Posts by Grumpy Fellow

AI infrastructure investment may be $8T shot in the dark

My AI needs are minimal

I think I could get by with my share of the $8T AI investment being about $1.00. Assuming that I am representative of the rest of the world population (sure!), that would be a total investment of $8 Billion (not $T). It amazes me that they plan to invest $1000 per human on the planet for AI. How about you keep my one dollar, send me the remaining $999, and I will continue to do my own thinking? As an aside, I'd be willing to bet that 99% of the humans would take that deal and run with it.

Artist formerly known as Indian Business Machines pledges $150B for US ops, R&D

I will see your $150 billion...

and raise you $150 billion. Yes, I pledge $300 billion! Starting over the next 10 years.

Trump thinks we can make iPhones in the US just like China. Yeah, right

The rub as I see it

I'm thinking that the plan is that US assembly + Taiwan components can back-fill the lost electronics from China. The obvious issue there is that this incentivizes China to assert control over Taiwan. I hope I'm wrong!

Not even Intel's top bosses know what's on CEO Lip-Bu Tan's chopping block

It's about time!

I'm surprised they are still in the core business at all. Core memory is great but it takes a shoe box to hold 32K.

SpaceX loses a Falcon 9 booster and scrubs a Starship

I wonder if this would work as a commenting system?

Over the last few years it seems like even fairly esoteric articles on the Register attract the dreaded first politically motivated comment, after which we go down the rabbit hole of follow up political discussion. So I was thinking, would it work to come up with a scheme that separates the wheat from the chaff, so to speak? For example, an idea I just came up with (and is therefore likely useless) would be to adopt the following process for responding in the comment section:

1) When you see the first political comment on a technical article, instead of looking up reliable rebuttal references and links, or coming up with a new insult, instead just respond with a standard response, something like this: Title: Absolutely right! Icon: Beer Comment: I am sure that you are 100% correct!

2) Subsequently, if you have read and wish to downvote a political comment, instead of downvoting the political comment itself, instead up-vote (yes) the followup "Absolutely Right!" comment.

3) Conversely, if you wish to upvote the political comment, instead of upvoting the political comment itself, instead down-vote (yes) the followup "Absolutely Right!" comment.

My thinking is this: We regulars then avoid running up the vote totals for the political comment, we can have fun with the inverted scoring, and we can take turns expressing full agreement with even the stupidest political nonsense. After all, nobody can tell sarcasm for sure on the Internet. Of course, if you still feel the need to respond with something serious, then have at it as usual.

Just an idea.

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

Re: 82 million hard drives per year, for the whole UK

That gets me thinking. There has to be some way to get a scam going where we send around pictures of a trashy looking hard drive, claim that it is the lost drive, and we just need a small advance fee to do data recovery on it. Obviously for a large return for the investor. If the Lads from Lagos pick up on this, you saw it here first and I want my percentage.

TSA’s airport facial-recog tech faces audit probe

Opting out seems an available option in my experience

I fly several times a week out of US airports and have yet to see a TSA checkpoint where photo opt out wasn't a clearly displayed option. From a flight security option I prefer that system's 99.7 % accuracy against what even a trained TSA officer could likely muster. You don't lose your place in line if you opt out, the TSA officer just squints and looks closer at your ID and your face. I don't understand what I'm giving up here. With either automated or manual ID any government organization already knows what flight I am on care of the airlines' passenger list reporting. The identification is just a quicker way of proving that my ticket ID matches my real life ID, which is something I value in my fellow passengers. I opt in because the ID system is faster. Now, Ring doorbells are another story. When I steal Amazon packages from front porches I prefer to remain anonymous and believe that is a fundamental right under the 1st amendment.

LinkedIn accused of training AI on private messages

Wrong forum for that kind of stuff

I only post "incredibly sensitive and potentially life-altering information" here on the Reg. It would be wasted elsewhere.

Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts walks free as Trump pardons dark web kingpin

So, can Silk Road resume operations?

Asking for a friend.

Feds sue Southwest for chronic delays, unrealistic schedules

What's the incentive to do this?

Just a question: What does an airline gain through having a flight scheduled unrealistically? Why not just schedule it 15 minutes later in the first place and make the customers happy?

