Posts by xeroks

Google is to journalism what Vikings were to monks. Now their man will run the BBC

Re: Motivations

For the last decade or so, the streaming services have been funded by VC cash. We're coming to the end of that now, so you will have to pay a subscription and *still* have to watch ads. In future that sub will be bigger. So between that, and all the services the BBC currently provides, I'd say it does pretty well.

I don't see the TV licence being around for long though, it isn't sustainable. I see a hybrid ad/subscription model working for the broadcasting side of things: broadcast tv and radio will have ads, which internet based video and audio will have a paid ad-free option.

I imagine the BBC websites will be funded though. possibly in the same way: a paid ad-free version.

I suspect the funding from these sources will be insufficient to maintain the quality of the current services.

Who knows. Maybe Radio 4 & Newsnight current affairs will go it alone, or merge with GB news.

Junior disobeyed orders and tried untested feature during a live robot demo

LATER

re-reading the text, there is some amibivalence about that sentence "Do a write-up, and take the credit for testing a potentially new feature – LATER"

OK - he thinks - this situation requires some urgency so I'll do the swap now and the write up the results and take the credit later.

Head-mounted VR hardware will never happen, says Neal Stephenson - who coined the term ‘metaverse’

Re: "staring at little rectangles in their hands"

Yes, the videophone thing... yes it kind of works, but when you have parents in their 80s... less so.

the reality of video call in our household is that I always get my parents in portrait mode, regardless of which way they or I have our devices. I usually only see the top of one of their heads, and even that shakes around, fall over. The sound doesn't work. Usually we spend the initial 10 mins trying to get the call to work, preferably on tablet, but that only works occasionally.

Discovering a suitable application is usually painful: in the early days I tried them with more professional apps like BlueJeans and webex, but everyone has a range of different social situations and each has its own platform. Nobody likes a multiude of apps, which inevitably resulted in another 10 minutes of "how do you log in?".

Webex managed to shoot themselves in the foot at one point by releasing a new, even more complicated version which had a separate app and a different login process and dammit, let's just use Whatsapp.

Calling out corporate BS? There's a steaming pile to aim for

Re: In the mockery a glob of insipid business speak oozes through.

At least "Learning(s) as a noun does have some historical usage. The one from the 90s that dove me up the wall was when "leverage" went from noun to verb. <shudder>

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

Had that when I got my first PC. It was huge, to be fair. After I'd set it up, I was showing it to my mate - who's demonstrably cleverer than me - and he said, "so when can you get rid of the big box?"

Mate - that *is* the computer.

Having said that, he's the one who was building computer-based lesson plans. I asked him which software he was using, he answered "Microsoft". Not "Microsoft Powerpoint" or whatever niche application he needed. Just "Microsoft," and refused to accept there could possibly be any further clarification required. I can see that perhaps in his organisation/peer group, calling the software "Microsoft" was sufficient. Or maybe it was called "Microsomethingelse" and he got it wrong.

Bug that wiped customer data saved the day – and a contract

Re: so .. er ?

My understanding is that they went to investigate why a customer's internet access was poor.

While doing so, "Caleb" spotted a setting in the - customer owned - routers which was perhaps incorrect. He tweaked it and it rebooted. Unfortunately the routers had a bug which caused the rest of their configuration to be reset.

Caleb set the router up from scratch, and suddenly the customer internet connection was working properly.

Bitcoin bandit's £5B bubble bursts as cops wrap seven-year chase

Re: Criminal Assets?

looks like it was well under $1K at the beginning of 2017, so a hundred-fold increase. Give the victim twice their money back, and you've got plenty left over for an upgrade to the panda car.

I was a part-time DBA. After this failover foul-up, they hired a full-time DBA

Re: RTFM. Has failing to do so led you into trouble?

I call this the "Serve with rice" documentation bug.

ie you spend an hour following a recipe, all the constituent parts are cooked and at the correct temperature, then the recipe finishes with "serve with rice," an element that will take 10 minutes to make and hasn't been mentioned in the instructions until now.

