Posts by PhilipN

New motherboards, old RAM, plenty of life left in yesterday's PCs

Re: Old kit is still cost effective

I'll see your Thinkpad and raise you a Mac Cheesegrater

Apple unleashes a swarm of Mac Minions to share GPU resources for large AI tasks

Re: Deja vu

Linux had Beowulf

Margaret Hamilton, software pioneer who helped put humans on the Moon, dies at 90

Hats off to El Reg

For covering this lady who despite my having been around during Apollo 11 I had never heard of.

And to her.

Met Police suspends use of phone-hacking software over Russian links

Re: .... through a Cyprus-based holding company.

"Russia does not appear to be acting rationally" ... They are Russians.

Uncle Sam coughs up $1.9B for grid upgrades as datacenters hit a power wall

..Reconductoring...

Stopped reading at that point.

USA’s Venezuela takeover comes with bonus exposure to Chinese AI surveillance tech

ASPI?

Pfffft!

Huawei Watch D3 pumps up its health-monitoring credentials

Re: I'd like my watch to be able to monitor blood pressure throughout the day

Me too - and also when I am on the treadmill watching my HR head towards Zone 6.

Maybe the tech is not there yet but by comparison, as partly intimated above, the typical BP check at a clinic is clumsy and capricious and takes no account even of the stress of visiting the doctor!

Cloud snail-mail service Docmail enters third day stuck in the outbox

"advice of external consultants"

= we haven't got a ....clue

Meta's proposed $18B settlement in teen harm case throws YouTube and TikTok under the bus, too

Re: Yet for fuck knows why….

"The cheque's in the mail" Meta style.

AI companies are burning books, advocates complain to FTC

"unpolluted"

You heard it here first.

Musk fumbles the timetable for first Starship catch

Check the calendar

Yup - market manipulation Friday.

New Zealand says China tried using space investments to spy on local affairs

Re: The name's Wong, James Wong

Try looking at the actual report. Scroll through many pages before the first mention of PRC.

Purple Mountain Observatory

Does a substantial amount of legitimate research - didn't know that? Thought not. Try G**gle.

Elon pledges to give Nvidia a virtual monopoly over the stars

Starmind

There's^ a name that sends shivers up my spine.

A deep dive into Nvidia's Vera CPU and the Olympus cores that power it

Re: Microsoft and Chip Design

"Microsoft held back the entire industry" countless times and they are not yet finished.

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

"move any non-trivial Word document .."

Troublesome enough just between different versions of Word - and don't get me started on different OS versions....

SpaceX just about nails Starship test flight 13

Nice one, Elon

Just tell me again how long to travel from here to Mars....... wow --- so you have Ticket #1 already booked? And could you give your bestie in the Oval Office a free ticket?

Google meets the neighbors and gets both barrels over its new UK datacenter

What was there before?

"vacant farmland.." WT actual F??!!

EU telcos ask: Huawei going to afford to replace Chinese equipment?

"high-risk vendors"

i.e. they make better stuff than we do.

Senior White House official claims China’s K3 model stolen from Anthropic

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent...

Had an open mind on the topic until you mentioned his name.

Torvalds challenged the haters to fork Linux. Someone said 'hold my beer'

Kernel 0.what??

Must be the one I tried when first checking out this strange thing called Yggdrasil*

* Confession : Had to look it up to verify spelling

TSMC's $265B US fab pledge is the outline of a concept of a plan

Re: On the other hand...

"threatened with restricted market access"- explain

Where are the engineers going too come from?

China produces 10 times as many as the USA every year. India 5 times.

Zuck's AI ambitions put Meta on course to become America's next big cloud provider

Zuck grinning

I hope that was an AI-produced "photo". It's nightmarish.

David Potter, the man who put Psion in the palm of your hand, logs off at 82

Thanks, Dave

And Psion 5mx - still the best portable keyboard ever.

HS2's latest reset ditches autonomous train tech to get project back on track

Re: Should have

Someone with the gumption to scout every inch of the system on horseback. Try and find an engineer prepared to do {the modern equivalent} today.

Re: We should have outsourced it to Japan.

China. It'll be done by the autumn and another runway at Heathrow in their spare time.

Former Microsoft engineer shrinks Notepad down to size

Software bloat

Hey why not pare all software back to bare essentials and reduce the work the CPU has to do and solve the heat/energy problem?

