Posts by cyberdemon

California goes ape with bill to crown Bigfoot official state cryptid

Re: Why let Oregon rake in all the tourist dollars?

Frankly, I am waiting for California to change their flag to a two-headed bear

BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn't

Soddering Iron

One thing that never ceases to amuse me is that the 'merkins pronounce it "soddering iron" - i'm going to sodder that joint up real good, etc.

Yes, really

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

> Look Elon. Mars is that way.

Pretty sure the Martians would deport him..

Euro cloud biz trials 'server blades in a cold box' system

Re: DC Pricing or utility pricing

Well, you can't use the heat directly, you don't want to send your actual coolant off-site because any contamination of it would be catastrophic. So you need either a Heat Exchanger or a Heat Pump. But from 50C a passive heat exchanger wouldn't be very effective at producing useful warm water, so you need the HP, which costs money to build and takes additional energy to run, so you do have some underlying costs before you can simply 'sell' the excess energy that would be otherwise wasted.

But since the inlet is 50C, the HP wouldn't have that much work to do, so it might still be a reasonable investment.

Well, I think that's why they suggested using a heat pump to efficiently take the 50C coolant exhaust up to say 80C for district heating, and that would be a separate loop. When the HP is running then the Big Fans outside don't need to run. If the heat pump fails or there is no demand for district heating, then the fans run and dump the heat to the outside air..

Dark mode might be burning more juice than you think

Re: And have these idiots...

My first thoughts exactly.. But worst are the websites that try to greenwash themselves by having a dark mode and trumpet about it, telling users that it saves X MWh/year or Y tonnes of CO2 by enabling it - No it doesn't. Certainly not on LCDs which are by far the more ubiquitous devices.. (in fact as the study says, LCD users are more likely to turn up the backlight brightness in dark mode).. OLED screens are pretty rare, and even on those, the savings from switching to dark mode on an an appropriate device are utterly minuscule, compared to the energy cost of running the website itself, all the shitty JavaScript it has, etc etc.

Mobile operators brace for bigger, faster headaches with 6G

> My 4G service (EE) is abysmal

As someone mentioned lower down it may be that your 4G tower has a crappy copper VDSL backhaul, shared between you and all the prats on their TikToks

The worst is "Edge" though, and for once i'm not talking about the abominable MS Web Browser.. Whenever I am out of 5G/4G range (3G being decommissioned) my phone switches to Edge, and it is near 100% utterly useless, I can rarely get even the level of service of a 1990s GSM WAP phone out of it

> Mobile operators brace for bigger, faster headaches with 6G

You mean 6G will give me even worse headaches, even faster than 5G did???

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

> positive discrimination is not allowed here (in the UK)

When did that change?

I worked in HR for a couple of months (forgive me, I was an engineer on a graduate scheme and we had to do 2-month stints in several departments) and the Catbert-HR troll gave me a lecture about positive discrimination and how it was a good thing. This was 2008. I argued that all discrimination is wrong and it should be meritocratic.

She told me that the gender balance in our engineering department was horrible - we only had 4 females out of 20 engineering staff.. I pointed out that her HR department was 8 staff, all of whom were female (not counting me, on a 2 month placement). So 80% vs 100%. She didn't respond, only glowered at me and left me at my desk

Re: Seems to match

I think it's pretty rare that two candidates would be exactly equal in their abilities. If it isn't rare, then it suggests that the hiring decision is not sufficiently detailed / granular e.g. rating everyone on a scale of integers between 1 and 5.

It's rarer still for those candidates to be of different genders, given the rarity of female applicants to engineering roles in the first place

So you are right, in an infinitesimal proportion of cases.

But, for the sake of sanity, I would just improve the detail of the hiring process to make sure that these cases don't happen, i.e. find out who is truly the better candidate, and hire them.

Microsoft boffins promise entire game worlds made from AI slop

I fear, what we will see is slop games flooding platforms like Steam, with some being loaded with malware. Steam and other platforms like Google Play etc clearly don't have nor want to pay for the resources required to properly vet each game, and the execs will have the proverbial dollar signs in their eyes when they see people buying more and more games just to find one that is actually good..

AI lowers the bar to entry, which might be good for an indie dev at first, but when they see what they are competing with, they will be disheartened, because the competition have the same low bar, while their own unique creativity if they had any will have been diluted by AI crap, and anything good that they CAN make to differentiate themselves, will just be stolen wholesale with little human intelligence required.

As with the rest of the news.. Welcome to the beginning of the apocalypse, folks. The end is nigh. Repent, repent, etc. Where did I put my sandwich board

Microsoft shows off novel quantum chip that can scale to 'a million qubits'. So far: Eight

Re: A Microsoft spokesperson said ..

