Posts by Watashi

MIT's bionic leg upgrade leaves amputees walking like the wind

Extended warranty?

This sounds great, but let's hope these bits of kit come with a lifetime warranty and a commitment from governments to ensure hardware and software are supported if business fails to do so. Otherwise they'll end up just like these revolutionary eye implants:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_retinal_prosthesis

"In 2020, Second Sight stopped providing technical support for the Argus, as well as for the successor device, Argus II, and for the brain implant, Orion; an investigation by IEEE Spectrum revealed that users risk – and in some cases, have already experienced – a return to blindness."

Meta won't train AI on Euro posts after all, as watchdogs put their paws down

Re: AI will be Americentric.

True that. When I was a Uni student in the 90s we called this "American Cultural Imperialism" and treated it like a bad thing that should be stopped... but these days the Americancentric world-view has become so normalised accross the whole of UK society that even the most bolshie students of today have become thoroughly Americansied.

Adios, accountability: X to hide 'likes' for everyone this week

Dislike

If only there was a way to not "like" things you don't want to go public.

I mean, I get that privacy is important but it does feel like a case of the professionally offended here.

Japan to draw up routes for roads dedicated to robot trucks

Japan does not do freight by train

Japan doesn't really use rail to transport freight and to start doing so would require a complete reworking of Japan's whole freight transport processes. Using road for automated freight transport is a much easier change than starting to use automated trains for Japan (assuming the technology works properly) even if it proves to be more expensive and less energy efficient than rail in the long run.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Japan

Devaluing content created by AI is lazy and ignores history

Good AI vs bad AI

I don't think many people would argue that modern CGI hasn't successfully revolutionised cinema and TV production. However, there's an awful lot of mediocre or just plain bad CGI being put into new films and shows. I expect AI will be the same.

Boffins deem Google DeepMind's material discoveries rather shallow

Re: S&M - Sales and Marketing

Indeed. I think we've all had enough of experts!

Amazon finishes pumping $4B into AI darling Anthropic

20 seconds to comply

Wait, so one of the main competitors in the AI sector is selling itself on the basis that it is less unsafe than its competitors? Way to build confidence! "We Build Safer Systems" sounds like it's straight out of a Paul Verhoeven movie. We're all doomed :(

One rack. 120kW of compute. Taking a closer look at Nvidia's DGX GB200 NVL72 beast

WoW

World of Warcraft still lags :(

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Omfg

The future is no email? The real future is that MS (and others) will remove all line-of-sight access between standard users and their data, do away with all local DBAs and sysadmins, lock everything inside rented, cloud-based black boxes and then charge organisations access to their own data through very expensive AI subscriptions. They will also use that data to train their AIs for free and will own all the processes their customers develop to manage data and steal it to sell to other customers.

Fucking great.

Microsoft calls AI privacy complaint 'doomsday hyperbole'

Re: the only way...

I guess a bigger question is this:- have companies used personal data that's not in the public domain to train their AIs? For example, if you wanted to train AI on, say, the kind of NYT articles people in various cities like to read, then you're not just using public data on the NYT website you're also using private data held in non-public company systems.

Now, who here trusts the tech giants to strictly limit their AI training to pubic data?

GDPR

Hmmm. So if I ask MS to tell me what data of mine they hold and how they are using it, are they obliged under GDPR to tell me what is included in the ChatGPT data sets? And is it the case that I already have the right under GDPR to ask MS to remove that data? What about data that they scraped from sites where I'm not explicitly identified? Can I ask for that data to be removed too?

Palantir boss says outfit's software the only reason the 'goose step' has not returned to Europe

World Emperor

How to say "I'm a narcissist" without saying "I'm a narcissist".

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

Re: The public

My bet is that we'll see a bunch of kids who do really well in homework and classwork but completely flunk their final exams. This trend will then continue into the workplace, with a sizeable number of new, young employees looking like they know what they're doing right up until the critical point where it becomes obvious they don't.

Did all that AI chatbot hype boost Bing's market share? Oh, wait, never mind

Bing user experience

Big search is one of those cases where you wonder if the people in charge of the department actually use their own product.

