Posts by elaar

Musk gets approval for bumper Tesla payout but, unlike his robot, there are strings attached

Re: The worlds most powerful

What if someone you know sees you though?

Senate bill would require companies to report AI layoffs as job cuts reach 20-year high in October

So the great AI investment boom is the only think stopping a recession in the US.

And the result of this is that unemployment could rise to 10-20% in the next 5 years from AI layoffs.

This is economic suicide surely?

Literal crossed wires sent cops after innocent neighbors in child abuse case

So all of this sophisticated software tracking IIOC sharing is then completely reliant on Service provider's databases being correct, and the ability for engineers to wire correctly on a cold day, low lighting and within a cabinet which is a wire tumbleweed. There's definitely a weak link there...

Ofcom refuses to bite over Openreach's fiber freebies

I remember ending up paying about £42 for my 80/20 from BT. Even if they'd offered a free upgrade to FTTP and the same monthly cost, it would still have been quite a bit more expensive than my £25/month from Swish fibre for 500/500Mb, and now £26/month for Gigaclear 500/500Mb.

Managers are throwing entry-level workers under the bus in race to adopt AI

"Honestly, its not AI that is holding these guys back. It is a crippling fear of learning something that isn't considered "modern"

Isn't that just a massive generalisation though, and equivalent to GenZ saying boomers are scared of anything new and insist on using their 20 year old version of Putty? Not true of course, but it's the same type of baseless, pointless negative stereotype.

But you've based it on your thorough observation though, so it must definitely apply to 2.5 billion people though.....

Arduino has a new job selling chips for its new owner. Let's not pretend otherwise

The Mega was a great design from Arduino, perfect for interfacing with older boards with 5v TTL.

They lost me with the Arduino Cloud though, the lowest tier was £7 a month, which is fine if you ended up with a proper project with lots of devices in your home linking to it, but really off-putting if you're starting out with a project, or just want to have a play with it.

We're all going to be paying AI's Godzilla-sized power bills

Seeing as AI has been fed millions of our books, websites and research papers, why has it not been able to suggest viable alternatives to our typical forms of energy production?

Ahh yes that's right, because it has no intelligence at all, and just regurgitates stuff it has scraped.

Teens arrested in London preschool ransomware attack

Re: Just turn the little shits over to the affected parents...

Ahh the good old days, when the previous generations hadn't filled the entire earth with endocrine disrupting chemicals that messes up hormonal systems, they're also now getting things like colon cancer (previously only really seen in older age) because of all of the dodgy chemicals we lace food with, and a year on year rise in auto-immune diseases. Damn them for having ADHD and Anxiety!!

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

"So if such an individual is sat perfectly safe on a beach in France, why would they "risk their lives on a dangerous sea crossing, often after giving everything they own up in order to pay criminal gangs", if it wasn't because they know there's a far better payday waiting for them on the UK side of the channel? Why does even Macron say that the UK is a "soft touch" and that they keep coming for exactly that reason?"

Firstly, bear in mind that more claim Asylum in France than the UK, and also that currently France has bettered the UK in standard of living and disposable income in recent years, so your arguments of the UK being a soft-touch or a better payday compared to France is demonstrably false.

"If you think the UK should bankrupt itself trying to save the entire world from poverty,"

This is the real problem, many people in the UK have become so obsessed with the idea that illegal migration is our number one problem, which is consistently leading to idiotic voting patterns, based on slogans rather than logic, and obviously the problem just gets worse.

We're doing very well at bankrupting ourselves without factoring in illegal migration. Most councils are bankrupt or on the verge of bankruptcy, Government Debt continued to rise despite years of "Austerity", with public services scrapped/reduced, a massively increasing Social cost and Welfare bill (and no, not to due immigration). But most people don't seem to notice or care about these critical issues, it's the boats that gets them worked up, even though their lives have never been impacted in any way by it.

"Such individuals get given houses/hotels to stay in in, mobile phones & internet, food, full access to the NHS & Schools etc without contributing a penny to the costs "

Of course, how can they contribute to the cost when they aren't permitted to work? It's quite easy to moan about people "not paying their way", when they're in a situation where they can't.

The high costs for housing etc.. are due to the continuing backlog of processing the claims. Other countries in Europe seem to do this far quicker than us.

Temporary access to services is necessary, unless you want to live in a Country where there's 50,000 extra homeless people dying on the streets each year whilst waiting for claims to be processed.

The last statistics I saw quite some time back, showed that there was a higher percentage of tax paying immigrants compared to the average British public.

