Posts by jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid

Samsung and Mousterian move ahead with floating datacenter for Texas

Re: " and releases no discharge into the surrounding waterway"

"And what about heat?

Like extra heat into already warming up oceans?"

You can work it out. Some assumptions:

10 of these 50MW data centres, all off the coast of Texas in the gulf of Mexico. Let's assume all the electricity consumed goes into heating the gulf's water.

10x50MW is equal to 1.6x10¹⁶ J per year.

Volume of the gulf is 2.4 million cubic kms, or about 2.4x10¹⁸ kgs of water.

Specific heat capacity of water is about 4200 J/kg/°C

So the temperature increase of the gulf over a year is 1.6x10¹⁶ / (2.4x10¹⁸ x 4200).

It's about 0.0000016°C per year.

To put it in some context, if we assume that the gulf receives the same solar radiation per unit area as the rest of the world (averaged out for day/night cycles) then the 500MW of electrical power is only about one millionth that of the solar radiation.

Of course, that energy will be localised, not spread out across the whole gulf. But if you want to think about the effect on weather, do the same calculation over say, just the area of a weather region. But that's getting into meteorology and I'm way out of my depth now.

Sci-fi authors Scalzi and Stross decry AI's dystopian impact on their craft

Re: Love the hypocrisy

I think that quoted section in the article is not Stross's personal opinion, but an extract from one of his stories as part of the plot and I presume as a satirical swipe.

UK mulls making employers ask before installing bossware

"You can be a brilliant manager, your staff can still take the piss"

More like: you can be a brilliant manager but still be completely unable to prevent the corporate spying machine keeping electronic tabs on your brilliant staff.

Americans give all-day school phone bans a ringing endorsement

"So you want to install a Faraday cage around an entire school (including outbuildings) sealing all openings and covering all windows with a grounded wire mesh."

Given the readership here, this is exactly the kind of technically elaborate offerings I expect. This is why I come here.

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Re: Empty A380

I guess because the plane is only out of maintenance and still not ready for passengers. Needs to be cleaned, supplied, flight and cabin crew embarked etc.

Flight plans are all worked out to maximise the efficiency of aircraft landing, depositing passengers and then heading off again with a new full load. Unlikely for there to be a one way flight route planned months in advance that a plane fresh out of maintenance would be able to service. Also, maybe maintenance completion periods aren't reliable enough to run a flight schedule around.

Burnham wants Big Ecommerce to bankroll Britain's pubs

Re: 2 separate problems

Supermarkets were first allowed to sell alcohol in the early 1960s, but now over 60 years later the number of pubs are still in decline, so I didn't think that change in the '60s is still having much of an impact.

In fact, according to the institute of alcohol studies, pub numbers have been on the way down for well over 100 years:

"In 1904, there were almost 100,000 pubs in England and Wales. By 1950 there were 73,500, and now across the UK there are around 45,000."

That same institute notes that in the 21st century, while pub numbers have fallen, the number of people working in them has increased as pubs have gotten bigger.

There's a graph on the institute's web page that suggests more people now drink at home and fewer in pubs, but it might be a proportion so that might not be the true story.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/310723/total-number-of-pubs-in-the-united-kingdom/?srsltid=AfmBOop5PHosgXpMdzEXz-UVTHZIh7CjH8u0FSVJtGQe4I4o778EcFi2

https://www.ias.org.uk/2026/02/10/is-the-great-british-pub-on-the-verge-of-extinction-the-truth-behind-the-headlines/

Google meets the neighbors and gets both barrels over its new UK datacenter

Re: well um

Flashlight? Torch, surely.

SpaceX Starship Flight Test 13 takes issue with the 'flight' bit

Re: Artemis schedule is political nonsense

"I'm glad to see the flight was aborted before going boom"

I don't think it was in danger of going boom, for once. 4 engines failing means it's at the limit of being able fly properly in the first place.

Unless you mean it was fortunate the flight was aborted because if it it did fly it would have gone boom because ... well, that's what starship does.

EU puts 'addictive' design of Facebook, Instagram under the DSA microscope

Re: Strange

Being susceptible to addictive behaviours isn't about having a short attention span. It's about simply being human and vulnerable to the psychological tricks employed to prevent a user thinking that they are at the end of an experience - like you mention. It's the same old tricks casinos and slot machines have used for years. Eye catching visuals and sounds, tantalising glimpses of what's coming next, everything to get you scrolling one more time whilst not noticing the passage of time.

Yes, put the phone down and walk away, but to be drawn in it to only be human. Facebook etc. know this full well.

Brit supermarket giant triples down on facial recog to nab shoplifters

No, I've not been collared for shoplifting and let's assume I paid cash (or left without buying anything). If they took my photo, how do they confirm or deny that they have my personal info (ie my photo and the biometrics derived from it that they would have used to compare with entries in the database) if they don't know it's me?

