* Posts by xyz

1073 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2007

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Search for phone signal caused oil spill, say Japanese investigators

xyz Silver badge

Re: Wow

Trust me.. A few feet does make a difference. I've got a cubic metre where I can get a signal in 40 acres. (apologies for the archaic measurement). Mind you, ships' captains seem to have form for coast hugging for dubious reason.. Remember that cruise ship off Italy that went crunch and rolled over.

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

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Re: The aftermath of the next Carrington event will be something to behold.

I'm off grid due to there beiing no grid anyway and all I know is that when BT does something (and at speed) there is much money to be saved by BT, so fuck the customer and smear them with bullshit.

This'll go like HS2's shrinking distance and the "edge cases" will end up as anyone not profitable to BT.

Anyway, I thought BT had a statutory duty to provide an emergency call service which is pretty much toast with VOIP.

Researchers train an AI system to find extraterrestrial life

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IMHO....

90% accuracy is shit. An AI/LLM/whatever needs at least a 95% accuracy rate. This is just someone mooching for new funding.

Car industry pleads for delay to post-Brexit tariffs on EVs

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Facepalm

I'm confused....

So, if someone in an EU country builds an EV with a Chinese battery and sells it in another EU country: no harm, no foul.

If that EU EV is sold in a 3rd country that has an agreed FTA (you know who), the 3rd country has to slap a 10% tariff on it.

And vice versa.

And, if the EU EV has an EU battery, then the aforementioned 3rd country can't slap a 10% tariff on it.

And if the 3rd country with an FTA can't muster its own batteries then they still get lumbered with the 10% tariff when they try to flog the 3rd country EV in the EU.

So the people of the 3rd country will end up paying more for their EV than Johnny Foreigner and selling less of their home made EVs because of the EU FTA.

I ask myself, could this possibly be something to do with Brexit?

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

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Re: Marketing....

You were sold double glazing as a child... Admit it.

UK-US data deal could hinge on fate of legal challenges to EU arrangement

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Re: "permit the flow of personal data [..] without the need for further safeguards"

Monetization... If you don't spell it wrong, they won't understand what you mean in the US.

Mind you the system will probably break at the Eng end if someone uses an apostrophe, sorry data entry error.

And always remember that "sharing" = shafting.

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

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Re: Pointless to complain

You think that's bad... Depending on the satnav, I have 2 different addresses that are almost the same but not quite... So I got a delivery on Tuesday, but the same company couldn't deliver on Thursday because my address didn't exist... Different delivery bloke using different satnav.

I get stuff delivered to the local bar now.

Vodafone claims first space-based 5G phone call – no modifications needed

xyz Silver badge

Meh....

I do that whatsapp intercountry "phone call" umpteen times a day using an unmodified phone via Starlink, (other VOIP apps are available) so the only difference would appear to be that I didn't need a lug around a dish. However if I was right in the sticks in Africa or someplace I wouldnt have wandered off into a vast nowhere without many supplies, a fuck off 4x4 and the aforementioned dish and inverter. Sounds to me like Vodafone is trying to talk up a Musk level POS purchase.

Neuralink's looking for participants willing to be part of human trials

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Re: I can't believe I am going to type this

I've only got one thing to say... FUCK THAT! No way am I plugging myself into a router.

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

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Maybe an English water company will buy it then.

Starlink speeds ahead in the satellite race but rivals aren't starstruck just yet

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I haven't checked the speed this a.m. but it's always over the 300mbps mark (40mbps up) with latency at around 30-35ms (Spain) , so I'm kinda baffled by the low speeds in the report. I'm guessing that as I'm in the middle of nowhere, my dishy doesn't have to fight with other dishys for laser "bandwidth".

The only problem I've had with the service is heavy rain (and associated cloud as I'm at 500m above sea level) dropping the connection, but as I'm running solar it's probably a good thing.

37 Signals says cloud repatriation plan has already saved it $1 million

xyz Silver badge

Re: Is it comparable?

No idea why the above got downvoted because that's pretty much how it works. I'm a capex and not an opex from the accountants "point of view" as I'm a "future boy" and not a "present day doer".

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

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My final word....

Subscription service = prepayment meter. Very council house, not very BMW.

xyz Silver badge

Yup, them commie pinko capitalists. Given that (in the UK at any rate) most beemers are not bought but leased fully loaded for x a month, wtf was the beemer board thinking of? Mind you, they have form...anyone remember flame surfacing and how well that went as a design choice. When BMW hump the bunk, they go balls deep.

NASA wants to believe ... that you can help it crack UFO mysteries

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It's a good thing....

To have world + dog at the ready to capture "stuff". Regarding the "everyone's got a camera phone" argument, just count the time it takes to pick up the phone, type in your security code, press the camera icon, point 'phone at the right bit of sky (just try that with an ordinary plane going overhead) and click.. Whatever it was would be half way to Mars by the time you're ready.

Everyone seems to agree that there is a something, so let's find out what the something is rather than adopting a denial posture.

