Posts by druck

World's largest private submarine in mystery sink accident

Cruashed

Well at least if the hatches were left open when it went down, it wouldn't be crushed. Might even be salvageable.

Microsoft: We beat Google, AWS to cloudy GPU VMs in Blighty

Re: Under-resourcing

Less of the canned press release please.

Under-resourcing

How does this play against MS's under-resourcing of their UK data centres?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/04/microsoft_azure_capacity_woes_hit_uk_customers/

IBM adds Optane to its cloud, only as storage and without GPUs

Looks like Optane could be the next Itanic.

'Real' people want govts to spy on them, argues UK Home Secretary

Re: Ask her this

Banking isn't end to end between two users, one end is the service provider, i.e. bank.

Which of course is the answer; e2e unless there is a warrant, in which case encrypted messages are exchanged via the app providers servers.

Pre-order your early-bird pre-sale product today! (Oh did we mention the shipping date has slipped AGAIN?)

Re: waiting patiently...

Exactly, pre-ordering is nothing new, companies have been taking us for a ride since the days of the home micro. Pre-ordered products were invariably extremely late, underspec'd or already obsolete. Often the best you could hope for was to cancel for a full refund with a lesson learned.

Virgin Media admits it 'fell short' in broadband speeds ahead of lashing from BBC's Watchdog

Re: You get what you pay for

An important difference between the two product isn't just the download speed, but the upload speed. It's only 9Mb/s for the 55Mb/s product, but 19Mb/s for the 76Mb/s one. That makes a lot off difference when doing things such as uploading to the cloud, RDPing in to your computers at home, or running your own VPN so your mobile devices aren't being snooped upon when using public WiFi.

Re: You get what you pay for

Nothing wrong with PlusNet's service. Just don't expect POP3/TLS.

Marketing giant Marketo forgets to renew domain name. Hilarity ensues

Re: Be Paranoid

Don't rely on the Registrar to remind you either. Found an old club domain had fallen off the net in June, with not a single reminder having been sent. Luckily we got it back and running again, but a shared calendar entry has now been set up, so multiple people get the message.

Alexa, why aren't you working? No – I didn't say twerking. I, oh God...

Re: have you tried...

I think even Amazon themselves are finding Alexa a bit frustrating, given the banging coming from the floor above at One Station Square. Or they could be playing with the delivery drones in doors again.

Trump's CNN tantrum could delay $85bn AT&T-Time Warner merger

Forget Trump...

...anyone think this merger is going to be good for the consumers?

Britain's warhead-watcher to simulate Trident nukes with Atos supercomputer

Re: Hmm

@Tascam Holiday: "Yeah but we'd keep the lid on the saucepan to be really safe."

Although it could end up as the second saucepan lid in space:-

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/16/america_soviets_space_race/

New work: Algorithms to give self-driving cars 'impulsive' human 'ethics'

In harms way

Choosing between hitting someone who has walked out in the road or swerving and hitting others on the pavement is not the right way to look at the issue, for a human or AI. The person that has stepped out in to the road has deliberately put themselves in harms way, the pedestrians on the pavement have not.

If the person stepping out is aware enough they may have a chance of getting out of the way in time, the pedestrians on the pavement will be generally unaware of what is happening on the road and will have no chance - as we've seen too often recently in both lorry accidents and terrorist attacks.

Blighty's Department for Culture, Media & Sport gets 'digital' rebrand

Keep it Simple

There shouldn't be more ministries than fingers on one hand; Home, Foreign, Defence, Justice and Treasury. The rest of these long acronyms should just be a department sitting in a dusty corner of a ministry.

French general accused of nicking fast jet for weekend trips to the Sun

Seafires!

Intel launches 64-layer 3D flash client SSD

Re: Who cares?

People with a clue don't buy overpriced Intel SSDs.

Who cares?

Exactly the same performance, but a different number of layers?

See title.

Google hit with record antitrust fine of €2.4bn by Europe

Re: Erm

@Robin Bradshaw: I wish I could set up a huge botnet to give your post the number of up votes it deserves.

Re: Erm

No the EU don't want to ban it, but they've been taken in by to the whining of dodgy link farmers, so now you'll also have to wade through pages of results which lead to crap sites which don't even have the products you are looking for.

Skynet? More like Night-sky-net. AI hunts for Milky Way's turbo stars

Re: Galaxy screen saver

It was very similar to that, couldn't say if it was based on exactly the same code.

Re: "My Way or the Milky Way" (throws dwarf)

The Milky Way has already collided with several smaller galaxies, and is in the process of colliding with the large and small Magellanic clouds (small galaxies). Eventually the really biggy will be in 4bn years when it comes together with the massive Andromeda galaxy.

