Posts by tony72

Nvidia bets on Gates-backed nuclear startup to keep its AI ambitions from melting down

Re: Not a conventional SMR

I suspect that they are promoting their reactor as being an SMR in an attempt to have some of the latter's good publicity rub off on them

Mostly agree with your informative post, but the Natrium reactor is considered an SMR because it's small, 345MW, and modular, as in the reactor will be built in a factory and delivered to site, it's that simple. So I don't think they need an ulterior motive to promote their design as an SMR; the term does not define the technology of the reactor.

Arc put on ice as The Browser Company bets big on AI-powered Dia

Web browsers long ago reached that sort of plateau of utility, where there is a de-facto core feature set that everybody knows and expects from a web browser, and trying to innovate much beyond that is really just not helping anymore. As the Browser Company found, even the vast majority of people who were willing to try a new browser didn't use the novel features of Arc, they just stuck to the core feature set that you get in any browser. It's worth improving browsers in ways that complement and support that core feature set, but anything radically new is going to have to be just mind-blowingly good before you're going to get any traction.

German court parks four Volkswagen execs in jail over Dieselgate scandal

A rare case of execs actually being held to account. I guess some scandals are just too big to sweep under the carpet.

Virgin Media O2 patches hole that let callers snoop on your coordinates

Re: Big difference

In the guy's blog, he uses "100m²" unambiguously, and doesn't appear to say "within 100 meters" anywhere, so I think that's a case of journalistic inexactitude, unless that line was taken from a different article or something;

"Each site in these areas can often cover areas as small as 100m². In a city, this becomes an extremely accurate measure of location."

So yeah, 10mx10m.

Next week's SpaceX Starship test still needs FAA authorization

It seems like when they announce a relatively firm date for a test flight when there's a pending investigation into a previous flight, it's because the FAA has already given them the unofficial nod, so I'd suspect if there's a delay, it's not going to be because of FAA clearance. They really need this test to go right, because it's been really unusual for SpaceX going backward with the Ship on the last flight. And even the boosters, I mean, there were supposed to be fixes to address the boost-back relight issue on the last flight, but we had two engines fail to relight instead of one on the previous flight, so even with the successful tower catch, that kind of went backwards a bit too. Anyway, excitement guaranteed, I hope it happens at a time when I can watch the stream.

Microsoft updates the Windows 11 Start Menu

Oh, and (3) fire whoever came up with setting screens that are mostly negative space with a few settings here and there.

I imagine the justification for that is touchscreens - fat fingers and the likes of a 12" Surface tablet requires that the controls be spaced out rather more than a mouse user might like. I do actually appreciate that on my own 2-in-1, although other annoyances of Windows as a tablet OS do tend to balance out such positives.

Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists

Irony?

I mean, what's more sci-fi than an AI vetting humans for a task? It's dystopian sci-fi, sure, but sci-fi nonetheless.

Chinese carmaker Chery using DeepSeek-driven humanoid robots as showroom sales staff

Good potential use-case

I dislike all human car sales people I've ever met, so personally I'm willing to give robots a chance here.

Amazon’s first 27 Kuiper broadband sats make it into orbit on an Atlas V

Re: Launch cost

SpaceX's 2024 revenue was around $8 billion, and profit (EBIDTA) around $3.8 billion. If you assume Kuiper can also earn a few billion profit per year after a few years operation, it doesn't take that many years to recoup the estimated $20 billion launch costs. But as the article states, the costs are relatively small beer for Amazon, and they're probably a lot less bothered about it being profitable (in terms of recovering the initial costs) than they are about becoming a major player in the LEO satellite internet market. I assume like Starlink, the satellites will have a lifespan of just a few years, but as you say, New Glenn will be reusable eventually, so the costs of maintaining the constellation could eventually be comparable to SpaceX.

Who needs phishing when your login's already in the wild?

"Additionally, employees or contractors often disable [antivirus] on their personal devices so they can install unlicensed software."

Obviously my pirating days are too far behind me, but I don't recall having to disable my antivirus in order to install unlicensed software. In fact, due to the prevalence of malware-infected software on pirate sites, it was exactly the opposite, any warez you downloaded, you'd want to scan very, very thoroughly before installing. Is this referring to people being stupid enough to disable their antivirus in order to install *infected* unlicensed software, or something else?

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

Or...

... you could just stay on your current version, and use 0patch to keep it patched. Not free (for full functionality), but a lot cheaper than Enterprise licenses.

