Posts by Stuart Halliday

How's this for X-ray specs? Wi-Fi can read through walls... if the letters are solid objects

Next it will be someone suggesting we use this concept to see if there are hidden rooms inside Tutankhamen's Tomb. Even a hint would be valuable information.

Tesla faked self-driving demo, Autopilot engineer testifies

As soon as you have sales people on staff, you'll have gross exaggeration. They'll have a set idea of what the product can do (mostly imagination) and the engineer will have an serious vision of what it can't do.

Then as these two will not talk about daily these two aspects grows a huge gulf between them which gets wider over time...

Happens every time with every project.

Move over, graphene. There's a new super-material in town: Graphullerene

And this new substance can be woven into statically charged white cloth...

Two million year old DNA samples discovered, lodged in ancient sediment

Re: It's the Ice Age/Jurassic Park crossover we've been waiting for

Obviously looking for further Grants... So take anything said with a grain of something...

Next-gen Thunderbolt capable of 120Gbps for 8K displays

I'm just waiting for the 1st customer who tries linking 2x 1M cables together and expecting it to work!

CEO told to die in a car crash after firing engineers who had two full-time jobs

When i worked as IT in a company I quickly automated it via Scripts. It rapidly became a challenge to me to do this for as much as possible.

I just thought of it as a requirement for IT staff as I could so easily do it

Then years down the line I realised I had quite a bit of free time on my hands. So I used that to find tools online that would help me automate more of it.

Only a couple of times did one of the Managers sort of cotton on to my amount of free time.

But as I was doing my job, he couldn't really fault me.

I ended up performing easy soldering jobs to pass the time.

Never thought of applying for a second job...

Yes, it's true: Hard drive failures creep up as disks age

What to dae...

Are these drives actually dumped or are they sold off somewhere?

Windows on Arm users finally receive Native PowerToys

Nothing a real user would use...

Take this $15m and make us some ultra-energy-efficient superconductor chips, scientists told

$15 million won't pay for much

What are they hoping to fund with just $15 million. That'll hardly pay for the Coffee machines...

10x prices, year-long delays... Life as an electronics engineer in global chip shortage

Re: Counterfeit chips

I've came across counterfeit fuses, resistors, etc. If it can be copied, then believe me when I say are you 100% sure all your stock is genuine?

Brave takes the spring out of creepy bounce tracking

Re: Carbon tax

Make button which reports unwanted behaviour. If enough reports, ban that URL.

Toshiba reveals 30TB disk drive to arrive by 2024

You buy 2?

You obviously buy 2...

Hubble Space Telescope restored to service: No repeat of those missing messages, but here's a software patch anyway

Brilliant job lads. Give yourself a few Beers..

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

If you really need an emergency button mounted somewhere, always make sure it's out of reach of the stupidest person employed there.

It's fake ooze, don't fall for fake ooze: Alien fossils found on Mars might just be simple chemistry, uni pair warn

So, don't get excited until it looks like a T-Rex?

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

Pity so few people knew that BT sold a little adapter that prevented that.

I remember the huge adverts in PCW supporting this product. Page after page claiming it was super mega. Must have cost a small fortune in advertising.

Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done

He's obviously read the Arthur C Clarke novel 3001: The Final Odyssey. In which everyone uses a Metaverse in their daily life.

Get real: Say what you like about your app but don't be surprised if I trollsplain

Being Autistic, I tend to be very literal and easily spot these sentences of delusion and can sympathise with you.

They really put me off products when I spot them. Seems to me that PR is getting worse or my condition is getting more extraordinary as I age.

UK Ministry of Defence apologises – again – after another major email blunder in Afghanistan

Re: Timing unclear

Trivial to get any decent email Server to pick up on the use of CC and auto convert it to BCC.

Fire the IT Admin too for not implementing this.

Beige Against the Machine: The IBM PC turns 40

I remember our department getting a PC for the first time.

They immediately played flight sim and a racing game on it. The games were pirated right away of course

Everyone was shown this machine playing the Flight Sim as if it was it's most important job.

I soon found out it did little else.

As a BBC Micro user I couldn't understand the fuss made of this weak, hard to use £1000+ computer!

International Space Station stabilizes after just-docked Russian module suddenly fires thrusters

Who will be sleeping in the module tonight? Take lots obviously...

NASA's InSight lander expected to survive most of summer before choking to death on Martian dust

Just needs to tilt the craft on it's side, even a little sideways rock may help?

