Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Aviation regulator outlines fixes that will get the 737 MAX flying again

Re: $19bn

Buy/But - damn phone autocomplete.

Re: $19bn

Buy that applies to an accident. The lawyers for the victims are likely suing on the grounds that Boeing deliberately built an unsafe aircraft and lied to the regulators about it.

University of Cambridge to decommission its homegrown email service Hermes in favour of Microsoft Exchange Online

Re: less than ideal

No it wasn't just on the Gates building it applied to everyone.

In a purely coincidental simultaneous announcement staff were required to agree that the University had rights to all intellectual property they created and they weren't allowed to enter into any other agreements.

It was pointed out that this meant they couldn't work on GPL software or transfer any of their work to the public domain. But it took several years of campaigning by academics for the university to admit that this was a problem.

If you are under censure by the DoJ for naughtiness it isn't unreasonable for people to assume naughtiness in your actions

Re: less than ideal

I remember back in the 90s when MSFT built them a nice new CS building and the T&Cs for all staff effectively blocked working on open source.

Singapore to give all incoming travelers wearable tracking device

Re: Looks like Singapore's off my travel list

Just drive to Canada claim you are heading to Alaska and then go on holiday coughing over the locals. It's your constitutional right

Days after President Trump suggests pausing election over security, US House passes $500m for states to shore up election security

Re: Its too late now

They have plenty of time and money to buy one machine for each likely democrat voting area. And then ensure it is securely guarded, in a disused lavatory, in a locked file cabinet with a sign say beware of the leopard ?

Microsoft confirms pursuit of TikTok after Satya Nadella chats to Donald Trump

So if enough people troll him on Facebook - we can get it banned ?

Re: Is M$ POTUS's official provider of IT services?

Trump is an Android

He is running Windows Vista, or possibly ME

Virgin Galactic pals up with Rolls-Royce to work on Mach 3 Concorde-style private jet that can carry up to 19 people

Re: A fifth of a concorde

Carrying 1/10 as many passengers it needs to be 1000% better

Re: Short and sweet.

"this" is a pr spin to get beardy (and RR) back in the public eye when it comes to airline bailouts

Linus Torvalds pines for header file fix but releases Linux 5.8 anyway

IBM did back in the 90s. The code was all in a database accessible through their Rational Rose tool. Then users realized that all their source was locked up inside an IBM proprietary system a d they would have to pay $$$ for ever

Struggling company pleads with landlords to slash rents as COVID-19 batters UK high street. The firm's name? Apple

Sales drop?

IIRC it doesn't make any sales in its UK stores, somehow the iPhone you buy on Oxford St is sold in ireland

Re: We should all pull together

No need, US taxpayers are already bailing them out with the fed buying Apple bonds (effectively giving them a bear interest free loan that will never be paid back)

Firefighters to UK Home Office: Yeah, maybe don't turn off emergency comms network before replacement is ready

Re: Been saying it for a long while

It's much cheaper to add another '9' to the SLA - it's literally a key press.

And assuming you are the only bidder on a government contract you know that nobody is going to successfully sue you - the worst you can face is a snide comment in Private-Eye or El'Reg years later

Re: Why use 2/3/4/5/6/x G at all?

>So they can have building plans and all that at the touch of a button.

So they've been watching too many of those movies where the hero gets to zoom through a 3D wireframe model of all the century old underground tunnels in London? I've had problems getting the floor plans of a building we are currently having built - just to find where I can put some heavy instrument.

Perhaps that also explains the government's love of CCTV - we just put one camera on the top of Big Ben and we can zoom in and "enhance" a crime anywhere in London

Re: Why use 2/3/4/5/6/x G at all?

But you can then sell the old frequency spectrum and the new 5G version allows real-time high-definition 3-D video streaming to the scene.

Which is obviously more important than your fire service radio working indoors or underground

Re: Been saying it for a long while

But the chances of a major powercut in eg central London is 1:1000 and the chance of a major fire incident is 1:1000 so the chance of a fire AND a powercut at the same time is a million to one!

