Posts by Dan 55

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

Re: How about unicode?

Flight plans are in capital letters only according to this.

So it can't be choking over a character which is not capital, or numeric, or one of a few symbols since this is so simple to validate.

Re: Expertise

activating what can only be described as an extreme fail-safe strategy (i.e. shut down all automated processing until the problem has been rectified).

Also known as SIGSEGV.

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

Re: QEII revenge

Got it.

That said the same principle holds. As ICAO codes have been a thing for years I find it difficult to believe that, in the Year of our Lord 2023, flight plans loaded by NATS are subject to the vagaries of encoding converters in the airport name in preference to the international code and one mashed up utf-8 or iso-8859-1 string or e.g. someone calling an airport by the town where it is ("Le Touquet Paris-Plage") instead of its real name is enough to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.

It would mean that NATS would fail much more often.

Re: QEII revenge

Er, shouldn't these things run on IATA airport codes instead of tripping up over a spelling mistake?

In any case the IATA name for LTQ is "Le Touquet-Paris-Plage".

Aerial cable tangles are still being strung up, but carriers are slowly burying the problem

The move came after a little bit of misguided shaming from Bill Gates, who mistook communication cables for power cables. Nonetheless, attention from the billionnaire techie was enough to drive the cables underground.

Telegraph poles are also a thing in the UK and US, maybe he should also drop a few hints in his home country and on visits to the UK.

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Re: I thought I was the last. . .

Even the computer science professionals with whom I work all use "top-posting" style.

What can anyone do? This war is over. Nobody rational is going to use a different posting style to the rest of the organisation.

Profits just keep rolling in at T-Mobile US. So only thing to do is axe 5,000 workers

Re: "We have zero intention of being a faceless – or heartless – company"

Sprint's big bosses have got a T-Mobile brand to use, that must be worth at least a year or two more of fluffy PR lines and customer goodwill surely?

Start rummaging: Atari's new 2600+ console supports vintage cartridges

Re: No shipping

Gaming and home computing did not collapse in a slump in Europe in 1984. The Atari VCS alone did though, probably because it was crimping out games like ET then burying them in a hole in the ground.

The only lead the VCS would have had this side of the pond would have between 1978-81. But still, I can't remember anyone I knew having one from 82 onwards. With game prices like these, nobody would want one. I can imagine them being sold on to the unwary to part-fund a home computer.

Re: No shipping

So it was launched in the UK in 1978 for £169.95 or £200 depending on where you look in this thread. Either price is quite pricey for 1978. It apparently sold 125,000 units in 1980.

Then the ZX80, 81, and Spectrum were released.

Then if you click here, search for "Numbers of units sold by Atari in 1984" for European sales figures, it's become a rounding error all over Europe compared to home computers.

Re: No shipping

I don't remember the Atari VCS doing well in Rightpondia, home computers were cheaper, did more, and the software was cheaper too.

It was just this thing that was advertised but nobody you know had one, like the Intellivision and Colecovision.

IBM sells off cloud business – yes, we mean Weather.com

Re: App uninstalled

Breezy Weather (link) seems to be a reasonable substitute.

You need to add the repo to FDroid, instructions here.

Musk's latest X-periments: No more headlines, old posts vanish, block gets banned

Re: It is amazing

Concerning.

Re: so blocking just blocks them from seeing you?

Block means they can't reply to your threads and you don't see their posts, mute means they can reply to your threads but you don't see the posts.

The difference is RWNJs still get to stomp all over your threads and insult you if they want and your followers get to see that even though you don't.

Microsoft wants Activision so badly, it's handing streaming rights over to ... Ubisoft?

Re: Virtue signalling

Now Thurrot is reporting that the EU thinks that Microsoft's concessions to the CMA go against the EU's own agreement with MS which required MS to licence to competing cloud services.

Perhaps MS let the cat out of the bag with their response to the CMA and their promise of "competing cloud services" to the EU always meant just Ubisoft, only they didn't tell the EU that.

Re: Virtue signalling

I thought Stadia proved game streaming doesn't work in the UK anyway for whatever reason (ISPs and Google just blamed each other).

Re: "Rare were at their best working with Nintendo"

Technically at their best, since their following 3D games were progressively more meh whereas 3D games made by others were better.

But their most playable games were those similar to their arcade roots. And they probably knew it since went back to arcade games in the NES/SNES era.

High severity vuln in WinRAR could allow code to run when files are opened

I don't see how unregistered WinRAR could be approved for corporate use anyway given its licence.

Apple's defense against apps vandalizing other apps still broken, developer claims

Apps are directories with files inside which follow a structure. They may be in user space or they may be in /Applications.

If the app folder is dragged to /Applications without an installer as most are, the owner is still the user (failure 1) and some of the files inside may be changed because Gatekeeper doesn't check everything on every run.

