Posts by vtcodger

Just $10 to create an AI chatbot of a dead loved one

A Possible Use Case

Would I pay $10 to talk to a simulation of my deceased cousin Gregory? I most certainly would if I thought there was any chance it would tell me where he hid the $228,000 he stole from the Bank Of America in 1988.

Disclaimer: I have no cousin named Gregory. And if I did, he was nowhere near West Covina on the morning of the robbery.

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Comment: I find people talking to Alexa creepy. I expect I'd find people talking to emulations of their deceased loved ones even creepier. But it doesn't matter what I or anyone else thinks. If it somehow comforts them, that's what matters.

Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop

Re: #@$Drivers

Well, let me give you an example of the kind of problems that I, and many others, have had. Our family doesn't do a lot of printing, but I have two printers on our network -- and Inkjet (HP1112) and a very low end LaserJet (HP1102W). The Inkjet hasn't been a problem as long as I print a test page every two weeks to keep the jets from clogging.

The LaserJet? Mechanically it's great. Reliable. Supports many network protocols. Warms up in seconds. Feeds paper even in the occasional periods of North American Summer tropical humidity. In fact, it's our standby printer and gets used not only by me, but by the whole family every time Microsoft screws up and kills their printer setups. They just email the print file to me, and I print it from Linux until someone finds the time/inclination to reinstall the printers in Windows.

Software wise? Not so good. Two problems. Initial Setup and Printer Protocol.

Initial Setup. Presumably to get around the fact that not all PCs have floppy or CDROM capability, this thing fresh from the box pretends to be a storage device. You need to connect it to a Windows computer which can then read the Windows (but not Linux) drivers from the device, install them and reconfigure the thing as a printer. Is there a Linux program to do this? As I recall, yes. But it didn't work. No problem. We just set the printer up from Windows and once set up, it'd talk to the Network. (But USB from Linux still thinks it's a storage device. No matter. Network only is good enough for us). I attribute this design to forebrain destroying contaminants in the drinking water in Silicon Valley.

Printer Protocol. The HP-1102W uses the relatively uncommon ZJS protocol instead of PCL or Postscript to stream data to the printer. One needs a a driver to convert other representations to ZJS. For Linux HP provides a driver (which works--Yeah) and an automatic installer which in the tradition of automatic installers everywhere and always, didn't. So I had to dig out and download a copy of the #@$driver (hpijs I think) and a ppd file that I had to tune to my configuration. This took a bit of time and modest amount of cursing.

My current problem: I have a chromebook that I'd occasionally like to print from. HP, to their credit, supports printing from chrome to many of their printers. BUT, the HP1102W is one of the ones they don't seem to support. Probably can't just copy the driver from my Intel Linux machine to the chromebook and I am afraid to try. What could possibly go wrong? Don't know and don't want to find out the hard way. So I'm thinking in terms of a server on some unused port on the Linux machine that will look like a printer to the chromebook and can then print via my existing software. Can that be done with existing Unix tools plus perhaps a bit of Python? My guess is yes. How? Haven't the slightest. Maybe I'll work it out someday. Or not. In the meantime, I print to pdf on the chromebook, copy the pdf to a usb stick. Move it to the Linux machine and print the pdf. OK for once a month or so.

#@$Drivers

One problem for many (most?) businesses and individual users is the lack of unix drivers (that actually work) for many older peripherals. Linux is good with networking, file systems, and monitors. Printers,scanners,etc? Not so much. Custom hardware? Forget it. And unix is a hell of a lot less aggravating for system administrators to work with than Windows. (No Registry for starters). But if your workflow depends on some older piece of gear, you may be stuck with Windows pretty much forever.

Mormon Church IT ransacked, data stolen by 'state-sponsored' cyber-thieves

Re: Meanwhile

Amusing Post. I upvoted it.

But I'd note that many Amish and Mennonite sects allow some use of technology (including the internet) as long as the usage is deemed to be beneficial to the individual/family/community. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_way_of_life#Use_of_modern_technology

As I observe the use and abuse of technology in society, the more rational the Amish POV seems to me. I don't actually agree with them. ... Yet. ... But the way things are going what with the bizarre actions of big tech, the whackiness of (most of) the IoT, and the willingness of industry to foist seriously flawed technology (e.g. Tesla Autopilot) on the public, I may come around eventually.

