Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Good news: Boffins have finally built room-temperature superconductors. Bad news: You'll need a laser, a diamond anvil, and a lot of pressure

Neutron star cores are superconductors even at a temperature of a few billion degrees (temperature defn get a bit squirly in a neutron star core) however the pressure is also a little extreme

Re: Did I miss it..

Nope its only magic while being pressed.

And we don't know what its limit magnetic field is

And it's probably really hard to make into long wires

And it probably wouldn't have the right pinch point properties to self-recover from a quench

Temperature isn't the hardest thing about superconductors. If you had all the other properties right then even liquid nitrogen "high temperature" superconductors would be practical.

Elizabeth Holmes' plan to avoid her Theranos fraud trial worked out about as well as her useless blood-testing machines

Re: Sympathy with investors is limited

There is a difference though between being over-ambitious and a down-right con.

If in 1976 I tried to get you to invest in a circuit board that you could type things into and it would run programs and produce results you might be sceptical that this PC thing would ever catch on or that the market would justify the cost.

If it turns out that microprocessors don't exist and there is a hidden wire to a teletype in another room where a team of people are working out the sums on paper and typing the answers = that's a con.

Re: She's got skills. Have to admit.

Will that become the standard way to avoid a fraud prosecution ? Become president.

Re: Technology

That's not unreasonable, it's just an engineering problem = you raise money to hire people to solve it.

It's like saying building the infrastructure to make a car to run on batteries is too much for the two guys that started Tesla and so it was a scam.

What the experts did say is that blood isn't perfectly mixed so taking a 0.1ml sample to reliably test for all the diseases they claimed wasn't going to work - because that 0.1ml might contain no markers for disease X even if you have it.

I can invent a much more sensitive soil test for a mineral, but if I then claim that I can find gold anywhere in the world from a single shovel full of my back garden - it's likely a con.

UK's Cheshire Police tenders for whole new ERP system after Oracle Fusion went live with 'significant deficiency'

Re: Enterprise Resource Planning

>For a moment I thought you were referring to two US Presidents.

That was a short running American TV show.

Two ex-presidents, fight crime. One wants to build houses for the poor disadvantageous criminals from broken homes but the other one always calls in an air strike by the end of the show.

Enterprise Resource Planning

Reagan and Carter never needed one of them.

Just a jag, a few transits and some boys in blue with pick-axe handles

Virginia voter registration website falls over hours before deadline. The Russians? No, a broken fiber line

Re: Britain solved this 'tech problem'

You sign a bit of paper to say it's really you and the other one wasn't and you get a provisional ballot. If the vote came down to you deciding then it probably gets a bit more complicated

Re: Britain solved this 'tech problem'

The problem with the British system is that anybody is allowed to vote.

By adding extra security measures, like having mandatory voter registration in Latin at the top of a mountain accessible only by Range Rover one can ensure that the peasants who watch Mrs Browns Boys don't interfere with the electoral process

Contract to run .eu domain-name registry is up for grabs as Brussels tries to avoid a .co-style debacle

Except if you do it for a business that generates almost no revenue (on the scale of internet companies) and has increasingly complex bureaucratic requirements, you end up with one incumbent who has the past experience to tick all the boxes and the 'contacts' in the bidding process - and they get to charge what they want.

See every govt IT deal

Re: "a kind of punishment on the UK government"

In response we are banning them from using English - that'll teach the blighters.

To be slightly more serious. People who us .eu are still paying the "golf club" to use it and are likely to be pro-eu. This is rather like the WHO saying: "if the US government leaves we aren't going to accept any donations in US $"

UK govt advert encouraging re-skilling for cyber jobs implodes spectacularly

Re: Yeah

> so they'd probably be pretty handy at getting heavy servers into the top of a rack.

Most server rooms seem to have been designed assuming that the average sysadmin is about 6" deep and can lift their legs over their head

Re: You mean "faux outrage"?

>The art and entertainment sector makes up a significant part of the economy

Does it? When they claimed here that it was some x% of the local economy - they were including peoples cable TV bills as part of the local "arts economy"

Re: Needs more "balance"

Slackware will boot on it. Babbage did a patch

India to build home-grown supercomputers, from the motherboards up

Re: Two Ways

And made in an Indian Fab, with Indian designed mask-steppers using Indian glass lens, mined from Indian minerals ...etc

Programmed with an Indian operating system using Indian languages?

There is a point where developing a national capability goes down a rabbit hole of political pointlessness.

