Posts by Lord Elpuss

More than $100m in cryptocurrency stolen from blockchain biz

Re: What I find odd

"Nicking $100 million of something would be front page news if it was in the "real world". "

'Real world' news needs to be in soundbites of 30 seconds or less so as to be digestible by Joe & Sharon Average in between their daily COVID and "Live in fear" reminders by the talking heads. Anything remotely complicated or needing more explanation than 'somebody bad dun something bad and here's a picture of the loot' won't make the front page.

Watch Idiocracy. It was satire when it was released in 2006; it's now terrifyingly close to the truth.

Samsung fined $14 million for misleading smartphone water resistance claims

Re: I propose a new law

Apple doesn’t call their phones waterproof; it calls them “… splash, water, and dust resistant … under controlled laboratory conditions”. They also clearly state what these ‘laboratory conditions’ are, eg IP68.

If the LCI is red, the device was exposed to environmental conditions outside IPxx as applicable. No contradiction here.

Re: I propose a new law

” Nope. I had a phone (don't remember the brand) sent to me by work. It arrived in a clear plastic retail package (inside the shipping box of course) and I could easily see the moisture indicator on the back was a bright red.

“

So it was broken. Not relevant to the original argument.

Re: Common sense...

I guess I just expected better from Reg readers. 99% of the time I don't have a problem with downvotes; I have some controversial views on Apple for example, which always get their share of downvotes.

Having a different opinion and expressing it with a downvote is absolutely fine and I respect that. Downvoting someone for saying they don't know how to do something however is not 'having a different opinion', it's 'being a twat'. And I'd hoped that people here were better than that.

Re: Common sense...

Incredible. Downvotes for saying I don’t know how to do something. There really are some pricks on this site.

Re: Common sense...

To be fair I'm pushing 60 and have never needed to bleed a radiator. I'm sure I could given a quick Google, but I wouldn't immediately know how to do it.

Re: I propose a new law

"These moisture indicators turn red when phone is used in a humid environment, so they are pretty useless."

The inside of most modern phones is a sealed space and not impacted by external humidity in any meaningful way. Using the phone in a humid environment will not change them.

Re: I propose a new law

"Moisture exposure turns a dot red and voids the warranty? It's not waterproof. A little bump breaks the glass and it's not covered? It's not a durable phone. 5G not guaranteed to work? It's not a 5G phone."

Define 'moisture', 'exposure', 'red', 'waterproof', 'bump', 'break', 'durability', '5G' and 'coverage'.

Not defending Samsung here because I f*ing hate them with a passion, but if manufacturers weren't allowed to make "within reasonable expectations" claims in their marketing material, then we could expect that the terms and conditions of warranty would need to be delivered by a forklift as EVERY single possible convolution of every single term would need to be legally defined. Which would put the price of a phone up into the tens of thousands, just to pay the lawyers.

SpaceX reportedly fires staffers behind open letter criticising Elon Musk

Re: If they can prove their diversity allegations this could get expensive

"If you have a job you really like other than one thing that really bothers you, why not take a shot at possibly addressing that one thing?"

If the 'one thing' that bothers you is excessive D&I nonsense, then the problem is you, and you need to 'educate yourself'. As the wokerati like to say.

Re: A close reading...

"I would tell everyone I approached that I would only ask them once."

And did you?

Re: Does as I say, not as I do

"The rich and powerful have always been able to use the law to protect themselves from publicity."

True. And for the egalitarians among us: in theory the law applies equally to everyone. In reality, it's frequently open to interpretation, and making sure that interpretation falls in your favour costs huge amounts of money. Hence why it only really works for the rich.

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

"It spent the next two years being used for browsing the web and creating the occasional poster."

If this was the early '90s, 'browsing the web' could probably have been done - in entirety - inside of an afternoon.

Apple may have to cough up $1bn to Brits in latest iPhone Batterygate claim

Re: This is why engineers shouldn't decide new features....

” the throttling covering up the defect.“

What defect?? The fact that all batteries lose capacity as they age??

Re: This is why engineers shouldn't decide new features....

"... the engineers undoubtedly decided on this feature being necesscary, to solve a percieved problem and went about solving it in a practical, common sense way."

I think this is exactly what happened.