PayPal decides fining people $2,500 for 'misinformation' wasn't a great idea

Re: It doesn't even seem legal in any way

The worrying thing is that banks could easily start doing the same thing

I believe that in the EU (and therefore, by legacy the UK?), PayPal IS a bank and is subject to banking laws. I think it unlikely that the regulators would put up with this nonsense.

In the US (and Canada?) PayPal operates as an unregulated bank and is apparently largely free to do anything it damn well pleases with its client's assets.

My personal belief is that anyone who conducts financial transactions through an unregulated bank is nuts. I've spent two decades trying to avoid any dealings with PayPal. But I'm in the US where credit card transactions above some low minimum are (at least conceptionally) reversible, and paper checks are a viable alternative for many payments. Not sure that those options are as viable elsewhere.

Linus Torvalds's faulty memory (RAM, not wetware) slows kernel development

Take This With a Grain of Salt

I'm operating mostly from my elderly and not so great human memory here. But I think the background on ECC is rather complex. The original IBM PC (1981) memory had 9 bit bytes -- 8 data bits and a parity bit. So did its clones and all the subsequent PCs that became common in the late 1980s. And they really needed parity because memory wasn't all that reliable back then. And early PCs didn't use a lot of it. 640K -- all Intel could easily access -- was a lot in the early 1980s. After a while people found ways to use more. But not a lot more. Which was good because memory was expensive. I'm pretty sure that I recall commodity 1MB "DIMMs" (I think we called their predecessors something else back then) going for $100 a MB back in the mid 1990s.

In the 1990s it became obvious to "The Industry" that GUI was the future and that GUI OSes were going to need LOTS of memory. So they looked for corners to cut in order to keep PCs affordable. One of those corners was memory parity. Get rid of that ninth bit and we can get more data bits on a chip. And make a bit more profit. And maybe even make the products a bit cheaper for the consumer. And for those few who REALLY care about memory integrity we'll do something more sophisticated than parity. Hamming Codes. If you're curious, here's a link to an article I originally wrote for the Compuserve Hardware Forum about three decades ago. http://donaldkenney.x10.mx/GLOSSARY/ECCMEMOR.HTM. Back in the 1990s, many gave credit/blame for the disappearance of parity in consumer PC memory to Microsoft. Maybe they were right.

PC hardware and software in the 1990s often didn't work all that well even on good days. I personally think lousy non-parity memory was part of the problem. But there were many other issues. So we don't have parity in consumer PCs nowadays. And AFAICS, no one knows (or much cares) if that's a significant problem.

Biden cuts off China's Yangtze, 30 others from US chipmaking gear

Curious

I don't know enough about the semiconductor industry to tell. But I'm curious. Is this actually a problem for China's manufacturing/research/military? Or is it a bit of occidental face-saving -- barricading the stable doors about two decades after the horses have wandered off?

IBM: Hey Joe, we make chips, too. How about some of 'em subsidies?

Memory problems

Perhaps I misremember, but didn't IBM pay Global Foundries a tidy sum ($2B?) a couple of years ago to take IBM's two major fabs off its hands? Doesn't sound to me like a company that wants/plans to be at the leading edge of chip making in America.

AI eye-scanner can tell whether you'll croak it from a heart attack

Spirits from the Vasty Deep

" AI algorithms can predict whether a patient is at risk of suffering a stroke, heart attack, or dying from heart disease just by studying images of their retinas"

This brings to mind Shakespeare:

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?

Charge a future EV in less than five minutes – using literally cool NASA tech

The Holy Grail

FWIW, the Holy Grail of EV batteries appears to be Metal-Air batteries. Probably Aluminum-Air. Aluminum being cheap, readily available, non-toxic, and reasonably well behaved. On paper, these have much higher energy density (maybe 3X?) than current batteries. Which means vehicles go further between charges and/or have smaller, lighter batteries than current EVs. They are primary cells. You can't recharge them. But what you can (hopefully) do is pull over to the side of the road, yank the defunct anodes out, stuff them in a plastic carrier bag for later recycling/disposal, and put new fresh anodes in. No fantastic high tech charger technology needed.

A few demos have actually been conducted, so they probably aren't completely impractical.

Folks have been working on these things for 3 decades or more. And there is still presumably a long way to go. But we're talking GREEN ENERGY here, so all concepts, no matter how hare-brained are assumed to be either ready for deployment or nearly so held back only by corrupt politicians in the pay of the evil oil companies.

