Posts by IDoNotThinkSo

Nvidia's 900 tons of GPU muscle bulks up server market, slims down wallets

Re: Burn the world is an understatement

Sorry, what? Solar radiation is about 175PW, which dwarfs that by several orders of magnitude.

BOFH: The Boss has a new watch – move readiness to DEFCON 2

I have one in daily use.

It runs Android 12 so it is no worse than current devices...

https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/klte/

UK science stuck in 'holding pattern' on EU funding by Brexit, says minister

Re: Equality

Getting hold of research papers is expensive for those without academic access.

OK, it is better than it used to be, but still...

Also, try getting published without the right 'credentials'.

This doesn't have to be about cranks.

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

Re: Personal heaters

I didn't realise this was a thing. I thought it was so stupid it couldn't possibly have happened more than once.

I found a double socket in the garage. Strangely, it appeared to be mounted with no feed wire. A single plug was plugged in to one half of the socket. What's going on here then? Ruh-roh! Live pins!

I kind of understand now why householders aren't allowed to do their own wiring any more (in theory, at least).

Judge dismisses objections to spaceport in Scotland from billionaire who also wants to build spaceport in Scotland

The further north the better, if you want a polar orbit. Not as much angular velocity to scrub off.

Not so good for geostationary satellites, of course, where the closer you are to the equator, the better.

Ordnance Survey recruits AR developer to build 'geolocated quests' to help get Brit couch potatoes exercising outdoors

Note that Lidar point cloud data is available for free from the Environment Agency via OpenData

It is the Garmin that is utterly useless, and always has been.

In what way does it provide anything better than the right application* on a phone (with suitable battery backup and a decent map)?

And yes, I have used one** in very poor conditions and -11C in the Cairngorms, and it worked fine.

* I use LocusMap on Android

**I also carry a paper map and a proper compass and know how to use them, but it is a hell of a lot easier to get a bearing from a phone when the spindrift is flying

Much like the British on holiday, NHS COVID-19 app refuses to work with phones using unsupported languages

Re: s/NHS/Serco/

Does the CT Scanner in your local hospital belong to Philips or the NHS?

Also:

https://fullfact.org/health/Serco-test-and-trace/

Serco did not develop the app. This was fake news first broadcast on RT.

Serco are running some aspects of test and trace.

The developers were:

Accenture, Alan Turing Institute, NHS Digital, NHSx, Oxford University, VMware Pivotal Lab and Zuhlke Engineering

What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases

Re: Data handling for dummies

CEO = MA Divinity

Pray to God and hope it works?

Amazon spies on staff, fires them by text for not hitting secretive targets, workers 'feel forced to work through pain, injuries' – report

Re: I wonder how many UK Amazon workers voted for brexit?

That's certainly the case round here. A lot of warehouse workers are Eastern European and the operators are able to pay significantly less than they would otherwise. Many of these developments were government funded (or at least, tax break encouraged) in areas with poor employment prospects, but because wages have been kept low it has done very little to help. Brexit should not have been a surprise.

Apparently Amazon do actually offer better terms than some other warehouse jobs (such as cough Sports Direct cough).

It is all a recipe for exploitation, though.

As a side note, I wonder how much of the Covid transmission in large factory sites has to do with it being passed around in the workplace, and how much is due to the staff living in crowded multiple occupancy housing?

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: Co-traveller

Quite. That's a very good reason to go it alone. None of my Lineage phones are going to get this update, either.

I thought GCHQ had provided some 0-day exploits for Apple and possibly Android to allow them to bypass the restrictions.

The big question is whether Apple and Google dare to patch the holes...

Re: I know you are lying* I just don't know how much

If they stamp each interaction with a location, in theory they could work out where (and possibly how) the disease is being passed on. I think that is the idea.

Obviously they can already map where people testing positive live.

Re: Stick to the tech, please

Their policy was to avoid having too many cases at once such they couldn't all be treated as appropriate. Other than that, there wasn't a plan to stop it spreading because they thought that almost everyone was bound to get it sooner or later. Delaying that outcome was pointless as it just meant a very long lockdown and a wrecked economy.

They did actually meet this policy aim.

There does seem to have been a pivot to waiting for a vaccine now, or at least running at a lower level of cases. Perhaps there is some confidence that vaccine will be available sooner rather than later.

In the absence of a vaccine, though, what is the point of an endless lockdown?

Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

Surely it should be Magnetic Resonance Geek, in case someone gets worried about the "Nuclear" bit?

Motorola's mid-range One Hyper packs 64MP cam, huge screen and – ooo – 'Quad Pixel' tech

64MP? What's the diffraction limit for a lens that size?

Oracle and Google will fight in court over Java AGAIN and this time it's going to the Supremes

Re: Could be *very* interesting

Nah. They come to an arrangement and then sue the existence out of anyone smaller.

