Posts by James Wilson

And now something fun for a change: Building blocks of life in Bennu asteroid samples

I misunderstood

I wasn't paying enough attention, when I read "a cold, lifeless rubble pile" I assumed they were talking about Basingstoke.

Is that a bird’s nest, a wireless broadband base station, or both?

Re: Invasive species

There's something wrong with the one I've got, it's not moving. I think it's asleep, or possibly pining for the fjords.

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Re: Any system...

Upvote for the ISIHAC reference, even if it was a little obvious. I suspect Samantha and Sven would have complained it wasn't hard enough to satisfy them.

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

We did a holiday to France recently in our EV. There was hardly any stress, there's so many chargers around it's easy to find one, and the Electroverse card & app were great. Also it's sooo much cheaper than the UK - worst I paid was I think €0.59/KWh and for a small detour I was able to get €0.25/kwh for a lot of it!

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

Been there, done that. It was a standing joke at my last company that the worst developer there was yourself about 6 years previously. I'd often open up some code and think "it's so obvious this will never work, which idiot wrote it?" Then I'd scroll to the top and find out I was said idiot.

Ford CEO admits he drives a Chinese electric vehicle and doesn't want to give it up

Re: :)

That's stage 2.

https://programmerhumor.io/debugging-memes/the-six-stages-of-debugging/

Re: :)

You can get base models for considerably less than that now, including the long-range one. There aren't many options, I think mostly just the 'Trophy' (oh, and different paint colours ;-) ), and that's only a few grand so nowhere near a Tesla Model 3. Though the 0-60 of 3.8s means they have an X-Power which is a bit more.

Other than parts and dealers there aren't many negatives, but it is a cheap car (correction, cheap *for an EV*) so there are some niggles. By far the most common is the lane-keeping-assist which is fine on large well-marked roads but poor on small ones. It's still good for the cash which is why it was the second-best selling EV in the UK last year.

Personalized pop-up was funny for about a second, until it felt like stalking

Re: Idiot

There used to be a shop near here that sold door furniture. It went by the name of 'knobs and knockers'. Sadly it is no more, I suspect they couldn't go online when the rest of the world did.

Uber and China's BYD agree deal to roll out 100,000 EV fleet

Re: Burn Your Driveway

My MG4 handles rather nicely. I mostly drive like an old fart but have played with it a couple of times to check what's available should I need it and I've been pleasantly surprised, you can feel the weight a bit but not as much as I was expecting. The only things that let it down are the "driver aids" like the lane-keeping assist (which I can only assume was sponsored by car repair companies) but from what I can tell that's the case on a lot of modern cars regardless of country of origin.

Kia Niro electric vehicle defies physics with record-breaking 114 million miles on the clock

Lane Killing Assist

Yeah, it's all of them, not just the Niro & Kona. MG4 forums are full of people going nuts as their car has not just bleeped but has tried to steer them in to a ditch. I assume (hope) NCAP have looked at this and the cars are safer overall when you compare the reduced number of motorway pile-ups, with high chances of fatalities or serious injuries, against an increased number of lower-speed crunches where the LKA got confused by a country road. Essentially though you're right, the systems need to be improved so they work properly on most roads.

Chinese electric car brands zapped by price surge as EU cranks tariffs

Re: Mostly Garbage

I've got an MG and I like it. Yes there's some cr*p, e.g. I've had to teach everyone in the family how to turn the lane assist off as it's diabolical and turns itself on each time you drive (thanks NCAP), but mostly it's great.

Rear-end crashes prompt probe into Amazon's Zoox self-driving cars

Re: Easily solved

I'll have you know I'm a motorcyclist and I'm not "about 50". I'm late 40s, dammit.

Baidu's PR head has a PR problem after workaholic social media posts

Wouldn't that be 439?

Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room

I only got Reading to Cardiff. I had to get the travel people to update the internal system from 'never allow first class' to 'only allow first class if it's cheaper than a standard ticket'. Ah, the joys of rail ticket pricing in the UK.

Sadly I was never able to convince them to allow me to book first class when it was 50p more than standard even if I paid the extra myself. Fair enough I suppose, there would be an admin cost to all that, but annoying.

San Francisco's light rail to upgrade from floppy disks

Re: "best in the US"

<Yorkshire accent>

You had it lucky! When I were a lad...

</Yorkshire accent>

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

Re: Modifications

Ah, the CPC 464. I have fond memories of that. Probably more playing "Harrier Attack" than of writing some incredibly elementary BASIC to make a little character man run across the screen.

I have less fond memories of waiting 17 minutes for a game to load from tape, from (very hazy) memory it was called "Sultan's Maze", only for it to be, well, crap.

