Posts by Death Boffin

The sins of OneDrive as Microsoft's cloud storage service turns 15

Probing the depths

If you don't want surface as a verb, you should avoid submarines.

It seems appropriate here as you are retrieving you data from the deep, dark realms of the Elder Gods.

China's 7nm chip surprise reveals more than Beijing might like

Work share

One of the problems with EU consortiums is the concept of work share. This is where each country gets a piece of the work. I recall a semiconductor fab where the work up through the gate process was done in one country. Then the wafers were packed up and sent for the remainder of the processing in another country.

This manufacturer maintained a consistent half decade lag on US and Asian manufacturers.

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Heavy lifting

Back in the days of yore, I was the delivery boy for a business machines company. I indeed hauled many Selectrics into office towers. The beast however was the Adler. Weighed about 50% more in the same footprint.

These were also the days of liquid toner in copiers. The suspension fluid was highly flammable. Many offices used it by the gallon. I'm surprised there weren't more fires.

DARPA seeks portable muon-making machine to see through almost anything

Short gigs

DARPA is mostly run in that fashion. Most of the program managers are on sabbaticals from universities or industry, or on tours from the military or other parts of the DoD. There are a few political appointees at the top. The institutional memory seems to reside in the SETA (System Engineering and Technical Advisors) contractors.

US EV drivers won't be able to choose vehicle safety alert sounds

ICE stopped

Many ICE vehicles these days turn off the motor when stopped. Do the need to be fitted with a noisemaker as well?

Taiwan creates new challenge for tech industry: stern content regulation laws

Re: Can't reclaim what was never yours

The world is hoping that the PRC will get it's act together and peaceably petition to rejoin the ROC after their teenage rebellion.

Why Wi-Fi 6 and 6E will connect factories of the future

Gbs capability for kbs data

Speaking of restrictions, all of this is predicated on the availability of chipsets suitable for industrial use – think microcontrollers and that sort of thing – that actually support this generation of wireless communications.

There seems to be a cognitive disconnect here. Why would a microcontroller need to support a multi-gigabit communications protocol? It would seem that they need a more reliable Bluetooth. Something I would welcome.

Soviet-era tech could change the geothermal industry

Several operational issues

Gyrotrons are big. They need large magnets in order to work, so you won't be fitting one down the borehole. That means you will have to direct the microwave energy down the borehole.

The gyrotrons produce mm-wave energy. That means having to pipe it around using waveguide. Waveguide is quite lossy at those frequencies, so you need to do trickery like quasi-optics to keep losses low. This needs finely machined and polished waveguide pipe, which is very expensive.

When you get the energy to the target, you have to deal with the vaporized material. This is one of the problems with beam weapons. You puff off a cloud of vapor and immediately your beam starts heating the vapor instead of the target. So you have to get rid of the vapor, some 20km away.

Finally, you have your hole and can start producing steam. You can't run that steam directly into a turbine. It has a lot of nasty silica and acids in it. These tend to clog up the pipes. The local geothermal plant periodically cleans the scale off and sends it off for reprocessing because it has significant amounts of gold in it. So yo you need to have a heat exchanger. Only then can you produce power.

Given these difficulties, this may work sometime, but don't expect it soon.

Micron aims 1.5TB microSD card at video surveillance market

Like this?

Content

Never fear, the White House is here to tackle web trolls

Speech = Freedom

Freedom of speech should be exceptionally safe. If Kamala does as well in this assignment as she has done in her other ones.

Man gets two years in prison for selling 200,000 DDoS hits

Customers?

So did the FBI go after any of the customers? I'm sure a good number of them had poor enough OPSEC to be identified.

The next time your program is 'not responding,' (do not) try these steps

systemd

In Soviet Linux, systemd uses you.

Supreme Court urged to halt 'unconstitutional' Texas content-no-moderation law

Re: Restaurant Rules

"We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."

