Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Re: Human Populations Are Not Quantised!

It's easy to quantise:

Everyone more than 5 years older than me = Old fart generation (stupid and ignorant)

Everyone more than 5 years younger than 5 = Dumb kids generation (stupid and ignorant)

Re: Most misused list - where is "steep learning curve"?

...or plot "% that must be learned" against time, where steep means more difficult, for example, having to memorise the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1 day would be a steeper "learning curve" than having to memorise the first two rows of the periodic table of elements in a week.

As usual, context is everything, and words can mean different things in different contexts. Whodathunkit?

Re: Most misused list - where is "steep learning curve"?

I suppose it depends on what that curve of material learnt vs time represents; the amount of information absorbed (steep means lots quickly = good), or the amount of information that has to be absorbed in a set amount of time (steep means more must be learned, which implies more difficulty)

Re: By a CG (computer Geek) older than all of you out there - blah blah title is too long

Old person hates on younger generations; film at 11.

Perhaps, the actual truth here is that lazy and stupid people are lazy and stupid, and trying to categorise entire slices of the population in this way, based on something entirely arbitrary such as age, is simply moronic.

Oh well, at least when that "not too many years" is up, some of the hoarded housing will become available to later generations, albeit not at a price any of us can afford, like it was when your generation bought it all up and then elected a government that deliberately depleted social housing, and effectively made it illegal for councils to build more, so they could make a quick buck to top up their pensions.

In the war between the Boomers and Millennials / Gen Z, Generation X is forgotten again.

For what it's worth, we care not one jot for the business speak coming from one direction, or for the excessive vocal fray, and elongated terminal vowels coming from the other, or, even worse, the tendency to replace the endings of words that terminate in "er" with "ahhh", it's not bigahhh, or cleverahhh. At least, I suppose, we've got rid of the thing where white kids pretend to be Jamaican that came to prevalence in the '90s.

We're equal opportunities haters of bullshit.

A toast to being in the right place at the right time

Re: Did it talk?

PTerry, of course, although not really in the set of Sci-Fi writers with the others.

ACC, I'll reserve judgement on; let's just say his personal life may have involved things that were "acceptable in the '70s" and leave it at that.

Re: What to do in case of a real fire...or other alarm

It was mostly solvents like dichloromethane through skin absorption and inhalation, which isn't the nastiest stuff in the world, but enough to cause some mild joint pain after prolonged exposure.

Re: What to do in case of a real fire...or other alarm

Yeah, why not? Unfortunately, I seem to have developed amazing powers of pedantry and sarcasm, which aren't so useful in everyday life...

Re: What to do in case of a real fire...or other alarm

+1 for "spicy rocks"

Re: What to do in case of a real fire...or other alarm

My experience of research scientists (and of, once, many years ago, being one) is that common sense can be conspicuously absent amongst the supposedly very clever. In totally unrelated news, I decided to stop being a research scientist before I managed to poison myself badly.

That, presumably, would be the site up near UWE that looks conspicuously empty on maps, and rhymes with "shabby good"?

Re: Did it talk?

We also gave the world the works of Douglas Adams, it's one of the few cases where the world is better off for the English.

WFH mandates bad for staff morale and stunt innovation

Azure devops tools are okay, it's the user permissions model that is confusing and ambiguous. Presumably so Microsoft can sell you training.

Re: Bad headline

At the risk of "mansplaining" the OP, that was the point; our Crosspondian cousins say "I could care less", whilst we (syntactically correctly) say "I couldn't care less"; the comment was an ironic illustration of the point.

It is traditionally said that it's Americans who don't get irony. Is this ironic?

On the flip side of this, if you are claiming this is about autism, most neurodivergent people find social situations (such as being plonked in the middle of a noisy open-plan office) to be both distracting and stressful, so I would suggest that what you are doing is trying to find evidence to fit your conclusion.

Also, there is absolutely no reason rules and processes cannot be employed without the need for physical presence. I'm not on the autistic spectrum myself (as far as I know, anyway), but find that a combination of Teams and email provide a perfectly adequate tool for all the necessary communication.

In terms of "emotional maturity", I have found that a lack thereof seems to apply mostly to those who are intent on forcing others into an office environment against their will, in order to plump their own egos and sense of self-worth.

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

"I googled it" is not an authoritative source. Back to school with you, laddo!

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Re: Useful idiot?

A tame idiot is much more useful, and easier to control, than a board member with the ability to think.