From a technical/solution perspective, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with what Apple did; in fact it was very well designed and implemented. What they THEN did was not communicate it effectively to customers and "Genius" staff; which led to many* people being driven to upgrade their phone, when they could have just bought a battery.

Not an absolution of guilt, but worth understanding where the process broke down. The engineers who came up with the solution are probably howling in frustration about how their good work turned into a PR disaster through no fault of their own.

SpaceX staff condemn Musk's behavior in open letter

Re: Woke Inc

If you have a problem with “Can’t get it up (to orbit), lol” then you have a serious sense of humour deficit. Grow the fuck up, and learn to recognise what’s serious and what’s not. It’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about: woke sucking the life energy out of ANYTHING that doesn’t match the impossibly narrow worldview that defines what they find ‘acceptable’ or not.

Hint; your definition of ‘acceptable’ doesn’t define the world. If you don’t like it, ignore and scroll on; cancel culture attitudes like yours make me sick.

Re: Woke Inc

Not a shill, just sick of woke. It's about time companies grew some balls and pushed back against the more idiotic D&I policies; mandatory pronouns, misgendering-is-a-crime, unisex everything to avoid offending some trans activist somewhere, huge lists of forbidden words, 'mental health' days and so on.

It's a world gone mad - and companies are having to pay huge amounts of money to worthless, ineffective and work-shy cretins to avoid D&I lawsuits that will cripple them, which means less money for people actually willing to put in a day's work without having a cry break because somebody assumed that their beard, beer belly and pants bulge meant that they were a man.

Re: Woke Inc

"Yes. SpaceX's job is launching space vehicles, not coddling woke snowflakes."

^ This.

Re: Dear Employees,

You mean like SpaceX, Tesla, PayPal, Neuralink, Deepmind, Hyperloop, Starlink, Zip2 or Solarcity?

Idiotic comment.

Re: Woke Inc

I believe they do - and the pan shots of the team during a rocket launch tend to back this up. It’s a D&I smorgasbord.

One suspects the issue is more along the lines of zero tolerance for less than stellar work; which if you happen to be of a D&I bent, IMMEDIATELY brings out the Victim mentality nutjobs claiming that xxx was fired because of his/her/it’s skin color/gender/orientation, as opposed to the rather more logical explanation that they were just plain crap.

Re: Woke Inc

”ROFLAMO!“

Laughing ass my off? Or is this a derivative of something more flame-y?

Either way your comment, somewhat ironically considering your last sentence), is particularly clownlike.

512 disk drives later, Floppotron computer hardware orchestra hits v3.0

"I merely take issue with that specific assertion."

The issue is that your comment only took issue with that specific assertion - rather than recognising the excellence of the achievement in general and having your issue-taking as a by-the-by. Thus it comes across as miserable and pernickety.

It's like commenting on the 1969 Moon landing by saying Armstrong & co "...might not have been quite as prone to blowing up as previous missions, but that waste of fuel searching for a landing spot was nonsense".

It's missing the point.

"They might not be as modifiable as the older generations, but that statement is complete nonsense."

Downvote for being a miseryguts and spectacularly missing the entire point.

Samsung accused of cheating on hardware benchmarks ... again

Samsung are scum. At least as far as televisions are concerned. I'm on my 2nd Sammy 65", both have broken shortly after the 2-year warranty expired. The first developed a bright yellow line 1/3 of the way up the screen, my current one has lost every 10th horizontal line. Both faults are ribbon cable related, neither is covered by warranty and Samsung will do exactly nothing to help out. In the EU we have Fitness for Purpose legislation, Sammy's response is: take us to court.

The second - and arguably bigger - issue is that my TV has started pumping ads across the Smart Hub dock. Sammy added this as a 'feature' shortly after I bought my TV, and retroactively updated their T&Cs to say they were allowed to do it. I never signed up for that. My TV has now been fully disconnected from the Internet and serves as a dumb monitor only, but every time I switch between sources it throws up a message saying it's not connected to the Internet. Annoying doesn't even start to describe it.

I personally will NEVER buy a Samsung television again, regardless of how 'good' they sound on paper.

IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts in older workers

Re: The dog ate it

From a technical perspective that is actually possible. Old Lotus Notes used to keep emails in a .nsf file which was essentially an encrypted database; the encryption could be pretty powerful, and there was no concept of access control hierarchy; so there was no admin/domain password and if the user password was forgotten, that database became useless. Could it be cracked? Sure, given enough computer power to brute force it (I don't think Notes enforced a password delay mechanism) but I can certainly imagine it was decided that it wasn't worth the effort if the evidence could be obtained another way.

Re: The dog ate it

Exactly this

Re: The dog ate it

"That's my employer's email policy, anything over 60 days old goes to /dev/null unless you actually save a copy"

YOU lose access to the emails after 60 days. The COMPANY will keep them. There are 2 reasons for this: first is the legal mandate (varies per state and per country), and second is so that if there's a dispute between you and them, only they have access to all the information. Hence why I keep offline backups of everything - just in case.

IBM AI boat to commemorate historic US Mayflower voyage finally lands… in Canada

Re: Overly complicated?

"Obviously I have no idea of the complexity required, but why wouldn't a GPS receiver be sufficient for this task?"

A GPS sensor won't help identify an errant buoy. Or wave magnitude/direction. Or a fouled propeller. Or any number of mechanical things.

Tough news for Apple as EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: Optional Chargers

Same with all modern iPhones.

Photonic processor can classify millions of images faster than you can blink

Re: What it will actually get used for

If this is US/UK miltech there won't be any false positives to cover up; but they will release a nice report after a few months showing the categories that were identified by their infallible chip.

1. Legitimate enemy combatants

2. Legitimate enemy combatants dressed as civilians, but we weren't fooled

3. Legitimate enemy combatants dressed as civilians, 11,000 miles away from the warzone, in Walmart - but our chip is so good it got the bastard anyway

4. Legitimate enemy combatants who'd somehow managed to morph into the shape of a goat, car, bridge, traffic light etc, but our chip could see through their sneaky Commie camouflage and still take them out.

Our chip is perfect, it just found some "Enemy combatants in non-standard scenarios".

Engineer sues Amazon for not covering work-from-home internet, electricity bills

Correct.

Re: Sounds logical

Logical, possibly.

Smart? Most definitely not.

"Oh dear God yes. At one place I worked the tea/coffee machines were free (that was actually an appropriate price based on quality) but in a random discussion someone mentioned this could be classed as a benefit in kind and taxed."

My old company (big, blue, IT) did exactly this in the early 00's. Sent a memo round saying that free tea/coffee was a BIK, and we could either all have a fixed amount deducted from our salaries to compensate, or they could start charging. They went down the salary route for a while (€10/month before tax IIRC) until there was a backlash, then they started charging instead.

The coffee was shite either way.

Travelling as day-to-day commuting. At least in my case.

I could (and still can) claim 27¢ per km travelled for home-work. In the days that I worked at the office, this amounted to a fairly tidy €30 per day before tax, which was pretty much all profit if I decided to cycle in on my ebike.

And I agree on the can of worms thing. Working from home is a win-win; if companies have to start paying people to stay at home (as opposed to just saving a bunch on office space) then they'll start weighing the odds, and may well end up mandating that employees come back to the office - in which case everybody loses. The company, the employee and the environment.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Unintended consequence: the user now actively hates "Eric" with a passion, for removing her excuse to not do any work at all that day.

IBM ends funding for employee retirement clubs

See You Next Tuesdays.

IBM-powered Mayflower robo-ship once again tries to cross Atlantic

Re: Here's the "crew".

[0] Ever see IBM field engineers in lots of fewer than three?

They hunt in packs...

Does anybody know the budget for this? If it's been built on a shoestring by a team of enthusiastic grads, using donated equipment and more chin fuzz than expertise, then this is all par for the course. congratulations all, you're learning a lot, great effort and good luck with your project.

If on the other hand, it's been built with proper investment by proper companies, set up to benchmark and prove cutting-edge technology, with access to all the latest wizardry and thousands of years of combined experience, then no this is a shitshow and not acceptable. Go back to page 1, sack a few technology consultants, employ a few sailors who've actually been to sea and some grizzled engineers who know a bit about operating machinery in a marine environment, and do it properly next time.

Your snoozing iOS 15 iPhone may actually be sleeping with one antenna open

Re: It appears to be difficult

Apology accepted; it’s abundantly clear you’re not one for definitions, which is why I’m happy to help you out.

