Posts by that one in the corner

Don't say Pentium or Celeron anymore, it's just Processor now, says Intel

!!!!

There you are, you forgot a few X-Clamation marks.

Actual real-life hoverbike makes US debut at Detroit Auto Show

Loud as...

Now you are just boasting.

"hooverbike"

Man, that just sucks.

Re: How high can it get?

> useful for the 'search' part of search and rescue in remote wilderness

But for that money, how many unmanned (visual and FIR) camera drones could you field? And of varying capability to cope with more kinds of wilderness (low-level fixed-wing drones with longer flight times for open-space wilderness, lots of small 'copters for zipping below the canopy for a forested wilderness, 'thopters for deserts of course).

Re: Long range delusions abound these days.

> ... when they aren't just toys

This will just be a toy, for fun, if you can afford it. Nowt wrong with that, in this capitalist world, is there.

You might even get one or two being run, for a short time until the novelty wears off, as an eye-catching courier service: cheaper than some other forms of advertising.

Oh, and it will appear in the next-but-one Bond film, probably only in the opening sequence.

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

Re: Wangs for the Memories

> that had a hard interior, but a softer exterior

So, not like an Armadillo?

NASA just weeks away from trying again with SLS Moon rocket launch

using a SpaceX lander to bring them down to the regolith

Bring them down? Not *take* them down?

So SpaceX is going to get Starship ready far enough ahead of the crewed Artemis to plop a lander onto the Moon and have it wait there until the crew arrive, at which point it'll go up to meet them, then bring them back as it goes down to the surface again?

Using the datacenter as a dining room destroyed the platters that matter

Re: When I worked for Network Southeast

Meanwhile, in the Old South West:

Years ago, whilst walking slowly up Nine Tree Hill in Bristol (slowly 'cos it is steep, you see) I happened to pass a lorry painted in the livery of a major computer manufacturer (Digital IIRC). At that moment, there was a rumbling noise, as of a pedestal-sized computer rolling downhill inside the lorry, then an almighty crash as the tailgate stood its ground.

No-one appeared to check on the lorry, at least in the time I stood there, gathering my startled wits before continuing to trudge upwards, looking back every so often until out of sight.

Don't really know what was in there, but have often hoped to hear of someone in Bristol who received a unit with strange dents but which was pleasantly easy to move around on its castors.

Certainly true for the original use of the name, but for better or worse the name was also attached to sealed unit drives that used the swing-arm mechanism that was introduced in the (later models of?) "real" Winchester units and licensed to other manufacturers.

At least until practically no-one was using (or had even seen) an old removable disc hard drive and everyone referred to the now-common sealed units as just a "hard-drive".

Although it seems that some places do still refer to hdds as Winchesters, if Wikipedia is to be believed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives

Re: No explosives in the tech support room

Did you mean to end with "and got lit"?

After all, as the notice was that specific, presumably everyone was actually quite happy with just being hit, so long as the fire stick wasn't actually alight.

Ad blockers struggle under Chrome's new rules

Re: Localised results - but without privacy intrusion?

Indeed, if you want localised results you can just add the location to the search.

Better yet, you can add a *useful* location. For example, if I'm visiting York this evening I have no need of a restaurant search for my current location, Derby, let alone where the search engine believes I happen to live (which shifts all over the place, to my great amusement).

Re: Advertising weary?

He said "free-to-air": streaming services have your individual (to the login, at least) viewing history available at least, probably more.

Good old fashioned TV, without the streaming, can at most provide regionally differentiated advertising.

Localised results - but without privacy intrusion?

Isn't that a bit of a contradiction?

"I don't want websites knowing personal details, such as my location"

"Why aren't these search results localised to me?"

Elon Musk claims SpaceX was in talks with Apple on iPhone 14 satellite services

Re: software updates

Hence the article notes that the larger V2 satellites would be needed, but they are not yet cleared for flight.

Everyone will have to start acting like a proper Brit and remember to always carry their (radio-refelective foil-lined) brolly.

