Posts by druck

How do you sing 'We're jamming and we hope you like jamming, too' in Russian? Kremlin's sat-nav spoofing revealed

Re: "Misinformation coming from Russia"

No, but there will be multiple points of uncertainty.

Googlers, eggheads urge web giant's bosses to kick top conservative off its AI ethics council

Snowflakes

If you wont allow differing opinions to be heard, you should not be on any decision making body.

IT meltdown bank TSB: It's as good a week as any to announce we're taking back control

Useless systems

My mortgage is with TSB and I'm coming to the end of the two year deal, so I needed to log on and get a statement. Couldn't remember if I'd logged on before, so put in my name and the account number from a letter, it rejected it as being two digits too long. Left off the /1234 bit and it was two digits too short. Thought maybe I hadn't registered, so tried that and the account number was rejected as being 3 digits too long, or 1 digit too short. Phoned them up, and the girl said "oh the computer system has never worked", I can give you your current balance now, and send a statement through the post in 10 to 15 working days. WTF!

Lip-reading smart speakers: Just what no one always wanted

Here's a thought

If it could detect the sound of my bones creaking in bed in the middle of the night, caused by my 3 year is climbing over me to get to mummy, and lure him back to his own bedroom with the theme music of Paw Patrol, that would be a real use for the technology.

Here's a race condition we can get behind: Neural net learns to keep up with 'skilled' amateur track driver in robo-ride safety experiment

The least useful test ever

Massive expanse of tarmac, a couple of cones, no other cars, cyclists, or pedestrians. This has absolutely no benefit to increasing safety of automated vehicles?

NASA 'nauts do what flagship smartphone fans can only dream of: Change the batteries

Or if it's a new build planet, they might find it stuck on a buried workman's helmet.

Russian sailors maroon themselves in Bristol Channel after drunken dinghy ride goes awry

Re: 4am?

Luckily they didn't rock up at Steep Holm, there's even less there.

Although not as bad as Rockall - There's fuckall at Rockall. ^{© Rockall Times}

Want to cruise your auto auto around but don't fancy killing people? Nvidia has an answer

But its not impossible you know you are talking b*ll*cks, given the current state of the art in simulations.

Re: All this hoopla for nothing

Even if it manages all those environmental factors, it will never contain human drivers, human pedestrians, and the most difficult to simulate; the completely erratic Cambridge cyclist.

And autonomous vehicles do need to be perfect not just better. Humans can believe in the failings of other humans, they will never accept deaths caused by computers.

O2 brings forth a Friday fail for some unlucky UK customers

Re: Do dual-SIM (ie dual network) mobile phones still exist in the UK?

Unless you rush out an buy a second SIM when there is an outage, keeping a second contract SIM costs money, and a second pay as you go is pain, as it will stop working if you don't use it every couple of months.

Chap joins elite support team, solves what no one else can. Is he invited back? Is he f**k

And you'll never work in any posh school again.

What do WLinux and Benedict Cumberbatch have in common? They're both fond of Pengwin

Re: Microsoft dreams finally come true

Multi-threaded rather.

Re: Use?

I actually see less creep and rot in WSL than Poettering's abominations. Only time will tell which does more damage to Linux.

Re: Microsoft dreams finally come true

Cygwin is fine for running useful GNI utilities that have no Windows CMD equivalent, but it really struggles with anything multi-tasking.

From MySpace to MyFreeDiskSpace: 12 years of music – 50m songs – blackholed amid mystery server move

Re: I wonder

Reply I suspect it isn't the cost of the storage, but the cost of ensuring that none of those MP3s are copyrighted, that caused them to be accidentally deleted.

Burn an offering and backup your system cuz Windows 10 19H1 might actually arrive for spring

Understatement of the Century!

"There is, however, no sign of Microsoft stepping back from six-monthly releases in other parts of the business, notably Windows 10, which has suffered a little in the quality department over the last two releases."

