Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Boffins build world's largest astronomical digital camera to map the heavens

Re: Liquid cooled or AI

It uses a fridge. A camera this big would use metric shit-loads of LN2 and since you want to run 365days/year for years that is a metric shit-tonne of LN2 to get to a telescope in the middle of nowhere.

Interesting that they do cool to -100c for a 15second exposure. We had to cool CCDs to that 30 years ago but modern dark current reduction designs (thanks Sony) made cooling short exposure CCDs unneccessary.

A bigger issue for this camera is probably cooling all the readout electronics. With that many chips you are going to have to have a lot of readout / processing electronics directly behind the chips = in the middle of the telescope, where you don't want to dump any hot air. The advantage of a fridge is that you can have the heat exchanger away from the telescope.

Re: Acronyms

Those are all European telescopes built and named by Germans

The German sense of humor is mostly pretending that Germans don't have a sense of humor

Re: Don't look up

No it won't.

The satelites only leave trails when the sun hits them, which only happens near dawn/dusk when they are in the sun, but the telescope is in the dark.

You try to image when it's dark, at dawn/dusk you normally try and schedule so you are pointing away form the sun (mostly from sky glow) but you balance this against looking near the horizon and having to look through more atmosphere which gives crappy images.

So I suspect with this mission you would want to stick to looking much closer to straight-up and just live with losing 30min/night

Yes, this is a survey telescope. the idea is to continually image the whole sky (over however many days) and so spot 'new' objects that you can follow up with bigger telescopes or space telescopes

Adaptive optics doesn't really apply to this sort of instrument, you can only correct the wobbly atmosphere over small patches of sky. The sky wobble at this site is <0.5 arcsec ( arcsec= 1/3600 deg) and the field of view is 3.5deg. The main requirement is a site that is never cloudy, if you are continually imaging the whole sky you can't miss half of it cos it was raining that night. The thing about a desert at 15,000ft is that you don't get a lot of rain !

Alibaba signs to explore one-hour rocket deliveries

But a space grade Titanium sleigh and mutant Space Reindeer...

Microsoft warns deepfake election subversion is disturbingly easy

Exactly. A certain Vulpine News Network (legally we are not news, for entertainment purposes only) could have filmed a lookalike President candidate announcing all sorts of illegal activities - and then broadcast that. But it would have looked bad in court later.

Now if they happen to receive in the email a video, of a presidential candidate committing illegal acts to disrupt an election - they can show it and claim they were just reporting the "facts" in good faith.

Ex-White House CIO tells The Reg: TikTok ban may be diplomatic disaster

Re: Is privacy a smokescreen?

>Imagine if there was a tv channel that had as many daily viewers as TT, its parent 'company' was the Chinese Communist Party,

Imagine one where the owners were Australian or Christian fundamentalists

But it's taking market share from patriotic anti-social media channels - honest G*d fearing Americans should be on TPFKAT or TS

Re: Political suicide.

>Anyone who uses TikTok, especially those who make their cash from TikTok will vote against the regime that does this.

It has 'interesting' tri-partisan support.

The GOP are for it cos China is the new bad

The Dems are for it cos a lot of foreign 'alternative truth' targets users who are likely their voters

The chosen one is against it cos a donor is a ByteDance investor he is fundamentally committed to free speech above mere global politics

Pressuring allies not to fulfill chip kit service contracts with China now official US policy

Re: Why?

>You also don't really want that state of the art CPU in most vehicle, medical, military or avionics applications

That would be the beautiful irony. TSMC / Intel etc all take the handouts strategic infrastructure investment, and build the most high-cost cutting edge next-gen AI-megic fabs in the the USA

Then China cuts off supplies of MOSFETs, 8051s, FTDI chips and the whole of western cheap consumer, industrial and military vehicle ECUs shuts down

TSMC boss says one-trillion transistor GPU is possible by early 2030s

2.5D -> 3D

Ours will got to 3.5D

Buy 3 dimensions, get one half-off !

Hillary Clinton: 2024 will be 'ground zero' for AI election manipulation

Re: Photo ID in UK

>, I expect there will be many such OAPs who will turn up to vote without photo Id because they didn’t need it in the past etc.

Wouldn't they enjoy being stopped by the Police and asked for their identity papers ? Blitz spirit and all that WWII nostalgia

Re: Photo ID in UK

> I have no doubt that if a UK citizen went off to fight for Russia against Ukraine you'd not want them back.

