Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Breathe easy: Apple Watch can read your oxygen levels again

Re: not presenting the blood oxygen measurement on the Watch

Yes, meant to reply to the parent above - el'reg's threading isn't always clear

Re: not presenting the blood oxygen measurement on the Watch

It even has a name "white coat hypertension" = higher blood pressure from the stress of being in a hospital/Dr office

Tencent doesn’t care if it can buy American GPUs again – it already has all the chips it needs

Re: "The bottleneck is on the software."

>there was linear progress in software

I don't think this is true for AI. Half a century of hoping that you could recreate a brain in LISP together with a few parlour tricks like Eliza

Then along comes transformers and 5years later we are talking about no longer needing any junior programmers/lawyers/bankers jobs

Re: Any move

Truly he is a nation builder(*)

* actual nation being built not guaranteed

Fortunately for our continued world domination.

While it's trivial to setup and operate the 2nm fabs needed for cutting edge GPU hardware and build the lithography machines to build those fabs - there is no way that a country with 1Bn people and universities turning out 5M STEM graduates / year will be able to compete with the home of ITT and University of Phoenix.

We are so confident in our unsurpassed leadership in science education we can afford to crack down on pointless degree-mills like Harvard, UCLA and Columbia.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Re: Why can't we have nice things?

Microsoft: Annoying the customer since 1985

Re: Why can't we have nice things?

If the world's largest software company needs to rely on the money from toolbar ads - we have bigger problems

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Re: 'Legacy' does not = 'obsolete' or 'bad'

If only we had rewritten it in pre-ansi 'C' then updated it in the 90s with C++, then redone everything in Go, we would be on track to rewrite it in Rust now

UK expands police facial recognition rollout with 10 new vans heading to a town near you

Re: We are living in a fascist state

If they can't be trusted to behave like decent chaps you really should have made some rules about what your government can do.

Getting it in writing would probably be a good idea. Think of it as a national pre-nup.

Re: We are living in a fascist state

That quote from "A Very British Coup" when MI5 are reviewing the files on the new cabinet

"4 crooks, 3 perverts, a poof and a couple of communists",

Sounds like every cabinet since the war !

Re: We are living in a fascist state

Don't you miss the days when the worst a politician could do was expense a duck island?

Or make their horse a senator

Re: United Serfdom

I always assumed that all government, of either flavour, policies are to try and destroy public trust in the police.

Re: We are living in a fascist state

>I thought you were referring to the people protesting outside hotels.

No those people are fine upstanding concerned members of society. I just want to make it clear I am against anti-genocide grandmothers and everything they stand for (*)

(* this comment complies with government requirements to be against any people who are against anything the government's American friends best friends do)

Re: We are living in a fascist state

But the police are the only thing protecting us from the 1000s of terrorists that recently stormed London?

Everyone is anti-police until they are face to face with an 80 year retired vicar with a placard or a blind guy in a wheelchair.

The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn’t one

There is no IBM anymore, it's just the unprofitable part of Redhat

Re: a more heterogeneous environment might be good

>What would a non=Unix-style OS be like?

It would be like taking VMS and removing the useful clustering features and turning it into NT ?

Re: Microkernel

IIRC Windows NT started as a MicroKernel because Dave Cutler is a proper software engineer

But it had to move graphics into the "microkernel" for performance reasons, then IE, then clippy, then .....

Re: Microkernel

>No. Microkernels are an abstraction too far.

Microkernels don't go far enough, you need KAAS

Kernel as a service allows your OS to rent a new kernel from a marketplace of online suppliers for each new process

Don;t worry systemd will soon be absorbed into Emacs

>"All" that Linux does is act as overseer.

That's the important job.

