Posts by A Non e-mouse

NASA's Mars Sample Return mission is in danger of never launching

Re: Space X

deliver on time

Either you missed the </sarcasm> or I want to know what you're smoking/drinking/injecting.

EE touts next-gen broadband Smart Hub with Wi-Fi 7 for 2024

Unless you're running a fairly closed network environment, QoS is impossible to implement.

Oracle at Europe's largest council didn't foresee bankruptcy

I'm not trying to defend Oracle, but some of El Reg's headlines give the impression that the Oracle screw-up is the cause of Brum council going bust. I haven't seen any evidence of that yet.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: Bolted Horses

What bugs me about Sky is that they want you to pay £X per month and still shovel adverts down your throat.

Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

There's protecting your intellectual property and there's just being an old school dick-head. I don't think it takes much to work out which one that Cambridge company are.

IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week

Re: 80km????

Three and a bit years ago people were already doing this. Smart employers were already offering some kind of flexible working as they saw it made their employees happier and hence more productive.

Lockdown made people realise how unpleasant big commutes were and so people lept at a more flexible working environment.

At our place, I'm hearing stories of people who have moved to be a 5 or 6 hour commute from their new home to the office and are refusing to ever set foot on company premises ever again. If that's part of you working your notice so be it, but as a permanent working arrangement? I'm not so sure.

Setting organisation wide mandates for how often staff need to be in the office will only breed (more) resentment. As a manager I see the benefits of both working from home and staff coming together in person. For me, different teams come into the office different amounts depending on their needs. Some come into the office almost daily, whereas others come in maybe once every six months.

Flexible working is here to stay. Let's be sensible and let teams and managers decide what works best for them. If a team or person aren't being as productive as you think they should be, then that's a HR matter for the people involved that needs to be addressed.

A corporate edict of "You must be in th office X days out of Y" is pointless. There are only two possible reasons for these edicts:

1 - Stupid top brass

2 - The company has signed expensive leases on offices which they can't get out of and want to see some return on their money.

BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

It seems VW might be learning/listening as early reviews of the latest ID say it has far more buttons.

Mozilla calls cars from 25 automakers 'data privacy nightmares on wheels'

Re: A long time ago...

Wendover Productions has a video about how airlines have become banks.

IT needs more brains, so why is it being such a zombie about getting them?

Qualifications are overated in my opinion.

Show me what you've done. Tell/Show me how you think.

Unfortunately, these are rather nebulous qualities so HR doesn't like them. (If you can tick boxes 1, 2 & 3 you're hired is all that HR are interested in)

Arm wrestles assembly language guru's domains away citing trademark issues

I'm sure this won't hurt ARM's public image one bit.

Nope, not at all.

Nothing to see here.

Move along please.

US Air Force wants $6B to build 2,000 AI-powered drones

Re: They are getting part of a clue

Maybe someone needs to send the military's top brass a copy of Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority" short story.

Dropbox limits ‘all the storage you need’ unlimited plan, blames abusive users

I've seen both Dell & Cisco servers with SD cards inside them - usually two in a mirrored configuration.

They usually use the SD card as the O/S boot device as ESXi isn't a storage hog for nor does it require high performance. (The shared storage the VMs sit on however, is a very different kettle of fish)

110GB ISO? What media is that for?

Re: the company saw more of this abusive behavior

This is, however, why I tend to be a bit nervous about unlimited packages.

In my day job, I refuse to purchase services with "unlimited" in the sepcification. I always push our lawyers to replace "unlimited" with an explicit number in the contract. My lawyer loves me for it, but it always blows the minds of the sale droid desperate for their commission.

China's top EV battery maker announced a breakthrough, but top boffin isn't convinced

Re: Charger power rating

Most people charging at home will only be topping the battery up.

Most of my charging is at home at less than 10p/kWh. My parents do most of their charging at home too. (Lucky buggers have solar so it's "free")

I feel that destination charging is the way to go as it's much cheaper than the public high power chargers.

Re: Charging is only part of the equation

I saw a program the other day where a new charging station actually had its own batteries to smooth out the load on the grid.

I've heard that Tesla have a rule that if you don't move your car within something like 10 minutes of your charge completing, you start getting fined.

J.D. Power, also cite a lack of charging infrastructure and price as factors influencing purchasing decisions.

I own an electric car. Whilst the amount of chargers and their prices are issues, they're not the number 1 problem for an electric car driver. It's the availability/reliability of chargers that's my biggest worry on longer journeys.

If I can guarantee getting to a charger and it working and being able to use it in a timely manner (i.e. not having to wait an hour or more before I can plug in) planning longer trips is much less stressful. At the moment, I work on the assumption that my prefered charge point won't be working and plan backup locations.

Some of the newer motorway service stations have large rows of chargers, but some motorway service stations have just two chargers.

NASA still serious about astronauts living it up on Moon space station in 2028

I seem to recall an annecdote about the Apollo program. During one of the moon landings an astronaught said "Ooh, that's interesting" and completely changed what they were going to do to investigate.

Robots are great at doing what they're told to do. Humans are great at changing plans on the fly.

Is this really going to happen? The Artemis program only exists to create jobs and keep politicians in power. It's nothing to do with landing humans back on the moon.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: This is government.

You also forgot to add:

Government: We will sack anyone who disagrees with us.

Re: "Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear."

