Posts by Little Mouse

Zendesk sold to private investors two weeks after saying it would stay public

"The effects of those actions are often not much fun for customers of acquired companies."

It's not exactly a barrel of laughs for the employees either.

Teslasuit demo: Taking a crack at force feedback with the 'Glove'

Those human fingers look a little fragile in that robotic glove. I'd be worried about it doing a Roy Blatty on me.

AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

Sentience? Meh...

My pet cat is sentient, but highly unlikely to ever pass a Turing test.

Shouldn't we actually be talking about Sapience?

Airbus flies new passenger airplane aimed at 'long, thin' routes

Re: Why

Ooooh - Matron!

Five Eyes alliance’s top cop says techies are the future of law enforcement

Re: Big words from Australia

Pick a country. Any country...

"...the Five Eyes is watching."

...or is they?

Japan's asteroid probe reportedly found 20 amino acids

Re: Which amino acids?

Exciting stuff - although probably not surprising that Amino Acids have been found. We've known since the 50's that they have a habit of popping into existence if the constituent elements are present.

So yes - which ones? How complex? etc etc.

Higher spec machines lift US PC revenues 40% even as shipments drop

Elephant in the room...

In previous decades, a significant factor in driving up hardware sales would be a new release of Windows coming out.

There's not even a mention of Windows 11 in the article, so I assume that is no longer the case.

TomTom to chop 10% of workforce, blames automation tech

Re: TomTom

My on-board SatNav just died, so I'm suddenly in the market for an external replacement, but have yet to do any real research. So I'll put the question out there:

Is TomTom worth paying for, or do free Android Apps do the job just as well?

i.e. Does it provide a "better" service?

UK opens up 'high-potential individual route' for tech worker immigration

I've spent my time jobbing around the globe, and loved every minute of it. I'm all for removing barriers for entry for people who bring real value to the table by virtue of their skills and work ethic.

When it comes to attracting suitable talent to the UK, I see no sense in limiting the candidate pool to a few select universities. That just smells of yet more elitism and "jobs for the boys" from BJ's intimate circle.

Reg hack attends holographic WebEx meeting, blows away Zoom fatigue

Re: Holographic porn.

"...Another wiggle or two and I burst out of the cockpit and into the engine cavity..."

Fusion won't avert need for climate change 'sacrifice', says nuclear energy expert

Re: "US government has promised around $1 billion in investment in nuclear fusion over five years"

Nice plan, but unfortunately, the science to bring people back from the dead is still 20-30 years away.

One of Arthur C. Clarke's books (maybe 3001...?) touched on the idea that the transition to fusion could actually make Global Warming worse.

Limitless free energy for everyone, but nowhere to dump the excess heat...

If it wasn't for "Physics" constantly getting in the way...

...we'd have cracked fusion decades ago.

Clearview AI wants its facial-recognition tech in banks, schools, etc

Re: Copyright?

Came here to say the same thing. 20 billion copywrite violations could prove to be quite expensive.

ServiceNow ordered a year's worth of hardware to avoid supply chain hassles

Re: Thank You

Just like every person who bought a few more loo rolls when the pandemic started, or driver who tops up their tank in anticipation of expected fuel supply problems.

The result is the same.

Each separate case seems perfectly reasonable when considered in isolation, but really it's just selfishly prioritising anticipated needs over other people's actual immediate needs.

Nvidia brings liquid cooling to A100 PCIe GPU cards for ‘greener’ datacenters

Is liquid cooling really "greener"?

"looking at liquid cooling as a way to cut down on energy consumption"

Assuming that the laws of thermodynamics didn't change whilst I wasn't looking, just how much truth is there to this? In terms of energy expenditure, just how wasteful is air cooling?

The same amount of heat energy has to get moved from A to B, regardless of the medium.

How these crooks backdoor online shops and siphon victims' credit card info

Re: Ah, but how?

A serious deficiency in security is certainly implied.

The FBI's recommendations for being "less of an easy target" include patching regularly, changing default credentials, etc, suggesting that some online businesses are still completely unaware of the basics.

Voyager 1 space probe producing ‘anomalous telemetry data’

Re: 41 hours of latency sounds bad...

"plan the message, send the message, go home for the [night]"

A fair few commentards, like me, would have worked along very similar lines back in the day.

Write & polish your code. Submit it to the overnight processing queue on the mainframe. Only find out the next day just how badly bugged it all was.

We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

I've only heard "Don't you know who I am?" once in my career.

It came from a local councilor whose name & face I have since completely forgotten, and who didn't get re-elected next time around.

"kidding" - nice!

OpenVMS on x86-64 reaches production status with v9.2

Re: I wonder how many people still remember how to use it?

I remember the error "Terminator not found" being used in hilarious ways by some of my colleagues.

Those long nights just flew by.

Microsoft Security Experts: Humans and automation to fight off cyber threats

And now it's Security's turn

I've spent the last 15 years of my life trying to stay one step ahead of the "as a service" curve.

And then each time I get proficient in a new skill someone packages it up neatly and pops it into a cloudy robot that can do my job at scale.

An international incident or just some finger trouble at the console?

Re: Figured out what THAT meant

I, for one, welcome our...

etc

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Re: Full names please.......

There was a Sherry Trifle at the first place I worked.

