Posts by Thomas Steven 1

If Microsoft made a car... what would it be?

Every car made since 2018 is a Microsoft car

Every hire car I've had since 2018 has been a Microsoft car.

The Ford Puma that flashed some crap up on the dashboard about pre-collision warning as I was weaving between parked cars at speed, just to provide some distraction at a critical point, and perhaps create a self fulfilling prophecy.

The MG something with an incredibly lane keeping assistance that basically tried continuously to aim at every single hedge on a trip to Cornwall.

Every single car with ultrasonic parking sensors that start bleating meters away from anything else when moving slowly, or not at all if you reverse quickly, useless in every use case they're supposedly designed for.

Reversing cameras with superimposed tracks that suggest where the car is going that are so horrendously misaligned as to be useless, which seems to be consistent across VW, Ford, Vauxhall and MG.

Trump says he got a deal for rare earths in Greenland, but they won't come easy

Doesn't the US want Greenland because it's on the ballistic missile trajectory to the US from both Russia and China, so that's where they want to site Golden Dome/Star Wars? After that they don't have to give a fuck about Russian/Chinese aggression until Russia reaches the Atlantic and China makes it's way across the Pacific.

Hyperscalers, vendors funding trillion dollar AI spree, but users will have to pay up long term

How screwed are we in the event that nobody, except in a few rare cases can figure out how to sufficiently monetize non-free AI? Or for that matter AI that costs orders of magnitude more as AI companies try to claw back their investments.

ISS spacewalk postponed over mystery astronaut malady

Maybe microbiology is only a good idea in such an isolated environment. Rage virus anyone?

When hyperscalers can’t safeguard one nation’s data from another, dark clouds are ahead

Re: Where Are Internet Service Providers Based?

Alibaba?

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

Re: Tesla has issued its eighth Cybertruck recall

Given that the owners of most BMWs, Mercedes can't get down a Cornish lane wide enough for two cars without leaving a 1 metre gap between them and the vegetation on the left hand side, I don't think it's an American car problem it's a can't drive problem.

CISA fires, now rehires and immediately benches security crew on full pay

All goes to show that Russia got the best democracy it's money could buy

TSMC promises $100B US expansion that Trump hails without clarifying chip tariff threat

I was under the impression that 2024 was the last time Americans would need to vote, and by 2028, Trump will be instated as El Presidente for life a la Putin/Jong et al that he's a fanboi of. No doubt with King Musk pulling his strings from behind the throne.

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

Re: Quantum of Bollocks

AutoQ surely

Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study

This could have saved the Stasi so much trouble

Imagine if your oppressive government could hoover up all of your data and all of your phone calls all of the time, have AI process it and send the nice gentlemen round to put a black bag for your head to get you off to the gulags. It would save so much manpower.

HPE wants investors to buy shares to help finance $14B Juniper Networks acquisition

After Autonomy would you buy into this?

Given HP/HPE's record with Autonomy, why would any right thinking investor give these clowns extra money for another acquisition?

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

I was considering an electric car but...

I took my current vehicle (transit connect 2012) for a service near work and was given an electric courtesy car. I drove it home and back, a round trip of 80 miles. The electric car started out saying it had 220 miles of range, and finished back at the garage claiming 60 miles of range. I handed the vehicle back and mentioned it, and the garage kind of looked uncomfortable and said 'yeah, it does that'.

Clearly when a trip of 80 miles uses 140 miles of range, these things can't be trusted. My 12 year old diesel vehicle is accurate within about 1 mile in 50 as to how much range it has left, so yeah it appears that range claims are a real concern, and that electric vehicle manufacturer's vehicles are lying about their available range. As far as I can make out there's no means of holding manufacturer's feet to the fire about this problem, so I'll be avoiding electric vehicles until there's some real world testing that's required to ensure that what your car is telling you vis a vis range is accurate.

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

Re: Blockers

I thought they were peril sensitive and absolutely necessary for dealing with the ravenous bugblatter beast of the planet Traal, a creature so stupid that it believes that if you can't see it, it can't see you.

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

Re: gigaspandrels

All hail Daoloth

US Senators take Meta to task for releasing LLaMA AI model after token safety checks

Personaly I suspect that senators Blumenthal and Hawley are a pair of whiny pissants who need to fill a bunch of dead air in order to get reelected at some point. Models will be used and abused regardless. Genie out of bottle, horse bolted etc etc.

