Posts by druck

K8s on a plane! US Air Force slaps Googly container tech on yet another war machine to 'run advanced ML algorithms'

You either forgot the joke icon for that first paragraph, or are happy to live underground once failed drones start raining down from the sky.

But on to your other point, adapting a manned airframe for use as a drone, negates many advantages of dispensing with the human. You don't need a load of glass sticking up in to the airflow for a human to look out of, you don't need to bring mechanical flying controls in reach of arms and legs. Any unmanned vehicle with the same mission payload and range will be a fraction of the size the equivalent manned aircraft - which means less flaming mass to come down on your head.

It's one thing making a plane that can fly without human input in good to moderate conditions, it's quite another handling all conditions its ever likely to encounter. Even the most decent auto-pilot will occasionally throw its hands in the air and say over to you human. If the human aint there, it's going to coming looking for one on the ground.

FFS FSF, you're 35 already? Hands up if you just sprouted a gray hair or felt a craving for a Werthers Original on reading that. Happy birthday, folks

Re: 9th October Anniversary

My first son's birthday is the day after my wife's birthday, and my second son's is two days after my wedding anniversary. As the boys start counting down the days to go at least a month before hand, and are continually suggesting toys they want, I'm now very unlikely to forget either preceding event.

9th October Anniversary

That's also my wedding anniversary, cloices, choices...*

_{* No, not really.}

GitLab scans its customers' source code, finds it's as fragile as you'd expect

Don't build on sand

Its either because my background as an embedded C developer or that I've got old*, but the thought of using layers of libraries which you aren't in control of, fills me with horror. It took until C++11 until I was happy using STL, and I still think Boost is often a step too far, no matter how useful. But then again, when I'm doing Python I'm happy to use anything that's in pip, as long as it has good documentation.

However, if I ever start using javascript, dragging in god knows what libraries from npm while cutting and pasting code I don't understand from stackoverflow, I hope someone will put me out of my misery.

_{* I think you've already decided which.}

Institute of Directors survey says most bosses expect no mass return to the office if COVID-19 crisis ever ends

Re: I'd like the sports option extended to work

We did that for one of our remote team members a few years ago, so we could remember what he looked like during the morning stand-up. A nice touch was it gained a Santa hat at Christmas.

Twitter: Our image-cropping AI seems to give certain peeps preferential treatment. Solution: Use less AI

Re: Who has been training the AI?

You could train the AI by using software to track eye movement, showing what part of the image is looked at the most by real humans.

What? You say the aim is to focus less on the chesticles?

Google adopts ‘value-neutral’ language to make selfies less about ‘beauty’

New Filter Names

How about; "zit remover", "don't look like I've stayed up all night playing games", and "a bit less like the back end of a bus".

Key-cutting machine borked sideways after visit from the BSOD fairy locks things down

Re: I wonder...

What better time to get locked up, than in lock down. You may not even notice.

Microsoft lends Windows on Arm a hand with emulation layer to finally run 64-bit x86 apps at last

Re: How many years have Microsoft had to get this right?

4^th attempt!

What price your home delivery? Amazon accused of hiding real injury rate in its overworked warehouses

Injuries per 100 employees

Is that per week, per month, per year?

Singapore Airlines turns A380 into a restaurant, delivers plane food to homes

Re: Empty prose.

Worth it for the Tim Tams alone!

Oracle gears up to fend off RPA and workflow upstarts by pouring more automation into core enterprise apps

RPA?

Are we expected to google what this means for ourselves?

Xen Project officially ports its hypervisor to Raspberry Pi 4

RISC OS / Linux Chimera

Hopefully with a hypervisor we can get RISC OS running on one core, Linux on the rest, and have the best of both worlds on one tiny British box.

Exercise-tracking app Strava to give away data sweated out after four billion runs, rides and rambles

Re: Toll Bike Lanes

I'll just assume the down voters have never been on a bus in cyclist friendly Cambridge (UK).

Re: Toll Bike Lanes

Yes, if only the busses didn't have to keep moving in to the traffic lanes to avoid cyclists.

Epic, Spotify, ProtonMail and pals rise up as one against Apple's 30% cut, call for end to Cupertino-style markets

What goes around comes around

Microsoft president Brad Smith voiced his concern about the monopoly power of Apple and Google.

Oh how the mighty have fallen, once upon a time no one would have out monopolised Microsoft.

Ethernet failure on Swiss business jet prompted emergency descent, say aviation safety bods

Moved on from the ARINC-429 used we in the A330/A340 then.

Hong Kong wants to teach kids more STEM – once it's defined what that is

Re: Coding?

