Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Parliamentarians urge next UK govt to consider ban on smartphones for under-16s

Ban pop music for under 16s

It's obviously causing these out breaks of ghastly frightfullness among the youth.

Yours

Col Throat Warbler Mangrove (retd)

Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

Re: Long term storage to tape, takes more than just a bunch of tapes!

A lot of storage is on tape because it is still relevant.

Scientific data from 150 years ago is still important in astronomy. Not sure if recopying reel-reel tape to exabyte to DAT to LTO is easier than just rescanning the plates.

And in the less real world, a lot of corporate / tax / insurance data has to be kept for decades.

I'm reading all the right bits - but not necessarily in the right order

Re: Squish

Do you have 150 exabytes in your pocket, or are you just pleased to be here?

Re: In tape we trust

Pah, with your new fangled writing

We encode data as the position of stones in circles. You have to re-encode it when the Earth's orbit changes midsummer but apart from that it's pretty robust

No it's quantum. So long as you don't try and observe the data then it still exists

'Little weirdo' shoulder surfer teaches UK cabinet minister a lesson in cybersecurity

Not quite true. You have to target floating voters in a few marginal constituencies. There's no point in worrying about somebody who might be torn between labour and Reform but live in Barnsley

Re: Pride

> is it allowed to leave that office unvoted, as long as you turn up and cast a ballot?

Yes and it's why the Australian election people have the world's largest collection of cock and balls drawings

Re: Mercer also wrote "I don't feel part of the team"

Although in this case: PM calls election to screw over his own MPs might be closer.

I don't think this PM is over concerned about keeping the pay packet

Re: Pride

>My only issue with mandatory voting is what if you don't think any of the candidates is worthy?

That's the nice thing about the Australian system (IIRC) , all the support agreements are worked out in advance.

So you can vote Communist / Green / Nazi, safe in the knowledge that the vote is actually going to transfer to the Labour / Lib-Dem / Conservative - but you feel like you are being individual

Re: Think about it...

>solving a non-existant problem, .. a chance to skew the vote at least somewhat in their favour

That was the problem it was solving.

Re: Pedantry alert

And <pedantmode=11> not all UK citizens are entitled to vote

Re: ID what ID?

Different things.

ID cards were to give the police reasons to stop anyone they wanted

Voter ID is to reduce the number of opposition voters

Obviously

We make it a crime to read government laptops

Tough on embarrassing leaks, tough on the causers of embarrassing leaks

Nvidia faces local competition for its 'China special' GPUs

Re: China first

>I mean that's basically 'capitalism', buy the best at the best price.

No I think you have that wrong:

Capitalism is buying the product made by people who look most like you. With the most macho name and the most flags and with the ads with the loudest music. If this isn't financially viable then the government can cover any losses the company makes.

Communism is trying to buy the best product wherever in the word it's made irrespective of what it's called or what kind of raptor is featured on the logo.

UK data watchdog wants six figures from N Ireland cops after 2023 data leak

Re: What is the point?

Personal liability from the person who clicked on the attachment, or the sysadmin that allowed attachments or the manager that bought Microsoft instead of insisting that the PSNI created their own secure OS or the minister that didn't give them unlimited funding for computer security?

Or do we just blame the current chief constable and rotate on the next one till the next scandal?

Re: What is the point?

But it does send a message to the government that the government really won't stand for this sort of thing and the government must do something about it or the government will be forced to do the same thing the next time the government scews up

55 years ago, Apollo 10's crew turned the airwaves blue

Re: Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end...

But if you have 1000 systems all with a 1 / 100 chance of a catastrophic failure then you have a 1 / 100,000 chance of a failure - and I have the PowerPoint to prove it

Re: In some ways, we haven't progressed much

"You wait until you accidently show a nipple on network TV........."

Wasn't even a real one, she had a tassle stuck on - leading to a suggestion that the wardrobe malfunction might not have been all that accidental

Re: In some ways, we haven't progressed much

>How's that so-called "British Empire" thing working out?

Taking the long view pretty well.

Everybody speaks English, most play some version of Rugby, and the best ones like trains and play cricket - in return they gave us some tasty recipes.

Re: The one where Adam fucked Eve's brains out

I thought he begotted her brains out ?

In 1940, future Field Marshal Montgomery, noting that 100x as many soldiers in WWI were hospitalized with STIs than gunshot wounds, demanded that all troops were issued with condoms.

All the bishops in the Lords and the massed catholic bishops called for him to be removed from command - it took Churchill intervening with the King to keep him in the job.

Beating the Nazis is definitely a goal - but we have to do it without mentioning unmentionables

Re: In some ways, we haven't progressed much

Asked once if there was any word in English for it that wasn't a euphemism = washroom / restroom / bathroom or just the same in French, lavatory / toilet.

You mean like "the shitter?" responded our Australian

Re: Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end...

Arguably though it set Nasa and the space shuttle up for long term failure.

The rush to get to the moon meant creating a massive organisation focused on a short term goal.

Afterwards you are left with a "what do we do now ?" problem. You either fire almost everyone and close 90% of the facilities and then start concentrating on long term sustainable research and development - or you look for another Apollo-size project which can be built with the same people and facilities.

It's common in armies that win wars. We won so we must have been doing it right. We now need to build more and better of precisely the same aircraft-carriers / main battle tanks / fighter aircraft that we used to beat the last enemy.

ASML could brick Taiwan's chipmaking machines in case of uninvited guests

>"Huawei Chip Equipment R&D Center – Shanghai ... total investment of $1.66 billion for this center

That's about what ASML spent just to buy a small stake in its glass supplier (Zeiss) and half what it paid for the EUV laser source supplier (Cymer).

