Posts by Peter Ford

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

Re: Immovable object meets unstoppable force

China could quite happily say 'meh, whatever' and go on trading with the other 6.5 billion people in the world. Sure they'd lose a bit, but not as much a the USA will.

Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel

Re: Lisp is in an amazing number of places

Isn't PDF just a wrapper around PostScript?

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

The political system that you are calling 'communism' has never really worked on a national scale.

The few countries that claim/claimed to be communist were nothing of the sort - just another form of dictatorship.

The name Nazi came from the first two syllables of the National Socialist party - German speakers would pronounce it that way. So, they were Socialist?

The Soviet Union, led by Lenin and Stalin et. al., were also 'Socialist' - it's the second 'S' in USSR. Again, more of a dictatorship, driving the normal people into poverty to enrich a few.

The People's Republic of China - communism? In their version everyone gets a job, but only a select few get any wealth. To some extent that has changed and they're now more capitalist than anyone, but still persecuting minorities.

Venezuela - definitely claimed to be Communist, but I don't think they shared out the oil wealth very equally.

Cuba - they're very communist: everyone is equally poor, except the people running the place. Same goes for North Korea.

Which communist government has actually killed more people than Hitler's Final Solution?

I don't think communism has killed many people at all, but fascism pretending to be communism has done quite a lot of damage to the communist ideology.

US Dept of Housing screens sabotaged to show deepfake of Trump sucking Elon's toes

What usually happens to the Untermensch is they gather what belongings they can and seek ayslum or refuge in another, more friendly, country.

Canada, and probably Mexico, might soon have a refugee crisis on their hands.

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

Re: How average people feel...

I have a bad feeling that mid-term elections might be considered ineffiicient before we get to 2026...

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Working for a small company, I was effectively always on call.

Being the only system admin I made as sure as I could that things wouldn't break, and of course in a small company there was not too much to go wrong.

Of course it only ever actually happened when I was on holiday. Three times.

First time when I was staying with relatives in Canada (I'm UK-based): luckily the chap I was staying with had a Mac that I could SSH into the system and sort it out.

Second time I was on a yacht in the Hebrides. That one had to wait, but it was a simple talk-through a restart operation with the boss.

Third time was a proper breakdown while staying with the in-laws at Christmas - massive RAID array failure (RAID-6, but three drives failed in a cascade...). I could SSH in and recover enough to keep emails going, but it also had to wait until I could get replacement hardware and physical access and then recover from off-site backups. Again, small company and Christmas was a quiet time, so we got away with that.

Now I work for a bigger company with more critical systems, and we have a rota: twenty-odd people taking the first call and a bunch of people who will work out-of-hours to fix something if they have to...

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: super thread drift.. but..

Firstly, if you're not capable of telling if the car in front is not moving, then there's a problem with you being in control of a vehicle. At least in the UK, and barring any other evidence of dangerous driving by the car in front (brake checking or reversing unexpectedly, for example), if a driver rear-ends the car in front it's no fault of the driver in front.

Secondly, there is no legal requirement to move as soon as the lights change (or whatever else blocking the way has cleared) - a green traffic light means 'proceed if it is safe to do so'. Also, the UK has an extra phase in the traffic lights (red+amber) that shows between red and green that gives drivers time to prepare to move.

Thirdly, a driver is considered to be in control of their vehicle unless they are parked with the engine off: handbrakes are part of the control system.

Fourthly, the handbrake has to be strong enough to hold the car on a slope - it used to be tested on a slope of up to 16% gradient but these days is more likely to be tested on rollers - so doesn't need to be as strong as the normal brakes. Even if something rear-ends hard enough to overcome the handbrake, then it's not going to move far. Having had a claim for one car being pushed into another while both were stopped on the road, your main brakes are only as strong as the grip of the tires...

I don't think you'd pass a UK driving test, but I suspect a lot of drivers around the world wouldn't - hell, a huge proportion of people in the UK fail it at least once.

Re: super thread drift.. but..

