Posts by Boring Bob

US convicts ex-Philips engineer for exposing X-ray secrets to competitor

Engineers aged 71 and 77? What is going on, why are these people still working at this age?

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

Re: Irate customers

My niece worked at IKEA on telephone customer support. She would often get people calling for advice on putting the things together. She has never touched a screwdriver in her life and would simply give them access to subcontractor they could pay to do the job for them.

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

No time

You just need to look at the amount of time he spends on twitter to see that he doesn't have the time to run Testla, go to Mars and trash the Americain government. No wonder Testla is dive bombing.

Trump’s tariffs, cuts may well put tech in a chokehold, say analysts

Not thought through.

It takes 5 years and God knows how many billions of dollars to build a semiconductor fab. Who is going to invest that money knowing that Trump could have another tantrum at any moment and remove the tariffs making the new fab obsolete?

Trump eyes up to 100% tariffs on foreign semiconductors, TSMC in crosshairs

Sounds good for China. It will take 5 years to build the semiconductor production plants in the USA (if any investors will take the risk as the plants will become obsolete the moment the import tariffs are removed). During which time what little is left of Americain production jobs will have moved to China to avoid the import tariff on chips.

Ryanair faces GDPR turbulence over customer ID checks

Re: "losing entire holidays"

Plenty of people understand, "bad service = cheap price". Reports of abusive behaviour to customes works out as great, free advertising for Ryan Air.

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Re: Range is not the issue!

Where I live your 200 mile daily drive would take me between 10-15 hours. When do you get time to work or sleep?

NASA's Psyche hits 25 Mbps from 140 million miles away – enough for Ultra HD Netflix

"NASA has better broadband than this writer, it would seem." Doesn't everyone have better and cheaper broadband than the UK?

Don't rent out that container ship yet: CIOs and biz buyers view AI PCs with some caution

1980's

Seen it all before, heard it all before in the 1980's. AI hardware didn't happen then, it will not happen now. AI got a recent boost from the Deep Learning idea and collecting training data on the internet. What it can now do (which is impressive) will now plateau until the next new technique in 40 years time.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

The best lesson.

The best lesson here is, live in France and join a union.

Fujitsu finance chief says sorry for IT giant's role in Post Office Horizon scandal

To be fair, I doubt that he or anyone in Japan had anything to do with this.

While it is a terrible scandel with truly aweful consequences for thousands of people, is it actually anyone's fault?

The real significance of Apple's Macintosh

A friend of mine who was a developer for Sagem Mobile in France told me that they had developed a touch screen phone before the iPhone, but some high-up director insisted a telephone had to have a physical keyboard and dumped the project.

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

I live in France and for some strange reason the French think that the English are experts at drinking tea. I have to explain to them that you only get 3 types of tea in in the UK and any taste that these might produce is washed out by the milk put in them. In France most large and small towns have specialist tea shops where you have a choice of 50 to 100 teas. Compared to every other nation in the world, I have to admit, the English know nothing about tea.

The Post Office systems scandal demands a critical response

I bet no one is at fault.

I used to work as a Field Application Engineer for a large silicon chip supplier. Working in the pressure of the sales office it was common to have a big boss explode because of a customer issue that could only be caused by incompetence on the part of someone. My job would to resolve the problems during which I never once detected any incompetence, just intelligent people making good decisions based of the information they had available to them.

I bet that at the end of the inquiry no one is found to be at fault.

The law was changed in the late 90's that changed that made computer created evidence infallible. It put the responsibility on the defense to prove the computer was wrong, whilst before it was the prosecution who had to prove it was correct. That is where the real scandal lies.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

Horizon Bugs

I remember how fixing the bug used up a large proportion of software developers at the time making it impossible to find anyone to employ. I was working for an American company at the time who closed our R&D office because they kept getting zero replies to adverts in the national press. The Horizon program was developed at the end of the 90's and the bugs in it appear to be due to a lack of skilled programmers. I wondet if the Post Office scandel is a result of the Y2K bug.

2010 bug

No mention of the 2010 bug. On the first of January 2010 half of the German population found their credit cards nolonger worked. The programmers had effectively windowed it by subtracting 10 from the year when storing and adding 10 when reading.

