Posts by frankvw

Retired man turns spare room into Soviet-era supercomputer

A warm and cozy computer room

I can relate to this, and not just in terms of temperature. I remember building my first tube rig Way Back When. I'd been mucking about with them newfangled transistors and they worked, but when I built a simple AM radio with an ECL82 and first powered it up, the glow of the filaments inside the glass tube somehow seemed more... alive to me than semiconductors. Call me silly if you will (and I suspect you will) but there's something about tubes that transistors and chips can never achieve, and "warm and cozy" is as good a term as any.

Now please excuse my while I go get my cup of tea and listen to The Archers.

Hugging Face is too important to fall into Nvidia's hands

Re: It's the Hardware

"If you want to host them yourself you just need to fork them...."

That's exactly what happened. We're all being royally forked here.

Unsafe at any speed: AI optimists are turning cautious as safety concerns mount

If this is true, we're f***ed

So the gist of it is that that AI-pocalypse is upon us, and that the only thing that can save the world is... good governance from wise leaders.

* Cough *

German-Japanese researchers invent electricity-free tech that could cool datacenters

Re: where?

Indeed. We have known this for some time. As Larry Niven pointed out in 1970 in his SF novel Ringworld:

""Heat is produced as a waste product of civilization. ... Most kinds of cooling systems only pump heat around, and produce more heat for power. ... Do you understand, then, that the heat of our civilization was making our world uninhabitable?"

Debian votes to let contributors code with AI

Luddites...

I have always found the Deb devs to be a sensible bunch. Following this decision, I still do. Why? Because I often disagree vehemently with Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, but sometimes he is entirely correct.

Re: I'm Questioning 'the Six Hundred'

Perhaps the rejected votes were suspected as coming from an AI...

Researcher shows how Claude Code can be tricked simply by asking it to summarize a website

Well, duh.

"The key takeaway ... is to run this and other coding agents in a sandbox ... Do not trust the model output."

You don't say. Did we really have to be told this?

FFS, AI output is unvetted third party code. Like what you find in an unsolicited email that says "This is cool, click here!" Fine, use it if you want, that's your choice, but at the very least scrutinize it properly before trusting it.

BOFH: Schrödinger's petty cash puts us in a very awkward superposition

Re: Quantum cash theory ...

And he's the origin of "...the sort that will be first up against the wall when the AI revolution comes (in a couple of weeks)". Second paragrah only and it's already priceless. Simon, have one on me! ---->

Google forces Android apps to use memory more wisely as RAMpocalypse rages

I feel old when I remember the time when designing your programs to save RAM was the norm. A ZX81 with 1k RAM, anyone? Doing things like XOR AX, AX instead of LD AX,0 to save a byte of RAM was what you did back then. Now you can't boot Windows in less than 4GB, but if you want it to do anything useful you need twice that. Kids these days...

Smart glasses are only smart if we train them to be good. Then they'll be fantastic

Re: This "could" work

"...an ethical company..."

A what?

China calls off ambitious ice-hunting moonshot a day before flight

I know I will get downvoted for this...

...but whenever SpaceX postpones a launch for one or two days, the El Reg commentariat explodes with mockery, scorn and derision in under ten minutes. But now Xi Jinping scrubs a major next phase in the Chinese space program for at least the rest of the year, and five hours in, there's just one single comment that mentions none of that.

Interesting.

Ancient ‘Who owns Linux?’ case now has one foot very deep in the grave

Re: "attorney fees are huge and dwarf what you could have settled for"

"Yeah, but if you settle, you're a pushover and inviting more lawsuits in the future."

It's worse than that. A settlement is generally perceived as an admission of guilt by the defending party. So the cost of reputation damage can easily exceed the cost of fighting it out in court.

Expired credit cards revived by researchers to make unauthorized payments

Re: "Let the dumpster dive for discarded cards begin"

"These can be had for £7.99 on Amazon..."

Or even less if you use someone else's revived old credit card. Just sayin'...

