Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

The US's biggest datacenter market is short on electricity

Virginia is for Lovers

Who presumably, like the power, don't go all the way

Re: Infrastructure

>Power is usually a private industry utility.

Yep, however reliable, resilient, winterized power requires planning and investment beyond this quarter.

>How much water does a data center need once its cooling system has been filled?

Metric Shit-loads. Semiconductors are very sensitive to trace amounts of solvents. Cleaning out waste solvents for reuse is way more expensive than buying fresh new municipal water and purifying it

>The number of employees needed for a sprawling bit barn wouldn't impact a rural B road.

And yet the inward investment is going to generate so many high paying jobs that it's totally worth the $MM in 'grants' and tax breaks to bring it to the area.

Re: Andy Power

Nominative determinism

His cousin works at OVH, unfortunately their middle name is 'explosion-of-backup'

Infrastructure

1, Build data center in shit-hole freedom state with low taxes

2, Discover state have spent nothing on power/water/transport infrastructure

3, Profit

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Somebody in Silicon Valley/Roundabout is now working in a Kickstarter for the eggPod - a wifi enabled system that makes you a boiled egg to your personal preferences, for an outrageous monthly subscription and something-something-blockchain.

Re: Intellectual property

Neighbour was in a small band.

They had to pay the levy on the blank CDs they made of their own music. But the royalties were distributed based on total sales, ie all went to Celine Dion, - although in practice the levy never brought in enough to cover the costs of the industry group distributing it so none ever went to any artists

It's a good topic to start if you want to see a Canadian get mad

Re: TomTom Lifetime Maps

Parachutes with a lifetime warranty ?

Re: You know you're old when...

All you need is the person sleeping next to you have to leave for work an hour earlier. Have them get up quietly, and make a cup of tea in a travel mug so it stays hot, and put it next to your side of the bed.

This is the morning service my wife receives.

Quite why she needs it to be Sven who sleeps with her and makes her tea isn't clear, perhaps he's better at putting the milk in.

US net neutrality bill is only two pages long. And that's potentially a good thing

Re: Wouldn't it be nice

They should just nationalise Congress

Re: Wouldn't it be nice

Trouble is that just passes the buck. It would just say agency X is in charge of making the rules - without saying what happens if a president puts his kid in charge of the agency / or appoints some bigwig from the industry that would be regulated

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Re: the Selectric – with its golf-ball type head replacing the basket of type bars –

1, Invent Electric typewriter

2, Wait for electricity to be invented

3, Profit ?

Re: Good on you for following through with plod

Except the plod in most places would have just charged you.

Same cleanup rate / zero hours worked = infinite key performance metric evaluation score

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

Re: Impeccable timing

Look it was a big spider and this was the only way to be sure

Philippines logs on to Starlink for remote area internet services

Re: if Oz NBN anything to go by

If NBN is your baseline, then everyone having their own Starlink satellite looks cheap

Semiconductor market to dip 2.5% next year as inflation hits

PC Sales ?

worldwide PC shipments decline by 9.5 percent this year ....For this reason

Are PCs still a significant part of the semiconductor market anymore ?

I suppose a new i9 with an NVidia GPU is a lot of $$$ but compared to all the other markets for "rocks taught to think by wizards" does it count ?

MIT, Autodesk develop AI that can figure out confusing Lego instructions

Re: If you can't build IKEA furniture...

I like my coffee like I like my Women.

Strong and a vital part of the workplace

>wonder again at the fact that it seems some humans need help to do things as simple as follow Lego instructions.

Well the instructions were written by humans , so ..

Micron's 232-layer NAND is a game changer for database workloads

Re: Is it worth having so many layers ?

Interesting trade off though.

Home user: I don't trust this tiny card with all my photos, I want you to guarantee it will last 100years

Data center: I'm going to depreciate all this kit in 18months. If you can make it 10% faster and only last 2 years.

Re: Not so long ago

When external 1Gb SCSI drives dropped below £1000 we bought one for every SUN in the lab - now we would have all our data directly accessible and never have to bother with tapes again

Re: Not so long ago

We had Kodak (!) Unix on PCs because it allowed us to use massive (literally) 330Mb MFM drives when DOS only allowed 32Mb

Computer glitches harmed 'nearly 150' patients after Oracle Cerner system go-live

Re: Umm…

I love the: please re-enter the credit card number without spaces.

Re: Not a unique issue

I did a medical imaging system once where we were told we couldn't display sex/dob/address/ssn on screen to identify patient. Only minimally identifying information is initial+surname

This is a city where Huang / Lee / Singh identify a majority of the population.

Re: Not a unique issue

There is a small farmhouse at the geographic center of the USA which is constantly raided by various squads of law enforcement for similar reasons.

No location for cyber attack? Default to default USA location

Unknown problems

To be fair, storing fixed format records on a small number of humans, retrieving them, updating them and ultimately deleting them - is a famous unsolved problem in computer science.

