Posts by Annihilator

NASA's Artemis III will need three rockets to do the job Apollo did with one

Not the fairest comparison really, given Saturn V was a 3-stage rocket, needing 5 x F-1 rocket engines for the first stage alone... Plus they carried what was essentially an aluminium 2-man-tent to the lunar surface.

HTTP gets a QUERY method so complex searches can stop pretending to be POST

Re: Idempotent

The doc prescribed me those little blue pills. I recommend you try them too.

Microsoft emails Windows 10 holdouts: Fine, keep your old PC another year

Family IT support...

So.. what should I be doing with my mother-in-law's old Win10 machine that can't upgrade? I've been ignoring the problem til now..

My technique to date has been "make sure the backup is pretty solid.."

BOFH: Cross-department AI pitches are easier to swallow with a pint in hand

Re: "It's nothing to do with witches"

I'm here for this comment too :D Andrew Hunter Murray wants his joke back!

Former Microsoft engineer shrinks Notepad down to size

You can change the options in Notepad to effectively remove tabs. Change "Opening files" to be "open in a new window", and "When Notepad starts" to "start new session and discard". Makes it broadly workable again - especially if you turn off formatting in the options too.

Re: Original Notepad and Wordpad still work OK.

I use the run dialogue for stripping off formatting (assuming it's a single line of text) as I can do it all from the keyboard. Ctrl-C, Win-R, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-X, Esc, alt-tab to my destination, Ctrl-V.

Muscle memory has it down in a couple of seconds.

Large Hadron Collider goes offline to make room for its enhanced successor

Re: the new one will be just as safe

Ooh this makes me very angry

Pretty big misunderstanding of modern physics. There aren't really "Eureka" moments for physics now - it's far too complex now for a lone figure squirreling away. A lot of the LHC work has been in experimenting with supersymmetry and helping understand the parameters to how that might exist.

But you can google it if you like. Since the last upgrade alone, pentaquarks, tetraquarks, 79 new hadrons have been discovered, and the first quantum entanglement of quarks have been observed.

End of era as the BBC switches off Radio 4 Long Wave service

Re: Run silent

To be fair, I think there were several more steps before that. There was one fewer step than before.

Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years

You can tell all the hype and bubble is about to burst for multiple reasons, not least this deal. Primarily because all the AI companies are doing IPO and floating on the markets. They're effectively cashing in at what is hopefully (from their perspective) the peak.

The bad news for us is that the financial risk is now firmly away from the likes of Musk and venture capitalists - instead it's loaded into the stock markets, in turn the wider economy and your pension funds. They walk away with a fortune, which has effectively been borrowed from the economy.

And that will start to pop as the AI companies realise the "free" funding is disappearing and they need to make a return on their investment, and charge users more aggressively.

At which point companies reconsider how much they're using AI, and that there's a cost to giving all users access to CoPilot to have it write their emails in iambic pentameter.

"I understand supply and demand but at those margins there is no incentive to increase supply"

Mmm... kinda. There's no incentive for them *all* to increase supply, but if only one of them does it, they get to reap the benefit of selling more (granted it'll bring the price down a little, but not a lot).

The problem each company has is if they *all* do it, because that would lower the costs back to normal levels, and negate the benefit. They can't afford to do it, but they equally can't afford to not do it in case anyone else does.

But the beauty is, they can do something like this - pre-sell to 16 chumps at an inflated rate and protect themselves from the latter example.

O2 joins UK 2G switch-off with summer 2029 start date

Yeah, but you just *know* that anyone making a mass-market electricity meter would have had ill-thought-out requirements, absolutely scrimping on the hardware and thinking security wasn't important enough to warrant spending an extra £0.20 on each unit to manage WPA (or possibly even not bothered with WEP at all!)

I simply don't believe them

They switched off the 3G networks to free up the 4G bandwidth. Now out in the sticks, I don't get any signal other than "E", which I swear is disconnected at the back end. I've never managed to get internet connections off that.

So frankly, I just think when they switch off 2G, I'll get absolutely nothing.

Yep, memories are definitely short here. It was probably WEP at best! I still remember the whole Nintendo DS debacle that couldn't cope with mixed-mode WEP/WPA networks, forcing you to use WEP instead of WPA, and that's 'only' 20 years ago.

There was also the desire for these devices to be completely agnostic of the customer's broadband. Imagine trying to debug the smart meter or describing to Joe Public how to join their meter to their wifi - if they even had it.

EU won't force publishers to grant dead video games an afterlife

My biggest challenge for old games is getting the damn thing to run at all on Windows 11 without having to spin up a Win95 box.

I think last time I had a nostalgia crisis and tried to play Doom 3 (2004) from the discs I still have, I gave up and paid £10 to Steam for the privilege. Same with Half-Life 2.

