Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Rivian crawls out covered in $1.5B of red ink, panting that it's still alive

Re: Nice cars

I suppose that when you're driving it you can't see the what it looks like from the outside.

Tesla devotee tests Cybertruck safety with his own finger – and fails

Re: Similar but very different:

You've heard about the butcher who accidentally leaned back against the bacon slicer?

He got a little behind with the orders.

Re: "The frunk is powered and shouldn't be closed manually"

My car has a powered boot lid. If I were to operate it as it was supplied in my garage or a multistorey car park it would bang into the upper surface and damage the paint. In consequence I have to adjust the stop point so that it doesn't fully open. The result of that is that it doesn't open fully in exterior places but remains at just the right height to crack my head on the protruding lock mechanism if I forget to manually force it to max (and the book says not to do that).

All my previous cars had a nice, simple, manual lift which I could gently open, against a strategically placed pad if required, with no risk of damage to car or head. It's just another example of an annoying gadget fitted "because we can", and not to meet any real need.

UK opens investigation of MoD payroll contractor after confirming attack

the "strongest action" will be taken if SSCL is found to have been negligent.

Oooh, smacked on both wrists...

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

Re: Up here just north of Southport...

And is it pronounced Ralf or Rafe?

Re: I've seen worse

There's an area near the University in Belfast with street names Cairo Street, Carmel Street, Damascus Street, Jerusalem Street and Palestine Street. It's long been known as "The Holy Land", even BBC news uses the description.

AI Catholic 'priest' defrocked after recommending Gatorade baptism

Re: Mathew 22:37-40...

It's so varied and ambiguous that you can find justification for almost any behaviour, good or bad, in the bible. That's why the church was so upset by the reformation. Allowing ordinary people to read the bible, in their own language, would stop the priests from interpreting it as they wanted to, and remove their control over people's lives (and money).

Starlink geofence appears to have some gaping holes

Re: Another headache in the making

Is it even necessary to get that sophisticated? The satellites are in LEO, and must know which country they are over. If a satellite over Ukraine gets a connection request from a customer registered in, say, the UK, it's got to be pretty clear that it's not legit.

NASA's Psyche hits 25 Mbps from 140 million miles away – enough for Ultra HD Netflix

There's also the additional noise that will appear on the channel as the amount of space it has to cross increases, so the usual Shannon theory will still hold.

Atlassian loses half its CEOs, but customers stay solid after Server products exit support

Re: So another CEO that doesn't talk to customers?

Along with usability, performance, ...

DARPA's latest toy is a 20-foot, 12-ton tank that drives itself

This is what Waymo needs, a cannon on the front to deal with those pesky pedestrians and unicyclists before they impede progress.

Strong electric car sales expected for 2024, but charging grid needs work

Re: Cheaper

on long journeys the car beats my bladder.

Now, if only we could usefully fuel our cars from that source...

The Dacia claims 137 miles range, so real-world that's 100 miles. Fine for a city runabout, but it certainly wouldn't work for me except as a second car.

Maybe, if you ignore the upfront cost of solar panels.

If Britain is so bothered by China, why do these .gov.uk sites use Chinese ad brokers?

Re: ".... reasonable to assume most UK citizens wouldn't ....,"

Yes, we are "subjects" of our monarch, not "citizens" of our country.)

Incorrect. We are subject to the laws of our country (as are almost all people to their respective countries, worldwide), and since the Sovereign is Head of State we're technically subject to them, but they don't have supreme authority. That lies with Parliament, due to a long chain of constitutional events from Magna Carta onwards. We are all, also, citizens of the UK, that status is clearly reflected in the wording of our passports, among other things.

Your trainee just took down our business and has no idea how or why

Re: My most memorable mistake

We had somewhat larger motor-generator sets in the Uni basement lab. The motors were fed by 200v DC via a rheostat, which was used to bring them slowly up to full speed. When you switched off, the rheostat holding magnet was supposed to release & drop the rheostat back to zero for the next restart.