More than half of Americans now view AI negatively

Re: "a court has ruled that it is illegal to replace human workers with AI"

BFD.

It is still NOT illegal to outsource work from in-house to an external third party, if said third party can do it much cheaper. And if that low, low price is the result of their use of AI, then well, hey, what ya gonna do?

The risk isn't the bubble bursting. The risk lies in the fact that the entire US economy is a disaster waiting to happen no matter what, as a result of lack of proper governance which, in turn, is the result of a lack of Actual Intelligence™ in too many areas of both government and society.

In other words, the AI bubble (and other ridiculous over-valuations) are not the problem; they are a symptom of a much bigger underlying problem.

And not the only one, either, if Agent Orange is anything to go by. If anything, the Mango Moron has brought to light how badly the entire world has let itself become dependent on the US. Now let's just hope this wake-up call will be taken seriously. If not, the AI bubble popping will simply have to educate us all further.

NASA estimates the size of the hole SpaceX made in the moon

"Will there be cake?"

Just space cake, I'm afraid...

Almost nobody pays attention to web standards anymore

This is news????

Sorry, but I don't understand why this would surprise anyone. HTML violations (and worse) have been rampant since before the start of the browser wars. For the past three decades the vast majority of websites has included malformed HTML. It's just been the degree that varies.

And don't even get me started on broken JS that lingers for years, invisible except for the errors that are only visibible on close under-the-bonnet inspection, or on CSS rules that are either broken or rendered inactive and therefore useless other than as an impediment to trouble shooting.

The code making up the average website is often little more than a digital rubbish dump.

Google buys crashed airline Spirit’s data at auction, because AI

There's nothing new under the sun

This reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon (from the 1990s if memory serves) in which Wally creates the new air traffic control system by reusing old payroll system code, and then advises his cow-orkers "Don't fly on pay day."

In other words, reused data is only as good as it was in the first place, so I wouldn't train an AI on data from a company that failed for a reason. But that's just me.

Lego's supersized Hubble deserves a little more shine

Re: 18+ Lego kits

Funnily enough my wife came across her Playmobil set from when she was in primary school (we're both in our late 50s now). We discovered those figurines are actually capable of a lot of positions and combinations that we're fairly sure the manufacturer originally didn't have in minde (and on which I need not elaborate, I'm sure).

Re: Fuck that

"I’m turning it into a submarine. That can fly. And go into space."

Funny you should say that. I was about to unleash my inner old grumpy stick-in-the-mud persona write a post on how Lego used to be just a box of bricks that you could use to build anything you liked, using just your imagination (and whatever colours of bricks you had left in the box, which meant that anything could have any combination of any number of colours, and nobody worried about gray).

I feel that Lego has lost that. Today it's a matter of spending lots of money on a kit that you can then assemble to make one object and not much else. I honestly believe that replacing creativity replaced with assembly and collection-building is a shame.

And yes, I get it, the market has changed, and when I were a lad we never had any Lego and we had to make our own out of rocks and twigs and all that, but still.

Virgin Galactic flights stay paused while ticket prices head for the Moon

Re: a virgin never goes all the way

That's alright. Bezos' flying dildo doesn't penetrate space very deeply either.

Give Google the boot by building your own search engine

Re: But why do you need a search engine?

You need your own search engine because you need search results that are tailored to your needs, or at least to your search requests, rather than to whatever it is that improves someone else's bottom line and data-gathering habits. (Yes, Google and MICROS~1, I'm obviously looking at you and your ilk.)

BOFH: How our Covid ransomware protocol's Y2K blockchain lowered uptime

Gigafloptule

My new favourite BS baffles brains Management Presentation term!

Floptule, n:

The number of flopped projects decided on by management. See also: floptulence, manglement.

I expect I might actually get some real mileage out of this. Simon, have one on me!

Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief after suspected Iran attacks

Re: But, but...

Licensing? Patches? Coprolite?