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

Re: misdirection going on here, i think

My understanding (not verified, I've not even looked at the project 2025 manifesto) is it's going to happen within the next couple of weeks. There will be no mid-terms, or if there are, many thumbs will be on the scales to prevent any significant dem wins.

Would love to be wrong.

misdirection going on here, i think

to me, the prime outcome of this is likely to be an angry US public: they are - at this point the biggest losers worldwide.

Unfortunately this ties in with what I understand is the one of the goals of Project 2025: invoking Martial law later this month.

I can't describe how sad it is so see this nation be pushed through this metamorphosis to authoritarian regime. There is opposition to it, but no plan. When up against a well funded organisation which has been on a war footing for one-and-a-half, two decades, you need a plan.

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

rewind to the top of the article

The fact Fred was employed in a missile factory kind of boggles the mind.

After China's Salt Typhoon, the reconstruction starts now

Start the year with a bang.

Great article Rupert.

<looks askance at my entire home & work networking>

Relocation is a complete success – right up until the last minute

I think you're assuming that the lightswitch was connected to the lighting circuit. It was probably set up by the previous owner so they could quickly switch on and off all their hardware from the one location.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

Re: the Law is drafted by those who wish to legitimize their delinquent behaviour

War is, for the most part, a legalised form of murder.

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

Jack Dorsey's next move

Should be to buy the twitter.com url and tradmark back - after all, Musk isn't using them and the company could do with the cash.

Then "simply" rebuild twitter from scratch.

The price of freedom turned out to be an afternoon of tech panic

Re: D'oh

" Excel was just a step, not the destination"

Sometimes there's a LOT of stopping on that step. It may be halfway down the stairs, but that's where people like to sit if they think the shonky workaround is good enough for customers.

Verizon to 'sunset' Blue Jeans vidconf platform

that's a shame

We previously used Blue Jeans (with its amusing abbreviation) at work. It was actually pretty good. The audio in particular was (in later iterations) awesome, particularly when wearing stereo headphones. They'd really sorted out cleaning up the sound from all the attendee's mics, and had the tech to place them precisely in audio space. It was really impressive.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Re: Real Sanitizers

The new Zaphod configuration was one of DNA's contributions, He was never concerned with tweaking stuff until it was right, and hadn't been happy with Zaphod being able to pass as human on Earth unnoticed.

How a dispute over IP addresses led to a challenge to internet governance

Power of the individual.

The thing that intrigues me about this is that it all appears to be the work of one person (plus a couple of contractors) who managed to grab a big bunch of IP addresses, and is doing his best to monetise them.

I doubt he's actually raking in the $14m-$21m revenues the figures suggest, but, presuming he has few if any employees, he's likely to be nicely well off.

Take a 14-mile trip on an autonomous Scottish bus starting next month

interesting route to chose

That bus is going to be riding along some highly congested roads, particularly during peak times. Admittedly, it won't be going fast, so that's in it's favour.

China unveils massive blockchain cluster running homebrew tech

Re: Small question...

a blockchain with a centralised authority doesn't require anywhere near the same computation. Yes, it's more than a plain old commit, but not much.

Re: Small question...

I don't think they trust anyone. This actually doesn't sound unreasonable, especially compared to the UK's constant requests to backdoor encryption.

Re: Small question...

The only advantage I can see for blockchain here is that it makes transactions less modifyable than simple entries in a table.

With table entries, someone with suitable access can edit that record however they wish. With blockchain - as i understand it - you'd have to roll that change right through all subsequent transactions.

Let me X-plane: Boeing R&D unit sheds rudder, ailerons, flaps for DARPA project

Re: Goo goo, gah gah

if you haven't worked out that American english and UK english are different things by now, there's no help for you.

It's a quote from Graham Drozeski, an american with a PhD. he's not stupid, or a child. He simply uses language in a different way from you.

Disruptive innovation's like a party. It's always happening elsewhere

What's "the meteor strike of World War II?"

presumably not the Gloucester Meteor?

