Posts by yet_another_wumpus

Slower US F-35A purchases piles $27bn onto total fighter jet bill

"That acoustic data can be used to precisely locate the “Big Lizzy” while she is at sea and ultimately be used to launch torpedoes at her. "

What part of "targets" don't you understand? Perhaps "zielen"?

Wikibon drops bomb, says Intel's Optane could be a flop...tane

Re: "Nearly as good"

@TechnicalBen: "It's apples and oranges.

Xpoint is not an SSD, it's not RAM. It's inbetween. If the PC/system does not need it, it does not need it."

That's the catch. 3DNAND is killing it in storage, and the use of psuedoSLC is pretty much killing the "inbetween needs" as well. It would make all kinds of sense if 3dNAND was always "slow" (relative to xpoint).

@bldrco: "While 3DXP is more expensive than 3D NAND, it's an order of magnitude cheaper than the DRAM that it's actually aimed at replacing."

Really? Microcenter spammed me yesterday with a sale on xpoint: $80/32GB. Pcpartpicker show 32G for $209. So less than a factor of 3 (newegg had a similar price, amazon had 0 hits on "optane"). The big kicker is that they have to get the endurance up. Endurance is believed to be a few times higher than SLC, not nearly enough to replace DRAM.

If they get that endurance up, I suspect they can indeed replace DRAM. I also think that is what is holding up the DDR4-slot stuff. That and not providing *any* information to provide compatibility.

Tape lives! The tape archive bit bucket is becoming bottomless

It looks like the only non-datacenter customers of this stuff are going to be getting it from the amazon-glacier program. I'm curious if backblaze is willing to undercut amazon (and themselves) by going to tape (for slightly slower access to your backup).

'No decision' on Raytheon GPS landing system aboard Brit aircraft carriers

That's a bit extreme. A more likely issue is that even the Iranians have managed to hack/jam a GPS signal sufficiently to convince an American drone to land in Iran. GPS is handy, but you should never rely on it.

Stop trying to make The Machine happen, HPE. It's not going to happen

To be honest, the latest PR I've heard from people claiming to speak for HPE say it is all about having non-volitile memory. Presumably for non-HPE jobs this would be something cheaper than DRAM, but I'm sure it will be more expensive once somebody trots out the magic word "enterprise".

In this new form, it should basically be a drop in replacement for normal devices. Just less likely to suffer certain failures (assuming they use DRAM as a write-through cache). Expect things to be relatively simple until PHBs decide to remove code that can't fail due to the "machine's" new ideal memory.

Honda plant in Japan briefly stops making cars after fresh WannaCrypt outbreak

Re: The price you pay for using generic OS for industrial control

The other half is that they had real backups (presumably. Or it certainly would have taken more than 24 hours). Even then, 24 hours of downtime is bad enough that they would want to run something other than windows.

Varjo promises Oculus-killing VR/AR, but is it the next Magic Leap?

Right now, Occulus/Vive systems appear to be bringing even 1080ti GPUs to their knees, cranking up the resolution is only going to cause more problems. I'm guessing that "FOVE" trickery (cutting down processing outside the high resolution areas) is even more critical. If they can get the GPU to help out (probably some kind of double framebuffer: one imaged on a virtual sphere, and the second one computed line by line from that sphere (needing only trivial 3dFX level processing) onto the LCD/OLED device (preferably computing head movement line by line).

GPU manufacturers talk a good game about VR, but they don't seem to be including anything really critical. I'd wouldn't be surprised if a "pro-VR" system has to ship first with a GPU+VR-post processor to deal with such issues. That could easily price it out of Occulus/VIve [Lenovo?] competition.

On the other hand, not doing such will leave you with VGA/EGA/CGA of yesterday.

IBM will soon become sole gatekeepers to the realm of tape – report

Re: I miss tape for my PC

Zips were 100MB. I had 200MB in my laptop harddrive, so I bought the first one I saw. I then bought one for my father when his birthday/father's day/Christmas came around.

The 1G tape took a bit longer, and the CD-R obsoleted it faster than I expected. It also remains an example of "things I had linux drivers for but never windows drivers (the driver cost roughly as much as the tape drive)" [the counter example was my first DSL modem. And I really wanted that on my Linux box, windows just wasn't up to the internet back then].

Disney mulls Mickey Mouse magic material to thwart pirates' 3D scans

Re: Or alternatively....

This also works for those "counterfeit" aircraft parts that they are so worried about. Not that the original outsourcers couldn't make a bundle with unauthorized extras (and sending an aircraft to "disappear" into a chopshop would appear as all "official" parts).

Intel to Qualcomm and Microsoft: Nice x86 emulation you've got there, shame if it got sued into oblivion

Re: 40 year old tech....

17 (in August) year old tech from AMD publishing the 64 bit spec. No idea when AMD filed the patents (current US law is 20 years from filing), but they can't last much longer.

While "patent troll" might be specific to "non-practicing entities" "patent abuse" is certainly part and parcel of large tech firms. Other than the insanity of "shield patents" (good God, why should these be necessary), I can't see a company filing for a patent for a non-troll purpose.

'Do not tell Elon': Ex-SpaceX man claims firm cut corners on NASA part tests

A tale from the Enron days (but giant military-industrial complexes move slowly).

