Posts by DJO

BOFH: This printer engineer knows every trick in the book

Re: "the sound of a large multifunction printer hitting a small white van from a great height"

Floors vary in height but I now realise we'd also need to account for any trailing cables which would definitely disturb the air flow enough to affect the drag and may also affect the orientation of the falling printer.

If the intended target is a (white) van a face impact probably wouldn't do a lot of damage, it might just bounce off after denting the roof, a fast enough corner impact would penetrate a (white) van quite easily so establishing how it falls is important when engineering a tragic accident working out what measures are needed to prevent tragic accidents.

Re: "the sound of a large multifunction printer hitting a small white van from a great height"

...I wonder what speed the terminal terminal velocity is...

Obviously if it was being dropped in a vacuum then it would be easy to calculate it's velocity when it hits the ground which is about as terminal as it gets. However if you've managed to coerce the engineer into a vacuum chamber then the blunt force trauma seems a bit superfluous - someone has to clear up the mess you know.

If you assume the multifault printer as a cube then the drag coefficient is around 1.05 if dropping face forward, for edge or corner forward it can be from 0.8 to 2.1 but the maths is bloody complicated and I cannot be arsed and anyway I don't know the height of the window from which it spontaneously defenestrated itself.

A lot of wind tunnel testing to find if the device orientates itself into a stable attitude or if it falls chaotically would be needed to calculate an accurate drag coefficient but I suspect there might be a bit of difficulty in getting funding for experimentation to determine the aerodynamic properties of printers no matter how obviously impactful the research would be.

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

Re: "when many phones still had removable batteries"

...battery life that could be measured in days...

To be fair, that is as much to do with the way modern phones are used compared to early cell phones. Even a modern phone will last for days if it is only used for the occasional phone call or texting - it's all the online crap that eats the batteries.

UK firm bombarded debt-ridden people with 5.5M texts

Re: Simple

Limited liability does not protect directors from criminal liability, only financial liability and not in all cases there either.

Economic Crime: Directors can face criminal prosecution for fraudulent trading, money laundering, or tax evasion.

Bribery & Corruption: Under the Bribery Act 2010, directors can be held criminally liable if a company offence is committed with their "consent or connivance".

Health, Safety, & Environment: Directors can face individual criminal prosecution for fatal accidents, corporate manslaughter, or severe environmental breaches if they are linked to personal neglect. (apparently it seems that water companies are exempt from this one).

Insolvency Law: Continuing to trade when knowing the company is insolvent (wrongful trading) can lead to disqualification, fines, and—in severe, fraudulent cases—criminal charges.

However the ICO would need to hand the prosecution over to the DPP and that is probably where it all falls apart.

Re: completely pointless watchdog

£300k would be a reasonable penalty, if it was per infringement but as a total penalty it's a joke.

They need to stop pissing about and make the penalties ruinous for the most egregious offenders rather than as it is now, an inconvenient expence.

Australia investigating five social media giants for not enforcing ban on kids

Nuance

The article is misleading, the 80% figure is just for the 14 to 16 age group which is the least vulnerable sector. For the 9 to 13 group it's around 40% and for the most vulnerable group, the under 9s the rate is under 10%.

Interestingly most use fake ID's, VPN use is at a very low level, around 3%.

It's early days and the implementation is far from ideal but it's better than just throwing ones hands in the air and saying it's unfixable.

Trump-shuttered climate change site back online in nonprofit hands

Re: Don't know if it's a shame or a good thing

Actually hydrogen peroxide did a fine job of killing off the blue-green algae leaving a nice environment for green algae that are not affected by hydrogen peroxide. It's a bit better, the green algae is less toxic than the blue-green stuff which is good news for any surviving ducks.

But you're right, to imply there was just 2 such acts is incongruous, vandalism has been the defining feature of suspect #1's tenure to date.

Re: Don't know if it's a shame or a good thing

Well it's true, in fact there were 2 instances of vandalism, the first was when some idiot had it painted it in a dark colour which is going to raise the temperature of the water to levels that encourage algae to grow, the second act of vandalism was when the same idiot drove a motorcade along it when it was still empty but before the lining had time to cure properly. When the idiot concerned is sent to prison, the world will be a slightly better place.