Programming error created billion-dollar mistake that made the coder ... a hero?

Now we have Entity Framework and LINQ for writing a few lines of code to make huge inefficient garbage calls to SQL Server databases

World's richest man posts memes as $44b Twitter acquisition veers off course

Re: I'm going to need more popcorn

I feel like I bought too much popcorn and this shitshow could be over by the end of the month. Probably the fastest bonfire of $44bn in history. The way Twitter is haemorrhaging staff, I honestly can't see how it can continue to exist for much longer.

China to crush secondary market providing forbidden gaming accounts to kids

Re: Modus operandi

I'll see your 'War on Drugs' and raise you a 'War on Terror'

Hey – how did you get in here? Number one app security weakness of 2021 was borked access control, says OWASP

Re: Needs to be announced to music

I'd personally go with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHPOzQzk9Qo

D'oh! Misplaced chair shuts down nuclear plant in Taiwan

Who Me? in ten years time

Dave, for that is certainly not his name was working in a power plant in Taiwan on the fateful morning in question As early mornings in a nuclear power plant are quiet, the crew's management had instituted a cleaning regimen, ostensibly in the name of building team morale and keeping everyone awake. The crew suspected that much of the cleaning effort was also aimed at keeping the reactor control room looking as new as possible because the operators wanted to get their operating license, which was due to expire in 2023, extended for a further five years, and were running a PR campaign to achieve just that.

Of course what was really happening was that a bunch of tired control room operators were lacklusterly going through the motions when the inevitable happened...

Thanks, boss. The accidental creation of a lights-out data centre – what a fun surprise

Re: Access denied

The only thing better than learning from your mistakes is learning from somebody else's mistakes.

I work therefore I ache: Logitech aims to ease WFH pains with Ergo M575 trackball mouse

Never found a replacement for the Trackman Marble FX T-CJ12

Used to love my Marble FX. Had 2, then Logitech stopped making them and never produced as good a trackball since. I used to love the way you could flick the mouse across multiple screens and stop it at exactly the spot you wanted. Also awesome for FPS gaming as you could spin round much quicker than most other players and aim precisely with it. All the subsequent thumb operated trackballs produced a far less satisfactory experience IMO.

I'm a trackball evangelist too, just the best trackball ever made stopped being made a long time ago.

Flying camera drones, cuddly Echo gadgets... it's all a smoke screen for Amazon to lead you gently down the Sidewalk – and you'll probably like it

Re: It helps to have the world's wussiest burglar break into your house...

Unfortunately if your rottie grabs a burglar and hangs on to him by the leg for 3 hours, doing minimal damage to the burglar, the law seems to take the view that your dog is dangerous and should be put down, and the burglar gets off scot free because of his 'ordeal'. Of course your family pet being murdered in the course of its duties doesn't count as an 'ordeal'. Best to have a plan for disposing of burglars properly.

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

Re: But how long will it take to get there?

I reckon that we would have abandoned nuclear fusion research decades ago, if it wasn't for the giant fusion ball in the sky that keeps telling everyone that this technology does work. All science has to do is miniaturise it a little bit. Apparently miniaturizing what the sun does is not as simple as shrinking transistors.

Global network controlled by erratic billionaire Qracks down on Qanon Qranks

Illegal how?

Facebook - their platform, their rules surely. You might not like their rules, but you're free to use any other platform that will have you, or even set up your own.

USA decides to cleanse local networks of anything Chinese under new five-point national data security plan

Clean Path...

This sounds like part of somebody's jobs list for the weekend has escaped onto a work document. Time to fire the intern!

China to slice internet connection costs for locals as part of plan to rebound from recent unpleasantness

Nope

5G/Covid conspiracy theorists don't have 'minds' to speak of, theirs have all been irradiated away by 3G and 4G signals already.

Is this an ASP.NET Core I see before me? Where to next for Microsoft's confusing web framework...

