Posts by Geoff Campbell

Microsoft tries to knife passwords once and for all - at least for consumers

Re: M$ Wants Biometric ID - Sure Hold-on a second ... - NOT.

I'm not sure that I see the problem here.

If you want the facilities, install the App. If you can live without those facilities, don't install the App. No problem, certainly no call to get stressed and angry about it - how's your blood pressure?

For the record, though, both Android and iOS give perfectly good, easy to use, ways to control what these Apps can do and access. The permissions systems are very fine-grained and easy to restrict if that's your thing.

GJC

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

Re: Launch cost

I don't think that's a very valid comparison. Only some of SpaceX's profit comes from Starlink, they also make money from selling launch services and from longer-term government projects.

GJC

Re: Launch cost

Oh, yes, I remember being puzzled by that at the time it was published.

All I can say is that three years of real-world usage of the system including a whole bunch of video conferences and voice calls didn't show up any problems at all.

GJC

Re: Launch cost

I used Starlink for three years without any noticeable jitter of significant magnitude, including in some long-term network monitoring tools. Got a reference for that claim?

We'll see how the services fare. It's a bit of an irrelevance to me now, as I won't do business with either of them, but I'm still interested to see how the services work out.

GJC

Launch cost

It's difficult to see how Kuiper can compete with Starlink while they are paying for other company's disposable rockets. I assume their business model is based on getting New Glenn running and properly reusable before too much longer, to directly compete with the costs of the Starlink plus either Falcon 9 or Starship combination.

GJC

NASA doubles odds of Moon hitting near-Earth asteroid

Seveneves

I thought the opening line was absolutely brilliant, and I didn't ever feel the need for an explanation. It was in the finest traditions of SF, a simple "What if..?" question where the premise doesn't have to be endlessly explained and unpicked, because it's the results that are important, not the root cause.

GJC

UK government told to get a grip on £23B tech spend

Re: Too big

Hell yes. I lost count of the number of arguments I had in the '80s with idiots saying that the new computer system must be *exactly* the same as the old paper system, otherwise it was a failure.

They just couldn't grasp that this was a new set of tools, fundamentally different to the old tools, which allowed new and better ways of working.

Oh, well, it's all ancient history now.

GJC

China’s chip champ Loongson teases trio of new processors for lappies, factories, maybe servers too

Re: Benchmarks

I think 8-bit integer calculations are used a lot in AI, aren't they?

GJC

"But eight-core CPUs at 2.5GHz won’t scare Intel or AMD"

Well, they should. Every successful challenger started with a credible, usable, but behind-the-curve option. Where will Loongson be in another five years? Two years behind? One year? Fully caught up? Or out of business?

Interesting times to be living in.

GJC

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: How?

I lived through a lot of that in the '70s. IRA bomb threats happened all the time in Britain, we'd often get herded out of swimming pools or cinemas. Almost all either fake, or so easily found and dealt with that they might as well have been.

But just enough that got serious to keep everyone on their toes.

GJC

Re: How?

I have long said that terrorists are really rather stupid people, targeting the high-profile and (at least theoretically) well guarded sites.

Small, cheap incendiary devices on electric substations, train signalling equipment, telephone exchanges, and so on would cause absolute chaos and huge irritation, with just about zero risk.

GJC

Google’s broadband balloon laser comms tech floated out as independent company

WISP services

One of my ISP connections here is a WISP service using point-to-point WiFi repeaters in a mesh over the fields. Works well enough, but at 20-30Mbps and with regular drop-outs, I'd be very happy to see them replaced with 20Gbps laser devices.

Don't know how well laser would cope with Welsh weather, though.

GJC

Broadcom has won. 70 percent of large VMware customers bought its biggest bundle

Re: For now

That was exactly my first thought. Migrating a big virtual installation isn't trivial, so customers will be buying time to evaluate and plan.

GJC

As Alibaba launches server-grade RISC-V CPU, Beijing throws its weight behind ISA

Re: RISC-V needs a new OS paradigm

Is that a facet of the ISA, or of current implementations of it? The CPU core design appears to be gather ing pace, which might fix those problems?

GJC

Reading Chinese

Google Translate. Sorted.

GJC

SpaceX receives FAA blessing for another Starship test

Oh no!

Won't somebody please think of the children!

GJC

Hundreds of Dutch medical records bought for pocket change at flea market

Re: I've got a stack

A few years back, a friend of mine died. I volunteered to help his widow clear out his hoard of, well, everything, really. We had a decent wake in my shed during which we recommissioned a couple of motorbikes he'd owned for decades, which I'm sure he would have enjoyed.

Anyway, after that, I started in on his hoard of computer gear. He'd spent about four decades tinkering with his own computers, and supporting a couple of small organisations and his entire extended family. And he'd never thrown anything away. There were several rooms and a decently large shed packed with bits of old computers, including every hard disk and memory stick he'd every used, replaced, or stored. Some were dated, including 5.25" SCSI units from 1984.

