Posts by Fursty Ferret 240 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2016
Agreed - and while they're at it they could link the account to iPlayer. It's utterly pathetic that they spend a fortune employing Capita goons in order to bully people who don't watch TV into paying, but at the same time the only way iPlayer content is secured is by asking "Do you have a TV licence?" every time you try to stream something.
It's interesting but only on a technical level. It's not as if there's been a spate of fake road signs over the last 50 years when normal eyeballs were doing the driving.
If you're driving and someone dressed in a high visibility jacket holds up a green "GO" board at a set of red lights, how long would you ignore it before proceeding carefully? Reg editors are surprisingly Luddite when it comes to new technology, be it LLMs, self-driving cars, even new Linux distros get demoed on an ancient machine at 800x600 resolution.
I can't understand why the Tesla board keeps him as CEO and keeps approving his ridiculous pay package when he's single-handedly delivered unimaginable damage to the brand. It's interesting that the only time he seemed interested in doing anything at the company was when they were debating his pay, and once approved he went back to fiddling with domestic and international politics.
I'd never buy a Tesla vehicle while he's there. He claims to be an engineering genius but if his engineering knowledge is anything like his political knowledge, it's surprising that anything at SpaceX got off the ground. His obsession with Starship is rapidly proving to be a stunningly expensive dead end for SpaceX (almost certainly why they're going public this year). His constant lies about Tesla's FSD / Robotaxi / robot / battery / charging capability is wearing thin (well, not as thin as it would be for someone who paid for it a decade ago).
Clearly, no one at DWP has used their own helpline or that of a similar government department (lookin' at you, HMRC). At the moment they're designed to discourage callers, so giving them AI smarts in order to fob people off on an exponentially better level is not going to help.
[robot] "Why are you calling?"
> To change my registered address.
"You can do that online."
> Yes, I know, but it won't let me mak-
"Goodbye".
[hangs up]
Solar flares don't really bother aircraft electronics, the impact is on radio transmissions mainly. The big cause of SEU is cosmic rays which come from outside the solar system, as they carry enough energy to make it a significant way through the atmosphere. In fact, high solar activity tends to reduce the amount of cosmic rays reaching lower levels.
I mean, where do you begin?
1. The heat output is completely dependent on the compute load. When will this be highest? Likely when electricity prices are cheapest, so overnight. Exactly when you don't want your house that warm.
2. Unless they're maintaining the entire unit at 60C or more, you're not going to get meaningful hot water without a huge heat exchanger inside, and being oil you have a limited thermal mass compared to water.
3. For heating a home you'd be much better off using a heat pump with 400-500% efficiency than waste heat from a bunch of Raspberry Pis.
4. What happens in a fault? You're reliant on the provider of the unit for service.
5. What happens in summer months? You're going to have a very warm house, or a huge fan blasting heat into the garden. You can't just turn it off, you need hot water.
6. Theoretical security issues from data off-site.
7. Synchronising compute load and power use with our ropey smart meter network will make billing a nightmare.
8. Do you have to give the provider 24/7 access to your home for troubleshooting?
9. What if there's a leak from your heating supply into the unit? Who's responsible for repair / replacement?
Honestly I can't think of a single pro.
I remember using that while wedged into a corner of the office at my dad's company while he was working. They had a colour dot-matrix printer. Thinking back on it the staff must have hated having me there because printing anything in colour took about 45 minutes and meant that no one could have a conversation due to the noise.
Is it in any way unusual that a company which sells desktop-as-a-service has published a study suggesting that it's better than outfitting your employees with their own machines?
It might be cost effective in the very short term, but that completely changes the moment their own servers [or AWS or whatever fall over and your entire workforce has nothing to do but stick their thumbs up their arse.
I’m still using a 7th gen X1 Carbon. Battery life is dubious at this point but easily replaced and the only upgrade I’ve done is to stuff a 1TB SSD into it. Replacement parts direct from Lenovo are so cheap at this point that I’m quite happy to abuse it (entire replacement motherboard complete with RAM is about £35 inc shipping). Everything on it is detected by Linux and Windows, and my only complaint is that Intel integrated graphics drivers stink regardless of what you’re using them on. Oh, and the USB-C ports feel irritatingly fragile compared to MagSafe.