This is far too close to the truth

I'm currently trying to "streamline" some of our internal processes, a number of which include using pieces of software that were last updated, and licensed, in the 1990s, and don't necessarily play nicely on anything more recent than NT (think applications that crash when you switch to another window, that sort of thing), are no longer supported, and can't be automated (so we can't just replace the whole process with a job run on a DevOps deployment agent), but are still in use, because we have that "perpetual license".

Never mind that in each case, there is either a well-supported, open source, free alternative, or the same functionality is built into Visual Studio...

Add to this that there are some people around, who, if the checklist had a step of "turn around three times and punch yourself in the face," would resist any change to get it removed, whilst bleeding from their noses.

That Meta GDPR fine is €1.2B. Plus biz must stop sending EU data to US

Re: Once you stop Facebook storing personal information......

I think you might be labouring under the misapprehension of what a trade war is, there.

The US isn;' trying to undercut foreign trade in personal data, and nobody is trying to add some sort of tariff to imports, which would be akin to a trade war.

In the EU, it is illegal to sell on people's personal data without their explicit informed consent, and with several provisos (such as the subject being able to get that data deleted at any time, and it only being collected for specific, named, purposes, which are necessary for a service the user has consented to).

In the US, it is "personal data, yum yum $profit $profit", the subject has no rights.

Clearly these two models are incompatible.

Re: Incompatible laws

I'm incorrect? In what sense? Just because the US likes to try to impose US law overseas doesn't mean it has any jurisdiction to do so.

If they want to tell an EU subsidiary of a US company that they must send their data to the US, the law in the EU member state, which says they cannot do so, takes primacy. If they want to then prosecute or otherwise sanction the US branch of that company for the EU subsidiary not doing, then that's their business.

If they want to try to sanction the EU subsidiary as well, then they can have a go at that. I reckon they'd probably fall foul of several international agreements by doing so. WTO rules about fair trade spring to mind, for starters.

So, the tl;dr; here is that just because the US thinks it has jurisdiction over the whole world, doesn't mean that it does.

Re: Honest question

It's almost as if the big players have worked out the 3-legged OAUTH is quite tricky to implement correctly, so they've stepped in with, "here, buddy, let us do the authentication leg for you, no monetary cost, all you'll pay us in return is your immortal soul".

Re: Once you stop Facebook storing personal information......

So what you are saying, is that you find the requirement (note: not request, but requirement by law) for personal information on EU citizens not to leave the EU for processing "interesting". Plenty of companies can manage that. The only reason to transport that data outside of the EU, where this company does have the infrastructure and ability to process it, would be to do something with that data that is not permitted under EU law, within the EU. Such as, for example, profiling a person's interests and selling that data on, without allowing the data subject access to that data, or recourse to have it corrected or deleted at their request. In other words, completely circumventing the point of data protection legislation in the first place, and going for the US model of "free for all, we own data about you, not you, and call flog it to the highest bidder". Add to that, the ability of the US government, under its own laws, to take control of any data held in its jurisdiction, under the auspices of "preventing terrorism" or some other such total bollocks, without the subject ever knowing, and the prospect of having any of my data held in the US, in the hands of a foreign power, and political entities of which I am probably not even aware, and certainly do not trust, becomes ever more terrifying.

this, I find "interesting", and by "interesting", I mean "backwards, and offering no protection to the citizenry". US adventurism of this type can fuck right off.

Oh, and the EU Commission doesn't "just make new rules". Any such power grab, as you describe, would require assent from all the member nations, and I think that, even for the more feverishly authoritarian amongst them (*cough* Hungary *cough*) that is a bit of a stretch of the imagination. All you have demonstrated with that bit of whataboutery is that you don't have a clue about what the EU Commission (and Parliament, and Council) is, or does.

Re: Honest question

I really abhor bureaucrats that act as prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner

As opposed to, say, a public prosecutor, and a judge. As far as I'm aware, no execution is on the cards, more's the pity.

As far as I can tell, the due process has been followed, which goes along the lines of a regulation being passed, it making its way into national law in member nations, an organisation being in breach of those laws, a national data protection agency neglecting to prosecute them, the bloc-wide regulator noticing this, and prosecuting in their stead, the company being found guilty, and being fined. Something like that. No star chambers, no "bureaucrats," whatever they are, and no avoidance of due process.

Now we turn to the next question in turn; who, or what, are you actually referring to when you throw around shibboleths like "bureaucrats"? I ask, because it's also thrown around in the company of words like "sovereignty," "taking back control," "migrant swarms," and all that other xenophobic bollocks, and often signifies an underlying lack of ability to think clearly and reasonably.

Quite.

They've been singled out because they are doing it on an industrial scale, in the same way that someone fly-tipping 100 tonnes of industrial waste into a river would be singled out over someone dropping a crisp packet.