Godwin's Law stikes again.

Cage match: Zuck finally realizes Elon is full of twit

People also think that big muscles mean you're strong. I've seen plenty of skinny people down the gym lift some seriously impressive weights.

"While I think it is very unlikely, given our size difference, perhaps you are a modern day Bruce Lee and will somehow win," Musk added.

Whilst size may be an advantage, that is all it is: An advantage. If you have no idea how to fight and are unfit, your smaller, well trained opponent will still cream you.

South Korea's biggest mobile telco says 5G has failed to deliver on its promise

3G & 4G were noticeable improvements for the end user. I'm not sure 5G is such a game changer. For many use cases 4G is perfectly usable - providing you get a signal. I think the only thing 5G has done for the consumer is get more frequencies which equates to more network capacity. 6G will be a "rinse & repeat" of 5G.

Just as the pace of innovation in smart phones and slowed, so has the pace of mobile network innovation.

Boffins reckon Mars colony could survive with fewer than two dozen people

Re: Obvious?

But how long would Space Karen last before Karen was asked to step outside...

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

Love how you didn't mention the "T" word once in the article. From now on, can we also use the phrase "South-African born spoilt child" instead of the "E" word in El Reg articles?

Lawsuit: We've got the stats to prove Twitter ax fell unfairly on older, female engineers

The difference in percentages between the groups doesn't seem massive, so I'm surprised they think they have a strong case.

UK voter data within reach of miscreants who hacked Electoral Commission

Re: Electronic voting

Was the aim to influence voting, or was it to get data on people for other uses?

We'd pay good money to see... oh dear, Elon Musk 'needs an MRI scan'

Re: hurt his back sumo wrestling on his bday years ago and has been in chronic pain since

With his wealth, if he's been in "chronic pain" he'd be paying for ops to fix it pronto. Ask anyone who's genuinely had chronic pain.

If all he's doing to prep is lifting some weights in the office he's doing it all wrong. First off, he needs to be doing some cardio & strength endurance work. Then he needs to learn how to fight. Without those things he's going to get creamed in seconds.

Fail icon as that's what Elmo is setting himself up for.

One weekend's TwitX chaos brings threats from Japan; indemnity promises for users; prominent account seizures

Re: Zuck is not holding his breath, apparently

And he's just made the first step in pulling out: theregister.com/2023/08/07/musk_cage_fight_latest

Re: Zuck is not holding his breath, apparently

TBH, I'm not actually expecting it to happen. Elmo pulling out for some reason is the most likely outcome.

I hope Zuck & Elmo knock each other out in the cage fight.

Satnav for the Moon could benefit from Fibonacci’s expertise

Re: I think you'll find it's more complicated than that.

Burried monoliths distort the gravity field too.

Too many bytes and not enough bricks for datacenters

I thought it was your sexuality that controlled the weather?

All this effort just to disseminate cat videos and hate speech.

Oracle's revised Java licensing terms 2-5x more expensive for most orgs

Is anyone surprised by this?

Re: Hey Oracle

If the license T&Cs are vague or confusing, they can always claim you've misunderstood them and send you a big fat bill for not following the rules correctly.

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

www.disconnect.blog/p/elon-musk-wants-to-relive-his-start

I wonder what Elmo's going to do about the existing @X account on his platform....?

For the innocent amongst you, years ago Elmo tried to make an app called "X". At the time, the other board members kicked him out and renamed the company "Paypal".

He bought the domain x.com a few years ago for sentimental reasons and is trying to resurrect his old idea.

World's most internetty firm tries life off the net, and it's sillier than it seems

Hillarious

It's hillarious that the company that pushes people to use its internet services so much is encouraging its employees not to use the public internet. It's almost as if they were only using the servers they own as everyone else's can't be trusted.

Tesla to license Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers, says Musk

Re: Behind, always behind

The hype around autonomous cars was bult by Uber so they wouldn't have to pay humans to drive humans around. Everyone followed their hype without thinking: Is this the real problem?

I think the real benefits of FSD are on long(er) distance, intercity routes (e.g. Motorways/autobahns/autoroutes/etc). And then, probably the first use case would be lorries/trucks: Human drives the truck to motorway, flicks the switch and then goes to sleep until the truck drives unit the exit/off-ramp. (If you've got multiple autonomous trucks, you could get them to talk to each other and slipstream safely)

Social media is too much for most of us to handle

There's a reason why the hyper-connected Borg supressed emotions in their drones....

Post Office Horizon Inquiry calls for compensation to be brought forward

The Post Office and Fujitsu put many people through hell, pushing two to take their own lives. There should be an unreserved appology and rapid & generous compensation payouts* for the hell they inflicted. Then we should lock up the execs at PO & Fujitsu and throw away the key.

Unfortunately, this is too much common sense so the chance of this happening is zero.

My sympathies to the people who had to endure this corporate f**k up.

[*] And the money should go to the victims, not line the pockets of lawyers.

Twitter ad revenue has halved since Elon Musk took over

Part of me wants Twitter to go bankrupt quickly so this is all over. But watching him squirm has a certain schadenfreude.

Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

It's the display technologies rather than the CPU/memory stuff. e.g. High DPI, colour technologies, hardware acceleration, higher refresh rates, etc.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Re: Poor design in my opinion

I Endeavour to support your Thaw-t.