ChatGPT burns tens of millions of Softbank dollars listening to you thanking it

I say please when asking Google Assistant to do something on my phone, and likewise when conversing with LLMs - if I'm making a request in the same form as I would make it to a human, that's always going to include the human level of politeness. As far as LLMs go, if the cost of handling people's thank yous is significant, I guess they could easily add some sort of non-AI pre-processor that detects simple politeness phrases and gives a canned response, without heating up any GPUs.

Microsoft admits it's not you, Classic Outlook can be a real CPU, power hog sometimes

Interesting

I see this issue on my laptop, although I would never have noticed if not for reading about it. As I type in a new email, I see one logical processor max out, and one running about 50%; stop typing and they go back to idle. Sometimes the processor activity continues for a while after you stop typing, but it seems to stop if the email window loses focus or is closed. This is with the MS365 non-New Version 2503. That's one to set the tinfoil-hatters off for sure - I wonder what it's doing?

Still browsing like it's 1999: Fresh tools that keep vintage Macs online and weirdly alive

What is going on? A classic AmigaOS update last week, and now classic Macs getting software updates. Must be something in the air.

Dead or alive, Britain hands Schrödinger's industry £121M

Quantum runs on hype even more so than AI, it's just that the barrier of entry is a tad higher. AI may not always live up to the hype, but it at least can demonstrably perform some useful real-world tasks.

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

Re: Meh

I don't know what counts, but I've had Microsoft accounts expire in that same scenario. However, if you ever once allowed any of the elements of Windows 10/11 that want to interact with a Microsoft account to do so, even if you're not using a Microsoft account to log on to the machine, then that would probably do it. You could sign in to said account on the web and check the recent activity, so see if some part of Windows is signing in without you realising it, although at the cost of certainly resetting the "counter".

Re: Meh

If you ignore that Microsoft account long enough, Microsoft will deactivate and eventually close it. So you have to have a Microsoft account, but not forever.

Privacy died last century, the only way to go is off-grid

Re: And even then...

And now, with the diffusion of AI for face recognition, you will also have to walk around in a hood like Kenny from South Park all the time. And soon with gait recognition it will become useless, too, and you'll have to learn a different silly walk (see Monty Python) every day.

After that, there will be brainwave signature detection, and maybe our tinfoil hats will finally become useful for something.

Cashless society could be why fewer kids are eating coins and sticking things up their noses

Re: Yikes

Some manufacturers (Duracell) put a bitterant coating on parts of their button cells to dissuade kids from trying to eat them. Unfortunately the stuff is not particularly conductive. If you find a device not working with a new battery, or the battery seemingly dying way faster than expected (like my car key fob), try giving the cell a good scrub with meths to remove the coating.

UK's first permanent facial recognition cameras installed in South London

Over the past year the mobile vans have caught around 200 wanted criminals in Croydon including at least two rapists who would not otherwise have been caught.

Rapists, meh. They were probably hoping for paedophiles - you can justify anything if you're catching paedophiles. Rapists, we'll be lucky if they didn't hand them a job application.

Hm, why are so many DrayTek routers stuck in a bootloop?

Re: Now that you mention it

We have a 2860n and 2866ax on our two sites, both with approximately year-old firmware, but remote management of course disabled, both also fine. I'm never 100% if there's more risk of introducing bugs with a firmware update, or the update process going wrong, when I have a stable system that's set up in what I consider a secure way, but I guess I better update those two now.

Rocket Lab says NASA lacks leadership on Mars Sample Return

I don't think NASA seriously considered anything other than the JPL option. They had to be able to say they had considered commercial options, so box ticked, but they didn't really want to use one - being plausible probably actually counted against Rocket Lab.

More Voyager instruments shut down to eke out power supplies

"If we don't turn off an instrument on each Voyager now, they would probably have only a few more months of power before we would need to declare end of mission."

These things are powered by RTGs right? And the decay rate of the plutonium therein isn't going to change based on the amount of power being drawn from it, is it? It's not like a battery; the plutonium generates an amount of heat purely based on its decay rate, and the available heat is turned into electricity by thermoelectric converters. So what's actually running out here that's going to last longer if they turn off this instrument? Is it that they wouldn't be able to draw enough current to prevent critical systems from permanently freezing or something?

SpaceX says bad vibes most likely cause of Starship 7 flop

Harmonic vibrations are a pain. I've seen gear after a plane journey with screws having completely unscrewed themselves and fallen out etc, if sufficient blue gunk wasn't used on the threads. Fortunately I don't work with anything liable to explode when it falls to bits, props to all the rocket scientists out there.

