Posts by mantavani

iOS 18 added secret and smart security feature that reboots iThings after three days

Re: Microsoft - Ahead with security!

That reminds me of working for Maplin electronics the day the in-house EPOS rolled back around to transaction number -2147483648.

Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week

A very perceptive comment that I've shamelessly stolen from social media (unsure of the original attribution) - CEOs think that the office environment is full of non-stop brainstorming and productive work for the same reason that King Charles thinks the world smells of fresh paint.

Raptor Lake microcode limits Intel chips to a mere 1.55 volts to prevent CPU destruction

Re: From Intel...

Depends on your frames of reference :D

“According to Intel's internal testing, performance hasn't changed for Raptor Lake CPUs except in a few cases“

So - performance hasn’t been affected except in cases where performance has been affected…

Under-fire Elon Musk urged to get a grip on X and reality – or resign

Re: Pedo Guy to the rescue!

I would agree that we shouldn't use radical words when they're not called for as it devalues them to some extent. I was struggling with what label to apply, but I think Ian Dunt has it right in his latest Substack:

The F-word is always difficult. It has two meanings.

The first is objective, on the basis of certain attributes. These are hard to pin down because fascism has no intellectual substance, but generally speaking it would have most of these qualities: a love of violence, a hatred of the out-group, a narrative of victimhood which usually takes the form of a conspiracy theory, a myth of national renewal, contempt for socialism and to a lesser extent liberalism, a belief in totalitarianism, total obedience to the leader, conformity, and the complete submission of the individual to the group identity.

Obviously many of these qualities are not present in the rioters. There's no particular reason to think they want totalitarianism, or total obedience to the leader. Indeed, there is no one leader to conform to really, it's all very diffuse. But enough qualities are there to authorise the use of the word fascism. And honestly, that's not even a particularly controversial view. If you see skinheads doing the Nazi salute while conducting racist attacks, that's a fascist you're looking at right there. No point wasting brain energy on settled disputes.

The other meaning is subjective. It's about the extent to which we need to hit the emergency alarm and say that we're seeing something particularly dangerous happening on the right. It's a word to wake people up, shake them by the collar, and shout: pay attention to what is going on out there because it's some pretty dark shit. This criteria was also satisfied this week.

You don't have to call it fascism. But if you want to, that is a perfectly accurate word to use.

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/putting-the-far-right-back-in-the

SpaceX's Falcon anomaly could have serious implications for the space industry

Re: Starliner rescue?

Really amazing that STS-93 made it to orbit, and Chandra along with it, at all. A billion-to-one coincidence that a serious electrical short occurred at the same as the engine issue, accidentally mitigating it and preventing what should have been a squeaky-bum-time contingency abort. Worth reading about!

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Good

You're assuming this system is idiot-proof, which is to underestimate the ingenuity of idiots. I have auto cruise on my car now, and occasionally despite being set at the correct motorway limit trundling along quite happily at 70, I'll pass something the upsets it - my favourite being a truck with Euro km/h speed limits, and as my car has a lot of pickup NOW YOU'RE DOING 90 MPH. Best bit is it tells you this on the dash with a graphic flash, and as we're visual creatures that's what pulls your attention first. Now I expect it every now and again I can catch it but it'd frighten the life out of my mum.

Re: The devil is in the detail

The adaptive cruise makes a reasonable stab, but using it on country roads results in my wife telling me I'm driving too fast (although it knows what's coming - hills, bends, roundabouts - I find it overestimates safe or at least comfortable cornering speeds) and occasionally misses posted limits. And I think lane assist hates cyclists and parked cars. But at least if you brake in your ID you know you're charging the battery rather than wearing out the brakes. Don't you drive in single-pedal/regen/B mode? In any case with all these assist features making our lives easier the main hazard I find on very long drives these days is the possibility of falling asleep due to complete boredom.

Re: Good

I remain to be convinced, because the signposted limit is not necessary the safe limit, and people who were 'just doing the limit' quite often get themselves and/or others killed. I suspect that people of the OP's mindset are the kind of people that I frequently follow doing 40 in a 60, and continue doing 40 through the 30, and yep, still doing 40 out the other side.

