Posts by werdsmith

COVID-19 was a generational opportunity for change at work – and corporate blew it

And B should pay you for your home office, heating, electricity etc.

The government already give an allowance for that.

Apple grabs smartphone crown as iPhone 13 wakes up the fanbois, leaves Chinese rivals eating dust

Re: Handed it to Apple

This is the problem. I'm not particularly partial to Apple stuff, but I cannot stand the alternative offering from google, so I am left with no choice but to maintain a 2017 iPhone 8. Which is very old but still getting updates as I just went to 15.2.1

I also have a Planet Gemini, from 2018, it is running exclusively Sailfish OS and still getting frequent updates. This is a niche product, shows just how dreadful google OS phones are.

Tesla driver charged with vehicular manslaughter after deadly Autopilot crash

the driver is, being American, heads down and playing on his phone

I don't think that trait has any particular nationality association. I've seen phone addiction everywhere I've travelled.

robots have a well-deserved reputation for spontaneously going out of control

Of course, a human would never do that.

Re: Assisted cruise control

the situations where it kicks in an emergency stop are ones where the driver would be slamming on the brakes themselves anyway

I had a pedestrian step into the road in front of me, I was prepared and covering the brake, yet the car was already braking before I had time to react. In the event the pedestrian hopped back and the car stopped 3 metres short. Impressive.

And on top of that, it can emergency brake if needed and the driver is not paying attention - which happens because the drivers are human and humans all vary in their ability to focus and their judgement of risk. Imagine that pedestrian steps out in front of a driver who is distracted looking in their mirrors etc.

Re: Hi-tech product management for cars

I think the driver assist stuff just doesn't suit some people. I use it, in particular circumstances it's great.

If it does act weird, there is a button on the steering wheel to switch it on and off. The AEB is not very intrusive, it's for emergencies and I've rarely seen it happen. The active cruise also operates the brakes and that can start to slow you down when you don't want it to. Like when there is a bend in the road and the white lines are faded, and there is a truck further ahead round the bend in lane 1, therefore directly in front of me in lane 2. But it's predictable and a quick thumb on the button temporarily suspends it.

MobilEye and similar stuff isn't supposed to keep you alert, it's supposed to recognise when you are looking a bit tired and warn you to stop and take a break. I think some of this explanation illustrates how perception of products and susceptibility to marketing differs between people. I wouldn't dream of interpreting Tesla Auto-Pilot as something that allows hands off driving. To me this is so obvious that it couldn't possibly be misconceived. I have difficulty believing people can actually make this mistake.

Re: It would make Musk even more of a liar

This is what Tesla say:

Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment. While these features are designed to become more capable over time, the currently enabled features do not make the vehicle autonomous.

Tesla Full Self-Driving videos prompt California's DMV to rethink policy on accidents

Re: Autonomous vehicles

Musk keeps poo pooing LIDAR

He does what? That man’s behaviour gets even more bizarre. But that’s some party trick, if he could get all his employees to do it, that would be a cheap source for the components.

Re: Two Teslas

“ being harassed by pedestrians / cyclists who behave in a manner designed to exploit the self-driving car's obligation to not hit them.

Because human drivers don’t have that obligation?

Re: "FSD is now available to all Tesla owners, who are willing to fork over $12,000 for it. ."

Getting something more Hyundai is a pretty good thing and better than Mercedes and especially better than Audi. Plus you don’t need to be a total wanker to own a Hyundai.

Re: Clippy

Why don’t you just go into preferences and switch it off?

Ukraine shrugs off mass govt website defacement as world turns to stare at Russia

Re: The Issue

We know what we are told, I mean the propaganda that we are the most susceptible to becomes our truth.

The same thing can look very different through other eyes.

It would be possible for a trouble making belligerent to carry out a cyber attack whilst giving an impression of being a particular power. If they were intent on kicking off some trouble. Or some faction within a particular power might decide to flex their muscles and test their skills.

Mobile networks really hate Apple's Private Relay: Some folks find iOS privacy feature blocked on their iPhones

If the ISPs and networks lose revenue from this data then they will just recoup it through their tariffs. We (who are customers) will all pay for this privacy in the end.

Apple custom chip guru jumps ship to rejoin Intel

Re: Nice One. ..... but it is not Cricket, Old Bean, is it?

So Wilcox transitions back to Intel with reams of Arm-based Proprietary Intellectual Property to share with Apple competitors/opponents?

Is that not akin to Industrial Espionage/Intellectual Property Theft?

Skills and experience are the property of nobody except the person that earned them.

Nvidia promises British authorities it won’t strong Arm rivals after proposed merger

Re: On the other hand ...

Neither the Labour party, nor the Conservative party sold any "top tier" companies. They have history starting in the 1980s of privatising utilities and other businesses that had been nationalised, but these "top tiers" you refer to are private companies or with publicly listed stock available and trade themselves only with governments looking over their shoulders.

