Posts by collinsl

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

Re: Are those ovens standard commercial ovens?

Items for use on ships or aircraft must be tested for various things which don't apply necessarily to shore bases - for example:

1. Power draw - yes ovens take a lot of power, but you have a limited power budget on board a small ship or an aircraft so you must be sure that your equipment doesn't go outside of it's rated range.

b.) Flammability - fires on ships or aircraft are a lot worse than on a shore base so you need to make sure they are made out of the least flammable components possible for their application and that they are much less likely than shore-based equipment to start a fire in the first place. For ships you also don't want them to behave unexpectedly when they become submerged in water in the event of a flood.

♣) Stability - because ships and aircraft move around a lot you don't want the oven or the shelves or the food on the shelves to move or fall out of the oven when the door is opened etc - barring earthquakes this isn't a consideration on land bases.

Lenovo bags HPC contracts for a pair of European customers

Re: Pre-owned

There's plenty of second hand PCs out there from Lenovo because they're one of the largest retailers of enterprise-grade hardware which means they will have a large proportion of the 2nd hand sales market. IIRC Lenovo outsold Dell and HP worldwide in desktops and laptops last year.

Musk and Trump take slap fight public as bromance ends

Re: Natural born?

Didn't he renounce for tax reasons?

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: Got it.

It's the Yes Minister four steps of dealing with a crisis:

1. You say nothing is going to happen

2. You say something is happening but we should do nothing about it

3. You say maybe we should do something but there's nothing we can do

4. You say perhaps there's something we could have done, but it's too late now.

Re: 250kW, 320kW chargers

Good for California, doesn't help in the UK where we don't have sufficient capacity for forecast demand (and new power stations like Hinkley C are going to take 10 years or so to build) and where it takes 5-10 years for a generation source to get a grid connection. Generation is the issue in the UK, distribution is also an issue but it's a slightly lesser one as we have a problem with moving bulk power from north (where we have lots of wind turbines) to the south (where most of the demand is), an imbalance which will only get worse with time if we do nothing.

Solar canopies also work less well in the UK when they're covered in variously cloud, dirt, moss, rainwater, and bird poo, depending on location within the country.

Ukraine strikes Russian bomber-maker with hack attack

Why is landing people on the moon more relevant than the other firsts? It's only "the goal" because America said it was.

Need for speed? CityFibre punts 5.5 Gbps symmetrical broadband at ISPs

Re: I would be happy...

Cable speeds are actually determined by how many "channels" they allocate to each router. Each channel they allocate is a set width, so by bonding together more channels they can allocate more data in each direction. For most cable companies there was no need to have much upload bandwidth in the old days when they were sending TV channels down the wire, all they needed to get back was a small amount of subscriber data like what channel you were watching, data from cable TV boxes when those became networked etc. This meant that the equipment to provide channels was heavily biased towards download channels vs upload ones, and this hasn't improved much as the cable TV standards (DOCSIS) are still geared towards download channels.

Windows 11 market share stalls ahead of Windows 10 cutoff

Windows is a sideshow for Microsoft these days, it's a gateway for them to get people to sign up for M365 subscriptions and use Azure services in the cloud. The cloud is where they make the big bucks and it's where the majority of their focus is.

Secondary to that is business on the desktop, so making and maintaining tools to administer fleets of PCs (which they are trying to force towards cloud-based tools naturally), and desktop/home Windows comes in a very distant last place as a place they can make some money from every time someone who is not a business buys a new computer.

This is why they're trying to pack AI into everything, because they want to capture and lock in businesses to their CoPilot walled garden, to make it much more difficult to give up the service or transition to another provider. Home users buying M365 home subscriptions and using AI are just a side benefit.

Ukrainians smuggle drones hidden in cabins on trucks to strike Russian airfields

Re: Who built/supplied the drones?

They do have doors, bloody great big ones at that.

Check out this RAF training video from the late 80s featuring Windsor Davies for more information.

Re: How very British

[runs away]

Are you one of their drivers?

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Re: Correction

If you a) have it installed and 2. are allowed to use it. A lot of places don't like little programmes like that for security and patching reasons.

Tesla FSD ignores school bus lights and hits 'child' dummy in staged demo

Re: Would it be possible ...

All of that is possible, but you then get the question of "What happens if it breaks?"

You need something which is advisory but it's absence doesn't prevent the car from taking the appropriate actions to take without the signal.

The worry is that the car manufacturers will remove the other equipment and rely on the signal in order to save cost, and when the signal is absent the car crashes.

