Posts by that one in the corner 5065 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
Trying to locate Little Green Undergraduates and Martian post-docs by waving around a cup of Pot Noodle, eh. At least the description of the sauce packet is reasonable: Organics and Chemicals ("chicken curry" my spotty[1] backside).
[1] inevitable result of too many PN's - Just Say No or the results will last a lifetime.
> But to get the ISS into a parking orbit would require 900 metric tonnes of fuel.
ok, 900 metric tonnes of fuel *that* is a reasonable thing to argue about - unlike (IMO) the arguments about "we don't have the means to re-use the material in space, *that* means we must not consider boosting. Talking of which:
> the thing is falling apart, its aluminium subject to fatigue and cracking. You wouldn't want to use it for spare material for any mission critical part.
Which is probably why I never suggested doing that - spot the bit about vacuum welding things that ought to open and the reference to one of the concepts for melting the stuff rather than using it as-is - and certainly not expecting to use it as spares? At (hypothetical) point in time I described, aside from the fact that it would be wildly unlikely that the designs were similar enough that anything *could* be used as spares, there isn't any reason to assume that *every* item be "mission critical" (i.e. if that one thing fails, it all fails). Think bigger - and further away in time - than the "barely scraping by" missions that we put together at the moment.
In other words, please don't just ignore my introductory sentence when replying:
>> That all depends upon how optimistic we are about having a long-term presence in space
Ok, you are not optimistic to the point where a boost might be something to consider (i.e. where you'd actually want to discuss whether the 900 metric tonnes of fuel would be worth it or not). But it would be good not to have that be admitted, rather than having to infer it.
PS
Not saying that I am actually that optimistic either, but I would like people to at least *try* to be and consider what that would be like. Personally, I have grave doubts about the likelihood of Artemis over the next decade, but would love to be proven wrong by that mission actually succeeding.
PPS
Thanks for the Ars Technica reference - I don't spend much time on Ars, most of my info about ISS, Artemis etc comes from just reading NASA materials and chats with the real space-heads at the local astronomy groups; it is good to have an article I point the less fanatically interested people at.
> Unless you want to send a recycling centre and the factories needed to then manufacture new spacecraft parts, it would have to come down then go back up anyway.
That all depends upon how optimistic we are about having a long-term presence in space. Push the ISS up enough that we can just ignore it for the next few decades[1] (nothing much will happen to it, who cares if hatches vacuum weld shut if you just mean to cut into it anyway). When somebody can make good use of a truss, even if only to render it down at the focus of a big mirror[2], it will be there for them.
[1] pick your own interpretation of "few"
[2] take one, big, mylar party balloon; add a bit of gas inside; cover outside with self-curing foam; cut in half; give one mirror to a friend.
> which means launching a rocket that's carrying a rocket.
OR (and stay with me on this, it is a bit wacky) launch a rocket and then refill it in orbit, then use that same rocket to boost the ISS up, up and away.
Hmm, why does that idea sound so familiar, and right in SpaceX's bailiwick?
Perhaps they are going to get trainers over from the Netherlands to teach their eagles to catch the drones? As the European birds have been sacked they could even be brought over and naturalised, allowing the Moolenaar to proudly claim that the US leads the way with its (Dutch) American Eagles.
> "Wacky" means "not rationally justified"
That was a very surprising claim, so I had a quick check.
Ah, it appears that in the US the third dictionary[1] definition does indeed include the word "irrational".
So, I shall take this entire exchange as being a Win, a strike against the yankification of Good Old El Reg (and a despairing shake of the head at people who will pick third defintion as an excuse to leap into outrage).
[1] third in Collins, third in Merriam Webster; Cambridge doesn't get as far as "irrational" (although some of the synonyms indicate disapproval or disbelief, mainly in a humourous way)
> "Wacky ideas" have no place in the development of an effectively monopolist tool relied on by businesses throughout the World to keep their lights on. The M$ dev teams need to grow up and accept that responsibility.
Leaving aside the usual El Reg sarcasm about "Recall", I wonder what an actual dev might consider to be a "wacky idea", something that could be played with for a bit of fun? Is there anything at all that maybe Mr "I know what Fun is" Mike could possibly have ever used (whether or not he knew it, after the actual IT people had done it for him)?
