Posts by Scoured Frisbee

Trump says he has a problem if Apple builds iThings in India

Re: manufacturing in poorer countries

My father (industrial engineer) contracted with dozens of companies through most of the second half of the 20th century, it has not been a stagnant field. When I was in high school (late 1990s) I toured a relatively new auto plant, even then it was all robots and low-touch. No one is going to pay a human to do something a machine can do at the same cost, the companies (like Apple, frankly) who skipped industrial automation because of quarterly financials were always going to be at a competitive disadvantage eventually.

Presumably you and I are in roughly the same demographic as far as ambition, entrepreneurship, education, and I assume we are both compensated commensurately. Many people aren't interested in doing more than just enough to eat, sleep, and be merry; there's beauty in that, and it doesn't make them idiots or whatever you were channeling. I have a lot more respect for an honest laborer, technician, or mechanic than I do a "serial entrepreneur" or most CEOs.

Do not take this as an argument for tariffs; artificially skewing one aspect of a market does not usually end well for the others. I'm just reacting to the unfortunately pervasive ideas that manufacturing hasn't changed since the 1900s and that low-wage, low-ambition workers are idiots.

Verizon hit with whopping $847M verdict for infringing 5G and hotspot patents

Re: The patent trolling capital of the Eastern District of Texas

794 [https://patents.google.com/patent/US9426794B2/en?oq=9%2c426%2c794]

Dated April 20 2001, eventually.

Interestingly I believe I was already doing at least claims 1-3 in public on consumer hardware in 2001 - that is, tethering my Thinkpad to my Qualcomm candy bar via the serial port and using it as a wireless modem. I have some vague recollection that there was a virtual uplink, but maybe I was dialing the Mindspring backup line at 2400 or 9600 bps. It was slow but SSH is low data anyway, just doing note taking and admin stuff on my home computer. That would have been on Verizon; full circle I guess.

I don't have much to say about 931, I learned a decent amount about TDD at University in the late 90s but of course we didn't go into great detail about broadcasting a bit mask to advertise settings like the claims, maybe that's not obvious to practitioners in EDTX.

ChatGPT wrongly insists Trump-Biden CNN debate had 1 to 2-minute delay

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/09/28/openai_reinstates_chatgpts_internet_privileges/

I hope it has improved since then, but from the article it seems like it would trust anything Bing told it.

Theoretically LLMs can be incrementally updated on incoming data in real time, for some approximation of the term "real" - the core model doesn't have to be retrained, in fact usually you wouldn't want to.

I'm only academic in NLP but if I wanted such a system I would probably build a cluster reading RSS feeds from various sources and rolling the small model updates to user nodes, system size mostly depends on the incoming data rate. Of course source selection is always the challenge with that kind of setup, GIGO just like the "expert" systems of yore...

Forget the AI doom and hype, let's make computers useful

In my Intro to AI class (graduate school, but still) our working definition was that AI was anything that [knowledgeable] people said a computer could never do. Obviously this is a rolling window, and at first I rebelled at its generality, but I've come to like this definition a lot; it seems to capture the popular usage very well.

Solar eclipse darkened skies, dampened internet traffic

Cloudflare reports it as bytes, and it's their data, so...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/total-eclipse-internet-traffic-impacts-mexico-us-canada

Check the byline, I'm pretty sure this particular author would not make such a mistake.

Lenovo to offer certified refurbished PCs and servers

Dellrefurbished runs a lot of coupons in the 40-50% range especially around US holidays - not sure about internationally - and their clearance (sans OS, mostly) goes about half off once the inventory has sat too long. Even with these discounts prices can be a mixed bag so you've got to know the market you're shopping, but I've bought a number of laptops and workstations for 60-80% of current refurbisher prices.

A big advantage is that you get actual Dell enterprise support, so I was able to get brand new hinges and a fingerprint scanner (as parts) sent with two emails, no fuss, relatively easy to crack the system and install. Mostly I haven't had trouble, though.

I do usually replace drives and RAM for performance reasons, but then I'd do that anyway.

Anyway glad to see Lenovo getting into the game, hopefully they are able to tap new supplies rather than just squeezing existing suppliers.

OpenAI tweaks its fine print, removes explicit ban on 'military and warfare' use

> over 61,617 jobs

Seems oddly specific...