And then all it says is "https://bit.ly/made_up_link_19" - what do you do with that?

Re: "casualty per 100000 people: Close to 4:1 "

In the UK if the passenger is over 18 then the no seatbelt ticket goes to that passenger (IIRC it's a fine and points if you have a license), if they're under 18 then it's the responsibility of the driver to ensure they're all belted so the driver gets the ticket and points.

It's been so long since I've reviewed UK driving laws I can't remember if there's a "basic speed" law as there is in the US. It states that it is an infraction to drive faster than safe in the current conditions. It could be zero in heavy fog or just a crawl in icy conditions if the car has suitable tires. It's not a ticket officers write a lot since it's more of an argument in court, but they will pull it out if the posted limit is 60mph and the conditions make 40mph excessive.

In the UK that would be covered under one of the following laws, depending on how badly things had gone wrong due to your driving:

* Driving without due care and attention (AKA "careless driving")

* Driving whilst under the influence of drink or drugs

* Dangerous driving

* Causing serious injury by careless or inconsiderate driving

* Causing serious injury by dangerous driving

* Causing death by careless or inconsiderate driving

* Causing death by dangerous driving

All part of sections 1 to 3 of the Road Traffic Act 1988

As police officers commonly say when they stop people "the speed limit is a limit not a target"

The UK wants you to sign up for £1B cyber defense force

Re: That's not the lesson to learn.

You try assassinating people surrounded by competent security deep inside enemy lines. See how easy it is then.

Re: Billion

Much slower than today and much less stuff got done. What tended to happen was that something would be approved by Parliament or by Ministers and then a private company would be contracted to do it, similarly to today.

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: It happens to the best of us.

My low end one cuts the gas off if it doesn't have electricity IIRC - some magnetic system or other to keep the gas from flowing if there's no ignition source I suppose.

Re: Intelligently stupid people

Because we have "ring final circuits" in the UK where all of the sockets in one area of the house are connected together in one big loop we tend to use the switches to isolate individual appliances without having to unplug them to cut down on standby power drain, and as an extra safety mechanism to reduce the chance of electrocution when plugging/unplugging things in case they have a damaged plug or cord etc.

We also don't use freestanding lighting as much as the USA, instead preferring in most instances to have either individually switched freestanding lamps, but for room lighting we tend to settle on integrated ceiling lights with a light switch on the wall as you'd expect. This allows us to use thinner grade cable and daisy chaining for lighting circuits because there's no risk of ever plugging in a high current appliance to them because that would necessitate removing a lightbulb and using an adapter. This used to happen in the old days (with electric clothes irons commonly used in bulb sockets) but back then thicker lighting cable was used and there was much less understanding of electrical safety, and consequently many more accidents.

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

The Grauniad has a style guide? I'm surprised!

Thunderbird is go: 139 follows closely on Firefox's heels

Click the column to sort it, it's simple

US to deny visas to foreign officials it says 'censor' social media

"The sooner they die the better" is NOT equal to "I hope they die" which is also NOT equal to "I hope someone kills them" which is also also NOT equal to "Please can someone kill them" which is also also also NOT equal to "I will kill them"

It's all graded. The first one is 100% protected by the 1st amendment in the US and free speech laws in other countries, the 2nd may be going into a grey area, the others are all more and more towards threatening harm or death or inciting violence etc which are wrong and probably illegal in many jurisdictions.

Three ways to run Windows apps on a Linux box

Re: Some Of This Sounds Like Heavy Lifting!

Look out for PCs on eBay etc basically from now onwards as enterprises complete their windows 11 upgrade programmes. The quickest ones will be just about finishing now (this of course ignores the ones that have been doing gradual rollouts but that's just background turnover) whilst the slowest will be finished around the end of December. Those who go longer will either likely be paying for extended updates or will not care and will be flogging their systems to death anyway so you'd never see them on the retail market.

From Russia with chokehold: Putin says foreign IT firms still in Russia should be 'strangled'

Re: Sounds like a pipe dream?

One of the other pools of recruitment for Russia in this war is Siberia - contrary to popular myth Siberia makes up the eastern 2/3rds of Russia, it's just the bit without many large cities and mostly without much wealth or influence. Excepting autonomous regions with warlord dictators like Chechnya most of Siberia is poor and rural, and largely populated by centuries-ago-conquered minority groups who are generally kept poor and rural as a control mechanism to hold Russia together. The younger men in these regions disproportionately signed up for military service pre-2022 because the pay was good compared to anything they could get staying at home, and these days the sign-on bonuses, injury and death benefits are many times higher than any salary they could get locally, so they have been signing up in droves. For the Russian government this is also useful as it deprives the rural regions of fighting-age males who may wish to rebel in the future, and it keeps their families on-side with the Government because they want to support their sons and qualify for the payout if something should happen to them.