Yes there are a whole army of people working at Redhat that will support Redhat, and at AWS and Azure and etc

The tricky bit is ensuring that we don't have a Redhat Kernel with Redhat fixes theoretically available to anyone who writes to Redhat, and an Azure kernel and an AWS kernel and a dozen incompatible "People's front of Judea" and "Judean People's Front" kernels

Tsunami forecasting about to get a lot faster thanks to El Capitan super

Re: No "AI" involved

Funny, it's precisely the sort of thing that AI is actually very good at:

Take a wide variety of noisy seismic and wave data from a disparate array of sensors of varying reliability. You have all this historic data from 50 years of tsunamis and the records of how big/where the damage was. Throw this into a training set on your favourite model and then keep feeding it all the sensor data and look at its predictions

Compared to the supercomputer CFD approach of:

Divide ocean into grid, grid cells are big cos computers are $$$

Only input data for a tiny fraction of cells cos sensor buoys are even more $$$$$. Assume all input data are perfectly correct

'interpolate' (ie guess) the data for the rest of the input cells where you don't have buoys

Make a bunch of simplification assumptions cos Newtonian physics=easy and turbulence and non-linear effects=hard

Run model which "predicts" how an ideal tsunami would behave on a spherical planet in a vacuum

Law and water: Russia blamed for US court system break-in and Norwegian dam drama

Re: Head meet wall

>Control over critical facilities should never involve the public Internet. End of discussion.

Yes they should only go over private leased phone lines

And you know that those 1000km of bare wire across the countryside are totally secure because they are private so no need for any security

So you should probably put high grade encryption and verification on those private phone lines, just in case, and you need some sort of secure access credentials for the people using them - the sort of thing you should have had on the internet

Who made the demo list for Trump's fast-track nuclear reactor scheme?

Move fast and break things and remember to build in it Idaho

Re: Hmm

Except none of these reactors are going to need Uranium, none of them are ever going to be build.

This is purely pork-barreling combined with a fuck-you to renewables (ironically since even most Greens now support nuclear )

The main "danger" is that it's going to paint SMR with the same Trump con that Trump-Coin did (perhaps rather more deservingly) to crypto

NASA mulls sending a rescue rocket to boost Swift observatory's orbit

Re: Wankword alert

NASA doesn't, and almost never has, built spacecraft.

Apollo was all built by the usual set of defence contractors, the Shuttle was built by Rockwell, Hubble was built by Lockheed-Martin

Instruments on these are normally built by either university groups, or designed by university groups and built by defense companies

US weather agency dangles $396M to run ops for its next space-watching fleet

Re: Didn't the weather service get Doged?

That was Earth weather, the Earth is a globe (at least to some Americans) and is therefore linked to the Chinese Hoax of Global Warming

This is Space weather and so slipped through the net (space is not a globe and isn't warming) - until somebody works out that NOAA also does Chinese Hoax of Global Warming

Desktops and printers in coffee shops? Starbucks Korea tells customers to 그만 해

Re: Now I understand

For those of you too young to remember the alfresco dining experience in the UK before chains.

A cafe would have an urn of tea, containing a large number of tea bags, more boiling water would be added during the day.

If you were some sort of effete social dandy you could order coffee - and an ancient tin of Mellow Birds would be found under the counter, anda half teaspoon would be grudgingly added to a tea cup

Ordering a burger meant taking your life into your hands by eating whatever grey frozen thing the COOP had on offer that week

Ludites

This is what led to the industrial revolution.

Freelancer artisanal home weavers would take their looms and hang around in artisanal coffee shops all day but then the owners of the dark satanic mills complained ....

The UK’s cartographer maps mission to help people and business

It's more losing out on wider economic benefits.

The government, is the tax payer, collected the data and tries to recoup some of the cost by commercial sales.

What this means is a lot of wasted admin as bits of the government get billed by another government organisation for using government data.

But it also means you couldn't have eg. a UK invented Uber because the early startup could never have afforded the map fees.

