Posts by ChaosFreak

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Fatherly advice

As my aircraft mechanic dad used to say, never write your name on your tools.

The amber glow of bork illuminates Brighton Station

Makes me nostalgic for the days of plugging my 8 lb laptop into a programmable display screen with a 9-pin serial cable and firing up Hideterm...

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

Been there

These power supplies were common in the 90's on PC compatibles. Luckily in the US when they arrived improperly set for 220, the results weren't destructive.

Intuit decimates staff, hopes to hire same number in AI refocus

Dumpster Fire Company

Intuit is a dumpster fire, selling overpriced, buggy products that are missing obvious features.

Google is wrong to put AI search features behind paywall, says HPC leader

If it's free, it's inaccurate

While we'd all love everything to be free, the current surveillance capitalism, advertising based business model of the internet should have taught us that you pay for free stuff in other ways.

With search, you pay for free search with inaccurate results that are littered with sponsored content, sometimes disguised so carefully as to fool the user.

I think a lot of people would be happy to pay a small amount per month to know that the answers to their questions are the best, most accurate answers, and not the answers that sponsors paid Google the most to display.

Engine cover flies from Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 during takeoff

Boeing doesn't make engines

While it's clear Boeing has serious issues with quality, the two incidents mentioned in this article were related to the engines, which are not manufactured by Boeing. Most aircraft manufacturers buy the engines from manufacturers who specialize in engines.

It's fun to pile on Boeing, but the El Reg reporter should know better. To say you've received no comment from Boeing about an engine failure without even mentioning the engine manufacturer or asking them for comment is pretty sloppy.

Boeing-backed air taxi upstart Wisk plans to fly you across town at UberX prices by 2030

Safer than self-driving cars

Comparing automated drones to self-driving cars is not very illuminating.

Roads are far more crowded than the sky. There are no pedestrians or bicycles in the sky. There are no traffic signals or roadsigns to read. All aircraft that fly in controlled airpace carry transponders that broadcast their position and speed to other aircraft for collision avoidance.

It's a far easier environment for automation.

Re: Drones as a Service?

Countermeasures are not needed. Light aircraft, due to their limited weight, can do little damage to buildings and other infrastructure as is evidenced by the many times light aircraft have accidentally impacted buildings. Even "packed with explosives", since the payload is limited, again they can only cause limited damage.

This is why terrorists chose airliners on 9/11, and typically choose car/truck bombs to attack crowded locations or events.

Also, you won't be able to just tell these drones to go anywhere. They'll be limited to specified "vertiports".

Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount

Out of Pocket!!!

A million kudos for the proper use of the phrase "out of pocket"!

Out of pocket means you are left to pay an expense yourself that should have been covered by another party, for example, your company. It does not mean "out of the office" or "on the road" as so many misuse it today.

Whenever I hear someone misusing it this way, I think to myself that they are psychopaths contributing to the downfall of modern civilization as we know it. Perhaps I'm overreacting...

RIP: Frank Borman, NASA commander of first Moon mission

Frank Boring

My Dad told me they used to call him Frank Boring, and everyone including Frank took it as a compliment. On a high risk mission, you want someone steady and reliable.

Bad software destroyed my doctor's memory

EHRs are billing systems

Sadly, this is another case of "the user is not the customer." Why does Amazon and Google search suck? Because the user isn't the customer, the advertisers are. Google and Amazon search don't return the best results, they return the results that maximize sales for advertisers and ad revenue for Google and Amazon.

Why do EHRs suck for doctors? Because they're not the customer, the accounts are. EHRs are designed primarily to maximize revenue and reimbursements, and only secondarily to serve doctors and patients. At least in the USA....

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

You are not out of pocket!

Number one on my list of misused phrases is "out of pocket", which people began using interchangeably to mean "out of the office" about 15 years ago.

Out of pocket does not mean out of the office!

Out of pocket means that you are spending your own personal money and not being reimbursed by the company. As in, "I am paying for this out of pocket".

I suppose with remote work having become the norm, we will hear this less often hopefully.

