibmalone

Re: Tesco

I don't know, maybe they don't. But a first thought would be that with a card id you can block certain cards. Some reward schemes let you spend points from the card, and being able to block a stolen or lost card would be desirable in that case. (Haven't used Tesco's scheme for years so not sure if they use points like that these days. I remember they used to send out reward vouchers for smallish sums, not sure if you needed to present a card when using them, I know other shops do require that.)

ibmalone

Re: Law of unintended consequences

Where to start?

Supermarkets. I don't know if you've noticed, but supermarkets accept cash and various different payment processors. And yes, if you have your credit card from Tesco, Sainbury's will accept it as a means of payment.

Cars, you have always been able to use third party parts. Recent moves by manufacturers to use software to prevent this are being resisted by right-to-repair legislation.

Smart TVs and games consoles. An interesting one. Market dominance in this sector is much less than Apple's in smartphone. Your smart TV will have an HDMI port into which you can insert a Roku, Firestick, Chromecast or even Apple TV (the device, not the streaming service, which, coincidentally, can be accessed from all of those). Useful when the manufacturer stops supporting it or the BBC updates their app so its no longer compatible. Consoles also have strong competition, but yes, vendor lock in is a problem there. Not sure why the danger of moving on to improve another sector justifies Apple locking third parties out. What's the opposite of a slippery slope? An upward escalator?

ibmalone

Re: Law of unintended consequences

Having just bought a new WD external drive, I discovered that what I initially thought was an instruction manual was in fact an extensive class action waiver in apparently every major language. Apparently I 'agreed' to this by buying it. This kind of rubbish needs to stop, the anglophone (at least) world's legal system is weighted in favour of those with money. (I suspect consumer rights in the UK should render such terms meaningless, apparently that doesn't stop companies thinking they can get away with it.)

'Father of the Xbox' Seamus Blackley issues Twitter apology to AMD over last-minute switch to Intel CPUs

ibmalone

There's a reason most console controllers now look something like the original Playstation controller (itself an updated SNES controller):

"In development, we simulated every possible joypad situation. We imagined what it would be like to have to continually put the pad down while mapping a game, or playing while lying on the floor, and many other cases. After that we had to decide on the weight of the buttons and the pad itself. We adjusted the weights one gram at a time and eventually we found the correct balance. We probably spent as much time on the joypad's development as we did on the body of the machine.[4]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_controller

Patients must know how their health records are used – and approve any sharing for research

ibmalone

'mutant algorithm'

While I largely agree with the arguments put here, I take issue with the phrase "mutant algorithm". It's meaningless rhetoric to use the word mutant there, and it originated from an attempt last year by the UK government to put the blame for their decisions on some "algorithm" as if it was beyond their control or that of the programmers who wrote it. The algorithm in question was not some uninterrogable machine learning model, but quite simply a choice to take teachers of small classes (private schools) at their word for predicted grades while thresholding results for large classes (state schools) at those of previous years. Talking about a mutant algorithm suggested some unforeseeable and incomprehensible consequence of computer programming beyond the government's control, when these were actually the entirely predictable consequences of fairly simple rules.

The phrases we unquestioningly adopt shape our thinking, and this is one to be rejected. Whatever the algorithm in question, it hasn't crawled out of the sea in some 50's B movie.

Opt-out is the right approach for sharing your medical records with researchers

ibmalone

"And as for assumed consent for sharing data, it’s important to remember that assumed consent is still informed consent"

Declaration of Helsinki, which should cover all medical research involving humans:

"25. Participation by individuals capable of giving informed consent as subjects in medical research must be voluntary. Although it may be appropriate to consult family members or community leaders, no individual capable of giving informed consent may be enrolled in a research study unless he or she freely agrees."

https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/

Directly at odds. So no. Assumed consent is not free and informed. A central plank of recording consent is that the subject must have the study explained to them and can only consent if they understand. (Participants not capable of informed consent are a different category, this may include, for example, a trial of some emergency care practice, in which case there are further guidelines about how this could be carried out.)

PCIe 6.0 spec just months away from completion, doubles max data transfer rate

ibmalone

Re: Fine, provided ...

PCIe has typically been forwards and backwards compatible with other PCIe versions.

Microsoft shows off Office 2021 for consumers ahead of the coming of Windows 11

ibmalone

Re: Standalone versions need an MS Account

Accurately editing? No problem editing. The problem is inconsistent formatting. But then again, I see this between different versions of Word too. I agree that sometimes I have to close Libreoffice and go to Windows to try Word on a document, but I also have to close Word 365 and fire up Word 2016 at times too.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the BBC stage a very British coup to rescue our data from Facebook and friends

ibmalone

Re: The same BBC...