I'm still not that Gary, says US email mixup bloke who hasn't even seen Dartford Crossing

I have a firstname.lastname gmail account.

I've been invited to meetings in Australia, to submit court documents in Florida, asked to comment on sewage treatment works in Warrington and subjected to a variety of other registration spam. I could also have taken over a EA gaming account.

Still, at least it confuses Google a bit.

One man's mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: The tale of Europe's Galileo satellites going dark

Re: QED

But it is in Europe. The EU did nothing. It took NATO to sort it out.

Criminalise British drone fliers, snarl MPs amid crackdown demands

Re: criminalising the flying of any drone within three miles of a licensed aerodrome.

Only if we can keep our food outside.

Tut – you wait a lifetime for an interstellar object then two come at once

Re: However, on a serious note

Après moi, le déluge

It will never be safe to turn off your computer: Prankster harnesses the power of Windows 95 to torment fellow students

Re: W98 was OK, but W95 and USB ..

Easy enough to get a copy of an old MS version.

There are all here:

https://winworldpc.com/library/operating-systems

Trivial to install in a VM. Don't have nightmares...

Drone fliers are either 'clueless, careless or criminal' says air traffic gros fromage

Re: Well, as they say ...

Why would the idiots care? Legislation isn't going to stop them.

Shove this in your orafce: Microsoft fiddles with cloudy databases as Build 2019 recedes

Re: Orafce

Lawsuit Larry says that's not allowed...

So, that's cheerio the nou to Dundee Satellite Receiving Station: Over 40 years of service axed for the sake of £338,000

Pity - although these days the images are all available elsewhere.

The login to their website is, however, my oldest active internet account. I've not changed the password for about 25 years. :-)

Brexit text-it wrecks it: Vote Leave fined £40k for spamming 200k msgs ahead of EU referendum

Re: Interesting dilemma

The ICO told them to delete the data, then fined them when they could no longer produce it.

A bit Kafkaesque if you ask me.

Surely the ICO wouldn't have an agenda here, would they?

iPhone price cuts are coming, teases Apple CEO. *Bring-bring* Hello, Apple UK? It's El Reg. You free to chat?

Re: The reasons for the iPhone sales slump were threefold

There is something to be said for tradition, though.

We'll still be following it in 100 years long after anyone alive can remember why it started.

If Apple last that long, of course.

UK.gov plans £2,500 fines for kids flying toy drones within 3 MILES of airports

Re: Excessive

I take vegetation monitoring pictures of a large wildlife site from 25m. Much of it is rather wet and inaccessible.

If any plane is flying at 80ft, 4km from the small airfield nearby, then they've got more problems than my drone. Electricity pylons, for a start. I very much doubt there is anyone there 24/7 to call, either.

Anyway, if the powers that be get their way, no purchased drone will be able to take off in the restricted zone, because they'll be hard-coded not to. Although mine will, because I built it. Perhaps that will make it an illegal item?

What a joke this is.

It seems that all they really want is a list of people to arrest next time someone sees a UFO at Gatwick.

What happens when a Royal Navy warship sees a NATO task force headed straight for it? A crash course in Morse

It is a shame they stopped that service, although it could get quite rough.

I remember watching a film in the "cinema" which was in the bow. Wind was F7 and it was rather choppy.

It was full at the beginning and less than a quarter full by the end, and not because the film was bad...

Watching motion on the screen whilst swaying side to side is a good test of any drugs (although I didn't take any, being brave or stupid).

Shift-work: Keyboards heaped in a field push North Yorks council's fly-tipping buttons

Re: Identifying the original owners...

Password123?

That's mine!

It's raining drones, but just one specimen: DJI's Matrice 200 quadcopter

Re: Drone crashes shock. Next story Bear in wood scat scandal.

Haha.

My Mk 1 build made quite a dent losing power at 50m, as it was hauling a Canon camera at the time. As per the regulations, there was nobody anywhere near.

Fly a drone? Gonna crash. Some operators seem to forget that. Don't forget your hard hat.

300,000 BT pensioners await Court of Appeal pension scheme ruling

I blame the cursed one

It is of course Gordon Brown's fault for removing tax relief on dividends in 1997, and thus screwing all UK pensions.

He thought he could get away with it as returns were good at the time, but then came a crash. And later, another crash...

20 years later, and defined pensions are a thing of the past.

Greybeard greebos do runner from care home to attend world's largest heavy metal fest Wacken

Re: I think I'll..

Then again, you could be a Wagnerian (although some may say this is just early Prog Rock).

4 tracks, 15 hours. Though I suppose you could have a break after each act if you are a lightweight. :-)

Whether the heavy mob would drag you out of the opera house during a performance to return you to your padded cell is yet to be tested. One day...

JURI's out, Euro copyright votes in: Whoa, did the EU just 'break the internet'?

Ignore?

Perhaps we should just leave this EU single market thingy.