Taliban impose tele-ban and take Afghanistan offline

Re: merrit

You don't need to turn of the whole internet for that, just the WWW, at least then critical interconnected infrastructure can still function.

Warnings about Cisco vulns under active exploit are falling on deaf ears

Re: Smelly?

My ASA5525-X is 11 years old. I stopped using it about 3 years ago.

How long should they provide support for? 20years? I can't think of any Manufacturer that supports devices that long.

Re: Smelly?

We're constantly playing whack-a-mole too with Fortigates also, it feels like we're changing the OS (for about 10k devices) on a weekly basis.

2 days ago we had to upgrade 30k devices from another Manufacturer for a critical vulnerability also.

People are often in the anti-Cisco camp on The Reg, but when you work for a managed IT provider, and have 200k+ routers/firewalls out on sites, then you know that Cisco is one of the better ones out there (as unpopular as that comment will be) ...

No chips for you! Senator wants Americans to get first dibs on GPUs, restrict sales to others

Does Trump expect other countries around the world to obey free market principles, whilst he ignores them and resorts to full-blown protectionism?

The rest of the world really needs to get together and simulatenously whack a massive Digital Servies tax on the US. Let's see how well the large US tech companies fare when they don't dominate due to widespread tax avoidance.

Huawei counts cost of Western bans as UK business withers

Re: outlawing the purchase of Huawei networking kit to build 5G networks

I think you missed my point really, which was that if Huawei posed such a security risk, then why was this limited to 5G Networks?

Really this was down to protectionism, the US wanted to give companies like Qualcomm a leg up.

outlawing the purchase of Huawei networking kit to build 5G networks

And yet no one seemed too fussed about them being deployed into NHS HSCN networks, and the fact that most DSLAMs had them.

Programmers: you have to watch your weight, too

Re: I know I am a dying breed

Sure, things like Type Casting and Memory access could result in unsafe code, but it meant you understood the system and coded appropriately/efficiently, especially when RAM was very limited.

I think it's a shame that coders starting off today often have very limited knowledge of the way the code interacts with the system, and it's all left to the compiler/interpreter, bloated code, bloated libraries and the assumption that limitless resources can be used.

AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content

Maybe website owners should join an organisation. One that aims to "thoroughly" scrape (repeatedly) all corporate websites owned by large AI companies, for LLM development of course. It should be done in a large distributed type way for extra efficiency.

UK unions want 'worker first' plan for AI as people fear for their jobs

Re: Gross "inequality" is a symptom rather than the ill

Farage hasn't had an intelligent idea in his life.

He's simply playing the game that the Tories were doing 3+ years ago, by shouting slogans that the Daily Mail readership want to hear, mainly about stopping boats.

The only reason he has any position in UK politics is because he carefully chose to stand in the most uneducated, poor town in Essex, which has a very high ex-prison population. And even Clacton folk now generally regret their choice.

"I'm damn sure that AI can't do anything in the physical world so any worker who is 'hands on' like the trades / services etc should be fine"

They won't be fine when those that do lose their job to AI have to re-train, many of which to jobs in the physical world.

Google tries to trump iPhone launch with AI-powered Pixel 10 range

Re: AI?

It's no different to everyone calling everything-that-can-connect-to-the-internet and a few GPIO, "smart".

Re: Google copying Apple

$300 for the hardware, $700 to fund the cost of the AI garbage you don't want.

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

"If you ban VPNs the entire NHS will collapse."

To be fair, the article is asking for age verification to use VPNs to stop children using them, it doesn't mention banning all (including NHS) VPNs. Not sure where you got that bit from.

Ebuyer website bought by Fraser Group plc

Re: Not much sympathy here I'm afraid

Maybe if Ebuyer got to pay no corporation tax for 4 years, and fiddle the other years with multiple divisions and the "super deduction" tax break, then maybe they'd be able to offer free delivery?

Obviously if you buy your goods from US International companies, that are masters at tax avoidance, you might save a few quid, but it will eventually destroy all domestic companies.

Hyundai: Want cyber-secure car locks? That'll be £49, please

Why is it so insecure?

I know very little about car remote technology, but why is it such a massive security threat on newer cars? Why can't the car/fob have preshared keys on them during the pairing stage, and then utilise the typical encryption methods that are common on the web? How is it so abysmally designed that's it open to man-in-the-middle type attacks?

Maybe there's something very obvious that I'm missing?

Millions of age checks performed as UK Online Safey Act gets rolling

Re: Madness

"How about getting parents to take responsibility for their darling rug-rats?"

