Posts by a pressbutton

Face masks hamper the spread of coronavirus. Know what else they hamper? Facial-recognition systems (except China's)

Re: I thought AI could detect

I thought ducks waddled

Something that walks like a duck probably isn't

Mysterious supernova is blasting far-flung galaxy with flashes of UV light – and astroboffins don't know why

Re: Hmm ...

You wish.

Black hole destroys corona

That take forever.

Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro: £250 mobe still able to deliver value in a brutally competitive niche

Headphone Jack

Yay.

... and for the bonus does it have an FM radio like my HTC?

Legal complaint lodged with UK data watchdog over claims coronavirus Test and Trace programme flouts GDPR

Re: But think of the <s>children</s> patients

20 years...

If the data is used to track and trace people you came in contact with, the useful life of that data for the purpose it is gathered is surely less than 4 weeks.

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

Re: "the concept of saving face"

EE cummings said it better than D

"A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man."

Raspberry Pi Foundation serves up an 8GB slice of mini-computing goodness

Re: Pi a great project

I remember that

An era when if you listed the program to screen, it scrolled slowly enough to be able to read

(was that the Atom?) - modern inkjet printers print faster(!)

that was all ruined by the BBC micro and its super speed

.... shuffles off slowly.

Twitter ticks off Trump with new 'Get the facts' alert on pair of fact-challenged tweets

Re: OI! KETTLE!

There are one or two perfumed handkerchiefs in the sea of ordure, like

COVID-19 Actuaries Response Group

but, as you say, sadly it is a reflection of the times that lying and hypocrisy seems to have no cost in real life as well as in twitter.

Lawsuit klaxon: HP, HPE accused of coordinated plan to oust older staff in favor of cheaper, compliant youngsters

Ethics...

A modern corporaton has no ethics - neither did non-modern corporations

The people who work there do (or should do).

This is complicated (not really)

TL;DR:

An $evil outcome is very easily achieved by a chain of people just doing their jobs in a putatively non-$evil way

1

You are a major shareholder in $corp - aka a fund manager

You see your $corp shares have not done as well as $close_competitor

You looking in the accounts and see that the cost / income ratio is different

You like your well-paid job. Your fund is under-performing

You call the management of $corp and say 'make more money' - 'cut costs'

2

You run or work in $corp at a high level.

Your shareholders have called you and said 'make more money' - 'cut costs'

You see £close_competitor and one of your minions tells you they make more money because their staff cost less.

You do not want to lose your job - or get taken over - or look stupid in front of peers

You issue an order "cut staff costs"

3

You work in a corp at a middle level.

You get an order "cut staff costs"

You have a spreadsheet that says getting rid some higher-paid people will reduce costs more and have less disruption on BAU.

You talk to lawyers who develop redundancy plans and schemes for redeployment that 'should' (no guarantees) be within the law

You issue an order "cut staff costs - these people"

4

You work in a corp at a middle level.

You get an order "staff reduction - these people"

You work through the process

5

Colin / Cathy $older_person after a gender / race / etc independant process loses their job.

I would - inside a 'just joking' clause suggest a "Corporate Morality Officer" who should be spotting this and taking responsibility for it.

But I bet there is such a thing out there already - probably in the BBC.

For the price tag, this iPad Pro keyboard better damn well be Magic: It isn't... but it's not completely useless either

Re: Because ... it’ll just work : Nope

I got my x220 in late '12

Not using it because it is in a drawer at work and the office is locked :(

You can't have it both ways: Anti-coronavirus masks may thwart our creepy face-recog cameras, London cops admit

Re: Why bother?

... shocking.

Huawei gets misty-eyed for the good old days (of a year ago) with maudlin P30 Pro remaster

The good old days...

having been locked down since March and may well be locked down until October,

I have started using the landline.

Mobiles are for people who are ... mobile.

Tesla sued over Tokyo biker's death in 'dozing driver' Autopilot crash

Re: Naming of devices

Easy

no-one would buy the car if you needed to spend £many_thousands and study for many_months before driving it -

especially if there was another, similar car you could just drive away in.

I Think it is a bit more interesting than that.

Tesla's 'autopilot' is probably quite a reasonable driver. Possibly average.

