Posts by Ze

NASA's billion-dollar launcher is behind schedule and burning cash

Or politicians

Or NASA management

Or NASA contractors

Nvidia's growth slows to a mere 122 percent but it’s still topping expectations

China has a mix of both onshore and offshore strategies with the ideal mix depending upon China future plans and timelines eg invading Taiwan and it's expectation of the risk of further actions by the west.

Ideally China would like sovereign compute with their own designs and manufacturing capabilities but while they are pursuing that and developing it, they still want western infrastructure whether it's sanctioned or not.

China also can also fund dedicated compute infrastructure overseas in different offshore locations depending upon where it expects sanctions and repercussions to bite eg severing fibre optic cables in event of invasion of Taiwan. If China expected to invade one or more countries one strategy would be to build up compute infrastructure and capacity in those countries and then take it over.

Re: What ?

Possibly or alternatively shipping to Singapore and then the customer ships somewhere else (eg China,Hong Kong, Iran,North Korea,Russia) or company setup in Singapore shipping somewhere else and then that customer ships to destination country.

It's possible although less likely that suddenly Singapore has grown as a place for shell companies or offshore subsidiaries for GPUs that much for non sanctions busting reasons. I know it has been popular in the past for tax minimisation and avoidance.

I wonder how many Chinese companies simply redirected their orders to subsidiaries data centres in non sanctioned countries , or to dedicated cloud resources they rent. Ie the Chinese companies effectively control the compute it's just under a subsidiary now or in someone else's data centre or cloud.

AT&T to shell out $950,000 after quad-state 911 outage

You forgot the part where it's cheaper for at&t to pay the settlements then it is to prevent this happening again in the future, so its cheaper to treat it as a cost of doing business than to provide the infrastructure to do the job properly.

It's a real win for at&t and a big f you to the public. Furthermore by settling at&t makes it harder for those affected to pursue legal action than if they had been found guilty since they can't use the verdict and the discovery evidence won't be made public in a trial.

The only thing that makes settlements more offensive is when there is a NDA attached. I'm inclined to think all settlements should be public records with the possibility of the plaintiffs being anonymised and some details being summarised for privacy of the plaintiffs and not the defendants.

Far too often we see things being hidden behind NDA's and no admission of guilt.

Part of this is because the legal system makes legal matters too expensive and take too long , so even if you are innocent it is cheaper to settle and admit no guilt and if you are the plaintiffs and in the right it's settle with the guilty defendants or let it be dragged out and the associated costs which aren't just the legal costs be borne by the innocent party in the meantime with the guilty party benefiting from it being dragged out and then often being able to hide,transfer or structure assets so the guilty party gets away with it, or the innocent party runs out of money and drops the case.

It hardly makes for a fair civil or criminal justice system.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Re: So true to life

Super glue?? I thought that was what hot glue was for, or even 2 part epoxy, although Sikaflex (polyurethane that they glue windscreens in with)would work well.

Re: Maybe it's the lack of coffee...

Wouldn't it have been easier to use the hammer on the boss either break the boss fixing the PEBKAC error or even just his hands.

Crypto-failure Terraform Labs to cough up $4.5B, liquidate self

Re: "its underlying blockchain being unable to scale"

>>>I do notice scanning through the listings a fairly strong suggestion from the chosen names that crypto appeals to the MAGA, extreme GOP, self professed libertarian

Couldn't you have just replaced that with idiots or suckers. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of wack jobs, it's amusing seeing them get their comuppence although I do wish I did mine some Bitcoin when I first heard about it in its early days but I overestimated the intellectual capacity of people and thought it was a waste of time.

Gone in 35 seconds – the Cybertruck's misbehaving acceleration pedal

Are you sure they glued it on? The mention of residual lubricant implies to me they didn't use glue rather they just pushed it on relying on pressure and designed in mechanical fasteners eg tabs,spring tabs,ledges etc to hold it together.

When designed right glue joints with the right glue and mechanical design can be incredibly strong. Just look at any modern windscreen, or the racecar windscreens of sports prototypes which can be cut out and reused as part of the structural monocoque in the event of a crash.

A small Alaska town wants a big bronze Riker

Re: Don't tell Paramount...

<quote>Or maybe the crew of Red Dwarf. We should have a referendum on who to memorialise. Referendums always go well.</quote>

Judging by brexit and the folks in charge for the last few elections you would probably vote for the toaster.

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

Re: Fujshitsu need to be punished as well

The cynic in me says that the outcome of this wil be either Fujitsu sells off this part of the business and the same people go on as normal or they move to a different company that does govt work and continue on as before.

Either way the cultural rot continues.

Buggy app for insulin-delivery device puts diabetes patients at risk of hypoglycemia

Re: Lobotomies....

"Surely someone a has a chunk of formally verified code to capture floating point numbers?"

Why does it need to be floating point surely fixed point would do in this case? Its not like you need a huge range or to have high precision. The more limited the input string is the better, an input string in decimal fixed point with a limited range and precision is all you need whether you then calculate the values using fixed or floating point and binary or decimal. Furthermore sensible error handling messages and range checks/confirmations within that limited range for excessive or unusual values would be desirable.

"This is a safety critical application. Running this on an android device is a bit like trusting a chatgpt brain surgery robot to remove a brainstem tumour."

Whilst android is overkill if it is a mobile app you run on your phone it's also one less device to carry. Furthermore you can then typically provide a better UI with better history and better error/confirmation messages.

