Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Dyson backs Britain plc with $2.5bn AI and robotics investment

Re: Errm, surely you mean...

Also, as any fule kno, power = watts * time,

I think most engineering fules would disagree. power = watts = energy * time.

I guess he has no interest in selling into the EU market

Dyson sells all over the world already, moving another 27 countries into "rest of world" isn't likely to be that much of a challenge.

Re: The best bit...

Is he really sure that 640K will be enough?

AWS's S3 outage was so bad Amazon couldn't get into its own dashboard to warn the world

Re: Am I Getting Old?

We don't. The question is why do people want Internet-connected lightbulbs.

Germany, France lobby hard for terror-busting encryption backdoors – Europe seems to agree

Re: Please raise your left hand

« Pour compléter ce dispositif, la révision do Code Frontière Schengen permettra de procéder à des contrôles systématiques aux frontières extérieures pour les ressortissants européens et étrangers. » Again, emphasis in the original.

The French politicians for some unknown reason have always been extremely reticent to move their police away from their borders and in France systematic controls have been occurring ever since Schengen was put in place, always with one excuse or another.

In the original text, doesn't "frontières extérieures" mean the external borders of the EU, not those of France? I would read that as saying that the revision to Schengen allows more extensive controls around "Fortress Europe", not as a desire to increase controls at French borders with the EU. In any case France reintroduced internal border controls with the state of emergency declared after the Charlie Hebdo and Nice attacks.

Two million recordings of families imperiled by cloud-connected toys' crappy MongoDB

Yes, we all know everyone checks then logfiles to see if they've made a mistake when otherwise the system seems to be working perfectly.

Any product that isn't secure out of the box when installed is unfit for purpose. If the developer has that cavalier an approach to security in general, what hope is there that the rest of the security "features" have ever been tested?

New UK laws address driverless cars insurance and liability

Re: Blue Windscreen of Death

I suppose this is similar to determining thata vehicle is roadworthy.

More than just similar, it is determining if it's roadworthy.

Something like an MOT would determine if the car is running an acceptably recent version of the SW, if not then it fails and is uninsured.

If there's a critical safety patch, the manufacturer has the responsibility to recall & fix the problem, just as they would if a mechanical probem was found, say with the brakes.

Sysadmin's sole client was his wife – and she queried his bill

Re: Two Rules Apply

I would suffer far more in the marital relations department if I refused to even look at a problem rather than just fixed it for her, if possible.

But it's when you walk over, do exactly what she was doing, and see it work perfectly that you can seriously dent a relationship...

they may be cheaper to run, but the service satisfaction just drops through the floor.

What's even worse is that the service gets so bad that no-one bothers to call support anymore. The reduced volume of helpdesk calls is then used by manglement as an indicator of how good the outsourced IT services have made everything.

Then something goes titsup and the whole company comes crashing down.

Gulp! Drones dodge spray from California's gaping moist glory hole

Re: Portal to another Dimension

Indeed, I was just thinking that the Dr. Who music would be a better accompaniment to that vertical view than Highway to Hell.

Automated, insight cannot be: Jedi master of statistics was good – but beware the daft side

Re: RIP Hans

He was never static! ;-)

Oops, too late to edit the typo. And yes, he was definitely dynamic! :)

RIP Hans

We can argue about how "exact" his presentations were, but let's not lose sight of the fact that he made statics both understandable and fun. One of the few maths presenters I would have gone out of my way to watch. A sad loss.

DraaS-tic times call for DraaS-tic measures in VMware's cloud

Re: Ah but

Who is going to offer Daas?

Didn't the US just elect him?

Connected car in the second-hand lot? Don't buy it if you're not hack-savvy

Re: Hackers dream

With all of these self interests at work there will be security holes that you could drive a double decker bus through...

Somebody else's double-decker bus, controlled from your phone.

Installing disks is basically LEGO, right? This admin failed LEGO

Re: RAID cock-up

the *wrong disk* had been replaced, losing all data.

