Re: american rover worn out after driving short distance
@MachDiamond thank you - that was a useful post.
Posts by Lord Elpuss
2298 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Aug 2009
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4,000 days of Curiosity: Rover still 'strong' despite worn joints, vision issues
Wednesday 8th November 2023 09:35 GMT 
"For the wheels, engineers admitted that they misjudged the conditions encountered on the Martian surface"
The way this reads sounds like they did something wrong, instead of building an incredible rover which already far exceeded its design parameters and lifespan, and yet retrospectively determining that if they'd had access to even more actual data, they could have done it even better.
Rethink your phrasing, Mr. Speed.
Apple slams Android as a 'massive tracking device' in internal slides revealed in Google antitrust battle
Saturday 4th November 2023 14:47 GMT
"Thing is, Apple talks about its love of privacy safeguards and how much it thinks Google is a fiend with people's data, but take a look at how it operates in reality."
El Reg can slag off Apple as much as they like (and ohboy do they like) but Apple's investment in privacy and security of user data puts the majority of other companies to utter shame.
There's nothing altruistic about this; the motive is profit, pure and simple.
Reason #1: Apple mines their own user data to cross- and upsell other products from within the Apple ecosystem. Keeping this data secure and private means they are the only company that is able to do this. It is incredibly valuable for this purpose, and this value would be drastically reduced if other companies had access to it and as a result were able to better target their own products. Apple would effectively be enriching their competitors.
Reason #2: Apple uses data privacy and security as a major competitive differentiator - maybe their only real competitive differentiator. If user data were leaked, or Apple were found to be dealing in user data despite their stance, customers would desert them in droves. Not Chastity and D'Shawnay who want the cheapest device they can get on contract, don't care about privacy and don't spend any money anyway; Apple couldn't give two hoots about them. No - the customers who would desert them are the major companies and government institutions who pay Apple billion$ to get this peace of mind.
From Apollo to Space Shuttle, Thomas K Mattingly's stellar journey ends at 87
Android VPNs to get audit badges in Google Play Store if they aren't comically crap
We're getting that fry-day feeling... US Army gets hold of drone-cooking microwave rig
Sunday 5th November 2023 08:49 GMT
Re: Obvious Countermeasure
Have the electronics in a microwave-frequency Faraday cage, only components outside the cage are the motors and a GPS antenna on top (just the antenna, not the electronics) - where it will be largely protected from a ground-based transmitter anyway despite being outside the cage.
Sunday 5th November 2023 08:44 GMT
Re: Countdown ..
"This might be a concern if there's a future upgraded model that has rad-hard electronics designed to mitigate ECM threats"
The second this system was announced, I *guarantee* various actors around the world immediately started hardening their drone electronics. It's cheap and easy to do, so I would expect this to be a short-term solution at best, intended for low-tech disposable drones whose operators are either too uninformed to know about Leonidas, or too poor to afford the pennies needed to put a bit of Faraday shielding around their sensitive bits.
GPS leading your phone astray? We can just fix that in code, startup claims
Uber, Lyft to hand back $328M of stolen wages to NY drivers
Apple lifts the sheet on a trio of 'scary fast' M3 SoCs built on a 3nm process
Tuesday 31st October 2023 19:39 GMT
Re: I know it's hard to believe
We can have the conversation, I’m fine with that. You inventing reasons why we “can’t” just demonstrates even more clearly that you’re in denial.
Here’s my rebuttal.
All my MacBooks have had base memory. I have never needed, or wanted, more; and as my use case is pretty much static, I’ve become very adept and knowing exactly what performance I will need over the lifetime of a device.. My base spec 2013 MBP served me well until I grudgingly retired it last year when my new employer gave me a new MBP with M1/8GB/256GB; the base model.
The M1 is the fastest laptop I’ve ever had, and when new it ran rings around anything Windows-based for anything close to equivalent money. As previously stated, I’m a classic Corporate use case, so use about 20% of the performance capability.
It will run, and run, quite happily on it’s 8GB unified memory, until it goes EOL in 2032 or thereabouts, or until I get a new employer. I will never need to even consider upgrading the memory, as there is nothing new I will need to do with this laptop within it’s (considerable) expected lifetime that will come close to requiring more.
Your assumptions are both arrogant and misplaced.
Tuesday 31st October 2023 16:34 GMT
Re: Not hard to see why Apple aren't fans of TheReg with a wildly biased article like this.
That's definitely possible.
The majority of laptops sold in that year had 500GB HDD or 128GB SSD options. Mid-tier options were typically a choice between 1TB HDD or 256GB SSD, and high-end offerings had 512GB SSD or (more rarely) 1TB/256GB HDD/SSD fusion drives.
Tuesday 31st October 2023 15:54 GMT
"And how exactly is 'performance' measured? What are the power numbers apart from 10W?"
Peak single thread performance of workloads taken from multiple industry standard benchmarks*, commercial applications, and open source applications. Comparison made against the highest-performing CPUs for notebooks, commercially available at the time of testing.
* Cinebench R23, Speedometer 2.0, Geekbench 5 (operating in single thread mode). Tests performed natively where possible, and under Rosetta 2 where emulation was required.
The graph clearly illustrates the power curve under and over 10W. 10W isn't a particularly special case (or a particularly special result, compared to the rest of the power curve) - it's just a convenient reference and a catchy soundbite (2x performance at 10W). In fact the M1 exceeds the Core i9 performance per watt by more than a factor of 2 under some other power conditions.
Tuesday 31st October 2023 14:30 GMT
"I suppose this has one solid number on it"
Actually it has several numbers, and there's nothing nebulous about them. 2x the performance at 10W, and matching peak performance at 25% of the power, compared to "the highest-performing CPU for notebooks, commercially available at the time of testing." - the 'Alder Lake' Intel Core i9-10900HK.