Also, apps create their files in ~/Library. The structure more defined than AppData in Windows but apps can still create files with almost any name they want (failure 2). Apple have been trying to retrofit jails for each app but a lot of stuff belonging to other apps can still be messed around with.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has a left wing bias – at times

Re: What do you mean by "Liberal"?

Sorry about that. I think I did confuse VVD with PVV and the red mist descended.

Icon for me.

Re: What do you mean by "Liberal"?

German FDP and the Dutch VVD [...] are right-of-centre parties focusing on small government and low taxes

Like you it seems there's another defining characteristic about these two parties I can't quite remember, it's on the tip of my tongue...

Re: An undesirable objective

Didn't my answer suggest ChatGPT highlighting different sourced opinions if it does offer them in a reply, not offering just one opinion?

Personally, I would always choose a centrist opinion about Shakespeare plays or health advice.

Re: An undesirable objective

If that's all you want out of an LLM, then it seems like you don't need an LLM, just a search function.

A search function doesn't stitch together answers from various sources. Hopefully we will get to the stage where LLMs will be able to do that with three caveats: 1) not making stuff up, 2) citing the different sources which it used to make its answer, and 3) citing authoritative opinions on the answer where necessary.

Your proposed LLM is easy to program at least, get some venture capital and go for it.

Re: An undesirable objective

Why should ChatGPT have an opinion? An encyclopedia regurgitator would be the best thing it could be.

Maybe it could find out that some notable people have said that this Shakespeare play is the best for these reasons and other notable people have said that another play is the best for those reasons, but ChatGPT shouldn't be giving its own opinion. All that would happen is humans would copy-paste that opinion and pass it off as their own and the Internet would fill up with something ChatGPT said for unknown reasons as the definitive answer.

Likewise for health, economic policy, foreign policy, etc... We really don't want LLMs to have an opinion and that should be the kind of thing enshrined in law.

YouTube accused of aiming ads at kids after promising it wouldn't do that

Re: Sleazy ads

Great, we've waxed lyrical about the 70s and 80s again, as always happens when this subject is brought up.

Nowadays schools push chromebooks so they have to be online to do homework. And how do you police them when they're on the Internet doing their homework, by not giving them a mobile and watching sitting next to them while they use the chromebook which oddly enough are designed to be always online all the time but are oddly remiss when it comes to parental controls for school-administered devices?

And even if you did do that (which is not a good thing to do when they're teenagers because if you do that to them at that age then they know you're implicitly saying you don't trust them), how would that stop Google, Facebook, et al targeting them for advertising? Every website builds up an advertising profile on everyone. Yes, commentards here all run a Pi-hole but that's not a universal solution.

And then they'll go to a friend's house or use a friend's phone and do everything they want anyway.

So, social media sites need to pull their weight instead of turning teenagers into the next credulous MAGA generation.

About the only thing I've been successful at is stressing that if it's on the Internet it's probably bullshit and you need to take whatever it is with a truck-full of salt, I think (I hope) the message has got through.

Hands up who wants a PC? Lenovo reports declining returns

Louis Rossmann has the same theory. Can't say I disagree.

Google reportedly designing chatbots to do all sorts of jobs – including life coach

Go ahead!

It works so well for Google's customer service, why not roll it out everywhere?

Musk's X caught throttling outbound links to websites he doesn't like

t.co links have been around probably as long as Twitter, only Musk used his galaxy brain to stick a sleep(5) in there if the address the t.co link lead to was NYT, Threads, etc...

80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office

Re: Idiocracy

I'm so sorry you're so weak of mind that you've been brainwashed by a social media echo chamber into the idea that getting into your car and commuting an hour each way twice a day is useful way to spend your time and energy.

Re: Yes, We Will Honor Our Pledges

Making employees go backwards and forwards to the office twice a day five times a week for no reason whatsoever somehow don't figure in their carbon neutral calculations.

Not call: Open source gurus urge you to dump Zoom

GitHub is easy to not use

You just decide not to use it and go to a (hopefully FOSS) alternative.

For existing projects it's more of a pain but if contributors have no problems keeping an open GitHub account then there's nothing stopping them from opening another account elsewhere, the T&Cs can't be worse.

Bank of Ireland outage sees customers queue for 'free' cash – or maybe any cash

It's a bank, of course it's not free money

The only way you're getting free money out of an offline cash machine is if the power fortuitously gets cut before it can talk to the mothership again and maybe not even then.

Perhaps the only way the bank was remiss is not making "this is not free money" message more blindingly obvious than it already was when the customer puts their card in, by displaying it in flashing red Comic Sans 36 point or something.

You're not seeing double – yet another UK copshop is confessing to a data leak

Re: The data was hidden from anyone opening the files

I'm sure they used higher grade protection than that, e.g. put the data starting at column AAA and row 65536.

Author discovers fake, likely AI-generated books written under her name

Your dystopia preview is ready

The runner up is someone selling fake books written using ChatGPT on Amazon and Amazon which uses ML to police suppliers, online reviews, and customer service failing yet again at all three.