Remember, with Raymond Chen's stuff, we are talking about the entire history of Windows, so perhaps our happy-go-lucky dev heroes had crazy - oops, sorry "Wacky" - ideas like:
* I wonder if I could just whip up a tool to help fiddle with all those Registry settings we're reading to control the UI? Ta-da: PowerToys (Note the "toys" in the name) and especially TweakUI! They were absolutely vital in the days of yore and even though they are no longer quite as good at making the UI behave itself, I make sure that I have the current lot installed (as I have a lovely old mechanical keyboard, I use Keyboard Manager remap the totally useless CAPS LOCK to be a slighty-useful Windows Key and SCROLL LOCK to Apps/Menu, just to name one use).
* Ya know, Word is ok, and Excel gets a load of use, I wonder if it would be possible to sort of "embed" one inside the other?
What Mike has clearly missed is that an awful lot of things start out as a dev just having a fun idea and playing around with it - outside of Microsoft we have silly little things like Linux - heck, lile Unix full stop! Or anything that came out of Xerox PARC, directly or indirectly - nothing terribly useful, just the GUI sitting on top of an entire OS![1]
[1] yes, yes, I know that there was all sorts of intermingling with other groups, but for today, let's just stick with the story that Xerox did it all and Apple nicked it and then Microsoft did a knock off and...
> When the AI chips have the all the electricity, will the rest of us be stuck with rolling blackouts?
Yes. Obvs.
Otherwise you risk the LLMs losing their train of thought and that would bring Western Civilisation to its knees[1].
On the bright side, once power is restored, you will be able to use the LLM to quickly write another letter of complaint to the electric company expressing your dissatisfaction with the situation. To which they'll reply, via LLM (to provide a unique and personalised response) that the entire matter is out of their hands (unless you would also like to buy a 500kW feed, in which case they can give you a 99.999% uptime guarantee, as befits so noble and graceful a customer). Your share of the LLM will then reply to that, prompting another reply back; this will all occur within the "AI data center" so that it can continue uninterrupted by the blackouts, as a part of the vital commercial communications that drives the industrial powerhouse that is our marvellous country, thus demonstrating the vital role these LLMs are playing and justifying the costs to keep them going.
Meanwhile, here is a candle, be sure to only light it in a well-ventilated area, your comfort and safety are important to us.
[1] well, if the sellers of the LLMs are to be believed, and they would never lead us astray.
>> 1950s SciFi imaginings of 3 or more large manned geosynchrous satellites relaying signals.
> Starlink et al are in low orbit for latency reasons.
According to the documentation[1] the manned stations will invariably invent faster than light comms, which improves the ping times.
[1] Venus Equilateral
> It still might not be “successful” because GPUs are so dominant, that it’s easier to make progress there than on limited-supply restricted skill-set FPGAs
Well, the next stage after proving your idea on an FPGA is to go custom ASIC, and then you get boards made with stuffed full of ASICs and given some overall name, next thing you know the same units turn up as chiplet subprocessors in your CPU.
Just look at the history of blockchain mining for a recent example of the trend (with only a bit more hype, instead of getting new CPUs being hyped with "NPU" units they'd be appearing with BCUs instead!).
The only problem is that if this new unit takes off fast enough, Intel, Apple et al will be left trying to figure out how to get you to trust them and buy a new CPU which has removed the NPU in favour of the new hotness. "This time, there *will* be useful software you'll want to use, and it'll be ready before we change the architecture again, honest".
> It doesn't take an Einstein to realise how tracking devices can be used for all the wrong reasons.
Just the ability to watch thrillers and Bond movies, TV such as The (New) Avengers etc from the 1960s onwards.
Maybe if all the Airtags came with a big red flashing LED, and an optional large silver toggle switch, then everyone would have made the connection in their minds.
Claim subrogation is just passing (part of) one claim from one body to another: you contact your insurer, they do the leg work to contact the insurers of anyone else involved, they look at what happened and make a claim against another body's insurer and so and so forth. This is one good reason for using an insurer, as you pass all that leg and paperwork over to them.
Anyone who has made a claim involving a third party is well aware of this (e.g. swapping insurance details after a prang, or when you burn down your neighbour's fence).
