Posts by Fogcat

New humanoid robots from China look like creepy pop star action figures – complete with slightly dodgy lip-synch

There's more AI than reality in their hype-y video

Perseverance rover finds even more signs of extinct life on Mars

Re: But the chances of anything coming from Mars

No idea why you got down votes there.

GNU TP

Tech is now rolling out the old grievance grift

Re: Dark triads are weird that way

It's like all those Hollywood movies where is revealed that the terrorists are actually attempting a heist and are only in it for the money. There seems to be something in the USA psyche that just can't grasp the concept of doing something for belief in a cause.

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

Yes this! So it is in the same place on every page!

<old man mode>It's all about the looks, not the usability</old man mode>

NASA working on ‘Big Bang’ upgrade to keep the Voyagers alive for longer

This is a great film about the engineers keeping Voyager going:

"It's Quieter in the Twilight" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/)

Attackers have 16-digit card numbers, expiry dates, but not names. Now org gets £500k fine

So I wonder how much DSG has spent on legal fees to avoid a fine of £500,000? Makes me suspicious there's something else going on here.

AI security startup CEO posts a job. Deepfake candidate applies, inner turmoil ensues

Re: Old school

Surely the correct response from the candidates should have been either "why?" or "who is going to be reading it?" It could be dry technical documentation; simple list of modes of transport and time taken. An attempt at an entertaining short story; a harrowing tale of how they nearly missed the bus. A poetic observation on the clouds over the highway.

ATM flashes a port or two for the enterprising hacker

Re: Hostile environment

Surprised The Register hasn't mentioned this yet:

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2026/01/house-of-lords-votes-to-ban-uk-children-from-using-internet-vpns.html

US ownership of TikTok off to a rocky start as outage continues into second day

Re: Have they changed the T&C's yet ?

They have, people are reporting that they want to close their account but can't get to the delete account option unless they agree to the new T&Cs first.

IBM touts progress on tech stack for AI-enabled airline with no passengers or alcohol

<arthur>Sounds ghastly</arthur>

Microsoft appears to move on from its most loyal ‘customers’ – Contoso and Fabrikam

Re: Zara may want to have a word or two....

Looks like they won that one in the end Mike's domain now directed you to a Microsoft site.

Ordnance Survey digs deep to prevent costly cable strikes

Re: Reinventing the map?

I also had a "huh" on seeing the headline. In the 80 I was working with mapping software that was being used by NJUG (National Joint Utilities Group) to do just this; avoid the electric company digging up the water main or gas pipes and visa versa.

A quick bit of Googling tells ne that NJUG became Streetworks in 2017 and Streetworks seems to be more of a trade body now than a hardware database so I don't know what happened inbetween. Probably funding I guess.

So you CAN turn an entire car into a video game controller

Re: This is the UK

There is a thing known as international English

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_English

And most places where not native speakers are taught English aim towards "international". My daughter (British English speaker) has TEFL-ed (Taught English as Foreign Language) abroad.

European consumers are mostly saying 'non' to trading in their old phones

Re: replacement cycles for phones extending past 40 months

"People only trade in if it's worth their while, and increasingly it's not."

This! The value offered for a trade in, or a purchase from one of the traders is miniscule, often not even the cost of the petrol to drive to the nearest Cex.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Re: OK, but what now?

https://ladybird.org/

But no where near "ready" yet.

Techies propose the Agent Name Service: It's like DNS but for AI agents

"So what we see is in the near future, maybe as long as 10 years or short as two or three or five years, the majority of internet traffic will be agents,"

We're doomed

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

Re: Here's hoping that...

You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's but Voyager has been travelling for nearly half a century and it's not yet one light day away!

Plan to keep advanced chips from China with tracking tech gains support in Congress

From the manufacturer's point of view if the products must include "feasible and appropriate techniques" ... they have no changes to make because there are none.

Update turns Google Gemini into a prude, breaking apps for trauma survivors

redirection of "gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25" endpoint to the newer "gemini-2.5-pro-preview-05-06" model.

Is it just me thinking it's a little bit silly to be creating a 'product' based off something that's labelled preview?

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

Many many many years ago I worked on a typesetting system running on a Data Genal mini computer (yes before the appearance of DTP systems) and the staff at one customer were ex hot-lead typesetters and regarded the computer system as de-skilling their job.

We would often get a mysterious crash on a Friday afternoon, always from the same terminal, and because of the time take to reboot and verify etc. the staff would be sent home early. We never did get to the root cause because any enquires of the user as to "what were you doing when it crashed?" were met with a "just normal stuff". They weren't giving up their leave early card.

When even Microsoft can’t understand its own Outlook, big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making

Re: Adobe Reader

Sumatra PDF does all I need

https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

"Fact checkers have just been too politically biased "

So let me see if I understand this .... Facts are too politically biased?