Big Tech is building the metaverse of its own dreams. You don't want to go there

Re: Apples "Envisioning"

The Creative music player was rust based, and predated the ipod.

The UI was clunky though, not a patch on the ipod's wheel (which _was_ a great innovation).

The Creative player was bulkier and awkward. It looked like consumer devices of the time, like portable CD players.

The look of the iPod was its other big innovation - it blew most other consumer products away.

US Army drone crashes hours ahead of breaking flight duration record

They may have 1500 hours of data...

... but I suspect the final few minutes will be the ones with the most attention.

It's a pretty impressive feat.

My mind was boggled, though, by those details about the record they were chasing.

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

Re: Additional Customs clearance chargers

the whole import & export of hardware can be fraught with entirely legal difficulties, never mind illegal ones. I've heard of servers & laptops being confiscated -legally - by governments. And we're not talking third world governments here: I'm sure the US was one of the worst culprits.

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

Other VBA limit

I used to maintain an excel app with a VBA form which at one point broke the limit of controls on it. There were thousands on it.

I don't recall whether it was memory or simply the count that caused the issue.

Supercomputer pinpoints exact origin of 'Black Beauty' meteorite from Mars

Re: OK, stupid question time

It's not a stupid question to my mind, but my expection was that there was a reasonable explanation to be had.

My follow-up stupid question is: how did someone know to pick this particular stone up and investigate where it came from? And give it a name?

Behold: The first images snapped by the James Webb Space Telescope

literally

"a *long* time ago in a galaxy far, far away."

AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

Re: The real issue

Having a constantly running and internal state is a facet of an animal consciousness, but does it need to be for a machine?

It may only require that its state is changed as new information is received, maybe with the equivalent of a regular reindex.

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Re: Full names please.......

The correct response to 'Sorry lads, if yer name ain't daaaan, you ain't comin' in' is

"We're here to *Get Daan*" <strikes Saturday Night Fever pose>

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

Re: Size of a real keyboard?

I had a dk tronics keyboard too, mostly because i'd hammered the grey one to death. The "real" keyboard was significantly better.

The peripherals not plugging in was a problem easily solved. Anytime I wanted to use my mate's specdrum, I just took the keyboard part of it off. By design (or fluke) the cable was long enough for the keyboard to be plugged in and usable but not actually in its proper place.

One of the nice things about the dktronics one was the power brick could be fitted inside the unit, which was much neater than having it on the floor.

IT technician jailed for wiping school's and pupils' devices

outlook and teams

If I want to use outlook or teams with my work account on my phone I must give my employer the authority to wipe my entire phone.

I imagine the same would apply to pcs, laptops. It's a data security measure. If the device were ever to be stolen or lost, someone else could access files or messages on it ( I think it's files they're most concerned about). Mostly it's to minimise the chances of sensitive data getting into the wrong hands. It's simpler applying the same rules to everyone in the organisation and not just people who might have sensitive data sent to them.

Not sure the mechanism: like many on here, I'm not going to give anyone that access thanks.

HPE has 'substantially succeeded' in its £3.3bn fraud trial against Autonomy's Mike Lynch – judge

Re: Swap him for

I believe she has already agreed to come back to face a trial.

'Can you identify your assailants?' Yes, they were pixelated! I'd know them anywhere!

7UP as a mixer

I hadn't - until now for some reason - realised how appropriate 7UP might be as an ingredient for an orgy-themed cocktail.

Anyone fancy a "Group Sex on the Beach"?

I own that $4.5bn of digi-dosh so rewrite your blockchain and give it to me, Craig Wright tells Bitcoin SV devs

I only have questions

how much bitcoinSV does he claim ownership of? Is it £16m worth or $4.5b worth? or are these valuations for different things?

And does he claim ownership over any BTC? Or do the coins he claims ownership of predate BTC?

The odd thing is that I'd have expected the inventor of crypto currency to have a working knowledge of the downsides of their design, e.g. keeping your keys and wallet secure is quite important.

