* Posts by werdsmith

7075 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Feb 2011

Sorry, Siri: Apple may be eyeing Google Gemini for future iPhones

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Re: A rotten Apple

Apple have always bought in and re-worked existing tech. They are know for it from when Apple acquired their touch screen tech by buying Fingerworks and before that.

So nothing is changing here.

Raspberry Pi OS 5.2 is here, with pleasant tweaks to Wayland-based desktop

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Raspberry PI OS (I can't remember how many years ago it was called Raspbian, but it's a long time) has an Add/Remove software application in the GUI now.

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Foundation people will also be fed up with having the finger pointed at them for the unofficial price gouging that happened during the penuries.

That wasn't even the fault of Raspberry Pi Limited, so whining about the Foundation is just idiotic.

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"The Raspberry Pi Foundation has updated its Debian 12-based OS for the pocket-sized powerhouse"

Are you sure?

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

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The cross charge to the non tech departments for their SAN storage use reflects the cost of Enterprise disk.

Often hear "but I can get 5TB drive from Amazon for 100 quid!!"

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

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Re: Coincidence...

But it doesn’t just work. It’s miles away from that. That’s the whole point of the conversation. It’s supposed to do something, a user gets instructions to do something but it’s not relevant to their distribution.

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Re: Coincidence...

Why would a generic average Mac user ever come up against "you need Homebrew"?

Because they've seen something in a youtube video.....

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Re: Coincidence...

Right down the bottom of the list? You don't have much experience with the users.

And Mac is OK until you come up against "you need HomeBrew".

The multitude of different package managers and dependency controllers like Snap that are not even associated with one distro, people go looking for instructions on the web, they get instructions for RPM they need APT. There are dozens of similar scenarios. I am used to this but I don't want to have to clutter up with Snap and Flatpak or whatever. Not to mention being told to download the source and build it then it fails and they have to figure out what switches.

A seasoned linux user might love all that like a dog likes gnawing a bone, but it's a royal pain to many that just want to be getting on with life.

And I've only been talking about installing software. Not touch on distros, guis and more.

Third time is almost the charm for SpaceX's Starship

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Re: maximising

Public (and your own) safety would be maximized by not getting out of bed in the morning.

A completely sedentary lifestyle is far more dangerous.

Chinese smartphone brand Xiaomi adds electric vehicle to its mobility offerings

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Re: If Xiaomi want to be taken seriously

Xiaomi recruited car design stylists from Mercedes and BMW and external help from..... Chris Bangle of the weird crease BMW styling.

Japan's first private satellite launch imitates SpaceX's giant explosions

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Re: I can't get the video to work

It didn't play for me either, so I hopped over and watched it on BBC.

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It looked like it started to pitch over too soon. The controllers didn't wait for it to be over the sea to abort, they did it quickly so the whole thing came down to start a fire on the pad. Maybe the abort was automated, but a few more seconds would have had the whole thing over water.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

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If there were no penalty for violence or murder, I would still look after the welfare of anyone, including my worst enemy.

Your PC can probably run inferencing just fine – so it's already an AI PC

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Tiny Jetson Orin SBCs can inference at a reasonable rate using pre-trained models. Even a basic Jetson Nano can do it usefully to ID objects.

Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery

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Re: "Climate change means beer made from sewer water"

Then also to complain about beer if they can taste it.

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It wasn't just the British, either. They just think nobody else of note existed back then.

An attitude that seems to have travelled west since then.

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It was usual on ships too.

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Re: "Climate change means beer made from sewer water"

The solution is just to chill it so cold that there is nothing left to taste.

Linux 6.9 will be the first to top ten million Git objects

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Re: a billion?

Ooh, CSV nightmare.

Grab a helmet because retired ISS batteries are hurtling back to Earth

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Re: I think I saw it!

Re-entry was between Yucatan and Cuba, during mid afternoon daylight. It would have burned up whilst tracking over the atlantic in a northeasterly direction.

'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

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MySQL free in some naked form. I see people downloading and using MySQL workbench My understanding that, in an enterprise, this is not free.

Perhaps the same applies to VirtualBox, where people download and install the extension pack to enhance the performance of their VMs.

Traps are everywhere.

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Re: Advice in dealing with Oracle audits

Have end of life for the Oracle software on your strategic road map. Start the process immediately.

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

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Re: Why isn't it the year of the linux desktop?

Some truths are just not popular round here, including what I like, others might not like.

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I installed linux mint and it was amazing. The sun came out, winter changed to spring and there were rainbows everywhere, cute little fawns and the rivers ran with fine ale.

Absolutely amazing it was.

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Re: Repeat after me:

Group Policy Objects.

Venturing beyond the default OS on Raspberry Pi 5

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What, if anything, on these other OSes is tweaked to use the VideoCore GPU in the Broadcom SoC for desktop acceleration?

German defense chat overheard by Russian eavesdroppers on Cisco's WebEx

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In WW2 US Marines used native Navajo speakers, who further obfuscated their comms by using a code. This, as far as anyone knows, was unbroken and made secret communications much quicker than the usual methods.

Juno fly-by detects lower levels of oxygen on Europa than expected

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Re: But when life got going on earth ...

I will read the paper when I get the opportunity, but this article doesn't say which hemisphere the 373km pass encountered given Europa rotates about 3.5 earth days being tidal locked with its orbital period.

There will most likely be more oxygen produced at the centre of Europa's trailing longitudinal hemisphere , and it would not be a uniform abundance across the surface of the entire sphere.

Tiny Core Linux 15 stuffs modern computing in a nutshell

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Re: Run from a ROM Chip

UV-erasable storage with 2-4GB per chip

Remember 2-4MB eproms. 2716 and 2732.

