* Posts by A Non e-mouse

3254 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2010

Uber Australia to pay $178M to settle cabbies' class action

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ridesharing regulations did not exist anywhere in the world

What's that got to do with the case? Uber are a taxi company, so why are they talking about rideshare?

Oh, you mean Uber are claiming they're a rideshare company not a taxi company? Good job in the UK we have the "duck test".

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

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Elsewhere, it was mentioned that the original plan for the Voyager probes was for this grand tour. Then the US Senate cut the funding and the engineers had to sharped their pencils. It's looking like the Voyager probes might outlast the humans who tried to shorten its life.

Third time is almost the charm for SpaceX's Starship

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Mushroom

In the later parts of the stream, the upper stage appeared to be tumbling & disassembling itself. Once it started hitting the atmosphere its disassembling accelerated very rapidly.

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

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I'm reminded of the chapter in the Resataurant At The End Of The Universe where Arthur Dent refuses to engage with a sentiant cow which is suggesting the best parts of its body Arthur should eat before the cow goes and humanly kills itself.

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

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Headmaster

Re: "Paper Trail ..."... "..paperwork..."

Are they really building planes in the 21st centuary and using physical paper to track everything? Surely it would all have been computerised decades ago?

Dell exec reveals Nvidia has a 1,000-watt GPU in the works

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Alert

Which makes the numbers even worse: 1000A running through a piece of silicon.

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Flame

Assuming the cards run at 5V, they're going to be pulling in the region of 200 amps. That's a crazy number. (even with 12V it's still a mind boggling 80 amps)

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Flame

Re: Bitcoin mining 2.0?

We've been looking into some local commercial data centres. They're quoting us a maximum power budget of 6kW per rack. I know you wouldn't put these into a normal data centre, but 1kW for just one card is getting rather silly.

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

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Re: Always was crap

With USB C monitors available for all that TV/fillum streaming/downloads, who is still going to want an unreliable HDM

My laptop is only three years old and I connect to monitors and docks via its USB-C sockets. I'm now finding that two of the USB-C sockets are becoming unreliable as the strain placed on the tiny connectors is too great. I'm not rough with my equipment.

The batteries on Odysseus, the hero private Moon lander, have run out

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And some jump leads!

Meta kills Facebook News in the US and Australia

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Windows

Meta wants to instead "focus our time and resources on things people tell us they want to see more of on the platform, including short form video."

My partner likes viewing Facebook, et al, using it to see what the kids are up to (They've flown the nest) I certainly don't want my partner to see more short form videos. I'm sat watching the telly and I get this stream of noise of videos as they auto-play.

Elon and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad legal week

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Re: Odd, isn't it?

He originally wanted to only use robots in his factories but he found there were lots of jobs that robots couldn't do (or do well) and so he had to employ those pesky meatbags. There were pictures a while ago of lots of robots stacked outside a factory after this failure.

New solvent might end winter charging blues for EV owners

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Mushroom

Lithium is well know for its flamability. And now we're going to add flourine to it. What could possibly go wrong?

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

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Flame

Re: Y2K times a million

I'm writing this on a computer using an ARM CPU, running an operating system that has been ported across multiple CPU architectures over its life. And that's before we get to Javascript/WASM.

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Re: Dream a Little Dream

Wasn't this the idea of OLE in Windows? You opened your file but it had text which was managed by Word, pictures from Paint, and tables of numbers from Excel. You just clicked on the object and all the menus change to the relavent "application". (I did try this one time but it didn't really work: It was an easy way to briing a PC to its knees)

The self-created risk in Broadcom's big VMware kiss-off

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The core problem isn't virtualisation (as you mention, that's a solved problem.) The real problem is management.

Having a management system that can managed 10s/100s of physical hosts and 1000s of VMs. That's why people paid the VM tax as their management tools were good.

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

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Re: So whose bright idea was it in the first place?

Agile & Oracle are not usually found in the same sentence.

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Re: Why?

Spend some time in the real world doing a real job.

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Re: What would it cost ...

PFI was never about saving the taxpayer money: It was always about syphoning money into the private sector.

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Re: Why?

There is an element that Oracle should have walked away and said "This will be a disaster and bad PR for us"

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Re: So, continuing the follow-up of the disaster

How long have the consultants been in? Are they not there to try and sort everything out?

A consultant's aim is to look after their pay packet.

I'll leave you all to decide if this is sarcasm or truth....

Australian supercomputer 'Taingiwilta' comes online this year with [REDACTED] inside

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I'm here to announce something. It's big, impressive, important and the people working on it should be proud of their achievements - which they can't mention to anyone.

Thank you for attending. Goodbye.

Vietnam to collect biometrics - even DNA - for new ID cards

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Re: Coming to a govt building near you

"Think of the children!"

Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount

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Corporate lawyers like to write lots of bollocks in their contracts to try to intimidate consumers. But in the UK, as a consumer, you have a lot more legal protection that other parts of the world. e.g. It is impossible to sign away your legal rights - no matter what the scary corporate lawyer claims. And even if you've signed an onerous contract, the court can tear it up if they think it's unfair.

Quarter of polled Americans say they use AI to make them hotter in online dating

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Mushroom

Re: If you’ve fallen as far as using a dating app

If you’ve fallen as far as using a dating app. I’m sorry for you.

You must find it such a chore with people throwning themselves at your feet all the time wanting to shag your brains out thinking you're smartest person on the planet.

Broadcom terminates VMware's free ESXi hypervisor

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One VMware consultant of The Register's acquaintance told us the change means some workloads now appear to be cheaper to run on bare metal than under vSphere

Even before the Broadcom take over, VMware was not cheap(tm).

Elon Musk can't wriggle out of SEC Twitter fraud inquiry

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Re: Huh?

