* Posts by Missing Semicolon

1739 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Nov 2013

Brit chip company picks RISC-V for next-gen microcontrollers

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Boffin

Base model?

Any chance of a small version available for a few quid to hobbyists?

Raspberry Pi hires former spy gadget-maker who baked devices into surveillance ops

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Different standards

It's funny that. In many cases, death threats by Social Media are investigated seriously. Because, unless I'm mistaken, they are crimes.

Yet not here.

Look like Bane, spend like Batman with Dyson's $949 headphones

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Earler Dyson Vaccums were OK

We have a DC41, which always leaves the carpet cleaner than any other vacuum. It will fill its bin from a carpet that's just been cleaned with another machine. The DC40 and earlier were better, as they were allowed to have full-fat motors (thanks EU!).

We also have a V7 portable. We chose an earlier model as they are lighter. The 20-minute run-time is quite adequate for a semi - you tend to use it little and often as it is light and easy to get out and use.

Having said that, both are only working as I am a bit handy at fixing.

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Re: Dyson peaked with the Ballbarrow

Since the barrow rotates about the axle of the ball when you tilt it, instead of the point of contact of the wheel with the ground, the barrow does not have a tendency to fall over when it is not held dead level. You can also make small course corrections by gently tilting it, instead of stepping round at the back.

Certainly, the disinclination to fall over makes it easier to operate.

TSMC founder says 'globalization is almost dead' as Asian foundry giant expands in US

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Re: The Indian elephant in the room

"The government tends to make investing in the economy awkward and bureaucratic, as well as sometimes difficult to get your money out afterwards."

Doesn't China suffer from the same problem (50% local partner, who knows how to extract profits)

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Re: Modern War: Electronics, Electronics, Electronics

Is there ever a point at which we will consider this kind of thing unwise? Or are the vast fees paid by foreign students too much of a draw?

Southampton is the UK leader in Optical Fibres. Most of the PhD students are Chinese.

Weep for the cybercriminals who fell for online scams and lost $2.5m last year

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Re: My heart does not bleed for them

How the heck does your post get stolen? If it's commonplace, then surely paper mail is dead for legal documents?

Using personal info for ads without consent puts Meta in EU's gunsights

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Re: Who else does this apply to ?

The inability to obey "do not track" is kinda useful. Privacy badger can use it to detect a tracking site.

Energy being expensive and trickier to source is good news ... for renewables

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IEA

.. has stopped being useful, and now produces on-message articles.

Microsoft reportedly mulls a does-everything 'super app' to expand mobile search

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Facepalm

More like that news widget?

Wow, what a crock that is! Wave the mouse near it and suddenly a load of your workspace is covered in this massive popover panel that captures clicks on it. And what's in it? Just a load of generica, that nobody really wants. Of course, whilst you can hide it, it's not really gone it's still snooping in the background.....

Longstanding bug in Linux kernel floppy handling fixed

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Windows

Looks like I'll not be updating then

.. if they've disabled raw access to the controller.

I have an old Core2Duo box, which I think is the last motherboard new enough to support modern 64-bit linux, but old enough to have a floppy interface. I keep it for data recovery from old floppies.

Fancy some fresh Linux Mint? 21.1 enters beta, should be here by Christmas

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Re: I wonder

I have fixed Nemo by replacing it with Caja (out of MATE). Much nicer for connecting to other boxen, with the neat trick that "Console here" will open a SSH terminal in the right folder of the other box if you connected over sftp.

Aside from that, it's got much more of a "windows file explorer, back from when it was usable" feel.

.NET open source is 'heavily under-funded' says AWS

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Windows

AOT (Ahead of Time) compilation

AOT (Ahead of Time) compilation == "compilation" to us greybeards.

Next they'll be AOT (Ahead of Time) compiling modules, then AOT linking them, and building a single binary pre-crossreferenced blob. i.e., linking.

US commerce bosses view EU rules as threat to its clouds

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Re: "ensure that non-EU suppliers cannot access the EU market on an equal footing"

Schrems III is kinda the point.

