Posts by tony72

HSBC spies $207B crater in OpenAI's expansion goals

Re: Making deals with money you don't have

OpenAI is not a publicly traded company though.

Crocs get the Xbox treatment with sole-crushing price of $80

Re: A fool ...

You could get three pairs of these for the price of a single iPhone Pocket sock thing though. Arguably brilliant value.

Vodafone, EE, O2, Three hit with £3B overcharging lawsuit

I'm no lawyer, but I'd guess this lawsuit will fail. Unless the contract states exactly what proportion of the monthly payment goes towards paying off the handset, and that the handset is completely paid off at the end of the original contract term (or some specified period), it's hard to see what the telcos could get nailed with. Maybe you're effectively renting the handset, rather than buying it, and so it's never paid off?

Starlink’s method of dodging solar storms may make it slower, for longer

Re: That's a better option

This. No alternative reaction seems to be proposed in the paper (or mentioned in the article anyway, I confess I haven't read the actual paper), while what SpaceX currently does allows the constellation to continue operating effectively, so I'm not sure what the authors point actually is. SpaceX don't want to raise the orbits of their satellites unless they have to, because it uses propellant and thus shortens the lifespan. But letting them get dragged out of the sky by a bulging upper atmosphere would shorten their lifespans even more, so it seems like a reasonable tradeoff!

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut

I get it

You're trying to tempt us into mocking our Russian comrades ... but I'm not going to fall for it.

Tablet market stalls because there’s not much new worth buying

True

I'm keeping my ageing Huawei Mediapad M5 8" going as long as possible, because there just don't seem to be any decent replacements, the 8" tablet niche seems to have been abandoned by most manufacturers. If I saw an 8" that wasn't a downgrade to the Mediapad, particularly in terms of screen and audio, and didn't cost silly money, I'd buy it.

Rocket Lab's Neutron slips to 2026: 'Our aim is to make it to orbit on the first try'

Ironic

It's ironic that vehicles designed to travel so very quickly, always make their way through their development phase more slowly than anyone thinks possible.

UK's Ajax fighting vehicle arrives – years late and still sending crew to hospital

I guess it's telling ...

.. that when I read that this thing is likely going to be $1.1 billion over budget and at least five years late, I thought "not that bad". My expectations have obviously been tempered somewhat.

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

When an AI band can make it to number one on a Billboard chart [...] it's an insult to the human artists who rank lower.

Most music that's released is slop, that's the reality. Derivative, unimaginative, forgettable drivel, 99% of it. Up until now, it's been human generated slop, but it's really no surprise to find that AI generated slop is quickly reaching par with the other kind. And the AI generated stuff only gets better from here, so if you're a mediocre musician, this is your sign that you're about to get found out. I don't think it's an insult to the human artists; what's happening, or about to happen, is simply a re-valuing of human-generated slop - it's much harder to pretend that generic crap is anything special when AI can generate better with but a few clicks.

SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew

SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew

Called on - by some rando on X, who almost certainly wasn't being serious - a low bar indeed to justify a headline on El Reg. I suppose it's an excuse to discuss the feasibility of such an endeavour, regardless the obvious 0% chance of it happening.

Google imagines out of this world AI - running on orbital datacenters

Re: …er, all of this on EARTH ORBIT?

A healthy dose of scepticism is indeed warranted here. However powering datacentres on Earth is becoming a huge issue, and the availability of "free power" in orbit makes it something that I don't completely dismiss out of hand. Probably you're not just going to take existing server equipment as-is and punt it into orbit, that won't work - they aren't built to be mass-efficient or particularly energy-efficient. You're going to select or design components with energy- and mass-efficiency as a top priority, and your physical form factor could be very different. An obvious option would be to base them on something like a Starlink satellite - a Starlink V2 Mini is estimated to cost around $800,000 dollars to manufacture, and generate around 73.4kW with its solar panels, so that could be your envelope - how much and what type of compute can you achieve with 70kW and 800kg of mass? Launch costs per satellite if you made them exactly the size and mass of Starlinks would be a further $680,000 per satellite on Falcon 9 to LEO, that should come down once Starship is in the game, but that'd have to be factored in. It doesn't seem like an entirely crazy idea to me though, I can totally see Falcon 9s blasting off and deploying an entire orbiting datacentre's worth of flat-packed "computellites" in one go. Maybe there are niche workloads that would benefit particularly from being done in space.

