Posts by Jimmy2Cows

Windows 11 comes bearing THAAS, Trojan Horse as a service

Re: emphasis on the last syllable

ert...?

Survey of astronomers and geophysicists shines a light on 'bleak' systemic bullying

Which only goes to prove how subjective the whole thing is.

Telling someone to do their job is not bullying. Telling them repeatedly to do their job, if they're still not doing it, is still not bullying.

Telling someone repeatedly to do their job, when they are doing their job, that's probably bullying. It could also be simple management misperception, looking at the wrong KPIs or whatever.

Anyone on the receiving end of that may well feel like they're being bullied, even if they really aren't.

That's why this kind of highly subjective survey, with no definition or data control, is not so helpful.

Without defining the framework or any data validation, it's impossible to see how this survey could possibly yield informed, balanced, policy decisions.

At best it indicates a lot of people feel there is a problem, possibly involving bullying, possibly involving people feeling hard done by. But that's all it indicates, which doesn't make it very useful and that's a shame. Genuine bullying at any stage of life is a problem which needs to be erradicated.

Activision Blizzard accused by California watchdog of fostering 'frat boy' culture, fatally toxic atmosphere

I do not know a single woman in the game industry that feels HR is on her side.

I don't know of anyone in any industry that feels HR is on their side. Perhaps the C-suiters. For everyone else, HR protects the company and its executives from its workforce, not to help the workforce.

Exsparko-destructus! What happens when wand waving meets extremely poor wiring

And a charred, smoking sparky? Or was he somehow spared voluntary electrocution?

Dog eats UK government's Hydrogen Strategy homework just as summer recess arrives

Yeah good ol' reliable wind power, eh?

The amount spent on these wonderful renewables could have gone on stable baseload and energy independence for the UK, but no: steady, reliable nuclear evil, intermittent to non-existent renewable power good.

Re: Enjoy the choice

The smart choice would be all of the above. But... politicians, smart choices... rarely seen in together in sentences unless interjected by "don't make".

Re: Where does the hydrogen come from?

At least that's carbon neutral, in principle. But it's still an uncomfortable truth that most "renewable" providers would prefer not to mention.

Re: Where does the hydrogen come from?

Hydrogen may be one solution to the fill-up time, grid-capacity and charging-availability problems of BEV, and so it could be a viable alternative for transport.

But it's a pig to store in useful volume and/or density, and likes to make its way through many solid materials. It's odourless and invisible when burning. Could solve those with a tiny amount of additives, but that may have other utility and environmental problems.

Personally I'd happily trade environmentally sound but less range for fill-up times and availablilty similar to current petrol/diesel. BEV are just about usable now, because hardly anyone has one. I sure don't go over the grid-capacity, charge times, charging availability, lack of off-road parking problems again that will come with mass adoption.

You're not imagining it. Amazon and AWS want to hire all your friends, enemies, and everyone in between

Re: Space Rockets don't grow on trees

No orbits were molested by that phallic rocket. He just popped above the Karman line for a few moments.

Engineers' Laurel and Hardy moment caused British Airways 787 to take an accidental knee

Re: Hang on a moment...

Smells like Boeing beancounters in action. Again.

"Logic" (I use the term generously) that perhaps went something like this: Why have the cost of machining two differently shaped holes and corresponding differently shaped pins, when a single hole and pin shape will suffice?

Classic failure to understand the vital reason for the differences. Just another line item to be cut.

Re: Is there some special reason...

Someone already took steps. Which is why they couldn't find a ladder.

Badum tish.

Buyer of $28m Blue Origin space ticket has a scheduling conflict – so this teen will go instead

Subtle distinction

Oxygen doesn't burn.

Re: "Now I'll become the youngest astronaut ever because I'm 18 years old"

Does that include the time it takes to eat the pizza?

Re: What is the word for someone who is definitely not an astronaut, but says they are?

Dickhead?

Windows 10 to hang on for five more years with 21H2 update

Re: PR disaster

Wasn't sure whether to upvote for cynically truthful predictive accuracy, or downvote for how depressingly tragic that is. In the end, I upvoted.

Cyberlaw experts: Take back control. No, we're not talking about Brexit. It's Automated Lane Keeping Systems

Re: It's the driver. get your hands off!

I feel like maybe you're overestimating the quality of the training sets, and the abilities of ML.

Re: Conflict

Uuuuuum... Yeah... Can we have some of what you've been smoking? It's been a long week.

Re: Automation

The difference between simple and easy. The rocket equation is simple. Turning it into a working reliable rocket is not easy.

Re: central control

Absolutely not. Just need vehicle to vehicle comms within a speed-dependent radius, and better sensors than just relying on cameras i.e. radar, lidar.