My little bottle of acetone for cleaning the sticky labels off the windows and my Stag programmer that could do 8 at a time from a master.

Ruggedized phone group takes the Bullitt, calls in PWC as administrative receiver

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Re: Alternatively ...

Buy our product. It's full of security holes, but we'll send you fixes for them every time criminals discover one

That's just pragmatic. If they said "Buy our product, it's 100% secure" I would say no thanks bullshitter.

NASA's Mars Sample Return Program struggles to get off the drawing board

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The Sample-Fetch rover was already developed to prototype at Stevenage, but missions plans were revised and it is now looking for an alternative mission.

Toyota admits its engines are overrated – by its own power testing software

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Re: Manufacturer's power claims

I've never driven my car to produce its maximum power, never needed to get that loud.

It's not a racing car and I don't drive it on a closed track.

Torque is useful in normal road driving. Power not so much.

EU-turn! Now Apple says it won't banish Home Screen web apps in Europe

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Re: "We have received requests"

I took my iPhone to a friends but couldn't charge it because it uses a lightning connector and they only had USB-C.

Actually, what really happened was I placed the phone on their wireless charger and no cable required.

FAA gives Boeing 90 days to fix serious safety shortcomings found in report

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Re: so why not just shut Boing (sic) down ?

Airbus have an order backlog of over 8000 aircraft, Boeing over 6000. If there were no Boeing there would be a fleet replacement crisis, older aircraft would be kept longer.

CAC need to step up quickly.

Underwater cables in Red Sea damaged months after Houthis 'threatened' to do just that

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Re: Why do they need a submarine?

You can take an angle grinder to a HVDC cable if you like.. There wouldn't be much left of you afterwards!

Interesting. Do these fibre optic communication cables that the article is about also carry HVDC?

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Re: Why do they need a submarine?

Presumably these cables are like the cross section examples I’ve seen in a museum with multiple spirals of steel cable on the outside providing armour.

At a reasonable depth, hooking on and pulling to the surface a few tonnes in water with a marine salvage crane, then the damage can be applied with a large angle grinder.

Google wants regulators to take Microsoft down a notch before it stifles AI

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the Windows giant comes down to licensing practices that either prevent or make it more expensive to deploy Microsoft's software platforms on third-party clouds – thereby creating an incentive to deploy on Azure.

Or an incentive to avoid those Microsoft software platforms.

Build cloud infrastructure so it is portable.

Odysseus probe moonwalking on the edge of battery life after landing on its side

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This and the Japanese effort are both amazing achievements to have made a soft landing close to a pre-determined target location at such a distance.

Even though the orientation was wrong.

Neither as good as the Indian one though.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

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Re: "Jensen Huang believes"

I worked at a place a long time ago, they had a PCB assembly department that they called the wire shop. Lots of chattering ladies would sit folding component legs and pushing them through PCB holes, soldering them and trim the excess.

Then they got a flow solder machine and less ladies. Then they got automatic test equipment and a more ladies that would read the ticket from the ATE and remove the indicated solder bridges, correct the wrong components and put in the missing ones.

Then they off-shored all the manufacturing. Over the years of reading the Register I've been reading about how all IT work in developed nations was going to be off-shored to developing nations, and quite a lot of companies tried that, and much of it didn't really work out. Then people were concerned about Cloud providers taking all the infrastructure work, but seems that is going through the same cycle as the off-shoring. I expect AI will have to go through that process too, before the reality occurs.

That company that off-shored its manufacturing is now doing its own manufacturing again, albeit with pick and place machine operators. One of the pick and place ladies is from the original wire shop and is back after some decades.

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I remember seeing a job advert once, asking for skills in using RAD tools.

Haven't seen one like that for a long time.

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

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Re: What the hell?

I think the presumption was that the idea of the Royal Navy using titanium is the joke.

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Re: What the hell?

It was the old Soviet Union that made their titanium alfa submarines and they are obsolete now. I don't think USA submarines were titanium?

India’s homebrew RISC-V CPU goes on sale in new development board

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Re: Not the only comparison

Still much cheaper than my StarFive VisionFive 2 which is a quad core RISC V with GPU and (just about) runs linux.

For lower spec'd RISC V cores without GPU, it's as much fun to put on on an FPGA.

Lender threatens to sweep MariaDB accounts over private equity bid

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Maybe it's more about it being publicly announced.

Intuitive Machines' Odysseus prepares for Moon landing

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Re: Hope it is better organised than their web page

" they mention the NASA TV coverage, but can't be bothered to give the URL"

www.youtube.com

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

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Re: RE: the bottom of the tower is reached along a pokey, dull little alley

As urban legends go, the one about it being omitted from OS maos is a very persistent one, but total bullshit.

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If wandering through Fitzrovia the bottom of the tower is reached along a pokey, dull little alley. It feels so inauspicious considering this was the glam building built at a time when central London generally avoided building above the height of St.Pauls dome, the earlier Shell building alongside the Thames stopped 4 metres short.

I've always loved seeing it above everything. Even today it doesn't have high structures close to it.

MariaDB receives offer to go private more than year after disastrous IPO

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I’ve long forsaken MySQL and its issue due to the involvement of Oracle and subsequent discovery of the excellence of PostgreSQL.

I just hope that University of California continue to look after PG as well as they have so far.

Insider steals 79,000 email addresses at work to promote own business

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Re: A slap on the wrist?

There's also the seeking alternate employment part. Assuming the side hustle isn't up an running enough to pay the bills.

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

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Re: cool beans!

An old computer with XP on it?

A defrag (remember that?) might have helped.