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

DLC

Voyager 1 now requires NASA to create an account and provide a credit card number.

NASA just patched Voyager 2's software but spared Voyager 1 the risky rewrite

Re: Software long term support is not rare in some industries

Making proper documentation is harder than building space probes, but maybe NASA cracked that problem too.

Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected

7 years of Android

Google has just announced that the Pixel 8 will get 7 years of security patches, so there's no way people will want to buy a laptop with a defined 5 year lifespan. Sure, most laptops don't even last 5 years but customers want to think their shiny new device might last more than that. And if it does last that long, they'll keep using it whether or not it gets updates, leading to bigger botnets and more security breaches and all the big players on the internet being unhappy about fraud, DDoS attacks etc.

Current system works fine - perpetual updates of Windows editions with the OS just being a fixed cost at purchase and then a platform for everything that makes real money. Yes, the occasional forced retirement of hardware when new security standards come along.

Enterprise buys MS licencing with everything they need, including OS, so nothing needs to change there.

Also, MS already tried to drop the version number. Remember that Windows 10 was going to be the last Windows edition with a new number in the name. But they realised that people want a higher number because then it feels like their new thing is better than the old thing even if its not.

Brit watchdog slams Microsoft as it clears $69B Activision Blizzard buy

Re: Embarrassment for the UK

Activision Blizzard annual revenue for 2022 was $7.5 billion, a 14.48% decline from 2021.

Roblox annual revenue for 2022 was $2.2 billion, up 16% from 2021

Yeah, no future in cloud gaming at all.

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

Nope

Quite the opposite. Quantum mechanics proves we are NOT in a computer simulation, because why would you even bother programming something as funky as QM into a simulation?

We're about to hit peak device count, says HTC veep, as AR takes over

Single point of failure

I'm now imagining having to replace my year-old non-Apple headset because Apple TV+ stops working on it due to reasons. It's bad enough maintaining compatibility between devices and apps / software / other hardware - creating a single point of failure would be a really dumb move.

Nobody in China wants Apple's eye-wateringly priced iPhones, sighs CEO Tim Cook

Re: Overpriced kit

What's the point of working for a social media marketing agency if you can't blow your big bucks on the most over-priced phone money can buy?

Just TWO climate committee MPs contradict IPCC: The two with SCIENCE degrees

The heat is on?

Yet the five warmest years on record have taken place in the last fifteen years, and 2014 looks like it'll be another hot one. We have not seen an increase in temperatures recently, but temperatures have not gone back to what we would expect if CO2 was having no effect. That's teh one fact that seems to pass the skeptics by. If CO2 doesn't matter, why are temperatures not going up then down?

TrueCrypt turmoil latest: Bruce Schneier reveals what he'll use instead

Infidelity

Well, they could easily update the latest version so it couldn't encrypt only on XP, and I can't help but feel that if the XP reason was genuine the notice would have said so. The conspiracy side of my brain does think that someone in the team has been identified by the spooks so they've pulled the plug... but it could be that a member of the team has sold-out, or internal politics has just got the better of them. The notice reads better than "Tom slept with my wife, so, by extension, his work on TrueCrypt can't be trusted either."

Indian climate boffins: Himalayan glaciers are OK, thanks

Re: Alarmists, get in line!

Don't forget other alarmist conspiracies such as...

Hitler invading mainland Europe (1938).

Deregulation of The City leading to an unstable economy (1980s through 2000s).

Overuse of Antibiotics leading to the return of once-treatable killer diseases (now).

Report: Apple seeking to raise iPhone 6 price by a HUNDRED BUCKS

Re: Yep, it'll work.

I do think there's a fear of Android for many iPhone users. I've used Symbian (first), iOS (second) and Android (third) of various versions and iOS is the one I find least intuitive. It's like the difference between a planned new town and an old town that's grown naturally. The old town is like Android - it's easy to navigate because it's natural. There's more to learn, but somehow there's more fun in it and this engages the user on a deeper level than iOS. iOS is like a new town - it's simpler and more structured because it's been planned out for the user. For those who started on iOS, it must be clean and simple to use, but it lacks charm and allows no interesting diversions so the user can't develop their own ways of getting around.

