Posts by agurney

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

Interestingly, $largeNuclearSite down the road has started doing just this, and is causing a drain of teachers from the area as they're offering much higher salaries and better working conditions..

Similarly, when I was starting out in education (teacher, then industry .. I could do so did!) at the start of the oil boom in Scotland, new science teachers who were being recruited for the northern isles (Orkney/Shetland) were being poached by the oil companies at massively inflated salaries.

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Re: Back of the envelope

I think you'd annoy Caledonian Canal users.

You might be able to increase the capacity but you'd need a considerable difference in head to generate electricity, maybe similar to the Cruachan pumped storage.

US stocks slip as Trump pulls trigger on Canada, Mexico, China tariffs

Re: Heres

"The problem is that those are really on the wrong side of Canada to export to Europe..."

Not really; after all that "drill baby drill" the Northwest Passage will soon be clear all year round :(

"Trump is a weird phenomina."

I was going to be a grammar nazi and complain about the use of the plural, rather than the singular 'phenomenon' .. but on reflection there's more than one of them :(

Wozniak: I didn't reduce chip count for manufacturing. I wanted to prove I was clever

Re: 'Woah… what a brilliant engineer.'

"I just wish he'd embraced Linux..... "

it may be a bit late, but what is his Raspberry Pi Zero using?

100-plus spies fired after NSA internal chat board used for kinky sex talk

Re: not the other meaning

"Wide topped welly boots...."

You're Baa-aad

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Re: Sounds like a resourceful IT tech

Clearing out a Ferranti site following their disastrous takeover, it was common to find stuff that had been thrown in a skip midweek appear in a car boot sale at the weekend.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: Here are the copies

My old QIC tapes are in the greenhouse.

Miles of strong ribbon that (mostly) keeps the avian pests away from my fruit'n'veg plants!

DOGE latest: Citrix supremo has 'read-only' access to US Treasury payment system

Re: DOGE

I was wonder how it's pronounced...

probably the same as Venetians pronounced it when the Doge was their head of state.

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

"Biggles Flies Undone" was a cracker

Is that a bird’s nest, a wireless broadband base station, or both?

Re: They're employing birds to do the work too?

.. The cranes snuggle up to the cows, pick a leg up, and go to sleep. Then the cow decides to move somewhere else...

Aren't you thinking of flamingos? (why do flamingoes stand one leg? .. because if they lifted it up they'd fall over)

What happens when someone subpoenas Cloudflare to unmask a blogger? This...

Re: First Amendment

I'd support Trump invading Tamworth if he were to ride into town in a Tamworth Pig - a Reliant Robbin for the uninitiated.

.. why does that make me conflate Trump and Del Boy?

Eutelsat OneWeb blames 366th day for 48-hour date disaster

Re: out by 11 days by the mid 18th century?

"..only Britain. E1R had been advised by John Dee to switch..."

E1R wasn't Britain; she was only England and Ireland.

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Re: Quote

"Not a battery as yet. I'll look at the figures after a full year of running.."

I'm happy with my numbers thus far; i've had one solar inverter failure (easy DIY replacement after 9 years) and the batteries 'should' have a good life:

As a fairly early adopter (2011) I'm getting around 73p per unit for FIT + (deemed) export which brings in around £2K per annum.

I'm paying about 8p for an EV tariff for a few hours overnight to charge the batteries (15kWh).

At the moment I'm using more than I can store overnight and the solar's doing next to nothing, but within a couple of months I expect to be able to charge the batteries mostly from solar so should have a minimal off peak electricity bill along with income from the FIT so more £ in than out.

But are the rest really any better ?

Scottish Hydro, which became SSE, then passed on to OVO .. doesn't matter which one you pick they all seem to be morphing and merging and following the same downward spiral.

Entropy would seem to be an apposite description.

.. " .. the bullshit about saving money, being more economical, is really annoying. If people want/need to use less they know how, and it doesn't take a smart meter to tell them..."

I find my smart meter very useful. I have solar + battery storage + a low cost nightly tariff (used to charge the batteries). The smart meter lets me monitor consumption in real time so I can see if I'm dipping in to the grid at peak rate times so can balance kettle/oven/heaters/whatever if necessary (target is: Usage Now=0 on the smart meter)

[ .. per another current thread I have ESP32s/ESP8266s monitoring water temperature, humidity, solar and battery inverters, and more, all feeding a Raspberry Pi running an MQTT broker and displaying via another ESP32 so I can see consumption and status across appliances.]

