Posts by Fursty Ferret

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh no! Anyway...

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

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

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

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?

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.

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

Chromium-based browsers are set to have a short life if Google gets their way in the near future. I'd also question the benefit of using it to demo an old website which isn't standards compliant.

Tesla plots entry to Britain's stagnant energy market

Your house is far more likely to burn down from an unbranded phone charger than a home battery.

a. It’s LiFe, which is incredibly stable.

b. It’s in a metal box, protecting it from damage.

c. It’s monitored thoroughly by a BMS.

d. You don’t think they thought of this?

But you go right ahead and store 80 litres of petrol in your garage inside something that’s designed to set fire to it.

Tesla ordered to cough up data for Autopilot probe or face heavy fines

This is actually a pretty clever request. Given the nature of Autopilot all this information should be available, tracked, collated and searchable.

So although it sounds like 830,000 is an insurmountable request in reality if their record keeping and SMS is up to the job it should be relatively straightforward.

If on the other hand they ask for six months so a team of interns can go through the hard copy with a highlighter pen, it suggests there are more fundamental problems with the safety case.

Starlink's rocket speeds hit a 50 megabit wall for large downloads

Sounds like the epitome of fair use

You get ~23GB in a single burst before it slows down (and it's a bit rich to call 50Mb slow when most of the country is on less). How often are people downloading more than this on a regular basis?

I draw m'lud to EE, which caps you to 0.5Mb when they decide that you're being a bit unreasonable.

You'll [BZZ] like Intel’s [BZZ] NUC 13 Pro once the fan [BZZ] stops blowing

Fans

when I was doing nothing more than adding a couple of tabs to my browser. It seems odd that would strain a machine

Dude, welcome to Chrome.

US watchdog grounds SpaceX Starship after that explosion

If you look at close up photos of the launch, you can see the bells of the failed engines are missing entirely, suggesting that they were knocked off by debris from the pad. Whether this happened because they didn't ignite is a moot point.

I'm not convinced that a big steel plate is the solution unless there's active water jets firing over the surface. Water-cooled is totally different to the traditional water suppression system, which is designed to prevent damage to equipment from the sound energy generated by the engines. If that's not addresses then the plate will just reflect the energy straight back into the engine bay.

This is not something that would be missed, so we're not seeing the whole picture.

Tesla wins key court battle over Autopilot crash blame

Re: I have to wonder

Bit risky to have just one confirmation. What happens if it's a bumpy road and your finger taps confirm by mistake? Better add a second just to be safe.

Chinese company claims it's built batteries so dense they can power electric airplanes

This whole thing is ridiculous, from the concept to the claims. There is no point in fitting batteries to commercial aircraft unless there's a 1000x increase in energy density. There are no problems lifting significant weight off a runway (eg even a 787 can stagger into the air at more than 250 tonnes), but you can't *land* at that weight. Don't forget that you'll need ~1MW continuously for air conditioning / pressurisation, hydraulic motor pumps, in-flight entertainment, flight computers, pilots' heated seats, ovens etc etc.

Far, FAR better accept that aviation will need to use hydrocarbon fuels and instead to concentrate on minimising the environmental impact from aviation by carbon capture and carbon-neutral fuel production.

Vessels claiming to be Chinese warships are messing with passenger planes

Re: Air safety is an International issue

It doesn't work like that in a modern flight deck. GPS jamming is commonplace, as this map (https://gpsjam.org) shows. Anyone flying east will lose GPS when passing between Turkey and Iraq.

The cockpit effects are mild, because in 2023 navigation is still dead-reckoning from a computer point of view, with the aircraft position fine-tuned from external sources. You'll see an advisory message saying that ADS-B (air-to-air and air-to-ground position reporting) is degraded. Eventually, as you go out of range of ground stations, the navigation will be entirely inertial.

You can also get an advisory saying that the look-ahead terrain warnings are inoperative - that's because they directly use GPS position. There has been cases where this system generated a false "pull up" warning at cruise altitudes, which is more likely to present a threat from the startle element than anything else.

