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Submission + - Asus Packs 12-Core Intel i7 Into a Raspberry Pi-Sized Board (theregister.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The biz’s GENE-ADP6, announced this week, can pack as much as a 12-core/16-thread Intel processor with Iris Xe graphics into a 3.5-inch form factor. The diminutive system is aimed at machine-vision applications and can be configured with your choice of Intel silicon including Celeron, or Core i3, i5, or a choice of 10 or 12-core i7 processors. As with other SBCs we’ve seen from Aaeon and others, the processors aren’t socketed so you won’t be upgrading later. This device is pretty much aimed at embedded and industrial use, mind. All five SKUs are powered by Intel’s current-gen Alder Lake mobile processor family, including a somewhat unusual 5-core Celeron processor that pairs a single performance core with four efficiency cores. However, only the i5 and i7 SKUs come equipped with Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics. The i3 and Celeron are stuck on UHD graphics. The board can be equipped with up to 64GB of DDR5 memory operating at up to 4800 megatransfers/sec by way of a pair of SODIMM modules.

For I/O the board features a nice set of connectivity including a pair of NICs operating at 2.5 Gbit/sec and 1 Gbit/sec, HDMI 2.1 and Display Port 1.4, three 10Gbit/sec-capable USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, and a single USB-C port that supports up to 15W of power delivery and display out. For those looking for additional connectivity for their embedded applications, the system also features a plethora of pin headers for USB 2.0, display out, serial interfaces, and 8-bit GPIO. Storage is provided by your choice of a SATA 3.0 interface or a m.2 mSATA/NVMe SSD. Unlike Aaeon’s Epic-TGH7 announced last month, the GENE-ADP6 is too small to accommodate a standard PCIe slot, but does feature a FPC connector, which the company says supports additional NVMe storage or external graphics by way of a 4x PCIe 4.0 interface.

Submission + - France to bar "dark store" delivery depots (bbc.com)

smooth wombat writes: "Dark stores", businesses which stock commonly needed items but which only offer delivery once you order over the internet, and whose "storefront" is a frosted window with no way to enter the "store", are now banned in all of France. The stores are now classified as warehouses rather than shops which will allow local mayors to take action if needed. From the BBC:

Run by half a dozen competing companies such as Gorillas, Cajoo, Getir, Flink and Gopuff, "dark stores" have proliferated in France as elsewhere over the last two years after Covid confinement popularised internet food shopping.

Advertising in Paris urges householders to get their food delivered in less than 10 minutes — or "quicker than a double by Benzema", referring to the French football star. A campaign by Cajoo shows "Alex" doing his shopping by smartphone while sitting on the lavatory.

But residents of buildings where "dark stores" have replaced pre-existing grocery shops are angry about noise from early morning lorries and the disruption caused by squads of deliverers on electric bicycles and scooters.

. . .

"This is not just a question of noise and traffic disruption. It's a question of society," said Camille Augey, a deputy mayor of Lyon.

"We need to ask ourselves what we want. Does every need have to be immediately satisfied regardless of external consequences? Do we really need that packet of pasta or bottle of shampoo at 11 o'clock at night? Can it really not wait until the morning?"

"We managed perfectly well before quick commerce, didn't we?" she added.

Submission + - Police Are Telling ShotSpotter to Alter Evidence From Gunshot-Detecting AI (vice.com)

An anonymous reader writes: On May 31 last year, 25-year-old Safarain Herring was shot in the head and dropped off at St. Bernard Hospital in Chicago by a man named Michael Williams. He died two days later. Chicago police eventually arrested the 64-year-old Williams and charged him with murder (Williams maintains that Herring was hit in a drive-by shooting). A key piece of evidence in the case is video surveillance footage showing Williams’ car stopped on the 6300 block of South Stony Island Avenue at 11:46 p.m.—the time and location where police say they know Herring was shot. How did they know that’s where the shooting happened? Police said ShotSpotter, a surveillance system that uses hidden microphone sensors to detect the sound and location of gunshots, generated an alert for that time and place. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vice.com%2Fen%2Farticl... ”>Except that’s not entirely true, according to recent court filings.

