Posts by anonymous boring coward

AWS rakes in half a billion pounds from UK Home Office

Seems the HO is quite expensive, in comparison to a few asylum seekers in dinghies.

Europol shutters ransomware operation with kingpin arrests

Re: SAD!

Sarcasm?

Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

Couldn't care less.

UK throws millions at scheme to heat homes with waste energy from datacenters

Re: Assumptions

Warming space?

Checking date... no, not April 1st.

Well, it's a problem if you think it's ok to leave things on because they will heat up the house anyway. A monetary problem.

Re: are they heating the homes...

But his is on the motorway. Is yours?

Re: Assumptions

"If it was viable, there would be profit in it and the free market would have done it already."

Not quite true. The awful "socialist" Scandinavia has many publicly funded or backed things, and benefit from things like good public transport, and good housing.

UK has things like slum landlords. Very free market.

Re: Assumptions

If you have the water based distribution in place, you can always heat the water using any number of current technologies, including fire.

I don't remember the details, but getting from warm to boiling hot is not an easy process. -it will cost energy. Thermodynamics.

I didn't say any of that "aggressive" stuff, did I?

UK has plenty of old things, heaven knows. You prefer global warming and paying through your nose to doing something, even if the UPVC "sash window" is now a 3-glass look-alike?

Or would you prefer freezing?

Sure. but money needs to go into implementing it. Not just architects faffing around. That would delight the Tories, however.

"This weeks magic bullet to fix everything."

True that. UK's politicians are notoriously sh*t at maths. They can only do simple addition, and only if it's money coming their way.

Re: Another hare-brained idea

"Another hare-brained idea"

It's hare brained only because UK can't implement shit.

Scandinavians have this in many places.

Re: At the speed of government

"Now, 189 years later, the government finally take notice."

Correction: pretend to take notice.

Heat from electricity is about 5 times the price of heat from gas, so that's a problem.

Communal central heating is a common thing in Scandinavia.

But, of course, Scandinavians do actual planning, and proper engineering. Thinking ahead, and that kind of thing.

So nothing like UK.

The same money spent on subsidising new front doors, replacing useless windows, etc, would probably save much, much more energy.

And especially "listed" stuff like sash windows need to go. Can't keep looking backwards.

US Air Force wants to see some atomic motors for future spacecraft

"between six and 20 kW of electric capacity"

Don't be afraid to call it power when it is power.

Capacity would be units like kWh, mAh (smaller, for your battery cells), Farad, etc.

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

They can object all they want, but this seems to work fine on the Internet as it is today. Nothing they can do to stop it.

Meta, YouTube face criminal spying complaints in Ireland

WTG!

Microsoft: Iran's cybercrews got stuck into Israel days after Hamas attacked – not in tandem

Not sure why anyone would down vote a fact?

Re: they didn't appear to be acting with prior knowledge of Hamas's actions

Hamas is just a parasite. The killed the political opposition (literally), and set up a dictatorship. In no way have they benefitted the Palestinian cause. Read up, instead of extrapolating from beliefs.

Yes, and Iran is the actual force behind Hamas and Hezbolla. Hence my comment about the ludicrous claim.

"Iran's role in the Israel-Hamas war has been largely "reactive and opportunistic," says Microsoft,"

You may want to correct this nonsense...

Perhaps you meant "cyber war"?

NASA's Lucy probe scores a threefer as it flies by first target in 12-year mission

Are you sure they were shocked, and not just surprised?

Robot mistakes man for box of peppers, kills him

Human rights and safety (part and parcel of the same thinking) aren't top priorities in the "tiger economies".

Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB in a PC

Re: Symbian all over again

I had the N95, and it was lovely! Still miss it a bit. Used it for sat nav in the car too.

Re: They’re exceptional

"and to my surprise the basic 8GB model pretty much always flew along"

It's really, really fast at swapping to SSD. Unfortunately this will take its toll on the SSD eventually. Hence pay the $200 for 16GB. It pays back in the long run, not to mention second hand value.