Just my 2 cents.

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

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Re: "leaving airlines to decide if they want to cram passengers in"

Don't tell Suella....

Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone

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More Pavlov's dogshit....

This is just a fancy version of Sheldon trying to train Penny with chocolate. Keep reinforcing the "message" to keep everyone happy (and controlled). I don't care if that's the intention or not but that'll be the result.

Alibaba set to unleash AI that offers financial advice – do you feel lucky?

xyz Silver badge

Mmmm...

Sounds a bit like 888.com

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

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Would you believe a double glazing salesman?

Oracle et al is what they do when they need better commission rates.

+ local govs and their ilk have a really bad habit of "kitchen sinking" their specs, much to the aforementioned sales wallah's glee as it lets obfuscation and misinterpretation flourish like weeds on a path.

If you like to play along with the illusion of privacy, smart devices are a dumb idea

xyz Silver badge

Already done this...

>But The Reg says that if you're really concerned about privacy, you'd do better to not buy these things, throw away your mobile phone, and move to a shack in the wilderness. ®

Box ticked already and no mobile signal, but saying that last night I had to give money to Skype and OMG, suddenly Google is involved in that transaction and then everything went weird because Google wanted my address but luckily as A) my phone is a country A phone, B) my credit card is a country B credit card and C) the use case wallahs at Google are dumb as shit, the resultant address ended up as Spanglish, but the transaction still worked so they weren't needing that address to confirm the transaction were they. Dumb American logic saves me again.

Again no mobile signal but have a Mr Musk dishy which makes Google think I'm in Madrid rather than off grid.

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

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Anyhoo...

At least the drones weren't running Windows... They'd still be bobbing about updating themselves.

BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

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Hopefully...

The "VP for wanky ideas" career is now on the skids.

22 million Brits suffer broadband outage blues and are paying a premium for it

xyz Silver badge

No, the problem is crap UK infrastructure.

Here in Spain you can get a 300mbs fibre + 2 mobile lines for 30 euros a month contract in any part of the country (Digi.es). If you want "smart" fibre (500mbs + 2 mobile) that's only 21 euros but you have to be in a city for that. You can even get 1gbs for 30 euros on that.

UK infrastructure seems to be stuck in the 2 tin cans and a bit of string era

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

xyz Silver badge

Please stop ffs....

With this American crap of sticking an "S" on the end of plural words that stay singular.

The plural of boar is boar not boars.

The plural of aircraft is aircraft not aircrafts.

The plural of deer is deer not deers.

Etc.

Drives me nuts.

BTW, I fight boar with knives (well actually a short sword and a machete). The small ones are more uppity than the big ones, but it still takes bollox standing your ground when 90kgs of pissed off pig is coming at you.

Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

xyz Silver badge

Xitter...

You can if you want, pronounce that as Shitter in Català.

Tech savvy gov... knowing how to plug the telly in.

Official: Microsoft unbundles Teams in Europe

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Does my head in having to go into task manager to kill processes just to get the other one to work. I mean how shite is that?

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

xyz Silver badge

Re: Le Brexit

Well it was a full Boris level shitshow.

Just checking to see if El Reg falls over if you use an apostrophe. O'Reilly.

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

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I smell a CSV file...

With too many inverted commas or too many commas.

Getting meshy: BAE scores £89m deal with MoD to build new battlefield network

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Golden...

A pile of TPlink stuff off Amazon, a bit of cammo wrap and they'll still come in late and overbudget.

Concorde? Pffft. NASA wants a Mach 4 passenger jet

xyz Silver badge
Trollface

Mind you mach 4....

Will still be faster than Teams loading.

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

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Can the author please confirm...

That he/she wears an easily identifiable item when entering public spaces so avoidance actions can be undertaken from at least 50m.

Last time I had so much "fun" was reading RFC 282.... and I got paid for that.

You may down vote at will mes amis (plural masculine; I checked in case pedantic Linuxeers are about. ) :-)

Fauna Query Language tamed to appeal to developers

xyz Silver badge

Dunno...

I quite like the idea and might give it a bash. Mind you it's just another obfuscation that allows the code first mob to avoid the fact that sql indexes can be good.

And they wonder why everything suddenly goes slow when they "scale up" ... ie more than 3 users. :-)

ICANN warns UN may sideline tech community from future internet governance

xyz Silver badge

Back in 2001...

Someone asked me what things would be like in 20 years and I said "buy guns and learn karate". My reasoning was loss of control of government funding (aka taxation) when people could stash their cash all over the planet via the internet. No tax, no government. Well that little idea got stomped on pretty quickly by HMRC et al.

This has the same whiff about it... control and no techies to say "but, but, but...."

G20 digital ministers sign up for Digital Public Infrastructure push

xyz Silver badge

A computer?

Isn't that what the gells use for typing?

Yeah, by the time, they come up with a "framework", it'll be out of date.

South Korea's biggest mobile telco says 5G has failed to deliver on its promise

xyz Silver badge

Ah remember t'days when....

