Posts by cyberdemon

The climate is turning against owning our own compute hardware. Cloud is good for you and your customers

Re: What was the question again?

And guess what: Thanks to the confusing definitions and ambiguous vote options, results so far are 52% in favour of the slurp-cloud (sponsored by Meta?) vs 48% against. Dom would be proud.

Re: What was the question again?

Er yeah. This debate was fluffed because the title of the article is inconstent with the "proposition".

Apparently if you Agree with the title "The climate is turning against owning our own compute hardware. Cloud is good for you and your customers" then you should vote AGAINST, but if you disagree, you should vote FOR. WTF?

Did the Reg attend the Dominic Cummings & Vladimir Putin school of Electioneering?

Anyway, my vote is: The cloud is BAD for both the environment AND my privacy, because it spends too many megawatts analysing all my surveillance data points, and trying to predict and influence my future behaviours.

Long live customer-owned hardware with open source software that doesn't spend all its time spying on the data cow user.

Australia will force social networks to identify trolls, so they can be sued for defamation

Re: The ultimate nanny state

I agree, but Australia seems to be something of a pit-canary for unpopular Authoritarian policy in the west. Australia does things that would cause riots in the UK, US and EU. But where they go, we all eventually follow.

RIPA: Happened in Australia first. Then Jacqui Smith introduced it to the UK.

Detention without charge if suspected of terrism. Hostile Environment. Slurping of medical records.

ID cards will be next. Then a ban on encryption. Then this.

P65 is easier to administer if you just slap it on everything. Your carpenter's square probably contained a high dose of Iron. If you swallow enough iron filings you will probably get cancer. Oh and if it's steel then it may contain a small amount of cobalt, a tiny fraction of which is radioactive!!!1

UK competition regulator to Meta's Facebook: Sell Giphy, we will not approve the purchase

Re: will Meta pull services

^ - This - ^

MetaFace/ZuckCorp for room 101 please.

China's hypersonic glider didn't just orbit Earth, it 'fired a missile' while at Mach 5

Re: Money Can't Buy Everything

That was probably a coil gun, which I also built as a kid. It can only fire a ferromagnetic (iron/steel) projectile. Mine shot a nail, at a similar subsonic speed to your paperclip.

A railgun works on a DC linear motor principle, whereby a large current passes through the projectile between the rails, and generates a magnetic field in opposition to the magnetic fields generated by the rails themselves. It operates at millions of Amps, and any paperclip would turn to plasma before it even starts moving.

Actually I think that is one of the main problems with railguns - the need to clean off the remains of projectiles that have sputtered themselves onto every surface on the inside of the weapon.

Sweden asks EU to ban Bitcoin mining because while hydroelectric power is cheap, they need it for other stuff

Re: Quite

> Even if you just use a conventional electric fire to create the heat you get virtually 100% efficiency

No, you don't. You get about 50%, the other 50% is lost in generation and transmission from the gas-fired power plant which is the only thing propping up the electricity grid when it's cold and dark and the wind isn't blowing.

Whereas a gas boiler gives you 95% of the heat from the source gas, and it doesn't load up the electric grid.

Heat pumps only work with an extremely well insulated house where the radiators don't need to be much hotter than body temperature to keep the place warm when it's freezing outside. But such houses aren't common in the UK or Europe, nor can they ever become common, not without a significant demolition spree. Simply squirting polystyrene foam into the cavity wall and filling the roof with fibreglass wool won't make enough of a difference, because the cavity wall is bridged by conducting iron tie-rods and there are vents in the top and bottom of the house to allow natural airflow. If you plug those up, you end up with low oxygen levels, damp, and black mould.

1MWh of electricity to process a single bitcoin transaction.

No, 1MWh to produce a single bitcoin. Most transactions are tiny fractions of a bitcoin. And many thousands of transactions are processed with the production of a bitcoin.

Not defending bitcoin though. Not unless we had ubiquitous nuclear power. And even then, there'd be much better uses of the energy.

