Posts by Jim Mitchell

Galactic Brain space datacenter coming in 2027, pledges startup Aetherflux

Natural General Intelligence

This is still in dispute.

Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

I bought my first computer from Micron many years ago. It had a Micronics motherboard. Probably did my research in Computer Shopper magazine. Times have changed since 1995.

Waymo chalks up another four-legged casualty on San Francisco streets

This has happened before and it will happen again. Small animals get killed every day by cars. Dogs should be leashed and cats inside, but I won't miss the squirrels.

Unofficial IETF draft calls for grant of five nonillion IPv6 addresses to ham radio operators

Is that Amazon the region or Amazon the company?

sold a quarter of it to Amazon.com in 2019 for over $100 million.

Landlord quirks leave thousands of flats stuck in the broadband slow lane

If I don't consume gigabit services what enjoyment would gigabit-capable broadband bring? How would it boost my productivity? How would a higher monthly fee boost my prosperity?

As I understand it, you don't need that speed unless you are doing things most households don't actually do. You can have the whole extended family watching 4k streaming video with that. A large family.

Aviation delays ease as airlines complete Airbus software rollback

Re: The mystery wrinkles

There is just more radiation at the altitude of a transcontinental flight. I suspect that this was a low probability event and the one flight got unlucky.

Meta knows how bad its sites are for kids, say lawyers

Reading the various comments, I'd like to remind people that the older generation has been complaining about the failings of the next one since the start of recorded time.

LisaGUI recreates Apple's innovative computer OS, without emulating it

the Lisa cost $32,500 in today's money (slightly under £25,000)

A comparison with what its competitors at the time cost would be useful.

DARPA making low-hanging satellites that use air to move

Re: How can this work?

Solar?

Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia

Like many, I'm curious on what this inability to connect to "000" emergency services special number is and why it requires specific hardware and/or software besides the regular network compatible radio bits, etc.

Pop!_OS deejays prepare to release holiday remix along with Cosmic v 1.0

Re: slightly different variants

the W95 desktop worked well enough to be worth copying.

Was it copied because it was worth copying or because it was the market leader and seen as necessary to acquire users?

ISPs more likely to throttle netizens who connect through carrier-grade NAT: Cloudflare

Re: IPv6 solution...

Flying cars, fusion power, the year of Linux on the desktop and wide option of IPv6 are always some date in the future.

AWS admits more bits of its cloud broke as it recovered from DynamoDB debacle

Re: What a great idea

I believe many positions were trimmed, leaving behind a much-smaller bunch of less-skilled (cheaper) operations staff working 24/7.

And if this was in-house, management would done the same.

Kicked from RubyGems, maintainers forge new home at Gem Cooperative

Re: The woke mob

"Educating" primary school children about transsexuality is inappropriate to say the least.

Here in the US, "educating" means letting the kids known that trans, etc, people even exist.

Dirty little Electron secret tanks macOS 26 performance

If other Mac applications managed to have pretty corners without using this "hack", then it seems that the problem was with Electron.

Square Kilometre Array is so sensitive, its datacenter needs two Faraday cages to stop RF leaks

Are the cages named Saturday and Sunday? That way they can be a Faraweekend.

IBM killing mainframe coding kit for PCs this year

zPDT and ZD&T sound like they do the same thing? "The IBM zPDT emulates one or more System z processors" vs "emulating the IBM Z instruction sets". And why is one lower case z and the other upper case?

Google is very sorry for pulling down COVID misinfo and pledges never to use outside fact-checkers

Re: xTube?

Apparently suing the Federal government and its agents is really hard for work related things. Maybe argue that slander is to far outside the President's duties and he is personally liable? I wish them the best.

SIM city: Feds say 100,000-card farms could have killed cell towers in NYC

You don't build a 100,000 sim farm to target individual people, no matter what the Secret Service says.

Cybercriminals pwn 850k+ Americans' healthcare data

Florida is apparently not where I thought it was if it is east of North Carolina.

AI can't be woke and regulators should be asleep, Senator Cruz says

Kratsios said that "truth seeking" should be a priority.

The Republican are fine with the government having a say in what is "truth" when they are one defining it.

Trump tells Big Tech: Your power woes? Totally fixable

Trump/Congress is also making it easier to export natural gas and making it harder to build solar/wind generation. Supply is being constrained as well as demand increasing.

ESA engineers trace anomaly in silent Juice spacecraft to a bug in the code

I realize that bits are expensive on spacecraft, but a 6 month timer rollover seems very limiting for no reason. How much bigger do you need so it exceeds the planned mission lifetime?

The Unix Epochalypse might be sooner than you think

Re: Personally, I'll be retired...

When we had a pool, the pump controller was a mechanical timer to turn power to the pump on/off; the software that controlled that was also the one with the cold beer.

Intel chief Lip-Bu Tan to visit White House after Trump calls for him to step down

Re: And another one get's called in to the orange Don's office...

AMD and Nvidia opted for gold. Apple went with a much less expensive item of real gold.

China says its lunar lander passed Luna-landing and take-off tests

Lunar Taikonauts will come to love the smell of UDMH, it appears. (Icon is for SpaceX, closest I could find.)

