* Posts by steelpillow

2023 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2016

Huawei or the highway: Chinese giant whacks marketing drones for tweeting from iPhone

steelpillow Silver badge

Wrecked again

"Wrecked again, I'm out on the highway,

"Wrecked again, I'm trying to find Huawei

"To you."

— With apologies to Michael Chapman.

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

steelpillow Silver badge
Alert

No. 14

I will never pay for a parcel at a post office ever again. Pre-pay via a comparison site (say ParcelMonkey) costs less than half as much for exactly the same service, and that's before taking off the broker's commission. Just print the label, hand over and they scan-and-send. Even the Parcel Post web site charges the full price for its pre-pay service.

New Horizons snaps finish buffering: Ultima Thule actually two dust bunnies that got snuggly 4.5 billion years ago

steelpillow Silver badge
Pint

Astronomical

What a bit of luck. The first object to be given a double-barrelled name in advance turns out to be a double object.

The chances against that must be, er, astronomical. >ducks for cover<

Naming them individually "Ultima" and "Thule" is not so much unimaginative as grabbing the moment to set an archetypal precedent. I only wish there were a double-beer icon here.

It's 2019, the year Blade Runner takes place: I can has flying cars?

steelpillow Silver badge
Boffin

AI? Not

Replicants are not AI as we struggle to create it today, they are biologically engineered - eyeballs being a case in point. Listen too to the dialogue between creator and creation over the way that the engineering of these supermen has led to an (admittedly convenient) un-fixable drastic reduction in lifespan. They are not AI as the article claims, they are supermen. The same applies to the artificial pets (nod to the forgotten owl, here). Given the current bleeding-edge work on athletic performance enhancements, neural stem cell implants, genetics and whatnot, we may perhaps create replicants before we can achieve true AI.

'Year-long' delay to UK 5G if we spike Huawei deals, say telcos

steelpillow Silver badge
Joke

Huawei in a manger

No crib for a red

The little ... oh, you know the tune, make it up as you go along.

Corel – yeah, as in CorelDraw – looks in its Xmas stocking and discovers... Parallels

steelpillow Silver badge
Boffin

History, history

WordPerfect was the original dominant wordprocessor on MS Windows, taking over the marketplace from the older WordStar on MSDOS. It was famous for its "reveal codes" feature which gave you an editable view of the raw ASCII document code. Magic! Rather than make a better product themselves, MS indulged in their usual hated tactics to oust WordPerfect and force their own Word on everybody, and from that grow an office suite to oust Lotus 1-2-3 etc. Corel bought the failing WordPerfect and, bless their cotton socks, kept it on life support until it regained a semblance of consciousness.

Meanwhile, Corel Draw was falling victim to Adobe's equally disreputable selling of their Sh*tware. Xara was a blazlingly fast and easy to use up-and-coming competitor to on Acorn's RISC OS/Archimedes. As the ARM-based OS fell from favour, so too did Xara's sales. They offered their UI to Inkscape, hoping to do a tie-in with Inkscape as the free version and Xara as the much faster pay-for version, but in the end all it did was improve Inkscape no end. Instead, Xara was bought up by Corel, who used its algorithms and UI to refresh Corel Draw. Hats off to the Xara team and RISC OS for the colour picker we have all used to death ever since.

I am amazed and delighted that Corel have the cash to buy anything any more.

IBM: Co-Op Insurance talking direct to coding subcontractor helped collapse of £55m IT revamp project

steelpillow Silver badge
WTF?

WTF

Agile + single-drop release candidate = WTF

Did nobody tell the customer?

Boffins don't give a sh!t, slap Trump's face on a turd in science journal

steelpillow Silver badge
Joke

The real truth

"This was just an unfortunate accident. We wanted to draw out the common sequence of breaking wind, in which there is little DNA, followed shortly by a number two, in which there is plenty. They can feel a lot the same while they are on the way, and sometimes even arrive almost simultaneously. So we searched online for an image of a "fart or trump" and photoshopped it onto the end of a faecal stool. We had absolutely no idea that the image bore the slightest resemblance to our esteemed President, this has come as big a shock to us as to everybody else. Now, can we please keep our jobs, Your Honour?"

steelpillow Silver badge

Re: They have to retract the article...

Yeah, it has apparently retained star of South Park, Mr. Hanky, as its lawyer.

Jingle bells, disk drives sell not so well from today. Oh what fun it is to ride on a one-horse open array...

steelpillow Silver badge
Flame

Somebody just took a ruler to the trends of the last two years. I could do that. How much was the clown paid?

Virgin Galactic test flight reaches space for the first time, lugging NASA cargo in place of tourists

steelpillow Silver badge
Coat

Re: Bah!

in space nobody can hear you yeeeehaaaa!

steelpillow Silver badge
Holmes

82.7 = 100, really?

"The Kármán line, at 100km, has commonly been regarded as where space starts."

So, not actually reached space, then.

I notice that the BBC swallowed the same guff and have since watered down their headline. Ho-hum.

Bulk surveillance is always bad, say human rights orgs appealing against top Euro court

steelpillow Silver badge

Re: there is an absolute right to privacy, which there isn't

"Bulk surveillance is recording every beach, all the time, and then being able to do a search at some point for where you have been. See the difference?"

Oh, you mean like security cameras in shopping areas? The ones they trawl back through to catch paedophiles, rapists and terrorists?

No, I don't see the difference, or at least, not that difference. (I noted a different difference already - got that?)

steelpillow Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: there is an absolute right to privacy, which there isn't

There is and there isn't.

First, let's include commercial spying, aka data harvesting, in the mix. What "right to privacy" applies to NSA and GCHQ that does not apply to Facebook and Google?