Where Putin doesn't want to recruit from is the cities in the west of Russia - most notably St. Petersburg and Moscow. These young people on the whole can get much better paying jobs in war production even than from the military, they are much more politically switched-on and ready to complain, which would of course be repressed but that looks bad in the media, and being closer together in a city makes it much easier for organisations like the "the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia" to form, who so famously forced Gorbachev to end the war and who contributed to the end of the USSR to some extent.

New Russian cyber-spy crew Laundry Bear joins the email-stealing pack

Re: Maybe a bit of standardisation is in order.

Well we would have to have a scale of units, like we do for mm, cm, m, km etc.

So 8 BBH is 1 BBD (BOfH Billable Day, including 1 hour lunch (paid, natch)), 5 BBDs is a BBW (BOfH Billable Week), 10 BBDs is a BBDW (BOfH Billable Double Week), 16 BBDs is a BBTW (BOfH Billable Triple Week - including 1 day's holiday), 32 BBDs is a BBSM (BOfH Billable Standard Month, averages out working days on months with fewer and more days), etc on up the scale.

We could then relate 1 Fortinet to 1024 BBDs (thanks to their voluminous high impact CVEs recently), 1 CloudStrike to 10240 BBDs or 10 BBYs (BOfH Billable Years), and 1 Microsoft to 102400 BBDs (to cover all the M365 outages).

Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

Re: Cuckoo land

Staggered start/end times work well as long as you can still fit in all of the face-to-face activities which make sense to be done in an office. Collaboration works slightly better in person, especially if you just go over to someone's desk to have a chat with them about something, or you overhear a topic in the office and learn some valuable information or can provide insight that would otherwise have been missed from a phone call between two individuals.

Companies therefore mandating "core hours" of 11-3 say make sense to work with this, as employees can arrive at any time in the 8-11AM period and leave any time in the 3-7PM period, and that gives you a guaranteed 4 hours of interaction time for those incidental conversations to take place.

Ransomware attack on MATLAB dev MathWorks – licensing center still locked down

Dear JulieM,

Please find below details of your refund for the outage period for your MatLab license, which amounts to £1.28. This has been refunded to your payment source.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

MatLab INC

Get a custom paint job for earbuds at a nail salon, type on a baguette, then build a fountain for your PC

When BBC Television Centre was built it had a massive fountain in the middle of the "donut" ( if you're interested a shot from above after the building was converted into shops & flats, and a street view version, shot during the 2013 filming of An Adventure in Space and Time before the BBC left but after they removed the fountain components and put in a skylight), the noise of which reverberated from the walls of the building. Apparently this had a "certain effect" on some of the "Lady Secretaries of a certain age" (as it was phrased at the time) who had to excuse themselves every 10 minutes or so. When the fountain started leaking into the basement where all the expensive tape equipment was they soon turned it off & drained it.

They did however restore it to working order for special occasions, and there is a story that the Queen visited TV Centre one day so they started the fountain just as the car arrived on site, and stopped it as soon as she got into the building (as she would be leaving via a different route she wouldn't see it again). What they hadn't anticipated was the Duke of Edinburgh following behind in a Range Rover so they had to turn it back on again as he also went in, and this was enough to overwhelm whatever flood defences they had deployed in the basement and several expensive machines were ruined.

Trump threatens to add formal Apple Tax on top of the 'Apple tax'

Re: Is that even legal?

the useless fuck Boris Johnson would not ever win a hypothetical general election EVER again:

Never say never

...sadly I suspect he may win if he made a pass for the leadership now, given the current state of the Conservative party.

Cybercrime is 'orders of magnitude' larger than state-backed ops, says ex-White House advisor

Re: [Can't] walk and chew gum at the same time...

It may also be a dig at disgraced and imprisoned ex-Congressman George Santos, who famously said "I can chew and walk gum at the same time!"

Lenovo thought it could surf geopolitics, until Trump's sudden tariff changes

Re: Move production to the US…

It'll also take longer to build than Trump (legally) has left in office so it works out badly for everyone involved.

Re: It would have worked fine for Amazon

Who did the town vote for in last year's election?

Bet it was the Monster Raving Loony Party

Russia expected to pass experimental law that tracks foreigners in Moscow via smartphones

Re: Comrade, papers please!

