Posts by balrog

Putin sends submarines to survey Britain's subsea cables. UK deploys Royal Navy, mobilizes parliamentary draftsmen

Re: Trembling

Putin has the biggest submarine fleet in the world don't you know?

Google engineer accused of turning Year in Search secrets into Polymarket payday

so making a million in a year is idiocy. But what is the ratio of idiots doing that to those bright enough to get a few thousands a year perhaps by making suggests to friends and family?

FAA grounds SpaceX’s Starship after another launch mishap

Re: Expected

Assuming this is a piss take out of Trump its bloody hilarious, subtle and actually significantly cleverer than the orange moron.

UK armed forces aims for secure comms via optical satellite links

Re: Secure optical data connection regrets?

And all things being equal the up will be less data sent in a burst. No reason why the reply couldn't be broadcast to the entire visible hemisphere in a continual stream, with garbage in there when not needed.

Plex appeal fades as Lifetime Pass jumps to $750

Exactly the same boat, started moving all my DVDs and BluRays onto spinning rust when the DVDs started to fail. It was all I wanted back in the day. No idea why they are trying to get in on the streaming thing, what do they offer that going direct to Netflix or Amazon doesnt deliver?

Database world trying to build natural language query systems again – this time with LLMs

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

Claude, please drop the data from May.......

Ahh little Johnny drop tables lives on.......

Forget call centers, local energy prices mean Britain's latest offshoring wave is AI projects

Re: Not just about marginal gas pricing

Our electric price is based off the cost of the most expensive unit I think? Truly only we could come up with that, and then a huge paper pushing bureaucracy and thus add more inefficiencies in!

AI is reshaping Britain's datacenter map away from London

Re: But how ?

Given a British child of 6 is more sarcastic (and possibly more worldly wise) than the average American I would suggest its the latter.

Iranian news service claims drone strikes on AWS were deliberate, to probe for US datacenter dependencies

Re: And the result Fars was?

This is an interesting sentiment that seems more and more popular. I imagine it will carry on expanding. Still if the (dunce) cap fits.....

Linus Torvalds keeps his ‘fingers and toes’ rule by decreeing next Linux will be version 7.0

Re: With 20 digits

A fact, which when pointed out to a supposed IT teacher by my daughter at school, was poo poo'ed. That the teacher was instantly proved wrong didn't help their mood. And we wonder why we lag behind other countries.......

On the plus side said daughter is heading for a decent degree in CS, iirc the IT teacher had a degree in geography maybe.

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

Concorde has, believe it not, the exact same failing that General Montgomery had. If only they had been American they would have been renowned.

It has been robbed for parts over the years though

Microsoft veteran explains the one weird trick that made Windows 95 restart faster

Of course pressing shift doesnt work. The instruction is clear, press the any key.

Spy turned startup CEO: 'The WannaCry of AI will happen'

Re: Understatement of all time

Perhaps we need to add a stupidity of the life vs level of tech expression to the Drake equation. It would explain a lot.

US freezes $42B trade pact with UK over digital tax row

You know they announced on the BBC that the entire country was bullshitting him on his state visit? We all agreed mums the word. It was literally the only thing everyone in the UK agreed on......

Re: You read his book?

You can learn as much from people who are wrong as people who are right.

The biggest difficulty is working out which is which.

Well I say that but in this case, not so much.

He has a simple modus operandi; demand something insanely unreasonable. Then choke it back a touch and declare yourself reasonable.

I read his book so you don't have to and it's all wrong. With the caveat I assume you want to make money compared to look like the biggest whatever it is he looks like......

From somebody who has made lots of deals in his life and makes sure everyone I make a deal with comes back asking for more. To quote somebody I make my money from repeat business. It aint sexy or hits high numbers upfront but glancing back I have made me and the people I deal with a lot of money over 40 years. And a minor plus is they dont think I am an orange bullying *choose preferred expletive here*

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

Re: Or...

you dont even need to risk heat, I can mill away plastic a few microns at a time with a relatively cheap cnc, to the point where the plastic is still intact but virtually transparent

Russian spy ship theories sink after Orkney blackout traced to wind farm fault

Re: Darkness

The Russians saying it was the Russians is the biggest factor to make it likely it was not the Russians. Unless the Russians want you to think it wasn't the Russians as it was the Russians and thus the Russians who blamed the Russians where double bluffing?

