Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Slow down on building power plants for all those new AI datacenters, report warns

Re: we need a two-tier power system

Yes, I'm saying businesses should have their power cut off before people.

And then the people who work for those businesses get sent home, so don't have money to pay for their electricity. That won't help.

French cops cuff Russian pro basketball player on ransomware charges

Re: "He's useless with computers and can't even install an application"

But aren't the worst serial killers always the ones who look least like killers?

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

Re: Firefox is very slow

How many of those would you use in a typical day? I don't believe anyone can keep track of 400+tabs, nor need them all frequently enough to merit the waste of resources involved in keeping them all open all the time.

Georgia court throws out earlier ruling that relied on fake cases made up by AI

Re: commonly used AI applications can be prone to "hallucinations,"...

Cabbage in, wind out.

UK police dangle £75 million to digitize its VHS tape archives

Re: How much?

I can't see the police outsourcing the actual conversion, considering the problems that would have on chain-of-custody for anything which was considered as evidence, never mind the liklihood of some juicy bits ending up on Xitter.

Nuclear reactors smaller than a semi truck to be tested in Idaho

Re: EBR II Site

Looks like Idaho is a popular spot for this.

Re: Up on Bricks

Now they'll be a small radioactive fire.

UK puts out tender for space robot to de-orbit satellites

Re: Why should i subsidize other people having more kids than they can afford?

Er, because if we don't have any kids we'll be fucked

How did you get from "more than 2 kids" to "any kids"? 2 children per couple is close to replacement levels, if people want more then they should be willing to accept the additional cost themselves, and not simply assume that everyone else will be happy to pay for them.

Re: Surely the people, companies and countries?

Where's the personal responsibility in this?

Personal responsibility? Such an outmoded, Thatcherite idea. This is the 21st century, everyone is entitled to everything they want today, it's the government's fault if they don't get it, and the taxpayer who is responsible for picking up the bill if the beneficiary can't pay.

(/sarcasm)

Financial 'stretch' for UK to join Europe's Starlink rival, says minister

Re: Britain: hunched in the corner ...

They're not pretending, they really believe they are running it.

Wayback gives X11 desktops a fighting chance in a Wayland world

Re: Wayland is just hard work

How often have we seen well-intentioned developers try to improve something by removing complex and less-frequently used features which affect performance or configuration, in order to to streamline it and make it easier to use? The inevitable result is that eventually someone who needs those features glues them back on, as an even clunkier wart than the original.

'Trained monkey' from tech support saved know-it-all manager's mistake with a single keypress

suit has plugged their laptop into a power outlet that is switched off

Well, let's be honest, we've all done that. At least being techy types we (usually) notice what the problem was...

US Air Force holds hypersonic resupply site review amid seabird concerns

Re: It is actually the other way around...

In a contest between a 100+ ton hypersonic rocket and a seabird, my money is on the rocket comng off pretty much unscathed.

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Re: Broken Britain

It always amuses me that a country like France, which vaunts its socialist model of égalité, fraternité, etc. still constructs an elite motorway network so that those with money can pay for fast and smooth travel, yet supposedly capitalist countries like the UK and USA mostly provide an open high-speed road network available to all for no additional charge.

Re: Broken Britain

I'd like to see a graph of "death rate vs time", and I would not be surprised to see an uptick after 31 January 1995.

Not hard to find, and you'd be wrong. One spike in 1999, the Ladbroke Grove accident when a driver passed a signal at danger, and another for Great Heck in 2001 when a driver fell asleep and rolled his Land Rover onto the track, but generally low and falling.

Re: Broken Britain

Not so. There were 732 deaths from 146 accidents in 46 years when there was national rail provided by the state between 17 April 1948 and 15 October 1994. There were 92 deaths from 50 accidents in 28 years when there was privatised rail between 31 January 1995 and 24 August 2021.

LHR has three separate power supplies but these are not linked to a common bus-main

That's the problem with infrastructure which has grown incrementally over 80 years, no-one is ever going to spend the time or money to redo the whole thing from scratch.

Re: Broken Britain

You don't even have to follow the process, just document it.