Re: Rarities

It's surprising there aren't more hyper-velocity stars, I used to have a RISC OS screen saver which simulated galaxies colliding and many stars used to escape before the galaxies coalesced. But then again it might not have been a very accurate simulation on a 200MHz Strong ARM.

50th anniversary of the ATM opens debate about mobile payments

Autobank

The Midland Bank before it became part of HSBC used to call it an "Autobank". We more commonly call it a cash machine, ATM is very American.

F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen on IoT: If it uses electricity, it will go online

Windows 10 S secure?

Did I really hear him say that Windows 10 S will be secure because it's not programmable? No 3rd party could ever hope to introduce more than a tiny fraction of the bugs that Microsoft will have included as standard, and will keep adding to with every non-optional update.

Intel: Joule's burned, Edison switched off, and Galileo – Galileo is no more

Re: Another botched call by Intel

@ Daniel Palmer you've clearly never used ARM assembler, or any assembler for that matter.

The original ARM instruction set of a thing of beauty, simple, orthoganal and immensely powerful. Unlike some other bloated ISAs which are effectively compiler only, it allowed developers to write large amount of hand crafted assembler to make things possible on early low power devices that couldn't be with high level code for several more years. (See RISC OS)

Re: Another botched call by Intel

@Bazza: I don't think Intel would wipe the floor. When they got hold of the wonderful StrongARM from DEC, most of DECs chip designers left rather than be forced on to the Itanium millstone. The Intel people then developed it to the X-Scale, which despite being fast at time due higher clocking using a smaller processes size than competitors, was a rather rubbish chip.

Unlike Apple who have actually improved their cores over the baseline designs from ARM, Intel made it far worse in terms of instructions per clock, with a load of unnecessary barriers between execution units which have never been seen on ARM before or since - indicating they just didn't know what they were doing. The memory subsystem was horribly crippled, and the chip errata was longer than every other ARM chip that came before it combined - almost as bad as an x86.

Microsoft throws its weight behind Parisian AI startup factory

I disagree, it will be no different to Microsoft Research in Cambridge. It tries to suck up the most promising UK graduates, who could have gone on to form the next Acorn or ARM, and lock them away playing with toys. They don't care that most of the projects will never bear fruit, but if by any chance they do come up with anything commercial, it will be Microsoft in the US that makes money out of it, not the UK.

US voter info stored on wide-open cloud box, thanks to bungling Republican contractor

Re: Police State

@Potemkine! "Such a database would be highly illegal here, and rightly so"

Where is 'here', and what is their immigration policy?

You're all too skeptical of super-duper self-driving cars, apparently

Re: Behavior

Yesterday morning people in Cambridge may have seen the air ambulance depart from Parkers Piece, after someone miscalculated that oncoming bus. Yes there are people who do that now, but I guarantee there will be hell of a lot more with driverless vehicles.

Behavior

What isn't being taken in to account the change of behaviour of other road users when automated cars are in the majority on the roads. Most pedestrians realise that stepping out in front of a car could mean death, even if it isn't speeding because you have to take a gamble that the driver is paying attention. When they think a driverless car will always see them and stop in time, then no more waiting for pedestrian crossings, they will just step out in to the road at anytime, and traffic will just stop.

So if you are in a driverless car get used to hanging off the seat belt every few seconds as a pedestrian or car with a driver decides you'll be the one to stop. I was going say pedestrians, cyclists or cars, but around Cambridge parts, cyclists already do that.

Wi-Fi Dream Home Of The Future™ gets instructions for builders

Re: getting the home-building industry to do WiFi right.

Our new house will have a phone socket in every room, which isn't needed as we've got cordless phones. But the builders wouldn't consider replacing the phone wiring with Ethernet.

Don't touch that mail! London uni fears '0-day' used to cram network with ransomware

Re: Oh dear...

But thinking back to when I was there (87-90), all the academic work was done on various UNIX boxes, and the only PC's were a couple of horrible Olivettis kept up in the attic to transfer files for personal use. These were so ridden with viruses, that you had to bring your own DOS floppy with you.

Remembering even more, the UNIX boxes for undergraduate use were so over subscribed as to be unusable (mainly Sun 3/50's with no local discs), so I ended up porting my 3rd year project to RISC OS to get it finished and then porting it back to UNIX. They also expected the dissertation to be written with nroff, but my pre-release copy of Impression desktop publishing software was a lot easier, and produced a lot better results when it came out of their postscript printers.

Oh dear...

...I had expected better from my alma mater.

Apeiron demos 'rocket ship' Intel Optane array tech

Hello

Any journalists present, or do the press releases just get published here automatically now?

Hyperloop One teases idea of 50-minute London-Edinburgh ride

Re: Commuter belt

Unless you've not noticed, London house prices follow anywhere where people who can commute to London live.