Having two daughters that have passed their UK (manual) tests in the last year, it seems that using the handbrake is now much less of a thing - they seem to be taught to keep a foot on the brake unless they need a hill start. I suspect that they're being conditioned to be able to transition to automatic transmissions and electric drive system that are likely to be in their future.

What does Google Gemini do with your data? Well, it's complicated...

Re: "Gemini is automatically ingesting even the private docs I open in Google Docs"

Bold of you to assume that Apple are not spying on you too...

65 years of NASA's meatball: Original logo lives on despite detractors

I thought this was the NASA logo

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/lego/images/6/65/Classicspacelogo.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20200608193435

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

A scrapyard somewhere has one of my 12mm spanners. I was trying to extract a light cluster from my Ford S-Max, and the sound was more of a clang-rattle rather than a ping, but it was in the bodywork for a few years before the car was eventually written off. Either that or it dropped out on the road at some point...

Intuitive Machines' lunar lander tripped and fell

Re: Failure

Not a failure.

Just "Another partial success" as Dr. Piehead would have said.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Re: Being polite is great

The person I'm most likely to be contacted by to help with things I used to do when I worked for them probably doesn't have enough money to pay a decent hourly rate. That's the main reason I'm not working there any more...

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

Re: Obsession with colour printing is the problem

I can honestly say that I have never seen an inkjet printer that uses RGB ink.

Or any other sort of printer. They're all CMYK. Even the fancy wax printer things that we had in the 90s in our research lab (can remember what they were called)

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

The apropos command works on my Mac:

% apropos pdf

snmpdf(1) - display disk space usage on a network entity via SNMP

Not much use though...

The 15-inch MacBook Air just nails it

Re: Ok, I'll be down vote bait

My biggest gripe with MacOS (I've been using it for dev work for a few years) is that you can't do everything with a keyboard shortcut. There isn't even a 'Open the menu on this app' keypress. Unless I'm missing something?

Why have just one firewall when you can fire all the walls?

I can't spell 'contanier', which is a bugger when a lot of our stuff is on Docker...

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: @Korev "Well the Z in Regomised is still there..."

I still have a 'Hacker' polo shirt with a Union Flag on the sleeve...

Teardown reveals iPhone 15 to be series of questionable design decisions

That explains the missing iPhone 9 and 10, at least: 9 would be scary and 10 would float away.

Mozilla calls cars from 25 automakers 'data privacy nightmares on wheels'

Re: A long time ago...

I think I'm with you on this: How many people are actually looking at any of this data that they have collected?

Targeted advertising is already confused by having a mixture of adults and teenagers on the same NAT address, so in our house any adverts that do slip past the pi-hole are not well targeted to whoever receives them.

This heap of data is mostly worthless bollocks - certainly the management of most companies is not intelligent enough to do anything productive with it. The biggest worry is that some AI in the future will be let loose on it and actually start making headway with it all. I guess that's when SkyNet happens...

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Re: Expose

A good many of the shopping malls were built on land owned by the Church of England, meaning they would have to abide by covenants on the land, such as not opening on Easter Sunday. Not sure if that's still the case.

Some of the other big landowners in England were the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge universities - there is the story that you could walk between the two universities entirely on land owned by their colleges. Again, probably not the case any more.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Re: Was that sheep (singular) or sheep (plural)?

You'll be wanting https://what3words.com/sheep.sheep.sheep - in Detroit

A new game

Take three words from a piece of text (miss out short words like a, of, to, etc.) and put dots between them for a W3W address, then see if it exists and where it puts you.

Interestingly, Natural Area Codes (https://what3words.com/natural.area.codes) is in Brazil...

Resilience is overrated when it's not advertised

Re: Fallback fault-tolerant

If they were from Sunderland, that's pretty much the same thing

Re: Fallback fault-tolerant

I set up the HP-UX cluster in the my Ph.D. lab with TTTE names - Gordon was the Big machine, Edward, Henry, James and Thomas were the smaller ones. When we got a shiny SG Iris in the lab the Prof said we had too many boys names and it needed something more feminine - if there had been two new machines they'd be Annie and Clarabel, but in the end the purple case (and the fact that it was a Crystallography lab) resulted in 'Amethyst'.