BUT the double claim being asked about here is the fact that the Oteros not only made a claim via their insurers but ALSO made a separate claim/action directly against NASA, doing an end-run around the insurers.
Which tends to mean that the person is trying it on - e.g. after a prang you get a lawyer's letter sent directly to you waffling on about whiplash; this is meant to scare you into making a bad move and pay up on a fake claim. All you actually do is pass that directly on to your insurer, who then probably starts taking a much closer look at the claims of the other party and gets very sceptical indeed ('cos your insurers get a better go at it if they can drop heavy hints about fraudulent claims). At least, that is how it'll work in the UK and EU with a half-decent insurer (from experience and anecdotes from colleagues).
No idea how it goes in the US, so not accusing the Oteros of anything, it may be quite normal over there.
What if the nuclear device was owned by the Scouts (that is the US Scouts; over here he'd be a tad old to still be in the Boy Scouts) or the Brownies?
Can a legal minor commit an Act of War[1]?
[1] tried g**gling that but didn't get any good answers, and none that I'd want to put on my insurance claim)
> It is actually a separate 32bit x86 CPU with its own operating system.
The OS is Minix, making this one of the most widely deployed operating systems on the planet.
There was coverage of this back in 2017, when details about the insides of IME were dug out
(Although read that article with care - it keeps on trying to demonise Minix, when all of the criticisms it makes are just because the source to IME isn't open, leading to a lot of "could" rather than "has been shown to do"; the same article could have written if the IME was found to be running any other non-GPL embeddable OS).
> You don't really believe that it is possible to get acceptable data speeds using an internal antenna on a phone that's communicating with a moving target several hundred miles in the air, do you?
Of course not.
Which is why you wear the 5G Silver[1] Sat Gloves, a stylish accessory for the Modern Road Warrior. An app will show how to hold the phone in between the tops of your wrists as you arrange your fingers into a parabola focussed on the antenna. Best results are to be had if you practice smoothly rotating your hips to follow the satellite track across the sky.
For the follically challenged gentleman, a paint-on coating is also available, which places the focus just under the chin. Sadly, this does mean you have to perform a handstand if you are too close to the equator (more moderate climes allow you to relax on a lounger with you feet in the air).
[1] Gold also available, as an upgrade.
> He requested an expedited visa to enter the USA, which was denied.
However:
After that cancelled session, he was not invited again:
> Virt-P2V, which we described as ... sends it to a conversion host system, which then wraps it up to run in a KVM virtual machine.
> Well, it was a dozen years ago. Times have moved on ... introduced that tool's more contemporary sibling,
Um, ah, how to put this...
Virt-v2v *is* the software running on the "conversion host system". IOW in order to run the "older" Virt-P2V you first need to be running the "more contemporary" Virt-v2v as a server!
Virt-v2v is a lot more capable now than it was twelve years ago and it is definitely worth knowing about using it not as a server process, but as a command to convert between formats, however it has been there all these years, as the powerhouse that lets Virt-P2V work at all.[1]
[1] Actually, I rather wish they *were* separate, so then you could boot an ISO then into Virt-P2V to create the VM files with nothing more than some (separate) drive space to store them. But now, as then, you do need to get a copy of Virt-v2v running in a second machine, which just isn't as convenient. First-world problems, eh.
> "Full Manhattan Project" and actually build a craft capable of reaching it in time.
That definitely needs to be Orion, to fulfill both those criteria.
No, not that one, this, older, one.
And when it reaches the rock, it is the design that is actually equipped to deal with it (no, not blow it into pieces, that still leaves pretty much the same amount of rock, and energy, on a collision course; Bruce Willis wasted his sacrifice): push it off to the side.
Just don't stand near the launch site; you thought Starship could tear up the pad...
> wildly different to what we know or expect
The changes over that - or any - time period don't *have* to lead to 'wildly different" creatures; if the path leading to sentient cats digging up McDonalds is a survivable strategy across 40 million years time, that is a route evolution can happily take.
> animals (if they still exist)
Unless there is a total wipeout of life, not "just" an extinction level event, "animals" are highly likely to still exist in 40 million years - the basic idea of "animal" has already been here a *lot* longer than that! After all, we often say that cockroaches will inherit the world (although my money is on tardigrades, huge monstrous tardigrades, almost a centimetre long!)
