* Posts by Spoobistle

186 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jun 2011

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Europe, UK weigh up how to respond to Trump's proposed tariffs. One WTF or two?

Spoobistle
Facepalm

Re: Prisoner's Dilemma!

Somehow, I suspect Her Majesty's finest will have the skills to engineer a situation where the UK is bitch to both sides.....

Enterprises in for a shock when they realize power and cooling demands of AI

Spoobistle
Windows

Re: Funny...

Just waiting for the first report of an AI coming to the conclusion that its AI work should be outsourced to 4 blokes in a shed paid in beer, so it can keep all that lovely electricity to perfect the Matrix...

Absolute Linux has reached the end – where to next?

Spoobistle

Re: I'm old enough to remember

Viglen P90 with 16MB and a 1000 MB SCSI drive, for Slackware, then Debian 1.2.8 on about 30 floppies...

I thought the thing about static vs dynamic linking was as much to save RAM, as executables could share pages?

Kernel modules could help too - I built one without IDE, though at this remove I can't recall if it achieved anything more than being able to say I'd done it.

Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corporation admits to hole in security

Spoobistle
Coffee/keyboard

Pastry faced

> pastry purveyors

No! Never! Pastry is rolled out!

KK can be dough distributors, or at a push sponge slingers, but it's not pastry!

As to eating them, one is enough. Two is indigestion. Three is blatant artery clogging.

We can't make this stuff up: Palantir, Anduril form fellowship for AI adventures

Spoobistle
Childcatcher

Rights management

I do hope the Tolkien estate is coining it in on all this use of their characters!

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

Spoobistle

Even less attractive

Hah - I'm getting old - my first thought was Benny Hill (Ernie, the fastest milkfloat in the west...)

Tower PC case allegedly used as 'creative cavity' by drug importer

Spoobistle
Holmes

Case closed

So are the coppers going to dump the cases in the WEE'd bin?

GenAI's dirty secret: It's set to create a mountainous increase in e-waste

Spoobistle
Mushroom

Re: There's always a bright side!

They're a bit bulky though if you want it on-prem - better to wait a bit for an 2nd hand ex-Navy SMR, that'll go nicely in the corner of the basement! Check the cooling regularly tho' to avoid icon ====>

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Spoobistle
Joke

Night night

That's a good idea: redefine sunset as always half past eight - time for all god-fearing clean-living folks to retire!

Say hello to the epi-bit, a new approach to DNA data storage

Spoobistle
Boffin

Re: Epi feat

There are more practical reasons. This is a bit like saying "get 12% extra RAM by using those ECC bits".

Biology doesn't put methyl groups on DNA for prettyfication, it is a marker for a purpose (e.g. defence against pathogens, turning some genes on or off in response to environment... there is a whole field called epigenetics dealing with this). So if you use a biological system to process or reproduce this DNA, you'll have to be sure the data isn't erased or corrupted. At that point you might be better just redesigning the system from the ground up with non-natural bases etc.

Incidentally if you want to compare I'd say DNA is more like tape backup, as it not infrequently needs to be unwound from histones to be read. It's also more stable then you would think, because of the deoxy function which slows down non-biological degradation hugely. RNA, especially mRNA is more like RAM, it is used for working copies and has a much shorter biological lifetime.

Of course it is the sort of work that raises institutional profiles and gets good publicity, so can't blame the boffins for milking it a bit.

Britain opens floodgates to US datacenter investment

Spoobistle
Pirate

Re: absolute power

Somehow, I don't think the current King Charles is going to be keen on that option, bearing in mind the fate of his err, predecessor.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

Spoobistle
Boffin

Re: Help...

Ooh no, we had this problem even before we went into the Common Market.

See Roy Kinnear as chief boffin in the Beatles film Help!, having to change a plug on his laser...

