Posts by Swiss Anton

O2 joins UK 2G switch-off with summer 2029 start date

Re: Lack of imagination

I thought the plan was stop kids from accessing the internet.

Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't

Re: The state of Utah may be surprised to discover

But how will the online ministries be able to brainwash the masses if they don't have the internet? (Ok, I guess they can still go back to old fashioned TV, radio, and soapboxes in the park).

Brace for the patch tsunami: AI is unearthing decades of buried code debt

QA is no silver bullet.

The initial design will be based on flawed assumptions, it always is, and this is why we use agile to address those flaws as we discover them. All the QA does is to confirm that the software works as designed, flaws and all.

Watch out UK taxpayers: 28,000 HMRC staffers just got an AI copilot

Re: In other words, fine for drafting emails, less so for anything that actually matters

In forlorn hopes of trying to understand what, if anything, this AI is good for, I've been watching some videos. The other day I came across a killer. Someone got an AI agent on his PC to use the windows calc app to add 2 and 2, copy the result, and then paste it into notepad. I wish I was making that up, but I'm not.

Anthropic mocks up Claude Design to draft fancy new pink slips for marketing teams

Re: Anthropic is making it clear they're going after jobs

Claude Politician - be careful what you wish for, especially if the model has been trained on the current crop of world "leaders".

HPE tweaks T&Cs so the price it quotes may not be the price you pay

Re: "none said they will defer purchases due to higher prices"

"Any computer that you bought five years ago will still do the job fine now,", except that MS Win 10 is at end of life, and upgrading to Win 11 may require a new processor, and that will almost certainly mean a new computer. Yes of course there is Linux, but that might not be an option for many.

Asteroid 2024 YR4 won't smack Moon in 2032, boffins confirm

2020 LD

The trouble is, we don't always see them coming. In June 2020, asteroid 2020 LD was discovered, BUT only after about 36 HOURS AFTER it's closest approach, which was in the region 0.8 lunar distances, and at an estimated diameter of 80-110m, it was big enough to destroy a city if it had hit one.

Qualcomm, Nvidia ready for 'AI-native' 6G, if only the world knew what it was

Re: Multiplexing

Except that we already know how to do that at the RF level. What I'm thinking of is that Ai can reduce the data that needs to be sent by sending a vectors that are generated when it initially analysis an input. If the sender and receiver are using the same LLM, then the sender only need to send the token that represent a bit of input, not the whole thing.

Multiplexing

I believe it was the 1930/40s film actress Hedy Lamarr who played a pivotal role in her other career as inventor in laying the foundations for multiplexing that allows for more efficient use of the radio spectrum. The point being that you don't need to update the RF hardware to make it better, you just need to us it more effectively, and I can certainly see a case for AI doing that.

Fire resistant?

Will the 6G transmitting equipment be less flammable than the current 5G tech? (Asking for a friend).

Britain's creaking courts to use Copilot for transcriptions

Re: End of justice

You list lots of reasons why trial by jury is bad, all of which I agree with, but then you follow that with "jury trial is undoubtedly a good thing". Make your mind up.

My view on trial by jury is quite clear, twelve untrained, unqualified, inexperience, potentially unwilling, and definitely unaccountable conscripts are not fit to make potentially life changing decisions. Even a one year suspended sentence can affect future job prospects and the cost of insurance. Most of the world does not use juries, it's only Britain, and some of it's former colonies that use this system of medieval justice.

Microsoft boss on AI content: 'Nobody wants anything that is sloppy'

A simple search.

A simple search from last week*,

"5 letter word ending in olm"

M$ copilot responded with

"Here are some five-letter words ending in "olm":

GLOOM

GOLEM

LOOMY

These words can be useful for word games like Scrabble or Wordle."

Err, I'm fairly sure none of those words end in olm. (*BTW, I was absolutely definitely not cheating, honest).

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

Re: Scene

Please, don't give them any more stupid ideas.

Accenture tells staffers: If you want a promotion, use AI at work

Does getting AI to fill in my annual appraisal form count towards adopting this AI thing?

You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised

My solution to the problem is notepad. For each site, I have two key letters and the numbers + a clue that only I will understand. For instance "aaa.com l3! long runway". I know what that means, but I'm sure nobody else will.