Huawei has to not only duplicate ASML machines, it has to replicate Zeiss's 200 years of glass production and lens coating expertise and it has to develop it's own version of Cymer's unique EUV light source.

Re: Rushing to the Taipei airport

> coupled to a nice amount of strategically placed HE

kill -11

Re: They never learn

It's more a risk thing.

We get the silicon to line the furnaces that melt the silicon to make the boule that we slice into wafers - from this single source.

So we only use a very small amount of silicon for this purpose, so we aren't super sensitive about the cost.

BUT if we used a different source and it turned out that all the silicon made from the 2nd source were bad - but we only found out once we had made M4 chips from it.....

Not to say the whole global semiconductor industry is based on superstition and placebos - but the yield went up when we wore yellow socks, and we need the yield to go up so ....

Re: They never learn

>Why the heck does North Carolina supply the purest quartz in the world, from which high-purity silicon ingots can be drawn?

Because we understand Silicon chemistry a lot less than you would expect.

This Silicon works, the ingots we make from crucibles made from this source work.

We could use silicon from anywhere in the world, but if the wafers we make from those crucibles have an issue we might lose $Bn in chips - so why risk it ?

>Why the heck did Ukraine previously supply half of the world's neon gas, a critical resource for semiconductor manufacturing?

Because we do know about Neon. So it doesn't matter where we get the raw gas from - so we get it from the cheapest source. However we can easily switch to any other Neon supplier and purify it to the same grade.

Re: Increasingly Irrelevant

On the other hand TSMC is Taiwan's only real defence.

By having TSMC there, the USA is forced to defend Taiwan - with TSMC fabs in Arizona then a US administration can just send 'thoughts and prayers' if Taiwan is invaded.

Re: They never learn

>Maybe because they developed it? The USA did not invent all of the high technology.

The history is a lot more interesting.

In the 80s anybody could invent it, Canon and Nikon were way ahead in mask-steppers.

The various US semiconductor firms were only interested in building their own machines to service their own fabs to build their own chips, and nobody would cooperate with a competing semiconductor company. So nobody got the scale to really invest the R&D.

It's was a US strategic decision allow a company (Philips) in a small, powerless but friendly country to build up the technology to prevent the US being dependent on an Asian superpower - but back then it was Japan.

Hm! Boeing union just ran whistleblower rights training

Re: While we have the conspiracy hat on...

I think it's Musk.

If we don't have Boeing then the only possible solution to long distance travel in America will be self-driving hyper-loop cyber-trucks

Techie invented bits of the box he was fixing, still botched the job

Re: Sleepiness is the Enemy

"/usr/bin/rm file not found" ?

Re: experimenting with being a "Monday person" and it feels weird

>As for a day off for each previous monarch, I see what you did there :-) I think we'd run out of Mondays.

Well obviously, post-Brexit, we wouldn't have any of those French or German ones

Just lots of Æthelstans and Æthelreds, maybe a few Cnuts

Re: Sleepiness is the Enemy

1, Accidentally connect your terminal emulator to /dev/sda instead of /dev/tty and overwrite your Minix installation.

2, Decide to just write your own OS to replace it

3, Profit

Re: experimenting with being a "Monday person" and it feels weird

It's Victoria day in Canada. Nice to see that the French also honour the old queen.

Surprised that the UK shows such disrespect by not having a Monday off for each ex-monarch.

Apple says if you want to ship your own iOS browser engine in EU, you need to be there

Re: Cunning move?

Apple gets $$ from Google to be the default search engine - there are no other browsers on iDevices - that's what the Eu is complaining about.

It's also useful for Google to show that they aren't a monopoly. If the Google had a monopoly in search then Apple would have to pay them, instead of them having to pay for visitors

Microsoft PC Manager app bizarrely suggests Bing as a Windows fix-all

Re: United States v. Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft-Office-LTD would have gone entirely online earlier. We would have more Mac and Linux desktops, but it wouldn't matter because all commercial software would be on a monopoly Microsoft cloud

United States v. Microsoft Corp.

Internet Explorer Bing is an integral part of the Windows operating system and cannot be separated. Bundling Internet Explorer Bing is a result of innovation and competition and the two were now the same product and inextricably linked.

AWS to pump billions into sovereign cloud for Germany

But if the EU agrees that the US is adequately safe then why does the data need to be in Europe?

Nvidia chief Huang given 60% pay increase amid AI hysteria

Re: That pay looks like minimum wage compared to what Musk wants

Jensen is also a real founder - not somebody who bought the founder title as part of his buyout

The excellent Aquired podcast did a series on Nivida and concluded with an interview with Jensen

He started the company and risked his money to get it going. The free loading investors, like me, bought some shares and are now laughing all the way to the bank (or at least our Robin Hood apps)

Brexit border system outage puts perishable goods transport in peril

Re: Laurel & Hardy in "Nothing but Brexit "

>So the "Brexit border system" is nothing to do with Brexit

Well true Brexit has never been achieved. When we would seal up the tunnel, blockade the channel and trade only with ourselves.

Re: I think there will be a huge rise in smuggling

HO-HO

Re: A power outage

>What ? There was no backup system ?

Yes there were 4 sockets on the extension and the computer was only using one - so there were 3 spares (expect the office kettle is plugged into one)

US watchdog chases Waymo robocars to catch violations

Good job all the waymo cars are white

Re: Oh got to love US tech bros

>Some rough stuff here. Not sore what L.A. is like.

They don't even allow flamethrowers here

Raspberry Pi prepares to boot up a London listing

Or an Arduino, or a Pi2040 - I don't think you need a full-up Linux desktop to open a gate

An ESP32 and you could even use bluetooth = it detects your phone / car and opens