Posts by Francis Boyle

Get your cheap memory while growing stockpiles push prices low

Re: The image is a hard drive interface

Well, they did say "hard drive interface" which is what SATA is. I haven't bought a new SATA SSD in years.

California rolls closer to requiring drivers in driverless trucks

The impressive thing is that when it needs to be driven by a human that human is in Perth over a 1000km away. And it looks like we are going to get something similar here in Queensland. Maybe I could apply to be a driver on a work from home basis!

The future of digital healthcare could be a two-metre USB cable

Re: Webcam consultation?

Well we'll just have to give everyone Pantone books then.

I must

try this!

I had

my first remote consultation last week. Or rather I didn't. The doctor was using a private number and my provider blocks private numbers for obvious reasons. Doctors and technology – not quite there yet.

There will always be people

like this just as there will always be ones who could give the Back Knight a run for his money (well, a hop at least). The trick is discouraging the one lot while not scaring away the other and that's not easy.

Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

You mean

this one.

AI menaces superbug by identifying potent antibiotic

Two hours

Pah. I'm sure Spock could do it in one!

Virgin Galactic flies final test before opening for business

Sucking?

Are you sure you know how rockets work?

Microsoft has made Azure Linux generally available. Repeat, Azure Linux

I think

the Neuralink trials have started early. Big mistake liking a human brain to a machine running Widows though.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: Clothing corallary

Since most people eventually get to the point where they're unable to maintain body mass it's just a matter of waiting long enough and being optimistic.

What

sort of equipment can you power with doll's heads.

My variation

is ordering something on ebay you know you have but can't actually find. Sometimes does indeed turn up before the grey parcel arrives.

I got sick

of having to root around in boxes to find the right power supply (and having too many boxes in my small unit) so I bought a cheapish but pretty decent programmable power supply. It should serve me until the USB-PD thing is sorted out.

Russian businesses want to party like it's 1959 with 6-day workweek

Oddly enough

a lot of hard leftist still support Russia on the enemy of my enemy principle. I'm looking at you Chomsky.

I'm sure

Russian equipment being all equally good/shit works for the Ukrainians.

Intel mulls cutting ties to 16 and 32-bit support

Nonsense

Even a Lovecraftian horror has a certain elegance to it.

Nearly 1 in 5 academics admit close encounters of the anomalous kind

I've always wanted to do this

but I couldn't bring myself to do something that risky in Australia at any time.

First ever 64-bit version of Windows rediscovered … and a C compiler for it too

You really need

the image of the concrete block for the joke to be funny.

Microsoft and Helion's fusion deal has an alternative energy

I think

Ballmer was more interested in wind power.

Who loves programming robots? Who wishes it was easier? Here comes Flowstate

Re: Talk about burying the lede!

And if you cant read past two sentences to get to the gist you probably should stick to real red tops! /sarcasm

Seriously, it's what the Register does and that's becoming a rare commodity in the age of AI content mills.

Don't panic. Google offering scary .zip and .mov domains is not the end of the world

Re: pointless

I think you made a mistake there. In the immortal words of Elizabeth Montgomery, it's not about whether you're a witch but whether people think you are a witch* and people think .zyx is crap. Plus there is the fact that you can be screwed over at any time. I once had a .art domain which thankfully I didn't use for anything much. It was less than USD10 a year so why not? Except at some point those running the scam decided they wanted several hundred dollars per year. If I'd been using it seriously I would have been screwed.

*In a particularly crap episode of Bewitched that has stuck in my mind for that reason.

We regret to inform you Earth will not be destroyed by an asteroid within 1,000 years

What

someone's gone out and painted all the space rocks with Vantablack. Quick, someone tell Anish Kapoor.

Oh, wait it was Anish Kapoor. Cool artwork mate but I'd rather not be extincted.

What's

so bad about being drunk?

Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison – with a $500m bill

If she wants try giving Murdoch some grief

she might even have my support. You must choose your enemies carefully.

Large language models' surprise emergent behavior written off as 'a mirage'

Except Conan Doyle

was fooled by a rather attractive 19 year old woman. I don't think it was the first time something like that has happened.

Astronomers say they've seen the largest explosion yet – and we just had to talk to them

Well given they tend

to draw off a lot of matter before merging I suspect the correct expression is "suck each other off".

This is nothing compared

to the explosion we'll see when Trump finally melts dowm.

(I only wish I were joking.)