Trump turnabout sees him re-nominate amateur astronaut Jared Isaacman to run NASA

I suspect Sean Duffy's blatant attempt at personal empire building didn't go down at all well with Trump or his inner circle; several White House sources have been reported as saying that Duffy totally overplayed his hand, and everybody is angry with him. So that will have opened the door back up for Isaacman, who has many influential supporters.

Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope

Have you actually looked at the package? As with the previous package, Tesla would have to achieve hugely ambitious milestones in order for Elon to get his shares. Market cap of $8.5 trillion. Operating profit of $400 billion. 20 million Tesla vehicles on the road. 10 million FSD subscriptions. Etc, etc. It's not as if he's asking for a handout. If Tesla hits even a few of those milestones, *all* Tesla investors will do extremely well. Which is why most supported the previous comp package, and I suspect will support this one too. In a world where CEOs commonly get massively rewarded for failure and cutting jobs, *more* CEOs should have their compensation tied to ambitious success targets like Elon.

Cybercrooks getting violent more often to secure big payouts in Europe

That's the downside of self-custody - you may be secure from hackers, but you are susceptible to the old $5 wrench attack.

Keeping the lights on takes up nearly all police IT spending in England and Wales

Plans for investing in AI and service transformation held up

Well, that's terrible. I can't wait for the police to start using AI for everything. I mean, what could go wrong?

ESA tests bacterial powder to feed Moon and Mars crews

... fermented with air (split into hydrogen and oxygen via electricity)

Okay, I'm historically bad at chemistry, but I'm pretty sure that air does not work that way. Should that not be water rather than air?

There's mushroom for improvement in fungal computing

I think it maitake while before this technology becomes mainstream.

Everyone wants a fancy phone – even the folk buying them second-hand

Re: Better than a new phone

You have to go a few generations back to not have AI at all, I think. I have a previous generation Google phone as of now, a Pixel 9a, and I believe it has significant AI features. I haven't actually taken it out of the box yet, but the reviews said while it's missing a couple of AI features that the latest gen phones have, it has Gemini Live and a bunch of other AI stuff. I think even the Pixel 8 phones had significant AI features.

Shadow AI: Staffers are bringing AI tools they use at home to work, warns Microsoft

Is Copilot not basically rebranded ChatGPT? Yet somehow it seems to be significantly worse. Maybe it's not, and I'm just subjectively applying to bias to my view of Copilot, but it does seem that way.

Exchange Online will start archiving your oldest emails before your inbox bursts

Timely

My boss's mailbox is at almost 98%. I've enabled archiving, but not assigned a policy yet. I'm tempted to wait and see if this feature kicks in (it sounds like it's going to be on by default) in a few days. He basically wants emails going back as far as possible in his primary inbox, so this is really what he needs.

Cerebras CEO insists dinner-plate-sized chip startup will still go public

Big chips

...while Cerebras has by no means abandoned training as a workload, that business has taken a back seat to inference...

So Tesla cancelled Dojo to focus on using AI5 and AI6 for inference (and maybe also for training), and now Cerebras has pivoted towards inference as well. It seems like the whole wafer-sized mega-chip approach may not be the way to go, at least when it comes to AI training. If they're pivoting towards inference, presumably they believe their chips are good for that, and there seems to be plenty of demand for the moment. So will the training business gradually be eclipsed by the inference side of things, or do they think they can do both well with the same chips? Or will they develop separate training-optimised and inference-optimised hardware?

UK minister suggests government could ditch 'dangerous' Elon Musk's X

Irony

Miliband painted Musk as part of a far-right cabal "who want to take away people's rights, take away people's freedoms."

Why not just classify X as a terrorist organisation and then arrest anyone who supports it, eh Ed? I guess taking away people's rights and freedoms is okay as long as it suits your agenda.

