Posts by macjules

UK police dangle £75 million to digitize its VHS tape archives

Re: How much?

I recall many years ago that a company successfully bid £120m to telecine the BBC’s entire film archive into a search engine optimised digitally accessibly format.

Then it was demonstrated that one (randomly selected) day from the beginning of the 1930’s had more than 100 hours of footage ranging up to more than 5,000 hours for events such as 6th June 1944.

I would be very wary of taking on a police contract to digitise anything (especially microfiche) unless you knew the exact extent of work to be done.

Microsoft tweaks fine print to warn everyone not to take its AI seriously

Re: Dreamland

I attended a Microsoft Edu. forum on AI a few weeks ago in the UK. The CoPilot for GitHub demonstrator actually remarked that using 'please' and 'thank you' in your statement can show a marked improvement in the responses from the AI.

I am still trying to work out if this is what passes for Microsoft humour.

Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison – with a $500m bill

Re: Does 11 years actually mean 11 years?

Similar to the UK. She could serve just a third of her sentence but given the serious nature of the offence and her pretty clear lack of remorse I doubt she will get released that quickly.

Twitch bans AI-generated Seinfeld show for making transphobic jokes

Remove the root cause

If humans/upright monkeys/apes cause an AI to generate bad text then we should remove that genre of human/upright monkey/ape from the species.

I, for one, welcome my GPT overlords.

Russia: Hey, don't act surprised if we're still on the ISS in 2030

Re: "built and ready to use until 2028"

Anything can be done so long as Vlad wishes it, including launching a new space station. Whether or not it can actually be used is a totally different matter.

Behold this drone-dropping rifle with two-mile range

Re: "lean" innovation

“The lessons of WWII that produced the AK47, which was copied from the German Sturmgewehr 43 and 44.”

FTFY :)

IBM's self-sailing Mayflower suffers another fault in Atlantic crossing bid

Have you tried …

… switching it off and on again?

HP turns back on $1b in annual sales by quitting Russia and Belarus

Just blame Mike Lynch

.. and chuck another £1Bn on the bonfire.

Apple delivers desktop, mobile OS updates, patches dozens of security holes

“gender-neutral voice”

Speaking as someone still blissfully fast asleep, I.e. not “woke”, could a kind individual help me out here and explain what a gender-neutral voice is?

UK govt signs IT contracts 'without understanding' the needs

Ui/UX?

Surely they must have people who have done user experience before committing to billion pound budgets? This is at the very heart of any digital planning.

Deutsche Bank seeks options as sanctions threaten Russian dev unit

I see they are now advertising for developers to be located in Birmingham. Don't know about you but I think it is a bit cruel on the sanctions to make people relocate to Birmingham,

Capgemini wins £30m deal to work on UK customs

More jobs for les garçons

I see Brexit is going to plan then.

1) Vote to leave the EU

2) Realise we do not have a proper customs system in place

3) Get an EU company to build it.

US Navy in mad dash to salvage F-35C that fell off a carrier into South China Sea

Re: Software?

The good news is that if the Chinese get their hands on an F-35 then the Royal Navy will finally be able to fully arm both aircraft carriers via Amazon.

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel green-lights Mike Lynch's extradition to US to face Autonomy fraud charges

Re: Astounding !

And to think that yesterday Mike Lynch had to worry about which private jet to use and now (albeit in 14 days' time) he just has to worry about 'top bunk or bottom?'

HPE has 'substantially succeeded' in its £3.3bn fraud trial against Autonomy's Mike Lynch – judge

Re: Lynch should be in prison

Deloitte should have been in the dock with him on this. Lucky for them they just had to pay £15m in fines for a series of botched audits.

Carked it, Diem? Zuckerberg's grand cryptocurrency thing may sell off assets for $200m

Carpe Diem

Less 'seize the day' and more 'seize the assets' if you ask me.

Meta trains data2vec neural network to grok speech, images, text so it can 'understand the world'

"self-supervised learning"

Would that apply to Facebook itself?

I think not.

NASA's Curiosity finds signs of ancient life on Mars. Or maybe not. More data needed

I gather that a probe from a galaxy far. far away landed in the middle of the Sahara desert recently and concluded that there are no signs of life on this planet.

On Christmas night, a computer logs a call to say his user has stopped working…

Re: Christmas Day for triple pay, yes please...

