Posts by Andrew Scott

/e/ OS 3.0: Slightly less clunky, slightly more private

google free phone

Thought the easiest way to get a google free phone was to get an iPhone or iPad. if my cell phone service had been allowed to offer iphones i would probably have one today, but back then i couldn't afford the service or phone, so waited until they offered the moterola droid. haven't felt the need to change and still don't. don't think there's much difference on what data is harvested and commercialized with existing phones or what might be offered in the future. just too much money involved for anyone to keep a promise not to commercialize your data at some point. expect even the ones that claim that your data is safe with them are simply using it for their own services.

Microsoft testing PC-to-Cloud-PC failover for those times your machine dies or disappears

Re: "ideal when physical machines aren’t usable."

hasn't Microsoft been selling a windows terminal that has a keyboard and screen but little memory or disk space? Seems to me i read something several months ago describing such a device. a new take on the diskless workstations they used to sell in the dos days. The did rpl to get dos running on the machine and then you load wordperfect or your app of choice from the file server. not much more than a keyboard with a built in network card some memory and a video card. Probably no graphics.

UK students flock to AI to help them cheat

Re: Glorified calculators

we used slip sticks mostly and had at least one class to learn to use them, but i had an hp 25 after i started college.

Penn State boffins create silicon-free two-dimensional computer

H B C N O F P S(sulpher) K V Y I W U Silicone is si Sand is sand, is this a troll? Do like the name origins, plumbum (plumber, plumb bob, plumb), wolfram, natrium, auric, argentium etc. amazing how far back these sometimes go with the basic use unchanged for perhaps 1000+ years?

Researchers claim spoof-proof random number generator breakthrough

Re: Jury selection

Both sides get an equal chance at selecting jurors from the pseudo randomly selected pool. Different states may have different pools to select from, but not all residents are known to the pool, and some are exempt because of age, health or other reasons. That's why trumps conviction was fair. everyone had the same opportunity to put their thumb on the scale. Here there is a mandatory town census every year to get the potential jurors other places may use driver registration or voter registration.

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

Sure thousands of years probably the greatest leap forward for the human race, food that isn't full of parasites and other nasty things waiting to move in when you eat the meat. Carriers are mostly steel, you should be able to start a campfire on the deck to roast a few potatoes in an emergency.

Google outfoxed by crafty squatters in $1B London HQ's rooftop garden

3 years

Expect that's the average in the wild. Lot of predators like cars, wolves, coyotes, mountains lions, jaguars depending where the live. over there it's probably wild cars that cause most of the deaths. see a lot of bobcats around here, but probably too small to be a real threat to a fox.

right, "the pursuit of the inedible by the unspeakable". should be lots of fun.

China accuses Taiwan of running five feeble APT gangs, with US help

Re: "Beijing complains it’s under relentless attack"

i had a nothing linux machine that was under relentless attack. no data of any value on it, just an experiment with linux and some other programs, but it was hit with 60+ attempts to login with every username you could think of with all sorts of passwords. actually no user accounts to use could only attach from a physically attached keyboard. use a program to drop connections if there were more than 4 failed attempts to login. didn't slow the attacks down one bit. most of them had ip addresses that traced back to russia, brazil and a few other assorted places.

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

melted paart of the road.

Gasoline fires do that. have seen a number of cars catch fire on i90 and you could see where the road was damaged by the fire. not that hard, have seen the road melt on a really hot day.

Ukraine war spurred infosec vet Mikko Hyppönen to pivot to drones

Re: Picking a side

us got dragged in because of dec 7, Russians changed sides because of Barbarossa, and the uk got dragged because they were allies of France. Allies of convenience with russia. keep them busy fighting both east and west. Don't think it needs much of an explanation. not sure we were fighting fascism per se. There were lots of people in the us and gb who thought hitler was doing a great job, and applauded his actions, or just wanted to stay uninvolved. kennedy as ambassador to gb comes to mind. think the wealthy 1% and many politicians have a sneaking admiration for fascists. certainly the current "leader of the free world" does.

60 years ago the US took its first walk in space with Gemini 4

Re: Amazing feats!

Watched Shepards suborbital flight in grade school on a tv. B/W tv on a high stand with wheels. didn't get much done that day. Think we had been prepared earlier in the week to watch it, but it got canceled. Couldn't have watched it at home as we didn't have a tv back then.