One student didn't notice that their magnet hadn't released, and so re-powered-on the motor at 0 ohms. The very thick cables all sagged noticeably, the fuses surprisingly didn't blow as the motor went from zero to several thousand RPM in under a second. The two things I remember were watching the thick steel case of the motor visibly flex under the torque (but remain attached to the floor) and the deafening tortured scream from inside it which brought staff running from the adjoining lab. I suppose we were lucky it didn't detach from the floor & exit via a wall. No-one ever dared to try it again.

Re: I did something similar as a rookie

a recovery from tape for the Arthur Andersen annual audit. It didn't work. The data was scrambled and unrecoverable.

Ah, the days when people just put busy loops in the code to get timing intervals right for tapes...

Whistleblower cries foul over alleged fuselage gaps in Boeing 787 Dreamliner

Re: All the best words have at least two meanings

As in "This needs more oversight", or "This was due to an oversight" ?

Microsoft to tackle spam by restricting Exchange Online bulk email

Fine, if they've opted-in to being told. Otherwise it's spam and the sender should be nuked from orbit.

CISA in a flap as Chirp smart door locks can be trivially unlocked remotely

Re: You're still using electronic locks?

Sounds like you may have a potential weather-related vulnerability there.

Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room

Re: Sod Monaco!

The only parts of Monaco he saw was from the taxi, going to & from the airport

He probably saw most of it, then.

Digital Realty ditches diesel for salad dressing in US to cut datacenter emissions

Re: Does HVO really reduce emissions ?

I think that the petrol issue is more likely that 95RON (E10) can contain up to 10% ethanol, but Super only max 5%. As always the key phrase is "up to", some E10 fuel has much less than 10% ethanol.

Intel CEO suggests AI can help to create a one-person Unicorn

Re: Generating business reports with AI

So, just like an AI?

A cheeky intern nearly turned MS-DOS into NSFW-DOS

The good old days

When MS did code reviews, and spotted undesirable changes before the product shipped...

Malicious xz backdoor reveals fragility of open source

Re: Some OSS development introspection needed

It highlights the same old problem, no programs (and especially not security-critical ones like SSH) should link to other code unless the code linked to has had at least the same level of review and scrutiny as the main program. This was found because someone did the due diligence, but many others don't. In both the companies I worked for where open source was used we were required to prove that we'd done such review before we were allowed to ship a product.

Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard

Re: Burned Cow Bones

It isn't just the Underground, it's London in general.

I remember a training course in London years ago, where I spent the day in the centre but stayed in slightly greener suburbs. Each evening I'd get back to the hotel and think "ah, fresh air at last". Then I got off the plane home in Belfast (Aldergrove, way out in the country) and remembered what fresh air was really like.

Hillary Clinton: 2024 will be 'ground zero' for AI election manipulation

Re: Photo ID in UK

Photo ID was introduced in N. Ireland 20 years ago. The general view of the electoral authorities is that it has had no effect on blocking any particular group from voting, with one exception. The number of dead people voting has dropped by 90%.

BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who

Re: He's The Doctor not Doctor Who.

So who is the title character?

Yes.

Good news: HMRC offers a Linux version of Basic PAYE Tools. Bad news: It broke

Re: "for businesses with fewer than 10 employees."

Fewer than 10, so maybe it uses a single-digit field for employee number...

Fujitsu set to be preferred bidder in UK digital ID scheme

Re: Bung received..

"Don't I get a cut?"

"No, Minister."

Re: Bung received..

The PASS scheme was launched in 2000, under a Labour government (or what passed for one under Bliar). He was also the PM who created national ID cards, and the National Identity Register database that went with them. The Tory/LibDem coalition scrapped the scheme and destroyed the database, as one of their first acts in office.

First release candidate of Linux kernel 6.9 looks 'fairly normal,' says Torvalds

Re: NTFS/Linux permissions

Perhaps use the suid mount option, so root maps to nobody unless mounted suid, when it could map to administrator?

I've not used NTFS on Linux, so may be way off base, of course.

The UK Digital Information Bill: Brexit dividend or data disaster?

Re: A gift?

For the brexiteers, brexit was always about making us the 51st State, making us subservient to America, ideally an America run by Trump and his kind.