Re: Shame

No one was required to absorb running costs or disclose IP. They only needed a patch to disable online registration or DLC checks in-game.

Hell, I don’t doubt for a minute that the patches already exist for friends/family/staff, and would be the simplest thing to code for anyway - a patch that replaces the DLC check functions to simply respond “true”. Release it when you EOL the package.

NASA names crew for Artemis III lunar lander rehearsal

Re: Have to wonder…

It would be somewhat ironic if they did just fake it, leading him to be declaring his (now correct) moon-landing-denier-fan-base to be Fake News.

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

"These days, you get arrested and thrown in jail if you say you're English"

"All mice are gay and from space aren't they?"

Have you been talking to taxi drivers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkCBhKs4faI

Re: Impossible to have a reasoned discussion

Everything's "not going to work" though. None of what Starmer is suggesting would prevent you setting up a local FTP site on your web host either. Just as it wouldn't stop them swapping USB sticks, or emailing it to each other.

From my memory, the IWF watchlist, mobile blockers and ISP parental controls are pretty good - obviously not going to stop your approach, but certainly a damn site better than the drivel the Online Safety Act rolled out. Some dodgy Russian porn site isn't going to comply with the OSA, but I'd bet the ISP level blockers (that again, have existed and been available to parents for over a decade) would have blacklisted it

Re: Impossible to have a reasoned discussion

"Some will shout that there should be no restrictions, without reasonably explaining how to protect kids from online harm (shrugging and saying ‘“it’s the parent’s responsibility” is not a reasonable response)."

They've existed for years!!! This is what's so maddening.

* Parental controls on smartphones - iOS even has a "sensitive content" setting on the iMessage app.

* Web filters on your home broadband (Sky Broadband Shield has existed since 2013 as the one I know about, but it's mandated across all the big ISPs), enabled by default for all new customers?

* The Internet Watch Foundation filter for all broadband providers has been there for about 20 years for illegal stuff.

* Mobile ISPs have had adult content switched off by default since the dawn of 3G - mine still doesn't have it enabled because at the beginning you needed to go into a retail store and show a passport or driving licence, and I could never be arsed.

* Now we've got mainstream internet providers forced to register your ID (and presumably your browsing "niches")

I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch, but I'm dubious as to the motivations of this level of government oversight. Not least because it's a very convenient headline winner for the "won't someone please think of the children" vibe.

Already implemented

You know Apple have already mostly done this, right? I sent a picture of my toddler to my wife - her bum was partially visible. My wife got an alert that she'd received "sensitive content" and blurred it, assuring that it was done locally (not in cloud) and could unblur if she chose.

Turned out she had a setting on by default - search for "sensitive content warning" in the settings, it's under the high level Messages section.

At the last iOS upgrade, the phone also asked me to verify my age. When I clicked to see the options to do that, it just said "na, you're fine, you've had your itunes account for 18+ years already"

It's not much of a leap to put those two things together, or at least (more sensibly) allow it to be a parental control. (One quick google later...) - it's already available as a parental control, as well as restricted web browsing.

This is what's pissing me off. All the tools are there. Give a child a smart phone? Use the bloody parental controls then. Enable the safe-surfing option on your ISP at home (been available for 10+ years, from memory it's now the default setting for new customers). Hell, my Vodafone account prevents me accessing "adult" material on the web, has done for 20 years, cos I've never been arsed to go in to a store to show my passport and unlock it.

Serious ISS air leak forces NASA astronauts to temporarily take shelter in Dragon capsule

Re: Seriously?

So interestingly, space craft aren't really in danger of a massive decompression event - the pressure difference is only 14psi from inside to outside, which isn't huge. It's why leaks aren't ideal, but are broadly a constant. It's like having a very slow puncture, and why they're so hard to find.

They said "nipples north" - when you think about it, "north" is still technically a fixed position from the ISS?.. It's always out the "left hand" window (given the station travels west to east)

Ah, didn't realise there were more than Crew 12 on board, and I'd read a separate news story about it a Cosmonaut being put into the capsule. Turns out it's more complicated than that - Nasa is defacto commanding SpaceX Crew 12 I think (which includes one cosmonaut, Andrey Fedyaev, who was ordered into the Dragon). The two remaining cosmonauts (on Soyuz MS-28) stayed to repair the leak. However the astronaut who's part of the MS-28 crew was also ordered into Dragon (Christopher Williams).

So there were 5 people in Dragon - 1 cosmonaut, 3 Nasa astronauts, 1 ESA astronaut.

What's not clear to me, is the sequence. NASA ordered all the crew members (astronauts and cosmonauts) into the Dragon. They were allowed back out when Russia stopped attempting to fix the leaks - but that task surely stopped as soon as the cosmonaut was safely tucked inside the capsule?

