Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Samsung releases pair of jeans that can't do anything except cover your legs and hold a Galaxy Z Flip 3

Re: "Who needs big pockets?"

We can't let women's jeans have pockets for the safety of the universe.

Have you seen how much stuff they keep in their bags?

Imagine if they had jeans with 5 pockets - it would result in a blackhole consuming the Earth.

I think Samsung phones have the included vape by default

Re: Sony Walkman

Little known fact, the poacher's pocket on a Barbour jacket was created to take Babbage's portable analytical engine - which was never launched

Re: Pocket Phrendly Phablets?

>iPhone XR, 20 quid black jeans from Asda

Maybe for you hipster metropolitan-elite media types at el'reg

With your brand label clothes and fancy coffee

What a Mesh: Microsoft puts Office in the Loop, adds mixed reality tech to Teams

Or just being able to have multiple instances of teams open at once.

Or even be able to view 2 documents in teams at the same time.

Re: This reminds me of Second Life

I'm happy with the metaverse at work - so long as I'm allowed a Katana and can use it in business meetings

Re: Green

It's ok, corporate standard Powerpoint templates now have a dark background

Re: Shouldn't Teams WORK before adding 3D crap?

But then how would you be distracted from its fundamental design flaws if it wasn't for the superficial design flaws

Sheffield University scales back student system after Oracle integration stumbles

How much?

Unless Sheffield has got a lot bigger it can't have more than 30,000 students - so that's a grand per database entry.

They are aware you don't need a separate computer for each record?

CyberUp presents four principles to keep security researchers out of jail for good-faith probing

Because the permission probably comes with a requirement not to tell anyone.

And 'owner' gets complicated these days, what if you find a flaw in a clients. oracle install on AWS, can Amazon and Oracle still sue you?

Remember the 'guy in a jetpack' seen flying close to passenger jets? Probably just balloons, says FBI

Re: It was “Witchie-poo” of the West, astride her “Vroom Broom”

And the police arrested somebody 100mi away for owning a Tim Burton dvd

Of course we've tried turning it off and on again: Yeah, Hubble telescope still not working

Re: Dragon?

No I'm saying that if you want a 2.4m class visible scope in a leo (and it's not clear why you would) you get a commercial outfit to build a bunch of them with modern instruments and launch them for cheap on a SpaceX flight

You don't try and limp an ancient maintenance nightmare in a poor orbit along for another few years

Re: Dragon?

By which logic, SpaceX should be refurbishing Space Shuttles instead of building Starship

Re: I'm going to scream and scream and scream

In space, nobody can hear you

Re: Hope

The starlink satelites are also flimsy and have large surface area of solar panels and antennae

Hubble is a school bus with a block of concrete in one end, it's going to come down largely one piece and make a hole.

Fortunately nobody with any sort of retaliatory capability lives in the tropics.

Re: Dragon?

But pointless compared to just launching a better telescope

Re: Not worth it ...

But it's government kit, so the paperwork to dispose of it must weigh more than the kit

Re: Hope

Probably nearer 20years

Unfortunately it's orbit was at the limit of shuttle so can only hit the tip of Florida ( or foreigners)

Re: Not worth it ...

Or the insurance damage.

Imagine the paperwork for disposing of an entire Saturn V, a service module, a Lunar lander etc

Initial here, here and here.

Now where's the rest of it ?

Trojan Source attack: Code that says one thing to humans tells your compiler something very different, warn academics

Re: C/P from PDFs can be interesting...

So your solution to the space/tab war is to introduce a em-space/en-space war?

Re: Wontfix

Real developers use emacs butterfly mode

Re: Old skool

You can't enter these characters on a Fortran punched card so I don't see how this is a problem

Latest Loongson chip is another step in China's long road to semiconductor freedom

Definitely the CCP. All day the Chinese govt tracks what I read and watch, monitors what I buy online and adjusts prices to make me spend more. They also show political messages to my fellow voters to influence the choice of govt.

If only chairman Pooh wasn't controlling all my internet things would be a lot saner here.

FCC officially opens its $1.9bn purse to reimburse those ripping out and replacing Huawei, ZTE kit

Re: FCC contribution to global warming

Not just the chips though, what about the staff?

Who is making sure that no sneaky foreigners or Orientals are working in our telecommunications system?

Surely vital computer systems should only be built and operated by straight righteous God fearing Christians who listen to country music - like they used to be.

Having made £1bn in gross savings well ahead of March 2023 deadline, more cuts could be on BT's agenda

Re: Management Idiocy in full effect

>debts that are accumulating interest quicker than property prices are increasing

Who are you borrowing from? Is their middle name "Razors" ?

Twitter's algos favour tweets from conservatives over liberals because they generate more outrage online – study

But there have never been any societal problems caused by lies or political bias in print media

Re: "the social media platform’s ML Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META)"

Since Google renamed itself I haven't been able to talk about my ox-house

Google's 'Be Evil' business transformation is complete: Time for the end game

Re: Without journalism, you get guaranteed corruption

> It is astonishingly clear that several newspapers are clearly linked to political owners

Really? What was the clue, hurrah for the black shirts?

Pack your bags – we may have found the first planet outside of our galaxy

Dot - wait 70 years - Dot - wait 70 years....

Re: "Pack your bags"

Haven't we got enough problems to solve in our own Galaxy before conquering others ?

Re: Let's move there!

I think x-ray binary is synonymous with the phrase "bad neighbourhood"

Re: What are the chances...

TLDR 70years isn't very long when it comes to Galaxies

UK science suffers as lawmakers continue to dither over Brexit negotiations

Re: British institutions are left high and dry while science marches on without them

So long as they aren't experts...