Radio altimeters will recover once outside of an area of jamming (which would have to be over a relatively small range). It is obviously possible to get jam-resistant GPS systems but the expense isn't worth it for civil aviation. Or more likely it's considered technology that shouldn't be exported from the country of origin.

Alarming: Tesla lawsuit claims collision monitoring system is faulty

Re: Just a thought

>> Roll forward to the 2020s and you can't help but wonder whether the sidelobe suppression is up to scratch.

Radar is either not fitted or not used on the vast majority of Teslas because of the difficulties integrating it with the vision system. Having said that they're now refitting a higher resolution version to their new vehicles, so who knows?

Bing AI feels like ChatGPT stuffed into a suit – not the future

Conversely, I've been quite impressed with the Bing-bot. Although it should have been called Clippy.

Like all modern tools it requires a degree of learning how to use, and many of the readers on The Register will struggle to cope with this as a consequence of their age. Once past their mid-30s most people struggle to pick up new skills without significant effort. It's easier to just criticise something as useless than it is to try it out.

You do need to be fairly specific with what you want. Personally I've found it useful for explaining concepts and it's also written some effective short Python programs. I hate Python with a vengeance and it did in 10 minutes (with a bit of back and forth where I clarified what I needed) what would have taken me all afternoon.

For the "how do I fix [problem]" Google is still faster if you append "+reddit" to the query. If you don't, then you'll probably still get a more useful answer from Bing given that Google search results are now almost entirely ads and spam.

Microsoft tells people to prepare for AI search engine that goes Bing!

Re: Bing+AI!

I stopped using Google last year because the monetisation reached a point where it was genuinely unusable. If it's not direct spamming via ads inserted into search results in such a way that it's almost impossible to tell the two apart, it's the simple fact that nearly all websites now are just designed to manipulate Google search rankings with generic copy-and-paste spam.

In 2023 the most reliable way to get the answer you need is to tack "+ reddit" onto the end of the query, which is a new low.

James Webb Space Telescope suffers another hitch: Instrument down

Just a thought, but maybe try a little harder not to use derogatory terms in future? The people who built the JWST are scientists and engineers, not “eggheads”.

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

The Tesla market and fan base in the USA is fundamentally weak, and a lot weaker than they would like people to know. It’s perfectly possible to set up the Autopilot system in their cars to disconnect without driver input or attention (just drive any Tesla in Europe and you’ll be nagged to make a steering input every 15 seconds or so), yet in the USA the system will allow frankly appalling risks to be taken. They could implement the European restrictions, but the increased safety will put off their target buyer.

License to launch: UK space regulator gives Virgin Orbit satellites the go-ahead

Re: I'm confused by all this...

>> A plane is taking off from some airfield which is now called a spaceport for some reason.

Said (elderly) plane has to overfly quite a lot of inhabited land with an unusual and extremely heavy load bolted to the wing spar. I'd quite like it to be thoroughly tested and licensed before they get to do this.

IT manager's 'think outside the box' edict was, for once, not (only) a revolting cliché

Ultimately pointless either way since carpet is an insulator, and the computer has a very effective metal chassis and ground connection which will deal with static build-up.

Intel's top-spec Raptor Canyon NUC can double as a 700+W space heater

In some respects stuff like this just makes me admire the newer handheld devices even more.

*looks at Steam Deck happily ploughing it's way through a AAA game but sipping just 20W*

Plop. That's the sound of a boot manager booting PCs off media they can't start from

this could be a handy way round time limits on the library PCs.

That would be brave, given that to get access to library computers you have to be a member, meaning they have your photograph and address on record. If I can point out this particular line from the Computer Misuse Act:

Unlawful access is committed if the individual intentionally gains access; knowing he is not entitled to do so; and aware he does not have consent to gain access.

Personally I think it's perfectly reasonable, but the tech-illiterate plod who turns up when the librarian says that someone's been fiddling with the computers that other people potentially use for financial transactions etc may not see it that way.