Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Objections to datacenter builds may be overruled now they are 'Critical National Infrastructure'

In theory.... but I bet it's a lot easier to get a new planning permission for a large empty concreted-over site with a new access road - rather than the local council demanding you return it to sugar beet

Especially if the current government is a hyper-capitalist free-market Austrian school mob, rather than the last lot of socialistic namby-pamby country-squire types

>(actually almost nowhere around can make decent onion rings)

I think we can agree that cows would be very very bad at making onion rings

If we reduce the number of cows we crop off the very bad end of the onion ring making curve

Therefore vegetarianism leads to better onion rings

But is going to be worth much less afterwards - so the cost of borrowing against it is going to be higher

Remember these are real estate deals by Brookfields etc, the actual "data" part is a side effect

>Here in SW Scotland

It's understandable, imagine what Glasgow would be like if it were ever industrialized

>why would you want to build it on green-belt with all the associated hassle anyway?

Because if you get planning approval - which you will cos it's vital infrastructure - and the project falls through then you have some very valuable land with outline planning permission near London.

You paid $(peanuts) for agricultural land - end up with $(Taylor Swift) building site

Data center brings little local employment

That's typical of governments that have for so long neglected the south east of England. We need to bring coal mines and steel works to these leafy backwaters.

Some people may argue that there is no coal in Hertfordshire, but there are also no natural GPU resources. We can import coal and employ the long neglected local peasants locals to bury it. Together we can regenerate these ignored leafy suburbs until they become the new Barnsleys of the south.

SpaceX faces $663K FAA fine for Musk's alleged launch impatience

Re: Troubled Starship?

>We regulate pharmaceuticals, aircraft, hospitals, spacecraft and banks

That harm people when things go wrong.

But if your alternative is a government funded space program that needs an astronaut form every state (to ensure funding) costs $Bn/launch and then shuts down all launches for 5y ears and has a presidential commission everytime there is a failure - we might just fall behind.

Re: Move launch site out of USA

>so an export permit is... unlikely.

What 'export' ? The boosters can be made in Taiwan with German machine tools and Chinese carbon fibre. The software can be written anywhere in the world.

When Boeing-Lockheed-Cyberdyne had a monopoly on space-rated kit then you could export control this stuff - now it's like trying to export control Linux.

Even politically I suspect SpaceX has a stronger hand. Boeing might have more senators on payroll but if SpaceX says we aren't interested in DoD as a customer - you can go back to paying for $Bn/launch at ULA. The DoD, and it's allies, lose Starlink and have to go back to Inmarsat truck-size antennae and large expensive drones, or only fight a modern war somehwere with Verison coverage.

Re: Should be prison time for musk

It would certainly help with American innovation in space.

If every unmanned launch needs approval from a dozen local, state and federal agencies and faces legal action from a dozen local, state and federal agencies that will certainly incentivize companies to launch from America rather than India or China

Re: Payback

I'm guessing a few $M get added to the costs of a few off-the-books launches for other government customers

Desktop hypervisors are like buses: None for ages, then four at once

If you read the headline you now owe Oracle your first-born

Elon Musk's assassination 'joke' bombs, internet calls for his deportation

Re: Right wingers saying extreme stuff

"Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think"

That was said by a French (a kind of foreigner) philosopher (somebody who thinks) in a book (a thing you ban)

Re: Recently found this blogpost, it's spot on

Does that read like it's written by AI or a 1st year philosophy student?

Re: Enquiring minds need to know.

And it's midnight in Moscow - they making you work late Comrade Troll ?

Re: Enquiring minds need to know.

>If he plays golf so much why is he so bad at it ?

It's really hard to get the ball past the windmill and through the drainpipe

>Stochastic terrorism is not a damn joke.

Better than stoichiometric terrorism

I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!

I got some cheap hardrives where volume wasn't adjustable

It was such a good deal - you couldn't turn it down

and backups

The first requirement for a DBA is fear.

Fear and surprise

Fear and surprise and sanatizing user inputs.

Win 11 refreshes delayed, say PC makers – and here's why

Re: Dear, dear Michael Dell

I'm not sure an AI trained on sendmail.cfg is likely to do any harm except to itself

Re: Cartel Is in Full Operation

>MS need to keep the hardware vendors sweet, or they loose business and hardware vendors start switching to Linux or other….

I wonder how true this still is?

MS wants my $30 monthly corporate subscription to O365/Teams/etc.

I'm not sure they care about the $3/unit every 5 years they get as part of an OEM licence deal

Re: Five year old PCs need replacing :o

>Time due for many organisations who use 365 to consider installing Mint or Ubuntu for certain user types, and adding Edge for Linux, then running 365 within Edge.

I keep arguing that we could issue Chromebooks

Everything office-ish we do is online on O365/Teams/cloud/Sharepoint and it all works fine from the Linux desktops

And the few Microsoft-only packages we need are too heavy for the corporate laptops anyway

And Chromebooks are built to be child-proof so can safely be given to managers

Re: Dear, dear Michael Dell

>"Every piece of software that you're going to use is going to have an AI assistant.

systemd-AI = the end of the world

sendmail.cfg-AI = it goes mad so you don't have to

fdisk-AI = manic Joker laugh

Re: Five year old PCs need replacing :o

There is no need to review the AI generated email yourself.

The recipient isn't going to read it either - they are going to get AI to summarize it.

Re: Five year old PCs need replacing :o

We get our corporate Windows laptops replaced when the Dell warranty runs out.

While the Linux desktops we actually do work on are much older, just add more ram, upgrade SSD->NVME and add this years fanciest graphics card

Ironically the most common 'upgrade' we have to do is a bigger PSU to feed NVidia's insatiable power demands.

