* Posts by Fursty Ferret

226 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2016

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User demanded a ‘wireless’ computer and was outraged when its battery died

Fursty Ferret

Re: Phone down

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.

Tug reaches flaming ship carrying electric cars off Alaska coast

Fursty Ferret

Re: ships or decks never catch fire

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).

Toyota picks Huawei’s Android-killer HarmonyOS for its Chinese electric sedan

Fursty Ferret

>> But its decision to use HarmonyOS suggests the Japanese giant believes Huawei will be.

Will be what?

VodafoneThree's a crowd – now comes the hard bit

Fursty Ferret

While unifying the two networks is a gargantuan task, allowing free roaming between the two for existing customers is a trivial task and that it hasn't happened alongside the formal merger is not a good sign that things will improve for either going forward.

Tesla FSD ignores school bus lights and hits 'child' dummy in staged demo

Fursty Ferret

>> 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.

Fursty Ferret

There are multiple sets of long skid marks visible in the video. I wonder how many attempts it took them to get the footage they wanted?

SpaceX resets 'Days Since Last Starship Explosion' counter to zero, again

Fursty Ferret

>> awful lot of analysis (which is not something Musk likes apparently)

I suppose it's a potential use-case for the enormous computing resource that Tesla / X etc is implementing.

Fedora 42 has the Answer, but Ubuntu's Plucky Puffin isn't far behind

Fursty Ferret

Re: a quiet life

>> 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.

Voda-Three name post-merger top team, keep schtum on layoffs

Fursty Ferret

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.

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Fursty Ferret

I quite like the cars but I won't go near one while Musk gets money from the deal. Even the people I consider mad right-wing nutters at work are turning their backs on him.

Microsoft quietly erases Windows 11 TPM 2.0 bypass workaround from help page

Fursty Ferret

Whether the workaround itself still functions or has been actively blocked remains unknown

Are you a tech publication or what? Try it and see what happens.

Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra, says Microsoft

Fursty Ferret

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.

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Fursty Ferret

Not sure of the business case here. For almost the same money you can pick up a used and slightly-dented Thinkpad with better connectivity, performance, cooling, a keyboard, monitor, and built-in UPS.

A New Year's gift from Microsoft: Surprise, your scanners don't work

Fursty Ferret

Re: Another good reason to stay with Windows 10 for now?

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.

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

Fursty Ferret

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.

Tesla sued over alleged Autopilot fail in yet another fatal accident

Fursty Ferret

Interesting - my Volvo did a very similar thing to me a few years ago, applying a pretty violent steering input on a quiet motorway. It pulled the wheel straight through my hands and nearly took out a car two lanes away.

Vodafone and Three permitted to tie the knot – if they promise to behave

Fursty Ferret

End of cheap 3 PAYG?

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.

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Fursty Ferret

Re: "as it would pass through the rotating blades during flight"

You test, but the test stipulation is 13 small birds (starlings or similar). It’s much safer to fly through a flock of birds and continue to land than it is to try to avoid them or perform a go-around.

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Fursty Ferret

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.

Self-driving cars safer in sunlight, twilight another story

Fursty Ferret

Re: Staying in your lane and maintaining speed of traffic

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.

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

Fursty Ferret

“No one wants to fix this bug” because if you’re foolish enough to use a LLM in a business-critical context you deserve all you get.

55 years ago, Apollo 10's crew turned the airwaves blue

Fursty Ferret

Re: Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end...

>> 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.

OpenAI says natively multimodal GPT-4o eats text, visuals, sound – and emits the same

Fursty Ferret

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.

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

Fursty Ferret

Didn't seem to stop them adding a sign saying "Caution: Tractor's Turning" near me.

Ford's BlueCruise driving assistant probed by US watchdog after deaths

Fursty Ferret

Re: I don't care if it is "hands free"

Does it make sure your eyes are looking at the road out in front of you

Actually, yes. The eye tracking is surprisingly sensitive and will nag you if you glance away from the road for longer than it takes to change radio station or check the map.

Boston Dynamics' humanoid Atlas is dead, long live the ... new commercial Atlas

Fursty Ferret

Re: Bad timing for Musk...

Dunno. There are a couple of videos on Twitter which shows incredible dexterity, but debate is split over whether they're genuinely robotic or just CGI / human hands. Which is, I suppose, a sign of how far His Muskiness has fallen.

