* Posts by Joe Gurman

666 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007

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Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

Joe Gurman

Really?

"pulled wool over buyers' eyes with forged veterinary certificates"

I see what you attempted to do there. As with the last line of the piece.

Fail, rather.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Joe Gurman

For some of us, no.

"We have all that still to look forward to" in 2038.

Not all of us. I expect to have no more computer time or any other kind of problems by then.

"OK Boomer" you may well say, but sometimes it's reassuring not to have to worry about things. "Right. We can just cross that one off the list."

New solvent might end winter charging blues for EV owners

Joe Gurman

Re: Fluoroacetonitrile

The PubChem list of hazards associated with the stuff is not for the faint of heart:

H225 (100%): Highly Flammable liquid and vapor [Danger Flammable liquids]

H301 (100%): Toxic if swallowed [Danger Acute toxicity, oral]

H311 (100%): Toxic in contact with skin [Danger Acute toxicity, dermal]

H315 (97.5%): Causes skin irritation [Warning Skin corrosion/irritation]

H319 (97.5%): Causes serious eye irritation [Warning Serious eye damage/eye irritation]

H331 (97.5%): Toxic if inhaled [Danger Acute toxicity, inhalation]

H335 (100%): May cause respiratory irritation [Warning Specific target organ toxicity, single exposure; Respiratory tract irritation]

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

Joe Gurman

Pretty much a classic case

....of an outfit that doesn't know how to manage its way out of a wet paper bag.

Doesn't know its employees are its one, real asset.

Doesn't know where its called-back-to-office employees are supposed to work.

Doesn't give a crap.

Sounds like Michael Dell.

For what it's worth, the best service I got out of anyone in Dell government sales when I was still working was from a woman working out of her home. The people who supposedly worked in offices, in Virginia and Texas, at least, were never at their desks and never returned calls. You'd think a commercial outfit would actually, like, want to make sales. Guess my requirements didn't add up to enough $. In the same epoch, all I needed to do to order from Apple or grey-box vendors was to go their website. Dell couldn't be arsed to organize such a thing.

Joe Gurman

Re: Wouldn't suprise me

Just so you know.... there's no such thing as redundancy pay in the US.

Angry mob trashes and sets fire to Waymo self-driving car

Joe Gurman

Re: Curious?

"You are more likely to hit someone in an American car because you can't see them, where the same person in the same position in front of a European car would be seen by the driver, and therefore the driver would be more likely to take action not to hit them."

Would you care to explain the difference(s) between "US" and "European" cars (many of which are manufactured elsewhere) that affect forward vision? I'm in the US, but have been driving ostensibly European-manufactured cars for the last 30 years, so I can't tell from personal experience.

iFixit tears Apple's Vision Pro to pieces

Joe Gurman

Worth mentioning

…. That the current price of the Vision Pro, mentioned prominently in every article I’ve read about the device, is roughly 53% of the initial price of the Apple II when it was introduced in 1977 (US$1298 = US$6525 today). No matter what other issues one might have with the device, or with Apple, that’s really rather remarkable.

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

Joe Gurman

I think this is the first time....

....that I'm pretty certain I know the who and where of a Who, Me? story.

That runaway datacenter power grab is the best news for net zero this century

Joe Gurman

Standard doesn't necessarily mean reliable

Unless, of course, the design goes through several iterations at the jawbone stage, and then several generations of prototypes. Unless, of course, if you decide to keep those spaceports handy in case, say, the entire UK needs evacuating.

Logitech warns of logistical impact of Houthi attacks in Red Sea

Joe Gurman

Is this historical revision in real time?

1,200 Israelis were not kidnapped; about 300 were. 1,200 is closer to the number who were murdered, raped, and/or tortured.

I also get the impression the Houthis are upset about the more than 24,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, but maybe I’m attributing more human sympathy to the bloodthirsty religious minority who have made life so miserable for the people of Yemen for years.

Data wrangler Zuckerberg becomes world's least likely cattle rancher

Joe Gurman

Just to clarify

That was a lower case "m" in "mac trees" in Zuckerberg's post, so th uppercase "M" in the article is either a typo, or speculation that Macintoshes grow on trees in Kauai.

30 years and still sunbathing: SOHO probe continues work as a space weatherman

Joe Gurman

30 years? Perhaps it's not base 10?

SOHO was launched on 2nd December, 1995, which makes the spacecraft's operational lifetime just over 28 years.

NOAA does not fund and never has funded any part of the SOHO mission. All the funding for operations comes from NASA, with program management support provided by ESA. There was a moment about a decade ago when NOAA seriously considered providing some funding to provide some redundancy in the provision of near real-time coronagraph images from SOHO and STEREO instruments, but that was never approved at higher levels of NOAA management.

