Posts by Sorry that handle is already taken.

You thought you bought software – all you bought was a lie

♫ You thought it was a toothbrush ♫

♫ but it was a flashlight ♫

♫ broke out all your teeth ♫

♫ in the middle of the night ♫

Tesla has a lot of work to do on its Optimus robot

Perhaps you might prefer a Fully Integrated Security Technetronic Officer?

It can't walk

Someone should have got in touch with Iron Maiden. They've had Eddie walking around on stage for almost two decades.

Remote work wipes $453b off office real estate

My heart bleeds

Wait, no. My heart warms.

And don't try to make me feel guilty for enjoying the collapse of a real-estate bubble just because unspecified "pension funds" might have been affected.

FBI: We tracked who was printing secret documents to unmask ex-NSA suspect

Re: Crypto currency is untracable right?

As long as you can link a wallet address to a real person, almost all cryptocurrencies are completely traceable – the blockchain is after all a complete record of every transaction ever made – hence the existence of mixing (i.e. money laundering) services.

There are a few that bundle transactions into blocks in a way that makes them effectively untraceable, but we don't know whether he used one of those. In this case, even if he did it wouldn't have helped!

Google kills off Stadia

Re: The only Google services you should rely on

Google Docs seems to be in for the long haul but I don't use it frequently, so I don't know how useful it is as a productivity tool.

Youtube... well that'll be around forever but you're right that it can't be relied on, with arbitrary, vexatious and even Kafkaesque rules about how you can use it as a creator.

And the less said about Youtube Music the better. I have free access to it through a family account, and it's worth even less than I pay for it.

Intel's 13th-gen CPUs are hot, hungry, loaded with cores

Power vs performance

There was a chart tucked away at the end of Anandtech's review of the Ryzen 7000 that showed what happened to performance when the 170W 7950X was restricted to a 65W operating profile using what AMD calls "ECO mode", here. They seem to be pretty efficient processors, being pushed hard for performance.

I wonder what happens to these Intel CPUs when you do the same, or even if you can.

City isn't keen on 5,000 erratic, traffic-jam-causing GM robo-cars on its streets

I agree with SF

It's much better to have 5,000 erratic, traffic-jam-causing human-operated cars on its streets.

PC component scavenging queue jumper pulled into line with a screensaver

Where goatse is a shock image, meatspin is a shock gif. And the clue is in the name...

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

Re: One day they will look at their daughters killed by the Moral Police...

Sure, but what about the USA?

Florida asks Supreme Court if it's OK to ban content moderation it doesn't like

When this headline turned up in my RSS feed I thought it was from one of the satirical news sites I subscribe to.

Americans: you need to stop this kind of thing while you're still a "democracy" and still can.

China to launch space tourism by 2025, says industry veteran

I suppose...

...one day a private Chinese space technology startup will arrive that hasn't simply rendered a bunch of copies of American rockets, only to disappear again shortly thereafter...

Firefox 105 is here, and it's faster and more memory-frugal

But does it support the extensions that stopped working in mobile version 69 yet?

Nvidia unveils RTX 4090 – but it's the 4080 to watch out for

Sounds like the 4080 12GB is a 4070 with a typo in the slide deck

Merge shifts Ethereum to full proof-of-stake, price slumps

Re: Squeeze

"Market cap" - i.e. simply multiplying the number of tokens that exist by the last trade price - is especially meaningless in the world of cryptocurrencies, before even considering the significant number of lost tokens. Even the volume is (probably*) mostly exchanges trading with themselves to manipulate the price.

* Ask yourself this: if you were running an exchange that you believed was outside the law, why wouldn't you be wash trading, painting the tape, front-running your customers etc. etc. etc.?

Re: Squeeze

The exchanges make money buying and selling tokens. If they're smart, changes in the price of the token shouldn't negatively* affect them.

And the bulk of the price of bitcoin is propped up by tens (or is it hundreds by now?) of billions of fake dollars in tether tokens.

