Posts by david 12

Scalding hot AI accelerators have put datacenters in hot water. Two-phase cooling could chill them out

"the less heat you need to push out to the atmosphere"

For the less technical reader (and writer), note that you still need to push exactly the same amount of heat out into the atmosphere.

This is a method for making it easier to push out the heat. By using a heat pump. Pumping heat out to hotter radiators / chillers.

It's not clear from the article if there are existing data-centre heat-pump designs, or if the entire industry is using single stage wet / dry cooling. It may be that the innovative feature is just the two-stage design, or it may be that reversing the order of the passive / active elements is the innovative feature.

Airbus takes flight from AWS. What happens next is critical

"Those in other countries"

Those in other countries, distrusting their government and fearful of persecution, will be welcome to enjoy the protection and liberties that European digital sovereignty can provide.

Those in other countries using EU or UK providers will get exactly the same protection as they get using US providers. None.

EU and UK providers are subject to exactly the same kind of government carve-outs for 'security' and spying and policing that American providers are subject to.

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

Re: Impossible names

Yes, I can use anything that exists (including external data sources) , the problem was actually creating the procedures in the first place. AIR, the system refused to create numerically named or prefixed objects like 1st_Class, 2nd_Class

I've written SQL procedure names that I was later assured were "impossible". All I know is that, at the time, using the version I had, using the tools I had, those procedure names -were- possible, and worked correctly for years until someone tried to recreate them on a new instance.

NTP server that traveled back in time caused massive Aussie mobile outage

Re: GPS card that … “did not operate as expected”

Such services are available, they used to be LW broadcasts,

Not in Australia.

In the far North East, you can (or could) sometimes pick up Japan, but Australia never had broadcast time.

NextBSD returns to dollop Apple source on FreeBSD

beginner question about GUI apps

Is the MacOS desktop similar to X? What is involved in porting apps between Xfce and Wayland and MacOS?

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

Re: "when many phones still had removable batteries"

2G is long gone in Australia, otherwise I would definitely be using my old Nokia. I don't actually use any smartphone features -- just voice and sms. I'm happy to own a smartphone -- I use maps or chat a couple of times a year -- but I'd rather just leave the smartphone on the charger on the desk, and carry something more appropriate with me for daily use.

Torvalds challenged the haters to fork Linux. Someone said 'hold my beer'

Generic Upvote

Comment-free upvote for article and @Poseidon

Re: Kernel 0.what??

0.98

In the countdown to 1.0 (ie pre-release version, or beta version)

Microsoft to switch off OWA Light after nearly two decades

Re: This was still around?

done providing standards-compliant LDAP,

Which part of which standard did you not think was met?

Re: This was still around?

I also forgot.

But I used to use the light/basic both of OWA and Gmail, because they were each faster and cleaner than their full-feature cousins.

Patchpocalypse Now: Microsoft tops last month's record with 622 Patch Tuesday CVEs

how many files? what % ?

I'd be interested to know how many of these patches were patching the same library or same executable.

Probably not 6 hundred fixes to one DLL, but perhaps also not 622 individual DLLs patched?

What % of Windows and Office does this change? 50% ? Or 1ppm?

Frame: A new X11 server – implemented directly in assembly

Re: So...

especially on the register starved 16bit x86.

yes, a strength of the 16bit x86 architecture was that it was easy for humans to work with, and a failure of compilers was that they couldn't handle the 16bit x86 architecture very well.

I don't know that I'd describe it as "register starved" unless my reference was algorthmic compiler optimization strategies.

Photovoltaics are still running after a year under Swiss trains

Re: Have to wait in UK...

https://jzdcable.com/can-photovoltaic-cable-use-aluminum-conductors-a-complete-guide/

"When to Consider Aluminum Alloy PV Cable?

Aluminum alloy PV cable is a viable, cost-effective solution for specific, large-scale scenarios:

(*)Large Utility-Scale Solar Farms:​ Where the cost savings on long string runs from the array to the combiner boxes can be substantial.

(*)Projects with Long DC String Runs:​ Where voltage drop can be managed by careful conductor sizing.

Re: Have to wait in UK...

It would all be aluminum cables.

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

Re: Losing the H in HTTP.

One of the significant reasons all that kludgy traffic travels by port 80 or "TLS on 443" is because the other channels are routinely blocked and/or analysed. VPNs and Skype are examples.

