Posts by elaar

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.

Re: no Real-Time Clock

So what happens wihen a server RTC battery dies, and reports no/corrupt time? The server will have the same issue with Fedora and refuse to boot.

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

It's not a solution for all, in the same way hatchbacks aren't suitable for your towing requirement, but that doesn't mean they're not a solution for others.

For the vast majority of the population, the average journey is something like 7 miles, and they don't tow things, so EV is a solution, just not a solution that covers everything.

Disney claims agreeing to Disney+ terms waives man's right to sue over wife's death

"show the European sources of the commenters involved"

I think most European sourced commenters are fully aware of the fact that the US does not have a government that serves the people.

Still waiting for a Pi 500 and wondering what do this summer?

Re: Point

"https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006997281548.html"

How many GPIO does it have? People seem to forget that the Rpi are usually aimed at hobbyists that are going to tinker and hook things up, rather than being simply used as mini PCs.

If you're using Polyfill.io code on your site – like 100,000+ are – remove it immediately

Re: Laziness

"People just slap in references to jquery or Bootstrap or whatever from random CDNs without a second thought."

Most people use a large, reliable CDN, that specifically offers this as a public service, using SRI in a secure way. What's the issue with that?

The chip that changed my world – and yours

Even when better processors were used in Video Gaming, the Z80 often still took a place as the sound CPU in Arcade pcbs all the way through to the mid 90s.

If it died, you replaced with a new one (costing peanuts).

Cisco creates architecture to improve security and sell you new switches

Joy, another new networking technology that involves AI, cloud dashboards and bespoke licensing plans.

AI defending itself from (probably mostly) AI-generated attacks.

Apple Vision Pro is creating a new generation of glassholes

Re: Lotta haters here

"I get the issues with driving", then why can't you understand the difference between criticising people doing something stupid for 10secs of internet fame, and jealousy?

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

Re: Purchase cost is one thing

I'd say about 90% of the reasonably priced+ EVs are leased, so resale value isn't important.

Many companies offer tax-swerving schemes like the Octopus one for example, to lease an EV at a reasonable cost.

Within another 8-10 years I'd expect there to be a practical and more reasonably priced way of replacing the battery pack, we've advanced a long way EV wise in the last 8.

Everyone wants better web search – is Perplexity's AI the answer?

Re: All I really want

I think we're in the minority these days unfortunately. People have become lazy, and want to be spoon fed answers from search queries, and I doubt most of them can be bothered to click the web link to check the validity of the answer either. But what I expect is them to segregate these search methods. One should be a website search, the other a simple question-answer search, they should not be combined.

A tale of 2 casino ransomware attacks: One paid out, one did not

"Most traffic is encrypted these days, and there's very little a firewall can do to inspect it"

Maybe old, traditional firewalls, but there's a great deal that Next Generation firewalls can do to control, inspect and secure ALL traffic. The FW controls the encryption process, rather than the client directly with the destination host.

To be, or not to be, in the office. Has returning to work stalled?

Re: Remote

Working from home is typically becoming FAR MORE secure compared to how working in the office used to be.

To deal with so many people working from home and/or using different devices, it's pushing most companies from using traditional corporate firewalls to cloud-based Firewalls/SDWAN type offerings, device fingerprinting, AI mechanisms etc..

Everything I use requires 2-factor authentication as well as the traditional security of the VPN. Annoyingly I can't even make a coffee before everything locks down. Compare that to the basic security we had on office machines 5+ years ago, with border firewalls.

Electric vehicles earn shocking report card for reliability

Hardly surprising though is it. Who would have thought that newer technology, electrically far more complex, would be more unreliable to begin with than a combustion engine that's had a century to be perfected/refined reliablility wise?

My 25year old gas boiler far outlived my brother's condensing boiler than had a corroded heat-exchanger after just 3 years. Far more reliable, but an awful 65% efficiency. We need the technological progress, and the reliability will catch up.

Chipmakers threaten to defect to US, EU if UK doesn't get its semiconductor plans sorted

Re: >Where's the Brexit bonus?

"and our local parliament would make the rules about (though not necessarily stop) immigration"

How would making "rules" stop immigration when you pee off the French and we're no longer able to use Dublin Regulation? All we've accomplished is less skilled immigration (which we desperately need in certain sectors) and more asylum seekers crossing.

Besides, the laws our parliament create still have to be ratified by our great House of Lords which is packed full of unelected cronies, isn't our democracy fab!?

Amazon warehouse workers 'make history' with first official UK strike

Re: 45%

A rep (when interviewed on the BBC this morning) plainly stated that the 45% wasn't expected or realistic, but was merely a starting point for negotiations. You have to start somewhere optimistically.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

"What could be easier?" - a metric system....