Re: Been saying it for a long while

IIRC the problem is that the allow/deny is done by the network behind the masts. So it needs a completed connection to decide if you are priority, it then drops other connections - which retry.

But there is no mechanism for a cell to broadcast that there is an emergency and noone else should try or to tell refused connections not to retry for an hour or for phones to send a priority level in the initial handshake and have the tower decide to continue in the first part of the connection negotiation

Re: Been saying it for a long while

It does have a priority user only feature. But it is implemented in the network (obviously) so a million plebs phones try to connect get refused a connection and try again - completely saturating the local airwaves for emergency users that would be allowed to route a call if they could connect.

The feature was a bit of an afterthought to the GSM spec

AI assistants work perfectly in the UK – unless you're from Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham, Belfast...

Re: Standard BBC English here

Tha reight, wi proper first person singular pronouns - not what a bunch of German royalty think English should be if it had Latin grammar

Belfast in Northern Ireland (64)

We used to have problems with Skype talking to people in N'orn Iron

The compression algorithm would chop down the already pretty clipped wording to the point of it being a bunch of clicks.

Boeing confirms it will finish building 747s in 2022, when last freighter flies off the production line

Re: Sorry to see the 747 go!

>Maybe you Brits should enquire with BA about where they plan to offload their 747s

I believe the plan is to load them with God-awful Starbucks coffee and dump them in the harboUr in Boston

Re: Sorry to see the 747 go!

If you have total air superiority and are just dropping tonnes of stuff on goatherds then all you need is big plane Something with 4 engines, 250,000lb payload and first class acomodation.

I also know a bunch of airlines that would offload them for cheap

Re: Sorry to see the 747 go!

The B52 is from 1955 and is expected to be in service into 2040s

Chinese ambassador to UK threatens to withdraw Huawei, £3bn investment if comms giant banned from building 5G

Re: Does the Chinese ambassador think ...

> I could imagine somewhere like South Africa is under pressure to do the same thing

You would think that South Africa would automatically be siding with requests to ban Huawei

After all that Britain and the USA did to create the modern ZA don't they owe us some fealty ?

Re: Great News

A pair of "Keep calm and carry on" tea mugs joined by red tape?

From the dept of redundancy dept

"threatens to withdraw Huawei and £3bn investment if comms giant banned from building 5G"

Ban us and we'll leave ?

Get ready to try virtual-reality goggles, er, virtually: Another in-person event bites the dust as CES 2021 hauled online

Re: Should've given it a shot!

This is a city with a conference that attracts 200,000 visitors connected to the rest of the city with a tiny monorail that holds about 20 people, the conference center is an hour walk from the main strip. It was unable to manage selling bottles of water to people standing in line for hours waiting for a taxi in 30C temperatures.

It's chances of organising a vaccine program is the only thing lower than your odds of coming out of the casino with more money than you went in with. (*)

* - although i did manage this at CES. Somebody had left some quarters in the payout chute of a slot machine that I picked as I walked past - in the days when the slot machines still took coins.

Microsoft runs a data centre on hydrogen for 48 whole hours, reckons it could kick hydrocarbon habit by 2030

Re: Hydrogen is not the answer

That'll teach those tall basterds

Intel couldn't shrink to 7nm on time – but it was able to reduce one thing: Its chief engineer's employment

Re: Ummm...

The wafer steppers are ASML but there is a lot more to developing the whole process than buy a machine from ASML and plug it in

Australia sues Google over data collection practices that merged DoubleClick data to create single user profiles

It's the new corporate tax.

Digital companies can make their "sale" anywhere so you can't tax them - instead you work out what you think they should have paid in tax and fine them that.

The only problem with it is at some point each company stops comparing cost of accountant vs cost of tax and starts paying cost of funding politician vs cost of tax.

