Posts by druck

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.

Ah, you know what? Keep your crappy space station, we're gonna try to make our own, Russia tells world

Re: It does have a finite life

The ISS has a finite life though exactly how old it could get before it became hazardous is anyone's guess.

Unfortunately the Russian contribution was original two modules the ISS is built around, and are MIR era technology, and that station didn't age too well.

Lego's Space Shuttle Discovery: No trouble with Hubble, but the stickers will drive a grown man to insanity

My 5 1/2 year old didn't wait for me to help with the stickers and did an amazing job on a pair of Lego city racing cars, his 7 1/2 year brother still got me to help with the ones on his Lego Ninjago dragon.

BTW: I know what I'm asking Santa for this Christmas now.

Listen, son... Monster trucks just aren't cool anymore. Real winners drive Tesla Roadsters

Re: Honestly

You've obviously never been close to either a coal or nuclear power station, as you'd know the difference between one which continually belches out tons of slightly radioactive waste in to the environment, and one which is spotlessly clean, meticulously monitored, and only produces a small amount of radioactive waste which is very carefully disposed of.

'There was no one driving that vehicle': Texas cops suspect Autopilot involved after two men killed in Tesla crash

You mean the US habit of changing the oil every 3000 miles like it was still the 1930s?

Elon Musk's SpaceX bags $3bn NASA contract to, fingers crossed, land first woman on the Moon

Re: HUGE slam for SLS

If they are going to use Starship to land on the moon, I really see no point in developing SLS just to get the astronauts along side for a transfer.

Google proposes Logica data language for building more manageable SQL code

Backticks

It uses backticks, smaller and more difficult to see than a single quote and needs two key presses on most Linux systems - just say no

Jackie 'You have no authority here' Weaver calls on the UK to extend Coronavirus Act provisions for online meetings

Re: Why, tho?

The problem we had wasn't with councillors moving away, but with those living locally failing to turn up. Attendance by some was abysmal, but at least with online meetings people would be able to see they weren't there week in week out.

There was one independent (Liberal Democrat until the coalition) who had a very well organising leafleting campaign opposing just about everything we did, which would get him elected but then didn't turn up for the crucial votes. When talking to people on the doorstep they always said "he does so much for the community", and wouldn't accept that you had to be at meetings to achieve anything.

Intel offers to produce car chips for automakers stalled by ongoing semiconductor supply drought

Spare capacity

Does this indicate Intel fabs have spare capacity? Maybe its due to Apple moving to their own silicon, data centres deploying their own ARM based SOCs and even AMD taking a tiny bit more x86 market share.

Jensen Huang's kitchen gets another viewing as Nvidia teases Arm-powered supercomputing chip Grace

Buy?

All very exciting stuff, but none of which they need to buy ARM to do. I'd feel far more comfortable if ARM was independent of any of their custiomers.

United States' plan to beat China includes dominating tech standards groups – especially for 5G

They did it before, and they'll do it again

The US, or rather Microsoft, did it before in 2008 when they packed out ISO and IEC committees to get "works like word 95" Open Office XML declared as a standard, to compete with that gawdamn commie ODF from Open/Libre office.

Software in space race heats up: Microsoft eyes satellite image processing with Thales Alenia Space's digital image analyst

Bit Barns in Spaaaaace!

I was hoping the story was about launching a data centre into orbit, to process all the satellite images before sending them back to earth.

Intel accused of wiretapping because it uses analytics to track keystrokes, mouse movements on its website

Re: How many times?

Some sites are almost impossible to navigate, due to confusing loops of links, hamburger menus, or not even being obvious some elements are links. If there was analytics which detected the users mouse rage, and flagged it up to the company, I might be tempted to enable their script.

Blockchain may be the machinery of mischief, but it can't help telling the truth

Re: Why blockchain?

Blockchain has the advantage that anyone paying millions for a NFT is indelibly and undeniably marked as plonker with more money than sense.

Samsung aims first 512GB DDR5 DRAM chip built on High-K/Metal Gate tech at HPC, AI markets

Fully Stacked

Hopefully this will greatly increase the amount of RAM which can be stacked on in a SOC (like on the M1), as well as increasing performance.