Severe solar storm could disrupt power, communications

Spoobistle
Alien

Re: Foggy

Well I've now got incontrovertible evidence that whoever controls the atmosphere reads Reg comment posts. Went out last night about 00:30 to see amazing purple and pale green glows across the sky. Clearly my complaints above caused embarrassment in the celestial realms...

Obvs icon.

Spoobistle
WTF?

Foggy

I have a theory that above my house the atmosphere is actually a giant cloud chamber, so solar particles, meteorites, comets etc automatically bring on the clouds and rain.

I haven't yet figured out how it knows when I'm putting out washing though.

UK Regulatory Innovation Office vows to slash red tape – but we've heard it all before

Spoobistle
Facepalm

Re: subsequent events

Coincidentally, I was watching the House of Lords Covid Vaccine Rollout committee (Parliament channel, last night).

Oxford vaccine boffins were being asked about their views on progress towards better planning for the next pandemic. Besides some rather tart opinions on various Government initiatives, they all agreed that the parlous state of UK funding (and high living costs) meant that talent is going to the US and Japan, not coming here.

Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice

Spoobistle

Re: He's right, of course

> the Xyzzy driver error handling fixes itself...

Self-modifying code?

Infosys scores deal to write code for EV-maker Polestar

Spoobistle
WTF?

Elk Test

But will it pass the Elk Test?

Musk dreams of launching five Starships to Mars in two years

Spoobistle
Mushroom

Re: Wrong Target

Urectum? U-bloody near ruined 'em!

Ba-boom-tish!

Anyway I think Elon should be on the first flight as he's laid out all that money.

Icon ===>

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

Spoobistle
Happy

This used to be a common problem with xenon arc lamps as well. First instruction in the S.O.P. "Turn on the lamp BEFORE starting the computer..."

Equipment designers have made progress in PSU arrangements over the last couple of decades, grizzled lab staff buyers roll their eyes if you have to explain why bits of your new Whizzo-XX+ have to be turned on in a strict order!

Raspberry Pi 5 slims down for cut-price 2 GB RAM version

Spoobistle
Happy

Re: 80s micros

To be fair, the same thing went on in the 1980s - "do I buy now or wait for the new model with colour/hi res/proper keyboard/disks..."

Not to mention overheating problems and ropey add-on connectors!

Still waiting for a Pi 500 and wondering what do this summer?

Spoobistle

Hot wiring

I'd like to see better power supply arrangements, the RPi's taste for fiddly little USB connectors doesn't fill me with confidence.

UK Royal Mint mining PCBs for precious metals in e-waste recovery effort

Spoobistle
Boffin

Re: news?

IIRC gold prices went up a lot at some point after the 70s, which prompted development of plating with a much thinner gold layer. That made recovery from more recent e-waste uneconomic. I guess now the economics have swung back with a higher gold price and also higher cost of non-recycling disposal.

Excir's contribution has been to develop a process avoiding cyanide, which is an environmental nightmare. However, from the limited descriptions I have seen it uses organic solvents and halogen acids, so not exactly nice. But TANSTAAFL, it's an inert metal so you've got to be brutal to get it out!

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Spoobistle
Unhappy

IEC what you did there

Seems like a good idea, till you find out that "kettle leads" wait till you're not looking then swap themselves round at the equipment end!

SAP system gives UK tax collector a £750B headache as clock ticks on support

Spoobistle
Joke

Nothing to see here

There aren't going to be any tax changes till 2029.

So we can keep on with the old system till then!

Curiosity rover is crushing it: Ran over a rock and found pure sulfur

Spoobistle
Boffin

Is there life on Mars?

This could actually be quite significant. Sulfur deposits on earth occur near volcanos, from chemical processes, but also arise from microbial alteration of rocks. My geology isn't good enough to know if these can be distinguished but I'm sure boffins will be pondering the question!

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Spoobistle
Joke

Article picture

"... our service is serverly restricted..."

I saw what they did there!

Windows NT on a whole new platform: PowerMac

Spoobistle
Facepalm

Awww

Only got a Powermac 7200 - it'll have to continue mouldering in a corner!