Google promises eternity of updates for Chromebooks – that's a decade for everyone else

Re: "at the end of their usefulness"

Just walked my 94-yo grandfather through a purchase a few weeks ago, the newest Chromebook he could pick up at a store expires in 2026. This was to replace his 13-year-old W10 Toshiba.

Working backward I guess he won't get an extension, so hopefully he needs at least one more refresh. I hope I am as active at his age!

Bad software destroyed my doctor's memory

Re: Have a hundred upvotes

Most likely every EMR system has those things already, but:

- no doctor is going to receive more than minimal training, and nobody is going to pay them to fuss about with the system off hours, so they won't know how to get to these features until some new kid shows up and figures it out

- paper records are scanned and - if you are lucky - OCR'd with Acrobat or some other barely-functional product, so searching keywords is at best 50/50

- Handwriting OCR is... Well have you seen doctors' handwriting?

- dates of paper records don't OCR better than anything else; especially if you have a pen-and-paper doctor the records are probably scanned and presented in the order received, muddy footprints and all

- for a specialist in the US, lots of stuff - especially lab results - come in as PDF images or faxes, so they aren't really easily searchable even if the site has been using an EMR for years

Digitizing paper is a pain. Once the patient records are entered digitally it gets easy enough to do all the things you mention and more. It is, however, very painful in the meantime, and having something transitional as mentioned in the article would at least keep down the error rate in the near term.

Crook who stole $23m+ in YouTube song royalties gets five years behind bars

Re: It doesn't mean that royalties are going "straight into the pockets of the streaming services".

Non-monetized videos on YouTube don't run advertisements, generally, as I understand it. Once someone claims copyright and monetizes, or the author chooses to monetize, advertisements are added to the video, and those are revenue shared with the monetizing party.

At church we've had some services monetized by "rights holders" of hymns+arrangements written by Charles Wesley (who died in London in 1788 - even before Walt Disney!). These videos tend to get fewer post-service views as folks click away during the ads. I've considered fighting about it but haven't bothered, which I suppose is the ambivalence these fellows banked on.

Google snubbed JPEG XL so of course Apple now supports it in Safari

I could not get the linked page to load in Firefox, it worked fine in Chrome but did not include a lot of detail.

Unsurprisingly the Register's reporting was much better:

https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/13/microsoft_ans_patent/

And more meta discussion:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/

US cybersecurity chief: Software makers shouldn't lawyer their way out of security responsibilities

Re: OS/360 had plenty of bugs

Recently deceased I'm sorry to say. The University is doing a memorial is this weekend if you want to attend the virtual event, or have already registered for the physical event. Quite a fellow.

https://cs.unc.edu/brooks

Home Depot sent my email, details of stuff I bought to Meta, customer complains

Re: Unhash?

Presumably FB already knows the address [e-mail] because Bob (or someone else) told them about it, and they just store the hash with the user profile. They can then match the Home Depot hash with what they calculated earlier.

It is mostly true that the hashes will turn out to be unique, but someone intercepting them probably can't easily reverse to the email addresses.

Longstanding bug in Linux kernel floppy handling fixed

I used them in mid-2010s at a prior employer, we had an oscilloscope that would only store images to 3.5" floppy. It was oldish but sufficient for that company's occasional needs, and sufficiently expensive that there wasn't will to upgrade, so it's probably still in use barring a catastrophic failure.

Cisco wriggles out from $2 billion bill for ‘willful and egregious’ patent infringements

Maybe it should have been 5 or 10 or 100 billion.

The article implies that now it is going to be retried. From the little guy's perspective that's punitive and expensive but that's because of the attorneys, not the courts per se.

Hey, GitHub, can you create an array compare function without breaking the GPL?

Re: Some functions are very simple

Yes of course, if you don't attribute code how can you hope to remember what you were thinking when someone asks? Why would you not want to add a comment with information -that you already have-? I usually even include 'loosely based on' or 'x does not work because y' so I can recall how I got to some solution, if I'm to the point of searching for code (which, admittedly, I rarely do at this point).

Maybe it's an experience thing?

Broadcom CEO says hiking VMware prices is not his strategy

I bought my first VMware license in 2006, and have had an active license / subscription ever since. Until vSphere 7 (which has been nothing but trouble) I was a solid NPS 10. My largest cluster was something like 45 nodes when I left in 2019, many hundreds of VMs rotating in and out.