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

Ouch. It used to be two, but I guess that's shrinkflation for you.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Re: Nice day for a trip to Scotland

Bracknell? Really?

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

Re: Dictionaries

I suggest to my former boss, for whom English was her second language (or third, or forth), when she wanted to say she would examine something methodically, she should really use 'analyse' rather than 'analise'.

You have to love English. Nothing like a bit of consistency, eh?

BOFH: Cough up half a grand and we'll protect you from AI

Re: Its a cunning wheeze

Oh, a missing word in the spelling pedant post, that's just beautiful!

Amazon Prime too easy to join, too hard to quit, says FTC lawsuit

Re: It is not just Amazon

I recently got fed up with that, where I signed up to a 18-month deal for £38/month and then 7 months in they raised it to £44 "because inflation". Initially I did the usual, phoned up and they offered me £36 so I signed up, but then I got pi**ed off so cancelled it and went with Toob. A few days after we'd had Toob installed VM texted me to offer a new deal of £14/month! Though I could have cancelled the new service (within 14 days of signing up) Toob hadn't done anything wrong and VM had wound me up royally so even though it would have saved me money I told them to stick it.

Seriously, boss? You want that stupid password? OK, you get that stupid password

Re: Simples..

I hope his name wasn't Esra

Uptime guarantees don't apply when you turn a machine off, then on again, to 'fix' it

Re: A strange feature of fault-tolerant systems...

Thanks Keith. The invoice for the replacement keyboard is in the post.

Four top euro carriers will use phone numbers to target ads and annoy Google & Facebook

Re: Those whowant targetted marketing

Yep, that's one area they really do need to improve. At that point I am not at all interested in seeing any drill ads and they should move on to ones for first aid products, plasterers and decorators.

Re: Those whowant targetted marketing

OK, I'll put my hand up. Say I'm interested in getting a new drill. I do a few searches while I'm researching, the advertisers pick up on this and I then see ads for drills (or bits, or eye protectors, or whatever). It might bring something to my attention I haven't seen and I like. I'd rather that than random ads, say for incontinence pads[1].They're only ads, it's not as if I'm forced to buy anything.

p.s. I'm none of young, female, or employed in the coloured crayons department.

[1] For now at least. Maybe in the future.

Learn the art of malicious compliance: doing exactly what you were asked, even when it's wrong

Re: Coffee... and Tea

When I was a good little boy I made my parents a coffee. My understanding was that they heated up milk and then added instant coffee so I put the milk in the (electric) kettle and, well, it wasn't as helpful as I'd intended.

UK's Online Safety Bill drops rules forcing social media to remove 'legal but harmful' content

Re: An exercise in pointlessness

Careful, feelings may run high, this is a highly emu-tive subject.

And yes, that's a standard el-Reg-sarcastic-pedant way of pointing out it's Chris *Rea*.

Boss broke servers with a careless bit of keyboarding, leaving techies to sort it out late on a Sunday

Re: Bosses shouldn't touch stuff...

I can stand up then! Though I should probably sit down after the time I entered (as root - yes, I know, I'm not so thick now):

rm -rf /somedirectory/ *

Note the space between the last slash and the star. Oops.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Re: Manual is optional,

Which category does the cattle-prod come under?

Rookie programmer's code goes up in flames ... kind of

I'd have accepted the blame for that one

Would be worth it to have the reputation as someone who could burn down a store with a code update.

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

Re: One word.

In school I had a friend who really should have become a QA tester, he could unfailingly find the unique combination to trigger the obscure bug in my code[1]. One time I thought I had him beaten, my program steadfastly refused to crash. Until he asked "what's that" and pointed at the screen, a centimetre-long spark went between it and his finger and the machine died.

[1] Or maybe, just maybe, I wasn't as good as I thought and my schoolboy code was littered with bugs and he just happened to find some of them. Nah, that can't be right, Shirley?

Braking news: Cops slammed for spamming Waze to slow drivers down

Re: feels valid to me

When a car is moving at a reasonable speed then it generates an area of low pressure behind it, particularly if the car has quite a large rear. That sucks up dirty water off of the ground, some of which will then end up on the back of the car.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Now 100,000kg smaller

Re: hype

Um, so you think if it's recycled then humanity will use the resulting plastic, however if it's incinerated then we will go without rather than using virgin plastic instead? I'm afraid I don't share your optimism.

Also the people doing this care enough about it to have put together a company and created the technology, while we sit at our keyboards and comment on El Reg articles. I suspect they've put a bit of thought in to the sea-life bit as well.