This isn't to say that someone dropping a crisp packet won't get a fine if they happen to get caught, but it's likely to be something like a £50 on-the-spot fine, and the industrial polluter is likely to get imprisonment as a punishment (or we would at least hope so, under our government, they'd probably get a performance bonus, and public subsidy to clean up the mess).

Meta haven't been "singled out", they have been noticed, and prosecuted, according to the law, for a serious breach of it.

Re: Incompatible laws

Every US company that works with EU data, via subsidiaries or not, is technically breaking GDPR law at the moment.

Well, yes and no.

If that data contains personally identifying information (PID), or is not adequately anonymised to the extent that PID can be extracted, or individuals identified, and that PID is being sent to the US, then yes.

If the PID elements of the data are stored and processed in the EU, in accordance with GDPR rules, and only the outputs from the processing, which would have to contain no PID, or any way to identify individuals, or small groups, are sent to the US for processing, then that is probably okay.

If everything occurs on servers in the EU, in accordance with GDPR, and only the money goes off to the parent company in the US, then there's no problem there. This is why a lot of companies have incorporated subsidiaries in each country, or bloc, they operate in. (And, incidentally, because of the bloc bit there, yet another reason why Brexit is an act of economic self-harm for the UK)

Essentially, it's only a botherance for companies which make their business out of sweeping up as much PID as possible and analysing, in the US, it for profit. In this case, Facebook, but I'd not be surprised to see similar against the likes of Google Alphabet, Apple, et al. It makes sense, too, for the regulators to go after the most egregious offenders first, and then work their way down the list.

IANAL, of course, but this is my understanding.

Re: In tangentially related news...

They don't want to sour their relationship with Apple, who is a large employer in Ireland, and has brought tech jobs there in preference to other places across the continent, attracted, essentially by the very low rate of corporation tax afforded to them (and other tech companies), as a trade-off against high-skilled high-wage employment which drives other sectors of the economy, such as housing, entertainment and tourism.

The quote from him in the other article I read about this a couple of days ago was along the lines of, "we're squeaky clean, we did nothing wrong".

Which, from the guy who essentially destroyed any trust anyone had in the Liberal Democrats for over a decade, by being utterly dishonest and getting into bed with the Tories, is worth essentially zero pounds and nought pence.

Guilty as charged m'lud.

Re: Honest question

Simply because, once in the US, the oversight and data protections afforded by the EU regulations, and the national laws that implement them, do not apply.

Facebook can then happily do all sorts of analytics on that data without having to worry about pesky things like leaking people's personal and private information. They can then make a wedge-load of cash by selling on that profiled data to advertising (or, more likely, by holding onto that profiled data and selling advertising "space" based on it). This is where all those creepy adverts for things you were talking about in private come from. For instance, I never once told FB that my wife is doing a specific training course for her career progression, but all of a sudden it is showing me lots of adverts for courses from training providers doing exactly that.

We should be concerned with exactly how much data is being vacuumed up by Facebook, from where, and where it is going. I can guarantee that there is something going on there with collecting data from somewhere other than just what you post on your account*, and you can be pretty certain that it is undergoing the sort of processing that would not be allowed in the EU (or, for now, the UK), in order to produce that lucrative targeting data for the advertisers. This is, after all, Facebook's main revenue stream - targeted ads.

*I suspect that there is some sort of microphone snooping going on, from anecdotal reports of adverts appearing related to spoken conversations. My money is on the microphone on people's phones being used in the background when the Facebook app is running, even as a background task, and this being streamed to a data centre in the US for speech recognition and analysis. Probably using that old chestnut "AI" to pick out relevant words and phrases, and to build some sort of categorisation profile that can be used to direct advertising. That's how I'd do it if I was completely immoral, and let's face it, nobody gets to be a billionaire by being ethical.

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

Re: Chaos Manor

ISTR a processor I had in a previous home-build PC that was purportedly a 6-core chip, but it was actually an 8-core one without two of the cores verified. I unlocked the two remaining cores in the BIOS, and overclocked the CPU to boot (by about 10% IIRC, it had a beefy heat-sink on it with lots of copper fins) and it all still worked fine.

This was probably 10+ years ago, so details are a bit hazy. I think it was my last AMD machine.

Re: Apologies in advance for the super-pedantry here...

Surprisingly it's low mass stars which burn cool and long that make elements up to Lutetium (#71).

This surprised me; I was taught that fusion only works up to Iron (due to the energy input outweighing the output after element #56) - ISTR a curve of energy vs atomic number, where it goes up rapidly, tails off and peaks at iron, and then slowly declines. I guess the heavier elements get created in that star's death throes, or by some process that can afford to put in more energy than it gets out?