Sure, we've got a problem but we don't really want to spend any money on the tech guy you're sending to fix it

Re: My 2 stories

If anyone suggested saving the company £20 was more important than 10 hours of my time, I'd have walked immediately. A family meal also sounds like little recompense for what must have been at least a 23 hour day.

TalkTalk kept my email account active for 8 years after I left – now it's spamming my mates

Re: I can confirm...

WHO allows an email server to run with ONLY plaintext passwords as an option nowadays?

PLUSNET

Hurrah for Apollo 9: It has been 50 years since 'nauts first took a Lunar Module out for a spin

Re: I always thought the LM was the greatest engineering result in reaching the Moon...

CSM & LEM were not the first docking, that was Gemini 8 & ATV 3 years earlier. Gemini 8 commanded by one Neil Armstrong, and the ATV was unmanned.

US Supremes urged by pretty much everyone in software dev to probe Oracle's 'disastrous' Java API copyright win

Re: Wow. Some just don't get it.

No amount of posts saying read the judgement, will make you any less wrong on this.

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

Re: Well currently the problem with ARM is not the CPU

What do you think the controllers on many of those M.2 SSD's are?

Entrust Datacard lined up to unburden Thales of nCipher biz as price for Gemalto buyout

Best of luck to everyone at 1 Station Square.

What's the frequency, KeNNeth? Neural nets trained to tune in on radar signals to boost future mobe broadband

Re: These energy detectors are not discriminating enough

I cannot upvote this comment enough!

The bigger they are, the harder they fall: Peak smartphone hits Apple, Samsung the worst

Re: Well well well ....

I could have written the same thing about the S8 and the S7.

'Occult' text from Buffy The Vampire Slayer ep actually just story about new bus lane in Dublin

It's probably because it's been re-shown on digital TV in HD, and you can actually read the text in the book, where as in the 90's with analogue SD and a VCR, you would be hard pressed to read the book title.

What did turbonerds do before the internet? 41 years ago, a load of BBS

Re: Technically...

You can run one over the internet on Raspberry Pi's, and it's great for those wanting a bit of nostalgia, but...

..what gets my goat is a couple of genetic throwbacks insisting on posting to comp.sys.raspberrypi via a Fidonet gateway on a BBS, annoying everyone else by having 90's style flame wars with each other, complete with broken threading, awful non standard quoting and incorrect timestamps - thanks to the ancient BBS software.

Missed Valentine's Day? Take your beloved to a Visual Studio 2019 launch event instead

The bloat is nothing new, I had to reinstall Visual Studio 2013 on an old laptop last night. I only wanted C++ and C# so unticked every optional component, and it claimed to need 9GB. After installation it had actually used over 12GB, and included crap I'd specifically told it not to, such as Windows Phone and Silverlight SDKs.

Oh Snapd! Gimme-root-now security bug lets miscreants sock it to your Ubuntu boxes

Re: snapd and systemd

Mint 19.1 has 3.0.4. No snaps required.

US kids apparently talking like Peppa Pig... How about US lawmakers watching Doctor Who?

Re: About time

That and all those learning letters toys.

Paw Patrol is the best (according to my 5 and 3 year olds).

LibreOffice 6.2 is here: Running up a Tab at the NotebookBar? You can turn it all off if you want

Re: 646464

Running Linux Mint Mate desktop on a 2GB Atom netbook, with Chromium, Thunderbird and a couple of terminal windows open, takes 774MB of memory with the 32 bit version, and 1.2GB with the 64 bit version. The 64 bit is faster, until you've been using the browser a while and it starts to swap, the 32 bit version lasts a lot longer before it starts to do this. The machine has a SSD, but being an Atom is a slow SATA2 bus, so swapping is still very painful.

I've got both versions, as already some 3rd party software is x86_64 only. So it looks like ARM is the only place where 32bit is OK, and incidentally a 32bit Raspberry Pi 3 runs faster and lasts longer before swapping, despite only having 1GB of memory and driving a 1920x1200 monitor rather than a tiny 1024x600 laptop screen.

