Posts by Neil Barnes

Microsoft intros clothing line that is absolutely not leftover conference swag

"and there is meaning behind each item in Hardwear."

And the meaning is... profit!

Smart thermostat swarms are straining the US grid

I recall fifteen or twenty years ago that the grid suppliers were getting concerned about the increasing number of switch mode power supply units that shared a characteristic of all grabbing current at the same point in the AC cycle, but very briefly, and then turning off... leaving a hole in the AC waveform.

Did they ever fix that?

Uptick for you!

I hate sleeping in a room with blackout curtains; my brain wants to get up when the sun does.

Re: After looking at all the smart thermostats...

Same here: I had a seven day thermostat for years at my last house (hot water was on-demand from a combiboiler, so independent of whether the heating was on).

Maybe twice a year I would come home to a cold house after a holiday in winter, and what do you know, in a few hours it was warm again. Amazing!

Re: "why not rev up ready for it"

the profit motive overrode any other consideration

Isn't that why the companies are in business? Surely no-one starts a company thinking 'wow, this is an amazing public good I can do' and even if they did, shareholders would be baying for profit in no time...

There are very good reasons for regulation, and one of them is 'do it bloody right first time or fix it expensively later'.

Hive to pull the plug on smart home gadgets by 2025

Re: Hands up all those who did NOT see this coming

I'd bet on the LPL with a paperclip... irrespective of connectedness.

Re: Hands up all those who did NOT see this coming

Service withdrawn: locks permanently unlocked.

Payment lapse: locks permanently locked.

FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

Re: Raise the Jolly Roger!

Tin worm vs silicon worm. I know which I'd rather repair. <looks for MIG machine>

Louis Rossman

Had a huge rant about this last night - great fun for all concerned, apart from BMW.

Re: Monthly?

A simple solution all round to heated/cooled seats: stop installing leather and go back to cloth seats. They're usually comfier, they don't conduct heat like leather does, and they're cheaper.

Oh, wait. Cheaper. No, that would never do.

Twitter sues Musk: He can't just 'change his mind, trash the company, walk away'

Musk and Twitter both in the firing line?

What could be better?

Maybe we can rope in one or two of the other tech giants at the same time? Please?

First-ever James Webb Space Telescope image revealed

Frustrating...

So much universe for me to play tourist in... so little time!

San Francisco cops want real-time access to private security cameras for surveillance

Re: Loopholes

Speaking as one who physically blocks cameras when they're not in active use, I'm unlikely ever to stick a camera on the outside of my house. Permission will not be an issue.

There is already far too much of this crap going on. It assumes everyone is at least a scofflaw and at best a criminal... and yet for some reason, we never see real-time video of the watchers.

Re: Do they not know how CCTV works?

and probably capable of enhancing images.

Ah, the CSI magic of enlarging a single pixel to a full high-resolution image...

Qualcomm, Ericsson, Thales are working on delivering 5G from orbit

cost-effective connectivity

For whom? You're going to want to have a bloody good reason to spend what these are likely to cost.

<cough>Iridium</cough>

Tech professionals pour cold water on UK crypto hub plans

Re: Oh, and talk about a slapdown

What do you call it when 'project fear' turns out to have been an accurate prediction?

The return of GPUs on sale may be tech world's monkey's paw of 2022

Re: When there's a component shortage

Yes. Sod the thousand dollar halo parts, let's see some jelly bean embedded processors, opamps, and even passives without sixty-plus week delays please.

Microsoft cloud exec accused of verbal attack on staff exits

He's perhaps heard

That there's a job at Number Ten coming up.

Pentester says he broke into datacenter via hidden route running behind toilets

Built a studio complex in the UN building

And discovered we shared a wall with a bank.

Well, we shared the first eight feet of the wall; right up to the false ceiling tiles. Above that was three feet of fresh air... they were a bit concerned when I pointed it out to them.

Tech world may face huge fines if it doesn't scrub CSAM from encrypted chats

Way to go, Priti

In the midst of a complete government melt-down, start to assume that you can legislate world-wide. Just keep believing six impossible things before breakfast...