IBM Cloud catches up to AWS and Azure – at least for refunds after major availability FAILs

It only counts downtime during 9-5, obviously you can't expect the computer to work all night

Arm has 11 months to hire 490 UK techies. Good thing there isn't a pandemic on. Or, say, Brexit

At which point TSMC stop fabbing any parts for China manufacturers and the People's Republic are left making phones by hand carving 40um CMOS under a magnifying glass

Do China get a say?

A Japanese hedge fund with Saudi money bails out by selling to a US company.

Unless trump gets confused by the Chinese looking guy who does Fonzie impressions

What's that, Lt Lassie? Three terrorists have fallen down a well? Strap on these AR goggles and we'll find 'em

In another experiment

Marines have been fitted with AR goggles allowing highly trained border collies to control them from a safe position.

They run around the battlefield happily carrying heavy loads and are easily trained by offering them treats such as crayons - said the lead collie

IT Marie Kondo asks: Does this noisy PC spark joy? Alas, no. So under the desk it goes

Re: Location location location

"ungents" = gentlemen's unguents ?

Re: cold feet warm computer.

During a few years in sunny climes I had an office that was freezing.

As in - I'm wearing a hoody at my desk and there are palm trees outside my window - freezing.

I complained and was fobbed off with, "you Brits have probably never seen Air Conditioning before".

Tried blocking the outlet vents and fiddling with the thermostat - risky activity with university facilities people.

Later heard that my replacement had also complained and discovered all the AC airflow valves had been put in the wrong way round. the more the AC tried to warm the room the colder it got.

From the Department of WCGW: An app-controlled polycarbonate lock with no manual override/physical key

Re: USB devices

Presumably it took 3 goes to get it the right way round?

It's in their DNA: Nobel Prize in chemistry goes to pioneers of the CRISPR gene-editing tool

A plug for a much neglected book The Evolution Man: Or How I Ate My Father

Hard to find, but worth it

Re: Amazing work.

>moronic, botox infested, silicon deformed bimbo

Presumably with CRISPR we could manufacture these directly? Homo-Kardashian ?

Wisepay 'outage' is actually the school meal payments biz trying to stop an intruder from stealing customer card details

Re: "a URL manipulation attempt"

But academies are above average - so if we make all schools academies then all will be above average.

Brought to you from the dept of: "cabinet members aren't idiots so if we put Chris Grayling in the cabinet he will cease to be an idiot"

And it means that cyber bulliesin North Korea can steal your lunch money

Disgraced cop, 55, spared prison term after admitting he abused police systems to snoop on his girlfriend's ex

Re: I thought this was SOP for police, fire service, ambulance, council etc etc

I thought you got a junior WPC to press the keys for you because you didn't know how to work it - then claim you didn't "access the computer"

But that's only for senior ranks

It really is your last chance to see anything at Cineworld for quite some time, and this big-screen bork speaks volumes

Re: Cinemas in their current form are an artefact of the limited availability of reels of film

>But the flip side of course is that cinema's in general have been ripping people off for decades.

The cinema gets almost none of that ticket price.

The opening weekend ( which actually means a week) ALL of the ticket price goes to the studio

In subsequent weeks the proportion going to the screen increases.

But the profit is entirely made on snacks/drinks and booking fees.

FFS FSF, you're 35 already? Hands up if you just sprouted a gray hair or felt a craving for a Werthers Original on reading that. Happy birthday, folks

Re: Stallman's absence

IANAL but the main purpose of GPL3 isn't to prevent blobs - it was to prevent somebody taking opensource code and using it in a product but locking it in such a way that you couldn't make changes.

On the other point I agree that there should be MIT/BSD alongside GPL. Some important libraries I work on are popular because they aren't GPL and so can be used without getting corporate lawyers in a state.

But I can see the point of having a "true believer" pushing for extreme freedom - if only to drag the others along. I suspect if all open source was BSD/MIT there would be a lot of internal corporate forks and very little sharing.

Excel Hell: It's not just blame for pandemic pandemonium being spread between the sheets

Re: Alternative?

Excel is the new access!

Re: Alternative?

AWK obviously - the answer to a text processing problem is always AWK

Re: Relax...

>The non programmer should ask a programmer when they need data crunching done

Yes, cos the intern at the NHS in charge of getting data emailed from 17 incompatible NHS trusts into one report is "empowered" (sorry) to call up Crapita and demand a custom applications

Re: Relax...

> almost all the actual uses of Excel in practice are as a simple spreadsheet

Almost all actual uses of Excel are as an ETL (extract-transform-load) tool.

ie to download information from one app, reformat/reorganise it and send it to some other app - and it's extraordinarily bad at this - in ways that most users don't know.