Coding is more about teaching about logical thinking than becoming a software engineer. But it may help people knock out a few spreadsheet formula too.

Ex-eBay global intel staffers to admit they cyberstalked online tat bazaar's critics – who got pig heads, funeral wreath, and more in the mail

Re: Can I just point out this is not cyberstalking, just plain old harrassment and intimidation

Cyberstalking would be posting ebay listings of those items on their facebook pages.

Microsoft leaks 6.5TB in Bing search data via unsecured Elastic server. *Insert 'Wow... that much?' joke here*

Re: Must be all of Bing data?

I think most people just use it to search for google.

Ancient telly borked broadband for entire Welsh village

Whip-round

I hope the village is having a whip-round to buy a nice new low noise LCD TV for owner of the old set, otherwise tomorrow morning...

We're not getting back with Galileo, UK govt tells The Reg, as question marks sprout above its BS*

Re: Two chocolate teapots

The UK military doesn't need PRS, it would be decades before we had any kit to use it anyway.

The only practical use for Galileo anybody managed to come up with was a EU wide road pricing scheme, and we certainly don't want to be part of that.

Before you buy that managed Netgear switch, be aware you may need to create a cloud account to use its full UI

Vote with your wallet

No sale is the way to deal with nonsense like that.

This is how demon.co.uk ends, not with a bang but a blunder: Randomer swipes decommissioning domain

If anyone gets reported to the IOC, it should be Vodafone for redirecting email to a domain they didn't own.

Hopefully the 3rd party is just someone who noticed this idiocy, registered the dummy domain, and put server on it to reject traffic, before anybody nasty got in there.

As we stand on the precipice of science fiction into science fact, people say: Hell yeah, I want to augment my eyesight!

The Six Million Dollar Man

I'm still waiting for my bionic eye with zoom capability, being to lift up a car with one hand, and to run in slow motion at 60mph.

Alibaba wants to get you off the PC upgrade treadmill and into its cloud

Keyboard and Mouse

USB-C is the key to the device as Alibaba images a single cable will power Wuying and connect it to a display. The company hasn’t explained how one might attach a keyboard and mouse.

Via the USB hub built in to the monitor.

Safety driver at the wheel of self-driving Uber car that killed a pedestrian is charged with negligent homicide

Re: I agree

There might be more road accidents but they are hell of a lot easier to investigate. There are no skid marks in the sky, and you don't have work out what has happened from tiny fragments debris scattered over hundreds of square metres.

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

Re: Not just dates get confused

I knew someone in New Zealand that received a legal nasty gram about downloading illicit content from their dynamic IP address at a particular time. Daylight savings time differences between

NZ and UK mean between April and September NZ is 11 hours ahead and September to April it's 13 hours ahead of the UK. After much investigation we worked out someone got 11 hours ahead mixed up with 11 hours behind, which is probably Hawaii. It took sometime for them to accept this though.

How about a lovely processor thermal trip? Hot day in Italy brings out the banking bork

Wouldn't have happened...

...if they'd used a Raspberry Pi, even a 4B.

Don’t lump us in with Facebook, internet infrastructure companies warn European Union

You aren't familiar with DMCA takedown notices then? This is already happening on a huge scale.

Vivaldi offers users a 'break' from browsing. No, don't switch to Chrome... don't sw..

Re: May have some niche use

...such as when your boss kindly asks you to take a break from the browser for a couple of minutes - to do some bloody work!

Competitive techies almost bring distributed disaster upon themselves – and they didn't even find any aliens

Re: Ah, reverse SSH tunnels.

That's just a normal forward tunnel.

At a previous job we had enjoyed a fast ssh connection in to the company in order to work from home, but after a while a pointy haired boss decided we should all use a new and incredibly slow VPN as it was "more secure". Suffice to after a week or so getting nothing done, word got around to have a careful read of the ssh man page.

So then I set up my work machine to automatically ssh in to my Raspberry Pi at home, with a reverse tunnel set up. Then when I was at home I could ssh in to the Raspberry Pi from the company laptop and connect back to my desktop at work.

RC5 cracking on the sly

Before SETI there was the distributed.net RC5 cracking challenge. I ran it on a few early Pentium III industrial PCsI had access to at work, but as there was only one PC with internet access in the office, I had to run the client and manually copy the data to and from the client for each machine. Later I managed managed to find a few more of the boxes which were going unused, and set them up at the back of a cupboard where hopefully no one would notice the noise from the fans and or wonder why it was a bit warm. Manually setting them up was a pain, so I created a shared drive and automatically ran the client on the internet PC out of work hours. The system worked very well for over a year, so well I forgot about it when I moved on, and it carried on submitting results for around 6 months after I left the company!

