* Posts by Flocke Kroes

4531 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007

SpaceX launches first totally private mission to the International Space Station

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Probably time to build another space station...

You are thinking of the Axiom Space Entertainment Enterprise module, which is the second module Axiom intend to attach to the ISS. Axiom's long term plan is add modules to the ISS until they have enough functionality to disconnect and become an independent commercial space station operator.

Canada wants Big Tech to share its riches with news publishers

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

The other way for Gooface to fight this:

Set up their own news services that create original content instead of paraphrasing other peoples'. It will cost money but they can afford it and they get to pay themselves instead of others for news. The model has worked elsewhere: Pixar decided creating their own films was a more reliable business than hoping to be hired by others. The streaming video services worked out that creating their own content was a better option than relying licenses from existing rights holders. As a bonus Gooface would get to decide what is and isn't news and from what angle to present the news they select. They seriously need to hire some competent staff in their "Let's be even more evil" departments.

French court pulls SpaceX's Starlink license

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Why?

The Starlink plan is to use the ion drive to bring satellites down quickly just before they run out of propellant. That way they can still dodge if a collision is possible. I would expect Kuiper to have the same plan but I have not seen (or looked for) a definitive statement from them so far.

Kuiper and Starlink are below the sweet spot for a Kessler cascade: fragments from a collision are likely to de-orbit before they hit anything else. There is also an upper limit: too high and everything is too spaced out for a secondary collision. For a cascade the best bet is a mummy-bear orbit like OneWeb.

Amazon books rocket flights for its Kuiper broadband internet satellites

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Re: Obviously.

I was wondering why Jeff would risk litigation from Amazon shareholders for buying from Jeff's privately owned Blue Origin when cheaper rides are available from SpaceX. There could actually be two valid defences: Blue might have bid lower and OneWeb might have bought all the remaining launches from SpaceX.

Falcon 9 is limited by how quickly SpaceX can build second stages, the time taken for the drone ships to bring the first stages back, the number of launches the FAA has permitted from each launch site and the amount of time SLS wet dress rehearsals block other launches. OneWeb launches are limited by the volume of the F9 fairing, not mass. The payload may be light enough to return the first stage straight back to the launch site without needing a cruise on a drone ship. The stage 1 manufacturing rate probably matches the total number of launches SpaceX is licensed to carry out from each launch site. That is unlikely to grow because launches are already a problem that aviators have to route around and other launch provides need the same sky too.

Kuiper's FCC license depends on getting half the satellites in place by mid-2026 and the rest by mid-2029. Any delay in the up-coming new rockets puts Kuiper at risk. A few years from now, Amazon may have to choose between begging the FCC for an extension or buying from the only provider with the required capacity: SpaceX Starship.

(Arianespace decided not to develop a re-usable rocket because there would not be enough launches to keep the existing work-force employed. This may turn out to be a false assumption.)

(Just found out you can buy a Falcon 9 from Amazon ;-)

Elon Musk buys 9.2% of Twitter, sends share price to the Moon

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Re: Alternative headline.

I think he his buying himself into trouble. He gave up the right to free speech when he became CEO of a publicly traded company. One of the few laws that rich people have to obey is "Do not make provably false statements to investors". Ask Elizabeth Holmes.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Why didn't old Trumper think of this?

Don has always had difficulty with thinking. He regurgitates an incoherent version of whatever he heard five minutes ago. No-one put that idea into his head because Alfa bank did not have enough money to buy twitter even if Vlad wanted to and why on Earth would Vlad pay again for a president he already owned?

Google unrolls search features to tackle misinformation

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Re: Believing fairy stories

People believing fairy tales because it suits them is a useful feature for scammers. Scammers start by saying what their victims want to believe. By repeating that step often enough the scammer becomes a trusted source of new information. The victims will then believe whatever lies the scammer says - because it is the scammer who is talking.

NASA will award contract for second lunar lander to a biz that's not SpaceX

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Re: If competition is so important ...

Clearly you do not understand what this is all about. When the choices for an American medium/heavy lift rocket were ULA Atlas V or ULA Delta V Heavy US politicians were not demanding competition and were instead finding excuses to continue buying Russian RD-180 engines for Atlas. When SpaceX offered Falcon 9s for ⅓ the cost of an Atlas and Falcon Heavies for ⅓ the cost of a Delta competition became essential.

For Artemis, SpaceX is such a horrible option (from a political perspective) that twice the price for 5% of the payload is called 'competition'.