I'd like to see these work out someday as they seem potentially a pretty adequate solution to many of the intractable problems with EVs using current technologies. But I'm not holding my breath.

How CIA betrayed informants with shoddy front websites built for covert comms

Re: Devil....Spoon....and so on......

Anything you put on a computer connected to a public communications network is public knowledge?

Yep. Sounds right to me. Even in the unlikely event that you don't screw up somehow in configuring your device(s), whoever you are talking to probably will expose your data. So any information you actually put on the network might as well be stamped on your forehead for all to read. And the network itself and its access tools are surely flawed. Maybe intentionally. So even the stuff you don't put on the network is probably vulnerable if anyone cares to do the work required to access it.

My guess is that the Cloud folks and others who NEED a public network will spend the next few decades deploying increasingly complex and user hostile technologies to "protect" things. Plan A will be replaced by Plan B then Plan C and D and ... , eventually, Plan Z. None of them will really work. Users who can't tolerate external attacks will simply move most (or all if possible) their operation off the public networks. Even private local networks may well be discouraged.

What's Plan Z? Reduce attack surfaces -- dramatically. Externally managed Over The Air updates? Of course not. Scripting of HTML? Mostly gone -- maybe a tiny, well vetted, subset remains. Firmware updates? Hard to see how changing the underlying operation of your hardware can ever be compatible with security.

That's very likely the future. It will not be all that much fun. We are living in the good old days of a internet that is perceived as being secure/securable. Enjoy it while it lasts. Which may not be all that long.

Florida asks Supreme Court if it's OK to ban content moderation it doesn't like

Re: Prime numbered circuits?

Basically an artifact of the judicial system set up in 1879 after the US Constitution was ratified. Small population, large area. Travel was difficult and time consuming -- especially in the interior prior to the construction of canals in the 1820s and railroads a few decades later. While trials and hearings were held at fixed locations, the next level of courts -- the appeals courts "rode circuit" showing up at the fixed locations a few times a year to hear any appeals that needed to be dealt with by a more senior court. Less inconvenient overall to move the court around than move the plaintiffs, lawyers, witnesses, etc,etc.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_riding

Starlink broadband speeds slow as subscriber numbers grow

"a median of 60Mbps"

And who knows if even that is realistic for worst case users?

But there would seem to be a lot of headroom here. A median of 6Mbps would be a vast improvement over what they have now for many rural users in North America.

Boeing wants autonomous flying cabs in US airspace by 2030

Maybe ...

I skimmed the article, but it sounds like they are thinking controlled airspace on both ends. Given a decade, maybe that's doable. Realistically, can the vehicle be built? Probably. Can it travel safely from terminal to terminal -- say JFK to/from a few terminals in downtown Manhattan? Probably. Can it pick you up or drop you off at the curb in front of your apartment? Betcha not. Two problems -- first it'll probably need a ground footprint a lot bigger than a conventional taxi. Second, vehicle manufacturers are having trouble doing 100% safe navigation in two dimensions. Three dimensions is going to be harder. Probably a lot harder.

After thought. Is any sane insurance company going to underwrite insurance policies for these things?

America taps 150+ prosecutors to fight cryptocurrency crime

150 lawyers

So, US taxpayers are going to pay to train 150 lawyers in the intricacies of a bizarre technology frequently used to launder illicitly acquired funds and to enable/perpetrate other frauds. What could possibly go wrong?

EU puts smart device manufacturers on the hook for cyber security

Re: Does that include TeleScreens?

I don't know about the UK, but in the US, I don't think there are any dumb TVs available that just tune and display channels. Haven't been for many years. Neither, apparently can you roll-you-own using a monitor and a separate tuner with just a power button and a channel select switch. They don't seem to make the latter anymore.

FCC Commissioner demands review of Starlink rural broadband subsidies

Re: Dish

I would guess that those "chips" all over the antenna board are phase shifters used to electronically steer the antenna beam. Conceptually, you need one of those for each active antenna element although there may well be design tricks used to cut the number required a bit. Anyway, phased array antennae have been around for half a century, and I would guess the Starlink folks picked the best suited current design for their unit. I wouldn't count on any major design breakthroughs.

Maybe someone around here is familiar with the current state of the art and can enlighten us.

Biden administration prepares to bring hammer down on Chinese chipmakers

Downvoted mostly because, based on your ramblings, I don't think you have standing to accuse anyone else of childish behavior.