There's simply no need for some kind of overlord watchdog system to know where all vehicles are at all times. There's enough of that with ANPR as is.

Teen turned away from roller rink after AI wrongly identifies her as banned troublemaker

Re: exhibit ingrained racist assumptions in the design

I think we can all understand the point you're trying to make here, but that statement is a bit of a stretch.

There's no racist assumptions in the design, it's just that dark anything reflects significantly less light than pale anything. Elementary physics. Cameras either need a longer exposure to properly image dark things, which will affect image quality in other ways, or need higher gain which can lead to image noise and overexposure of brighter image regions.

There's no easy answer. It's not like this is an already-solved problem whose solution is being deliberately ignored because racism.

Physics isn't racist, it's simply physics.

Facial-recognition technology gets a smack in the chops from civil rights campaigners

can be used to personalise in-store marketing and improve customer service

Oh God, no! Just NO.

I don't need or want personalised in-store marketing. I want to buy what I want/need from the store without being hassled. I want customer service that is available and responsive when I need help finding or returning something.

AFR solves none of that. Fuck off with it already.

[Icon = what should be done with AFR, especially in retail environments as a customer experience tool]

BT to phase out 3G in UK by 2023 for EE, Plusnet, BT Mobile subscribers

Re: sensible thing

Covered the "smart" meter with a Faraday cage? Refused to allow them in your home at all?

Lenovo says it’s crammed a workstation into a litre of space – less than three cans of beer

Simple or bendy?

Depends on your preferred tipple. Some are 500ml, others the full-on 568ml.

Either way it's not a reliable standard for a unit of volume. El Reg authors should stick to approved El Reg units.

OK, you're paying data charges in the EU, but you can still roam free in, er, Iceland

Re: duct tape

Only if said duct tape is also "oven-ready" and "world-beating".

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

Re: At workers' expense

Not sure anyone is forced to work for ol' Beardy. Yeah he should've given credit where it's due, but had VG spent their "money to burn" on salaries, surely they'd not have a product to build (setting aside whether or not said product is a worthwhile endeavour or simply a "because I can" vanity piece). No product = no reason to employ anyone.

If you've mastered Python 101, you're probably better at programming than OpenAI's prototype Codex

Re: public repositories mis-parse

I initially scanned that sentence as public lavatories. Apt, given the output quality.

So it's useless, then.

11-year-old graduate announces plans to achieve immortality by 'replacing body parts with mechanical parts'

Re: current technological level

Nice rant. Seems pretty clear his goal is to advance our technological level, not stick at current levels.

Massive 3D catzilla gets crowds purring in busy Shinjuku district of Tokyo

Komatsu make a (possibly) adequately sized mobile litter tray:

Komatsu mobile kitty litter tray

Re: what's not to like

So, umm, steganografeline...?

Belgian boffins dump Starlink dish terminal's firmware, gain root access and a few ideas

Re: Here's my guess

login: elon

password: muskrulez

The James Webb Space Telescope, a project dating back to the late 1900s, may launch this very century

Re: Well

No such thing as "rapid" when building space telescopes. It took 4 years just to develop a test demonstrator for a single mirror segment:

https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/observatory/ote/mirrors/index.html

Now they have it, things could go faster in the future. Maybe. The mirrors still take a lot of time to grind, for example. Maybe loft a few more JWST-class 'scopes pointing in different directions, if orbital dynamics permit.

But that's just keeping like for like. Going bigger, better, more capable means pushing the envelope still further, which means long leads times, technical demonstrators, designing and trying different approaches.

British Airways data breach lawsuit settled: Airline coughs up potentially millions to make sueball bounce away

Re: It won’t cost BA a penny

That's not how it works. They don't pay £32M less tax. It just reduces the amount they are taxed on.

Ransomware-hit law firm gets court order asking crooks not to publish the data they stole

Re: rouge states

By making themselves conveniently red?

Re: D'oh

Lawyers thinking like lawyers...?

The bastards stole our data. Quick! File an injunction to prevent them disclosing the content!

Pentagon scraps $10bn JEDI winner-takes-all cloud contract

Spin

More likely it's all spin for DoD to save face. Avoids them admitting they didn't specify the contract properly in the first place.

NHS England staff voice concerns about access controls on US spy-tech firm Palantir's COVID-19 data store

Re: Up to the elbow

I'm sure the penetration is being greased by brown envelopes and future non-exec directorships.

Brit firm fined £200k for banging on about missold PPI in 11.4 million nuisance calls

It also told them that failure to do is a criminal offence

Doing it the first place should be a criminal offence, with mandatory serious jail time for the directors and executives of any company committing said offence.

