Posts by bernmeister

Boffins warn that AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

Garbage everywhere.

AI is not just swamping science with garbage studies but it is filling the internet with with rubbish articles. Lots of repetition and no solid information are surely the hallmark of AI articles.

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

Re: There are three urgent priorities here.

Its back to the Magic Sate then. An all American invention. I am sure Trump would approve of it.

Boeing 787 radio software safety fix didn't work, says Qatar

Re: software in a radio ?

My thoughts as well. But these days the fad is that everything has to be done with software. No doubt the VHF receiver is based on SDR and the only traditional part of it is the final audio to the pilots ears. Am I being cynical? Perhaps others have more precise build information.

What to do once your Surface Hub v1 becomes an 84-inch, $22K paperweight

its not at the end of life.

Users can "disable the Surface Hub’s internal PC and use an external computer with their 84” or 55” Surface Hub". Thats from Microsoft. There are probably many ways of using this beast for serious applications.

European Gaia mapping satellite is retired but proves very tough to kill

Re: -.. --- -. .----. - / .--. .- -. .. -.-.

Dont forget to transmit the station ID, -.. . --. .- .. .-

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

RS232

Those were the days. If the mouse worked your RS232 port was OK. I kept an RS232 mouse handy just to test the port.

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

ignoranuses

The spelling may well have been deliberate. Think about it.

Dark mode might be burning more juice than you think

Re: My pet peve

Name them and shame them. Tried for ages to get Photoshop Elements 10 out of dark mode. It turned that was all it did.

How much is saved.

I have yet to see any analysis of the power saved by running dark screen with an OLED display. Interestingly, with dark screens text can easier to read by people with vision defects such as partial cataracts.

ESA's Integral gamma-ray gazer gasps its last

Long Life

Space craft exceeding their design life seems to be a thing. Voyager 1, OSCAR-7 to name a few.

Payday from hell as several British banks report major outages

Random

There are a lot of high street shops out of action today due to power outages, but next door is operating. Is this some hack into the power distrubution system. "Lets disable a phase and see what happens".

If you dip your toes into immersion cooling, watch out for dielectric liquid sharks

Brilliant Idea.

Dielectric cooling in its simplest form is just dumping all your heat producing electronics in a bath of dielectric fluid and circulating the boiled off vapour through a heat exchanger and returning it to the system.Thats where the simple bit stops. Amazingly many electronic components remain undamaged when immersed in hot dielectric fluid and function well. Its usually obvious what wont survive but you get the odd surprise. Modifying stuff to remove fans and heatsink paste is obvious but every now and then a component will crop up with a non-compatible encapsulation. Mainly capacitors. Helium filled sealed hard drives are OK but older types are a no go.

The red color of Mars might have an earlier, wetter origin

Earlier work

There is little new here. Previous studies have come up with similar ideas. https://doi.org/10.1002/2016JE005222. However, being subject to near vacuum for billions of years Martian Ferrihydrite (If any really exists on Mars),willl contain much less H2O than terrestrial Ferrihydrite.

UK government insiders say AI datacenters may be a pricey white elephant

Three Wrongs

"fusion can power our AI ambitions," the government said at the time." Three wrongs dont make a right. I am not a techno-skeptic but I dont think government, AI and fusion should all be in the same sentence.

US datacenters in for shock as Canada mulls cutting the juice over Trump tariffs

Not connected.

"The electrical power grid that powers Northern America is not a single grid, but is instead divided into multiple wide area synchronous grids."[Wikipedia) So they can do flexible things with their energy supplies. Is that good or bad?

Sri Lanka goes bananas after monkey unplugs nation

Fix it

Inthe UK we call them trainees.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Beware Bitlocker

Two times I have come across cases where people have got locked out with no access to a key due to not knowing bit locker was enabled and not being prepared with any recovery options.One user got locked out when he plugged in a USB memory stick. My advice was before you make any changes to your system check for bit locker and switch it off if present. Bit locker still makes me feel nervous. I hate it.

Real datacenter emissions are a dirty secret

CO2 is not the point.