The thing is that it is not perfect.

So, when it goes wrong and something bad happens, who is at fault?

The answer on the face of it is pretty clear - the _human_ driver.

Where it gets interesting is when the victims of the collision claim that the accident happened because the car is 'defective' and but for the defective Autopilot, that man would be alive.

Tesla's lawyers have a narrow path to follow. They need to show that

- the software did not fail to stop

and

- the _human_ driver was in control

Popcorn...

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

MS is what you think it is

© - formerly known as Microsoft

Sadly, the prince symbol is not in a standard keyboard

However, C can mean anything you want to project

Hey bud – how the heck does that stay in your ear? Google emits latest Pixel Buds, plus extra bloatware if you have the matching phone

Re: Wireless

That is why the newer flagships do not have a headphone jack.

Not to save themselves £1,

but to cost you £150

Even if only 10% of new gen pixel owners fall for it, that is many £millions of extra revenue.

Spyware maker NSO can't claim immunity, Facebook lawyers insist – it's time to face the music

Re: end user

Nah.

I have knives in the kitchen.

I do not have a nuke in the breadbin or nerve gas in the fridge. These things are not harmless until used.

Much like my partner's pickled cabbage that popped open, stank out the larder and left a nasty residue that I swear glows just a bit.

'Come 75,000 workers, join us!' says Amazon. Just don't dare complain about the boss or you're out on your ear

Re: Highest turnover in the industry

Phol & Kornbluth - the space merchants

There was a duopoly - Universal products and Starzelius

Published in 1950s

Described a future that was not bright.

Re: Highest turnover in the industry

Do not worry.

Due to amazon's relentless competitive skills, in a few years time you will either be working for amazon or a place just like it.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

But brought up to early 21st century standards where no one person is stamping, just a lot of people making up rules and following them, who all think they are doing the right thing.

(which, on reflection, was one of the points of the book)

Suspicious senate stock sale spurt spurs scrutiny scheme: This website tracks which shares US senators are unloading mid-pandemic

Re: So when are they buying back in?

After the ninth wave, Kate bush will be buying.

Good example

Comment is relevant to the UK

I do not have access to insider information, but am forced to sit through the online course every year.

If the information is available to the public, it is not insider trading and IANAL.

So, if that carpark was visible to the public, and it was possible for the public to see the number plates, probably not insider trading in the uk.

The example we get is

(a)Factory on fire that you can see from the train - public information

(b)You pick up a document from the next seat that says P&C all over it and read it and it says 'oops our top secret factory has burnt down and no-one knows' - not public information.

Please remember: I am not a lawyer.

Give us a reason... not to buy a new handset? Samsung back-ports Galaxy S20 photo features to Galaxy 10 range

It could be the 'customer photo filter' stops anyone noticing that the S20 is the S10

Bet you missed the fnords as well.

Have you ever seen one of these, son? Ricoh spins off 360° camera boffins to debut neuralyzer-shaped snapper

Re: I was thinking...

From memory, having a dog (for the sake of clarity golden retriever etc) was a minority specialist interest in the Tokyo suburbs.

No need for the mac - apart from when it is raining.

After 16 years of hype, graphene finally delivers on its promise – with a cosmetic face mask

Real World Uses

see https://graphenecomposites.com/

seems that they have a lightweight bullet proof vest that will stop a 7.62

https://calvin-benton.squarespace.com/

Why so shy, Samsung? Weird Find my Phone push notification did not only affect Galaxy mobes

Can you reassign the bixby button to something useful?

S20 Ultra 5G: Samsung unfurls Galaxy flagship with bonkers 108MP cam, 6.9-inch display

Re: In 2020, what's the point of spending more than a grand on a phone?

People with less than average eyesight like bigger than average screens on phones.

Eyesight degrades as you age...

In deepest darkest Surrey, an on-prem SAP system running 17-year-old software is about to die....

Re: 'National Government initiative' misty eyed memories....

I worked with an analyst who worked on that project.

He was sort of sad to see it complete as he was working on a large base west of london and if the officers wanted to discuss something they would get up, and take their dog for a walk to the other person's office.

He said the dogs were sad and real productivity fell.