Moody's raises Big Red flag over Oracle's AI datacenter buildout blueprint

I happened to be watching Bloomberg TV the day that deal was announced, or maybe the day after, anyway I've rarely seen the Bloomberg talking heads as nonplussed - as they pointed out, the energy requirement of the deal, if implemented in full, would be equivalent to two Hoover Dams, which they did not seem entirely convinced would even be feasible. If the AI industry is *not* in a bubble, then I guess we're in for some crazy times.

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

Guessing might produce a superficially suitable answer. Telling users your AI can't find an answer is less satisfying.

This only mirrors the direction search companies went long before LLMs. Google went from proudly proclaiming it was an AND search, and that every result matched all your keywords back in the day, to the situation now where you have to fight to stop it from ignoring your most important keywords and returning utterly irrelevant results. Apparently lots of bad results is better than few accurate results. Same old same old.

US tosses $134M pocket change at fusion pipe dream

...which perhaps explains why the DOE is only committing such modest sums, in comparison with the billions being pumped into the semiconductor industry.

The fusion industry is raising plenty of private capital all by itself, so it wouldn't make much sense for the DOE to pump money into already well-funded fusion companies that really don't need the help. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised over $2 billion by itself, for example. By contrast, manufacturing chips in the USA is *only* going to happen if the government pumps a ton of money into it (and uses tariffs and other coercions into the bargain) to make it happen, so I'd say it's more about putting the money where it's needed than anything else.

Everyone needs an AI phone. No, don't hang up, it's true

Acronym

I suppose you're meant to say "NPU" as an initialism, i.e. "N", "P", "U", but I like saying "en-poo" instead.

Anthropic to pay at least $1.5 billion to authors whose work it knowingly pirated

Re: So for clarity....

The fund values each pirated book at $3000, so it's not like they are just paying the cost of the books, most of that $3000 is punitive. However it is a huge win for the AI industry insofar as the principle of training AI on (legally obtained) copyrighted works was upheld as fair use. If that principle is upheld in other cases, that would be possibly the biggest headwind for the AI industry removed.

Apple iOS 26 set to dump 75M iPhones on the e-waste pile

Re: Why?

You can get twice as much selling on eBay versus trade in. If you have the stomach for dealing with the scammers and time-wasters that is. Yup, in the drawer it goes.

McDonald's not lovin' it when hacker exposes nuggets of rotten security

Re: What a bunch of clowns

We might have to Filet-O-Phish for them.

Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

I'm honestly having trouble remembering all what I used to play on the Amiga. Dune 2, Civilization, A Train and Sim City 2000 for sure took care of many, many hours. Oh, and Syndicate. And I used to do a full length race in Microprose Grand Prix before every actual Grand Prix. Oh yeah, Sensible Soccer, Alien Breed, Speedball 2. Good times.

SpaceX prepares itself for a tenth Starship flight test

Re: Is there an award for Best Euphemism?

I like "negative perigee orbit" better.

Trend Micro offers weak workaround for already-exploited critical vuln in management console

Not a fan anymore

Trend Micro are on my shit-list for problems with a different product, the latest of which has finally given me the push to switch us away, literally in process as we speak. There's a general feeling of just not giving a shit with this company.

Mobile industry charts course to smartphone satellite broadband

Good jargon

Not normally a fan of jargon, but "Supplementary Coverage from Space" sounds pretty cool, TBH, childish me wants some SCS action.

Amazon’s Kuiper satellite broadband to offer commercial services in mid-2026, at least in Australia

Reasonable

I think we can take it as read that they're not going to have half their constellation in orbit by mid 2026, but they don't need to in order to start offering services. SpaceX only had around 720 Starlink satellites in orbit when it started offering services commercially, ~6% of its initially approved 12000 satellite constellation, and less than 2% of the later expanded constellation of 42000. So if Amazon could do similar, they might be able to start offering service with only around 200 satellites or less, which seems a bit more doable than 1600 by next summer. So what they might do is start offering services with whatever satellites they've got, then go to the FCC and say, hey, okay, we haven't gotten half the constellation launched, but here we are successfully providing services already, please can we have an extension on that, and please don't take away services from the customers we're already serving? It seems to me, as long as they've got a credible plan to complete the constellation, the FCC is likely to go along with that. Since the requirement to launch half their fleet by mid 2026 is a US regulatory thing, I guess they might be able to position the initial satellites to better serve US customers to help make that case as well, I don't know if that's a possibility.