And your Android phone is connected to the internet, which means it can be hacked. It's not a question of if, but rather, when.

Broadband rollouts feel the burn from AI memory frenzy

Presumably, for this AI stuff to make money, then it needs people to be able to connect to it and do something. If your customer's can't get online, then it's not going to end well for the AI providers.

Memory price explosion triggers PC buying spree

For those not familiar with the ZX81, as standard, it came with a whopping 1kb of RAM, and that was for the program, display, and data. The wobbly 16k RAM pack was a huge thing (well, about the size of a pack of 20 cigs).

Romanian rail workers accused of bribery turned to ChatGPT for legal tips

Re: I'd love to see an example defence statement

Romania is one of those sensible countries that does not delegate justice to a bunch of untrained, unqualified, unaccountable and inexperienced conscripts, also know as a jury.

UK agri dept spent hundreds of millions upgrading to Windows 10 – just in time for end of support

Re: Ha, ha, ha

What is so wrong with windonws 10? I've just had to fork out a wad of cash for a new PC that can run window 11, and I'm very annoyed.

Why aren't the IT companies being fined for imposing pointless upgrades on us that only happen because they want to make more £s/€s/$s by forcing us to "upgrade" to something that's more or less the same as the old, but just a little bit more annoying. They've fined Apple for it's abuse of power regarding it's app store, they should also be fining M$ for it's abuse of power.

US Department of Defense will stop sending critical hurricane satellite data

Re: There isn't a hurricane on the way

And let's not forget the Æ community

TSA wants to expand facial recognition to hundreds of airports within next decade

There is no privacy to lose.

To be able to compare the facial image with the id, the system needs to already have a copy of the id image. It doesn't matter whether the airport scanner saves it recorded image or not, the authorities already have a copy of your face. They will also have all the info the require to track your journey through the airline ticketing system and banks used to processes the transaction used when purchasing the ticket. All the tech does is reduce staffing costs, and arguably improve accuracy, as the robots won't have a hangovers at the start of the day.

Musk decides to bury dead Twitter accounts, warns users follower counts could sink

I know what you mean, my favourite "was" @WorldBollard. An account dedicated to bollards protecting the world from bad drivers. I say "was", becuase I was recently banned from twitter for reasons that remain obscure. I can't say I mind, I'm glad to be out of the cespit that accounts for 99% of the content that is now current on the site.

NASA scrubs Artemis SLS Moon rocket launch

The problem is with 1 of 4 engines.

Since 3 of the 4 identically designed engines do not have an issue, Occam's razor says that the problem is down to some sloppy build or QA work. Though of course that doesn't rule out fragile design etc as being the cause.

Google tests battery backups, aims to ditch emergency datacenter diesel

A sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Belgium has a stable electrical supply, hence the backup generators will usually only be fired up for a few hours every year for testing, so the CO2 implications are negligible. Batteries would be more useful elsewhere, for instance in storing excess renewable power for use on the national grid.

Pretend starship captain to take trip in real space capsule

It's space Jim, but not as we know it.

UK MoD data strategy calls for social media surveillance on behalf of 'local authorities'

Re: "population sentiment"

To be fair, there are many town halls up and down the land that could benefit from some rapid deconstruction.

Re: "social media sentiment analysis"

Er, but you're not.

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

My ZX81 was a stepping stone at just the right time.

Courtesy of an inspirational teacher at my very bog standard comprehensive school I had already learnt how to program by the time I got my ZX81, but that computer gave me the space to try things out, and 40+ years later, I'm still hacking away with the kids writing stuff that is a million miles away from that start. Without doubt Clive Sinclair (and his team) gave me a massive boost towards what ended up being my career. RIP Sir Clive.

RAF chief: Our Reaper drones (sorry, SkyGuardians) stand ready to help British councils

Berkshire council may have a use.

With appologises to the former Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman

"Come, friendly Brimstone missiles, and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now,"

Think you can solve the UK's electric vehicle charging point puzzle? The Ordnance Survey wants to hear about it

Forget that £2, EV's are going to get taxed.

As demand for fossil fuels falls the governemt will need to replace the tax income from old tech cars with a new tax on electric vehicles. I'm thinking that it will be some software that reports your daily milage back to a central computer, and which then taxes you for each mile that you drive. Obviously it will charge more for driving into cities.