As "middle management" in a government IT department it fell to me to be at work when nobody else wanted to be or when everyone else was out getting slaughtered, and as "middle management" that meant "doing one's duty for no extra pay". For a number of years Christmas Eve generally meant "12 hour shift playing Quake 2 CTF" and that also included, to my better half's annoyance, 1999 New Year's Eve.

Facebook locks out 1,500 fake accounts used by cyber-spy firms to snoop on people, alerts 50k potential targets

Meta announces large-scale job losses citing “internet mercenaries using its social networks to help governments violate human rights”, claiming that this depriving Meta employees of a living.

FTFY

Playing jigsaw on my roof: They can ID you from your hygiene habits

Re: Don’t joke

Everything I shred tends to end up as hamster/gerbil bedding. I challenge even the most hardened Iranian shredded document solver to endure hours of gerbil excreta in reassembling that lot.

Assange extradition case goes to UK Home Secretary as High Court rules he can be sent to US for trial

Re: thou

Especially when your case will end up on Priti Patel’s desk,

“Extradition approved. Sorry about the bloodstains on the folder.”

Irish Health Service ransomware attack happened after one staffer opened malware-ridden email

Re: Patient Zero?

And don’t forget the multiple uses of ‘probably’ by PWC, who ‘probably’ charged HSE a lot more than the $20m ransom.

One of the beauties of cyber security consultancy: you can state obvious facts (“you’ve been hacked” or “what? No backup?”) with no responsibility and can charge whatever you like.

A smarter alternative to password recognition could be right in front of us: Unique, invisible, maybe even deadly

Re: On a related topic...

Whoever invested the facemask never encountered someone in the street who has just broken wind in front of you, thus ensuring that you get the full benefit of his emission and it stays inside your facemask.

No joke, I can assure you,

You, me and debris: NASA cans ISS spacewalk because it's getting too risky outside

Damage protection from space debris

How much additional protection, and thus extra fuel, does a rocket have to carry because of debris?

UK Test and Trace finding consultant habit hard to break: More contracts go to Deloitte and Accenture

Re: IR35

Wondered when someone might mention that. As for the "because the skills NHST&T was trying to recruit for ...," they just did not want to pay the appropriate rate for the job, hence the lack of takers.

Reg debate asks readers about their post pandemic status. Half ask, 'What status?'

management is looking to drive the business forward with AI, IoT and Big Data.

This is where I usually email management a Dilbert cartoon

One click, one goal, one mission: To get a one-touch flush solution

Re: Thank you for drawing my attention to these devices

Eden:” At Eton we were taught to wash our hands after using the WC”

Churchill: “At Harrow we were taught not to pee on our hands”

Re: Don't make it a Castodrama

One worse has to be Leroy Merlin. Their Cotê D’Azur branch is just off an almost unmarked road which, if you miss it, puts you right into the A8 péage. The store is up a long winding roads at the top of a hill which peters out to a track before you see the entrance. Store service makes you long for the occasional insult you get at Castodrama or even (what my nearest and dearest calls) BalsUpitrand.

UK's newly merged Foreign Office puts £40m on table for hardware, software, services

Deloitte?

Deloitte has picked up the contract to be a guiding hand for the technology and organisational changes the new department might need.

Better add another couple of zeros to that £40m figure then.

Facebook may soon reveal new name – we're sure Reg readers will be more creative than Zuck's marketroids

Re: If it's located in Hell...

Ah, but in Hell a whistleblower is someone who has to blow a whistle loudly and constantly in order to avoid being slowly dunked into molten magma.

Whatever name marketing could come up with will undoubtedly be rendered by Zuck into something easy that he can understand. His wife (Priscilla) is commonly referred to as 'wife' while the dog is just called 'beast'. Facebook will probably just be called "corporation" or "work" but at an extreme could be called ZuckCorp after his inspiration LexCorp.

Good Grief! Ransomware gang has only gone and pwned the NRA – or so it claims

Re: "the cybergang at arms is under US financial sanctions"

"I'll give you my website when you pry it from my cold, dead server"

Canon makes 'all-in-one' printers that refuse to scan when out of ink, lawsuit claims

Re: No print? No buy.