Other commentards have noted that at SpaceX & Tesla the boards work hard to keep Karen away from tthe real action. There's no-one to do that at Twitter.

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Re: Delay, Delay and Deny

Delaying a court case for years is his SOP

To be fair, it's the SOP for anyone rich. They aim to bleed you dry with lots of frivilious legal schenanigans.

PiStorm turbocharges vintage Amigas with the Raspberry Pi

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From reading other retro restoration blogs, replacing all the electrolytic capacitors before you power on is standard fair.

Amazon overcharges shoppers with Buy Box algorithm, fresh lawsuit claims

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Amazon don't make it easy to compare different sellers of the same product. Sometimes it's not until you get to the checkout that you find the real delivery costs.

Due to their sneaky pricing practises and reputation for knock-off goods I'm rarely clicking on an Amazon link in search results anymore.

Microsoft embraces its inner penguin as sudo sneaks into Windows 11

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Meh

Re: Sudo

Hopefully after that Microshaft will supply embedded X11 server

Wayland, surely...?

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

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Re: So easy

It's not just Universities: It's public sector in general. They think that because you're a world leading expert in X, Y or Z, you'll also make an excellent senior manager who can manage hundreds of staff and multi-million pound budgets.

As much as we malign managers in the comments section, management is a skill. Some people have it, some people can learn it and others just can't do it.

Alaska Airlines' door-dropping flight was missing bolts

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Re: "poorly drilled rivet holes"

Boeing decided a while ago that making planes wasn't their business. So they spun-off the part of the business that did the core manufacturing and it became Spirit AeroSystems. I think the idea was that Spirit would make parts for other companies. But I believe Spirit get most of their business from Boeing and Boeing only buy from Spirit. (Basically, if one company fails, they both fail)

I'm sure some clever MBA can explain why this separation is a good thing. Being a lowly engineer, it's beyond my capacity to understand these complex business/financial topics.

Aircraft rivet hole issues cause delays to Boeing 737 Max deliveries

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Re: Side hustle

Just like the space side-line is one of those "20%" projects.

(In this case, the space side of the house is probably accountable for more than 20% of Boeing's losses!)

Whether to move off Oracle is the $100M+ question for Europe's largest public body

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Re: But guys, be reasonable

Queue the trope about Birmingham having more canals than venice.

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They did have a spec at the start: Then realised it was impossible to implement so did a massive change in the spec during implementation.

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Re: Are there other choices?

If it were that simple, we could have just one HR system for all of England's public sector.

It's not so much the function, more how each council's processes differ. As a trivial example: Imagine all the different policies on leave that could exist. Then try getting one system to cope with them all. Scale that up to more complex topics and you're in a world of pain.

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Re: Errm.. how?

I suspect it's because Birmingham is one big local authority. If you look at London, which is much larger than Birmingham, that's split into 32 authorities. (Obligatory Map Men video link)

Amazon extends the life of its servers to six years, expects $900m benefit in 90 days

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Re: Alternate headline

For single threaded application, CPUs haven't really progressed much in the past decade (Except maybe larger chaces). Only multithreaded applications notice a difference due to the increase in cores: But those apps have to be written well to scale efficently beyond a couple of cores.

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Stop

The debut of a canine chatbot named "Rufus" in Amazon's apps, to help with product searches and recommendations

Question: Why is this not coming via Alexa?

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

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Re: I remember those days!!!

MS used to produce a book which detailed so much of the Registry. It made supporting Windows so much nicer.

Then the registry exploded in size, MS stopped telling everyone what could be done via the registry and...*sigh*. Good times.

It took Taylor Swift deepfake nudes to focus Uncle Sam, Microsoft on AI safety

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Facepalm

"Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should "

Japan's lander wakes up, takes blurry snap of Moon

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Pint

The probe travelled quarter of a million miles, lost an engine yet soft landed only landed 55 meters away from the planned landing location.

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

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Re: Pointless if potless

QI claims that americans can't use electric kettles due to their voltage only being 110v

I have no idea how true this is. "Facts" on QI have to be treated with a pinch of salt (unlike tea which must never come into contact with salt)

Microsoft sheds some light on Russian email heist – and how to learn from Redmond's mistakes

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FAIL

Something smells wrong here. Having no MFA on a test tenant is fine. But how on earth did a single app registration in the test tenant pivot to having enough permissions in the live tenant to manage app registrations.

JAXA releases photo of SLIM lander in lunar faceplant

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Pint

Re: Japan deserves a little more credit

Beers & Sake all round.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

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Flame

Re: This far down in the comments

Wordperfect 5.2 for Windows was the pinacle of word processors. Since then it's been downhill.

Amid Broadcom's subscription push, VMware killed a SaaS product

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PS

Back in the 80s or 90s (in the UK), there was a car parts supplier who were the sole supplier to a car manufacturer for one component. The manufacturer screwed the price right down until the supplier went bust. The liquidator knew the manufacturer's production line would stop withouth the part and and kept the supplier trading for a few months by raising the cost of the parts by a very large amount (something like trippling the cost) The car manufacturer went to court claiming the price rise was unfair and the court threw the case out. It took the car manufacturer several months to find another supplier for the part they needed. In the mean time, the manufacturer had to pay the higher cost until the new suppliers came online.

My search engine skills are failing me, so I can't provide a link to this. My suspicion is that Ford were the car manufacturer.

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Re: I'm wondering...

Broadcom clearly feel that most of VMWare's profits come from just a tiny fraction of their customers, so are laser-focused on those select customers and want to get shot of all the others as they're just "overhead".

As a supplier, I'd want as broader range of customers as possible. That way problems with one class of customer will have less of an impact on my business. But I'm just low-life techie and not the boss of a multi-billion/multi-national company so clearly I don't know what I'm talking about.