Posts by Jonathon Green

NEC insists its face-recog training dataset isn't biased, but refuses to share details of Neoface system with UK court

Re: Error

They’ll probably shoot you anyway just to be on the safe side...

In Hancock's half-hour, Dido Harding offers hollow laughs: Cake distracts test-and-trace boss at UK COVID-19 briefing

Not even that.

The whole thing makes much more sense if you start from the proposition that BJ really doesn’t give a fuck about anything, not even the traditional Tory motivations, about anything beyond self aggrandisement - if he thinks something will make a good photo opportunity (or headline, or TV news clip, or radio sound bite) it’ll happen, if it won’t it is even on his map...

It’s kind of like Trump and his tweeting, only with just a little more self awareness and a slightly longer attention span, anything which looks like a coherent plan or policy is actually just one of those oh-so-trendy emergent phenomena taking shape from Brownian motion within a self publicity spin machine.

Re: Better is possible

“You seem to forget, there's no 5G in Ceredigion. :)“

Which of course is the *real* reason the numbers are so low... :-)

Watch an oblivious Tesla Model 3 smash into an overturned truck on a highway 'while under Autopilot'

Re: It is autopilot but not autonomous

There are bucketloads YouTube videos and EV forum posts with Tesla owners proudly boasting of doing ridiculous things with Autopilot engaged and companies have actively marketed devices to defeat the safeguards which are supposed to prevent that sort of thing.

Are Tesla’s accident figures broken down by geographical territory? Given the Standards of driver training and the level of driving standards regularly demonstrated in their home market it probably isn’t at all difficult to outperform the meat there...

Re: It is autopilot but not autonomous

...nd whoever it is (I can’t imagine who that might be...) in Tesla’s management who insists on persisting with the “autopilot” branding in the face of clear evidence that a significant proportion of their customers *are* treating it as a fully autonomous capability...

Re: @SJA - Seriously?

If (as I completely agree) Tesla don’t have autonomous vehicle they really ought to stop throwing words like “autopilot” around quite so casually...

Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps

I like Americans. They’re funny.

Honor launches new UK store, laptop, kettle, er... toothbrush?

That’ll sit nicely alongside Youngest Son’s HTC hair clippers...

You can't have it both ways: Anti-coronavirus masks may thwart our creepy face-recog cameras, London cops admit

Think I’m going to be sticking with the not going anywhere near London option...

You overstepped and infringed British sovereignty, Court of Appeal tells US in software companies' copyright battle

I like Americans. They’re funny.

China strings up red tape barrier that shows businesses they're better off buying local tech

Or vice versa...

Wanted: An exit strategy from the overt surveillance of smartphone contact tracing

...and there’s always the next pandemic.

Stack Overflow banishes belligerent blather with bespoke bot – but will it work?

I just came here to upvote the Cheap Trick reference.

Carry on...

UK MPs fume after Huawei posts open letter stating: 'Disrupting our involvement in the 5G rollout would do Britain a disservice'

Presumably we should only be accepting special pleading from across the Atlantic and start kowtowing to the USA...

Capita inks deal with NHS to 'bring back staff': Workers get an hour of training to recruit and vet retired doctors, nurses

What could possibly go wrong...

Minister slams 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories as 'dangerous nonsense' after phone towers torched in UK

Upvoted for the mention of “The Beiderbecke Tapes”, a bloody fine, entertaining piece of TV which had slid away into the hinterlands of what I laughingly call my memory, and which I’m pleased to be reminded of...

Not exactly the kind of housekeeping you want when it means the hotel's server uptime is scrubbed clean

Re: Who was really at fault?

“ I'm wouldn't be surprised to learn that hotel receptionists today would do practically the same.”

My wife works as a housekeeper in a well known budget hotel chain.

And the answer is yes, they absolutely would, because they’re working to inflexible checklists, schedules, and requirements which say that certain very specific things have to happen in certain very specific places within certain very specific timeframes. If they can’t show that those things have happened then the consequences range from loss of bonus payments (which while derisory are still a big deal when you’re dealing with the pay scales at the bottom end of the hospitality industry food chain) to disciplinary proceedings.

So yes, if they haven’t got specific written instructions from local management, signed off by the people at head office who audit and compliance check the time sheets, daily reports etc then damn right they’re going to unplug your server to do the hoovering,,,

Brit MPs, US senators ramp up pressure on UK.gov to switch off that green-light for Huawei 5G gear

...and just guess where the WTO. Complaints would come from (c.f. Airbus).

After 1.5 million days of computer time, SETI@home heads home to probe potential signs of alien civilizations

Re: Sorry, too late...