Microsoft veteran on how he forged a badge to sneak into a Ballmer presentation

Re: frequent password change

I particularly enjoy the "That password does not meet the required length and/or complexity requirements" message I often get. Particularly when I discover that the "complexity" it's moaning about is that I tried to re-use one of my last 20 passwords.

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

Re: Ah DEC

There's a number? I usually need support if I have to go to Basingstoke too.

Are we springing into a Y2K-class nightmare?

Re: if programmed correctly, mean that a straightforward update will do the trick

I'm a lazy programmer! That means I don't want to go back and sort out messes caught by short cuts in the first implementation so stuff like this is never hard-coded.

Though I'm happy to admit to being lazy (it is one of the three virtues after all) I do my best not to be shoddy and, well, you'd have to ask my peers about competency.

Bouncing cheques or a bouncy landing? All in a day's work for the expert pilot

Re: In the pilot's defense...

It's not just the extra power. I passed my test and went from a Suzuki GS125 to a Honda CBR600F. Got to the first corner and, oh, totally different feel and experience. Still, somehow I got round it, then learned to ride a big bike properly and had lots of fun on that CBR (until some complete b*stard nicked it).

I was totally behind when they put in the progressive access / direct access licence distinctions, hopefully saved a few people doing the same as me and coming off a lot worse!

Do you know what TikTok is? Then you might make a good magistrate, says Ministry of Justice

Re: I read the FAQ...

Hand me the black cap, will you, I'll be needing that

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

Re: Printer Cartridge

My father asked for help as the stupid new cartridge he'd put in his printer wouldn't come out at all. I eventually managed to extract the black cartridge from the colour slot. In his defence the cartridges on that printer are the same size, though slightly more damning is that he had needed to force it past the plastic part that is there to stop you putting one in the wrong slot.

Shocking: UK electricity tariffs are among world's most expensive

Re: Blame the renewables

Yep. That's the point. The move to renewables isn't because because they're cheaper, it's because if we continue to burn dead dinosaurs at the rate we are then we'll make (even more of) a mess of the planet.

A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes

Re: I had a somewhat similar problem

I had that. Rode back from deity-knows-where in small bursts (of incredibly boring but very fuel-efficient riding) between stopping to open the fuel cap and allow some air in. I can't remember if the bike had some safety feature where I couldn't get the key out of the cap without it being closed or I was just too young and dumb to think of riding along with it open.

Remember SoftRAM 95? Compression app claimed to double memory in Windows but actually did nothing at all

4MB of RAM

Ah, I remember when Dell accidentally put 4MB of RAM in to the new 486 my mum bought, even though she'd decided that was too expensive and gone for 1MB. Man, that thing FLEW!

F*ck, I'm old.

Tech support scams subside somewhat, but Millennials and Gen Z think they're bulletproof and suffer

Re: "recent accident"

My favourite is "f***ing hell, that was quick, they haven't even cut me out yet"

Brit MPs and campaigners come together to oppose COVID status certificates as 'divisive and discriminatory'

But conversely you can say no-one should be stopped from visiting a pub/restaurant/etc because they would have a significantly heightened risk due to not knowing if the other people there are vaccinated.

Re: Not "divisive and discriminatory", but essential

Yes, the vaccination should be (and is) voluntary, people can chose not to have one. However that doesn't mean the right to chose not to have one comes without any implications at all. While it shouldn't be effectively obligatory (e.g. you can't go in a supermarket without a vaccination or an exemption) it should be reasonable for e.g. mass events to insist on one.

Re: Not "divisive and discriminatory", but essential

I know at least 2 such idiots and they're not social outcasts. Though one works in sales which is pretty close. On reflection that's a good group to target as they'll meet a lot more people than us nerdy IT loners, and their grasp of science ... well let's be kind and say it is variable.

Re: Not "divisive and discriminatory", but essential

No, they don't prove you are safe, but they do show you're much safer than you otherwise would be. Seatbelts don't save 100% of lives yet we (in the UK at least, YMMV) do say they're obligatory. I wonder if when that was introduced there were arguments about people wearing seatbelts believing they are safe and likely to drive with less caution?

Why yes, I'll take that commendation for fixing the thing I broke

Re: Wisdom = learning from others' mistakes

Mee

Microsoft settles £200,000+ claims against tech support scammers who ran global ripoff from cottage in Surrey

Re: This Morning

Mine are mostly either from Amazon or an ISP these days. I always press 1. I think the best I've managed is about 25 minutes before they realised I'm not actually following their instructions and installing a remote desktop program. Some take it gracefully, others get a bit sweary.

VS Code acknowledges its elders: Makefile projects get an official extension – and VIM mode is on the backlog

Ctrl-d. I have the 'Duplicate selection or line' extension installed.