This is the comment I came for.

.. I'd like some of what they are smoking, tbh

HP Inc to build future products atop grave of flopped 'AI pin'

Re: Why would a printer need AI?

A cunning plan worthy of Baldrick?

We're not selling enough overpriced ink cartridges... My lord I have a Cunning Plan!

We will add a special button to the printers that prints random AI generated slop, so that confused customers and their bored offspring can waste buckets of our black gold and have to buy more, from us!

Excellent idea Baldrick, and to top it off, we'll make the drivers so hideous that the customers won't be able to able to print the document they wanted to print, and will have to keep pushing the AI button over and over, until it spits out something close enough or they run out of ink!

Re: Why would a printer need AI?

Oh god. Recall for your Printer. Now you can print documents that never even existed! Stuff that looks vaguely like something you might print, but is in fact total nonsense! Skip the whole step of writing documents in the first place when you can just hit print on the printer and it prints whatever you were statistically most likely* to print next!

(most likely, according to a quantised and highly imperfect version of statistics)

Hundreds of Dutch medical records bought for pocket change at flea market

After erasing them with random data, he should take them to the dump in Newport

Then he could recoup his costs by pretending he found them there and selling them on to a complete chump.

Microsoft declutters Windows 11 File Explorer in the name of Euro privacy

If it's already served its purpose and the snapshot model has already been sent to the mothership, why keep the local copy? Can't have any power, however useless, left in the plebs proles mugs datacows user's hands, can we? Like I said, recall is not for you, it's for the real customer, BB.

The supposed utility to the end-user is just a figleaf for the real purpose of Recall, so why would they care if they break it from time to time?

Re: update to Recall will delete a user's existing snapshots

The Recall Snapshot data was never for 'you' anyway..

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

Re: The GNOME web browser ... now has improved file import

Drag&Drop files maybe? As in email attachments etc? Works fine on my KDE desktop with Firefox/Chromium..

I'll stick with the desktop that works for me, thanks... The garden Gnomes and Waylands are, (as seems to be the riposte politique du jour) "for the birds".

Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit

Re: what are you paying for

As would Messrs Sue, Grabbitt & Runne

Re: what are you paying for

Well, if you as a client had paid for legal representation by a qualified lawyer, and you did not in fact get legal representation by a qualified lawyer, but instead were given generative slop from some bullshit machine, then it would be fraud. But here, it is the judge who has been presented with slop, so it is contempt.

UK's new thinking on AI: Unless it's causing serious bother, you can crack on

> I personally, don't give a shit what my data is worth, I just don't want them to have it.

Well, that's what the 'if anybody' was for.

I.e. i wasn't implying that I or anyone else should sell their data, just that they should have a choice, and "not for sale" must be a valid choice

But the idea of the government selling our personal data from under us via a tax for using it, is repugnant to me

Er, no, sorry but I don't want the government selling my personal data either. It's MY data, they should pay ME for it if anyone

The Doom-in-a-PDF dev is back – this time with Linux

Re: Coolness aside

Coolness? It's an abomination.

Call me a boring old fart, but the whole point of PDF was supposed to be that it was as immutable as a paper document, didn't run code in the background, and is pretty safe to open.

RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101

Re: I don't think that number means what you think it does

No, in octal, 404 is 260, which is not biologically plausible.

However in base 5, i mean base 101, 404 is 104

_{(credits to my favourite calculator, the interactive Ruby shell (irb) and its String.to_i(int base) function)}

Why do younger coders struggle to break through the FOSS graybeard barrier?

Re: What are the actual demographics?

Depends on the project.

I was at the Embedded Open Source Summit EOSS2023 in Prague, specifically for the Zephyr developer summit. The demographics there are pretty healthy, a lot of young developers there, maybe because it's a fairly new and fast-moving project.

That said, there is a very high bar to getting code accepted to Zephyr, and for good reason. But the other devs are very helpful with pull requests to get it up to the required standard.

Have I Been Pwned likely to ban resellers from buying subs, citing 'sh*tty behavior' and onerous support requests

The whole idea of selling bulk access to HIBP seems to defeat its purpose.. The purpose is for end users to improve their security by changing credentials for accounts that have suffered data breaches. Whereas bulk access would allow a third party (perhaps a cybercriminal themselves) to fish for targets who might have forgotten to change their credentials, and to either target them with scams, or indeed go and purchase those leaked credentials on the dark web and see if they still work.

Undergrad and colleagues accidentally shred 40-year hash table gospel

Re: Well Done.

Since at least one person didn't get it, I should explain that my subtle joke with the icon is one that I stole from a Private Eye cartoon..

