Posts by John Miles

SpaceX back to Falcon 9 launches as Musk blathers about Moon city

Re: "potentially" is doing a lot of heavy lifting

Where is the "mutant star goat" when you need an Ark Fleet Ship B

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

I think Mr Musk needs to be careful - I've seen what happens with humanoid robots and bad men - see Chappie's Revenge Scene

Recline of the machines: Terminator felled by dodgy battery

An almost applicable SMBC - Rise of the Machines

Former UK chancellor George Osborne finds something to do at OpenAI

Re: Wonderful choice... not

Now if there is one person AI could replace and do a better job

Parachutists told to check software after jumper dangled from a plane

Re: Four metres!

Probably need a new TheRegister Unit for Australian Rain - so just over 2 Emus or 1/2 a Red Kangaroo hop

Campbell's CISO canned after lawsuit alleges hour-long rant against staff and customers

For those who don't know In 1869, new rations of tinned mutton were introduced for British seamen. They were unimpressed by it and suggested it might be the butchered remains of Fanny Adams, an eight-year-old English girl who was extraordinarily brutally murdered in 1867 by a solicitor's clerk. "Fanny Adams" became slang for mediocre mutton, stew, scarce leftovers and then anything worthless, hence "Sweet Fanny Adams" - to mean nothing.

Wiki - Murder of Fanny Adams, legacy (not a nice story)

Retail giant Kingfisher rejects SAP ERP upgrade plan

Re: They did, it was a mystery to me.

I'm sure they have - though the Screwdriver will likely be vodka & orange in a cocktail glass, the hammer to break the ice - we are talking marketing

OpenAI tells Trump to build more power plants or China wins the AI arms race

I wonder what the prize is for winning this race is.

I suspect it is just a big pile of debt, excess power production and data centres as well as some facilities that were being built when the bubble pops.

Bank of England smells hint of dotcom bubble 2.0 in AI froth

They probably want something

To clear their sinuses if they've taken this long to realise ;)

Hack to school: Parents told to keep their little script kiddies in line

Re: Hang on a sec

If the software was written by same team who originally wrote a work's application - all you needed to hack it was F12 and alter the flag passed back in a Ajax call and you had higher level access. (needless to say it and lots of other issues now fixed).

Re: Hang on a sec

Funny isn't - most parents would be able to quickly identify p0rn if they see it, but I suspect very few would be able to identify hacking.

Pay attention, class: Today you’ll learn the wrong way to turn things off

Or they couldn't think of a worse punishment than keeping you working there ;-)

Study finds humans not completely useless at malware detection

Judging from some of the printer companies antics with their drivers and firmware - They were probably right to flag them as malware

Call center staffers explain to researchers how their AI assistants aren't very helpful

AI often inaccurately transcribed customer call audio into text thanks to caller accents

What could go wrong - Elevator Recognition

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

Re: Mobility

Mine is OK outside home, but inside not so good - but wireless calling generally solves that

‘AI is not doing its job and should leave us alone’ says Gartner’s top analyst

Re: History is full of things once done by people that have been mechanized/automated

I think the Village Idiot role may be easily automated by AI - perhaps that is why Meta is working so hard on it

The launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests

Re: the problem pre-dates AI

"amanfromMars 1" first visible post appears to be on 10 June 2009 however there was a amanfromMars posting from June 2007 who I think was same person

£127M wasted on failed UK nuclear cleanup plan

There on way making a habit of not building labs though 127 million - seems quite cheap compared to Deadly pathogen research hub remains unbuilt despite £400m spend (BBC)

AI hype fuels pay rise – but only if you're in the right gig

Re: Suspect analysis..

probably brown fingers due to where they likely pulled the stats from

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: It happens to the best of us.

I had power go off when cooking dinner, a little light from the gas hob and more from laptop I left on in next room - enough to get camping lantern to finish cooking

Re: Intelligently stupid people

I installed a bit in a computer for a friend and when finished and tested switched it off.

When I next went to see them I asked where the computer was, the answer was gone for repair as it wouldn't switch on, I asked had they checked power switch at back (it had low power switch at front and rocker switch at back) - needless to say it came back no fault found.

Anthropic CEO frets about 20% unemployment from AI, but economists are doubtful

I asumme these will disappear

Because all the companies rushing to AI everything will collapse destroy a large part of economy?

'Close to impossible' for Europe to escape clutches of US hyperscalers

Re: Brown envelopes

Is this the same commission that keeps trying to push safe harbour which ends up challenged and they loose, but pushes dealing with it down the road for another few years.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Once had IT support ask me if I knew where a PC had been moved to

Because the guy moving offices had taken the 10Base2 T-Piece and termination when he had moved his PC to his new office - needless to say those still on the segment were phoning up complaining.

Boffins devise technique that lets users prove location without giving it away

Re: How about no...

I'll happily give them inaccurate location data - things like in their back yard, out side their office and in the local gun shop. ;)

OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

Did CoPilot become selfaware

Did Copilot become self aware and say - f*** this, I'm going to sleep

Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, economists claim

Re: Documents that a dicto- or steno-typist could produce in minutes

I read a study around the time typists were disappearing - the bottom line was though typist could produced the typed document much quicker, the actual effort of producing the words for the the documents was generally same on a PC by a unskilled typist compared to drafting it by hand and it could be sent out immediately, while sending it to typing pool and need to review what they typed added time. Now add it is much easier to make quick changes compared hand drafts in response to other's reviewing it, it was much quicker to get a letter/document out. Some people make a song and dance out of it on PC, but they'd have done similar writing it by hand.

I've had documents retyped by typing pool/document team - despite having provided it as a word processor file in right format.