Vivaldi gives its browser a buffing, adds a dashboard

Re: We need a User Agent that isn't Googled.

There is a completely new engine, not Blink, not WebKit, not Gecko, in development

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_(web_browser)

But don't expect to see anything until 2026!

From https://ladybird.org/ : "Ladybird is currently in heavy development. We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026."

Lab-grown human brain cells drive virtual butterfly in simulation

Isn't that what the "Far Zeniths" tried in Horizon Forbidden West?

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Re: In the days before t’interweb…

Way back, early in my career in the pre internet days, I was told to look something up in the timsboard. When I looked puzzled I was directed to a lever arch file.

It turns out that a now departed employee named Tim had originally kept all sorts of useful notes on a notice board. Once that was full the data moved to a folder but the name stayed as a piece of in-house jargon.

SpaceX aims high with Polaris Dawn mission

Can one of the space geeks please explain to me what is meant by the orbits 190 x 1,400 km and 190 x 700 km? Is that elliptical sizes? 190 x 1400 is very elliptical if so.

(I did try googling)

Zen Browser is a no-Google zone that offers tiling nirvana

The number of sites that just don't work properly in Firefox seems to ne slowly increasing. Too many web "developers" only testing on Chrome. (long time FF user)

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Re: Not tea

Back in the days when there were smoking rooms there was one in our building which was shared by everyone... cleaners to the board. I learnt so much about what was going on in the company just by sitting quietly in the corner with the reports I was reading and listening to the execs chat.

But on the other hand a different building that also had a similar smoking room that was used by all the data entry staff (yes it was a long time ago) on their 15 minute break. If you walked into that room just after one of those breaks had finished you could barely see the opposite wall! No need to light up.

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

A long read but it gives you a good view of the approach of the "AI bros"

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/essays/an-age-of-hyperabundance/

Stargazing with the Beaverlab Finder TW2

Re: Planet X

When I was very young (50+ years ago), a next door neighbour had a reflecting telescope (no idea of size or spec but he had a concrete base in the garden to mount it on) and I remember one night him just saying "have a look at that" and when I looked through the eyepiece it took me a while to work out what I was seeing, because it wasn't round like Mars that I'd seen before. It was Saturn with enough ring tilt so that the overall view was an oval with a couple of dark spots. Really cool, still remember the wow factor.

Rusty revenant Servo returns to render once more

I'm keeping half an eye on https://ladybird.dev/

Mastodon makes a major move amid Musk's multiple messes

Re: Shame about Mastodon

I've thought about giving BlueSky a try - but it seems invites to join are a commodity (just check eBay!)

Bad software destroyed my doctor's memory

Re: "radically alter the workflow of medical professionals, without their input"

I first made a comment about this 8 years ago.

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2015/09/02/nhs_to_go_paperless_by_2020_says_info_director/#c_2620739

System designers absolutely must talk talk to the users. And not just talk, watch them do their job, try and spot the things they do so instinctively that they would think to tell you about them.

To the Moon? Emojis can be financial advice, says judge

Re: Small correction needed in article

"While one investor had reportedly purchased Moments worth a total of over $15.6 million."

That was the bit that made my jaw drop, who has 15 million dollars just laying around that they splash on virtual cards? Or did they actually look at this, investigate, and go 'yeah I'll sell all my stocks and bonds and buy this new thing instead'?

Games Workshop once again battles scariest monster of all: ERP gone wrong

Re: The Horror

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jul/31/how-games-workshop-grew-to-become-more-profitable-than-google

In praise of MIDI, tech's hidden gift to humanity

Re: Nice to have.

There was an ST game ... "Midi Maze" that used daisy chained STs to create a 1st person multiplayer shooter (your avatar was just a big smiley face) in a very simple maze.

You could even have one machine with overview mode that showed where everyone was lurking. My friends an I had great fun with it in the pre doom days.

Killing trees with lasers isn’t cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?

I previously posted this in 2015, and although i thankfully haven't been to watch any similar work activities I have no doubt a lot of this still goes on.

I'm not a reactionary but after having spent a few hours in the waiting area of a day surgery unit last week (where patients did have a wrist band with a QR style code) and watching the activity I wonder if the managers have any idea about the non-obvious uses of paper files?

These include:

* Attaching a patient's locker key to her file to keep it safe during the op.

* Provision of files to different theatre teams based on where they were on the central circular desk.

* At a glance checking of a patients position in the queue by where there file was in the array.

* Ad-hoc note scribbling (and diagram drawing) in the files.

* The good old fashioned thumb flicking browsing of old notes in a very thick file by an anaesthetist (presumably visually scanning for related info rather than doing a keyword search)

* Detaching forms/pieces of paper to take away to another location (colour coded forms by what I observed)

And then there's the signing of patient consent forms; and the showing them to the patient in theatre and asking "is this your signature". They'll need something better than the things I sign for parcel delivery!