Re: Isn't this going to make the chip shortage worse?

As was once explained to me by a quality consultant, the military prefers older, time tested, components for equipment that has to operate reliably from Arctic Cold to desert afternoons and may be in use without replacement for decades. In the US at least, there are biases toward such components built into the procurement specs. Also, the chips have to meet military, not commercial, performance specs. In some cases I believe, Mil-Speced components are required to be individually tested, not just batch sampled.

Also, military test and development cycles tend to be extraordinarily long by civilian standards. Decades in many cases.

But doesn't this tend to produce equipment that is outdated by marketing standards? Yep. In many cases, it is slow, bulky, and power hungry. And it doesn't often come in fashionable colors. But it (usually) does work. And it (often) works the same after falling off a truck and being run over by the next three vehicles in the convoy. And someone who was trained to use it eight years ago and hasn't seen one since will (probably) be able to grab the current version and use it without having to puzzle over a UI that has been gratuitously altered three times for no very obvious reason.

And, Oh yes, I've been told by folks that know how the semiconductor fab down the road from me works, that one modest part of their business is producing some Mil-Speced old-fashioned commodity chips for the military. Chips that equipment mongers aren't allowed to purchase from overseas anyway.

Shape-shifting cryptominer savages Linux endpoints and IoT

Show Me The Way To Go Home.

"AT&T recommends Linux endpoint and IoT device managers keep security patches installed ..."

I seem to have gotten off at the wrong stop here. I wonder if anyone can tell me how to get back to planet Earth? But first do you have time for a couple of questions?

1, On your planet are there such things a "IoT device managers"?

2. And are there actually security packages for IoT devices here?

3. And is it possible to actually install those patches on your world's IoT devices without two days of fighting with obtuse configuration issues?

... No. On second thought, I don't think I want to go back to Earth anyway. Odds are that any alternate universe selected at random will be better than where I came from.

As Cybersecurity Week begins, Beijing claims US attacked Uni doing military research

Military Secret theft

"How much military research has China stolen from the west to advance it's military?"

Surely not as much as you think. Nobody in their right mind puts military secrets on the open internet where the half-life of their secrecy would be measured in hours or days. In point of fact, the US spends tens, probably hundreds, of billions of dollars every year making sure secrets aren't trivially accessible to clever folk in (potentially) hostile nations. And every other major power surely does the same.

There has probably been a bit of leakage of military secrets through old fashioned espionage. But if so, either there wouldn't seem to be much of it or their spies are remarkably adept at not getting caught.

(China is accused, probably fairly, of spying on overseas Chinese communities, but apparently they are looking for supporters of causes/philosophes/whatever that are not considered appropriate in the People's Republic, not for military secrets).

Amazon drivers unionize after AI sends them on 'impossible' routes

All may not be exactly as it seems

Home deliveries are not a problem I've ever had to deal with. But I'd note that a lot of the stuff Amazon delivers is fairly bulky, so it isn't just distance they need to worry about in ordering their deliveries. They need to worry about whether the boxes -- all of them -- intended for a given address are accessible in the back of the truck when they get to said address. And that folds back into loading order at the warehouse. I don't know much about warehousing, but I do think that I know that it is complicated and easy to screw up.

So, perhaps some apparent disorder in Amazon's delivery routes is explicable.

But that's no excuse for presenting drivers with unrealistic demands. Solution: Ease up on the drivers. Fire a few managers -- who should have been working to get the situation resolved. And fix the software.

DeFi venture OptiFi permanently locks up $661,000 of assets in code snafu

New and Creative Ways to Screw Up

Would this be a problem with one of those curiously named "smart contracts"? Or is this yet another way to screw when trying to make some quick bucks without working very hard for them.

Was anyone else reminded of The Incredibles -- "They keep on finding new ways to celebrate mediocrity"?

FBI: Look out, crooks stole $1.3b in cryptocurrency in just three months this year

Re: "get professional financial advice if in doubt"

Don't you think that bathwater might be considered to be hazardous waste? I'm not sure how one decontaminates it.

Singapore struggles to curb cryptocurrency enthusiasm

"Banning retail access to cryptocurrencies is not likely to work," said Menon.

