Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Stranded in space: Starliner crew to remain in orbit even longer as SpaceX faces delays

Re: The resupply spacecraft also carried special items for the crew to celebrate the holidays

Redundancy notices for when NASA is shut down.

And an eviction notice requiring you to vacate the premises within 24 hours

Re: Of course there's a backup plan!

I thought the backup plan was to use Soyuz from our closest friends and allies?

Just how deep is Nvidia's CUDA moat really?

Re: K-T Boundary?

I think NVIDIA's moat was more "going all in" than first just mover.

There was a while when the new OpenCL had a lot of interest. Certainly in academic circles it was a lot more popular than CUDA, there is a lot about the language design that was nicer.

But nobody really committed to the HW, everyone had an "OpenCL implementation", but they were all slightly non-standard, didn't keep up with new versions and had terrible tooling. Soem <cough>AMD<cough> had terrible unfixed bugs in core routines like FFT but nobody cared because the market was games or laptops - OpenCL was just a checkbox to meet some purchasing requirement

NVIDIA on the other hand bet everything on GPU compute, years before AI, not just HW but the tooling and support around CUDA.

purportedly up to 95 percent

And as we all know, the first 95% of the port takes 95% of the effort, while the last 5% takes 95% of the effort

US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

Re: Observations

I like the Vatican airforce attacking the death star (or Richard Dawkins house)

Cherub 1, this is Cherub leader standing by...

Re: Observations

"textbook definition of a moral panic"

And that's why we need to ban textbooks

Re: It's not very small, it's just very far away...

Now concentrate this time, America. These are small, but those are far away... Small, far away

Re: New Jersey: stupid isn't just for red states since 1787

So going anti-postal ?

Re: The Idiocracy takes flight

It will soon be resolved in the same way as Gatwick.

Except the police will raid the home of the owner of a toy drone from Walmart and shoot them.

Trump administration wants to go on cyber offensive against China

Re: How to fix the cyber offensive environmant

> there was no malware in those old days because it took far too long to deliver all attacks

Herr Zimmermann might disagree

But those are worth a lot in votes

You can't make much publicity on cutting the ribbon of the "Richard M Nixon hacking center" and other than Star Trek conventions nobody is celebrating fleet-week for the Cyber-Security 1st Guards Regiment

Re: "We've got a tremendous private sector with a lot of capability"

Good option: A few secret-budget $Bn goes to the usual suspects for unspecified activities related to cyber offensives. The usual suspects use this to buy back their shares and pay CEO bonuses, share price goes up - everyone happy.

Worst option: They announce bounties, every script kiddie does an attack and then tries to claim a bounty. Hong-Kong Shanghai Bank Corp sounded Chinese so I ransomware'd them, where's my money? This hospital had Lenovo laptops, so obviously Chinese, so I was doing my patriotic duty when I crashed their systems.

Probable option: 15mins has gone by and that story wasn't scoring well in clicks so over to a viral video of a Squirrel

But that would cost money to improve security on all these services, while "offense" merely involves a few sound bytes and releasing an AI generated video clip with eagles in American flag hoodies against a green screen text monitor.

London's Met Police seeks business services, ERP refresh in £370M deal

finance and commercial services

Can't criminals and Sun journalists (but I repeat myself) just pay in brown envelopes anymore ?

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

Re: Not even the A500 was "switch on and go"

No those are just scanners - those are boring.

Re: BBC Micro..

The Micro:bit does have the air of "designed by an educationalist" about it. Funny even as a little kid you could tell toys that had been designed to be "educational" rather than designed to be toys or even designed to be things to learn from like lego-technic or science kits.

Re: BBC Micro..

>whereas the idea of recovering/restoring Windows means tedium and teeth gritting

Whereas in school, breaking a Windows machine on the school network will involve an expensive support call to G4SCapGeminiOracle Educational Services and the student either being expelled, or shot by the school internal anti-terrorist unit (dependant on pond side)

Re: Not even the A500 was "switch on and go"

Not even for Things With An Interesting Name ?

It's unbelievable what a fiver will get you: $8 MilkV Duo dual RISC-V microcontroller lets you run Arduino and Linux in parallel

I don't know how much the Pi Zero has advanced from the ARM2 in the Archimedes but, 1GHz 64bit CPUand 512MB RAM compared to 32bit 8MHz and 1 Mb of RAM - so lander should certainly go a bit faster !

Re: Everything has become so complicated

But the difference is important for teaching.

print("hello") or write("hello") or type("hello") are all equally good.

from System.Output using Console.WriteLine("hello", locale=SYS$DEFAULT, security=compartment.modal, memory_exceptions=disable) might be vastly better for a provably correct safety-critical system with automatic checking, but isn't ideal for 8 year olds first introduction to computers.

It's why C, Java and C# were terrible for intro programming. Lesson 1: copy all this boiler plate exactly correctly into your program before you can print("hello"). Don't worry about what "#include" or "sys.argv" does, you don't need to know. Leads to "computers are not for mere mortals to understand" which is the entire point of teaching about them in school

The is an irony here.

The need for the Pi was that school Windows systems had become so complicated that they needed specialist and expensive support - and so kids have to be restricted from not breaking it.