Off topic: Heat Pumps vs Gas Boilers

Err, not defending Bitcoin/Shitcoin (and not calling it 'Crypto' either because as an earlier Reg article pointed out, cryptography is losing its name to this crap) but can you please give me an example of a heat pump that can exceed 300% (or even 150%) efficiency in realistic UK winter conditions (never mind Sweden), when the source of heat is below 10 degrees C (i.e. outside air in winter) and the water output is above 60 degrees C (i.e. able to heat radiators to a point where they are effective at heating a house).

Your gas boiler will normally heat the water to about 50 degrees C on minimum and 85 degrees on maximum. Normally you'd have it set to 60 for efficient operation, but you may need to raise it to get good heating performance in the cold weather, especially if you live in an old brick house as so many of us do here in the UK.

I think you'll find that the 300% figure only applies with a ΔT less than 30 degrees (air to water, so if it's freezing outside, then your radiators only reach 30 degrees which is hopeless), and it drops to 200% around ΔT=50 C, i.e. radiators at 50 degrees which is still pretty hopeless. In cold conditions with a hot output comparable to a gas boiler, they are below 150%.

And remember, you have already lost a lot of that energy during electricity generation and transmission so they don't actually start at 100% (and if it's cold, dark and still, it won't have come from renewables). Factoring in the generation and transmission efficiency, they are frequently less than 100% efficient, even if the heat pump is running at 2.0 Coefficient of Performance ("200% efficient").

Whereas condensing gas boilers are genuinely 95% efficient, because they don't involve any Carnot cycle - we are not converting heat into another form of energy, we are using it AS heat, with almost no wastage thanks to the condensing system (whereby they use the exhaust gases to pre-heat the combustion gases).

What's more, they are RESILIENT. They don't put a strain on our rather fragile electricity grid, and if the grid does go down, we can easily run a gas boiler and pump with a small battery inverter.

And the amount of materials (copper, neodymium, refrigerant gases, semiconductors for power electronics, energy) needed to build these bastards is pretty horrendous. And they are all made almost exclusively in China.

They are also noisy and bulky, like an oversized air conditioning unit, which is what they are, really.

Rust dust-up as entire moderation team resigns. Why? They won't really say

Linux a disaster with just one controlling voice which explains why it's had no real take up.

You forgot the joke icon mate.

Do not try this at home: Man spends $5,000 on a 48TB Raspberry Pi storage server

Re: A real engineer..

And inside the SOC, is the peripheral bus PCIe or something else?

YouTubers

It was done so that he could put on that surprised YouTuber face and make yet another pointless clickbaity video to add to the sewer of shite that is YouTube. Why is this being picked up by the reg?

Boffins find way to use a standard smartphone to find hidden spy cams

How it's done

From the paper:

Specifically, the hidden camera embedded in the object reflects the incoming laser pulses at a higher intensity than its surroundings due to an effect called lens-sensor retro-reflection. This occurs when almost all light energy impacting an object is reflected directly back to the source (see Section 2.2). These unexpectedly high-intensity reflections from hidden cameras cause certain regions of the ToF sensor to be “saturated” and appear as black pixels. LAPD processes these saturated areas to automatically identify the hidden camera.

So, it sounds like any glass bead would be identified as a hidden camera.

Ubuntu desktop team teases 'proof of concept' systemd on Windows Subsystem for Linux

Re: @karlkarl - I don't think so!

And I think that's why Microsoft bought GitHub. ;)

What happened to the Bill Gates Satan Icon?

Re: @jake - "2 users though have frequently requested systemd support"

> What is UEFI if not a Basic Input Output System?

It's a rather complicated, convoluted and contrived system for a lot more than input and output.

Amazon tells folks it will stop accepting UK Visa credit cards via weird empty email

Re: My email wasn't blank...

Yes exactly, because that kind of information is regulated.

I'm sure Amazon have some means to analyse it, even if it's not stored explicitly though. ;)

Maybe Visa told them not to do that.

Re: Hovering

Err, yes, that's a few kilobytes of data per day, at best.

And while they (Mastercard/Visa/My Bank) might know the different shops that I frequent and how much I spend, they don't get enough data to properly analyse the things that I buy.

