Posts by Kimo

CERN puts two new atom-smashers on its shopping list. One to make Higgs Bosons, then a next-gen model six times more energetic than the LHC

High-field superconducting magnets, high-temperature superconductors, plasma wakefield acceleration tech, bright muon beams? My local police probably already have all the bits and are using them for crowd control.

Microsoft Teams gets off to a wobbly start as the world and its cat starts working from home

Can't wait until next week to see how Ohio State's systems handle switching 50,000 students to online classes.

You, FCC, tell us again why cities are only allowed to charge rich telcos $270 to attach 5G tech to utility poles?

Which would look nice next to a modern 5G unit. It's all about showing the structure and services.

Cost per pole varies widely. The hourly rate to process depends on the local cost of living and prevailing wages. Des Moines can afford a much lower fee than San Francisco because you have to pay people enough to live in the Bay area.,

And despite their protests about aesthetic issues, there are real concerns especially in historic districts. Slapping a fuggly bit of kit in the French Quarter or Savannah's old city is different than putting it on the side of a brutalist office slab.

After just one phone, Essential Products ascends to the great venture capitalist in the sky

I like my Essential phone, but I picked it up at $250 instead of launch price. At that price the so-so camera isn't a deal breaker, and I did get the 360 camera attachment. They could have followed up with a second phone with a better camera and lower price, but they wanted to make SHINY-SQUIRREL instead. They changed focus more times than my cats. But they made a decent bare-bones Android phone.

Whoa, France. Take it easy. Wow. You're out of control. Fining Apple 55 minutes of revenue for secretly slowing down iPhones? Maniaques!

On the other hand

Sudden shutdowns would also cause people to buy new kit. Informing them and creating an option screen would have been a good move, but Apple could get hit on either side for this.

Google says its latest chatbot is the most human-like ever – trained on our species' best works: 341GB of social media

Skynet doesn't scare me. The YouTube comments section becoming sentient, that's my worst nightmare.

China tells America, with a straight face, it will absolutely crack down on hacking and copyright, tech blueprint theft

Check back in a year

This is just a fig leaf deal so Trump can declare victory before the election. If this deal has teeth, I will be incredibly surprised. And I can see China buying a large quantity of farm goods in 2020 to push up Trump support ahead of the election so they don't have to deal with a grownup in the White House, but in the long term the amounts they have sorta promised to buy are unsustainable.

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Re: AKA Libertarians

At Ohio State, to graduate as a Computer or Software Engineer, you still need the into Engineering sequence. You can get a Computer and Information Science degree without any Engineering classes.

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Re: Storing in the wrong place?

I was once given the task of telling a list of users to clean out their inboxes before a major maintenance on an Outlook server. They estimated rebuilding the system after would take about 1 hour/gigabyte, with a handful of accounts nearing the 3GB storage limit. As I was not a senior position, most just told me "no" even knowing that we were looking at an extended email outage.

Academics with laptops are the worst offenders. Had a boss about that time get a nasty file-corrupting virus with over three years worth of work on an un-backed up laptop. I spent three days on it (OK, half a day finding a tool to dredge through the disc, 20 minutes to start it up, another day of actually salvaging files, and the rest of the time spent explaining back up resources that they were ignoring).

They say lightning never strikes twice, but boffins have built an AI to show where it'll come next

Re: If it doesn't strike twice

I used to live about a block from a university dorm that was the only 7-story building for about 70 miles in any direction, which was built on a ridge in the middle of the Mississippi delta, some of the most amazingly flat land in the world. It got 2-3 strikes every time we had a good storm.

Just what we all needed, lactose-free 'beer' from northern hipsters – it's the Vegan Sorbet Sour

Pennsylvania Dutch traditionally left cider out to freeze to make a concentrated version.

Re: You're thinking..

Wheat and rye are OK because they can all be malted, just like barley.

Right-click opens up terrifying vistas of reality and Windows 95 user's frightful position therein

Best thing about Windows 95...

...was you could still boot into DOS and launch programs from there.

Massachusetts city tells ransomware scumbags to RYUK off, our IT staff will handle this easily

And the spread was stopped by turning off machines. My campus with 63,000 students likes to keep all machines on 24/7 for "updates" that could easily run at boot, leaving he entire network exposed.

