Posts by Roland6

Here's how to watch the Artemis II splashdown

Re: What I didn't get was ...

I didn’t know Houston had a hot line to God - “please sir can we have calm seas on…. Amen”

Given how much more in capsule “video diary” style media we got with this mission (through that UFWA), it did seem a little odd to not have it whilst we waited for them to do their systems checks etc. Plus whilst “the keystone cops” got themselves organised there did seem time for a video talk session.

Re: What I didn't get was ...

>” It would be a whole lot of "not fun" to have one of the astronauts going for a swim while trying to exit the capsule.”

Don’t remember any of the Apollo astronauts going for a swim…

The laugh was just how long it took to get around to attempting to attach the porch, given its obvious utility in getting the astronauts out. About the only reason I picked up from commentary was whether they had under estimated the heat of the capsule and the time needed for it to cool to something reasonable.

>” NASA needs to get its media act together.”

The BBC weren’t much better, it was nice to have a countdown, only the viewer needed to work out that 15 hours from now was 1am tomorrow morning.

Re: What I didn't get was ...

>” Suppose it started taking in water like Liberty Bell 7 did?”

They were fortunate, the sea was calm with little swell, given how long it took before they managed to get additional floatation support attached to the capsule which had its hatch wide open …

That hour of faff really was audience killing. If it was planned to use the calm water to practise all sorts of stuff, then someone clearly forgot about the TV audience. There really wasn’t any reason why there didn’t seem to be a live TV camera in any of the small boats or in the command capsule.

What happened when AI ran into the cold hard reality of the legal profession

Plus automatic damages to whomsoever they were prosecuting, for defamation and wasting the courts time…

Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job

Re: no-receipt claim of £500

Just get a taxi driver to give you a receipt - these always seemed to be just an amount written on the back of a business card - never had any refused. Likewise a receipt for cash from one of those receipt books you used to be able to buy in WHSmiths.

Britain's biggest nuclear site skips competition, hands SAP £33M to start ERP switch

Re: Unique challenges

> I am baffled as to how it has been made so complicated!

It’s a single system, hence you can’t upgrade one part without upgrading all parts at the same time…

Never been a fan of single vendor wall-to-wall enterprise systems solutions, much preferred more focused systems integrated through EAI middleware. But the sales people at the monolith ERP vendors will tell you at length about how bad this approach is compared to their monolithic lock-in solution… The only downside with my approach is that you do have more procurements and suppliers and hence elevated costs.

As for security, I would hope they are deploying S/4HANA in its on premise version rather than cloud and have demanded SAP commit to easy upgrade/replacement for a rolling 999 years given the long-term nature of their business…

Re: Another unique ERP instance

No we most certainly don’t need a single government ERP…

Britain seeks views before it drops the hammer on signal jammers

Re: I want one

Actually both work (as does 112), however calling 911 from a UK mobile in the UK used to go to a different call centre which got full mobile locational information, whereas calling 999 they only got the caller id.

Re: Wrong end of the stick

> No amount of money spent on a mechanical lock will make it pick-proof.

Sometimes you want to be about to “break the lock” - a software lock requires a working battery to operate. Have the battery pancake overnight and oops you can’t get in to open the bonnet to enable you to recharge it…

Had a similar problem a few years back, an elderly relative had a fall in their home, no one else had a key - fortunately a fireman found a fanlight was open and was able to reach in and open the larger lower window, thus avoiding the expense of having the front door cut out…

Re: Wrong end of the stick

It was the case that you only needed to thump on the bonnet to unlock a car - I know as that is what the AA guy did to my Ford Focus when I accidentally locked my keys inside…

Re: Incomprehensible

Whatever the government of the time deems it to be…

Re: Incomprehensible

As could some mainstream 802 WiFi USB sticks and adapters…

Re: Incomprehensible

The trend - with UK security legislation- has been to make what constitutes “illegality” means what the government wants it to be, so just using the web to research signal hammers, could be sufficient to be flagged…

Suits won't quit AI spending, even if they can't prove it's working

Re: And the reason is....

From the number of BMWs and Audi’s I’ve seen do the “leave at the junction you are about to miss” manoeuvre, I wonder whether the dashboard does actually warn about the next junction or if there is just a huge delay in the dashboard to steering wheel interface.

Two different attackers poisoned popular open source tools - and showed us the future of supply chain compromise

“ Biasini suggests using AI agents to help. "This (SBOM) would be a great place to leverage AI,"

… "Start turning on AI agents to identify where these open source projects are in your environment."