The really hilarious thing is that, as Poland just proved, they could have stayed in the Eu and just ignored it.

Re: British institutions are left high and dry while science marches on without them

And the real point isn't the money - each country gets back in contracts roughly what it puts in (minus a bunch of waste and overhead) so it's really just an expensive/inefficient way for each country to fund it's own high tech industry.

What it's really losing is the freedom to work together.

The UK remains part of CERN (and sort-of part of ESA) but instead of scientists and their families being free to live work around CERN they will now presumably have a Swiss visa to visit the facility for a limited time and a French residency visa

Re: Science

But developing a vaccine is a "social issue", these Scientists obviously want people to be able to get together safely and be social - therefore they must be socialists

It's much better for everybody to stay isolated in their bunkers mom's basement and not go out (except to rallies and football/hockey games)

European Commission sticks 'in-depth' antitrust probe into Nvidia-Arm merger plan

No this is more like Microsoft buying Intel and then deciding that Intel chips would only be sold running Windows.

Companies don't necessarily send IP to ARM but they are sharing IP.

Hey ARM sales guy - we are planning to develop a line of AI+GPU cards using AMR, they will have X power and we will ship Y units starting in Z. Now imagine the same conversation if the ARM sales guy has an nvidia.com email ?

TSMC are deeply involved in the design of the chips, it's an inherent part of high-end fab.

It's why Samsung have a much more restricted fab business, you buy pre-existing cores from Samsung but nobody is going to trust them with anything that might be worth stealing.

But Intel as a fab for hire. Like AMD / Nvidia / anybody-Chinese is going to hand over it's designs to an American "National Champion" !

'We will not rest until the periodic table is exhausted' says Intel CEO on quest to keep Moore's Law alive

Re: "two advanced chip factories in Arizona"

Arizona is the intersection of plenty of space, reasonably nice towns, relatively sane politics, sensible weather and geological stability

31-year-old piece of hardware not working very well: Hubble telescope back in safe mode over 'synchronization issues'

Re: "telescopes that have abilities which can not be met on ground."

JWST or Herschel have to be in space - but they don't all have to be $20Bn 20 year programs.

That's the big thing that SpaceX is changing.

When you had a once/decade chance of $1+Bn Shuttle launch you had to make sure that your payload would work, which meant every last resistor had to be space-grade, which meant it cost $$$ and had to be a 20 years obsolete 'proven' design.

So any mission cost a minimum of $10Bn and took 10-20years, at which point you might as well also build an entire institute around it. And that has to have a director and staff and has to be funded for 10-20years. And the payload needs to be manually operated , so that you have lots of staff because that adds to the budget and prestige of the institute which further ensures its funding.

With a $50M launch available every day the economics of flying 10-20 space telescopes, built on a production line for $100M each with new instruments, operated by universities - even if a % of them fail.

Re: JWST is not a new HST

It was to have a "turbo-bump" special fairing

Hubble was vastly more expensive and seriously scientifically constrained to make it Shuttle compatible.

The Shuttle was massively more expensive and fatally less safe to meet USAF requirements.

But neither of them would have been funded without these limitations.

Each service mission cost more than the VLT - would you rather have had 20+ 8m telescopes on the ground + ALMA + SKA

Re: JWST is not a new HST

So long as it isn't in an aerosol can we are happy to receive foreign cheese aid !

Re: It’s going to L2?

This is an IR telescope it it's going to spend all its time pointing as far away from the Earth and Sun as possible.

L2 isn't mathematically stable but JWST doesn't have to remain precisely on station and there isn't much else for it to drift into so precise station keeping isn't critical.

To reduce costs you would expect this to be relatively autonomous, observations are planned a year in advance to optmise movements and it should have a lot more on-board storage and processing than HST - so constant comms shouldn't be necessary

Re: As well as the James Webb

Yes, although a 2.4m mirror isn't the main cost factor and arguably you would rather have a modern lightweight mirror rather than a 70s era one. But it's good "swords into ploughshares" PR

I'm guessing that the paperwork in transferring the asset, the testing, and some computer controlled re-polishing costs more and takes longer than making a new one - but that might be my experience of dealing with NASA.

Re: JWST is not a new HST

It's history is even more perverse than that. It was originally (late 90s) a relatively cheap 6.5m lightweight monolithic mirror launched by an Ariane5, at the same unserviceable orbit.

Then 9/11 happened and the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys declined an invitation to take part in Vietnam-II Desert Edition and so it had to be launched on a Freedom Rocket = hence the insane complicated folding design.

As the design got more insanely complicated the costs went up and so it was cancelled in every round, but so much money and prestige was attached to it that it had to be reinstated. But each hold adds time and costs because it's built by a defense company that has other commercial priorities. Which led to more calls for a cancelation, which added more holds and more costs.

Ultimately it got so expensive that NASA needed a foreign partner, who would also chip in a free launch - on the CESM Ariane5.

Re: "servicing the HST is no longer viable"...

>That mission (and every servicing mission since) has cost more than it would have cost to build a HST Mk2/3/4/5 and launch it into orbit.

It was also estimated that extra costs to make HST a "man rated" mission to allow servicing + the cost of storage after the first Shuttle incident = 3x the cost of building a HST

Non-profit's IT manager accused of embezzling $400k by buying gear, services from his own fake companies

Re: Nonprofit a bit shady?

It's usually easier to rip off non-profits, especially from the inside.

It's not like they are going to have armies of accountants and compliance officers watching everyone

Online harms don’t need dangerous legislation, they need a spot of naval action

Although that was a deliberate plan by the Allies to get Germany operating and build up a new army to fight the USSR.

If you dealt with all the people who had opposed the previous lot, and were still alive, you would have to run a country with 2 hidden communists and a cat.