Posts by phuzz

NASA dons red and blue cardboard 3D glasses to drive Curiosity rover because its GPUs are stuck in the office

Re: Sounds like they are using old GeForce 3D Vision kit

You could probably run this mode on even something like a mid range laptop.

Or alternatively it should work ok in a remote desktop environment.

AMD takes another crack at Intel's server stronghold with more Epyc silicon

Re: Sorry AMD fans...

My Ryzen 3700 is helping me WFH by munching through F@H tasks, whilst still remaining perfectly responsive for work tasks. Turns out 16 threads can get a lot of shit done simultaneously...

French pensioner ejected from fighter jet after accidentally grabbing bang seat* handle

Re: Double ejection

I was an air cadet in the mid 90's and although we watched the safety videos etc. the extent of the parachute landing training was "and when you reach the ground keep your knees bent so you don't break your legs", but no training or testing etc. I think the assumption was that you were almost certainly not going to use the parachute, so a couple of broken legs would be the least of your issues.

Re: Double ejection

All this talk of socialism, and no one has mentioned how most armed forces are much closer to being socialism, than the health services of either the UK or France.

BepiColombo probe swings by Earth on way to Mercury – the Solar System's must-visit coronavirus-free resort

Re: Brilliant stuff

This paper assumes that General Relativity wasn't taken into account when plotting the course, and predicts that the final pass off Venus could be off by ~8x10⁵km.

No idea if they're correct or not.

OK brainiacs, we've got an IT cold case for you: Fatal disk errors on an Amiga 4000 with 600MB external SCSI unless the clock app is... just so

Re: Which reminds me of an AI koan ...

The number of times a user has called me over to fix a problem, which then magically fixed itself as soon as I was stood there, is enormous.

Possibly the user is taking things slower and more carefully when I'm watching, but sometimes I think it's just electronic fear.

Re: The real mystery is how Paula discovered the clock work around ...

holding down the entire SCSI bus until they returned and the damnable machine would finally boot?

This still happens today. Last weekend my computer started hanging for minutes at a time, and after a bit of troubleshooting, I narrowed it down to any attempt to read or write to a particular SSD*.

So, a few days later, replacement SSD in hand, I power off my machine to install it (it had been powered off several times in between). It was at this point that the bad SSD decided to fail completely, and the machine refused to boot until I'd removed it.

I suspect that if I'd been more patient it would have eventually booted after timing out.

_{* I'm using StorageSpaces with tiering on Windows 10, which is completely unsupported, and I only have myself to blame}

Something something DANE cook: Microsoft pledges to wrap its email systems in secure anti-snooping protocol

Re: Let me see if I understand this...

It's just as likely that the US TLA's have told Microsoft that they require DNSSEC for email, so MS are adding it to try and get a big, juicy, DoD contract for Office 365.

Plus they don't need to crack the encryption on the emails in transit when they can just grab them at rest.

Minister slams 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories as 'dangerous nonsense' after phone towers torched in UK

"However the moon landings were fake because they didn't bring back any cheese."

Clearly you've not watched the documentary "A Grand Day Out".

Watch: Rare Second World War footage of Bletchley Park-linked MI6 intelligence heroes emerges, shared online

Re: Fortunes and Silent Fame in the Novel Era with Back Room Bods and AI Boffinry ...

It's always fun to watch someone argue with a bot :)

Where's the best place to add Mentos to Diet Coke for the most foam? How big are the individual bubbles? Has science gone too far?

Re: I suppose....

None of that is an assumption.

Dissolved CO₂ in water makes it more acidic (in the case of the sea, it's making it less alkali, the average is around pH 8.1, rather than making it acidic per se).

There is an increase in CO₂ in the atmosphere, from burning fossil fuels.

Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network

JANET still exists, and is one of the largest networks in Europe.

NASA reveals the new wavy Martian wheels it thinks can crush the red planet

Re: Robot planet

There's also amanfrommars1, who may, or may not be a robot.

What they're referring to as a 'tyre' is a solid aluminium wheel (with titanium spokes). There's no rubber involved.

JPL have built the last three rovers on Mars, so I'd say they're the leading experts on driving there.

Motorola casually trots out third UK release in as many months: This time it's a 'Lite' take on the Moto G8 Power

Re: That's the worst thing about new phones

Fortunately Motorola allows the end user to unlock the bootloader on most of their phones, even the G8 (use this page). It voids your warranty, but that's the fun part imo.

From what I hear they generally don't stray too far from vanilla Android on their phones, but I'd install a custom ROM just as a matter of course.

Absolutely everyone loves video conferencing these days. Some perhaps a bit too much

Re: Paris...

One of the people I work with doesn't bother setting the language to en-GB when he installs an OS.

Now, as 99% of the time we're accessing it via SSH so it's not a problem.