Seems someone is trying to sell AI instead of using what they most probably already have.

Enterprises (with any interest in security) are already running security sites that include software configuration management, so these pre-existing systems will provide the information (and remediation) with no additional agents and thus increase in the attack surface. The advantage of this approach is that the security agents were written to be deterministic and so won’t hallucinate either the presence or absence of threats.

However, the majority of threats ie. Attempts to compromise a host, come from the web mostly in the form of web scripts/executables downloaded on the fly and vaporised after use. The analysis of these is something security software is supposed to be good at, hence once again, not an application for a generic “AI agent”.

South Korea introduces universal basic mobile data access

Re: Digital ID Required?

>” digital ID makes life easier, but without one then life would be like life was before digital ID”

Yes digital ID can make life easier, when the network connection etc is all working; without a working digital ID life will be much worse than life was before digital ID because all the systems that currently work without digital ID will have been replaced by systems that relied on digital ID. It’s why M&S, JLR et al struggled to do anything after their cyber attacks.

Re: Security nightmare as nobody updates?

Shame Starbucks is only open 5:30-20:30 (15 hours)…

Fewer than 3 in 10 register for HMRC's Making Tax Digital shake-up

Re: MTD = Making tax difficult

> Perhaps some future chancellor will decide that SME business should pay their tax quarterly, but that isn't the plan now

“Perhaps”? More like “definitely”, HMRC want to move away from getting lots of tax revenue once or twice a year to a more consistent stream. If you are already paying VAT quarterly, paying tax quarterly isn’t that bigger step, only issue is the money will no longer be invested on your behalf so you do need to get your pension and other tax efficiency schemes up and running. Which has the consequence of increasing your OPEX…

Re: MTD = Making tax difficult

> Your accountant isn't just your bean counter, they are your firewall.

It’s (wryly) funny how many do treat the Accountant as the bean counter (ie. Book keeper/accounts clerk) and thus fail to get the full value.

With Charity VAT and the changes/clarifications that came in a couple of years back, having a Chartered Accountant as a sounding board is very helpful, plus we have an audit trail documenting the agreements and rationale as to why we do VAT in a particular way (ie. Why certain projects/work are subject to VAT, whilst other isn’t and how this difference is recorded in the books), which given how grey/open to interpretation(*) some parts of the VAT code is very reassuring , as the last thing you want is for HMRC to decide you’ve underpaid VAT and decide to backdate the underpayment 20 years (yes, you may only need to keep income tax records for 7 years, but with VAT the Revenue can go back 20 years…)

(*) Determining whether a “grant/gift/award” is a donation or actually a payment for services is a bit like IR35 and the after the event determination of whether a job is inside or outside…

They already had 6 IBM mainframes and no one blinked when we suggested adding another for improved resilience and simpler maintenance.

From my point-of-view it brought to an end the indecision on whether to buy IBM or Sun. Whilst I preferred Sun, Sun just didn’t understand the level of engagement they needed to make to establish a “bridgehead”, in comparison the IBM account tech lead seemed to have ready access to knowledgeable experts and pro-actively turned our queries around.

From a personal learning point-of-view, I learnt a lot about Parallel-Sysplex and thus really appreciated just how weak in comparison the Unix and Windows versions were. It also forced a very clean n-tier solution, which in hindsight was very easy to secure from “mischievous” web access.

It was £1, with the rest bundled into the annual fees package…

Re: It's more work, more expense, marginal benefits at best

For the accounting package ad’s, it does seem a big sales point is the ability to do “everything” on the mobile phone. If implemented well (something I doubt given my experience), this “convenance” could easily become a habit, making cash-in-hand / off-the-books jobs more hassle, so forcing businesses to be more honest without really trying to be.

Re: It's more work, more expense, marginal benefits at best

Not been paying much attention - as over the threshold, but I seem to remember the VAT threshold is also due to be lowered.

The irritation is I expect HMRC are expecting a high level of late filing and thus fine income, additional to tax revenues.

> which meant a crap time for a whole bunch of people.

I remember working for a UK client, with a Christmas shutdown, where we had to arrange access between Christmas and new year, just so that IBM could deliver a new Z-Series before the end of their tax year.

Microsoft cuts cloudy desktop prices by 20 percent, warns they’ll wake up slowly

>” You can huddle a small group around even a 12" laptop when needed.”