Probably true. But I'd wager that a 1% or 2% transaction tax on cryptocurrency transfers to and from Singapore with a short jail sentence(per transaction) for failure to pay would pretty much eliminate risks of significant economic damage from a crypto crash. If people want to play with this stuff, let them. But you don't want a major chunk of your economy to go to hell if crypto vanishes into a bottomless hole some fine morning.

T-Mobile US and SpaceX hope to deliver phone service from space

Re: Hardware not compatible

Upvoted because it's an intelligent post and correct as far as it goes.

However, Elon and his technical folk clearly know about electronically steerable phased array antennae. I have no idea what the state of the art is in phased arrays, but I know that BIG ones (football field size) can have remarkably tight beams. IF StarLink can put a sufficiently large antenna (big, but not football field size) into orbit and solve some other problems, they MIGHT be able to reduce their target area to something comparable with that of a cell phone tower. Substantial (but solvable?) problems at the satellite end? But nothing special required at the user's end. So conceptually, you really MIGHT be able to talk to an upgraded Starlink using an ordinary cell phone. ... MAYBE

FWIW, the internet assures me that many cell phones have a high power mode with 3 watt output.. Can that connect over a 300-400km link with a high gain antenna at the satellite end? My GUESS is maybe.

"Global coverage. As long as you're in America"

Ahem ... No. The Starlink satellites are in low circular orbits -- presumably in order to minimize latency (speed of light delays) in their populous target areas. One of the prices you pay for circular orbits is that you end up providing pretty much the same coverage to every place at the same latitude even places where there is nothing in your coverage area but a few shepards or fishing boats.

"And have a massive phone battery."

Probably not needed. The limitation on received signal strength is generally the noise floor at the receiving end. Amplification (in a receiver) is cheap and not power hungry. Most receivers intended for any serious purpose will amplify any signal stronger than ambient noise up to a usable level. FWIW, I've used my old 2G cell phone in some pretty remote locations and only found one -- a box canyon in Eastern Nevada where I couldn't raise a signal. Albeit, in the boonies, you do sometimes have to trek a few tens of meters up a hillside to find a bar or two on your phone.

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I wouldn't be surprised there are other problems. The cellular phone network was not designed with satellite relay in mind. But signal strength and coverage (outside of the high Arctic/Antarctic which will have zero coverage unless Elon decides to spend a lot of money to launch a bunch of satellites into polar orbits in order to serve them) probably won't be a problem.

Re: I am very dubious about this!

"I would think acquisition would be a challenge as you can't use a narrowly focused beam, so the signals will be very weak."

I would think probably the exact opposite. Unless I've botched the math (wouldn't be the first time), you probably have to use a narrowly focused beam, otherwise, you'll be trying to sort out signals from every currently active cellular phone in an area (about 1,000,000 sq km?) larger than Texas (roughly 695,000 sq km).

Amazon has repackaged surveillance capitalism as reality TV

Re: Someone near us

Just curious. What do you reckon the thieves did with the gear? Surely Amazon wouldn't let someone connect a stolen camera to their service ... Surely ...

Python tops programming love list – but if you want a job, learn SQL

Re: Python-- a transition from v3.9 to v3.10 breaks things

Yep. That's a real problem.

Not surprisingly, there's an xkcd that addresses it. https://xkcd.com/1987/

Universal Unix tool AWK gets Unicode support

Re: Still work in progress

One wonders how many mainstream programs are really still 7-bit ASCII only. If they try to use the eighth bit for some internal purpose, they won't work with Latin-1, CP-1252 or other encoding systems that I assume to be in common use in Europe. Surely that'd be a nuisance. But you're surely right about having to deal with UTF-8 multibyte characters without trashing or misunderstanding them.

US Army drone crashes hours ahead of breaking flight duration record

Proof Of Concept

I'd say that 64 days constitutes adequate proof of concept. Good for them.

Big Tech is building the metaverse of its own dreams. You don't want to go there

The Northwest Passage

They are doomed to fail, it is premature to try and build a metaverse

Probably true. But you don't know until you try. I'd compare it to the search for the Northwest Passage. Great rewards perhaps if you find one. Eventually they found one. Turns out there are several and none of them are reliable. Which routes, if any, are open in any given year depends on where the Winter's ice pack drifts to in the Spring/Summer. The season is short and even with a warmer climate it's possible that none will ever be usable for much.

A good deal of resource was lost trying to force a passage through the Canadian Archipelago. Maybe there's a warning for Silicon Valley there.