Lapsus$ teen sentenced to indefinite detention in hospital for Nvidia, GTA cyberattacks

Joe Gurman

Given that it appears….

…. that every youthful UK perpetrator of every leading perpetrator of every major intrusion into the networks of commercial firms and government agencies is autistic, maybe HM government need to consider a safe and supportive institution in which to confine such talented if non-neurotypical youth, away from the temptations of the Internet, which their parents are clearly not capable of doing.

Either that or, given the equally criminal proclivities of Tory ministers, just ship ‘em all off to Rwanda.

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

Joe Gurman

Re: Options for MacOS

Having no need for ReST, I continue, happily, to use BBEdit pretty much daily.

Virgin Atlantic flies 'world's first fossil-fuel free' transatlantic commercial flight

Joe Gurman

Is there a Reg unit for....

....the number of full English breakfasts necessary to produce enough grease to fuel a 787 on a transatlantic flight?

That time a JPL engineer almost killed a Mars Rover before it left Earth

Joe Gurman

Re: Measure twice, cut once.

Or even just before lunch, when some people's minds stray....elsewhere. For an example, see: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1783/was-the-noaa-n-prime-satellite-really-dropped-on-the-floor .

Amazon's Project Kuiper satellites nail online orders from orbit

Joe Gurman

Re: Excitement

Because there are many, many people in the world who have no access to such bandwidth.

Scientists use Raspberry Pi tech to protect NASA telescope data

Joe Gurman

Just need to note

....that the volume figures for the balloon referred to its size at causing altitude. It was, of course, much smaller at launch.

Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB in a PC

Joe Gurman

Interesting edge case

Just what percentage of buyers of laptops, “pro” or others, Apple or others, is using the laptop to run ML code?

Fresh find shines new light on North Korea’s latest macOS malware

Joe Gurman

The expression "legitimate cryptocurrency exchange"....

....is the null set, right?

Crypto exists ONLY for criminals, speculators (also criminals, really), and bad actors (ransomware gangs, state "hackers," and the like), plus, of course, the ability to demonstrate to other investors that they're examples of the class of those born every minute/

Apple swipes left on the last Touch Bar Mac, replaces it with a pricier 14″ model

Joe Gurman

“Dream of a touchscreen Mac”

Nightmare, more like.

If you want to get your grubby fingers on an Apple device screen, buy an iPhone or an iPad.

Forcing Apple to allow third-party app stores isn't enough

Joe Gurman

“We could be our own gatekeepers.”

Who is this “we” to whom you’re referring? The more-or-less It-savvy typical Reg reader, or the billion or so yutzes with smartphones around the world?

I realize that Apple is far from perfect in many ways, but they do a better job (that is, any job at all) at protecting their users from crapware. Far from perfect, but they at least try. Imagine those billion in-duh-visuals loading their phones with all the crapware that’s out there, and will have a boom when the EU regs go into effect.

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

Joe Gurman

I remember that driver update

Good grief I'm old.

Now IBM sued for age discrim by its own HR veterans

Joe Gurman

Re: HR...

Rush to judgment? Moffat pleaded guilty.

Amazon unleashes Gen AI for product descriptions, curbs it for Kindle

Joe Gurman

Will this mean more or fewer....

....orders on which Amazon's fly by night third party "partners" don't ship the item pictured, described, and, sadly, ordered?

India set to launch Sun-spotting satellite on Saturday

Joe Gurman

Ouch!

Brexit propaganda on steroids? SOHO is an ESA spacecraft, and nine of the twelve instruments at launch (some have been shut down since, due to degradation of detectors or thermal issues over more than two decades of operation of hardware designed for 2 to 6 year lifetimes) had European principal investigators. The launch was provided by NASA, and spacecraft and science operations take place at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In all, an outstanding example of international cooperation.

Reports of the PC's death are greatly exaggerated, says IDC

Joe Gurman

Don’t believe everything from IDC you read about Mac sales

Yes, they were down early this year over pandemic and Apple Silicon introduction quarters. But second-generation Apple Silicon (M2) machines are available now, and the there’s this about enterprise sales: https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/08/29/apple-hardware-is-a-benefit-to-enterprise-survey-reveals

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Joe Gurman

And somehow….

…. Eudora is not even mentioned.

A Microsoft mail client for the Mac before Outlook? Who needed it?

Lost voices, ignored words: Apple's speech recognition needs urgent reform

Joe Gurman

Glad to hear that Dragon Speech, at least has improved with time

I recall using it a couple of decades ago on the Mac, and it ranged from almost passable to horrendous. Far too much work to correct all its errors, even after repeated trainings.

My principal complaints with dictation in macOS now are: its steadfast refusal to learn (e.g. that I use certain non-English words regularly — what, the voice recognition AI hasn't been trained for yiddish yet?), and scientific usage.... as in, the Sun is always capitalized in astrophysics, solar physics, and space weather journals. As a 'Murrican, the British periodical of the same name and capitalization has little to no resonance for me.