Backblaze on the back foot after 'inadvertently' beaming customer data to Facebook

Blocked

At least you know now why Google tag manager and Facebook scripts should always be blocked.

Inside the 1TB ImageNet data set used to train the world's AI: Naked kids, drunken frat parties, porno stars, and more

Re: Pictures of bikini clad women

I was trying to generate pictures of bicycles and got bikini girls instead, is not an excuse my wife would believe.

Fire takes out Japanese chip plant, owner Renesas warns of more silicon shortages

Re: Their chips are down

If there is a shortage of chips, maybe this is an opportunity to go back to producing cars which are just cars. Ads for small cars now don't feature driving at all, it's all about how you can hook up your phone to the entertainment system to continue consuming social media.

Safety would be greatly improved by dropping distracting touchscreens and going back to tactile buttons and dials, removing "driving assistance functions" which encourage you to lose attention behind the wheel such maintaining lanes, and autopilots which aren't.

Get rid of all that superfluous stuff, and there would be enough chips for the essential function of controlling the engine.

Boldly going where Elon Musk will probably go before: NASA successfully tests SLS Moon rocket core stage

Re: Musk

Ironically it's the French that have kept a Concord in an almost flight ready state in an air conditioned museum, while all ours have either been chopped up for transport to an old shed, given to the US to put on a barge, or left outside to corrode.

DARPA picks Intel to automate conversion of FPGAs into ASICs for military applications

Buying spree

Isn't this because Intel bought up a lot of the PGA and ASIC specialists such as Altera, Omnitek and eASIC?

Microsoft rolls out mask detection to Azure Cognitive Services. And yes, there is a noseAndMouthCovered attribute

It's been an hour...

...since this was published, so someone must have found a way to game it.

Rookie's code couldn't have been so terrible that it made a supermarket spontaneously combust... right?

Re: The power of coincidence

Mothers are like that, I was a qualified CEGB test engineer for a short time many years ago, she knew I was allowed fiddle with conventional and nuclear plant, but still stood over me when wiring a plug, and asked if I was sure I knew what I was doing. God rest her soul.

Retro Microlympics concludes with possible reopening dates for UK computer museums

Re: Elite

I managed to become Elite after much night and day space trading action, and accumulated 1,000,000.3 credits according to my certificate. I started off on the Acorn Electron, and later bought the enhanced copy for the BBC Master, to finish visiting all the 8 galaxies

NTT boffins reckon they’ve out-randomed current quantum random number generators

Random Noise

I'm confident that better random noise is going to be the ultimate achievement of quantum computing.

Linux Mint users in hot water for being slow with security updates, running old versions

Re: Could they pick a better example than Firefox?

I would say that anyone still visiting yahoo is likely to be firmly entrenched in the past, and probably well past being able to update their OS. Mint 17 is still a lot newer than Windows 7.

British govt emits fuzzy vision for UK version of American boffin special forces group Darpa

Re: WWW?

Are you now claiming Britain doesn't fund CERN?

Re: WWW?

So working as part of an international team at Cern makes him Swiss and not British?

You want me to do WHAT in that prepaid envelope?

Re: French Tests

In Japan the smart toilet does all those tests for every movement.

Cred-stealing trojan harvests logins from Chromium browsers, Outlook and more, warns Cisco Talos

Re: And bingo !

Unfortunately NoScript isn't available for Microsoft Help, which is what loads/runs .chm files.

Linux as root partition on Hyper-V: Microsoft submits patches for kernel 5.12

Hopefully...

..our PCs will soon have Linux as the HyperV host, and Windows 10 subsystem for Linux will be an ever shrinking guest.

'It's where the industry is heading': LibreOffice team working on WebAssembly port

Re: It's the way the industry is heading

One of the main reason I use Libre Office is that the program is 100% downloaded to my machine and the document is 100% on my machine. As long as I have power, no cloud, and no network gets in the way. Once the document is written I can fling it as far in to the cloud as I like, but I still have my local copy.

Voyager 2 receives and executes first command in 11 months as sole antenna that reaches it returns to work

Re: It's a different world

But back then we had supersonic passenger aircraft which could cross the Atlantic in 3hours, today we don't.