That night, 19 ShotSpotter sensors detected a percussive sound at 11:46 p.m. and determined the location to be 5700 South Lake Shore Drive—a mile away from the site where prosecutors say Williams committed the murder, according to a motion filed by Williams’ public defender. The company’s algorithms initially classified the sound as a firework. That weekend had seen widespread protests in Chicago in response to George Floyd’s murder, and some of those protesting lit fireworks. But after the 11:46 p.m. alert came in, a ShotSpotter analyst manually overrode the algorithms and “reclassified” the sound as a gunshot. Then, months later and after “post-processing,” another ShotSpotter analyst changed the alert’s coordinates to a location on South Stony Island Drive near where Williams’ car was seen on camera. “Through this human-involved method, the ShotSpotter output in this case was dramatically transformed from data that did not support criminal charges of any kind to data that now forms the centerpiece of the prosecution’s murder case against Mr. Williams,” the public defender wrote in the motion.

The document is what’s known as a Frye motion—a request for a judge to examine and rule on whether a particular forensic method is scientifically valid enough to be entered as evidence. Rather than defend ShotSpotter’s technology and its employees' actions in a Frye hearing, the prosecutors withdrew all ShotSpotter evidence against Williams. The case isn’t an anomaly, and the pattern it represents could have huge ramifications for ShotSpotter in Chicago, where the technology generates an average of 21,000 alerts each year. The technology is also currently in use in more than 100 cities. Motherboard’s review of court documents from the Williams case and other trials in Chicago and New York State, including testimony from ShotSpotter’s favored expert witness, suggests that the company’s analysts frequently modify alerts at the request of police departments—some of which appear to be grasping for evidence that supports their narrative of events.

Comment Standalone backup (Score 1) 283

And what is wrong with:
BOOT/R5:E0000000 DUA0
$ BACKUP/IMAGE DUA0: MUA0:BACKUP.BCK/SAVE/INIT/LABEL=BACKUP
?

apart from:
1. The tapes only hold 90-ish MB so you'll probably need more than one. (could be worse, could be RX50 floppy discs)
2. You try buying TK50's in quantity now
3. If you're still using VMS, you're probably only doing this because you're an old git and showing off, as it's faster to emulate the thing on SimH, and you could just copy the disk image file somewhere else in a few seconds instead of waiting several hours for old serpentine tape technology to wind it's way from end to end 22 times.
4. You could (and probably should) think of several million things that you should be doing instead

Regards,
A curmudgeonly VMS system manager

Comment Re:New phone time (Score 1) 137

You can still replace your battery? Samsung will be sure to relieve you of the horror of that tedious chore so you can support their market model properly.

While the A10 I have is nice, and I usually manage to break phones in a total bonehead maneuvre before the battery dies the death, I still feel somewhat agrieved that if I somehow manage to care for this device well enough for long enough, it's lifetime is still going to be finite.

And back on topic, I had an alcatel phone, until they updated the calculator app or all things to contain ads. I'm not sure what bit of the sea that landed in. I had hoped Samsung were above that sort of thing.

Comment Other - Roll your own (Score 1) 226

In the UK, there are four dominant carriers, O2, Vodaphone, EE and 3. All of the other carriers piggyback on those four to some extent, for example Tesco Mobile uses O2 as a carrier.

I have a number of SIM cards from sip2sim.uk which connect a mobile device to a VoIP service, which can be provided by their parent company, or any other VoIP provider on the planet. The SIM card itself does not provide a mobile telephone number, as the VoIP service does that. The mobile phone then becomes a registered device on that VoIP server, and consequently could be an internal extension on a corporate network, or any other kind of service provisioned via VoIP. The sip2sim servers just need, for each card, a server, username, and password. What happens to traffic after that point is down to the server you are logging in to.

These SIMs by default piggyback on UK O2, however in the event of no O2 signal, can switch automatically onto Dutch Vodaphone. Why Dutch? UK Vodaphone customers cannot roam onto EE's network, however Vodaphone customers from other countries can, so I effectively get three-network domestic roaming. Quite what will happen after Brexit, I have no idea.

My VoIP service is provided elsewhere, and I have all of my SIMs logging in to that, which means all of my devices have the same telephone number. This seems to confuse some organisations, but the practical upshot is that if you phone my number, you get me. I actually have multiple numbers, some of which I give to work contacts, others to private contacts, others to potentially spammy outfits, as numbers are cheap (as little as GBP 0.10) and can be terminated easily if a specific company starts to annoy me more than most. (British gas, I'm looking at you...)

