Posts by Annihilator 3984 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
I think I posted this the other day, but having recently reluctantly "upgraded" to Win 11, my biggest, easiest example of what he's talking about is in the Start menu. I've disabled the "recommended" element of the Start menu, because why on earth would I want it?
The result? In the middle of the Start menu is a blank section that says:
"Recommended - to show your recent files and new apps, turn them on in settings <link to settings>"
Power is the reason. They wanted to use submarine cable tech, because the optical repeaters are powered by the cable itself.
Microwave repeaters need height, and power, or they're stuffed. And they've only got about 40-50 miles range, so you'd need about 100 of them stretched across Africa. A cable largely disappears over time and isn't visible.
Well this is the bonkers thing - you still can. It's under accessibility/contrast themes and a quick try suggests that all the dialog boxes mentioned in the article change when you enable one. So quite why they're reinventing the wheel is beyond me.
But this is an operating system that still hasn't completely ditched the Control Panel approach and relies on a batsh1t crazy combo of that along with the Settings app, so hardly surprising.
"This particular snafu echoes Windows 95's early USB support, when BIOS firmware lagged behind the OS, leaving users with USB keyboards unable to access BIOS settings without digging up legacy PS/2 keyboards."
Happened well into XP times from my memory - a BIOS would only natively support USB keyboards quite late on. Blew my mind the first time I saw one with mouse support. From my memory though, keyboards stayed PS/2 for quite a while, it was mice that first made the jump (and always came with that USB/PS2 dongle - fun fact, they didn't really do anything, the mouse recognised it was connected to one and started sending PS/2 signalling through the USB interface instead)
"Readers also reported that broadband was affected by the outage, which is odd since we would have expected cellular and internet connectivity to be largely separate."
I don't know why you would have expected that - companies are all about "synergies" and "efficiencies", I'd 100% expect them to be sharing as much kit as possible.
It's technically two-way laser communications, but the uplink to the probe is at what Nasa calls a "low rate" one, also used as a beacon for Psyche to aim at. The transmitter is actually about 100 miles away from the receiving telescope, but yeah, there's still a need for a hefty one (5m) to receive the signal at the higher rates.
It's a demonstrator though, it's main goal is for proving data links between human missions to Mars, rather than probes.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/deep-space-optical-communications-dsoc/
I had solar powered calculators in the 80s/90s, I think schools were basically issued them (albeit without any battery or charging capabilities) - I doubt they were ever taken outside, but managed to work just fine.
It does raise a good point though - perhaps we shouldn't be calling them "solar powered", rather "photovoltaic powered".
I'm guessing that a Kessler event in the orbit of starlink would resolve itself reasonably quickly (well, in a year or two). They're in very low orbit and would fall back to earth quickly without boosts, so I'm guessing the debris would too.
The ISS might be fcked though. But Musk has the contract to deorbit that, and is a big fan of doing it early, so maybe that's his plan?
Agreed with that summary, but mostly because I don't really understand Plex (or what I'd be paying for, and why it needs a centrally managed account). How is it any different to just enabling the media server functionality that any NAS has had for the past decade, and that any TV from the last decade could access? Willing and ready to be enlightened.
Earlier this year Mozilla's CFO warned that cutting the Google subsidy would "potentially start a downward spiral of usage as people defected from our browser, which ... could at the end of the day put Firefox out of business,"
I'm pretty sure Mozilla are doing a good enough job of that on their own.
Also I doubt this pole view is new. Unless there was one 10 years back saying "69% (fnnaaarr) of Reg readers back a move to Microsoft cloud services in the UK public sector", with the comments section ably refereed by the Moderatrix.
But I really doubt it.
It's safe to say that running *any* CPU at constant critical performance boundaries non-stop will need some serious regards to cooling. Yes, they'll throttle, but they have to hit those temperatures for the throttling to kick in - do that repeatedly and you'll ultimately end with thermal stress.
There's a reason that people are wary of buying GPUs that have been absolutely battered in bitcoing mining farms, and that's despite their cooling mechanisms being factory mounted rather than whatever this boffin seemingly cobbled together.
6-axis gives you 3 lateral movements in the x,y,z axes (forward/back, up/down, left/right, but facing the same direction, if you like a real world example), and then 3 rotational movements in the same axes (rotate left/right, look up/down, tilt left/right if you consider your head movements).
I'd argue getting an oversized brick to glide was probably more of an engineering feat.
But, it is literally the only thing that we have ever built that allows you to launch *and retrieve* massive objects. If the shuttle were running today, I'd argue that Hubble would almost definitely have been retrieved as a museum piece in the future - before or since, there is nothing that can bring stuff back from orbit, or service them. Whether that was ultimately worth it financially is another question, but Hubble would have been a white elephant were it not for the ability to service it.