Teen bought Google ad for his scam website and made 48 Bitcoins duping UK online shoppers

It would seem fair to, as far as possible, return the proceeds, where possible, to the victim of the crime. But I know that isn't going to happen.

If you're going to make a high-risk investment...

best use someone else's money.

Twitter's machine learning algorithms amplify tweets from right-wing politicians over those on the left

Re: Black Box

weird use of the term "benign".

Promoting policies and attitudes that cause damage to people isn't harmless.

Re: Tweet Bias

Use of simple answers tends to be a tactic used by populist politics, so generally the more extreme stuff.

Maybe - because the majority of twitter is US based - there is little if anything on the extreme left-wing to balance those US far-right-wingers out. Until recently, even our tory party were to the left of anything the US have come out with.

Computer shuts down when foreman leaves the room: Ghost in the machine? Or an all-too-human bit of silliness?

Re: Power socket on the lighting circuit?

Oh that's interesting. I have a garage with a round-pin socket and a meter that time forgot.

I've wondered (because of the way the mains wiring is shared with neighbouring garages) whether there what the maximum power supply is supposed to be.

Upgrading all the electrics is on a to-do list somewhere. If nothing else I need to know how limited that supply is before buying that electric car.

If anyone can explain why Jupiter's Great Red Spot is spinning faster and shrinking, please speak up

Re: Green energy

"Besides that Transient Shadow last mentioned, there hath been observed, by Mr. Hook first ... and since by M. Cassini, a permanent Spot in the Disque of Jupiter."

I bet Neal Stephenson wishes he knew about this factoid while he was writing his Baroque Cycle books. It could have taken things in a very different direction.

One-size-fits-all chargers? What a great idea! Of course Apple would hate it

Re: Apple don't like it?

Although a usb-c lasts you several years, I wouldn't be surprised if your wife goes through them at the same rate as her lightning ones.

BTW I'm very much in favour of rationalising these sockets for most devices. I'm more concerned about situations where this might be wrongly applied. I'm thinking specifically about gutar pedals, which all used the same 9V round pin as they used 40 years ago or more. If the EU forced manufacturers to switch to USB-C for these, that would cause more waste rather than less.

Ofcom swears at the general public for five days during obscenity survey

Re: It's "NOB" !

Ah bless. A Beano reader.

While homophones, they're different words, with different meanings. A nob is not necessarily a knob, and a knob is not necessarily a nob. Though to be fair, the Venn diagram has an impressive intersection.

A practical demonstration of the difference between 'resilient' and 'redundant'

Re: The old demonstration of if only

I'm clearly not as au fait with stats and probability as I thought. Why only 63%?

While I understand that after 1000 rolls of that awkardly sized 1000-sided dice, there's not 100% chance of an accident, I don't understand why it's as little as 63%.

Happy birthday, Linux: From a bedroom project to billions of devices in 30 years

Re: I've got a suggestion...

That's fair.

An alternative, taking "Uncle Jack" as a proper noun, would have resulted in the "my" being spurious. So the sentence would have ended up as "I helped Uncle Jack off a horse."

(I started this post disagreeing with you, but have seen the error of my ways)

Three things that have vanished: $3.6bn in Bitcoin, a crypto investment biz, and the two brothers who ran it

Re: Company compliance officer

To be fair, a tech company run by a 17 and 21 year old with billions of other people's money is exactly the target organised crime would go for.

And with those rewards, they might not be too squeamish about how they did it. Computer hacking isn't the only way of doing this stuff: good old-fashioned finger hacking would do the trick too.

Yep, the 'Who owns Linux?' case is back from the dead

Suitable investment for a large company

Anyone any idea how much SCO - in its bankrupt state - have cost to buy?

If I ran a big, big linux using company, the idea of buying SCO might be reasonable, if only to minimise the legal costs associated with this kind of action. If I had less morals, I might use the purchase and start suing the opposition.

Hell, I daresay that I could pay linux licencing fees to my own company as part of a "tax management" scheme, and decrease my tax liabilities.