CO2 is not the point. Its global warming that is the issue." If everyone achieved true "net zero" CO2 emissions, the world would not immediately cool down, but it would eventually stabilize at the current temperature and prevent further warming, as long as net-zero is maintained; however, it would take a very long time for the planet to significantly cool due to the long lifespan of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, meaning past emissions would still impact the climate for centuries to come." Google AI. Its too little too late guys. But dont give up. keep the band playing,rearrange the deck chairs and assure everybody that all is well.

Sorry, Elon, your Tesla roadster won't orbit for billions of years

Re: AU/Myr is a unit of speed

I have not checked out the points covered but I question the value of Ssx. The theoretical max speed of any object (including sheep) in a vacuum is close to the speed of light. Whether a sheep can muster the amount of energy needed to reach even 3.9537712e-10 Ssx is open to doubt.

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

Re: Just a thought

Just what my boss said, and he added,"for less money".

It's not just Big Tech: The UK's Online Safety Act applies across the board

I am all right jack

I suspect that small niche websites wont be affected by this. I run a small website dedicated to the modification of old radios. I have only received one comment and three views over the past few years. Its a free site and I dont look at it myself very often. I put it together as an experiment. The comment was "you dont seem to be very active".

UK government pledges law against sexually explicit deepfakes

So its legal right now

I had no idea it was legal, there shiuld be a law against it. The problem seems to be, exactly what is it.

Japan's wooden satellite exits International Space Station

Re: What happens when they collide ?

I should think Kyoto University already has a splinter group studying the problem.

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Many brains make light work

Now there is a thought. What would 1.5 GW worth of human brain power achieve if concentrated on one subject? It could be a bit like the Manhattan Project, Bletchley Park, etc on steroids.

Why fossil fuels?

I will answer that question. 2.2 GW generator gas turbines are probably the quickest and cheapest short term solution for that much power generation.They are not going to wait 10 years or more for their own nuclear plant. Profit talks louder than good intentions and hype.

When old Microsoft codenames crop up in curious places

No need for memory

General availability August 24, 1995. 95 means 95, try and remember when vista, win7 etc were released.

Google thinks the grid can't support AI, so it's spending on solar for future datacenters

A fair weather friend.

A bit short sighted. What happens when the sunlight is lost and wind speed drops? Germany already has this problem. Its called ‘Dunkelflaute’ . Google it and worry.

Amazon makes $500M bet on itty-bitty nuclear reactors to fuel cloud empire

They are missing the point.

The whole point of an SMR is mass production in a purpose built factory. Its all very well having half a dozen reactor designs but without the factory every one is just a hand built prototype. Nobody has yet built a production SMR., they are all lovingly hand built with each part carefully dimensioned and finished by hand as if a luxury motor car was being assembled. I can visualise the logos, "My second SMR is a Rolls-Royce". Dont get me wrong, the concept of mass produced SMRs is a lovely dream but I think it may remain that way for a lot longer than expected. The companies involved dont raise much confidence. Elon Musk companies, Ford and Hitachi, they would be the main runners, not obscure startups.

Post Office CEO tells inquiry: Leadership was in 'dream world' over Horizon scandal

Hide your head in the sand.

Post Office infallibity seems to be source of all of this trouble. If somebody gets enough power they can bluster and bully their own way irrespective of facts.

Raspberry Pi Pico 2 lands with (drum roll) RISC-V cores

Re: Still with the micro-USB that detaches from the board if you look at it the wrong way?

The USB-C port is a fully functioning USB OTG port but many USB A to C patch leads only have the 5V and GND connections wired in. If you just pick a lead out of your cables box you may well end up with a 5V and GND only lead. All those leads I thought were faulty and put to one side are now clearly labelled 5V ONLY.

Scientists demonstrate X-rays as a way to zap asteroids out of Earth's path

Loads of power

I was thinking perhaps we miss interpreted the article. A 15cm sphere would need close on double the power, no problem but a proper sized asteroid say 12 meters diameter would need 1000000 times more power than the largest pulsed power device in the world today. I am still checking the calculations to get the final laser link budget from the moons surface to an asteroid 250,000 km away. I think they are going to need some very very large capacitors to due this.Very large everything. Perhaps this is all just Pi in the sky.

