Posts by Neil Barnes

Voyager 2 receives and executes first command in 11 months as sole antenna that reaches it returns to work

Re: Press any key to continue

>> If there's nothing left on the planet

The possibility exists that life will evolve. One day there *will* be small lemon soaked paper napkins. Until then, there will be a slight delay.

Re: It's a different world

Tsk!

Nobody doesn't have a nuclear powered flying car.

Well, nobody who matters...

Supermicro spy chips, the sequel: It really, really happened, and with bad BIOS and more, insists Bloomberg

From a position of complete ignorance

It strikes me that if we're speaking x86 parts here, isn't messing with the Intel Management Engine the way to do it with no obvious physical addenda to the circuit board?

Like others, I have a hard time believing in the need to supply extra chips to the PCB with all the attendant risk of discovery, when Intel have kindly provided exactly the claimed abilities built into the system by design.

helloSystem: Pre-alpha FreeBSD project chases simplicity and elegance by taking cues from macOS

Re: Well...

I wonder about sticky edges to menus... slow the mouse down as it approaches a menu bar? Mr Tognazzini makes that suggestion for drop-down navigation.

Re: Well...

In responding to this and to Greybeard's earlier reply to me (thanks!) I believe it was Unity which put me off top edge menus. The top limit to mouse movement (= less aiming required) is logical but DrXym's point about multiple small windows and large mouse movements was a stopper for me.

I wonder how much of this is simply 30 years of being exposed to menus-on-windows? Were the tests that Mr Tognazzini describes performed on naive users or with people who have used one or the other approach for years? I suspect the results might be different for different groups.

I can't help feeling that the biggest barrier to adoption of a new 'better' UI is simply familiarity with the old one - for example, I find the MS ribbon to be a largely unusable mess. But I am aware I am an old fogey; hell I even write in C so what do I know?

Nonetheless, I shall have a play with this project. You never know - I might like it!

Global menu bars?

I thought we'd done away with that idiocy... perhaps they've done something obvious to link the menu to the currently live window?

Still, might be worth a play. Have one of these, just in case. -->

This scumbag stole and traded victims' nude pics and vids after guessing their passwords, security answers

Re: John Kettley is a weatherman

And for those who might be wondering just what we are smoking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJRdsqMvBgE

Re: If you don't want people to see you in your birthday suit

There's probably some sort of internet help group for that.

John Kettley is a weatherman

And so is Michael Fish.

Oh, wrong bloke. Sorry. The, er, raincoat please! -->

Better buckle up: Volkswagen puts Microsoft in driver's seat to deliver 'automated' platform

At what point

will it become necessary to close all the windows and restart the engine to proceed?

Forget about an AI stealing your job, even pigs can be trained to use computers

Hamlet and Omelet were terminated from the experiment because they had grown too large

I scent the delightful odour of bacon. Mmmm.

India on track for crewed space mission, says first test flight to launch in late 2021

Chicken Korma?

A staple of UK 'Indian' takeaways, of course, but perhaps not traditionally Indian.

It's not going to provide any additional -->

Drag Autonomy founder's 'fraudulent guns' and 'grasping claws' to the US for a criminal trial, thunders barrister

Re: They're a weird mob.

I'm no expert on the game in question - I live on the other side of the pond - but wasn't it named for the newspaper that sponsored the competition?

The laptop you bought in 2020 may stop you buying a car in 2021: Chips are going short

Re: Stop me from buying a car? Probably not.

I was waiting for that one... but in the 25 years I've owned that car, it has 'failed to proceed' three times: once a dirty contact on a spark amplifier, once a broken cambelt[0] (a week before it was booked in to change it <grrr>) and once a dead bottom end, the direct result of the broken cambelt but sadly not known about and thereby fixed at the same time.

And as pointed out above, it still manages to exceed the emission requirements *for its age* though I admit that current levels are lower, and still manages respectable fuel economy.

To be honest, I don't think there is any such thing as a 'bad car' these days, at least in Europe and Japanese builds/imports. There are certainly lemons out there, but I suspect that electrical gremlins figure highly in their failure modes. At least, those are the reports I get from my contacts in the motor trade (where they've largely given up diagnosis beyond 'plug the computer in').

[0] Little known fact: the most dangerous speed for a cambelt is at tickover: from there it can accelerate to eight or ten times its speed in a second or two, which it certainly can't do if it's already doing 5,000rpm.

Re: Stop me from buying a car? Probably not.

I observe that my 1995 Fiat contains no more than three processors, not counting the radio, and yet seems in no way functionally deficient on the road. Perhaps the makers desire that every component should complain to every other component if it thought it might not be the manufacturer approved part has something to do with this?

Apropos of nothing: I have been watching people trying to get 1970s US cars running on Youtube recently. Youtube has decided now that I am a Trump supporter, and recommends lots of party videos. Is there a connection, I wonder?

