Posts by John H Woods

Tesla admits it was asked to hand over Autopilot, Full Self-Driving docs to investigators

At least the steering wheel hasn't come ...

... off

McDonald's pulls plug on Wi-Fi, starts playing classical music to soothe yobs

Kids these days ...

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” -- Socrates

helloSystem 0.8: A friendly, all-graphical FreeBSD

re: "just works"

FreeBSD just works. Then add a GUI if you want one. This seems a laudable attempt to get a new FreeBSD distro that's better targetted to those uses who like mice.

Re: "Not quite BSD command line"

zsh isn't it? Pretty sure you can install this on BSD.

BT in tests to beam down 5G coverage from the stratosphere

Re: Google Loon (but with wings?)

Emergency services would benefit even from low bandwidth comms. I've always found the mobile-phone-that-can-send-satellite-texts quite an intriguing idea.

AI cannot be credited as authors in papers, top academic journals rule

Goodharts Law

This was an almost inevitable consequence of people who don't understand the writings of scientists determining whether they remain employed on the basis of the number of things they have published.

Scientists conclude cats only have three personalities after YouTube clip binge

Errm....

If you assign things to one of three categories, you get three categories?

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

re: Just because it fits

indeed - a Usb A plug fits snugly into an RJ45 socket :-)

Experts warn of steep increase in Java costs under changes to Oracle license regime

"Oracle stands accused of "predatory" licensing tactics"

insert shocked.gif meme here

Techies ask PM to 'prepare UK chip strategy as a matter of urgency'

"We currently have the highest tax's in decades"

This isn't a sim, and 'tax rate' is not a single slider that affects everybody equally - it's quite possible for very nearly all of the 60% of the country who pay income tax to be being absolutely hammered whilst very wealthy people are insufficiently taxed.

If your Start menu or apps are freezing up on Windows, Microsoft has a suggestion

Re: Start menu is suddenly unresponsive and some applications won't open or work

That was closer to the end of WWII than it is to today ...

Intel: Please buy these new 13th-Gen CPUs, now with 24 cores

Re: "one of my projects"

I'm not sure whether your project is "finding biggish prime numbers" or "testing whether N is prime" --- primality testing and prime generation are different (although both can be parallelized). Once you've determined this, start with an internet search of "parallel primality testing" or "parallel prime number generation."

If you try to reinvent the wheel without reading at least some of the extensive literature you will, at the very best, waste significant effort duplicating work, but realistically you are almost certain to come up with a worse solution.

There are people out there immeasurably smarter than us, and fortunately they like to publish their thinking ...

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Missed opportunity

as a keen, if unskilled, cook my regret is that we didn't just metricate ounces at 25g as, at domestic quantities, grams are useless for anything except herbs and spices and kilos anything except potatoes or oranges. 25x isn't far off the logarithmic midpoint when you have a system based on powers of 10^3 - it would be nice to have a word for it.

Netflix changes CEO-sharing arrangement, teases paid password-sharing

Re: "Making punters pay for password sharing is one way Netflix hopes to improve revenue."

They've cancelled dozens of quite good shows on the basis of 'low completion' (the number of users watching a season through to the end). It's getting to the point when you don't even want to watch the first season of something because you know you'll just be left hanging with loose ends. It's one thing if there's a book (Altered Carbon) but quite another if there isn't (The OA) or if it's adapted from the book but so loosely (True Blood).

At least give the writers enough notice to wrap it up: Last Resort's writers got told they weren't getting a second season and finished the story's arcs at a gallop (possibly same for GoT?).

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

Re: What a load of cobblers

No nibbling the niblings!

If your DNS queries LoOk liKE tHIs, it's not a ransom note, it's a security improvement

Re: Am I being Dense?

Ah, of course... Thanks.

Re: Am I being Dense?

Finite but large; for 17 chars like www.theregister.com that's a 2^17 (about 130,000) increase in the number of bogus responses an attacker has to create.

But I agree it seems a bit of a weird hack. AIUI you are trying to defeat the caching of DNS servers you don't control. If any of these servers start using case insensitive cache lookups to return case sensitive answers, you're back to square 1.