"We Brits still call the standard building timber a "two-by-four". So much easier than "hand me a couple of one-hundred-by-two-hundreds, there's a good chap"." - You don't base a measurement system on which one's easiest to say. You can still call it a 2x4, as it's pretty close, I'm sure the person passing it to you won't get confused if you're a few mm out with your description.

I don't think we'd suffer any major issues if a pint of beer was 13% smaller, the US version is under half a litre, and that's the point really... a system where values differ between common countries has no place in a modern society. The only people that argue against this are those that grew up with said archaic system.

Cisco warns it won't fix critical flaw in small business routers despite known exploit

Re: Hardly the first problem

It does beg the question though, why not buy a proper Cisco SOHO router (like the C900) that has a proper IOS? All of those RV routers might have the Cisco brand attached, but they're the equivalent of the cheap Linksys stuff.

Re: Time to dump Cisco

This isn't a "security product" though, it's a very cheap 13 year old design SOHO router, and to be fair no business EVER should have remote web management enabled on a public facing device, that's a ridiculous thing to do fullstop.

Sony, Honda collaborate on 'premium' electric vehicles that are born in the USA

Re: "continuous relationships with customers across the entire value-chain."

You could just completely block a smart-TV in your firewall, that's what I do. I might unblock it once a year to check for updates and that's it. It's a shame to miss out on some of the best Panels just because you're put off by the "smart" rubbish.

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

Fixing toilets.

In my early years, we had a small team that worked alone in a DC we had a large presence in. Support, hands and eyes, installations, basically anything and everything required to keep the services going.

It was then decided by the Office Manager of the local London office (a few miles away) that we could carry out general office maintenance tasks for them, because after all if you have IT training you must also be a qualified electrician and plumber...

One day we had a request from her to repair one of their toilets. I told her politely to ring a plumber, which compelled her to write an email to my manager and hers about how "unhelpful" I was. I never went over there again.

Demand for software experts pushes tech salaries higher in UK

Re: Not just gender

We've advertised 8 different job positions in the last 6 months (all in IT, 2nd/3rd line and managerial positions etc.) and from memory we've had ~50 male candidates apply. We have 1 female in the whole of our support department of ~30 odd people. The company would literally do anything to employ more females, to the point where their skillset doesn't even matter (which is an awful thing to admit).

We just don't have enough interest in the industry.

Braking news: Cops slammed for spamming Waze to slow drivers down

Re: I have no problem with this.

Speeding can be a crime. If instead of getting a PCN/FPN it goes to court, and you're convicted, then you have a criminal conviction and it goes on your criminal record.

Re: I have no problem with this.

I have a similar journey time to work. 70mph and more frequent overtaking I get about 48mpg, but if I sit relaxing doing 57mph in the slipstream of a lorry I get 68mpg, and it takes just 2mins longer.

Burger King just sent spam receipts to customers

Re: Why did Burger King send me this blank receipt whilst i was sleeping at 5am?

If only those "stupid" people did the simple task of setting up a unique random email address for every single bloody website/company they ever contacted, and spent their lives monitoring all addresses incase there's an order update or similar. They would then miss all those emails that you have to click "unsubscribe" on, and the one ever BK blank order receipt, the fools!

Critical flaws found in four Cisco SMB router ranges – for the second time this year

Do you think our core infrastructure uses cheap Cisco devices with (publically accessible) web guis?

Web Guis are always a vulnerability in this sort of kit, but there's many non/semi-technical customers that require it, hence why they put it in cheap SOHO kit.

China's 7nm chip surprise reveals more than Beijing might like

Re: Ours

I'm not sure how the EU stopped the UK from having fabs, I can't find any information to suggest that. But I do know that the EU (UK) is at the forefront of Medical Research, Fusion projects, CERN to name just a few. So to suggest the EU is behind on "high tech" because it doesn't have sophisticated FABS is laughable.

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

Re: Not near wind farms

The issue with that is a lot of people want easy access to their DC (even though visits tend to be pretty rare), so that would cross off using it for co-lo etc. The other issue might be a lack of skilled staff in those areas. But yeah apart from that it would make a lot more sense.

Re: And they said...

If everyone had on-site equipment rather than off-site, then a LOT more power would be used overall in the UK (more seperate air-con units, single servers rather than large virtual servers/vhosting, and all power consumption would be in the UK rather than some in foreign DCs).

Considering we're going to go through a massive energy crisis before 2025 (when the last remaining coal stations and the last of 8 reactors go offline), then it's probably a good idea we used UK datacentres (and a vast amount shipped off to DCs in other countries).