Ah yes, the "reverse back up from blank drive to full one" problem. Used to happen with removable disk packs. There's a reason those floor-standing drives had a write-protect switch, but that message didn't always get through.

Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong cuffed in $40m corruption, perjury bust

Re: Thank God for small mercies

Lucky, especially if it turns out he really was in someone's back pocket...

Déjà vu: Euro Patent Office prez ignores yet another formal rebuke

Re: A question of (lack of) trust?

Just to clarify - it's not actually a European organisation.

It is not funded by the EU at all

I very carefully didn't mention the EU at all, because I am well aware that it isn't an EU organisation. It is, however, a European one (the clue is in the name: European Patent Organisation) and while it may be funded by the patent applications, the Administrative Council that oversees it, and about which I was commenting, is made up of "representatives of the contracting states" who are most assuredly financed by their respective taxpayers.

And you, the tax payer, should educate yourself a little more about what you actually vote to reject.

And you, the Anonymous Coward, should perhaps remove the Brexit chip from your shoulder long enough to actually read the post you reply to.

A question of (lack of) trust?

It's not the first time that some European organization has got into this sort of mess, with a power-hungry type who's hard to be sacked creating a little empire. The need for every government to agree to sack him seems typical of these groups, no-one trusts the others to do the right thing so they insist on full agreement of all 30-odd people before any major decision gets taken. Inevitable result: no major decisions ever get taken (well, except for salary increases & expenses payments, of course). Meanwhile, of course, we (the taxpayers) continue to finance this fiasco.

Come the revolution that wall is going to be very crowded...

Global IPv4 address drought: Seriously, we're done now. We're done

The only realistic way you'd end up using that lot is individually assigning addresses to nanobots.

https://xkcd.com/865/

Get it while it's hot: NASA's Space Poo contest winners wipe up $30k

Re: one more....

Gives a whole new meaning to "floaters"

Hold the phone! Crap customer service cost telcos £2.9 BEEEELLION in 2016

Re: That assumes there's competition to which we can switch.

the phone company/cable company/cellular company wants a bajillion Pounds to build the infrastructure required to reach your house?

I can understand that you don't want to pay what it would cost to get suitable infrastructure, but do you really expect all the other phone company customers to be happy if they have to pay for your upgrade? Because that's what getting the phone company to pay actually means.

Unlucky WD Ultrastar drives are knackered, need replacing ASAP

Re: Leaking Helium?

I wonder if the failure is being caused by the helium escaping

Or do the controllers have Intel Atom chips in them?

Brexit could further harm woeful rural payments system

Re: Why do you think reducing the amount of trade agreements

But if Dutch, German, Belgian, French, Italian and Spanish farmers can run globally successful production within the current trade agreements

Can they? The only reason French farmers manage to make a living at all is because they're paid huge subsidies by EU taxpayers. Their farms are far too small to actually be profitable.

The CAP was set up to help such small farmers survive, and it crippled the abilities of big farms like those in the UK. Whatever else Brexit brings, the end of the CAP rules in the UK can only be good for farmers, who will have some incentive to make the UK self-sufficient, instead of being subsidised not to be and forcing us to import food.

It all goes way beyond simple subsidies, of course. The main problem in France is that when a farmer dies the law requires that the estate (which in most cases means the farm) be equally divided among the children. Compare that to UK tradition where the farm is passed down whole to the eldest son/child. Over time that means UK farms can grow, but French ones remain small and fragmented.

Of course, the EU politicians could try to fix that by mandating the same inheritance rules across the EU but they know fine well that it's an impossible task, there's far too much cultural difference for it ever to be acceptable. Note that they'll admit that, of course. Instead they just implement the usual fudge which only works for some people. For the others, well it's their own fault for not being ideal Europeans.

Trump cybersecurity order morphs into 2,200-plus-word extravaganza

size

Executive orders – even those signed by Trump – tend to be relatively short and quite vague

I thought that these days they had to be no more than 140 characters?

Euro bloc blocks streaming vid geoblocks

Re: That's the BBC buggered then

You haven't read the document, have you?