I think, probably the "where do heavy elements come from" is still one of the not-fully-solved issues with cosmology. We're not great at visualising the sorts of things that go on in and around stars, and I think the maths probably gets quite tricky when looking at huge magnetic fields twisting themselves up into all sorts of contortions and interacting with plasmas at millions of degrees. Not to mention the fact that we haven't completely understood all the subatomic physics going on either (there are still a lot of unanswered questions there too, which we're trying to answer by smashing very small things together very fast).

Re: MEGA pedantry here

Well yes indeed, I was quoting the article, mind...

I'll also add that merging neutron starts themselves have a prerequisite of two neutron stars, which are formed in supernovae.

I think the formation of heavy elements in the early universe probably involved all sorts of "exotic" things such as "black hole stars" - stars so massive that they have a black hole inside but extend beyond the event horizon, so still continue to shine, and other mind-bending things like that.

ISTR some stuff recently about supernovae where modelling of the collapsing magnetic fields suggested some of those elements could be formed there as well. I guess the whole things is hard to nail down, because a lot of this stuff is based on theoretical modelling, and not direct measurement, what with supernovae being relatively uncommon, and a long way away, and pretty unlikely to be something that can be reproduced experimentally, not to mention hazardous to be within many light-years of.

Apologies in advance for the super-pedantry here...

A spot of insulating tape was placed inside the mouse to prevent the distant mass of burning gases – whose awesome power is responsible for all life on Earth – interfering with the sensors.

Nearly all life on Earth. At the bottom of the oceans, around hydrothermal vents, are organisms whose biology is based on thermosynthesis; the energy for which comes from decaying radioactive elements in the Earth's core. No big ball of thermonuclear explosion needed, although the existence of those radioactive heavy elements does rely on a previous thermonuclear ball going all 'splodey some 8 billion or so years ago.

UK's GDPR replacement could wipe out oversight of live facial recognition

Re: The reward for your support

Most of them are actually adherents of the utter whack-job Ayn Rand.

Re: The reward for your support

That's exactly what an unregulated free market does; it concentrates power in the hands of a few, at the expense of everyone else - those with the capital accrue more, and everyone else gets less. This is why regulation is vital, to prevent too much capital (and hence power) being accumulated by too few people. This is why the likes of Rees-Mogg talking about "cutting red tape" should ring all manner of alarm bells, because what this really means is "I want to do what I want with no oversight, and fuck the peons".

Edit - note that I'm not advocating for replacing free-market economics with, for example, a command economy, as those don't work either. What I'm advocating for is the sort of anti-monopoly regulation that seems to be sorely lacking at the moment, and possibly escalating taxation on those who do manage to game the system and accumulate obscene wealth. Nobody should be obscenely wealthy, certainly not when others are going hungry.

"Success" at the Coronation

The sort of "success" where they arrest women's safety volunteers distributing rape alarms to vulnerable women, at night, whilst wearing high-vis jackets stating that they are working in association with the Met, arrest a bunch of would-be protesters for thought-crime, and reportedly a royal "super-fan," causing them to miss the whole charade?

Bang-up job there, Met, you've definitely sorted yourselves out, and adding more surveillance tech will definitely turn you into a well-functioning and non-corrupt force.

Meh.

Microsoft and Helion's fusion deal has an alternative energy

Re: It's a sure thing

If I could be bothered to find a reasonably priced radiation counter, I reckon my collection of uranium glass is probably a bit "warm" too. I've not grown any extra limbs yet from eating out of it, nor have I developed any glassware-related superpowers. If I did, due to the period that most of it was made, I could probably call myself something like "Art-Deco Man".

Re: Erm...

By the way, the author did also link to the other two articles here that discuss exactly that, in the second paragraph of the article. I'm assuming that they chose not to regurgitate the content of another article, because (a) that's not what this article is about and (b) why would The Register want to publish two articles within a week of each other with the same content? This isn't one of those non-peer-reviewed online journals that just publishes anything for money. Yet.

Re: Erm...

This is true. What they have failed to do, so far, to the best of my knowledge, is demonstrate actual fusion in those pulsed plasma waves. In theory, it might check out, but I suspect the author has left out all that detail for the sake of brevity, because it is all, currently, theoretical.

If it works, it will, no doubt, be a game changer.

If. It. Works.

Re: I think

If only you could harness the power from flying chairs, they'd be quids-in.

Re: It's a sure thing

If you circulate a liquid through a mildly radioactive material, such as granite, which contains traces of radioactive elements, it is going to get irradiated.