Re: Orwell's dystopia is already here.

Why would a database execute commands in a data entry field?

Something I've never got my head round: if I make a subject access request like you describe, I presume I have to give them my name and other details to allow them to accurately recognise me in their database. If they only have my biometrics (e.g. my facial recognition profile) not linked to my name, how do they correctly respond to the SAR?

Re: Orwell's dystopia is already here.

"fun might be had by holding a QR code up to FR cams"

Just on a hypothetical basis you understand, but would doing that with the intention of making the FR system do something it shouldn't, be possibly an offence under the computer misuse act?

Asking for a friend, of course.

Former Microsoft engineer shrinks Notepad down to size

"...'exactly like you might remember Notepad Circa Windows XP,' just with an even smaller binary"

So same functionality, smaller footprint. Isn't this how software should mature over time rather than ballooning in size for little real benefit?

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Re: Not with a disk, but

Nothing broke here either, but when I was at university, my tutor had a fine piece of certain metal that he had swiped from the specialist engineering workshops and was using it as a paperweight. Just looking up prices of said metal, I'm guessing today it would be worth about £80,000.

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: Dealing with reality

"The COO had to make a decision based on inadequate information. And, very likely, he had to make it now"

She, not he, it says so in the article. Shes can be rude and aggressive too.

Re: Ah the C-Suite

"Though I’d wager the really big corps CEOs have underlings vetting the mail anyway"

Not just email, but all things getting in the way of actually doing work. I remember our workforce (me included) complaining to the c-suite about the awful corporate bit of software that we were all mandated to use to record our timesheets. (last job on a Friday before the weekend, perfect way to leave a sour taste in the mouth and really make staff not look forward to the Monday morning but they just didn't get that). HR insisted their user testing had confirmed it was easy and simple. They didn't think that it was because being HR and all overheads, they didn't actually do proper timesheets, so no wonder it was easy for them. The c-suite also insisted it was all fine and the problem must be with us (some of "us" were actually professional software engineers specialising in human factors issues but would HR ask for advice? of course not). Then we learned that the c-suite didn't do timesheets either so they had no idea why we were complaining. The software was eventually improved, a bit, but again with no chance for the actual users to be part of that change. To this day it's still a source of aggravation and the corporate tool for ruining what might otherwise have been a good week.

Re: Not quite the same but...

"perhaps more importantly, desensitizing us to the alarm sound"

During one of my first job interviews out of university I was being escorted around a facility by my host when I asked her "what's that ticking noise?". She said "what ticking noise?". I said "that one ............ there it is again!". "Oh that?" she said, "that's the emergency alarm being tested every 20 seconds so we know it's still working, you don't notice it after a while".

Re: Not quite the same but...

That sounds like a fairly innocent set of circumstances, but very good that the organisation learnt from it.

Where I worked once, it was one the duties of the fire wardens to note the names of everyone who decided to stay at their desks instead of obeying the fire alarms wherever there was an evacuation exercise. Personally, I'm always one of the first out the exit after having experienced some exciting situations in my earlier career. Being several decks before the waterline, in the cold North Atlantic when the fire alarm sounds really focusses the mind. Especially when you're trying to go up the steps when the fire crew are telling you to get out the way as they are coming down, and you later raise that no, it wasn't a drill. Also, times when no matter how many decks up you go, there's no guarantee of open air when you get there.

Brits still reckon Big Tech isn't paying enough tax

Re: Hmmmm...

"Would you prefer to continue as things are or you would prefer to pay more in exchange for companies you do business with paying more corporation tax?"

Yes I would. I would be willing to pay more tax in return for that tax money going on better public services.

Re: Global accounting is the problem

"...treats enforcement against multinationals as some impossible philosophical puzzle while showing miraculous energy when chasing small firms and ordinary taxpayers."

The problem is those multinationals have huge legal resources to hit back at HMRC with and tie up the process for years. Small firms and ordinary taxpayers don't, so can't.

Also, the tax system is so opaque and full of loopholes that unlike many other parts of law, it's not clear cut what specific tax offence has been committed, if at all. Often it comes down to legal opinion rather than cold hard fact.

Simplify the tax system and a lot of these issues become easier to deal with.

Why are businesses taxed on profits not income? Individual citizens are taxed on income (salary) not profit so why the difference?

If businesses were taxed on income (turnover) it could close a lot of tax loopholes like payments to sister-companies purely to avoid tax.

Britain's privacy watchdog quits after 'poor judgment' admission

Re: "...including inappropriate attempts at humor"

"I feel sorry for anyone who tries to build a career as a comedian in these days"

Plenty seen to be doing it and doing it well. Maybe it's the past generation dinosaurs who can't cope with what isn't considered funny today.

