Posts by x 7

Chinese company claims it's built batteries so dense they can power electric airplanes

Ideal for stealthy military drones

will massively cut the IR / thermal signatures of drone

and whose technology have they stolen to do it?

Microsoft mulls cheap PCs supported by ads, subs

Time for the cheap s*** to be cleared out

reminds me of that episode where Time Computers offered a free PC to anyone who took out a two-year subscription to Supanet, their in-house ISP.

In fact it was an attempt to get rid of their unsellable stocks of IBM / Cyrix 333 processors - remember those? The ones which actually ran a lot slower with funny jumper multipliers which made them overheat and crash.

Turned into a money black hole as they all had to be replaced by setups using AMD 475 processors and new motherboards

NASA details totally doable, not science fiction plan for sending Mars rocks to Earth

Eggs

Martian rocks contain rock snake eggs

We're doomed

Microsoft's Lennart Poettering proposes tightening up Linux boot process

How did.............

Can someone explain just how-the-**** one misguided fool became so important to Linux?

Who are the idiots who promoted him?

New measurement alert: Liz Truss inspires new Register standard

Horse feed

A "truss" is a unit of horse feed

Namely, how much hay you can pick up on the end of a pitchfork

If someone weaponizes our robots, we'll be really, really sad, says Boston Dynamics

Aren't there some laws built into robots to make them safe? Three from memory?

Google delays execution of doomed Chrome extensions

Will this affect chrome extensions running in Opera or Edge?

Japanese boffins build solar-powered, remote-controlled cyborg cockroach

Killer bees

So who will be the first to remotely control swarms of Africanised killer bees?

Would make a good anti-personnel battlefield weapon.

China can destroy US space assets, Space Force ops nominee warns

If earth's orbit becomes so full of junk that space flight becomes impossible, then good.

It will stop us from wrecking other worlds and planets

Google says some AI call center agents took the morning off

Time Computers used to work on a 70% staff loss rate in the call centre at Simsonstone

China's single aisle passenger jet – the C919 – likely to be certified next week

Chinese Airlines Always Crash

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAAC_Airlines

Rare hexagonal diamond formed by crash of dwarf planet and asteroid, scientists believe

So why is it named after an area of Lancashire?

Software fees to make up 10% of John Deere's revenues by 2030

China?

And how much does Deere buy from China?

Where do they source all that wireless and remote networking gear?

LockBit gang hit by DDoS attack after threatening to leak Entrust ransomware data

Did anyone proof-read this report?

NASA has MOXIE, but rivals reckon they can do better for oxygen on Mars

So how's it powered?

Google hit with lawsuit for dropping free Workspace apps

So what are the differences between Google Workspace and the free Google Apps that come with a Google e-mail account?

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

Considering that their exhaust catalyst business is about to go totally tits up (TTU), finding another entry into the vehicle market makes a lot of sense.

My guess though is it will only be cost effective for heavy / commercial vehicles i.e. trucks, vans, rail locomotives

China says it has photographed all of Mars from orbit

where are the rock snake photos?

If these photos are real, where are the rock snakes?

Weed dispensary software company's ambitions pruned after Spotify trademark clash

DOPIFY

Less than PEACH-y: UK's plant export IT system only works with Internet Explorer

Ask the NHS

Ask the NHS how many clinical software systems only work in IE (mainly with an outdated Java plugin)

You won't like the answer

RAF shoots down 'terrorist drone' over US-owned special ops base in Syria

Re: Brain processes of a commentard

"The RAF has scored its first air-to-air "kill" – where an aircraft downs an enemy aircraft – for almost 40 years..

"Forty years? but didn't they, during the Falkland's...""

Nope

The Fleet Air Arm scored all the air-to-air hits during the Falklands war, not the RAF.

Though you have to give the RAF credit - they strapped Sidewinders onto a Nimrod and went hunting for the Argentine 707 spy planes.

Swiss lab's rooftop demo shows sunlight and air can make fuel

So where is the hydrogen coming from?

You need a source of hydrogen - which means a fuel source to electrolyse water, or a methane feedstock.

But we can already catalyse methane directly to methanol, so what's the point?

This is nothing but an academic curiosity.

Re: Ethanol

"So efficiency wise, it's no better than growing Barley, fermenting it and then distilling it to produce the same methanol, without the expensive Cerium Oven and CO2/Water capture contraptions. And I'm quite sure the Barley method tastes better too."

Not if its making methanol..............

Ofcom announces plan to protect endangered species – the Great British phone box

Are the rare green painted ones at Abbotsbury and the London Embankment still there? Or did they get redwashed in the end?

Truck, sweet truck: Volvo's Chinese owner unveils methanol/electric truck with bathroom and kitchen

Re: Methanol as a store of energy for a fuel cell

Presumably methanol synthesised from methane

Not very green

Intel pays VIA $125m to acquire its x86 design talent

Cyrix?

Did Centaur include VIA's other CPU brand - Cyrix?

And what happened to S3 graphics? That was in the VIA mix somewhere

Ancient with a dash of modern: We joined the Royal Navy to find there's little new in naval navigation

Re: Question?