Insiders say IBM's broader return-to-office plan hits older, more expensive staff hard

Re: "skills rebalancing will be perpetual"

Most companies build up skills by training their workfore according to their needs.

Not by hiring and firing.

I'm not sure that's strictly true when it comes to American companies; at least in my (admittedly extremely limited) experience, hiring and firing seems to be very much part of the way of doing business over there.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Exactly. Surely nobody's first choice is to pick up the phone and deal with hold music, glacial voice menus, clueless call-centre staff, etc. Personally if I'm phoning support, it's an absolute last resort after all other possible avenues have failed.

Type-safe C-killer Delphi hits 30, but a replacement has risen

Re: Not

I dunno boss, just a dumb Windows guy here, only ever used Lazarus on Windows, but I spun up a Mint VM, downloaded the three .deb packages from the Lazarus site, double-clicked them from my downloads folder to install, in the order it stated to do so on the download page (fpc-laz, then fpc-src, then lazarus-project), then typed startlazarus in a terminal, and it worked perfectly. Only glitch was it didn't show up on the Mint application menu until I went into the menu settings, unticked it, then ticked it again, hence I had to look up how to start it from the command line initially. As a Windows guy, I can't guess what might have gone wrong with your install though, but it certainly was straightforward for me.

"You don't have to use the new version. If you don't like it then stick with the old version."

I guess I took that to heart - still using Delphi 2007 in 2025!

London has 400 GW of grid requests holding up datacenter builds

Re: 400GW?

Did a decimal slip somewhere in the report from Ofgem?

I don't think so, numbers of that order of magnitude seem to appear elsewhere on Ofgem's site, e.g. this blog post, which says "The connections queue now stands at 701 Gigawatts (GW) with estimate this could rise to 800GW by the end of 2024, an amount of electricity generation that is over four times more than what is predicted we’ll need by 2050" (That's for the whole country, not just London).

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Re: Hm

What's the saying, "never let the truth get in the way of a good story"?

To be charitable though, maybe it was supplied with a 240->120V converter, and the smoke incident occurred when they plugged it in directly to 240V instead of using that? Or maybe the teller got his consoles mixed up.

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

Re: The puns, they hurt!

You could say they really laid it on.

Vodafone aims to offer satellite-to-phone connectivity starting later this year

...two out of five mobile phone subscribers are unwilling to pay any extra for direct-to-cell satellite services

I'm surprised it's not higher than that, depending on how exactly the question was worded. How much extra, and what exactly does it do for you? If you rarely go anywhere that doesn't already have cellular coverage, then it would seem to be rather pointless, so what exactly do most of the three out of five subscribers who are willing to pay extra for it think they're getting?

Blue Origin reaches orbit with New Glenn, fumbles first-stage recovery

Re: Optional advice... YMMV

I have to agree. I watch the NSF narrated Starbase updates, but I also find their live coverage irritating. I tend to watch the Spaceflight Now feed, if not the launch providers' own stream.

Microsoft goes thin client with $349 Windows 365 Link mini PC

From The Verge; Windows 365 Link is secure by design, using all of Microsoft's previous work of locking down Windows and even the Xbox xonsole to keep hackers out. That means it won't run anything local on-device other than a lightweight OS that's designed to get you into a Windows 365 cloud PC as quickly as possible.

So it sounds pretty locked down. Hard to say until hackers get their hands on them, but it sounds like they've put a fair amount of effort into preventing them from being repurposed.

Europe glances Russia's way after Baltic Sea data cables severed

Re: Why would they bother?

It may be inconsequential on its own, but who's to say they're not going to cut some more cables, to the point where it does start to be a problem? Maybe this was a test run, to see what it takes to cut the cable, and evaluate the effects?

NASA wants ideas on how to haul injured moonwalkers

In lunar gravity, couldn't you just drag the bugger on an inflatable Kevlar sled or something? I guess you would also need a bottle of compressed nitrogen to inflate it. Sorted. So, how big a share of the $45000 do I get?

Sweden's 'Doomsday Prep for Dummies' guide hits mailboxes today

Can't remember the jingle, but I just about remember us getting the leaflets when I was a kid. The good old days, eh?

UK test-fires Spear mini cruise missile that will equip F-35 fighters

Cost

No mention of how much these things will cost - I guess it's in the "if you have to ask" bracket?