Smartphone market to shrink 15 percent this year due to memory crisis

Re: security updates

Can you tell what security updates you are currently getting, and therefore if they are useful to you at all? If you don't know what you're getting, does it matter if they stop?

I've got a device (not a phone) that begs for a firmware update every time it's turned on, partly because one is available. Fortunately, the marker's website tells me it's for compatibility with an obscure Bluetooth peripheral that I don't have. So I'm not doing that update.

Capita is about to sail past deadline to fix civil service pensions scheme

Re: Oh it can easily be fixed.

"The rules say that they are not allowed to take past performance on other contracts into account"

Not true. I've worked on Civil Service contract assessments and there is nothing of the sort. You certainly don't have to take past performance into account but you can if you want to. There's nothing to say you can't.

I think this misconception arises because some tender invitations say they will be assessed solely on the basis of the bid contents. But that's to ensure that bidders include all relevant information so that the bid is self contained, to prevent a bidder just including lots of links that never end. In those cases, you still can consider past performance. I've even seen that category explicitly stated as a bid assessment score.

KPMG's AI report becomes an accidental demo of AI hallucinations

Detection of AI produced text seems to have already peaked and is now getting less effective. LLMs learned their writing style from scraping human generated text, now young humans are learning their writing style from reading AI generated text (whether they know it or not). The logical conclusion is that humans and LLMs converge on the same writing style as they learn from each other. I wonder if we are already there.

Elon Musk is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000

Well, yes, but Musk doesn't actually have a trillion dollars or even access to a trillion dollars. It's just the hypothetical valuation of all those shares. Hypothetical because he can't cash them in for the total value because they way shares work, if he tried to, they would immediately devalue.

Your point about lots of money held in the hands of not many people is still valid. But, hey ho, that's just the way the cookie gets completely stomped on and obliterated.

'Resistance is futile,' says Qualcomm CEO. AI agents will be become invisible, inescapable, follow you across devices

Re: I don't even give my real name at the take away when I order.

"Don't forget, paying with cash doesn't leave an audit trail with your name on either."

It will one day. As soon as banknotes have RFID tags for counterfeit protection they will be tracked. Cash points and shop tills will have readers in them to track the flow of individual notes. Even if you acquire a banknote without the system knowing, it won't be long before it figures it out. As soon as you put a banknote near your phone, your car, your washing machine, your hearing aids, underpants, anything with an RFID scanner in it or even if someone else walks past you or sits near you and their phone detects your banknotes and any single other thing that identifies you, the system will then know which banknotes you have, where you got them from and where you get rid of them. Exchanging banknotes in a shop won't save you either because somewhere, there will be CCTV identifying you and associating you with those notes.

Yes, there will still be ways of avoiding that surveillance, but those ways will get harder and harder until eventually they only way will be to buy your own remote wilderness and live in it as a hermit.

Google explains how it will infuse ads into AI answers

Re: More enshiffication. Unashamedly based on my earlier post but it's still totally relevant:

"Or will I STILL just see:

Ads for stuff I've already bought...

Ads for stuff I've already looked at and decided I don't want?...

Ads for stuff that's "trending" (as if I have a shit)."

I quite like it when this sort of stuff is served up to me, because it suggests the limit on what they actually do know about me.

If, at the moment I bought something, I suddenly stopped seeing ads for it, then I'd get more worried.

UK reloads artillery plans with £1B remote-control howitzer order

Re: Nice

They won't be deployed in the UK. They'll be fighting a land war in eastern Europe in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania etc. They are the nations next in Putin's sights as he continues to try and reconstitute the pre '80s USSR.

Utah mega datacenter could dump 23 atomic bombs worth of energy per day

Re: Let's do some math

There must be a way of containing those fission bombs somehow and harnessing the energy released. Maybe if you could somehow slow the reaction rate down enough that you could capture the energy with, I dunno, some sort of heat exchanger and boil water into steam to drive some sort of mechanical machine, that would keep James Watt happy surely? Someone should look into it.

Re: Where is the skepticism?

"Simple physics suggests that even very large datacenters contribute only a small additional heat flux when spread over kilometres"

If you're taking about heat flux, then you should be using an absolute temperature scale like Kelvin, not a relative one like Celsius of Fahrenheit. At 10 degrees Celsius ambient temperature (283 K), 5 degrees increase is only 5/283=1.8% which you could call a small increase, numerically. But 5degrees increase is certainly a very noticeable increase - the difference between needing a coat or not.

Britain's £6B armoured sickener Ajax cleared for duty despite injuring troops

"Or maybe there is a real problem and it's too difficult to measure subjectively"

I know you are referring to the perception of illness (and possibly the nocebo effect), but the noise and vibration conditions inside Ajax can and were measured subjectively. They showed that the early predictions based on models were wrong and underestimated the levels that crews would encounter.

