* Posts by A Non e-mouse

3265 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2010

Microsoft poaches Apple chip expert for custom silicon

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

The problem with Qualcom in the mobile arena is you can't buy just the CPU. You have to buy their radio (3G/4G/5G) chipset too.

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

I wonder if people are missing the point with the poaching of these Apple silicon people.

Sure, Apple have some smart hardware people. But Apple's big advantage is that it owns and controls the entire stack: That's how it's getting maximum performance out of its kit.

Software engineer jailed for 2 years after using RATs and crypters to steal underage victims' intimate pics

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Mushroom

Austism Defense

I know Autistic people see the world "differently" but I seriously doubt autism affects someone's ability to tell right from wrong.

Disclaimer: I am on the autism spectrum.

Mobile networks really hate Apple's Private Relay: Some folks find iOS privacy feature blocked on their iPhones

A Non e-mouse Silver badge
Big Brother

Private Relay

Is it really the carriers complaining about Apple's Private Relay, or are they being leaned on by the local spooks to complain about it?

Remember Norton 360's bundled cryptominer? Irritated folk realise Ethereum crafter is tricky to delete

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: "requires powerful hardware"

NASA lost the Shuttle to beancounters

Er, no. NASA lost the shuttle 'cause it was killing people due to design flaws. The fact that it was very expensive to run didn't help the matter.

I only hope the SLS is just expensive and doesn't kill people too.

DIY Sinclair clones: Left it too late to back the Next? Build your own instead

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: I'm still waiting for...

Never heard of the Sam Coupe until now. Thanks!

IntelliJ IDEA plugin catches lazy copy-pasted Java source

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: False positives?

It's looking at code you paste in, and comparing it to other code within your code base. Where it finds a match, it suggests that instead of copy/pasting the code multiple times you apply software engineering basics and create a callable method.

I thought Jetbrains' tools already had smarts to highlight potentially duplicate code? (I'm sure I've seen a suggestion along similar lines in some of my projects already)

A Non e-mouse Silver badge
Windows

Improvement

He's a suggestion for an improvement - and it's simpler too:

Has the code been copied from Stackoverflow? If so, mark it as a security issue.

Hauliers report problems with post-Brexit customs system but HMRC insists it is 'online and working as planned'

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Headmaster

Re: Hmm

As in many things in life, the history of RoI & NI is complex and sweeping statements such as yours pay no respect to the history* of the situation.

* - And by "history" I mean the deaths of many Irish & British/English citizens.

A moment of tension as the James Webb Space Telescope stretches sunshield on way to L2 destination

A Non e-mouse Silver badge
A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: Webb scheduled to last a long time

Sorry, this is a joke, there is, as yet, no known Lagrange 5 service station able to re-fuel the satellite.

We've got ten years to correct that.

New submarine cable to link Japan, Europe, through famed Northwest Passage

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: Avoiding NSA tapping?

The article mentions it touches Alaska. Ergo, NSA will have their fat hands all over it. (Plus the fact that it passes close to Alaska surely makes adding a tap much easier)

Dutch nuclear authority bans anti-5G pendants that could hurt their owners via – you guessed it – radiation

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: DO NOT DO THIS!

Did Mythbusters undertake rigorous scientific investigations? No.

Did they bring critical thinking, introduce the scientific method and demonstrate that fun can be had with engineering, to the general public in a non-intimidation (and humorous) way? Hell yes.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

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Pint

I've just read his blog post where he describes the image format and it is *very* simple. (So simple even I can understand it!)

Somestimes, simple is best.

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: Only just caught up.

Many years ago I got to grips with Emacs. But I moved to a MS-Windows shop and Emacs wasn't readily available so the muscle memory faded away. Emacs was powerful, but it had/has such a steep learning curve. Like any system, you have to use it regulalry to keep the memory of how to use it.

Insurance firm Admiral fails to grab phone location data of 'fraud' claimant's mother

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: A judge suggested checking with the milkman?

Whilst they are rarer than when I was a youngster, they do still exist in some areas.

£42k for a top-class software engineer? It's no wonder uni research teams can't recruit

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Headmaster

A top-class software engineer in the education fields is educating students to do create the research coding

Not every job in a University involves teaching students.

After deadly 737 Max crashes, damning whistleblower report reveals sidelined engineers, scarcity of expertise, more

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: "scientific testing" of safety is done by the manufacturing companies

In Boeing's case, the problem was the engineers were marking their own homework.