Diabetes devices have really come a long way , we have insulin pumps, finger prick glucose monitors,continuous/flash glucose monitors that go on your skin and pierce the interstitial layer of your skin and last for upto 14 days or are implantable and last longer. When you combine the two you get an artificial pancreas system like ÀPS or openAPS.

Datacenter architect creates bonkers designs to illustrate the craft, and quirks, of building bit barns

Re: Typical architect design

That's all good in theory about UK versus US architects and Oz ones being like UK ones except that at the beginning of the story it says he went to the Illinois institute of Technology so he's the product of US architecture training and may not be even be Australian even though we're currently stuck with him.

No comment section in sexist tech bros article

No comment section in sexist tech bros article

Was commenting disabled on the https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/30/women_in_tech_survey/ with title "Tech bros still cling to sexist stereotypes, forgetting female pioneers who coded their path" or is it a bug? If it was never allowed that's a pretty bad indictment of the staff opinion of el reg members and if it was disabled after bad comments then that's a pretty bad indictment of el reg members. I personally hope it's a bug.

Intel shows off 8-core, 528-thread processor with 1TB/s of co-packaged optics

It's actually not due to areas being switched off but rather because we have 8 core complex's composed of 6 cores with 2 cores being single threaded and the other 4 cores being 16 threaded so we get 66 threads per core complex. So we end up with 8×(2+4×16) = 528 threads, or 16 threads on 16 ST cores and 512 threads on 32 MT (16 thread) cores.

Fed-up Torvalds suggests disabling AMD’s 'stupid' performance-killing fTPM RNG

Re: "...which could then cause random problems..."

Is that what they are calling SpaceX starship now?

It works for both but I was thinking rocket propelled grenade as well. I've now realised that Elon Musk could be called both.

Steve Jobs takes medical leave from Apple to focus on health

Jobs Health

Whilst I have sympathy for anybody suffering a serious illness and I hope they get better.

Steve Jobs and Apple have brought the calls for full disclosure on themselves by not only building a cult of Steve Jobs around him but also by how they've handled his health concerns instead of being honest they've done their best to play them down.

BNP list hunters bring down Wikileaks

@AC

"And the USA require people to give up foreign citizenship to have only USA citizenship how racist is that, no dual nationality from the racist merkin system."

That's just plain good sense. If you want to become a citizen of another country then you should give up citizenship.

I've got no problem with people who are under the voting age having dual citizenship but once you become an adult able to vote you should make a choice.

BNP leaked list claims first victims

@AC

"What is your opinion on religious people working in the health service? Large number of doctors are Muslims and Christians, hardly harboring the most tolerent of views towards homosexuals and transgendered people who they need to offer comfort and lifesaving care to."

Just because you are muslim or christian doesn't mean that you aren't tolerant to others choices , nor that you believe the whole story.

I think it's wrong that people are banned from any particular political party but I see no problem with banning someone from public service if their actions aren't compatible with public service. IE in this case it'd be wrong to fire someone because they are a member of the BNP but it wouldn't be wrong for the internal affairs/integrity commission to investigate people on the list to see if their actions aren't compatible with the public service.

SGI shows off Molecule concept machine

SGI answer to bluegene?

SGI answer to blue gene?

With the rise of low power chips again , it seems to me like IBM might have to look at commodity chips for bluegene. IBM isn't afraid to use another manufactuers chips though.

I wonder how CELL based supercomputers are doing though.

Intel rallies rivals on parallel programming education

@Louis Savain

The concept of a global clock with double buffering just doesn't cut it. Global clocks are slow. Why should one part run slow if I can run other parts faster? Then you've got register/cache/memory speed issues. If we adopt your solution we end up running at the speed of the slowest *possible* bottleneck instead of the slowest bottleneck.

On the hardware front I reckon we'll end up with a bunch of non-homogoneous cores with homogeneous instruction sets running on a fast IO interconnect.

On the software front we'll end up with some form of multi-threading/multi-process using either NUMA shared memory or Message Parsing. Developers will just have to get used to the fact that programming is hard and and that the things you learnt in your Computer Science degree are actually useful.

BTW the sure sign of a kook is when they say algorithms are dead then present another algorithm.

Google - the world's first firewalled monopoly

Yahoo/Google Herring was a win/win for Google.

I honestly don't think Google intended to go through with it.

They had a win/win deal going by giving Yahoo the impression of an alternative to Microsoft.

If microsoft had upped it's offer then it would have depleted Microhoo/Micropoo cash reserves.

If Microhoo fell apart then Google has reduced the chances of a competitor arising for a while. It was a win/win for them.

BOFH: Taking out a contract

One of the most amusing things about Wikibeancounters.

is the way that they are able to instantly transform any given selection of notionally intelligent people into door-slamming illiterate monkeys who are apparently unable to make even a stab at what information a diagram of the thing they're standing in front of might possibly be trying to convey

Bloody hell they are spoil sports with no sense of humour or taste. Seriously though when you've got Jimmy Wales who's basically a shonky bastard and then you've got a bunch of power tripping folks on it , and they are begging for cash. I hope it's replaced by something better. I think their whole notability criteria is a load of crap , space is cheap and if you combine all the information together it could actually be useful.

BOFH: Radiating sincerity

Tasmanian Desktop Users

I'm guessing it has something to do with the old aussie joke.

What's the difference between a Tasmanian and a Queenslander?

A Tasmanian has two heads , whilst a Qlder has one head + a scar on their shoulder.

Hmmm going to need to think up a title for myself when I form a company soon. BOFH is much more tempting than MD.