Posts by John Miles

The Raspberry Pi Pico goes wireless with the $6 W

Re: Pounds?

Google says £1 = $0.83 at the moment - so £4.98 + vat at £0.996

Toyota, Subaru recall EVs because tires might literally fall off

Reminds me of a guy I worked with

Many years ago, as he got a recall on his VW Polo because the front wheel may fall off, not through loose nuts but rotted out subframe - trouble is he got this a week after it fell off at a junction. Not the brightest spark as he only got it moved after the police prosecuted him for failing to move it for several days

Elon Musk flogs $8.4bn of Tesla shares amid Twitter offer drama

Re: Irony

It's like democracy - one man one vote and Elon is the man and he'll have the free speech

Oracle to release on-prem software usage tools to prep cloud switch

I'd say as long as break was similar to Robert Maxwell's all is good

Day 7 of the great Atlassian outage: IT giant still struggling to restore access

Could be 2 more weeks according to a Reddit comment

Seen a Reddit comment - Link

got email from the community manager, that some instances can be down for further two weeks.

This is not how a billion dollar company build the system or handles recovery, I am going to look for an alternative and dump Atlassian as soon as possible.

​

==== snip of the email I got ====

What this means for your company

We were unable to confirm a more firm ETA until now due to the complexity of the rebuild process for your site. While we are beginning to bring some customers back online, we estimate the rebuilding effort to last for up to 2 more weeks.

I know that this is not the news you were hoping for. We apologize for the length and severity of this incident and have taken steps to avoid a recurrence in the future.

Hackers remotely start, unlock Honda Civics with $300 tech

The Faraday cage is to stop a relay attack where a range extender is used to fool the car into thinking key is close to it. One person waves an aerial around the front door of house where lots of people keep their keys and another by the car door, then some electronics picks up the fob's/car's signals and relays them each way enabling them to open door and start car.

You Tube Link (at about 2 mins)

We had those back in 80s

Back then some manufacturers managed to make their keys less unique than they should have been especially after a couple of years of use, such that you could open them with any key. Keys didn't stop huge numbers of hot hatches going awol in UK during the 80s either

Tesla to disable 'self-driving' feature that allowed vehicles to roll past stop signs at junctions

And at level crossings

A recent twitter post - Watch a Tesla with FSD try to drive through a moving train.

Planning on buying a new motor? Chip shortages set to hit UK carmakers this year and next

Re: "planning to increase their inventory levels"

It is not a robust chain they need it is a beholden one and a reasonably steady demand. While the shutdown caused shortages, the problems they are seeing are a result of reducing their orders to their suppliers. The suppliers of key components weren't going to take the hit so started looking for other customers, now they want to ramp up their own production the key suppliers aren't just going switch back to supplying them as they have other orders on the book.

Just in time is not about reducing inventory - it is about pushing the risks onto the supplier and they are now dealing with the fallout when suppliers don't quietly take the hit

Re: "planning to increase their inventory levels"

give it a few years and they'll forget that.

In their drive to get the leanest possible company they forget you need a certain amount of "slack" in organisation to avoid being too fragile, but then that doesn't matter if you move on with nice bonuses before the brown stuff hits the fan.

A moment of tension as the James Webb Space Telescope stretches sunshield on way to L2 destination

Re: Webb scheduled to last a long time

It is likely to be an automated mission to refuel it so I think more of an engineering & economics issue than anything else

Re: Where is it? Check this...

There was a failure in switches to indicate the cover had rolled up - that delayed some things and meant some late work - most likely the delay were mainly a result of that and they didn't want to start the critical with people tired

Spar shops across northern England shut after cyber attack hits payment processing abilities

Re: Cash Is King

The replacement Visa Credit Card, for an expiring one, I received last month just has the numbers printed on the back - the front only has the chip and bank logo. Back still looks like it has magnetic strip

Warning: China planning to swipe a bunch of data soon so quantum computers can decrypt it later

Re: quantum computers

I wonder if quantum computers can decipher "amanfromMars 1" posts? ;)

Amazon tells folks it will stop accepting UK Visa credit cards via weird empty email

Re: There's a trend here ...

HSBC used to issue Mastercard Maestro debit cards and Mastercard credit cards, but they have mainly switched to Visa (I think their Premium accounts might still get Mastercard)

It appears we are just behind Australia

As - From November 1, Amazon will apply a 0.5% surcharge to purchases made using Visa credit cards on Amazon.com.au.