Scot NHS Trust probes email stuffup involving maternity patients' data

Email stuffup?

Data handling fail. Unauthorized data access*.

But using an email system correctly, to do what email systems do correctly, under intentional action, is not an "email stuffup"

*In the sense that taking data offsite is unauthorized.

Outlook for Mac bug makes font choice a purely decorative feature

Yes. In contrast, it's easy to see where bottom posting came from: it reflects the technical limitations of early email systems, now thankfully replaced.

Windows 95 detected installers by looking for magic words and hoping for the best

Re: Explains a lot ...

I dumped OS2 for Win95, and never looked back. But that's an accurate memory of Win95 installation problems.

Win95 installation was fragile, and hardware recognition frequently failed. I'm able to believe that it was fast and efficient on standard IBM kit, but installing on a variety of beige compatibles sometimes failed hardware recognition, and required restarting the process from the beginning.

Win95 did not have a protected file system. That fact that you confuse "operating system" with "protected file system" just shows how little you know about resource restriction.

The fact that you are still pretending that Win95 was just a shell indicates bad faith or stupidity. Or both.

Secure Unix ancestor KSOS did type safety before Rust made it cool

Re: Nice find

five years after releasing Pascal says a great deal.

It says that Wirth was a language developer, and his interest was in developing languages.

He was good at it -- for example, his decision to include "write" in the compiler is now emulated in the c compiler I use, although it implements functions like that "as if" they were library functions.

Failed blockchain project ends with big fine for fibs about it being on track

Re: I might be a bit thick...

Securities Exchanges are very, very fast

That is a description, not a requirement.

People (machines) that trade on the exchange are very very fast, and make money by being faster than other people (machines) that trade on the exchange. It's not a requirement that the exchange itself be fast.

Having a slow exchange is one way of mitigating the problems of having very very fast traders.

It gets complicated from there. If you have a slow exchange, that is a inducement for fast traders to trade around and outside the slow exchange. And a distributed block-chain settlement system both locks them into the exchange, and provides a mechanism for fast off-bourse trades.

Former Indonesian minister and startup hero jailed for Chromebook buys

Re: "The decision to purchase Chromebooks was made at arm’s length"

The common American view, that being smart and hardworking makes you rich, is not shared in much of the world. In Australia, the default view is that if you are rich, you're a crook. In Indonesia, the default view is, if you are rich, your friends and relations are crooks.

Former Microsoft engineer shrinks Notepad down to size

Crinkler

What's the point of using a packer for this? Sure, it compacts the disk image, but who cares? It means the whole thing has to be unzipped, than rescanned, and, as noted, makes your AV more suspicious and slower. We aren't at a point where "larger disk image" is the important part of "bloat"

HS2's latest reset ditches autonomous train tech to get project back on track

Re: HS 2 late

very few rail projects I can think of in the last 30 years that we ended up regretting building

It wasn't clear if this was a rail project, or a research project.

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

Re: Irreplacable...

Is that an inherent feature of digital transmission systems?

It is an inherent feature of digital transmission: the high value bits are just as likely to be degraded as the low value bits, so when you get a bit error it's just as likely to destroy the whole signal shape as to add a tiny bit of low-down noise. But since that's an inherent feature of digital transmission, it's all about how you handle that problem. You can prioritize High Fidelity at good signal levels, or prioritize gradual degradation.

Re: Irreplacable...

Most of those valves are replaceable with HV FETS, which do cost a lot of money, but only in the 10's of thousands 20 years ago when a lot of stations were replacing their transmitter valves with FETS.

HV/HC FETS are a lot cheaper now, but on the other hand, most of those other radio stations have also shut down: I don't know what is available now for transmitter tube replacement. But my bet is that it's the buildings that are the major costs. A lot of buildings built around that time are end-of-life.

I have no doubt that was part of the consideration when ownership was transferred to "a third party". Get it off the books, and when it needs replacement it won't be our problem.

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: Not quite the same but...

My Dad's procedure, ex-Navy and ex-fireman, was that you always identify the exits when you first enter, and plan to leave /first/ while the rest of the people are wondering what the alarm means, and if it matters. He didn't care what the alarm meant, or if it mattered: that was something you could find out tomorrow, or live without knowing.

From him I also learned his scorn for and disgust with people who sit on stairs.