One for AI - but AI is signally incapable of solving its own problems.

Nation-state actors cracked critical Australian infrastructure to ‘cripple it at a time of their choosing’

Burgess?

There’s a pungent comment to be made here about changing his name, failing which his line of work, but natural delicacy etc etc

The memory crisis is getting so bad that even retro RAM prices are going to the Moon

Have drawfuls of old RAM

as do I suspect many of us here. Wouldn't it be nice if some bright spark starting building boards to plug them all in.

India and China are home to 2.9 billion people – and together they bought just 13 million PCs in Q1

Tablets and Phones

Chinese youngsters are barely into solid food before they have a tablet put in front of their faces. It never leaves.

Britain sending Ukraine an extra 30,000 drones – now 150,000 all up

Re: Standard Operating Procedure

Called asymmetric warfare these days. US very good at it without realising - the CIA's training and support of the Mujahideen while they fought the Russians came back to bite Uncle Sam in the *ss years later. But then Afghans learnt much earlier to replicate the Lee-Enfield and kick Blighty in the *ss.

Firefox 152 understands 'Sssh!'

OCLP

Thanks for the reminder [^thumb]

Scientists pour cold water on claims phones are rewiring kids' brains

Times change

Used to be parents fed up with bawling brats would shut them up with a sticky lolly.

Now it's a tablet/phone.

The one rotted the teeth. The other ruins the eyesight.

But at least Mum and Dad get some peace and quiet.

XP-era Windows spotted haunting London's driverless railway

2600 magazine-type expose

Fond sigh.

Elon Musk is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000

Elon - World’s greatest (manipulator)

Where can I place a bet that he gets a spacecraft to Mars but not a human?

Trump phone has HTC guts. Tremendous guts. The best guts

Re: Assembled in Florida?

The label was made in the UK - so no problem. Uh ... it was, wasn't it?

US firms still dominate chip subsidies

"espousing the market economy and democracy"

Quite so. Maybe the OECD should have regard to the fact that (1) China is a centrally-planned economy and (2) all resources belong to the state already so re-allocating from Sector A to Sector B is not a subsidy.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Single line app

Details long since evaporated from the grey cells but a good long time ago I think it must have been this very organ the article itself and then readers came up with a single line of code to do something which I also forget. I was more than a little impressed as readers one after the other chipped away at what was already minuscule to reach a stage where you could easily count the number of characters (including punctuation marks, naturally). Those were the days, and it shows that as with any profession only experts know what they are doing. The rest muddle along and hope for the best (and then relied on Intel to speed it all up).

FBI: Get to know your IT guy – extortion crews are visiting law firms pretending to be tech support

In other news top law firm budgets $500M to build its own proprietary AI systems

Oh wait - same story, yes?

FAA grounds SpaceX’s Starship after another launch mishap

"To be fair to the Muskian outfit"

Give me a moment while I.....no, sorry, you lost me there.

Google is cannibalizing the web to feed AI

Pope Leo's Encyclical on the dangers of AI

Everyone should read it.

But I am waiting for the AI summary.

The Virtual OS Museum opens its doors

Wonderful and hats off to the guy

Enough here I expect to support the contention that “just because it is newer does not [of itself] mean it is better”.

Classic 7 is Windows 10 LTSC cosplaying as Windows 7

Here's hoping. But never come between a girl and her nesting instinct (there's a joke there somewhere).

Except MS has not been in the OS business for some time. They are in the Cloud business.

US Army goes green-ish, wants soldiers munching on plant proteins

Changing tastes in Blighty

Seem to recall a story that for some time British Army rations have included tinned curry. Whose effect was - urrrm - cough! cough! - the opposite of constipation.

HP stuffed a PC into a keyboard. We took it for a spin

"new spin"

Not quite. There was such a product some years ago. Memory fading but wasn't it even a British company? Anyone remember?

macOS 27 threatens to bury Time Capsule, FOSS brings a shovel

Re: NetBSD

320MB?? - Luxury! [OK I just had to be the first}

London’s BT Tower to get rooftop swimming pool

Re: Considering

Only hoi polloi swim laps. Don't get your point.

That old phone in the kitchen drawer could save an industry

Going out on a limb here but..

..how about a phone that just makes phone calls? [Yeah I know I know}