Funny how the Microsoft Surface (rebranded Microsoft PixelSense) seems to have died and is now long forgotten.

Re: Overpriced

>” dealing with people who are expecting to frequently not have an internet connection.”

Trouble is since the late 1990’s many Internet and mobile internet “solutions” have been built on the assumption of a reliable internet connection, an assumption that could be valid in a LAN environment but most definitely not in a WAN environment.

I remember one presentation from that era where I laid into a presenter that they weren’t living in the real world, their presentation went really well until they came to demonstrate their product; the venue was in a mobile data not spot (ie. Sufficient signal for a handful of concurrent voice calls but not for a data connection)…

Re: Overpriced

>” You can run plenty of things successfully in 4 GB of RAM”

You can, but run a modern office desktop and achieve a reasonable pace of work, ie. One that doesn’t require users to wait excessively.

My standard test is running: Windows, 2 of MS Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, plus Outlook (all desktop versions), Chrome/Edge with a couple of open tabs and Teams running a screen share walking through a document or spreadsheet.

I appreciate there are better desktop options, but remember rather a lot of businesses run MS desktops, so unless you are very sure of what the system is going to be used for, being able to run a relatively undemanding (from a typical office user’s viewpoint) set of open applications is a good baseline.

Re: Overpriced

> Even when you don't have one?

I did say “mostly”, so much depends on the mitigations you are prepared to accept, like working in a local coffee shop with WiFi…

Interesting take the only question is whether cloud PC is to be accessible from the phone when in phone-mode rather than (docked) desktop mode. From memory of Canonical‘s work, this dual access was a big problem, so having effectively two user accounts, one of which gets suspended/hibernated when docked/undocked might be a simpler problem to solve.

Re: Overpriced

So like-for-like: an “entry level” office desktop with 2 years maintenance can be had for £730 (4 cores 16Gb RAM), (which can support multiple users); the equivalent 365 Business Cloud PC is £57.30 per user per month. So breakeven point is a little under 13 months.

With a laptop things are similar, although the breakeven point will potentially be a few months later.

In both cases the dependency on a functional Internet connection can be mostly mitigated as can the need to have a client system to connect to the cloud PC.

The focus of this offer is those who believe increasing OPEX is the way to go even though it costs more.over the normal 3~4 year depreciation lifecycle.

Deere oh Deere: Tractor repair row heads for $99M settlement

Re: This Settlement is **NOT** an excellent result for the Class

It’s the gaskets, seals and Conformal Coatings that make your phone waterproof.

As for “small”, only someone who never used a pre-smartphone mobile would consider any modern smartphone as “small”.

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

Re: Obviously bollocks

I suspect the real reasons are as people here have alluded to: the old Kindle Whispernet interface doesn’t support the “rich” functionality now “required”, namely: serving of ad’s, collection and upload of telemetry ie. All the stuff that enables Amazon to monetise their customers.

>” and sail the seas, you will find that your kindle works just fine”

I didn’t know the Kindle could survive a dunking in sea water…

Microsoft hints at bit bunkers for war zones

Definitely need to think about what you are saying. Basically, a “datacentre” composed of dynamically connected servers distributed in people’s backrooms, is going to be much more resilient than a single huge bit barn. Ie. The move to cloud computing and its associated concentration of IT in large scale bit barns is going to be less resilient than old school on-prem deployments in the event of wars, natural disasters or acts of god.

Re: LOAC1

Wouldn’t call them “strong”. The definition permits the Israeli’s to consistency target schools, hospitals etc. and claim they were being used as a military command posts (*) etc., Also some of the excuses being used by the Americans for their targeting of bridges etc. in Iran, where basically if a military vehicle or train carrying military equipment could use it, it was classified as a legitimate target…

(*) A military command post only really needs to have an officer, a comm’s guy and a foot soldier or two ie. The occupants of a single vehicle doing a tour of a building and thus operating a mobile command post that is only temporarily in a specific location.

Japan relaxes privacy laws to make itself the ‘easiest country to develop AI’

Re: " current laws represent “a very big obstacle to the development, and utilization ….”"

It’s also a funny way of saying “we’ve drunk the AI kool-aid and now will be turkeys voting for Christmas.”

UK's grand plan to fuel AI with public data faces uphill battle

Re: As below, so above.