Politically hot parts of US Constitution briefly deleted thanks to 'coding error'

Re: there's a lot to be said for plain text

Alas, if the Constitution had been written in plain text we would not be in the situation of requiring 9 oracles to interpret it for us mere mortals.

Reddit is people! Which means its search might not be so damaged by AI slop

Re: Have you ever searched for anything on Reddit ?

Nobody uses the search or they wouldn't post the same questions again and again. Eternal September isn't a joke.

Debian isn't waiting for 2038 to blow up, switches to 64-bit time for everything

Re: Can't Someone Plan Ahead?

Declare that the year of Linux on the Desktop has finally arrived?

IRS has lost one-quarter of its IT staff since Trump took office

"That said, in the real world, I'm surprised to see republican politicians directly calling for smaller budgets for the IRS in order to protect honest tax evaders from nasty bureaucrats."

New to the US, eh? The IRS has been dysfunctional for years due to the Republicans' hate of the rich paying taxes. There is a reason the only have the resources to audit the poors.

Struggling to sell EVs, Tesla pivots to slinging burgers

I'm surprised there are not carhops on electric roller skates.

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

Taking "denis bider (who styles his name without capital letters) ", shouldn't it be "mr bider" and not "Mr Bider", as used later in the article?

xAI's Grok lurches into right-wing insanity, offers tips on assaulting man

"Mirroring" is something people do, consciously or not, when engaging with somebody. It makes them be more receptive to you. You look like them, you sound like them, you act like them, tricking the human brain into liking you as long as you don't overdo it. An AI LLM probably shouldn't be told to that or else you just get a feedback loop cycling into even more bullshit between the user and the model.

Trump tariffs turn techies topsy-turvy as US braces for PC tax

Re: Idiotic tariff nonsense

Yes, the US is also a large producer of tea. Well, no. But unlike coffee, it could be grown in bulk here if people thought that tariffs were not going to change in twenty years instead of two months.

Of course, since the US is also rounding up and deporting all the people who would actually grow that tea....

Wayback gives X11 desktops a fighting chance in a Wayland world

Re: Wayland is just hard work

And yet I've never seen an article about Wayland touch on visual qualities mentioned, either as a plus for Wayland or a negative for X.

Visiting students can't hide social media accounts from Uncle Sam anymore

Doesn't Thailand jail critics of the monarch?

Brit space sector struggles to compete with £90K graduate banking salaries

Re: > banker salary in London

Housing is just not a financial instrument, like equities or gold. Everybody needs housing and you just can't order more from the factory. People have to live someplace so the amount they are "willing" to pay can be quite high since the alternative is leaving or sleeping on the streets.

Tinfoil hat wearers can thank AI for declassification of JFK docs

Re: Yes that AI really helped

A lack of evidence just means that evidence is being suppressed by those in the conspiracy. It is a game that logic cannot win.

Microsoft patches the patch that put Windows 11 in a coma

Sure, then the other class action for not patching their software hits from the other side!

Wyden warns telcos still leave Senate in the dark after Trump DOJ snooping scandal

Re: What's good for the gander is good for the goose

These are not NDAa keeping an employee from talking, this is the government telling somebody to not talk to avoid compromising an ongoing investigation. I believe that courts have generally found this to be OK, to a point. Yes, this puts the telco in an impossible situation.

The Constitution does not say that Congresscritters can not be surveilled. They can't be arrested in certain situations or have their speech on the floor used against them.

70-knot winds so far blamed for yacht disaster that killed Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch

70-knot winds blamed for yacht disaster that killed Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch

is technically correct, but the real reason seems to have been poor boat design that could not handle 70 knot winds.

VPN Secure parent company CEO explains why he had to axe thousands of 'lifetime' deals

I appreciate that there might be reasons for incorporating in the Bahamas, but if you can't find a physical address for your vendor (VPN or otherwise) that makes sense and doesn't feel like the first layer of a tiered shell company cake... Due diligence applies to consumers as well.

That said, the US had plans to force the beneficial ownership of shell companies to be disclosed to the government, but that got killed recently. Wonder why.

Qatar’s $400M jet for Trump is a gold-plated security nightmare

https://www.twz.com/air/turning-qatars-gifted-747-into-air-force-one-will-be-anything-but-free

is a good article on the subject

CERN boffins turn lead into gold for about a microsecond at unimaginable cost

You want gold and farts and science all in the same article? Some volcanos emit gases that contain measurable amounts of gold (if you could capture it all).

US, China agree to roll back tariffs – but only for 90 days

If high tariffs will stop the fentanyl, replace the income tax, and restore US manufacturing, why is he lowering them?

You think ransomware is bad now? Wait until it infects CPUs

How many bits of hardware in your average computer have modifiable firmware? Probably more than just the UEFI/BIOS and processor mentioned in the article.

FBI steps in amid rash of politically charged swattings

Why do the police treat an anonymous tip, supposedly from somebody who knows what is happening in one house locally, but sends the tip from a VOIP line routed from offshore providers as a SWAT team actionable item?

OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining

Re: Not since Ringo Starr married Yoko Ono have I been so surprised

You are causing me cognitive dissonance. I'll upvote up I don't like it since you've also polluted my own knowledge of the world.

More Voyager instruments shut down to eke out power supplies

Re: I could only wish my work lasted that long

I make sure my code takes a nap in the afternoon so it's less cranky.