Microsoft Access finally breaks free of its 22-inch form limit

The Holy GUI of Antioch

Shalt thou count to 22. No more. No less.

22 shalt be the number thou shalt count,

and the number of the counting shall be 22.

23 shalt thou not count, nor either count thou 21, excepting that thou then proceed to 22.

24 is right out.

Why Amazon hates 'human-in-the-loop' AI governance

Re: Believing in the powers of magic

See my comment above but the key point that addresses your valid concern is for general aviation (i.e. not airlines or military)::

USA: 5 to 6 accidents per 100,000 flights.

Europe: Under 1 accident per 100,000 flights.

Re: Issue

...And then occasionally you get a mistranslation...

Yes, that why I said it's a "good" tool, not a perfect tool, not an ideal tool but an adequate one. And the narrower the field the better it is, translation is actually quite wide as context is very important when translating and for context you need to understand the sentence being translated and have some idea of the idiomatic constructions in both languages which can be complex and illogical. A word for word translation is quite easy but if the source is longer than a few words the result will almost always be bad, close but still bad.

This is why checking "AI" output is vital be it a translation or some generated code or anything. This is obviously impossible with a real time system like driving a car so liability needs to be sorted out quickly - the Tesla approach of handing over control to the driver half a second before a collision and then blaming the driver when no human could react in the time given really should be illegal.

Re: Believing in the powers of magic

The busiest airspace in the world is over London.

Europe hosts around 11.1 million commercial flights/year, the USA 16 million per year so 50% more flights and double the number of incidents.

But that is just commercial aviation, the bulk of flights are general aviation and you are correct that there is a lot more of that in the USA so we need a fair way to compare the statistics:

USA: 5 to 6 accidents per 100,000 flights.

Europe: Under 1 accident per 100,000 flights.

Who'd have guessed, more regulation makes for safer skies.

Oh and that 20% / 66% split is total bollocks. there are about 41M commercial flights globally per year, USA: 16M (39%) Europe: 11M (26%) so who's misrepresenting statistics now?

Also a minor issue, most those flights are to & from western Europe or to put it another way, about 33% of the landmass in Europe is responsible for about 80% of the flights.

FYI "Europe" is the geographic continent of which the UK is a part along with 43 other sovereign countries. the "EU" is the political union of 27 countries of which (regrettably) the UK is not a part. Please use the correct terms, it makes your communication clearer.

Re: Issue

The thing is "AI" can work quite well when it used for a very narrowly defined specific function. You want to fold a protein, translate French into German etc. "AI" is a good tool.

General purpose "AIs" however are doomed to fail - they may work OK for a bit but failure is guaranteed, it may be overt it may be subtle but it will happen. The trouble is that "AI" evangelists are too stupid and/or too gullible to realise this, and/or have a vested interest.

Re: Believing in the powers of magic

That's regulation at work. Of course it depends on how well the regulations are enforced. Consider the USA with "light touch" regulation has around 1,200 civil aviation incidents a year while Europe with more than double the population and busier airspace has under 600 civil aviation incidents a year.

Capitalism is an effective mechanism only when hand-in-hand with effective regulation and well funded regulators with real teeth and who are not afraid to use them. With poor regulation or defunded regulators you get a free-for-all which only benefits people who already have more money than they need - everybody else suffers in one way or another.

... they'll do a good job,”...“And then they'll do an okay job. And pretty quickly they'll be doing a poor job.”...

That's not an inherent human trait, it's the result of poor planning and ineffective management. Working staff 8 hours a day 6 days a week with no mandated breaks and minimal paid time off is going to impact performance. Also many workers in this type of repetitive role benefit from having an occasional month or 2 doing something different.

Telegram founder accuses Meta of sabotaging access in India with BGP hijacks

Re: It's India. Who cares?

Who cares about them. USAians only account for about 15% of English speakers, the other 85% will continue quite happily ignoring them.

As for Webster, he was a git with a grievance - he changed the spelling not to make it easier but to deliberately differentiate from British English (interestingly, Harvard uses the OED as the primary reference instead of Webster).

Re: It's India. Who cares?

The OED cares and for international English it is the base reference upon which regional variations are made.

