Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

RIP Gordon Moore: Intel co-founder dies, aged 94

Re: Has anyone ever wondered

>and I could eat garlic…

Remember when there were tomatoes in supermarkets?

Re: I am not fan of corporate cultures...

>. I wish we had more scientists leading the corporations of today

Ironically AMD, currently eating Intel's lunch, has

So does TSMC who make all this possible

Even Nvidia's CEO is an engineer, if not on quite the same level as Drs Su or Moore

Re: And I had just bought some more Xeons, too…

And the HP Laserjet is still running

Re: And I had just bought some more Xeons, too…

We must have transitioned from MFM to ESDI at some point, there were definitely separate data / control cables but we had 330Mb cos we had to run Kodak (!) Unix on the 386, installed from boxes of 5.25 floppies

I remember in the mid 90s when external 1 Gb SCSI disks dropped to £1000, we got one for each Sun so that we would never have to worry about disk space ever again.

Re: I am not fan of corporate cultures...

ps I'm not sure that Moore's law didn't actually stop at around 14nm designs for the original purely financial defn

Features have got smaller, and that's necessary for speed/size/power consumption, but I don't know if a 3nm fabbed device is cheaper/transistor than at 5nm

Re: 1996-2023

Interesting how they were only thinking microprocessor = desktop CPU

Even in 96 the number of small embedded, 8051, ARM etc massively outnumbered x86 / Sparc / PowerPC

Re: I am not fan of corporate cultures...

No it was an observation that the process cost of each wafer was proportional to the wafer area but the cost of going to smaller features was a one-off cost of a mask stepper (at least until we got into insanity-optics of EUV) and making a gate 30% smaller lets you fit twice as many parts in the same area.

Re: And I had just bought some more Xeons, too…

>Hard drives for PC ATs in late 80's were confined to <500MB (ESDI) drives

Or full-height 330Mb MFM drives that needed their own controller card - and were 10x the 32Mb limit for DOS/Win3.1

BOFH: The Board members are looking very ill these days

"Chair" is ablist unless you also specifically include wheelchairs

I think "facilitating coordinator" or "coordinating facilitator" but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of purely external affairs.

ps the "man" part in chairman is actually "main", French for hand and nothing to do with bloke-ness i.e. from the hand of the chair - cos the nobs were French when committees were invented

>And really, what IS the assurance that none of the petroleum used in the vinyl came from animals?

But at least they were free-range dinosaurs

There's one sure winner in the AI explosion, say analysts: Dutch outfit ASML

Re: Just sayin...

I was on an optics course at Imperial College in the 90s - with a lot of people from Zeiss

That course has since been shut down

Re: Just sayin...

All our optical engineers are mainland Chinese

You know how schools cut back on STEM cos specialist teachers and labs were expensive ?

And the universities cut back on physics and chemistry cos specialist teachers and labs were expensive ?

And top physics dept stopped teaching classical optics in the 70/80s cos it was old and boring ?

And the few top optics research depts shut because all the students wanted to do cooler/better funded topics ?

Well this was also true everywhere outside china

Re: Perhaps one should hold some ASML stock

I meant their customers had tiny margins. TSMC are a $$$$$ company but fabs don't have Apple 30% margins

Re: Perhaps one should hold some ASML stock

Strangely not that profitable.

Yes they are a monopoly supplier of vital equipment, but to a tiny industry that has tiny margins and they themselves have to invest a fortune in R&D to just build what they already have

B-List celebs including Lindsay Lohan fined after crypto shill probe

Re: Are people that desperate?

But you eat crisps cos an ex-footballer said so

Re: Hope & Change

"Jazz musicians . . . of some notoriety my Lord"

Re: Hope & Change

I used to respect Sun, nice workstations !

Re: Shouldn't this be the rule?

But if they are on a movie review show on the non-commercial BBC then we must assume they are telling the truth about how great their upcoming movie is and have no financial interest

Shouldn't this be the rule?

When being interviewed about their role in a movie actors should have to state that they are being paid to say how much they respect the director.

On the red carpet they should say they are wearing TKmax and that they're being paid to

French parliament says oui to AI surveillance for 2024 Paris Olympics

Re: The Olympics have always been a political joke and a waste of time

Except perhaps on the equestrian events.

Re: The Olympics have always been a political joke and a waste of time

>IMO the IOC is the most corrupt institution on the planet.

FIFA, we're holding the next world cup at the bottom of the ocean following a very nice lunch with BP

Uncle Sam reveals it sent cyber-soldiers to Albania to hunt for Iranian threats

Cyber-Force

Sounds way cooler than sending "voting advisers" and has the advantage that you can send them to countries that don't have votes.

Not sure about using article 5 against cyber attacks, I seem to remember Germany's leader was cyber attacked by a foreign superpower and their Eu trade negotiators were hacked by a foreign no-longer-super foreign power.

Turing Award goes to Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of the Ethernet

Re: Ethernet has stood the test of time

Ethernet was the cheapest to wire and cheapest to build cards for, and the protocol was free and easy

>(54 byte packets, anybody?)

53 bytes (well 48byte packet and 5 byte header) cos even numbers are for squares.