The fluid is going to get hit by the alpha and beta particles, the odd fast neutron, and gamma radiation, from the radioactive decay of those elements, which in turn is likely to make it mildly radioactive, and the regulations are indeed strict enough that such things should be monitored. The main point here is probably the circulation, which may concentrate some longer lived isotopes.

It’s a relative term, though, I got irradiated the other day when I was outside doing some painting. The radiation burns have stopped feeling hot now, and just resulted in an upsurge in melanin production in my epidermis. I removed myself from the radiation source before it started triggering cell apoptosis, and put on some sunscreen.

BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus

Re: Cheapo USB key

Why on earth are they still stocking and selling these?

They're selling them because they have them in stock. The person responsible for doing so was probably a bean counter who got a price break of 0.01% at 100,000 units, oblivious to the fact that they'd be obsolete and written off before half of them had been sold.

Re: AHH the good old USB

...and with a 50/50 chance that it comes preinstalled with a virus on it.

Re: When do people understand that cash rules?

... although I suppose if you were cunning, you could fabricate a plug with some very thin wires, and some tinder in it. It would require airflow through it though, which might look suspicious.

Re: When do people understand that cash rules?

You'd also have to have a USB socket to plug it into that is capable of delivering that much power. The average laptop USB socket will put out half an amp at 5V, or, if you're lucky and have a USB 3.0 one, 900 mA. 3.5W is hardly a fire-starting amount of power.

Tough Euro crackdown on AI use passes key vote

Re: Jack the Ripper

Reading the article, though, it sounds like this piece of legislation is more about stopping those sorts of things (the one that stands out is "social scoring systems" à la China's surveillance state). Mention of AI like this seems almost like a bit of a gimmick, much as a lot of supposed "AI" is. We're certainly still years away from an actual artificial general intelligence, if such a thing is even possible. As you say, what is getting called "AI" and "Machine learning" is better described as a bunch of techniques for data analysis and pattern matching. Those techniques are certainly getting more refined, and it is potentially worrying that they can produce results that look like they were done by a human, but at the same time, a robot can produce a car that looks like it was welded together by a human. The issues only arise when people attempt to pass one thing off as another. Oh, and "AI" can't do fingers properly...

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Re: Spreadsheets for Dummies /s

To the extent that geneticists have renamed several gene to work around the problem. Presumably because changing the human genome and scientific literature is less trouble than getting Microsoft to fix a hateful spreadsheet application.

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

Exactly this. If I could upvote it more than once, I could. If you're doing anything to screw with the normal, atmospheric, levels of gases, you need to be monitoring it very well.

I recall a story a while ago, where some physicists working with liquid nitrogen managed to asphyxiate themselves when they were carrying a dewar in a lift and the lift broke down. You won't even be aware of it if you are breathing pure nitrogen, you'll just pass out, continue breathing normally, and die.

Re: death trap

Not so long ago, people would routinely smoke in offices

The 1970s ended 43 years ago.

I've never, in my entire working life, worked in, or even visited, an office where people smoke in the actual office. One place I used to work at had a smoking room, but even that was got rid of long before the ban on smoking in the workplace was introduced (over 15 years ago), in favour of a "bus shelter" outside.

A lone Nvidia GPU speeds past the physics-straining might of a quantum computer – in these apps at least

Re: Narrow optics

Whilst all of this may very well be true, and we've probably reached a point with battery chemistry where any improvements on power density / unit mass are going to be incremental, there's probably still plenty of room for materials science to come up with better battery structural designs and tweaks to chemistry that will yield better battery life and charge/discharge cycle time, that sort of thing. At the moment, the life cycle of an electric vehicle is very much governed by how long the batteries will usefully last, and a battery that has a useful life of ten years rather than five would make a vast difference.

Unlike your iPhone, Apple's batterygate controversy refuses to die

I don't think the logic quite follows, though.

If it was just a batch of faulty batteries, why did they add a software "feature" to manage those batteries rather than just 'fess up and replace them?

Also, why was the "feature" added, and triggered, on all phones, and not just the ones with "faulty" batteries. Could it be that all the batteries were actually inadequate.

One could contend that Apple knew very well that the batteries they had specced for the iPhone 6 were inadequate for the purpose, and would have a short lifespan. It could be suggested that the faulty batch of batteries just provided a smokescreen for this. One could then argue that this was done intentionally, to force the users to "upgrade". The "battery management feature" was just a symptom of this, an attempt to manage the situation to make it look as if they weren't just trying to push the users to "upgrade". Gotta protect that revenue stream, eh?