I'd group VR, AI and Quantum Computing as unproven technologies that might have great promise or might be nothing more than huge resource sinks. It's not clear whether pursuing them leads to great benefits for humanity and untold wealth for pioneers or like the search for El Dorado will leave the seekers wandering about in an endless wilderness until they give up and go home.

Huawei dangles developer incentives to sell Harmony OS around the world

Re: 'created'

Downvoted because the post is pretty much complete nonsense. The Chinese initially got their rocket (and nuclear) technology from the Russians, not the US and Europe. In point of fact, the US did everything it could to keep space technology from the Chinese. To the extent of putting all US satellites on the US "munitions list" for many decades and thus preventing the use of Chinese launch capacity even for routine platforms that the Chinese knew perfectly well how to build.

Note that the attempts to keep Western space technology away from China didn't work all that well. Makes one suspect that the current attempts to keep advanced semiconductor fab technology out of Chinese hands might not work all that well either.

Google shuts off IoT Core services shortly after announcing API stability commitments

Re: Google discontinuing a service??

Google is pioneering the IOP -- (Internet Of Paperweights)

We were promised integrated packages. Instead we got disintegrated apps

Re: Cloud access?

"Like the way that my car insists on looking up the driver profile on a server somewhere in the cloud every time I unlock it?"

What kind of car? I ask because I want to make sure I never consider buying one.

Modeling software spins up plans for floating wind turbines

They can move on to ...

Yes. I imagine the modeling was tricky. Be interesting to see how well these actually works when they get around to an extended physical test in salt water with gusty winds, swells, breaking waves and maybe some freezing precipitation at times. But what I'm really curious about is how they plan to get the generated power to shore. That's proven in the past to be a bit tricky in shallow water using turbines solidly attached to the bottom.

FCC decides against giving Starlink $1b in rural broadband subsidies

Re: Are all improving technologies disqualified?

This is a curious situation:

It turns out that because of the peculiarities of orbital mechanics, if Starlink provides decent coverage in New York City or London ( 40 deg latitude for NYC, 51 deg for London) it will provide pretty much the same coverage everywhere at the same latitude. Including vast expanses of desert, ocean, and howling wilderness with few or even no inhabitants. There are some nuances involving number and location of ground stations and relays. But basically, satellite providers unlike ground based providers, don't need a lot of additional infrastructure in order to provide rural service.

And satellite providers probably need good coverage in NYC, London and other metropolitan areas if they plan to make money.

So why pay them a bundle to provide to rural users what they are going to provide anyway?

Now if you want coverage in Alaska, Iceland, the high Arctic or Antarctic, THAT probably requires a subsidy. Maybe a substantial subsidy.

FauxPilot: It's like GitHub Copilot but doesn't phone home to Microsoft

Philosophical Question

If Microsoft doesn't know who you are, where you are, and what you are doing, do you exist?

Remember the humanoid Tesla robot? It's ready for September reveal, says Musk

Re: Yeah right

Don't you want a 100% success rate for something like "turning"?

You probably want 100%. As do I. But Elon is more pragmatic. 90% is good enough for his customers.

Pull jet fuel from thin air? We can do that, say scientists

Re: At scale???

I upvoted both you and Twanky because it's so refreshing to see ANYTHING in the energy, climate change universe that actually looks like engineering.

FWIW, it looks like this scheme's eventual product MIGHT -- if everything goes unusually well -- be as much as four times as effective as the best current "Natural" source of liquid hydrocarbons which is palm oil. That's based on average output for 6 hours a day of usable sunshine at 20% efficiency and annual palm oil production of 3300kg per hectare.

What's the catch

Well for one thing, it's very likely only 20% efficiency for a few fours around noon on sunny days in latitudes that aren't too far North. For more information on the probable problems with a facility using Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), aim your favorite search engine at "Crescent Dunes" and/or "Ivanpah". Those are grid scale concentrated solar facilities in Nevada and California respectively. I think both are now (mostly?) shut down. They did generate some power. But nowhere near as much as they hoped. And the technical problems were numerous.

One of the more publicized -- if comparatively minor -- problems was a software/engineering/operations glitch that set one of the towers at Ivanpah on fire when the facilitiy's own concentrated beams mistakenly got aimed at the tower. But a more basic problem at Ivanpah seems to be that the molten salt thermal storage didn't stay molten over night and had to be warmed in the morning with copious amounts of natural gas. But maybe not. Lot's of money involved so lots of dubious information both pro and con CSP.