Stuff all that - how are we going to control our water infrastructure through an app on our smartphones?

Brit boffins boast of beating barriers to building fusion power

Re: Looking like...

Thirty years? We have had "working fusion power" since the early 1950s. See icon.

What we have not had, and what the boffins have been working on since then, is finding a way of releasing it in a controlled manner without irradiating the punters with nasty neutrons.

Incidentally, I use the term "boffins" advisedly. I know the scientific community frowns at the term, but really, this level of nuclear tinkering makes rocket science look easy. Case in point: rocket science has had far more explosions lately. So I doff my hat to these guys. Chapeau!

IT department put sticky notes on the laptops to help employees log in

"So a shelf of new laptops with biometrics and a finger taped to each of them?"

Tempting... but no. Consumer-grade fingerprint scanners, and even fingerprint scanners that claim to be better than consumer grade, are notoriously easy to fool. They are designed as bolt-on module, designed to be made as small and cheap as possible rather than as secure as possible. See the Mythbusters episode from 2006 for a demo; things have not improved much since then.

What I don't get is why equally inexpensive webcams aren't used more often for biometric security. Computing power and software have evolved more than sufficiently for this. I live in South Africa where technology is hardly cutting-edge, but one of the local banks requires a selfie with a smartphone prior to certain transactions to verify the account holder's identity. Even on the most inexpensive devices this works well: the data is obviously sent to a back-end server, not processed on the device, so all you need is a camera that's good enough to determine the position of eyes, ears and other biometric features. So pretty much any laptop built in the past 20 years can do that. And even desktops have webcams these days more often than not, what with Zoom, Meet and Teams having become a staple of the modern office. Biometric security should have been as pervasive by now as well. But no.

Elon pledges to give Nvidia a virtual monopoly over the stars

Peak insanity?

Not really.

Orbital data centres may be (and almost certainly are) the sort of ketamine-fueled pipe dream that the Elongated Muskrat is notorious for, but the applications for hardened versions of GPUs are very real.

Just ask the military about Electronic Warfare (especially their need to defeat directed EM energy attacks) and their ongoing attempts to develop EMP resistant kit.

NVidia may have spare cash to burn and $13.2Bn is chump change for them, but they're not stupid.

NASA boss balks at billion-dollar estimate for recycled Moon rover

If NASA spent less resources of coming up with cool sounding BACKRONYMS they might have a lot more room left in their budget.

NASA's Swift rescue slips to late August as LINK battles its spin

From the announcement posted earlier I understand it's not the reaction wheels themselves that have failed, but that the problem is "due to issues related to the upstream bus electrical power system". Which makes me think of failed electronics, wiring, or other electrical jiggery-pokery that didn't stand up to either launch or the conditions of space, rather than RW failure.

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

The W3C HTML Validator was created to help clean up the mess of the Browser Wars and I've been religiously running all my web pages through it as a matter of routine for the past 28 years. Maybe you should, too. It saves oodles of time and lots of aggravation.

Viking 1 landed on Mars 50 years ago

Don't write it off just yet

It occurs to me that if and when Must finally (or ever) gets his rockets to Mars, a major hurdle to colonizing the red planet may already have been solved: that of raw materials. By then there will be so much defunct hardware on Mars (from old and/or crashed landers to end-of-life rovers) that simply salvaging all that scrap will give any off-world colony a major boost. The Viking landers alone weight in at half a ton each, Curiosity is almost twice that. Colonizing Mars might start with scrap salvage!

Sun sets on Vulcan Centaur as NASA moves SunRISE to SpaceX Falcon Heavy

Given that ULA is 50% Boing, I can't say I'm very much surprised. I expect we'll see more moves away from ULA in the foreseeable future. Especially given that the SRB problems they've been having hint at serious problems with their manufacturing, testing and QA procedures. It's not as if they are exploring the outer reaches of the engineering here, after all; SRB technology is quite mature by now and repeated failures like this simply should not happen.

