Posts by Helstrom

A quarter of 5-7 year olds now use smartphones, says regulator

Do 5 year olds actually "own" anything?

"The research showed 24 percent of five- to seven-year-olds own a smartphone"

I'm not sure that 5 year olds are capable of owning a smart phone. Ownership comes with a level of responsibility (not to lose it, break it, keep it in good repair, liability, etc). Try explaining to a 5 year old the consequence of them breaking something they "own"... This is maybe the entire problem. The parents own the smartphone and all the responsibility that comes with it. If they choose to let their 5 year old have a phone that doesn't absolve the parent of responsibility.

Judge refuses to Ctrl-Z divorce order made by a misclick

More Information Needed!

This article needs more information. I don't know if I should be outraged for an injustice done or laughing at someone getting their just desserts.

Icon because unsure how to respond.

Wyze admits 13,000 users could have viewed strangers' camera feeds

When you integrate it - you own it

"The incident was caused by a third-party caching client library that was recently integrated into our system,"

I'm sorry but no. The library may have been written by a third-party but once you choose to integrate such into *your* solution *you* need to take ownership of the end result. I find the amount of faith that developers put into random code found on the Internet frightening. It doesn't matter if it comes from a repo like NPM or had all the stars on Github, if you don't know what the software in your entire solution is doing, then it's not your software.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Re: On false equivalences

Have an upvote. I came to say the same thing. While I love a good hyperbolic table flip as much as the next guy, we do need to acknowledge that Unity binaries/technologies are redistributed with the games. I'm not saying what Unity is going is good or bad - just indicating that a redistribution royalty is not uncommon in the software industry and is not the same as using a hammer to build a house.

Hong Kong ups its SEO game to stop Google playing a protest song as its national anthem

".. but also mislead the local and overseas netizens, ..."

I'm not sure what it says about the local education system if a Google search can mislead local citizens about what the national anthem is...

Sony, Honda collaborate on 'premium' electric vehicles that are born in the USA

"the amount of concentration required to drive will be reduced"

This statement alone scares the hell out of me. I'm speechless that vehicle manufacturers are counting on us to not pay attention while driving even though their solutions are only level 2/3 autonomous.

You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups

Stack popped reading that procedure....

Honestly, I couldn't really follow the article after reading that back up procedure. I think it got my mental processing into a bit of an infinite loop. Does it sound like he just copies things back and forth from the live to removable and vice versa until quitting time?

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Re: Genuine Question

I agree with your sentiment. I design and build full IT solutions to support industrial automation activities as an OEM. Love it or hate it when you have 500 Windows servers/workstations you have a single Active Directory domain to administer. When you have 500 Linux boxes you have 500 Linux boxes to administer. I want to use Linux but I need the enterprise management tools that Microsoft brings to the party and are sadly lacking in the Linux space. If Linux (from any vendor) had an equivalent to GPOs I'd jump onboard.

Palantir expands from Covid role, wins $90m deal with US Department of Health

"They are not all accounted for..."

"It is dangerous to use them. They are not all accounted for. We don't know who else may be looking"

-Gandalf the Grey

Has HHS not seen/read the Lord of Rings? Seriously though: could Palantir not have chosen a creepier company name given their history?

UK, EU regulators probe Google and Meta's 'Jedi Blue' ad deal

What Consumers?

"...and therefore restrict or distort competition in markets for online display advertising, to the detriment of publishers, and ultimately consumers."

Maybe it's just me but I've never thought of myself as a "consumer" of online ads. They're more something I need to put up with. Are there any actual ad consumers out there?

Chromebook sales in recession: Market saturation blamed as shipments collapse more than 63% in Q4

I've not used a chromebook so this statement is absolutely coming from a place of ignorance: My understanding is that the entire appeal of these devices is that they're meant to be the thinnest of thin clients as everything runs in the cloud. To me this seems to imply that these devices don't need to be refreshed regularly since they don't actually need to do much. Wouldn't it therefore follow that at some point everyone who wants one will have one and there's no real need to upgrade?

Darmstadt, we have a problem – ESA reveals its INTEGRAL space telescope was three hours from likely death

Random Charged Particle

"ESA boffins have fingered a random charged particle hitting INTEGRAL's electricals and sparking a changed state as the possible cause of the malfunction."

Not only has this event made the case for working from home as the author noted, it has also validated the "stray alpha particle" excuse for random failures!

Microsoft admits to yet more printing problems in Windows as back-at-the-office folks asked for admin credentials

Microsoft's Effort at Being "Green"?

Think of all the trees being saved by people being unable to print their childrens school work at the office (because we all now that's a good 80% of the workload of the average office printer)!