In real life the rocket closest to competing with Falcon is Rocket Lab's Neutron. I am sure that if Rocket Lab submit an Artemis proposal then next year we will hear Blue Origin advocating for a third competitor.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

NASA thoroughly understands the problem but so do congress and the senate. NASA are required by law to spend money on SLS. They are required to use the preferred (by congress) contractors even when the costs are astronomical. To accomplish this they have to employ people who can do that work without vomiting. Plenty of people at NASA lack this important requirement but most are able to avoid commenting on SLS while they get on with something constructive.

Take a closer look at job creation schemes. Head bean counter takes a taxi to work = 1 job. Bean counter takes a taxi home, that is another job - even if it is the same driver. SLS does actually employ some people so it is a step up from many job creation schemes. If the law requiring SLS were cancelled tomorrow, everyone on the project capable of designing or constructing a rocket could get new jobs in under a month. Rocket start-ups are popular with investors at the moment. SLS as a job creation scheme is really harmful because it diverts skilled workers from constructive projects.

Starship is not going to cancel SLS. The key difference between New Glenn and SLS is that Jeff has at least some clue that he is being fleeced but few US tax payers have cottoned on. Some space enthusiasts hope SLS will explode early enough in the launch to destroy the MLP. This would leave congress with the choice of taking years to build a replacement, taking years to convert the other MLP to Block 1 SLS, waiting years for Block 1B SLS or cancelling SLS. I think they could go for converting the MLP to block 1 and ordering another one for block 1B while getting enthusiastic cheers from voters for creating jobs for people who would otherwise be doing something useful.

The only good news at the moment is progress on the Programmatic Environmental Assessment for Starship. A new delay in publication should be announced tomorrow.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Boeing Boeing Gone!

The other bidder is Blue Origin+Lockheed-Martin+Northrop Grumman. There were three proposals: Dynetics, Blue Origin and SpaceX.

The Dynetics lander has some excellent solutions to some problems but some other problems still needed a solution when the proposal was submitted. The original concept assumed a stop at LOP-G. The 2024 deadline meant LOP-G would not be there and that caused changes to the mission profile that made the lander's payload mass margin negative.

Blue Origin should have read the instructions more carefully. They assumed NASA would make two awards so they could safely pad their proposal until the price just beat third place. The actual request for proposals document said up to 2 - which includes the possibility of 0. NASA's budget is a matter of public record so it was clear that $6B was never going to be selected even on its own. Blue were supposed to offer their best price. As Jeff could knock $2B off shortly after the submission date perhaps the $6B price was not entirely accurate. Even $4B was too expensive. The good news is that Blue's lander should get 4500kg to the Moon (6500kg with New Glenn) and Lockheed Martin's ascent vehicle should get the astronauts and a few souvenirs back to Northrop Grumman's transfer element. (There is little point in lifting tons of Moon rocks because they will not fit in the Orion Capsule for the journey back to Earth.) The bad news is the Astronauts have to spend a significant amount of time on the Moon reconfiguring the vehicle for the return journey.

As well as being half the price, the SpaceX solution gets over 100,000kg to the Moon (more if you are not bringing tons of rock back). It will be completely re-usable. On top of that, add a crew starship for the journey from Earth to Lunar Orbit and back and you can cancel a $4B SLS+Orion launch for each trip.

The most obvious Boeing involvements are that they are the lead contractor for SLS (which is required to get the Orion capsule near the Moon) and they own half of ULA who would probably provided launches for the Transfer, Landing and Ascent elements of Blue's system. (No-one was able to propose New Glenn in 2024 with straight face.)

The gigantic super-mammoth on the room is where the budget for this second lander is going to come from. One obvious place is the money already promised to SpaceX. Congress already did something similar by moving commercial crew funds to SLS which had the added bonus of delaying commercial crew so the SLS delays would have company.

Microsoft accused of spending millions on bribes to seal business deals

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Re: Illegal Bribes?

In some countries you wait at the top of a hill for another driver to pass. While that driver is keeping the police officer busy you drive to the top of the next hill and wait there.

Hackers remotely start, unlock Honda Civics with $300 tech

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Re: Water

Even now there is often a mechanical lock on one door. In the UK it is likely to be on the passenger side. To replace an RF key you have to go to a franchise and pay monopoly prices but you may be able to get a purely mechanical only key for a sane price.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: rip the starter wires out

AFAIK, they only do that in films. For old cars, ramming a screwdriver into the ignition and twisting hard would often start the engine but will not defeat the steering lock - as partially competent thieves discovered with my car. The other problem with that method is it bends the electrical contacts so they no longer work reliably with the key.