Re: Five year old PCs need replacing :o

But how can you do modern office productivity tasks like replying to emails, playing with Powerpoint formatting and reading Facebook - with a 5 year old PC ?

That's an i7-9000, barely 500GFlops, you wouldn't even be able to use emojis with that

Germany’s CDU still struggling to restore data months after June cyberattack

Jesus saves

But the Christian Democratic Union doesn't

Homing pigeon missiles, dead trout swimming, butt breathing honored with Ig Nobel Prize

One interesting, but unfortunate, side effect of modern drug trials is that placebos become more effective.

If you have people come into a lab with lots of flashing machines that go ping, lots of people in white coats and have them sign lots of impressive forms about risk of death - they believe the stuff must be powerful and get better. Irrespective of if it's real. Making the placebos have side effects will make this worse

It means a lot of safe effective drugs have failed trials simply because they aren't statistically better than the placebo.

Re: Invalid GPS location

And although it was never used, due to WW2 finishing early rather than going into extra time. The same idea was used in search and rescue to spot tiny orange lifejackets/rafts at sea

EU OKs $1.9B aid for Intel Polish plant, assuming x86 giant doesn't end up cutting it

It sounds like a politician has added the $1.9bn back hander grant to the $4.6Bn plant and come up with a $6.5Bn project

It's a bit like the UK buying £250M of wind turbines from Germany. Shipping them to Belfast as a £250M plan to repurpose the docks as offshore wind support and investing £250M in renewable energy programs in Northern Ireland. They were then installed off Morcombe as part of a £250M regeneration of the area and contributing £250M to renewable resources in the North East and adding £250M to the Northern Powerhouse.

So overall £1.5Bn of UK eco-regional-goodness all for a mere £250M to Siemens

Re: More corporate welfare.

The government should take all the tax money it raises and hand it out to the people as cash

Then all the people can get together and build all the power-plants/roads/railways/chip-fabs that they need

You're not an Austrian economist by any chance?

Re: MAGA…

This isn't Eu funding - it's Polish tax-payer Government funding

The Eu is just approving that this isn't unfair state aid to subsidise a Polish company at the expense of the other members

Boeing union workers in US reject contract: 96% vote to strike

Yes that was rather my point. The "learn to code" you obsolete blue collar dinosaur = there is a lot more programming in machine shops than in web development shops.

Even if you get the surface file from engineering, the toolpath optimisation is a valuable skill

Re: replace them all

>Rocket Science *is* hard

Rocket science is trivial. Newton's laws and Tsiolkovsky

Rocket engineering on the other hand ....

> The union will kill the company, then where will all these idiots be?

Where will skilled machinists be in an America with 4% unemployment rate if Boeing shuts down?

Only fans presumably. Or they can learn to code (something beyond CNC)

Boeing's new motto. Built by the cheapest unskilled, untrained labor we can drag off the streets.

Not sure how that flys

Re: Easy fix

You're promoted to executive vice-president of door bolt installation

No there isn't a pay rise but you get new business cards.

Have you tried being in a field with limited practitioners and which brings economic value to customers?

Re: replace them all

>send them back where they came from

But who then will pick our fruit, play in our orchestras and teach higher mathematics?

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

Re: Boldly going where no portly tech has gone before

How did you get the root password?

Re: Boldly going where no portly tech has gone before

I have one of those. The back doors have been replaced by a sheet of cardboard because there isn't enough room to open them.

You have to Ministry of Silly Walks over the network cables to even get behind it.

This is in a "secure data center" as required by ISO 9001 but is actually a locked cleaners cupboard in the basement.

Re: Whoops there go the tape drives

Sounds like an HR-worthy conversation was involved

In a strictly scientific attempt to understand the problem did you have her wear a wide variety of other exotic materials?

AI giants pinky swear (again) not to help make deepfake smut

>researching ways to render illegal content unusable.

Ban typewriters and photocopies, Authors will still produce descriptions of illegal acts but won't be able to distribute their illegal content

Boeing's Calamity Capsule returns to Earth without a crew

Re: What’s the point?

>Could you name six of these benefits

Distracting the public from your presidential private life

Amortization of the costs of ICBM development

Strategic investment in aircraft makers without being a communist

Gives retired Nazi rocket scientists something to do

Gives redundant Soviet rocket scientists something to do

Allows people to run for office with a suitably macho story if we hadn't had any successful wars recently

Re: uh oh

Bungy cords from the ceiling= simple

'Hyperscale customer' to take massive datacenter site near London

Re: Cooling?

Normally increase the temperature to reduce the amount of fluid(ie water) you're moving.

You could take the 40C air from the racks and send it directly to homes and end up with 25C at the end - but you are going to have to shift a lot of air and people object to having pipes the size of the channel tunnel across their garden.

The obvious solution, given the housing situation inside the M25, is to move the people to the heat. A series of recyclable wood-fibre based pre-fab 'housing' could be built directly on the roof of the data center and be heated with no further infrastructure. As an extra bonus these can be recycled from the 'housing units' the servers are delivered in.

Japan to put a small red Swedish house on the Moon

Re: "a small red house on the surface of the Moon"

And that the foreign house will be unaffordable for native clangers

Pokémon GO was an intelligence tool, claims Belarus military official

So I suppose having soon sort of GPS tracking app running all the time would have good for the defendant.

There have been cases where police investigating a crime have asked for all cellphone location data near the area and then picked out an appropriate suspect.

A former prof of mine was an expert witness on radio propagation showing that the cell phone tower triangulation inside a large mall wasn't the super-precision perfect solution the police and cell company imagined.