Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Linux Foundation celebrates 30 years of Torvalds' kernel with a dry T-shirt contest

And what's wrong with a wet t-shirt? Mine normally has wet coffee on it at some point

The James Webb Space Telescope, a project dating back to the late 1900s, may launch this very century

Re: To be fair

And to protect it from lost aircraft

Re: Well

6.5M isn't huge anymore.

Colleagues are building a telescope from 7 x 8.4m mirrors.

Even more incredible these are off-axis 8.4M parabolas (you need to be an optics nerd to appreciate how insanely hard this is)

It was originally planned for a cheap telescope launched on Ariane 5

Then switched to a US launcher, presumably a Delta, for politics.

This required the complex and expensive folding mirror.

This took so long and cost so much it now needs to be launched on an Ariane 5

Re: Please Please Please go to (latest) plan.

Foveon of course is just what a color film does.

There are direct color array detectors. Where each pixel measures the energy (ie wavelength) of the incoming photon directly. Unfortunately they generally need to be cooled to a few Kelvin and so are inconvenient in a cell phone.

UK competition watchdog sniffing around Motorola profits after delay to replace company's Airwave service

Re: Well if you'd specified a valid replacement

It would be like allowing a bus company to get a train franchise and then agree to paying separately for any rail replacement bus service

Re: Well if you'd specified a valid replacement

I think the issue they are upset about is more:

You have an expensive system you are paying Company A for and so you get Company B to build a replacement.

Company A immediately buys Company B and somehow the system never materializes, meanwhile Company A ups its fees for supporting the old system.

Intel's Foveros tech hits a speedbump as Lakefield gets canned – one year after launch

Re: 10nm ?

Intel 10nm == TSMC 7nm

Except Intel 10nm never really worked and TSMC is now on 5, heading for 3

Florida Man sues Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for account ban

>Make every story you have to write about the individual start with - Florida man …

Shouldn't be too hard to make a chrome plugin that replaces the "T" word with "Florida Man"

Re: Legal Scholars?

Surely a government employee should be free to say whatever they want, irrespective of "facts" ?

And yet this simple first amendment stance got me fired as an air traffic controller

You mean Florida man "sues" people all the time

Re: The oxygen of publicity

In the words of the late great Linda smith:

"I don't really like you saying his name, because it gives him the oxygen of publicity and I'm not happy with him having the oxygen of oxygen."

IBM insiders say CEO Arvind Krishna downplayed impact of email troubles, asked for a week to sort things out

Re: A week long email disruption

Makes you wonder if it's worth the costs of running an email system at all?

If the cost is more than $520K it would presumably be cheaper to just turn it off and accept the $10k/week losses

Jackie 'You have no authority here' Weaver: We need more 50-somethings in UK tech

Re: It is not skills..

>Female, queer, uses emacs. Anybody got a non-white person (pref bi or gay to make up for me only being bi) who wants to do a day a week?

That sounds like an amazingly specific online dating request.

May we wish you the best of luck on your romantic quest

Re: It is not skills..

I don't want to appear prejudiced but I don't think AWK should be acceptable behavior in public - won't somebody think of the children ?

Re: Ages of IT specialists

>I wonder who the 50 year old members are.

The grand-children of the previous committee.

Re: Black, Indigenous, People of Colour

> So I suppose BIPOC means "nearly everybody".

Except those bloody Anglo-Saxons and Normans

It's a perfect system - all us greybeards understand the maths and physics behind the problem we are working on and the millennials know about docker, build systems and package managers.

The maths and physics haven't changed much since Legendre wor a lad but the toy technologies change every 3 years - so we just replace the kiddies with each new fashion.

Re: Ages of IT specialists

The MCC looked around the committee room and discovered that women don't exist and so there is no reason to consider admitting them

Re: Electronics sector is the polar opposite.

>Nope no one is on anything as low as £30K. Are these for new grad positions? Or are you looking at jobs outside of the US/Europe?

Or just outside London

Re: It is not skills..

>Generally, the rule is that there's no obligation to fill the quota, but if you don't want to, you pay more taxes

There is no obligation to follow the law, but if you don't want to you pay more fines

Re: It is not skills..

>Also, although I am gay, I do get confused with all the letters after "LGBT" and what they mean.

Dear facist please report to your nearest re-education workshop for re-programming.

I think we will have training updates on new letters as often as we have mandatory GDPR compliance

Re: It is not skills..

And ensure the dept is 51% women, 15% non-white, 10% gay and 1% people-who-use-emacs

After 15 years and $500m, the US Navy decides it doesn't need shipboard railguns after all

Re: A cunning plan

>The Cold War between the US and USSR was essentially won by outspending the other side.

One was a state where all government spending was directed at increasingly unaffordable and ineffective military programs to the detriment of the standard of living of their citizens.