The fix was to run a wire from a side light to the coil. Insert the key and twist to release the steering lock, turn on the side lights to activate the ignition and use a long screwdriver to connect the starter motor to the nearby big positive connection. Make sure you still have the same number of fingers you started with and drive away. To stop the engine: turn off the side lights.

[Do not try this with modern electronic cars. Only the old ones that you could build without microchips are this easy to hack after someone fails to steal it.]

Apple's Mac Studio exposed: A spare storage slot and built-in RAM

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

The other storage slot ...

This has been solved elsewhere.

Your standard off-the-shelf flash parts are not going to work because they include a flash chip controller and probably some cache RAM. Apple included the flash controller on the CPU (saves part of $1 by not having a separate chip) and use some of the system RAM as cache (probably saves the rest of that $1). Your new storage card will need chips that Apple has created software for, and probably the same type and number of chips as the card in the first slot. Have fun sourcing those.

Your next problem is all the data in the chips is encrypted and the decryption key is in the CPU. If you swap the storage cards between computers the CPU will try to decrypt the data with the wrong key, notice there is a problem and refuse to boot. This is fixable: connect a working Apple computer and it will be able to fix the borked one - by erasing all the data and installing a clean copy of the OS.

I am sure all Apple users are happy with Apple making an extra $1 profit on their new computers and will be overjoyed to pay Apple's monopoly prices for storage upgrades.

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

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C int

C has to deal with lots of different hardware.

example 1: C requires sizeof(char)==1 but is does not require char to be 8-bits. I have used CPUs with 16-bit chars because adding 1 to a pointer moved forward 16 bits in memory.

example 2: In C, int is the size of a register. Put a char or short in a register and it will be sign/zero extended to the width of the register. Any subsequent arithmetic will be done using the width of a register. C makes it clear that if you ask for an int, the number of bits you get will be CPU dependent because that is a fact of life. Worse than that, the width of a register is somewhat subjective and some CPUs give the OS the opportunity to decide. If you want a particular size, #include <stdint.h> and use uint32_t, int64_t or whatever.

"Fixing" the unknown size of int in new languages requires a layer of abstraction between the program and the hardware. That layer of abstraction eases programming at the cost of performance (or portability problems). C's unpredictable size of int is not wrong or bad in absolute terms but may be problematic or beneficial depending on the use case.

I would be nice to believe we all know about: printf("%d\n", -9223372036854775808); If you don't, TRY IT NOW. Yes in theory it could be fixed but modular arithmetic is a massive performance boost over "infinite" precision and programmers are supposed to be clever enough to keep this things in mind.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

I prefer ...

Buffy: There is no problem that cannot be solved by chocolate.

Willow: I think I am going to barf.

Epson payments snafu leaves subscribers unable to print

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: The problem is easily solved

Epsom stylus P50. Really, you are looking for anything that understands a documented system for communicating with printers (such as PCL) so that there will be an open source driver. I think you also need one that has not been connected to Windows for years. I believe the official drivers downgrade the firmware to reject third party ink but I do not have the nerve to test this. Try a web search for Linux printer support.

You can find a list of printers here. One of the fun thing about The Linux Documentation Project is that the articles can be hopelessly dated. That one is from 2003 - which in this case might actually be a useful feature.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: The problem is easily solved

You could try going to the local electrical waste recycling centre and looking for a really dusty printer. Mine is ancient and as it uses an open source driver it has never received Epsom firmware downgrades. A decade's supply of third party ink recently set me back about £20.

The IBM System/360 Model 40 told you to WHAT now?

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: No rude but I always laughed

I believe they actually had a good reason to mess with /bin/true. The original implementation was an empty file. The OS interpreted that as a command to do nothing, which it completed successfully. AT&T added a copyright notice as a series of sh comments but missed out the magic sequence to identify the file as a sh script. Apparently Solaris saw a non-empty file with no magic to identify the interpreter so AT&T's updated implementation exited with an error until it was fixed.

We are very lucky that diligent GNU programmers implemented /bin/true as a C program with command line options. If Larry can demand billions for rangeCheck imagine what Darl McBride would have wanted for an empty file that wasn't his.

File Explorer fiasco: Window to Microsoft's mixed-up motivations

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Irritation and security flaws are an intentional feature

If you need to focus on your work and really do not want malware: pay an hourly fee for Microsoft Enterprise Premium Plus which comes with free reduced advertising for the first 45 minutes.