Eye see you're having surgery: Origami inspires tiny, super-accurate robot surgeon

Re: That's all sounds very good, but what is the tiny surgeon's golf handicap??

Probably that it is 20x smaller than the ball ?

other research groups have developed more precise robots

But how big.

An engineers approach to more precise is to make it bigger and more rigid, which makes it bigger and heaver, so to make it more rigid it has to be bigger and heavier... until you end up with a wafer stepper or a CNC machine.

Making something small and flexible means it can be faster to respond and just as accurate, if you get the control loop correct

EU orders Airbus A350 operators to install anti-coffee spillage covers in airliner cockpits

Re: SImpler solution?

Fly upside down

Boeing

Presumably follow the American car model and have several 64oz drink holders per pilot.

Although spilling a McSlurpy on Boeing's electronics probably improves airworthiness

USA seeks Moon and Mars nuke power plant designs ready to fly in 2027

Re: What are they going to do with the heat?

Back of the fag(*)-packet calculation

10Kw/m^2 into space at near enough 0K implies a hot surface temperature of about 350C

So as long as you can keep your reactor about the size and temperature of a pizza oven you are ok just sitting there. Make it any bigger or hotter and it gets easier.

* term carefully chosen to trigger colonial commoners

Re: What are they going to do with the heat?

Space is 1, big and 2, cold so radiating heat isn't too difficult.

And 10 kw isn't such a lot of power - about the same as a 100 people on a sofa

We're not all about rockets, says NASA: Balloon tech is good enough for economical star scanning

Re: Balloons?

Hielt man für Ufos aus dem All

Re: Cool

Probably not thermoelectric - they don't work well at cryogenic temperatures.

More likely a fridge - ie a Stirling (or GM) cycle cooler

Re: Stability?

Long infrared is normally background limited so you take a bunch of shorter exposures, hope the background is more random than the source and do a bunch of clever stats.

there isn't the same need to keep locked on a single target for hours as in bands where you are readout noise limited.

Is that croaky voicemail of your CEO just a Fakey McFake Fake – or does he normally ask you to wire him $1m?

Re: should have some sort of procedure to check

>I still don't get how this kind of thing works.

Worked with a few companies that did offshore oil kit in dodgy parts of the world. They were often run by an owner/founder who would ring up and need to hire an airliner/pay a bribe/be got out of jail.

Mind you the AI would have to do a very good line in Aberdonian swearing to fool anyone.

The security protocol was to say "no" until the person threatened to go totally BOFH on you and everyone else in the office in graphic anatomical detail - at which point you knew he was the real deal.

Re: a "software-generated voicemail message"

One news show here subtitled police protestors were throwing "Mazeltov cocktails", oi vey

Chinese tat bazaar Xiaomi to light a fire under Amazon's Kindle with new e-book reader

Re: Bazaar?

> I thought Xiaomi was a tat maker.

They make some good stuff, like phones and headphones but they also rebrand a lot of crap - stick it in a plain white box and see if it sells

At least the arch-capitalist would never delete books from your kindle

Bill Gates debunks 'coronavirus vaccine is my 5G mind control microchip implant' conspiracy theory

Re: Mind control by 5G is not a risk

I'm being mind controlled on rural 3G - that explains a lot.

Re: So if it was true.....

Obviously to run the virus you will need vastly bloated hardware resources - that's why it's only being rolled out in America. You think their obesity is accidental?

Wake up sheeple !

Re: What if MS had not become dominant ?

Unless you believe that the "evil SCO" was a Microsoft run campaign

IIRC Microsoft paid SCO $MM in 'fees' as their anti-Linux thing kicked off

Certainly Microsoft resellers were coming upto our Linux software at shows and telling us that our customers would be sued because Linux was stolen

Intel's 7nm is busted, chips delayed, may have to use rival foundries to get GPUs out for US govt exascale super

Re: Interesting

Is that a little like asking, at what point does somebody invest in Edison and seriously take on GE's incandescent light bulb market?