Posts by druck

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

Re: Always date and time

There are always problems with date and time in computers. It is one of the most difficult things to get right. And when you get it right, you probably got it wrong anyway, somewhere.

Very true. I knocked up a quick Python script to make a graph from an rsyslog file using datetime.util.parse to turn the month and day in to a full date, and thought was working perfectly until I looked at the graph on new years day. Instead of showing the last 2 days data, it showed a year with data from 1st Jan 2022 and 31st Dec 2022. Quickly changed it to use datetime.strptime with a calculation of the correct year.

Car makers lock in long-term deals with chip giants for future autonomous vehicles

Comfortable?

Vehicle manufacturers are said to be getting comfortable with these chip suppliers after years of stringent testing and validation of self-driving systems for stability, safety and operation in harsh conditions.

Not quite reality is it though? Letting these self propelled agents of death out on public roads with a barely functioning human not paying attention behind the wheel, and hoping it doesn't kill too many people, is more like it.

DIY Sinclair clones: Left it too late to back the Next? Build your own instead

Re: Great article

The only proper 8 bit machine was the BBC Micro.

Microsoft Paint + car park touchscreen = You already know where this is going

Abolish Anonymous Cowards

Microsoft rang in the new year with a cutesy tweet in C#. Just one problem: The code sucked

Re: Video..

The video makes a lot of sensible points, including that in general date comparisons should be done in UTC. But in the case of printing a message at new year, local time would be what you are interested in. Otherwise someone in New Zealand would be half way through new years day before the computer was hit by the clue bat.

Nationwide Building Society's Faster Payments turn into Slower Payments for 2022

The start of the calendar and fiscal year always used to be on the 25th March, which became 5th of April under the Gregorian calendar, and we then adopted this new fangled idea of starting the calendar year on the 1st of January, but the fiscal year has stayed on the 5th of April.

A lot of bills normally go out from my account on the 1st, 2nd or 3rd of the month, as all those were a weekend or bank holiday, they've all hit my bank account today, and I've become considerably less well off very quickly.

America's 'Team Telecom' backs switch-on of Google and Meta's US-APAC undersea cable

Re: Re a Galactic Intervention Verging on the Heralding of Myriad Future Psychotic AI Episodes?*

And not forgetting the 2946 posts from the first incarnation amanfromMars, before he/she/it typed gibberish in to the password field one too many times.

Although given the spread of posting times, I'm not convinced they are the same demi-bot.

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

Pi 3B+'s are also impossible to get hold of, I've had to buy a 3B from ebay to upgrade the original 256MB Model B in the shed.

Intel updates mysterious 'software-defined silicon' code in the Linux kernel

Re: Hardware as a service

Acoustic couplers at the ready!

Re: Hardware as a service

Emulating a BBC Micro would be fun, plenty of old games to play.

But if it reverting to 486 speeds with Windows 11 running on it, that wouldn't fun.

Return of the Mac (mechanical): Vissles keyboard for fans of keeping a low profile

Re: No point in buying a mechanical keyboard if it's low profile

Doh! Yes - I can't understand wanting less keys.

Re: No point in buying a mechanical keyboard if it's low profile

I can understand anyone who does any serious work wanting less keys on a keyboard.

Intel's mystery Linux muckabout is a dangerous ploy at a dangerous time

Re: You Do Not Own Your Computer.

There is no new AI and quantum tech.

Gas giant 11 times the mass of Jupiter discovered in b Centauri binary system

Mass

Scientists have discovered a gas giant planet 10 times the size of Jupiter orbiting the binary system of b Centauri A and B.

I believe it is 10 or 11 times the mass, rather than size.

Microsoft gives Notepad a minimalist makeover to match Windows 11 style

Re: Dark?

Don't forget the BBC Micro - white text on a black screen when you powered it on.

The reason for that is it was designed to be used with domestic TVs, that had poorly focused beams and high persistence phosphors. White text on black had slightly too thick lines and smeared when scrolled. Black text on white had very thin lines making it hard to read, and almost disappeared when scrolling.