[ The OVO reference hit a nerve; I've just had a smart meter fitted to MIL's remote property because of the radio teleswitch service cutoff and they still haven't sorted the bills out after nearly two months]

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

Re: Car doors

At the other end of the scale I had a Ford Cortina (MkII, 1970s) where the driver's side lock was so worn I could unlock it with my thumb nail. Ignition was a bit trickier, but not mutch.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: Screen savers

yeah, but when was the last time you saw a keyboard with "Enter" on any of the keys?

Re: I had one user...

Personally, I can't remember seeing an office printer using anything other than A4 or A3 paper.

I worked as a tech. writer for a US TLA in the UK .. I regularly had to flit between A4 and US Letter in the same printer.

Abstract, theoretical computing qualifications are turning teens off

Re: COMAL

WOW, that brings back memories .. there's a fair chance that you used one of the BASIC and COMAL open learning courses that I wrote for TVEI way back when (1987-1988). The language and environment (compiler, interpreter, whatever) wasn't important, but the approach I took to logic and code structure was.

Coincidentally I'm retiring today after several decades in the industry (real world, not Scottish education) with no regrets.

Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

Re: Just move some disks

ah, you mean mañana .. however there's no word in Gaelic with such a sense of urgency

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Re: Lifestyles of the rich and famous...

I have dropped an anchor in 3m of water and then ridden to it in 30m of water. Loch Striven..

I've done the same many times - same & similar Lochs on the West coast.

I should have known better and thought about it a bit more before posting.

Re: Lifestyles of the rich and famous...

..at 5am they were almost certainly anchored.

Anchoring in 50m? I doubt it.

Hello? Emergency services? I'd like to report a wrong number

Re: Really?

There doesn't seem to be anything close to a universal standard.

A good start has been made in the US for new 'phone systems:

- “Kari's Law” has been enacted, whereby any calling device within a property must be able to directly dial 9-1-1 without a prefix, with a notification being sent to a central location (e.g. security, reception, front desk),

- Ray Baum's Act takes it a stage further and mandates that location information be included (e.g. address, hotel name, floor, room number)

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: super thread drift.. but..

"The reason they teach drivers to keep the wheels straight (in a right hand turn situ in driving on left side countries, and left hand turn in driving on right side countries) is to avoid the problem of the car jumping into oncoming traffic in the case of being rear-ended."

..and why here (UK) you're taught to apply the hand(parking) brake when stationary at lights or in a queue.

Raspberry Pi OS airs out some fresh options for the summer

Re: Sunshine

It's the middle of July here in Caledonia and our Christmas roses have started flowering :(

'One Less Car' Uber bets a grand you'll ditch your wheels

"one less car"

I gave up at less (see icon)

The trial will involve just 175 carefully selected people in ...

What criteria? There's no point calling an UBER if you have a wheelchair or other awkward load .. and if they can take a wheelchair I believe there's a surcharge for the extra time involved (please correct me if I'm wrong)

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Tools..

As a student (in the 70s) I had a couple of summer jobs in a Dutch pickle factory. The 'superviors' were students from a local engineering college whose tools were a monkey wrench (adjustable spanner) and a large screwdriver.

When the production line jammed the monkey wrench was used to smash the offending jars of gherkins and the screwdriver was used to clear out the mess .. I don't think the students were actually allowed to use the tools to adjust the machinery.

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

In the 1950s and 60s the Glasgow trolley buses were known as "silent death".

Sounds like not much has changed.

BT delays deadline for digital landline switch off date

Re: Reality bites

I'm writing this via a data-only FTTC line in Edinburgh. It works fine.

.. I'm using FTTP just along the road from you, however I also have a "careline" system that requires POTS; if there's a power cut the copper phone line still works and the panic button will still call for help.

Going fully telephony over FTTP I could probably run my UPS to the ONT and phone to ensure that I have a connection, but there's no suggestion BT will provide a UPS to every premises to keep the system working the way it's done for decades with the power provided by the cabinet/exchange.

An attorney says she saw her library reading habits reflected in mobile ads. That's not supposed to happen

So give us a "such as" example..

I work in the hospitality industry; on my work laptop I might research a particular property, say in the Seychelles. Later, on my home computer, I start being served ads about flights to the Seychelles and where to stay. A little more than coincidence and circumstance.

GM shared our driving data with insurers without consent, lawsuit claims

Re: Enrolled

"..misfeatures like auto stop/start that can't be permanently disabled..."