TESCO, Chipping Soddington, 53.21 GBP, Friday 13 April, 18:36

This gives them a very approximate location, i.e. country and vicinity, but it doesn't give any details of what I bought (though it does for Tesco, if and only if I use a Clubcard) or the exact coordinates of where I was. And my credit rating is literally THEIR legitimate business.

Whereas (for most people) Amazon collects: Their exact GPS coordinates at all times (via the App on their phone), a picture of their face whenever they enter their own home (via Amazon Ring), potentially anything they say in their private home (via Amazon Echo/Alexa/Spot), every exact product they buy, every product they have hovered over while scrolling and might buy, every product they have reviewed and they way they form sentences in such reviews, any websites that they visit without clearing Amazon's tracking cookies in their browser, any other apps they use in their phone (via Android/Apple tracking APIs which cannot be cleared/disabled), etc etc.

And for those poor sods who are unlucky enough to work for Amazon or one of its many subsidiaries, partners and customer companies (e.g. Deliveroo) then they are surveilled every second of their waking (and probably sleeping too) lives.

Meanwhile Facebook, Google, Microsoft et al are all competing to collect even more data. And they all use this data (at great expense to the planet) to build yet more power and more influence over everyone's daily life.

In other words, I would not trust Amazon or any of the aforementioned tech monstrosities with one iota of well-labeled concise data of the kind that I trust my credit card company with.

And that's not to say that I am a fan of the credit card duopoly that is Mastercard/Visa. I just trust them an order of magnitude more than I trust Amazon, because they have been around for longer and as such, our laws and regulations are well-established to stop any funny business from them.

Re: Hovering

> Your credit card company has more information on you, thanks to you people flicking that credit card out for £5 lattes, than Amazon will have in decades.

Err, no. Not by a long shot.

The data that banks and credit card companies collect has been very well-regulated for decades. Whereas the likes of Amazon, Google and "Meta" collect unregulated gigabytes of data about you all the time, and abuse that data to model and manipulate you.

I agree with the OP: Credit card data is far more dangerous in the hands of Amazon than it is in the hands of Mastercard or Visa, who are only allowed to use it to compute a credit score.

Hopefully Amazon would be subject to the same regulation, but I trust them a lot less than I would trust a labrador with my lunch.

A 'national security' issue: UK.gov blocks Nvidia's Arm deal for now, inserts deeper probe

Department of Culture, Media and Sport

AKA the Ministry of Fun.

NVidia might have too much fun with ARM, and that's not permitted here in Blighty.

I'm sure Priti Patel will find some Israeli company to sell ARM to instead...

SAP patent not inventive enough to get legal protection, judge rules

A Pox on Both your houses!

Trivial patents like these are an abuse of the patent system, and a waste of the court's time.

And TBH, with the modern pace of product development, I think it would be fair to shorten the life of all patents to 5 years instead of 25.

If you haven't got your great idea to market by then, it's time to let someone else try it.

Sheffield Uni cooks up classic IT disaster in £30m student project: Shifting scope, leadership changes, sunk cost fallacy

> you cannot even rely on the source code being correct, as some fixes were done in machine code in the compiled program, it was easier that way.

Easier to ensure their long-term job-security that way?

Re. "Central Abomination" of R'lyeh:

At some point you would have to consider which would be more costly: An army of Oracle consultants incrementally "upgrading" the system, or A tragic 'accident' involving the core mainframe and its entire disk array.

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

ecohippies

The UK is 'part of the problem' in that we still buy tat from China and India to prop up our economy.

Said 'Tat' includes Neodymium magnets for Wind turbines EVs and Heat Pumps, Lithium and Cobalt for batteries and EVs, and Silicon for solar cells (which would be much more effectively used nearer the equator), all so we can pretend that we are saving the planet (when like you say, our 'local' emissions already represent the tiniest fraction of global CO2 emissions). We are simply shifting the problem somewhere else.

The real problem is that our economy is fundamentally dependent on "growth". In the words of Agent Smith, the Human Race is a Cancer on this Planet. Globalisation has allowed us to 'Grow' far beyond our means, nothing we can do in terms of so-called renewable energy will stop that.