Dell reneges on remote work promise, tells staff to wear pants at least 3 days a week

How's that Koolaid Tasting?

Dell to its customers: "Buy lots of Dell laptops so your staff can work from anywhere!"

Dell to its employees: "You'll come the office to work and like it!"

US officials probe Tesla's incredible detaching steering wheel

Teslas have always had poor quality

Tesla quality has always been terrible, and has only gotten worse. They ranked at the bottom of the JD power initial quality ratings in 2022. People have purchased these cars up until now because (1) there really aren't that many other options for all-electric vehicles, or (2) they are fanbois who are buying into an image rather than making a rational decision. Unfortunately for Elon, the image most of his Tesla fans have been buying into is at odds with his more recent behavior, and also there are now many electric vehicles available from much more reliable brands. I don't see how Tesla can survive, and it looks like the stock market agrees with me.

Japan's next-gen H3 satellite launch vehicle fails on debut

Almost there

Another way of looking at this is that they built an incredibly complex machine and manage to get it almost into orbit on the first attempt. That's actually not bad, considering how many failures NASA, SpaceX and others have experienced on their way to perfecting new launch vehicles.

Infosys founder slams working from home, side hustles, as slowing India's growth

Get off my lawn!

Old man shakes fist, yells at those damn kids to get off his lawn

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

Surrendipitous Interactions?

The idea that "serendipitous interactions" In the office lead to creative ideas has been so thoroughly debunked, I'm surprised we keep seeing this old trope dragged out over and over again one discussing the merits of working in the office.

Serendipitous interactions are more likely to be productivity sucking interruptions 99 times out of 100. If you want to foster creativity, schedule events to promote brainstorming, including off sites, activities and brainstorming sessions.

Meanwhile, in Japan, pet fish run up credit card bill on Nintendo Switch

I'm surprised the credit card company didn't automatically detect those fishy charges

Boffins deploy machine learning in search for intelligent ET

Re: Fermi Patadox

LOL, Patadox

Looks like I may not be a terrestrial intelligence

Fermi Patadox

It's cool they've developed some tech to clean up signals, which could be useful elsewhere, but searching for extraterrestrial intelligence is a complete waste of time and money.

As Fermi proved long ago, if we were going to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, we should already have done so many times over.

It's just a numbers game. Even at 10% of the speed of light, an intelligent species could colonize the entire galaxy in less than a million years. Given that the galaxy is over 13 billion years old, and it only took just over 4 billion years for intelligence with the capability of space travel to arise on Earth, If the probability that intelligent life arises on a planet other than Earth is anything other than zero, it should have already happened over and over and over again in the history of the galaxy. As the SETI people like to say, with 100 billion stars in the galaxy, and 14 billion years to play out, any non-zero probability of the existence of extraterrestrial life means it is definitely out there. What Fermi says is, sure, in that case it should be EVERYWHERE, so where is everybody?

The fact that we see no evidence of this means that for some reason intelligent life does not spread throughout the galaxy in a way that is detectable by other intelligent life. It doesn't mean it's not there, it just means we will never detect it, because if we were going to, we would have done so by now, given the age and number of stars in the galaxy.

And before anyone starts posting "objections", Note that virtually every objection to the Fermi paradox only proves the paradox when you think about it.

Maybe all intelligent life destroys itself in a great firewall? You've just proved the paradox.

Maybe all intelligent life develops to a point where they communicate by means that are undetectable by us? You've just proved the paradox.

Maybe all intelligent life decides that colonizing the galaxy is not a worthwhile pursuit? You've just proved the paradox.

Maybe intelligent life is so exceedingly rare, that even with 100 billion stars in the galaxy humanity is the only intelligent life? You've just proved the paradox.

Sad, since I'd love to meet ET, but unfortunately it's the reality of the numbers.

(By the way, I am aware that there is some doubt as to the provenance of the Fermi paradox.)

Robotics startup wants to disrupt walking with AI roller skates

Kickstarter... LOL

Kickstarter... It's like Amazon Prime but with two year delivery. That's if you ever get anything at all.