I bought two large car-loads back home and spent a very therapeutic couple of weeks recovering what data I could, which all fitted onto a single modern hard disk, then introducing the disks to a pillar drill and sledgehammer before dropping the remains off at the tip.

GJC

Mobile operators brace for bigger, faster headaches with 6G

Re: 4g is fine

Yup. We don't need higher peak bandwidth, we need much better availability of average bandwidth.

GJC

Why AI benchmarks suck

Re: puzzles...that AI models try to solve as a measure of intelligence

The absolute pinnacle would be an AI seeing, by chance, the Times crossword on a researcher's desk, and saying "I'd like to have a crack at that, so I'll ask the owner to photocopy it for me so I don't spoil his chance to enjoy what he paid for".

GJC

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Re: What people really want

ICE isn't half the cost of EV these days (comparing like-for-like, obviously), your information is very out of date.

But yes, sure, you can buy a second-hand diesel car for a lot less than a brand new EV. This isn't going to be headline news any time soon.

GJC

Re: Heil Wankpanzer...?

They never have. If they take a car as trade-in, they will sometimes remove some software options before selling it on at auction, notably free Supercharging. This was widely misreported when it first became known.

GJC

Re: What to expect

Most of the standard car parts that make up my Model S85 are either Mercedes or Brembo. I've found them to be very high quality over the eight years I've been tinkering with it.

GJC

Re: Oh, and...

The Octopus tariff we're on gets you 7p/kWh for all usage 23:30-05:30, you just need to own an EV to be eligible for it. We run everything in the house on electricity already, with heating and hot water both run from storage systems that heat themselves up overnight on the cheap juice.

In fact, that's going to be the limitation on any battery system here - we already bang up hard against the 80A capacity of the incoming fuse, often for hours at a time overnight, so I need to tread carefully.

GJC

Re: One piece of anecdata

Polestar would probably be my second choice, certainly. But Tesla have better software, and the Supercharger network. Some of those are now open to other makes (something around 50% of sites in the UK, from memory), but the Tesla vehicles know all about them right in the SatNav, and the integration is superb.

GJC

Re: One piece of anecdata

You do need to be a little careful. Tesla treat the battery pack as a single FRU, so any failure tends to give a fairly sizeable bill, whereas there are lots of third parties that will drop the pack, open it up, repair what needs repairing, and put it back.

I had the battery management module replaced in my pack last year. Even paying a third party to do the work, it was only a hair over £1,000 - I could have done it myself, dropping the pack out is easy enough so long as you have access to a two-post lift (which I do).

Anyway, we'll see. If I do decide to sell it, it should go well enough, as it's an early model with free Supercharging, which are quite sought-after.

GJC

Re: What people really want

Speak for yourself. We've been driving electric cars for eight years, and we would never go back to internal combustion. They're just so slow, noisy, and generally primitive, and as icing on the cake they're so expensive to run.

GJC

Re: Oh, and...

As I suspect that an 11 year old, 150,000 miles Model S might be a bit difficult to sell on the second-hand market now, I think I'll probably dismantle it for the 16 battery packs, and convert them into storage for the house. It'll be nice to still have use out of the money we spent on the car.

GJC

One piece of anecdata

I bought a 2014 Model S second-hand from Tesla in 2017. Tesla looked after me very well over the years, and the car has been great.

Now that it is coming to the end of its life, I was thinking of replacing it with a Model 3 in a year or two. But that idea started to look a bit poor when Musk started supporting Trump, and now with his recent behaviour it's completely off the board. I do still think that Tesla cars are the best in the market, but the competition are getting closer to them, so it won't be too much of a blow to buy something else. Maybe something Korean or Chinese, I'll have a closer look into the options later.

So, yeah. This previously happy Tesla owner has been lost to the brand directly and specifically because of Musk. Just one data point, of course.

GJC

Re: Heil Wankpanzer...?

Transferring ownership of a Tesla is easy. There's an option right in the App to do so, takes minutes.

This comment does not imply any level of approval for Tesla, however. Just correcting a minor point of information.

GJC

Amazon's Kuiper secures license to take on Starlink in the UK

"A certain person"

Bezos was stood alongside Musk with the other tech-bros at the inauguration of the orange shit-gibbon.

Boycott them all. I've just replaced my Starlink with an ADSL service, I am not giving any more business to any American organisation until they regain sanity.

GJC

Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra, says Microsoft

Re: Why?

I can only speak for myself. The Windows/Office/OneDrive ecosystem is beautifully integrated and removes any trace of dependence on individual machines. I can bounce from desktop to laptop without missing a beat, and if any machine gets stolen/broken/whatever I can buy a new one off the shelf and be back up and running with no data loss in minutes.

Use what you choose, and allow others the same courtesy. We all have out requirements and reasons.

GJC

Apple again? Every sodding time.

