Posts by squigbobble

What if Microsoft just turned you off? Security pro counts the cost of dependency

Re: there are more mobile phone owners than toothbrush owners

'In the UK, do they have dentists and subsidized bi-annual dental exams available for everyone?'

Never have done. Dentistry wasn't folded into the NHS so the only NHS provision is via contracts with private dentists. The contracts are shit so few dentists will take up the offer which leads to a massive shortage of patient capacity. Even then, it's only subsided and not free for a lot of procedures. Only kids and the spectacularly poor are eligible for NHS dentistry, anyway.

The contracts work by allowing the dentist to claim for the cost of any procedures they do on patients but there's a fixed price list. This leads to occasional outright fraud wherein dentists claim for procedures that never happened. The other side effect is dentists stalling treatment on teenagers with unprofitable problems so that they turn 18 and get kicked off NHS dentistry and are forced to pay the full private dentistry price. Obviously, there's an inherent gamble that the teens don't move to another dentist when they go private but there's also the shortage of capacity in private dentistry to limit their choice.

The year of the European Union Linux desktop may finally arrive

Re: Desktop is not the only problem

It runs much deeper than that. Many companies and orgs have their entire software stacks built on MS languages and platforms. They would have to port or rewrite all of their codebases.

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

'twas ever so

The finance sector has been Dutch Disease-ing the rest of the economy for decades.

KDE targets Windows 10 'exiles' claiming 'your computer is toast'

Re: Gnome is my favourite… I think

>Some of the extreme reticence to switch from Windows 10 to 11 surprises me.

Did you miss the Windows Recall kerfuffle or do you have a version of Win11 where it stays disabled?

America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

Boycotting...

... Microsoft will be an enormous challenge given that many companies have built almost their entire tech stacks on MS products, even the programming language.

Re: Federal...State...?

I suspect that the actual plan with the NOAA etc. is to privatise them so the individual states would contract the new owners for the service. Just like healthcare, having customer base divided as small as possible hands all the negotiating power to the company.

This would create a new monopoly that Trump can bestow on the highest bidder.

Microsoft Copilot shows up even when it's not wanted

Long Term Service Channel

I wonder if the Win11 LTSC version is affected by this. It's supposed to be stripped down enough that there's no Copilot installed.

China hits back at America with retaliatory tariffs, export controls on rare earth minerals

Re: All is good!

>Having said that, what is Trump's solution on the vast amounts of American and Canadian IT jobs that have been farmed offshore for cheaper labor in India and Philippines to name a couple of countries.

Elon's approach to that seems to be to import as many H1B Indians to the USA as possible.

Re: Meanwhile...

UK electricity prices are mostly dictated by the price of natural gas as the wholesale generator price is set by the most expensive source in the mix at any given time. It was our last Conservative government that cancelled all the preceding Labour government's plans for new nuclear power stations, purportedly as they wouldn't produce any results they could crow about before the next election. Those power stations would've come online in the early 2020s.

Mr Intel leaving Intel is not a great sign... for Intel

Re: Replicant Gelsinger

Cost efficiency seems to be AMD's edge, rather than performance. I think AMD will be stuck playing 2nd fiddle to nVidia in the consumer GPU market for some time but if AMD can get more people using ROCm or help them port CUDA code to it then the risk is of them eating nVidia's datacentre market. AMD's industrial cards are a lot cheaper than nVidia's but nVidia's spent over a decade cultivating the software ecosystem for GPU computing.

nVidia's also in a weird personnel position in that so many of its staff were given company shares in years gone by that the place is full of millionaires now.

AMD's baby Epycs are nothing more than Ryzens in disguise

Re: less power

Ryzen 7000 lets you change the CPU power limit in the bios (possibly in Ryzen Master too, I dunno) just like the power limit slider for graphics cards. You can turn any Ryzen 7000 into a 65W chip with a concomitant reduction in performance. On the top skus you can usually knock the power limit down to 75% while losing less than 10% of the performance cos they're tuned so aggressively out of the box.

Now, the question is whether that's been implemented in the bios for the server rebranded chips.

Palantir boss says outfit's software the only reason the 'goose step' has not returned to Europe

They could have spent the money on legal migration instead and would have not died.

You'd be surprised. Work visas have to be sponsored by your job which means it has to be both a job that's eligible for visa sponsorship and worth the company's while navigating the byzantine sponsorship rules. You also need a job offer before you can get the visa.