Tha last three products I backed on Kickstarter either never shipped at all because the company ran out of money or they shipped years late with fatal bugs and then the company ran out of money, leaving me with worthless junk and no firmware updates.

Don't know why these guys are allowed to operate this way.

White House puts $50m into floating wind turbine projects

Re: Energy, not power

Actually, to be fully accurate, we are talking about electricity, not energy. Electricity is only one form of energy generation. Total energy consumption in the United States is much higher then total electricity consumption because you have to include energy derived from burning fossil fuels directly, such as in transport and heating. If these forms of energy use are eventually fully electrified, US electricity consumption will be much, much higher.

DARPA seeks portable muon-making machine to see through almost anything

Why Worry?

Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back.

That emoji may not mean what you think it means

Actually, emoji don't come from emoticons

The word emoji does not derive from emoticon, as is commonly believed.

Emoji is actually a Japanese word. "E" (pronounced "ay") means "picture" and "moji" means alphabetical character. So, emoji literally means "picture character" in Japanese.

Emoji became popular in the 1990s in Japan as the spread of mobile phones led to the popularity of texting. However, emoji are much older than that. The original Japanese word processors from the 1970s and 1980s which used proprietary character codes all included emoji in their character sets.

Apple's return-to-office plan savaged by staff

No evidence

Whenever a company advocates for returning to in-person work because it improves collaboration, and encourages "serendipitous interactions", they never seem to cite any evidence to support this claim. The reason is simple, there is no evidence. It is simply an assumption. In fact, all the evidence points to the contrary, that putting people together in one space to work (especially open plan spaces) increases distraction and reduces efficiency.

In a world where every remote work is a viable option, companies that force people to come into an office are going to have a lot of trouble recruiting the best talent. They will also be paying for buildings that don't contribute to shareholder value. If I were a shareholder of one of these companies, I would be pressuring the board to maintain a full remote work policy.

Atlassian sprays more machine learning over its cloudy BitBucket, Jira, Confluence wares

Yeah, but...

Yeah, but you still can't sort comments newest to oldest on JIRA's "New Issue View".

Instead of working on "AI", Atlassian should tackle the mountain of bugs and missing features on their community forums.

Nah, that would only make users happy. Announcing fake "AI" features...now that makes investors happy!

Stalker attacks Japanese pop singer – after tracking her down using reflection in her eyes

Spelling error

Her name should be spelled Matsuoka, not Mastuoka.

Bowel down: Laxative brownies brought to colleague's leaving bash

Re: A tip-off...

> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/germanys-typhoon-problem-only-four-fighters-can-be-made-combat-ready/

Haha, I was reading that URL quickly and thought it said "Only Foo Fighters can be made Combat Ready".

Guns, audio and eye-tracking: VR nearly ready for prime time

I gotta wear shades...

"Once it becomes like putting on a pair of shades, things will really take off, but that could be a decade away."

Have you heard of this company called Magic Leap?

10 PRINT "ZX81 at 37" 20 GOTO 10

My First Computer Game

OK, so not a Timex Sinclair 1000 but still nostalgic... I managed to get my parents to splurge on a TRS-80 ("Trash 80") as an "educational device" (not a toy) back in 1981 when I was still in primary school. My big sister (six years my elder) was taking night computer courses at Boston University and so we bought a modem so that she could dial into their PDP-10. I soon figured out where she kept her password and spent hours playing "adventure"... when I finally got a Commodore 64 a few years later, the first games I bought (OK, downloaded from a pirate BBS) were the Infocom games as opposed to the flashy graphics games, which were WAY more engaging. I remember spending almost 48 hours straight solving "Planetfall". But try and tell that to kids these days...

I did manage to teach myself BASIC from the manual included with the TRS-80, the start of a long and satisfying career. My sister also has spent her whole career coding. I think she made it in just before the home computer industry decided that computers were "toys for boys" and began marketing exclusively to boys. Most of the jobs I worked in the early days had a very healthy (even by today's standards) mix of gender among the programmers, but that was a window that soon closed, unfortunately.