See how far you get with that one if you base it on race, sex or gender identity. You need to look up the term "public accommodation"

Re: Social Media sites should welcome laws like this

The post office doesn't offer broadcast services?

What the hell are all those pieces of junk mail showing up every day? Snailmail spam!

How ICE became a $2.8b domestic surveillance agency

The E in ICE?

So what are they using this information for? It's certainly not for deporting illegal aliens.

Human-made hopper out-leaps rival robots in artificial jumping contest

Re: The next hurdle

The problem with flying robots is that the don't work well on the Moon.

MIT's thin plastic speakers fall flat. And that's by design

Wallpaper

Sounds tinny not woody. Gives new meaning to "the walls have ears".

Departing Space Force chief architect likens Pentagon's tech acquisition to a BSoD

The Bureaucracy

Innovation in the US military moves with the speed of contracting and security. In other words very slow. In cases where troops in combat need something, procurement regulations are waived and things are much faster. Why this can't happen for regular procurement is that too many rice bowls would be broken.

The only saving grace is that this process is still faster and more efficient than our adversaries'.

Icon: The desired outcome of the process.

US Army to build largest 3D-printed structures in the Americas

Re: Earthquake-resistance? Tornado resistance?

Texas is 800 miles wide. This part of Texas doesn't get tornadoes. Earthquakes are also pretty rare. This is just an interesting test of the technology. They will need to be able to print around rebar at some point.

Re: I wonder if it would be simpler

You have to realize that bricks and breeze blocks were built around human capabilities. Is this the best way to introduce automated assembly? Only time and experience will tell

Congressional pressure mounts to pass $52b CHIPS Act

Re: Next generation semiconductors aren't the only thing that needs help

The US still has state of the art board manufacturing capabilities. It is just not at the price that they can get from Chinese board houses.

In the graveyard of good ideas, how does yours measure up to these?

Re: But....

Would that be the excrable Ladybug and Cat Voyeur? (Subjected to that when my daughter was preteen.)

Level 3

Here in the US they are rolling out Level 3 on a national basis. Can't afford gasoline, buy an electric car. Can't afford food, eat lentils.

CEA sees future in waferscale quantum computing chips

Re: Endless quantum hype cycle

It appears to be a way to suck multi-million euro subsidies out of the CEA. No one has shown a way to grow carbon nanotubes where they want in a controlled manner.

Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?

Amiga

You get a Guru Meditation Number.

Lapsus$ extortionists dump Samsung data online, chaebol confirms security breach

Bootloader

Hopefully info on how to unlock the bootloader is out there now so I can get the official Samsung malware off the device.

Customer service chatbot sector forecast to be worth $7bn this year

A.C. Clarke strikes again

So this company is producing Harry Potter style pictures?

Sufficiently advanced technology truly is indistinguishable from magic (!/?)

Food for thought on the return to the office

Re: Fresh milk!

Living in a Leftpondian environment, I always made sure I bought tea with me. Most offices did not stock it. Or, they thought some tisane called Mellifluous Melonhead was adequate.

I could usually find hot water, although sometimes it tasted of coffee.

Arm's $66bn sale to Nvidia is off: Deal collapses after world's competition regulators raise concerns

Re: Worthless?

The CCP requires that at least 51% be held by the Chinese partner, just so those pesky foreigners can't interfere.

FBI says more cyber attacks come from China than everywhere else combined

Surprise Surprise

What really bothers me is that Wray was surprised by the extent of Chinese hacking and industrial espionage. The military has seen China as our primary adversary since the 2000's. Better late than neve, I guess...

SiC move: STMicroelectronics banks on bringing power electronics material in house as electric cars rev up

SIC is hard

I wish them luck, growing SiC substrates is much harder than silicon. So they will always be more expensive than silicon devices.

The performance of SiC is so much better than silicon that it is worth the extra cost. These devices can handle voltages in the 1500 volt range. They have 10 times the thermal conductivity of silicon, the better to get the heat out. This is just what you need for electric cars.

GaN has better electrical performance than SiC, but is usually grown on a SiC substrate.