Re: why don't they have doors?

They do have doors. And airlocks. They're conveniently located where the docked spacecraft are.

They were doing more than sheltering in the Dragon capsule. They were in, effect, preparing to evacuate while the situation was assessed.

Intel Diamond Rapids to boost core counts to 192, but RIP Hyperthreading

Re: And what does this mean for us SMB users?

The fun part for me, is seeing just how honkingly expensive cloud costs are becoming. To the point that we're currently migrating a large production dataset from on-premise/self-hosted to cloud-hosted, and our execs are only just realising it'll be more expensive...

Blue Origin's New Glenn makes a crater-sized dent in Artemis plans

Re: I wonder...

It's the lander tech they're looking for, not the booster tech. So the Lunar Lander would be the appropriate thing to dust off, not the Saturn V. And besides, they're not looking to just "do what Apollo did", as there's zero point to that.

Re: I wonder...

I've commented elsewhere, but it's likely to be cheaper/quicker to make bigger incremental jumps and accept the risk of catastrophe, especially if you can get good enough real time data before it goes boom. Success is a pretty lousy teacher - failure is where you can learn more lessons quicker.

Re: I wonder...

"Or do they each individually need their own "Apollo 1 moment" to prompt them into being careful?"

One would imagine they have a fairly tight risk process in place. The fact all personnel were nowhere near the bloody thing when it went off suggests it was a high enough probability to warrant that mitigation.

Risk management means accepting the risk profile, and the consequences, mitigating it where possible. They presumably figured that it was cheaper/quicker to accept the risk to fail fast vs build/test 3 articles in between this one and the last one. For all we know, that's still the correct decision, and the 3 additional incremental tests would have taken longer than potentially rebuilding the pad.

There's a reason unmanned things fail more frequently than manned ones. The risk tolerance is distinctly higher.

SpaceX pitches itself as integrated interplanetary proto-monopolist in IPO filing

Re: Thanks for all the fish

It's not clear to me why anyone would go to Mars under SpaceX. You're trapped there if Musk decides he doesn't like you, or you displease him in some way (and let's remember that's really easy to do). And you'll very much live by his rule, and not a damn thing anyone back on Earth would be able to do about it... Remember the phrase "absolute power corrupts absolutely" and weave Musk's ego into that tapestry, then put yourself at his mercy 100,000,000 miles from home.

Years after UK Post Office scandal broke, Accenture and OneView Commerce bag contract to replace Horizon

"which built the error-prone PoS"

Um, is that "Point of Sale"? Or something else...

NASA's Psyche mission set for a brief encounter with Mars

Re: "The trajectory allowed significant propellant to be saved"

I'm not sure the size of the launch vehicle would really determine the likelihood of stopping. Pluto is just too far away. The probe would have needed to be huge in terms of propellant to slow it down, and/or gone slower to begin with, which would have taken decades. The size of the launch vehicle wouldn't have really made a difference to that except maybe launching a bigger/able to stop vehicle, but that was deemed too expensive/risky/complicated and still wouldn't have needed a Saturn V to get that much payload into orbit.

Cloud-managed earbuds sound strange - as a concept, and on a plane

Cloud - for the love of $deity, why??

I think the only plausible reason given was "to update firmware, cos bluetooth might get a security breach".

First off, my non-cloudy Sony XM4s can update their firmware over bluetooth just fine.

But secondly, most importantly, I absolutely guarantee that a proprietary/closed Cloud solution will introduce a much bigger security breach than anything the open spec Bluetooth could have ever devised.

What an utterly stupid bit of feature-creep. I'm surprised they haven't claimed the ANC is AI driven.

Just eff the eff off with this cloud nonsense. There is zero chance a company are going to want centrally managed earbuds for crying out loud. It's a peripheral "disposable" commodity from their perspective - my company will ask for my laptop and lanyard back, and that's it. Maybe the charger.

Memory godboxes could offer relief from the RAMpocalypse

Re: Pawn one and you have them all ?

A memory fetch is never high latency, nor is it low latency. It arrives precisely when it means to.

I'm going to guess "probably". If the CPU/APU/CUDA core has to wait 25x as long to process the next piece of data, then I can't see that not having an issue, unless it's a very very easily predictable pipeline that doesn't depend on the operations before - not impossible, but depends on it being highly parallelisable. As soon as the pipeline stalls, you're into the "pause 250ns... or, 500-1000 instructions depending on the clock speed of the CPU" territory.

Or put it another way, stick 2GB memory in your PC, but give it a massive swap file on an NVMe drive on the PCIe bus, see if it works as well. Then stick that NVMe drive at the end of a 10m thunderbolt 4 cable for shts and giggles.