Notion kills its Gmail client after AI agents keep humans from troubling inbox

Database

I think that "HIPAA" is the clue. You can use the agent to download your mail into a statutory record keeping system, or project database, or bug-tracking or issue-management or complaint-record database, or basically any management system that "isn't gmail"

I'm small enough that I've always just left stuff in my mail, but over the years I've frequently seen people asserting that email is not a database, along with "excel is not a database", so I'm not surprised that there are use cases out there.

London cops bring live facial recognition to West End

live facial recognition

Bobby on the beat.

You have got to be KDDI-ng – Japanese telco exposes 14.2 million managed email credentials

Instagram fail Roughly 34,000 accounts

"In March, a group of hackers discovered a bug in a Meta customer service tool that allowed anyone to use an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot to reset the passwords for Instagram accounts. "

Including including USA "Space Force" department and Barack Obham Whitehouse instagram account

Mythos discovers 'Squidbleed,' a memory leak that's gone undetected since Clinton era

Re: Wait, what?

I must setup an FTP server and then sit and wait for the victim to try to connect to my nasty little FTP server using squid specifically?

Squid is a cache. You notice someone's squid server, that caches HTTP (and FTP), and just copy out everything that goes through it.

People put caching servers in front of their HTTP servers, so squid servers are exposed, and (accidentally) you can use FTP to capture and copy out anything going through the cache.

Microsoft Access finally breaks free of its 22-inch form limit

It's entirely file based

It was designed for 255 users, but optimized for 32, as was documented at the time.

Changes in the operating environment make that less attractive now, but those are changes to Windows networking and the "Server" service, not the system Access was designed for.

It's entirely file based

Actually, it's record based. Using the database primitives provided by the operating system.

The database primitives provided by the operating system date back to DOS SHARE and SMB, pre-date Windows authentication, expect per-table files, and don't provide for record-level authentication, so (in order to get a single-file database) Access still creates a whole system of app-level authentication.

Microsoft had the idea of upgrading the Operating System Database Primitives after Win2K, but the project failed, and MS SQL Server was making too much money anyway, and MS development became very badly siloed, and Access development languished, and usability and reliability and compatibility went backwards.

Tensordyne makes a big bet on log math to beat Nvidia

Re: I think they just invented the slide rule.

A slide rule is a lookup table, not a Mitchel approximation with subsequent correction.

Most computing uses simple multiplication like you learned at school, with optimisation to reduce the number of steps. For very large numbers (million digit), it becomes more efficient to use logarithms with FFT calculation and the use of the Mitchel approximation instead of FFT has been of increasing interest over the last 10-20 years. Initially, math research focused mostly on making the approximation more accurate. Recently, as practical applications came into sight, there has been interest in matrix math and on making the approximation faster. This announcement is not a bombshell, people are interested in the idea and someone has come up with the money.

FWIW, the exponent of a FP number is the logarithm of the Most Significant Bit. You just need a bit-detector and that gives a logarithm with 100% worst case error (the difference between 2 and 4). The Mitchel Approximation uses that, then takes a straight-line approximation to the next exponent value (between 2 and 4). The "straight line approximation" is a computed multiplication, but it has the hardware complexity of multiplying by a fixed number, ie much simpler than a generic arbitrary multiplication. That gives a worst case error around 10% (at 3, when it's not close to 2 or 4). This announcement uses a two-stage correction, so it's not a simple Mitchel Approximation, but they've used that term to explain what they are doing.

Microsoft's latest Windows bug belongs in the Recycle Bin

Re: How is this even a thing? Recycle bin has worked fine for years.

For performance reasons, file explorer is tightly coupled, rather than being a swarm of independent processes.

Midjourney pivots from AI image generation to body scanning medical spa where patients bathe in 'golden light'

obviously you need to be naked for the 'golden light' to work

Promotional material shows beautiful bodies in bikinis. (Because you would, wouldn't you).

I also wonder what their water bill is going to be...

"avoid 30% of all deaths"

That isn't what I've read in other press reports.

"avoid 30% of all preventable deaths" is both more realistic and more meaningless.

Microsoft once used its own brand of 'Lego' to optimize Windows

Re: The simple answer was responsibility.

I am ancient enough to remember having to optimise Fortran 77 code to run in Bill Gates "no one will ever need more than 640k of RAM".