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Failed Y2K by sheer laziness

Back in 1999 I was working an embedded project that wasn't due to ship until mid 2000. So on January 1st, 2000 when all the units under development displayed a year of 1900 I just popped in a line that said something like "if (year < 2000) year += 100;" and then went for beer as usual. I guess I should have been proactive and tested it out the day before as a lot of folks were upset that I waited to see if it would fail before fixing it. I guess I'll have to make it +=200; in another 75 years.

Technical issue briefly grounds American Airlines flights across US

Good use for the AA App?

A system wide meltdown like this would seem to merit a notice on the AA app but no. I kept checking this morning and nary a whisper about how none of their flights were actually taking off. You could check individual flight status and see that they were delayed, but you really had to be in the airport with the monitors there to know that it wasn't just that your individual flight that was delayed.

Verizon snaps up Frontier in $20B fiber power play

Comparing my Frontier and Verizon service

I've got Verizon FIOS Internet service at one location and Frontier fiber optical Internet service at another.

When Frontier came out to install, the job was done in about 30 minutes, throughput was amazingly fast, and the tech seemed like family by the time he left. He gave me his business card and said to call him direct any time if there was an issue.

When Verizon came out to install my neighbor's service in the Verizon service area the tech just gave my fiber connection to the neighbor and disconnected my house. When I finally got a repair crew out two weeks later, that tech said that the Verizon installation techs save time on their installation calls by stealing a known-good fiber line from a neighbor rather than spending the time to activate a new fiber line back at the central office. He said it's the follow-up repair crews that then reconnect the neighboring house that the installation tech hijacked. The two week wait for repair was all the more annoying because of having to talk to Verizon's automated, then off-shored support assistants who are advising me to re-install Windows (when I'm running Linux), while the Optical Network Termination box is flashing the "no link present" LED.

Other than paying twice as much a month for worse service, I don't see this merger benefiting me.

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: 'Exit interview'

I've had some success over the years with this approach: At the exit interview I insist that working at "this" company has been heaven on earth, and I am only leaving for a remarkably good opportunity (a promotion!) at "that" company. Suppose I am a lowly level 0 at this company. In the exit interview I let it be known that I'm moving up to level 1 at that company. Then in a year or two this company may possibly offer to hire me back at level 2, since they can't expect to lure me back at level 1, can they? I learned this move from playing Donkey Kong.

Google says public data is fair game for training its AIs

Is robots.txt still a thing?

Just a question. In the old days you could put a file called robots.txt in a web site's home directory to deter content scraping by web crawlers. Would that address this issue?

Boston Dynamics' latest robot is a warehouse workhorse

Forklift?

To unload a trailer I was thinking the robot would have forks to lift and withdraw a loaded wood pallet, a knife to remove the plastic wrap holding the cardboard boxes together, whatever it takes to transfer the boxes to their next location, then back to the forks to move the empty wood pallet onto the empty pallet stack. Or maybe this robot needs to be used in pairs at both source and destination.

A borked bit of code sent the Hubble Space Telescope into safe mode, revealing a bunch of other glitches

Re: I'm surprised they tried the backup motor

Yes, I've found out the hard way that Mom was wrong. Actually, any even number of wrongs do make a right.

Intel chip flaw: Math unit may spill crypto secrets from apps to malware

Re: Floating point crypto operations?

Thank you all for filling me in on this. I did not realize that the scope of the FPU had grown so much over the years!

Floating point crypto operations?

I'm not aware of any cryptographic operations that are implemented using floating point arithmetic. Can someone explain? Does the FPU also support integer arithmetic nowadays? I am so stuck in the 1980s.

'We need a new Geneva Convention to protect all citizens from snoops'

It got better a bit later in the morning

When Whit Diffie suggested that the best cybersecurity approach might be to write secure code in the first place. He was talking to a room full of cybersecurity tool vendors and he still got a big round of applause!

Uber's self-driving cars can't handle bike lanes, forcing drivers to kill autonomous mode

Good to know!

Thank you so much for this instruction on how to turn across a bike lane! After reading the article I checked my state's drivers manual and there is nary a word about moving into bike lanes. It seems an obvious safety improvement to do what they say, it's just that I thought bike lanes were off limit for cars, almost no matter what. I'm going to be visiting SF for the RSA conference and this article may well have saved poor cyclist's life!