ExoMars rover launch axed over Russia tensions

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Ariane 5 is sold out

If you want an Ariane 5 you have to buy one of the last 8 from someone who bought one of those launches for about €150M. You could try an Ariane 6. The first one of those could launch late this year so the 2024 Mars launch window remains an option if the entry/descent/landing system is ready. The planned cost of an Ariane 6 was €70M - before the fixed costs got divided by a smaller number of launches because purely commercial customers are likely to hire Falcon 9 for $52M.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Goodwill gesture from Roscosmos...?

Europe has been collecting oligarch yachts which should be enough to cover the expenses. Boris has been struggling hard to delay similar actions in the UK so his friends have time to move their wealth elsewhere. One of the many advantages of "taking back control".

How experimental was Microsoft's 'experimental banner' in File Explorer?

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Microsoft has been an abusive partner for decades. Your friends have been recommending that you walk away. Try it a little at a time and later decide if you really enjoy being abused over an alternative.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Lightweight WM

XFCE4 is almost fine. Getting rid of the icons is easy (desktop icons are always inaccessible because there is an application window on top). Getting rid of the last panel requires a quick web search (panels use up space that I want for the application on that virtual desktop). A few minutes setup and I have a window manager that does only what I want it to do.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Why is easy

Because almost everyone capable of switching to Linux already has. The remaining customers are already securely tied over a barrel. Microsoft can do whatever they want and only a miniscule proportion of their victims will break free.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

So you are saying ...

... successful computing professionals choose FOSS because it scales, it works and it is cheaper.

Microsoft used to say that malware slingers used FOSS. What IT purchasers heard was "professionals skilled in IT security choose FOSS".

If software does not do what I want my choices are:

FOSS) Fix it myself or hire a programmer at a competitive rate to fix it.

Proprietary) Beg the monopoly supplier to fix it. Buy the next version and hope the fix is included and new breakages aren't.

Perhaps the worst advertisers of the world are not entirely dim.

Salesforce sued in attempt to block release of Capitol riot info

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Buttery males - use your own server

Elephants are grey. My car is grey, therefore my car is an elephant.

Deplorables have joined the Republican party. ??? is a Republican, therefore ??? is deplorable.

Republican communicators are good at taking quotes so far out of context that they make no logical sense and Republican voters are really bad at spotting logical fallacies. It did not matter what Hillary said. They would have found some way to turn it around - no matter how daft. For example many Republicans actually believe Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet.

Hillary's email server was not illegal at the time. It was against State department policy and for that she deserved a scolding and a slapped wrist from the Secretary of State (herself). The emails were almost all found and recovered from computers they were sent to. Despite the best efforts of the RNC there was nothing in the emails that showed anything illegal. GWB43 was illegal and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of emails that went through that server during the run up to Iraq war V2 was illegal.

Hillary made many mistakes when running for the 2016 presidency. Fairly high up was being a loud critic of Putin. Russia as a gun manufacturer is a major contributor to the NRA which can make campaign contributions which Putin could not do directly. The most obvious mistake was not including the Trump campaign's "get out the vote" software. This was an area where the Republicans had previously been hilariously incompetent and Donnie wasn't going to waste any of his hard earned campaign contributions on that. Robert Mercer provided high quality "get out the vote" software that no-one saw coming. This meant the polls were off by 6% and Hillary spend the final weeks campaigning in safe Trump states instead of the marginals.

Hillary earned an end of her career by losing to Donald but not for using her own email server - which was a response to the proper tools of the time not being made available to her. "But her emails" was a common "joke" aimed at Republicans every time Donald did something ridiculously stupid and harmful between 2016 and 2020.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Buttery males

I thought the RNC understood this from last time. If you like to send incriminating emails, use your own server.

OpenZFS 2.1.3 bugfix brings compatibility with Linux 5.16

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: We're absolutely firm on this

The patent licence can be voided without changing the CDDL. For the patent license to be valid you must not change any of the code that implements any of the patents. If a need to change such code does not turn up on its own Oracle can create the need by adding a feature that requires such a change. You then have the choice of voiding the patent license or becoming incompatible. You already have the burden of checking any changes against the patents. Microsoft use pretty much the same trap for anyone brave enough to implement their standards.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: We're absolutely firm on this

It is not about extremism, purity or absolutism. Firstly it is about "will I get sued" and if the answer to that is a definite no then it is about the copyright holder's intent. CDDL contains a patent license that Oracle can void with a small amount of effort. That alone is enough for me to avoid it. Back when Sun was choosing a license they deliberately chose to base CDDL on a license with GPL incompatibility. I respect their choice.