In any case, my current VW - which has the detection kit if not the annoying beeping - is not apparently capable of recognising the 4 miles of national speed limit on the way in to town, thus pissing off everyone following if I try to use the 'smart' cruise (its useful on motorways, but surely no-one is ignorant of the limit there). Meanwhile, the lane assist frequently tries to get me to turn in to parked cars or other obstacles that I'm passing courteously. It's the opposite of helpful. I've yet to have it properly correct my road position, yet if you turn it off, it's back on again the next time you start the car.

TeamViewer can't bring itself to say someone broke into its network – but it happened

When you're even being satirised in a Jason Statham B-movie (The, erm, Beekeeper) it's probably time to take a good hard look at how you're doing things.

Asda IT staff shuffled off to TCS amid messy tech divorce from Walmart

Re: Thought this was a UK rag, albeit online

The differences are mostly down to Noah Webster (he of the US dictionary) working in the early 1800s.

California upgrade company aims militarized 'Tactical' Cybertruck at police forces

Bodies of water

> Tesla CEO Elon Musk says his truck will one day be able to cross bodies of water, including rivers, lakes, and even seas, as long as they aren't "too choppy."

It’s probably not the look he was going for, but I’m picturing Jeremy Clarkson trying to cross the English Channel that time in a Toyota Hilux.

Musk axes two more senior Tesla leaders, guts public policy team – report

Context

Here on planet Earth, sales of ICE cars peaked in 2018, and globally BEV and PHEV sales are more than healthy with EVs accounting for around 1 in 5 cars sold. In the US alone, to the end of 2023 the market grew by just under 52% compared to the previous year.

The challenge for US and European car makers is indeed their profit margins, but in the sense that the sunk costs in their ICE programs mean easy money in the short term. They make plenty on EV sales, just not quite so much, however they also know that if they don’t pull their fingers out they’ll have their long term market share lunch eaten by the Chinese. That’s why the US administration is talking of 100% import tarifs. In the domestic Chinese market, most EVs are currently cheaper than their ICE counterparts.

The Hertz sell-off was as much about pie-eyed provisioning and more importantly serious management issues with the Tesla fleet (that lack of model-year consistency really bit them hard), and even then only represents less than half of the overall Hertz EV fleet, which was previously 80% Tesla. Their stated aim is to continue, perhaps slightly more cautiously, with other brands.

Your infrastructure issue is going to be heavily dependent on where you live and what you think a long journey is of course, but around these parts that hasn’t really been the case since the early adopter wilderness c. 2016 (I take my hat off to those of you who have been doing it longer than that). We didn’t start off with gas stations on every corner either.

Sources:

https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/us-ev-sales-grew-nearly-52-in-2023.html

https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales

https://electrek.co/2024/04/22/global-ev-sales-are-robust-more-than-1-in-5-cars-sold-in-2024-will-be-electric/

https://www.motortrend.com/news/hertz-ev-fleet-sale-tesla-report/

Meta connects Threads to the Fediverse

Re: Here's how it will go

It’s a tale as old as Microsoft.

WhatsApp is really the ‘good enough’ Meta kingpin, in the UK & much of Europe at least. Hardly anyone under 35 bothers with a Facebook account these days. It will be interesting to see how the space develops, hard enough to prise my kids away from Snapchat. Perhaps these natural generational firewalls are good things.

When life gives you Lemon, sack him

Ketamine

It’s not and never has been a horse tranquilliser. It’s a dissociative anaesthetic. It’s used for induction of anaesthesia in vet medicine because its cardiovascular side effects - or lack thereof - are beneficial when you’re knocking out 600kg of horse. You might have it yourself if you’re involved in major trauma for the same reasons. But that’s not the same as no side effects, and as people who have used it recreationally might be able to testify there can be psychological implications. This is beyond Michael Jackson territory (who was misusing propofol, another anaesthetic).

Microsoft Publisher books its retirement party for 2026

Re: Serif PagePlus...

Although Serif lost their way for a while I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with Affinity, and their reluctance to adopt the SaaS model is to me an absolute breath of fresh air. The discount offered to v1 users for the full v2 suite cross-platform license was IIRC 40%, which isn’t bad, and there are pretty regular 25% discount offers, but I’ve yet to upgrade from v1 as it still works fine for my needs.