The Surface Pro X running Windows on ARM was released over a year before Apple released their ARM Mac range. It was a thing of beauty.

GJC

Re: Why would anyone want any Microsoft Surface?

Yes, but then I would have to use the train-wreck that is MacOS. Hateful.

GJC

Re: Why would anyone want any Microsoft Surface?

Yup. I used a Surface Pro X for five years as my main travelling machine, and it was glorious. So I bought a Surface Pro 11 as soon as they were released, and that too is glorious. Windows on ARM is not going away, I would say.

Buy what you like, but do not write off other people's choices based on some weird herd instinct.

GJC

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

Tesla Board

If the Board of Directors at Tesla have the best interests of the company at heart, they will get rid of Musk as soon as possible. We'll see.

GJC

Car sales, an entirely unscientific survey

I have asked a few people I met at Superchargers over the last few days. About 50/50 split between not really caring who builds their car, and strong feelings that this would be their last Tesla solely because of who builds them. I'm in the latter camp, after eight years owning my Model S, I will be replacing it with something non-Tesla when the time comes.

So, expect a big drop-off in car sales figures over the coming years, perhaps. Although that might not matter if the Robotaxis are viable (yeah, I know...).

GJC

Re: an alleged Nazi salute

There's not enough proof in the universe to get a news publication to put itself in front of that particular legal train, I suspect. The fig-leaf is fine.

(Hmmmm, no Nazi icon. This is probably for the best...)

GJC

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

Re: Starlink

> Starlink is apparently planning a launch of direct-to-device mobile services from their 7000 current satellites.

Not quite. They are launching a service, but it is supported by specific satellites equipped with cell-tower hardware in addition to the "traditional" Starlink kit. These are flying in a lower orbit than normal (about 350km, as I recall?). It doesn't use the existing Starlink constellation, there's no way a standard phone could have a viable Starlink antenna.

GJC

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Re: Might be counting "R's" in a different language

...or maybe something snarky about the use of apostrophes? But to be fair, I've been wrestling with that one all morning.

GJC

Re: Might be counting "R's" in a different language

I think perhaps you missed Phil's little joke. There are indeed four "R's" in "the word strawberry".

Mind you, I'd like to see an LLM that responded: There are no "R's" in the word "strawberry". However, there are three "r's", which I think is the question that you meant to ask?

GJC

AI datacenters putting zero emissions promises out of reach

Re: Wow

And I am not your mate, in any sense of the word.

But, fine, you just want to pick fights. That's cool. I can just ignore you, then.

GJC

Re: Wow

Please quote your sources, so that I can confirm my suspicion that you do not understand the difference between "percent" and "percentage points".

GJC

Wow

Put your analyst on danger money, baby. And stop getting your "science" knowledge from lunatic fringe web sites.

GJC

SpaceX resets ‘Days Since Starship Exploded’ counter to zero

Huh?

One step at a time, man!

We're only just now working out how to do reusable flights to Earth orbits. Let's worry about the reliability of FTL and space colonies next decade, eh?

GJC

UK unveils plans to mainline AI into the veins of the nation

Re: This is what you get

It's AI all the way down, as Pratchett so very nearly wrote.

(Why don't we have a turtle icon?)

GJC

Tim cooking up the dough as his Apple pay rises 18% to $74.6M

Re: I know you hate wintel but . . .

It takes a brave person to mention any faults with Apple kit. But they're computers, they have faults, like all computers. So, not for me, but if you prefer Apple, for any reason, that's cool, too. The only thing I hate about the market in general and Apple in particular is all the very many people who get tribal about it. Make your choice, and let me make my choice. You want to discuss the pros and cons over a beer? I'm right there. You want to tell me your choice is all pros and no cons and I'm wrong in my choice? Yeah, you can FRO.

GJC

OK

So how much of that rise is Tim Apple responsible for? I mean, as in, uniquely and directly responsible for? And how is that qualified?

GJC

Yup

Funnily enough, I did. Well, I didn't have the multi-millions, but I was earning enough to put in the two-post lift in the large garage and pay off the mortgage, at which point I mostly stopped working. I think I can thoroughly recommend it, although to be honest I'm still making the mental shift to not having to look for customers, which is taking a while.

GJC

Database tables of student, teacher info stolen from PowerSchool in cyberattack

Re: PAM

School IT is stuffed full of service providers who hold data for huge numbers of schools and colleges worldwide. You'd've hoped that they would know better on security, but we all know that Hope is a small village outside the city of Reality.

GJC

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Re: Viable as a desktop replacement?

Have a look at the Argon ONE v3 case with M.2 support (link below). A Pi5 in one of those, with a cheap M.2 SSD, would make a great desktop machine for Libre Office and web browsing, I think. Removing the SD card improves the performance noticeably.

https://thepihut.com/products/argon-one-v3-m-2-nvme-raspberry-pi-5-case

GJC