Over the years it has become clear that different people in Sun had different intentions. As far as I can make out, some people who are not the deciding authority say that mixing CDDL and GPL does not violate CDDL but people who really should know what they are talking about say that mixing CDDL and GPL violates GPL. That by itself is sufficient for me to avoid a mixed work.

There is wiggle room for argument. I do not want to have that argument in court with Oracle's lawyers. Oracle could make things clear by either releasing their code under GPL or stating clearly that their code is not to be mixed with GPL code. My personal interpretation of their decision to keep things vague is they want people to create derivative works without giving permission so that if there is ever enough money involved they can sue.

I do not know if Larry needs a bigger yacht than Jeff but I see no reason to risk contributing to one.

Reg reader rages over Virgin Media's email password policy

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re-enabling paste

This is how to re-enable paste in Firefox. For other browsers, ask duckduckgo.

Why Nvidia sees a future in software and services: Recurring revenue

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Things / Ideas

Things can be bought. Ideas are licensed. Cars are things with software. In the past, you could buy a car and the car came with a license for the software. The software license could be transferred by selling the car. The camel is already half way in the tent: Some cars already have some software with a license that does not transfer with the sale of the vehicle, for example Tesla's "full self driving" (deleted huge rant about the misleading name).

A car manufacturer can legally license software as free for the first year followed by a monthly fee. I would like to think most people would read the small print and buy something else. In the real world most people make disappointing purchase decisions.

GlobalFoundries' new silicon photonics tech gets big buy-in

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Re: I don't understand any of this but...

The speed of light changes with the material is travels through. The speed of electrical signals is ... the same as the speed of light in the insulator separating the conductors. Either way, the maximum speed is when the material is a vacuum. (The speed of light in air is almost as fast as in vacuum.)

The big selling point here is not the signal speed but the data rate. It is easier to get more bits per second along an optical fibre than along a pair of wires. The plan is to replace many pairs of wires with a single optical fibre.

All this "data at the speed of light" stuff is marketing gibberish to impress PHBs.

Microsoft 365, Office 365 price hikes delayed

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Sparato must be very thankful for libre office

Spataro tried to justify the price hikes by pointing to the extra features customers had been lavished with.

By itself, bundling unwanted software is not illegal but when a monopoly does forces purchases of unwanted goods with their unique product the EU will fine them many millions a decade later.

Chinese rocket junk may have just smashed into Moon

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Gray argued that scientists should start paying attention to junk further out into space: "Many more spacecraft are now going into high orbits, and some of them will be taking crews to the Moon," he said. "Such junk will no longer be merely an annoyance to a small group of astronomers."

Someone at the US Space Force has been paying attention. They plan to extend their monitoring from geostationary to the Moon.

OneWeb drops launches from Russia's Baikonur spaceport

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Re: (eventual) refund?

Rogozin made demands because he knows there are no future customers to lose.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: (eventual) refund?

OneWeb hired Boeing to make the satellites. Part of the contract was that OneWeb had to buy launches from Boeing. Pre Starlink, the satellite costs might have been reasonable but post Starlink the satellites are overpriced or under featured. That is half of what drove OneWeb bankrupt. The other half is Boeing ignored the cheapest launch provider (SpaceX) and negotiated a really good bulk price from Roscosmos. Boeing then charged OneWeb Roscosmos's full retail price for each launch.

Roscosmos spent lots of money half building rockets for the OneWeb contract then OneWeb went bankrupt leaving Roscosmos with lots of value stranded in rockets it could not sell. Luckily the UK government came to their rescue. If things went the same way as before, Roscosmos has taken Boeing's deposit and fees for previous launches but will not be getting money for future launches. In theory, Boeing is owed money or launches but has not way to collect.

Perhaps Boeing owes OneWeb money or launches but judging by OneWeb's negotiating skills I would not bet on it. If the UK government renegotiated the deal then I am certain UK tax payers now owe Boeing money.

If you have a good product you sell it to people. If you have a bad product you sell it to businesses. If your product is completely FUBAR you get a government to mandate its use. OneWeb was not competitive with SpaceX so there is no chance of retail sales. They may still get somewhere with a tiny numer of commercial customers if there are any who can make good use of the partial constellation. At this time OneWeb really needs a government mandate.