Re: It appears to be difficult

Define 'waste'. There are very few, if any, smart multifunction devices on the market these days that provide 100% of the features any given customer wants, with 0% of the features they don't. One person's "waste" is another person's "must have".

iPhones are brilliant, amazing tools for people who value the features they offer. This may not be you, in which case feel free to move along and buy something else, but that doesn't make what they do offer, waste.

"I" value the 'track when turned off' feature highly because I live in a - ahem - 'less than salubrious' area, where the local scrotes congregate of a weeknight around street corners, and 'lift' from passers-by with gay abandon and dearth of consequence. Police almost don't regard phone theft as a crime any more, because they're too busy tackling issues that people really care about; such as misgendering, wearing a culturally appropriated hairstyle and so on. Which means if my phone gets half-inched it's down to me and a couple of my less reputable (and more pungent) leather-jacketed mates to go and get it back. Which I can and will do, if the pond scum of humanity that stole it doesn't keep up to date on his tech news and doesn't realise it can still be tracked.

Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests

Re: Try Scooters in Madrid

Are you familiar with the expression: "When in a hole, stop digging"?

Re: Try Scooters in Madrid

"So your average speed, including stopping for traffic lights, was the same as the cyclist. No hold up at all then..."

No; it was only the same because they'd been stuck behind the cyclist for miles. If they'd been able to overtake earlier, they'd have been through the lights way ahead and there would have been no issue.

Re: Try Scooters in Madrid

"Did it not occur to you that this simply demonstrates the futility of the overtake at any cost mindset? Or that maybe you, and all the other drivers annoyed but not in the slightest inconvenienced by the non-delay might have been better off riding bicycles themselves?"

If the cars had been allowed/able to safely overtake earlier, they would have got through the lights at least one cycle ahead of the cyclist, and would have been way ahead. Being stuck behind idiotic, selfish and inconsiderate cyclists for miles on end will result in non-insignificant delays; as well as increasing the risk of a serious accident (and quite probably shortening the lives of everybody involved as a result of the increased blood pressure).

And no, the answer is not 'relax'; the answer is 'be considerate to your fellow road users'. Something many cyclists know VERY little about.

Believe it or not, I'm writing this as an avid cyclist who is frequently disgusted by the shockingly antisocial behaviour of my fellow cyclists on city roads.

Re: So technology works as intended...

"As you state, they're level 2 systems that seem to perform as described in the manual (I have an L2 myself). Fully autonomous driving *is* hard, which is why we don't have L4+ cars on the road yet, but this test / article says nothing about the capabilities of L4-L5 platforms."

*You* know this.

*I* know this.

Car manufacturers' marketing departments however, do not seem to know this.

Re: So technology works as intended...

"I don't know whereabouts in the world you are but here in the UK they've been turning motorways into "Smart Motorways" for the last decade or more and have generally caused complete chaos in the process."

The UK's definition of 'Smart' in this context beggars belief. It's designed to increase capacity at the expense of safety; nothing more; and it's an outright insult to anything carrying the label 'Smart'.

Re: So technology works as intended...

"These are L2 vehicles at best, but appear to be L3/4/5 tests."

They're L2 vehicles, but the marketing blurb (AutoPilot, CoPilot, EyeSight and so on) most definitely implies they are L3 at least; and Tesla's Full Self Drive doesn't just imply it, it outright states it. Therefore it's fairly reasonable to put these claims to the test, even if we know the likely outcome.

Re: Tricky technology

"but that detritus would also include clown-car deathtraps (anything make by Tesla, Kia, etc.)"

I own neither a Tesla nor a Kia, but this ^ is still pathetic. Grow up.

LIDAR in iPhones is not about better photos – it's about the future of low-cost augmented reality

Re: Reality distorition field

True. It'll be the 2050's version of misgendering. Sigh.

Re: Oh Apple...

You get a downvote from me because your comment is utterly irrelevant to the content of the article.

Mars Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance are talking again

Re: Should have a nuclear drone carrier

This time round, Ingenuity was nothing more than a technology demonstrator - a tryout to see if the concept of controlled flight on Mars was feasible. Now they know this, who knows what they'll put together next time to build on this concept!