Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Blocking stolen phones from the cloud can be done, should be done, won't be done

Re: Nice idea

but they won't because they listen to public opinion

The audacity of it, a government listening to public opinion instead of just giving people what's good for them. Can't have that.

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Re: VAX field service engineers

SYSTEST / UETP

Surprising how many people forgot that one when "securing" their systems. I remember wandering semi-randomly around JANET back in the 80s, and finding many accessible systems. That was in the days when the worst that would happen was a polite "who are you?" request.

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Re: Its only taken 50 years....

One of the morning flights from Belfast to Heathrow used to land just before the departure time for the Concorde to JFK. In those days Belfast passengers had to deplane via the steps and go though special security, no airbridges straight into the terminal for us.

If a Concorde started its take-off roll as we were walking across the apron everybody stopped to watch, to the great irritation of the ground staff yelling "keep moving, you can't stop there" at us. Never worked, the sight, sound and ground-shaking feel of Concorde was just too much to resist. It was especially impressive when it followed a 747 down the same runway. The Jumbo lumbered along, looking like it was never going to get up enough speed, and would finally crawl into the air well down the runway. A few minutes later the Concorde would appear, accelerating like a bat out of hell, and after less than half the runway it just lifted its nose and soared up into the sky far more steeply than any other plane. Magic.

Pretty much a "numbers" game.

Trouble is, after getting to 10 Trump runs out of fingers.

Japan's latest Moon landing written off as a failure after ispace probe goes dark

Re: Lots of trouble with lunar laser rangefinders lately...

With no atmosphere any dust kicked up will fall straight back down, it won't necessarily form clouds as it does in atmosphere. I'm not saying that I disagree with your theory, but it's not as simple a case as it would be on Earth.

Toshiba realises it can build, power, and maintain datacenters – so builds a team to do it all

Modular data centres

Reminds me of the Sun Modular Datacenter idea. It never really took off, but a modern version stuffed with GPUs, sold alongside matching containers holding diesel or LPG power stations (and maybe ultimately SMRs) and allowing custom DCs to be built like Lego might just be interesting. It would solve the grid connection issue, albeit not in a very 'green' way, but the big IT companies seem to have stopped worrying about that in their desparate rush to AI.

Ukraine strikes Russian bomber-maker with hack attack

It's also entirely possible that Tsar Vladimir or his pals will be so irritated by this that some poor bastards in the Tupolev IT department will 'accidentally fall' out of windows, which will work wonders for the morale of anyone that stays.

Re: You are a moron but as a country leader I can't be

Not at all, I've never considered Greenland to be evil, for example. Trump is a clown, he's not as clever as he thinks he is, nor is he as clever as Putin or Xi Jinping. That, however, has nothing to do with the value and solidarity of NATO which is guaranteed by all its members.

European pols wave their hands about digital sovereignty with broad but vague plan

Re: What I don't understand

why can't the EU use the same economics to build EU owned datacentres?

It's not the data centres, it's the cost of shipping all the data from Brussels to Strasbourg and back every month to keep the French happy.

Re: An International Digital Strategy costs money

So, if necessary, it can be done. But when do we decide it is necessary?

And who will pay for it?

(Yes, it's a silly question. We know the answer; "us")

Ukrainians smuggle drones hidden in cabins on trucks to strike Russian airfields

Re: Ukraine did

Maybe Russia has decided that it's past time Ukraine had a new President and government.

I thought Tsar Vlad had decided that back in 2022, when he invaded? He was clearly hoping for a quick replacement of the Ukrainian government by a Russian puppet regime, but 250,000 dead Russians later he's no closer to achieving it.

Re: Ukraine did

Amazing how many times I've made the point that using a civilian as an unwilling suicide bomber is the problem.

Well, you've tried to make out that an unharmed civilian used as an unwitting driver was somehow a suicide bomber, but no-one with any brains believes you.

Maybe you should try calling them "martyrs", that usually gets a good response from sycophants.

Re: Unintended (?) consequences

The Russians care about the Ukrainian people, so they want to harm as few of them as possible.

The Russian leadership clearly doesn't even care about it's own people used as cannon fodder. Putin & co. certainly don't give a flying fuck about ordinary Ukrainians.

Re: It's still terrorism when you do it to unpeople.

what look like regular shipping containers. The Bbc's 'experts' have probably never noticed those before.

The BBC photos don't look anything like standard TEU shipping containers. They don't have twistlock fasteners on the corners, they don't have end doors, and they're made out of wood!

with 45-50 drones in each container,

117 drones for 5 sites? Your maths is way off.

launch and control enough of them simultaneously

Was the launch simultaneous? With maybe 25 drones per box, 4 waves of 6 would be perfectly manageable, they didn't have to fly far.

Bandwidth is no big deal, a few kHz for the control, maybe 200kHz for return video? You could knock that up with off the shelf ham radio gear without much effort.

Re: It's still terrorism when you do it to unpeople.

