Posts by PhilipN

Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren't going to 'hit climate goals anyway'

Now I am curious

Has anyone calculated how much energy was saved by the WFH regime and general lockdowns during the Pandemic (and since)?

A year after taking on Intel's NUC mini-PCs, Asus says it's ready to improve them

Re: They'd better get a move on

Plenty of them running on Intel … AMD … and with Windows 11

They'd better get a move on

Quick trawl of Aliexpress and dozens of small form factor PC's (of unknown brand) jump off the screen. Few years ago it was mobile phones. Next, PC's.

If you're excited by that $1.5B Michigan nuke plant revival, bear in mind it's definitely a fixer-upper

"We expected to find..."

So a proponent of Murphy's Law Part 37. I take that as a good start.

China trains 100-billion-parameter AI model on home grown infrastructure

Re: What can't it say

You beat me to it.

"high quality English corpus" - chuckle! Try talking to almost anyone in the UK and subtitles if not always essential would be a great help. And don't even get me started on Written English.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

TEDIT

Thanks for the reminder. And the boot interrupt key sequence. Saved my bacon quite a few times.

FBI boss says China 'burned down' 260,000-device botnet when confronted by Feds

They found that one!

Fire up the others.

Apple debuts iPhone 16, Watch Series 10, assorted AirPods

And as for the old stuff ??

Never mind the new shiny I’d be utterly delighted if Apple would fix the utterly crap frigging software supposed to be running their HomePods.

I’ve lost count of …. Ah forget it. My blood pressure won’t stand it.

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

Re: OS/2: the expensive flop

With the wisdom (OK cynicism) of age I now believe MS who were always (cough! cough!) fleet of foot intended to milk everything they could out of the IBM connection then go off on their own. Which duly happened.

It was their own fault because IBM viewed OS/2 as only “one of [their] operating systems” and their PC division wanted to sell as many boxen as possible which by that time meant Windows.

Even though (I think it was Eric Raymond who wrote) W95 was “shockingly inferior” to OS/2 Warp.

Starliner's not-so-grand finale is a thump in the desert next week

Gwynne

Impressive lady

China is beating the world at scientific research, think tank finds

Read the Acknowledgments

which include “Patent Analytics Hub, IP Australia” which is where the datasets and analyses were cribbed from.

The researchers then just began with the assumption that the most hits means being in the lead.

NASA will fly Boeing Starliner crew home with SpaceX, Calamity Capsule deemed too risky

Re: MuskX

If memory serves every time Amazon started looking like it was going to go into profit he slashed prices. Interesting business model.

Oreon Lime is AlmaLinux with a desktop twist

Re: Who Knows Best????

“you seem to be basically agreeing that "GNOME knows best"......”

No he isn’t. Where do you get that from?

City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle

“a national crisis in local government”

I just felt my brain go into a permanent tailspin.

Stargazing with the Beaverlab Finder TW2

Re: "small adjustments to view distant objects are very difficult"

Couple of friends are twitchers. Ta for the heads up.

"small adjustments to view distant objects are very difficult"

Exactly so, which makes it in some respects a non-starter. When I was ill-informed enough to buy a telescopic camera lens I had not realised in my excitement that even a (relatively) static Moon would disappear from view at the slightest jerk of the lens or camera. I do not know how twitchers (which I am not) encourage an exotic bird way over there in the jungle to stand still and pose so they can grab that unique shot. Without a mechanism for minuscule adjustments such a toy is almost unusable.

Is Lenovo a blind spot in US anti-China security measures?

Re: So, Lenovo will go the Huawei way

"being registered in Hong King is no different than being registered in China"

Obviously you get all your "news" about Hong Kong and China from Western media, hence spouting the same absolute twaddle.

Bugging out: 53 years since humans first drove a battery-powered car on the Moon

Peter Fairley

Thumbs up for jogged memory

Boeing's Starliner proves better at torching cash than reaching orbit

Poor guys on board

Just imagine being cooped up in a tiny space with no end in sight - with your co-workers.