Back of the envelope calculation for somewhere like Heathrow where there are 250-ish short haul departures per day from BA alone (according to Google). Average taxi time is 25 minutes, so given a 5 minute warm-up and a bit of flexibility, the saving per flight will be 15 minutes. You can only count the saving of one engine (because they're already using one-engine taxi procedures), so that's 250 * 15 minutes * 500kg/hour of fuel, so approximately 31 tonnes of fuel per day, or 11,000 tonnes per year. That's 35,000 tonnes of CO2.
Throw other airlines into the mix (Air France, Lufthansa, Iberia all use A320s for short haul because the 737 is crap) and the benefits get even better. There are, however, some quite big challenges associated with the implementation, namely that if it doesn't release from the aircraft then you have something stuck in quite an inconvenient position and holding everything else up. Faults tend to present on Airbus at first engine start, so doing that in the queue for take-off is not ideal. None of these are insurmountable, though.
Takes a LOT of radiation to give someone radiation sickness. Even more to kill them. They might not be very well but DNA has stunning proof-reading and correction built right in. I’d peg psychological issues as by far the biggest threat on a manned mission. After all, is someone who sets out knowing it’s almost certainly a one-way trip actually the best person for the job?
Doesn't matter who they are, how much they earn or how important they think they are. Anyone yelling and ranting like that at me down the phone is just getting the call ended straight away.
Damn straight. The one time I was sworn at by a colleague (needlessly, I might add) I walked off the job. Cost to the company? €126,000. The man that swore at me is no longer employed there.
The energy released in a lithium-ion battery fire is from the chemical make-up of the battery, not from the electrical energy stored within. A fully charged battery has a higher potential to start a fire, but equally a deep-discharged one is also more prone to ignition. Which comes down to the fact that manufacturers specify a defined charge level for shipping (20-50% on average).
>> Are you implying it's okay to run over children as long as you don't make a habit of it?
I'm pretty sure that was a mannequin of a child, not a real one.
Like everyone on the internet the producers of this video have a point to prove and will selectively select footage that supports their case. It's cool to hate Tesla and Tesla-drivers at the moment (and there are excellent reasons for doing so, mainly led by the Nazi manchild who's superficially running the company), hence the downvotes on a comment which suggested that maybe, just *maybe* it might be worth having a closer look at the footage.
>> and it now supports dual-booting with a Bitlocker-encrypted copy of Windows.
Does it now? Be very careful and have a hard copy of your Bitlocker unlock key to hand. Microsoft has got this so tightly locked down that you need 2FA to login to Windows again after making changes to the UEFI partition layout, which may come as a bit of a surprise if you're on the road.
I'm disappointed that an install of Fedora with LUKS encryption is still a massive pain in the arse.
I don't want to be cynical but the only way this merger got approved is down to the traditional brown envelopes stuffed with used, non-sequential, £50 notes. Three has the worst customer support of any major operator ("Live Chat" with Indian-based representatives who don't have access to billing systems) and average coverage. Vodafone has a great customer service team and mediocre coverage. I'm willing to bet a leg (either leg, your choice) that the Throdafone merger results in an entity with Three's customer service team and Vodafone's network.
If they were serious they could have instantly enabled roaming across their paired networks, but haven't. There's a good reason for this: when they start cutting back on any areas of overlap, the combined quality will be worse than either.
Staff where I work are offered a choice between a Lenovo Thinkpad (Intel) or Surface laptop (Snapdragon). The overwhelming majority are now on Surface, and complaints are few and far between. We're not in a situation where we're rolling out the absolute latest Intel generation yet, but Windows on ARM64 for 99% of people is absolutely fine. While we're a Microsoft shop, we really owe Apple for proving that ARM architecture works well in the desktop environment.
if I were Intel I'd be worried.
Yes, but Windowsifying Linux is just putting users in the uncanny valley of operating systems where it nearly, but not quite, works as expected, and is utterly impossible to troubleshoot over the phone.
I'm a big fan of Elementary OS for people who want to move away from Windows.
Aviation experts at FlightRadar24 said the craft made a low-altitude flyover of the airport, likely in an attempt to have officials on the ground confirm the state of the plane and suggest next steps.
This is how you know they're not aviation experts. No one would overfly an airport in a commercial aircraft (even one as antiquated at the 737) in order to determine the state of it.
A few facts: almost every airport in the world has bird warnings from time to time. You might delay take-off for a flock of birds at the end of the runway, but unless there was an extremely compelling reason you'd continue an approach. If the birds appeared on short final, you fly through them and land. The risk to engines from bird ingestion is exponentially greater at high thrust than at approach thrust (at low thrust the birds tend to be diverted down the bypass ducts). Even if you lose one engine, you're almost at the runway and in the landing configuration, so WTF would you go around? Stopping distance on a limiting wet runway is less than 15% greater than with both engines running.