The Bbc isn't exactly a very reliable source and has happily regurgitating whatever the SBU tells them.

You missed the "interviewed by Russian state outlet Ria Novosti part of the original story then?

that's one of the inconsistencies in the story. Ukraine claims all involved escaped safely, yet also claims that drivers were unaware and arrested.

No inconsistencies at all. It sounds like the drone operators, who were not at the truck location, were able to get away safely. The drivers were unaware and uninvolved, but have unsurprisingly been arrested for questioning, that would happen in any country. Whether the Russian police will believe them or simply use them as convenient scapegoats is a different matter.

It's possible that scouts found truck parks with really good WiFi, or maybe the were using satellite broadband that for Western operators, isn't supposed to work inside Russia.

Or maybe they were just sitting in a car a few km away using bog standard radio links. We used to get along fine for C&C without IP networking, it's still a robust approach. Line-of-sight VHF or UHF comms would still be fine for 50+km. By the time the authorities started a search of the local area they'd be well gone. Probably not much CCTV or ANPR camera penetration up there in the Arctic circle, even in Russia.

Re: Unintended (?) consequences

Russia now checks each and every truck coming into the country.

Since the drones each had its own pilot the limiting factor on this attack could well have been availability of pilots and comms. There could be several hundred other sheds already delivered and tucked away somewhere in Russia, maybe a different design or colour, just waiting to be deployed. Russia should be very nervous.

KDE targets Windows 10 'exiles' claiming 'your computer is toast'

Re: Gnome is my favourite… I think

I don't really care whether W11 looks like W10 or not. We have three main computers in the house, 2 running only W10 and 1 dual-booting between W10 and Linux. Not one of them can run W11, whatever it may look like, because they don't have the required TPM, and I am not going to pay to replace 3 perfectly good, working, computers just to satisfy some Microsoft salesman.

Cops want Apple, Google to kill stolen phones remotely – so why won't they?

Re: Talking to the wrong people

Google: All your IMEI are belong to us.

What will UK government workers do with an extra 26 minutes a day?

Re: 26 mins per person, per day?

slightly over half a million UK government employees

And yet they still can't even answer their phones. HMRC callers spent 798 years on hold in FY 2023. Even if they spent every one of those 26 minutes saved helping a customer, it wouldn't make any difference at all.

It may well have saved them time, but did anyone verify the accuracy of the results? There's no point in getting an answer twice as quickly if it's the wrong answer, and far too many people will simply use what they get without even basic verification.

Tesla FSD ignores school bus lights and hits 'child' dummy in staged demo

Re: Elon bad > bash Elon right

Don't we ALL want this to work?

Nope. If you want transport that you don't have to drive, get an Uber or take the train.

I always thought it was after a spate of accidents on the newly opened M1 which became a racing track.

I think that influenced the 70MPH limit on motorways from 1967(?), but that was briefly dropped to 50 in 1973 during the fuel crisis. I remember the 60MPH single-carriageway "national limit" coming in in the 70s (although I wasn't old enough to drive then!) allegedly for the same fuel-saving reason.

nor do I require a device to centre my vehicle in a lane

Especially a device designed to work on wide motorway lanes, and which is lethally dangerous on a narrow country road where approaching a bus or HGV coming from the opposite direction requires both vehicles to keep to the extreme inside edge of their lanes to pass safely.

It's only a matter of time before someone is seriously hurt because that 'driver aid' tugs them into the path of an approaching 44 tonne lorry before they can react to override it.

That's such a useless sign that whomever came up with it should be sacked.

That sign long predates the idea of a national speed limit. It originally meant "end of speed limit", i.e. after it you were literally on the "open road" and expected to use common sense to choose a safe speed. When the fuel crisis happened in the early 70s the government decided that there had to be reduced speed limits everywhere to save fuel and redesignated the meaning of that sign to avoid the cost of changing them all.

Unfortunately common sense is severely lacking today, and people seeing that sign on a country road assume that it means "60" (the national limit for such a road) even when it is manifestly unsafe to drive at anything like that.

People visiting the country might not know

People visiting the country should learn before travelling (see my common sense comment above). Try the "but I'm a visitor" argument with a French gendarme after having an accident when you ignore 'priorité à droite' and see how far you get...

But a car in adaptive cruise doesn't brake hard unless there is an emergency.

Unless it's a VW, which can't tell the difference between a stationary vehicle in your lane and one slowing or stopping to turn in an adjacent lane. It will merrily slam on the brakes with a screaming alert even when it's clear to the driver that there's no risk of a collection. There are roads near me where it is simply unsafe to use the cruise control for that reason.

Signs over lanes aren't uniform across the world so development of software and camera field of view would wind up needing country by country manipulating

That's equally applicable to human drivers, learning the signs in your country is part of learning to drive. In the UK the matrix signs over lanes mimic the metal signs exactly, precisely to avoid that confusion.

