Posts by wiggers

A deep dive into Nvidia's Vera CPU and the Olympus cores that power it

Yes, but...

Does it run Doom?

Jailed Flock vandal wipes out three cameras, racks up thousands in damages

It's all about metadata

As Gordon Welchman (Hut 6) first twigged, metadata is king. Surveillance is all about joining the dots even if each dot is seemingly meaningless.

Good article here: https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-flock-camera-locations-every-state-growing-backlash-12248033

Quote: Flock said in a recent blog: "Flock ALPRs do not and cannot track vehicles, much less individual people. ALPRs take a point-in-time image of the rear of vehicles on public roadways. They are incapable of tracking the whole of anyone’s movements."

EU puts 'addictive' design of Facebook, Instagram under the DSA microscope

Maddening...

I find Facebook highly unwatchable. I've joined a few groups but if I so much as look at another group the groups feed suddenly becomes flooded with "suggested posts" from the glanced-at group. No amount of hiding or reporting seems to remove it. So I have to look at each group individually.

Brown says AI make student brain no work good, teacher should help use it better

Support CAMRI

CAMpaign for Real Intelligence

Clingy Virgin Media fined £28M for refusing to take the hint

I was moving house in 2018 to an area where Virgin didn't operate. Even then it was very difficult to get through to them that I no longer needed the contract at my old address!

Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander

Did no one watch 2001?

The vision in the film of using an Earth-orbiting space station is surely the way to go, rather than surface-to-surface missions? Have two classes of surface-to-orbit vehicles, heavy-lift and crew. Then another interplanetary transfer vehicle, one variant with low-gravity lander capability for the Moon.

Small island nation tries bold tech education strategy

Re: Have you met teeanagers?

it's not up to the author to suggest a solution. This from a blog I read this morning, "If I don't think that Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) shot JFK, I don't need to suggest who did."

Banning things simply drives them underground. e.g. Prohibition of Alcohol in the US.

Waymo hits the brakes after robotaxis keep missing the signs for freeway construction zones

The first time I had to negotiate that roundabout after passing my test I discovered that they were resurfacing and all the road markings had disappeared! It all actually worked quite well using simple collision-avoidance rules. (Keep left, give way to traffic from the right.)

It's in the maps...

I use Waze satnav and it know exactly when the speed limit changes regardless of any absence of signage.

Brussels' datacenter efficiency scorecard may come with a credit warning

New definition of shooting oneself in the foot

"The European Central Bank's (ECB) 2021 climate action plan made the integration of climate risks into its collateral framework a stated priority"

Windows boot partition runs out of space for Microsoft's May security update

Re: Time to give Windows

I upgraded my hardware (15+yrs old) to enable Win 11 to be installed. Win 10 then announced it wasn't Authenticated so prevented upgrading. Went through MS support, who eventually told me I've run out of activations! Have been dual booting to Linux Mint for several months, will now be my permanent OS.

Datacenter builds could be shielded from judicial review in UK planning reforms

We know what's best for you.

Resistance is futile.

Indra rides off with £1.96B Transport for London ticketing deal as Oyster heads for back-office overhaul

£1.964bn...

Would pay 5,600 staff at £50,000pa (total cost of employment) for seven years.

Home Office seeks three CTOs to keep borders, passports, and core IT ticking

Too many chiefs...

"three chief technology officers"

Who will the the chief of the chiefs?

Make crappy moves around AI and face voter backlash, govts warned

"Who controls the bots controls the narrative"

This is the biggest issue in my opinion. What are the bots being trained on, all points of view and opinions or just those of the owning organisations?

Time to end the 'uncontrolled experiment' of social media on kids, scientists say

We know what's best for you (and your kids)

Resistance is futile.

West Sussex's Oracle rollout pushed back again as costs balloon 15 times

Reinventing the wheel

Every county council must have some commonality that can be shared across the country surely?

Horizon redress still a mess, MPs say – and Fujitsu hasn't paid a penny

The whole world used to run on paper records quite happily. It's computerisation that's slowed everything down! My expenses after a trip used to take half an hour. Then they computerised it and you had to set aside half a day! And then they have to "upgrade" the system every few years to something even slower and more complex.

RAM is getting expensive, so squeeze the most from it

Adjust swappiness also

If you are lucky to have lots of RAM you can reduce the amount of swapping that goes on. Look up vm.swappiness.

Government upgrades drones, deploys joystick tweakers to catch illegal dumpers

One small problem, there's no shortage of trucks..

NASA points fingers at Boeing and chaotic culture for Starliner debacle

Management overriding engineering

Where have we heard that before...?

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

Orbiting AIs

Straight out of Neuromancer by William Gibson.

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Re: "all this is old news"

I got the biggest OLED computer monitor I could find and it's plugged into an ancient Freesat box. I've got an old Chromecast video adaptor with which I'm currently experimenting also.

Newly launched civil service pension portal from Capita is crapita, users report

Re: Other providers

I find it bewildering that these systems appear to be written from scratch for each organisation. Surely there must be solutions available off the shelf for running a large pension scheme? Or are they created in such a way as to be completely unique to each customer?