Even if it was used with a monitor with a better focused beam and lower persistence phosphor, the refresh was only 50Hz, which gave a very pronounced flicker with a white background.

Foreign Office IT chaos: Shocking testimony reveals poor tech support hindered Afghan evac attempts

Re: Organisation

Don't let anyone on board wearing a Taliban uniform, Pike.

It's primed and full of fuel, the James Webb Space Telescope is ready to be packed up prior to launch

Re: New! Improved! oxidiser!

Which flavour of hydrazine? Good old MMH or funky UDMH?

US trade watchdog opposes Nvidia's Arm buy, mostly over fears about datacentre innovation

We need ARM back under UK ownership, and for it to stay that way.

Could we use an LLVM-based cross-compiler to build apps for quantum computers? This alliance says yes

You can use any cross-compiler for quantum, as they'll all make you cross when it doesn't work.

UK intel chief says MI6 must outsource innovation – and James Bond's in-house 'Q' is nonsense

M/C

MI6 boss Richard Moore (whose initial, one notes, is 'M')

But is known as 'C'.

Microsoft adds Buy Now, Pay Later financing option to Edge – and everyone hates it

What next?

Clippy does payday loans?

Quantum computing to grow by 50 per cent per year until 2027, when revenue will still be chump change

A fool and their money are easily parted.

That's still a lot of people paying a lot of money for something that doesn't work now, and still wont work in 2027.

Project Union: Microsoft releases Windows App SDK 1.0, developers try to puzzle it out

They really haven't got a clue, have they.

China plans to swipe a bunch of data soon so quantum computers can decrypt it later

Re: Quantum computing and decryption

It nice to know the Chinese have bought in to the quantum snake oil, jut like everyone else.

Nuclear fusion firm Pulsar fires up a UK-built hybrid rocket engine

Re: Fusion rocket engines - the gist

Bob, you are correct it has already been done, the F1 engine vented the fuel rich exhaust from the turbo pumps into the main nozzle to form a protective boundary layer. However things have moved on since the 60s, with the full-flow staged-combustion-cycle Raptor engine being far more efficient in terms of both specific impulse and thrust to weight ratio, even if a single engine can't compete with the F1 in terms of total thrust.

James Webb Space Telescope gets all shook up – launch delayed again

Re: a "sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band"

Probably the same as when we were trying to get the 75" TV up the stairs to the first floor living room, on its end and one step at a time to clear the ceiling. We accidentally dropped it down the first step on to the concrete floor when getting it on to its end. There was a lot of swearing, but by a miracle the glass didn't break. Now its on the wall you can see the chassis is very slightly dented at one corner. Fingers crossed the stored up stress is going to make it go crack just after the warranty is out.

A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal

Re: What was I thinking?

Sounds like most of the Black Friday deals this side of the pond.

Everything but the catch: '90s pop act or a successful mission for Rocket Lab?

Re: Raises hand from back of room

Its rather obvious when you see the video above.

Do not try this at home: Man spends $5,000 on a 48TB Raspberry Pi storage server

Re: "overall, the device's performance was ... mostly disappointing"

The Pi 4B is showing an iperf result of 968Mbps over gigabit Ethernet.

The Pi 3B+ wasn't true gigabit but could still do about 300Mbs.

Cruel and unusual IT fail upstages Megan Fox. Transformers: Windows in disguise

I thought it might be...

...a modesty dialog, in case she'd had a wardrobe malfunction, but then thinking about it, Windows has no modesty.

Boffins use nuclear radiation to send data wirelessly

Re: a small step

Neutrinos are very different particles to neutrons.

Two non-Gtk Linux desktops have put out new versions

Re: Variety is the Spice of Life...

You will never get wide-scale buy in from the business community to use Linux on the Desktop due to the retraining costs and lost productivity every time a bad design decision takes the desktop over a cliff. It's just cost prohibitive.