Literally, look who's back: A comet that last swung by Earth 50,000 years ago

Re: Waiting

Me too. After watching Halo, I wonder if she has one of those Spartan pellets in the base of her spine...

AI may finally cure us of our data fetish

Re: Prosthetic imagination

Me neither. The problem is the "need" to disguise the content in boilerplate. It's bad enough when the boilerplate is just formatting templates

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/208575160_The_Cognitive_Style_of_PowerPoint

... I suspect it is going to be even worse when the boilerplate includes reams of unchecked, low S/N text.

Re: Preferences

Karyotype isn't gender.

UK Online Safety law threatens Big Tech bosses with jail

Re: MPs earn £80,000 per annum....and they are "doing something"......Hurrah!!

It's the politicians' syllogism:

Something must be done

This is something

Therefore it must be done

Basecamp details 'obscene' $3.2 million bill that caused it to quit the cloud

Re: nice to see

Exactly - economy of scale is balanced with diminished returns. A big enough (and almost certainly multi-site) company with a predictable compute load will find that outsourcing all that to $CLOUD_PROVIDER will probably not generate enough efficiency savings to pay $CLOUD_PROVIDER's margin.

Naturally the cloud providers are keen to net the biggest organisations (especially governments) because they have the deepest pockets. Yet it is precisely these organizations who stand to benefit least from cloud, as they already have the budget, the real-estate and the staff to do it nearly as cheaply as the cloud provider can.

Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff

Can anyone help me

You're missing a minus sign in line 40

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

I remember these times well...

.... I grew up in Rheindahlen.

We got a lot of threats, as it was JHQ.

Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

Re: The meltdown continues

As I get accused of beivg a left wing extremist when I quote Adam Smith, I'd have to disagree.

Tesla fails to push racial discrimination lawsuit into arbitration

Re: Fucked that for you

You might want to read up. You're announcing* your place on the spectrum from ignorance at best to racist at worst. Glad I'm not one of your colleagues, but it's a shame I don't have a real name to avoid.

*If you were pedantically correcting what you think is a typo, you would have mailed corrections@el reg. We've both been here long enough to know that's the procedure. You wanted to make a point. You have made one, but I doubt it's the one you think you were making.

Patients wrongly told they've got cancer in SMS snafu

Re: Is this common?

Re: "Urgently" reminds me of the old joke where the Dr calls: “I've got bad news and worse news".

"Ok, what's the bad news?"

"You've only got 24 hours to live."

"WTAF? What on earth is the worse news?"

"I've been trying to call you since yesterday"

Indeed.

2 + 2 falls somewhere in the range 3 to 5 as you can soon find out looking at "integer" formatted spreadsheet cells (amongst other things).

Citizen Coder? Happiness Concierge? Here come 2023's business cards

Re: Evangelists, Jedis, Ninjas, Prophets, Gurus

There's way to much military speak in IT. It annoys the pacifists, the vets and those like me who never joined but can see how bloody hard it is/was.

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

Re: I read this article to my son ...

It becomes a vote loser in a country where people educationally unprepared to counter the propaganda they read have developed lower brain reflex "public spending = bad"

This is why we got PFI when the state should have *financed* new hospitals to pay private contractors and corporations to build them.

Re: I read this article to my son ...

"Financially Google/Apple/Microsoft are probably in a better position..." .

Maybe I was unclear but that's what he's saying. Not that nationalization is good or even desirable... but that big corps losing $$$ running what they can (probably not unreasonably) claim to be essential services eventually find a way of socializing the losses and making the state pay.

As with the given examples of the bank bailouts and the first rail nationalization.

Re: Serves Google right

"At least Amazon are quite capable of using your existing email address to work with."

And, to be fair, so are both Microsoft and Apple.

I read this article to my son ...

... who is smarter than I am (not a high bar, but he seems pretty smart to me :-) )

and he said - almost immediately - "I can see a nationalization - by the time something that important is in trouble, nation states have to step in: as with bailing out the banks, or indeed the first British Rail nationalization (which may have to be repeated, because Railways just aren't profitable)"

Seems a possibility to me ...