From an Android user perspective, iOS is fairly easy to navigate once you accept that you have to think the way the planners want you to. Moving from iOS to Android must be quite hard, though, as all that controlled order is missing. Long-serving iPhone users are a little institutionalized, which means that Apple has a higher customer retention rate.

Fee fie Firefox: Mozilla's lawyers probe Dell over browser install charge

Semantics

So, this must be how Dell prep their PCs:

1) Get PC with no OS from Chinese manufacturer.

2) Open up the box, plug it in etc.

3) Configure BIOS and add service tag (some charges may apply).

4) Eject the DVD tray and put in Windows OEM disk.

5) Install Windows.

6) Update Windows.

7) Install each piece of Dell bloatware manually.

8) Install PowerDVD, Office Home trial, AV (free for a year or whatever) etc manually.

9) Install Firefox manually.

10) Run sysprep so that you get the out-of-box experience when the buyer switches it on.

Or...

1) to 3) as before:

4) Deploy the OS image containing the requested software onto the PC.

Now, if Firefox is on the OS image there is no difference between the way the purchaser gets Firefox and the way they get IE. Yet no-one would say that Dell installs IE on every Windows computer you buy from them, and imagine the mockery if Dell tried to charge users for IE installation. And as a choice needs to be made whether or not the Firefox image is used, the effective cost for each additional PC which has Firefox installed is about zero.

Now it may be that Dell are technically correct in a legal sense, but Mozilla's terms and conditions are there to prevent consumers being ripped off and this is exactly what they're trying to do. Dell are ripping customers off, plain and simple.

Software needs meaty cores, not thin, stringy ARMs, says Intel

Two models of computing

This is not about numbers of cores or architecture per se, but is about basic physics. There is a direct relationship between the work done by a software process and the electrical power required. There is also a direct relationship between the word done and the heat generated. That means that heavy processing tasks will always run better on processors that are not designed with power consumption efficiency in mind. The bottleneck is how much entropy the system can manage. You wouldn't dream of trying to dissipate anywhere near as much heat through a tablet's case as you would through an MT form factor CAD machine's case.

A big give-away is the battery life of smartphones. Very few mobile devices last a full day of medium-level use without needing a bit of a charge-up. It would be quite easy to put a bigger battery in smartphones like the new Nexus 5 so that they ran either faster for the same time or for longer. Why don't they do this? Because a) users of smartphones don't expect a full day's charge and b) the limit to processing power in smartphones is the heat generated, not the processing power available. I predict that we are not far off the ceiling for mobile device processing power until we develop much cooler ways of carrying out computer calculations.

Dell directors foresee unremitting brutality in PC market

PCs too good

Much is made of the Tablet boom killing the PC, but in the workplace the real killer of the PC market is the PC itself. With a dual core PC and 2Gb RAM you don't really need a replacement cycle of anything less than five years for many users. If you're employees are on mandatory profiles and standard Office apps / server-based systems a dual core PC will work fine until it packs up. The IT Support team's focus is now on business critical / specialist PC replacements. And when the time does come to replace these PCs, the bottom of the range model will do.

This trend should have been obvious several years ago (it was to me, anyway) but I suspect that the Tablet success obscured the basic change in the PC market.

iPads in education: Not actually evil, but pretty close

Wot, no computers

Imagine being told that you were only allowed to use your work computer for one hour a day, perhaps two. And that for the rest of the time you would have no access at all to your email or internet. If there was any work you couldn't get done between 9 and 5, you'd have to finish at home with your own personal computer. If that computer broke, you'd have to buy a new one or risk loosing your job.

Welcome to the world of school education.

The iPad may not be the ideal solution, but it is a solution to a problem many teachers don't want to admit to. Not surprising, really, as teachers do not work in the real world. A large number of kids in today's schools will be entering a University or workplace environment unprepared for the computer use requirements that will be placed upon them. Being able to use Google is now as important as being able to use a library, while using a spreadsheet to process data is as important as GCSE maths.