The only challenge here is with the planners. Nuclear power is the only way forward. BTW.

Microsoft solicits Clippy comeback – later reveals it had already decided to bring back the peppy paperclip

Re: "Oh how we laughed and laughed, except I wasn't laughing..."

Down vote because your comment is not IT related.

Former NASA astronaut and Shuttle boss weigh in on fixing Hubble Space Telescope

Re: Faulty backup computer

I think the fact that we once had the ability to fix Hubble was a bonus. There will be no such options when it comes to the James Webb space telescope.

UK urged to choo-choo-choose hydrogen-powered trains in pursuit of carbon-neutral economic growth

Re: Huh

The problem is that it is very expensive to retrofit the required electrical infrastructure, and on some lines, like the one through to Aberystwyth, the volume of traffic doesn't come close to justifying that that investment.

Hubble Space Telescope sails serenely on in safe mode after efforts to switch to backup memory modules fail

Re: This is starting to look bad

If they can fix Hubble's optics, then I can't see any reason whty they can't attach a small rocket motor to force it's re-entry. It would be easy enough to ensure that it then comes down over an ocean. As to creating more space junk - satellites have been known to collide, so I would suggest getting it out of orbit when it's of no furthure use should be a priority.

Re: This is starting to look bad

I worked on software for the Envisat sattellite. It died / suddenly went deaf. I know it's not always possible to re-enter old spacecraft, but it has to be in your plan to try to do so if you can.

Re: This is starting to look bad

Hubble has far exceeded it original design remit. It has provided so much data that they will still be analysing it long after it stops working. My only hope is that when the end is really nigh, they point it back home, and let it burn up in the atmosphere so that it doesn't add to the ever growing "pile" of space junk

Internet Explorer downgraded to 'Walking Dead' status as Microsoft sets date for demise

Any businesses that still have to use IE probably have much nastier things to worry about than a flaky browser.

China to enforce social distancing on peak of Mount Everest

It clearly won't do for Nepalese Sherpas to mingle with Tibetan Sherpas. Who know what crazy ideas the later may learn from the former.

US declares emergency after ransomware shuts oil pipeline that pumps 100 million gallons a day

Re: One word:

You need to do more than check that you can recover from a backup, you need to make sure that the backup isn't compromised. There is no fun in restoring a system with a dormant virus which then wakes up and re-infects the restored software and data.

Ingenuity Mars Helicopter cleared for further, farther, flying after landing on 117-second fourth flight

Re: I've never been so happy to be wrong

I suspect that it probably uses some solid state accellerometers and rate gyroscopes, much like the ones in my mobile phone. Its a simple enough job to integrate their outputs to get a measure of distance travelled in the X,Y & Z directions. Since the flights are so short, the cumaliative measurement errors will be tiny.

Traffic lights, who needs 'em? Lucky Kentucky residents up in arms over first roundabout

Re: Er ...

By Fance

Sadly, the catastrophic impact with Apophis asteroid isn't going to happen in 2068

Re: Wish upon a star

We had a near miss with a 100m-140m rock in June of last year (it is named 2020LD). The rock came as close as 200,000 miles, which 80% of the distance to the moon. It wasn't spotted until 2 days after it had passed us. I guess we got lucky.

We need a 20MW 20,000-GPU-strong machine-learning supercomputer to build EU's planned digital twin of Earth

Re: A bit late, don't you think?

An "expert" on the radio (*) reckons we need to build 1 nuclear power plant, or a 2500 turbine wind farm, every day for the next 30 years to replace all of the fossil fuelled power stations in the world by 2050. He didn't say what the generating capacity of these units was, so I decided to do my own estimate based on a 800MW nuclear plant (like Hinckely Point B), or a 80x10MW turbines wind farm, and I came up with a more optimistic estimate of one of these every 4 days. My estimate based on current electricity demands and does not take into account the increased demand of electric cars and of replacing gas central heating systems.

So in short, I agree, we're fucked.

(* The radio show is a BBC world service programme How soon can we go carbon zero? )

The CIA's 'entire' collection of UFO records has been made available for you to sigh at

With every person and their dog / cat now having a smart phone with a camera, why isn't the internet awash with new UFO videos?