Posts by Death Boffin

US Air Force wants to see some atomic motors for future spacecraft

CANDU

See title

Tipsy tongues tell all: How your sloshed speech could snitch to Siri

Toga!

I see a new drinking game in the offing!

Net neutrality is back in the Land of the Free – for now

Needless

I have yet to find anyone harmed by the lack of net neutrality over the last decade. All the dire warnings are bogus. Someone please cite a case where someone was harmed.

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

Re: Scary Movie

Parts of Invasion of the Body Snatchers were filmed in the town I grew up in. So a trip downtown could be quite interesting.

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Long March

Google may not be taking on Microsoft Office directly, but is instead going with a longer term plan. For years, my kids have been required by their school to use Google Docs and Drive for their school work. The school also used to issue Chromebooks. The next generation will be quite ready to use Google office apps in the next few years.

Lesson 1: Keep your mind on the ... why aren't the servers making any noise?

Going south rapidly

The electronics side can have a lot of excitement too. A 30kV 100mA magnetron supply failing provides plenty of fireworks.

What DARPA wants, DARPA gets: A non-hacky way to fix bugs in legacy binaries

The past rises up

I imagine there is a lot of embedded code out there which was originally Ada.

Downloading the Webb Scope's data starts with a 6-month scheduling scramble

Multiple dishes

One thing to remember is that each DSN site has multiple dishes. While the headline big dish communicates with Voyager, smaller dishes are used for planetary missions. Webb being relatively close to Earth, doesn't need a particularly big dish.

Japanese boffins slice semiconductors from diamonds – with lasers!

Diamonds are hard

One big problem with diamond semiconductors is finding good dopants to get the good electronic performance. The dopant has to squeeze into the very strong lattice of the diamond crystal. I think the timeline for commercialization is optimistic. SiC took a full two decades to mature, diamond is even more difficult.

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

Someday my Prints will come

So she would be The Printless Bride?

US Air Force's Angry Kitten turns Reaper drone into fierce feline of electronic warfare

Safe separation

The fins are there to ensure predictable flight characteristics in the event the pod has to be jettisoned in an emergency.

Chinese balloon that US shot down was 'crammed' with American hardware

Really?

It's difficult to believe the balloon wasn't transmitting data back to China. Were the Chinese going to parachute the sensor down when it got back over China and collect the Temu-sourced memory stick with the data?

California man jailed after manure-to-methane scheme revealed as bull

Where's the beef?

Technically he was not peddling bull. The working material was from dairy farms.

NASA and miners face off over lithium deposits at satellite calibration site

Beyond Area 51

Railroad Valley is really the middle of nowhere. Leave Tonopah headed east, 50 miles beyond the turnoff for Area 51. Count the cars you see for the next 100 miles, chances are you will only reach the teens.

Railroad Valley also has possibly the only oil deposits in Nevada. The field is at the north end of the playa.

If you want a big brain, make a habit out of daytime naps

Sleep and lasagna

Seems a bit of nomitive determinism here that the lead researcher here is named Garfield.

Intel to invest another $25 billion In Israel

Re: Bottom line

I wouldn't be inclined to accept the human rights declarations of a UN committee that includes Bolivia, Cuba, China, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Venezuela.

Waymo robo-car slays dog in San Francisco

Invasion

Yes, they were eaten by the dog.

Here's what the US Army picked for soldier-worn tactical USB hubs

Sand in the gear(s)

Wonder how they will weatherproof those? Sand and salt water are still really rough on even ruggedized electronics.

Samsung reportedly leaked its own secrets through ChatGPT

Who done it?

Next week's edition of Who Me?

Space dust that regularly hits Earth could contain proof of alien life

Documentary

Didn't we do this back in the '60s? They made a documentary about it: Andromeda something or other.

NASA's space nuclear power program is a hot mess

Management failure

NASA tends to have an allergy to the security necessary for this kind of project. The disconnect with the DOE is evidence of this. For half a billion dollars, they should have been able to come up with something. Maybe the should have let the Navy run it, as they already have a nuclear power proof.

A research project like this needs serious hands on technical management. This appears to have been run like a postdoc program. It appears there were few if any milestones or deliverables.

Student satellite demonstrates drag sail to de-orbit old hardware

Re: Should have used Duracell

I have seen standard AA cells used in systems subjected to 1000's of g's. The cells are incredibly robust. Some care is needed in attachment and mounting. For a limited duration system like this, they are an excellent choice.

South Korea warns US: The CHIPS Act leaves a sour taste

Say what?

"China and South Korea are firm allies,"

US Air Force scares up $75.5M for ad-hoc missile silo network

Packet Radio

Seems like they are reinventing packet radio from the 80s. I don't see any technological advancement here.

Bitcoin mining rig found stashed in school crawlspace

Re: Location, Location, Location

This being Massachusetts, a picture of the Queen probably would have brought an additional charge of treason.

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

Re: Squirrels

It's all a great conspiracy. https://cybersquirrel1.com/

Bunny begone

Also had a lot of bunnies on the lawn to count walking into the workplace. That is until the bobcat showed up. A little unnerving to see the bobcat lurking under the rosebushes on the way in. It was quite unafraid of humans. Probably not life threatening, but could do a lot of damage if it decided it didn't want you there.

Google's AI search bot Bard makes $120b error on day one

Nomative determinism

So a bard is one who tells tall tales of hero, battles and true love. Seems that the name fits.