Re: It's India. Who cares?

... As long as we have to deal with their shitty barely-intelligible English...

If you can speak Urdu (or one of the other 120 languages spoken in India) as well as they speak English, you can criticise, otherwise, shut the fuck up. Also, please leave your moronic prejudice at home.

1st Line support always works from a script and in that respect a team in Delhi is no different from a team in Paris (France or Texas).

2,000 retired Google Pixel phones get a second life as a private cloud

Re: Perhaps a more practical use…

...I imagine the gps and cellular functions along with the camera(s) would be ideal for embedding...

No, they would be useless in the electronic warfare environment found on the front lines. GPS is useless and cellular functions are even less useful.

A modest proposal: Reformat everything to make documents more palatable to AI

Re: How about No

...I would be more interested in a format that makes a document absolutely impossible for AI to ingest, while remaining pleasantly readable by humans....

I can certainly see the advantages of a clear unambiguous text file format, we've needed one for decades - MS DOC formats are nasty, PDF's are the spawn of the Devil, RTF is fractured with too many different implementations and plain text lacks useful formatting options.

All this needs is a simple flag in the header that tells LLM's to ignore the file and it'd be perfect but I suppose this being the real world it'd never work, the LLM companies would eventually (or immediately) just ignore the flag.

Brit regulator finds mobile network service on trains is far from first class

Re: Does it matter?

... then I'd carry on working on the train...

Presumably on a laptop, probably a document or spreadsheet that would already be on the hard drive so for the vast majority of cases where people do some work on a train, connectivity is not really all that important. Helpful yes, essential, no. People were working during commuting long before anybody considered the possibility of internet connections on a train.

I do understand if you are using live data a connection is required but that would apply to an insignificantly tiny minority of commuters who probably shouldn't be accessing the data in a public place anyway.

If you need funny cat videos in 4K you might be disappointed but a crappy connection is enough to deal with looking stuff up online.

Re: Does it matter?

...Read a book, look out the window or something!...

Apparently in GB the average journey is around 40 minutes. If people can't disconnect for a little while, I think they really need to look at their life choices.

AI heavyweights warn their tech could help terrorists develop bioweapons

Re: Please legislate for this....

Just make the C suite fully culpable for any criminal activity that is assisted by their AIs.

Ring gets buzzed by class action for collecting visitors' faces without consent

... I shall just print off a page of landscape, 180pt bold with FUCK AMAZON across it and hold it in front of my face when I'm walking up to the door...

You'd be amazed how sophisticated gait analysis can be. I'd suggest using a pogo stick when passing their camera as well as obscuring your face.

LLMs are closer to religion than they appear. Watch out for those who like it that way

Re: "young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old."

...Fundamentalists of all stripes seem to have a similar mentality...

Obviously, their stance has nothing to do with religion, in most cases it is counter to the lessons in their scriptures but it is everything to do with control.

If you can't control the women you can't control the children, and you need to control the children in order to shape them in your image to sustain the insanity across the generations.

Re: "young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old."

...were people escaping religious persecution...

Not 100% true, in fact in most cases it was the complete opposite. They were religious fanatics who wanted to persecute everybody who didn't follow their extreme versions of Christianity and they were prevented from doing that. So if not being allowed to persecute others is persecution then they were persecuted but I suspect most people would not agree with that definition.

FAA grounds SpaceX’s Starship after another launch mishap

Re: "one of the great visionaries of our generation”

...Having drug induced visions is not the same as being a visionary...

Er, John of Patmos, Dante Alighieri and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to name a few, may beg to differ.

Unless they build power generation specifically for this purpose the electricity will come from the grid. You cannot say this electron is from renewable sources and this one is not. If the grid is supplied by something like 30% nuclear, 40% renewables and 30% carbon then that is the ratio for everybody no matter what PR crap they spout.

EU moderation watchdog says social media giants hate taking down hate speech

Re: By design

...value of content purely by how much engagement it gets...

So the penalty should be high enough to make it cheaper to follow the regulations than it is to flaunt them. This is of course tricky to ascertain and will be different for each offender so an easy solution is to start with a small penalty but double it on each subsequent infringement with no upper limit so eventually it becomes ruinous to ignore the regulations.