Not just that but Canon "inks" tend to be small, cost one hell of a lot and that you need 6 separate ink cartridges. Also the printers have a nasty habit of going into "petulant" mode without warning and then demanding that you go over to the printer and confirm that you are indeed printing to A4 paper, or whatever.

Mine got left in a London street with the warning "works fine, will bankrupt you and may cause irrational anger".

Electric car makers ready to jump into battery recycling amid stuttering supply chains

Re: "Less than 5 per cent of lithium-ion batteries are recycled today"

Awful isn't it? One wonders if you could make batteries from something that is easily disposed of or recycled, such as Sodium Ion ...

Shatner breaks the age barrier, goes where no nonagenarian has gone before with Blue Origin rocket trip

Re: Well, that's Captain Kirk ticked off.

Kremmen: Carla! Is that Hortense?

Carla: I dunno, she looks pretty relaxed to me Captain...

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the BBC stage a very British coup to rescue our data from Facebook and friends

We’re talking Zuckerberg here, right? Hand me the ammo please Alice.

Tech contractors fume over payday outage at Giant Pay after it sniffs 'suspicious activity'

Re: Any reason to delay payments

Slightly annoyed that the agency I contract through pays OutsIde IR35 contractors within 14 days of receipt of funds but pays Inside IR35 contractors 30 days after funds received from the client (which can be 180 days). I am still waiting to be paid fo work done in May 2021.

Don't forget to leave a rating: Amazon chairman meeting with UK prime minister to talk taxes

Re: Philosophy of taxation

Can not upvote your comment enough. Yes it is truly awful to see these billionaires squander cash on “my rocket goes higher than yours” projects, but where is the point of caring about this any more? They are not going to pay tax simply because of how outraged we are at their behaviour or indeed because Boris asks them to pay a bit more.

RAF chief: Our Reaper drones (sorry, SkyGuardians) stand ready to help British councils

... can also mount aerial surveillance equipment

So you get a photo of the smoking crater where your car was recently incorrectly parked together with an £18,000 bill for the missile used to take out your car and the whole block surrounding it?

Moments like these need @RAF_Luton

Amazon says Elon Musk's wicked, wicked ways mean SpaceX's Starlink 2.0 should not be allowed to fly

Dear Mr Bezos

The last but one person* who attacked me received a free Tesla Roadster, has a rather good view of your home and I dare say even one of your concentration camps distribution centres from orbit.

* The last one I called a pedo guy since he didn't like my idea about rescuing children from a cave.

Yours,

Elon

Guntrader breach perp: I don't think it's a crime to dump 111k people's details online in Google Earth format

Providing a shopping list for the UK's criminal fraternity as well as causing gun owners to now be forced to increase their home protection could not possibly be a cause for 'terror'.

No doubt the SWRCCU have their excuses and PR well prepared when a family is murdered in their home for their firearms collection.

UK tech investors buy data centre from the land of ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow

Re: Let's hope they know...

Luckily their only goal is the western shore.

Academics tell UK lords that folk aren't keen on predictive policing, facial recognition, heightened surveillance

Re: The Government is singing from the Philip K Dick Songbook because ...

Think they threw that one away some time ago and opted for a state like Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, where everyone lives in an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass, which assists mass surveillance.

A speech recognition app goes into a bar. Speak up if you’ve heard it already

I closed the window.

I do hope you read up on your 'Direction générale de la sécurité civile et de la gestion des crises' pamphlet. Makes for slightly less humorous reading than the US "Duck and Cover" equivalent.

Confessions of a ransomware negotiator: Well, somebody's got to talk to the criminals holding data hostage

Shah and his team get very little intelligence from the police

Could tell you that without the need for a "ransomware negotiator".

Think you can solve the UK's electric vehicle charging point puzzle? The Ordnance Survey wants to hear about it

Well, we all know what happens

The contract is awarded to Capita* to implement a national UK EV charging system at a cost to taxpayers of £1.3 billion. Come 2033 there are still no EV charging points except for some at Capita's headquarters in Reading. Capita offer to remedy the situation at a cost to the taxpayer of another £2 billion.

* or insert parasitical service corporation of your choice.

Oh the humanity: McDonald's out of milkshakes across Great Britain

Re: My milkshake

Mr Nigel Farage will no doubt be breathing a sigh of relief.

Of course there is always Burger King ...