I've been using Amazon less and less over the last few years - mainly because they seem to go out of their way to promote cheap tat

Pulling down a partition or knocking through a door does not necessarily make for a properly connected workspace

Re: but I'm not allowed

It is worth checking the wiring Regs Part P as it was updated in April 2013 with less stringent requirements as to what was notifiable

Some FAQ

The return of the turbo button: New Intel hotness causes an old friend to reappear

Re: Useless idea

For a few games I played back then the turbo button allowed them to be playable - but I don't recall encountering any other software where it helped, though I am sure there were some

Reg reader returns Samsung TV after finding giant ads splattered everywhere

Re: Stargate DVD Box sets - No adverts

I'd disagree - SG Atlantis Box set I have has un-skippable adverts, including one for SG1 set (which is why it is still sealed on shelf). It irritated me so much that I never bothered finishing the series or buying any more box sets.

DDoSers take weekend off only to resume campaign against UK's Voipfone on Monday

Re: against a DDoS

That may just be because in past it costs lots of money or you have to be a big provider who'd rapidly be disconnected from world if you try it. There are been BGP Hijacks that may have impacted telecoms providers that likely ended up in phone lines unavailable

However at a smaller scale I believe there have been instances of companies dialling competitors and keeping their phone lines tied up back when everything was caller was only one who could disconnect

LAN traffic can be wirelessly sniffed from cables with $30 setup, says researcher

Re: I thought LAN cables were shielded

When you come to commission the link one of the things you don't want to hear is the guy wiring it up didn't understand twisted pair so didn't worry where to put the black wires from each pair, fortuantely the team lead got it sorted quickly - this was a single circuit site to site V11/RS-422 link so not large and sometime ago

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

Re: Personal heaters

Back in late 90s we upgraded all our cad workstations from 80s Unix system with impressively large monitors at the time to latest PCs - then during winter heating broke down and the drawing office wanted their old systems back to sit in corner and act as space heaters

BT Wholesale wants the channel to give SMBs a nudge before copper sunset in 2025

RE: Discovering that the backup battery has died

You don't even get a backup battery now and the Nokia ONT I have installed doesn't have a Phone port, which I believe is main BT installs now and the Phone plugs into the SuperHub (or FritzBox used by Zen) so when the power goes you need a UPS covering two or more devices

Git 2.33 released with new optional merge process likely to become the default: It's 'over 9,000' times faster

Latest versions of TFS (or now called Azure DevOps on Premise or such) has GIT as the code repository

Before I agree to let your app track me everywhere, I want something 'special' in return (winks)…

Re: Outlook

Maybe it wants to check whether you need to leave for your appointment, it could check Bing Maps for traffic delays and tell you you better start if you want to make the 200 mile/320 km trip via ferry to the meeting room the other end of the building ;)

The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too

Re: Would need a 32-bit Windows?

Yes - but it could do some 32 bit stuff with Win32s and thunking

You MUST present your official ID (but only the one that's really easy to fake)

Re: or that you previously suffered from COVID but aren't dead

It does have all the symptoms what we fear of being caught in a bureaucracy nightmare - there was a Romanian in similar position

or that you previously suffered from COVID but aren't dead

Proving you aren't dead might be hard - one woman’s battle to prove she isn’t dead

Hungarian tech store closed by World War II bomb

BBC has a video of it being blown up - Link

LibreOffice 7.2 release candidate reveals effort to be Microsoft-compatible

Re: Use early Microsoft formats where possible for interchange

You can have JavaScript in a PDF Action Run JavaScript file and you can embed documents and it has been possible to run them - Can a PDF file contain a virus?

Teradata customers express terror as field-based hardware support outsourced to IBM on both sides of the pond

I'd go with Snail Mail as likely to get there this year

Galaxy quest: Yet another sub-£500 phone comes to trouble mobile big dogs in the form of Realme GT 5G

Re: Security

If you are truely security conscious - why are you keeping anything important on a phone? Especially as the two major phone OS are from USA companies who can both be required by USA law to provide any data on you.

New mystery AWS product 'Infinidash' goes viral — despite being entirely fictional

Re: but if I've got 10 years experience in something,

10 years expereince - that's less than half of Asok's intern experience, so another couple of decades and you'll be junior ;)

IT management biz Kaseya's VSA abused to infect businesses with ransomware

Re: Ghost Guns

I doubt they print reliable rocket parts using an Ender, or maybe they do as one was seen in NASA

On a consumer grade FDM/FFM (Fused Deposition Modelling/Fused Filament Fabrication - only prints plastics), like the Enders pictured in the AG Shapiro article, you aren't going to be able to print things like usable barrels, though you certainly can print some parts and moulds.

