Posts by wiggers

Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard

All your electrons are belong to us.

"which will in turn let the grid sap some stored EV battery juice at times of high demand (with permission), as well as management options that'll restrict EV charging to "grid-friendly" times of day."

Biden to bolster boondocks broadband with a billion bonus bucks (barely)

Meanwhile...

Elon is rolling out Starlink as quick as he can.

We need to be first on the Moon, uh, again, says NASA

Fifty years ago...

They had the technology for manned moon missions. They threw that away for a pantechnicon designed by a committee. Forgot to design a successor and ended up with no human capable space vehicles. Astonishing strategic failure.

UK government's semiconductor brain trust meets for the first time

If all else fails...

...form a new committee.

Clingy Virgin Media won't let us leave, customers complain

Switching to a non-cable area? Fugedaboudit...

I moved from a cabled area to a non-cabled area but Virgin Media's system didn't comprehend that such areas existed. Probably because they didn't provide a conventional service to this area either. Major battle ensued to switch to a different provider.

38 percent of tech job interviews offered exclusively to men: report

Businesses are there to make money for their owners. What does it matter who they chose to employ? Choose the people of whatever age, sex, racial background, etc who are best suited to the job, will provide the best return on their investment.

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

There's the English spelling and then there are mistakes.

EU lawmakers fear general purpose AI like ChatGPT has already outsmarted regulators

Who wants to talk to a computer anyway?

Digital Realty lines up hefty solar, wind projects for APAC datacenters

By how much...

will this policy "correct" or otherwise "fix" climate change? Please show working including cost/benefit analysis.

British industry calls for regulation of autonomous vehicles

Regulation = crystal ball gazing

Regulation is the attempt to predict all possible harms from a new technology or application thereof by those not necessarily qualified. Virtually impossible and restricts potential benefits.

Far better is the law of Tort. Have penalties for causing harm, to focus the minds of those developing the tech to design-in safety.

"First, do no harm."

Mozilla says 80 percent of Google Play's app safety labels are inaccurate

I use the DuckDuckGo browser that has an app tracker-blocker. Astonishing to see the number of tracking attempts. Santander's app is the worst, 10,000-20,000 in a day most days. When I've raised this with them they seem completely clueless, mutter something about essential cookies. One app, Eufy Clean, they didn't even know the app had trackers until I pointed it out to them!

Results are in for biggest 4-day work week trial ever: 92% sticking with it

Re: Well...

Yes, we used to have lengthy "team" meetings every week where we'd have to report what we were working on and what progress had been made. Problem was that the "team" were all working on completely unconnected projects and the "progress" was never compared with a programme nor even what was reported the previous week.

Well...

"Having a shorter work week apparently led to more efficient meetings"

Just cutting out time-wasting meetings probably saves at least a day a week! No drop in productivity.

BT in tests to beam down 5G coverage from the stratosphere

Re: Google Loon (but with wings?)

The commercial viability is really what is being tested. Hard to tell until they try it.

For password protection, dump LastPass for open source Bitwarden

Re: +1 for Bitwarden

Yes, I migrated from LP to DashLane. After a while they changed their UI and it was really bad. Actually prevented me from logging in to a bank account! Now a happy Bitwarden user and I get the functionality for free that I had with the paid sub to DashLane.

Draft climate law threatens fines for datacenters that don't cut their carbon count

Just impose a Carbon Tax already!

Instead of micromanaging every industry, just impose a Carbon Tax and let people find their own solutions.

Unless, of course CO2 isn't the actual problem and they just want to interfere in everything...

Uncle Sam OKs vaccine that protects honeybees against hive-destroying bacterium

I thought you used antibiotics against bacterial infections, no?

NASA retires Mars InSight mission after it enters ‘dead bus’ condition

Could they not apply a coating to neutralise the electrostatic charge, or an active system to reverse the charge? And if the tiny natural gusts can remove the dust, surely it shouldn't that hard to devise a system?

NASA reassigns Venus boffins to save short-staffed asteroid interceptor

Is this Dilbert?

"NASA said it has since pulled more employees to work on the Psyche mission – including hiring more leaders..."

"Top management at JPL must also organize meetings more regularly"

Yeah, that should do it!

$50m+ contract for crime-fighting IT system won by Fujitsu after no one else bid

If no one else bid then that should have been a red flag. Something was very wrong with the contract terms. The bid was no doubt pitched high because they didn't really want it.

NASA builds for keeps: Voyager mission still going after 45 years

How long before we launch something that can overtake them?

BT strikes to start this month, 40,000 workers to down tools

Will anyone notice?

Hangouts hangs up: Google chat app shuts this year

I had no idea it was still going! The remaining three users must be devastated...

China's blockchain boosters slam crypto as Ponzi scheme

Re: Ponzi scheme?

"If crypto is a ponzi scheme because it relies on new investors valuing the asset, what does that make gold?"

I agree that the crypto world is more like a bubble than a Ponzi scheme. The enthusiasm of the crypto-kiddies talking it up on social media is testament to that. Whether a cryptographic "coin" has the immutability of gold is another debate.

Re: Pension funds

The (UK) State Pension "fund" is only a kind of Ponzi in that pensions are paid out the tax revenue from those currently working. If you have a personal pension then that is *your* pot of money ready for when *you* start to draw it down. Hence the advice to view the State Pension as a potential safety net, in case for some reason your personal arrangements go pear-shaped.

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Re: Such memories...

Also, sending out a batch of floppies to customers only to find that the post room had stapled the disks to the letters before putting them in the envelopes!