The winner is the school district asking ChatGPT to tell them exactly which books out of all the ones they have contain references to sex, ChatGPT confidently making shit up (again), and children's education being restricted as a result.

Enshittification has escaped from the Internet into the real world.

Cumbrian Police accidentally publish all officers' details online

Rejoyce!

The £25m NHS data transfer deal to Palantir and recent leaks from the Electoral Commission, PSNI, this, and others means essential UK population data won't be lost. Putting data out to tender on the internet so organisations can make copies represents best value for money for the British taxpayer.

Honey, can you shrink the plugin? Mozilla allows desktop extensions on Firefox for Android

Re: Mozilla.is irrelevant on Android

As far as I can tell, if I press the reader mode icon in the address bar which appears for most pages with a fair amount of text, the text is reflowed.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Pi? Asus's 'NUC-sized' SBC aims to out-Pi the Raspberry

Raspberry Pi unfortunately (albeit predictably) priced themselves out of the market with v4.

What's the price of a comparable SBC to the RPi4 that's cheaper and do you think that SBCs are going to drop in price in the future?

CLI-beautifying ANSI escape sequences can also make your log files a security threat

Re: Seriously, who doesn't just load log files into a boring old programmer's editor

An editor which only understood plain 7-bit ASCII would mess up iso-8859 and utf-8 text and puctuate readable text with nonsense every so often where there is an escape sequence. Also you couldn't grep it.

You need a command which properly interprets escape sequences and removes them, like piping through ansi2txt would.

4 in 5 Chromebooks sold to US students in Q2 as demand rises

Re: Lifespan

All this aside, do you really want to train more British children in using shitty software from a long-term monopolist?

So you're saying moving from training kids to use shitty software from a long-term monopolist to training them to use shitty cloud services from another long-term monopolist is an improvement?

RIP Bram Moolenaar: Coding world mourns Vim creator

Re: Thanks for Vim on a Fish Disk

I'm another one who started using vim on the Amiga and since then PC, Mac, and Linux. I don't think there is a piece of software which has been used by more people over such a long period of time which is testament to the quality of the software and the person behind it.

Japanese supermarket watches you shop so AI can suggest more stuff to buy

Hello Mr Yakamoto and welcome back to The Gap

And so another bit of Minority Report came to pass.

China floats strict screentime limits and content crimps for kids

Re: It'll be interesting

I assume it'll be more difficult to bypass if parental controls must be built into the social network by law.

Brit healthcare body rapped for WhatsApp chat sharing patient data

Something not quite right here

Communications were sent to both all staff and Teams with the instruction not to use WhatsApp for sharing personal data. NHS Lanarkshire subsequently seized the phones of staff involved which was completed by ███. All phones were deprovisioned, which NHS Lanarkshire confirmed deleted the chat, and staff have been issued with new phones.

First of all, I bet many staff members had the unencrypted Google drive backup option enabled.

Secondly, it appears WhatsApp is not good enough for the NHS but it's good enough for the government. Shouldn't the ICO have instructed that MPs and civil service phones with WhatsApp be requisitioned, a copy of the chats be taken to get them officially recorded, and WhatsApp and data be deleted from the phone by now?

Biden urged to completely cripple AI chips to China

Re: But I *Liked* the Z80! ...

The MSX2 version is prettier but MSXes are more expensive.

Also the lead programmer funded the second Spectrum Next Kickstarter so hopefully it'll be ported to that too when he receives it.

Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan

Re: Summary of the UK's future climate/energy strategy

So you have no idea how Amtrak started, do you?

It was because privately-run US passenger rail failed. All private train operating companies either ended up joining Amtrak or went bankrupt.

Re: Summary of the UK's future climate/energy strategy

How does it not work? Rail exists because of private investors creating it and deploying it.

Tell me more about private US passenger rail.

Re: Summary of the UK's future climate/energy strategy

So why bother giving them money from government then? And why bother setting a minimum legal investment? Just let them sink as companies until someone buys it out and runs it effectively at a rational price.

They already tried that in the US and it didn't work.

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

I think there was a film about codejunky's posts made in 1973.

Re: Summary of the UK's future climate/energy strategy

Perhaps something as vital as rail infrastructure should be run by the government, that way train companies wouldn't need to receive bailouts from the government, make only the minimum legal investment, and sell tickets at a higher price all just to make a profit to distribute to shareholders.

(Idem water.)

By the way, the London ULEZ requirements are Euro 3 (2000) for motorbikes, Euro 4 (2005) for petrol cars and Euro 6 (2014) for diesel cars. Judging by the response to press coverage over ULEZ, it seems most people will be surprised to learn they do have a vehicle which meets those standards after all.

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

All of these problems are probably down to those .DS_Store files which just don't work very well on network drives or even if there is more than one user locally and more than two decades later Apple still haven't seen fit to replace them with something less terrible.

About the previous post:

it is negative advocacy, and promotes anti-platform sentiment

Don't we all get to the point in IT where we hate all platforms equally? Apart from retro ones of course.