Posts by Paul Garrish

Miniature nuclear reactors could be the answer to sustainable datacenter growth

Re: Amazon

Every time I watch Wall-E the similarities between Buy-n-Large and Amazon get stronger

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

The one place these have a real use for me is in the car. It's not safe to try and pick a song or send a text or select a call contact using the touch screen but all are easily accomplished with Siri (assuming there is a data signal of course). At home it's almost always easier to use a screen to do anything.

Binance robbed of $600 million in crypto-tokens

Re: FFS !!!

Whilst I agree Crypto seems very very prone to theft for a supposedly 'safe' system, have you seen how much banks and credit card companies lose every day?

"Experts have estimated that global card fraud losses will jump from $7 billion in 2017 to $35 billion by 2020." (no idea which experts, but assuming the 7Bn figure is real suggests credit card fraud is a BIG problem)

Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister

Palantir...

Given how much influence Palantir have in our government, this smacks of trying to enable even more data access for them. GDPR upsets the US tech firms so it must be good. (hence, it must be bad if you are a UK Tory being 'lobbied' by them)

How to polish the bottom line? Microsoft makes it really hard to claim expenses, say staffers

Re: How do you get a 50p coin out of a Yorkshire person's hand? With a spanner...

My ex employer was like that. They'd put you in a cheap hotel miles from site and pay a fortune in taxis or mileage but wouldn't budge on allowing a more expensive hotel to save time and money because of the 'policy'. All the processing was outsourced to eastern Europe and they had no leeway to deviate from process - an they applied it to the penny, regardless of the cost of dealing with it all.

Most 'company' credit cards are in your name so you're carrying the risk if they choose not to reimburse you or pay the card.

In 2006, Amazon debuted EC2. 15 years on, HashiCorp says firms blowing their cloud budgets is all part of the fun

worrashock

So companies, who've frequently gone for the cloud because they couldn't forecast what they needed on their own hardware, have used more than they intended....

For the price tag, this iPad Pro keyboard better damn well be Magic: It isn't... but it's not completely useless either

Re: Because ... it’ll just work : Nope

Just did the same with a 1992 A1200. I don't miss flickering CRT monitors though...

Queen Elizabeth has a soggy bottom: No, the £3.1bn aircraft carrier, what the hell did you think we meant?

Good job something is (in full working order, that is)

Tesla’s Autopilot losing track of devs crashing out of 'leccy car maker

Really?

Airborne software used to be really reliable, but was extremely expensive to create and test and dealt with a much simpler environment. Even so, it used to be subject to massive regulation and certification. Recent events show what happens when that process is 'streamlined' to save money through cheaper dev/test and/or reduced or sub-contracted certification.

What on earth do we think will happen when this sort of (much much more complicated) software gets developed for cars which are relatively cheap, more loosely regulated and developed by companies that focus on saving pennies on their multi-thousand pound products?

High-freq trade biz sues transatlantic ISP for alleged spiteful cable cut

Re: High-frequency trading companies = parasites

agreed, boo-bloody-hoo for people who do pointless stuff... maybe we should cut all their flipping cables.....

MPs of Europe unite: Listen up big biz, air your tax deals in public

And who do you think the corporations pass that tax bill onto? Consumers DUH!

You say I mustn’t write down my password? Let me make a note of that

That reminds me

That story reminds me of when I went skip diving in Panama last year......

My self-driving cars may lead to human driver ban, says Tesla's Musk

Software?

Aircraft software (airborne software) is documented to death, written in one of a few certified compilers, walked through and tested to death. It runs on old, very well understood processors and is generally pretty simple - look up tables with simple interpolation algorithms. All the data is developed on the ground, slowly, carefully and under a microscope. There are more than one of everything in the plane and if they disagree, they shut down and the pilot takes over. Yes the results are clever, but the implementation is clear. It is written for one type of aircraft at a time. AND IT IS VERY VERY EXPENSIVE!!!!!

Compare to the above - state of the art hardware (Pentium FPU anyone...), Consumer O/S (enough said), commercial constraints and minimal regulation, Dozens of types and models of cars, brakes, engines, steering etc etc.

Its a bit like Mainframe vs PC - would you trust your life to a PC?

$10,000 Ethernet cable promises BONKERS MP3 audio experience

Not the whole story

Surely, you need to have it professionally burnt in before it will give it's best....

http://www.russandrews.com/product-Cable-Burn-In-Service-BURNIN.htm

Olympus trio escape jail but firm fined £4.6 MEEELION

So yet again the employees will pay for the ineptitude/criminal behaviour of the execs. Company fines just get passed on as layoffs or price hikes or both.

War On Standby: Do the figures actually stack up?

Try sorting out industrial power usage first

When I can walk down a street at 10pm and all the closed shops are unlit, then I'll worry about my TV being in standby overnight.

Osborne promises 'Budget for growth'

Interest rates....

So, we're all skint, prices are going up - and the response is to.... up the interest rate and make everything even more expensive??? How does that work then? If people are borrowing tons of money and spending it on 'stuff' pushing up prices, I can see how an interest rate hike would slow things down - but I reckon if they only measured inflation on needed things (food, energy, fuel etc) the figure would be even worse - and that's not driven by consumer spending - so.... how's an interest rate going to do anything other than slow everything down?

Steve Jobs Flash rant put to the test

Agree

My son plays simple platform games on Friv using a P4 3.2 with 2GB Ram. It maxes the CPU all the time - my old Amiga 500 could have done those half asleep. Trying to play HD video using iPlayer - it can't, and yet the same machine can play HD video using VLC/MediaPlayer with only 10% CPU thanks to a cheap HD grfx card.

Flash is pants, used by numpties to write crap code..... but cos everyone has it, it's the easy choice. Can it.