Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

It takes more clicks to reject their cookies than accept them, so France fines Facebook and Google over €200m

Re: It's not enough

Then how do you pay for the sites?

Obviously all TV should have a menu where I have to select seeing adverts, and it's only fair that the default must be no ads, but there must also be no licence fee.

Northern Ireland aims to break free from BT's 27-year reign with £125m procurement of land registry systems

Re: 27 Year Old System

I hope so, I would expect a database of roll numbers, address, owners, last transfer and a download of a map - ideally not just a low res scan of a pen+ink drawing from 1790

I don't want a Web 3.0 interactive virtual interface on the block chain

Heart attack victim 'saved' by defibrillator delivery drone*

Re: Doctors...

There was a fundraising to put one on just about every street corner here.

I was sceptical, I thought they were only good for certain heart problems but people who watch TV think they save 100% of all heart attacks and the makers were definitely leaning into this while being very careful what they claimed

Re: AED drones were on standby from 0800 to 2200

You also need someone to notice you have had a heart attack to call for the drone - less likely in the middle of the night

At 9 for every 100 workers, robots are rife in Singapore – so we decided to visit them

Re: What is a robot?

Or a food dispenser system roughly the size and shape of a fridge with a glass front where you can select the preferred comestuble by entering a number and have them dropped to the bottom

Payment could even be integrated allowing restocking by a supermarket chain.

Re: Interesting Math

A robot librarian picking physical books from shelves?

Is the next invention a robot arm that moves beads on an abacus to perform calculations faster than a human ?

Hauliers report problems with post-Brexit customs system but HMRC insists it is 'online and working as planned'

Re: Covid isnt causing any shortages

That's why London should have its own protocol and be allowed to stay in the Eu.

It voted remain, the city wants to remain in Europe and it would be quite happy to have a hard border down the middle of the M25

Presumably all it has to do is launch a series of bomb attacks on Westminster and then choose a suitable religious holiday to sign an agreement

then it can have all the special treatment it likes

Re: While avoiding the question of just what the 'planning' actually covered.

>"Hauliers will be presented with screens showing stuff."

I'm assuming they mean words and numbers.

But it would be nice if HMRC had adopted a surrealist interface - your login is a melting clock and your customs documents are painted on the side of a cow wearing boots and a beret

Re: Hmm

Obvious solution is to split N.I into two - creating a new long thin border region nation with a soft border to N.I and a hard border to the R.O.I / Eu

"We Import Two Thirds Of Our Cheese That Is A Disgrace."

So they solved the problem of "importing" = job done

Chip manufacturing equipment vendor ASML reports fire at Berlin factory

Re: Conspiracy?

Elvis did it to cover up that Nessie did the JFK assassination ?

Re: The vagaries of the stock market

It's a closed system, every seller = a buyer. So if it turns out that this is no big deal and it doesn't affect production a bunch of people got a January sale on arguably the world's most important company.

Google fixes bug that stopped some Pixel phones from making 911 calls

Re: Didn't they see the advert?

Or just email them.

Re: Presumably only an American problem?

I know in the USA dialing 112 (the GSM standard emergency number) doesn't necessarily connect to 911 - the 911 service is locally operated so everything varies.

Dialing 911 works in most european countries because the phone system routes it to the emergency services as a safety feature for US visitors

Presumably only an American problem?

If in need of medical services they can just turn to Facebook research?

Or if being forced to use Teams on their phone just pray for the sweet release of death

AMD claims up to 24 hours of laptop battery life with its latest Ryzen 6000 silicon

ARM advantage?

We aren't in the days of a 30,000 transistor ARM2 anymore - a modern ARM is pretty complicated and not very RISCy

Is there really that much difference in TDP between a 5nm TSMC x64 chip and a dozen core Apple ARM?

Or is the Apple M1 battery life mostly from smarter GPU use and better integration design eg shutting down peripherals?

A moment of tension as the James Webb Space Telescope stretches sunshield on way to L2 destination

>"the solar array is approximately 100 meters (yards) wide".