Tuesday 31st October 2023 14:12 GMT
Re: I know it's hard to believe
"The 8 gig is basically useless"
For my use case (classic Corporate) 8GB is absolutely fine; and all I am likely to need for the foreseeable future. 8GB Unified Storage is also substantially faster than SODIMM.
You never buy RAM because you like the pretty packages the chips come in; you buy it because of what it makes possible. If you can do all you need with 8GB, then 16GB or more is a waste of money.
Tuesday 31st October 2023 09:58 GMT
Re: Not hard to see why Apple aren't fans of TheReg with a wildly biased article like this.
"256GB SSD is a standard spec from 8 years ago"
Nope. 8 years ago, spinning rust was still the norm on standard-spec laptops. 500GB, or 1TB if you were feeling flush. *If* a laptop had an SSD, it was usually 64-128GB except on top end models.
https://laptopmedia.com/reviews/best-notebooks-of-2015-depending-on-your-needs/
https://www.gadgetsnow.com/slideshows/8-best-laptops-of-2015/dell-xps-13-priced-at-rs-70990/photolist/50354717.cms
Tuesday 31st October 2023 08:19 GMT
"Of course, we recommend you take Apple's performance claims with a healthy dose of salt here. The company has a history of making nebulous claims backed by unlabelled charts about the performance of its M-series silicon, especially when it comes to comparisons of their graphics-processing powers."
No they don't.
Don't look now Reg, your Apple hatred is showing.
IBM to scrap 401(k) matching, offer something else instead
Thursday 2nd November 2023 15:19 GMT
People can occasionally forget that IBM, like the vast majority of companies, doesn't exist for the benefit of the employees. Employees are tools and lines on a spreadsheet, and can be expect to be treated as such. Companies like IBM will always be looking to squeeze the most out of their people, at the lowest possible cost within the boundaries set by law. And sometimes beyond those boundaries.
I guess the message here is don't rely on your employer, or your government. Don't expect them to be nice. Or decent. Or "value" you in any sense beyond what you're doing for them today. They will rape and pillage you and your finances to suit themselves, anywhere and any time they get the chance.
Apple swipes left on the last Touch Bar Mac, replaces it with a pricier 14″ model
Wednesday 1st November 2023 12:49 GMT
It's not DDR5, and it's not soldered - in fact it's not a RAM 'chip' at all in the conventional sense. It's part of the SoC, and on the same silicon die as the processor - connected directly to the CPU and GPU. In terms of speed, it has a transfer rate of up to 400GB/s*, as opposed to 50-70GB/s on the very fastest DDR5 available today.
*M3 Max. "Normal" M3 is 150GB/s.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/06/28/why-apple-uses-integrated-memory-in-apple-silicon----and-why-its-both-good-and-bad
Wednesday 1st November 2023 08:30 GMT
It's not about the amount. It's what you can do with it. It doesn't work like normal memory; it's built onto the processor die so in performance terms it actually sits somewhere between RAM and L2 cache. And it's crazy fast; real world throughput 150GB/s in the M3, up to 400GB/s in the M3 Max. By comparison the absolute fastest DDR5 modules available today offer a theoretical 50-70GB/s per module, and you'd need a VERY well designed architecture around it to take advantage.
Just out of interest, there could be any number of reasons why your 16GB Mac is swapping, but how do you know that's what it's doing? Anything M-based (M1, M2, M3) has a Unified Memory architecture where it's effectively indistinguishable from cache as far as the OS is concerned, and I'm not aware of any apps that let you see what's in memory.
Wednesday 1st November 2023 07:24 GMT
Re: poor idea, should have never got out of the testing labs
"A keyboard that has contextual keys that change depending on the app focus. So much for touch typing and not looking at keyboard."
If we were talking about the whole keyboard, then yes I'd agree. But it's the function keys. And they have always been contextual - right back to DOS days.
EDIT just seen that An_Old_Dog wrote literally the same thing. Must read before posting. Sigh.
Wednesday 1st November 2023 07:20 GMT
Surprisingly unbiased article. Only this statement needs context:
"Apple's entry level MacBook Pro had been replaced by a stripped down 14-inch model with an M3, 8GB of memory, 256GB of storage, two USB-4 ports, a single cooling fan, and a higher starting price of $1,599."
$1,599 for the 14" is more than the outgoing 13" model, but the 14" model has actually dropped in price; from $1,899 to $1,599. So while technically true that the entry-level model is now more expensive, you get a substantially different device for your money.
As NASA struggles to open OSIRIS-REx's asteroid sample can, probe heads off to next rock
Biden's facing the clock to veto Apple Watch import ban after ITC patent ruling
Monday 30th October 2023 09:06 GMT
Amazingly, Masimo aren't a patent troll. I was 99% ready to pile in on this and say they deserve nothing, scum of the world restricting innovation etc etc, but reading up on them as a company they appear to actually have a set of products around in vivo monitoring, and the patent appears to be valid.
Curious where this will end up.
Former IBM Canada worker wins six-figure payout for wrongful dismissal
Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'
Amazon unveils new drone design, plans liftoff of aerial delivery in UK, Italy
US prosecutors slam Autonomy tycoon's attempt to get charges tossed
Three dozen plaintiffs join Apple AirTag tracking lawsuit in amended complaint
Monday 16th October 2023 16:16 GMT
Re: Punish criminals not manufacturers.
"Take a gun for instance. It is produced to make holes in something, namely a living something. By itself, it is harmless. In the hands of idiots and those that don’t have boundaries, it is deadly."
The difference is that a gun is deadly when used properly, as designed, and in accordance with the instructions.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