US regulators set the stage for small, local nuclear power stations

Reactor disposal

Shipping the End Of Life reactor to a disposal site, may not be as easy as it sounds. One of the many (largely specious IMO) concerns that sank the proposed Yucca Mountain disposal site in Nevada was that radioactive waste being shipped to the site might be released if there was an accident during transportation. That in a region where virtually no one lives and 100 atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted between 1952 and 1992.

Concerns about transportation may be specious. But that doesn't mean there won't be a constant drumbeat of doom and gloom if anyone tries to move that dead but genuinely at least a bit radioactive reactor.

So, if you can't move it, what do you do with it? Damned if I know.

US mulls more export bans – this time, memory – in war on Chinese chipmakers

Weirdness

It's a little weird y'know. Because it costs a lot to make stuff in the US, there isn't all that much US made stuff that folks overseas want to buy. Then the US turns around and limits/bans export of the stuff that folks do want to buy. Then, the same folks that won't export whine that the US isn't competitive and US manufacturers need massive subsidies in order to compete.

One suspects that a time traveler or intelligent alien might find this strategy to be a bit baffling once it was explained to them.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Drums

Apropos of not much

In the late 1950s, before there were disks, there were (a few) magnetic drums. The idea was to mount read/write heads for a row of bits -- typically a CPU word width of them plus a parity bit, then rapidly rotate a magnetic drum under them. Expensive. But quite reliable. Quite fast if the drum happened to be near the area one wanted to access. Sometimes, if you were very clever, you could make sure that happened and interleave drum access with computing. And they were easy to program -- feed the hardware a drum address, a buffer address and tell it whether to read or write. None of that moving heads, waiting, then waiting some more for the proper sector to appear that disks demanded. .. When the disks worked at all, which with the earliest units wasn't as often as one might like.

How big were they? It's been quite a few decades, but my memory says the USAF AN/FSQ7 computers had quite a few of them -- each with 4096 32 bit words. So, 16KB. Primarily, they were used to stage programs into memory in meticulously handcrafted pieces.

Sage accused of misselling perpetual licenses it knew would soon be obsolete

15-year perpetual license

... Accurate name? -- for some definitions of "year" and "perpetual"?

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Re: Before computers we used to make stuff that worked

If by "We" one means the US and Britain, you're not wrong. 1960s or so joke: "Why do the British drink warm beer? Punch line: Lucas refrigerators For the young folks out there, Lucas Electronics were widely used in British cars and were know worldwide for their dubious reliability.

However, the Japanese -- who for some odd reason actually care about quality -- came along and started shipping cheap, reliable vehicles around the world. Ironically, the Nihonjin adopted the quality control notions espoused by one C. Edwards Deming under the mistaken impression that American manufacturers followed those practices. Actually American manufacturers had no idea who Deming was. However some of them figured it out and actually started to produce decent vehicles in the mid-1980s before the East Asians could put them all into bankruptcy court.

I'm hoping something similar will happen with digital stuff.

Massive solar project in Tennessee is all about Google

Re: In a country where Pi can = 3

No problem. If the sun starts showing a bit of wear, we'll just send it a few subsidies so it can buy some more Hydrogen,

Actually, our current theories of stellar evolution -- which might well be correct -- say the sun is very slowly getting brighter and will continue to do so until it runs out of Hydrogen in about 5 billion years at which point there will be a rather eventful eon or two while the core collapses and various alternate nuclear reactions sputter. Eventually it'll become a red giant, then then a white dwarf. If intelligent life has evolved by then, they may want to consider leaving.

About that $1b... IBM says Watson Health assets fetched $230m in pre-tax profits

Answers

. Does Watson generate their executive statements? ------ No. Watson is capable of creating coherent sentences.

. Are words selected entirely at random ? ----- No way to tell. Would need a larger sample to test for randomness.

. Could we use Watson to read the statements? ----- Probably. Unless Watson refused to be associated with the effort.

. Would that be a new vertical, horizontal, or diagonal? ----- None of the above? An entanglement perhaps.

Windows Start Menu not starting? You're not alone

Re: Start menu? Who needs it?

Jeez man. It's trying everything in its power to tell you NOT TO USE THAT APP. And do you thank it for its sage advice? No. You disparage it. See if it ever tries to help you out again.