Posts by AIBailey

Apple goes all in on AI acceleration with M5 MacBook, iPad, and Vision Pros

Re: Oh FFS

I couldn't tell whether that line was because the author is a Yank that doesn't understand how the English language works, or whether it's deliberate rage-bait.

Either way, have an upvote.

Why Windows 95 left a handy power saving feature on the cutting-room floor

Re: rain.exe

I remember rain.exe

If my memory still works correctly, because it was gobbling up the spare computing resource in W95 to chuck HLT instructions, it ironically caused the task manager to show 100% CPU usage.

RefreshOS 2.5: The Debian remix that borrows from every desk in the house

I feel obliged to post an obligatory XKCD... Standards

Trump stomps feet, pulls out 't-word' again over China rare earths ban

Hybrids - the worst of both worlds.

Additional weight compared to the equivalent ICE vehicle, resulting in a decrease in MPG fuel economy. Coupled with limited electrical range and the additional purchase cost.

Hanging up: AOL to pull the plug on its dial-up service after 36 years

Not in the UK.

I remember standing in a queue in an electrical retailer (Curry's, I think) about 25 years ago, and spotting a CD on a stand near the counter, that promised free dial-up internet for the one-off fee of purchasing the CD (which I think was around £20?). It seemed worth a punt.

The ISP in question was "LibertySurf", and the catch was that whilst the dial-up telephone number was a 0800 (free) number, you had to use their provided dialler, which would display an advertisement bar across the top of your browser.

However the program was easily removed, meaning no adverts, and free internet access really did mean free.

Flock storage: Audio boffin encodes data in a starling

As starlings are migratory...

... you're guaranteed off-site backups.

Though the latency for retrieval from an off-site starling backup could run into many months.

Trump can bluster and bluff all he wants, but iPhone manufacturing isn't coming to the US

Re: Not going to happen

They could even ship the completed PCB's, the case halves with the screen already installed, and the batteries as seperate parts, pay someone in the US minimum wage to snap it all together, and hey presto, you've earned an "Assembled in the USA" sticker. Everyone wins.

At least until you look behind the curtain and realise that the levers are still being pulled over in China.

Japan serves Google a cease and desist order over its Android bundling deals

Google unfairly blocked Yahoo! Japan...

The most astonishing thing I found about this whole article is the fact that Yahoo! still has a percentage of the market. I'd assumed they were at the point of being a rounding error on CFO spreadsheets these days.

Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

Does this mean that this particular install of Windows 11 will be devoid of all the additional AI functionality that has been creeping in to later updates?

I'm struggling to see any downside here......

I'm typing this response on a Windows 11 machine.

More specifically, a 2010 laptop powered by a *first* generation Intel i3 CPU.

So can definitely attest to the fact that Microsoft is lying to you about what hardware is actually capable of running W11.

BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows

BT Whatnow?

No idea what BT Fiber is. The BT website makes plenty of mention of Fibre though.

Just because the US decide to name or spell something one way, doesn't mean it's correct for the rest of the world. (See the Gulf Of Mexico etc.).

Anyway, get of my lawn.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: Please stop old-bashing

Not really.

SOME people now in their 70s and 80s literally invented computers and computing.

Also, people forget things and technology moves on.

Both my parents are in their 80s. My father is a retired chemistry and physics teacher. He used to bring computers home over the holiday period, and so my first introduction to computing was using a RM380 Z, a TRS-80, a Video Genie and a BBC. He taught me to build my first PC, and is still a clever fellow.

However nowadays he's flummoxed by a lot of tech, can't really get the hang of a mobile phone and considers networking to be a black art.

And my mum, while having more success with her phone, can only use a PC if she's following a list of instructions (click here, press this button, chose this menu etc.)

So I'm unclear what your point is, especially why you think the previous comment is any way a generalisation of all elderly people. Unless you're specifically looking to create something to be offended at?

Celebrating when EVs went to the Moon with a Lego Lunar Roving Vehicle build

Re: "We asked Lego why it did not create a custom part for the dish"

I miss the days when Technic Lego (and the other ranges) worked their wizardry with a comparatively limited stock of infinitely-repurposeable standard parts.

I completely agree. I had the car chassis kit myself, and was always impressed by the fact that the "spark plugs" were actually repurposed taps from Lego kits that featured kitchens!

The horror that is VHS revived for horror movie release

Betamax was the better format, assuming you were happy with a tape that could only record for an hour, until the Beta I recording mode was dropped.

The vast majority of Beta machines supported only Beta II and Beta III, which were close enough to VHS quality.