Perhaps a young agile upstart like Oracle can make a breakthrough in Fifth-generation AI powered quantum computing to enable this

James Webb, Halley's Comet may be set for cosmic dust-up

Sorry that was a bit short and rude.

The large self supporting steered shield on JWST is a big bit of engineering. But a thermal shield around a tube is just wrapping it with 20+ layers of Aluminium coated mylar each 0.05mm thick. Like a super lightweight version of the silver blankets at the end of marathon.

Roughly each layer halves the heat load, so 10-20 layers in space is awesome insulation

Re: Unserviceable????

Coincidentally just writing a safety course on how to label/explain things without causing dangerous "inflammable == not flammable" confusion.

There was a plane crash that killed 100 people because expired != expended with oxygen generators

Re: Forcefields

Unfortunately Bigfoot stole the plans during the break-in by mothman

Yes its about 5x further away than the moon.

Because of this it wasn't designed to be serviced, it's extremely fragile to save weight and none of the instruments are easily accessible, unlike Hubble

Nope you can simply wrap it in layers of reflective foil. You get a vacuum between them for free, think of a Russian doll of 100 thermos flasks.

I saw one proposal for a passively cooled IR telescope that reckoned it could get down to 40K with just shields

JWST sheild is big to keep the whole mirror in shadow of the Sun and Earth

Worth noting, Hubble's full tube was to control stray light from the big bright Earth just next door.

Re: Unserviceable????

No user serviceable parts inside ?

Re: The mote in JWSTs eye

Unless the comet is assigned to the SLS project, then its return will be delayed to 2090

The no tube is mostly a function of mass. A tube for a 6m mirror is going to be massive

It's fairly easy to get a telescope tube in space to radiate down to a pretty cold temperature - enough that it has no background at JWSTwavelengths

The distant orbit is mostly so that the Earth doesn't fill the sky and limit your range of observations, it also reduces the heat load from the Earth

Chinese smartphone sales sink to levels not seen since 2012

Re: Also... Why upgrade?

The industry just needs to get together and have their politicians ban screen protectors and cases

Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds

Re: Smear?

No because GPS doesn't use leap seconds for precisely the reasons that Facebook argue that they shouldn't

Re: Life is hard, Zuck!

You realise that inserting leap seconds is equally arbitrary and is also done by a committee, many of which are foreigners and therefore can't be trusted.

Fortunately Britain isn't affected by this and free of foreign rules can revert to Imperial time

Re: Fuchsache!

Because if the committee announces that a leap second is 'now' it might be a little tricky to get that information distributed to every clock on Earth before now becomes back then

Price, lead times and scarcity of fiber optics may derail projects

Re: The world is ending! Buy NOW!

Because of lockdown nobody went on holiday and so no buckets of sand were brought back from the beach to make the fibre

Given that the cost of deployment has suddenly doubled

No it hasn't. If the fiber only costs a pint/km (a new unified Brexit/Eu unit) then it probably has bugger all effect on the cost of digging a trench, laying fibre, terminating it and putting flashing lights on the end.

Its like saying the cost of handlebar mustache oil has doubled so doubling the RAF budget.

Experts warn transition to private space stations won't happen anytime soon

highly capable microgravity laboratory

No it wasn't.

The very few micogravity experiments it tried were ruined by the vibration of people moving around and all the machinery needed for life support

There was even a free flying microgravity module to try and solve this.

If you wanted to try and build a microgravity experiment you needed it to be fully autonomous and free-flying AND fit in with all the requirements of a manned space station - way cheaper to just build a cube sat and have a cheap commercial launch and recovery

Software issues cost Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess his job

Re: Usual mistake

But if they used software engineers then the ABS in each wheel would use a different Javascript framework and the teams working on each would refuse to talk to any of the other wheels because they use a different editor

Aviation body wants views on rocket plans of Virgin Orbit

Re: Marine licence?

Fry: How many atmospheres can this ship withstand?

Farnsworth: Well it's a spaceship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one.

After config error takes down Rogers, it promises to spend billions on reliability

Re: Rookie mistakes?

Not clear they ever had any adults.

They were a cheap cable TV company that added Internet, telephone and mobile as the rules were relaxed.

They never had the telco "a downtime of seconds/year is simply not acceptable" mindset

Re: Oops

Their internet failure, oops oh well no Facebook, also took down telephone for a lot of emergency services - less good

Browsers could face two regimes in Europe as UK law set to diverge from EU

Could they argue that since it's FIFA world soccer, the bribes are for extra realism?

Re: FUD?

>with a view to making improvements to the website

If we track you when you visit any competing websites we can offer you different prices and so make money and use this to pay for improvement, so it's legal right ?

Re: And nothing of value was achieved …

"to drop" implies throwaway

Not when it comes to bombs

Re: Finally

I'm torn between wanting more government and businesses tracking me online in order to protect me from from the children - but I'm British and so want to be tracked by biscuits not American 'cookies' - preferably hobnobs