Re: 45 years ago

It was one of many 'benefits' of sort-of privatization

The charges and conditions to OS data (or Post Office PAF) were so high that no UK startup could do anything in GIS

Then the government realised that they were the OS's only customer and it was costing more in licensing costs than to fund them directly

Californian man so furious about forced Windows 11 upgrade that he's suing Microsoft

Re: If you REALLY want Windows 10, run Server 2019

It's a crystal Raspberry Pi

Re: Being sensible for a moment

The trousers split ?

Re: Being sensible for a moment

I suspect well see the last of the "everyone has to update" cycle where Msft/Intel and Dell/HP all get to break out the champagne every 3 years

With MSFT making all the profit from subscriptions and cloud I wonder how long they will bother writing an OS instead of just making an Edgebook

PS no I don't bother down voting anyone

PPA " 5-dimensional virtual hypertrousers" is a great band name

Re: Being sensible for a moment

Yes Microsoft are evil, I remember back in the 2000s when they told customers of our Linux app that they would be sued because "Linux was stolen"

But is there a reasonable limit to how long you have to support an OS? We used to pay a fortune in maintenance contracts for VMS. Should I expect HP to now provide free security patches?

Re: Being sensible for a moment

>And Win10 has been released to the public in 2017

It feels much longer. Perhaps the 7->10 transition was so seamless they blurred in my ever fading memory...

Being sensible for a moment

I know, I know - I'll say three Hail Marys and a Systemd

Microsoft keeping Win10 alive means them paying workers to 'fix' an OS that they sold you 10 years ago.

Is this the same as a car company still making spare parts for a 10 year old car? Or is it the same as insisting that the dealer gives you free upgrades to meet new safety or emission standards ?

Are the "security fixes" fixing flaws in the original product or are they adapting to newly invented threats ?

NASA won't name the Shuttle picked to move to Texas

Re: The bill does NOT require a shuttle

>How many shuttles are in blue states?

How come blue States built all the shuttles and get all the rocket scientists?

Re: won't name ?

So The Shuttle Melania is going to need a fair bit of plastic surgery to make it look new again, but still cheaper

Re: Moving the vehicle remains a near-insurmountable challenge

What about using the official Trump Baby Balloon?

Reports say it is 6m high and so if we assume Trump is basically spherical, that's 110m^3 of Helium for a lifting capacity of around 130kg, so 600 Donald Trump Baby balloons could be used to lift a shuttle

Re: won't name ?

What about the rusty old Soviet fake shuttle?

Wouldn't that be more appropriate ?

Re: Insanity

> I'm sure Boeing would build them another one for $40mn.

I hear that Boeing 747s are given away for free to super best friends

Intel chief Lip-Bu Tan to visit White House after Trump calls for him to step down

Re: Ironically, this is the right thing for the wrong reason.

I did once fall for "fish&chips" on a menu in Hawaii

They brought a delicious local fish steak and a bag of crisps

Re: Ironically, this is the right thing for the wrong reason.

Is it time for private equity to just come in and strip mine this leaderless bankrupt organisation for any remaining value ?

And should they do the same for Intel ?

Re: "Trump calls for him to step down"

Remember this is "government of the people by the people" so the chosen leader should have control over all aspects of government and is able to chose CEOs and create a glorious 5 year plan for tractor production.

I'm assuming the sending the intellectuals, ie. anyone who wears glasses, to work on the collective farms is next week ?

Re: And another one get's called in to the orange Don's office...

That's why AMD and NVidia need to kick back 15% of their take in China, while apple gets to do whatever it wants

But AMD, Nvidia and Intel have CEOs who wouldn't get past the membership committee at Mara-a-Largo

Re: And another one get's called in to the orange Don's office...

Presumably to deliver the Frankincense.

Dr Su better start shopping for Myrrh

UK secretly allows facial recognition scans of passport, immigration databases

Re: surely if you've got Nothing to hide ...

Vote New Labour Starmer for another decade of total law enforcement

Chinese biz using AI to hit US politicians, influencers with propaganda

Re: the influence

Well the widespread use of Chinese propaganda does explain why Maoists have such high ratings and political influence in US politics