I don't know what happened here, but the birds are likely to be the least exciting finding in the investigation.
Assuming that the first thing to go will be the cheap PAYG packages with Three. The fact they still have roaming included when the full-fat contracts ditched it years ago is a little gem.
Having said that my experience is that Vodafone have much better customer support than Three. They at least answer the phone instead of forcing you onto Live Chat, who tell you that they can't help, and to phone...
Personally I'd be keeping a close eye on the driveway of the person responsible for approving this whole deal and counting the new Range Rovers that mysteriously appear in six months.
Reminds me of the time when a miniature Hitler came rocketing across the tarmac in his orange and white Hilux pickup “safety vehicle” at a large airport to inform me that I was going to be fined for not having my high visibility vest fully buttoned up.
“But how did you know it wasn’t done up?”, I asked.
“Because I could see you from ALL THE WAY OVER THERE”, he replied, without the slightest trace of irony.
I was working under IR35 at the time when I shouldn’t have been, so the fine was filed in the kitchen bin and the airport didn’t bother to follow it up as it might have raised questions they didn’t want answered.
What is interesting is that how much of it is almost subliminal. Occasionally I find my Tesla refuses to pass a slower-moving vehicle in the next lane. Almost invariably when I've taken over to accelerate past them a quick glance across shows the driver on their phone. The slight drifting and weaving in the lane is almost unnoticeable to me, but is obviously triggering something in its tiny brain.
>> no onerous health and safety regulations
What do you think defined the modern idea of "health and safety"? In reality it was the structured and logical attitude towards risk developed during the Apollo missions.
What you're conflating it with is litigation fear which leads to the circumstances where anything deemed slightly risky is banned outright because people are too lazy or incompetent to do risk assessments, and so "elf an safety" gets the blame. As someone who works in an industry revolutionised by modern safety practices, this casual blaming is an insult to the people in whose blood our health and safety regulations are written in.
Not necessarily related to OpenAI, but I've noticed this too. People that are (superficially) intelligent are falling for major conspiracy theories. There are now countless people who believe that Covid vaccines are a population control tool, that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is perfectly reasonable, and that the world is being controlled by a shadowy business cartel. One of them captains long-haul passenger jets, although I didn't push the case as to whether he believed in chemtrails or not.
While I subscribe to the fact that if you believe in conspiracy theories you're a moron, it's concerning that people who have demonstrated flawed analysis and decision making processes are in a situation where they might need to use the same skills in a life-or-death situation.
I, on the other hand, am not so impressed with the Affinity model. You can keep using the older versions that you paid for, but once about half the people you work with have upgraded you've got no choice but to follow suit as the older versions won't so much as look at anything produced by the newer one.
On top of that I paid for the full package about 2 weeks before v3 was released, and Affinity's response to me asking for an upgrade (or even a discount code) was a big fat middle finger and ****-you via email. So now I pay for Adobe CC mainly out of spite.
Every so often I turn off my ad-blocker in response to one of the guilting "Do you want us to starve?" pop-ups, but swiftly turn it back on when I realise what I'm getting. Smaller sites are suffering because of the decisions taken by big content providers (lookin' at you, Future) to bury the actual interesting stuff in a mixture of ads and sponsored advertorials.
To be honest, having the option to make micropayments in order to browse ad-free is quite appealing, but only to the extent that I'd like to add exceptions to ensure the particularly shitty websites (see previous on Future, or Reach) stay clear of my wallet. And they would be the first to take advantage anyway, probably hiding a million pixel-sized individual ads.
On Airbus that's no real problem, Airbus has automatic de-icing, so when ice is detected the de-icing is switched on and the cold wet air cools the inlets.
Just to clarify, the reason this doesn't affect Airbus aircraft is because they use a different inlet and a different version of the LEAP engine which won't melt if you fly with the engine anti-ice on in non-icing conditions.
Boeing can make working ice detection (ish, it mostly works on the Dreamliner but has a few bugs), they never fitted it to the 737.
Airbus has always had distributed production on account of being a pan-European business. Final assembly takes place in Toulouse and Hamburg. Airbus has a very different philosophy to Boeing from the ground up and are very difficult to compare on a brick-by-brick basis. Your typical Airbus has countless features to mitigate against the biggest risks in modern aviation. Boeing hasn't introduced anything new in over a decade apart from fixing a bug that allowed the autopilot to stall the aircraft.
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