And don't let the door catch you on the arse on your way out.

Near-undetectable malware linked to Russia's Cozy Bear

Re: Cunning ?

do not open attachments from people you don't know

And that will happen, um, a day or two after the heat death of the universe...

Large Hadron Collider experiment reveals three exotic particles

Re: Ever get the sense...

Admit. What they're really working up to is discovering just how loud it is when you smash a couple of grand pianos together at the speed of light...

China rallies support for Kylin Linux in war on Windows

Re: UT

- one OS to secure, maintain and develop

- one OS to write apps for

- And in the darkness bind them...

Google location tracking to forget you were ever at that medical clinic

controls to delete all or part of those records, or switch it off

Remind me again why 'switch it off' isn't the default option on location services?

After all, how much do I need to know where I've been - and how much of that history do I need to have on a commercial service in another country and jurisdiction? Why is even legal to collect this data in the first place?

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

Re: I haven’t found them in Germany yet…

Thank you - I've seen a couple of 'English' shops but the markup, while maybe explainable, offends my grasping Yorkshire soul :)

Re: aaargggh!

When I was a company director (of my own company, staff of one!) in the UK, I had to have a company stamp made for some bank or tax form. It was used exactly once...

Re: Hobnobs - invented for mans pleasure

Plain chocolate is the only adequate enrobing for pretty much any biscuit, but of biscuits, the plain choc hobnob is the king.

I haven't found them in Germany yet... the search continues.

Everyone back to the office! Why? Because the decision has been made

Re: Scheme

an ambulance driver can't work from home, and never did,

Er, my late father worked for many years as an ambulance driver - from home. Admittedly, he lived at the back of beyond and a good three hours from the hospital, even with blues and twos, but the ambulance lived on his drive and he worked from home.

OpenSea phishing threat after rogue insider leaks customer email addresses

An electric hovercraft! Just what I need.

I suspect an electric eel might be a charged wet fish...

The Raspberry Pi Pico goes wireless with the $6 W

Re: I/O

Apropos of which, I looked out for some eeproms from major retailers (digikey and mouser) last night. Both offered delivery dates expected at the end of 2023...

Re: I/O

Probably its only edge over the competition is that it is available whereas STM32 is not in stock.

These days, being able to deliver is a significant market advantage.

Nvidia, Siemens tout 'industrial metaverse' to predict the future

Yogi Berra -

“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

City-killing asteroid won't hit Earth in 2052 after all

Re: Fair play to the asteroid

Wouldn't it be ironic if the official Hollywood way to solve an asteroid impact crisis - the atomic powers combine to blow the thing to bits - failed because the Russians had foolishly used all their rockets up?

NanoAvionics satellite pulls out GoPro to take stunning selfie over Earth

Re: Awesome!

Well, the Special Projects Bureau nearly managed it with PARIS and LOHAN...

RIP Lester.

California's attempt to protect kids online could end adults' internet anonymity

Re: I can see this working

A website might not need external verification: if you've been logging on for a number of years, the site probably knows how long (e.g. Vulture Central knows I've been posting here since 2007, possibly earlier) and if a client has been posting for a significant length of time, they're probably all grown up...

Soviet-era tech could change the geothermal industry

Re: How deep?

Feels about right. In a previous employment I designed deep well guidance control systems; we tested the electronics to operate reliably at 150C and were starting to look at 175 and 200C when I left. Even 150 is not easy; all the things you're used to with electronics start to change in subtle or not-so-subtle ways when they have to work across the range from -60 to +150...

Not much of this actually from 'China anymore,' says Northern Light Motors boss

Re: Sourcing everything from the UK

But where does the stuff that's sourced from the UK come from? Has the UK got production facilities and local sources, or are they assembling Made-In-China parts and waving a Made-In-The-UK paintbrush over it?

I'm not criticising; I think it's laudable to make things without dragging the components half way around the world. I'm just not sure the UK has the sources for everything on this project.