But that one time when I had to log into the console, with a UK keyboard, it took me several minutes to work out why my password wasn't working. It was (as I'm sure some of you had guessed) that the OS was expecting an en-US keyboard, with it's keys in the wrong places.

Had a similar problem logging into something via a Mac, when I had a # in my password.

Intel's 10th-gen Core family cracks 5GHz barrier with H-series laptop processors

I'm sure these will last at least five minutes on battery. Maybe even ten!

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

Re: Am I surprised?

Well I guess that the silver lining in all of this is that most aircraft are getting grounded and probably switched off at the moment. There's literally only ten aircraft operating at Heathrow right now (as per flightradar).

One of them is a 787 though.

Re: Windows Server 2000

Uptime is just a measure of how long since you last verified that your machine could boot successfully ;)

(Don't forget that a reboot doesn't give anything a chance to really stop. Problems are more likely to crop up after a machine has been powered off for more than a few minutes, and parts of it are cooling down).

Who's going to pay for Britain's Aunty Beeb to carry on? Broadband users, broadcaster suggests to government

Re: Three problems I can think of

The BBC is also an education service.

Not only do you have things like BBC for Schools, and their broadcasting of Open University programs, but also documentaries on pretty much everything (including the Natural History unit which is an obvious gem). This is where the BBC's non-commercial nature means they can make programs about subjects which would never make enough money for a commercial company to be interested.

I'd argue that their news output is closer to being education than entertainment as well.

Re: Ha

I think you might have missed some sarcasm...

Well, I hope they were being sarcastic...

Re: The British government is now consulting...

Perhaps the Labour Party could suggest decriminalisation of bank robbery to address the over-financialisation of the UK economy

Arguably the de-regulation of financial markets in the 1980's allowed entire banks to be 'stolen'.

Drones intone 'you must stay home,' eliciting moans from those in the zone: Flying gizmos corral Brits amid coronavirus lockdown

Re: Don't give them ideas...

"Give someone a good reason, and they will invent a drone with an attachment for a remotely fireable airsoft gun"

I'm pretty sure all the reason I'd need would be "I have a drone and a BB gun", although now I think about it, a water-pistol might be more amusing.

Alas I have no drone.

Announcing the official Reg-approved measure of social distancing: The Osman

It is a linguine rounding error.

Isn't it always?

BEHOLD! Japan's Hayabusa2 probe left human imprints on ASTEROID SAND

Re: Threat

Well, the wiki article on Planetary Protection should answer most of your questions in detail, but the short answer is lots of thought and peer review.

Of course, it goes both ways. Scientists want to keep their samples contained so that there's no risk of them being contaminated by terrestrial stuff.

Lockdown ain't easy. And that's without snoring, burping, hair-shedding seals outside your house

At least in Antarctica they're iceolated.

PC owners borg into the most powerful computer the world has ever known – all in the search for coronavirus cure

Re: Yay!1!

That seems overloaded, you can also try this third party site:

https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/search.php

Re: Remember kids

On Windows most browsers notify the OS when they download a file, and it's automatically scanned by whatever virus checker you have installed before it's saved to disk in the final location.

eg, in Firefox it's controlled by the browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone setting.

Re: For those at home with a good rig

Hey! Someone else with a Vega 64! *waves*

Mine's water cooled, so even running full tilt the core hasn't quite hit 60C

Re: Very worthy

It's bringing home to me quite how much spare capacity a 16 (logical) core CPU can have.

When I do get a CPU workload for F@H, I can still use the computer for basic web browsing etc. with zero impact.

Hypochondriacs – are your eyes all blurry? It's just YouTube trying to cut video-stream quality worldwide amid the coronavirus pandemic

I've not noticed that here.

Nope, just checked, Youtube is still defaulting to 1080 for me (in the UK).

'Azure appears to be full': UK punters complain of capacity issues on Microsoft's cloud

Re: Looks like i picked the wrong week to quit on prem.

The same reason we have to have meetings to deal with something that could easily have been an email.

Some people can't deal without face to face contact, and they often fail upwards into management.

After 20-year battle, Channel island Sark finally earns the right to exist on the internet with its own top-level domain

Re: Glad they didn't overthink the process....

"a future monarch could quite easily restructure Parliament and the Courts on a whim"

They could try, and by that evening the UK would be a republic.

Over here, it's less "what does the law say", and more "you and who's army?".

First impressions count when the world is taken by surprise by an exciting new (macro) virus

Re: It seems almost the entire world ignores warnings

to sell bog-roll, tampons and beer

Yep, it's all down to a perfidious cartel of bum-wad manufacturers. Of course. I can't believe the sheeple don't realise this.

Surge in home working highlights Microsoft licensing issue: If you are not on subscription, working remotely is a premium feature

Re: The most simple way is not mentioned here?

likely a smaller business has HOME versions of windows

They're already breaking their license by doing that then. The Home version is specifically for non-commercial use. (Not that most small businesses care).