Hence all the genes misclassified as dates, dropped initial zeros in phone numbers, bad handling of embedded commas etc

Meet the new aviation insecurity, same as the old aviation insecurity: Next-gen ACAS X just as vulnerable to spoofing as its predecessor

Re: real weaknesses of ACAS

There was a crash where one crew obeyed the ACAS and the other obeyed ATC. This has now been settled = if you get close enough for ACAS then ATC has screwed up so ignore them.

One concern is that the cybersecurity requirements get to be too strict. You don't want to ignore a jet coming straight at you because their certificate expired at midnight.

Wind and quite a bit of fog shroud Boris Johnson's energy vision for the UK

Great opportunity

Pay £160m for some Siemens turbines = making a £160m investment in green tech.

Load them onto a ship in Belfast, making a £160m investment in NI and a £160m investment in repurposing old shipyards.

Then install them in the Irish sea making a £160m investment near a former industrial area and brining the power ashore in cumbria making an investment in the rural North West.

Delivering £160m of green power.

So for only £160m you get £bn of green!

China takes TikTok-WeChat ding-dong to World Trade Organization, accuses US, India of breaking global rules

Re: doesn't China already ban a lot of US apps?

That's the difference.

The USA isn't banning it - it's banning it unless it's sold cheap to a friend of his.

Germany bans swastika flags, it doesn't force the Chinese Swastika flag company to pay a commission to a CDU donor

Hasta la vista, Ola: TfL bans ridesharing startup, claiming unlicensed drivers picked up passengers

Re: introduction to British life that only a black-cabby can provide

I thought many black-cabbies (as opposed to 'black' cabbies) were in favour of free trips home for Indians ?

But does this Indian company offer the same introduction to British life that only a black-cabby can provide ?

IBM manager had to make one person redundant from choice of two, still bungled it and got firm done for unfair dismissal

Re: And so the other guy

But then he/she/it would argue that they were made redundant because of the other guys lawsuit and not because of their own performance - and so they go to court as well.

Resulting in IBM deliberately hiring a new person specifically to be made redundant.

Re: I think that I might have also worked for that company

>do you want the flight control system written by exactly the 'correct' ethnic diversity of people, or the best people

Well by the cheapest veteran-owned business in the city giving the biggest tax breaks in the state whose senator is going to support buying our new fighter

And so the other guy

Got made redundant instead?

Big IQ play from IT outsourcer: Can't create batch files if you can't save files. Of any kind

Re: Classic techie mistake

Wasn't this a Feynman story?

The safes at Los Alamos were ridiculously easy to open, he showed them this and the response was a security memo telling everyone not to let Feynman near their safe.

Bill Gates lays out a three-point plan to rid the world of COVID-19 – and anti-vaxxer cranks aren't gonna like it

Why not just make the tracking chips new and shiny and charge $1000 for them ?

People would queue up

Since the EU won't share all its toys, UK Space Agency fires up fund to support more international collaboration

Re: An Application for Smashing Applications

How much of amfm1 did you read before realising it wasn't an Dominic Cummings official statement ?

Huawei's UK code reviewers say Chinese mega-corp is still totally crap at basic software security. Bad crypto, buffer overflows, logic errors...

Re: Not sure about this...

> so why not point out the problems?

Because Huawei are the official enemy of the people (at the moment)

It would be like the rebels finding the unsheilded exhaust port and telling the Empire so they coudl fix it

Re: Lets hope

>We exploited a few of the vulnerabilities in the Chinese network

The bits of it that are in English at least

US comms watchdog calls for more scrutiny of submarine cables that land in 'adversary countries'

But if you don't have a cable to China they can't get into the pipes with their hashtags

Hydrogen-powered train tested on Britain's railway tracks as diesel alternative

Re: Not as green as 25kv overhead

>Natural gas is hydrogen bonded to carbon

Obvious solution is to combine the hydrogen with carbon = green carbon capture tech

Then distribute the resulting methane safely by pipeline into tanks on the train = simple existing technology

Use solar, wind or reliable nuclear electricity sent over low-loss 25KV overhead lines to split the methane into carbon and hydrogen. the hydrogen can then be fed to the fuel cell.

A future Britain could then develop some technology to allow trains to be powered by the waste carbon byproduct

Singapore Airlines turns A380 into a restaurant, delivers plane food to homes

Re: Among the odder products of the COVID-19 pandemic are “flights to nowhere”

>"why would visitors wish to leave the Garden State in such a hurry?"

Why is New Jersey called "The Garden State"?

"Because 'Oil and Petrochemical Refinery State' wouldn't fit on a license plate?