I know a woman with 3 master's degrees in different domains (science and humanities) which she studied in her 2nd and 3rd languages (English being the 3rd) currently working for the NHS in a visa eligible job who can't get her visa extended cos NHS management will only sponsor clinical roles...

Intel starts mass production on Intel 4 node using EUV in Irish fab

5 in 4

I suspect that Intel is going to deliver 5 nodes badly in 4 years as they strive for supremacy in the Holy Number, as another commenter put it. Are they going to keep all the nodes in production or will some of them get dropped before they've even hit the plateau of the yield curve?

Intel promises to reduce droop with backside power in 2024

Presumably...

...the lower voltage loss in the phat wires will reduce their heat output as well. I wonder how much experimentation it took to decide whether the power or signal side should be deposited first.

Look mom, no InifiniBand: Nvidia’s DGX GH200 glues 256 superchips with NVLink

Helios...

An AI supercomputer called Helios. Will its job be to manage the Aquinas Hub?

Since when did my SSD need water cooling?

SSHDs aka hybrid drives

Seagate and Toshiba used to make them but they stopped in the last couple of years now that SSDs are competitive for large capacity storage.

The Twitpocalypse may have begun, as datacenter migration reportedly founders

Ummmm...

'Until today, though, the former micro-blogging service has not really experienced major incidents on Musk's watch.'

How many weeks ago was it that the entire login system failed for 4+ hours? That was on Elongated Muskrat's watch. Existing sessions still worked for me but if I tried to open Twatter in a new tab (yes, I'm troglodyte who uses Twitter web) I just got a generic error message when I logged in that tab.

Twitter starts auction to flip the bird, furniture, pizza ovens, gadgets galore

Re: How shit is your grasp of value....

> SF isn't exactly short of food service businesses for hungry staff.

Silicon Valley companies don't provide cafeterias for the convenience of the employees, it's to maximise the time that they spend in the office. I expect there'll be enough coffee machines and pizza ovens left for the remaining staff and the provision has been reduced to match the new headcount.

Like somebody else mentioned, it's an expensive rented office, occupying more space than they need to is costing Twitter money.

Non-binary DDR5 is finally coming to save your wallet

Shockingly, LTT saw it first

3+ weeks ago, Micron let Linus from LinusTechTips loose on their development production line on a weekend and let him make his own sticks of DDR5 RAM. At least the bit of the process where the DRAM chips get stuck on the PCBs, anyway. When they POSTed, the sticks read as 24GB each. I assumed that it was a prank (they'd also made some labels saying that it was DDR9000 CAS 69) and somebody had fiddled the SPD data on the sticks. However, 24GB capacity fits perfectly with the 8 chip sticks he was making if the chips are 24Gb ones.

Intel reminds everyone it's still cooking away on more PC processors

Re: Chairs

D'oh, it's 6nm & 5nm, not 7nm & 6nm.

Re: Chairs

It works well for AMD. Improvements in performance, efficiency etc. don't scale evenly across different types of IC as you reduce the node size. The RX7000 GPUs have the cache and memory controller on 7nm chiplets and the rest of it on 6nm. According to AMD's slide deck for the launch, cache only sees a fraction of the improvement from 7nm->6nm that logic does so it made sense to put it on the cheaper node.

After spate of delays, Intel promises Sapphire Rapids Xeons for early 2023

AMD reaping the benefits

...of being the first to move to an entirely chiplet lineup. Intel is still bogged down in the same painful learning period that AMD went through last decade, giving AMD time to catch up.

Cloudflare tries to explain why it protects far-right forums that stalk and harass victims

Anonymous VoIP

How, in all the incidents of swatting, does the enabling technology always seem to escape scrutiny?

Re: Seethe

kek, you did all the work to make an account on here and all we got was a misremembered Farms meme

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Re: Ebay

This is why I only buy electronics off eBay that come with the original box, it's much less likely to have been nicked with the box. A side benefit is that it's much more likely to arrive intact in the original packaging than in a jiffy bag.

Intel's net positive water use only tells part of the story

Re: You put your left foot in ...

I had a similar thought when they claimed that the waste water from the planned Magdeburg fab will be cleaner than the feed water that they're planning to draw from a local aquifer. The only charitable explanation I could think of is that the fab processes introduce specific contaminants which have a big effect on the process even in trace amounts, making it uneconomical or infeasible to completely remove them. The levels of the mystery contaminants would be low enough to pass public water quality standards (if they're even regulated) but not to meet their own requirements.