Tesla touts battery that turns a Model S into 'third fastest ever' car

Think of the pedestrians?

If I'm crossing the street in front of a Dodge Hellcat I will maybe have a chance because I will hear the roar and can run for the curb. Does the Tesla give a warning to pedestrians when doing this fast 0-60 thing? If not, can we have someone run ahead of the car while waving a flag to warn horses, dogs, and pedestrians? It takes me a lot longer than 2.5 seconds to cross the street.

Man killed in gruesome Tesla autopilot crash was saved by his car's software weeks earlier

Not so fast there

Before deciding that the truck driver caused the accident I would like to hear how fast the Tesla driver was going. If this is a 55 mph zone and the Tesla was going twice that (for example), then all bets are off. I find it curious that the speed of the Tesla hasn't been released at this point, at least I haven't heard it. Tesla company certainly knows that number. I'd be interested to hear from any Tesla driver whether or not you can use the autopilot mode to exceed the posted speed limit. I'm thinking that a properly functioning autopilot would obey the speed limit just like it obeys a stop sign. Or would it? I'm genuinely interested to hear.

White Truck?

Most trucks here in the US, even white trucks, have 18 large black tires (5 visible per side in a distinctive 1-2-2 pattern). I think a possible tweak to the software would be to disengage the autopilot and apply the brakes, rather than driving at high speed between adjacent sets of black truck tires. The algorithm to identify sets of truck tires could be similar to the detection of the EURion Constellation that is used to prevent color copiers from duplicating US and Euro currency. This wouldn't absolutely eliminate running into the sides of trucks, but it would prevent running into the 18 wheelers, the only ones in the US that could appear to have a gap between wheels large enough to drive through. Before you down vote me for this comment, please give me credit for the correct spelling of Brakes (not Breaks) used in this vehicular context.

We have hit peak Silicon Valley: New crazy goal to disrupt entire cities

Re: What grumpy old man wrote this?!

Wasn't me. Have an upvote!

Score one for the patent trolls: US appeals court says it's OK to shop for patent-friendly judges

Wait just a minute

Most of the corporations in the United States are incorporated in Delaware in part because they have an excellent corporate law system that is fair and business friendly. Delaware has more corporations than people. When a corporation avoids Delaware courts I suspect there is something going on other than a concern about fairness of the decision.

X-ray scanners, CCTV cams, hefty machinery ... let's play: VNC Roulette!

Midwest Screen Shot

That screen shot from the midwest looks like a sewage treatment plant to me. I'll bet its a honey pot. Nobody would put their sewage plant controls on the Internet. Would they?

Nest thermostat owners out in the cold after software update cockup

I can handle this one

If (too_hot)

{

AC_On();

}

Else if (too_cold)

{

Heat_On();

}

Else

{

Heat_and_AC_Off();

}

Top VW exec blames car pollution cheatware scandal on 'a couple of software engineers'

Maybe, maybe not

As much as I think the chief is lying, I have to say that I've been doing embedded software since the 1980s, and for most of that time I was the only one on God's green Earth who knew what most of the lines of code that I wrote actually did. Sure, we had peer review and SQA and audits, but If I wrote a line of code that turned off the Clean Mode and labeled it with a // Enable Clean Mode comment, then it would make it past the reviewers. Especially if there were pointers involved and maybe an enumeration in the mix. It is hard enough to detect unintentional errors in embedded C code. Finding an obfuscated intentional "error" is pretty unlikely. So, if I were doing embedded code for VW, why would I turn off the emissions controls? Maybe I think that the emissions rules are BS and that our customers deserve a better running car (not my personal opinion, mind you). Maybe I do it so that I earn the respect of my fellow engineers, or so I get to keep my job in a downturn because I am the Diesel Engine Wizard at VW. Embedded software doesn't have to be a black art, but in most organizations it is still practiced within a narrow slice of the organization without much visibility upward.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Southern biscuits and gravy

We are getting close finally

Sooner or later they are bound to do a PPNN with Scrapple! Please, oh please!

