Posts by TeeCee

Update your Tesla now before the windows put your fingers in a pinch

I suspect that, while the standard tech may be a well-trodden path and reliable, Tesla have elected to just fit the load sensors and to do all the interpretation and control in software. Just like everything else they do.

It seems to work as well as everything else they do too. As this is a recall, I guess they have to sort this now and put "slaughters children when automated" on the back-burner.

I reckon that Tesla's main purpose in life is to provide something for Alfa owners[1] to point and laugh at when reliability comes up.

[1] A group of automotive masochists who number myself in their ranks.

Larry Page's flying taxi startup Kittyhawk calls it a day

Re: it lasted longer than I thought it would

I suspect that they realised that their usual approach, of just turning a popular service off when they felt like it, stood a good chance of killing people if they actually got this working.

Thus the early bail out.

"...We're still working on the details of what's next."

A tenner on "tumbleweeds" please.

Afghanistan’s Taliban government bans TikTok

Re: A good start...

Best example of how daft things have got is to watch the Royal Funeral(tm) as it passes up the Long Drive to Windsor. The route is lined with thousands of people all with their right arms held up at 45 degrees.

Now, I know that they're all holding mobile phones to take pics / video / livestream / influence sheep, but from a distance it looks a lot like a Nuremberg rally.

Instagram. Making the Nazis acceptable again.

Emissions-slashing hybrid trains to hit tracks in Europe

Re: Where will they get all that green H?

If you want serious, long-term expertise in handling enormous quantities of Hydrogen, look no further than Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH.

It didn't end well for them either...

Don't want to get run over by a Ford car? There's a Bluetooth app for that

"...that's not a lot of stoppng distance."

I'll bet a stack of cash a foot thick that this isn't how it works.

My bet is that passing Ford A (that's just an identifier, it doesn't have to be a Model A) picks up the signal and sends it to "the cloud" (ooooooo trendy). This then SYNCs (geddit?) with Fords B, C, D, etc in the vicinity.

Of course, this only works if everyone has their cars connected all the time. Thus the connected car becomes an Important Safety Feature and not an important data scarfing revenue earner for Ford at all. Oh no. Perish the thought.

I can't help thinking that a greater level of safety could be achieved by not having pedestrians dicking about with Ford apps rather then looking where they're going.

4/10 - please try harder.

Google says some AI call center agents took the morning off

I guess they felt that Time wasn't on their side...

By Jove! Jupiter to make closest approach to Earth in 70 years next Monday

Re: Gas giant

Everything will stop working because it's the wrong sort of gas.

(See also: Leaves, snow, etc).

Excel's comedy of errors needs a new script, not new scripting

Re: From "Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors" by Matt Parker

"...estimates that over 90 per cent of all spreadsheets contain errors."

Let me guess. They have a spreadsheet showing that data, don't they?

Can reflections in eyeglasses actually leak info from Zoom calls? Here's a study into it

Re: No video...

Telephone? Luxury that is. When I were a lad we 'ad to use morse code on 'telegraph. We only 'ad one bloke who knew morse code mind. 'E 'ad use of 'company bicycle and rode round to each person oo wanted to send a message.

Microsoft Outlook sends users back to 1930 with (very) mini-Millennium-Bug glitch

AHEM!

To save memory, early coders used the shortcut,

Depending on the language you were using, you often had no choice. More than a few had all the built in dates (e.g. today's date) and the handling for conversions as six digit date only.

Re: Off topic but...

I'm sure the vultures are still trying to work out a way of getting it to follow you around via electronic advertising hoardings, destination boards and the like.

Climate change prevention plans 'way off track', says UN

FFS! There is no bloody "evill guvrmint concpirassy", or bribes/lobbying to preserve oil and gas.

It's purely because no transition of this magnitude has ever even been attempted before and it needs toi be a gradual process. The alternative (touted by the fuckwit loons of "stop oil" and the like), is economic collapse, mass starvation and a really, really big shooting war, probably with lots of nukes.

i.e. the same end result as doing absolutely nothing, only faster, more messy and the fucked up ecosystem also glows at night.

Re: So?

According to Dale Arden, it's way worse than that...

Rare hexagonal diamond formed by crash of dwarf planet and asteroid, scientists believe

Tell me about it!

Isn't it amazing how fascinatingly addictive crystalline structures and their fracture planes are?

OVH opens less flammable datacenter at site of 2021 fire

Somehow I doubt that, of the various liquids that might have been present, it was the water that caught fire.

Intel's stock Raptor Lake chip will do 6GHz and overclock another 25%, if it keeps cool

If you've got Excel chewing 27GB, that spreadsheet is not trivial. It may be simple and have a fuckton of imported data to analyse, but that's a different kettle of fish.