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

5. Helicopters

The dry mass is 70t but if you stripped out the rocket motors, cargo doors, etc, You could get it down to under 60t. Then you'd just need three Mil Mi-26 each with 20t capacity. I'm sure some drone squadron software could be used to synchronise the flight of the helis. No?

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

The "golden rule," is to "never use the output without checking it." - so the 46 minutes is lost to checking CoPilot's homework?

Could of course just get rid of a whole tier of middle management whose entire function appears to be preparing reports for other managers to read. Could just get one AI to write the reports and another to read them. No need for endless pointless meeting either.

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

"This is an architecture that no NASA administrator that I'm aware of would have selected had they had the choice."

Means it'll probably work and at a considerably lower cost.

Vodafone keels over, cutting off millions of mobile and broadband customers

Re: They unannounced most/all of their BGP routes.

I was using Cloudflare WARP at the time and it briefly flagged up a MITM attack before pulling the plug.

Brits sitting on £1.6B gold mine of Windows 10 junk as support ends

"stir in the respective current values of precious metals"

There doesn't appear to be any mention the processing costs to extract these minerals.

Explain digital ID or watch it fizzle out, UK PM Starmer told

"Medical professionals have already raised questions about the project."

So basically this is a vote-winning policy that hasn't actually been worked out with those who have to implement it.

UK Post Office names public inquiry as risk to £410 million Horizon replacement project

How about...

...just commission a system that actually works, verifiably, without waiting for the inquiry that tells you the last one didn't work?

70-knot winds so far blamed for yacht disaster that killed Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch

Re: Predictive Modeling???

Yes, I've experienced katabatic winds that come from nowhere and you only just have time to get the sails down once you spot the flattened water. Once we were tied up in a marina and heeling over quite alarmingly when a gust caught us. As someone else said, if it was at anchor it must have been a significant shift in wind direction for it to have caught the boat abeam.

Sustainability still not a high priority for datacenter industry

Claims...

Having been on many construction projects in my career from the late 1970s, the one of the biggest source of claims for delays is the weather. Nothing new there, just that they can add weight to their claims by citing "climate change".

OK, Google: Are you killing Assistant and replacing it with Gemini?

I've never used Assistant and this doesn't encourage me to start!

Europe's largest council kept auditors in the dark on Oracle rollout fiasco for 10 months

To err is human...

To really cock things up takes a computer.

Stick with paper-based systems. Simpler and cheaper, never needs replacing. (Apart from the pencils.)

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Re: This is great news but...

The rule of thumb is 1kW per household, so someone has simply misplaced the decimal point. Should be 300,000 homes.

Re: This is great news but...

300MW divided by 3.1millon is 96W per home. Just about enough to run the TV. Tough if you want to boil a kettle...

Odds of city-killer asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting Earth creep upward

DOGE avoidance strategy...

Smacks of desperation, trying to justify their existence in the face of a major government efficiency drive.

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

"Avoid meetings with time-wasting morons"

I think this is from The Dilbert Principle.

I worked in a group of softies all working on different projects for different internal and external customers, either individually or pairs. We had a weekly team "progress meeting" in which few could actually discuss any detail, there was no comparison with any planned programme of activities, and no reference to the previous week's minutes. Basically, two hours listening to other people talking of things that were of no relevance to anyone else whatsoever. Occasionally the manager had some announcement that affected us all, usually a new HR initiative that was designed to distract us even further from doing our jobs.

The whole thing could have been done by email in a fraction of the time.

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

Tosh.

Complete and utter tosh.

Parker Solar Probe set for blisteringly hot date with the Sun on Christmas Eve

METRES not METERS.

The workplace has become a surveillance state

People used to believe...

... in an omniscient deity to keep them from straying and shirking their work, reinforced by weekly sermons. Now it is The Man and the State that watch you continually.

A new city springs from the rainforest to become Indonesia's tech hub

Is that Sim City?

Or designed in Cities Skylines?

Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die

Default User is Administrator

I find one of the biggest bugbears trying to support friends and family is that the default user account is administrator. SO all kind of things get installed and settings changed without a thought. If a password had to be entered every time a potentially serious change is made it might concentrate the mind. Several friends simply have one account, administrator, called "User" with no password at all!

UK's 'electricity superhighway' gets green light just in time for AI to gobble it all up

That'll definitely reduce our 'leccy bills.

Tesla Berlin gigafactory goes dark after alleged eco-sabotage

Surely there wouldn't be a single point of failure to take out a whole plant and town?

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

"the 177 meter (581 ft) high structure"

Meters measure things (electricity, pressure, etc).

Metres are the SI unit of length.

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

The last time...

"In 2016, another missile, launched from HMS Vengeance, failed after telemetry problems..."

Word was that someone got the target coordinates wrong and it was heading for the wrong hemisphere.

Half of polled infosec pros say their degree was less than useful for real-world work

Re: It's pretty much the same for anything..m

Very true. I had to re-learn practically everything after graduating.

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

BOEING... or Boding?

used to stand for "Bits of Engine In Neighbours Garden". Now doors?