Microsoft will stop pestering Windows users about Edge in EU

Re: One use

use a different computer and download the installer of your choice to a flash drive. then you don't need to use edge for anything. You might even be able to use a smartphone to do this.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Re: Pointless

once got a script to run in a terminal window on a mac. wouldn't run as it had been edited on a pc. notepsd++ has an option to convert line endings to mac, unix or pc. open the file on a flash drive, convert line endings to mac move flash to mac run script. took longer to figure out why the script wouldn't run in the first place. wouldn't think the official file from ITS for turning a non managed mac to a managed mac would be messed up that way.

Tesla FSD ignores school bus lights and hits 'child' dummy in staged demo

handled by the insurance company in most cases here, and driver behind is always at fault. if they hit you from behind they were either too close or not paying attention. you need to be prepared for the car ahead to brake quickly at any time and allow for those circumstances.

regularly get sudden 0 from 70 mph. Often with half car length gaps. Then you realize the pickup behind you can't slow down as fast as you can.

Re: Small meatsack + not Elon's progeny = not worth saving

Just changed the problem. Was a person, after impact, not a person. Genius tech that found a solution to the problem without stopping or even slowing down. What else would you expect from Elon?

Haven't seen a road like that since visiting grandmas place in Maine back in the '60s. Dirt road maintained by the coastguard as it was the only access from the highway to the lighthouses and passed through her property. Do you have to dodge road apples or cow pies? Even rural places generally have wide enough roads for two buggies to pass.

Microsoft's May Patch Tuesday update fails on some Windows 11 VMs

and the year is half over.

India none-too-subtly reminds Big Tech that local laws prohibit dark patterns

just get them as gifts from the uae. though maybe you need to be potus to get that kind of grift.

AI won't replace radiologists anytime soon

To an llm these are just Rorschach tests.

MIT boffins claim liquid sodium battery could one day power aircraft while sucking up CO2

put it in boiling water, that will melt it. 97 C or 208 F. Still, hot enough to not want a bath or shower in it. expect there would be other problems if it leaked. Add k to it and the melting point drops to a more comfortable level.

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

Re: Human Nature

had no problem with google finding articles about Litvinenko prompted with "poisoning". when i added "nytimes" it took me to a number of articles in the ny times. not sure what the complaint is here. Adding "guardian" got articles from the guardian and replacing that with Daily Beast got me articles from the daily beast.

China spawns an x86 supercomputing monster, with an AMD connection

Re: Interesting

Believe i read something in the last year that said intel was getting rid of smt/hyperthreading. the most recent cpu's i've seen only support smt on a few cores with the rest being economy cores. expect it has to do with heat and power consumption.

Lenovo thought it could surf geopolitics, until Trump's sudden tariff changes

how many things that you purchase actually are imported after you pay for them? Hard to believe that the overnight deliveries you get which include imported goods are coming direct from China or other countries with the possible exceptions of Canada or Mexico.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Re: In denial

16 when i got my first glasses. recognized people by their voices or context, not their faces. finally looked at trees and saw the individual leaves and looked at the ground and saw separate rocks and stones. prior to that i had to walk up to the blackboard in 5th -8th grade to see what was written there. never did homework as i didn't know there were assignments on the board.

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond

Re: At least Notepad++ is still available

Yes, don't really understand why ms still includes notepad when there is a so much better program out there and it's free. No contest, and a1 (as our uneducated secretary of education calls it) won't help.

Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’

Re: clustered

thought that was Henny Youngman.

China finds a previously unknown microbe on its space station

don't know, sounds like haggis.

Windows reports two CPU speeds because one would be too simple

bogomips for windows.

Microsoft-backed AI out-forecasts hurricane experts without crunching the physics

Going back to the farmers almanac, sounds like they use the same source materials for their predictions.

Google crowns Jules to be its agent and spreads the AI love

oh yes, much like automatically increasing prices on-line when the store sees that the interested party is using apple hardware. got more money they're willing to spend than the cheap android and pc users.

Annual electronic waste footprint per person is 11.2 kg

Re: Kilo grammes?

Actually i believe we spell it slugs. pound is force gram is mass. slug is mas. Europeans often substitute mass for force while we substitute force for mass naturally.