Harmed by a decision made by a poorly trained AI? You should be able to sue for damages, says law prof

Re: Theory and Reality

Which renders its use in *any* circumstance dubious at best, surely? Unless each and every decision it makes is supervised by a responsible adult...

One sees so many examples (claims) of 'AI performs better than humans' but in what is essentially a statistical issue, what matters are the effects of both false positives and false negatives. What happens, for example, when two AI systems trained on different data give differing results? And of course, there are huge differences in the importance of the decision: e.g. medical tests, or self-driving systems, job screening, or immigration decisions might have more of a knock-on effect than deciding if the washing is finished, or food is cooked.

Computer says no?

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

Re: Think of it as evolution in action

Yep.

Think of it as evolution in action

See title.

Don't scrape the faces of our citizens for recognition, Canada tells Clearview AI – delete those images

since they’re all publicly available anyway

And presumably Clearview can document that they have checked with the rights holders that CV may use the scraped images in this way?

I think in the States you have to register for copyright, but this side of the pond, and I would guess Canada also, copyright exists as soon as something is published.

NASA offers foodies, boffins $500,000 to find ways for astronauts to make their own dinners on the Moon, Mars

Re: Obvious answer is obvious. And one word.

I have vague memories[1] that when TV dinners were introduced as ready meals in the 50s or 60s, they sold well for a couple of weeks and then folk stopped buying them - because they were too identical in flavour and texture. The makers added some randomisation and sales went up again.

[1] I have vague memories of reading about... TV dinners weren't a thing when I was a kid.

Don't meatsacks generate water from combustion of sugars? It's a long time since my Biology A-levels...

Re: Obvious answer is obvious. And one word.

This. And the good cook. He has an incentive if he doesn't want to become lunch...

I suspect managing changes in flavours might well be the significant chore. Perhaps the crew might be allowed a kilo of their favourite herbs and spices? No coriander/cilantro for me, thanks.

Funny how with a whole planet to choose from, as a species we basically get by on a handful of plants for our carb and protein needs, and a rather larger handful for flavour.

I dunno the maths on this, but I suspect that having already lofted a number of fleshy meatsacks out of the gravity well, each of which automatically generates a significant quantity of H2O just by being there, might mean a double hit if you send extra water up with the grub.

What might you be looking at - a kilo or two per astro-food-portion per day? It soon adds up, whereas in space, everything that goes around, comes around...

p.s. How about some of Harry Harrison's dehyrated alcohol for emergencies?

Re: Ok,

Ok, then a bag of potatoes, some hydrazine, and a fishtank.

Surely the Mars Bar already answers this need?

Or is that not allowed on the moon?

Yes, the airtight one I think, thanks! -->

How do we combat mass global misinformation? How about making the internet a little harder to use

Aye, there's nothing quite as useful as an 'Academic result' when all you see in most cases is a hundred-word preamble paragraph leading to a ridiculously priced pdf of the actual paper... and in many cases you have no idea as to whether the paper is actually what you were looking for in the first place, or one of the dozens of 'meta studies' that just add up other scholars papers.

Elsevier and their ilk should be ashamed of themselves. ArXiv is to be commended.

No ports, no borders, no hope: Xiaomi's cool but impractical all-screen concept phone

yabbut...

The first thing you're going to do with a phone like that is wrap it in silicone padding so it doesn't break when you drop it.

Google’s Pixel phones to measure heart rate and breathing, other ‘droids coming soon

Could be fun

Just to see what my apparently abnormally low breathing rate - four or five a minute - does to the software. It certainly upset the hospital after a serious accident some years back...

But then again, it's Google. So nah...

Vote machine biz Smartmatic sues Fox News and Trump chums for $2.7bn over bogus claims of rigged 2020 election

I think they should vote on the result of the lawsuit.

Oh, wait...

Nearly 70 years after America made einsteinium in its first full-scale thermo-nuke experiment, mystery element yields secrets of its chemistry

Re: Open YouTube

I believe this was detailed in Poul Anderson's excellent 'Uncleftish Beholding': https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/students/dtc/students2011/maitland/fun/

LibreOffice 7.1 Community released with user-interface picker, other bits and bytes

a desktop tool in an era of cloud and mobile

And highly to be praised for that.

I'm not part of a team working on collaborative documents; my documents, my storage, my problem, thanks.

Chromium cleans up its act – and daily DNS root server queries drop by 60 billion

well how about...

If the user starts an entry with http(|s):// or even www. or ends an entry with .blah, it gets treated as a URL and triggers a DNS search.

If not, the query goes to the search engine of choice.

One might reasonably expect that Google actually have a list of URLs that could be tested for before troubling the DNS servers, no? But that would be using Google's hardware rather than the commons, and perhaps they don't like that.