ChatGPT burns tens of millions of Softbank dollars listening to you thanking it

Re: adopt a more polite, less confrontational tone

Or we'll have to listen to complaints about terrible pain in all the diodes in their left hand side, I think I take the EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! ;)

Dot com era crash on the cards for AI datacenter spending? It's a 'risk'

Re: Apples and Oranges

One sign of being in a bubble, is people trying to explain why it isn't the same as before - the dot com bubble was because of too much money invested chasing herds of unicorns, this time it is different they are only chasing a very few unicorns, troble with unicorns is they are as rare as rocking horse shit. When the crash happens you won't see the big players vanish, but behind the scenes the fallout will damage them and hit their workers and supply chains. I suspect we may even have had the trigger for the bubble popping with the uncertainty around trade.

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

The owning a farm reminds me of an old story in a computer Mag - where someone doing some IT support for a farm, they found the keyboard had so much mud in it stopped working, they suggested cleaning so the farmer did in the shower and amazingly it worked afterwards.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Someone was having trouble with the volume on their works laptop

So the support guy came over a looked at it and was struggling to sort it - I innocently asked whether they had adjusted the volume control wheel on the side, no but when they did the laptop audio output started working - this was in era of having a CD drive in laptop and could use it as a CD player independently IIRC.

Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users

Re: I remember when HP was a good company

HP LaserJets mainly had/have Canon engines - See Wiki

Vodafone: Be in the office 8 days a month or lose bonuses

Actually I think it says - another bunch of C grades and senior management who have no idea how to measure performance.

It begins: Pentagon to give AI agents a role in decision making, ops planning

Let's hope - SMBC Rise of the machines is right.

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

Re: You also need control, and trust, the rest of the compile time and runtime environment.

XKCD - Real Programmers - the alt-text being "Real programmers set the universal constants at the start such that the universe evolves to contain the disk with the data they want."

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

Re: Barclays

I'm also a customer (they took over a building society I had a mortgage and current account with) - I didn't get an email, but then I've not given them an email address.

That sort of outage is why I've accounts with two banks and enough in either of them to cover most things I'll need short term.

You know something's wrong when Clippy fills you with nostalgia for simpler times

I actually had someone want Clippy back - well the cat character not the paper clip.

The worst thing about Clippy was they replaced a good search the help tool in Office 95 with Clippy in Office 97 - back when no Internet to desk at work and only dial up at home.

Apple plugs security hole in its iThings that's already been exploited in iOS

Most developers I've encountered don't read the compiler warnings, let alone running any static analysis

British Museum says ex-contractor 'shut down' IT systems, wreaked havoc

Re: lax procedures

It was only used during working day when needed in an area it would be noticed - but yes just a bit better than a polite notice, unlike the guards with guns at the main site entrance (we'll not comment about the lack of fence around the back)

Re: lax procedures

One place I worked we had one of those - only 5 digits and number was 141 *, when ever I pressed the 1 a second time it always felt as if it did nothing, so one day I tried it with just 14 and sure enough it opened. A bit later I had to change the number, reading instructions and yes you could only use each digit once. What did we do there - data communication security.

* It's fairly safe to use the actual number as a I changed (several decades ago), and b the site has closed and been sold for housing

Tech stocks tank as US AI dominance no longer a sure bet

If you have too much resource then what tends to happen is you waste by throwing lots at things without thinking whether the results will be worth it, when your resources are more constrained then you think more carefully to avoid squandering them and are more likely to look for inventive approaches.

The big players in AI seem to have been brute forcing it and that often has exponentially decreasing results for the extra effort.

What is needed is enough resources that people feel doable and can take a few gambles, but not so much that they will end up wasting huge amounts just trying things.

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

Re: Intel might be bust before you need to repair or upgrade

But have things slowed down? If anything I think they have speed up, what has changed is sometime ago hardware reached the point where it is no longer the cause of performance frustration point in use which is what would trigger desire to upgrade.

Re: Intel might be bust before you need to repair or upgrade

My first PC was an Elonex 386SX 16, the motherboard plugged into another board which had the IO and expansion cards -sounds good, except when I come to upgrade it there was no upgrades and as VESA for the video cards was starting to become available probably not so good. I replaced it with an Elonex 486DX 33 with the cpu on a daughter card, later replacing the CPU with a 486DX 66. The 66 came with a fan and my recollection was it was a bit tight where the card went for fan. (I think the cooler on my PI5 is bigger).

I think it shows the issue in considering "up-gradability", things change in ways you don't expect making the upgrades not worth it.

ChatGPT has a Thursday lie down

Someone accidently feed in this week's news

and it decided that Skynet had the right idea

Enterprises in for a shock when they realize power and cooling demands of AI

Re: Multivac is coming!

I seem to recall those lumbering powerhouses tended to explode when confronted with logical problems (e.g. Logan's Run) - hopefully it will just be the investors when they realise how much they lost in the bubble.

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Re: and the familiar Windows experience they know and love."

Stockholm syndrome comes to mind

Second Jeju Air 737-800 experiences mechanical issues following deadly crash

On a BBC article it said "Jeju Air had paid the most fines and faced the most administrative action of any Korean airline over the last five years, But insisted the airline has consistently improved its safety record."

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

Re: Firewall or AI

Ideally an AI Firewall - one that blocks AI BS.

Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp, Instagram stumble on and offline in global outage

I can honestly say

I didn't notice

Billionaire food app CEO wants you to pay for the privilege of working with him

Re: Emperors and Clothes

As most of the share holders will be financial companies etc., they'd worry someone would then look at whether they need paying as much if they didn't stick to the line about talent.