The long held myth that Beta was vastly superior to VHS is based on the original technical specifications. The visual advantage that original Beta spec offered came at the price of short recording time. Once Sony moved to the slower tape speed of Beta II (and removed the function to record in Beta I from their machines), that visual advantage was lost.

It seems clear that 99% of the people that go on about how much better Beta was, haven't actually used one.

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

Quickest fix : in the late 90's I was asked to go and look at the laptop of one of our MD's. He'd been in Hong Kong for the past week (on work) and hadn't been able to get any sound from his (Windows 98) laptop for the whole time. This was, of course, urgent.

I won't spoil the story by telling you how I fixed it, though will point out that the laptop in question was (IIRC) a Toshiba Satellite Pro 440. And I'll also point out that on the front edge of said Satellite Pro 400's was a thumbwheel to control the volume.

Putin really wants Trump back in the White House

Re: Eric Hoffer had Donald Trump COMPLETELY figured out YEARS AGO---

During Obama's 8 year span, the US military dropped just over 92000 bombs, an average of 11500 per year. In 4 years of Trump rule, the US dropped almost 75000, an average of about 18750 per year.

But please, remind us about how "Trump = peace"?

UK Royal Mint mining PCBs for precious metals in e-waste recovery effort

Re: 50 Million Tonnes?

There's definitely something wrong in that calculation.

A quick Google (other search engines are available) suggests that the global figure was 62 million tonnes in 2022

Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery

This is nothing new!

El Reg have been reporting on the quality of water for years.... spunk

Rice isn't nice for drying your iPhone, according to Apple

I've often pondered the best way to use rice to dry out tech. I think it's fine as long as you put the device in something like the end of a pair of tights. That should still let the moisture escape, but forms an effective barrier against particles getting in.

OpenAI tries to trademark 'GPT'. US patent office says nope

Re: GPT?

Ex-GPT graduate here. I think the business fragmented - the area I was in became Marconi Communications, then Marconi, before splitting again, with half going to Ericsson, and the other helf re-emerging as telent (who are still going strong).

Blue Origin pulls sheets off cargo lunar lander prototype

BO have to focus on the "easy" wins, like perhaps getting someting into orbit instead of just firing things upwards. Then they can think about shooting for the moon (literally)

Less of a cult, more of a bar.

And yes, it has a theme... Blue Oyster Bar

Tesla knew Autopilot weakness killed a driver – and didn't fix it, engineers claim

Re: "Autopilot"

(taken from Ask The Pilot)

And what do terms like “automatic” and “autopilot” mean anyway? Contrary to what people are led to believe, flying remains very hands-on operation, with tremendous amounts of input from the crew. Our hands might not be steering the airplane directly, as would have been the case in the 1930s, but almost everything the airplane does is commanded, one way or the other, by the pilots. The automation only does what we tell it to do.

...

People would be surprised at how busy a cockpit can become, on even the most routine flight, and with all of the automation running. Tasks ebb and flow, and granted there are stretches of low workload during which, to the nonpilot observer, it would seem that very little requires the crew’s attention. But there also are periods of very high workload, to the point where both pilots can become task-saturated.

...

Fewer than one percent of landings are performed automatically, and the fine print of setting up and managing one of these landings is something I could spend pages trying to explain. If it were as easy as pressing a button, I wouldn’t need to practice them every year in the simulator or review those highlighted tabs in my manuals. In a lot of respects, automatic landings are more work-intensive than those performed by hand.

And if you’re wondering: a full 100 percent of takeoffs are manual. There is no such thing as an automatic takeoff anywhere in commercial aviation.

Plenty of people simply have no idea of what "autopilot" really means.

Missing Titan sub likely destroyed in implosion, no survivors

Re: "These men were true explorers "

"True explorers"?

No.

They were tourists paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get some photographs of a mass grave.

Whilst it's a terrible way to go, let's not make them out to be heroes.

Can noise-cancelling buds beat headphones? We spent 20 hours flying to find out

Re: Aeropex works great for outside

Have an upvote for Gamma Ray.

Microsoft appeals UK's block on Activision deal

I still don't understand why the UK objecting to a merger of two US companies has any relevance at all.

Surely as long as the US is okay with is, they can go ahead anyway?

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Re: Better than a PM

Then came the day he must have restarted it & it was no longer on the network - Three years later, when I left with still no clue as to it's location, or indeed how the union rep got his very important files off the locked down NT4 machine with no USB access.

From some of the experiences that I had doing IT support, there would still be a few ways of getting data off that machine.