Also, Mrs Mouse had an aged aunt called Ida Payne.

Re: Full names please.......

Ben There, Dan That...

<sigh>

Off the grid, Day 10: Yandex's only datacenter outside of Russia still running on diesel

All puns aside - we've seen in the UK that it's not particularly hard to choke the supply of diesel, intentionally or not.

Perhaps Extinction Rebellion and their kind could unglue themselves from UK tarmac and make themselves useful in Finland?

Shareholders turn the screws on IBM and its gag orders

Re: "there was (and is) no systemic age discrimination at our company"

"Mister"?

(But upvoted anyway)

Alibaba launches collaboration suite for smart glasses

Forget work...

Is there any reason why these can't be used for gaming, or as virtual cinema screens?

Microsoft fixes Point of Sale bug that delayed Windows 11 startup for 40 minutes

P.O.S.

I'm amazed that Windows 11 has already been deployed into live environments like this. The wrinkles haven't been ironed out yet and it's effectively still in Beta.

P.O.S. indeed.

Re: FFS.

Everyone should always have some pocket cheese or meat handy, for emergencies like this.

Your AI can't tell you it's lying if it thinks it's telling the truth. That's a problem

Re: Cue Dr Susan Calvin

I'm ignoring your comment because you are false data.

Immersion-cooled colo is coming to Ohio... via a crypto-mining datacenter

Re: I have a much better idea

And here's another idea, for anyone/everyone who issues press releases:

Stop using the phrase "Perfect storm" to describe literally absolutely effing everything.

Blood pressure monitor won't arrive for Apple Watch before 2024 – report

Re: it's not measurements

Blood pressure should be easy to measure with a wristwatch. They just need a way to inflate/deflate the strap.

Admit it, it would be pretty cool.

Fish mentality: If The Rock told you to eat flies, would you buy my NFT?

Re: Lab-on-a-fish

I'm a fan of Pot-Fish: Synthetically and artificially fish-flavoured instant snack products in a plastic pot-shaped container.

But I avoid pale imitations such as Cuppa-Fish and I Can't Believe It's Not Pot-fish.

Blimey! That's good!

Cryptomining groups fight fiercely for cloud resources

Genuine question:

If the crypto-currency bubble were to burst overnight, who in the "real" world, apart from criminals and the gullible, would suffer?

I imagine there must be a few pension & investment funds out there that include crypto as part of their portfolio, but hopefully none that depend on it.

Microsoft backtracks on lack of easy Windows browser choice

Re: Please explain to me

"to 32k modem on win3 with a huge CRT"

You call that a curse? Those were my halcyon IT days. A time when Computers were a fun hobby, and I was optimistically looking forward to carving out a career working with them.

It's all been downhill since then...

1,000-plus AI-generated LinkedIn faces uncovered

Like you, all correct, although for the first few that I saw I had to take a bit of time to decide. After 20 or so I've started to fly through them, taking only a second or two to choose.

Sounds like prime AI/Machine Learning fodder to me, so I imagine that it won't be too long before we have AIs generating images that don't contain the obvious giveaway artefacts.

Sealed, confidential IBM files in age-discrimination case now public to all

Off-topic, but reminds me of the psychology rule of thumb: That anyone who uses the argument "I wouldn't lie to you" / "I wouldn't lie about this" to try to convince you of something is probably someone who would lie to you by default.

Are we springing into a Y2K-class nightmare?

With a slight tweak here and there, your plan just might work.

First, re-order that list to Play-Sleep-Work to ensure the important stuff gets done. And then maybe just leave the day at 24hrs long.

Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows

Bollocks statistics

"the average workday span (the gap between first and last meeting or chat) for the average Teams user had increased by 46 minutes"

Since when was the gap between your first & last meeting of the day a meaningful measure of anything?

Personally, MY "workday span" is the the time I spend in the office added to the time I spend commuting, which has gone down considerably since mostly-working-from-home thank you very much.

Doom comes to the Pi Pico

"the game rocks along usually between 30-35 FPS"

Sigh - I seem to remember my old 386 juddered along at around 15 FPS.

And if I stumbled into a large "outdoor" area with lots of enemies, things got really sticky. I'd often end up dead before I even saw what killed me.

Boys outnumber girls 6 to 1 in UK compsci classes

Re: Problem?

Is something preventing girls from choosing compsci?

Well, yes. That's exactly what the evidence suggests. But figuring out what that "something" is? That's the kicker.

UK criminal defense lawyer hadn't patched when ransomware hit

However - "Tuckers refused to pay the ransom" is a definite plus.

It's not WW3. Spotify, Discord, Google Cloud had a wobble

Re: "So far there's been no such actions..."

But we have to assume that they've thought of us thinking of that...

So maybe they'll wait even longer.

Deere & Co won't give out software and data needed for repairs, watchdog told

Nominative Determinism

An attorney called Crooks? Sweet.

PsiQuantum envisions a datacenter-sized quantum computer

You'd think a "quantum" computer would be really really small.

Customer service chatbot sector forecast to be worth $7bn this year

Re: Alternate Reality?

As long as a chatbot is also able to give me useful contact details when it knows it can't answer my question then I won't complain too loudly. A few do this, but they're overwhelmingly in the minority.

The majority of them are just inferior versions of FAQs. At least with an actual FAQ list you know when you've got to the end.