Minimum 5 years, no early release. Sentence scales by a year per million calls made, to a maximum of 10 years, again with no chance of early release.

Cross-discipline boffin dream team issues social media warning: FIX IT NOW!

Re: looking at pictures of cats and hope it all goes away

They don't know yet. I dimly recall a documentary disguised as an advert showing that cats had developed opposable thumbs.

Catmagedon approacheth, as certain as night follows day.

Digital delinquent deletes developer's database during disastrous Docker deployment, defaults damned

Re: my compliments

I think you left your coat behind. I'll get it for you.

‘What are the odds someone will find and exploit this?’ Nice one — you just released an insecure app

Re: Life is full of surprises

Microsoft...?

Re: Why = Money

Where do you draw the line between poor software, and tried really hard to check as much as possible but stil missing something?

I've been doing this 30-odd years and while I'm always generally improving, I'd never claim my code is completely bug free, vuln free, 100% tested and audited.

We have design reviews, unit tests, functional tests, smoke tests, security audits with hundreds of rules covering a wide range of possible vulnerabilities. Can that cover anything? Hell no. 100% coverage is impossible, and chasing it rapidly hits diminishing returns.

Occasionally something still sneaks through, or a new problem is discovered that none of the checks and audits could find as it wasn't even a recognised problem.

How much mitigation would that provide us under your "bunch of liability"?

Some places a happy to bang out shitty code. A lot of places are not. Quality is important as a driving factor for customer adoption and retention. Other places sit somewhere in between. It's a continuum, and painting the situation as black and white feels deliberately disingenuous. Or should that be ingenuous...? I guess either can work. This wholy black and white perspective is certainly naive.

Pyjama bottoms crew, listen up: In 2022 we'll still be at home

Re: Be careful what you wish for

If you want to quickly sort companies that are good to work for, from companies no one should touch with a 10ft dogshit-tipped barge pole, that kind of invasive surveillance seems an ideal tool.

Trust people to do their job and mostly it'll happen. You'll quickly identify unproductive workers, because, well, they'll be unproductive.

Micromanaging staff into a state of paranoid fear is not the way to get good results.

Google says its artificial intelligence is faster and better than humans at laying out chips for artificial intelligence

Re: 3 Laws Safe?

That would imply the ads are vaguely useful.

Au contraire.

The ads will be for an item or activity you recently purchased which may or may not be in any way related to the situation you now need rescuing from.

Linus Torvalds tells kernel list poster to 'SHUT THE HELL UP' for saying COVID-19 vaccines create 'new humanoid race'

Re: Critical Thinking

More that kids used to be taught to question things, instead of blindly following whatever drivel is spouted.

But that leads to older kids and adults daring to question what teachers and "authority" tell them, and teachers and "authority" figures don't like that.

Oh, the temerity. The very idea that someone might dare question their betters!

People are far easy to manage, manipulate and control when they are taught from an early age not to look behind the curtain.

Hong Kong to explore its own digital currency and keep testing China’s Digital Yuan

Re: Anonymous

So, Richard, how's that anonymity working out for you?

Tesla owners win legal fight after software update crippled older Model S batteries

Re: The overwhelming majority of the ongoing maintenance cost and effort is ... the ICE itself

Au contraire, starfish hair... maintaining the ICE is but one aspect. Brakes, suspension, steering, tyres, heating, cooling, AC, bodywork, trim, interior, safety features, electronics... EV have all of these which still need to be maintained.

The motor still connects to a powertrain, just it's electric instead of dino-juice. It still needs to be maintained, though it's arguable simplier than an ICE. But, there is still the transmission system: driveshafts, differentials, axles, ball joints, control arms, linkages, possibly a gearbox. Plus, an EV has a bunch of complex power electronics not found in pure ICE cars. Or you may have multiple electric motors, per axle or per wheel, which eliminates some transmission complexity but adds others.

So, no. EV's haven't removed complexity. Just some aspects are different. The vast majority is unchanged.

Frontier sued by FTC, six states for allegedly over-promising, under-delivering broadband

Re: The ideal Amercian business

I think you could say the same of any business anywhere in the world. Minimal outlay for maximum return tends to be a common driving force. Some US companies take that to extremes, but it'll happen anywhere one has a real or effective monopoly.

iFixit slams Samsung's phone 'upcycling' scheme for falling short of what was promised

Re: useless

Most likely referring to the perception of uselessness, obsolecence and underperformance that phone companies and network providers want consumers to believe. If Joe Public believes their current phone will be perfectly good for many more years, where's the compulsion to buy a new one, sign up for a new X-year contract?