/Steps away/

New UK drone laws are on the way – but actual Drones Bill still in limbo

Re: Great weight limit

Depends if it is a mass limit or a weight limit, I suppose...

If it really is a weight limit, then I'm definitely building a UAV airship.

eg See http://www.silent-runner.net/index.php/Main_Page

Britain mulls 'complete shutdown' of 4G net for emergency services

"Advanced" meaning the civil servants don't understand it and it will cost us all a lot of money.

Defra to MPs: There's no way Brexit IT can be as crap as rural payments

Re: They're probably right

You jest, but one particular DEFRA application form that I had to deal with once was the worst Excel spreadsheet disaster I've ever come across. How farmers were supposed to deal with that horror I've no idea.

There was a course (££) on said form for land agents but that was mostly about how to work around the broken bits.

I don't think the bizarre EU driven rules helped, either.

US Army warns of the potential dangers of swarming toy drones on US soldiers

Re: It ain't rocket science

It certainly doesn't take more than 5 minutes to think of the many ways that cars can be used to harm society. Ban them now!

As for the idea of automated cars? Even worse.

France to lend Brexit Britain sore souvenir of Norman yoke – the Bayeux Tapestry

A grand gesture. We should lend them a similar cultural icon in response. How about HMS Victory?

Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

According to that BBC article "Semi-conductor chips are found in many of the world's computers".

Obviously someone out there is still using valves...

PHWOAR, those noughty inks: '0.1%' named Stat of The Year

The criteria appear to have been selected to support an agenda (whatever that is). The best sort of statistics, obviously.

This isn't exactly new data, the Corine data set has been available for years and the urban part isn't exactly hard to examine.

I imagine most parts of suburbia under their criteria are 'not densely built on' because they have, shock horror, gardens.

You could go to the other extreme and look for areas with no modern human structures visible (shrinking very rapidly due to wind turbines) - and there isn't really that much.

"Urban" land cover by most definitions is between 5-10%

Thou shalt use our drone app, UK.gov to tell quadcopter pilots

Re: Polices the irresponsible, perhaps: not the wicked

Flying into a plane engine deliberately would be very difficult, although not completely impossible.

You are right though, none of the bad things can be stopped by technical rules or import bans as the technology is used everywhere.

Maybe the idea is to add anyone to the monitoring list who buys drone parts without also having a licence, but given you could use a mobile phone as a flight controller with a suitable USB interface board, I'm not sure that will really help.

There is no evidence that a consumer drone could bring down an airliner.

I would guess drones are the new UFOs when it comes to airline pilots. Try identifying something 30cm across at 400 knots. How long can you actually see it for?

Don't bet on at least half of these sightings not being geese, plastic bags, etc etc etc.

Re: OK, so which part do I register?

I'm in the same boat - built in about 2013, dropped into a field from 50m after a power failure and rebuilt with a collection of parts. Thinking of replacing the old 16-bit flight controller with a new one, just because.

I'm not about to fly it anywhere stupid, because crashing happens. I just take monitoring photographs of a wildlife site miles from anywhere. As there is no useful mobile signal there, what good would an app be?

None of the legislation will 'apply' to the idiots anyway.

My #95Theses of #Digital

#31

The man who actually buys Photoshop is as rare as he who is really penitent; indeed, he is exceedingly rare.

#32

Those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have paid for Oracle licences will be eternally damned, together with their finance department.

Compsci grads get the fattest pay cheques six months after uni – report

The article doesn't say what job they were doing.

I'm guessing a large number were in the City, and not necessarily doing development. That's where a lot of Oxbridge science graduates end up.

Hence why the salaries bear no relation to normal computing jobs...

BoJo, don't misuse stats then blurt disclaimers when you get rumbled

I can "cost" a Bugatti, but that doesn't mean I can afford to run one.

Energy firm slapped with £50k fine for making 1.5 million nuisance calls

Re: I miss the good old days.

Your 'recent car accident' calls are nothing to do with a recent car accident, unless they actually have the full details.

They call everybody. I get them despite having about 20 years claim free.

I always ask them whether they mean the Rolls-Royce or the Ferrari.

The Reg chats to Ordnance Survey's chief data wrangler

Re: Disagree - GPS is the future

Indeed. I ALWAYS have a paper map and compass in the bag, even if I'm using a phone (with spare battery) for convenience.

Though I don't normally have to count steps on a compass bearing in a whiteout any more, or do a box search for a summit cairn (Scottish winter can be 'interesting'), I do at least know how to do it.

Also, if you are following a bearing in poor visibility, you do actually need a proper compass. Electronic ones are rubbish and I've never seen a sighting compass on a phone.

Anyway, business speak or not, OS maps have always been a promise of adventure to me. Even the ones in SE England.

Good luck building a VR PC: Ethereum miners are buying all the GPUs

Re: "Proof of work"

You mean, I do something useful, someone gives me a token for it, and I can then exchange the token for beer?

I'm sure that would never work.