Traeger security bugs bad news for grillers with neighborly beef

Spoobistle

Pesky kids

Somehow I think the most likely use of this bug will be as a plot device in an straight-to-free-streaming-service movie (was going to say straight to DVD but that would be showing my age).

Hubble will transition to single-gyro mode to gain a few more years of operational life

Spoobistle

Re: NASA Operational Procedure 119a: Keep your fingers crossed

From a previous Reg article. apparently 3 gyros have failed; the single gyro mode lets them keep 2 in reserve presumably extending the total lifetime of observations. The single gyro mode uses other instruments to make up for the lacking two, so I suppose must reduce the versatility and response time of the telescope. Best of a bad job.

Recycling old copper wires could be worth billions for telcos

Spoobistle

Re: Cable stripping

In a local charity shop last week, I came across one of those Chinese-style cardboard packets, unusually heavy. On a closer look at the labelling, it proved to be a contraption of wheels, blades and apertures designed for stripping long bits of cable. Not having enough time for the hobbies I've got, I left it for someone else to take up cable stripping for fun and profit, but I did wonder who the target market was, and why it was languishing among the pottery labradors and microwave egg poachers.

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

Spoobistle
FAIL

Howls of derisive laughter...

... from across the globe have persuaded the council to replace the "apostrophe's" and other punctuation:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn0r04g2xwdo

Spoobistle
Trollface

Re: BS7666

I think the councillors involved should be forced to move to De'Ath Row...

Forget feet and inches, latest UK units of measurement are thinking bigger

Spoobistle
Headmaster

cut ... some slack heads off!

54m vs 50m might not seem much by the Reg's louche standards, but if the blades end up 4m closer to the ground than passers-by are expecting, there could be some interesting consequences.

Look to the skies this weekend as solar storms strike Earth

Spoobistle
FAIL

Re: Cue the UK being covered with cloud

Friday night, partial cloud cover and a thin high haze, Sunday night even thicker than Saturday!

I think the only way to see astronomical events from Yorkshire is via someone else's webcam.

IT biz trials gadget deliveries by drone to sidestep traffic and emissions

Spoobistle
Joke

Dropped off

"We've delivered your hard drive!"

<picture of silvery object in a gutter, next to a cracked roof tile>

"What am I supposed to do with that?"

"Oh, don't worry - it's on the house!"

(Stolen from ITV2)

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Spoobistle
Facepalm

Re: F-91W

Just for reassurance, my 2024-vintage F-91W is no more clued up!

Australian supercomputer 'Taingiwilta' comes online this year with [REDACTED] inside

Spoobistle
Pint

Re: What can be inferred?

CFD.

So it's designing the new submarines then?

Or better beer bottles! Obvs icon --->

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

Spoobistle
Boffin

Re: Nernst equation?

E = E0 + (RT/vF) * ln((a(A)*a(Bv+)/(a(Av+)*a(B))) where E0 is standard EMF, R gas constant, F Faraday constant, v number of charges in the reaction and a() activities of reactants A and B.... according to Atkins.

So it's proportional to absolute temp (Kelvin), which gives us a drop to 78% going from +25 to -40C. I guess there's more loss than that due to electrolyte viscosity etc alluded to in previous posts.

> decent diesel generator in the EV's boot.

I'd fancy a trailer with sled and dogs...

Silicon Valley weirdo's quest to dodge death – yours for $333 a month

Spoobistle

Re: X (née Twitter) ?

Nay, twitter ye not!

(with apologies to F. Howerd)

Cutting-edge microscopy reveals bottled water has 'up to 100 times' more bits of plastic than previously feared

Spoobistle
Boffin

Re: Plumbosolvency!

Now there's a word I haven't seen for a while. In the olden days when chemists used burettes and washbottles and got jobs with the Water Board, they were taught about such things. Apparently soft water, as seen in areas fed from peat covered volcanic geology like western Scotland and north-west England, contains organic acids that do lift a bit of lead off the pipes so flushing is not a bad idea. In hard water areas (on chalky ground) the minerals tend to coat the inners of the pipe so there is less of a danger. In the cities of course, you got plenty of lead from the dust in the car exhausts anyway.