Brits to help foot power bill for datacenters under government AI plans

Re: UK Government Seriously Delusional

Batteries are a good way to save money for the moment. I'd put a short term payback in though, say 5 years? Do you think electricity will be discounted overnight when there are millions of TVs, including trucks, construction and farm plant, charging overnight?

Chip bans? LOL! Chinese web giant Tencent says it has enough GPUs for future AI model training

Re: The Chinese are devilishly cunning

I'd put it more like 'those who think for themselves are more likely to use the right tool for the job'. AI, properly trained, can be really useful. Trick is to avoid the hammer/every problem is a nail approach others have mentioned.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: hot plug

Exactly. Because a UK double socket is usually rated at delivering 16A and the ring it is on is often 32A. So the 13A max cable/device needs protection. These days though the MCB at the consumer unit will flip long before the fuse in a plug goes if there is a short to neutral. Or the RCD will trip if there is an earth leak. Or the RCBO if you are using them, as is sensible, these days. Which reminds me of a small gripe, earth being called earth where its actually better described as a neutral reference. It is the same wire into most houses these days......

A mutli tiered or onion approach to safety which some other countries are less enthused by....

Signalgate storm intensifies as journalist releases full secret Houthi airstrike chat

Re: They're already

As I am sure you are aware the first powered heavier than air flight occurred in Chard, Somerset. The original, and best, Somerset too. Where the cider and cheese comes from.

After three weeks of night shifts, very tired techie broke the UK’s phone network

Waynes 100 quid bung helped me pay that months payment on my JCB. Lost a nights sleep though.

Altnets told to stop digging and start stuffing fiber through abandoned pipes

Re: Asbestos

The other big issue is anything more than about 30 years old is only roughly located at best. Go back much further than that and its even worse.

UK government insiders say AI datacenters may be a pricey white elephant

This is also why they are giving the go ahead to Heathrow and Gatwick expansions. Its money spent (i'll not say invested on purpose) into the UK economy that costs government nothing. If the big tech companies want to build huge buildings then why stop them? At least thats the current governments thinking it seems to me

UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

Re: Which is exactly....

Actually both countries are doing something illegal, spying on Americans in the USA is illegal regardless of your nationality. The point is when caught the host country can hurrummpppphhh and garrummppphh expel somebody and the elected officials can pretend they are as clean as fresh snow.

Abandoned AWS S3 buckets can be reused in supply-chain attacks that would make SolarWinds look 'insignificant'

Re: Reverse Authentication

There are ways to do this already. The issue is not an Amazon one, its that people are not using the facilities there already.

Re: What!

I think its more how you set up your privileges when you build your S3, if you allow access to everyone with no security Amazon says if thats what you want. For some use cases that could be fine, say a document repository.

It may be lazy developers who point the 'update url' in their app to a named S3 instance much as they could to any domain name. Once the domain name has lapsed you can buy it and do much the same.

Singapore says Nvidia's astounding local sales don't mean it's the source of DeepSeek's GPUs

Re: Tesla FSD and bus lanes...

You haven't had it flag 110 as the limit yet? Watch that happen when it sees a 110KMh sticker on the back of some other vehicle.......

Apple and Meta trade barbs over interoperability requests

Meta are so dodgy they make Apple look good. Wow.

UK Royal Mint mining PCBs for precious metals in e-waste recovery effort

50 Million Tonnes?

Around one tonne per person? Seems unlikely

Boeing to reacquire spun-off supplier Spirit AeroSpace to shore up safety

Re: Lessons not learned

Correct but you just got the timescale wrong, the move on happened a few years ago. The art of fucking like this is to exit while you can smell of roses. I'd look at 'retirements' and those 'looking for future challenges' from 4 or 5 years ago if you really want the arch manipulators here.

The literal Rolls-Royce of EVs is recalled over fire risk

Re: 400 volts through the chassis

I think most EVs still have a 12v system, complete with canbus and maybe even a 12v lead acid battery, so that all the accessory items are off the peg bits from bosch! The high voltage DC supply will be separate with a positive and a neutral as this can not run in the same place as the 12v.. A three phase motor doesn't need a neutral, with three phase 'neutral' is the same as all phases connected (draw the phase diagram, add the amplitudes and watch them sum to zero, noodle fried yet?). So I can not see where either of the high voltages would be connected to the chassis but there is plenty of power in the 12v to start a fire.

Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight

Re: What is/was that saying?

BOEING; Bits Of Exit In Numerous Gardens??

Zuckerberg hunkers down in Hawaii to wait out apocalypse

What these type of people dont realise.......

....... is that even after some sort of apocalypse this sort of thing is staffed by locals. And locals loyalty is only available when they need you. So come apocalypse day whats to stop said locals booting Zuckerberg out on his arse to allow more space for their actual friends and family. Even those special 'security consultants' are going to be bright enough to see which way the wind is blowing.

Bezos might beat Musk to Mars as NASA recruits Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket

Re: Nothing much to be missed if lost.

Oh its way more likely to be an August than 2024.......

Apple lifts the sheet on a trio of 'scary fast' M3 SoCs built on a 3nm process

Re: We need a new metric

He doesn't use a M series mac in an office environment and thats obvious. We use Studios in our err studio. And we hammer photoshop so I whimpered and paid out for 64Gb when we refreshed. Anyway a while later I needed to hire a couple to cover some temps and could only lay hands on 16Gb minis on an M2. And they are plenty fast enough for what we do. Best we dont let the bean counters find that out. In the mean time I'd bought more macs always upping office users to 16Gb. The last couple I got with 8Gb and we find them perfectly fine for MS Office/FileMaker/general use. Modern apple hardware does have some issues, heat in the intels, somewhat mediocre build quality, poor port selection and lets not even mention the keyboards but the tightly integrated processor, memory and ssd is not one of them.

What did the VisiCalc fairy bring you for Spreadsheet Day?

Anybody ever use Keep It Simple Spreadsheet (KISS). I quite liked it as it used more structured table data where you would apply a formula in a flow chart type arrangement to generate a new table. Sounds clunky but I thought it elegant and possibly a step between a grid of boxes and a database.

Hell no, we won’t pay, says Microsoft as Uncle Sam sends $29B bill for back taxes

And before that refusing to pay those who stopped the pesky French invading them.

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

Re: Were there no signs indicating that the Bridge was out?

In the Uk I believe the highway code, and thus the law, says something along the lines of 'drive at such a speed you can stop in the space you know to be clear'. Obviously going on to state an exemption for all Audis.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Deere oh dear oh dear....

John Deere are the poster boy for the lease it and tie them in. And the most interesting development in that is a tractor company restarting production on a model explicitly allowing you to change and adapt their product. The question that raises is there a car market big enough for a similar swing?

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

This I very much doubt. If you can travel through space that sort of distance what do you get from Earth? There are limitless sources of resources open to that level of tech. Which leaves religious or ideological idiocy. I rather hope that was something we had monopolised.

China debuts bonkers hybrid electric trolley-truck

I can see this kind of thing working until batteries catch up with what we want. Charging on the go is a must though as fitting this wiring through junctions with lane changes is going to be impossible. Maybe it needs combining with 'teaming' vehicles so the maximum number of vehicles can be charged and moved at the same time.

Re: Nice until

Oh no, Germany are living off massively underpriced exports as the likes of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal hold the value of the Euro down. I mean it comes at the cost of the Greek youth but never mind.

Tesla eyes Nevada for Semi electric truck plant, battery factory

No trucker was involved in that design....

Suicide doors and a central driving position? Nobody who has ever hooked up a trailer is going to like that. Also the likely weight is not ideal in the UK, we could use it as a lot of our trucking is under max weight, but its a real big deal in the US where their max weight is way lower.

Just 22% of techies in UK aged 50 or older, says Chartered Institute for IT

Re: hmmmm

I resemble that remark

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Re: Tonight's Headline

Also 50% are only below average if you use the median, the more commonly used method, mean, has no such indication. I would suggest 90% of people are below average intelligence, one pointer being the inability to do basic maths

Russian 'Minecraft bomb plot' teen jailed for five years

Re: Guilty as charged

In 97 I was sacked (well bullied into resigning) by Kingston University for sharing that with a colleague I rather naively imagined a friend. Or at least friendly enough to scan through it and discard it as more of a liability to yourself than others.......

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the BBC stage a very British coup to rescue our data from Facebook and friends

Re: BBC

My tory friends say the BBC is lefty, my lefty friends say its tory. brexiters say its remainer, guess what the remainers say? I reckon as long as the BBC upsets everybody one way or another it could be doing worse.