Of course being the internet, it should have been called Grimm.

helloSystem 0.8: A friendly, all-graphical FreeBSD

Re: Don't get this MAC is simple thing

More along the lines of a roast pig with an Apple in its mouth.

Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs

Eunuchs not Unix

My wife has threatened to give me a soprano voice if I ever delete Excel 97 from her computer. It does everything she needs to do and she is comfortable with it.

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

Not caring

Maybe they should call it the Apathy Software Foundation.

Fraudulent ‘popunder’ Google Ad campaign generated millions of dollars

Re: Never heard it called that before

As Art also said, "keepin' the customer satisfied".

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

I did see someone get branded once when they got their bracelet across a large 5V power supply.

Remember folks, rings and watches off.

Icon better take that shiny thing off before working around electricity!

Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist

Re: I posted this before, but it is worth it. Sockets that go from 110 to 220 on a switch!

Quite likely the bright spark(y) was trying to wire things so a second light switch could also turn off the lights, like in a stairwell. However it looks like he switched the opposite phase onto the neutral. Why this would affect the wall sockets is another collosal blunder. Somewhere there was an open neutral. As long as there was a ground things would work sorta ok. A ground fault interrupter would pop immediately, so likely there wasn't one.

Not only did you save the University thousands of dollars, but maybe some lives.

Re: Paint all over everything, including power sockets and emergency buttons?

Government can be like that. Ours had an overhead fire sprinkler system. The system inlet was set up so that if water started flowing, some of the water would be diverted to power an alarm bell on the outside of the building and trip the fire alarm circuit.

For 20 years the system sat. Finally a new inspector from the government fire department came around an noticed it. "Hey, where's the annual inspection tag for this?" Cue an explanation that it hadn't been touched in twenty years.

A test was scheduled and they found the diversion valve had failed. Much scrambling around to replace a very old and obsolete valve. Regular yearly inspections were scheduled. The following year, the building was demolished.

UK arrests five for selling 'dodgy' point of sale software

Re: And Turkish Barbers where I live.

I want to know where I can buy some of those computer breeches the IT press keeps writing about.

Two million year old DNA samples discovered, lodged in ancient sediment

Crossover

Looking forward to the revival of the Skratasaur.

Energy being expensive and trickier to source is good news ... for renewables

Expensive Energy

So the IEA thinks expensive energy is a good thing since it makes green energy more competitive. This is entirely bass ackwards. Green energy should be more competitive so it displaces fossil fuels.

More expensive energy impoverishes poor people. From heating to cooking to the food itself. Most fertilizer is produced from fossil fuels. More people will die from cold and hunger in the net zero world than from any warming. I believe the folks at the IEA think that is just dandy.

Icon for the thing that might kill more than the IEA's policies.

Boeing swipes at Starlink as it finishes two internet slinging satellites

End of life?

What is the plan to deorbit these birds at end of life? Orbital lifetimes in MEO are measured in millennia. Much delta v is also required.

OpenAI opens doors to ChatGPT, another AI to fill the world with kinda-true stuff

Re: It sounds very human to me

Politicians are human? It seems that ChatGPT has had much better training than the Kamala Harris bot.

After lunar orbit trip NASA's Orion capsule is on its way back home

Re: 'Terra Firma'

Given that Mauna Loa is erupting again, it could be both. (How well will the heat shield withstand lava?)

Software company wins $154k for US Navy's licensing breach

Spaffing

The Navy likely spaffed it out to every computer on the NMCI network as part of an update. Most users had no use for it and never used it. The equivalent would be pirating a DVD and then burying it in your back yard without ever viewing it.

Arm confirms IPO delay till later in 2023, blames global markets

Market timing

Margins are wafer thin right now. The market has been chipping away at value. An IPO now would be dicey.

Japan to set up new semiconductor outfit with IBM's help

Node work

It is interesting what IBM is doing. They sold off their foundry business to Global Foundries when they decided it was uneconomic. Then they got bent out of shape when Global Foundries decided that developing nodes smaller than 14nm was uneconomic. Now they are having a go with the Japanese. Which is interesting, because the Japanese had decided that keeping up with node reduction was uneconomic. Something tells me they will be buying from TSMC in the near future.

InSight Mars lander has only 'few weeks' of power left

Space modulation

5 kg of plutonium eh? I wonder if Marvin could use that in his Space Modulator?

"Where's the KABOOM? There should have been an Earth shattering KABOOM."

Ritz cracker giant settles bust-up with insurer over $100m+ NotPetya cleanup

Cyber security

Or did Mondelez do the cyber equivalent of parking their car in a bad part of town with the keys left in the ignition?

Bumble open sources AI code to automatically blur NSFW photos

Re: Art class

I will only ask, correlation or causation?

Art class

That generative AI uses previous artists' work to make images does not appear to be any different than any human art student. They study the Masters' techniques, styles and composition to produce their own art. The fact that there is a genre such as Anime shows that some amount of intellectual property has been copied from one place to another. But if a computer does it, it is different for reasons.

ISS dodges space junk from satellite Russia blew up

Political Problem

There is a relatively cheap way of deorbiting these debris. It involves a high power ground based laser. The problem is that it is also a first class anti satellite weapon. It could even take down a Musk sized satellite constellation. The first one built will ignite an arms race.

Bill Gates' green investments to shift from tackling climate change to mitigating impacts

Re: @Sceptic Tank - You're absolutely right.

You can have cash flow problems. Although there are some interesting workarounds. See "Comedy of Terrors" with Vincent Price.