Apple makes it official: No Home Screen web apps in European Union

Re: Did anyone ....

You mean this letter of the law, Apple being the gatekeeper?

"The gatekeeper shall not degrade the conditions or quality of any of the core platform services provided to business users or end users who avail themselves of the rights or choices laid down in Articles 5, 6 and 7, or make the exercise of those rights or choices unduly difficult, including by offering choices to the end-user in a non-neutral manner, or by subverting end users’ or business users' autonomy, decision-making, or free choice via the structure, design, function or manner of operation of a user interface or a part thereof."

https://www.eu-digital-markets-act.com/Digital_Markets_Act_Article_13.html

Re: Yes, you really are the product

No, it was Nokia they killed stone dead, in handset terms at least, and while I've considered Sailfish (and even Ubuntu Touch when it was still a thing), without that critical hardware and app ecosystem it's always going to be more niche than niche. Apple and Google's bipartisan stranglehold seems inevitable now but it was surely as much accident as investment. Parachuting an MS exec in to Nokia to kill of anything that wasn't Windows Phone was a huge tactical error even before it was clear Windows Mobile was unlovable, and who would have thought Blackberry would drop the ball as catastrophically as they did.

Re: Yes, you really are the product

Same story as Lord El here. My iOS loyalty is only as strong as my distaste for the chocolate factory, and that's stretchable but not infinite. If only MS hadn't killed Nokia stone dead and we had Meego as a viable platform, or heck even Windows Mobile.

COVID-19 infection surge detected in wastewater, signals potential new wave

Re: It is only Covid if you take a test

The common cold viral complex has hundreds of representatives of various species, many of which are poorly understood. Four principle coronavirus species were previously known to infect humans, hence 'novel coronavirus', then 'Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus SARS-CoV-2'. It's misleading to group it/the subsequent variants together with the common cold viruses. Whales and kangaroos* are both mammals, but a marine biologist isn't going to be all that interested in the latter. Well, maybe if one unexpectedly turned up at sea.

I should be very careful with the blanket claim that infectious agents tend to evolve towards reduced virulence. It was a reasonable hypothesis when suggested in the early 1900s, and it has been shown to be so in a limited number of cases such as myxomatosis in wild rabbits, but it rests on a number of assumptions that either don't at all, or don't necessarily hold true for covid-19. Rather than me drone on, have a look at the open access paper below.

Essentially, 'endemic' doesn't mean what people would very much like it to mean.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10066022/

Kun Á, Hubai AG, Král A, Mokos J, Mikulecz BÁ, Radványi Á. Do pathogens always evolve to be less virulent? The virulence-transmission trade-off in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Biol Futur. 2023 Jun;74(1-2):69-80. doi: 10.1007/s42977-023-00159-2. Epub 2023 Mar 31. PMID: 37002448; PMCID: PMC10066022.

*despite what Stephen Fry said in that episode of QI, grrr.

50 years ago, Skylab's accidental rebels put Mission Control on mute

Re: Surprising

Apollo Applications was one of the most innovative, forward-thinking, what-can-achieve-on-a-shoestring programmes of the whole period. What else are you going to do with a spare S-IVB, stick it in a museum? ;) still, it's amazing that any science was done given the damage inflicted during launch.

Re: RE: limits

Well, this is why CAPCOM always was (certainly was then, and still is today at critical mission points) someone in the astronaut corps. They were better able to appreciate the situation in-orbit.

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

Re: It's an impressive sight

The landing queue was quite a sight this morning, lights as far out as you could see as soon as the noise restrictions relaxed, even for Heathrow it seemed busy. Fortunately we arrived from the US bang on time courtesy of Delta, the equivalent BA flight was four hours late departing, I assume because of the knock-on from inbound flights being delayed - not that BA can moan too loudly, given their own recent IT track record!

BBC to staff: Uninstall TikTok from our corporate kit unless you can 'justify' having it

Re: Apple 'privacy'

He didn't say he trusted Apple, just that he trusted them more than Google. I make the same judgement. Admittedly the spectrum of insitutions more trustworthy than Google is vast. It's unfortunate that it's essentially a binary choice between the two if you want to be able to use things like e.g. banking apps.