I think "EF driven hellish wasteland of something little better than SELECT *" is incredibly kind

Trying to disentangle the hellscape of nested selects and correlated subqueries that EF creates to figure out what it's actually trying to do, and turn it from a 4000ms horror that requires 30% of the system's entire resources to a sub millisecond query that you can show to a developer and say 'make it do that', only to be told it can't makes EF the bane of the lives of anyone who has to tend a database that's been around for more than a couple of years. EF looks like not merely a marketing tool for SQL Server, but a means of ensuring that the number of licenses required to run a given database is increased by orders of magnitude, and the costs of running a database with more licenses than it needs for years is likely to outstrip the cost of teaching developers how to write a decently optimized bit of SQL.

I suspect that the developers who use EF are long gone by the time someone operations realizes that the business is being bankrupted by their database and some poor DBA is told it needs to be looked into.

Ofcom measured UK's 5G radiation and found that, no, it won't give you cancer

electromagnetic hypersensitivity

I assume one of the symptoms "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" is that you're a twat

Delayed, over-budget smart meters will be helpful – when Blighty enters 'Star Trek phase'

Re: "when we move to the Star Trek phase..."

More like the Brazil phase

Pork pulled: Plug jerked out of beacon of bacon delight

Lambs to the slaughter...

TSB goes TITSUP: Total Inability To Surprise Users, Probably

Is TSB a canary

Are all the other banks equally awful, and the TSB is just the first to properly fall over?

For all anyone knows, most banking systems are held together with gaffer tape and bailer twine. TSB has had issues doing upgrades, are they just the first to try to modernize their systems, and at some point all the banks are going to have similar issues.

Amazon meets the incredible SHRINKING UK taxman

This is just a non-problem isn't it

Politicians look at company profits

Politicians see big numbers

Politicians want to get hands on company money

Politicians can't because of the laws only politicians can change

Politicians tell company it's doing it wrong

Politicians leave law alone because they are all doing the same as big company, they're just not as good at running their affairs as big company, which is why they're in politics.

Those who can't go into politics where they shout loudly that those who can shouldn't or something

Blame everything on 'computer error' – no one will contradict you

Oliver Cromwell?

Surely Ely is better known as the birthplace of Andrew Eldritch?

British Crackas With Attitude chief gets two years in the cooler for CIA spymaster hack

CWA man in Cooler after CIA Spook Cyber Caper

Sorry, just what came to mind when I saw this story

Don’t fight automation software for control, just turn it off. FAST

Yeah, I'm waiting for self driving vehicles. I want mine with no windows, and certainly not to front or rear, as I presume they will be millimeters apart. I want a toilet, shower, kitchen, couch and TV, and I intend to use one or all of them on the way to work. I expect that once out of urban areas nothing other than gentle braking or acceleration will be required because there won't be any idiots either pedestrian or other drivers.

I expect my commute to work, should I choose to accept it to be quite pleasant, of course, with a few other additions, I might seriously consider not needing the house.

I also expect that it will go off and get itself serviced while I'm at work, otherwise, why the hell is it autonomous. Perhaps if it can pick stuff up from B&Q and the supermarket while I'm at work as well...

15 'could it be aliens?' fast radio bursts observed in one night

Doesn't powering down active Alcubierre-White propulsion produce something akin to this

Is it possible that a FRB could be an Alcubierre-White warp drive equipped spacecraft skipping through space/time and taking breaks every 15 minutes to make minimally destructive progress around a galaxy.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/140635-the-downside-of-warp-drives-annihilating-whole-star-systems-when-you-arrive

Why is it that geeks' favourite enemies are... other geeks?

Surely it's because only other geeks can be worthy adversaries

There's no point in taking on clueless users. They are not worthy adversaries.

Today is a good day to die. Qapla'

Google bins white supremacist site after it tries to host-hop away from GoDaddy

Nazis love diversity

I take issue with '...albeit against opponents whose position on diversity is to insist there be none'

Nazis love diversity.

There's the Nazis (they call themselves us)

and then there's:

There's everybody who is black

There's everybody who is Jewish

There's the Communists

There's everybody who is Gay

There's the gypsies

There's the Catholics

There's the Freemasons

There's everybody who disagrees with them

There's everybody who isn't white

Britons ambivalent about driverless car tech, survey finds

Yes, can I spec my self driving car

I want a shower, a toilet and a sofa/bed and TV and a wardrobe.

I don't want windows.

Make my journey to work perfect.

Fall out of bed and into the car. Perform 3 Ss in car. Get dressed in car. Arrive at work.

Drive me with no heavy braking or acceleration to allow the above to happen.

