Posts by lnLog

GNOME Foundation's new executive director is Canadian, a techie, and a GNOME user

Re: The question is...

Read the article, they are front of house to bring in the cash, and don't appear to have a role in directing the specifics.

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Re: turn it off

Most are on what is known as 'at will' which involves zero notice for them firing you or you leaving.

If there is lot of jobs all power to the employee, otherwise all power to the employer.

What better place to inject OpenAI's o1 than Los Alamos national lab, right?

Most step by step reasoning is likely to come to the unhelpful? conclusion that the world would be a better place and would solve all humanities problems if humanity just ceased to exist

NASA wants ideas on how to haul injured moonwalkers

Re: Giant Steps Are What You Take?

if there is three in a group, then a telescopic pole between the two and a strap to carry the third, bump up their suit pressure so they dont sag

AI PCs flood the market. Their makers hope someone wants them

Re: Generative AI is only a bullshit generator.

An NPU provides no battery life advantages if it is never used, and just uses up die area. The sooner needs to come sooner than it currently is to minimise the waste of resources and energy being shovelled by those investing in the current FOMO rush.

Norway datacenter dumps diesel diet, goes veggie with biofuel backup

Re: burning 1,000 liters of HVO will release 195 kg of carbon dioxide,

Most of the energy in combustion of hydrocarbons comes from the hydrogen, not the carbon. Which is why burning equivalent amounts of coal, refined oils, natural gas and hydrogen gas, will release significantly decreasing amounts of carbon and increasing amounts of water (H2O).

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Blame-shifting gone mad

Brazing is where the filler and temperature is high enough that there i a significant amount of mixing of the base metal(s) to form a new alloy. Done right you can start off with a filler that is no longer present in the joint and a joint strength significantly higher than the filler material.

Yes, the base metal can 'melt' in the presence of fluxes (the filler can also act as a flux) that is a lower temperature than the base metal bulk melting temperature.

Infineon promises 12kW PSUs for next generation of power-hungry AI servers

The sooner this 'AI' bubble bursts the better, and dumps the ~80% of cryptocurrency-esk wastefulness of proposed inane use cases.

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

background noise the issue?

maybe a reason to reduce the background noise of ICE vehicles?

Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problems

a right mess

The whole system is a machine to make profit and keep pension funds ticking over.

Editors are seldom paid positions, similarly the peer review process is also not paid, researchers have to pay to submit papers and if they want the paper to be available to all they must pay extra, or it goes behind a pay wall.

The issue of fraudulent and or poor quality papers means a vast number of academics just do not respond to requests to provide a peer review and yet the institutions actively push for them to generate as many papers as possible with no regard given to providing peer review.

Many editors at the 'higher end' journals will ignore many papers that do not have someone significant on the author list or are submitted by an institution or country that does not meet their ideals, either ignoring or selecting for 'third world' depending on the field.

Underwater cables in Red Sea damaged months after Houthis 'threatened' to do just that

If you have a underwater drone and/or have identified the cable some other way, you just set a charge and blow it, no need for dragging

Windows 11 24H2 is coming so we can all shut up about Windows 12 for another year

ha!

"one more hurrah for Windows 11 before the operating system moves to maintenance, and something with a less toxic brand takes center stage"

Judging by the talk of integrating Artificial Ignorance 'AI' into windows 12, it looks like it may be two in a row for high toxicity...

A ship carrying 800 tonnes of Li-Ion batteries caught fire. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: I assume they discharge batteries before shipping them?

They will have charge in them, as part of the manufacturing process is to apply charge to form the surfaces (chemistry / texture) of the plates after initial assembly. The article does not mention if this is nickel (NMC) of iron (LFP) Lithium cells, the latter do not suffer from thermal runaway due to damage.

The truth about Dropbox opening up your files to AI – and the loss of trust in tech

Re: The Dropbox CEO is lying

Likewise, I logged in and this setting was enabled. I've not used dropbox or had it installed for about a year now

Tool bag lost in space now tracked by garbage watchers

Re: Spanners

For West pondians, spanner != wrench, a wrench has a camming action and usually knurling for grip (which bites into whatever is being torqued). I've seen west pondian mechanics tool kits from the early 1900s and it literally was wrenches used for working with nuts and bolts.