If there was a separate division for the testing & certification vs the design that would have been a good start.

China's road to homegrown chip glory looks to be going for a RISC-V future

A Non e-mouse Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Question is

Actually, designing chips is a lot easier than manufacturing them

Just ask Sophie Wilson & Steve Furber.

More than half of UK workers would consider jumping ship if a hybrid work option were withdrawn by their company

A Non e-mouse Silver badge
Meh

At our place, most people want to spend most of the time working from home, with the odd day working in the office. Nobody wants permanent work from home or work in the office.

Intel updates mysterious 'software-defined silicon' code in the Linux kernel

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Re: The plan is obvious

You think AMD are any different...?

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: The plan is obvious

Or if you're a three-letter agency...

Qualcomm takes a swipe at Apple's build-not-buy culture (because it wants to sell stuff to Apple)

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Joke

The quality of a cellular modem isn't in the theoretical maximum speed, but in how well it manages with a weak cellular signal and/or interference from lots of other phones in the area.

Apple have a whole lot of experience in antenna design ;)

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: Chips on demand

FPGAs are hugely powerful - completely different beasts to the PALs, etc many people may have started with. I've seen many startups begin with an FPGA version of the product until they get the money to upscale to silicon. (And many products stick with FPGAs through their life as they're easier to update with bug fixes through a software update)

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Apple aren't a daft company: They know where to invest their money. If they thought Qualcom (or Intel) offered them a better solution rather than designing their own, Apple would take it. The fact that Apple have taken on the massive overhead of designing their own silicon and still come out with a design that it as good as, or better, than Qualcom/Intel speaks volumes.

If Qualcom want Apple's business they should offer a solution that Apple couldn't resist. Actions speak louder than words. Qualcom are just throwing a tantrum as they no longer have Apple by the *ahem*...

Think that spreadsheet in your company's accounts dept is old? 70 years ago, LEO ran the first business app

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

There's an excellent book on the history of Leo: A Computer Called LEO.

It describes how, for once, the board of Lyons understood IT. They could see that LEO could drastically improve currently manual computations: But they could also see that if LEO broke the business would be stuffed. So they insisted that a second LEO was built, just in case.

Australia will force social networks to identify trolls, so they can be sued for defamation

A Non e-mouse Silver badge
Flame

Re: "Road to Hell is paved with good intentions"

I was on the cusp of up-voting you - until your last sentence.

SmartNICs, IPUs, DPUs de-hyped: Why and how cloud giants are offloading work from server CPUs

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: This is to replace soon to die peripherals like GPUs

...but GPUs probably won't exist ten years from now, as really we do not need bigger monitors at higher resolution.

I thought the next big thing in graphics was real-time ray tracing - which requires an order of magnitude higher in GPU Performance to perform at high resolutions.

LoRa to the Moon and back: Messages bounced off lunar surface using off-the-shelf hardware

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Joke

Size Matters

This is low bandwidth stuff, but also low power, low cost and very very small

If a 25m dish hooked up to a 350w transmitter is low power and very very small, I'd hate to see what high power or "big" is!

US Defense Department invites four cloud firms to seek contracts for JEDI replacement system

A Non e-mouse Silver badge
Meh

Re: 4 competing suppliers will try harder than 1 non-competing supplier.

To be fair, for a fleeting moment, to the DoD, they don't have a monopoly on over budget, over running projects. (SLS anyone?) Nor is this just a US malaise: The Brits are perfectly capable of screwing up a big project too. I suspect other countries are quite capable of such accomplishments too.

As to why big projects over run and go over budget: Well, there's a whole host of project management textbooks that explore that topic.

A tiny island nation has put the rights to .tv up for grabs – but what’s this? Problematic contract clauses? Again?

A Non e-mouse Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Public view

he apparently always just Googled the sites, had never bookmarked anything

I saw one user fire up IE. It defaulted to Bing. In the Bing search box they'd type "Google". Then in the Google search box they'd enter the URL of the site they wanted to go to.

Robo-Shinkansen rolls slowly – for now – across 5km of Japan

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: "But the train did come to a complete stop just 7.5cm from its intended stopping point"

The high frequency of some London Underground services has another complexity: At the end of the line where the driver has to change ends, there isn't enough time for the driver to walk to the other end of the train. Instead, another driver is waiting at the platform ready to step into the rear of the train to take it back out.