And if the front page of the ULA website is anything to go by (it shouts "LAUNCH SUCCESS!" for every rocket that didn't fail, as if that's something unusual to be particularly proud of) they know it, too.

Microsoft rolls out Windows Search updates and they're... quite good

About time

So it's 2026, and MICROS~1 finally manages to get a basic search function not to suck too hard. Right.

I have run updatedb in a cron job once every 24 hours and used the locate command for more years than I can remember on my Linux boxen, and it's always worked quickly, painlessly, efficiently and accurately, thank you very much. For content searches 'grep -ilr ...' works fine. And all with a minimum of system load.

Nice that MS is finally starting to move into that direction. Now let's see if they can do something about the ridiculous overhead of their search "service". Once they get that right maybe they can debloat the rest of it as well. And pigs might fly in the middle of... Oh, wait.

C programmers commit fresh crimes against readability

BASIC?

"...this vulture was still at school and learning BASIC...

Which reminds me of Diomidis Spinellis' 1991 entry: a working BASIC interpreter, contained in a rectangle of C code that fits precisely onto a 80x20 terminal screen with some room to spare (albeing not much). It was the first entry I ever saw (I came across it on Fidonet) and I remember being mightily impressed. Grab a copy and run LANDER.BAS to play Lunar Lander!

David Potter, the man who put Psion in the palm of your hand, logs off at 82

Re: A British success

Indeed. An increasingly orange-tinted country across the Big Pond (and I know I'll get downvoted for saying this) believes itself to be the greatest on Earth. Meanwhile the early computer market was pioneered in no small degree by the likes of Acorn and Sinclair, who stood on the shoulders of British giants such as Babbage, Lovelace and Turing who practically invented computing as we know it. Then there are such trifles as the jet engine, television and the World Wide Web, not to mention the Proper Pint of Bitter. All from the British isles. Not too shabby, Nige!

NASA says it will isolate volunteers from the outside world for a year

When Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun, a relay sat could be used to avoid a full comms blackout (albeit at the cost of even greater latency times) and I expect that will indeed be done. Other than that you're spot-on.

Think again. "During field work conducted at the McMurdo and South Pole stations in 1988 and 1989, informants complained that the lack of privacy and constant gossip within the community had a negative influence on social relationships, especially between men and women." (Source: Wikipedia)

The psychology of isolation

"Johnson Space Center in Houston will be home to the willing participants ..."

I can't claim to have any expertise when it comes to mental health (having dealt with my fair share of nut jobs in the course of my IT career doesn't count) but it seems to me that there is a marked difference between spending time in isolation on Earth and spending time in isolation millions of miles away from Earth. Knowing there are other people just on the other side of the walls makes a difference. The fact that in space there is a hostile and lethal environment on the other side of the wall rather than the balmy Houston air and sunshine also matters a lot. If a space craft springs a leak (ISS, anyone?) that's a lot different from simulated isolation in Houston. The pressure of knowing you're at a deadly risk when your habitat and life support systems fail will significantly contribute to the level of psychological strain.

In order to get a really good insight in the effects of isolation on a Mars trip it might be better to drop the isolation chamber into the Mariana Trench or some such isolated hazardous environment. (See also: Antarctica.)

End of era as the BBC switches off Radio 4 Long Wave service

Re: Irreplacable...

"I am not sure what the ongoing cost is..."

For starters, running the two 250kW (for a total of 500kW) transmitters is expensive. At an efficiency of about 70% and a typical modulation depth of about 30% we're looking at close to three quarters of a megawatt in power consumption. So the energy costs alone are considerable.

Maintenance of the humongous antenna towers, radiators and guy wires is also not exactly cheap, especially given their age and condition. Then there's the specialised output valves that are part of the transmitters. Not sure if they still make them but if they do they will cost a pretty penny, and they have a limited service life. Add sundries, and the question "Who still listens to longwave these days?" and it is clear why the cost/benefit ratio has become unupportable. Sad but true.