On way home catch up on TV/internet

Sleep in car if necessary/fallen out with wife/car's better than my house

London Mayor slams YouTube over failure to remove 'shocking' violent gang vids

Re: Why doesn't the Met do something useful with these videos

No, its not trivial, its their job.

If what is happening in the video isn't a crime then why are they whining about it? If it is a crime then they should be doing their job. My guess is that there is very little glory in doing your job and a whole lot of looking like you're doing something while achieving virtually nothing in pointing fingers at YouTube in press conferences.

If they did their job and then demanded the video was taken down after the miscreants were behind bars, then all well and good, or even better demanded it was taken down and replaced with a re-edited version, perhaps highlighting the characters and their fates.

'Sean Dickwad, seen here making gun gestures at Petey Arsehole, 10 years for dickwaddery',

'Petey Arsehole, here recorded saying he is going to kill Dickwad and his gang, 5 years for aggravated arsehole'

Pour encourager les autres.

Ditto extremist/sexist/racist/homophobic inciting violence blah blah blah video.

Why doesn't the Met do something useful with these videos

Like identifying these people from the video

Like identifying the crimes of these people from the video

Like using the video as evidence to arrest these people

Like using the video as evidence to convict these people

Perhaps showing how they use the video to identify these people, identify their crimes, secure an arrest and conviction, perhaps even in their own video. Instead of whining about videos glamorizing gang violence that they want taken down, how about leaving them up with a counter video showing how the police are doing their fricking job and rounding up and arresting the kind of idiot that makes a Youtube video like that.

Oh, that's right, the above looks like work and a proper job, whereas bitching at YT about the video being up in the first place just involves firing off a couple of emails and a press conference, about how they can't protect the children unless censorship.

'OK, everyone. Stop typing, this software is DONE,' said no one ever

Re: If you're into tool porn...

Yay for Festool yes, yes, yes! And railsaws Yes!

I still haven't found what I'm malloc()ing for: U2 tops poll of music today's devs code to

Which songs?

Where the streets have node names?

Two leading ladies of Europe warn that internet regulation is coming

there is clearly confidence that something solid will result.

Most likely a huge grogan that won't flush.

All that free music on YouTube is good for you, Google tells music biz

Most artists only make between 0 and 3 things I want to hear

I find most musicians (around 99.99999%) produce 0 things I ever care about hearing ever.

Of the rest, I believe that most will make 1-3 tracks I would care for.

I have tried Spotify and will never move off their free tier because their discovery algorithm is pants. You liked something by artist X. Other users liked something by artist X. Those users also liked Y. You will like Y. Complete tosh. I spend my entire time trying to vote off the shit tracks by artist X that seem to be the primary handle for feeding me more dreadful shite by artist Y.

If their algo worked closer to track level it might help, but I've never seen any evidence, and 6 downvotes a day may not be enough to benchmark with, but I'm not prepared to even think of paying for a crap algo.

I used to spend a fair amount of time tuning Nokia's Mixradio so it didn't produce crap, but at least it could be tuned.

Youtube can't be tuned at all, but it's about as good as Spotify without the frustration because at least it's honest and doesn't make any grandiose algorithmic claims that are clearly BS.

Franken-firm DXC Technology is born today, the fun begins...

Funishment

This sounds like a day of torture for these poor souls.

Any event at work where 'fun' is compulsory is what we used to call funishment.

Russia, China fight UN effort to extend human rights onto the internet

Re: @Hstubbe Theresa May

It may be imprudent to imagine a politician can't be all bad. Maybe she wants something worse.

The underbelly of simulation science: replicating the results

Re: and this is called chaos theory...

I believe the country you mentioned is called something like the Caliphate and is currently being set up in the odds and ends of other countries such as Syria. If you want a place run on naive idealistic principles, it looks pretty good.

UK needs comp sci grads, so why isn't it hiring them?

I love developing

When I was at school 'computer whatever' wastaught by maths teachers. Unfortunately most of the time software development is about problem solving not maths (not directly). Unfortunately if you give teaching computing to maths teachers they tend to teach mostly maths'n'computers. When I was 11 I wanted to do software, so I didA levels in history, politics and english lit and a philosophy degree. Still developing software 30 years later because I didn't let some arse spoil it for me.

If I need maths I can read, and I still read more than most of my colleagues on a daily basis..