That at least makes sense, if you are only doing one significant figure, meters=yards

The annoying/wrong one is when something says, plant the seeds 1inch (25.4mm) apart

You geeks have inherited the Earth, but what are you going to do with it?

Re: Yes, true. But I'm not a "geek"

On the other hand I can see several nerds from my desk

James Webb Telescope launch delayed again, this time by weather

Re: If it blows up on the pad

Nope, typically 80-90% of the cost is testing

And if you can't build the replacement board using another identical XYZ chip from the same batch from 1995 then you are going to have to retest all the systems that it interacts with.

>So far it's twenty times over budget. How bad would it have been without that redesign?

About 5% of the final cost

You hire a big defense contractor to make a complex unique project, they start a design, do research, hire subcontractors etc.

Then the next year you halve the budget.

The contractor writes off the previous work, hiding the sunk costs in misc additional charges to the new budget, they then start a new cheaper design from scratch.

So far this has cost 2x the original design budget with nothing to show for it.

Then throw in a requirement that it must use certain national champions - and throw out some partners.

Then invite new partners to help with the budget, redesign to accommodate them.

Repeat these steps 5x

Online retailers delaying sales of Raspberry Pi 4 model until 2023, thanks to a few good chips getting scarce

Re: Hmmm - Pis were being built in Wales

The chips are fabbed in Taiwan, but where do the wafers come from ?

Re: all eggs, one basket

If it wasn't China it would be something else

In the Kobe earthquake the world discovered that all the black plastic that coated chips used a chemical made by one Japanese chemical company - guess where it exported from ?

Then floods in Thailand wiped out the world's supply of spinning rust for 2 years.

It's not just where you make your product, it's where the people that make the products that go into the products that make the products that you use to make your product....

If anyone feels like worrying, the crucibles that melt the Silicon boules that are used for all chip wafers are all made from Quartz from a single mine.

Shed certified electronics are always expensive

I think WHSmiths still have storeroom full of Acorn Electrons

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

And then store your entire civilization as a mark on a stick - there's an SF story about it

Police National Computer not pwned by Clop ransomware crims, insists Home Office

No data was obtained by hackers

If you want access to police data you have to buy it from a copper like any other journalist ( unless you're a funny handshake pal)

Dutch nuclear authority bans anti-5G pendants that could hurt their owners via – you guessed it – radiation

Re: Ha Ha Ha

And protects against werewolves

Re: To save us all.. we could just..

Didn't Sandy Heath get caught in op Yewtree?

Re: Source of radiation

But Am241 an Alpha emitter and these claim to emit negative ions to counter 5G.

Does that mean they might not even work ?

Re: Rocky atoll for sale

>available 24/7/365.

On what planet ?

Re: DO NOT DO THIS!

>and your tummy will literally explode. That would probably kill you.

And yet you can't produce any double-blind clinical trials proving this

US distrust of Huawei linked in part to malicious software update in 2012

So they don't use log4j then ?

"It is fanciful to suggest that 'Huawei's software updates can push whatever code they want into those machines, whenever they want, without anyone knowing.' It does not work that way."

RAF shoots down 'terrorist drone' over US-owned special ops base in Syria

Re: Heat?

Does it say it hit it? Or does it say they fired a missile and the drone subsequently didn't reach the target.

Re: Technically fantastic but...

>From a technical point of view, hitting a "small" drone (

But knocking a $50 Aliexpress drone out of the sky with the wake of a $200K missile missing it - isn't. Assuming the drone ever existed and wasn't just phoned in by somebody on Twitter

Confirmed: James Webb Space Telescope team plans launch for this Xmas Eve after data cable fix

Re: The first rule of government spending

Ironically a copy could cost much more.

This thing was built by a bunch of defense contractors over a decade, in plants that may have been shut down, by people who have left/retired, with components that are no longer made, with subcontractors that have gone out of business/been sold.

If you want to make an equivalent telescope, it's not too hard. If you want to make a precise copy, where you use this particular memory module from 1999 because it passed radiation tests and this type of kapton tape from this supplier is good for 10 years in vacuum - then it gets really hard.