Being forced to work with MS teams (say the name three times holding an image of the person you hate in your mind and an outlook reminder will pop up on their screen and remove any useful thought from their mind) things have not improved.

At last, the fix no one asked for: Portable home directories merged into systemd

GDPR...

Client grants us remote access to support our app via AWS.

No drive access of any sort outside the app sandbox (i.e. files cannot be copied local pc<>aws)

No cut&paste

Print to local machines switched on, but will probably be gone soon.

The are looking into forcing fullscreen on all the time which makes it v. hard to get a screenshot.

That portable home drive is not a use case, that is a legal case against the employer.

Accounting expert told judge Autonomy was wrong not to disclose hardware sales

Hmm

Peter Holgate: - "my opinions are given on the basis of the facts I have been instructed to assume"

i.e. I was given facts that made Lynch look guilty, instructed to instructed to assume them and in my expert opinion, he looks guilty

Does HPE think anyone is fooled?

I so look forward to the judge's comments on this.

In the red corner, Big Red, and in the blue corner... the rest of the tech industry

Re: This is US only.

As Mr punch might say ....

Thats Huwai to do it!

and indeed if they do sell into the UK / EU this is the first step in that direction

This is US only.

As other posters have stated, in the UK / EU this will not apply and looking to China well...

Given this and US software patents etc I would expect the next generation of tech to happen outside the US and possibly not sold to the US due to legal risks.

You're not Boeing to believe this: Yet another show-stopping software bug found in ill-fated 737 Max airplanes

Re: Isn't THIS why we've got to teach 2nd-graders how to "code", rather than how to think?

My dad told me a story:

Leo was used to do all the payslips for Lyons.

It failed.

After much grief, just on the deadline it worked and printed a few thousand payslips.

Someone had loaded the wrong paper - non-perforated A(something or other) pages

This was where my dad was called in.

After a bit of thinking they clamped the paper in a block between 2 sheets of ply, sellotaped a blank perforated page on top and sawed down the dotted lines.

Puts debugging in it's place.

China tells America, with a straight face, it will absolutely crack down on hacking and copyright, tech blueprint theft

Re: Disney must be all excited right now

You are speaking words of wisdom

but it could be worse

let it be, let it be.

Samsung’s aspirational Galaxy Chromebook: Shell out $1k for a fast beaut (and remember to try Linux if you're into that)

Re: how Samsung has handled the thermal demands

pump the heat into the battery (as per note 7)?

No horrific butterfly keys on this keyboard, just you and your big, dumb fingers

Re: that keyboard would be useful

I'd love to type at normal touch-type speeds on a phone.

... is that not called dictation?

Lynch lied about Autonomy's accounts, rages HPE to the High Court

fiduciary trust

To be completely safe from fiduciary trust attacks HPE need to show not that Autonomy & KPMG were asked for relevant numbers and they didnt provide / said they couldnt in the timescale

but something rather stronger

They need to show $other_party lied to HPE.

I think this is the core driver for the case here. We thought this court case was expensive - wait for the US shareholder suits.

Not looking too good for HPE right now.

HPE goes on the warpath, attacks AWS over vendor lock-in

What triggers my allergies...

Something called ZANTAZ - an HP Autonomy offering - was inflicted on us a few years ago with $previous_employer

"ZANTAZ Enterprise Archive Solution (EAS) is a highly scalable and flexible archiving platform that enables your organization to capture and preserve email messages, attachments, and files in a way that both optimizes storage and allows immediate access for discovery and review by courts, regulators, administrators, and end-users. Powered by IDOL, EAS automates the processing of enormous volumes of information, dynamically exposing the patterns, linkages and meaning within."

The effect - typically speaking - was that when outlook was not frozen, it ran like a dog. It forcibly archived anything over a couple of months old and the attachments often got lost.

When you tried to restore, it seems the special references often went missing

When they stopped using it, _all_that_data_was_gone_

Fortunately I worked out how to switch it off v. quickly.

With the benefit of hindsight, why there was an exe on my laptop at all completely escapes me.

If only

...HP had a section or subsidiary that specialised in analysis of large scale unstructured big data.