Microsoft issues emergency fix for Wi-Fi foul-up delivered hot and fresh on Patch Tuesday

Re: We used to be able to choose when we update

Unplug the Ethernet, turn off the WiFi, take out the SIM card - although I still couldn't be 100% sure it wouldn't find a way to update.

We imagine this maths professor's lecture was fascinating – sadly he was muted for two hours

Re: Much more embarrasing: hot mic

It would be, but it's a bit too specific to my set up, relying on guessing the video traffic from IP and port numbers in the router's connection table.

Re: Much more embarrasing: hot mic

I've got a Raspberry Pi Zero with a small screen that can monitor the router for video calls to computers in the home office, and display a red "ON AIR" sign.

Better buckle up: Volkswagen puts Microsoft in driver's seat to deliver 'automated' platform

Re: ANY of them. Not.

Then the answer is to make the human driving test harder, rather than to set the bar for AI to be better than a drunk driver.

Re: VW. Not.

Google or Azure? This isn't about your advertising preferences, but putting your and others lives in the hands of that incompetent AI / Cloud provider.

Intel sues former staffer for allegedly stealing Xeon cloud secrets in USB drives and exploiting info at Microsoft

Re: Indeed

It's not on the network, it's on a spare Ethernet port. e.g. the port on the laptop when it is connected to a dock with it's own Ethernet on the company network.

War on Section 230 begins in earnest as Dem senators look to limit legal immunity for social networks, websites etc

Facebook and Twiter aren't the internet I know and love...

...but many other sites which rely on user generate content will be wiped out by the additional costs to comply with this legislation.

Vote machine biz Smartmatic sues Fox News and Trump chums for $2.7bn over bogus claims of rigged 2020 election

It will be a retraction similar to what used to happen in tabloids. After running 144pt headlines on the front page for weeks, six months later they put a mealy mouthed apology in 6pt text at the bottom of page 22, in whichever edition has the lowest circulation.

ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 1: Workhorse that does the business – and dares you to push that red button

Re: Red pointy thing

I mostly use the trackpad, but when you have 3 monitors, the nub is far better at whizzing the pointer 10,000 pixels and back.

Microsoft backs Australia’s pay-for-news plan, risks massive blowback over a lousy $3bn and change

Re: Spite

If google pull out of Australia there will be a massive spike in bing usage, as Microsoft are hoping for.

But it will only last as long as it takes to type google and VPN.

In Rust we trust: Shoring up Apache, ISRG ditches C, turns to wunderkind lang for new TLS crypto module

Re: Valgrind says 'hi'

The defensive attitude as because once you've been in the industry for a while, you see that every five years or so someone comes along, and says "you don't want to use that language any more, its crap, you are crap, look at the dozens of bugs in (several million lines of) your code. You want to use #newshiny instead, its so much better, look I've written half a screen full of code with no memory leaks whatsoever."

Some of these new languages may have significant advantages and become popular, others wont. But you can be sure that in a few years time, someone will be trashing the investment you've made in Rust and suggesting you rewrite everything in #newevenmoreshiny.

'It's dead, Jim': Torvalds marks Intel Itanium processors as orphaned in Linux kernel

We had a few different Itanium variants in a test lab all with everything else under the sun (groan), They were all stupefyingly slow compared to contemporary SPARCs and POWERs, and of course left for dead by Xeons.

Perl-clutching hijackers appear to have seized control of 33-year-old programming language's .com domain

Re: I loved Perl so much...

Twenty years ago Perl was still popular and there wasn't any problem finding devs. These days we were relying on half a dozen crusty and costly contractors who had Perl and luckily also Python skills. No one who had been in the department less than a decade had any real Perl experience, but all the perms knew Python. So the choice was either to train everyone up on a declining and difficult to master language just follow an old corporate standard, or turn the ship around and develop new code in something that matched the skills set, and could be supported in house for at least another couple of decades.

Re: I loved Perl so much...

I did automate most of it, with a Python script containing an absolute obscenity of reg-ex's, but it did 95% of the donkey work so I could concentrate on debugging.