Yes, make parents (many of which are tech-illiterate) monitor every single thing all of their children do non-stop on every single digital device until they reach the age of 16+ (I can tell you have children...) Or, we could just make it so that graphic porn isn't accessible to children with just a few clicks.

Have they gone about it the right way? Of course not. Moaning about the Parents isn't going to solve it though.

Trump AI plan rips the brakes out of the car and gives Big Tech exactly what it wanted

Re: Contrast

"Yes it really has. Most of your PC, windows, god knows how many linux contributors, products etc. Plus Google as one of the best search engines to come about. Whatsapp and before that skype, msn messenger and god knows how many things you have used and do use. So yes."

Have you not realised that the reason US International companies do so well is that they've historically been experts at dodging both International and Domestic Taxes, enabling them to dominate International Markets.

Take a look at Apple, What's it up to now, about $150billion in offshore profit swerving domestic and International taxes? Any attempt at countries putting in Digital Service type taxes to counteract it, results in the US government muscling in like some sort of Mafia.

I've paid more Tax than Amazon has in the UK in certain years. How can any domestic company compete with that?

None of the software you mention is unique in any way, it becomes mainstream due to dominance and money.

Science confirms what we all suspected: Four-day weeks rule

Future pay increases

What these studies don't tell us (too short), is what future salary increases will be like.

I can imagine companies using the excuse that employees have dropped to 4 working days, to give below inflation pay rises for the next 10 years.

Frozen foods supermarket chain deploys facial recognition tech

Re: Collapse

"She went to prison for that. Is this the type country you want to live in?"

Yes, it is. What sort of excuse is "in the heat of the moment"? What other crimes should you be let off from if done in the heat of the moment? When you have a large number of people all "heated up", and on the rampage, then it's exactly this type of comment that will motivate them to do the act.

"with no means or actually intention to blow the mosque up herself." - Well you've completely missed the point there, she didn't say she was planning to do it, she was inciting other people to commit the act, and that's the basis for her sentencing.

Break it down.... She was suggesting people that were already angry and rioting, to go to a mosque and murder people of a specific faith. I don't want to live in a country that allows that sort of action. You have to think about your actions in life.

LLMs can hoover up data from books, judge rules

"what you do with it (for your own use) is no longer any business of the publisher or author."

In the case of an LLM though, it's no longer for your "own use". As soon as the LLM reproduces any of that work (possibly an unlimited number of times), you have participated in the mass redistribution of the material

Microsoft rolls out Windows 11 Start Menu updates

Yes, it's generally agreed that it's the Windows 7 Menu that was preferred.

What was the search like? No bloody idea, no one needed it because they knew where everything was, how to access it, and the menu didn't change.

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

Re: Final

A bit like how "you'll never need to reboot after updates in the next Windows version", and yet I'm prompted to reboot almost every time I go to use my Win11 home PC.

Trump tariffs to make prices great – a gain

Re: Just once...

You do realise that by saying that people don't understand how economics works, and that you do because you're an accountant, doesn't make it true just because you said it?

People with even a very basic level of intelligence should be able to realise that you don't create tariff rates based on trade surplus/deficit figures, right?

Have you got some decent examples of countries "dumping on your markets", or anything useful to add? We can give lots of examples of large US companies swerving taxes all around the world, including offshore accounting in their very own country, giving them unfair market advantages for many decades.

As Elon Musk makes thousands of federal workers jobless, tycoon pushes for $56B Tesla pay deal

Do you mean what he's actually achieved, or what he claims to have "achieved"?

Claiming to be close to peace with Russia/Ukraine, whilst the Russians bomb Ukraine more now than before Trump got involved.

Claiming to fix Israel/Palestine with a bit of ethnic cleansing, displacing millions of Palestinians so he can build some hotels.

Creating an international trade war, worsening relations with lots of countries, where everyone will lose.

Tesla Cybertruck, a paragon of reliability, recalled again

Re: Made me wonder at least...

"which would I imagine would also require MOSFETs for switching"

There's probably MOSFETs on every single PCB in the car. MOSFETs are usually reliable electronic components, so the question is, what dodgy Manufacturer did they buy there's from? Or is the real issue that there's a design fault and they're thermal stressing them.

UK energy watchdog slaps down Capita's £130M smart meter splurge

Re: The real reason the UK government wants smart meters

You'll be forced by the backdoor, by eventually there being no tariffs available for non-smart meter customers. Or the few remaining will be twice the price.

Re: Dear Smart Meter Zealots: Explain why they all....

"they are also remote disconnect switches"

Which is a fairly pointless "feature" anyway. If you're not paying your bills and there's a reasonable chance of disconnection, just create a makeshift faraday cage over the meter to stop it talking back to the mothership.