And yet they happily just suck it up every time Windows goes over a cliff?

At least with Linux if your desktop goes in a direction you don't like, there will be a fork that keeps it the the way it was.

Linux PC shop System76 is building a new desktop environment in Rust

Re: There is nothing like change to get people excited

this inconsistency of desktops with distros changing from one to another or hacking them about shows just how far Linux is from mainstream, there is no one Linux, and never will be (which is both good and bad), for users to get behind, and in my experience if there is one thing the great unwashed user morass hates it is constant change and churn and spending any amount of time to get back to where they were before you changed things for the better.

I'd argue Linux is much better than the mainstream i.e. WIndows. The Windows desktop continually churns, moving from 7 to 8 to 10, and onwards. What choice does the great unwashed mass of users have if they don't like it? Suck it up and hope the next version isn't as bad?

When a Linux desktop changes disastrously, such as with Gnome3, you just install Mate and carry on as before with all your existing applications - no continuous nagging and dialogs trying to trick you into upgrading to a telemetry laden version you don't want.

Tencent Cloud boasts it's made the world's best AI silicon and SmartNIC

I think we'll file this one under [Citation needed]

No day in court: US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rulings will stay a secret

Re: ....perhaps Blowfish is easier.....

No one cares what random characters an anonymous conspiracy nut posts on the register forum. not in Cheltenham, Fort Meade or anywhere else.

The pandemic improved the status of IT workers … forever

Re: Hahaha . . . no.

The usual change is to git rid of the survey, or better still write it in a way that the only answers are the one they want to hear.

What a clock up: Brit TV-broadband giant Sky fails to pick up weekend's timezone change, fix due by Friday

Worse than that the NSW/Queensland board goes through the middle of Coolangatta and Tweed Heads, so one side of the town spends 6 months with an hours time difference to the other!

Upcoming Intel GPU to be compatible with Arm

Marketing incentive

It would seem strange to want create a super computer from ARM chips paired with by far the weakest GPU maker, could it be a marketing incentive? Or rather several sack loads there of.

SoftIron now slinging servers with artisanal firmware and an auditable bill of materials

Wow, sounds too good too good to be true!

Shrootless: Microsoft found a way to evade Apple's SIP macOS filesystem protection

Who found it?

If only they put as much effort in to finding bugs in their own OS.

Windows Subsystem for Android: What's the point?

Re: Minimum system requirements

A 4GB laptop upgrade is around £20, 8GB around £30.

Not for laptops which have 4G soldered to the motherboard it isn't.

Get ready for full holograms and 6G while living in the metaverse, says Samsung

Re: Backtracking?

XG - everything we claimed for (X-1)G, but actually working this time*, with added unicorns.

_{* But at frequencies which wont pass through a paper bag.}

SolarWinds attacker on the move: Russia's Nobelium crew has trebled attacks targeting MSPs, cloud resellers, says Microsoft

Re: And in tonight's RT news

I think that is saying the head of the catholic church is not called the pope, not that the pope isn't catholic.

Behold, Eclipse's open-source software defined vehicle project

Re: They couldn't make an IDE so I doubt this will be a success

I thought "Eclipse and car?", surely they'll need a truck to drag around all the memory it will need, and it will perform like a 18 wheeler going up a 1 in 7.

Pack your bags – we may have found the first planet outside of our galaxy

Re: Hope

There is hope that our elites take inaugural flight and they won't have enough fuel to come back.

I love posts like this, if there weren't plenty of people only too eager to step in to be the next elites, you'd probably be left not knowing which hand to wipe your bottom with.

Apple's Safari browser runs the risk of becoming the new Internet Explorer – holding the web back for everyone

FTFY: Chrome and Firefox skins for Safari are in the IOS app store. Just not very popular because it's still Safari underneath.

Microsoft emits more Win 11 fixes for AMD speed issues and death by PowerShell bug

Re: How many years ?

With the Windows 10 now 11 rolling upgrade shitstorm, how do you tell what is version 3?