Don't forget the shuttle is still effectively living on, as the X-37B, so there's clearly some use for it - just not as a civilian effort (and it started as a joint civilian and military project).
It does seem the only logistical solution, and it does feel a bit out of place on Intrepid. It's one helluva journey by sea though (2000nm, and having to sail round Key West, so avoid hurricane season, and protect the shuttle from the sea air), and still the problem of subsequently moving it by road from wherever it docks near Houston. The move to Intrepid was relatively easy, given it was a short barge ride from JFK after the shuttle carrier dropped it off there.
It's also got the problem of looking a bit... crap. Been lucky enough to see Discovery and Enterprise, and Enterprise just looks more like the Lego model than an actual space-faring shuttle.
But from a practical solution, like the article states, I think NASA only "owns" one shuttle - Atlantis. I'd imagine Intrepid would want to be compensated for the loss if they took Enterprise back.
They’re talking about putting a nuclear reactor on the top of a honkingly big rocket and landing it on the moon, a celestial object we have about a 50% success rate of landing on (crewed and uncrewed).
As every school sports day fan knows, the egg and spoon race isn’t won by someone sprinting for the finish line, so I’m more than fine with them not having another race!
Yeah I meant to add that bit when I was posting it, I'm pretty sure this was implemented by the big 5 or 6 ISPs as a way to defer the OSA (basically they said "self regulate, or we'll regulate you") and initially they were going to add controls by default to any new contract (essentially you had to opt-in to adult content, rather than opting out), but I think that gradually disappeared as a promise.
And yeah, it won't stop determined teenagers, much like I managed to find nudity before the age of the interwebs.
Perhaps, but by the same token would you support the selling of top shelf mags to anyone? Because by the same extension, there was no point in banning it for under 18s, cos their older looking mate could just buy it for them, or they could just find a suspiciously stuck-together copy in a bush somewhere. Pointless even trying to ban it!
Yes, it's a terribly implemented solution (the correct one was to implement it at an ISP level, similar to what mobile networks already do, and force the ISPs to provide better levels of control around content to technical illiterate parents), but it is needed for the same reason we prevent kids from buying booze or physical copies of the same content.
I'd argue that the primary use case of VPNs that pop out in different countries was and always will be streaming of content available in a different region - if it was just about relative privacy, there would be no reason for it not to be a UK end-point. So increase in customers should roughly equate to the same level of increased bandwidth requirements.
Arguably, the new traffic will probably operate in, erm, "burst mode", so wouldn't actually be a linear increase compared to the baseline. None of the new users will be streaming the content equivalent to a box set..
"...finally make governments start tinking a bit more about the consequences in dabbling in this sort of legislation"
I note with interest that today Nige Farage has announced with quite some bombast that he'll roll back the act when Reform get in. One suspects he was caught unaware and had a challenging wank this morning.
To be fair, they're correct that credit card ownership is proof of age. A debit card number is distinguishable from a credit card number by the first 6 digits. Dunno about the phone ownership though, that does seem rather bonkers as an approach.
Not only does this whole scheme frighten the bejesus out of me with loads of people now going to sign up to services that will undoubtedly leak (and let's face it, the older generation) and leave people open to blackmail, but on top of that, every platform will choose a different one. So this won't be a one-and-done sign-up - your data will be across multiples of these companies depending on the services you access. The fact that Reddit and other non-embarrassing sites will be on the list is only going to compound the issue.
They had an option to make this really simple - mandate ISPs to be "non-adult" only (which I think they did?). I can't access certain sites on my mobile cos I can't be bothered to do the age verification with them - do the same with home broadband and job was done. Obviously the problem with that is it pushed parental responsibility onto the parents... And we couldn't have that.
"Yes, an LLM bot will kick in and try to suggest an appropriate name for groups of tabs."
It's not really AI though is it? Especially if it's running locally like that with no specific hardware support required. It's no different to the iOS ability to suggest a name for a folder when you group a bunch of apps together, which has been done since long before LLM was a buzzword.
But hey, they need to be seen to be jumping on the bandwagon don't they? Microsoft will be retrospectively calling Clippy an AI/LLM tool soon.
You've slightly conflated the assumption and the conclusion there. NASA *did* assume that they were going to lose people to Apollo, due to the levels of unknown they were facing and the sheer size of the challenge, and as a result leaned very heavily into risk management processes to minimise this outcome.
The Shuttle programme, as a result, inadvertently took a different approach and assumed that the Apollo success would carry through, and so minimise the risk management, leading to 2 failures (and dozens more close-calls).
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190002249/downloads/20190002249.pdf
The "normalisation of deviance" is another interesting thing to look at, where NASA effectively learned to ignore issues outside of tolerance *because the mission didn't fail* and allowed them to accumulate. There were multiple o-ring issues and tile degradation events before the losses.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