Capital crunch: Virgin Orbit confirms all ops on pause until Tuesday

Colour me completely unsuprised that a civil aviation administrator operates in a (small-C) conservative, risk averse manner. Given that we don't have an easy several thousand km of sea East of us to soak up prograde launch failures without too much trouble, and that airspace access has to be co-ordinated with multiple countries, I honestly think the CAA has done its job pretty well. Still, moaning about the local regulator works for SpaceX so why not everyone else too; Space Forge knowingly put all its eggs in VO's basket despite it being an essentially unproven launch option - increased rapid uplanned disassembly risk is therefore part of what they had to have accepted prior to launch.

Personally, I can't wait for Orbex and especially Skyrora to get their act together. The engine powering the latter's XL has much more successor-to-Black-Arrow feel about it; though if you want some John Scott-Scott love*, his influence lives on through Reaction Engines Ltd and the Skylon spaceplane.

* as a boy Scott-Scott carried bell jars of peroxide home on the school bus to build model rocket engines using bic biro tubes as injectors - when he joined Armstrong-Siddeley's rocket dept they worried there had been a security leak. He was part of the Black Arrow brains trust. What we could have had if people like him had been allowed to achieve their potential.

NASA starts assessing Orion capsule for refurb

Science Fiction

Apply the same logic to Apollo, which was also science fiction until it wasn’t anymore. Musk is the mouthpiece and the funds, but the quiet engineering skill at SpaceX is breathtaking.

The UK remains the only country to develop and then voluntarily relinquish an autonomous space access capability. That programme was for its day every bit as impressive as Falcon. For all the problems with his Muskness, the engineers need someone to facilitate rather than squander their genius, as happened here. Perhaps he has a place after all.

Where would Reaction Engines be now, if we were a country that could actually nurture and grow science and engineering talent, rather than just pay lip service to it?

That’s easy to answer - humans. Greater than 75% of emerging infectious diseases are of zoonotic origin, but it’s human interference in animal ecosystems (deforestation, intensive & factory farming, population growth) that exposes us to these threats, and we’re but we’re the only species capable of bridging them them into a pandemic.

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

It died in a freak HVAC accident.

Man wins court case against employer that fired him for not liking boozy, forced 'fun' culture

Re: "Fun & pro, that's our motto!"

> Not sure if I want to listen to the final episode

You really should - it’s sublime (or to put it in Arthur, brilliant).

Google: We had to shut down a datacenter to save it during London’s heatwave

Re: Heat island

Perhaps somewhere near 'London' Luton airport?

SpaceX's Starlink service lands first aviation customer

Re: Put that laptop away

Brilliant.

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

Re: People lost interest since Big Tech is morally bankrupt

Car companies & their heavy machinery compatriots do sadly do a lot of those things. Google 'right to repair' together with John Deere, or Tesla, or the the Alliance for Automotive Innovation (an industry ground backed by Ford, Honda, Hyundai, and GM that spent $26million in Massachusetts alone trying to gerrymander that state's proposed RtR legislation) - it's not just an IT problem, it's a problem of shortsighted narrowly-focussed corporates who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, jealously guarding their fiefdoms within regulatory environments that do little or nothing to contain them let alone protect the consumer.

Give us your biometric data to get your lunch in 5 seconds, UK schools tell children

"Contactless payment using facial recognition is very fast and efficient and gives time back to pupils to spend with friends or at lunchtime activities."

Gosh yes, because my children are so time poor.

Google emits Chrome 94 with 'Idle Detection' API to detect user inactivity amid opposition

Re: Would've been good to give the settings link

It's a really obtuse toggle, too. When it's on, the hint text is 'Ask when a site wants to know when you're actively using this device', when it's off this changes to 'Block sites from knowing when you're actively using this device'.

In other words, you could easily hit the toggle because you think you are turning the block on.

'Big updates' to Mac design app Sketch add real-time collaboration – but you'll need to fork out for a subscription

Quite. Serif in particular are having something of a renaissance with their excellent Affinity suite precisely because Adobe have pissed everyone else off - and there's less of the bloatware too!