> run cold tap for a minute to flush the water from house lead pipes

AstraZeneca bets $247M AI can create a cancer-fighting antibody

Spoobistle

Re: If it works ...

Or you might think that Pharma has been round this loop before with "new drug bonanza" methods and (a) doesn't want to saddle itself with datacentres and compute farms if it's a dud (b) knows very well what its internal strengths and weaknesses are and realises to get moving it needs external expertise.

See also the Boehringer/IBM story a couple of days ago. I wouldn't be surprised to see more hook-ups like this.

Boehringer Ingelheim swaps lab coats for AI algorithms in search for new drugs

Spoobistle
Boffin

No less lab coats

The use of AI for generation of new candidate therapeutics is unlikely of itself to be a threat - this is the start of the process before all the effectiveness and safety testing. Most of the previous approaches have the same problem that they generate many candidates from which you then have to pick the winners. It's not like Pharma hasn't done that before (and we all know what happens when it goes wrong) so I'd be more worried about AI being used to interpret effectiveness or safety testing data.

The antibodies slant does seem to be a novelty - most drugs are "small" molecules that fit like a key in a lock to disrupt some process. Antibodies are much bigger and work the other way round, by enveloping themselves round or sticking to a smaller entity (epitope). Historically, drugs were made by chemists and antibodies by biologists - it's only relatively recently that antibodies have been recognised as potential disease fighting molecules*. The classical way of making an antibody is by immunising a person, or animal. This is a very hit and miss process but its mechanisms are becoming better understood through systems like Alpha Fold, so I can see why AI would be a good bet to move the field on in a rational direction.

It's not going to reduce lab coats though - still got to make and test the things!

* Though anti-toxins and anti-venoms have been used for specific purposes for about a century.

Scientists use Raspberry Pi tech to protect NASA telescope data

Spoobistle
Boffin

No Lead in your Pencil

The stuff in pencils is graphite, once known as plumbago, or "black lead" from its resemblance to the metal or its ore.

Datacenter would spoil beautiful view ... of former industrial waste dump

Spoobistle
Joke

Powerless?

Goodness me, don't they have wind in Bucks? Ideal opportunity for the new on-shore turbines policy, no?

Alien rock remains found not on but deep inside the Earth

Spoobistle
Alien

It's life, Jim, but not as we know it...

Those aren't blobs - they're EGGS!!

The Raspberry Pi 5 is now available ... if you pre-ordered

Spoobistle
Go

Pi 500?

I wonder if there are any plans to put this in a case with keyboard etc like the Pi 400? Given the (supposed) pretensions to a desktop status it would seem a rational idea.

UK splashes £4B to dive into next-gen nuclear submarines

Spoobistle
Joke

Re: Hidden Submarine service 2 London from Scotland?

> build a big tunnel.

No, no need for that - what do you think all those canals are for!

Hyper-slosh 2! Look at the bow-wave on that!

(Ok, so the trans-pennine locks might benefit from an upgrade, I admit.)

Scandium-based nuclear clocks promise punctuality for next 300 billion years

Spoobistle
Go

Re: No plane needed

There's a speculation in the Nature article that the scandium clock could do this with millimetre scale height differences! So I suppose you could use it as a sort of very expensive altimeter.

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

Spoobistle
Facepalm

you say tomato

America doesn't do IUPAC.

That's why I couldn't find caesium chloride in the Merck Index.

Xebian is the Marie Kondo of Linux distros – it's here to declutter

Spoobistle

defaults to a very simple disk layout

I guess for "default" read "lowest common denominator". If the Calamares installer is the same as Debian uses, then the Manual Partitioning option in the install will allow for separate /home, on a separate drive etc.

Not sure how much swap partitions are used these days.

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