Ten serious sci-fi films for the sentient fan

God complexity

I love Star Trek: The Motion Picture's allegorical tale about how our quest for scientific knowledge can both empower us and dehumanize us. The two films I'd add are Dune and Sunshine, the first is a seminal Sci-Fi tale looking deep into the human soul, the second shows us that we don't need God to have a profound spiritual relationship with the universe.

Help-desk hell

Sensor disarray

There was the time I spent a whole day trying to figure out why a ceiling mounted projector kept cutting out after a random amount of time, but worked fine in the workshop. Turns out the installers had wired it into the same circuit that fed the old power-saving lighting system, and the power was cutting out because the sensor mounted in the corner of the room wasn't detecting any movement.

Microsoft said to be building Apple TV adversary

Yeah, but...

With the Zune and the Kin, MS were trying to launch a device into a market that already had good products. At the moment, there is no reasonably priced wireless media streaming device that works well. If you think there is, you obviously haven't actually used an Apple TV.

Apple slips bomb into ITC filing: Samsung being PROBED by US gov

Re: Double standards

Samsung invents something really useful and the law forces them to let Apple use it. Apple invents the quadrilateral and the law bans Samsung from using it. The law, my friend, is an ass.

Apple's iPad Mini mishap: scratching out the retina screen

Death of a salesman

How quickly Apple has gone from taking cutting-edge technology and packaging it into a snazzy, if overpriced, "magical and revolutionary" device to trailing in the wake of the competition. iPhone 5 and now iPad Mini are devices that make Apple feel like Nokia did just before its collapse. I guess it just goes to show that monopolies really are uncompetitive - the vertical monopoly that is the famous walled garden has allowed Apple to make tonnes of dosh without having to plan for the future. Apple spend very little on R&D considering their huge revenue and that is now beginning to show. The question for the shareholders is whether or not the more-money-than-sense legions of brand enthusiasts will stick to the all-important Apple label now that it looks old and tired.

From a personal point of view, the whole Apple cycle has been fascinating. Very rarely do we get to see a big company expand so massively and then implode (I'm predicting that before the end of the decade Apple shares will be worth 1/10th what they are now) in such a small amount of time. Perhaps a new phrase will be spawned: "Apple Bubble"?

iPhone 5 poised to trounce Android, devastate BlackBerry?

Sh*t survey

Did anyone notice that 52% of respondents were iPhone owners? This against a background population of 23% of smartphone being Apple devices. The sample group is clearly not representative, so this survey is utterly pointless. Perhaps El Reg should close down over July, as there's obviously not enough real news to keep their pages filled at this time of year.

Surface: Because Microsoft does so well making hardware?

Nokia

Nokia produce some of the best hardware for mobile devices, so perhaps some kind of partnership deal between the two would be a good idea.

iPhones, iPads to be FULL OF FACEBOOK and NOT GOOGLE

iTards

I don't think I've ever seen a more meaningless set of statistics than the "Installed base" figures supplied by Apple. My Galaxy Ace, which I got in Feb and is currently available for free on Vodafone for £15 a month, runs fine on Android 2.3. As it's a bottom of mid range phone I wouldn't expect it to run v4 of Android. The cheapest new iPhone I could have got is the iPhone 4, available at £36 a month on Vodafone, and I'd be pretty p*ssed off if it didn't support the latest version of iOS.

Look at the market and these figures tell you only one thing:- companies offer cheap mobiles that run older versions of Android and expensive mobiles that run the new version of Android. You might as well say that the average Jaguar owner has a bigger engine in their car than the average Ford owner.

Extreme weather blown away from unexpected direction

Re: Have they never heard of the boy that cried wolf?

Unfortunately, runaway global warming is one of those things we do have to be afraid of, just like asteroid collisions, local supernovae, giant solar flares and mass volcanic activity. It's hard to say what the risk is, but it is a definite possibility (as the atmosphere of Venus demonstrates). As we have very little chance our outrunning a drifting black hole or other calamity, we should at least make an effort to minimise the risks of disasters we may have some influence over.