Latest patch leaves some Windows 10 machines stuck in recovery loops

security risk

hmm, potential security risk vs lost data and non working computer, not to mention the lost time trying to recover something? really hard call.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

truck/van

van isn't always a truck. in the particular instance when a truck is helping us move, it may be called a "moving van". still a truck but in this case it's called a van. hood vs bonnet is kind of silly. bonnets are thought of decorative where hoods are practical coverings. hood makes sense.

Some English hospitals doubt Palantir's utility: We'd 'lose functionality rather than gain it'

Re: No!

absolutely, sounds just like the brits who wanted to get out of the eu. we can do bloody well without you.

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon

Re: American leadership in aviation ?

Do remember hearing sonic booms when i was a kid in Boston. Been a long time since i last heard one. Do wonder how a thermocline would be confirmed to be at the right altitude and intensity to mitigate the boom. Sounds like the speed of the planes would need to be modified depending on the local weather conditions. Sounds possible though. Perhaps thermocline is not accurate though it seems a reasonable term for temperature differences creating layers in air.

Saudi CubeSat gets golden ticket on doomed SLS rocket

salman

just the kind of gut trump likes. he also likes kim jong un. i think he had a relative poisoned in an airport. loves putin and probably has people he'd like to defenstrated like putin has, and maybe will. it sounds like the supreme court has said that he could order it to be done if it was in his capacity as president.

Boffins warn that AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

paper mills

Wouldn't surprise me if a lot of these are being done for the sewage swimmer kennedy, looking for confirmation of his opinions of vaccines.

Microsoft facing multibillion legal claim over how it sells software

dominance

Can't find anyone saying google is 80%, most of the sites i've looked say it's closer to 45% and puts ms office at around 30%. Still that's surprising. Lot of people in my offce and strictly office. us governent listed at 86% office usage. Of course that workforce is shrinking rapidly, so if trump has his way that could be 85% of nothing unless MS give him a big bribe, perhaps a nicer jet than the one he just got.

Amazon tested warehouse robots and found they're not ready to replace humans

plumbing robots

Like to see one of these get to the leaking hot water line in the crawl space beneath on half of my house littered with rocks an boulders and patch the line. Was happy to pay $300 for that.

M365 apps on Windows 10 to get security fixes into 2028

office

Once called ms support about a problem with mail merge in office, quite a while ago. Ms support said they were aware of the bug, the fix was to buy the new version of office that had the fix. think we'd only had office for about a year at the time. Wasted a lot of paper because of that bug. took another 3 years before we got a new version of office.

OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

bug

Now we know where that 30% of new code written by ai for microsoft went.

LegoGPT is here to make your blocky dreams come true

Re: infinite monkey

There are obvious constraints that limit the complexity of the problem.

You think ransomware is bad now? Wait until it infects CPUs

Re: Physical Write-Protect Switches

Haven't see a real toaster around here in years. Last on i saw was a sunbeam toaster back around 1964 perhaps. There could be some very large countries that just don't use toasters. Also possible that the us has the highest rate of household toaster use. figures don't lie, but liars can figure.

Microsoft wants us to believe AI will crack practical fusion power, driving future AI

Re: "It's sort of foolish to imagine that we'll do fusion by trial and error"

And the person who disproved the theory of phlogiston went to the guillotine.

Yolk's on you – eggs break less when they land sideways

egg side splitting

All this time i thought that hens were incubating their eggs the wrong way around. Thought they should have the pointy side up to keep them from breaking!

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

leader of the free world?

Looks to me like the free world is dropping him like a hot potato. Don't think he leads much more the 1% ers and maga nitwits.

Trump promises protection for TikTok, for which he has a ‘warm spot in my heart’

tik toc

wonder how much a warm spot near his heart cost? probably need 1cm gps to find it.

Culture comes first in cybersecurity. That puts cybersecurity on the front line in the culture wars

trump not bound by law

scotus basically said that as president or as expresident trump could not be held accountable by any action taken in office. the idea that he could order the murder of a political opponent as president seems to have been upheld by scotus. there is nothing to stop him from doing what he wants and he's taking advantage of that. think the courts are starting to realize what they've done which might explain recent rulings that went against him. might be too little too late though. He recently claimed that he knows nothing about any requirement to uphold and defend the constitution despite taking an oath witnessed by the chief justice. where does that lead? he really needs to be impeached post haste.