What the AI copyright fights are truly about: Human labor versus endless machines

I have a big neural network in my head that has absorbed all the books that I have read. If that neural network produces a book, then one can be certain that book will contain influences from all the books I have read. Does that mean that authors should pay royalties to all the authors of every book they have ever read?

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Seasickness

And that was the last time I played a compter game. I got a dose of seasickness once when playing Doom with my boss on an RS232 cable. Ever since I feel sick just watching a computer game

Artificial intelligence is a liability

The wall

When neural nets became popular in the 80's they quickly hit a wall due to the limits of technology and data collection. Then the idea of deep learning came along, massively speeding up learning and the internet helping with data collection for some applications. The stuff you can do with them now is great. The question is when will this step in technology hit a wall again.

Pope goes fire and brimstone on the dangers of AI

Yes, his predecessors did, just you were not listening. The Vatican is one of the institutions that is the most informed on science. They have came a long way since Galileo. Numerous discoveries and leaps in science have been made by scientists within the Catholic church (priests and monks). One way to study God is to study his creation, science is one of the means to do that.

Re: AI is EVIL….

Go back to commenting at the Daily Mail

Why do cloud titans keep building datacenters in America's hottest city?

Re: 4 cents?

It isn't the government who decide to link the electricity price to gas, it is the market. We need electricity generated by gas as it can react rapidly to fluctuations in load. Hence we need to buy electricity at the price that gas allows. Competition from other sources will not bring down the gas price, hence the price for electricity is determined by the price of gas.

Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse

Re: Use Case

Imagine a family of 4 sitting around their TV all evening looking at their smartphones.

Kremlin claims Ukraine hackers behind fake missile strike alerts

Re: Probably one good reason for the UK not to have such a system.

The UK does have such a system. I remember being woken at 2:00am 29 years ago by someone who incorrectly set off the nuclear 2 minute warning sirens in Coventry.

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

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

Auvoirdepois has nothing to do with pounds, shillings and pence. Precious metals are measure using the Troy system that has 20 ounces to the pound. That is why a pound of gold weighs more than a pound of feathers. 1GBP was originally worth a pound of gold hence 20 shillings to the pound.

New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong

The niavity of your comment implies that you haven't reached you 30th birthday yet.

CES Worst in Show slams gummi gouging, money-wasting mugs, and other dubious kit

Sad truth

The sad truth is, the gummies will be a big seller.

University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

Rather than ban new technology, one should accept that new technology renders certain skills obsolete; embrase the technology and concentrate learning efforts elsewhere.

India sets USB-C charging deadline for smartphones

Surely post-Brexit we can force the rest of the world to use a UK standard. USB-UK or something.

BBC is still struggling with the digital switch, says watchdog

No, the French have also removed Road Tax 10 years ago, much to the annoyance of cyclists.

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

Walk into a friend's house and ask Alexia what are the last three items you have bought. Then when you get home unplug yours.

It's 2023, let's check in with the metaverse... Nope, still doesn't exist

The Metaverse will become as popular as 3D TVs.

OK, Google: Why are you still pointing women at fake abortion clinics?

Re: I agree with the Supreme Court

In Europe, individual states legislated on abortion. Many people are against abortion but recognise the democratic legislative process. That did not happen in the USA, Roe-Wade was a judicial coup that claimed the Constitution gave abortion rights in a text that never mentions abortion and was written to give legal rights to people of colour. Ever since abortion and politics have been mixed up because of this.

This has now been reset and has returned back to the 1970's where it is up to the USA to correctly legislate on this issue in the same way as the vast majority of democratic countries have done.

Google is just a search engine that just finds web pages that are linked to the words you type in. If one doesn't like it then one should just go back to using the web before search engines: surf it and keep and share bookmarks.

Click bait

Oh dear, the Register appears to have started employing ex-Daily Mail journalists who create "non-News" stories just to make readers angry and comment about anything but the story itself.

Intel offers Loihi 2 to boffins: A 7nm chip with more than 1m programmable neurons

Been there, seen it, never happened, 35 years ago. Difficult to get excited about the same old, "every chip will have a dedicated neural processor in it".