A captive subcontractor for Lockheed made its ethics program *very* clear. Lowly engineers will be told to produce or else, and treated accordingly. Don't expect an explicit "we expect you to forge documents", how to pass qualifications is up to you, but you might not get the schedule/budget to do it on the up and up. The entire program was made to shove the fall guy as far down the chain as possible. Finally: once you leave the program, the company might be interested in access cards and laptops you might have, but you *better* fork over that ethics handbook. They *really* didn't want that thing falling into the wrong hands.

Pass all complaints to the ethics officer. Whose only obvious qualification involved sleeping with the boss (married, but apparently they started during his previous marriage. Oh and she handled the security clearances as well).

(You can't) buy one now! The flying car makes its perennial return

It's an autogyro. You can get these things for about 1/10th the price the article asks, but they won't look as nice (but they *exist* as opposed to the vapor being sold).

They are slow and require runways, so it has all the problems of planes and "flying cars" added together, plus a much higher price tag (for the vapor in question). Safety should be a bit higher (thanks to the autogyro effect), but don't count on being able to choose a landing location in case of an emergency (you are pretty much coming right down, although probably slow enough to survive).

If it still sounds good, you might find an existing one (I think someplace in New Zealand has some in stock). Don't expect what you see in the 'Jetsons'.

Back to the Future 2: Gasp! America's trade watchdog discovers the risks of 'free' movies

Compared to the "real American" malware and rootkits you can get playing properly licensed Sony media.

AI gives porn peddlers a helping hand

"Anyone care to define "safe for viewing" for me, please? :-)"

Anything that shows something your boss won't admit he approves (at work).

(Not at work) anything saved in flash, avi (that can download drivers "for" you), or similar. Or just boot into Linux and don't worry.

Seagate plans to bring down the 16TB HAMR... soon(er)

I looked at HAMR and thought "wasn't that the tech that Steve Jobs was pushing on the NeXT optical drives? Then I realized just how useless a laser would be to writing 21st century (or even 1990s) hard drive densities. The real effect is pretty freaky.

Google teams with Iron Mountain for LTO-to-cloud migration

Any guesses if this makes more sense than Amazon for (excessive) individual use? Do they store your data on tape (like google stores theirs)? Does anybody else provide a "tape via cloud" service, preferably RAIDed across multiple geographic areas?

If you know what's good for you, your health data belongs in the cloud

And just how are you going to tell the difference between real medical analysis and an effort to sell you more viagra, oxycodin, or whatever drug has the highest markup? Americans unfortunate enough to be near a television will be getting inundated by drug pushers. Inboxes are either programmed to filter out such "help" or are useless due to the spam.

It should also be noted that in America, there is zero legal difference between someone other than your doctor recommending a real medical treatment and recommending a treatment entirely based on the profit returned to the company making the recomendation (this has additional ethical issues where the drug makers lobby the doctors directly).

Lets just say that in America (home of the world's most profitable health system) we won't notice a difference.

Russia poised to unleash 'Son of Satan' ICBM

Speed of missiles? Suborbital flights are typically set by how far they go. Note you *can* make the missile come down that much faster, but you equally warn the victim that much earlier that you are blowing a corner of his country off the map, so it is rarely done (and would typically require an equal boast about an ability to target areas even farther south than Texas).

I strongly suspect that the rest of the boast is equally absurd. Takeaway: Russia has missiles, just as they have since the mid-1950s. If the missiles launch, the USA and Russia will more or less cease to exist and the resulting economic and ecological damage will likely collapse the nations of anyone not already glowing. And "blowing up Texas"? Are they claiming to be able to launch (and MIRV) the "Tsar Bomba"? I think that even Pravda would have trouble with that one. Better cut off the propagandist's vodka supply.

Reagan's Star Wars ideas are even more futile than George Lucas's (although it might not be such a bad idea to circle North Korea with counter missiles that hit things on the way up. You just need agreements with China to cover the Northern boarder as well).

Spinning rust fans reckon we'll have 18TB disk drives in two years

Re: Wishful thinking ...

Wake me when these fancy systems cost less per TB than simple 1-4TB drives. It makes more sense to RAID up a bunch of wimpy consumer drives (at least for home use, is there a way to make the timeouts sane on zfs without using "red" drives?).

Zombie SCO rises from the grave again

Re: SCO is not paying is Lawyers

That's the rub. Best guess is that the owners of the lawsuit (SCO rump or whatever) will force Boies and Partners to cough up some money to settle (or at least drop the lawsuit). Presumably it is essentially a game of chicken between SCO rump and Boies, with the possibility of the Judge giving up on the whole thing and throwing everyone out (although I'm seeing issue in expecting Boies doing the work they contracted for. I really doubt you can sanction them for their *own* costs, which is what they deserve).

IBM has already won, and has everything it could ask for. The whole point is if SCO Rump can hustle anything out of Boies.

Fifth time's the charm as SpaceX pops satellite into orbit

Re: Missing the point...

Which leaves the question: what possible value is increasing public relations among those who watch the real-time launch/landing videos and could the benefits of such possibly cover the costs in fixing it?

My guess is UVA fanboys can't believe anybody could miss a chance to spend money.