Fursty Ferret

Re: 001 or T001?

100% this. Even from a stationary start you can hear cooling fans screaming in the video. Terminator movies would be marginally less exciting if the T-900 had to stop to plug in an extension cable in every scene.

Despite two previous court victories, Tesla settles third Autopilot liability case

Fursty Ferret

Re: Is there a better advertisement

>> rather than the "smart cruise control" it more closely resembles.

Having had a Tesla as a rental car recently even that's stretching it.

Watchdog calls for more plugs, less monopoly in EV charging network

Fursty Ferret

Re: Does this include Tesla?

Tesla drivers fund the Supercharger network via vehicle purchase. It's a totally different proposition. Should a random passerby have a guaranteed right to sleep in your spare room if they offer to pay towards the mortgage? No.

KDE Plasma 6.0 brings the same old charm and confusion

Fursty Ferret

On the other hand the face that Jakub's personal website is utterly confusing and impossible to navigate says an awful lot about the current state of UI on Linux.

Microsoft Publisher books its retirement party for 2026

Fursty Ferret

Re: Serif PagePlus...

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.

Cruise swerves to hire safety guru after series of misadventures on the streets

Fursty Ferret

Re: Completely uninformed about the legalities here

Awkward, but understandable. Massive marketing boon if your competitor accidentally drives over someone.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

Fursty Ferret

Re: Flip Side

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.

Aircraft rivet hole issues cause delays to Boeing 737 Max deliveries

Fursty Ferret

Re: And then there's the engine inlet problem...

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.

Fursty Ferret

Re: Reap what you sow

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.

Tesla power steering probe upgraded after thousands more incidents reported

Fursty Ferret

Re: Lucky for them...

That motor can apply significant force to the steering rack, easily enough to overcome most drivers. I've had the Tesla try to get into the wrong* lane before and the force required to overcome the computer was much greater than anticipated (you couldn't do it with one hand, and most people who hold the wheel lightly in two hands would have been surprised).

There's something funky with this setup because normally the steer assist disables with the lightest touch during a lane change.

* When I say "wrong", I mean the feckin' gap in the barrier on a dual carriageway to allow cars to turn right. And there was even a car in the space.

GPS interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry

Fursty Ferret

Re: Redundant

What's happening is that the spoofed position is about 60 miles west of the true position. When the incorrect position is first calculated, it's rejected by the flight management computers (FMCs) as it differs significantly from that derived from inertial positioning. Plane continues trundling on the correct course. So far so good.

Over time the FMCs start to take a closer look at the GNSS signal, and consider that it's been like that for a while. So they begin to give it a little more credence. What if it's right? So they start to bias their calculated position with an element of the (incorrect) GNSS location. You're still within the required navigation performance limits, but with some uncertainty. Various non-critical navigation systems have failed at this point, including position reporting and look-ahead ground proximity warnings.

Finally, your FMC locks onto a basic navigation beacon on the ground. Aha! We only know the line-of-sight distance from the beacon, but that's enough to confirm position to within a mile. Except that what's happened is that the sneaky Iranians have built a radio beacon that broadcasts on the same frequency as the one that your FMC is looking for. The FMC discovers that the calculated radio position matches the spoofed GNSS location and thinks "shit, I'm off course".

Remember how the spoofed position was 60 miles west of true? This means that to re-acquire the correct track you need to fly east by 60 miles, which is just enough to put you nicely inside Iranian airspace without permission. I think it's very unlikely that you'd be shot down, but a Western airliner forced to land at an Iranian military airfield is an enormous political bargaining chip. Would the Iraqis provide a warning that you were off track? Possibly. But given the Americans named the primary navigation waypoint in the country "Rag-head" and have vetoed attempts to change it for years, I doubt they'll be hugely interested in helping.

Samsung’s Galaxy S24 pitch: The AI we baked in makes you more human

Fursty Ferret

Re: And all that Samsung bloatware ?

You can always tell which tech publications get given free swap and invited to launches in interesting and exotic places. Even The Reg isn't immune from this.

