Posts by druck

IPv6 still 5-10 years away from mainstream use, but K8s networking and multi-cloud are now real

IPv6 still 5 to 10 years away...

...for PlusNet

Here boy! Making the Sample Fetch Rover that'll collect soil from the Red Planet

Re: Dust

We were talking to the team on their stand at Goodwood, the sample containers the rover will have to find and collect are quite small, about 12cm long. Perseverance can't leave an exact location, due to the lack of GPS on Mars, so they will have find them visually, hoping that dust wont cover them up over the years before the recovery missing takes place.

Imagine a world where Apple shacked up with Xerox in the '80s: How might it look today?

Re: Why jobs...

He would have found something to sell, even if it was iPhone cases at the mall.

Re: If Xerox had never sold their Apple stock

They would end up being shutdown to liberate the shares. The same thing happened to Acorn, who created ARM and retained a large share holding, which became worth more than the parent company. They ended up being taken over by a consortium of banks, various divisions were sold off for nominal sums, and company closed down so the shares could be sold without incurring as much tax.

Euro space boffins hatch comms satellite hijack plan to save Earth from extinction

Implausible

Repurposing in orbit satellite's small station keeping thrusters to try to intercept an asteroid is Implausible to say the least.

A far more reasonable idea would be to attach a large mass to the orbital transfer vehicles which put satellites in to the correct orbit, and have that crash in to the asteroid.

Samsung Galaxy A52 5G: Sub-$600 midranger makes premium phones feel frivolous

Re: Roaming

And your comment on the A52 is?

It's all in the mind: Thought-command slot car racing in the city of the future

Brain power

We saw young girl use it very effectively, able to start and stop the car at will, but the demonstrator started asking her maths questions until she was no longer able to concentrate and it stopped. My 7 year old wanted a go, and we waited about 40 minutes to get to one to go in the queue, but unfortunately the head band ran out of batteries, and they were having a lot of difficulties getting the replacement to pair over Bluetooth. At that point I wanted to get back to the action on the hill climb, so had to drag him out of there.

Wanna feel old? It is 10 years since the Space Shuttle left the launchpad for the last time

Re: Endeavor…

The A10 Thunderbolt begs to differ.

Suck on this: El Reg forces dog hair, biscuit crumbs, and disconcertingly sticky stains down two mini vacuums

Re: That's it?? Where's the rest of the review?!

How often do you have to rescue it when it gets stuck under the dining chairs and starts beeping in distress?

The splitting image: Sufferer of hurty wrist pain? Logitech's K860 a potential answer

I spend a lot of time working collaboratively over video conferencing, so while I'd like a clicky tactile keyboard, I went for a MX Keys, which is quiet enough not to have to mute every time you need to type anything.

Arm chief hits out at 'ill-informed speculation' over proposed Nvidia buyout

Re: More corporate bull

I have no worries that in 10 years time ARM will be still be headquartered in the UK, my worry is that a competitor owning ARM will drive other customers to move to RISC V.

Richard Branson plans to trump Jeff Bezos by 9 days in billionaires' space race

Re: To quote a well known phrase...

They aren't going anywhere near high enough to be bothered by orbital debris.

UK Cabinet Office's spending on cybersecurity training rises by 500% in a year

Re: Surprise at CCTV....

You really think a minister earns a copious amount of money? It's a lot less than many of council chief executives and university chancellors. I'd argue that paying them closer to the amount they can earn in private industry when they leave the job, might make it a bit easier for them to keep their distance from those commercial entities while in office.

NASA's InSight lander expected to survive most of summer before choking to death on Martian dust

Re: Learning point.

Find dust tends to be electrostatically attracted and wont fall off by turning the panels upside down.

UK urged to choo-choo-choose hydrogen-powered trains in pursuit of carbon-neutral economic growth

Re: Huh

Swapping train sized batteries is not an option, unless they are in a separate unit, as per OssianScotland's suggestion.

But if you put a heavy enough battery in the train, it may even be able to cope with leaves on the line, or perhish the thought, the wrong kind of snow.

Intel to put SiFive's latest CPU cores into 7nm dev system to woo customers to RISC-V

Re: you can see why word emerged of Intel offering at least $2bn to take over SiFive

I wondered why Intel would be interested in an open source design, but as SiFive has already made the performance series closed source, Intel wouldn't have to take any flack for bolting the stable door.

