Posts by PenfoldUK 29 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Sep 2015
... at least it's fairly reliable in an emergency.
I know at one place I worked at, a big office environment, the one fax machine that was installed became a lifeline whilst the building LAN was down.
Of course, totally impractical for today's pace of business, especially with job cuts. But a good back up none the less.
Especially if Putin uses Goldeneye on us...
I know it was probably done deliberately by Microsoft to push W11, but I didn't get the W10 ESU option until I followed some instructions on a YouTube video by a contributor who has subsequently had several such videos banned by YouTube under it's "illegal and dangerous items" terms.
Please note the video ONLY showed how to get ESU enrollment working as intended. NOT to enroll outside of Microsoft's stated terms.
A few years ago I did use Bing for certain searches, as it had some features that Google apparently didn't have. Or at least they weren't as obvious to access.
Then Microsoft removed those features and I haven't used Bing since.
Instead of trying to ape Google, why not innovate and offer stuff Google doesn't?
You've picked a good analogy there.
Whilst the top speeds of Ford's may not have increased recently, the engine and fuel efficiency has .
The 13th and 14th Gen Intel parts were like old "muscle" cars that had their engines so overturned and ramped they were literally damaging themselves beyond natural wear and tear.
Intel realised they had hit the limits and had to reset.
Whilst the 200S series may seen lacklustre, they are still good chips for most compute tasks. And form a solid base for the future.
You also have to remember that Intel also have to build experience with their new chiplet/tile designs. Much as AMD have had to with theirs.
It depends on how you define "stupid".
Yes, from a pure steps executes point of view it is wasteful. And must increase power consumption to a degree.
But can be incredibly useful to save a CPU sitting largely idle and save overall runtime. Especially if you write the code so that any rollbacks happen in a minority of cases.
Of course, the downside is when the implementation of the rollback isn't 100.00%, which has allowed a number of exploits in recent years. So you have to decide whether to have speculative execution switched on or not, depending on your use case and security concerns.
One thing that always puzzles me about graphics drivers is why they have to be updated so often, apparently even for individual games.
I can get with things like DLSS a game by game approach must taken. But driver updates seem to be required even when rendering natively.
Is this a case of newer games picking up bugs in existing drivers, so need updating?
Or are drivers bring altered to accommodate individual games, and if so why?
My personal take on Windows 11 was that it was launched to early in its development cycle. Giving it a reputation as a buggy mess that has never really gone away.
And I think they released it too early as Intel bounced them into it to make their new p and e cores work.
Of course the ridiculous hardware requirements, in the middle of a global economic downturn haven't helped either. I doubt most enterprises have reached return on investment for the kit they needed for Windows 10 yet.
There are a number of human rights concerns with client-side scanning.
Firstly once the software and hardware infrastucture is in place, there is little to stop it being used for other purposes.
Even with the stated aim of detecting child pornography, given how "advanced" auto scanning is I can see many people being incorrectly flagged. And with things like child pornography, even a totally false allegation can trash someone's reputation.
Finally, I have sincere doubts it's effective anyway. The paedophiles will just use obfuscation products to hide the photos and videos.
Standards is a two-way street.
Yes some standardisation is a good thing.
But if the standard is dodgy, like the PCI-SIG 12V power cable standard appeared to be, or you've got a faulty batch, you then don't have anything else to fall back on. And it might be months before a resupply mission can be launched.
As for rhe space suits. It's all relative risk. For a return journey they're there in case of cabin depressurisation or life support failure. Most other failures on reentry would be fatal space suits or not.
One of the reasons given for the movement towards chiplets(AMD) and tiles(Intel) is a combination of lower yields with monolithic chips and that certain parts of CPUs don't need the full-throttle approach.
Hence plans for the chiplets so that things can be mixed and matched.
With rumours that nVidia are sticking with monolithic GPU chips for it's forthcoming RTX40 series, will be interesting to see how the manufacturing costs v performance stack up for both approaches.
Having said that any new approach is likely to have some teething problems. So AMD may have to take a short-term hit in manufacturing costs to pull it off.
With Intel/nVidia power consumption, the KFC Console concept is becoming a reality.
Except in the data centres they'd be able to actually cook the chicken rather than just keep it hot.
Maybe it would be an idea to build fast food outlets into data centres, or vice versa.
Or build data centres next to housing developments so that the heat can be used to heat the homes cheaply.
Whilst I can see that the "suck it and see" approach to engineering may produce benefits with the development of new rocket technologies such as Falcon 9/Heavy and Starship, given the decades of data available for satellites of all sizes this seems more of a waste of money than a legitimate experiment.
I appreciate the delays in launching were not down to SpaceX (particularly that idiotic Cruise Ship), but launching when you've got a major storm warning seems overly risky. If not a fit of pique.
Given that SpaceX, Starlink and even Tesla are heavily associated with billionaire Elon Musk, I don't think it's sexist to refer to a man in this instance.
He doesn't strike me as the kind of man who'd ring back unless he's interested in you birthing his Imperial Progeny*
*Intentional reference to Ming the Merciless in the 1980's Flash Gordon film.
Could it be that some more right-wing people are more likely to tweet simplistic solutions to complex problems, that are themselves more likely to get re-tweeted?
For example, with the Covid-19 anti-vaxx rhetoric, in English-speaking circles at least this seems to be driven more by right-wing ideology than left.
Whereas people debunking the claims often have to post several tweets to explain their views. Which then are less likely to be retweeted.
What is more disturbing about this story is that if Twitter don't know why their algorithms are generating these results, maybe they should switch to code that identifies why certain tweets are promoted over others. Black Box processes have a tendency to give unintended results precisely because no one know how they are making the decisions.
Agreed. The car manufacturers are used to bullying their suppliers. And expecting them to respond at the drop of a hat. Chip making doesn't work like that.
So when the car makers told the fabs to go screw themselves at the start of the pandemic, the fabs took on more reliable and currently more lucrative customers.
Now the car manufacturers are bleating like toddlers who've been told their favourite sweets aren't available.
As a UK reader, this reminds me of my experiences with the Argos high street catalogue chain over the decades.
When it first came to my hometown, I was amazed at how high-tech and fast it was. The first time I bought something, it was ready waiting for me by the time I'd ordered and paid for it (separate transactions at two separate tills - those were the days).
Each time they brought a catalogue out, it was an exciting time. Seeing what new wonders they'd added. (No, I'm not being sarcastic, just nostalgic).
Then it got to the point where they reached saturation. Virtually everything they sell is just new iterations of the existing stuff. So the excitement of that new catalogue has gone...
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