Amazon CEO: Directors and team leaders will determine return to work policy for white collar workers

"...we set previously for people got start returning to the office at least three days a week...”

All of that technology developed by Amazon and the CEO couldn't get his missive to the minions checked for grammar...

Arms not long enough to reach the plug socket? Room-wide wireless charging is on the way

What's in your wallet?

I'm curious about the impact of this sort of thing on other magnetism based dumb devices. Will this wipe out credit cards/hotel room keys/etc?

Smoking smartphone sparks emergency evacuation of Alaska Airlines jet, two taken to hospital

Re: batteries

My wife just got a Samsung XCover Pro. Not only does it have replaceable batteries but it can also take a few drops (my wife is rather clumsy...) and it's on the cheaper side as well.

Google opens Workspace to anyone with a Google account, but you'll need to cough up for the good stuff

Clearly the same kind of psycho that feels a family reunion requires an itinerary....

Ring glitch results in global ding dong ditch: Doorbell bling flings out random pings but they're not the real thing

No expiry timer?

Maybe I'm missing something here, but shouldn't a system that is designed for immediacy have some sort of expiry timer on notifications? In this case at least on the chimes (there may be a case to continue to log the notification)? What is the value in playing the "ring" well past when it would have been useful?

Did this airliner land in the North Sea? No. So what happened? El Reg probes flight tracker site oddity

Re: I blame the following, in this order...

What about DNS?

Apple takes another swing at Epic, says Unreal Engine could be a 'trojan horse' threatening security

"imminent threat to Apple’s customers’ data (including children’s data)"

I can certainly understand the need to throw out the near obligatory "think of the children" line in any avenue meant for public consumption but I would have thought that such hyperbole wouldn't be necessary in court filings.

Grav wave boffins are unsure if they just spotted the smallest black hole or the biggest neutron star seen yet

The Rebel Alliance tricked the Death Star III ("That's no Neutron Star - that's a space station") into getting eaten by a black hole thereby actually killing The Emperor for real this time.

QED

'It’s not a surveillance program'... US govt isn't going all Beijing on us with border face-recog, official tells Congress

How much "rage" is enough?

“unlikely that every demographic will be identical in performance across the board, whether that’s age, rage, or sex.”

So exactly how enraged do I need to be at the border to not be positively identified?

-> Big brother because apparently he can't handle angry :(

Hang on, don't go out yet – wait till IBM's done swinging its storage announcements around

Is it bad....

Is it bad that when I saw a headline with the words "IBM" and "Swinging" I assumed the article was about the "Axe" and was thus disappointed to see the article talking about storage annoucements?

You: 'Alexa, open Cortana.' Alexa: 'Who?'

Inception?

But can you ask Alexa to open Cortana and then ask Cortana to open Alexa? How far down the rabbit hole can we go until a server in Seattle/Redmond pops it's stack?

Disengage, disengage! Cali DMV reports show how often human drivers override robot cars

GPS NIghtmares Made Worse?

My 2017 vehicle still has maps from 2009 and there are no updates listed. When updated maps are available they will cost me $250USD. When I drive home my vehicle insists I'm off-roading at 120km/h because the highway was realigned 2 years ago. Unless mapping updates become instant and automatic I can foresee our autonomous future ending in tears...

UK spies on MILLIONS of Yahoo! webcams, ogles sex vids - report

"Undesirable nudity"...

Any word on what percentage of intercepts were desirable nudity?

Chips in spaaaaace: old tech is in

It's not just the time it take harden the electronics...

I work in the rail automation industry and even in this field extremely out of date electronics are used. Why? Because the general consensus is after 10+ years all defects in the circuitry are known and can be worked around (look at the errata for the 80386...). When developing systems on which lives are at stake (or at which billions of dollars are at stake as in space flight) you want to limit the unknown as much as possible. Using older tech goes a long way to ensuring this.

LOHAN plugs into some hot LiPo treatment

Disconnecting battery

I would recommend simply using exposed mated pins (ie. DBx pins with no housing). You can keep the wires leading to the pins at different lengths to ensure you don't get any shorting. I'm not sure how a bit of dangling wire off of LOHAN will affect flight characteristics but it is very simple and the pins don't bind tightly allowing them to be pulled apart once you have ignition. The only consideration is if low temperature may cause them to bind but then again the surface area where they connect is very low so any freezing shouldn't have too much of an impact given the force generated by the motor.

Regardless, based on you battery usage testing it appears that you can use a less than ideally conductive interface since there appears to enough battery power remaining to deal with high resistances. I have in past had success using iron filings lacquered to tissue paper (burns up very quickly).