Ireland wasn't exactly friendly post-war to those who went off to fight for Britain against the Nazis

Re: The burden of proof

Which is why Judges are chosen by lottery.

Imagine how fscked your system would be if a government could stack the courts with lifetime political appointees

Re: Photo ID in UK

>As much as you would like to blame Labour, this is just yet another Tory fuckup.

But if Labour hand't kept losing elections then a series of disastrous Tory PMs wouldn't have been in power and so really all this is Corbyn's fault

Re: Photo ID in UK

>Could you provide the necessary paperwork to show you are a citizen of whatever country you think you are a citizen of?

Yes cos I'm a filthy rotten immigrant

Bring me your Physics PhDs, bring me your entrepreneurs yearning to form companies

Re: AI == Absolute Idiot

But would be capable of making a video of a president collapsing and being put in an ambulance, that could be aired continually by a vulpine news network on election day.

Re: Photo ID in UK

Naturally, dead conservative voters are much more politically involved than dead labour votes - you just have to look at the Tory party conference

Re: Photo ID in UK

>nothing is stopping younger people and minorities getting ID cards, you can get one for free from the government site.

So all those black people deported in the Windrush scandal could have avoided being rounded up and deported if they had just thought to apply for and carry a free Id card to prove they were real people?

Really how much simpler could we have made it? Perhaps some sort of badge they could sew onto their clothes ?

Re: Hillary is an AI creation

Unlikely, AI models generally spout nonsense, make up words, go off on tangents and make nonsensical statements totally unrelated to the subject and hallucinate events and facts that didn't happen

No way they could reproduce a presidential candidate

Re: Photo ID in UK

Because pensioners vote for us and students vote for them

Re: Photo ID in UK

We must get to the root of the problem. Bears are being forced to dress as people to achieve their political goals. Universal suffrage for Ursine mammals now

No it's a simple 1 dimensional board - but you can only make a new word by adding a compound to the existing word

The Register meets the voice of Siri Down Under

An Australian ?

So when you ask siri a question it responds with an answer that sounds like a question?

Sorry but my one "ok-boomer" (Well Gen-X) things is confusion when anybody under 30 answers with that rising inflection at end of the sentence

Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard

Re: Following BSE in cattle...

We had the blink tag

Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

Nope, I see almost no ads - between pinhole and no-script browsers. Worst I get is 'and now a message from my sponsor' in the middle of a YouTube

If the YouTuber was forced to do 20ad reads or have half the screen be an ad in the original content my experience would be diminished

Re: Still too low.

>To them, "infosec" is a foreign word

Ingsoc is double plus ungood

Re: Still too low.

Wouldn't a cybernaut travel by trireme?

>worst irresponsible

They are noble benefactors of us 'professionals'

They are the ones that pay for all the stuff we get for free and they distract the ad-slingers from getting more aggressive targeting us.

If everyone runs an ad blocker they are either going to get more intrusive about putting ads into the content or just put more stuff behind paywalls

UK skies set for cheeky upgrade with hybrid airship

Re: Really???

Are there any MRI scanners that are purely cryo-cooler now?

There are a few that are sealed unit and contain very little Helium and vent almost none in operation

Even then the initial cooling uses a lot of liquid helium and in a lot of places like hospitals it's not cost effective to recover that initial charge.

Re: Really???

Also in Canada, people call visiting their lakeside holiday home 'cottaging'. Interesting to hear your boss announce they are looking forward to going cottaging at the weekend

Re: No shortage of helium

>The US used to keep a cave full of helium but is selling it off because there is no strategic reason to maintain a reserve.

The original panic was that they were ordered to sell the reserve off in a ridiculously short time to meet some political budget deadline. So it would almost all have been dumped just to prove that the government wasn't involved in owning things and therefore commies.

IIRC there were some quiet behind-the-scenes words and sanity prevailed.

Pragmatic Semiconductor opens UK's first 300mm wafer fab in Durham

Re: At least its a factory

They did leave a legacy, the Radio Astronomy dept at Cambridge and Space Science dept at UCL were both paid for by Mullard

Not very, 800 - 1000nm ?