Japan assembles superteam of aircraft component manufacturers to build supersonic passenger plane

It's first flight was 52 years ago in 1969, so it's very old technology, you could even call it space-aged.

Dependable Debian is like a rock in a swirling gyre of 'move fast and break things', and version 11 is no different

Pi's

Looking foward to performing over a dozen problem free upgrades to my Raspberry Pi's when the first version of Raspberry Pi OS (bah, Raspbian is a much better name), based on this comes out.

Norton dodges UK courts after telling Brit watchdog it will be nicer to consumers

NortonLifeLock

The name of the produce gives a clear indication of how difficult it will be get out of a subscription, it could only have been more honest if they had named it:-

Until you die, and then some...

IBM pulls up the ladder behind some supercomputer customers

Re: Lousiville Ladders

(250+ US pounds)

US and Imperial pounds weight the same, they just look a lot bigger ;)

UK tells UN that nation-states should retaliate against cyber badness with no warning

Re: Unintended Consequences (Facts not Fakes)

Belgium attacks Cheltenham? Well I suppose they could up the mortality rate from obesity, by sending us lots of their delicious chocolate.

Pre-orders open for the Mini PET 40/80, the closest thing to Commodore's classic around

I tripple E

The original Commodore Pet might have seemed expensive at the time, but it was bar far the cheapest way of controlling industrial equipment which had an IEEE interface.

FBI paid renegade developer $180k for backdoored AN0M chat app that brought down drug underworld

Re: Just think and consider for a moment ...

Zero, it's not something you could buy, as the article says; it was supplied by criminals exclusively to other criminals.

Chinese app binned by Beijing after asking what day it is on anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre

Re: They're weirdly touchy

This presents certain rather obvious problems with food, housing etc so they then panicked and went from one extreme to the other with population control and have managed to keep the population down to 1.3 billion at the expense of China sitting on the worlds biggest demographic time bomb as the older people die off, which they can currently hear ticking.

No, the time bomb is due to older people not dying off. That single child has to look after 2 parents, and 4 grand parents, i.e. a working population supporting a much larger retired population, with all the healthcare costs that brings.

Ethernet standards wonks eye up speeds beyond 400Gb/s

Re: In the meantime 10Gb/s has been available for years now ...

Even a Raspberry Pi 4B can saturate 1Gb/s Ethernet.

How many remote controls do you really need? Answer: about a bowl-ful

Re: Mother knows best

Our old 2009 Samsung TV came with a very large standard remote with lots of buttons, and a pebble remote which was just on/off volume up/down channel up/down.

Arm has another 'most powerful CPU to date' – this time, the 64-bit-only Cortex-X2 for laptops and smartphones

ARM A710 or ARM710

It's a bit confusing they've gone full circle on the naming. ARM710

Tesla owners win legal fight after software update crippled older Model S batteries

Re: ICE - still the way to go

Main difference is that none but me is going to f**k with it to reduce performance. Not VW, not Tesla (the company doesn't even exist any more).

You've not heard about the change to E10 petrol then? By increasing the proportion of Ethanol, it will reduce the power output and mpg, worse still on a car of that age it may destroy some parts of the fuel system and carburettors.

Guido van Rossum aiming to make CPython 2x faster in 3.11

Re: The proof of the pudding will be in the eating.

This is very welcome and will more than reverse the small loss of performance when migrating from Python 2.

43 years and 14 billion miles later, Voyager 1 still crunching data to reveal secrets of the interstellar medium

Re: Progress...

That's about twice the average DAB channel bit rate, or so it sounds.

As another vendor promises 3 years of Android updates, we ask: How long should mobile devices receive support?

There's nothing wrong with my 5 year old GalaxyS7, battery is still good for a day or more, it runs everything I want at a decent speed, photos and video are decent. Now I've cleared the pocket fluff which was preventing the charging cable connecting securely, it's got years more life in it. The last firmware update was September 2020, but I don't think its getting any more, as they've announced the S8 isn't.

Quantum computing: Confusion can mask a good story, but don't take anyone's word for it

Re: Quantum Computing

The IET did a lecture on QC last week, lots of hand waving about how it will (in theory) revolutionise certain areas of computing, but light on any details. In the QA afterwards he admitted the only practical use you are likely to see from it is a better random number generator.