What goes up, Musk comedown: Falcon rocket failed to strut its stuff

The processes failed before the strut did

To second the previous post, the important point isn't that they fix that strut for the next flight. The point is to figure out how their processes allowed a defective critical strut to be assembled into the spacecraft in the first place. Whenever you analyse a system failure you look for where your processes let you down. The failure itself is interesting, but you can play whack-a-mole with individual part failures until you go out of business without getting to a reliable product. I would bet that when they re-examine their processes in light of this failure they identify at least a dozen other latent defect parts that were similarly under-spec but ended up close enough to work. These parts will all be corrected along with the "guilty" strut.

Google: Our self-driving cars would be tip-top if you meatheads didn’t crash into them

The Snow Belt?

One aspect that they might be missing out in California is driving in a snowstorm, especially at night. It really changes everything when most of your vision is filled with an almost opaque wall of snowflakes flowing toward you. I'm not sure exactly how I see where I'm going in the snow. I follow the tire tracks or tail lights ahead of me if there are any. Otherwise I try to distinguish between the drifts and the bar ditch as best as I can. If there are phone poles I try to remember how far away from the road they are. I once had to turn around leaving a small northern plains town in a snow storm because once the phone poles ran out, there was nothing at all to drive by. Another thing that an autonomous car might have trouble with is getting around a break down or accident where someone is directing traffic by hand. I hope that they program the cars to not close off side driveways when approaching a traffic light. The car should stop short and flash the lights to let a car out, not close up the gap and block them in. For some reason, when I read about autonomous cars, I always flash back to the movie Airplane, with Otto the Autopilot.

Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future

Mom told me

It is nice to be important, but it is more important to be nice.

Big Data shocker: Over 6 million Americans have reached the age of 112

Just wait

Until 2038 when the current 112 year olds discover a 32 bit fountain of youth and we kick off another Baby Boom!

Lenovo hopes to say Hello Moto to smartphone cash

A ThinkPad Phone might make sense

There was a rumor a while back of a Think-brand phone out of this. I have to say, if they built one I would find it hard to resist. As long as the phone was matte black with a ThinkPad logo, of course. I'm pretty happy with how Lenovo has held up the quality of the ThinkPad line and they still support the old ones well. Just a week or so ago I had to download Windows 95 drivers so I could run some DOS stuff on an ancient ThinkPad and all the drivers were still available from them. That's long term support!

I'll be back (and forward): Hollywood's time travel tribulations

Giant Blancmange south of London with Time Travel

Does anyone else remember visiting a giant white dome down near Greenwich back in 2000? They had a special theatre set up on the site that showed the time travel film "Blackaddr: Back and Forth". That film treated time travel with just the right amount of irreverence. Ah, the memories! Particularly when Shakespeare gets his comeuppance. By the way, what ever became of the dome? That thing was frickin' huge! Probably a shopping mall now? I'm off to the Google to check.

Remember that internet sales tax? Wasn't that a great idea? It's dead

Not dead yet

Amazon collects sales tax for 23 states at the present, including many big ones. To the best of my knowledge the blocking of this bill doesn't undo that situation, it just keeps the present mess in place and lets the remaining states go after Amazon on their own if they wish. I live in one of the five states without sales tax so this is primarily of academic interest to me. I'm not a big fan of sales tax in general because I think it is a regressive way to fund a state.

Elon Musk says Tesla's stock price is too high ... welp, NOT ANY MORE

Blue Chip - Seriously?

My definition of blue chip is a large cap company that has survived several long business cycles and which pays dividends. I still see Tesla as a start-up company. That's not to say that you won't make money by buying the stock, but I would question the judgement of any financial analyst that described it as Blue Chip at this point. In my opinion it is still far from a sure thing that the company's profits will grow to meet their valuation in the stock market. Let me tell you about my Nortel "investment" some years back! <groan>

Boffins suggest storage be baked into mobile base stations

Does their caching work for secure connections?

A lot of bandwidth-hogging content such as YouTube is delivered over HTTPS now. Can they cache that?

