Posts by Sorry that handle is already taken.

SpaceX is about to launch its first Starlink internet satellite sporting a sun visor following complaints by astronomers

Landing footage

This should satisfy that commentard who kept complaining about the barge camera cutting out during landings.

Not the Wright stuff: Bitcoin 'inventor' loses bid to sue YouTuber who called him a liar

Re: Libel tourism

It was big news (and comedy) at the time.

A gift

Craig S Wright (the S is for Satoshi) really is the gift that keeps on giving.

Re: Libel tourism

Ver is a US citizen

Not since he renounced his citizenship six years ago.

And was then in 2015, according to Wikipedia, "denied a visa to reenter the United States by the U.S. Embassy in Barbados, which claimed that he had not sufficiently proven ties outside of the United States that would motivate him to leave at the end of his visit, causing fears he might become an illegal immigrant." Hilarious.

VirtuaVerse: Cyberpunk point-and-click throwback with ace chiptune soundtrack put out by... a metal record label?

Re: Thinking of ITs Future Phorm ....... Virtual Pathology

You can enter a room, exhaust dialogue options, mess with everything in there, leave, and be none the wiser.

amanfromMars in a nutshell

Re: MBR

I know the genre as "djentstep". In a similar vein, here's The Algorithm. I saw them live once and their set broke the venue's electrical system.

Australia to refund $720m in 'debts' determined by dodgy algorithm

Re: Apauling policy

Shitting on the vulnerable and underprivileged is just a normal day for the coalition. I'm positive that it gives them a tingly feeling in the pants.

Watch SpaceX's Starship SN4 prototype accidentally self-destruct in a rocket test burn

Re: The video doesn't show the full story...

It worked for Mikhail Yangel...

Twitter, Reddit and pals super unhappy US visa hopefuls have to declare their online handles to Uncle Sam

Re: not all speech is protected

I'm not sure any of that would pass the "reasonable person" test in court if it was said by a normal person.

Remember when Republicans said Dems hacked voting systems to rig Georgia's election? There were no hacks

Re: Move on

But I only have the one brush with which to brush

Made-up murder claims, threats to kill Twitter, rants about NSA spying – anything but mention 100,000 US virus deaths, right, Mr President?

Re: You supported a system...

Personally, I blame the 75% of eligible voters who didn't vote against him.

Re: You supported a system...

Indeed. You made your bed, America.

I just wish you'd keep the disease to yourself...

Dude, where's my laser?

"Of course, in the '70s, active correction of the beam was not an option."

I'm not convinced it's an option today either. Adaptive optics work to improve the definitiion of incoming signals but signal power is still lost. They don't "unscatter" the original signal, they correct what remains of the signal at the receiver.

And if a laser beam has been bent up into the sky by the atmospheric conditions, there's not much you can do at the source to counteract that. You could aim it downwards but the earth is probably there...

Singapore’s mega-investment firm Temasek joins Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency effort

Libra

From David Gerard (https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/04/16/facebooks-libra-national-currency-tokens-a-new-white-paper-what-this-means/):

Facebook is slowly being dragged, kicking and screaming, to running Libra like an ordinary, compliant payments processor — PayPal, but it’s Facebook — or Libra won’t be allowed to exist.

The only interesting things the blockchain parts could do is work around regulations — and there’s no way regulators will let Libra do anything like that.

Libra was founded on Bitcoin dreams — but none of those aspirations will ever happen, because they contradict everything about how finance works in the real world.

If you’ve looked over previous versions of the white paper, you’ll want to read this one afresh, closely.

Just focus on the bits about regulation. Ignore the wild crypto aspirations — because none of those are going to be allowed to happen.

Crypto dreams are tolerated when they’re put forward by weird small-time nutters — but not when they’re coming from a huge company with a continent-sized user base.

Post-pandemic hard-sell under way: Resellers leaned on to convert free trial users into fully paid-up customers

Re: Exactly 250

You mean $6 right?

The iMac at 22: How the computer 'too odd to succeed' changed everything ... for Apple, at least

Vintage internet humour

http://www.bbspot.com/news/2000/7/new_macs.html

Forever mothballed: In memoriam Apple Butterfly Keyboard (2015-2020)

I mean...

There's a reason for this icon, innit?

Fake crypto-wallet extensions appear in Chrome Web Store once again, siphoning off victims' passwords

Be your own bank!

Coiners really are suckers for punishment.

NASA signs deals to put a rocket under Artemis flights until 2029

Re: Even during the Shuttle days the RS25 was uprated past it’s original design.

And tossing all of those engines into the ocean is an absolute travesty.

Intel is offering more 14nm Skylake desktop processors, we repeat: More 14nm Skylake desktop processors

Re: HELP!!!

Anandtech Bench will be updated with these CPUs eventually.

Re: I don't get it...

What's gone so wrong with Intel's 10nm process is what I want to know.

Re: I don't get it...

Well yes, it does become fairly difficult to double the transistor density every 18-24 months when you're stuck on the same process node (more or less) for five years for... whatever reason. Fortunately, Intel isn't the only game in town.

Lars Ulrich makes veiled threats of another Metallica album during web chat with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

"The people that make the software and all the stuff that we use to record are sitting right now trying to figure out how Lars and James [Hetfield] and Kirk [Hammett] and Rob [Trujillo] can make a Metallica record from four different locations in four different states. That's obviously something that we're very excited about."

Literally, there are bands that have been doing it this way for 20 years or more and only congregating for live tours. It's done using a thing called the internet.