That's assuming your meter actually works anyway, mine doesn't,

Python dethrones JavaScript as the most-used language on GitHub

Re: This is good news

You should provide examples of why you think it's articulate.

- Personally I think the use of tabs/spaces to structure programs was always a bad idea.

- Comprehensions are often abused and turn into an unreadable mess to anyone else.

- The removal of brackets for conditions achieves nothing apart from tripping up programmers that constantly have to move between using half a dozen different languages

I could go on for a long time. I think most of it comes under personal taste, but I really wouldn't class it as articulate.

I'm not denying that Python has its advantages, I'm currently writing some tools for work with it. But let's be honest, the reason it's popular is primarily because it's easy to learn to an "okay" standard, which appeals to the masses (which isn't the aim of many other languages). Hence why so much of Github consists of it.

But personally, I think there's a lot of questionable syntax/design decisions in Python, it's comparatively slow (hence why they've tried to address that somewhat in recent versions over the years), and hence it needs to rely on a lot of functions/libraries/frameworks written in a higher-level language like C to perform many tasks efficiently, then you can't directly credit the Python language for this aspect.

I'm sure there's some very good frameworks out there, but there's a lot of bloat, especially with web frameworks (seriously, what sane individual would use Django for proper development? People that are desperate to use Python for everything.)

Github does tend to attract newish Python coders, that dump unfinished projects on there, trying to get their raspberry PI working with their thermostat etc.

Compared to slow, mostly badly written python code? Where you need bloaty frameworks to do anything useful?

I never used to like Javascript, but found it very useful recently.

Combustion engines grind Linus Torvalds' gears

Re: Hmmmm...

That's not far off the cost to replace the engine (and other damage caused) on numerous engine designs that turned out to be naff. Such as the chain stretch problem with the BMW/PSA Prince engine, or the early ST engines that had catastrophic failures with piston land faults.

Even after 100 years of combuston engine design, there's still costly failures.

My partners VW Golf "eco" 3 cylinder engine had a fault at 3 years at 2 weeks and VW refused to replace it under warranty (expired 2 weeks prior), £900. Suspension struts started leaking at 2 years. Plus it wasn't eco at all. Very few things on an ICE car are "relatively small and affordable" anymore, unless you buy the part yourself and fit it yourself.

Most EV's have a warranty of 3-5 years, what one offers 2 years or less?

Re: Hmmmm...

I don't think he meant under a decade to design from scratch every single part of an electric car, I think more to bring one to production using mostly existing designs/technology/products.

Even the Manx beach buggy now has recently announced an EV model, how many decades do you think they've spent designing batteries and their motor housing?

I think you're taking his comments too literally.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

Unfortunately, for future generations of kids, it will all be monitored exams/assessments in metal clad rooms, rather than coursework. Which is unfortunate for those that don't perform well under those circumstances, and time based assessment is not a great method of evaluating someone's knowledge.

Re: School rules

"Students should "not use AI tools during in-class examinations, processed writing assignments, homework or classwork unless explicitly permitted and instructed," the policy states.

Whether you use it as a Search Engine, or to write the actual paper is irrelevant if the school policy is essentially "Do not use AI for anything" (see above).

Thousands of Fortinet instances vulnerable to actively exploited flaw

Re: Couple of version too late.

The issue is, you can't always follow the upgrade path, especially when it involves thousands of devices. With Fortinet, every new update seems to introduce more exciting service affecting bugs for you to discover, especially when it comes to SDWAN, where we're frequently having to create workarounds and offload stuff from the CPU/NPU to software. We seem to open a new TAC case with them on a daily basis.

Energy companies told to recharge for AI datacenter surge

Only because the infrastructure has been left to decline for 40 years....

Musk's Starlink rockets to 4 million subscribers

Re: I'm not surprised - it works very well

You're fortunate, we provide Starlink as a service to our customers and rarely get more than 10Mb up. Our equipment has to use 4G to "boost" the upload.

Very good for download, and latency is pretty impressive all things considered.

Apple ropes off at least 4 GB of iPhone storage to house AI

Re: "about the size of an HD movie, for now"

My movies used to be 2.5GB each 15 years ago. Now days it wouldn't even cover the audio stream. I'm assuming you mean movies solely to watch on your phone rather than a decent TV?

Raspberry Pi 4 bugs throw wrench in the works for Fedora 41

I remember purchasing the latest PIC32 chips, then realising the full datasheets were 1000 pages long, and almost giving up before I started.