However a couple weeks ago I installed proxmox on my dev (old) cluster and I'm really impressed, definitely has given me motivation to do some bigger tests before we renew production vSphere in January. Just wanted to leave a note for other folks to consider.

Mouse hiding in cable tray cheesed off its bemused user

Re: Wireless Mice

Watch out for the MacBook Pros: https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/15/ncat_flexgate_apple_macbook/

All my computers are older than 4 years; my TRS80 model 100 (1983) only bit the dust a couple years ago, until then I was using it to generate lunch menus for the kids. I've been surprisingly happy with last decade's Latitudes for price:longevity, my 2015 7250 runs fine despite looking somewhat worse for wear.

I was issued a monstrosity of a wireless keyboard to complement my wireless trackball and mouse (which I use simultaneously thank you very much). Since it took twice the square footage of my old keyboard I stuck it in a drawer. Every few months I'd put something that rolled in that drawer, of course never remembering straightaway...

Linux 6.0 debuts, missing some Rusty bits and a magic mushroom reference

I think you're just putting the year in the wrong place.

End of the road for biz living off free G Suite legacy edition

Re: As someone affected by this....

For me the sting was the loss of licenses if I didn't enroll in the subscription - I bought a lot of streaming video and TV when the kids were small and was not excited at an ultimatum to 'pay a monthly fee or lose the licenses forever'. (I have apps and music, though I've mostly repurchased those for family library.) I really don't mind switching everything else, I self-hosted everything for 15 years and don't mind doing it again if I can't find anything I want to buy.

With 7 family users, $42/month is a lot just to keep access to some old Disney movies. I assume eventually the service will go away for real and I'll just have to rebuy anything I still want. I just wish Google offered a license migration so we could get out without having to spend extra money (and that probably with vudu at this point).

The black screen of BIOS borkage haunts Space Shuttle Discovery's new home

I took the same picture on Monday but never got around to sending it in - nicely done! For what it's worth the computer is in the pedestal below the screen, there's a mesh through which it is partly visible in one of my photos. Observation tower is closed for the moment, but it was great to see the Apollo 11 control module outside the restoration bay!

Hacking is not a crime – and the media should stop using 'hacker' as a pejorative

Metrics

I am mostly interested in how many people change their mind during a debate, not how many there absolutely are. The comments here are a good example why: apparently lots of the readership has given up on the term, and presumably thought so before reading the article - it would be interesting to see if anyone went from against to for, though. Surely the readers of this esteemed organ could handle six or seven options (unsure/unsure in addition to the conclusive 6).

A cautionary tale of virtual floppies and all too real credentials

> ln -s /usr/bin/ls /usr/bin/dir

Why are you running as root? You never know what might happen. I bet there's a "Who, Me?" somewhere with such a story.

Your IT department should behave like a jellyfish, says Gartner

A brain by any other name

> "whatever is up top can co-ordinate action and send the right signals"

Um...

Cops called to Singapore golf club after 'wrongdoers' use scripts to book popular timeslots

Autofill

I fill in all kinds of forms in Chrome with one or two clicks, two seconds is just on the low end of reasonable if you've got a lot of people trying who are familiar with the form.

I mean, I could script it, but given the market share of Chrome I'm not sure it's the simplest solution. Two seconds seems a little long for a scripted solution.

Trucking hell: Kid leaves dad in monster debt after buying oversized vehicle on eBay

I have 2FA on for PayPal - except it doesn't work for eBay, where somehow it just magically pays with one click using only my active eBay session for authentication. I imagine I set this up when I sold some stuff years ago (back when you had to get a physical 2fa card for PayPal), but now I don't have any idea how to turn it off.

Fortunately my default PayPal card messages me for purchases so at least I would know.

Imagine surviving WW3, rebuilding computers, opening up GitHub's underground vault just to relive JavaScript

> A human-readable index and guide have been stored too.

And in which language are those?

'iOS security is f**ked' says exploit broker Zerodium: Prices crash for taking a bite out of Apple's core tech

> Add time and financial motivation, he said, and you get more bugs.

No, if you have time and financial incentives you will get more issues. The bugs were already there.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

No one has proffered "Bitzilla", the software monster?