There's a new Chipzilla in town: Samsung topples Intel to become largest chip maker

TSMC?

Was wondering where TSMC placed on this list?

Website fined by German court for leaking visitor's IP address via Google Fonts

Re: Only one site?

Both those sites are blocked by NoScript. Comments work fine without them.

Idea of downloading memories far-fetched say experts after Musk claim resurfaces in latest Neuralink development

Brainwaves

One way to get an idea of the complexity of the brain is to consider it as a billion years of spaghetti code.

Earth to Voyager 2: Standby for connection – after we tip this water out of the dish

Re: Wouldn't work in England

You might have noticed that the Deep Space Network dishes tend to be in rather dry places. Australia, Spain, and the Mojave desert. In the Mojave, there are many years where they get less than an inch of rain for the entire year.

It's more than 20 years since Steps topped the charts. It could be less than that for STEP's first fusion energy

Re: Manhattan Project

Not true. Chicago was only a proof of concept for chain reaction. The main sites were Hanford, WA, Los Alamos, NM and Oak Ridge, TN. All essentially in the middle of nowhere. This was done for safety and security reasons.

Ukraine blames Belarus for PC-wiping 'ransomware' that has no recovery method and nukes target boxen

Belarus as the attacker? A distinction without a difference.

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

DST Fix?

My 2006 Odyssey clock is running exactly 1 hour fast. It will be interesting to see if it fixes itself when Daylight Savings Time rolls around. Or will it become off by some other amount.

Re: GPS week rollover

In the 80's I was still repairing military radio equipment from the Korean war. Parts were still available in the military supply system even after 30 years. B-52's have a timeline closer to 60 years.

Going round in circles with Windows in Singapore

Circling the Bowl

I've often had Microsoft errors where the only indication is an endlessly circling ring. Try getting info on what happened from that!

Anyway, Happy New Year!

A proposal to beat below-the-belt selfies: Crowdsourced machine learning using victims' image stashes

Re: Sorry, it just had to be done!

So you've been dickrolled?

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Sometimes the Problem is Linux

Decided to install Mint on an older laptop. Everything went fine until it was time to get the wifi working. Downloaded drivers from all over, but nothing worked with the obscure Broadcom wifi chip. After two days of trawling the Linux forums I finally found a series of arcane letters and numbers that had to be manually typed into an init file. After that everything worked fine.

President Biden orders transformation of 'Federal Customer Experience'

One ring to rule them all

After the OPM breach debacle, I really don't one logon for my interactions with Social Security, Medicare, IRS, etc. Keeping them in their own domains has some advantages.

China's Yutu rover spots 'mysterious hut' on far side of the Moon

You can't never have too many apostrophe's'

It's'

Monty Python's' Flying Cir-cu's'

Microsoft adds Buy Now, Pay Later financing option to Edge – and everyone hates it

Down on the Microsoft Farm

Hay, I think you used the wrong word there. It goes against the grain. Maybe you should winnow through your spell checker. You need to separate the wheat from the chaff..

China trying to export its Great Firewall and governance model

The Borg

All your codebase are belong to us

Google's Pixel 6 fingerprint reader is rubbish because of 'enhanced security algorithms'

Digital rights

You could always give Google the middle finger.

140,000-plus drivers sent $60m in compensation checks after Amazon 'stole their tips'

Electronic larceny

A specific person at Amazon made the decision to implement a change to the payroll system knowing it was illegal. It should also have gone through a change control board before being implemented. All those involved should be charged with grand larceny. Illegal acts pierce the corporate veil.

Get FOSS-happy, China tells its financial institutions

Free Open What?

My irony meter just pegged. The Chinese Government promoting free, open anything?

Online harms don’t need dangerous legislation, they need a spot of naval action

Equal opportunity bile

If you visit left wing sites, you will find at least as much hate and bile directed at the right wing. And the left wing media doesn't help either.

But that's ok, those right wing people are evil anyway. /S