WeWork restructuring bites El Reg hacks where it hurts as afternoon brew delayed

Re: staff have been banned from serving up anything non-vegetarian.

Chuck in a few black puddings to get them really bloody worked up.

Che tiara! Revolutionary cloud commune fitted for Red Hat developers

Re: I misread something

Unless a SystemD happens to fall down it, never to been seen again.

Tedious Service Bulletin: No prizes for guessing which UK bank's services are DOWN for business users

Re: Why do they still have customers?

Well no matter how many IT failures, they have never failed to take my mortgage payment on time.

Brit security services firm SecureData sold to France's Orange for an undisclosed sum

Re: Rental UK

Military victories.

Team America tries to crash Little Rocket Man's Joanap botnet from within, warns owners of infected boxes

Re: That explains a lot

They need to send a SWAT team in first to convince you.

Human StarCraft II e-athletes crushed by neural net ace – DeepMind's AlphaStar

Not playing the same game

It receives a raw interface describing the current state of the game with a list of available units and their properties as input

AlphaStar has a few advantages compared to its human opponents. It played a slightly dated version of the game “geared for research” rather than for entertainment, and could glance at the whole map. Everything not hidden by the fog of war, including its own units and its enemies can be seen at once. Humans don’t get this luxury, and instead only see bits and pieces by clicking on parts of the map.

It would have to be pretty shoody AI not to win with such an advantage.

When the AI is playing the same game, i.e. with the same interface as the human, and it wins, then report the story.

UK.gov plans £2,500 fines for kids flying toy drones within 3 MILES of airports

Re: I would be fascinated to know

Having seen a couple of Russian 747s (which had visited Marshals for refurbishment) taking off using every inch of runway, and passing very low over Cambridge station, you wouldn't want them to encounter any drones, it could wipe out half the city.

Re: amazon delivery drones

Outlawed as it damn well should be.

Canonical brings some bling to the Internet of Things with Snap-happy Ubuntu Core 18 release

As ever, the world comes back around to the RISC OS way of doing things, even if it doesn't know it.

Self contained applications with no interdependencies, you saw it here 30 years ago,

Google to yoink apps with an unauthorized Call Log or SMS habit from Android Play Store

Re: Backhander

Sorry old chap, but we speak the Queen's English here.

Re: Backhander

check verb (EXAMINE) ​ A2 [ I or T ] to make certain that something or someone is correct, safe, or suitable by examining it.

cheque noun [ C ] a printed form, used instead of money, to make payments from your bank account.

If at first, second, third... fourth time you don't succeed, you're Apple: Another appeal lost in $440m net patent war

...To think you can win against someone who can afford more lawyers?

No more Windows build strings for you: BuildFeed has turned off the lights

Has about the same effect on the average user's productivity too.

While Windows 7 wobbled, AI continued its relentless march at Microsoft

Re: Azure not Linux

Python is 25% to 40% faster on Linux than Windows in to the bargain.

A billion-dollar question: What was really behind Qualcomm's surprise ten-digit gift to Apple?

Re: I do wonder...

That's the best joke I've heard yet this year!

IBM insists it's not deliberately axing older staff. Internal secret docs state otherwise...

Re: Management by PHB wannabes

I think you have accurately identified that older works are completely incompatible with what IBM are trying to sell to other businesses these days.

You were told to clean up our systems, not delete 8,000 crucial files

Re: TMP=temporary? I hope not!

In case you had not noticed, this is an English language website, so correct use of the decimal point is required.

Re: TMP=temporary? I hope not!

Either you are specifying the RPM to 3 decimal places, or you are using a decimal point where you should use a comma.

A few reasons why cops didn't immediately shoot down London Gatwick airport drone menace

Re: Cut off the GPS so it lands

Private pilots do not rely on GPS, and are probably more skilled at navigating without any electronic aids than professional pilots - and won't be using Gatwick in any case.