Considering the total overall cost of changing to renewable energy sources is minimal when compared to other big expenses (e.g. Credit Crunch, Iraq War) it seems churlish to cheap out on this possibly species saving caution. Blame the hyperbole if you want, or blame human stupidity - hopefully the policy makers will be a bit more careful than the sceptics.

Charge of the Metro brigade: Did Microsoft execs plan to take a hit?

March of the neophobes

A lot of people here are displaying two dimensional thinking. Metro apps aren't for touch devices, they're for the cloud.

Windows 8 is the world's first device-independent operating system. Throw in lots of cloud services and virtual desktops and you have a truly liberated computing workspace. Remember those dreams of carrying your OS around with you on a flash drive an plugging it in to whatever PC was handy, booting it up and having all your documents and programs there? Microsoft have created an operating system that does exactly that - only instead of needing a flash drive, you just need a Hotmail account log-in. Your XBox, mobile, tablet, PC, smart TV or even car computer console will all give you access to your personally tailored workspace at a moment's notice.

Windows 8 certainly feels like it's a while away from maturity, but it is a big step forward from anything else on the market in terms of the way it integrates many different computing models. Windows 8 itself may not be the future - it's a big gamble and may even spell the end for MS operating systems - but whatever replaces it will be nothing more than a refined version of the new computing model Windows 8 is providing.

New Yorker sues Apple: 'Misleading and deceptive' Siri ads

Contract not worth digital paper

A contract has to be legal before it can be legally binding. Either Apple deliberately lied in its marketing (illegal) or it lied in its small print (also illegal).

iPhone tethering app uses HTML5 to defeat Apple's censors

Death of the walled garden?

Apple have tried to kill Flash because it doesn't work on their phones, so HTML5 has received a big push...but what does this mean for Apple's app store? Google is set up for the idea of a browser as a portal for cloud services, but Apple clearly isn't. If most popular apps end up being web apps, how will Apple control what their customers use? Will they require every HTML5 website to pass their quality control system or block access to their devices? At the moment the huge number of apps available to Apple devices is a big selling point, but if Apple start blocking lots of HTML5 websites the situation will flip over and Android and Windows devices will become more functional.

Death to Office or to Windows - choose wisely, Microsoft

Office for iPad or productivity lite

Hmmmmmmm.

This is the way I see it, If you REALLY need office, then you need a big screen (preferably two), a full sized keyboard and a mouse. If you're an office worker you also need to run databases, email, web etc at the same time in an easier to use way than the iPad can provide. If the world was all iPads, the Windows PC would have to be invented.

If you don't need full Office, then why not just use Office 365? That'll work on any device you use. My suspicion is this: there are quite a lot of execs, journalists, students and so forth who like to look like they need full office, but actually don't. These people will parade around with their Office loaded iPads for effect, whilst the rest of us use Office on proper computers to do real jobs.

Johns Hopkins and VMware forge medical records mega-cloud

Employees vs government vs hackers

Hacking is so last year. Why not just pay an employee with direct access to the database for details of medical records? I'm sure there are plenty of low-paid healthcare employees who would not be against taking a few buck in return to do an illegal data search for the ploice / your prospective employer / the press etc

Anyways, the real problem with the security of a medical mega-database is who the government legally allows access. Expect upcoming data trawls for DNA matching, for meta scans for medical insurance fraud, etc etc etc. And what about giving Google "limited, anonymous" access for marketing purposes?

Data is power, and the more easily a government can tie all our data up together the more power they have over us.

Apple demands US ban on Samsung's Galaxy Nexus

9) Capitalism is dead

9) Someone will bemoan the lack of free markets in Western Capitalism, suggest that the Patent system is biased towards American companies and then imply that Apple is inhibiting, rather than promoting, innovation in the tablet and smartphone biz. He will then wonder how Google is ever going to monetarize Android anyway. Finally, he will say that this whole thing just shows that we've learned nothing from the Credit Crunch.

Apple and Google ramp up proxy war

Trade war

Or possibly we'll see a trade war open up (though some may say we're already there) between East and West as governments back their favourites by biasing the results of patent conflicts. iPhones and Nokia / MS phones will be the only ones you can buy in the West and LG, Samsung, HTC, Sony, and the upcoming Chinese companies will sell exclusively in the East. Think I'll move to South Korea.