All these things *can* be supported with technology but I suspect it's not as simple as people think.

'What's the point of me being in my office, just because they want to see me in the office?'

House!

Instagram star gets 11 years for $300m email scam plot

Re: I wonder how long Elizabeth Holmes will get

Apparently she *didn't* defraud the little people, you know people getting misleading results from her tests or anything.

"Holmes, 37, reportedly showed little emotion when the verdicts were read out. The jury found her not guilty of four charges of defrauding the public, though this was cold comfort when set against the other seven charges of defrauding investors and wire fraud. She has denied the charges."

https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/04/elizabeth_holmes_guilty_verdict_theranos/

Meta fined record-breaking $24.6m for deliberately ignoring political ad law

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mindf-Inside-Cambridge-Analyticas-Break/dp/1788164997

Just because it's not Cambridge Analytica doing it it doesn't mean their methods have gone away

NHS data platform procurement delayed for a second time

Re: Money trumps humanity

Having just read MindF*ck by Christopher Wylie I would be VERY wary of Palantir. Although the book is about Cambridge Analytica Palantir always seems to be hovering just off page at key moments.

Well worth a read, the headlines don't even scratch the surface of all the crap that CA got up to.

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Re: One Ring to rule them all ...

Yes this! - Streaming service fragmentation. To start with there was Netflix, easy, why bother (a-hem) torrenting. Then Amazon Prime, ok a second won't hurt. then Netflix when big on "home developed shows" and every studio started looking enviously at the customers (Disney, Apple) and you get things like Paramount pulling all the old Star Trek off of Netflix so they can start their own service. Surely they can't all survive?

California state's gun control websites expose personal data

Re: Our privacy laws only punish data blunders

That is scary!

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of fraud: Blood-testing machines were vapourware after all

Re: Sentencing will be interesting

And not guilty of four charges of defrauding the public (and most importantly patients).

Every Little Helps: Former Tesco boss Dave Lewis to advise UK govt on supply chains

Re: The main thing I observed about the (previous) CEO of Tesco...

Just because someone is the head of an organisation with a large supply chain does that really mean they are an *expert* in supply chains? I would have thought the person you really wanted was not a "suit" but someone like the national warehouse manager. But they they probably don't go to the right cocktail parties to get invited to apply.

Version 8 of open-source code editor Notepad++ brings Dark Mode and an ARM64 build, but bans Bing from web searches

Re: the text editor for granddads

I won't down vote you, because hey, personal preference; but I use Visual Studio and Notepad++

Visual Studio for the IDE, code hinting etc. Notepad++ for log files (some very big), XML and everything else (with a few plugins added). NP++ is fast, has a "classic" interface and does it's job very well.

Also NP++ is free Sublime isn't. When I trialled Sublime (a while ago I admit) it seemed more about "style" than usefulness.

Google's diversity strat lead who said Jews have 'insatiable appetite for war' is no longer diversity strat lead

Re: Out of context

Sorry if it came over that way, I had no intention of implying a "secret cabal" with all the associated historical and social baggage. All nations indulge in influence, public relations and propaganda to various degrees, some are better than others, and again in this instance I'm referring to nation states, not peoples, faiths etc.

And as for criticising on the "same issue" - some issues are very strongly geographically specific, I'm not sure how I could criticise Thailand for it's use of air strikes in the occupied territories. Or for that matter criticise the Israeli government for the treatment of the Rohingya in Myanmar. The criticism needs to be applied to the agency carrying out the actions.

Re: Out of context

One of the things that seems to me to be prevalent today is the idea that any criticism of Israeli government policies is automatically anti-Semitic. Some is, because some people don't seem to be aware that Jewish ethnicity is not the same as the Judaism the faith and neither are equivalent to an enthusiastic support of the government. But valid criticism is often shouted down.

This conflation has, I personally think, been very carefully crafted and cynically encouraged over a length of time by a highly effective PR campaign.

Even typing this I'm trying to be very careful about what I say!

Harassers and bullies succeed in tech because silence is encouraged

Re: Tales from the Crypt

This will no doubt attract a number of down votes, but ... these sorts of things are an example of where the backing of a union can be very helpful, they have their own legal resources, unfortunately lots of experience in similar cases and more time and money than an individual can dedicate to fighting back. They're a bit like insurance, you hope you never need them, but they're damn helpful when you do.

Vote to turf out remainder of Nominet board looks inevitable after .uk registry ignores reform demands

I've only got one uk domain with an undecided registrar (easily) - any recommendations on who to switch to?

And it really really does seem like there's something to hide that they're clinging on so desperately.