NTT Docomo claims first 5G network with both sub-6 GHz and mmWave

Keeping us on our toes

by contrasting radio bands, one by frequency and one by wavelength. That won't onfuse anyone, will it?

On which point, by sub-6 GHz do they mean (sub, 6GHz), e.g. Long Wave, intruding on The Archers, or (sub-6, GHz) the comms used by Blue Submarine No. 6?

How this Mars rover used its MOXIE to convert CO2 into precious oxygen

Re: But aren’t the blue eyes a characteristic of Dune?

"Few of whom lived on Dune"

The Fremen keep the secret of their numbers from the offworlders.

The answer to 3D printing equipment on Mars might lie in the Red Planet's dust

Re: A typo surely

Something made out of 100% Mars is going to crack easily?

So, soft landings only or we'll have another Valles Marineris on our hands.

Perseverance generated 110W at time of launch from its RTG; enough to drive a plastic filament 3D printer but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that heating regolith and titanium into a composite takes a bit more juice.

Re: So much for commercial space flight

The delta-v from Earth to most places in the Solar System are similar, because of the effort to leave our gravity well in the first place. The killer difference between a Lunar trip and one to Venus is the time required, which translates into life support mass for a manned mission.

Haven't looked into the mission to Venus you mention, but can't help thinking that, in order to get sufficient per-man life support onto a Saturn V they'd be looking at reducing the crew complement. Say, to one.

And they before they'd invented the e-reader or MP3 player - it'd be a real-life case of 12 records (ok, tape cassettes) and one book (alongside Shakespeare and the Bible).

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

A Head of State for Our Times

I admired the way that the Queen reduced the pompery and distance between herself and the (extra)ordinary people she met across the UK, Commonwealth and the World.

Asus packs 12-core Intel i7 into a Raspberry Pi-sized board

Re: $1,217.00

> Ouch

Not bad though, compared to the current price of a Raspberry Pi 4 on Ebay.

DoJ charges pair over China-linked attempt to build semi-autonomous crypto haven on nuked Pacific atoll

Adding radioactivity into the mix

is barely going to change the toxic nature of cryptocurrency.

Microsoft warns of bugs after nation pushes back DST switchover

Re: Sundials

Just so long as you remember to adjust the gnomon angle on your wristdial when travelling on the M1*

*other roughly N-S roads are available

History never bothers to explain..

Could not reach History to pass your complaint on, but was able to leave a message with Kleio.

SiFive RISC-V CPU cores to power NASA's next spaceflight computer

"If the spacecraft can be told..."

(Have been wracking my memory - and wild web searches - but I just can't bring the details to mind, grr:)

One of the old space probes took photos of some previously-unknown moonlet (?) because one of the programmers had found a bit of room to insert a pattern-recognition routine as an freebie extra feature (and was allowed to put it in).

(IIRC one of the Voyager or Pioneer craft, but probably not)

Open source biz sick of FOSS community exploitation overhauls software rights

Re: Looks like a bait-and-switch to me

How so bait and switch?

If you are successfully using Akka at the moment under the Apache licence you can keep on using that copy forever.

Now the response will be "but I can't get free updates any more"!

Well, as was pointed out above, you were never guaranteed any free updates: you don't have a support contract, you were just keeping your fingers crossed that the Akka devs would decide to keep writing and releasing free updates. They didn't decide to do that, so just the same as if they were hit by a bus, you put your contingency plan into action.

(Oops, meant to be a reply to Pascal Monett, missed the "reply" button)

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

Did you have TomTom in 4WD off-roading mode?

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: UXtards to blame

> blame the coders

WHAT?

Blame the coders for coding up what the UX designer told them to do?

Dead people could be designated authors of Atlassian Confluence docs and that can't be changed

Re: See it another way

Very true.

I've lost colleagues far too early; I keep around some old files & commit notes they made as mementoes that can still turn up occasionally in a "search all files".

Re: Pretty pretty rules, OK

> But that's developer thinking

Upvoted you for the "something's seriously wrong with the thinking" BUT

Excuse me, that is Atlassian bug triage thinking.