* This is where the manipulation comes in. Their books are full of degenerate gamblers holding highly leveraged (10-100x) short or long positions. So they bump the price up a little to clean out the shorts, or bump it down a little to clean out the longs. If you watch a cryptocurrency price chart for a while, you'll notice formations that look like square waves. This is that.

Re: Squeeze

There's no point performing any market analysis of cryptocurrencies because 1) none of it makes any sense and 2) they're all heavily manipulated by the exchanges anyway.

Scientists pull hydrogen from thin air in promising clean energy move

Re: Storage ? Transport ?

Petrol can be stored unpressurised at a wide range of temperatures that we encounter day to day. The problems aren't quite exactly the same.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

Re: Last meeting of note

Not an accusation, but it reminded me of this.

NASA sees our space future as both government and privately run

Absolutely, but the costs and the risks are orders of magnitude greater once humans are involved, and it's the evaluation of those "orders of magnitude" that I'm very interested to understand better than I do (which isn't much).

I'm interested to read more about this, do you have a link handy?

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Skeuomorphism

It was the loss of skeuomorphism in (Windows) UI design in general that was the beginning of the end, IMNSHO. Now everything looks flat and bland and unintuitive, UI elements are difficult to discern from everything else, as a result there's far too much empty space between them and interacting with the system is generally just a frustrating experience.

Add in the specific case of Windows from Win8 onwards, the window manager is a total buggy mess that constantly glitches out when it's trying to draw things, which makes the whole experience even worse.

WHAT WAS WRONG WITH THE WIN95-WIN2K DESIGN LANGUAGE?

Re: windows 11 makes me cry

As a grumpy old man in training, this truly sounds like a fucking nightmare.

Woman forced to sell 4-bed house after crypto exchange wrongly refunded $7.2m

Re: Australians have a long history of Criminality

If comparative theft and homicide rates are any guide, it turns out that the descendents of criminals are less likely to be criminals than those of the people who sent them here.

Basically modern libertarianism in a nutshell...

The International Space Station will deorbit in glory. How's your legacy tech doing?

Re: A strange set of priorities

Not even hours, he was up there for minutes

NASA scrubs Artemis SLS Moon rocket launch

Re: 200% trust in congress

Setting SLS entirely aside for a moment, despite the impressive progress SpaceX has made, Super Heavy and Starship remain untested and unproven vehicles. The program has been beset with issues (because they're ambitious and rocketry isn't easy) and the SS test articles are still basically just big tubes with some propellant tanks inside. SH is probably pretty close to functional since it's just the booster but even if SpaceX manages to conduct a successful first orbital flight test, whenever that might occur, there's still a huge amount of work to be done to turn SS into a usable launch vehicle.

It's all well and good to say that SH+SS is going to make various other launchers obsolete, but there's currently no timeframe for that to occur.

Re: 200% trust in congress

But how many Falcon Heavy launches could you get for the cost of one SLS launch?

NASA toyed with multiple-launch options while scoping the Apollo program and settled on the Single Big Launch Vehicle (with lunar orbit rendezvous) for cost reasons. Now, even that isn't a constraint.

James Webb Space Telescope finds first evidence of CO₂ in exoplanet atmosphere

As the sensitivity of our exoplanet detection technology continually improves, we'll be finding more and more of those.

Janet Jackson music video declared a cybersecurity exploit

Spindle speed

Few modern machines have hard disk drives, never mind drives that rotate at the unfashionably slow speed of 5400 revolutions per minute.

Indeed everything consumer grade seems to have migrated to 5900 RPM...

Your AI-generated digital artwork may not be protected by US copyright

Does this AI produce exactly the same output when given the same input?

In both DALL-E 2 and Craiyon, a selection of differing images is produced each time you make a request and the output is different every time you do so.

Twitter unveils US midterm election integrity plans, upsets almost everyone

Re: world leaders and politicians should be held to a higher standard when tweeting

To be clear, I'm not suggesting for example that "Republicans lie and Democrats don't". I'm saying the scale of their lies is completely different.

But only one side of politics in Australia, the UK and the USA has been actively trying to undermine or even destroy democracy.