As long as the US has a law that says "It doesn't matter what's in the contract between a non-US national and a US corporation, or the subsidiary of a US corporation, or wherever the data is actually located, under whatever jurisdiction, if the US security services ask the US corporation for the data, it must be provided, without necessarily notifying the non-US national.", any data stored in a US cloud service cannot be locked such that only the non-US national has access.

Intruders get their hands on user data in LastPass incident

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Re: Available + Convenient != Sane

Definitely. After much thought, my password storage at home is a Little Black Book.

UK cuts China from Sizewell nuclear project, takes joint stake

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Re: How many homes was that, again?

You should divide your total use by a value nearer to 12, rather than 24, to allow for higher daytime usage.

Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything

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Similar

Phone call after being gone for a while..

"What's the root password to that box under your old desk?"

"it's written on the label on top of the box"

"Oh, yeah..."

FWIW, the box did not have encrypted drives, so if you had the physical box, the data was yours anyway.

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment

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Re: I agree.

Especially good for postage labels. Inkjet in the rain is not a good look.....

Massive energy storage system goes online in UK

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FAIL

Re: Great, we'll build another 200+, then.

"Never not windy"?

Try looking at http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ on many days in winter. The "Wind" dial goes to pretty much zero quite often.

The weather patterns around the UK mean that you do indeed get windless days over the entire land mass, and over the sea for quite a way.

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Re: Per home usage

Well, yeah, supplying homes in the daytime would be the point.

Most people do their stuff in the daytime. The result I get is at least defensible, where the one they use is just nonsense.

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Re: Per home usage

They make the numbers up, of course! Otherwise the real answer (it can replace a single power station for about 6 minutes) sounds less impressive.

One trick is to use the daily consumption and divide by 24. Like we cook and wash through the night too.

Homes use between 8-10kWh/day (Ovo, repeating a figure from BEIS suggests 10.2kWh). So at 10kWh, that's going to be 10/12 kW (about 830W) mean consumption during the daytime. So the actual answer is ~236000 homes for 1 hour. Their figure assumes average consumption is 327W, a daily waking hours consumption of about ~4kWh. Fantasy.

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Boffin

Frequency trimming?

One of the things that the big rotating machinery is good at is frequency maintenance. My understanding is that the inverters on wind farms are network-synced, and so can't drive the frequency.

So, can the monstrously-huge inverter on this lot do that?

University orders investigation into Oracle finance disaster

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Re: There are so many of these incidents

ERP is the systemd of finance. In order to track everything,it must control everything.

Locked out of Horizon Europe, UK commits half a billion to post-Brexit research

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Re: "the UK remains open to association"

What is forgotten is that the anti-democratic Benn Act was pushed through to enforce an unnecessary deadline.

No deal in time, no Brexit.

This meant that the required haggling and hardball couldn't be done, so we got a crap deal. Which was the plot all along to bring forward the frabjious day when it could be undone.

Also rather deceitful.

Microsoft makes a game of Team building, with benefits

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How about finishing the product

Before adding games!

FTX disarray declared 'unprecedented' by exec who cleaned up after Enron

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Facepalm

Finally?

Is this the final rug-pull? Finally?

Open source community split over offer of 'corporate' welfare for critical dev tools

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Ah, control.

The Linux Foundation is offering infrastructure,not money. Infrastructure ultimately under the control of the corporate members. Fishy?

NASA's Artemis mission finally launches after faulty Ethernet switch delayed countdown

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Valves

So they tightened a few up. Can't these guys get stuff to seal properly from the get-go?

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Facepalm

Basically it takes reusable Shuttle engines and uses them once.

Croatian EV maker Rimac claims 412km/h speed record

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Makes a change from an Astramax van.

University staff voice 'urgent, profound concern' as Oracle finance system delays payments

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Mushroom

Transalation

“We are acutely aware of the impact that this is having on some of our staff and students, and we will continue to keep them informed with progress"

... but we get paid, and our fat pensions are still being topped up whatever, so fundamentally you can just eat it. Whatever happens, no blame or responsibility can possibly be attached to us, so any problems are not really problems.

Microsoft warns Direct Access on Windows 10 and 11 could be anything but

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Not a VPN?

So how does it provide secure access to the corporate network/

Twitter begs some staff to come back, says they were laid off accidentally

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Re: Tumbleweed

But if everyone joins Mastodon, it will turn into Twitter. Twitter's problems are not technical.