I just fired up a genuinely trivial spreadsheet to sanity check that apparent cobblers. 66MB total Excel memory use. Most of that's overhead too (i.e. the executable and its raft of associated DLLs) as, drilling down, it's allocated a whole 140KB of working memory.

Hybrid work not working? Try building an 'intraverse' to fix it, says Gartner

Let me fix that.

"But if you are highly visible about it, they will know that you triedthey should leave before you go bust from hosing cash on idiotic, trendy shit."

Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C₈H₁₀N₄O₂

Re: Better yet...

That was my first real hardware cockup.

I volunteered to fix the boss' keyboard that she'd just chucked a cup of coffee over. I dismantled it, washed all the placcy bits out and carefully cleaned all the sensitive bits with cotton buds and alcohol. I then reassembled it and to ensure it was thoroughly dry before trying it out, stuck it on a heater...... which melted it.

Dump these small-biz routers, says Cisco, because we won't patch their flawed VPN

Re: OpenWrt or DD-WRT?

Small Business Routers.

Thus very unlikely to have the necessary Rocket Scientist on staff to install and configure such.

No professional third-party in their right mind would take the job on. Putting yourself in the position of being potentially liable for outages on a lash-up like that, with no manufacturer support, would be suicidally stupid.

Using the datacenter as a dining room destroyed the platters that matter

"Vince is not allowed to cook kippers in the microwave"

Right. Spray cans everyone. Time to make that as ubiquitous and puzzling as "Kilroy was here.".

(Hmm. Which SF author was it who wrote the short time-travel story which explained that latter?)

NASA just weeks away from trying again with SLS Moon rocket launch

Will it be third time lucky?

Just remember that problems always come in threes...

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

What does IKEA stand for? Never seen that one...

SiFive RISC-V CPU cores to power NASA's next spaceflight computer

...one of the more likely to have a large developer base 10, 15, or even 20 years from now...

They could make some real money by sharing time on that Crystal Ball of theirs.

CERN draws up shutdown plans to save energy

Re: Ukraine is a (large) straw that broke the camel's back

Pandering to the eco-loons, rather than taking a more scientific approach, turns out to be a huge mistake?

Who Could Possibly Have Seen That Coming?

Microsoft mistakenly rated Chromium, Electron as malware

Yeah, right.

Who the fuck do they think they are? McAfee? Avast? etc el Reg articles passim ad nauseum.

NASA scrubs Artemis mission yet again because SLS just can't handle the pressure

Re: Gimme a spanner...

It's a leaky hose. Any fule kno that you fix that with duct tape, not a spanner.

Voyager 1 data corrupted by onboard computer that 'stopped working years ago'

Re: Foresight

Vauxhall PA.

Rumour has it that Vauxhall put the rust in during manufacture to save time.

Google, YouTube ban election trolls ahead of US midterms

Re: MAGA Republicans

Well, apart from the fact that they hate each other of course.

Very like the raving marxists and barking fascists, ideologically opposed but otherwise identical.

At least the russian trolls are getting paid to do a job, which makes them probably the most normal and sensible of all the above.

Here's how 5 mobile banking apps put 300,000 users' digital fingerprints at risk

Re: The other 2%

I'd be more interested to know what proportion of that other 2% were straight ports of an existing app from, er, iOS?

Braking news: Cops slammed for spamming Waze to slow drivers down

Re: feels valid to me

Rather amusingly, those grey plates are excellent at fooling a cheapshit digicam (like a dashcam), but utterly bloody useless at foiling ANPR.

I've seen the demos and that's why the cops aren't too bothered about them. If they actually worked, having a set on your car would get you nicked in seconds.

No use of indicators: Can't do that and steer while texting on the phone.

No stopping at XYZ: Didn't see the need to while looking at the phone.

etc.

Zuckerberg: Yes, Facebook kept Hunter Biden's laptop under wraps

Re: Why choose the lesser of two evils?

Lesser, LESSER!

Re: "Hunter Bidens Laptop"

Yeees, but don't those sort of movies usually have something bad happen in them?

James Webb Space Telescope finds first evidence of CO₂ in exoplanet atmosphere

Is he related to Mary?

T-Mobile US and SpaceX hope to deliver phone service from space

Re: I am very dubious about this!

You forgot:

6: T-mobile are involved and we all know what a bunch of rapacious, lying, thieving bastards they are.

Then again, they'll probably be why it does eventually happen. The prospect of being able to lock-in customers globally at whatever they want to charge must be giving them repeated orgasms.

Tesla owner gets key fob chip implanted in his hand

Let me fix that.

Tesla owner Brandon Dalaly....

I'm sure that it's actually spelled; "Doolally".