Say 'ahhhh' – AI robots are now gunning for your gums

What's the machine going to be called?

If it is "White Angel" I shall not allow it near me.

Intel to shed at least 15% of staff, will outsource more to TSMC, slash $10B in costs

Intel Share Price

Down 5%+ today.

That went well, didn't it, Dave?

How deliciously binary: AI has yet to pay off – or is transforming business

Yawnworthy but...

Had to search "what does Apple AI actually DO" only to be reassured that after years of emails my brain does a more useful summary at a single glance than my Mac or Iphone will.

But then, being human, I just can't wait to ***k with the system : less common words, unusual phraseology, deliberately acting tangentially etc

I mean, one of the first things we learn is how to ...urrrmm... mislead the boss. Why should an AI algorithm be any different?

Logitech Zone 305 is light on the ears and wallet, maybe a bit too light on quality?

Re: Business Headsets - just dont!

Surely you can wait until you’ve finished the crossword?

iPhone kicked out of China’s top 5 smartphone brands as domestic market bounces back

Not surprised

Repeating with apologies a comment I posted a while ago : I have top end Iphone and top end Huawei phone. Both are excellent. Each has its quirks but I suspect if I knew Chinese the Huawei would be ahead on points.

Other PRC manufacturers do full-on Android, and they compete like hell with Huawei.

So not surprising at all.

With users mostly happy to keep older kit, Macs just ain't selling like they used to

Re: Feels the hot wind on the leg hairs

Two cheese graters here one at home one in the office mainly for backup but able to go live in no time at all if something happens to the main machine. I sometimes wish** to G*d that one of them would break down so I have an excuse to spring for a new one.

[**Actually, no, I don't. It would be like losing a friend]

Texas court blocks FTC noncompete ban, and you can blame SCOTUS

A nation run by lawyers

What could possibly go wrong?

We've banned Chinese telco kit and drones. Next: Mountain bikes?

Re: Why does an e-bike

Then kindly stand aside for the serious (non-e) bikers (as in pedal bike). I mean, put it this way, our wives have this strange idea that they are more important than our bikes! (Shakes head in disbelief)

Boeing to reacquire spun-off supplier Spirit AeroSpace to shore up safety

"By reintegrating Spirit..."

I dare say there was a similarly plausible reason for spinning it off in the first place but I honestly can't be ar*ed to look it up. One good thing about modern social media is that for more people the bull**** meter is finely attuned.

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

Try French Polynesia Bora Bora

Short memory syndrome but one thing the Pandemic demonstrate is that you seldom have to go and be somewhere else to do anything. Although I've heard Bora Bora is nice.

Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

Why now?

Awaiting a sagacious explanation.

Biden bans Kaspersky: No more sales, updates in US

Rod Stewart

Booed at a concert recently for supporting Ukraine.

Hong Kong authorities halt alleged smuggler shifting 596 'high-end' CPUs to China

Those are the ones they wanted you to find

Tip of the iceberg.

By the way the suspected crime was for an unmanifested cargo. Tch! Tch!

NTT uses scattered monitors to trick your brain into seeing 3D images

David Hockney

Believe he exploited this in some of his artwork.

Voyager 1 makes stellar comeback to science operations

50 years

Taking a moment to remember what an obnoxious little twat I was back then. Haven’t changed much but even if (big if) it was the only thing NASA had done the entire team should be Nobel Laureates.

IBM dream to gobble up HashiCorp challenged in court

Re: Insiders the main beneficiaries?

“ This benefits management, but not us shareholders!”

Right. So what else is new?

At Apple, AI stands for 'Apple Intelligence' – and it's coming to everything

"a history of taking ideas and .."

It's all in the timing. The only time serial billionaire Jim Clark stubbed his toe was trying to introduce streaming video to a part of Florida when none of the components were ready. Least of all broadband. Didn't take that long afterwards, but not by him.