Cage match: Zuck finally realizes Elon is full of twit

Joe Gurman

How?

Because nothing shields you from the reality of having to deal with other people like being filthy rich.

Want to pwn a satellite? Turns out it's surprisingly easy

Joe Gurman

CubeSats are low-hanging fruit

At the outfit I used to work for, considerably larger spacecraft — so-called “Small Explorers,” or SMEXes in the argot of that acronymophilic agency — were considered Class D in the hierarchy of risk management. That meant that individual components required less testing or could be adopted even though they had shorter lifetimes than the more expensive kit used in larger spacecraft, that schedules had less slack built into them, and that if I recall correctly, encryption was not required in communication between spacecraft and ground.

It was a totally different picture for even larger, more expensive missions.

Lower tolerance for risk drives cost and schedule (more testing and reviews required), higher tolerance makes the development faster and cheaper — bur also riskier.

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

Joe Gurman

I find your lack of evidence…. disturbing

There is no quantitative evidence at all that Mac users feel any need to use cloud implementations of macOS for but a tiny percentage of niche cases — and those are mere substituting cloud versions for what had been, for decades, hosted services, e.g. running your own mailserver.

The vast majority of Mac users use the OS on laptops and, to a lesser extent these days, desktops. And though it should probably go without saying, the number of users of macOS continues to dwarf the number of people who like to fiddle with Linux on the desktop. To each their own.

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

Joe Gurman

Am I the only one here old enough to remember....

....that that "X" logo was the one use day Xerox in the 1960s? Wonder if they still own the trademark....

PyPI subpoenaed: US govt demands data on developers

Joe Gurman

5 points to Gryffindor....

....for the subhead.

Microsoft enables booting physical PCs directly into cloud PCs

Joe Gurman

Microsoft....

.... making th boot process slower than it's needed to be since Windows 1.0.

Of course Russia's ex-space boss doubts US set foot on the Moon

Joe Gurman

Ahem

How could NASA do 54 years ago what the Soviet Union3 was unable to might be a more appropriate question.

Google crams more AI into search as Apple, Samsung sniff around Bing

Joe Gurman

Really?

Is the Apple contract still worth $20B after Apple made data sharing optional, and ad revenues plummeted as a result?

Yes, Samsung 'fakes' its smartphone Moon photos – who cares?

Joe Gurman

Except….

There is no single “moon,” so the ML-assembled photo is misrepresenting the fact that the moon displays libration, up to 8° in longitude (from ellipticity in the moon’s orbit) and nearly 7° in latitude (from the inclination of the moon’s axis of rotation to the plane of that orbit). Except, of course, the evil geniuses at Samsung don’t know anything about the moon other than that there are lots of bona fide images of it. Prats.

Why our solar-storm sats corrode – and probably not what you expected

Joe Gurman

Why, you may ask, do this instruments have alumin[i]um entrance filters in the first place?

They reject visible solar light, which is many orders of magnitude brighter than the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light the instruments observe, while transmitting, as noted, most of the EUV light.

Why, you may ask, do we want instruments that observe EUV emission from the Sun? Most of it comes from the solar corona, the tenuous, outermost part of the Sun's atmosphere where a good deal of solar activity originates — and where variability in the solar output is much larger than in the visible.

Semiconductor industry: To Hell with the environment, start building fabs already

Joe Gurman

Still wondering....

....what genius at TSMC decided arizona, which has a critical water shortage problem, was the right place for a fab — or are they just looking for an easy excuse to back out?

Rugged satellite messaging phone Bullitt fired out ahead of MWC

Joe Gurman

You do know....

....satellite SOS has been a feature on iPhone 14 models since last September, right? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213426

And presumably, some of the recent models using That Other Phone OS do so as well, because everyone imitates everyone else, everywhere, all at once, right?

Who needs sailors? US Navy's latest robo-ship can run itself for 30 days

Joe Gurman

[D]isaffected English religious extremists?

OK, it’s typical El Reg snark, but for many, I suspect most readers, ignores the fact the reason they left England twice (first to the Netherlands, then to North America) was the religious fanatic tyranny of an English monarchy/head of established church who instituted a series of fines for anyone who didn’t attend established church services every week — that quickly escalated to imprisonment for repeated offenses.

I wonder how many readers would call people who wanted to escape a mind control regime like that “extremists?”

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

Joe Gurman

So right

So far, cryptocurrencies have proven useful for only two things: speculation and scams (including ransomware payments and separating the credulous from their hard-earned cash in real currencies backed by national governments). So, yes, about cryptocurrencies, at least, the elderly gentleman is 100% correct.