Google engineer suspended for violating confidentiality policies over 'sentient' AI

Looks like one thing that Ex Machina got right...

...is the existence of people like Caleb Smith.

Swedish data centre offers rack-scale dielectric immersion cooling

Re: In days of yore

I've been using XPSC EC6 non-conductive coolant (smells like rapeseed oil and probably is) for about 4 years and I've never had any sort of buildup. The only thing it seems to do is form condensation in the air spaces in the loop, which is odd seeing as it's s'posed to be a waterless coolant... maybe I got some moisture into the loop. It stains things if it's left to dry on them and leaves a sticky mess if there's enough of it.

I've unintentionally tested its non-conductivity with my graphics card and it really is. I've also been reusing the same litre of it by draining the loop back into the bottle without any problems.

Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket's tanks just disintegrated in Earth's orbit

Re: Musings from the group W bench...

'After a while...' That 'while' could be centuries, especially for orbits above LEO.

Author of infamous Google diversity manifesto drops lawsuit against web giant

Blissful unawareness...

...is actually blissful autism- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/16/james-damore-google-memo-interview-autism-regrets

Makes me wonder...

...what happened with the similarly vociferous (but less polite) Tim Chevalier's lawsuit against Google for firing him over stuff he posted about Damore's memo.

Intelsat orbital comms satellite is back online after first robo-recovery mounting and tug job gets it back into position

Makes me wonder...

What part of a satellite, that was never meant to dock with anything, would be sturdy enough to grapple? The engine bell? Hardpoints where was attached to the rocket that launched it?

Morrisons puts non-essential tech changes on ice as panic-stricken shoppers strip stores

Flu....

...has nowhere near a 3% death rate. Neither does COVID-19. The actual number of infections will be a lot higher than the number of cases so dividing the number of deaths by the number of cases (aka the crude CFR) will always overestimate the death rate except very early on in the epidemic before people have had chance to die of it. The infection fatality rate is the important number, that's your overall risk of dying if you get infected although it doesn't account for age and, as you correctly stated, this kills the same people that seasonal flu does.

The WHO report from mid-February estimates the IFR at 0.3% - 1% : https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200219-sitrep-30-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=3346b04f_2

A report based on data from the Diamond Petri Dish cruise ship puts the IFR at 0.91% - 1.2% overall depending on sampling and 7.3% - 9% for the elderly, who are the main clientele of cruise ships : https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/diamond_cruise_cfr_estimates.html

As for flu, well: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/19/1/12-0124-techapp1.pdf

The global CFR for swine flu was 0.048% across all ages so the IFR will have been lower than that, possibly less than half. The Asian flu pandemic of 1957 had a CFR of 0.3% which is the bottom end of the current IFR estimate. The only flu pandemic that has this beaten on paper right now is the 1918 one but that had more severe economic/social effects as it killed the exact opposite of the people who are vulnerable to COVID-19.

My guess is that the IFR number will go down as data comes in from countries that don't have China's spectacularly bad air quality.

There is another side to this; although less than 1% are dying of this, it's still putting a lot of working-age people out of action for a few weeks which won't play well with the just-in-time distribution model that everything is built around in the West. That's why slowing the progress of the pandemic is important, so as to minimise the proportion of the population who are sick at any given time. It also put about 5% of cases in China in the ICU which is a burden that the NHS is ill-equipped to bear, now that it's been organised so that all resources are fully utilised by not having enough of them.

Sometimes shining a light on a nuclear problem just makes things worse

Re: Mice too

Even later optical mice could be banjaxed by a piece of paper. One of my housemates discovered this in the early 2000s when she tried using a blank piece of paper as a mouse mat so there was nothing for sensor to read as she moved the mouse.

Having trouble finding a job in your 40s? Study shows some bosses like job applicants... up until they see dates of birth

Boomer is a state of mind

...was the saying at the time that this trend started. It's spawned a sub-trend of needlessly categorising people so there's Zoomers (Gen Z), Doomers a probably a few more -oomers besides.

OK Boomer

It started as a response to older people dishing out absurdly out of touch 'advice' over social media, people so out of touch that they think that most workers entering the workforce can get a job for life or that it's the norm for companies to reward loyalty. These kids have been on the internet for long enough to know that trying to change other people's minds, especially if they're coming from a viewpoint so far removed from their own, is a fool's errand as so many people are out to score 'wins'.

But that's just my experience.