If you go professional then your choices of materials go up, but so does the expense - from $200/400 for typical Ender to many thousands/10 of thousands

Mayflower, the AI ship sent to sail from the UK to the US with no humans, made it three days before breaking down

They are probably aiming for everyone to be smiling like Jack Nicholson

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

Sounds like you are firing blanks to me ;)

Blue passports, French service provider: Atos bags £21m UK Passport Office deal

Re: barely delivering a lorry.

if your definition of lorry includes a three wheeler driven by Inspector Clouseau

When software depends on a project thanklessly maintained by a random guy in Nebraska, is open source sustainable?

Re: unlikely that the commercial entity will vanish overnight.

Thinks back to last redundancy, to most of the customers and staff a software company did just disappear overnight leaving several companies desperately looking for support/replacement for a critical system.

Nasdaq's 32-bit code can't handle Berkshire Hathaway's monster share price

There was a plain version of Windows 3.11 which was just a bug fix release - there was also a version 3.1 for Work Groups - but most people would have probably got Windows 3.11 for Workgroups as I believe that was default for OEMs

NASA’s getting really good at this flying a helicopter on Mars thing

Re: Why are there two sets of tracks in the aerial photo?

At a guess it will involve testing systems out, looking best place for and dropping helicoptor off and they can't move to far from helicoptor at this stage

Capgemini scores £150m contract to help Student Loan Company overcome its IT problems 5 years after £50m superfail

Re: why not at least try to get the person who has benefited

And there lies an issue with our education establishment - it is geared towards number of people on courses and makes no concern whether those courses have any value to society or the people on them.

Re: why not at least try to get the person who has benefited

From what I see the biggest group who benefited by increasing the amount of people heading to university is those who can claim they have lowered youth unemployment and those in charge of universities.

If the person gained benefit from going to college then likely they will be paying with higher taxes over their working lives as they will gain better paid employment - but this is becoming less likely than in past. You'd expect that under normal supply and demand when you increase supply, now add in the increasing tendcy to shift expensive non management jobs to lower cost regions and you are hitting falling value in degrees - so I am not convinced degrees are generally cost effective for the person studying for them now.

Businesses should be gaining benefit for better educated workers - but they seem reluctant to pay for it now.

Pentagon confirms footage of three strange craft taken by the Navy are UFOs (no, that doesn't mean they're aliens)

Re: They cross the vastness of interstellar space in technology far beyond our own

Probably just some rich kids with nothing to do. Who cruise around looking for planets that haven't made interstellar contact yet and buzz them - Teaser

Move aside, Technoking: All hail the Sweat Master and his many inspirational job titles

Technoking

For some reason I keep reading Technoking as combination of "Technology" and "Smoking" - but then it is Elon Musk

Microsoft customers locked out of Teams, Office, Xbox, Dynamics – and Azure Active Directory breakdown blamed

Re: 365, 364, 363...

To paraphrase Douglas Adams

We have a new normality. I repeat, we have a new normality. Anything that still doesn't work is therefore your own problem.

Remember that day in 2020 when you were asked to get the business working from home – by tomorrow?

Re: If this pandemic had hit in the '90s, ...

I wouldn't have been able to work from home in the 90s (and not just because of the lack of Internet) - however the offices I worked in had more space per person and only a few people compared to the open plan ones at work now. So I wonder if it would have been that bad

The sooner AI stops trying to mimic human intelligence, the better – as there isn't any

Re: Then they tried it on some real data,

You know this sort of error is older than computers -

Anti-Tank Dog -

Another serious training mistake was revealed later; the Soviets used their own diesel engine tanks to train the dogs rather than German tanks which had gasoline engines. As the dogs relied on their acute sense of smell, the dogs sought out familiar Soviet tanks instead of strange-smelling German tanks.

Hacking is not a crime – and the media should stop using 'hacker' as a pejorative

Re: My current annoyance is "gift" as a verb

Looking in the Oxford Dictionary on the shelf - Gift can be a verb and is 400 years old . I'd usually expect it something like "To Gift something to ..."

I have usually seen it that way in legal documents

Microsoft unveils swappable SSDs for Surface Pro 7+ but 'strongly discourages' users from upping their capacity

WIFI card with non HP approved

I guess the non-approved ones would be the ones that actually worked - used to have to reboot a HP laptop several times a day as the wi-fi card/driver just died and only full reboot would recover it. (It got better after a firmware update) - The only reason I would consider another HP laptop is the works ones I have had since have been pretty reliable.

Forget about an AI stealing your job, even pigs can be trained to use computers

Re: Done before?

Yes I remember seeing something similar from back then - used to come to mind when watching people struggle with using computer mice for first time. (edit - as highlighted just how intelligent pigs are)