If only there was some kind of plague to reduce the numbers of humans to a sustainable level without causing WWIII. Oh wait. There was. Damn and blast those vaccine developers...

Nuclear is the way to a stable sustainable future, but I fear we in the west are far too late thanks to our shunning of it (because the CND took issue against our foolish use of civil nuclear reactors to develop weapons in the 60s) in favour of Gas and Oil (and probably Big Oil were backing the CND..)

Now globalisation is out of control, and if we unilaterally stop economic growth now, we will be overtaken and immediately threatened by Russia and China, who will still use Oil and Gas resources, as well as Nuclear.

In the end, we will have plenty of nuclear energy, whether we like it or not. (see icon)

Re: Compost Heap

Ok, so in reply to my own post: The sun's core is approximately 0.8% of its volume and produces 99% of the fusion power. So that's 25kW/m3, which is a lot more than a compost heap, but still about 10,000 times lower than a Fission reactor core.

ITER has a plasma volume of 830 m3 so it would produce 25MWt if it had the same power density as the sun's core. It is designed to produce 500MWt from 50MW input, so needs to run significantly hotter. And as you can imagine, not many materials can withstand megawatts per square metre of Neutron flux.

Re: Fusion

Interesting, thanks.

Can you give any comment/explanation on why Germany decided to close all its nukes in response to Fukushima?

The acquaintance who told me this worked for a German nuclear company at the time, so may well have been biased, or had insider information, or both.

Re: Fusion

A German acquaintance once told me that at the time, all of the German press reported that there was a nuclear incident *followed by* an earthquake/tsunami. So a large portion of the German population believed that the nuke incident *caused* the earthquake/tsunami, whereas clearly it was the other way around.

That kind of explains the massive knee-jerk reaction in Germany to shut down all their nukes and replace them with brown lignite coal (the worst kind of coal, more polluting even than Biomass) which has to be one of the stupidest energy decisions in human history, and one that we are paying heavily for in the climate crisis.

Can we blame the Russian troll-propaganda department for that one? We'll never know.

Re: Compost Heap

This is a good point. Thanks.

Do you have a figure for the power density at the core? How does it compare with ITER / DEMO ?

Re: Nuclear powered shaver.

So, AC. What's your solution?

Currently, the UK produces about 35% of its electricity from gas, and that's without considering all the gas boilers and petrol/diesel cars that we are supposed to be phasing out.

About 40% (currently) of electricity is renewable by volume, but that disappears as soon as the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing - we need gas to step in at these moments or else the lights go out, and energy storage on that scale is mind-bogglingly expensive, inefficient, unreliable and dangerous (even when compared to nuclear,(and even with the current set of Nuclear regs which were practically written by the CND))

And once you consider house heating, that demand doubles at least.

Without nuclear, coal or gas, where would a nation like the UK get its stable baseload energy from?

It's still a 'solution' in both the mathematical and technical sense, to the global warming problem.. Just, not a very optimal one, from Humanity's point of view.

Re: Fusion

But population displacement and loss of land are because of fear, not actual danger, no?

Re: Compost Heap

Minor correction. I meant power density (volumetric and gravimetric) not energy density. The sun produces only about 275 watts per cubic metre, and 385W/ton. Similar to a garden compost heap.

Obviously its energy density is higher than a compost heap, unless you plan on extracting nuclear rather than chemical energy from the compost heap.

Fusion

I worked in Fusion for 6.5 years. I can tell you: It doesn't have potential to replace fission.

(We have only one working fusion reactor, and its energy and power densities are approximately that of your average compost heap. But it is so massive, that it lights up the planets nevertheless. That's why any fusion power plant has to be even hotter and even higher pressure than the sun, which is hard to achieve. And the energy output of a fusion reactor is in terms of neutron radiation. It is much MORE radioactive, when operating, than a fusion reactor, the only difference is you can turn it off. It doesn't produce heavy isotopes with thousands of years of decay time. But it DOES irradiate your cobalt-steel with neutrons and make it radioactive, for example)

However, fusion may well have potential to augment fission though: e.g. hybrid fusion-fission reactors, you use a small "fusor" (i.e. a very small fusion reactor that doesn't care about reaching anywhere near unity output, these are cheap and compact, you could almost build one at home) as a source of fast neutrons with a fast "off" switch. These neutrons are then used as an "ignition" for a fission reaction using sub-critical Uranium, i.e. uranium that cannot sustain a reaction by itself. Now you have a nuclear reactor that you can turn off, just like that.