Not really an answer though. Yes, you can get away with lying about your email address (to a degree). What proportion of people do you think do? Why is it necessary to play that game at all? Do you really think that if you use the same computer or IP for this and other purposes that they wont get linked anyway? And either way, this is a story about how they intend to "protect" our data better, does it really cohere with the iplayer data grab?

Social media, great, take a gold star. For the rest of us, buried in account settings (not cookie settings):

"Allow social network recommendations

This means we can share some data securely with social media sites to make sponsored BBC recommendations relevant to you.

If you turn this off, you might still see BBC posts, but they won't be personalised using your BBC account data."

There are certainly talented people working there, they've done some clever stuff in the past, but the modern corporation doesn't seem much interested in protecting the data of listeners and viewers.

ibmalone

The same BBC...

Is this the same BBC that put Iplayer, including no-license-fee radio, behind a signup wall that requires date of birth and address, and by default links to social media accounts? Yeah, they're some hoopy froods alright.

More than three years after last release, X.Org Server 21.1.0 RC1 appears

ibmalone

Re: Not Really Off Topic!!!

Don't forget the magic cookie!

ibmalone

Re: Not Really Off Topic!!!

Ours is working okay, using EPEL packages (RHEL7, Gnome is a no-go, so need MATE) on RedHat from Linux, Win and Mac clients. However trying to get a working install built from source did not go well. It's basically click and go, but few knobs to tweak if something isn't working right (have had to track down some not-very-well documented server[1] and user config[2] files to address a couple of issues). Nice compared to VNC and the like in that multiple users can have persistent sessions and no funny X config work needed. I guess RDP functionality is probably similar.

[1] X2GO_NXOPTIONS="sleep=0" in /etc/x2go/x2goagent.options. Nice feature to sleep the session when disconnected, but the opposite of what people need if they're carrying out long-running processing.

[2] Mac to X2Go to VMware issue with key code mappings, requiring ~/.vmware/config line "xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true". I guess not strictly an X2Go issue.

ibmalone

Re: Wayland a no go on Kubuntu 21.04 and an older graphics card.

As AC points out, they maintain older cards on an older driver branch. Fedora users will find these in RPM Fusion. 390 series goes back to GeForce 400 (released 2010) and was updated July this year, current 470 series goes back to GeForce 600 (released 2012). While I'd certainly prefer an open source driver where they could theoretically be maintained forever (I like that my ICE 1724 soundcard is still supported), that's a pretty good lifetime. (In practice they wouldn't, kernel folks dropped 386 and are currently talking about 486.)

My current problem is actually a Fedora system with i915 (open source) doing weird things (Wayland and X...) with characters occasionally, while the same Fedora release on a machine with gtx 1060 is fine.

ibmalone

Re: Not Really Off Topic!!!

X2Go also works pretty well and is based on NX 3 as a replacement for FreeNX (and for those following along, runs over an ssh connection). More bandwidth efficient than X forwarding if working over a remote connection.

'Large-scale computing' needs a government team driving it, says UK.gov

ibmalone

It's a gas

"take today's newspapers and the gas industry, take today's water industries, road, rail infrastructure"

Ah, about that...

(Particularly, this week, to suggest the gas industry as a shining example.)

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

ibmalone

Re: A one off

Remarkably, James Lovelock is still alive the age of 102. You don't get much more boffin than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock

De-identify, re-identify: Anonymised data's dirty little secret

ibmalone

Re: The article said it best.

How does one do immensely useful public health or other medical research then? Any dataset of really useful size is generally too big to be collected by a single institution, but limiting its use to that institution freezes out a lot of talent for investigating the data. The alternative is a plethora of underpowered studies.

Edit: in this case I'm talking about data collected from participants with informed consent and ethical approval.

Right to contest automated AI decision under review as part of UK government data protection consultation

ibmalone

Re: Data economy?

Let's ignore the most obvious fact that the move is only made possible by brexit and consider the more fundamental background.

You've misunderstood, this was always the project.

Yes, they sold you a story about immigration, or 'Brussels diktats' or benefit tourism or whatever it is you like arguing with guardian readers about. But the people behind it, when they said "take back control" always meant control for themselves, not us.

It annoys old Etonians and their like that despite having 'won the game' in their minds by getting made MP that there were still rules and powers bigger than them. It annoyed the people who used to be able to stick them a few quid to sort things out that somebody might now come along talking about competition law.