Swift thinking buys NASA observatory a little more time before re-entry

Re: American English.

Both "autumn" and "fall" are 16th century British terms the former deriving from the Latin "autumnus".

Latin is a bit complicated for the early left pondians so fall fell into common usage while over here in the 18th & 19th centuries kids were bullied by grammar school teachers into using Latin derived terms whenever possible to confuse the plebs and oiks and some of it hung on until now.

Before then the Anglo-Saxon term was "hærfest" and I'm sure you can work out where that one came from.

Digital sovereignty, the musical: One engineer’s bizarre crusade against hyperscalers

Optional Title Omitted

Small mercies - At least there's no C++ shanties.

No captain, my captain: Navantia floats crewless warship

Marine warfare has changed. A navy in the traditional sense is not necessary anymore for a defender when sea drones can deny access for enemy shipping to coastal areas.

An attacker needs to project force so in most cases a navy of some kind is still needed but the risks to shipping are far greater especially as new swarming software allows attacks involving dozens of drones in one go, far too many for conventional air and sea defences to cope with and that capability will only increase, the only problem is getting the drones to a close enough launch position.

Nobody is there yet but soon they'll work out how to mount air drones to sea drones so an attack with at about 10 sea drones each with 4 or 5 air drones launched on final approach could critically damage if not sink any ship no matter how well defended. Also an attack like that would cost around 2 to 3 million$ - less than a couple of patriot salvos and a lot less than the value of any ship.

Re: Oh yum, more stuff to hack, now with guns

While "unhackable" is an impossible dream, "bloody difficult to hack" is within scope. If you have access to satellite comms it's quite feasible.

For line-of-sight operation a bidirectional laser or microwave link would be the best bet.

The threat is enough.

Ukraine who scuttled their only warship to prevent it falling into Russian hands have incapacitated (either sunk or damaged beyond easy repair) 1/3 of the invincible Black Sea fleet with sea drones and missiles.

Since then the remaining fleet has been withdrawn as far as it can get from Ukraine and is stuck in port at Novorossiysk - they know there's a risk of drone attack if they sail too close to Ukraine so they don't take the risk. Actually they're not safe there either, Ukraine has attacked that port with long range missiles and Russia cannot reinforce or move the ships any further away because Turkey has closed the Bosporus Strait to military traffic.

As for a carrier, one missile on the flight deck would render it useless for fixed wing operations and one sea drone or torpedo at the waterline might not sink it but depending where it hit, the ship could lose full manoeuvrability and be unlikely to survive for long as once damaged it would be a sitting duck for follow up attacks.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Analogue clocks

Did you know that's where "clockwise" comes from? The movement of the shadow around a sundial.

Typical hemispheric bias, sundial shadows go the other way in the southern hemisphere. (On or near the equator it's complicated, you need an armillary sphere.)

Australia threatens tech companies with 2.25 percent tax if they don’t pay publishers

Re: Meta packed up its toys and went home

Not really, the thing is money is being taken out of the system and sent abroad, it doesn't matter if that money is is avoided tax or avoided royalty payments the money has left Australia so any way to get that money back to where it should be (the Australian economy) is a reasonable plan. This might not be the best solution but anything is better than just allowing tech bros carte blanche to rape the economy.

As for earmarking funds, this is called hypothecation and is complete bollocks. Governments are a big fund, money goes in, money goes out. To say this tranche of money is for A and this tranche is for B is absurd, it's all the same money going through the same system. It's just headline friendly PR junk, budgets may be outlined in advance but the actual spending tends to be more reactive than proactive depending on the conditions at the time of the spend.

Re: Meta packed up its toys and went home

I think it's more "we're taking money from you because you are squirrelling too much money out of the country untaxed"

Of course it would be better to fix the broken tax system that allows such egregious abuse but that's really difficult and would require some improbable international cooperation to do it properly.

Trump to UK: Stop taxing our big beautiful tech corps or face tariff tsunami

Re: This serves Britain right

The USA has never been our friend, in the 1930's they drew up a plan to bankrupt the UK to accelerate the collapse of our empire so they could step into the power vacuum that would create, we were already heading that way after WW1 but if peace continued we could have just about survived as the global naval superpower - we still had the largest navy at the start of hostilities in WW2. But WW2 finished us off economically, interestingly the USA forgave the WW2 and Marshall plan loans to every recipient except the UK, we finished paying off the loans less than 20 years ago.