It's perfectly sensible, the datacoms guys wanted larger 64byte for high speed efficiency and the telecoms guys wanted smaller 32byte for better latency - so they decided on a perfectly reasonable compromise of 48bytes. then they added a separate header so you wouldn't have to bother reading the packet to find out what to do with it. then the committee went for a series of long lunches

Re: Drop out

Strictly speaking cat5 specifies the assembly, both the plug and cable and quality of the connection.

I've made a few custom long runs with genuine cat5 cable but crimped to a cat0.5 standard

Re: Drop out

cat5 plug ? - younglings

It was vampire tap or nothing (although sometimes crucifixes and holy water were also necessary to get networks to work)

If the first implementation of something doesn't involve a lot of wire wrap and sticky tape it won't be a success

With modern networks being point-point through smart switches with QoS and other information in the packet, isn't it closer to ATM than original collision-detect shared wire ethernet?

We've got plenty of AI now but who asked for it? El Reg's vultures chime in

So it created some unique citations and you dismissed its artistic endeavours ?

I suppose you would object to Michaelangelo's David on the grounds that the famous little stone wang didn't exist

If scammers use your AI code to rip off victims, the FTC may want a word

Re: Section 230 Safe Harbor

But they have tracked down that Metcalfe chap who is the mastermind enabling all these online scams

The primary or even sole purpose of some of these computer generated image "CGI" systems is to create fake stuff.

Ban Marvel movies now

Europe's right-to-repair law asks hardware makers for fixes for up to 10 years

Re: 10 years is a bit long

Also means you have to keep plants and suppliers for 10years. So what happens if an environmental law bans a component or process or China closes a factory ?

Re: What stunt will 'Elon the magnificent' play to get around this?

They also proposed a law for motorcycles that said no after-market parts or accessories - for safety

Not at all motivated by BMW

Re: What stunt will 'Elon the magnificent' play to get around this?

There will be exemptions for cars. There are a lot more Eu car makers than Eu phone makers.

In fact we should probably look at tightened repair requirements for cars, for public safety. Probably a requirement to have all repairs done at a dealer and ban 3rd party aftermarket accessories.

>it only took three minutes to repair it, including the safety testing after the repair.

TuV have got a lot faster, they take months on our stuff.

Did that cover emc as well?

>My wife is big on the right to bear arms - the little thing just loves being securely wrapped in their fluffy warmth

But soon they will be waking up from hibernation

IT depts struggle with skills shortages despite Big Tech layoffs

Re: LinkedIn

That's the wonder of the modern economy.

With only one actual job we have generated 100s of vacancies by simply spamming it to 100s of recruiting sites - think of the GDP !

So back when I wor a lad, and computers were fun, the advice was to do physics/maths/engineering not CS cos you could pick up that programming stuff yourself anyway

Then there was dot-com boom and everyone did CS cos it was an automatic job.

Then everyone had a CS degree so we only hired physics/maths/engineering people cos they hadn't just done CS for a job

Then nobody did CS cos you couldn't get a job

Now everyone does english/PPE/classics and a bootcamp - and we still only hire physics/maths/engineering who've learned programming stuff themselves.

Ladies/Gentlemen/AIs - that's the history of CS degree job prospects since the 80s

Re: How many are Bullshit Jobs?

Sorry: Also "useless waste of space" and "bullshit jobs" aren't synonymous.

Re: How many are Bullshit Jobs?

>Likewise at Google and Microsoft, when times are good they probably employ a whole bunch of people who don't actually produce very much.

Not necessarily a fault.

You might employ a Linus, or Bjarne or Guido even if they don't check in any code - to attract other star employees.

You might hire people because you are planning on moving into a new area and are "building a bench" or you might be snapping up all the experts in a field to stop a competitor.

Microsoft research is widely believed to be a way of keeping down a lot of possible disruptive startup ideas. Famously "if only we had managed to hire a couple of Stamford grad students and paid them to research page ranking algorithms - without them doing anything"

Also "useless waste of space" and "bullshit jobs" are synonymous. You can have morons working in vital departments and geniuses working as patent clerks

Re: Twitter shouldn't even be counted

>If you're laid off you're laid off. It doesn't matter where from.

For you personally - no.

For the market - 420 people laid off from Twitter because Musk was stoned doesn't mean technology sector is crashing

Re: LinkedIn

>Out of interest, where are you based?

We have fantastic opportunities for a $ROLE in that $REGION

Watchdog: Broadcom buy of VMware may be bad for competition

Re: As if

How dare you sir !

I shall inform his majesty and he will most certainly send a gunboat to punish the foreigners for their impertinence

$61 billion

Why don't they just buy the UK and not have to worry about it ?

Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools

Re: FOSS neutrality?

So this is a big opportunity.

Companies receiving federal money shouldn't be using this open source cancer with it's Russian/Iranian/Cuban components.

They should be restricted to buying pure American software - like AWS / Azure / GoogleCloud

Shouldn't we then go further and remove existing Russian contributions to open source projects?

We could also remove Russian inputs to vital military systems. Without the tyranny of the Tsiolkovsky equation our rockets will be much more capable.

>It was not possible to remove every NSDAP voter.

There was also a need to rebuild a country and an army using people that had thrived under the previous regime and were devoutly anti-communist

Fortunately there was a thriving 'not a Nazi' rubber stamp system

Re: Iraq (and Afghanistan)

Oil (and Opium) ?