Commuter belt

Do we really want to extend the London commuter belt to pretty much the whole of the UK? There would be nowhere left with remotely affordable housing for those of us not on an overinflated London salary.

Boeing preps pilotless passenger flights – once it has solved the Sully problem, of course

Re: There's something fundamentally important they're missing.

The risks are anything software designers couldn't think of at the time. Take the old classic of the perfectly Airbus that ran off the end of a runway in Poland.

First when the aircraft touched down, ice on the runway meant the wheels didn't start turning.

A computer controlled safety feature meant that because the wheels weren't turning, the spoilers didn't deploy.

Because the spoilers didn't deploy, and produce drag and down force, the weight on wheels switches didn't trigger.

A computer controlled safety feature meant that because the weight on wheels switch wasn't active, the thrust reverser's wouldn't activate.

So you are on an icy runway, brakes don't work, spoilers don't deploy, and thrust reverser's don't active, so welcome to the snow bank past the end of the runway.

All the computer controlled safety features were reasonable in isolation to prevent past proven causes of pilot error, but the software designers had not expected that combination of events.

Re: There's something fundamentally important they're missing.

I'd rather trust a live pilot with 1/10th of the skill of Sully on the oldest ricketiest plane still allowed in the air, over the latest modern aircraft with no pilot on board, speaking as both a passenger and a private pilot.

Virgin Media resolves flaw in config backup for Super Hub routers

ISP Provided Crap

While ISP-provided routers like this are generally subject to more security testing than a typical off-the-shelf home router

Really? ISP provided routers are normally the cheapest nastiest piece of crap they can lay their hands on.

On services where you can use your own equipment such as ADSL/VDSL use their router to check the services is up, then put it back in the box and use your own choice of router. I'd say bin it, but if you are unlucky enough to have a line fault, you may need to reconnect it just to get past some hell desk check list entry.

Windows 10 Creators Update preview: Lovin' for Edge and pen users, nowt much else

Wrong Direction

I thought for a moment he picture of the file type associations was moving from horrid metro look back to a usable control panel window, but oh horror the caption says the new way is on the left.

HPE ignored SAN failure warnings at Australian Taxation Office, had no recovery plan

Anywhere? Really?

As previously stated, this issue was triggered by a rare set of circumstances within the ATO’s system that has never been seen anywhere else in the world.

Anyone know different?

Horror in space: Hot alien giant boiled alive by nasty radiation-belching star

Re: That picture

The star is supposed to be spinning very rapidly, so would appear as a flattened ellipsoid. You would expect the planet to be orbiting in the celestial plane, so the star would be rotated 90 degrees to that shown, with the budge at the equator.

The internet may well be the root cause of today's problems… but not in the way you think

@joeldillion

May hasn't even been elected, yet, anyway.

Shame that complete ignorance of the British electoral system is no bar to voting.

She was elected to parliament just as every MP is, and was elected leader of the party by the parties MPs as every leader has been. If that party is in government, the leader becomes the Prime Minister.

We do not directly elect the Prime Minister in the UK, perhaps you are getting confused with the US presidential system.

Going to Mars may give you cancer, warns doc

Health and safety warning: risk of scurvy on long sea voyages

Exploration Cancelled

The new world not discovered

NASA not created

EU wins approval to waste €120m on pitiful public Wi-Fi

Oh, they'll be wanting us to continue paying for this after we've left, as part of the €100bn extortion divorce demand, but not give us the shiny WiFi hotspot. And can anyone work out how on earth you can come up with a 3 year running cost of €20,000 per hotspot, even if you were using the most expensive 4G contract a back-haul? I guess I'm just not able to imagine the levels of corruption involved when such EU funding is up for grabs.

Microsoft's cunning plan to make Bing the leading search engine: Bribery

Bing Bots

I'll make a wager that Bing will be groaning under the strain of millions of Bing Bots reaping reward points by next week. No doubt Microsoft will call that a success, regardless of the cost.

Spacecraft spots possible signs of frozen water on the Moon

Soil?

“We found that the coldest places near the Moon’s south pole are also the brightest places – brighter than we would expect from soil alone"

There is no soil on the moon, as it lacks any (known) organic material. The correct word would be 'regolith'.

German court says 'Nein' on Facebook profile access request

Re: You say that now

People expect their profiles to be private

Can you actually hear yourself? It's Facebook - sign up as an advertiser with a sufficiently large budget, and they'll sell you every aspect of the persons profile, alive or dead.

Windows 10 love to see PC market grow again. Future iPhone to be clear. Elvis to re-appear

People wont be happy with Windows 10 until...

...Microsoft kills it off, and starts forcing people towards an even worse Windows 11.

FCC revised net neutrality rules reveal cable company control of process

Class Action?

How is submitting automated comments using names and addresses of people who haven't consented, in any way legal? Surely they would be will within their rights to launch a class action suit against the culprit?