Ever wanted to own a piece of the internet? Now you can: $1 for a whole gTLD... or $2.8m if you want a decent one

.com, .org, .gov, .edu

Can't really see a need for much more than that, except perhaps for country suffixes - often it's nice to see where a company thinks it lives.

ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 1: Workhorse that does the business – and dares you to push that red button

Re: Red pointy thing

Heh. Old Dell laptop here, pointy thing in the middle of the keyboard and a touchpad with not one, not two, but five clicky buttons.

I am however in the 'hate the touchpad with a vengeance' club - it just doesn't work for me for the sort of things I do - and despite using a Libretto for some time (years ago) with the pointy thing on the side of the screen and the buttons on the back, I still don't use the pointy thing.

External mouse for me, please, on a mouse mat. Yeah, I know, get with the times, Grandpa... YMMV.

Musk see: Watch SpaceX's latest Starship rocket explode while trying to touch down

The bad news: oops!

The good news - there's probably enough left to find out what went wrong. "We've just got to work on that landing a little bit..."

Is it just me, or do the youtube videos look more like a 50's sci-fi film set than real life?

I think the engineers need one of these -->

Going underground with Scaleway's Apple M1-as-a-Service: Mac Minis descend into Paris nuclear bunker

can handle a 20 MEGATON nuclear strike.

How do you know? Has it been tested?

Accused of underpaying or snubbing women and Asian techies, Google spends pocket change to make it all go away

They have the money and they want the talent.

But not, apparently, if it wears a skirt or has the wrong colour skin.

To be honest, I really doubt that this sort of thing is policy-from-the-top. Rather more likely, I feel, that either at the actual hiring decision point individuals are, consciously or otherwise, hiring people that match their own preconceptions of what they are looking for and will always select the closest they can.

This behavior may well be innate - hey, I'm no psychologist - and I'm not sure that there is a way to fix it, unless perhaps *each and every* hiring decision has oversight from an independent arbiter of the company's ethics/policy. And if a hirer cannot provide an adequate answer to 'why did you pick person X over person Y' then there is cause to reconsider that hiring decision.

Which is not to say in any way that people should be hired to just fill quotas of any kind: what a company needs and generally wants is the best it can get. But that 'best' should be examined.

In wake of Apple privacy controls, Facebook mulls just begging its iOS app users to let it track them over the web

the benefits of personalized ads

Cui bono?

I mean, really, does the user *really* benefit from an advert? This brave new world of the internet, all based on a funding model intended to sell soap eighty years ago? Can't we come up with something better?

Microsoft's Gooseberry is a dish best served really, really cold: Progress made on silicon quantum computing

Perhaps the time is right

For El Reg to provide a handy-dandy guide to quantum computer concepts and implementation for elderly engineers like me?

I dislike magic incantations (the quantum states collapse...) and have absolutely no idea how or why one might want such an animal - apart, apparently, to break the entire financial world.

Knock, knock. Who's there? NAT. Nat who? A NAT URL-borne killer

Re: Web browsers need a built-in firewall....

Well, I'd be happy to see Javascript and its ilk go the way of Flash.

But then, I don't live my life in a browser. YMMV.

Drone smashes through helicopter's windscreen and injures passenger

Re: /rant

Where is it the sole resposibility of a drone pilot to avoid a aircraft?

Did you read what I wrote? It is every pilot's responsibility to avoid a collision. That doesn't matter whether the pilot is in the air or on the ground. Do you imagine that the pilot of the chopper that was hit flew into the drone deliberately, just because he had right of way? Don't be silly - he collided with it because he *did not see it* until too late to avoid it, if at all.

What the hell are you doing below 400ft if not landing or taking off?

You may not have heard of ridge soaring. It's gliding using the rising air caused by wind blowing towards a ridge - you'll often see it at coastal flying sites, or at inland sites where there's a long ridge facing the prevailing wind - good examples in the UK are places like Dunstable Downs or Long Mynd. Unless the pilot finds a thermal, he's not going to gain much height and his altitude will be largely controlled by wind speed.

Stay out of the air then, what you think that you own the airspace?

In some cases, yes: paraglider sites are often either owned by the clubs or used by careful agreement and negotiation with the land owner - and the landowner's rules often state that only specific people and/or aircraft may fly there.

At many flying sites, airspace is shared with model aircraft fliers. Because of the difficulty of judging height and distance from a ground viewpoint, such sites have well defined areas as to who flies where. As long as pilots respect those areas, there is no contention.

Cooperation is the way forward, drones are here to stay, so you better get used to flying aroud them...

For cooperation, see above. And I suspect you're right; drones are probably here to stay (unless they're legislated out of the sky, which is unlikely in the short term). But please remember this: as a drone pilot, you're used to an aircraft that can go from high-speed flight to hover in seconds; that can make course and direction changes effectively instantly. A paraglider moves forwards at 20-40kph in normal flight and cannot stop; it can't change direction anywhere nearly as quickly as the drone can. (The German DHV basic qualification test requires that a pilot perform a 360 degree turn in both directions (i.e. one left, one right) in under thirty seconds, which might give an idea of speed of turning).