And so here we are. Steadily chipping away at hard win democratic rights that were meant to stop people being packaged and sold.

ibmalone
WTF?

We're fucked

We're all fucked.

Why tell the doctor where it hurts, when you could use emoji instead?

ibmalone

Re: Accessibility Fail.

I see no point in downvoting a reasonable question, so have an upvote for curiosity.

ibmalone

Re: Accessibility Fail.

Emoji are decided on by the Unicode Consortium. They partly descend from a similar system in Japan. Entertaining video on the topic

ibmalone

Re: Accessibility Fail.

Ohhh, interesting point, following on from my other post, people interpret on their appearance. There's no reason a screen reader couldn't read out the emoji name for you, but that may not always match what a sighted person would interpret the pictorial form to mean.

ibmalone

Re: History repeats itself

""It's tempting to dismiss emoji as a millennial fad, but they possess the power of standardisation, universality and familiarity," claimed Shuhan He, MD"

I also don't buy it, see the mentioned eggplant. Emoji are not displayed uniformly across devices and interpretation of their meaning relies on the interplay between their appearance and cultural context. Hence innocent fruit and vegetables become suggestive. "Sure," you think, "People will always find ways to be rude with turnips." That little snorting smiley face that to most westerners looks angry? It was originally "Triumph" in Japan.

Egypt moved away from purely ideographic hieroglyphics, they came to be used for syllables and more generic ideas. Heiroglyphs were later on limited to cermonial use, for a long time it coexisted with the more day-to-day hieratic script. Chinese has similar ideographic roots, yet most characters no longer resemble the thing they represent, even when that was their original derivation (to pick one from my almost non-existent knowledge of Chinese, horse is just about recognisable as a horse in traditional script, and not really in simplified script). The one thing emoji have going for them if they want to endure is reliability in reproduction, while Chinese and Hieroglyphic scripts written by hand required lengthy training to reproduce.

Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos fraud trial begins: Defense claims all she did was fail – and that's not a crime

ibmalone

The missing ingredient is arrogance. For example, she may have believed that it could be made to work and a little fraud until it did was acceptable.

ibmalone

Re: "... failure is not a crime"

Lawyers must not lie on behalf of their clients.

"Elizabeth Holmes did not go to work every day to lie, cheat and steal,"

I conclude there were some days she did not go to work.

Fix five days of server failure with this one weird trick

ibmalone

The reason this thing is 650W! Needed a new one quick, think it was from Maplin (I know, but used to be handy if you needed something that day) and there wasn't a great range in terms of quality, so I made sure to go up. Brand is CiT, which I see people have issues with, but it's probably pushing less than half its rated power.

ibmalone

Re: The "inspector"

We've got some old (very much out of warranty but still going) Precision workstations that have once or twice in the past couple of years booted with a cpu fan error. The fans are magnetic bearing (they're big!) and spin freely, but occasionally seem not to start. Power down, open up, a little nudge, power on, everything is good again. (I suspect a brush issue, but not really worth replacing at this point, especially as ebay isn't exactly an approved supplier.)

ibmalone

Re: Power supply on the floor?

From self builds I'm always suspicious of PSUs. Have a few times had odd stability issues that were either caused by an overloaded supply or one which had just gone bad. (On the other hand the current one is a cheap model that was bought because I needed a quick replacement and has lasted years, so maybe they're getting better.)

Fancy joining the SAS's secret hacker squad in Hereford as an electronics engineer for £33k?

ibmalone

Re: The ad is a declaration of intent.

Not sure, the only qualification mentioned is a BSc, and none of the rest of it has the "demonstrate..." or similar specification I'd expect if they were looking for prior experience. There's an exciting Q-branch list of responsibilities, but it could all be interpreted at a range of levels, the most basic of which is not too dissimilar to a final year engineering project.

ibmalone

Re: The ad is a declaration of intent.

If it's a degree level start it's not too bad. Not sure how fast it will grow though. A friend looked at Qinetiq years ago and realised none of the actual engineers were getting paid that much. Not as derisory as some of the GCHQ starting salaries when they started advertising openly.

(Possibly, as above, they're looking for people who can't be bought as they already have all the cash they could want?)

BOFH: 'What's an NFT?' the Boss asks. In this case, 'not financially thoughtful'

ibmalone

Re: Turings?