In other news, Kraft promises it will keep Cadbury confectionary manufacturing in the UK.

"but it wasn't us, it was Mondelez that shut down the Keynsham factory to move production to Eastern Europe...."

Ceefax replica goes TITSUP* as folk pine for simpler times

Re: Pedantic - slightly inaccurate

and almost certainly contained the first mircoprocessor "chip" running software in the home.

The early Pong consoles might have a claim there. They were available 3 years before the Speak & Spell and Simon arrived in 1978. In the late 70s and very early 80s the Teletext was only on the higher end TV sets. Ours didn't even have a remote control in those days.

CEEFAX of course, I still remember the page numbers I used most.

Teletext was the popular rival, but who else remembers when it was called Oracle? (nothing to do with his Larryship).

Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics

RISC-V CTO: We won't dictate chip design like Arm and x86

Re: Exactly half-right

“ If NVIDIA are able to buy ARM then they can set whatever terms and conditions they want when it comes time to renew your license”.

For new projects maybe, but paying big billions for a tech and then kill it by encouraging potential clients to look elsewhere, which in turn will accelerate development of the open source rival, leaving NVidia with dwindling existing royalties only. Unless they plan to keep the tech to themselves.

With the rise of an open source alternative, ARM need to get a bit more generous with terms and conditions.

So no, that is definitely not all of it.

Did you look up? New Year's Day boom over Pittsburgh was exploding meteor, says NASA

Re: Other reason

It's actually NCC1701 re-entering earth atmosphere after time travelling.

Oh no! I've just disclosed the sys admin password for a million nerds.

AT&T, Verizon delay 5G C-band rollout over FAA fears of passenger plane radars jammed by signals

Re: Empirical evidence?

Planes crashing or just inconsistent radar altimeter readings compared to eyeball on approach.

Re: Altimeters

They are a critical part of the approach and landing for low visibility and autoland approaches where they give the accuracy needed that a pressure altimeter can't. At higher alitutudes, altitude is based on a standard pressure which separate aircraft by flight levels, and may not necessarily be the actual height above ground level, because it is affected by change in the weather systems. But the same for all aircraft relative to each other.

Some errors fill the screen. And some come from the .NET Framework

Thanks for letting us know .

Not the kind of note you want to see fluttering from an ATM

Re: Its the graphics

Windows has also go the whole Active Directory / Group Policy thing going on, which is one of the overlooked reasons that it remains strong on enterprise desktops.

Can you get excited about the iPhone 13? We've tried

I’m happy to be stuck with an iPhone 8, given that there is no incentive to change up and I can’t stand the alternative popular phone OS. The only thing on later iPhones that I would like are the cameras but not worth hundreds to acquire.

I do have one device running Sailfish and it’s the best phone to use by far. Just misses a couple of vital apps.

I would happily switch to Sailfish otherwise.

At the end of the day, Apple can sell all that they can get made for them, so their biggest problem is supply, same as everyone else. I doubt they’ll lose much sleep over a few nerds sneering about them.

Tesla disables in-car gaming feature that allowed play while MuskMobiles were in motion

Re: What is the point ?

modern "driver assistance" features because they work. Proximity radar and line assist help in dense traffic - especially when stop/start queues form.

No. I have these. They are crap in heavy traffic. They are influenced constantly by the actions of other drivers and when there are a lot of cars close together then they become ridiculous. They are only really good for less dense traffic. Incidentally, the wide load overhanging your lane would cause the car to brake, not continue to try to pass. I would expect not to be lane keeping in a lane that has an obstruction in it anyway, a driver's responsibility.

if you have your windshields coated with rain repellent

I have no problem seeing through my windscreen, the wipers in good condition will keep it clear enough. Fog and spray, though, are a different matter.

100% focus. The reality is that none of us can maintain that for hours,

It's still needed and it's still our duty to try.

The roads are an awful place to drive these days, and certainly no playground. There's no way I'm going driving without a real need. I avoid it a lot. I've also mentioned a few reasons, I haven't touched on the worst one yet, the behaviour of other road users.

Re: Soft controls

While they're at it, what about redesigning the user interface to avoid soft, screen based controls?

This should be market driven, but seems to be manufacturers driving the market. I'm incredulous that car makers push this stuff. If people just stopped buying cars that use this approach, then it would stop. But they won't.

Some car makers, notably Honda, have put the controls back on rotary knobs, as well as on the steering wheel. I think anything you need whilst driving, with the arguable exception of sat nav, is on proper controls or on the steering wheel.

Re: What is the point ?

I find driving creep-forward stop start in heavy traffic as uninteresting as it is possible to be.

I find the 100% focus you need when a road is crowded but the traffic is still moving at high speed to be very tiring. Add to that the wet conditions and low visibility, I will do all I can to avoid driving.