>” 40 pin IDE”

There are IDE desktop enclosures (5.25 inch) and pocket drives (2.5 inch) with either USB or SATA connectors. Otherwise this might be of use: https://www.amazon.co.uk/SATA-Converter-Adapter-Bi-Directional-Conversion/dp/B0B3CXJD79

One of my “fun” projects is the discovery of 3 ancient external 5.25 inch disk enclosures complete with (pre IDE) disks with full sized DB25 parallel port connector… unfortunately, as they predate Bitcoin, there won’t a “lost” crypto wallet waiting to be discovered.

Definitely shock horror given “ misleading titles and non-existent metadata, the data currently available cannot support any meaningful analysis” is.a good description of unstructured data, which is exactly what all the current mass market LLMs have been trained on…

The shock horror is how so many believe: garbage in, intelligent insights out…

Artemis II snaps eclipse, Earthset shots on first crewed lunar flyby since Apollo

Re: 54 minutes of Totality

The laugh is some parts of the UK are forgetting what rain is…

If an AI agent screws up while running your business, there's nobody to sue

>” But if such a scenario does happen, who will take the blame?”

Getting a bit ahead of ourselves, with the amount of AI “marking the homework”, the question is whether the misdiagnosis ever gets seen and thus detected…

Patch to end i486 support hits Linux kernel merge queue

Re: What about space?

If you are building for space (or other niches), I suggest using an off-the-shelf mainstream OS is not a good idea. I expect there are businesses that will maintain OS’s (which may be a stripped down Linux) more suited to your application domain.

Re: Buggritt

>”By the standards of seventeen years ago (*), it was acceptable for the cheap, low-power netbooks it was intended for,”

Acceptable to Intel and Microsoft may be, but not to users.

I had an Aspire One and on discovering just how compromised it was - thank you Intel and Microsoft, did very little with it; preferring to stick with lugging a full sized laptop around until the iPad was launched…

Re: they are falling short of target

“AI” autocorrect…, it should have been “chip let” not “chip set”.

Re: they are falling short of target

There is an interesting thread discussing what is a “586”: ”How you define a 586”

Given the move to chipset architectures, it would seem future generations of CPU’s will be equally complicated to support…

However, with respect to the 586, we should not forget Intel only stopped production in 2023.

AI will make anyone a 10x programmer, but with 10x the cleanup

Re: Why bother?

I suggest involving an AI agent doubles the task: you have the real task at hand ie. What the program needs to achieve and a second task orchestrating the AI agents to increase the chances(*) of a clean output.

(*) Given the way AI works, you cannot “ensure “ the output is clean, you can only increase the statistical probability of the AI creating a clean (but probably wrong) output.

“More work at the beginning means less to worry about during runtime”

It is clear those writing about AI, never bothered to read up on the software development process. As then they would know why the phases before “coding” were so important and time consuming, plus also know that problems solved/address early result in less (expensive) work/rework further down the line.

It would thus seem, those who’s jobs are most at risk are the “keyboard junkies” - the people who didn’t bother with specifications and design but jumped straight into coding and designed on the fly; AI prompt writing, it seems needs good design, specification and (pseudo) natural language skills.

We know what day it is but these Raspberry Pi price hikes are no joke

Re: Love

>” Same reason you should replace your old tumble drier with a heat pump model, even though it's £200 more expensive to buy.”

I passed on that one; I wanted my washing to dry in a reasonable amount of time. Plus I wanted my drier to be simple enough so that it could be fixed and would last circa 20 years without needing to be replaced. Talking to service engineers, heat pump driers aren’t generally field repairable and so are more likely to be scrapped early.

Just had to replace a 20 year old washing machine (design defect / built-in obsolescence in the drum mountings), the laugh is the old one used a few more litres of water than the new one, but has very similar electricity consumption. However, it could comfortably handle a family of 4 adults washing in one day (along with the tumble drier), unlike the new washer (same vendor as old one) which struggles to complete a wash in under 2 hours and lacks many of the useful features. The sad fact is given the build quality the manufacturers own engineers don’t expect the new washing machine to last 10 years, hence why the maximum warranty is 6 years…

Obviously, having solar panels, my energy considerations differ to those who are wholly dependent on the grid supply.

Ex-Microsoft engineer believes Azure problems stem from talent exodus

Re: Letter from MS to former MS Senior Technical Leaders

? Former ?

"Dear Microsoft Senior Technical Leader:

Remember how we granted you an indefinite sabbatical …”