I saw a new "no bicycles" sign that was the image of a bike with a red circle around it rather than the circle and diagonal line. Did anyone stop to think that somebody with red/green color impairment would see the sign as "Bikes ok"?

Not in Europe, because a red circle around a sign means "forbidden", and no signs have green circles for exactly that reason. When you have to deal with a dozen languages it's well worth standardising on the same pictorial representation to avoid confusion. We did that decades ago. Countries have some specific signs to allow for unique situations (like the French 'priority road') but the general signs are clear even in monochrome.

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Re: Nothing like as traumatic

It was highly theurapeutic!

The first time I had to destroy a disk I used a hammer and chisel. I found it really difficult to strike that first blow, despite knowing that the disk was already erased. Something just felt wrong about doing it.

Anthropic CEO frets about 20% unemployment from AI, but economists are doubtful

You mean just like the current US president?

As far from politics as possible.

Thunderbird is go: 139 follows closely on Firefox's heels

Re: Don't like it at all

Basically all the recent changes can be turned off again, and that is what I do.

Upgrade to a new changed version, and turn off the changes? Hardly seems worth it.

Trump tariffs ruled illegal within minutes of Musk announcing end of government role

To be fair, the church and priests have been doing that with the bible for centuries, republicans are just following their example.

German court parks four Volkswagen execs in jail over Dieselgate scandal

Re: re: Sentences

Why does anyone need standardized tests? Government loves them because they can base taxes on them, but do buyers actually care? In the past we used the figures from magazine road tests, today there are lots of websites with those figures, which are much more trustworthy and realistic than WLTP figures because they represent the way people actually use the vehicle.

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

Re: I know it's an old joke but on the topic of office signs...

I was once given a business card which proclaimed its owner to be a "principle engineer". I never did find out what he did.

Re: Aquarium offices....

they were put there with nothing to do for months in a row in the hope they'd quit or died out of boredom

Ah, the France Telecom approach.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Re: Trouble-ticket system's AI summary.

An unexpected error has occurred.

Re: Once had IT support ask me if I knew where a PC had been moved to

Ot the weird problems the happen when someone extends the network with 2m of 93 ohm arcnet cable instead of the correct 50 ohm. It seems to be fine until network load reaches a certain point and the reflected packets cause an unrecoverable level of collisions.

Not a bastard of a job then?

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond

Re: Reminders.txt

Trouble is, she's a deepfake AI.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: bit of sillyness....

Just use a silly putty damper.

Re: Out of control

Sun produced 2 variants of the Type 5/6/7 keyboards:

US: CapsLock to the left of "A", Ctrl bottom row left, then Meta, Alt and Spacebar

US_Unix: Ctrl to the left of "A", CapsLock bottom row left, then Alt, Meta and Spacebar.

There were also differences in the placement of Esc, ~/~, backspace, Compose and others.

I also bought several, years ago, but since I prefer (or was used to) the US_Unix and my wife preferred the other, I have a collection of both types.

DARPA zaps popcorn with laser power beamed 5.3 miles through air

Re: A small fridge?

dedicated popcorn maker

Cut out the middleman, just drop the kernels into the laser beam.

IT chiefs of UK's massive health service urge vendors to make public security pledge

Re: Security responsibility is a two-way thing

Correct, and there needs to be a willingness to discipline the staff who don't follow the rules they're trained on. No more "oh, it was a silly mistake" or "anyone could have done it" excuses which make people think it isn't serious. If the system is compromised because "Doctor X" left a password on a post-it, then "Doctor X" should expect to be demoted or fired.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Vincent truck Gogh

And the G is pronounced as H: van Hoch.

Re: Do they really spell archaeology like that over there?

You're presupposing that they know where Greece and Turkey are, and that there is water between them.

Annual electronic waste footprint per person is 11.2 kg

Re: Quality is a main issue

Talkie toaster style it insists on doing a full rinse cycle (no point in telling it that the load is already f*ing wet and just do your spinny thing to make it less so.).

I have an LG which seems to have a similar setup, no "just do a spin" programme, but...

If you push the "on" button, and then touch the "spin speed" setting to pick a speed without selecting any programme, and then press 'start" - it just spins!

Might be worth a try.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: TODO

it tells you a great deal about the 21st century computing industry.

It tells me that I'm so relieved to have retired from it, to my dual-boot W10/Linux desktop.

Re: TODO

"Using Windows" generally means turning on the new laptop and following the prompts. That will always be easier and less intimidating for the non-techy users than "pick a distro, download it, run the installer, choose a window manager " etc.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Divers log

As a child I remember being outraged when a 5d packet of crisps became 2½p (6d) with no change in weight. It was the closest decimal value, but always seemed like a rip-off.

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

Depends on whether Boeing have any part in it. If they do, I wouldn't put much money on it making it past the Kármán line.

UK government overrules local council’s datacenter refusal on Green Belt land

visual impact?

Datacentres don't need windows, if visual impact is a concern why not build them underground? Gives you well-insulated walls as well.