The case of the disappearing insect. Boffin tells Reg: We don't know why... but we must act

Maybe now the Eco-idiots will embrace GMOs?

This would seem to be a huge call to action for agricultural scientists to use gene splicing and editing to engineer crops that can resist insect attack without the need for pesticides.

But you'll hear very few "ecologists" embrace that approach. They'll just start screaming "Monsanto is evil!" even though the vast majority of GMO research is done by non-profit institutions.

As the article rightly states, organic is only an answer for those who can afford Whole Foods (aka "Whole Paycheck"). So I guess we need to starve 3 billion humans to save the insects, because GMOs are "evil"...

Canucks have beef with Soylent as to whether or not it's a real meal deal

Re: Only word adjustment needed

Unfortunately, Soylent would have to make this wording change across the whole world, in all of its markets, just to accommodate Canada. This is because when you market a product online, you can't have one message for Canada and another message for the rest of the world. Everyone is on the same internet (more or less).

They are successful selling it as a "meal replacement" everywhere else, they're not going to abandon that just to get around Canadian regulations.

Re: Mystifying...

@Ramses Niblick...

I think you forgot to end your comment with "No, you can't have your ball back kids, and stay off my damn lawn!"

It's a true sign that you've gotten old and irrelevant when you start blasting the "kids these days" for their "new fangled ways".

This new generation aren't "disengaging" or "playing" when they are on their mobile devices. Have you ever asked them what they are actually doing? They are COMMUNICATING with each other. This generation is the most connected we have ever seen. As a result, they are far more empathetic and more likely to care about the plight of people they have never even met. Stephen Pinker proposes that humanity has become far more peaceful than ever in history in part due to the development of low-cost printing and narrative story telling. People could see the plight of others and actually started caring. This connected generation is a huge step further down that path. I, for one, welcome our future millennial overlords, and I'm barely a Gen-Y.

It seems to me you have your own definition of what makes communication and interaction "real", and that you are unable to see things from the perspective of a new generation raised in a connected world. The "ideal" you seem to pine for is where people are only friendly with, and concerned about the plight of, those who they personally know and spend time with in person. This is a myopic view of community that limits the potential of humanity to truly become a global community that values all lives equally.

Surfacegate: Microsoft execs 'misled Nadella', claims report

My Surface Pro 4 Used to Overheat Constantly

When I first got my Surface Pro 4 (I pre-ordered, so had one of the first off the line), it used to overheat at least once a day. I would leave it on at night, and the next morning it would have completely rebooted. This was a mystery, until I witnessed it happen once while I was using it (the big thermometer icon appears on the screen). Sometimes I couldn't even install updates because it would fail halfway through with the thermometer icon. I had to rig up a beer keg cooler and place the Surface Pro on that to prevent it overheating.

I never returned it or had it serviced, but the problem went away after a year. I suspect that Microsoft rolled out some updated BIOS/firmware and/or drivers that fixed the problem.

Pre-order your early-bird pre-sale product today! (Oh did we mention the shipping date has slipped AGAIN?)

Indiegogo -- It's like Amazon Prime but with special three-year shipping!

Indiegogo -- It's like Amazon Prime but with special three-year shipping!

French firm notches up 50km unmanned drone inspection flight

ADS-B

Why not equip them with ADS-B and traffic avoidance software?

India sets June 5 as the day it will join the heavy-lift rocket club

Maybe I'm just old, but this reminds me of Salvage 1!

https://starlogger.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/spacecraft_salvage4.jpg

Anyone remember this show?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078681/

Why Microsoft's Windows game plan makes us WannaCry

What we likely won't see is a change in policy from Microsoft.

The author ends with "What we likely won't see is a change in policy from Microsoft." I'd be interested in hearing from the author as to what policy changes he would recommend to Microsoft.

This is not meant as a criticism of the author or a defense of Microsoft, I am genuinely interested in how Microsoft could change its policies to make it less likely that un-pached XP machines will be attacked in the future.