That was indeed true in the 2000s, but by 2015 or so it was definitely over, with Putin becoming more detached and cautious. COVID sent him totally over the edge though, and he's now essentially a paranoid crazy man with the ability to control a state.

This law isn't so they can catch burglars or whatever, it's a) to intimidate people with fear of the state (even more than usual), 2. tell the Russian populace "look, we're doing something about the rising crime rate which must be caused by all those unwashed immigrants, right?" which furthers their agenda of blaming everything on non-Russians, iii.) so they can check your phone for anti-Putin content, and ♣ so you can be easily located and deported at some convenient moment if they need a scapegoat for something or other.

Intel bets you'll stack cheap GPUs to avoid spending top dollar on Nvidia Pros

Re: It's Intel

Nah, it's AI they're after. I do HPC work and they're reducing their support for FORTRAN in their software, which a lot of HPC jobs still use. The problem is that traditional HPC is a small market now for them since they're making 10x the money ($22bn last quarter) on AI than anything else.

LastOS slaps neon paint on Linux Mint and dares you to run Photoshop

Re: 1998

Erm, there wasn't a Windows 97. There was 95 and 98 and a few NT versions, but they all shared an interface paradigm from Windows 95.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Because...

Should be "There is something up with which we will not put."

Re: If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't have started from here

relabeled a public wig

Just think of all the lice from renting that public wig!

Re: Whoops

Ma's out, Pa's out let's talk rude!

How sticky notes saved 'the single biggest digital program in the world'

Re: Hang on a moment...

We don't have an Inland Revenue Service in the UK, that's American.

We have His Majesty's Revenue and Customs, AKA HMRC, AKA His Majesty's Ravenous Crows, AKA Hide Money, Run, Collectors!

Next week's SpaceX Starship test still needs FAA authorization

Re: Picture of Elmo

Sounds like Captain Hans Geering, who just used to salute with "-tler!"

For those not in the know, this is a reference to the British comedy series 'Allo 'Allo

Re: Picture of Elmo

Spanish Catholics would disagree: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/04/15/article-2605045-1D1F3FFF00000578-430_964x625.jpg

Royal Navy freshens up ships' electromagnetic warfare defenses

Re: Does this miss the target?

Yes but then you've got a missile which doesn't work in the dark or in fog or cloud or over the horizon etc. Some of these EW systems can be deployed when the missiles are quite far away.

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

That was actually one of the Twenty Committee's (so named because twenty = XX = double cross) great spy plans. The double agent actually sent warning with the wrong dates a few weeks before D-Day started, but sent a follow-up letter saying she'd been given the wrong dates and that the invasion via Calais was pushed back a month. The letter would arrive after the actual invasion and would "rehabilitate" her mistake, keeping her available as a resource. More info here from the National Archives

This was part of a wider scheme wherein multiple double agents (real and invented, there was a whole spy network in the mind of one guy) all reported similar information about the Normandy landings being a feint for a full attack at Calais a few days later, which Hitler believed and kept troops pinned at Calais awaiting an invasion which never came, troops which could have been used to push back the Normandy landings.

Re: Defence against directed energy weapons

They 100% still do, so this would be easily doable with a few upgrades to either output more water over the entire vessel, or just output where it's needed with enough volume, which would require individually selectable dispensers.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: Decision tree?

An example of this sort of thing already in existence

Chip bans? LOL! Chinese web giant Tencent says it has enough GPUs for future AI model training

Re: A bigger gun is not always a better weapon

If you think that's an anachronism just look at the French "Steam Horse" which is what they used to measure engine power including for the 2CV (which is 2 steam horses, not two horsepower by British standards)

GAO finds billions in possible government savings, all without Elon's help

Re: How to get DOGE on board with GAO recommendations

Just use the "King & Country" magazine - soft, strong, and thoroughly absorbent.

Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search

Re: distributed search

True, but on main lines and in congested areas the problem can be worked around by having multiple tracks in each direction where trains can overtake each other. Stations used to be very common for this as you'd have your stopping or slow train in the platform (stopped, naturally) and the express would continue through on the through tracks running between the slow lines in the platforms. In some cases stopping trains also used to be shunted into sidings to let express trains go past.

These days we don't do any of that, because the sidings are mostly gone and the express tracks through stations have been ripped up to "economise" on track maintenance. We do still have fast and slow lines though so some services can overtake others.

C-suite at Alphabet make B-A-N-K from 2024 equity awards

Would love to see their modal salary rather than median, and the associated ratio. But they'll never publish that because it'll look bad.