Down votes for a cataclysmic failure of imagination.

Being able to decode a signal would be amazing, two-way communication would be awesome, but simply having real evidence that another technological society existed (or had existed, even if it was in the distant past) somewhere in the universe would be world shaking in itself....

We regret to inform you there are severe delays on the token ring due to IT nerds blasting each other to bloody chunks

I’m now getting a little tickle of recollection about a hack which turned the output of the unix “ps” command into monsters in a first person shooter game environment and let you (literally) kill processes by shooting them...

Anybody else or is this something my over active and under utilised imagination has conjured out of thin air?

Tanks for the memory...

Back in the early-to-mid ‘80s the product development wing of the electronic instrument manufacturing company I worked for was an Apollo/Domain shop.

Apollo had its own version of Token Ring networking which actually worked very well, remaining reasonably responsive even at very high traffic levels and we regularly used to stress test it with a multiplayer version of the old “Battlezone” vector graphic tank battle game. Happy days...

What was Boeing through their heads? Emails show staff wouldn't put their families on a 737 Max over safety fears

Re: Fuck you Boeing

By a strange, dark coincidence I’d just (re)listened to that album for the first time in years when I came across this story, and, well...

Synchronicity works in strange, sometimes rather disturbing ways - it’s a reminder that we’ve been here before and that unless something surprising and unlikely happens to human (or corporate) nature we’ll probably find ourselves back here again.

Re: Fuck you Boeing

‘Catching a 737-MAX is easy,...”

Just buy an acre of land and then wait?

100 mysterious blinking lights in the night sky could be evidence of alien life... or something weird, say boffins

Need a version of this icon with half-a-pint of foaming goodness in the container...

Optimistic interpretation: We’re observing the appearance of Kardashev level II civilisations, and they’re more common than anyone would have expected.

Pessimistic corollary: The Nicoll-Dyson laser beams are on their way and they will be here Real Soon Now..

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

But on the other hand...

...they’ve got a point about the veggie burgers, milk substitutes, and vegan cheese though...

Why can't passport biometrics see through my cunning disguise?

Re: Imp Y Celyn from Llamedos, spelled backwards, "sod 'em all"

Hmmm... Bud of holly.

Is that sung to the tune of Cwm Rhondda[1]?

[1] Frequently referred to as “Bread of Heaven” by us culturally insensitive English types...

Uber CEO compares pedestrian death to murder of Saudi journalist, saying all should be forgiven

Ethics...

...it’s not *just* next to Suffolk...

A spot of after-hours business email does you good, apparently

An alternative interpretation.

I suspect that the authors may be experiencing some confusion between “employees who prioritise work performance goals and who would prefer to attend to work outside of hours if it helps them get their tasks completed." and “employees who are scared shitless that they’ll find themselves either out of a job or passed over for otherwise well deserved pay rises or promotions if they’re not seen to be willing to prioritise their corporate life over their private life in aggressively competitive, presenteeism driven working environments”...

Telstra chairman: If those darn kids can earn $5m playing Fortnite, why can't execs?

Re: Let's settle this empirically.

Or alternatively we could replace a few CEOs with pro Fortnite players and Fortnite players with CEO and compare results. I have strange feeling that the Fortnite players will turn out to be better at being CEOs than the CEOs will at being Fortnite players...

You know the deal: October 2019. Pwned by a spreadsheet. Patch your Microsoft stuff

Re: No Adobe patches

That and fixing the Creative Cloud stuff so that it works on macOS Catalina...

WeWork, but We don't IPO: Self-styled techie boarding house calls off cursed stock offering

Re: No Meat... No IPO!

Is the cow engaged as a subcontractor is a zero-hours basis?

Fairytale for 2019: GNOME to battle a patent troll in court

Re: I have said it before

That or sell hunting licenses. That should work pretty well in Texas...

UK Supreme Court unprorogues Parliament

I think the issue is that if 48% of people are lactose intolerant then expecting them to live exclusively on cheese is not going to end well for anybody...

Except it’s not is it...

...it’s judges ruling that parliament ultimately has authority over the executive, which very much *is* how things ‘work’ in the UK.

Brit MPs: Our policies are crap and the political process is in tatters, but it's Twitter's fault, OK?

Re: No s##t Sherlock...

So why is extending the right to buy which public sector tenants have enjoyed to private sector tenants such a bad thing?

Are private sector tenants Bad People who don’t deserve the same opportunities as public sector tenants??

HPE lawyer claims key associates of Autonomy boss Mike Lynch 'refuse' to testify to High Court

Re: Is that allowed

On the basis of the article nobody’s refusing anything.