Hack-age delivery! Wardialing, wardriving... Now warshipping: Wi-Fi-spying gizmos may lurk in future parcels

Re: I'm not so sure.

Step one: send a series of emails, not spammy enough to go straight to the junk folder, and search for out-of-office auto-replies. "I'm on vacation until..." is gold. Step two: ship a small box spoofing an office-supply chain return address. Those don't get checked often. Now you have a box sitting on site for some time.

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

Re: We hide reality Per 100,000

Comparing crimes per a set number allows comparison over time and across borders because we have a set scale. You can compare the number of knife attacks in the UK and the US but the number itself is meaningless until you look up population and do some maths. Same with looking at London in 1960 and 2019. The population has increased and that context matters.

Who needs strong encryption?

Most of our home-grown terrorists here in the US put their info on Facebook and Twitter instead of using secure communications.

Sleeping Tesla driver wonders why his car ploughed into 11 traffic cones on a motorway

Re: Not-an-Autopilot

The car makes a noise if the driver's hands leave the steering wheel.

Re: Not-an-Autopilot

My knowledge of the workings of autopilots comes entirely from the movie Airplane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WQfZYacEAw

Legal bombs fall on TurboTax maker Intuit for 'hiding' free service from search engines

Re: Not being an American

The most audited returns are those claiming the Earned Income Credit, a program set up to help keep the working poor less dependent on other forms of assistance. And the people who are claiming the credit also tend to have less education and experience with this type of paperwork. So tax software can help people to navigate their filing and keep it safe in case of an audit. There are low income people who absolutely need it.

Boeing boss denies reports 737 Max safety systems weren't active

Re: But they did, they told Muilenburg to stop digging, many times.

You can't simply blame one executive or one aircraft builder (not that Boeing is innocent here). The FAA allows employees of the manufacturers to do the bulk of certification work. Certification requires the cooperation of aircraft firms, but also requires that the personnel in charge are not paid by the companies they are certifying. They need the independence and authority to ask difficult questions and delay certification without worrying about losing their jobs.

Astronomer slams sexists trying to tear down black hole researcher's rep

Re: Being a gay astronomer...

Must not make Uranus puns....

Re: From His Twitter Thread

If he even THINKS about suggesting an Ursula K LeGuinn story as a musical, I will lose all respect.

LOL EPA OIG NDA WTF: Eco-watchdog's auditors barred from seeing own agency's cloud security report by gagging order

There is a Public Interest exception to an NDA, despite what the text may claim. Our current administration loves them, but the courts do not. Better to violate the NDA and sue if they take action.

Biker sues Google Fiber: I broke my leg, borked my ankle in trench dug to lay ad giant's pipe

Sometimes you do the math and sue for less than the cost of hiring lawyers for the trial. Especially if you have a weak case. Google could easily decide that spending $100K to defend against a $75K suit is in losing deal, even if they win.

They declined to sue Sean Penn in the comic because juries love famous people.

Official science: Massive asteroids are so difficult to destroy, Bruce Willis wouldn't stand a chance

So we just split the asteroid in two, let each half pass on the opposite sides of the Earth, and then recombine on the other side?

Sure, you can keep Grandpa Windows 7 snug in the old code home – for a price

Re: Redmond

The Hellmouth is under Issaquah.

Could be an incompatible BIOS. Had the same problem with an older laptop that couldn't read the storage after the reboot to first run Win 10. The Win 10 Upgrade Adviser does not check BIOS for compatibility.

Re: Redmond

Pompeii itself was not buried under lava, it was a mix of dense ash and sulfuric clouds. Areas close in to Mt Saint Helens suffered a similar fate, except it was mostly trees instead of a city. Portland was covered in a thick layer of ash, which I as a lad was paid what seemed at the time good money to shovel off of parking lots (with minimal breathing protection, it was different times).

So in short, Redmond could end up like Pompeii, or could end up under mud. Or a major quake from the offshore subduction zone could lead to a mega-tsunami, which is also a bit overdue.

Bad news...

"How much an enterprise actually pays will, of course, also depend on how good their deal makers are."

Expect both the US and UK governments to end up paying at least twice the listed amount, then.

Amazon tried to entice Latin American officials with $5m in Kindles, AWS credits for .amazon

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/amazon.png

Ecuador says 'yes' to Assange 'freedom' deal, but Julian says 'nyet'

Re: Yes, but you've omitted the most important bit...