If they had that they could really clean up

The IoT wars are over, maybe? Amazon, Apple, Google give up on smart-home domination dreams, agree to develop common standards

Re: I already have an IoT standard

The one useful use we have is on going away for 1 night or more

we switch the heating off on leaving the house

and about 2h before getting back home, remotely switch the heating back on.

Intel is doing so well at AI acceleration, it's dropped $2bn on another neural-net chip upstart (third time's a charm)

yay

Another set of chips that make neural net training faster.

Please do not confuse this with Intelligence. This is just a faster way of getting the answer you programmed in with the training set.

Lynch was 'willing to lie' to High Court over Autonomy whistleblower, claims HPE

Judge is correct.

They say that you had buyer's remorse and Hewlett-Packard, in the light of that remorse, scratched around for reasons to justify its rather immediate writing-off of a large part of the purchase price. That's what they say. You say they're wrong about that and they say they're right about that.

To which I would add:- No-one forced HP to vastly over-pay for Autonomy, from an earlier post

Courtesy FT Alphaville 11/09/19:

We’ll leave you with this, a quote from Sun Microsystem’s founder Scott McNealy. Having watched the stock of his company appreciate nearly 14-fold during the dotcom bubble, and then collapse 95% during the bust, McNealy was bemused that investors ever considered paying what now looks like a rather diminutive 10 times sales for the computer hardware company’s stock at its peak in 2000.

Why? This is what he told Businessweek in 2002:

(https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2002-03-31/a-talk-with-scott-mcnealy)

At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realise how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don’t need any transparency. You don’t need any footnotes. What were you thinking?

10 times sales…

… that made me think

Autonomy was sold for $12bn 18/8/11 and revenue to the end of the last FY – 31/12/10 was $870m

That is a ratio of *13.8* times revenue.

And I expect this lawsuit to be a massive waste of money too.

Worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable and royalty-free: Amazon's Alexa NHS contract released

Dead peoples health records

I do not think GDPR etc applies to dead people.

Now, this (I think, IANAL) is the law.

The morality of what was done in this case is _very_ dubious.

Elon Musk gets thumbs up from jury for use of 'pedo guy' in cave diver defamation lawsuit

in musk's mind

... a pedo guy is someone who walks

In some parts of the US, that is a pretty nasty thing to say.

Listen up you bunch of bankers. Here are some pointers for less crap IT

Re: Legacy still all over the place

Two minicab firms.

One has a brand new fleet all of the same type - and they are maintained by the main dealer.

The other has a fleet fill of the sort of cars that should have been 'retired' 5 years ago, and yes, sometimes some cars break down and they are then fixed - not always perfectly, admittedly.

Fast forward 10 years

One of those minicab firms will know what to do should a key supplier fails.

European smartphone market rallies but Apple didn't get the memo

Re: Nike shellsuit owners like their Apple's

Quite correct.

Comparing phones to fashion brands is a valid thing to do.

Consider Lacoste or French connection or any number of brands that became popular through clever marketing, overexpanded - over diluting their (upmarket) identity, or just fell of the wave they rode.

Apple has the store that reduces the defection rate, but, that wont help.

However I do not see teenagers choosing Android because their parents have iphones.

So this might be just a blip.

Found on Mars: Alien insects... or whatever the hell this smudge is supposed to be, anyway

Jeff Wayne

... my apologies

The chances of anything living on Mars are a million to one, he said

The chances of anything living on Mars are a million to one...

But still, they live!

Take a Big Blue cheque and go: IBM settles 281 UK age discrim cases

If this includes loss of Defined Benefit Pension entitlements, compo could reach 7 figures.

Absolutely smashing: Musk shows off Tesla's 'bulletproof' low-poly pickup, hilarity ensues

Less bladerunner / matrix

More space 1999

Pack your bags, you're going to America, Lord Chief Justice tells accused Brit hacker

Re: Odd thought

Perhaps is is more proportional to the number of people visiting the other country.

Looking around, in 2018

3.8m visitors - tourists - from USA to UK

3.47m visitors - tourists - from UK to USA

so, all things being equal I would expect roughly equal numbers of extradition requests.

Uncle Sam prepping order to extradite ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch from the UK

Re: Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Small Minds

Some people in Guantanamo bay for example might say the US does not have an embarrassment nerve(*)

(*)if there is such a thing