Another official four-day week pilot kicks off in the UK

I dispute your claim about UBI, most of the reportage I've seen lately on UBI has been of the "UBI has failed" variety, however that's an aside. As far as the 4-day week is concerned, I'm one of the apparently lucky few that works for an employer that has implemented a 4-day week, since a few years ago in fact. I can attest that everyone here is happy with it, both workers and management, and productivity has been maintained. It does work, and it is a mystery to me why more companies don't do it. Obviously the nature of some businesses would make it impractical, but for those that can, you know, you really should.

Japan's wooden cube-shaped satellite rockets to space

Sounds like a bit of a weird story. I may check it out.

Water is a good shielding material for space radiation, so I'm wondering if it's the water content of the wood that might do it? But a) I'd have thought you'd need a thick bit of wood for that to work, and b) I'd have thought the wood would lose moisture once exposed to space. Yes, definitely more info required on that.

Mozilla Foundation crumbles as third of staff cast off

Wait ...

Royalties – largely fees from search engines – fell to $510 million

So they're taking in roughly $500 million in royalties alone per year. And they have 120 employees. That's $4 million per employee per year. Where's all that money going? Are they burning it to keep warm?

Classic Outlook explodes when opening more than 60 emails

Re: Is it..........What.

First the article says "Classic Outlook" as in Outlook.exe? Then goes on to talk about Outlook 365 chrashing.

Two different things aren't they.

They could have been more precise, but Microsoft 365 installs an "Outlook.exe", which, assuming one has not clicked the "Try the new Outlook" toggle at least, is just an up-to-date build of classic Outlook. Yes, you can use Outlook 365 on the web, and yes, you can opt in to the "new Outlook", but assuming they are talking about the installable, non-new "Microsoft Outlook for Microsoft 365", I think it's fair to refer to that as either "Classic Outlook" or Outlook 365.

Toyota and Joby complete Japan's first air taxi flight test

Re: Solution in search of a problem?

I don't know about Joby, but Scott Manley visited Archer Aviation in a recent YouTube video, and I was impressed by how much redundancy they seem to have in their aircraft, I came out of that video with a much improved opinion of how safe these things could potentially be as well - they have multiple battery packs powering separate sets of motors, so they can handle losing a battery pack or a motor etc. I can see eVTOLs being potentially significantly safer than a conventional helicopter eventually.

Boeing launches funding round to stave off credit downgrade

Re: Funding round ? For Boeing ?

I guess the counterargument would be that it's a too-big-to-fail company, and it's shares are probably pretty cheap right now. I'm certainly not tempted myself though.

Boeing strike continues as union rejects contract, scuttling CEO's recovery plan

Pensions

The unions are dumb to take a stand on the defined-benefits pension scheme issue. Nobody does those any more because it's a great way to go bankrupt, like United Airlines, Bethlehem Steel or General Motors, for example. Of course, the unions know that, but they also know that if Boeing does go bankrupt, the taxpayer gets lumped with the pension liabilities. So maybe they're not dumb after all, just cynical.

Thunderbird for Android is go – at least the beta is

Based on K9 Mail, hmm. I used K9 for ages, but eventually switched to FairEmail - K9 was a little clunky, and aesthetically somewhat lacking - it didn't really even try to fit in with Android visually. I hope the Thunderbird fork has made significant progress in those areas.

Brits hate how big tech handles their data, but can't be bothered to do much about it

That said, there will always be those who take no action unless they know something directly affects them negatively, and for the most part personal data mishaps don't lead to catastrophic consequences.

Hmm. I installed the "I don't care about cookies" browser extension way back, and my attitude since then manifestly reflects the name of that extension. Does that count as taking no action? I believe that extension auto-accepts whatever cookies are necessary to get past the cookie dialog, but to be honest, I'm not completely sure, or bothered, as long as I don't have to click any cookie dialogs. I never delete cookies (except when the BT Business Portal won't let me log in until I do so, anyway). Still waiting for the sky to fall.

Microsoft throws in the towel on HoloLens 2

Credit where credit is due, I am impressed with Meta sticking to the task and continuing to pour the billions into their AR developments, with any eventual resulting profits still way in the future and by no means guaranteed. But from what people are saying about Orion, they seem to be making some impressive progress. I'm not surprised Microsoft is giving up on HoloLens, it seemed a bit half-hearted from the start. Really pushing the technological boundaries takes more commitment than that.