Slightly later, OUCS had machines named as colours, and the main multi-user servers were 'black' and 'white'. They were superceded by 'sable' and 'ermine', which somehow transitioned to a mustelidae theme and there was (I think) a 'wolverine' and a 'weasel' after that...

The company I moved to had Arthurian Legend names - Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, Morgana...

Later when I took on the system admin of that company, I went very boring and used NATO phonetic alphabet names for the sudden proliferation of VMs

Intel pulls plug on mini-PC NUCs

Re: Just as I was thinking of buying one...

Find a second-hand intel Mac Mini and put windows / linux on it...

Lamborghini's last remaining pure gas guzzlers are all spoken for

There is only one issue stopping me getting a BEV - the price of buying it. I've always bought cars cash: £5000 for a small one and £10000-12000 for something bigger. I don't have £40,000+ cash lying around for a new one - even the small BEVs are more than £25000 at the moment, and there's very little second-hand stock of BEVs, apart from crappy Leafs with knackered batteries and Teslas that are not far from new price.

UK's dream of fusion power by 2040s will need GPUs

Re: What a coincidence

Surely the point of this simulation kit is to work out how to do it safely. If Ocean Gate has done a decent simulation, they might have had a better outcome, or more likely a more expensive ticket price...

Bosses face losing 'key' workers after forcing a return to office

I think it might be easier to replace the micromanging managers with robots - I suspect ChatGPT can already replicate most of their behaviour.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Re: Unique keys

I worked for a chap who disliked his first (of three) given name, so in anything useful to him he went by his second name.

On surveys, questionnaires, internet forms, etc. he used his first name, so spam, and sales calls would alway ask for his first name - a useful filter for phone answering...

He hated his third name even more - I'm not sure he really admitted it's existent beyond the initial letter.

A toast to being in the right place at the right time

Re: He's toast

Had a similar problem, but the solution was to cover the stupid smoke detector in the kitchen with tin foil...

Four out of five Uranus moons likely to have ocean under crust

Re: This is so cool (no pun)

Fish still need oxygen.

On Earth enough dissolves in the water from the atmosphere and underwater plants.

On an icy moon I'm not sure where that oxygen comes from, especially if there's a thick crust of ice over the top and pretty-much no gaseous atmosphere.

Balloon-borne telescope returns first photos in search for dark matter

Helium is cheaper than rocket fuel

But rocket fuel can easily be made from sustainable sources, whereas helium is a bit trickier to make. At some point rocket fuel will be cheaper than helium...

Boffins claim discovery of the first piezoelectric liquid

Re: Aaah, unfortunately paywalled

I think the article said that the piezoelectric effect of the materials they have so far is an order of magnitude less than quartz, so probably not great...

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

Re: Don't get me started...

Or even a saxophone.

A horn is a musical instrument with some sort of noise generator at one end and a conical bore to the other open end: the conical bore means the tube is gradually getting wider along it's length so if you straighten out the curves it would look like a cone (although chopped off at the top, I suppose)

So horns include all of the saxophones (where are single reed generates the noise that then resonates down the horn), and the brass horns like the cornet (lit. little horn), French horn, E-flat horn, euphonium, tuba, Sousaphone etc., but *not* the trumpet - that has a cylindrical bore that only flares at the bell.

As for the cor anglais (English horn), that's not a horn or English...

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

Re: Content

"Computer is running an update process that cannot be interrupted by you and anyone else under any circumstances."

Oh yes it can...

Perhaps 'must not' would be better.

All of the norths are about to align over Britain

Re: Or you could...

More or less straight down my street, which is a pain because it means I had to add some blocks to stand the dish off the wall a bit to get the alignment.

Re: Or you could...