America's mystery X-37B space drone lands after two years in orbit

Q-36?

Are you sure it's not a Q-36?

https://youtu.be/Z40AsPaktzw

Hard-pressed Juicero boss defends $400 IoT juicer after squeezing $120m from investors

Re: Juicing is bad

Yes, but you eat LESS fruit when you eat it whole than when you juice it. It takes 2 - 4 oranges to make a glass of orange juice, but if you eat one orange (with all the pulp and fiber) you're likely to feel full and not eat three more, so you get 1/4 of the sugar.

Switch on your smartphone camera and look how fertile I am

Right On, Man!

I've "bought" three items on Indiegogo in the past three years:

One was a kinect-like device that was supposed to allow you to control your computer with gestures. They were six-months late shipping. Their driver caused Windows to crash. Then they went out of business before they could fix the driver. I have an expensive paperweight.

The second was a set of glasses that was supposed to help you fall asleep or recover from jetlag. They were over a year late shipping. The first one didn't work. They replaced it and this one "works" but doesn't do what they originally said it would do.

The final one was a carbon fiber wallet. It is two years late shipping and still hasn't shipped.

Indiegogo... it's like Amazon Prime but with three-year shipping!

(PS - I know that Indiegogo isn't an online store and that I'm not "buying products", I'm "supporting projects". It's just that the fail rate is so incredibly high.)

Amazon Chimes into video-conferencing: Look out, Skype, Google

Skype and Hangouts Suck -- There's a Real Opportunity Here

Our organization has shifted back and forth from Skype to Hangouts as we experienced constant instability with both platforms. With a hangout with more than 4 people, there's about a 100% chance that one of them will be unable to get audio or video to work.

On Skype, the issue is drop-offs, occasional complete inability to make or receive a call and screen sharing is hit or miss.

If Amazon comes out with a solid, high-quality service, they could clean up.

Google's big Spanner in the works for price war against AWS

We're on MS and Google--Not Happy with Either

We're in the unenviable position of paying MS for Office 365 to get email and access to Office software, but we can't use their cloud because, when we previously tried to migrate all our files from Google to MS, the MS cloud "updated" all of the "Last Modified" timestamps on the files, making it impossible for users to sort files by date (which is quite common when looking for files). MS support refused to call it a bug, instead saying it was "by design" because, technically, the new "copy" of the file was "modified" when it was created on the new cloud (even though it's an exact copy).

So, we're stuck with two clouds, paying two bills and using only half of the functionality of both.

My fortnight eating Blighty's own human fart-powder

Awesome! Can we order it in the colonies?

I just tried looking it up on Amazon here in the US and it doesn't seem to be for sale here yet...

Nissan reveals self-driving chair

Dammit! I thought of that years ago

Should've filed for a patent...

Assange returns to Earth

You have six fingers on your right hand... someone was looking for you.

Japan loses contact with new space 'scope just weeks after launch

This is Terrible News

Just think of the data this space-based X-ray telescope could have produced over its lifetime. What a shame...

Surface Pro 4: Will you go the F**K to SLEEP?

Go the Fuck to Sleep!

Damn... I have the same "bag heater" issue with my SP3. You put it to sleep, it wakes up immediately. Put it to sleep again and put it in your bag, an hour later you have a very hot bag and your Surface has turned itself completely off (due to thermal overload) which means you're starting from a clean boot.

I was hoping the SP4 would solve these problems. Sounds like it hasn't.

Taxi for NASA! SpaceX to fly astronauts to space station

Boeing = Russian Rocket

Hmmm.... I'm glad NASA is excited to have "two American companies" who can put people into space without going "hat in hand" to the Russians, but unfortunately one of those companies, Boeing, buys 40-year-old rocket motors from Russia, so... better hang on to that hat the next time Russia decides it wants some of its old Soviet territory back and we decide to impose sanctions.

Boffins unwrap honeybee black box recorder project

Measuring Stress?

I wonder if this project also measures the stress on bees of having an RFID chip glued to their bodies...