A high in-memory database cluster is in memory for a reason - much like the point above, it's probably similar to having it on NVMe storage instead.

Re: Slower

Yup, typo, I was meaning 0.1m but the latency calcs were the same. :-) I was using the 1ft/ns calc as well.

Re: Slower

Yeah but like you say, they're not stating what measurement they're doing - you would have assumed it would be the lowest number possible for headline stories though.

I'm not concerned about throughput really, you're right it's broadly in line. But just sheer distance alone will ramp up the latency. Local memory is under 0.1 cm from the CPU, so signals are 1ns away, 2ns return trip. Start shifting it metres away, and the latency starts to build up fairly significantly, and that's before we get into whatever interconnects/processing exists between the two.

"the latency isn’t as bad as you’re probably thinking — on the order of a NUMA hop, or about 170 to 250 nanoseconds of round trip latency."

So up to 25x greater latency than that of local DDR4/5? I'll be honest, that's exactly as bad as I thought.

Musk has never built a wafer fab, but he wants to burn $119B on one anyway

Twitter *became* that swirling vitriol and mindless drivel, accelerating even faster after Musk bought it and gutted the moderation teams, and bots took over. If you recall, Musk also unbanned all the absolute hoops who had been kicked off the platform, because "free speech", then proceeded to quietly ban a load of left-wing journalists who happened to get under his Rizla-thin skin. And any journalist who referenced his private jet tracker.

In the early days of Twitter, it was a largely joyful experience, useful for interacting between anyone and anything - when breaking news stories happened, or motorways closed etc, Twitter was one of the first places I went to for crowdsourced information.

Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone

For me (and I clicked "verify" out of curiosity, fully expecting to bail out when I hit a "provide your credit card details"), it basically said "oh, you first registered this Apple account fucking yonks ago, you're clearly 18" and cracked on. No ID required. I genuinely thought that was a nonsense, then realised by first phone was the iphone 3GS in 2009, and they assume I wasn't 1 when I set that account up.

That length of time made me feel sick.

Microsoft raises UK Surface prices as RAM crisis reaches the checkout

Re: I wonder how many surface things they sell

The biggest news to me in this news article, was that Microsoft still made and sold Surface

Re: Bring back efficient programming

And if it's a laptop, you'll buy a PCMCIA network card for $10 instead. :-D

Re: Bring back efficient programming

Fun fact (I'm great at parties), those PS/2 to USB adapters didn't do anything active at the electrical or signalling level - it was passive and just mapped the 4 USB pins to the 6 PS/2 pins (pins 2 and 6 weren't used on that port) and the mouse itself recognised it was in PS2 mode and adjusted the signalling accordingly. Most (all) modern mice today won't have the ability to recognise and signal in that way, so you'll still need an older USB mouse.

Re: Bring back efficient programming

I don't think that's the slam you think it is.

If by D-Sub you mean VGA, all my modern monitors still support that. The one I'm using right now is a modern USB-C hub one, and still caters for VGA. A 90s motherboard will still have the same PS2 port that even today's USB devices support (heck, if it's late 90s motherboard, it'll have USB anyway). Networks, I can either repurpose the PCI card (old school, not PCI-E) in my junk box. Or buy a gigabit one off ebay for a tenner. If I'm forced to go ISA, I might have to stretch that to £20.

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

Re: Obviously bollocks

The failure of that analogy is that Linus didn’t build and sell the 486 chips in the first place, or have access to stats that demonstrate many of his paying customers still use it.

I’m guessing that Amazon didn’t sell them with a “oh by the way these will stop working eventually…” warning. Probably quite the opposite.

I also doubt there is any new feature available for a Kindle that would stop it from being able to download and store new books. It’s a glorified EPUB reader.

We know what day it is but these Raspberry Pi price hikes are no joke

Re: My Pi 4Bs are currently unused

“ Too valuable to sell off”

Arguably the ideal time to sell if you don’t have a short to medium term use for them

Commercial space pleads with NASA to stop moving the goalposts in orbit

Re: The president and congress dick around with NASA every damn year

Not to mention it didn't really complete when they said it did. They rushed the job of anchoring the dam to the bedrock and didn't complete the grout curtain properly where it was too difficult. They spent a further decade discreetly correcting all of that.

Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow

Re: Gamers say pull the other one

Think is, are we not fast approaching the point of diminishing returns for gaming graphics power? Once that gets hit, then the discrete power-hungry GPU just starts to shrink, both literally and from a market perspective.

Though I feel I probably said that about the original GeForce 256 Annihilator Pro (where I originally got this username I think - or certainly the same sort of time) with its glorious 32MB of DDR memory that really made Quake 3 Arena come alive.

Re: Gamers say pull the other one

I snorted 3 separate times in quick succession reading that. Well done.