Happy birthday, ARM1. It is 35 years since Britain's Acorn RISC Machine chip sipped power for the first time

Re: Thanks for this.

I spent a lot of time on it in my school's Acorn lab but I think I missed out on the music.

Yes, we had Acorns in Australia!

Re: Thanks for this.

Uhh... SimCity 2000? No idea how I managed that. SimCity 2000.

Re: Thanks for this.

Shame about the ecosystem

Simsuty 2000 was available for RiscOS, what more do you need?!

You have one job, Australian PM tells contact-tracing app, and that’s talking to medicos

Re: Australian Gov

The Prime Minister of Australia now Listens and refers to actual science and qualified people in press briefing...

Yeah... that's what's so puzzling.

Or perhaps it shouldn't be. He's following the science here because 1) it's politically convenient to do so in this particular circumstance and 2) he doesn't have a choice. Once this is over it'll be back to business as usual for the anti-science brigade. A leopard can't change its shorts.

Given this government's track record, and the relevant minister's in particular, it baffles me that anyone would trust them with any amount of data, private or otherwise.

We're all stuck indoors, virtual reality tech should be hot. So why is Magic Leap chopping half its workforce?

Ooh I know!

Is it because Magic Leap is toss?

NASA makes May 27 its US independence day from Russian rockets: America's back in the astronaut business after nearly nine years

Re: The Shuttle's lessons were learned so well that it led to the F-35 program

Space programs live on OTA updates!

Seriously some of the post-deployment hacks that have been performed, either through necessity to save a mission or because improvements have been found, are legendary. Many of them have been covered here.

Re: Retro Progress

And failure modes that don't exist in any other spacecraft

Grab your Bitcoin while you can because Purse.io is shutting up shop in June and you could lose the lot

VCs

VC funding is drying up faster than California's aquifers as capital hunkers down for a long recession

It couldn't have been the credit card fraud, oh no.

Roaring trade in zero-days means more vulns are falling into the hands of state spies, warn security researchers

A zero-day is a software vulnerability that has zero days between the time it is discovered and the time that someone is found to be using it for criminal purposes

I understood that they're so named because they're already being exploited on "day zero" of (i.e. before) patch availability.

From Amanda Holden to petrol-filled water guns: It has been a weird week for 5G

Re: Who'd have thought

Which icon did you intend (and forget) to attach to this post?

Minister slams 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories as 'dangerous nonsense' after phone towers torched in UK

Maybe this 5g rubbish has been created to identify gullible idiots

https://newsthump.com/2020/04/05/5g-conspiracy-theories-all-part-of-secret-plot-by-the-government-to-identify-simpletons/

Cricket's average-busting mathematician Tony Lewis pulls up stumps

Looks like it's been corrected on WP, wonky editor indeed.

Per Cricinfo:

The late Tony Lewis of DL(S) fame

Tony Lewis, former England captain

Soichi to join three-spaceship club, SpaceX is going to the Moon (no, really), and rocket boffins step up COVID-19 fight

With apologies...

The vehicle will lug up to five metric tonnes of cargo to the Gateway

The tonne is already metric

Planet Computers has really let things slide: Firm's third real-keyboard gizmo boasts 5G, Android 10, Linux support

Re: "deforming shirt pockets"

Those are big pants!

Remember that clinical trial, promoted by President Trump, of a possible COVID-19 cure? So, so, so many questions...

Re: Quinone

I would hope (for your sake) there's no quinone in your G&T!

OP was so confused that not only did they mix up two different anti-malarials, they then confused that with a different class of organic compounds.

What the actual fuck are you talking about?

That's a very diplomatic way of saying "scam"

What happens when the maintainer of a JS library downloaded 26m times a week goes to prison for killing someone with a motorbike? Core-js just found out

Re: Zloirock

I wanted to upvote this, but you're at 69 right now so I can't. Fnar.

Crack police squad seeks help to flush out Australian toilet paper thieves

Re: Really?

There are probably more than enough of them to go around....

...stuck in distribution centres because there aren't nearly enough trucks to get them to where they're needed when they're needed.

Eight-core 3.8 GHz CPU. 12 TFLOPS GPU. 1TB NVME SSD. 16GB RAM. Not a half-decent workstation, it's the new Xbox

Re: "eliminate loading times between levels"

The only thing strange about mentioning ME2 is that I forgot to begin the sentence with "And". It wasn't meant to "disprove" anything.

Back to ME, I never noticed a speed-up after upgrading to a dramatically faster PC (or upgrading a slow one with an SSD). I assume that means the base storage performance of a contemporary gaming PC was more than sufficient for the game.

Re: "eliminate loading times between levels"

Mass Effect elevators.........

running on a high end PC made them a LOT faster........

I don't remember system specs ever affecting the elevator travel time. No radio announcement or NPC conversation ever got cut short.

ME2's loading screens were simply a video you had to watch until the video was finished, regardless of the background load state of the game. Replacing those video files with empty ones often dramatically reduced loading times on a capable PC...

Re: Storage

I'd say so

But can it run...

But what we’d really like to know is if the Xbox Series X can run Linux. Or Tetris.

Is "but can it run Crysis?" too trite these days?

But its specification is impressive and it looks like it would make a great workstation.

Former Googler Anthony Levandowski ‘fesses up to pinching trade secrets about self-driving cars

Is that...

Is that a rape joke, right there in the article?

Broadcom sues Netflix for its success: You’re stopping us making a fortune from set-top boxes, moans chip designer

Re: Truly disgusting behaviour

Broadcom could be the SCO of the 2020s