It's why military aircraft projects tend to be very expensive, you build an order of x000 airframes and all the spares they are going to need for 30-40 years, because starting up a line to make a replacement PCB for 1980s fighter is $$$$$$

One colleague of mine was trying to get samples some particular astronomical emulsion - which Kodak stopped making because it contained Buffalo gelatin which was banned by BSE regulations. The Keck telescope, built in the 90s, has an entire team building replacements for 80/90s era control hardware.

You mean triangular,?

Newly discovered millipede earns its name by being the first to walk on one thousand legs

Re: millipede

Surely a kibo-pede it has 1000 legs not 1024

As CISA tells US govt agencies to squash Log4j bug by Dec 24, fingers start pointing at China, Iran, others

Re: Them and everyone else

I'm a little out of the loop - my Vidiscreen has been broken.

Is that Turkey, our staunch NATO ally in the war against the Kurds who are responsible for maintaining all our new F35s?

Or have we always been at war with Eurasia ?

You managed to generate all the PowerPoints necessary to launch a cross-department liaison office with a mandate to discuss ways formulating a policy to respond to this - in only one day ?

We have barely gathered all the logo images of the stakeholders for the title page

National Cyber Strategy will lead to BritChip for mobile devices by 2025, claims UK.gov

But the chips wont be available to foreigners and so those naughty people wont be able to program any exploits for British computers

But they have a quantum national cyber strategy - which loses coherence as soon as anyone looks at it

Re: BritChip?

Because it will have hardware support for feet and inches and the new post-Brexit global Britain currency.

Once the US comes to its sensitive and switches to Pound-Shilling-Pence to go along with its other patriotic measurements, the chip will be a great success

SMACKDOWN! Reddit hires wrestling's investor relations head to helm IPO

Re: Confidentially filing an S-1 form to go public

It's the first step, it allows regulators to raise any objections before you publish the full S1 with all your financial information

Google Chrome's upcoming crackdown on ad-blockers and other extensions still really sucks, EFF laments

Re: Fork it and wave goodbye

Because Google will change as much of the code as possible to make this difficult.

Chromium can back port the fixes but it then needs a mass of programmers to keep up with Google.

Re: Never mind ads, Javascript is the problem

And those are (more) reasonable.

If I watch F1 I don't mind the sponsors names on the cars. I don't mind ad images embedded in a magazine article, chosen by the magazine with some idea of their brand having some responsibility

I object to 1000s of pop-ups, random ads for stuff I'm not interested in, dating ads at work, autoplay video etc. that's why I have piHole and Brave

When product names go bad: Microsoft's Raymond Chen on the cringe behind WinCE

And even older to know that the joke originated with HAL

Re: WTF

There was a debugger/in-circuit emulator back in the day called, Neuromancer inspired, BlackICE

I always wondered what it did to you if you made a mistake

Re: I swear it was unintentional...

NASA had a spaceplane project for the ISS called Crew Return Vehicle - CRV. During the prototype phase this would have to have Experimental (X) appended, as per Nasa regulations

Somebody decide that CRV-X was too close to lady parts and the projected had to be hurriedly renamed.

UK's antitrust watchdog is very angry and has written a letter telling Apple and Google how angry it is with them

Re: Ironic?

Also back in those days we (or at least Jobs) thought of a phone as principally a phone.

Imagine if some buggy Microsoft app on an iPhone caused it to drop a call, or make the phone unable to call 911? That would be the end of the market - a phone that couldn't make calls would be a disaster, rather than a bootnote story on el'reg

Study says SEC 10-K not fit for purpose when it comes to Big Tech, and the companies are using that to their advantage

Re: 10Ks are uninformative

Or in a joke dating back to the 1920s

Two economists walking down a road see a bug on a leaf.

1st economist says, I'll give you a $100 to eat that bug, the 2nd economist does so.

He then sees another bug and says to the first economist, I'll pay YOU $100 to eat that bug.

The 1st economist replies, but then we will both have eaten a bug and neither of us will be better off.

Ah, says the 2nd but we will have contributed $200 to the economy.