But not educated enough to know that BG never said that.

Back in the day, when he was just another software company talking to journalists, he attributed his edge to his legal training and willingness to push to the edge. If he had anything to say, it wasn't about hardware decisions made by IBM or other companies.

Windows devs rerolled old code to save precious bytes

Not all ... are ellipsis.

Re: Compiler Optimisation

The Intel Fortran compiler - used for highly optimized math-intense code -- demonstrated this behavior in comparisons. But, FWIW, the Intel Fortran compiler was, like many optimizing compilers then and now, an optimizing backend with several available front ends, and would presumably demonstrate the same behavior on C comparisons or other supported languages.

Amazon owns up to using 2.5bn gallons of H₂O in its bit barns last year

(and no mention of how many Olympic swimming pools the figures equate to).

What I notice is the now standard use of "KWh" instead of "MFLOPS" or "MIPS"

The Y2K bug is back! Dutch dev digs up untimely flaw in old BSD build

The 8088 was a 16 bit CPU gussied down to look (externally) like it had only 8 bits

Trump phone has HTC guts. Tremendous guts. The best guts

Re: "designed in China", Map Wars!

This isn't Wikipedia. We can laugh at how people describe themselves. How people describe themselves is sometimes less important than where and what.

"designed in China", Map Wars!

UK "one China policy": Taiwan (home of HTC) is "China"

Met Police, Apple join forces to choke London's stolen phone trade

I would not be surprised if the big tech companies have been dragging their feet on blocking stolen phones is because there is no financial incentive to do so. Implementing blocking tech will cost them to develop, administer and maintain.

As the article indicates -- but the press release presumably doesn't, Apple already has this technology and has for years.

Council in UK's City of York outs hundreds of disabled residents with a single email blunder

Re: Mass email using BCC

Oh no - let’s just stuff a Bcc: field with hundreds of bloody email addresses instead!

If they are using a private, local, email server, then it's only allowing that because it was out of support 10 or 20 years ago. Even the mail servers I've touched no longer allow hundreds of email addresses in the CC field without special configuration.

Home Office ditches legacy asylum database, keeps the spreadsheets

Re: "some Home Office staff continue to maintain their own spreadsheets alongside official systems"

Access was actually pretty hot stuff in the 1990's. Oracle types used to hate on it because it had features that didn't make it into Oracle until years later. "Not ISO standard" they used to call it -- until the rest of the world caught up.

But when the new ISO standard came out, Access went from being a technology leader, to technologically backward. And when SQL server 2K came out, it adopted features and properties of Access, -- and broke compatibility with Access. And when Win 2K server came out, it made Access slower and network bugs caused data errors and database corruption. And the planned upgrades which would have been used by Access -- database file system and OS HTML rendering -- were abandoned. "New" features for Access were buggy, broken, incompatible or unwanted. The UI is aggressively retrograde and inflexible.

It's not just the case that the rest of t he world caught up with Access, it's also true that Access went backwards. Most of the use cases have been overtaken by dedicated apps, but for the remaining uses, Access's startling advantages of speed, robustness, and ease of development have disappeared.

England's exam watchdog frets over smart specs turning GCSEs into Google searches

Re: Different sets of Problems

Is it really worth it?

Exams are currently making a come-back as the response to wholesale use of AI to write assignments, essays, reports, summaries, etc.

Here? We force kids through 2-3 grading cycles - GCSE, A-Level, possibly AS or Highers or University for some, then stamp that future on them.

Judging the worth of a child based on an exam they sit in their teens - and then having their performance in those couple of hours dictate the arc of their life - that's just flat-out wrong.

Educators have wanted to get rid of exams and judgement for years. People who want to judge the worth of individuals become policeman, not teachers. If you get rid of the repeated assessment, you get a single do-or-die ultra-competitive, frightening, destructive, single point of failure. If you get rid of assessment entirely, the child and parents have no way of judging the teachers and system until it is too late.

For every complex problem, there is a simple solution, and it is usually incorrect.

Trump pumps federal funds into coal plants in the name of energy security

promised ... that at least one small nuclear reactor project would be online by July 2026.

He didn't. That was a mistake made by The Register. (And the link is to the article with the error).

He asserted that at least one small nuclear reactor project would "go critical" by July 2026.

As I pointed out at the time, "go critical" is a step far earlier than "be online".