Musk claims that venting liquid oxygen caused Starship explosion

Fursty Ferret

I don't think anyone disagrees that he's a right-wing bigoted opinionated self-obsessed childish prick, but do you think that as a tech publication you could focus on the tech news side of things? Ultimately SpaceX has driven the industry further and faster than at any point since the race for the moon, and that particular aspect I find interesting.

Musk is like Trump, he revels in controversy and publicity. Not mentioning his name at all is the most effectively way forward to silence the man-child, while we still get to enjoy the news of SpaceX etc.

What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?

Fursty Ferret

Jesus Christ, that video is 10 minutes of my life I'm not going to get back.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Fursty Ferret

This comments section is depressing. I would normally associate Register readers with intelligence and the ability to select out conspiracy theories and news peddled by GB News and big oil companies, but apparently not.

1. The grid will not collapse (source: National Grid[1]). The average person drives less than 10 miles per day to work, so that's about 3 kWh of electricity, filled up when there's an overnight surplus. Charge at work? Even better.

2. We won't run out of lithium. There's loads of it, it'll just be more expensive to dig out of the ground. The quoted figures are, as others here have suggested, based on current mine capacity. If there was an upcoming lithium shortage, you won't find in products literally sold to be thrown away (those awful vapes), and it doesn't seem to stop people buying phones.

3. Big energy companies like Octopus have been campaigning for the link between electricity and gas prices to be broken. This is what's driving the disparity at the moment. I don't disagree that Instavolt and Osprey etc are predators.

4. Laws need introducing to protect charging facilities. For example, Tesla put 20 Superchargers in a Marriott carpark at Heathrow but f***** up the contract. Marriott now charge £5 just to plug in, before any electricity is delivered. Can you imagine BP or Esso having an access charge on their pumps?

5. There is a massive education problem (see these comments ^^). EVs don't randomly run out of electricity on the motorway, and if stranded in snow etc will outlast most internal combustion vehicles without the risk of poisoning the driver. FWIW, a modern diesel may not produce enough heat to keep the cabin warm when idling.

[1] https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars

The 15-inch MacBook Air just nails it

Fursty Ferret

Re: Cost as reviewed?

It might not look like it but the 14 inch MacBook Pro is a brick in comparison to the Air. You need to balance out whether it's worth it for the brighter / faster screen and extra ports. I think the speakers are identical between the two (if not, the ones on the Pro are stunning for a laptop).

Apple slams Android as a 'massive tracking device' in internal slides revealed in Google antitrust battle

Fursty Ferret

I use an iPhone while occasionally gazing jealously at the old featherweight Pixel 5 that sits on the shelf. However, the fact that iOS lets you block intrusive ads in Safari is enough to keep me there. The difference is stark if you open a page in Chrome via the Google Discover feed - mobile browsing is pretty much unusable anywhere without ad-blocking these days.

Textbook publishers sue shadow library LibGen for copyright infringement

Fursty Ferret

Re: Welcome to the new corporate Register

Except (especially in the US) the professor teaching a university module sets the textbook. Which is conveniently their own work and contains homework assignments that change every year.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using Libgen for this situation, especially when you consider that the university library often doesn’t have a copy and the price of the textbook is upwards of $200 in some areas.

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

Fursty Ferret

Re: Update

Li'l Bobby Tables all grown up and running an airline...

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

Fursty Ferret

Oh no! Anyway...

Lesson 1: Keep your mind on the ... why aren't the servers making any noise?

Fursty Ferret

Interestingly, circuit breakers were redesigned some years ago to prevent exactly this scenario and in the event of overcurrent cannot be held closed.

The price of freedom turned out to be an afternoon of tech panic

Fursty Ferret

Thankfully when it was all done the owner was very forgiving, though it had cost an afternoon's online sales. And he did dock Jeff's pay for the cost of relisting everything.

Riiiiiiight.

Are all these stories made up now, or just part of them? You can't dock the pay of an employee for an innocent mistake.

Tesla steering problems attract regulator eyes for second time this year

Fursty Ferret

Re: I have had power steering fail in an ICE car

>> Eventually I switched off the ignition (no steering lock in those far off days) and started to slow down on compression.

How on earth was this not your first idea?

Fursty Ferret

Re: I've rebooted my 2021 Audi's electronic systems

Tesla steering is perfectly normal rack-and-pinion power assisted steering, nothing more. They're looking at going steer-by-wire in the future though.

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