One downside is that I have a UK telephone number which does not start 07. Numbers starting 07 in the UK are usally mobile telephone numbers, and despite many mobile networks actually offering non 07 numbers, quite a lot of companies think they are doing you a favour by refusing to accept 'mobile' numbers that do not start 07. The conversation usually goes:
Can I have your mobile number?
Sure, it's 014....
No, your mobile number
Yes. 0, 1, ..
No, it starts 07
No it doesnt
Yes it does
Stop asking me for my mobile number and then telling me that it's wrong!
(The conversation usually ends badly at this stage, although sometimes I actually get someone order a SIM card. Just don't get me started on the reaction I get from Carphone Warehouse staff when I try and buy a new mobile handset and they ask what network I'm with. (I just lie, it's easier))

So, I could allocate an 07 number to it, I do have an allocation, but why would I do that as it is still expensive to call 07 numbers from quite a lot of phone contracts when calls to landlines are practically free. (Ok, it's not a landline either, which just illustrates how easily confused the telecoms companies are)

Comment 16385 - Suspicious number (Score 5, Funny) 341

Anyone worth half a karma point here will recognise 16384 as a power of two.

In my years of software development, numbers like this jump out at you, usually while debugging something that has crashed due to overwriting something, and suspicious powers of two just scream 'BUG' at me.

Perhaps this move to manufacturing has simply been caused by microsoft not allocating enough bits in the build number, and one more recompile has tripped the manufacturing release...

struct BuildNumber
{
    int IncrementalVersion : 14;
    int ReleaseToManufacturing : 1;
    int FinallyBugFree : 1;
}

(and if this really is the source code, we'll have to wait until release 32768 for a bug free version, assuming we don't hit -32768 first)

Mozilla

New Firefox Project Could Mean Multi-Processor Support 300

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Mozilla Links "Mozilla has started a new project to make Firefox split in several processes at a time: one running the main user interface (chrome), and another or several others running the web content in each tab. Like Chrome or Internet Explorer 8 which have implemented this behavior to some degree, the main benefit would be the increase of stability: a single tab crash would not take down the whole session with it, as well as performance improvements in multiprocessor systems that are progressively becoming the norm. The project, which lacks a catchy name like other Mozilla projects (like TaskFox, Ubiquity, or Chocolate Factory) is coordinated by long time Mozillian, Benjamin Smedberg; and also integrated by Joe Drew, Jason Duell, Ben Turner, and Boris Zbarsky in the core team. According to the loose roadmap published, a simple implementation that works with a single tab (not sessions support, no secure connections, either on Linux or Windows, probably not even based on Firefox) should be reached around mid-July."
NASA

NASA Running Low On Fuel For Space Exploration 282

smooth wombat writes "With the end of the Cold War came warmer relations with old adversaries, increased trade and a world less worried about nuclear war. It also brought with it an unexpected downside: lack of nuclear fuel to power deep space probes. Without this fuel, probes beyond Jupiter won't work because there isn't enough sunlight to use solar panels, which probes closer to the sun use. The fuel NASA relies on to power deep space probes is plutonium-238. This isotope is the result of nuclear weaponry, and since the United States has not made a nuclear device in 20 years, the supply has run out. For now, NASA is using Soviet supplies, but they too are almost exhausted. It is estimated it will cost at least $150 million to resume making the 11 pounds per year that is needed for space probes."
Space

Submission + - NASA running low on fuel for space exploration (msn.com)

smooth wombat writes: With the end of the Cold War came warmer relations with old adversaries, increased trade and a world less worried about nuclear war. It also brought with it an unexpected downside: lack of nuclear fuel to power deep space probes. Without this fuel, probes beyond Jupiter won't work because there isn't enough sunlight to use solar panels which probes closer to the sun use.

The fuel NASA relies on to power deep space probes is plutonium-238. This isotope is the result of nuclear weaponry and since the United States has not made a nuclear device in 20 years, the supply has run out. For now, NASA is using Soviet supplies but they too are almost exhausted.

It is estimated it will cost at least $150 million to resume making the 11 pounds per year that is needed for space probes.

Music

Submission + - UK Report Suggests "Modernizing" Copyright

danpsmith writes: "The BBC has an article about a government report which proposes new powers against copyright infringement. Interestingly, however, it also: "says private users should be allowed to copy music from a CD to their MP3 player" and further "recommends the 50-year copyright protection for recorded music should not be extended," saying, "The ideal IP system creates incentives for innovation, without unduly limiting access for consumers and follow-on innovators."

While satisfied with most of the report, The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) says, "it would continue to press for the copyright extension.""

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