Re: Insult to injury

Your local importer bought stolen stuff?

Or did I misinterpret that?

Re: Insult to injury

I'll inform my son that when he is downloading a 120GB game from Steam it is actually a really small thing, thanks to X86 compact instructions...

(Point being that there's tremendous amounts of stuff, even in RAM, that has little to do with instruction sets.)

Re: Nah

"Apple can't be arsed with the cost and effort of modifying their designs "

They just moved from Intel to M1, M2 and so on. With massive effort put into Rosetta 2.

Your description of laziness sounds a lot more like MS and Intel.

Re: Pointless penny-pinching

Yes, but can you blame them? Most average users are fine with the entry level products, and why destroy the upper end where you can make a bit more margin?

Just cough up the $200 and be done with it. It's expensive anyway, why cheap out on crippling the Mac?

16GB iPad? That would be the flash memory then. Nothing to do with RAM.

Re: Insult to injury

I think Mac introduced it in 2013. No surprise MS did so a few year later.

But yes, some Apple managerial types probably aren't up to speed on much.

Re: Symbian all over again

Agree with most of it, but Apple isn't peddling 2GB and 4Gb models. The entry level is 8GB. So pretty standard for decent laptops.

The M* line will get more RAM soon, for sure. It's just a bit more complicated than the separate RAM approach.

Re: 8GB? No thanks!

I suggest you check just what the heck your apps are up to...

Re: Twice as good

Hang on now.. This discussion is getting out of hand.

Many (most?) PC laptops come with 8GB as default too. And it's poverty spec on those too. But it works if you are an average user. Just like the Macbooks.

The "Pro" moniker is indeed a marketing strategy as well.

The Pro macbooks use active cooling (fan) so can theoretically run faster at high loads. My Air M1 is fast enough for me. I just wish it was 16GB, but on the second hand market the premium isn't just $200 -it's more like $400 because buyers were stupidly stingy when speccing their macbooks (so there are few 16GB models around, and even more so for the Air models).

Just one more thing..

Applications are very much to blame. Single web pages using 500MB+ for example.

My current instance of Excel with 3 tiny spreadsheets open, using 2GB of RAM! Never, ever releasing anything until you kill it dead.

Throwing more RAM at that sort of thing just makes developers even more lazy.

Re: I was gonna say...

So, get the 16GB version then...

What's the problem?

Pro users need to get the correct tool.

Re: I was gonna say...

I find that most pro mac users know all about needing RAM and buy accordingly.

Re: Insult to injury

It's probably the RAM compression they are thinking of. Well, that would be the explanation, anyway.

Re: Insult to injury

Mostly stolen ones.

I've bought many macbooks and ipads on auction, and never had an issue.

Re: Insult to injury

Second hand value is very good, as long as the machine doesn't die. I only buy second hand. An M1 Air is my newest machine.

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

"YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues"

Shocking revelation?

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: 2G is perfect for this

"The data rate of a channel depends on the bandwidth and the signal/noise ratio"

With no noise the data rate can be infinite. Of course, there's no such thing as "no noise".

Re: cost savings to households from knowing the amount of energy they are consuming

I’m not a poor beggar, but I certainly check my IHD, sometimes in horror as it indicates £10+ for a single day.

It’s good to know what’s going on.

Turn off reliable old systems that are still in use?

Makes so much sense.

Microsoft scratches Surface device policy – some get extensions of up to 6 years

"Just weeks later, Microsoft announced it was extending its spare parts program for Surface devices by providing replacement components via repairs site iFixit. "

iFixit had an April Fools article about Apple doing this, a couple of years ago.

Now, how "affordable" will those parts be? And why should iFixit have some kind of exclusive rights? (If that's indeed the case.)

Can open source be saved from the EU's Cyber Resilience Act?

Re: GB left the EU

"Sharply downhill" may be overstating it a bit?