That's not long division, Timmy! China school experimented on pupils with mind-reading tech

So the teachers stuck some wires to the kids' heads and told them they could see if they were concentrating and those who didn't concentrate would the thrashed. And then they noticed an improvement, what a surprise.

Cubans launching sonic attacks on US embassy? Not what we're hearing, say medical boffins

Climate change

You can add the climate emergency to the mass hysteria list. A new world science based on computer models programmed for free by post grads who know nothing about computer science using data that has to be massaged before it can be used. Any form of conclusion relies on data 100s of years old (short-term changes are meaningless) most of which does not exist and must be filtered and modified for "good" data - so much for controlled experiments.

Before the climate crisis no one was interested in climate science now 18 year olds want to study it in order to save the world. So most of these scientists who are filtering data and creating the computer models are climate change believers on a crusade to save the earth.

All you need to add is the population on mass simply repeating what everyone else is saying and calling that "understanding science" and some grown men crying because a penguin doesn't have to suffer as cold a winter as usual and you have all the ingredients of mass hysteria

Boffins blow hot and cold over li-ion battery that can cut leccy car recharging to '10 mins'

The future is hydrogen.

Very few people seem to understand just how much energy there is in a litre of petrol. There is 36MJ, in a petrol station you pump about 1/2 litre per second into your tank. That is a power of 18MW! It is okay to rely on science to solve issues in the future but you are wasting your time if you are relying on magic.

The callosal energy production requirement could be met in the future with nuclear fusion. However the electricity transfer issue will require magic. Forget batteries, the future is hydrogen powered cars.

I assume you are based in the USA and on 110V. In the UK with 240V you can comfortably have the kettle and fan heater on at the same time. However you would still probably be better off with a gas hob.

Isn't going to happen

However you look at battery cars on mass isni going to happen. The energy on a litre if petrol is too big to replace with electricity. To produce the electricity needed we will need nuclear fusion, will happen one day. Burt the problem is the distribution and energy transfer to the car, the only way I can see to solve this is to use hydrogen.

Literally braking news: Two people hurt as not one but two self-driving space-age buses go awry

Painfully slow

In the Austrian case the pedestrian is definitely at fault. Until recently Navya has a bus operating where I work in Le Défense near Paris. The busses are painfully slow. On the rare occasion that you see someone inside one they appear trapped, regretting ever entering it as everyone else walks past them.

Can't quite cram a working AI onto a $1 2KB microcontroller? Just get a PC to do it

What is new here?

In the 1980's I was program neural nets on micro-controllers smaller than this for audio recognition. I assume they have developed something clever to deserve an article on this website, could someone point out what is new here?

Ahem, ahem... AI engine said to be good as human docs at spotting lung cancer developing

It is only at the end of the article that it is stated that the radiographers and AI results are the same when all previous scans are used. I'm not surprised by this. The neural network cannot be better than the training data and the training data relies in part on the radiographers analysis (I can imagine it is easy to create a record of radiographers false positives, but a record of false negatives would be more difficult).

China trade tariffs? Fuhgeddaboudit, say Cisco execs. We, er, shifted some production

Re: Don't be daft

"Religions started that 2000 years ago". What a ridiculous statement. Firstly, why should all religions suddenly start doing this 2000 years ago? Secondly, religions do not actually do anything, they are abstract concepts. It is people who put fear in other people, they may try to abuse the concepts of different religions to manipulate people for there own ends, however all ideologies and objects are vunerable to this type of manipulation why pick on religion?

"politicians pull off these days". Are you really so naive as to believe that there was ever a time when humans didn't do this?

Great news, cask beer fans: UK shortage of CO2 menaces fizzy crap taking up tap space

Tetleys hasn't been the same since they brought out the round tea bags.

Who will fix our Internal Banking Mess? TSB hires IBM amid online banking woes

Re: But what about Damon?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/damon-yates-1421b43/

Am I correct in understanding that TSB hired someone with only one year of project management experience as their head of IT infrastructure?

Perusing pr0nz at work? Here's a protip: Save it in a file marked 'private'

Re: The real story

Aren't jokes supposed to be funny? Your comment was an idiotic repetition of insults and brainless prejudice. Which part of it would you consider to be witty?