Re: world leaders and politicians should be held to a higher standard when tweeting

Politicians left and right

Anyone who's been paying attention to politics anywhere in the Anglosphere should know that "but both sides!" is horseshit of the highest order.

As they say, "every accusation by a Republican is actually a confession"...

Microsoft asks staff to think twice before submitting expenses

Re: "think twice before submitting expenses"

This might be relevant

Re: "think twice before submitting expenses"

I'm surprised a company that operates like that has staff...

There can be only one... Microsoft Excel Champion

Re: Sports?

A year or so ago I watched an electric mountain bike race on a motocross course. It was about the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

The EWS-E on the other hand is fine.

Aussies crowdsource a business case for central bank digital currencies

Re: I hope that this isn't going to involve mining

Mining (i.e. proof of work) is a requirement to ensure that a distributed network of users don't have to trust each other to ensure that legitimate transactions are processed and illegitimate ones aren't. It has significant flaws (e.g. if one entity controls large enough mining resources) and obviously the energy consumption being proportional to the token price is a huge compromise.

If you're going to set up a centralised version of the same system, it doesn't need mining, and therefore doesn't even need a blockchain. You can do what we already do and use a traditional database...

Re: Digital Currency automatically means Cryptocurrency?

That's fair but if there are no elements of cryptocurrencies involved then I wonder how it can differ significantly from what we already have

I'm really fascinated to see if they can come up with any good reasons for any of this to exist.

There's about $100 in my wallet from pre-covid times but the rest of my money is already digital...

Re: Use case

As distinct from actual use cases, this is mostly a list of classic cryptocurrency booster talking points.

a) If I want to transfer a dollar to a recipient in another country using a cryptocurrency, I have to first buy a token (paying a transaction fee to the exchange), then pay a transaction fee to the network to send the token, then the recipient has to sell the token (paying a transaction fee to the exchange). Who knows what the spread of exchange rates will be but if they aren't closely matched to real market rates, someone would arbitrage it, so there's unlikely to be any upside. In addition, there need to be enough buyers and sellers of the tokens at both ends for the system to be balanced.

Also, "traditional" financial institutions are regulated and insured and the money in my bank account is safe as a result. The same can't be said for many (if any) of the "non-traditional" financial institutions that have sprung up around cryptocurrencies.

b) These time delays are a regulatory issue, not a technological issue.

c) "Banking the unbanked"... Cryptocurrencies have failed to achieve this. Meanwhile, there are already services that do achieve this without resorting to cryptocurrencies, such as M-Pesa.

d) No regulator is going to support anonymous digital money because of the potential for money laundering. Governments won't support it either for numerous reasons (terrorism, general surveillance etc.)

e) Central banks can control inflation (to varying degrees of success) because they control the circulation of money, i.e. by creating or destroying it. We moved off the gold standard because the lack of control turned out to be disastrous.

Bloke robbed of $800,000 in cryptocurrency by fake wallet app wants payback from Google

Dude...

You wanted to be your own bank, but instead you learned an $800k lesson in data security.

Toyota's truck brand Hino admits faking and fudging emissions data for 20 years

Re: Just follow your nose...

There's a reason we call it "diseasel"

Robinhood's crypto unit hit with $30m fine over security, anti-crime misses

Re: Shady

And it turns out AML and KYC are major issues when you're dealing with pseudonymous pseudocurrencies that were designed to avoid scrutiny.

Who knew.

Preparing for Skylab: The separate 1972 experimental mission that never left the ground

Impeccable timing

A Skylab article just as more (likely American) space junk falls on Australia!

DARPA seeks portable muon-making machine to see through almost anything

Re: Hmmm

That's alright. The Meson Gun generates mesons, not muons.

Re: negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit

Sure but if you say "Absolute", how do I know you mean Kelvin and not Rankine?

Bogus cryptocurrency apps steal millions in mere months

Did you somehow misunderstand "for every winner there's an equal loser"?

Tesla jettisons 75% of Bitcoin holdings, boosting cash balance by $936m

Re: Twitter fine?

Have you considered using those £15 to buy a belt?