Perplexity AI accused of scraping content against websites’ will with unlisted IP ranges

Surely it's the "Compliance is voluntary..." part that's the problem, not the implementation? Right now, if someone chooses to ignore robots.txt, all you can do is shake your fist and mutter curses.

Microsoft bolts Copilot Mode onto Edge to chase AI-browser crowd

Re: Does anyone use Microsoft Edge anyway?

I did. It was a decent browser for a while. However I suspected from the start that it would get progressively less decent, and indeed I eventually elected to abandon ship - currently using Vivaldi.

P.S. I hope the "Microsoft edge is a Google Chrome downloader" joke is told with a suitable degree of irony.

And now for our annual ‘Tape is still not dead’ update

Not bad

36TB, wow, I make that roughly half a billion Sinclair Microdrive cartridges. Tape has come a long way!

P.S. if you're the guy that borrowed my Microdrive and Interface 1 in 1989, I'd still like them back.

Brit watchdog says public service TV must 'urgently' join Team YouTube

Re: I’ve never understood the UK TV licence thing

Retailers used to be required to inform TV Licensing when someone bought a TV, however that was ended about a decade ago. However, I think the general assumption is that every household is going to have at least one TV in this day and age, so they probably send letters to any inhabited address that doesn't have a license.

NASA hacked hardware of camera orbiting Jupiter – and fixed it

Towel trick

Many people scoffed at the Xbox red ring of death "towel trick", but that's basically what NASA did here. Well done NASA, anyway.

Scientists spot massive black hole collision that defies current theories

First confirmed intermediate?

So does this mean that intermediate-mass black holes are no longer theoretical? Or are they extending the range classed as Stellar-mass black holes? Up to now, I believe the intermediate-mass range of 100 to 100,000 stellar masses had a few candidates, but no confirmed members, so this would seem to be the first confirmed member of that class, unless there's some nuance I'm missing.

GParted: Still the best free partitioner standing – unless you're on a 32-bit box

I booted a 32bit system from my GParted flash drive just the other day, not because I wanted to use GParted, as it goes, but it happens to have MemTest86 on it too - I was testing an embedded board with a Vortex86 SoC on it, a 32-bit 486-class unit. I'm not actually sure that the GParted option would have run on a 486-class CPU, 32-bit support or no, but I didn't try.

Haven't heard of Ventoy, but it sounds useful indeed.

NCA arrests four in connection with UK retail ransomware attacks

Doesn't seem very smart, carrying out cyberattacks on organisations in the country where you live. Cybercriminals operating across international borders rarely seem to get nabbed, but it's nice to know there are a few not smart enough to avail themselves of that advantage.

Nuclear reactors smaller than a semi truck to be tested in Idaho

The general idea with SMRs, as I understand it, and I presume with micro-reactors as well, is that you send the whole thing back to the factory once the fuel is used up, and swap it for a new one - no messing about with nuclear fuel outside of the factory.

Tesla Robotaxi videos show Elon's way behind Waymo

Not looking good for Waymo

Waymo has been operating for years, and burning vast sums of cash ($4.4 billion loss in the last fiscal year alone). Robotaxi is just launched and in a limited testing phase. So what, there are a few teething troubles. But given that the Tesla vehicles are currently basically unmodified Model Y's, if they can fix the minor issues we're seeing, it's hard to see how their costs aren't going to be a tiny fraction of Waymo's. And the dedicated Cybercab vehicle will be even cheaper to build and run, when that comes out. Shame Waymo isn't publicly traded, it'd be looking good for a big short right now.

Re: Gosh

WillbeIT is clearly referring to the comments section, not the article. Well, far be it from me to speak on his behalf, but that's my impression. The article is somewhat balanced, however I don't see a lot of balance in the comments section.

China’s trying to slim down, which will fatten the smartwatch market

Dammit, just realised I left my smartwatch at home! Useful things if you can remember to actually wear them. Maybe the Chinese will get the price down low enough that you can leave a few spares here and there just in case, like you do with glasses.

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.