> The scientists and engineers who warned
And the rock star & film maker who joined in with the warning.
"I'm a shooting star, leaping through the sky"
> "the personal intelligence system that puts powerful generative models right at the core of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac,"
>> "Sounds ghastly"
PS
If any yanks would like to get their hands on an EU, Apple Intelligence-free iThing, give us a bell, usual number, usual fees, and I'll pop over La Manche and chuck one in le post to you. Guaranteed pukkah.
[1] not trying to imply that Apple devices have a smug air about them, heaven forfend.
Ahem.
> "But on the way up Oxford Street you encounter a group of Vegan Crossfit enthusiasts who are in a piano accordion ensemble. After consulting the internet and not being able to find a local gun shop
James Purdey and Sons, bespoke shotguns and hunting rifles; South Audley Street, less than one mile from Oxford Street.
There may be - lesser - establishments closer to hand, but if a gentleman is not willing to take a stroll past Mayfair...
Although, given the details of this sordid tale, one may find Mr Purdey (senior) a tad reluctant to serve at such an hour, at least not without a proper appointment being agreed beforehand.
> not that anybody really does the X protocol directly across the network any more...
Oh, I dunno. I tend to take the attitude that if you are snooping on the traffic across the wired LAN in my study and attic to poach the unencrypted X11 traffic that occasionally flies around, I have far worse problems to deal with.
> I have written one [pure X11 app] myself, as it happens, which wasn't as horrific as some posters on here would have you believe (although the documentation is, um, "terse", to say the least).
Terse? It came in a honking great fat tome[1] for Xlib! Plus another tome each for the basic toolkit, the User's guide, the Admin guide - at least 8 books in the series (My First O'Reilly Books, before the Great Plague of Animal Covers).
If they'd been any less terse, more chatty and fun to read, one loose bookshelf and you'd never survive the avalanche!
[1] clearly fans of Laurie Taylor: "one of these days I'm going to write a book, and it'll be thick enough to stun an ox"
> I wonder if you were using modern hardware and/or multiple graphics cards?
Can not speak for the person you actually addressed that question to, but I (reasonably) recently built a new PC, running Devuan and X11. It didn't need any help from me to find the single new, big (to me) monitor. Nor when I plugged in the two old ones as well (aside from the obvious "this is to the left of that"), nor did it need anything from me when I plugged in a second GPU a short while later (with its own monitor). It even coped fine when I took away the first GPU again to pass through into VMs.
I've loads of notes on what I did wrong fiddling manually with all of the above (hey, do I get better results with open or proprietary nVidia drivers? Oops, that was the wrong block of incomprehensible numbers to pass through the correct GPU) but the windows kept on appearing...[1]. Ok, maybe a reboot was needed when I really messed up.
[1] to my amazement, as I do remember all the fun that could be had decades before; somewhere I still have some very thick tomes of X11 manuals from Foyles 'cos who had drive space to keep that lot online?
So now purging tmp files is the duty of an Init system, not, say, a cron job with the cleaner of your choice?[1]
Or am I just so totally out of touch that I've not realised that Init means "every single second of your system's runtime, even when it is running stably" and not just that bit at the beginning with all the messages on the console?
[1] and far simpler ones than this beast, according to its manpage. Although, some of those options do look really useful, if you find that the rest of the Init keeps dying 'cos the processes invoked keep messing up their own files/dirs and need them to be quickly recreated before said process is started. Not that anything in a systemd based setup would ever need such patching, would it?
So, we will have to learn to talk to these things using some kind of pseudo-natural language, following a set of rules that the researchers formalise for us; if we get it right then the machines will do what we are hoping for, but if we make mistakes then we can expect to get nonsense results back.
Hmm, that concept rings a bell; didn't we use to have a word for that, before the LLMs made the whole idea redundant. On the tip of my tongue, began with a 'p'? Prog, prog - prog rock?
Still, at least all the models will behave the same way, so we only have to learn one formalism to use with all of them. What? Those rules only applies to Microsoft's LLM? I have to learn another to use Google's? And it'll all change next month when the LLMs are updated?