200MP smartphone and first premium PC spearhead Samsung's pro push

Joe Gurman

So Samsung has finally figured out….

…. that while people may buy this or that piece of Apple kit because they find it so desirable, what keeps them buying more is the level of integration among its products. Having tried for years to slavishly copy Apple design language, they decided some years back to come up with their own, and now they’re back to copying — this time the integration experience and hopefully the customer loyalty it produces — at least if the experience isn’t built on the thin reed of how well Microsoft and Alphabet’s offerings work together.

World of Warcraft Classic lead dev resigns to protest 'stack ranking'

Joe Gurman

Microsoft used it in the naughties?

So that explains the Zune. Nothing else could.

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

Joe Gurman

Re: Fear those who don't know what they don't know

Here's a clue, bub: the Climate Orbiter fiasco was created 100% all the way down by old, pale males.

Joe Gurman

And in this same day, El Reg....

.... has highlighted an article about a decrease in chip manufacture — on 8 and 12 inch wafers. Of course, the wafer size could just as well be defined in cubits or furlongs, since no one ever converts the wafer measurement to anything, other than number of chips one can contain.

NASA overspent $15m on Oracle software because it was afraid an audit could cost more

Joe Gurman

Once upon a time

I worked for the four-letter-acronym agency, and much as I cursed the extra work associated with the SAM requirements, I thought the group responsible for SAM (part of the NASA Shared Services Center) was extremely customer-focused, perhaps because the NSSC is staffed mostly by contractor personnel. It would be a shame if their excellent customer service (bringing on new software under license when requirements for such are demonstrated, negotiating reasonable license terms, &c.) were sacrificed to concentrating solely on the big-ticket items cited in this report. I know they helped the projects I worked on and many others to control costs and remain compliant with Agency requirements.

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Joe Gurman

Prices of Teslas in the US

There's one repeat ONE and only one model/options offering from Tesla below US$50K, the Model 3 "standard" (that is, loss leader) range. If you want the extended range version, that's US$56K. Every other new Tesla vehicle is over U$50K.

That's meaningful not only for new-to-EV buyer buy-in, but for simple economics. The US last year enacted legislation, effective four days ago, that allows even manufacturers who had "graduated" out of federal tax credits to purchasers because of accumulated volume of sales. But th new tax credit is limited to vehicle with sticker prices of US$50K or less. Chevrolet Bolt/Bolt EUV, anyone?

NASA infosec again falls short of required US government standard

Joe Gurman

About that

"identified that low-budget missions scarcely think of infosec because they try to spend every cent on science"

As someone who's been there and done that, I wonder if most readers, who probably think of NASA Projects as rolling in gigabucks, understand that in "Phase E" (post commissioning activities that follow launch), most if not all NASA space science missions operate on budgets considerably leaner than during Phases A - D (formulation, development, testing, integration, &c.). After one or sometimes two Congressionally mandated Senior Review cycles, the operating budgets are almost without exception, even for scientifically highly successful missions, put on a life-support budget, that is, one that barely provides for paying the Flight Operations Team (the folks who operate the spacecraft), the science operations team(s), either at a center or the various Principal Investigators' (PIs') institutions, and any non-Deep Space Network tracking and telemetry services (DSN services are paid for at a higher level in NASA's Science Mission Directorate budgets), and so on.

At that point there's little or no funding for new science in project budgets, beyond the fairly routine analysis of sample software data to insure instrument health and safety and data integrity.

Thus, NASA's uncrewed, science flight projects don't have to make a tradeoff between science and risk management (including IT security, mandated and otherwise); it's been made for them. For at least a decade, at two year intervals in our division of SMD, as a project scientist I requested modest increases in finding to cover increased IT security requirements. Never got one. That could be explained by the fact that the Senior Review panels were made up of scientists, some of the university research scientists who'd never been in mission ops and had no clue why, in the words of one, "Why are these things so expensive?" We did our best to explain, but the requirements appeared to be so foreign to university scientists with no direct mission experience that it was like talking a foreign language.

I would hope that by now (I've been retired for four years) SMD management would take the IT sec requirements to heart and add people with experience in implementing successful IT security in mission/mission science operations to its Senior Review panels. And seriously consider what decent, thoughtful IT security

costs.

I'll just stop down off my soapbox now....

P.S. As an example of what the costs are like, I had to dedicate at least 1/3 of the time of my most senior system/net admin to security compliance (more like 2/3 in years with then required triennial reviews), while not having any funds to replace her time. And that didn't count my time, or the time of the PI teams and other sys admins — with no offsetting funds. I got the impression that my management chain didn't appreciate, however, my response that stretching the staff so thin was a significant risk for mission success and possibly even mission survival because I had to make it in the "risk assessment" section of annual budget reviews.

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