There was 0G and I could still sit on a train reading websites and emails with my trusty iPaq connected infraredly to my Nokia and then someone decided to stuff a camera into a 'phone and started sceaming about their G spot and it all went titsup after that. Remember that tube crash or bomb or fire or whatever it was... Someone took some grainy photos and everyone wanted a camera phone after that. That should be the 6G hook, live streaming from disasters should boost sales.

Never underestimate the power of people wanting to show their mates that they're not losers.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

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I'm going with a 3-0 result....

For the little green men team. I bet they're still pissed after Nasa did that bomb run a few years back. Imagine the "coincidence" if the Indian and Chinese efforts do the same as the Russian one.

LG's $1,000 TV-in-a-briefcase is unlikely to travel much further than the garden

xyz Silver badge

Re: There are solar-powed USB chargers

Or there's always the dirty version... 12v to 230v inverter (sine wave) for about a buck and a half off the amazon tateria, that plugs into your car's lighter/power socket and plug your 230v telly/dvd thing into that.

Or being greener... hefty watted solar panels iare cheap as chips these days, so is an mppt controller, battery is a bit more expensive though and then connect your inverter noted above to that. Lob in starlink for streaming and you're golden.. and no nasty LG data slurping. And all for about half the price of the LG effort.

Or being even greener, go old school camping and use a tent for what it's meant for when its raining.. Shagging.

Humans stressed out by content moderation? Just use AI, says OpenAI

xyz Silver badge

Re: AI auto-moderation

>> and implement your rules with gay abandon.

Don't mention "gay" or AI might 'ave you.

Anyhoo...

Fucking twat arse faced tosser...

Just checking if El Reg has gone all AI (probably too expensive) or if there's still a mod (cheaper) somewhere around the office, slurping coffee, with his feet up and who doesn't give a...

Bank of Ireland outage sees customers queue for 'free' cash – or maybe any cash

xyz Silver badge

Off topic...

I've been on this site for years and I'd never seen a gold badge until now (TeeCee above). I ask myself, is there a also black badge like the gold and black daleks?

Microsoft may store your conversations with Bing if you're not an enterprise user

xyz Silver badge

I've heard of Bing...

Isn't that the pR0n search engine?

Milky milky!

In case you forgot...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-3x9jqPV_VY

Cumbrian Police accidentally publish all officers' details online

xyz Silver badge

For all the billions spent on giant...

Willy waving projects... Most IT systems on the planet seem to be run by someone in admin using an Excel spreadsheet saved to a shared drive (shared drive, intranet, internet, what's the difference?).

Indian armed forces gives Windows its marching orders, but only for desktop warriors

xyz Silver badge

All I'm saying is...

I've seen this sort of "mentality" before and it doesn't end well. It's one thing building a secure system, say for example, airgapped up to TS with loads of skilled people with the necessary security clearances, and it is a whole other thing building a system for rabbit holes above that, where security restrictions reduce the knowledge pool and everything is compartmentalised.

6 months will be the POC that someone is crowing about, which is another bad sign. The pen testers are going to be busy.

Think International Space Station dust is obviously free of bad chemicals? Wrong

xyz Silver badge

Yeah whatever...

I'd be more worried about the fiery reentry death, the micro meteorite death, or the other x number of more probable deaths prevalent in ISSland. Dust, who's worried about a bit of dust.

Virgin Galactic sends oldest-ever Brit and first mother-daughter duo into space-ish

xyz Silver badge

C'mon... Look at the wonder

on her face. Brilliant. And sporting a Saltire on her arm as well. Bet the Aberdeen Mex restaurant she works in at the weekends is packed.

New Zealand supermarket's recipe-generating AI takes toxic output to a new level

xyz Silver badge

Err....

I've made worse.

The banana and tomato smoothie example I did last week although I did add slightly past it spinach, some green things my gf bought a couple of months ago that I found at the bottom of the fridge and the least mouldy rasberries that werent welded to the bottom of their punnet that I'd forgotten about.

The result was brown and I drank the lot.

Burp.

NASA to test potential 400Mbps laser link for Mars

xyz Silver badge

Re: error correction

Yup, typing your "what I did on Mars this week" report via MS 365 Cloud is going to be a right PITA.

X tries to win back advertisers with brand safety promises

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Lol...

Just tead this...

https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/aug/10/what-is-disease-x-how-conspiracy-theorists-hijacke/

Lawsuit: We've got the stats to prove Twitter ax fell unfairly on older, female engineers

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Re: A tough sell

>> 54% vs 46% is not a big difference, especially when you account for the fact that the older ones were almost certainly....

You talking about Brexit?

Pope goes fire and brimstone on the dangers of AI

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Pope's probably worried...

AI goes off and finds God or finds there is no God or decides it is God or worse decides X Musk should be God.... Aaarrrggghhh.

UK voter data within reach of miscreants who hacked Electoral Commission

xyz Silver badge

Re: Palantir

And they could lend a hand to NI plod too who seem confused about what the "enter" key does.

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