Google says its latest chatbot is the most human-like ever – trained on our species' best works: 341GB of social media

Re: Hummm soo...

Did you see that ludicrous display last night? The thing about Arsenal is, they always try to walk it in.

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

I totally get not mixing state and configuration in /etc, and it is trivially obvious that this is going in the opposite direction - as the follow up line of questioning revealed, if you have to get the system to sign your home directory then now the home directory is storing configuration. Whatever, I've built systems that had problems too, if I don't catch them then hopefully someone else does and we figure it out - that's why I enjoy working with smart people.

What I don't understand is what is happening at RedHat. There are plenty of bright folks at RH who could have easily come up with all our above objections and then some. How did P get to a conference before he considered them, and that on stage? Is there some cult of personality going on, or dearth of management keeping communications open? Did all the good developers move away because of a toxic environment? Something something agile devops sprints? As someone who has occasionally considered RH jobs I am genuinely curious...

No it's not Russell Brand's new cult, it's Microsoft's Office crew rolling out their Save Experience

Illustrations

Microsoft... Blah blah whatever. Kudos to the Reg team for making great art for the article - I got a good giggle out of "A Word document saved to OneDrive" and was happy to see truly relevant images. Cheers!

Microsoft's only gone and published the exFAT spec, now supports popping it in the Linux kernel

Re: What if ...

> AFAIK no one has seen fit to do an open source driver for ext on Windows...

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/

Been using it recently for pulling data off a USB ext2 drive, but I seem to recall having previously used it with ext3. Can't speak to its writing but reading is great.

It is a user space reader, I'm not sure if there's a way to make it load dynamically when a drive is connected. It's been pretty stable, and I don't reboot very often, so this has not been a huge limitation for me as a technical user - for my wife and kids it would be, but then they have no interest in reading my old backup drive anyway...

Sleeping Tesla driver wonders why his car ploughed into 11 traffic cones on a motorway

I fell asleep in that stretch some twenty-odd years ago, driving across the state late after graduating and moving out of my college apartment. My mid-80s Buick was not so good at self driving - I took out a bunch of median poles and destroyed the car, but was not injured and fortunately no one else was involved. Glad it was only superficial damage for this gentleman.

That night I did receive a ticket for driving too fast while being asleep. It was certainly true and I paid it, along with enhanced insurance rates for some years My parents also paid for the DOT to replace the median catcher for the next sleepy fool - my graduation/survival present!

In NC most road construction sites are not populated; often cones are put up at the extreme ends and stay up for the years it takes to finish a project. Not to justify running the barrier but odds are good no one was actually at the site beyond the other drivers. From the video I'm glad the driver did not instinctively jerk to the right upon waking!

DXC Technology exec: What should our brand be known for?

* Redundancy: it's not just for data anymore

* DXC: "nothing" is our middle name

* When everyone says it's impossible, DXC will take your cash up front

* It's not witchcraft, we're sinkimg

* Testing contract law since 2017

* Good, fast, cheap: we've heard of them

* Now offering flexible timetables for your projects

Germany has a problem with the entire point of Amazon's daft Dash buttons – and bans them

Re: A 'proper' use for the buttons

I am surprised it took this august community so long to get to the real utility of these (and presumably why Amazon charges cost). I have a number of the buttons, they hop on the WiFi when pressed and then drop off after timing out - five minutes if I recall. This makes it trivial to script stuff, even with openwrt or the like - just be sure to block the uplink so you don't really order anything!

They're good for counters, logging when something happens, reminders - anywhere you want a binary input and can wait five minutes between events.

Nobody in China wants Apple's eye-wateringly priced iPhones, sighs CEO Tim Cook

Re: Overpriced kit

> We have 4 newish iPhones in our family and the total cost for all of them together is just under £750.

I bought my daughter a 6s for Christmas, the cheapest usable one I could find from a reputable vendor was us$200 - and it will be out of security in a year. (That said she doesn't have any money, so I'm expecting her to keep using it until something crazy happens.)

But where'd you pick up 4 for £750?

Oregon can't stop people from calling themselves engineers, judge rules in Traffic-Light-Math-Gate

Re: Restrict engineering

To add to the above poster, as a licensed professional engineer I've agreed to put the health and well-being of the public before my own and employer's interests. If you disagree with my actions you can complain to the board, which will pull my license.