The cat has been talking to Muller.

Reverse Ferret! Forget what we told you – the iPad isn't really for work

Re: Changed the ink .....

"No child, I haven't. Because you don't change the "ink", you change the ribbon ( or the cartridge )."

Unless you are exceptionally cheap, and re-ink your ribbons,

Re: Bend Test

(holds up left index finger)

Wanna know how I got these scars?

...and a lesson from my 15-year-old self in tool safety that I will never forget.

Re: Oh FFS

I work at a University of over 50.000 students. The higher ups just did a deal with Apple to get iPads for all incoming freshmen. Too bad we require SolidWorks for our Engineering courses (and now have to look at running it on servers and using the iPads to control the Windows installs).

Premiere Pro bug ate my videos! Bloke sues Adobe after greedy 'clean cache' wipes files

Re: user error

My video cache is on a pair of old laptop drives in a RAID 0 array. They could give out at any moment, but all that I will lose is my current cache. Raw footage and rendered is on my storage drive and external. If I made a living at it, I would spring for off-site storage as well.

Pleanty of blame to go around...

Courts can and do apportion blame. Proving the value of the files will be a tricky problem unless he had logs of what was shot (he should at least have logs for anything he billed to a client) but both Adobe's bug and his lack of sensible backups contributed to the loss. It is up to the court to set the percentage for each party.

Re: Biz math

Consider one off-site back-up in case of burglary or house fire.

When I was working on my PhD, I used two different online file storage services as well as copies of everything on my local drive, an external drive, and a USB stick for taking to the library.

Tech world mulls threat as new round of US China trade tariffs looms

Not what we are told they are intended to do.

The pro-tariff argument is that it will bring jobs to the US. But the effect will be to move jobs to other Asian countries that already have the infrastructure to build the consumer products that the US buys.

Should a robo-car run over a kid or a grandad? Healthy or ill person? Let's get millions of folks to decide for AI...

With careful programming....

...the car could hit both.

Android creator Andy Rubin's firm might think its phone is Essential, but 30% of staff are not

The phone ain't half bad...

But I picked one up when Amazon had it for $250 and after many updates to the camera app. The build quality is top notch, and at that price it was a steal even at the risk of becoming an orphan product.

It is too bad they keep changing what they want to make. The first phone was overpriced but gaining some traction as the price became reasonable. I think they could have made a go as a phone company if they had stuck to it and built the promised accessories (their web page is full of things I want to buy, but will never see the light of day). But it seemed like every week they changed focus between phones, home automation, HD audio, and whatever else.

Sure, Europe. Here's our Android suite without Search, Chrome apps. Now pay the Google tax

Best of both worlds. I would expect them to keep the budget model prices down as much as possible and add a significant bit to the flagship models to cover the loss.

Re: Actually, they haven't stated the price.

The commission's reasoning, according to another article that I conveniently don't have a link to at the moment, is that if Google charges for their apps, it creates an incentive for competition because now other app makers have a price point to compete with. If phone makers have to pay, then another paid option is more viable. If, for example, Microsoft wanted to push Bing and Edge to handset makers, they could compete on price. If Google is free and included by default, it is much harder to convince vendors to add another option, even if it is free.

I find your lack of faith disturbing, IBM: Big Blue fires photon torpedo at Pentagon JEDI cloud contract

You can cross the streams but...

Could you not at least find a picture with Ivanova in it?

Mozilla accuses FCC of abdicating its role, ignoring comments in net neutrality lawsuit

Re: "controversial decision to tear up existing net neutrality rules"

The new rules were put into place after several documented instances of ISPs slowing or blocking content for economic or political reasons, and as more ISPs are entering into "preferred" relationships with video streaming platforms.

Google keeps tracking you even when you specifically tell it not to: Maps, Search won't take no for an answer

Re: Stuff Like This Should Be Illegal

Or that your corporations and our corporations are not the same corporations.

Happy birthday, you lumbering MS-DOS-based mess: Windows 98 turns 20 today

Re: The ONLY things going for it were

I kept 98 SE until XP Service Pack 3 made XP usable. The initial XP release was also a mess, and the experience with 98 and XP trained many people to avoid Windows versions until after at least the first service pack.