Hyundai takes 80 per cent stake in terrifying Black Mirror robo-hound firm Boston Dynamics

In the Canadian TV series War of the Worlds, these 'dogs' go around shooting people.

But no mention of this series?

Linus Torvalds tells kernel list poster to 'SHUT THE HELL UP' for saying COVID-19 vaccines create 'new humanoid race'

Linus :Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?

Moderators : Right here we go.

Google says its artificial intelligence is faster and better than humans at laying out chips for artificial intelligence

How long before we trust it and stop double checking it's correct?

How long then before we lose the skill set to do it ourselves?

Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

Let's be thankful that decent well trained IT staff found and sorted the bug.

Thanks, boss. The accidental creation of a lights-out data centre – what a fun surprise

If you display a big red button, expect it to be pressed. Stupid IT.

Days Gone PC: Melting pot of open-world influences makes for one of the more immersive zombie slayers out there

Re: "It ran silky smooth from launch ...

I could barely afford a GTX750Ti. So If it doesn't run on that, tough!

Arm has another 'most powerful CPU to date' – this time, the 64-bit-only Cortex-X2 for laptops and smartphones

Will it ever lose it's Acorn/Archimedes link?

iFixit publishes teardown of M1 iMac, shows that making a determination of repairability is still hard

Re: e-waste

Not true.

Maplin for example paid a fee to be exempt from this.

Apple announces lossless HD audio at no extra cost, then Amazon Music does too. The ball is now in Spotify's court

Re: Can you tell the difference?

Damn it. I keep picking the mp3 version!

Anyone care to speculate late why they're doing this?

Amazon says it destroyed two million knockoffs in 2020, a fraction of the amount it ships

EBay is just as bad.

Look up 2TB USB Sticks or fake HDMI leads or multiple coloured flowers. Thousands of items.

Ebay don't even have an option to report fake goods. Fake goods aren't even listed as an option to report.

Samsung stops providing security updates to the Galaxy S8 at grand old age of four years

Doomed....

So I guess my Galaxy S9 is doomed next year or sooner?

British IT teacher gets three-year ban after boozing with students at strip club during school trip to Costa Rica

Obviously he has personal problems if he thought he could get drunk in front of pupils.

FreeBSD gives ARM64 green light for production over x86 alternative's 'growth trajectory'

Does seem that ARM is slowly being adopted by the Big boy industries.

My first Arm was the Arm1.

Blockchain may be the machinery of mischief, but it can't help telling the truth

So if I print a hash of a NFT, could I sell that for a million quid?

Scottish National Party members found among list of names signed up to rival Alba Party after website whoopsie

That didn't take long...

The Audacity of it all: Version 3.0 of open-source audio fave boasts new file format, 160+ bug fixes

It works....

Grotesque soundbyte alert: UK government opens wallet to help rural areas get 'gigafit'

I wonder when domestic customers will realise that "36Mbps" you supposing paid for is shared between you and 50 other customers..

That's more like 720Kbps if they all try to use it at the same time.

Wake up and ask about the 'contention' ratio?

Faster than a speeding... tab opening? Vivaldi 3.7 is here

Still using Brave here...

Gummy bears as a unit of measure? The Reg Standards Soviet will not stand for this sort of silliness

Is this the American Gummy or the British Gummy?

The 40-Year-Old Version: ZX81's sleek plastic case shows no sign of middle-aged spread

The reason why the ZX81 was so delayed was the ULA was devilishly difficult to make. Ferranti had problems of Fungi getting into the die and wreaking the device.

Does Samsung want you to buy new phones? Asking 'cos Galaxies now get four years of security updates

Re: Mandatory 5 year minimum.

Wouldn't it be nice if companies offered a 5 year repair policy. I keep my phone until the SSD wears out... Still on a Samsung S9

Healthy 32-year-old offered COVID-19 vaccine because doctors had him down as 6.2cm tall with BMI of 28,000

Cute. But let's not make a mole hill out of a mountain?

Nurserycam horror show: 'Secure' daycare video monitoring product beamed DVR admin creds to all users

About time we had a government system of testing security and issuing certs of hardware.

'It's where the industry is heading': LibreOffice team working on WebAssembly port

If they think more people will run LO because it's in a web browser, then think again.

Most users have no idea what a web browser is or what it does.

Looking for the perfect Valentine's gift? How about a week of retro gaming BBC Microlympics?

I wanna play Sentinel....

https://thekingofgrabs.com/2019/03/06/the-sentinel-bbc-micro/