Python tops programming love list – but if you want a job, learn SQL

Re: Really?

Aha! Square pegs and round holes. I remember once poring over a diagram of all the software bits 'n pieces with a consultant who was trying to understand it (at least they made the effort, a big plus in my book).

At one point he pointed to a small, acronym-labelled box between two systems and said: "What's that do?".

"That is a piece of software with a square peg on that end and a round hole on that end. I know it's daft, but it was either that or build Mallet 1.0".

Re: "SQL coders"

Oh yes. Those rules should be written in stone.

My all time favourite example of an infraction was a monolith of something over 2,500 lines which never once accessed a database.

A close second was a somewhat smaller example which, at one point, shelled out and.....ran another stored procedure on the same database(!)

ServiceNow: Customers 'struggling to understand the value of ELAs', says Gartner

So, to cut a long story short, even bloody Gartner reckon they're expensive.

Commercial space station Orbital Reef's design phase passes NASA review

... optimistic in all ways, including proposed timing.

Yeah, yeah, overruns. Some poor bastard won't get his delivery bonus, but you can bet your bollocks that it won't be the bastard handling the proposal phase, who will have moved on by then.

The great unspoken truth about bonus incentives is that the one thing they really incentivise is bullshitting.

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Re: Bank Accounts

Oh no! I thought that at least we'd always have Paris...

Digital Ocean dumps Mailchimp after attack leaked customer email addresses

Automation

...announced its clients were undertaking less blockchain-related activity.

Mentioned the B-word. Block it.

Sounds like this bunch of postal primates have never advanced beyond the sort of control that gave us "Philip K Masculine Area" and other such gems. How quaint and old skool.

BOFH: Who us? Sysadmins? Spend time with other departments?

Re: No fenestration?

You mean:

Never walk around barefoot, there are plenty of evil bastards around who have access to powdered glass.

Chekov

Google fined $42.5m over misleading Android location settings in Australia

Google's defence.

"Haven't you collected too much data here?"

"Nah mate, we can't even tell what it is yet.".

DoE digs up molten salt nuclear reactor tech, taps Los Alamos to lead the way back

Re: REstart?

A breakdown on a concrete mixer truck is always fun.

Sorting that out requires someone small and agile enough to get into the drum, a pneumatic drill. goggles, ear defenders, a respirator and several hours of the most evil bloody job on the planet.

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

Same old...

Just like old skool BMW pricing. In theory they were sensibly priced, in practice even the Spartans would have bitched at the equipment level you theoretically[1] got for that price. Actual price to get something that looked like the adverts was always a good 10-20% more.

The only difference now is that modern tech enables them to build everything in and only switch on what you pay for. Now, this makes no difference at all to the purchaser of a new vehicle, but suddenly you can flog options to secondhand purchasers, which is a whole new can of wormsrevenue stream.

[1] Yes, theoretically. Nobody ever bought one like that. For a start it would have been worth sod-all a year later, as hair-shirted masochists who want a secondhand BMW are rare things.

Digital Ocean customers back away from blockchains

He offered no explanation for why customers had cooled on the distributed ledger tech.

Er, can't be arsed? There's a newer, new shiny?

Oh, I know. Money's tight right now, so any project which involves spending a shitload of cash and time to do something they already do, but in a more complex manner, just to fill a spot on their Wankword Bingo card, gets killed off.

Pull jet fuel from thin air? We can do that, say scientists

Re: Bah!

Save a tree, drive longer distances and take more holidays abroad.

Equifax software bug messed up credit score calculations for weeks

Computer says...

...urk, wibble, wibble, wibble, I'm a teapot.

Toyota's truck brand Hino admits faking and fudging emissions data for 20 years

...alongside Volkswagen, Nissan, Subaru, Mazda, and Suzuki.

You forgot to mention Volvo, who are the target of a class-action suit at the moment.

Since Volvo are owned by Ford and use their oil-burners and also since Ford's oil-burners are PSA (Peugeot/Citroen) units, I suspect this still has a long way to run.

Also note that VW, who got caught first, supply their smoke generators to their subsidiaries Skoda, Seat and Porsche.

As Hino seem to have got away with it for 20 years, that looks more like success than failure when compared to the competition.

We'll get you that Wi-Fi 7 laptop by 2024, Intel says

The benefit for a typical WiFi 7 laptop...

...assumes:

1) That you can find somewhere with WiFi 7 to connect to.

2) That wherever that is also has a connection to the wider world that handles its WiFi 7 clients running at full chat.

3) And it hasn't got so many things connected to it that you'll actually get a small timeslice of the bandwidth.

4) And its not surrounded by other WiFi 7 connections, so it can only use somewhere around a quarter of the channels required for full speed.

Fat Bloody Chance.