Boeing could offer launch on ULA's Vulcan. Boeing owns 50% of ULA and would like to close that deal but Vulcan will use Blue Origin's BE-4 engine - if Blue ever delivers (Try an image search for "Where are my engines Jeff?"). If OneWeb cannot or will not buy launches from SpaceX the next options are China and India - but only if they can get that past Boeing. India's GSLV2 is a bit small but Bharti Global owns half of OneWeb so it may go that way. Blue Origin still talks about launching this year but I am not sure how a litigation company can put anything in orbit especially when New Glenn is supposed to use BE-4 engines.

A Snapdragon in a ThinkPad: Lenovo unveils the X13s

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Re: Microsoft Pluton

Pluton is not the (only) problem. The CPU is from Qualcomm. I expect support to disappear in the same amount of time it takes Qualcomm to end support of Android phone CPUs.

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

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Re: No CPU heat sink

I just checked a photo of the board. Even the voltage regulator did not have a separate heat sink - just a big patch of copper on the PCB.

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You have missed the entire purpose of a patent. There is no point patenting anything original as there would be no-one to sue. A patent only has value if it is so obvious that lots of people are already infringing it.

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The actual features at issue were: glass to the edge of the device (that only Samsung could manufacture at the time), four columns of icons (to match the number of fingers on most hands) and Steve's most astonishing invention - the colour black.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: 1980s

And 70s: Ohio Superboard, Nascom, Commodore PET and ITT 2020. (If you really want to wind up the most extreme Apple fanboys: the Xerox Alto.)

Your app deleted all my files. And my wallpaper too!

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Clearly someone who understands ...

Whether they admit it or not, most people use the "Now or Never" filing system to organise their projects. The system is workable - as long as you do not convince your self that you are using some more complicated priority based system.

["Just do it" themed clothing is popular at my gym. One young lady has an excellent hoodie with "Just do it later".]

Mobile-based ID wallets for government are coming

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Not good.

Last time I checked... you are not required to have your driving license with you even when driving but you may be required to go to a police station with your license with 24 hours if a policeman decides there is a problem with the way you drive.

I thoroughly agree with you that using a mobile phone for anything that requires security is completely insane. About the only more stupid idea I could dream up would be to use blockchain - oh wait: Gartner beat me to it.

If the article had said something about the government allowing authentication with FIDO2 I would have wondered what had happened to the rest of February and the whole of March. There is no way I would believe such sanity from our politicians as the OMRLP have clearly held the majority for decades.

Americans far more willing to hand over personal data

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Re: @nematoad

As you want a better life, try the survey:

Would you tick "like" and "dislike" buttons so I can select news for you that you like? (Eg: presented in a style that matches your confirmation bias until you trust my news to the point of buying ivermectin for COVID.)

Would you give me access to details of your income and expenditure so I can list products at great prices? (Eg: match my prices to what I decide you can afford.)

Would you give me your bank details in return for a better life? (Eg: I get the better life.)

I can place a fictional carrot in the direction I want you to answer the survey. You can answer everything the way I want but that does not lead you to a real carrot.

PC OEMs are sitting on 10 weeks-plus of DRAM, says Trendforce

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Re: Moan Time

Use cases are subjective. To me, a Windows license has negative value, standard software comes with any mainstream Linux distribution and the system only needs to be fast enough. The huge step up in performance that comes with Intel/AMD/nVidia has far less value to me than the cost. Other people have different priorities.

File suffixes: Who needs them? Well, this guy did

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Re: Still humans in the mix here not just machines

OK I could type 'file *' but 'ls' is easier to type and the output is easier to read.

IBM looked to reinvigorate its 'dated maternal workforce'

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Bankers comparing sizes...

US Banker: Our staff work more hours than yours.

UK Banker: Our staff bring in more money than yours.

I can understand paying some attention to age if a significant proportion of the workforce will retire in the same year. What really matters is achievement and if IBM manglement are optimising for age instead then they are making determined progress on their path to irrelevance.

Geomagnetic storm takes out 40 of 49 brand new Starlink satellites

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Re: Cost

$62M for ride in a shiny new Falcon 9 that is recovered at sea. Used to be $50 for a slighty sooty ride. There is a discount for buying in bulk. The internal cost is believed to be about $20M. There are additional costs for things like payload integration and adding propellant to the satellites.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Skynet

The actual figures were 40/49. All the other satellites had already raised their orbit and were in no danger from Earth's atmosphere being kicked up by a coronal mass ejection.

What would make a difference is launching with a Starship instead of a Falcon 9. More satellites on each launch and rumours are that the satellites will be bigger and heavier. That future generation of satellite may be more or less susceptible depending on whether size or mass increases fastest.