Large-scale battery storage is potentially as dangerous as Nuclear. Current battery storage systems are tiny, they are only able to compensate for frequency deviations in the grid, i.e. when the sun goes behind a cloud, they provide just enough juice to prop up the grid while we spin up a gas turbine and start burning more fossils.

If you wanted a battery that could power 10% of the UK grid for an hour, (never mind overnight on a still day), you're talking 4-5GWh. The biggest battery storage projects in the world are a fraction of that, and we have yet to see the effect of one of them having a 'meltdown', but we know that it involves a lot of extremely toxic fluorinated gases e.g. HF entering the atmosphere. On the other hand we have had a few meltdowns of nuclear plants over the last decades, and they have proved extremely rare, and surprisingly safe. For example, everyone seems to think of Fukushima as a disaster, but I see it as a triumph for nuclear safety: It was a very old design, it suffered pretty much the worst event that can happen to a nuclear reactor: A Tsunami that killed 50,000 people and made millions homeless flooded the plant and shut off all power to cooling systems. 50 people went in to stabilise it, all of them expecting to die from the radioactivity, but so far not one of them (afaik) has. The tsunami killed 50,000, the nuclear reactor killed approximately zero. So where is the disaster?

And without more reactors, we will burn more fossils, and we will have more typhoons. (I don't think we can blame global warming for tsunamis)

I think if the money we have spent on Fusion could have been spent instead on better Fission designs, then the world would be in a much better place right now.

We could have had molten salt fast (as in fast neutrons) reactors, which are able to consume the spent fuel that other reactors would consider to be "high level nuclear waste". They can even eat the Plutonium that we have stockpiled for weapons.

There is a solution which is perfectly feasible and pretty much guaranteed to reduce carbon emissions in the long term:

Have a war, shrink the global economy and the global human population by 50% or more. Any volunteers?

If we don't do something about the problem now, that option could be forced upon us when global food shortages hit, etc.

Re: One in every town

Oh and did we mention they are modular? That means less risk: You can use a relatively small investment to build the first one, and then when that starts making ROI, you have an income on which to secure investment for three more.

Whereas with a gigawatt-scale nuke, you need tens of billions up front. No investor, perhaps with the exception of Jeff Bezos, would be daft enough to do that.

Certain hippie types might not like it, but Nuclear is the only reliable low carbon energy source that we have. We can't do everything with wind, solar and lithium batteries, you know.

FYI: If the latest Windows 11 really wants to use Edge, it will use Edge no matter what

I agreed with you until the ascendancy of Red Hat/Poettering.

Then use Devuan. It is impressively good.

Re: Microsoft Office

no. Obviously it only works for Microsoft (i suppose you could rent yourself back from them). You are a slave by proxy.

VR is not a problem at all in my experience. It works brilliantly. Possibly better than on Windows.

The Forest, Dead Effect 2, HL:Alyx, Thrill of the Fight, Serious Sam.. Loads more. Only two of those are officially supported, but everything so far seems to 'just work' with Proton, so long as you tick the box that says "Enable Steam Play for all other titles". Then you can play almost everything on Steam.

> MS Access is a problem

I hope you don't mean to say that you actually use that pile of dinosaur shit that was called Microsoft Access.

Have you heard of SQL? Django?

You do NOT own your computer, but you SHOULD own your data!

Excuse me, but I own both.

And while I agree with some of your points, your post reads like a rabid conspiracy-nitwit of the kind that just discredits those of us with an actual logical point to make about the degree of control exerted by the megacorps.

Also, please learn the function of the carriage return key. You know, the one that looks like a backwards L-shaped arrow.

And if you're that paranoid, wait until you read about Intel Management Engine... There's no hiding from the CIA.