Experian, T-Mobile US settle data spills for mere $16m

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Validated IT expenditure decisions

Much, much cheaper to pay the fines ("settlements") than spend money on actual security.

Security breaches are virtually free. It seems the fines are inversely proportional to the number of affected people.

Qualcomm vs Arm: The bizarro quotient just went off the scale

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Re: Conspiracy theory : An Arm leak to test the waters?

Quite possibly, since Qualcomm have decided to disregard the contract terms.

Reducing partisan divide alone does not boost support for democracy, study finds

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Is this the real purpose of the research

Or, based on the current screeching by the incumbents, is this an academic way of asking "why are voters to dumb to vote Democrat"?

China reminds world shock and ore can hurt tech supply chains

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Re: The problem is

"soft diplomacy, trade and support " == Massive bribes to corrupt Governments.

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Re: An interesting game of tug-of-war has started

"Thanks to Trump and his stupidity, China has finally woken up to the fact that it has most of the resources everybody else wants.". Really? China knew this all along. Only Trump was rude enough to point it out. Many people were pointing out that relying on China for all our tech was a bad idea, but they got condemned as protectionist nutjobs, in order not to interrupt the smooth flow of cash into executive pockets, or something.

Microsoft mulls cheap PCs supported by ads, subs

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More landfill

Cheap PCs subsidised by ads only work if you can only use them with the delivered software. So these machines will have to be Pluton'ed to the max to ensure only the Microsoft cloud client OS will run - no sneaky Linux install for you!

So when the sub runs out, or they "expire', many will just get chucked out.

NASA uses space station dust sensor to map 50 methane 'super-emitters' on Earth

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Ars Technica

Looks like El Reg is going that way.

Google's Alphabet to review every project after $6bn decline in profits

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Happy

Re: If that's an economic slow-down

Sponsorblock. Except on Aging Wheels. His sponsored bits are usually hilarious.

Microsoft's Lennart Poettering proposes tightening up Linux boot process

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Re: ...using TPM 2.0 hardware

"existing secure boot can be disabled in the BIOS settings" for some machines. Not the cheap ones.

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

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Re: No loss of hardware support

If you want to run an archived Linux version, you will have to get hold of the correct versions of the source for all of the applications supported at the time, and their dependencies. Then build them all, and recreate the package archive. Basically, respinning an old distro. A job that is far from trivial.

Nvidia RTX 4090: So hot they're melting power cables

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FAIL

Can't bend the wire

"any bending of the wires within 35mm of the connector "may lead to an uneven load across the other wires, increasing the risk of overheating damage.""

Means that the pins aren't sufficiently well located in the housings (to allow for sloppy moulding tolerances) and don't latch on to the receptacles well enough.

So too thin, too flimsy, not big enough.

What's to bet that the engineers originally designed a chonker of a connector, but it was shot down for being too big, and containing too much copper.

Microsoft fixes printing gremlin, ends that block on Windows 11 upgrades

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Mushroom

It's got breaking bugs in it

But because the numbers affected are low enough, they ship it anyway. The actions of a monopoly.

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

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Re: I don't mind PDFs

To be fair, away from Geocities, web "applications" (static pages generated from dynamic data) - i.e., web1.0 - could at least express a reasonable amount of data

A suitably-crafted <table> attribute makes a reasonable on-screen simulacrum of a paper table, or a spreadsheet.

Nowadays you can fit about 6 rows on a HD screen.

Union meeting BT shareholders today to discuss strikes, pay rises

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Psychopathic

It takes a "special" kind of person to insist that there is no money for pay rises, after awarding themselves a 30% pay rise in the face of declining profits.

Blazing South Korean datacenter operator raided by cops, blames its own batteries

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International Cybercrime

It would be good if the Indian Government could have a look at the ongoing telephone frauds that emerge from the country.

How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling

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Re: The word "Math" is ...

But they are ripums! (c) Ave.

Amazon hit with $1bn claim that secretive Buy Box algorithm screws shoppers

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what about co-mingling

This is where multiple sellers for the same product have their stock put in the same bin. So if you pay extra to buy from the trustworthy seller, you may actually get the fake item from the scammer.