And as for your note about an invoicing system - well, that just sounds like that set of devs had insufficient domain knowledge; hey, they are devs, not accountants. In any project, you have to ensure that the devs are supplied with enough training/info to provide the domain knowledge. You did just update the specs and pass back some training materials, didn't you, rather than - as here - mock them just for knowing something you did but they happened not to?

Re: "we can’t build everything at once"

MVP is *really* not meant to be used like that! You're not supposed to expose the final end user to the MVP, it is for the client's internal team!

But it is, sadly, only too easy to see how the term was abused to mean, as you put it, MMP: "hey, we can point to this page that says that an MVP is a Good Thing" and quickly put the book away before they read the actual description.

Add it to the long list of badly treated and totally incorrect language that makes up "Management Speech", along with the old favourites "quantum leap" and the upstart "steep learning curve".

Re: Maybe there are other ways

That is probably workable if you see one Confluence page as roughly equivalent to a complete document, but becomes intrusive to unworkable if there are lots of shorter pages (intended to be easy to digest when read online) or even very short to tiny pages.

For example, I was working on a "company glossary entries" page collection, where each page was just one glossary entry - so generally tiny - and you could create a complete glossary with just the links to the relevant items for your immediate requirements. Some entries in a glossary are nigh on trivial whilst others (expanding an acronym to point to the correct set of industry safety standards) could be critical to get right.

Having an author section and contact details for an entry pointing you to the Pantone and HTML hex for "Goldenrod", as used in the project logo, would be laughable, but SOP has to be consistent so in it would have to go...

But any approach like the one you suggest is just papering over the crack in the basic product (one of many such) so you have to use what works for you...

Internet pranksters send hundreds of cabs to Moscow street, cause gridlock

Re: Moscow

Yeah, but phoning up and getting UK bobbies to pop round for a chat, see if everything is okay, your neighbour was a bit concerned doesn't have quite the same impact as US cops in full military gear going "hut".

Re: 99 pizzas

> SWATting the Kremlin

How do you avoid half of them just overrunning the town of Kremlin in Oklahoma whilst the other half charge off to Moscow, Idaho?

(Had to Google for those two, but I just knew that they'd exist somewhere in the USA)

Xcel smart thermostat users lose their cool after power company locks them out

Re: Control issues

> The only advantage of a smart meter ...

Another "advantage", that is frequently missed, is the opportunity for the smart meter to start taking into account the Power Factor of your house's loads.

Posts like this one https://www.lemonfool.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=12645 explain it better than I would do (and you can watch a few Big Clive videos, his favourite Hopi meter shows the PF of whatever he is fiddling with today), but suffice it to say that the cheap LED lights using capacitive droppers have low PFs and that could (theoretically so far, but...) lead to higher costs if (when?) PF starts being used in the calculation of charges.

There are reasons for the grid to care about your PF (if it gets really low for everyone), so taking it into account may be justified, but then we'd be in a pickle trying to explain to Joe Bloggs why these LEDs may be cheaper to run than these LEDs over here.

Chances good for NASA Artemis SLS Moon launch on Saturday

Priorities

But that's a double-episode-of-Casualty night!

Well, at least it won't be interrupting Strictly.

Underwater datacenter will open for business this year

Re: Ode to an On-Call Engineer, whose scuba kit failed

That's it, you're bard.

Re: Correct terminology

Instead of "Cloud Computing" we can have "Protean Processing" (or "Pelagic Processing", but the shape-shifting aspect seems appropriate).

For "Cloud Storage", maybe "Salacial Storage" (as in 'of Salacia', careful not to confuse that with "Salacious Storage", as if) or maybe simply "Doris Data" (not to be confused with "Doric Data", which would be a spreadsheet).

Re: At 700ft Nobody can hear your data scream...

From the article: Inside, the servers are also immersed in a dielectric coolant, which conducts heat but not electricity.

That coolant is a liquid, as demonstrated on Tomorrow's World.

Re: Why the bleep dunk these things in salt water?