Microsoft Office

Have you noticed how they have *removed* the AutoSave feature from Office? Now, you *have* to be connected to 365, it doesn't do local AutoSave anymore. And if you are connected to 365, your every keystroke and mouse twitch are sent to Microsoft, who may or may not use them to train a GPT AI model of you.

And even if you "opt out" of "connected experiences", sometimes it is forced upon you by Group Policy, so you still get the data-slurping features like "Microsoft Editor" which analyses your text as you type and creepily tries to suggest things for you, like Clippy on steroids. Or the layout in PowerPoint that uploads everything to Microsoft and "helpfully" suggests ways to make your presentation look shit.

Windows and Office are nothing more than a data-slurping GDPR violation. Microsoft want more data than Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon. Data is the new Oil, etc.

Teams works perfectly

For its primary use-case as a data-collection tool for Microsoft.

But no one will die or get disfigured because of Microsoft

Depends if their hospital uses Microsoft Cloud

insists on putting links to its paid sycophant partners on the Edge home page.

Not just in Edge, but the flipping Start menu!

If you want, you can install another program and tell Windows to use it to handle the steam:// URIs instead of Steam (maybe some custom script you wrote).

Not so with microsoft-edge:// - Have you READ the article?

Traditionally, Apple HAVE been worse at treating their computers like a lease/rental (sorry, you can't open that case) but Microsoft have caught up and are determined to go much further. Meanwhile Apple have scaled back some of their old user-hostile practices (which isn't to say they are great, just not quite as bad as they used to be).

If you want a computer that works for YOU and not someone else, use Linux. And familiarise yourself with some of the source code if possible - you may want to change it and contribute the odd pull request if you want it to behave exactly how you want.

Games

BTW: I have literally yet to find a game that doesn't run in Steam/Proton (except those with 3rd-party DRM, which I avoid purchasing, for reasons unrelated to Linux). Even VR games work perfectly.

You just need to tick the box that says 'Run ALL windows titles, not just officially supported ones' and Proton will do its best.

Proton is a per-app tweaked fork of Wine by Valve, that is specifically designed to integrate with Steam, the Steam overlay, and SteamVR. It's amazingly good. And fast.

Re: Sym link?

Yes, probably the same paranoid level of security anti-user DRM that caused Snipping Tool to break for several days in Win11 due to an expired certificate. Apparently Windows needs to verify that you are using the authorised version of Snipping Tool or else it won't run it. Probably the same goes for Edge.

Icon: the ultimate in anti-user DRM

Why the downvotes on this?

NTFS is horrendous at reading and writing large numbers of small files, compared to Btrfs say.

But tmpfs (ramdisk) beats them all.

mount -t tmpfs tmpfs ./build

Altium

Works happily in VirtualBox and other VMs apparently. Even the 3D stuff.

And then you can use Linux iptables to block access to all internet hosts (except the Altium license manager) for the VirtualBoxVM process, ensuring that while technically you are running a Windows instance, at least you are not letting the Microsoft spyware through.

He called himself the King of Fraud. Now this bot lord will reign in prison for years

Why is this filed under 'on-prem'?

This guy will be 'on-prem' for a while, I suppose.

UK Treasury and Bank of England starting to sound serious about 'Britcoin'

The problem is that people who can make money from it will lobby for it

> and will convince a lot of people who do not now how the current system works that we are missing out on something and falling behind other countries

Sounds a lot like B****t

Swiss lab's rooftop demo shows sunlight and air can make fuel

Re: isn't this what a tree does?

Yes and a Tree has an integrated Carbon Capture and Storage system, (as long as you don't chop it down and bung it into Drax)

Re: Ethanol

5kWt for 7 hours to produce 30ml Ethanol per day? At Ethanol's energy density of 24 MJ/L we have only 720kJ output, for 126 MJ input. That's an efficiency of 0.57% for this process.

So efficiency wise, it's no better than growing Barley, fermenting it and then distilling it to produce the same methanol, without the expensive Cerium Oven and CO2/Water capture contraptions. And I'm quite sure the Barley method tastes better too.