Sherlock Holmes (rifling through his desk drawers): "Watson! My Opium and Hashish drawers are empty!"

Dr. Watson: "No 'shit', Sherlock?"

Re: Well Done.

When I was at Uni, I discovered a new kind of hash, too.

Sadly, I have none of it left..

Murena boss says customers about to wake up from its cloud storage nightmare

Re: WAG

I use the NatWest App on /e/OS. I don't use my phone as a contactless card though, but all the other features work

Re: WAG

Meh.

When I got my Fairphone4 and installed /e/OS on it, I was looking for a de-googled, cloud-free phone with a micro-SD card for voluminous local storage, that I could back up myself via Syncthing.

Naturally, I didn't subscribe to a Murena account or use any of their cloud services, what would be the point? Someone else's computer etc.

So, I think the mistake was to bother offering these "services" in the first place. I don't want them, I don't know why anyone else would want them, and I don't know why they were offered in the first place.

Maybe, anyone who makes a mobile phone OS that gains any sort of traction soon gets a visit from some men in suits and dark glasses, who tell them that they must offer some cloud storage services.

Trump’s cyber chief pick has little experience in The Cyber

Up the Cyber without a Paddle ...

Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study

Keeping up with the Musks? And the Thiels

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

Re: The bag was taken to the tip directly by his then girlfriend.

The best end to this story would be when the prat has spent millions purchasing a literal dump, the ex missus reveals that she in fact kept the hard drive, and incinerated it

Re: The real question

Hopefully an AC electromagnet. That would thoroughly reset the bits, assuming the bin-juice hasn't already lifted the magnetic coating from the platters...

London has 400 GW of grid requests holding up datacenter builds

Re: 400GW?

Well, the reason for the backlog is essentially because the DNOs (Distribution Network Operators) and TSO (Transmission System Operator) are receiving requests faster than they can deal with them.

That is partly due to duplicate submissions and 'zombie' projects that were never intended to be built, but objections to "pylons" and substations from NIMBYs (and so-called NOBYs or BANANAs, who say "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything") do obviously reduce the ability to clear the backlog, so it is logical to say they are partly responsible for it. And as I have said before, the NOBY anti-pylon argument is misinformed.

(That said, I think the NOBY brigade are right about Solar - The place for solar panels is on roofs and the odd sheep field, not high-grade arable farmland)

But, we really do need more overhead pylons and substations, net zero or no net zero. The grid is dangerously unstable without them, and there will be deaths if we have unexpected blackouts. Imagine your granny going upstairs to the loo for example when the lights go out. A certain percentage of the elderly/infirm would fall or otherwise injure themselves, as well as road accidents when the street/traffic/building lights suddenly go off, it becomes very dark indeed

Re: 400GW?

Well, the "misleading clickbait" that I was commenting on is the "meta:og-title" which appears only when you share a link to the article (or read the HTML source, line 11 of view-source:https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/10/london_has_400_gw_of/), which says that the 400GW is all Datacentres, which OFGEM does NOT say, nor does the actual article or its title.

Re: 400GW?

Also, it's worth noting that the 400GW figure could be inflated, since developers (of all projects, not just datacentres) have a habit of submitting multiple planning applications for the same project, in the hopes that one will get through

Re: 400GW?

But 400GW just for Datacentres in London?

The articles's "OpenGraph meta-title" (the text that you see when sharing the article on something like Slack or WhatsApp, seen in the HTML headers) says "London has 400 GW of grid requests for datacenter builds" - whereas the actual title is (or has been changed to?) "London has 400 GW of grid requests holding up datacenter builds" which could mean that there is 400GW in the queue in total, including solar farms, gas/diesel generators, EV chargers, housing developments, etc. and all this is holding up the approval of the er, much-needed datacentres.

But then again, the article says "These figures are drawn from the EMEA Datacenter Market Update for H2 2024" so it might be talking about just datacentres, but it's one of those evil Javascript PDF "flipbooks" so I can't be bothered to read it.

Edit, OK I relented and read the ghastly flipbook - London has 265MW DCs under construction and a further 1260MW planned, so more like 1.6GW, not 400. So the reg "meta-title" is misleading clickbait.

Some workers already let AI do the thinking for them, Microsoft researchers find

Re: ChatGPT, comment on this article in a pithy and thought provoking way.

I suck.

There, I did the bot's job for it. Hail to Humanity

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Re: Tesla was all about PR

+1 for turbine-electric hybrids

The turbine cars of the 50s used mechanical gearing to go from high RPM (100k+) to wheel speed and it was stupid. Gyroscopic loads and supersonic surface interactions caused bearings and gears to fail. But there have been significant advances in microturbines, high speed bearings and high speed low-inertia electric generators since, and an all-electric (series) powertrain means that the turbine runs at its optimal speed, and has no gears to wear out.