And the other collapsed

Re: It’s not 15 years

I can't really see the advantages of this for battleship guns - other than there is no other way that the Navy is going to get the DoD to pay for a new battleship after Pearl Harbor

For a close in defense system - ability to put a lot of metal between you and an incoming unwanted gift basket very very quickly, and the ability to not run out of ammunition this might be a good idea.

Re: It’s not 15 years

>but it's hard to compete with the energy density and "recharge speed" of chemical energy storage (a.k.a. chemical propellants).

But it is very easy to run out of 16inch shells, and Amazon delivery takes forever to Jutland. You can store a lot more steel ball bearings.

There is also the advantage that you don't have a big room full of explosive in the middle of your boat which can be an issue if you come up against a boat full of particularly belligerent Germans.

Re: Further cunning plans

The odd thing about defence stories is that, by contrast, amanfromMars makes sense

A cunning plan

I wonder how many of these programs are to trick the opposition into wasting more money trying to catch up with your development ?

Chinese chip designers hope to topple Arm's Cortex-A76 with XiangShan RISC-V design

>At who and on what basis?

It's the C21.

ARM could sue for having rounded corners on a chip package or having a name made of an UPPER CASE acronym

In the early 80s the USA blocked the import of Japanese LCD screens to protect the US manufacturers of this vital defence component.

So Sharp partnered with Toshiba to make laptops themselves to have a market for their screens - worked out rather well for them.

Latest patches show Rust for Linux project making great strides towards the kernel

Re: Another language?

>It makes NO sense to change the programming language of the Linux kernel.

It makes no sense that the object files linked in the kernel should care what language they were original written in.

Re: Next to learn

The GNU Hurd kernel is still Perl though?

GitHub Copilot auto-coder snags emerge, from seemingly spilled secrets to bad code, but some love it

The final stage

Copying code from Stackoverflow, as a Service by AI

DARPA nails cash to project 'FENCE' — a smart camera that only sends pics when pixels change

This is different though, it describes the content of each transmitted pixel in a separate XML file which also lists all the security classifications

For backwards compatibility the XML file is also in EBCDIC

PPE, Part II: UK health department takes second stab at e-commerce system for personal protective equipment

Re: I'm impossibly dense

So what's in it for me (a poor MP trying to survive on precarious cabinet minister salary) in selecting it ?

Taikonauts complete seven-hour spacewalk, the first for China since 2008

Re: Well done!

>Who stole the jet engine from us again?

The Germans ?

Re: Well done

>We shouldn't be giving a platform to countries with not exactly great human rights track record.

You might want to look at the history of the USA space program

Re: Well done!

>never realised space had to demonstrate a profit back then.

That's what's been holding it back - imagine how aircraft would be if only the US govt had been involved in their development.

We would be attempting to repeat the first crossing of the Atlantic with a new expensive disposable aeroplane

Re: Well done

While Apollo astronauts were chosen in a free capitalist manner by whoever bid the highest

Arm chief hits out at 'ill-informed speculation' over proposed Nvidia buyout

Re: Different way

Then it could be as great as INMOS

Things that needn't be said: Don't plonk a massive Starlink dish on the hood of your car

Re: Spaced-GenX?

> I can understand if it was mounted on the roof

Well that would be closer to the satellite

Richard Branson plans to trump Jeff Bezos by 9 days in billionaires' space race

Re: Low hanging fruit

Grocers?

Amazon buy wholefoods

The virgin is still an air launched missile once it gets dropped form the carrier

In a way it's riskier, you are relying on the carrier aircraft not having a bad day as well as the rocket gizmo working.

That's one of the issues the Pegasus system had

Re: Low hanging fruit

Although Yuri did actually orbit and re-enter, not just zoom up 100km and fall back down.

Amazing when you think we went from Wright Brothers to Earth orbit in <60years and in another 60years we have gone from Sputnik to grocers being able to not really get to space

Re: Low hanging fruit

And managing it only 60years after a hero of the Soviet union did it first

Not for children: Audacity fans drop the f-bomb after privacy agreement changes

Re: Given the number of projects that are upsetting users...

I wonder if IBM have already patented: making software T&C so bad that people setup an alternative ?

Boss, since we shutdown centos people are getting mad at us and are making an alternative. Lawyers eye's light up

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

Re: Calling upon a higher power

These are my fingers, eat them in memory of me (fried in breadcrumbs).

Ex-boss of UK's Competition and Markets Authority asks: How can it tackle Big Tech when no one knows what the CMA is?

Re: Jurisdiction

>If you're trading in the UK, you're legally required to form a company of some description.

Really ? I bought a load of stuff from china and I don't think Store12345 on aliexpress have a major UK subsidiary.

Remember Google don't trade in the UK, they merely advertise - all their sales happen in Dublin.

This always-on culture we're in is awful. How do we stop it? Oh, sorry, hold on – just had another notification

Re: Maximum weekly working hours

Yes that's exactly the point - the boss who spends a minute to call you and thinks that it's no big deal because it's only a minute and forget about the hour you spend fixing the problem