Inventor flames Reg, HP in memristor brouhaha

If it walks like a duck...

Far as I'm concerned, the HP usage of a memristor is an electronics component, not a part of an old skool electrical circuit. But then there's no real reason why there should only be a missing "fourth component" to go alongside capacitor, inductor and resistor. You could add superconductor, diode and some other components into the list if you wanted.

Basically, it's the functionality that matters and not how you get there. What we need is something that works like a memristor as per the description of its voltage vs current graph but which can be easily manufactured in very large amounts in a very small space without any moving parts. It may be easy to build a memristor on a big hunk of circuit board using existing components, but that isn't going to revolutionise computing. If HP are achieving a memristor on an equivalent scale to the transistors found in modern chips then I don't care if they're called a memristors or a duckristors.

Chrome passes Firefox in global browser share

IE in the workplace

Form a support point of view, IE is just easier than Chrome or FireFox. There are aspects of browsers which don't really matter at home but are important in the work-place. For example, if Chrome doesn't work properly with a website at home you just write it off as "one of those things". If Chrome doesn't work properly with a website at work, you'd be on to tech support asking them to fix it. At home, the inadequacies of FireFox and Chrome are hugely outweighed by the advantages, but in the workplace the inadequacies are much more significant and the advantages much smaller. You may not see the difference as a user, but to a support tech in a large company with a network built upon an MS infrastructure they're a big deal.

One thing about the stats:- considering how many people are allegedly spending all their time on the web using their iPads, and that this is the year of the tablet, why has the growth in Safari been so small?

The End of Free: Web 2.0 will squeeze punters rotten

Friends Unreunited

Remember Friends Reunited? The first modern style social networking website committed business suicide by trying to charge users for services they either didn't really want / need or could get for free elsewhere. It was launched three years before MySpace and four years before Facebook and was market leader for a while. Now it's worth a fraction of its peak valuation and used by hardly anyone.

It's a tricky one, this, because no-one wants to shoot the goose that lays the golden eggs. No-one has successfully moved a web-based service from free-to-use to subscription paid yet and so everyone's playing chicken. Could Apple charge for access to iTunes cloud service? Could Amazon charge a small subscription to access its on-line store? Probably. But what if it's just enough to push customers towards a new site that does most of the same stuff?

We have seen that new services spring up very quickly on-line. Breaking into the market for web-based services is much easier that most traditional industries. It's so easy to add infrastructure - no new factories have to be built - that up-sizing is cheap and quick, and that means established names are a lot less established than they'd like to be. Truth is, there are a lot of Facebook users who don't really need it at all. Charge me five quid a month and I'd leave today. Charge me five quid a year and I'd stay but start using Google+ in the hope that others would. Once enough people were on both I'd switch. And there are a lot of kids around who'll switch as soon as Facebook seems uncool, and they'll drag a lot of us with them. Parents will follow the kids, friends and relatives of these parents will follow and soon everyone will have moved.

Thing is, we have very little personally invested in existing web services because we all know the market is going to change. I have absolutely zero expectation that I'll be using Amazon, Facebook or even MS Windows in fifty years time. The knowledge that we'll have to move to a different service every so often is built in to the consumer mindset. Thus, the last thing Facebook et al want is a proper marketplace for their services. $5bn a year is not as much as $30bn, but its a lot more than $0! Rather, Facebook will probably do what Apple do now with iTunes music and app stores - skim money off the top for paid-for products and services that are supplied through their channel whilst keeping the channel free to access.

It may not generate as much money, but charging only for extras keeps the freetards happy.

Gallery mulls 'damage' after cleaner scrubs modern art

German humour

Martin Bormann was (and possibly still is) a high-ranking WW2 Nazi whose death is surrounded by conspiracy theory, with some claiming his DNA-identified remains are not actually his remains at all, and that he is still hiding away somewhere. Naming a Brazilian petrol station after him is a nice bit of trollery.

Router glitch causes widespread net outages

Head in the cloud

Bodes well for cloud compu