Hate hub hacked, Cisco bugs squished, Bluekeep attacks begin, and much, much more

Re: I Now Pronounce This Hunt Open

TIL that a small internet forum having a bodycount means that it's merely a proponent of ideas that are in opposition to Liberalism, for whichever definition of 'liberalism' that is.

I bet you'd like to know how Castro found that list of donors, it's quite tricky. First you have to go to the Federal Election Commission's website and fill in a search form that's almost as big as the one for rscomponents.com, then it spews out a list of names for you to peruse- https://www.fec.gov/introduction-campaign-finance/how-to-research-public-records/individual-contributions/

Campaign donations over $200 are a matter of public record, no l33t h4x or brown envelopes required. That a candidate for office would do this is dodgy and should discount them from it but this is hardly the first time this information has been abused- https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/us/19prop8.html There's probably been a few other similar events too.

I expect that something like this'll happen again in the future, once everybody's forgotten about this time.

Re: Hate hub hacked

The forum was shut down in 2017 anyway, for reasons that I don't know and that don't seem to be widely known.

Military perspective on the Iron March leak

Since there were quite a few Iron March users who claimed to be in the military or were interested in joining it, I thought people might be interested in how this is viewed by military-orientated journalists- https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/11/07/desire-to-join-military-large-focus-of-leaked-chats-in-infamous-neo-nazi-forum/

Robocop needs reboot, $200m for AI research, UK govt knowingly deployed racist passport system – plus more

Every time...

...I see another part to the running gag of 'racist' facial recognition it makes me want to train an AI that can only recognise black people's faces and release it as freeware, just to see what people write about it on the interwebs.

Re: Absolutely right!

'A similar story came out where some AI sometimes thought people of colour were chimps. How racist! Turns out it also tended to think paler folks were manitees.'

It's cos the its attempt at categorising black people happened to coincide with a racial stereotype. If it thought they looked like bears or something you probably wouldn't have heard about it. If that AI had thought white people looked like crackers you'd've certainly heard about it.

Re: Racism

I strongly doubt that farcical recognition tech is paying attention to your eye colour, otherwise it'd have as much trouble with brown eyed white people as it does with black people. Older facial rec systems often looked for an inverted triangle of dark patches (eyes and mouth) with the nose outlined by its shadow. The contrast between the 'canvas' of the face and facial features is crucial for the AI. This is why it fails with dark skin where the contrast is lower (or even reversed) or with very pale people as their eyebrows blend into their face.

Re: a reminder to all the convenient fools intent on excusing examples of systemic racism

The other 90% of the problem is that, in the rush to automate all the things, the gov seem to have completely stopped giving a fuck about edge cases and the edges seem to getting bigger all the time. All they had to do was add a human review step for pics that the AI rejects or give users a 'no, this really is a face' button to send their pic to review but that's too simple. God forbid anything should imply that digital.gov services are less than perfect.

Spacecraft that told us 'you're screwed' finally gives up the ghost after doubling its shelf life

Re: Vomit comet?

I think you only get about 30s of zero gravity before being slammed into the floor on the Vomit Comet, they're probably looking for changes that take longer to appear.

Not even their first

Sam Cristoforetti was a bomber pilot in the Italian air force before becoming an ISS astronaut.

Computer says no: An expression-analysing AI has been picking out job candidates for Unilever

Re: A less biased system

eBay still let's you exclude things from results by putting - before a word e.g. -hardening

I use it cos a lot of sellers went to The Keyword Spam School of titling your sale items.

YouTube's radicalizing Alt-right trolls and Facebook's recruiting new language boffins

Re: Radicalization

Peterson, King of the Lobsters, is almost certainly in the Intellectual Derp Web category in this study. As mentioned in the study, there's overlap in the audience between the IDW and the talking heads formerly known as alt-right which would be enough for YouTube's algorithm to try and steer viewers from one to the other.

CASE studies...

...follow an individual example in order to show what mechanisms are in play. It's more or less a short longitudinal study with a sample of 1. They're useless for statistical purposes, even adding a bunch of them together isn't much use as every case study could have used a different procedure.

The quoted study actually has a large sample size with consistent measurements and can, presumably, be used to draw some sort of conclusion with stats to back it up.

You're mixing up the 2 types of study, it's not the article author who's confused about that. You're right that he hasn't cited any of the 'many' case studies, though.

Giraffe hacks printers worldwide to promote God-awful YouTuber. Did we read that one right?

Re: Get thee back to reddit

Well, I was optimistic.