Depending on the configuration, there could be a SCSI card in there, so an external CD burner or Zip drive could be an option. There may even have been an internal CD burner, or he could have used a parallel port Zip drive.

Hell, even good old floppies were still viable in the days of NT4. Even dozens of word documents could fit on a handful of disks.

Microsoft cries foul over UK gaming deal blocker but it's hard to feel sorry for them

Sorry if I'm playing the Idiot card here, but as this is fundamentally one US company buying another US company, how does the UK CMA have any control over whether or not this happens?

Adidas grapples with $1.3B in unsold Yeezy sneakers after breaking up with Kanye West

Well if you spent money on something that hideous, you'd certainly be taking the piss.

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

Re: This sounds familiar....

At least it proves that the Regomizer is working.

Re: South don't work in the North

Is this really a thing?

Surely even rotating a CRT (e.g. so the screen is facing east instead of west) would then affect the influence of the magnetic field of the Earth?

A tip for content filter evaluators: erase the list of sites you tested, don't share them on 100 PCs

If you worked in an IT department of any decent size, you'd probably be using a Windows 95 volume licencing disc - no licence key needed. I remember we used to get regular deliveries from Microsoft, dozens of disks in burgundy sleeves, with everything from the current OS installers (95, 98, NT and XP etc) and the Office suites.

Also, from memory, Windows 95's idea of multiple user accounts on the same machine was pointless, as hitting escape on the sign-in screen would just take you straight in anyway.

The new GPU world order is beginning to take shape

Re: Hah

I used PoV (Persistence of Vision) on my Atari ST to render an example file as a 640x480 background image for my dad to use on his PC.

It took all night and much of the following morning, but I was rewarded with a ~900KB file on my hard drive.

Unfortunately, the file was too large to fit on a floppy disk, and also too big to zip down (not enough memory on my 1MB ST once GEM and a zip program were loaded) so I've no idea what it eventually looked like...

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

Re: We are in the wrong business...

I regularly get adverts for "audiophile mains leads" pupping up on Facebook.

I haven't bothered to click the "stop showing me this advert" option because some of the comments from folk that believe the nonsense are the most amusing part of my week.

Re: Digital transmission?

I came here to recommend the same videos. They appear a little dry in places, but are extremely informative (and disprove a lot of the misunderstanding in the comments here).

Microsoft: You own the best software keyboard there is. Please let us buy it

I'm probably the only one here...

...but I'd actually like to see a decent, no-frills reliable T9 keyboard for Android.

My fat thumbs mean that I definitely rely a lot on auto correction and word prediction, but the muscle memory that I built up working my way through the ranks of early non-smart phones means that a T9 keyboard is still probably the fastest way for me to write a message.

Russia mulls making software piracy legal and patent licensing compulsory

Re: re: countries that haven't ventured an opinion on the invasion and shelling of civilians

...given three NATO members already share a border with Russia.

There are actually five countries. Which kind of undermines the whole "not wanting NATO on the border" argument.

God of War: How do you improve on perfection? You port it to PC, obviously

Xbox 360 used an AMD GPU.

You might be thinking of the original Xbox, that was an Intel CPU and NVidia GPU.

Google: We disagree with Sonos patent ruling so much, we've changed our code to avoid infringement

Re: This is a company who developed a technique of syncing speaker volumes across a wireless network

...and this is a perfect demonstration of just how stupid the patent system is, especially in the US.*

Remember when patents used to be to protect ideas that were genuinely interesting, innovative or simply completely unlike anything that had gone before.

I don't have any particular opinion on either Sonos or Google in this instance, but the fact that someone can patent changing volumes across multiple devices is nonsense.

* - Other countries may have equally daft patent systems, I genuinely don't know.

BOFH: The vengeance bus is coming, and everybody's jumping. An Xmas bonus hits me…

Excellent

All that's missing are the Eastenders' "doof-doof's"

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me... a coding puzzle and it's a doozy

When all you have is a hammer...

...every problem looks like a nail.

Considering I've solved day one on a works PC, where it's pretty locked down, the only hammer I have is VBA in Excel.

Still, it got the job done.

Icon, because that's how it feels when your computer is locked down.

Want to feel old? Aussie cyclist draws Nirvana baby in Strava on streets of Adelaide because Nevermind is 30

Cobblers!

He's been dining out on his fame for years, reproducing the album cover on several occasions as he's grown up.

And let's face it, if he stopped "outing" himself, not a single person other than his parents would actually know it was him.

Sir Clive Sinclair: Personal computing pioneer missed out on being Britain's Steve Jobs

You're right. In the very early 80's, the issue facing computing wasn't so much size as cost.