Nothing interesting about it after all these years. When I was a new driver maybe, now it's just 100% trying to get to my destination without incident.

Re: Removing distraction = good

Yes, roundabouts are prone to some accidents, but they tend to be low speed and less damaging accidents.

Re: Removing distraction = good

Btw anyone got a handy reference guide to adding hyperlinks to register comments?

Try here.....

Europe completes first phase of silicon independence project

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

Thankfully. Look at the subsidies needed to make these fabs in expensive countries. We have high costs in labour, bureaucracy, health and safety, electricity, etc to produce something we cannot compete on price with. Better let the US and EU pay it out and UK benefit like the rest of the world from cheaper chips.

This is an example of the massive ignorance and short-sightedness, blinkered vision that has led us into the mess we are in. Or it's a desperate barrel scraping attempt to save face when you are looking at being part of the most embarrassing fuck up ever.

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

There's a raspberry on the Raspberry Pi 2040 Pico chip die.

Re: "efforts to create made-in-Europe chips"

I am old enough to remember Zilog Z80, MOS 65xx, Motorola 68xx, Intel 8080 plus a few other also-rans all competing, take your pick and make your hardware.

Then came the 16 bit evolutions of all of them, the 8086 became the de facto.

Electric fastback fun: Now you can surf the web from the driving seat of your Polestar 2

Re: Cue the anti-moving work-around in 3, 2, 1...

It’s been possible for years to install head units with screens that show video one the move, so a browser on one of those is probably already done.

Cryptocurrency 'rug pulls' cheated investors out of $8bn in 2021 – report

The VAST majority of people involved have made good money out of it. People like to shine a spotlight on the failures because they feel a bit like they have missed out on an opportunity. It makes them feel a bit better about it.

Re: 66,239

Here's another angle.

Bitcoin: something that I played with as an experiment because I was curious about what it was all about, and ended up paying off my mortgage and buying me a new car.

Online retailers delaying sales of Raspberry Pi 4 model until 2023, thanks to a few good chips getting scarce

Re: 2023

I think these are just arbitrary lead times, they don’t mean anything but a number sometime in the future because there are no firm dates being offered by manufacturers . Expect them to change when supply starts to trickle through.

Try and get a Google Coral USB with importing a used one from Japan for triple the price.

Insurance firm Admiral fails to grab phone location data of 'fraud' claimant's mother

Re: A judge suggested checking with the milkman?

Both, Asquith butchers and Associated Dairies joined together to create Asda.

I think they are trying to prove that he was staying with his parents at their home, rather than renting a house from his parents.

If he was staying with his parents at their home he is incurring lesser costs than using a house that his parents could otherwise be gaining income from if they were able to rent it out.

Cerner, a company that scooped more than £100m in NHS deals in a year, is in Oracle's crosshairs

When will we be rid of that disease-ridden parasitic economic leach?

RAF shoots down 'terrorist drone' over US-owned special ops base in Syria

Re: Technically fantastic but...

However I fear that the terrorists are winning the economic argument here. £200,000 for the missile vs how much for a small drone?

I don't think so. I'm sure that the RAF have stocked up with certain types of air to air missile, but having not fired one in anger for 40 years, those old ordnance have become obsolete and just been used up on live fire training exercises or decommissioned and scrapped. No big difference between shooting a little target in an active zone, or shooting an aerial dummy target in training.

Windows Terminal to be the default for command line applications in Windows 11

McCulloch.

And I'll still take London Bridge.

well I have a bridge to sell you.

I’ll take your banal cliche bridge, because McCulloch who took the facings of the previous London Bridge to Lake Havasu City knew exactly what he was doing and very lucrative it turned out too.

£42k for a top-class software engineer? It's no wonder uni research teams can't recruit

I can do the job for 20% less if you pay cash Pascal, know what I mean? Just between you and me like.

I’ve noticed that a science academic non-developer is often damn good at R, and much better at slinging data around using Python/pandas than the average professional developer.

Is it decadent that I use four different computers each day, at different times?

Re: White letters on a black background?

Yes, the ipad can do that. It has "smart invert" mode that will ignore images, media and apps that are dark already. It also has a classic invert mode that just inverts everything.

It also has modes to reduce white point, filter certain colours, and differentiate UI items that rely on only colour.

It's also possible to invert within the app only, if the app supports it. Like Kindle app for example.

Re: Bright little apples?

I have the blue light filter on my reading glasses which give a very slight sepia tinge.

Only four ?

Yes, that's a bit decadent for a Reg person. I'm thinking a dozen and upwards is more my usual day.

Actual metal being welded in support of the UK's first orbital 'launch platform'

Re: Equator

Yes, precisely and French Guiana works well for Ariane.

For comedy value only, somebody started a petition to ask the government to use Ascension for space launches. It got 6 signatures. https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/17692