Top engineer who stole trade secrets from Google's self-driving division pardoned on Trump's last day as president

Which makes it particularly ironic that having the word militia in your Facebook group name seems to be enough to get you knocked off the platform.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-55676607

We don't need maintenance this often, surely? Pull it. Oh dear, the system's down

Re: Financial software - Money extraction

And thus comes the whole right to repair argument. We bought a used Audi some years ago - it did not come with satnav installed, but installing it took approximately ten seconds on the dealer's computer. BMW are experimenting with renting out features now, while Tesla do all they legally can to stop you modding your own car, bordering on extortion (it'd be a shame if you lost access to the Supercharger network, right...).

It's cool for Brit snoops to break the law, says secretive spy court. Just hold on while we pull off some legal jujitsu to let MI5 off the hook...

Re: Arbitrary law is reappearing

Your assumption only holds water on condition that the PM in question actually commands a working majority in the House, rather than just behaving like he does.

France says 'non merci' to Facebook-backed Libra cryptocurrency

It’s constantly flown upside down here quite often too.

Apollo 11 @ 50: The long shadow of the flag

Cost

Can we dismiss this idea that the Apollo project was some kind of uber-expensive white elephant? During the Apollo era, NASA accounted for 4% of the US federal budget (today it's more like 0.5%). The whole shebang cost around $25 billion (without adjusting for inflation), which amounted to a massive stimulus package that the entire economy benefited from. Aside from the fantastic technological advances in every field from integrated circuits to materials science that happened along the way (NASA document more than 6,000 discrete innovations from smoke detectors to microwaves as a result of the space programme), for every dollar spent on Apollo the US economy benefited to the tune of about seven dollars.

For comparison, you could have had five and a bit Apollo programmes for one single Vietnam war.

25 seconds of fuel

I thought Bob Carlton stopped his watch at 18 seconds of fuel remaining?

Jodrell Bank goes full UNESCO while Dundee awaits the decomissioners

Re: £4 parking fee

There is a balance to be struck. The parking charge in particular just seems punitive and cynical. I love Jodrell, to the extent that one day I'd like to volunteer there. I don't pine for the days when you could walk right up to the dish without paying a penny - the science engagement is much needed and my girls (4 and 7) enjoy the place too. But at the end of the day, bar the Lovell itself, there isn't much to do there beyond soaking up the atmosphere. I can't justify £72 for an annual pass, and as it's now over £30 if we just feel like going for a picnic our visits will sadly be fewer and farther between.

Car park

The cafe at Jodrell does a pretty good breakfast, and the radio quiet zone is an excellent excuse to turn the phone off for a bit. Won’t be stopping by quite so often since they introduced the £4 parking charge on top of the entry fee though, which made my last visit there a bit on the steep side (in fairness also because I can never resist a bit of space tat from the shop). The car in front of me turned around at the gate (there is no warning prior to this). The lady on the front desk was very apologetic and explained it was the only way to get match funding out of the University. Seems like Dundee aren’t the only ones full of it.

Heathrow Airport drops £50m on CT scanners to help smooth passage through security checks

Re: if the tech will mean an end to the daft liquids rule – only 100ml per container

The last time I flew internationally, I still had to dump the large bottle of water I bought *airside* before going through the final bit of security theatre when boarding. I was incredulous.

Take-off crash 'n' burn didn't kill the Concorde, it was just too bloody expensive to maintain

Re: The most amazing engineering

I bet the runway was there before your old office. Always amuses me when people complain about what they moved next door to.

Re: The most amazing engineering

I used to time my walk home across Albert Bridge and through Battersea Park for the same flight, so we were both gazing at her at the same time!

Huawei Mate 10 Pro: The unfashionable estate car wants to go to town

Re: Why is it...

Me too. I also see Chevy Chase driving it.

Birds are pecking apart Australia's national broadband network

Re: Cull them all.

The plumage don't enter into it.

Hurricane Irma imperils first ever SpaceX shuttle launch: US military's secret squirrel X-37B

Re: Just Category 5?

Presumably a cat 6 storm will be just like a cat 5 storm, but with less crosstalk.

Up close with the 'New Psion' Gemini: Specs, pics, and genesis of this QWERTY pocketbook

Re: 18:9?

Any number of arguments? 3.14159...?