When is a privacy button not a privacy button? When Google runs it, claims lawsuit

Cyanogen lives on in the form of LineageOS,

Google's claims of super-human AI chip layout back under the microscope

Not just the reviewers, the majority of editors are also unpaid

MIT Press to trial open access journals, so long as someone else pays for it

Ditch the share holders

Hows about not handing out dividends.

Most editors are not paid positions (at least no more than beer money for those that are), reviewers don't get paid and authors pay 1000's per paper. So where is the money actually going?

Can gamers teach us anything about datacenter cooling? Lenovo seems to think so

peltier elements are horrendously inefficient for shifting heat, best use cases are for precision temperature control in lasers etc.

Data loss prevention emergency tactic: keep your finger on the power button for the foreseeable future

pedant says...

I like to point out the american tendency to use pre-revolutinary units does not match well with their image of themselves

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

Re: At last, a benefit of Brexit

What this one....?

Delta Air Lines throws $60m at flying taxi startup Joby Aviation

Re: I18N

exactly this^ of course everyone wants to ride a flying turd

Rookie programmer's code goes up in flames ... kind of

Re: Vital detail missing

Just watch out for a case of plague if you have bad luck and it was not cooked well enough...

Twitter whistleblower summoned to Senate Judiciary Committee

To convenient

No fan of either twitter or musk, but the timing of this sounds far to convenient for musk

Scientists use supercritical carbon dioxide to power the grid

pre-revolutionary units

Whilst the use of per-revolutionary units does irk, I'm more confused by the grid connection and dynamo being a big thing.

Thermal power plants use turbines, and they have the power take off and grid connection part sorted.

If you have lower power requirements then you just use an inverter (with efficiencies of >98% so minimal losses), what's the big thing here? Other than replacing steam with CO2 which apparently provides some advantages in operational efficiencies. This is the second article discussing 'Sandia' does a relative work there? I've never come across the institution? before.

AI chip adds artificial neurons to resistive RAM for use in wearables, drones

Artificial neurons use analogue signals not digital, magnitude not value. Hence the comment about the line switches coping with both analogue and digital signalling.

NASA wants a hundredfold upgrade for space computers

Arduino -> Atmega -> Atmel -> Microchip

Microchip also now own Atmel, so have their line of SAM (arm) and AT (avr) chips. Did someone say Arduino in space....

Russian anti-satellite test added to a 'pressing threat to security' in space

pedant says...

-> Thank you for confirming my point. I wrote that scientists are not always right. What a pity that the first groups of scientists who said such and such was safe can't be force fed the excrement they created.

Thalidomide is safe to those taking it (people still take it to treat leprosy), however it is not safe for fetus at a certain developmental point. Now how many pregnant women do you think were in the initial drug trials? same number as are in pretty much all drug trials - zero.

There is never zero risk, and sometimes the consequences are horrendous, but new information comes to light and conclusions change.

Massive solar project in Tennessee is all about Google

This -> 100.5 tonnes is f-all.

Bank of Google? Not exactly. But fintech's future is in Big Tech's ecosystems

Yes, that is right...

'While you're probably not going to be depositing checks with the Bank of Google, Apple or Amazon anytime soon,'

Yes that is right, the USA still uses cheques extensively, although with minimal checks, so are quite weird about sharing direct deposit details.

Amazon fears it could run out of US warehouse workers by 2024

They just have to start using prisons and they can have all the slavery they want...

IT staffing, recruitment biz settles claims it discriminated against Americans

Slavery has not been completely abolished, it is still allowed for prisoners, hence the large numbers of such low cost workers.

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction"

ASUS recalls motherboards that flame out thanks to backwards capacitors

Re: In their defence

Those are polymer caps, tantalum are too expensive / bulky for that usage (voltage/capacity combination).

US distrust of Huawei linked in part to malicious software update in 2012

pedant says...

No, you provide your evidence and references, if you are an expert.