The way I parse this is that Lynch’s team decided that they didn’t need the testimony of these witnesses and so aren’t going to be calling them. HPE’s team are trying to make something out of this, but if they felt that this particular set of witnesses and their testimony were important to HPE’s case then surely they could/should have called them themselves...

Electric vehicles won't help UK meet emissions targets: Time to get out and walk, warn MPs

Re: 50 miles???

“Try using solar power in the UK on a cloudy winters day!!!”

Person with standard ~4kW rooftop solar installation on the roof and Nissan Leaf parked on the drive here.

Actually it seems to work surprisingly well, far better than I’d have expected. On the basis of my electricity bills over about an 8 year period, comparing before and after we got our first Leaf 4 years or so ago, and with a ~30 miles round trip daily commute it looks like a pretty substantial majority of the electricity for the car has been coming from the solar panels. Add a fairly modest battery installation to smooth the peaks and troughs and I think you probably could cover the lot...

Now you see them... IBM made over 800 UK jobs vanish in 2018 despite improving fortunes

“Globally, IBM is trying to morph into a business that makes its money from selling clouds...”

Now that’s a neat business model if you can make it work, especially if you can do a bit of arbitrage by buying up unwanted clouds around peak holiday periods or major sporting events and then selling them (along with their aqueous content) to customers elsewhere in the the agricultural or water and sewerage sectors during periods of high demand...

Here's to beer, without which we'd never have the audacity to Google an error message at 3am

“Have you checked the hosts file?” is generally a good opening gambit regardless of alcohol consumption or google input...

Ohm my God: If you let anyone other than Apple replace your recent iPhone's battery, expect to be nagged by iOS

Re: Quality Control

There’s a very good back street[1] repair shop near me which specialises in Rolls Royce and Bentley motors, has a world-wide reputation for the quality of their work, and for their apparently magical ability to source high quality alternatives (sometimes better than the original in some respects) for hard to obtain bits for older cars. They also rebuild aero engines, including RR Merlins. Damn right I’d take a poorly Turbo R (or whatever) there...

[1] It’s actually in a rambling, apparently decrepit range of buildings on an airfield in the middle of nowhere, but you get the idea, and they certainly aren’t RR franchisees....

Our hero returns home £500 richer thanks to senior dev's appalling security hygiene

It is absolutely logical thinking. If you treat people in an unprofessional manner then you shouldn’t be surprised if/when they start to behave in an unprofessional manner too.

Since there’s no fucking way I’d ever work for a company where anybody behaved disrespectfully towards me (and when it turned out I had been suckered into a company where such attitudes were common I was back out the door faster than you could say “probationary periods work both ways”) the situation has never arisen...

Yes, it is a bit half assed. If an IT manager (or anyone else for that matter) referred to me as a code monkey (to my face or otherwise) I’d have come up with a much more imaginative, effective, and reliable way of putting him/her in his/her place than just leaving my login credentials around. At the very least I’d be arranging for them to be broadcast on a skiddie IRC channel rather than just leaving them visible in the office...

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

Re: More useless

Woah! we’re half way there...

Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned

Re: Concrete Tornado

I’m thinking of things like Klystrons and the various Travelling Wave variants here - they work at crazy frequencies and power levels...

Re: Concrete Tornado

At the frequencies and outputs Ferranti were used to dealing with they may have had a point, my understanding is that it took a long time for solid state electronics to catch up with vacuum tubes for high (kilowatts) power, and high (gigahertz) frequency applications.

And as at least one other poster has suggested, there’s really no substitute for a quartet of gently simmering EL34s to funnel your guitar licks through... :-)

Re: Concrete Tornado

Contemporary hearsay had it that the dummy radar had it’s own unofficial rainbow code[1], generally being referred to by those in the know as Blue Circle...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rainbow_Codes

A $4bn biz without a live product just broke the record for the amount paid for a domain name. WTF is going on?

That sounds like the perfect domain name for a Spinvox relaunch...

The latest FCC plan to boost US broadband? Prevent competition in apartment blocks

Re: I like the US...

Damn. I was just about to put up my obligatory “I like Americans, they’re funny...” post, but someone got theirs in first...

Pushed around and kicked around, always a lonely boy: Run Huawei, Google Play, turns away, from Huawei... turns away

Re: Reap what you sow

The irony being that with its insularity, crumbling infrastructure, cult of personality dominated politics, and dysfunctional law enforcement it’s actually the USA which is looking more and more like some kind of third-world banana republic with more money...

Dedicated techie risks life and limb to locate office conference phone hiding under newspaper

Re: You wouldn't like me when i'm angry

I like Americans. They’re funny...