Misguided call for a 7-Zip boycott brings attention to FOSS archiving tools

Re: A couple of points

I blame it all on Noah Webster's attempt to simplify English.

Which makes a certain amount of sense, given that many of the excess letter spellings he objected to are thought to have been introduced by scribes copying documents who were either being paid by the letter or (more likely) just thought that a few 'u's around the place made it look more French and upmarket.

Nonetheless, I find I prefer English orthography to North American. It can make learning German more difficult than it needs to be when one has to continually translate between English and North American to keep Duolingo's bloody owl happy.

Toyota, Subaru recall EVs because tires might literally fall off

Re: Obligatory pedantry

And either way - since the recall is for hub bolts and not wheel nuts, it looks as if the whole hub is coming off. The wheel and tyre are mere courtesy details.

Cloudflare's outage was human error. There's a way to make tech divinely forgive

Re: "a hangover from the days when storage and CPU were too expensive"

absence of planning is planning for absence?

Big Tech silent on data privacy in post-Roe America

Re: Theocracy

Can you tie 'em in a knot,

can you tie 'em in a bow?

BOFH: HR's gold mine gambit – they get the gold and we get the shaft

Re: Unicycle test

At a previous employer, three of us were apparently in the dangerous corner: one paraglider, one diver, one unicyclist.

NASA wants nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030

Arabidopsis thaliana

(Just wanted to see that name again!)

As I recall the report on the experiment, it didn't really prove that stuff could grow on moon-dust/regolith; rather, it showed that it didn't kill plants immediately. As pointed out, the plants didn't grow as well as those on terrestrial soil.

The regolith was being used - IIRC - simply as a matrix to support the roots of the plants, much as one might grow mustard and cress seedlings on a damp flannel. Both water and nutrients were provided, but I understand that one reason they didn't grow so well was that the sharp spiky bits on the moon rock damaged the roots of the seedlings.

I suspect that, as on Earth, if you want something to grow well, you need a nice layer of organic matter well mixed in with the structurally supporting rock matrix. So growing grass for a few years might be a good start... It doesn't look like the moon is necessarily going actively going to kill plants, but it's not going to be immediately easy. The micro-flora and fauna will probably need careful monitoring, too.

On the other hand, it's a lot easier to deliver a tonne of compost (that needs to stay) to the surface of the moon than a tonne of astronaut (who would probably like to come home).

Bipolar transistors made from organic materials for the first time

Kinda assuming I really want to wear a computer.

Brave Search leaves beta, offers Goggles for filtering, personalizing results

redefine the relevance of search results

I'm not sure I really see the use case here. Surely what one wants when one searches is that for which one searched... for example, when I search for 'the register' (on DDG) the register front page is the first hit, and almost everything else on the first results page points at vulture central. I don't see how one would change the relevance of that.

I can certainly see the utility of getting rid of clone answer pages - they're only there to benefit from the users of an authoritative site and they sooner they disappear, the better.

But I can't help feeling that a more focused search engine - particularly one in which I can exclude things easily - would be more helpful. I don't think I really want a thousand pages of advertising links (which I'm going to block anyway) while I'm trying to find substitutes for electronic parts, or how loud a sparrow is in dBA (the internet is really failing me on this last one!).

Meta now involved in making metalevel standards for the metaverse

Re: Seeking education here...

Thank you.

It strikes me that that might cause issues with varifocals; you'd really be looking for - as you say - a single distance prescription that doesn't change with angle of view.

My assumption is/was that the optics in the headset are infinity focused.

Seeking education here...

(aka too lazy to do some searching)

How do these headsets deal with people who need eye correction - particularly if it's complex, different for each eye etc?

Spain, Austria not convinced location data is personal information

Re: Hm, I'd say..

I would agree. But the meat of the judgement seems to equate 'someone else could have used the phone' with 'therefore it's *not* personal data any more'.

Info on 1.5m people stolen from US bank in cyberattack

We have no evidence that any of the information has been misused

Well obviously the miscreants were white hats on a mission to demonstrate how bad the security was. They're not going to actually use the exfiltrated data for any naughty purposes.

Right?