Posts by Scott L. Burson

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

There are no bugs in LLMs

... for the simple reason that you can't have bugs unless you have a specification. There's no spec for an LLM; it just does whatever it does. Ergo, no bugs.

TSMC shrugs off impact of Taiwan earthquake

Mercalli, not Richter

Richter magnitudes do not change depending on where someone experiences the earthquake. You're probably thinking of the Mercalli intensity scale.

Digital memories are disappearing and not even AI or Google can help

You have HUNDREDS of browser tabs???

Piker. I'm into the thousands.

Deepfakes being used in 'sextortion' scams, FBI warns

Actually, this has an upside

Now when your actual nude photos get out, you can claim they're fakes.

Greg Christie to leave Apple as Jonathan Ive seizes design reins

"seizes design reigns"???

Someone has been learning to spell by reading blog page comments.

FBI offers $10,000 bounty for arrest of laser-wielding idiots

Re: I don't understand

You're quite mistaken. Battery-powered lasers the size of a small flashlight are readily available for a few hundred dollars that put out 1W and even 2W -- that's 2000mW, probably about 1000 times the power of the laser pointer you looked into. I've read that shining one onto a wall and looking at the spot for a few seconds can cause permanent retina damage.

I agree that they're weapons-grade, but floor-mounted and mains-powered? Absolutely not. And why do you need a sighting system when you can see the beam clearly?

RUMBLINGS: Apple pondering 'Touch Cover keyboard' for iPads

"... brushed aluminum and all"

HA! I KNEW you Brits would eventually learn to spell "aluminum" correctly! Now I can start on the Wikipedia editors...

Experts agree: Your next car will be smarter than you

But as C.W. McCall knows...

You can't have a proper convoy without a chartreuse Microbus.

'Brit Bill Gates' was powerless to stop HP's Autonomy acquisition

It's Shane Robison, not "Robinson"

Come on, Reg...

Apple, Facebook, Google: Same-sex marriage 'a business imperative'

Re: Equality?

So for you, then, marriage is just a business transaction. Marrying the person you're in love with and want to spend your life with doesn't enter into it.

You are either permanently single or in a miserable, loveless marriage.

If I'm wrong, then you have no heart, because you're unwilling to allow others the same joy you have found.

Sorry Meg, not buying it

"I supported Proposition 8. At the time, I believed the people of California had weighed in on this question and that overturning the will of the people was the wrong approach."

So you're saying that the majority does have the right to discriminate against the minority, just because they can? I'd say you still don't get it. If you had said "I supported Prop. 8 because I had not yet examined my own beliefs, and I was wrong" then I would applaud your sincere conversion.

The amazing magical LED: Has it really been fifty years already?

Shuji Nakamura needs to be mentioned here

I don't know anything about Naruhito Iwasa, and I'm sure this was a team effort, but the Nichia inventor who has received most of the credit for GaN blue and white LEDs is Shuji Nakamura, who received the 2006 Millennium Technology Prize for this work.

Ten backpacks for tech-heads

Outdoor Products Power Pack

... is my favorite. Easily holds a 17" MacBook Pro. Has plenty of roorm for everything. Is absolutely covered with pockets and spiffy features. The best I've ever found.

Attacker pleads guilty to hatchet-job on ISP

Great subtitle...

... but you're dating yourself :-)

LinkedIn faces class action suit over password leak

The CPU power available to crackers has increased to the point that salting is no longer adequate; it would not have protected these passwords from being cracked, assuming (as would have been likely) that the attacker got access to the salts as well.

These days you also need to use a so-called "bit stretching" algorithm such as PKBDF2, bcrypt, or scrypt.

But yes, LinkedIn screwed up here badly.

Intel comfortably conquers chip market in 2011

If you're going to use this meme, get it right!

It should be: "All your transistor are belong to us".

It's mangled English, remember?

Dell: HP's PC exit is an opportunity, not a death knell

Huh??

Hello? HP is spinning off the PC business, not shutting it down. They're not leaving the field at all -- they'll still be a huge player.

TSA to revise nudie scanner software

If the Cylons really had humanoid models

they would look like these pictures.

Google's HTTP Archive merges with Internet Archive

How can you have a whole article on the Internet Archive

and not mention Brewster Kahle, its creator?

Pure Storage to dethrone 'evil' hard disk

"The company is a stealth-mode startup"

Um, I think once el Reg is writing about you, you're not in stealth mode anymore.

Selling Apples to Japan: Complicated as a Nipponese typewriter

Ah, the Digi-Comp I

I had one of those. Hadn't seen that mentioned in many years. Great toy.

Appro overclocks HF1 server for hedge funds

Only 4.4GHz???

Geez, you can get to 5GHz with liquid nitrogen.

People have no bloody idea about saving energy

Paper is completely wrong about aluminum

This paper makes a ludicrous error about aluminum. It talks about the energy required to make an aluminum can FROM VIRGIN ALUMINUM. But in doing so it ignores the much, much larger amount of energy required to smelt the aluminum from bauxite in the first place! Hello???!!!

Ballmer and Softies sacrifice sleep to catch iPad

Here we go again

Redmond, start your photocopiers!!

Google's WiFi snoop - who knew and who didn't?

Expectation of privacy?

I'm missing something here. How is using an OPEN wifi network different from leaving your windows open so that passers-by, including Google Street View, can see what you're up to? I think people need to get that if they're using an open wifi, anyone could be recording their traffic. This incident should serve as a reminder of that.

More problems for Apple's top desktop

Clock speeds wrong??

How odd -- the 3.06 GHz model (left column) is listed as less expensive than the 2.66 GHz model (right column). But the left-hand model has less VRAM. Looks like somebody screwed up which clock speed went where.

Oh, sorry

Oh, I see what's going on -- the left-hand, 3.06 GHz configuration is a Core 2 Duo, while the right-hand, 2.66 GHz is a Core i5.

Electric car maker in 'urgent financial distress'

Two out of three

Anyhow, Matthew correctly used both "they're" and "their", in the same sentence no less. I've seen a lot worse on these boards...

Fraunhofer boffins: Laser printers safe after all

Silicone oil, not silicon

Will journalists ever learn the difference? Silicon is an element; in its pure form, it's a solid, somewhat resembling the mineral hematite but considerably lighter -- and of course is the primary raw material for the chips powering our industry. Silicones, on the other hand, are compounds, any of a variety of silicon-oxygen copolymers; they can be oils, greases, adhesives, rubbers, etc.

Samsung pitches '15,000rpm HDD speed' SSD

El Reg has it backwards

Yes, AC, it's sequential I/O (particularly writing) that SSDs are usually not good at. With zero latency, they do random I/O at the same speed as sequential -- much faster than discs do.

Texting worse for drivers than drink or drugs

Texting kills

Seriously -- here in California we just recently had a very serious train wreck caused by an engineer texting. He paid with his life, and the lives of 25 others.

Retailer dangles earring headphones

I'm still waiting for...

... a Bluetooth headset that looks like the piece worn by Lt. Uhura.

Unpatched Windows PCs own3d in less than four minutes

Has been true for years

This was already the case five years ago. I guess it's good to keep reminding people of it, though.