LastPass admits attackers have a copy of customers’ password vaults

Re: Someone Else's Password

And why polarised sunglasses are now shit for driving as nearly all the displays inside the car, and a good many outside are now unreadable!

Annoying because reactive sunglasses are also useless in any modern car because most filter the UV that darkens the lenses. Thank goodness for decent neutral tints ...

Patch Tuesday update is causing some Windows 10 systems to blue screen

Re: Ploy to make you upgrade to Win 11

People would be more likely to update to Win 11 if it didn't specifically stop itself from running on almost any hardware that wasn't sold with Win 11 on it.

Re: Typo in the worst place?

The backslash always was an abomination. So are spaces in filenames :-)

McGraw Hill's S3 buckets exposed 100,000 students' grades and personal info

They should be ...

... and they are.

Just create yourself a free AWS account and then create one if you don't believe me.

Linux kernel 6.2 promises multiple filesystem improvements

Don't flame me but I think people should have stopped using RAID5 twenty years ago!

I don't know much about BTRFS or XFS but I still think it's slightly disappointing that the Linux community had such apparently slow adoption of ZFS. However, that reluctance did eventually drive me to FreeBSD for my servers at least. Hasn't stopped me being a Linux fan but its nice to have some diversity.

NB usual disclaimer (about not being an expert) applies.

Google datacenters use 'a quarter of all water' in one US city

Re: It is a lot of water ...

Ah, I get it, they are cooling it as if it's a power plant.

It is a lot of water ...

Why? Aircon usually produces water, doesn't it? Are they simply hosing the racks?

NB: I'm not an A/C expert. Or any kind of expert, really.

When ERP projects go bad: Surrey County Council's £30m ditch SAP effort delayed again

You could probably do it with two dozen smart people using off the shelf (maybe even FOSS) software.

Elon Musk starts poll with one question: Should I step down as head of Twitter?

Re: Confused.com

Went to a Tesla showroom recently, the salesfolk said he was "a bit of a mixed blessing" which is British English for an outright liability.

Openreach offers more wholesale fiber discounts, rivals call foul

Re: Admission

The powers exercised by "big government" don't magically cease to exist if you shrink government, you just have them being exercised by people who are a) less accountable and b) less bothered about you.

Re: Admission

To be fair, the essential requirement for such regulation in order for capitalism to work effectively is easily missed by those soi-disant devotees of Adam Smith who have never read a word he wrote.

Salesforce's new hires are less productive, says CEO Benioff

"Lower productivity"

No metric is supplied.

As I like to KISS I'm wondering if the problem maybe that they are measuring productivity by a measure which is correlated more to presenteeism than actual quality* of output.

In which case, yes, WfH, will tend to lower that.

* I actually worked for a company once that had a question on the colleague peer-assessment form "Regardless of quality, what is the quantity of [colleague]'s output"

I always refused to answer it.

Indeed, and ...

They have polled their own platform asking whether they should stand down and the platform has said yes.

New research aims to analyze how widespread COBOL is

Re: PICs rule

I hear what you're saying but you can make it as readable as you like, eg.

"Smalltalk"

accountBalance := (AccountBalance format: 'zzz,zzz,zzz.zzdb'); showBlankIfZero; beTwosComplement

//Java

AccountBalance accountBalance = new AccountBalance("zzz,zzz,zzz.zzdb").blankIfZero(true).twosComplement(true).

This is the thing about OO languages, you aren't limited to only instantiating the objects the language designers gave you.

Corporate execs: Get back, get back, to the office where you once belonged

Re: C-suite interfacing with the rest of the company

Exactly... Many of them do not have the skills required to assess productivity rather than presenteeism

Musk bans private-plane-tracking @Elonjet on Twitter, threatens legal action

Me too.

I suspect it's because of the strong association of the ae dipthong with the feminine 1st declension from Latin (fem sing dative, genitive and plural nominative). My assumption would be that you are well educated and/or well read. And that Musk isn't.

Microsoft Teams: A vector for child sexual abuse material with a two-day processing time for complaints

Now everybody in MacD is staring at me

*mops laptop keyboard* ... at least Stinkpads are drip-resistant.