> Also worth pointing out, water pressure increases about 1psi per 2 feet...

From the article: Inside, the servers are also immersed in a dielectric coolant, which conducts heat but not electricity.

I.e. the pods are filled with liquid which is as incompressible as the water outside, so no need for any diesel pumps to pressurise them, just a simple equalisation mechanism (squeezy bag).

Though you do want to be careful of any gas pockets within the kit itself, so SSDs instead of helium-filled HDDs perhaps.

USB-C to hit 80Gbps under updated USB4 v. 2.0 spec

Re: EU will love this

I still have a couple of SCSI drives tucked under my desk that use the Centronics style cables, from Frog; used with an Amiga and then a PC. One day, will find out what condition they are in. Yup, one day, real soon now.

Can we at least stick to micro-USB when that is all that is needed?

So far, not one gadget I have[1] which uses a USB C connector actually *needs* that connector - they could all work perfectly well with micro-USB (just for fun, my usual "USB C cable" is actually a short mini-USB to C on the end of an 'old' mini to A cable: at the time, cheaper than buying a long enough C to A).

If you see micro-USB you know what it may demand from the other end. See a C and you have go check the specs to find out if it is compatible - only to find out that it doesn't uses anything beyond old fashioned USB 2! What a waste of time.

But we have some people that demand C where it isn't needed (and where it would add cost), often because they "just threw away all the old cables" (citations available if required). Aargh.

[1] I'm aware that there are gadgets that do make use of the facilities, I just don't have a use-case for them (and, fwiw, neither do any of my old fellow CS alumni I met up with last week; just my sample set, yours may differ). Monitors all happy on VGA, HDMI, DP; don't do video enough to justify a superfast external drive; happily bumbling along with a few dozen MCU boards and blinkies, smattering of 'phones and tablets around the house.

Re: FFS

You need to set up a database, with each cable QR coded and kept in an acrylic tube. Just dump all the tubes onto the kitchen table and start up your app (you do have the app, don't you?); tap on the image of the master device (PC, laptop, DVR) and the slave (memory stick, actioncam etc). The app then shows a video of the table and uses AR to highlight which tube contains the cable you want.

It couldn't be simpler.

Re: Oh good

You forgot USB 1.0 (aka "USB") and USB 1.1

I've still got bits around here with white plastic in in Type A connector!

Re: EU will love this

Why are your old cables suddenly not working and need to be sent to landfill?

Don't they still work with all the stuff they were working with the day before you bought the latest shiny?

Oh no, that James Webb Space Telescope snap might actually contain malware

Social engineering as part of the exe chain?

As I read the article, I think you have just fallen into a trap the bad guys set:

"There is a certificate involved, blame the OS for not protecting you"

or similar feelings expressed about the use of a JPEG...

The "certificate" was just used as a wrapper, so that if you spotted the download you'd not be suspicious. Then you'd see certutil.exe run: ok, what else would you use with a certificate? But it was just used to extract the next link in the chain.

(Similarly, the JPEG, abused to innocently carry a link in the chain)

At no point is the "certificate" intended to be handed 'properly' to the OS and hence, as you hoped, be validated: to the OS it is just another piece of downloaded stuff.

Now, you *could* demand that the OS examine every bit of data and validate it before letting any other process access it: now you have either invented the malware scanner or have effectively switched on autorun for everything that is ever downloaded (because you know full well that, for example, detecting that a file is "a certificate" and then running some autovalidation on it means another vulnerability will be found and the fake certs designed to exploit that).

But because of your reaction to the fact one link used a certificate, the bad guys now have you wasting time and energy talking about that - and, who knows, enough people follow suit and pressure OS writers, who add in the autorun scenario "as an extra precaution" (aka to be seen to be doing something) and bingo, attack surfaces grow and grow...

GM's Cruise revises self-driving software after San Francisco crash

And how much are both the article's and your statements going to increase the levels of fear above the point where the fear itself is more damaging than any realistic risk?

after 3 or 4 minutes, they're completely locked in

Um...