"But our process is ISO9000 certified, it must be OK"

Cold without the compressor: Boffins build better ice box

Re: Is it just me?

We do our best.

Deutsche Bahn train hits 405 km/h without falling to bits

Re: Privatisation for the win!

Any nationalised firm, especially one that is a model of happy customer service (I was going to say efficiency but DB could have been bleeding cash for all I know) should have laws laid down about the following, that must be obeyed, even after privatisation:

1) Maximum X% of profit going to shareholders. Any other profit is reinvested in the firm.

That's what the regulator is supposed to deal with. Unfortunately most regulators for these industries are made up from the same civil servants who ran the industry when it was nationalised, so their main aim in life is to increase their own power & department size, and they tend to assume that money grows on trees well-watered by taxpayers. Any well-run firm will have the balance between profit-after-tax and dividends/interest correct, or their competitors will eat their lunch.

2) Maximum salary (including all share options, and other bonus bollocks) for C-Suite capped to X times the average employee salary.

You'll never get the C-suite filled by competent people like that. Pay peanuts, get monkeys. All the decent directors will up sticks and find another position.

3) Bonuses for the C-Suite are cancelled for any 12 month period in which 1% or more of employees are "let go, made redundant, downsized, or any other HR bollocks which means fired".

I wouldn't set a straight percentage, sometimes there are good reasons why some staff need to be laid off, yet the business can still be successful. If you electrify a rail line, you don't need people with diesel maintenance experience, for example. Better to tie the bonuses directly to overal business performance, of which staff numbers are just a part. There again, that's what the regulator should enforce. Unfortunately they are usually toothless, incompetent, and/or asleep.

Junior sysadmin’s first lines of code set off alarms. His next lot crashed the company

Unwritten rules

an inelegant dashboard for the Nagios network monitoring tool, he volunteered to tidy it up

Unwritten rule #1: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Supremes uphold Texas law that forces age-check before viewing adult material

Re: Always that weird "free speech" logic

There's quite a lot of recent choral stuff written by John Rutter, who describes himself as 'An agnostic supporter of the Christian faith', where does that fit? I'm not religious (and can't sing), but I like some of Rutter's music, although it tends to be a bit saccharine in large quantites.

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

Re: > "Open the pod bay doors, HAL," that's agentic AI too.

we did see a few more open-ended interactions, but most of those were Wikipedia lookups

Brings back memories of that Burger King ad from a few years back, which triggered readout of the Wikipedia article about the "Whopper" via an "OK Google" statement.

Playing the contents of a user-editable encyclopedia article as part of a publicity campaign was never going to end well...

It is simply using voice recognition to to translate the voice command into the exact same digital inputs that you would generate by pressing buttons on a control pad.

And considering the limited vocabulary it has to process, that could have been done with 1980s technology!

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

Re: "perhaps a little simpler"

I think Grace Hopper would take issue with your "always a guy" comment. Certainly in the mid 80s out network admin was female, as were many of the local DEC field service folks.

Baud

Baud rates and bit rates are connected, but not equivalent.

The baud rate is a measure of the number of symbols per second, but each symbol can represent multiple bits. A V.21 300 bit/s modem operated at 300 baud, but a V.32 9600 bit/s modem was only 2400 baud, because each symbol can represent 4 bits.

There's no international protocol on what to do if an asteroid strikes Earth

Shouldn't be a problem, the gravitational field associated with Musk's ego will be enough to change any asteroid's orbit.

Frozen foods supermarket chain deploys facial recognition tech

Re: Simple solution.

In Iceland vouchers?

Re: Organized and targeted retail crime is out of control.

The answer is to have the police available, turn up, and actually do something

True, but where's the incentive to do that when the courts will release anyone they catch with only a ticking off, even when they're repeat offenders?

It must be disheartening to keep arresting the same people time and time again, knowing that it won't have the slightest impact on them.

Re: Hmm

Go back to proper checkouts.

Why, so that those of us who just want to do a quick shop have to stand in line while some bored person at the head of the queue shares their children's entire life story with the cashier, waits until everything has been scanned before even starting to pack, and finally takes an age to find their loyalty card and their credit card.