They are much lighter per kW than ICEs and have a similar if not better overall efficiency. It would solve a lot of problems with the 'range extended EV' concept.

Re: Not really a time to be owning a Tesla

The cars, the company, the fanbase.

And soon: The USA

Re: Tesla was all about PR

Are you sure that the Tesla forums are populated by real people? Or is it just an automated massage booth for Twitler's monstrous ego?

Re: Tesla was all about PR

And as the first poster alluded to, so was Gerald Ratner :)

He just didn't know it until he told the public that the only way he could make money from his cheap tat was "because it's total crap"

Datacenter energy use to more than double by 2030 thanks to AI's insatiable thirst

I don't know about Texas, but in the UK, we have a lot of small "reserve" power stations which are essentially farms of containerised Diesel gensets. They get around the rules on carbon accounting, because the individual generators are below 2MWt - (but they have a few dozen of them at a time colocated on the same site..). These "Diesel farms" got a lot of press in 2015 but for some reason they have been forgotten about now. But whenever the grid is struggling, they make a massive profit on the UK's Balancing Mechanism, selling at up to 50 times wholesale price to the grid.

I have also heard of datacentres overprovisioning their "backup" generators by just over double, so that they can not only be paid to disconnect from the grid, but they can function as one of these Diesel farms at the same time.

However bad coal or gas is, diesel-powered electricity is worse - there are no electrostatic exhaust scrubbers, and their thermal efficiency is worse than an open-cycle gas plant.

What we needed was nuclear - but the industry has been regulated to death. Apparently a lot of that crippling regulation and anti-nuclear propaganda of the day came from the Rockefeller foundation, who had a vested interest in Oil.

At the rate we're going, a wad of £5 notes will cost less than a lump of wood or coal for the fire.. Unfortunately they are plastic, so they don't burn as well as they used to.

But, blackouts are a serious possibility now, never mind with Ed Milliwatt's barmy plan for 95% renewables.

I only recently discovered Kathryn Porter (linked above) and she talks a lot of sense. It helps having degrees in BOTH Physics and Economics, she is the sort of person who _should_ be energy minister.

Building datacentres at this pace is worrying, because they are a constant load day and night, wind or calm. And things like "demand control by voltage reduction" (one of the tools in NESO's toolbox to avoid future blackouts, so they say) doesn't work on them, because their electronic power supplies would simply draw more Amps if you gave them less Volts.

At the same time, we have crackpot NIMBYs objecting to "pylons", believing that everything can be underground or offshore. Unfortunately they miss a few key points: 1. Just because London has some short (and exceedingly expensive) 400kV AC cables in tunnels (see: London Power Tunnels, cost: £2bn), doesn't mean that it can be done over long distances. Even if we could afford the tunnels and the cables, the capacitance of a HV AC cable fundamentally limits its length. It becomes inefficient, and you need very expensive shunt reactors to correct the power factor, even for short distances. 2. HVDC is great for cross-channel links between two separate grids, but it is a terrible idea internally. It can't work without stable AC commutation at both ends, and doesn't contribute to grid stability. If the 50Hz goes out of tolerance by 1Hz, HVDC links along with most Wind and Solar will trip offline. 3. They say "Just uprate existing pylons" - that is being done, with High Temperature (HTLS) conductors that can withstand operation up to 250°C at double the normal load for their weight, but this is inefficient, expensive, and doesn't improve system reliability - anyone on these forums knows that two lines of pylons have more resilience than one.

Perhaps anyone wishing to build a datacentre should have to pay their share of the next nuke plant, and the transmission infrastructure to go with it

Why UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for bloggers

Re: Many thanks to Thomas

A heroic effort indeed. However the response received from minitru^W ofcom is hardly comforting..

> The Act makes no mention of how closely connected to the provider content the comment or review must be to benefit from this exemption

So.. This is an IT forum and we are (in the main) discussing IT related matters, with the occasional bootnote. The Act still leaves it in the hands of ofcom to decide if we have deviated from our remit, essentially giving ofcom the potential power and remit of "Roskomnadzor".

Re: Brown said he intends to put this question directly to Ofcom

Wrong icon.

Off to the Gulag with you!

Veterans Affairs reboots Oracle health records project for $330M

Re: Trumusk

For a shorter and snappier word for the abominable amalgam of Trump and Musk, you could try Mump

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

Re: In the opinion of this Englishman

Well, there is Nigel Farage