For some locations you'd use divers to survey the area

Arm teases its GPU that will follow next year's graphics processor tech

Re: Competition stifling

Could ARM buy nVidia?

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

Beadwindow

Beadwindow

Nearly 140 nations – from US and UK to EU, China and India – back 15% minimum corporate tax rate

Isle of Man, Channel Islands

I foresee a jurisdictional argument looming.

The UK is responsible for the foreign relations of the Isle of Man and channel Islands - so responsible for any tax treaties.

However the UK does not control the islands tax laws. We could be heading for a legal collision with the UK imposing laws on the islands, ending their tax haven status

State-sponsored Chinese crims targeted India with tax and COVID phishing

Time to impose a second "Great Firewall of China" - this time an external one blocking all external government / business / potentially criminal / suspect / banking traffic.

Isolate them

Competition watchdog? We've heard of it. But emergency comms firm still on track to Airwave hello to £1.2bn

Surely we could buy.......

an off-the-shelf 5G system from Huawei?

We might as well get something thst's modern technology and reliable

We're all at sea: Navigation Royal Navy style – with plenty of IT but no GPS

Re: But do you trust the technology?

My memory was faulty - the actual problem was if you go over 20 knots the radar reports distances at half their real value.

But do you trust the technology?

Anecdotal tale from a former Seacat Master.........

Apparently when those catamarans dropped below 10 knots, the navigation system started reporting radar echoes at twice the distance they really were.

Software coding issue which at the time (around ten years ago) hadn't been fixed.

Must have been disconcerting at night in a storm

Has anyone offered

to take you down to see the Golden Rivet?

Boffins say Martian colonists could pee in buckets, give blood if they want shelter

Re: Does the Churchill reference............

sorry that should read Pykrete

Does the Churchill reference............

mean someone has been reading about Pyecrete and Project Habakkuk???

equally impractical

So nice of China to put all of its network zero-day vulns in one giant database no one will think to break into

Easy way to

create a database of weaponised bugs for free.

This is a database of exploits to be used, not ones to prevent

OpenSearch, the AWS-sponsored Elasticsearch fork, reaches 1.0 milestone

Re: But what does it actually do?

Alta Vista's "Search My Computer" could do that twenty years ago...........

But what does it actually do?

But what does it actually do?

And how do I use it?

Hubble, Hubble, toil and trouble: NASA pores over moth-eaten manuals ahead of switch to backup hardware

Would......

closing and reopening all the windows work?

Hubble memory errors persist despite NASA booting long-idle backup payload computer

Faulty windows?

Or faulty mirrors\?

Stob treks back across the decades to review the greatest TV sci-fi in the light of recent experience

Is the governer

Mini Marcos or Imelda Marcos?

Perseverance Mars rover sets off on its first mission, to boldly drill and return samples as no rover has drilled before

Do you think they'll tell us when they find the Rock Snakes?

The "rock samples" are really baby rock snakes for use in military research.

Wyoming powers ahead with Bill Gates-backed sodium-cooled nuclear generation plant

Re: Easier

NaK

It needs careful handling, but a room-temperature liquid is always going to be safer than something you have to heat through several hundred degrees in the absence of oxygen or water.

I can remember talking to Callery Chemicals about it 30 years ago, and they had the safety aspects well sorted - it was used in several industrial processes. They were also supplying it for nuclear use at the time - but they wouldn't talk about that.

The Russians were touting it around at the same time - though we had extreme worries about using them as a source

Sodium vs Sodium-Potassium alloy

Surprised at the use of sodium in the primary cooling circuit. Sodium-potassium alloy is a better bet as its liquid at room temperature so easier to handle - and has been used in reactors before

FWIW Thunderbird 2 was said to use either liquid Na or NaK back in the 1960's - the liquid metal took the heat directly from the aircraft's nuclear reactor core and dumped into the ramjets (used for supercruise flight) that ran along the two sidestruts that held the front and back of the aircraft together.

Chemical rockets were used for launch until enough air was flowing through the ramjets.

Spent Chinese rocket stage set to make an uncontrolled return to Earth

Re: Hidden launch of a second payload

You misunderstand the scenario in the tale.

After release of the first satellite the booster continued to boost to a higher orbit, releasing the second military payload before tumbling back. The second payload isn't disguised as the rocket stage - that's just a diversion.

In both these recent episodes with the Long March 5, the problem has been with the booster continuing to burn after payload release - potentially allowing that second payload release

Re: China appears to do things a little differently.

That's because they don't give a shit about anyone else

Hidden launch of a second payload

I read a novel years ago (name and author forgotten) in which incidents like this were used as a cover by the Chinese for placing a secondary military payload into orbit. Easy way to place a satellite-killer, or a nuke into orbit with no-one realising

The Fast and the Curious: Safety-conscious Red Hat eyes continuously certified Linux platform for motors

National security worries

In ten years time when the whole western car fleet runs on Linux, it would be so easy for a foreign malefactor to disable the whole lot with one message via the inbuilt GSM. Would bring civilisation to its knees.

The Chinese right now are probably looking at how to weaponise car control systems.

Disable the west's phones, disable its transport - and they've won the war before it starts