UK governments have always known this but they also know it's easier just to pretend and smile and nod and then continue with whatever they were doing anyway.

Re: Honestly, fuckit

...It seems that the better approach, identifying the loopholes that are successfully used to avoid taxes but shouldn't be and then removing them, is too much work for politicians...

Absolutely but it would be civil servants who have to work out how to close the loopholes but that'll never fly because once you start closing loopholes it starts to affect the political donor class. Also it would require primary legislation to enforce it and for the same reason good luck in getting that through both houses undiluted.

What's worse is that some of the "loopholes" have legitimate purpose but are being abused so removing them would hurt some people entitled to the relief. Perhaps tightening up the regulations where there is any possibility of abuse but that tends to lead to a really tricky game of whack-a-mole. Unfortunately there's no easy solution, it'd be nice if there was. I suppose one way would be to slap so much extra duties on them it'd would be easier and cheaper for the foreign companies just to pay the same taxes that local companies would pay in each region of operation.

AI-powered mainframe exits are a bubble set to pop

Re: I disagree

Well the telco I worked for had (several) data centres full of IBM and Fujitsu metal, multiple robotic tape libraries and a host of other overpriced toys. While x86 may well be (and probably is) used at the exchange level to agglomerate the raw data, the real work was done on big iron. Perhaps you worked for a smaller telco. :-)

I just used telcos as an example, there are several use scenarios for which mainframes are the optimal solution or replacing them is more trouble than the benefit gained, but I'll agree that pool is diminishing year by year. That's not to say new uses for mainframes cannot arise, the way things are going the ability to handle absurd amounts of I/O is always going to be wanted by somebody.

Re: I disagree

The coding isn't really the problem in MF migration, mainframes do not do a lot of heavy processing instead they tend to move a lot of data around very very quickly and at the moment only mainframes have the necessary I/O capabilities for these tasks although that is slowly changing.

Consider a Telco, they have thousands of calls of various kinds made every second and they all need to be recorded accurately as and when they happen, no (current) x86 solution is going to be able to cope with that amount of traffic.

Waymo's self-driving cars face their toughest test yet: London

All they need to do is add Musk's vile chatbot and equip it with a voice synthesizer and a voice recognition circuit and you can get the full (if somewhat clichéd) black cab experience.

Amazon would rather shareholders did not look too closely at carbon footprint

Re: Inconvenient Balderdash

I really can't be arsed anymore, you are plainly living in a fantasy world where facts are optional.

The end really cracked me up, nuclear power is incredibly expensive, certainly the day-to-day running costs are not that high but when you amortize the construction and decommissioning costs into the picture it is just about the most expensive form of power but it is useful as an always on baseload.

Can't you understand the power system is made of many parts, expensive but reliable nuclear then wind and solar as available, hydro also if present then you have the quick start systems like gas turbines which can run up in a few minutes (unlike nuclear or coal which can take a day or more to start from cold) and in between there's short duration instant power like pumped hydro or batteries which provide power for transient loads or while waiting for the gas stations to spool up.

Just concentrating on one source is crazy, they real world is not like that. Nuclear is good in the correct use cases, wind is good in the correct use cases as is solar, hydro (pumped or normal), tidal, wave and whatever else people come up with can to push power onto the grid in an effective and hopefully cheap manner. Railing against wind flies in the face of evidence, the UK grid got over 24% of power from wind in 2025 and that is slated to increase, cheap reliable power - of course being an island nation we get constant Atlantic winds, somewhere central and landlocked like might not have such trusty winds but because wind might not work in one place does not mean it cannot work elsewhere - just because solar is suboptimal in mountainous regions because of the cloud cover does not mean it won't work in the desert.

Re: Inconvenient Balderdash

Drone drone drone, nothing new, nothing original, nothing with any foundation.

Please explain in simple terms, with references, why the climate is getting hotter and the incidence of extreme weather events is increasing. This is de facto evidence of climate change so all we are disputing is the cause for that climate change.