That's really about as nonsensical a statement as claiming that remainers want to stay in the EU to make us subservient to Macron & Sholz.

Time to examine the anatomy of the British Library ransomware nightmare

Re: Force of Islam

You would have thought it would have been documented at the time in Egypt.

And maybe stored in a big library?

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

Useless when everyone works at home, though.

Truck-to-truck worm could infect – and disrupt – entire US commercial fleet

Re: Going Fishing with Another Can of Worms

And the whole film sponsored by Tesla, whose cybertrucks will turn out to be the only ones with a secure ELD (yeah, I know, but it's a movie).

Yacht dealer to the stars attacked by Rhysida ransomware gang

Re: It's hard to feel sorry for some victims

Why, do you think it's OK for criminals to attack people as long as the victims are rich?

Garlic chicken without garlic? Critics think Amazon recipe book was cooked up by AI

Re: Sounds like someone

So that's what AI means: Amazon Indigestion!

Catch Java 22, available from Oracle for a limited time

Re: Stop right now!

Larry has enough private jets

He has a MIG-29, but the US government won't let him fly it.

What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

it tends to screw up the formatting.

In my experience that's almost always down to font differences. It's worth looking online for some of the additional free fonts that match those used in MS tools.

Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4

Re: One more reason

If the Firefox developers would stop fucking about with the UI and breaking stuff then they might keep more users.

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

Re: Impressive horns

So you want to cross-breed sheep with mice, to create mini-sheep that are better at hiding?

The huge holes in the skirting board would be a giveaway, though.

Ten nations tell social media, banks, and telcos to get better at stopping scams

make social media, banks, and telcos jointly and severally responsible for all losses

All losses? It's not that easy, for several reasons.

Many of these scams work because greedy or stupid punters are willing to ignore the "if it looks too good to be true" rule in the hope of making a quick buck. If you buy a too-cheap Rolex from a guy down the pub, and it turns out (surprise!) to be a fake, should the publican be required to reimburse you? Why should the honest, sensible, customers of those businesses be on the hook to bail out all the dumb ones? Make no mistake, if a bank has to pay out compensation that money won't come from the bank, it will come from the bank's customers, which after all is where the bank gets all its money.

There's also the risk of unintended consequences, if people get used to the idea that they will always be bailed out when they do something stupid there's a risk that they will be more careless about scams: "It might be a scam, but who cares, I can't lose either way". There still needs to be some level of personal responsibility involved, even if that's not very trendy in these nanny-state days.

If there's negligence on the part of the bank or other platform then by all means make them pay, but it can't be a blanket rule.

Cryptocurrency laundryman gets hung out to dry

Reminds me of a colleague who refused to pay motorway tolls with a credit card because "they" would know where he'd been. He could never explain who "they" were, nor why he thought anyone would care where he'd been.

Incidentally, paper cash usually has unique serial numbers, so is also very traceable.

Japan's first private satellite launch imitates SpaceX's giant explosions

Re: I can't get the video to work

Oddly enough, if you right-click & ask Firefox to open the video in a new tab it plays (from YouTube) just fine.

Airbnb warns hosts who use indoor security cameras they may face eviction

Re: Other side of this.

Use a bell on the door, it worked fine in the days before cheap CCTV cameras.

Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO

Re: All those were the days

A colleague discovered that the audio device on early Sun workstations had world write permissions, so you could rcp audio files to someone else's system. On one occasion he sent the noisy bit of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus to a machine being used by a fairly new team member on the floor below.

With impeccably unintentional timing she had just completed a successful demo to a visiting VIP when the system boomed "Haaallelujah! Haaallelujah!"

Apparently she just looked stunned, and stuttered "it's never done that before!"

Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery

Re: In Beer, Strength...

Greene King is in Bury St Edmunds, are you sure you're not thinking of Tolly Cobbold which had a brewery in Ipswich docks?

It's been a long time since I had a pint of Tolly (fortunately!)

UK finance minister promises NHS £3.4B IT investment to unlock £35B savings

Re: Zero sum game

Just ahead of the Office of Budget Responsibilty.

Toyota, Samsung accelerate toward better EV batteries

Re: Seeing is believing

For our flying cars?