Bad PUPPY: Undead Windows XP deposits fresh scamware on lawn

An optimist's view for your consideration

My optimistic take on the end of XP support is that Microsoft has stopped patching it because they found that after 13 years of removing flaws from the code every Tuesday, the software that remains is simply perfect and no longer needs patching. Consider this, would you feel more comfortable on the maiden flight of a new jetliner as it rolls off the Boeing assembly line (Windows 8.1) or flying into Dallas on one of American Airline's 1980s vintage DC-9s that has been proven with 30 years of six flights a day without crashing (Windows XP). OK, it's a bad analogy because XP crashes, but that's not the point here.

BEHOLD the HOLY GRAIL of TECH: The REVERSIBLE USB plug

Re: We have all experienced Schrödinger's USB stick

Top and Bottom? What am I missing here? All of my USB ports are oriented with the long direction vertical. Is there a similar join on the Left or Right?

Elon Musk slams New Jersey governor over Tesla direct sales ban

Musk in salesman mode much?

"There are no oil, spark plug or fuel filter changes, no tune-ups and no smog checks needed for an electric car," Musk wrote.

This is literally true but a bit misleading:

From the Tesla website it appears that they charge $600 per year for maintenance.

My internal combustion Ford requires the following maintenance: Oil change, $25 every 7500 miles. Tune up (i.e. Spark Plugs) $100 every 100,000 miles. Fuel filter $50 every 100,000 miles, Smog checks never since OBD-II introduced in the mid 1990s.

Mind you I'm not siding with New Jersey on this, but keep in mind that New Jersey law requires that your car be fueled by a professional petroleum transfer engineer (no self-serve allowed).

Reg snaps moment when Facebook turned air Blu: 1PB box for unloved pics

Missing the tactile joy

I'm not into tape nowadays, but in the 80s and 90s there was nothing more satisfying from a tactile standpoint than threading a nine track tape onto a tape drive with mechanical tensioning, starting the tape on the takeup reel with a couple of spins, then hitting the "Load" button and seeing it balance the loops and find the start of the tape. The most exciting tape of the year was the one that brought back the latest goodies from DECUS of course. A nerd could feel cool walking down the hall in sneakers while spinning the tape reel in hand and catching it after exactly one revolution. Brings tears to my eyes. Jay doesn't know what he is missing.

Crooks target Target: 40 MILLION bank cards imperiled in cyber-heist

Just to clarify

Please be aware that those of us who shop at Target regularly pronounce the g as a Voiced palato-alveolar sibilant.

'Disruptive, irritating' in-flight cellphone call ban mulled by US Senate

This works for me

I ride the train fairly often, and they allow cellphone use. I have found that a good way to quiet a motor-mouth is to simply show an active interest in their conversation. Open a pad of paper and start taking notes if they don't get the hint. Write down what they say and underline it for full effect. Nod your head in agreement. Toss in an occasional verbal "Amen!" for emphasis.

Hot Stuff! NASA mulls 'urgent' space walk as ISS cooler conks out

Just asking

Have they tried turning it off and on again?

SuperStride Me: Reg hack spends week working at 'treadmill desk'

Wheel vs. Treadmill?

Would it be possible to make the desk more efficient by having you walk/jog inside of a big wheel instead of on a flat surface? This would greatly reduce friction and you could rock it back and forth when you stopped walking/running. Another advantage is that the wheel would clean the cedar chips off your shoes.

MacBook Air fanbois! Your flash drive may be a data-nuking TIME BOMB

Speaking of SSDs in general

I have been disappointed in the reliability of SSDs that I've purchased (not from Apple) over the last five years or so in general. The advertised MTBF is very optimistic, I would say. I think the part I like the least is that they will go from working perfectly to not working at all just like a switch was thrown. In the old spinning drives I usually got a warning in the form of bad sectors as a signal to replace the drive ASAP, but you had time to order a replacement drive and copy your data off in most cases. If the system wasn't so fast booting up with the SSD, I would go back to spinning disks in a minute.

US red-tape will drain boffins' brains into China, says crypto-guru Shamir

Pot, meet Kettle

Excuse me? The US visa system discourages travel? How about the UK's exorbitant Air Passenger Duty?

iOS 7 SPANKS Samsung's Android in user-experience rating

Bell Telephone

The old rotary dial phone I have hooked up in the basement would score 75 and beat them all based on these criteria. Not bad for 1950's technology. Cognitive Load: 100, Efficiency: 100, User Experience Friction: 100, Customization: 0 (Fail). Average: 75.