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Flame

Re: Cost savings?

are never on strike

Because the London DLR never stops working when staff go on strike.

www.londonreconnections.com/2021/the-political-myth-of-the-driverless-tube-train/

A Non e-mouse Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: "But the train did come to a complete stop just 7.5cm from its intended stopping point"

They also need to be comfortable with barely interacting with other humans for hours a day.

Sign me up!!!

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: A train, any train, not just the Shinkansen

Perhaps I'm missing something obvious?

Being slightly more serious for a moment...

The problem is cost and complexity.

First off, all the examples quoted are practically, isolated lines/systems: They can guarantee that all the trains that run on those lines will be under the control of the signalling system. If you mix in other traffic, then that makes the system way more complex.

But the big reason is the cost of the signalling system. High Speed Train == Long Distance Journeys == Lots of signalling equipment,

If you're building a line from the ground up to be automatic train control, then the cost will be lower. But upgrading an existing long distance line will be very expensive. (Just look at the London Underground 4 Lines Modernization Program. That is, slowly, upgrading some lines to automatic train operation. But look how expensive that is. (And how much it's running over time)

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: "But the train did come to a complete stop just 7.5cm from its intended stopping point"

They'll probably be trained enough to drive it to a station, but only under remote supervision and only at reduced speed.

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: A train, any train, not just the Shinkansen

*cough* London Underground Victoria Line 1968 *cough*

Do not try this at home: Man spends $5,000 on a 48TB Raspberry Pi storage server

A Non e-mouse Silver badge
Meh

Re: Even if money is not an issue

In my experience, I see a lot of fancy/complex IT where a geek said "Oh, look how clever I am" without bothering to ask the fundatmental question of "Should I do this?"

In the '80s, spaceflight sim Elite was nothing short of magic. The annotated source code shows how it was done

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: Ah Elite !

Recently, I bought No Man Sky and Stellaris due to Elite memories :)

Have you tried Oolite?

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: Ah Elite !

my gaming platform could not play it (was on Amstrad I think

There was an Amstrad CPC version of Elite.

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: Joysticks

I seem to recall (on the BBC) you could force a drop out of hyperspace and get bounced by the Thargoids?

Didn't you have to angle hard up as you jumped to Hyperspace to bump into the Thargoids?

A Non e-mouse Silver badge
Pint

Right on Commander!

See icon --->

Sheffield Uni cooks up classic IT disaster in £30m student project: Shifting scope, leadership changes, sunk cost fallacy

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

"But it wasn't really sold to the business in those terms because it's not sexy."

That's bad project governance.

Apple is beginning to undo decades of Intel, x86 dominance in PC market

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: Opening up the M1

I actually pity MS. They didn't see the writing on the wall

I'm no MS fanboi, but have you seen MS' strategy? They're basically giving away Windows client and they are focusing on subscription based services. (Office 365, Azure, etc)

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: Why is the speed of switch in anyway surprising?

It is the performance parity offered that is impressive. Achieving that in 1 year later is rather quick.

I don't think it was that surprising. Apple have been shipping their own ARM based CPU with their own OS for some time. You may have heard of it: It's called the iPhone. So the core technology combo isn't new to them.

With Apple being so secrative, we have no real idea for how long they've been working on the ARM varients of the Mac. The M1 may be the first, second, third, or whatever version of their ARM desktop CPU.

What, Uber charges disabled people fees for taking a while to get into their ride? Doesn't seem fair, says Uncle Sam

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

They're following the budget airline model where what you think is included in the price (e.g. time to get into the vehicle) is actually an optional extra. Uber will be charging for carrying luggage in the boot/trunk next.

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Headmaster

RTFA

The UK Supreme Court ruled in February that UK Uber drivers should be classified as employees and not contractors

No. The Supremem Court ruled that the drivers who brought the case should be classed as employees. This had zero impact on any other Uber drivers (or any other gig-economy workers)

New Zealand spooks say satellite snooping is obsolete – better intel is found elsewhere

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Better sources

Facebook, Twitter & Google are probably better sources of data.

NASA delays crewed Moon landing until 2025, citing technical infeasibility

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: Dust off Apollo

The problem with re-doing Apollo/Saturn V (apart from the tiny fact that they don't actually know how they built the darn things) is that the program was "of its time". And by that, I don't mean technically, but socially & politically. Now, there is much less drive to go back.

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

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Meh

With the Rolls-Royce SMR technology, we have developed a clean energy solution...

And what about the decommissioning..?

Whilst I like the idea of nuclear power, the mess it leaves behind isn't very pleasant.