It's pretty clear that the idea is that someone who is normally resident in one Member State, and temporarily travels to another Member State, will still be allowed to stream anything they signed up to at home. That's all.

Prepare your popcorn: Wikipedia deems the Daily Mail unreliable

The Mail "is no longer considered to be a reliable source and cannot be used to demonstrate notability",

I expect that the Mail feels the same way about Wikipedia. Does anyone really trust either of them?

IBM's Marissa Mayer moment: Staff ordered to work in one of 6 main offices – or face the axe

Re: The Yahoo experience

OTOH, we have one team member that the rest of the team are all very happy to have working remotely.

We had one team member who worked remotely, from Hawaii. He had to come in for meetings, tightwad managers would never let us go to him for them...

She has no clue

there is something about a team being more powerful, more impactful, more creative, and frankly hopefully having more fun when they are shoulder to shoulder. Bringing people together creates its own X Factor.

Where 'X' is the unknown?

That statement is complete bollocks, having a distributed team has it's own advantages once you learn to take into account timezone and cultural differences so that you use them instead of fighting them. Remote workers in distributed teams tend to spend less time goofing off around the coffee machine and can be more productive than a team that is all in one place, when properly encouraged and managed.

Most important of all is having a team and Peluso seems determined to destory the teams she has.

Go IBM! (I work for a competitor...)

UK uni KCL spunks IT budget on 'reputation management' after IT disaster headlines

Re: Mountain out of a mole hill

Managers who discourage being told bad news are very bad managers

True, but technicians who knowingly operate procedures that they know aren't correct just because their manager tells them to are very bad technicians. Whether the fault with the backups was due to technician error, or management orders, it doesn't reflect well on the techs.

Brexit White Paper published: Broad strokes, light on detail

Re: referenda being ignored...

the people still put the same councillors back in power that ignored them.

More fool them.

How many of the people who objected to the parking charges stood for council election on a "no charges" platform? Or did they, as usual, assume that it was up to "somebody else"to 'do something" ?

the least-worst can be picked

It's a negotiation, no one gets to "pick" anything, and it would be plain stupid for either the government or the EU to publish details of their final acceptable positions. It would be like going into a poker game saying you expect to play 4 aces, but if pushed you would be OK with a full house.

Baird is the word: Netflix's grandaddy gets bronze London landmark

Re: Bandwidth?

HDTV did not really become practical until sufficiently effective digital compression was available.

Japan was broadcasting 1125-line analogue HD ("MUSE") in the 1980s, from satellite.

HD

There's some confusion in the article about line resolutions. Baird's original mechanical system was 30 line, but by the time of the Baird mechanical versus EMI electronic runoff the Baird system was 240 line, and EMI 405. The BBC started in 1936 with the EMI 405-line system, not a "240 line HD" service.

French 819-line broadcasts, arguably a true HD service, started in 1948 but it didn't last and they settled on 625-line like the rest of Europe.

Northumbria Uni fined £400K after boffin's bad math gives students a near-killer caffeine high

Re: Numbers

us not to blindly trust calculators or computers (or humans!). Once you've got the answer you should always ask the question: "Does this number look/feel right?"

It's the "GPS problem". If it says turn left, bell-end driver turns left. The fact that there's a No Entry sign, or a dirt track, or a pier end doesn't matter. Schools don't seem to teach common sense any more, and too many parents abdicated that duty a generation ago.

Sky fattens up broadband subs as it hovers above Fox's open mouth

The business also announced it will launch a Sky TV service in the UK without the need for a satellite dish

Doesn't Sky already have "Now TV" for that? Is this just a rebranding exercise?

Irish townsfolk besieged by confused smut channel callers

Re: Where's the EU when you need it?

French mobile phone numbers start 06.

112 isn't really hamonized. France has separate 2-digit emergency numbers for each service, 112 just connects to paramedics as a catchall. It won't help if you actually want the police, they'll just tell you to hang up and dial 17.

It's pretty typical EU "standardization", a compromise that sort of works because none of the EU members will actually agree to change anything so that things would really be the same.