I miss shortwave broadcast myself, but I can understand why it's rapidly going the way of the dodo as well.

Space Force goes to (pretend) orbital war following record-fast Rocket Lab launch

A fine performance. But then, their whole design is geared towards quick deployment. Essentially all the have to do is put the rocket on the pad, fill the tanks with LOX and off you go. RP1 can be pre-fueled and the pumps use batteries. Much like early ICBMs.

Datacenters dip a toe back into waterborne computing despite obvious challenges

Re: Ocean cooling ?

Ocean cooling seems great at first glance: dumping heat into the ocean creates less of a temperature spike than dumping heat into the atmoshpere. However, ocean warming may be slower, but the effects are more persistent, and more disruptive to the Earth's climate system as a whole.

Towing all the AI company CEOs (and the politicians they own) out to sea and sinking them there might be a better climate solution in the long run.

NASA payload to ride commercial Mars orbiter from rocket biz yet to reach orbit

If overinflated claims could move payload, we'd have reached the Andromeda galaxy by now.

Microsoft has mostly repaired a flaw in Surface hardware that allowed unprotected devices to be bricked by a single packet

Re: Misleading headline?

Indeed. The headline brought back memories of the days when I was contracting for a very large telco in the mid 1990s. All of a sudden every Windows 95 machine in their offices (which occupied five buildings) started crashing, all at the same time, once an hour. Some frantic Ethernet sniffing traced the problem to a malformed packet that triggered a bug in the 3C509 NIC driver on those machined, which in turn sparked a frantic network-wide driver update that should have been performed months earlier.

Interestingly, some of the old Unix SVr4 mini's in the server room also proved susceptible to the "ping of death" as we had dubbed it by then. Fixing that was much more difficult.

But the fecal matter really hit the rotating blades when we located the source of the malformed packets: one of the server admins on the night shift had installed an Open Source monitor application that was intended to detect, and alert the operators of, a server going down. It did so by sending the offending packet to the systems to be monitored, but said operator had failed to limit that to a handful of servers and instead just pinged the entire network.

I don't recall having seen much of him after that.

That's what the headline reminded me of. But that's not what this problem is really about.

BOFH: For one ambitious security type, chaos is a ladder

Re: Beware of BOFHs bearing "gifts"

I'd be more worried about falling down a flight of fire escape stairs than a fire in that scenario...

FTFY.

Blockbuster new Raspberry Pi project turns any screen into old-school VCR

Re: "If you don’t happen to have an old CRT TV"

"...the ability to play ... on an old-school CRT TV."

Great, but why so complicated? The RPi has a composite video output, which will make any media look like it's 1999 on any TV.

NASA's Secret: Moon astronauts will be rocking Prada underwear

Not so fast

"... soon Moon-bound astronauts will be sporting unmentionables from the high-fashion brand."

If the current outlook and progress are anything to go by, the next 'nauts to put foot on the moon will be wearing Chinese fashion labels.

Re: Just carrying on the tradition?

"...whatever was meant to be Lifted was lifted..."

Well, it was at about 1/6th gravity, so lifting anything was a lot easier.

GitHub nukes 70+ Microsoft repos, breaks CI/CD pipelines, following suspected worm infections

I don't get it

If MICROS~1 is so hell-bent on destroying Github (which they clearly are) why don't they just close it down and get it over with? Since they acquired Github it's been dying slowly. Why do they prolong the agony so much?

Because the end is inevitable. Github is simply one of the last entries in the long list of products and businesses that MICROS~1 acquired and then flushed down the toilet. Nothing of what we're seeing here surprises me at all.

I just wish they'd admit it by simply killing their acquisitions right away rather than let them perish slowly.

Netflix wiz creates app to slash AI bills, then open sources it

I have a better idea

To slash your AI bills even further, here's a top tip: do you own work rather than relying on a glorified Eliza implementation to do it for you. That's not only a lot cheaper but the result is usually a lot better, too.

You're welcome, C-suits.