Why would you want to be burning fuel when stationary?

Academics probe Apple's privacy settings and get lost and confused

Re: Not just security

Location tracking IS satnav. Just saying

No it isn't. I'm happy with my GPS receiver telling me where I am whilst not having that information sent to another party.

Tech titans assemble to decide which jobs AI should cut first

Re: What IBM did next

Have Watson-X train it's replacement AI in a low wage, offshore country before making it redundant

At least any AI that I've used knows the difference between it's and its.

Re: Retraining?

What’s the betting it’s a couple of e-learning courses and a miserly severance package?

I tried using ChatGPT to help me write an e-learning course and the results were surprisingly promising, albeit lacking in several areas.

I never thought I'd be relieved at having passed retirement age ... especially if AI's also involved in any severance calculation.

Hotel check-in terminal bug spews out access codes for guest rooms

Re: "Accor Security, the security arm of Accor, which owns the Ibis Budget chain"

...and the kettle was burnt out. Reported immediately, but none were fixed by the end of my stay.

That's been addressed. Last time I was in Accor (Sheffield IIRC) they didn't provide kettles.

Chinese chap charged with stealing Google’s AI datacenter secrets

Re: Google waited a week to revoke his access after he resigned?

"Seems pretty sloppy."

not if he was expected to work a few weeks notice after submitting his resignation

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

Re: But ... I thought computers didn't do Scottish

Hatfield and the North.

Here's a list of thousands of artists Midjourney's AI is ripping off, creatives claim

Re: Piles of styles

NO, artists don't learn by copying (at least in my experience as a '70s Art school graduate).

They may be "influenced" by their tutors, but usually in an "up yours" type of response rather than replication :)

Former Adobe software engineering leader convicted of insider trading

Re: Yes ..... But !!!!

Jaywalking isn't victimless, albeit most of the victims are jaywalkers.

A large proportion of the ".. bunch of dickheads who are “making” money by gambling the public’s money .." are pension schemes, so your retirement income will potentially be adversely affected by these shenanigans.

What the AI copyright fights are truly about: Human labor versus endless machines

Re: They're not

There's been a scheme place since 1979 in the UK whereby authors receive a payment for books loaned through libraries, and from around 2020 for eBooks, (PLR - Public Lending Right - https://dcmslibraries.blog.gov.uk/2020/03/12/public-lending-right-explained/ )

UK judge rates ChatGPT as 'jolly useful' after using it to help write a decision

Similarly, ChatGPT's saved me a couple of days' effort by generating the structure for a course I wanted; it wasn't perfect, but by giving it appropriate criteria it came up with the sort of framework I would have written myself in days rather than seconds.

This isn't particularly novel; for millennia, painters, sculptors and the like have used their students/apprentices to knock lumps out of marble to create a rough shape, paint generic backgrounds, and so on, leaving the SME to use their expertise to finish (and take credit for) the masterpiece.

ChatGPT, and its ilk, is just another tool.

Hope for nerds! ChatGPT's still a below-average math student

i

.. the mass statistics of the global idiot network to support it's "answers."

One thing I've noticed from playing around with ChatPT is that its responses are reasonably correct grammatically, although the content is often dubious.

If its/it's or their/there are used correctly I am sadly now more suspicious that the answer is AI generated.

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

Lead with a hint of copper? A few FMJs down range then scrape up the residue sounds like a good start.

About ducking time: Apple fixes up autocorrect in iOS 17

By taking the context into account hopefully other irritating stuff can be addressed, such as the tautological ".. autocorrected words will be underlined with the ability to revert them back"

Lockheed Martin demos 50kW anti-aircraft frickin' laser beam

Re: Frikkin Lasers

I am laying claim to the following:

SHort Attack Range Kilowatt Laser - SHARK Laser

I will happily license this name to anyone who wants to build one. ;)

.. there's a new shiny version to counter the disco ball defenc(s)e : Short Prismatic Attack Range Kilowatt Laser - SPARKL :)

Rookie programmer's code goes up in flames ... kind of

Re: Bernie

I think the Regoniser did rather well with Bernie, a pint for Mr Powell -->

That's too generous for simply changing the character's name from Harry - https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/01/who_me/ .

Are we now going to see a plethora of recycled stories with changed terminology for the Americas (in this case changing "supermarket" to "grocery store")?

Queen's shooting star was actually meteor, not SpaceX junk

Re: Islay

.. and Lagavulin has the best anchorage