Chevy Bolt electric car came alive, reversed into my workbench, says stunned bloke

How can an electrical device function without a neutral?

Three-phase.

My hole is a private thing – see for yourself

Re: Un-clouding

Or SNOW:

Still

Not

Outsourcing

Work (or Windows, if you must)

?

Euro space agency's Galileo satellites stricken by mystery clock failures

Re: "halt launches until the problem has been traced and cured"

Ignoring that ESA never had a shuttle in the first place, could the Shuttle ever reach geo-stationary orbit?

No, but neither do GPS satellites.

Why Theresa May’s hard Brexit might be softer than you think

Re: 2 years?

Most mature referendum-holding countries apply a double majority for decisions of major consequence.

You mean the way that not a single one applied such a condition for joining the EU in the first place? Funny how people want to change the rules when the game isn't going their way.

Solaris 12 disappears from Oracle's roadmap

Re: Srtaws in the wind

everything is going to hyperdense x86_64

I hope you've got good cooling.

Japan's terrifying techno-toilets will be made foreigner friendly, vow makers

rather than the anemic 100V used in Japan.

Depends on which island you're on.

French spies warn politicians of hack risk as election draws near

Re: Hacking French politics ? Not worth it.

Third, personal misdemeanours of a sexual or financial nature seem to be of no real concern to the French voters.

If they're bad enough, they do. Ask Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

People lie to pollsters

I doubt that MLP will get through though, it's far more likley to be Valls, Macron or Fillon.

If there's a second round I agree with you, she stands no chance against Fillon, and little against the other two likely opponents.

It's a potentially big "if", though. French voters have a tendency to use the first round as a protest vote, to send a message, before lining up behind more moderate candidates in the final head-to-head runoff. That bit them in 1995, and could do so again. Le Pen is the only mainstream candidate who is vocally anti-EU (especially anti-euro) and anti-immigration, and it wouldn't surprise me to see her get a big first-round vote from across the country on those issues. People forget that if she should happen to pass the 50% in that first round, there won't be a second round, she'll be elected. With the FN sitting at a consistent 25-26% now, and given people's tendencies to lie about voting for them in polls, passing that 50% in April isn't impossible.

I'm not sure that high levels of trust in the media are necessarily a good thing. In the UK people have very little trust in the press, especially the tabloid press, and even traditionally trustworthy sources like the BBC are now seen as pushing a political agenda (maybe they are, maybe not, but there's a belief that they are). The result is that people are sceptical of what they read.

In France the very paternalistic society means that people trust the state and the media somewhat blindly. If it's in Libération or Le Figaro it's trusted much more than something published in the Guardian or Daily Telegraph in the UK would be, for example.

What that means, though, is that there's less precautionary scepticism in the society. If one of those papers does start pushing a specific agenda it is much more likely to be swallowed without questioning it, at least for a time.

Japan tries to launch satellite on rocket the size of a telegraph pole

But whose going to be the first to launch an actual telegraph pole into space?

The Scots try manual launches from Braemar every so often, but they never seem to get very far.

BT installs phone 'spam filter', says it'll strain out mass cold-callers

Re: BT need to sort out CLI

If BT are doing this properly they won't be relying on the (possibly-spoofed) CLID, they should be able to see the real number in many cases. Won't help for VOIP calls, but it's a start.

Promising compsci student sold key-logger, infects 16,000 machines, pleads guilty, faces jail

Re: Ignorant Brit here

3.0 is pretty normal as regular smart people are good at something and suck at something else.

So really it's as useless as a TripAdvisor star rating, then.

Mr Angry pays taxman with five wheelbarrows worth of loose change

Re: He'd be shit out of luck in the UK

banks are not obliged to process written instructions

Thanks for the clarification.

one wheelbarrow shall be known as 1Whb

Pronounces "whub" I suppose? So we can measure Google profits in megawhubs, and government debt in petawhubs.

I suppose by that reckoning my lunch cost me 10 milliwhubs. hmmm.