"the issues stemmed from vehicles being operated and maintained improperly"

Rubbish. The Dstl (MOD's own in-house boffins) were warning back in 2018 that there was a noise and vibration problem. DE&S (the bit of MOD actually buying the vehicles) said Dstl were being too boffiny and excessively picky. DE&S effectively said "look Dstl, you're not helping, can't you just sod off and let us get on with it?". Dstl were spot on.

Microsoft updates the Windows Update Experience: You can hit pause now

Not indefinitely but in Windows 10 you could pause them for a while - 35 days sounds familiar to me. This sounds just the same. I hope noone at Microsoft spent much time on this "enhancement".

DeepSeek's new models are so efficient they'll run on a toaster ... by which we mean Huawei's NPUs

Re: I will grab my non-GMO popcorn

"You can't spend your way out of debt."

With a few tweaks, you can spend [other people's money] your way to an inflated share price, allowing you personally to cash in.

Greece relaxes Euro biometric border entry rules amid airport chaos

I guess you can be denied entry for reasons other than security? An invalid passport perhaps?

Trump to UK: Stop taxing our big beautiful tech corps or face tariff tsunami

Re: Honestly, fuckit

While I agree with your headline conclusion, I disagree that this is bullying. It's just grandstanding and showing off. Trump may well put tariffs up, but as others have pointed out here, that'll just backfire. It's more like a bully who threatens to punch you in the face, then as he walks over to do it, trips over his own shoelaces that he tied together because he is incompetent and smashes face first into the dirt.

It would be hilarious if it weren't the case that he's now sat in the middle of the road with a bloody nose and throwing a tantrum by refusing to move. All the traffic is building up parping their horns for him to bugger off. When you get to the pub later you find that the beer lorry got caught in the traffic and couldn't make it's delivery. But because of the strange way economic forces work, this means that while the pub still has beer, the price has strangely gone up. All because some orange idiot couldn't tie his own shoe laces properly.

If malware via monitor cables is a matter of national security, this might be the gadget for you

If they are for sale, I fully expect some security researchers to be doing a tear down very soon.

I wonder what ifixit's repairability score will be?

I meant to do that! AI vendors shrug off responsibility for vulns

"It's hard to imagine any other sector in which a company could tell people 'our product puts everyone at grave risk' and still be allowed to operate with impunity."

Plenty of precedents of harmful products freely made and sold. Alcohol, tobacco, social media, gambling, processed foods.

Cops hand Motorola £25M no-bid deal to keep 2000-era radios alive

Re: Obvious from the start

On time, on budget or on quality. Seems these days that we can't even get one of those things, let alone two.

Fission impossible: Uncle Sam wants nuclear reactors in space by 2031

The 20kW of waste heat will be dumped offboard in a tightly focussed laser. It's a heat management system, definitely not a death ray.

I vibe coded a feed reading web app. It was enlightening and uncomfortable

I saw that at a bar at a popular sporting venue recently. You scan your payment card at the entry turnstile, walk in and take whatever drinks you want then leave. I presume there are cameras watching you to see what you pick up and take.

I didn't use it because I asked the attendant if I could get a certain drink there, and they didn't have it.

Virgin Galactic reopens ticket sales with out-of-this-world price hikes

They haven't flown since 2024 and even their Wikipedia page looks like it's covered in dust. I presume this is the register's April fools joke story.

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right

Re: Waiting for the AI induced crime headlines

An interesting issue there was in the interview with one of the police who investigated the case. When they looked at the conversations between the man and the ai, had a real person said the things the ai had, they would have likely been charged with conspiracy or similar.

UK wants to know if banning under-16s from social media does anything useful

Re: Banning stuff

"Stay out of the curtain twitching local groups, don't discuss politics and religion."

Very true. Recently my other half had a perfectly reasonable question to ask the local council about why something had been done, but couldn't bring themselves to message the council via Facebook because they knew others would jump on it and turn it into a rage storm of mindless off-topic government bashing.

The next day, someone else asked the same question instead and my other half's prediction came true almost immediately.

Chemists concoct nail polish that lets clawed humans use touch screens

"Hmm, I'm not used to seeing fems with really long nails doing any actual work"

Come to our labs and see some of my women colleagues with long nails working there, operating equipment with touch screen interfaces.

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

"terawatt's worth of computing power"

Why is compute ability measured purely in units of power now? It means nothing. Like anyone, I can build a terawatt of (really inefficient) compute power. Ok, so actually getting a terawatt into it is a different challenge.

Competition watchdog cracks knuckles, probes legality of Adobe cancellation fee

Re: Seems like

"(Relatedly, how has it taken me 15 YEARS to realise 'the register' is a pun)"

Huh? What? What's the pun?