Even with a digital watch you can imagine where the hands would be. With a bit more effort it works in the dark: if you can see the Moon you can work out where the Sun would be based on the phase and then determine where North is (actually, determining South is easier, but then you just go the other way...)

Of course, if it's too dark to see the Sun but clear enough to see the Moon, chances are you can see the relevant stars for your hemisphere...

How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling

Re: *article paid for by Google

And in most cases didn't get up after lunch for at least an hour after the Britsh had finished

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Re: Bad design

I have an AOC monitor that has one button, on the bottom edge, that lights up green when the monitor is on. If I press it in certain ways I can apparently adjust stuff, but it also functions as the on-off button.

I leave it on - it's working fine at the moment, and I dare not press the button to turn it off in case I press it wrong and mess up the settings.

I probably have a manual somewhere, with three pages of English instructions buried among 4795 pages of other languages.

Founder of zero-emissions truck venture Nikola found guilty of $1b fraud

Re: energy storage ... pulling a train of concrete blocks ...

There's at least one more, Ben Cruachan near Loch Awe in Scotland, on a similar scale to Dinorwig.

But you're right: digging tunnels big enough to pour a lake down a mountain through turbines is hardly less infrastructure than a bit of railway track. I suspect the train doesn't quite match the power generation capacity of a big pump-storage system.

Scientists model turbulence to boost space propulsion

Re: Waiting on Moore's clock

I thought DNS was pretty mch an industrial-scale compute job, so either this is an oxymoron, or they truly mean 'really really big'. It's probably been planned for years and now there are facilities big enough to handle it within the time-scale of a Ph.D. project

Heart now pledges 30-seat hybrid electric commercial flights by 2028

Re: It's not time to railroad

There are plenty of examples of railway locomotives in Europe that can run on either electric pickups (two different types in the UK) or diesel. For a locomotive, where weight is not so much of an issue, it works just fine.

I also see that there is work in hand to make battery locomotives too - for some applications like trundling along over long distances a diesel battery hybrid might make sense, especially if the batteries can be charged from overhead or third rail pickups at locations where power is accessible, and also from regenerative braking.

But I don't think the USA has an appetite for rail travel in place of flying or driving...

Demand for software experts pushes tech salaries higher in UK

Re: Discrimination comes in many forms

Age discrimination is certainly not a given - I just got a new programming job at age 52 and the team is almost all middle-aged men, including two other new hires of a similar age to me. Anyone discriminating on age is going to miss out on a lot of experience, but I guess young people are cheaper...

Ransomware attack on UK water company clouded by confusion

Leaks

"They also taunted Thames Water, writing they had spent months inside the company's network and that it had 'very bad holes in their systems.'"

I think they missplet 'cisterns'?

Password recovery from beyond the grave

Re: Legal issues

It seems to be a thing, especially among Americans, to avoid using words like 'died', like it's unlucky or something. See also 'toilet'...

Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows

Re: Bollocks statistics

It doesn't take into account the 2 hours in the middle of the day running/cycling/kayaking/swimming during everyone-else's vague definitions of lunchtime.

I reckon I can do four hours in the morning (starting from the time I'd otherwise be setting off for work), two hours of exercise in the middle, make a bit of lunch to take to my desk, and then do four hours in the afternoon (up to the time I'd otherwise be getting home).

So if I were in meetings at the ends of that day, it would look like I was working 8am to 6pm...

Journalist won't be prosecuted for pressing 'view source'

Re: There’s more than what meets the eye

They said that sort of thing about Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump.

Dido Harding's appointment to English public health body ruled unlawful

Re: Quantum idiots.

At least while they're in prison they wouldn't be cocking up everything else for the rest of us. I'd say the cost of dinner with the prison governor would be saved a million times over by keeping them out of government decisions.

BOFH: What a beautiful classic car. Shame if anything were to happen to it

Re: Fond memories

My Dad had a Morris Oxford too - it was written off after a minor collision with a Mini caused it largely to disappear in a puff of iron oxide dust. The Mini was unscathed...