White House hopes $180M will solve science, tech gaps in commercial fusion power

Re: Not Needed, They Already Had A Solution

“Kirk Sorenson” - thanks for the signpost. Looking more deeply but initial assessment is he’s still “out there” but struggling and even if he stood to share in 180 million pfennigs (he doesn’t) it would be nowhere near enough to outargue his opponents.

Edit : Kirk SorensEn, but YouTube found him.

Wi-Fi can watch your heart beating, Taiwan’s datacenter power outfit Delta finds

Re: "a bed with smartphones on adjacent nightstands"

Except if for curiosity when exercising I wear an HRM alongside this "smart"watch or that the discrepancy in calories burned according to the app/watch is massive. Sometimes up to 100% difference.

But solved that problem : no not the average. I add them up. If the app can lie so can I.

Elon Musk confirms 12K H100s ordered for Tesla were instead prioritized for xAI

Usually the other way round. Prominent shareholder sells his/its private assets to listed company for massive mark-up. Chances are - where I live - the listed company funded the purchase of the assets in the first place.

HP-Autonomy: Attorneys wrap up arguments in Mike Lynch's stateside criminal fraud trial

"not doing proper due diligence"

Exactly so. Much smaller transactions involve armies of lawyers and accountants to turn over every rock. It is simply not possible if they'd done a proper job they would not have uncovered "every accounting trick in the book". In fact - what a dead giveaway. If those were indeed the known accounting tricks those are exactly what the due diligence team would have been looking for.

Will Windows drive a PC refresh? Everyone's talking about AI

"commercial fleet refreshes" - now I am worried

As an interested non-techie I took comfort from the expectation that AI would be in the hands only of those qualified to manage it.

But if everyone in the damn company has access to the headless monster ......

Venerable ICQ messaging service to end operations in June

"waned with the end of the dialup age"

Actually began a (briefly) slow (then accelerating) fall off the cliff during the digital age because AOL as a suicidal marketing ploy introduced free use of the dialup connection which meant that every single user in New York City had the connection open and operational every minute of the day.

BOFH: Come on down to the dunge– erm … basement

2009 Mac Pro Not junk!

I have two, one running 24/7. Both for backup. Wouldn't want that new-fangled stuff for such a critical item.

Google's €1B Finnish datacenter expansion to heat the local community

You may or may not be thinking of the office building in Liverpool designed to be energy efficient having regard to hot bodies, typewriters etc inside but if so I don’t remember the swimming pool part.

On the other hand the pandemic reminded us of a few things one of which was the joy of being able to throw open a window and inhale fresh air.

DoJ, ByteDance ask court: Hurry up and rule on TikTok ban already

Six months is “fast-track”?

Aiming to compete with Jarndyce v. Jarndyce then.

So you've built the best tablet, Apple. Show us why it matters

MS only ever really wanted desktop. And now Cloud.

Stifling Beijing in cyberspace is now British intelligence’s number-one mission

".. to the extent Western nations can't defend against it."

Where did she say that?

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/speech/cyberuk-2024-gchq-director-keynote-speech

On the other hand she does digress towards child pornography, womens lib and diversification in favour of ethnic minorities.

Google gives in to Hong Kong, blocks fake national anthem on YouTube

"a law that allowed"

You mean draft law, which was never adopted, originally motivated to allow the formal extradition of an accused murderer from Hong Kong to Taiwan for trial, and which because of publicity about this incident, had broad public support at the outset.

Dublin debauchery derails Portal to NYC in six days flat

"possible technical solutions to inappropriate behaviour by a small minority of people"

Whoever thought of the installation had never been around a bunch of schoolkids.

Does anyone else here remember the Schoolkids issue of Oz Magazine. Or even that there was a magazine called Oz?

For the rest : It was an early part of the counterculture, although "culture" didn't have much to do with it.