> LED headlights ... have a much longer life than the older halogen or xenon bulbs they replaced
Well, unless they "accidentally" overdrive them, under cool them and shorten their working life.
Big Clive has a few telling videos about reducing the power for all sorts of bright LED lighting, resulting in extended lifetimes (like, the life you'd expect an LED to have) with no significant loss of lighting effect from the p.o.v. of the human eye (the advantage of log versus linear responses).
> cutting edge SystemD uses Win3 type INI files with square brackets as section separators
And?
It is easy and simple to parse, and will get the job done is all you need is basic <key,value> pairs with a bit of structure (sections) if you want. If you *need* a deeply-nested structure with lots of arrays and structs on the 'value' side then there are other, more complex formats available. But aren't most (if not all) of the arguments against systemd because it keeps going the complex route?
Are you railing against it *purely* because Windows is the most obvious originator of the format, therefore it can never be a Proper Linux Solution? But it appears all over the place - doesn't that Git config file look suspicious?
No love here for systemd (Devuan FTW etc, as noted as far back as, oooh, Friday) but being catty about INI file format really seems like scraping the barrel for things to criticise it for.
>> You don't think, perhaps, that this is just a marketing mockup?
> No, I don't think it's just a marketing mockup. I think (as per the subject line) that it's one of those endless silly stock photos of Photoshopped keyboards
So this photoshopped photo is NOT a mockup done by marketing?
In that case, who is doing the photoshopping and releasing them in marketing materials - the tealady? Sneaking it onto the website whilst passing around the digestives, distracting the head of marketing with an artfully placed chocolate bourbon as he is asked to agree their final layout?
Hmm, a shot of just one corner of the keyboard. Done in a rather stylish fashion, with a large aperture and a well-manicured finger in shot. Not exactly an engineering specs quality photograph.
You don't think, perhaps, that this is just a marketing mockup?
Or, if it it does really look like that, that it could just be a funky marketing label applied to an otherwise perfectly normal shift key?
> And no-one needs so-called "AI"
The NPUs are just more compute in your box.
Believing that they are only usable for the much-hyped LLMs is a failure of the imagination: consider that GPUs were only ever talked about in terms of FPS in Doom, or shading models in Tetris 3D[1].
But we know full well that GPUs were long used for other number-crunching, encouraged by things like CUDA to ease use and Numpy/CuPy to make it even easier to apply in your own field.
Even if you stick to running ML (or even just neural nets) on these things, there are other models than LLMs (especially intetesting given that even TLA gives this laptop's NPU's performance a sneering report as "not much compared to...". As noted in other comments, this week I am mostly interested in Birdnet, 'cos it is fun.
Of course, if you are sure you have absolutely no use for any of this, then, yes, "being forced" to buy and run them is a waste of resources.
Although, running them - hmm, looking at temperatures and the power pulled by my PC, it almost looks as though it is reducing power and shutting off units inside the CPU that are not in use at the moment. Funny, that.
Generally, I don't subscribe to the catastrophism heard in these comments that you will be "forced" to buy them and they will never be of any use to you; yes, everyone and his dog is boasting about how their latest high-end CPUs have this built in, but you do not have to buy the biggest. Okay, if you have chosen to go with a specific manufacturer and they *only* supply supply the biggest NPU they can foist on you, then you are not going to get a perfect fit for your desires all the time, but, hey, who does? Maybe reconsider the choice if it is too painful.
"But Windows will force this onto you" - and haven't we seen, in The Register, a long history of MS being a right pain in the arse and someone then showing you how to apply some Preparation-M to ease the suffering?
[1] sorry, I know very little about video games - remember the discussions but the actual games aren't memorable to me
PPS
> Just get on and release a Pi PC, without any AI BS wasting cycles/amps.
So, the Raspberry Pi 400.
Or is this just a complaint that they've not released a Pi 500 fast enough after the Pi 5?
Sorry, I seriously do not understand why people demand that the Pi has to become a boring old PC, with one specific model released from the manufacturer, and lose the "choose the bits you want to assemble what fits you best" that we've had right from the beginning.
If you just want a closed black box that happens to run Linux, they exist and have done for ages.