Chinese rocket plunges into Indian Ocean, still lands sharp rebuke from NASA

Re: Perhaps,

I'm reminded of when a Long March 2 went a bit sideways at Xichang

https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/disaster-at-xichang-2873673/

China sprayed space with 3,000 pieces of junk. US military officials want rules to stop that sort of thing

A quick chorus of Imagine, and then back to the real world.

The Wight stuff: Marconi and the island, when working remotely on wireless comms meant something very different

Re: Inspiring review

Well I was circling around to get a picture of my boys (then 3 and 5) enjoying the Dino Jeep Safari, when I saw the monument and was pleasantly surprised to read about the history of the site. The chair lift down to the beach was great too, the boys were terrified and thrilled at the same time.

Terminal trickery, or how to improve a novel immeasurably

Re: Black magic

Yes you are right, I think it was a Pyramid there anyway, the Prime was at a different site.

Re: Black magic

At our university it was VT220s to an old Prime mainframe. We explored just about every control sequence for mischievous purposes, including ending the victims session by ending with a stty 0 > /dev/ttyXX

UK watchdog would cease to enforce data protection law if Supreme Court sided with Google, its lawyer tells judges

Re: Class action

Well that's how it played out for Microsoft, every single time.

Can't get that printer to work? It's not you. It's that sodding cablin.... oh beautiful job with that cabling, boss

Re: Bloody Developers and memory

Then again, no!

Appeals court nixes online blueprint sharing ban on 3D-printed 'ghost guns'

Re: Why bother with 3D printing

I think the point of a 3D printed gun would be to produce a very realistic replica, however it would get you shot just as well as if you we brandishing the real thing.

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

Re: Microsoft’s new default font options, rated

At least Tenorite has proper 'a's and 'g's, as for the others, who really cares.

Michael Collins, once the world's 'loneliest man,' is dead. If that name means little or nothing to you, read this

On top of the rocket

The Lego Saturn V comes with three micro-figure astronauts, Neil and Buzz are on the moon next to the LEM, but I keep Mike on top of the escape tower never to forget him.

UK government gives Automated Lane Keeping Systems the green light for use on motorways

Idiocy

This will do more to set back road safety than smart motorways.

Traffic lights, who needs 'em? Lucky Kentucky residents up in arms over first roundabout

Re: It'll be alright...

No, traffic lights on roundabouts indicate that the roundabout should never have been put there, but those responsible can't lose face by ripping it out and making it a normal traffic light controlled junction again, so they make it both which is far worse than either.

Ofcom 5G auction ends with UK carriers spending £23m for choice spectrum positionings

Re: Remember the 3G spectrum auction of 2020?

But this isn't about buying any new spectrum, its about putting the purchased blocks in a particular order, therefore the far smaller cost.

UK Court of Appeal rules Tiny Computers' legal remains can sue Micron and Infineon over 2002 DRAM price-fixing cartel

Re: Mother fuckers....

Is it ethical for the ethics training to include how not to get caught in the future?

SpaceX flings another bunch of humans into orbit in reused capsule atop reused booster

Re: One careful owner...

If SpaceX were used car salesmen, they would have at least valeted the thing before selling it on. It was still covered in soot from the last flight, and just like with some old van rear window, the astronauts had scrawled their initials in the muck.

Exam-monitoring biz Proctorio tried to silence a critic using copyright law. Now EFF sues to put an end to this tactic

Proctoring proctologist

It would seem installing proctoring software on the computer is about as pleasant as a visit to he proctologist.

Greener Windows? Microsoft previews EcoQoS and Task Manager Eco Mode for would-be power-sipping devs

Save energy?

So this saves energy by making an application slower? Well apart from wasting my time (when I could be out planting trees or something) and burning more electricity to power my monitors, wont this give Windows even more chances to decide to do a burst of unexpected activity, suddenly spinning up the fans to full speed when you aren't doing anything? Strange how the same hardware doesn't do that when running Linux, so if you want an eco mode close your Windows.

Microsoft loves Linux – as in, it loves Linux users running Linux desktop apps on Windows PCs

Without ... managing virtual machines

In the dark ages when I was forced to have Windows as my base OS for work, running Linux is a VM was the only way to get things done. My Linux VM could have an uptime of months, as I could just suspend and resume it every time Windows needed a reboot for an update.