Disabling RDP is one of the ways Microsoft differentiates Home vs Pro, to encourage you to buy the Pro version.

Re: The most simple way is not mentioned here?

1) PaloAlto's "Global Protect" VPN has a linux client that works just fine. (I like it better than the Windows one tbh)

2) I'm not sure if any linux RDP clients support every last feature of the latest RDP protocol (v 10.0), (and frankly they all seem to do a bad job of listing exactly what features they do support), but at the end of the day, even the earliest versions of RDP are a massive step forward from VNC in terms of bandwidth and general usability.

RDP is backwards compatible though, so you can connect to almost any version of Windows RDP with any client that supports the basic protocol.

(There's also open source servers too. Virtualbox uses it to allow access to VMs).

Re: The most simple way is not mentioned here?

It's almost as if they are setting traps for the unwary to fall into and create extra revenue.

Oracle licensing in a nutshell.

Netflix starts 30-day video data diet at EU's request to ensure network availability during coronavirus crisis

Re: Increasin social distance ...

. . . b e t w e e n p i x e l s

ftfy;)

Re: Pointless

A lot of people are going to be sat at home on VPNs which are funnelling all their traffic to their work network. So business connections are still dealing with the same amount of traffic as when everyone is in the office, as well as then sending all that traffic over VPNs.

(And if the VPN is tunnelling all traffic, that would include that Netflix stream you were watching on your other monitor while pretending to work)

Bad news: Coronavirus is spreading rapidly across the world. Good news: Nitrogen dioxide levels are decreasing and the air on Earth is cleaner

Re: Pharmacologists on el Reg?

Even better, make yourself some honey and lemon, breath in the steam from that first, and then you can drink it (possibly with whiskey in, although I doubt that's medically advisable).

Re: Lung washing Corona Virus

My friends' three year old, on being told to wash her hands with soap because it kills the virus:

"So why don't we all eat soap then?"

Re: the sky has gone a couple of shades bluer

Millennials are between twenty and forty years of age, so most of us are juggling trying to look after children, and our ageing parents.

And of course, the millennials who are staying at home as much as possible are the ones you're not seeing. Confirmation bias innit.

The show Musk go on: Tesla defies Silicon Valley coronavirus lockdown order, keeps Fremont factory open

Damnit, I should have stocked up on army ration packs. No shitting for days with them.

Yes, true, fusion reactors don't work quite yet, but, er, maybe AI can help us stop our experiments from imploding

Re: Kaboom!

So what you're saying is, place the AI core right next to the reactor.

That way the little silicon bugger has an incentive to get it right!

SpaceX beats an engine failure to loft another 60 Starlink satellites

Re: "Shows value of having 9 engines"

That's what launch insurance is for, because historically there's an element of risk with every launch.

However, a failed landing only makes a difference to SpaceX's bottom line (unless it lands on someone's head of course).

As it stands, 86 launches, with 84 successful payload insertions for the Falcon 9 (one lost in flight, one on the ground before launch) is a 97.7% success rate, which is pretty good for an orbital rocket. Antares is down around 80%, whereas Delta 2 is around 98%, Ariane 5 is about 95%.

So all in all, if you had a satellite to launch, you could feel reasonably confident putting it on a Falcon 9 that it would reach orbit, and by all accounts, their prices are some of the cheapest.

British Army adopts WhatsApp for formal orders as coronavirus isolation kicks in

Why France? Let's invade Belgium, better beer!

Looming ventilator shortage amid pandemic sparks rise of open-source DIY medical kit. Good thinking – but safe?

Re: Apollo 13 anyone?

The Apollo 13 air filter only needed to filter air as it was passed into a cabin. A ventilator has to get just the right amount of air into someone's lungs, and then back out again, over and over again.

If you get that wrong you could seriously damage someone's lungs, especially as they'll already be ill in the first place.

Re: RE: werdsmith

That's probably a translating error, or it could be testing for the presence of antibodies for the virus, rather than the virus itself.

Theranos vampire lives on: Owner of failed blood-testing biz's patents sues maker of actual COVID-19-testing kit

If a US bounty hunter tried to grab someone in the UK they could be charged with 'false imprisonment'. Obviously if they did attempt to "BRING YOU BACK BY FORCE" (sic), then they could also be charged with GBH, assault etc.

If there was an Interpol red notice for the suspect then they could be arrested by the UK police and would face extradition proceedings, but in general, the only people that can arrest people in the UK are the police.

tl/dr US bounty hunters have no jurisdiction outside the US.

America: We'll send citizens cash checks amid coronavirus financial hardship. UK: We'll offer £330bn in biz loans

Re: UK Contractors

That's a great idea, but I was in my mid-30's before I could afford to save that much money. It's just not practical for a lot of people.