They are flexible chips printed directly onto the flexible interconnects, mostly used for things like sensors or antennea

IIRC they are a descendant of the inkjet-print-transistors Cambridge spin out in the 90s whose name I have forgotten

It's not bad news - but this isn't a fab in the TSMC sense.

They make flexible circuit boards, NFC antennae etc, useful and they are good at it - but this isn't the UK competing with Taiwan and the USA

Re: Nice trip hazard

With feature sizes of a fraction of an inch

Boeing top brass stand down amid safety turbulence

Nobody actually died in this case so we probably don't need to go to the trouble of new ID card lanyards with "SAFETY" logos.

If a couple of planes full of people had been lost then you might need mugs or even baseball caps.

Re: The rot has already happened.

Not sure it's fair to blame the NTSB for Boeing. Generally the NTSB are involved after the plane has already had the bad day

Re: Musical chairs

>and they're just rearranging the deck chairs

That's a bit unfair to Boeing management. They are not re-arranging deck chairs.

They have actually sold the division in charge of deck chairs who gave replaced the deck chair arrangers with gig workers. And by making it merely a re-arranging there is no need to include it in any safety plan.

UXL Foundation readying alternative to Nvidia's CUDA for this year

Re: Is very likely this will fail, like many others before

I suspect it's like the days of Unix workstations, Sun / SGI / HP-UX / IBM RS6000 all competed to be the best proprietary Unix to lock you into their propriety hardware.

And all got wiped out by Linux - but it would have been instant death if any of them had embraced Linux and still allowed it to run on other people's cheap hardware. But Linux only really replaced them when you had powerful commodity h/w to run it on - which only happened because Windows Servers created the market.

So to replace CUDA with OpenCL HIP or Open-flavour-of-the-day we need a market of commodity massively powerful non-NVidia GPUs to run it on, and if the only maker of massively powerful GPUs is NVidia cos of CUDA it's a bit of a Catch-0x16

AMDs software has been crap, to the extent of fundamental bugs in the fft lib being reported and unfixed for 2years.

They can't get onboard with Intel's API if Intel are competing with AMD for graphics card sales.

And nobody is going to get behind an open standard that doesn't give them the advantage everyone else implementing the standard, so it becomes a box tick 'opencl support(*)' in the same way that Windows 'supported' OpenGL and POSIX.

* for minimum values of support

Good news: HMRC offers a Linux version of Basic PAYE Tools. Bad news: It broke

Locally installed tax software?

If only there was a way of interacting with HMRC's computers through some sort of remote interface allowing browsing through tax form pages.

First release candidate of Linux kernel 6.9 looks 'fairly normal,' says Torvalds

Re: Bitlocker

It is possible to boot into windows recovery and fix it after turning it to AHCI mode but it's a pain.

Yes I would believe it's a deliberate Linux block, Balmer is back and just a bit more subtle

Same reason people keep having children when perfection was obviously reached with YAANONC

Bitlocker

> Microsoft's on-by-default BitLocker and Fast Startup features will prevent you mounting NTFS volumes from Linux, unless you manually disable them in Windows.

Isn't that rather the behavior you would want from a full disk encryption ?

Google's AI-powered search results are loaded with spammy, scammy garbage

Re: No shit sherlock

Google strives to send you to sites that have Google ads

So all the responses have become like those recipe sites that have 20pages about their Italian Grandmother to click through before it tells you how long to boil an egg

Woz calls out US lawmakers for TikTok ban: 'I don’t like the hypocrisy'

Apple don't need to slurp your data to market to you. You bought Apple and therefore will continue buying anything Apple wants to sell you as long as you keep staring at the shiny Apple device

>What specific information do you think people will be angry about telling the government but willing to put into a Facebook form? I can't think of anything.

In some of the more G*D-fearing states: that you are a friend of the star of wizard of Oz or that you are expecting a baby ?

Or suppose you were a sovereign government outside the USA, possibly one which encompassed 27 European economies, and thought to yourself:

You know, those American chaps are right, it's totally unconscionable to have the private data of your citizens in the hands of filthy foreigners

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, TPFKAT you have 180days to divest all your companies in the Eu

The UK Digital Information Bill: Brexit dividend or data disaster?

Re: Growth & innovation

>If government cared about economic growth they'd have delivered some in the past 14 years, when in real terms it has flatlined.

But that's the fault of the previous government and Jeremy Corbyn