Once I asked some peer software engineers from a public-facing company the last time they considered anyone other than their employer and immediate customers. It took them most of lunch just to parse the question, the concept was completely alien. I don't think they were doing anything malicious, the wider impact of their code (and there is a lot!) just wasn't part of their thought process.

Personally I'm in the 'licensure is fine if you want it' camp, but I see the value in having an external group with whom to discuss ethical concerns, and the unspecified fear of having to justify some possibly-unethical action to a board of peers.

Git it girl! Academy tries to tempt women into coding with free course

Re: "they aren't interested"

Hey, so, I totally get not wanting to reply to every bigot. However you and I would like a nice public collection of stories about women in the profession - both for advertising to students/children and also for responding to 'there's no different treatment' - and it strikes me that you are in a position to get them. Any chance you could convince the Reg editors to do a series of interviews with female and trans coders/ IT staff/ architects, and maybe women who shifted away from computers and why? It would be a very valuable contribution to the field.

Scam alert: No, hackers don't have webcam vids of you enjoying p0rno. Don't give them any $$s

Life imitating art

Surprised it took this long, frankly:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shut_Up_and_Dance_(Black_Mirror)

Yes, people see straight through male displays of bling (they're only after a fling)

Re: Funded by a car manufacturer by any chance?

Anybody have recent research on new car depreciation? I was shopping for a Camry (US) a few years ago; after straight-line depreciating for mileage the used cars were 10-20% more expensive than the new offers from Toyota, not even accounting for better interest rates. In fact for most of the slightly used vehicles I found (<3 years / 30kmi) they were -in asking price- more expensive than the Toyota new prices.

I've driven old and fixable cars forever (mostly old Mercedes and Volvos) but shopping for a newish reliable one made me second guess the common wisdom. Now that cars are basically odd-shaped computer cases I'm not sure if it was a weird market thing or a new trend, hence would appreciate any pointers to reliable recent surveys.

'Well intentioned lawmakers could stifle IoT innovation', warns bug bounty pioneer

No love for IoT...

...but I find

> governments would be prohibited from buying IoT kit with known vulnerabilities as ill conceived

as eminently reasonable. Cisco didn't patch its switches for Meltdown/Spectre, but they are known to be vulnerable, for example.

I've worked in enterprise embedded software for nearly 20 years, releases that have shipped without known exploitable bugs were usually found to be under-tested by the field.

There's definitely a spectrum but drawing a bright line just means companies will lawyer up until vulnerabilities can't be disclosed, not that IoT kit will suddenly become impenetrable where the rest of the software industry has failed.

Ethics? Yeah, that's great, but do they scale?

Re: Great!

One of the (dis?)advantages of being a professional engineer is being held responsible for the general welfare, and having access to a board with which I could discuss ethics issues. It is a reminder to think of the public (not just customers!), though that probably would mean I'd be out of the company if it came to it.

For me I'd rather be ethical than employed, but I can see how I would be tempted to compromise in such a situation. As such having the extra layer of oversight is good for me.

TVEyes blindsided: Fox News defeats search engine in copyright spat

Re: Ten minutes??

TL;DR

Arlo, can you go? NETGEAR spins out its security cameras biz

I'm interested in and possibly afraid of the organic products they're expecting from Arlo.

HP coughs up $6.5m to make dodgy laptop display lawsuit go away

Re: Similar Prob

On the subject of lemons, the worst laptop I ever had was a Powerbook. One day I came home to find it in the driveway, my wife had thrown it there hoping I'd run over it so I couldn't fix it again.

So there's my Apple story. Not to worry, I have plenty of others - my wife is great at destroying electronics from any manufacturer.

Ever wondered why tech products fail so frequently? No, me neither

Re: UAT Testing

That's why professional software testers automate everything they can, so the next time they get to break it by doing something else. Now if someone can point me to a vendor that has enough testers to automate and also meet schedules I will buy only from them henceforth.

Space.. the fi, er, New Frontiers: NASA to hurl space robot at duck comet – or Saturn moon

Re: Europa

Surely drilling Europa should be the domain of the ESA?

NiceHash diced up by hackers, thousands of Bitcoin pilfered

Assume he meant "after reader Lee Reeve"...