Scientists make spin ice breakthrough

"could lead to"

How many times have we heard that with laboratory discoveries?

Reg scribe spends 80 hours in actual metaverse … and plans to keep visiting

Is there a version for eBikes?

Asking for a friend...

Google lab proposes solar-powered moisture farming to provide water for billions

Absolute not relative humidity

The actual amount of moisture in the air is measured as absolute humidity, g/m³.

Relative humidity is simply the ratio of the actual moisture content compared with the maximum for that temperature and pressure.

Hitting underground pipes and cables costs the UK £2.4bn a year. We need a data platform for that, says government

I thought this was already a thing. It was certainly being talked about in the '90s when Nynex were busy digging up everything. They certainly found the location of a large number of underground services, usually by damaging them!

Give us your biometric data to get your lunch in 5 seconds, UK schools tell children

Twins?

My class had three pairs of identical twins. How does facial recognition cope better with that than a contactless card?

Ordnance Survey to take a poke at Pokémon-style gaming with outdoorsy AR adventure

It's still pretty bad. As you zoom out it suddenly switches from the 1:25k map you downloaded to a 1:100k or something. And offline is still not working. Once you're out of mobile signal you can't go very far before walking off the edge of the visible map. Have had long correspondence with their support for a few years now.

Feature bloat: Psychology boffins find people tend to add elements to solve a problem rather than take things away

Happiness...

...is the removal of all annoyances.

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

The ASN lists quite a lot of CoG errors leading to accidents and even more for overweight:

https://aviation-safety.net/database/events/dblist.php?Event=CGC

https://aviation-safety.net/database/events/dblist.php?Event=CGO

(Might be some overlap.)

NHS COVID-19 app is trying to tell Android users something but buggy notification appears stuck on 'Loading...' screen

"There is the danger that some might deal with the notification problem by simply deleting the app,"

That's what my partner did!

UK on track to miss even its slashed full-fibre gigabit coverage goals, warn MPs

I think I can see the problem...

"Government plans..."

If a technology is being promoted by the government it is either out of date already or is hideously expensive and poor value for money. Or both.

Yes, true, fusion reactors don't work quite yet, but, er, maybe AI can help us stop our experiments from imploding

"Clouds of plasma made up of positively and negatively charged ions are placed in a donut-shaped chamber"

Surely they need to be one or the other? It's only in colliders they are opposite charges, so they flow in opposite directions under the same magnetic field.

What simultaneously sucks and doesn't? This new robot vacuum cleaner

I make it 793,722 ponds/acre

Fancy yourself as a bit of a Ramblin' Man or Woman? Maybe brush up on your cartography

Undocumented feature

You used to access the paper maps from the main menu and switch between types of map there. After weeks of uninstalling and reinstalling I suddenly discovered you now enable them in a completely different way, by tapping on the part where you download them. Thanks for telling us OS!

The UK's Cairncross Review calls for Google, Facebook to be regulated – and life support for journalism

Most news publications, with the exception of the BBC, do so to make money. Mostly from advertising and partly from subscription. There is a market for news, however loose the definition. There is no monopoly. Therefore there is no need for taxpayers' money to be thrown at a non-existent problem, especially not yet-another-QUANGO.

Boffins build blazing battery bonfire

Government funding

Presumably because no one else was daft enough to invest in it!

Congrats from 123-Reg! You can now pay us an extra £6 or £12 a year for basically nothing

Re: I want to move away

I'm using Tsohost now, seem reasonably low-cost and competent.

Offered for domain already migrated away!

They sent me the 'deal' for a domain I transferred to someone else many years ago! When I queried it they sent me a list of half a dozen other domains they were 'protecting' that I had transferred to another registrar over the past couple of years.

Infrastructure wonks: Tear up Britain's copper phone networks by 2025

Governments are crap at picking technologies

So they install fibre everywhere at taxpayers' expense just as the rest of the world moves on to something else, say mesh radio of some kind. When demand outstrips supply the price goes up, encouraging new investment in the supply side. Having the government plan things is a horrible idea.

"Hayek was right, the only calculating machine we have capable of planning the economy is that economy itself with its pricing mechanism." @worstall

UK.gov is not being advised by Google. Repeat. It is not being advised by Google

Just what we need..

Moar QUANGOs!

"I'm from the government, I'm here to help."

Brit ISPs get their marker pens out: Speed advertising's about to change

Re: Hmmm...

I've noticed many survey/speed test sites don't allow the option of 'coax' or cable, which forms a large proportion of VM's connections.

MIT gives one-star review to Lyft, Uber over abysmal '$3.37/hr' pay

Judge by what people do, not what they say they want.

If the 'wages' are so bad why are people still driving for these services?

Worstall, formerly of this parish, has an explanation:

http://www.continentaltelegraph.com/2018/03/02/is-it-ubers-wages-or-the-minimum-wage-wrong-here/

Another day, another meeting, another £191bn down the pan

The Dilbert Principle

"Always postpone meetings with time-wasting morons."

http://dilbert.com/strip/1989-05-10

Best piece of advice I ever read!

Transport for London to toughen up on taxi firms in the Uber age

It's all about control

"the increasing number of journeys made by vehicles it doesn't control"

How exactly does it intend to control where taxis go? Surely that's down to the passenger! And what about all the privately owned vehicles, not for hire, by far the majority of traffic in London? Seems a rather specious argument.

The reporting to police business is a bit odd too. Surely it is the victim or witnesses who do the reporting, not the people who run an hailing app!