While the PC was originally popular in business because the expensive mainframe needed specialist support and so users had to be kept from breaking it.

Re: On a slight tan(x)

Totally different uses of course, I just wanted to cheer on another example of making simple HW for education, backing it with some well written software and have it become ubiquitous.

Before this thread naturally devolved into: the Pi should have NVME and 10Gb Ethernet and it doesn't cost $25 anymore and I can buy a used SFF corporate desktop for less on eBay and assorted Windows bashing

Re: Cheap

That's why I don't understand the global car industry selling $Bn worth of cars when I got my Nan's old Fiesta for free.

Re: BBC Micro..

It definitely was. Most 8bit micros had some sort of exposed I/O ports for games cartridges but the BBC went way beyond that in userI/O.ports, ADC inputs and the processor tube.

Somebody doing the spec was thinking about science/engineering experiments controlled by computer.

Re: BBC Micro..

ubiquity was the point - for education it's pretty much the only requirement

The most important design aim was that you could break the OS install and be able to start again easy. In contrast to the complex support required of a desktop Windows setup. Allowing kids to play with and break things, rather than being sandboxed and threatened has been the goal and I think it achieved that.

On a slight tan(x)

Can I give a similar shout out / slap on the back, to the Arduino.

Given a slightly complicated set of outputs to generate every time some input happened, a board that cost the price of a Happy Meal / pint, let me do it in the time I would once have spent working out which precise version of an 8051 I had for the settings in Kiel compiler

SoftBank pledges to pour $100B into US, create 100,000 jobs in Trump's second term

No, this is an entirely new promise by Trump which will deliver .....

Well when I say "Is" I mean "Is promised to be" and as we know all announcements of massive infrastructure investments always come true.

Re: Trade deficit?

Where are you going to get skilled chemists?

I suppose you could get H1Bs if you can demonstrate there is nobody in WV with the necessary skills

Re: Did the $50B happen?

He made some terrible early investments and lost 99% of the fund's money in the dot-com crash.

He survived cos of an investment in Alibaba and then spent the time since funneling Saudi oil $ back to the US / transferring the Saudi sovereign wealth fund to an Israeli con-artist genius

Re: Hmm.

No, we've always been at war with Eurasia

Re: Trade deficit?

Not if it's immediately spent on foreign hookers and imported drugs.

That site is already 2 chip fabs, a data center, an EV battery plant and a combined nursery and orphan kitten sanctuary.

The number of cut up ribbons on the ground is staggering

Re: "SoftBank is known to be trying to capitalize on the ongoing AI boom."

They can finally run $VIDEO-GAME meme ?

Re: Hmm.

1, Because technology isn't as vital to the USA as building battleships

2, Cos it's called Nippon Steel and it's buying US steel. Remember Pearl Harbour ?

3, Softbank is just the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and the Saudis have always been our greatest allies.

Australia moves to drop some cryptography by 2030 – before quantum carves it up

Re: Australia has always done things a little “differently”

Remember "The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia"

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Re: Tounge in cheek?

As long as the estimated was always more than the amount actually owed, then it probably does

Iran-linked crew used custom 'cyberweapon' in US critical infrastructure attacks

A technical superior nation state enemy

So Iran is a theocracy where all education and science is subservient to the will of mad medieval mullahs. While North Korea is a state where the adult population all have to spend 10 years of "conscription" as unpaid agricultural labourers.

And yet both of these are apparently beating us at cyberweapons.

Where are our politicians with the vision to call for a solely bible based education and a return to field slavery - to counter the cyber threat .

Re: "The malware was embedded in Gasboy's Payment Terminal"

The military doesn't use encryption, it plainly and simply calls a spade an "M1 manual entrenching and ground material transferal tool (Green) troops, for the use of"

( is it some US DoD security through obscurity program to cal every bit of kit an M1 ?)

Backup failed, but the boss didn't slam IT – because his son was to blame

Re: Backups...

Sorry, when I went to school administration was a paper register, entrusted to the kid least likely to get lost, and taken to the school's central administrative function = a middle aged lady in a cardigan with tissues up the sleeves and an electric typewriter.

Of course we didn't achieve 11 A* in key stage assessment level alpha

Re: Backups...

If schools are graded on their proper filling in of forms then they should direct all resources towards and 'deemphasise' non-core activities like kids.

Google thinks the grid can't support AI, so it's spending on solar for future datacenters

Re: COMMUNISM!

Damn, if only Corbyn hadn't been in charge for the last dozen years we would have a glorious future of < rising strains of Elgar >

Re: Ballpark power comsumption figure anyone?

A lot. Typically twice what a regular DC would use.

So an AWS/Facebook uses <10kw/rack while AI pulls 25kw. It means a lot of older data centers have to run half empty because they don't have the power/cooling

Re: COMMUNISM!

The Democratic (Republican) Union of Mineworkers will demand nothing less !

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

Re: EV tanks ?

Also handy if you need to cross a river and are a mad German and have accidentally invented a tank too large for any bridge

Re: turrets, autoloaders etc are electric anyway

You mean somebody bungi-ed a Honda generator to the back, painted it green and then charged $100K for an "M1 Mil-Spec Power Distribution Unit (Auxiliary)"