No wonder people prefer online shopping.

UK to buy nuclear-capable F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers

Deliveroo and Parcelforce spring to mind.

Heaven help us if it were Evri.

Re: "In an era of radical uncertainty"

Because the probe part sticks out which isn't very stealthy and it's already plumbed with female parts for the boom.

Well, the probe could probably be made movable so it only sticks out when required for coupling, that works ok in other situations...

As for the plumbing, isn't gender reassignment all the rage these days?

Visiting students can't hide social media accounts from Uncle Sam anymore

Re: Other religions?

> We have a different standard for our kids

Yeah, wouldn't do to let them grow up into free-thinking adults who might vote for the wrong sort of president.

Japanese company using mee-AI-ow to detect stressed cats

Stressed cats?

Do cats get stressed? Usually they just sack the problematic staff, and find new ones that will deliver better food and attention.

AFRINIC election annulled after ICANN writes angry letter to African regional internet registry

I recently voted by proxy in the AGM for an apartment building where I own a property. The election rules were quite straightforward - if a person for whom a proxy vote was submitted turns up in person, the proxy vote is cancelled and the in-person vote takes precedence. Surely the same process could have been followed here?

Mozilla rolls out Firefox 140 with ESR status and fresh features

Re: Firefox

the delicate sensibilities of fellow commentards.

I think you forgot the joke icon.

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Re: Honestly

Almost as bad as european bars that sell metric pints, 68ml short of the real thing.

Re: Honestly I'm bilingual

Then you have tyre sizes, something like 205/45R17 is such a wonderful mix of metric, percentage and imperial, but we're stuck with the format now.

Huawei chair says the future of comms is fiber-to-the-room, which China has and the rest of us don’t

Re: FTTR? Really?

But both are dwarfed by the equipment that's connected, so it isn't really an issue.

US patent office wants an AI to scan for prior art, but doesn't want to pay for it

Re: "The selected vendor must be willing to receive consideration that is primarily non-monetary,"

I think "sucker" is the precise term.

Glazed and confused: Hole lotta highly sensitive data nicked from Krispy Kreme

Retaining CVV numbers (prohibited by card industry rules)

That alone should have their CFO and CIO in jail.

‘AI is not doing its job and should leave us alone’ says Gartner’s top analyst

Re: The org now uses AI to automate all steps in parallel...

The Wikipedia entry makes interesting reading, such as "In 2020, The Observer gave ScottishPower an award for the year's "worst customer service" for "its singular pursuit of revenue", including sending bills, debt collectors' letters and the threat of bailiffs to people who did not use its services, then refusing to register their complaints."

I could easily use AI to sort out my Monday morning chores. Open inbox, delete all new messages except those from my boss. Job done.

Usefully done? Maybe not so much.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Re: Sure it has flaws...

Unfortunately Windows has such a hold on the market that "correct" essentially means "works with Edge". Something may not technically comply with a CSS standard, but given a choice between "works with Edge" and "follows the standard" most people will take the former.

Larry Ellison is still not the world's richest person

Re: Fashion-driven gibberish

It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

He wasn't wrong but, just like PT Barnum, he knows how to make money out of idiots. The trick will be in judging when to sell the cloud business to some other idiots, just before the crash.

Google Cloud goes down, takes Cloudflare and its customers with it

Re: Standards should Triumph

It's the way I tell 'em

Re: Standards should Triumph

A Spanish tourist wandering around Ireland was intrigued by signs in Irish, and after chatting with a local asked what the equivalent of "mañana" was. After some thought the local admitted "I don't think we have anything with the same sense of urgency."

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

it stopped working after 500 miles

So, not an EV then?

Re: TV portrayal of computer use

I've had a sleeping laptop wake up and start an update overnight - while ensconced in its neoprene case. I assume that the battery going flat was what saved it from catching fire, it was *very* hot.

Ease the seat back and watch some video in your car with next Apple CarPlay

it won't let drivers scroll through their music library while the vehicle is in motion

That must be really irritating for a passenger who wants to choose the next album.