Happy birthday to the Nokia 3310: 20 years ago, it seemed like almost everyone owned this legendary mobile

Ah, the 8310 prison edition.

Samsung reveals new folding stuff for people who like flaunting wads of folding stuff

Re: Ooh look!

That's an idea. I'll just duct tape my old S5 to my S7, for a far more affordable foldable.

Party like it's 2004: Almost a quarter of Windows 10 PCs living with the latest update

Re: Hey guys!

No

UK govt: It's time to get staff back into the office! Capita: Hey everyone... about that...

Re: square feet in round holes

But soon the employer will be wondering why they need to pay you a salary based on the £8K commuting costs you no longer have to pay, while you work from your home.

Next they'll be wondering why they are paying you a salary based on expensive homes in the south east when you or someone else could be working from home somewhere cheaper in the north of England.

After that they'll be wondering why they are paying a salary based on someone living in the UK, when someone else could be working from home in a much cheaper country.

When Irish screens are borking: Ticketing trip-up for Dublin-based Windows 10 IoT terminal, but at least it's not XP

what is hoovering up all that CPU is up for discussion

It's got 4 cores so the 22% will be Explorer maxing out almost an entire core for absolutely no reason.

Sounds like the black helicopters have come for us. Oh, just another swarm of FAA-approved Amazon delivery drones

Don't let this become the future

Rm9sbG93ZXJz

Palantir: Never made a profit, we do something with family-separating ICE, we just lost $580m – please join our IPO

Bait for some corporate mega-sucker

Why does this make me think of Autonomy?

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Keep stupid out

Anyone that cannot set up a plain text email client, has no business being anywhere near kernel development.

There should be barriers to entry when dealing with highly technical areas, and anything that keeps stupidity away from the Linux kernel is a good thing.

So... just 'Good' then? KFC pulls Finger Lickin' slogan while pandemic rumbles on

Re: Stats

I'm pretty sick of the food bigots on here that every time KFC or McDonald's is mentioned feel the need to bleat on about how bad it is. No one is saying its the best food in the world, or suitable to eat every day, but a lot of people enjoy the occasional fast food meal. If you don't like it, just don't eat it, and STFU.

Uncle Sam to blow millions on getting fusion power finally working – with the help of AI

Re: Fusion reactor safe?!!!!

1500 tons of liquid sodium coolant was used in the Doonray experimental fast breeder reactor. It does burn in air, but you forgot the bit about it exploding in water (the secondary coolant).

India selects RISC-V for semiconductor self-sufficiency contest: Use these homegrown cores to build kit

Which way around?

Specifically, we're talking about two designed-in-India microprocessor designs, the 32-bit E-Class and 64-bit C-class Shakti, and the 64-bit Vega.

As any Mercedes own knows, the E-Class is larger than the C-Class.

AWS creates a quantum computing cloud with classical testbed plus rentable qubits

Not when but if

Which is all very exciting, save for the fact that it’s generally agreed that useful quantum machines are years away and that when they arrive they’ll be extraordinarily expensive to acquire and operate.

If they ever arrive, but in the meantime here is a simulation of how we hope they might work.

EY to outsource compute function, sending 800 staff into the loving arms of... IBM

Re: Nobody is being “forced”

Yes, it's such a great time to start looking for a new job, everyone is doing it.

Co-inventor of the computer mouse, William English, dies

Re: Revolutionary

One of the first mice for the BBC Micro was the large and expensive AMX rat, I couldn't afford that so, bought a cheaper one to connect to the user port. It featured the real mouse layout, of buttons at the front and a tail at the back, before they realised the lead kept getting trapped under your wrist. As it was cheap the traction of the ball was poor, so it would only work well using the rough side of a bit of hardboard as a mouse mat, and the plastic case was so thin sunlight would confuse the sensors, requiring a mod with some black tape. But it worked, and was so much better than a joystick for precise control on screen, it revolutionised my use of the computer.

Wrap it before you tap it? No, say Linux developers: 'GPL condom' for Nvidia driver is laughed out of the kernel

Re: Not 'ARMless

Its normal for some SOC makers to have closed source drivers for the proprietary parts of their chip. It would be a lot different if the you couldn't get hold of the documentation or reference code for the ARM core in the SOC, unless you were device manufacturer paying large sums to nVidia.

Self-driving car supremo Anthony Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in the clink for stealing trade secrets from Google's Waymo

A tiny 3/4 million payout in compensation, a pocket change $95k fine, and a $179m lawsuit still comes way short of the £680m from the sale to Uber.