OK it may not be 100% due to human activity but plainly adding more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in a time where it's warming up is the height of stupidity. If the climate is changing naturally (it's not but let's pretend) promoting activity to accelerate that change and preventing action that *may* alleviate the potential issue is just insane.

Have you ever heard of "the precautionary principle"? If in doubt take the course of least damage.

This is not politics, this is not dogma, it's just common sense. Anyway why are you so riled up about it, if alternative fuel sources are utilized and action is taken to mitigate emissions just how does that hurt you personally? It doesn't, you are just being contrary for the sake of it. If you are worried about the cost then the earlier action is taken, the cheaper it'll be, prevention is cheaper than cure so all you are really achieving in the long run is to increase the final cost for everybody.

Re: Inconvenient Balderdash

Anybody who seriously thinks academics are in it for the money has either never actually met an academic in real life or so far past the sanity event horizon they can see the curvature of the universe.

The 150 year approximation is not a selected point but the rough start of the era when original records were saved, some will go back further some not so far, it's a vague average with no cherry picking involved, you're inventing reasons where none exist purely to suit your agenda. Anyway the industrial revolution started in Britain over 100 years before that point so finding records that predate that would be tricky, there may be incomplete records at some universities but records taken by students around 250 years ago might not be quite as rigorous as we would like.

The total number of weather stations that are officially monitored is around 30,000 with easily 10 times that number of unofficial ones but it's fair to ignore those for the most part so yes you were right there are not 100's of thousands but 10's of thousands, my bad. Those are the ones monitored by meteorological organizations. Navies and air forces will also maintain a wide network of weather monitoring which may or may not be integrated with the civilian network depending on the country.

As for nutjobs, there are a far more on the right side of the political spectrum than the left so you're best not going down that avenue. As for uneducated that is the fault of whatever government they live under for not supplying adequate education - The USA is particularly guilty in this respect - note Trump declaring how much he likes the uneducated, the unstated reason is that educated people don't vote for morons like Trump - the GOP have been downgrading education in the USA for decades and Trump is a result of that work.

The useful idiots are the ones who believe that what the oil company stooges say about climate change is true and seem to believe that thousands of independent academics and researchers who have evidence to back their position are all lying. I'm sorry but if you truly think that is the case then I have a selection of bridges in fun and exiting colours you may be interested in purchasing.

Re: Inconvenient Balderdash

Nonsense. Control over who? How do thousands of climate researchers benefit from this fraud, how is it organized and by whom. How is the conspiracy managed, if the data does not back the argument it must be altered or misrepresented to fit but that is impossible.

In reality there are 100s of thousands of weather stations all with data going back far before the computer age most of which can be accessed in it's raw state (in some cases scans of hand written daily reports dating back to the late 1800's are available for researchers).

To suggest there's some grand conspiracy is ridiculous, the only conspiracy is the one by the oil companies spending a fortune discrediting legitimate research, which in the 1970's they financed but hated the results. From a business perspective that is understandable, they need to protect their revenue stream but why otherwise intelligent people lap it up and are happier to believe vested interests over independent researchers will continue to be a mystery.

Oh and trying to link Marxism to climate activism is perhaps the most stupid thing I have read for a long time. Do you even understand what Marx wrote or are you just using it as a pejorative? The USSR may have been Marxist for about the first 10 minutes of it's existence, after that, not in the slightest.

Re: Inconvenient Balderdash

The way these posts are organized makes it really hard to work out which post you're replying to but I think I've got the right one :-)

I would suggest you do you own research, I wouldn't want you to be able to accuse me of selecting research that supports me while ignoring that which does not. Perhaps starting with a query like "archaeological record of climate change time spans" or similar and work from there.

But if you cannot be bothered to do any research here is the first link when I searched on the criteria I suggested:

https://geoscientist.online/sections/unearthed/climate-change-in-the-geological-record/

I've only skimmed it but it seems to back my position. However I'd want to check the general veracity of the publication before according full credence to this article.

South Korea introduces universal basic mobile data access

It's OK, if you fall down a well that's outside of a densely populated area, Skippy (the bush kangaroo) will fetch help - no worries.