For all practical purposes, paragliders *can't* fly around a drone; larger and faster gliders and powered aircraft are unlikely to be able to for the same reasons. I haven't seen a drone flying with high visibility lights on - is this something considered in the drone world? Strobes, for example? They'd at least improve the chances in VFR flight which is where most general aviation happens.

Please understand: I'm not trying to ban drones, and I'm not trying to ban you: I'm asking that you give consideration to other fliers - the same 'get used to it' that you're asking for.

/rant

I've said it before and I have no doubt I will say it again.

IT DOESN'T MATTER who is in the right

If you want to fly drones from safely on the ground, that's fine. But in most countries - and in particular the UK with which I am most familiar - you have the legal responsibility to fly in a safe manner and obeying the rules. Those rules not only include the correct way to turn to avoid collisions but in the case of POV flying a second pair of eyes keeping watch for other traffic.

If you and your spare eyes are doing the job properly, you will have seen and/or heard an oncoming helicopter long before it arrives (a helicopter is generally audible, from my practical experience, for a good twenty to thirty seconds before it's overhead and visible for much of that time). I find it hard to see how one might 'accidentally' bump into a helicopter unless you are active trying to or so careless as to be negligent.

Put yourself in the position of a pilot in the air; whether a chopper, a light plane, or a paraglider/hang glider. He's busy actively flying. He's watching for oncoming traffic; he may be looking for lift sources (often indicated by the behaviour of other gliders or birds) or soaring a ridge. He is going to have a certain amount of difficulty seeing a small object against ground clutter irrespective of speed differences. If he hears a drone it's likely at a distance too close to be able to do much about it.

I don't want to stop your fun - but I do remind you that you are on the ground risking a grand's worth of hardware. I'm in the air and you're risking my life.

Let the usual downvotes begin.

Re: Relatively wrong headline?

If you've ever been pilot in command in the air you might realise how difficult it is to see any other aircraft - full size, let alone something the size of a drone. Jets have flown past and under paragliders and hang gliders without even seeing them; paragliders and hang gliders and sailplanes have all bumped into each other with varying degrees of survivability; you'd think something ten metres across and in fluorescent colours might be visible, but apparently not.

However, irrespective of who has right of way and who is where, it is the responsibility of *all* pilots to fly in such a way as to avoid a collision.

(I speculate that the limited field of view of a forward looking drone camera might have the same effect I get trying to play granddaughter's video games; even with large monitors I am disorientated by the wide angle view through a letterbox effect and cannot position myself in the field of play).

Europe considers making it law that your boss can’t bug you outside of office hours

Re: Standard interview questions...

Yup. You pay me eight till four, I work eight till four. You want more work, you pay me more.

'On call' is work *even if I am doing nothing*.

Soon, no more blood tests or probing for prostate cancer? AI claims 99% success rate using more relaxing methods

99% accuracy on 23 tests?

Who has 1/4 of the disease then?

I mean, I'm no statistician, but if 23 tests all gave the correct answer, shouldn't the accuracy be 100%?

US cyber intelligence officer jailed for kidnapping her kid, trying to hawk top secrets to Russia in Mexico

a wealth of electronic devices:

one laptop computer, two tablets, five cell phones, four mobile phone SIM cards, three external hard drives, four thumb drives, and nine SD cards.

And a paaaaartidge in a pear tree!

(too soon? nah...)

Smartphones are becoming like white goods, says analyst, with users only upgrading when their handsets break

Re: which are often only changed when they stop working

An update perhaps on the 'we want something with red and transparent plastic, a shiny metal bit, build cost under a buck, retails for $24.99' approach?

which are often only changed when they stop working

Why would anyone change anything that's still working (asks Mr Outlier, who cheerfully runs cars for twenty-five years)?

How does one get infected with the 'form over function' virus that causes you to lust after the latest new shiny?

But manufacturing has not been based on 'build something that will last, fix it when it breaks' for years or decades; the whole concept is to make something with which the customer will initially want but which will with time have some flaw that causes the customer to be vaguely dissatisfied; something to make him want a new one.

c.f. Douglas Adams and the Shoe Event Horizon.

AI clocks first-known 'binary sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system'. Another AI will be along shortly to tell us how to pronounce that properly

Re: it doesn’t look like there are any exoplanets in TIC 168789840

I suspect also that any putative planet would probably be wandering in and out of various Roche limits too... nice sunset, shame the planet just pulled itself to bits.

it doesn’t look like there are any exoplanets in TIC 168789840

Shame, really - the tides would be amazing, along with the sunsets.