This is a standard method / trick used by various virulent political parties and conspiracy theorists. The argument goes that if you disagree with them, then you should be able to spout chapter and verse of references to support your view. But in their case they will not say, X and Y because of this and this reference, because in that way they can easily be refuted.

Their aim here is to get you to provide references to the negative and then pick and argue for you to provide more against a particular part that they identify as incorrect.

The second objective is to get the less credulous to search for 'bellingcat is bad' and then start digging through the latrine of conspiracy theories.

Amazon textbook rental service scammed for $1.5m

The one remaining place where slavery is still legal in the USA

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/

US nuclear submarine bumps into unidentified underwater object in South China Sea

pedant says...

"When you ARE a magnetic anomaly, its hard to detect other ones that are nearby..."

Thats where the whole sub degausing system comes into its own.

Chocolate beer barred from sale after child mistakes it for chocolate milk

Milo

Also popular in africa and south/central america

Google killed desktop Drive and replaced it with two apps. Now it’s killing those, and Drive for desktop is returning

multiple logins?

That's nice, but will it support multiple logins / instances?

Origami... in spaaaaace: Inflatable folded objects discovery brings new meaning to blowing up buildings

not a patch on concrete canvas

Not a patch on the durability of concrete canvas shelters, They could team up and devise the geometry for a new product.

https://www.concretecanvas.com/cc-shelters/

Ice Lake, Baby: Intel's 10nm 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable server processors to arrive at last

yes, flexible in your history

"Our 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable platform is the most flexible and performant in our history"

But not as flexible as AMD EPYC enabling all features for all versions...

Cherry on top: Dell shoves MX keyboard into its Alienware m15 R4 ultrabook

Mouser

More interesing is when mouser will start selling the new low profile switches...

You only need pen and paper to fool this OpenAI computer vision code. Just write down what you want it to see

Naivete

A good demonstration of naivete, they need to include a bastard network to come up with reasonable Skeptical options.

I'm fired: Google AI in meltdown as ethics unit co-lead forced out just weeks after coworker ousted

Re: If you want to find 'Ethics' in Google ...

Google Maps can't find google ethics

Make sure your search is spelled correctly. Try adding a city, state, or zip code.

Try Google Search instead

Should this place be on Google Maps?

Add a missing place

Quixotic Californian crusade to officially recognize the hellabyte and hellagram is going hella nowhere

Re: B, H

H is used for Henry - units of inductance

How to leak data via Wi-Fi when there's no Wi-Fi chip: Boffin turns memory bus into covert data transmitter

pedant says...

Read up on the derivation of the phrase - so and so must really have drunk the kool aid (there was a good BBC multi-part piece on it); And then reaslise quite how distasteful the phrase actualy is.

Humans are very 'special' mammals.

Boffins from China push quantum computing envelope for 'supremacy' in emerging photon field

physical test measurement

So [The Chinese team developed an apparatus, dubbed Jiuzhang, that consists of a laser, mirrors, prisms, and photon detectors. The group reported that they achieved a sampling rate that's "~1014 faster than using the state-of-the-art simulation strategy and supercomputers."]

They built an experiment and were able to take measurments 10^14 time faster than simulating the physics in a computer. It is unclear what is new about this state of affairs, this is why most groups use experiments for this type of reaserch, rather than simulations.

Android without Google – and yes it has apps: The Reg talks to founder about the /e/ smartphone

recently bought a pixel after essential phone went under. This would have been a prefered option.

Days before the US election, phishers net $2.3m from Wisconsin Republicans

Re: Trump money and mouth miles apart

Most americans think that slave labour was abolished by the 13th amendment. In actual fact by convicting someone you can then use them as slaves; "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

hmm, I wonder why there are so many people in jails? /sarcasm

Mystery cloud added 10,000 new AMD Epyc servers in under ten days to handle demand for you know what

7002 EPYC ATX boards?

So when is supermicro going to release an H12 ATX board?

Cryptocoin investors sue Chase Bank for sky-high credit card charges

Its referred to as a currency, that does not make it one. Does the bank charge cash advance for purchases of silver and gold?