By the time the Spectrum launched, the Atari 8-bit line had been around for 2.5 years, the TRS-80 Color Computer for 18 months, the VIC-20 for a year or so, and other too.

All of those offered colour graphics, some quite limited, but in the case of the Atari, the palette went up to 256 colours, They also offered multiple sound channels.

On paper, they all blew the ZX80/81 away, and should have been significant rivals to the Spectrum. Some (especially the Atari) were theoretically in a different league altogether.

But the issue they had was cost. All of the competitors represented a massive outlay, whereas the Spectrum, whilst not exactly launching at pocket money prices, was something that could be put on a Christmas list.

This was Clive's expertise. He never strived to make the best systems full stop, but he did know how to make a good system on a budget.

Blue Origin sues NASA for awarding SpaceX $3bn contract to land next American boots on the Moon

...a tourist shuttle which can only get half way to the ISS

Not even that.

NS-16 reached an altitude of just over 65 miles, a quarter of the 260-ish miles needed to reach the ISS.

Crucially, however, the maximum velocity that New Shepherd reached whilst on that jaunt was around 2200 miles per hour, far short of the ~17,000 miles per hour needed to attain orbit.

Granted, BO are taking incremental steps towards full orbital space flight, but when you consider that back in the early 1960's NASA was flying the X-15 faster and higher than Bezos has been, and the fact that SpaceX have already demonstrated they have the speed and the altitude to do "real space" rather than just pretending, the gulf between Blue Origin and SpaceX becomes vast.

Hmm.

SpaceX : Regular launches, placing satellites into LEO, launched an object into heliocentric orbit, ferrying astronauts to the ISS, safe return to earth of said astronauts.

Blue Origin : Single launch on ballistic trajectory, just cleared the Karman Line, total flight time of just over 10 minutes, of which I guess 1 minute of that was technically "in space".

Whilst neither company have experience of lunar missions, one has a proven record of putting "things" into space (both human and mechanical), the other is just a jumped up fairground ride.

It's no surprise where NASA felt more comfortable putting their money, regardless of the differing bid prices.

Sadly, it's also no surprise that the loser reaches first for their cheque book, then when that's rebuffed, they reach for their lawyers.

Bezos offers to knock $2bn off his bill to NASA to stay in the running for Moon contract

So NASA...

... awarded the contract to the company with a proven track record of launches and recovery into LEO and beyond, vs a company that's not actually put anything into orbit yet and has only recently demonstrated a glorified fairground ride with a ballistic trajectory?

Shocking.

Google wants to look like it cares about your privacy with Android 12 Beta 2, but note that's not how Google works

Re: Location Services

As I sit here listening to music on Bluetooth headphones, with location services switched off, I must admit I'm confused by your comment.

Remember Anonymous? It/they might be back, and it/they are angry with Elon Musk

Musk is a "...narcissistic rich dude who is desperate for attention."

We didn't need Anonymous (or a variant of) to tell us that.

Visual Basic 6 returns: You've been a good developer all year. You have social distanced, you have helped your mom. Here's your reward

VB6 was the only programming tool I had to hand many years ago, when I found, abandoned in the corner of one of out IT store rooms, a receiver to pick up the time signal transmitted from Rugby. It was unused simply because it only had a support driver for Netware, and we already had time sync on the Netware network provided from another source. I think there was a Windows driver available, but at a fairly hefty cost.

The instruction manual included details of the protocol it used, and so using VB6 I knocked together a program to read the stream from the serial port and set the system time on a Windows NT Lotus Notes admin server at regular intervals (I can't remember if it was overnight or weekly), meaning that our email system got proper synchronisation*

VB might not have been a great system, and my program was a bit of a cludge, I guess, but it worked.

* - I should say "mostly proper synchronisation", as despite the fact that there were CRC checks in order to ensure that the time signal was correct, I arrived to work one morning to find people were complaining that many of their emails he become unread, and new emails were appearing out of sequence. I assume that in some circumstances it was possible that the signal noise to occasionally flip enough bits so that the time signal and CRC value were both wrong but matching, and the server date and time had changed to something several years earlier. I fixed this by requiring the program to validate three successive time messages before making any clock changes.

Quality control, Soviet style: Here's another fine message you've gotten me into

Re: Such value for money

My first car was a Lada Niva (the 4x4) that was handed down from my Dad.

It was almost bulletproof - it once went through a stone wall in Derbyshire without so much as a scratch, and always started straight away on even the coldest morning.

The thing that always amused me most was that, should the starter motor ever fail, there was a hole in the front bumper to allow the use of a starting handle.