My tip is use the self-sevice checkouts, most of them accept all UK banknotes. (Exception I've found is 2019 Ulster Bank plastic notes when they hadn't been out for long, not tried the 2020£20 yet.) Although getting them taken in London is not too difficult.

Before I agree to let your app track me everywhere, I want something 'special' in return (winks)…

ibmalone

Particularly when all controls are defaulted to "No" and unless you know to hunt for "legitimate interest" it looks like the defaults are fine.

Don't get me started on colour choice and other UI design to try to hide opt outs or make it look like they're not available.

Q: Post-lockdown, where would I like to go? A: As far away from my own head as possible

ibmalone

Re: Babylon Zoo

In a similar vein, Michael Mann's Lucky Star advert.

84-year-old fined €250,000 for keeping Nazi war machines – including tank – in basement

ibmalone

Re: WTF?

After all, he brought a massive army with him - and there was nearly a battle - although much of James II's troops had already buggered off at that point. So it never happened.

Minor correction, it did happen, just in Ireland. Part of a larger war between the French and the Dutch. But don't tell the English that.

Tech support scams subside somewhat, but Millennials and Gen Z think they're bulletproof and suffer

ibmalone
Coat

As for calls about my "recent accident" I lead them down a long winded story culminating in the fact I was hit from behind by a flying elephant.

What a dumbo.

Latest patches show Rust for Linux project making great strides towards the kernel

ibmalone

Re: Misrepresentation

Agreed the string handling bugs are mostly a subset of other memory management issues, but they're particularly pernicious due to the traditional nul-terminated representation and string format specifiers (together with sscanf/sprintf and %n meaning even incautious printf can write to memory it shouldn't, not just access).

UK artists seek 'luvvie levy' on new gadgets to make up for all the media that consumers access online

ibmalone

Re: What about the people in the software world?

An open source fund would make more sense!

Thinking of buying a new development laptop, 3% of a neat £1500 comes out at £45, am I any more likely to use this to do whatever it is they think I should be paying for than with a £30 Fire Stick / Chromecast / Roku? Do we have to pay it on our server and storage purchases?

Anyway, this problem is largely sewn up now, access through mobile devices and smart devices means most people are using streaming services for legal access (or semi-legal in the case of youtube videos). If producers aren't getting paid enough then that's the door to knock on. Or maybe do it out of general taxation, after all, I sometimes overhear buskers without paying them and no device was involved there.

Microsoft releases Windows 11 Insider Preview, attempts to defend labyrinth of hardware requirements

ibmalone

Re: Forcing hardware upgrades in the midst of a global silicon glut, how to do PR the Micro$oft way.

Yes, one thing that struck me about the "rootkit" was it required admin to install and appeared to be intended to let gamers spoof location. That is, the real crime is trying to escape corporation control. (And of course it keylogged, because the kind of people who write this stuff are often dodgy.)

This may turn out to be a factor, when people realise their older hardware running linux can do things they are no longer allowed on newer hardware. The same way I still own a RPC-1 DVD drive.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

ibmalone

Re: So, SatNad...

If you or I knew the answer to that then we wouldn’t be having this conversation because one of us would be genuinely clairvoyant and along with knowing what the PRC, Russians and NSA have compromised in our software supply chains we’d also know that this conversation was a waste of time with no positive outcome for anyone involved.

The thing is, we know commercial software has been compromised by intelligence agencies in the past, including holding on to vulnerabilities in Windows, so there's no particular use in asserting open source dependencies are compromised in particular (looking forward to bugs: "Regression, remote access exploit no longer works after commit abc123"). If they want to compromise open source they'll at least have to put some effort into maintaining it. MS have been less dislikeable recently, but as with Apple their goal is user lock-in, telemetry and requiring online accounts are moves towards that goal, the best we can hope for is they see utility and interoperability as a better way to achieve customer loyalty.

ibmalone

Re: Windows

None of my own computers have 2.0, one has 1.2. Work machines TPM 1.2. Fortunately already using a KDE desktop, so don't need to switch to MS's.

Android apps is an interesting one, looks like MS moving in the opposite of walled garden direction in some respects.

Who would cross the Bridge of Death? Answer me these questions three! Oh and you'll need two-factor authentication

ibmalone
Flame

Re: As I see it

My bank ditched the chip-and-pin token generator for SMS 2FA a couple of years ago. Soooo much more secure.... (see icon ->)

ibmalone

Re: Ah Captcha!

"Taxis" = yellow cars (rather than a Prius or an old black Merc with a sign on top). They're not yellow here. Are they even uniformly yellow across the USA?