An unexpectedly fresh blast from the past, Freespire 9.5 has landed

No

I will not appreciate Freespire's ribbon-driven office suite.

ESA's Jupiter-bound Juice spacecraft has a sticky problem with its radar

What they need

is a miniature Canadarm with a camera. And a tiny hammer.

I'm not even joking.

Microsoft signs up to buy electricity produced by fusion, perhaps in 2028

Re: Any version of fusion works for me, as long as it works

There are a lot of startups these days trying to get fusion to work in as many different ways. I expect one of them at least to suceed.

Four out of five Uranus moons likely to have ocean under crust

Well

if I had Ariel and Miranda anywhere near my. . .

I think the typo thing

was patched in last Tuesday. Seriously, it's not like it would be hard to do.

Ten-day optical burst shows star eating giant planet, scientists say

Re: "click to enlarge"

I find that porn usually actually works.

NASA tests bot built to slither across, and beneath, alien worlds' ice

Looks

How shall I put this, phallic. I wonder how long before there's porn of this. Oh, wait! There already is, in Japan.

(Given that these prototypes all seem to be tethered, I'm forced assume that the production models will have two spheres at the rear. To house the batteries, of course.)

Open source AI makes modern PCs relevant, and subscriptions seem shabby

Re: costs

I have a local installation and the results are indeed disappointing though I'm not sure what I could do to improve them. The version I installed requires CUDA and since I only have an ancient Quadro card (because I'm not willing to give money to Nvidia these days) it's pretty slow. But the the main problem is that the images are just pretty naff and I'm not prepared to put in the time trying to make them better when I can produce better images using more traditional means. (If you can call Blender traditional). Maybe I'll give it a while and try again.

Re: Can't happen fast enough

I've finally got hold of a little board that can do Star Trek style voice recognition locally. It's not bad though it has it's limitations. If I had open source software that could run on my PC I suspect those limitations would be blown away.

India calls for all mobile phones to include FM radios

It's India

Indians don't accumulate drawers full of random junk. In rural India buying a phone is like buying a car in the western world.

(BTW, I didn't downvote you. I don't downvote people for expressing surprise.)

The Hubble Space Telescope is sinking! Two startups want to save it for free

"Leveraging Momentus's flight heritage with three orbital service vehicles on-orbit today and Astroscale's expertise in RPOD (rendezvous, proximity operations and docking), we found our product suites to be synergistic in support of a major NASA mission,"

If the service vehicle is going to be buzzword powered I think we're onto a winner here.

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

Re: "English has more words than any other language, , by a factor of two or three"

They used Wiktionary to determine the number of words in English. Not even wrong! Using a dictionary for this purpose shows that they have no idea what they are doing or even trying to do.

Say "Nee"

Never. Though I do like to say 'Ni' on the odd occasion. (Well, usually a very odd occasion, but that's just me.) Is this an American/British thing? Did Noah Webster dictate that Americans should write 'Nee'?

Here's what the US Army picked for soldier-worn tactical USB hubs

"exiting offer"

That's what you call having a bullet go through your skull while you were distracted by MS's latest exciting offer.

Apple finally pro giving Pro iPads these Pro apps

I'll

stick to DaVinci Resolve. Definitely pro – used to sell for something like $100K now free for the sort of people who might be thinking of forking out $4.99 a month for a video editor.

Universe-mapping Euclid satellite arrives in US ahead of July launch

I'll give nautical miles a pass. Like the Register sailors get to have their own units.

Handwritten Einstein essay on theory of relativity goes under the hammer

Old wounds, mate, old wounds

There is no (body). The body is an illusion. Why don't you understand this Register.

Like the Batman but he got the dayshift which just isn't a lucrative for a vigilante fighter of insane criminals (most loonies only come out at night except on the internet) hence the slow descent into irrelevancy and madness.

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

Re: ping

I have always thought of it as like trying to get Basil's Fawlty's attention by hitting the bell on the reception desk.

Of course Russia's ex-space boss doubts US set foot on the Moon

Re: Wikipedia

He may well just be a hack Putin appointee but my money's on troll.

Re: Whatever next?

Well, if Stalin haven't sent Korolev to a camp leading to his early death the Soviets might have beat the Americans to the Moon. Also relevant – Korolev was born in what is now Ukraine.

Hubble spots stellar midwife unit pumping out baby planets

Yes

Came here to point out that the headline writer obviously doesn't understand the whole "birth" thing.