Re: I though this was a solved problem

Only pseudo-random in a digital simulation. In real life there would be no precise pattern reapeats.

'Hyperscale customer' to take massive datacenter site near London

Lets think about this.

The output of a small modular nuclear power station is 300MW. Since almost all of the energy used by a data centre is eventualy lost as heat it would make sense to build somewhere closer to a power station and where the heat dissipated by the data centre could be reused. South Mimms does not seem to fit the bill. Just another nail in the coffin.

Inquiry hears UK government misled MPs over Post Office IT scandal

Re: at what point does....

At the same point as being economical with the truth.

BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe

Bitlocker is a pain.

Two times Bitlocker has me out. First time I did no know Bitlocker existed, changed drive parameters and lost it. Second time plugged in a USB drive and got locked out. My advice now to everybody is disable Bitlocker before you make any changes to your computer.

Windows Patch Tuesday update might send a user to the BitLocker recovery screen

Dont panic.

Luckily Bitlocker is not implemented on Windows 10 Home.

Tesla shareholders agree to pay Musk staggering sum of $48B

Re: He doesn't deserve the payment

22.6 olympic swimming pools full of cash is actually easier to visualise than $50 billion. To put this into context the wealth of an average US citizen would fit into a small suitcase.

Arm CEO warns AI's power appetite could devour 25% of US electricity by 2030

IIve cracked it!!

Use the heat from the AI servers to run heat engine grid generators and community heating. Not only will this reduce the server energy bills but it will balance out the extra consumption. There will still be losses due to system efficiences. Are these losses all of the 25% extra power consumption?

Who is designing these systems?

The extra electrical energy used by these systems is dissipated as heat. An obvious solution to the problem of high energy consumption is to use the heat to power things.that would otherwise be powered by the electrical energy used by AI systems. There will be losses but they cant be as bad as just releasing the energy into the environment.

Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check

Dissapointing.

One of the original attractions of SMR was the short build time. Why has it turned out they take so long to build?

Cybercriminals raid BBC pension database, steal records of over 25,000 people

Re: Names, national insurance numbers, dates of birth, sexes, and home addresses

Could have been even worser. Their gender and preferred gender.

What next?

What next? Personal and financial details of every person in the world hacked. A dystopian future. I claim the film rights.

Windows 11 24H2 might call time on that old NAS under the stairs

Stop sigh.

The only thing I have learnt from this article is that the UK traffic stop sign is eight sided.

Aghast iOS users report long-deleted photos back from the dead after update

Ironic.

You spend ages trying to resurrect a lost photo and two come along at the same time.

UK's National Cyber Security Centre entry code cracks up critics

Lets be sensible.

During meetings involving outside individuals there would be a need for visitors to have a secure local Wi-Fi connection which does not compromize the hosts security. How would the team suggest this is done?

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

Stupid

Stupid. Remove the punctation from the data base but retain it on the printed road signs. A bit of common sense, or is that asking too much from the council mind?

First 9front release of the year is called DO NOT INSTALL

They think they are funny.

Some IT guys just cant resist the odd.joke. One company I worked for had a software developer who delighted in adding cryptic comments into firmware upgrades. One example that caught me out was the screen text "Upgrade Completed" instead of the documented checksum.He thought it hilarious that I had to check w[th him to be sure that the upgrade was OK. His words were "Didnt you believe what you saw on the screen?"

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

Low charge rate and poor location.

Low charge rate and poor location make this idea a non starter. People will use it when it is free but not when they have to pay. But, here is a thing. The 240Vac supply is low capacity but there are a tremendous amount of copper pairs connected. Perhaps this is part of the undeclared "innovative technology"? Also utility companies seem to have carte blanche to installing stuff.

Ford in reverse gear over AM radio removal after Congress threatens action

Does it really happen.

In all these comments and discussions it has been assumed that AM reception in EVs is seriously degraded by inverter noise. No doubt it will be there but has anybody experienced this and how bad is it?

Plans to heat districts with datacenters may prove too hot to handle

Pipe Dream

Its just a pipe dream. A lot ot pipes and a lot of dreaming.