Next there is the POPD - Plain Old Physical Domain. What "right to privacy" does online trawling breach, that a telescope on a pier above a crowded beach does not?

And what "right to privacy" should override the right not to get abused by a paedophile, rapist or terrorist?

I am not saying there are no such rights (for example trawling the 'net often reveals an ID that the telescope seldom does), but I am saying that a lot of BS is spouted by rights activists.

Boffins build blazing battery bonfire

steelpillow Silver badge
WTF?

Photovoltaic?

Natural hot-rock exploitation uses water/steam or a similar working fluid to turn the heat into mechanical work and drive generators. Why change to photovoltaics?

BOFH: State of a job, eh? Roll the Endless Requests for Further Information protocol

steelpillow Silver badge

Sometimes it's the Boss

Company I was with had a helldesk system just like that. Problem was, sales were falling because the printer in the sales dept had been borked for so long.

I was asked to take the desk over, fit it into my spare moments, so I did the job properly. A couple of months later sales are back up again. But management decides I am "spending too much of your valuable time" on it, a euphemism for my once-weekly round-robin status emails, which were embarrassing said managers for not getting things done.

So it gets passed back to a secretary who could teach the PFY a thing or two. Couple more months and it is back to square one.

Falcon 9 gets its feet wet as SpaceX notch up two more launch successes

steelpillow Silver badge

Re: If only...

Thanks. The parallel is still worth noting and it is hard to do so while being kind about [CENSORED].

Actually, I just say what I think and let the up/down votes look after themselves. They speak more to me about the psychology of commentards than about my posts.

steelpillow Silver badge
Devil

If only...

...his Dot-Com Boomness's Autopilot-controlled cars "behaved exactly as designed in its abort mode."

Total Inability To Support User Phones: O2 fries, burning data for 32 million Brits

steelpillow Silver badge

Re: Ericsson blame 'expired certificate' in software version

"the main issue was an expired certificate in the software versions installed"

Can it be that carrier-grade installs don't get updated by operators as promptly as the run-of-the-mill swearware does?

Whoever woulda thunk...

Adobe Flash zero-day exploit... leveraging ActiveX… embedded in Office Doc... BINGO!

steelpillow Silver badge
Coat

Re: leveraging ActiveX

Probably thinks he's Archimedes.

steelpillow Silver badge

Re: Flash, ActiveX, Office doc embedding/scripting - should already be DISABLED

Yeah, but we have so much legacy flash/office stuff that our business depends on, we cannot just turn it all off.

We are too dumb to plan migration to a secure policy. We just have to learn and not do it again. This time we really will learn, we really believe that.

Except, we are still as dumb as Charlie Brown when it comes to being suckered one more time.

BTW, it's spelled AUGH!

Early to embed and early to rise? Western Digital drops veil on SweRVy RISC-V based designs

steelpillow Silver badge
Devil

Re: 28mm CMOS process technology

You stole my post!

I knew that Open Source technologies can lag behind the proprietary bleeding edge, but this is ridiculous.

No, you haven't gone deaf – the Large Hadron Collider has been wound down for more upgrades

steelpillow Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Explain pleeeese

The regular hydrogen nucleus is just one positively-charged proton.

The innermost electron orbital around it, known as the S, has room for two negatively-charged electrons.

H+ has no electrons and is just a proton.

H has one electron and a neutral electric charge.

H− has two electrons, and is stable because they fill the S orbital so nicely.

Intel eggheads put bits in a spin to try to revive Moore's law

steelpillow Silver badge
Trollface

?

Nobody is talking switching speed yet. I wonder why not.

Nor is anybody talking about noise immunity - lower voltages mean greater susceptibility.

Tesla autopilot saves driver after he fell asleep at wheel on the freeway

steelpillow Silver badge
FAIL

The elephant in the back seat

So, if there is no driver giving signs of life, how the feck does the car manage to carry right on as if there is?

@Elonmusk: The default behaviour is not happening. That is a bug the size of an elephant. Look into it, or get cuffed when the court case that notices your failure to do so comes up.

It's nearly 2019, and your network can get pwned through an oscilloscope

steelpillow Silver badge

"So I unplugged the network and took pictures of the screen with my phone."

Used to use an old Polaroid instant film camera with special adapter hood.

Sysadmin went nuts. "Not what we are here for" blah blah.

But he insisted on being the only one who could set up network connections, because self-promotion security. He was a backroom admin, not routinely allowed on customer premises, so we explained that it was the only non-network option available and told him we needed a consistent presentation style in our reports (Pritt stick and photocopier).

After a bit he came back whining about digital backups. "OK, if you want to scan and archive everything, the roomful of filing cabinets is over there".

High Court agrees to hear full legal challenge of Blighty's Snooper's Charter

steelpillow Silver badge

Re: At least in the UK...

I'm not expecting miracles, I'm expecting the people we vote for to do what we want them to do.

The difference being?

steelpillow Silver badge

Re: At least in the UK...

Nobody really understands the pros and cons of mass surveillance. Where do you draw the lines between publicly-available Internet stuff, commercially-sensitive Internet stuff, personal Internet stuff and private Internet stuff? Commerce, the right to privacy, and the national security we all pay taxes for, all have different ideas about where to draw those lines. Blink and the technology changes and the rules need to change with it. Don't expect politicians to keep up.

The UK constitution has a reasonably robust series of checks and balances built in to try and work towards a sensible balance on such thorny issues. It's more than most countries' constitutions have, but there's no point in expecting miracles.

Support whizz 'fixes' screeching laptop with a single click... by closing 'malware-y' browser tab

steelpillow Silver badge

For old times' sake

Back in the day, PCs had no hard drive and an OS like MSDOS or CP/M had to be loaded from floppy disk on startup.

Neighbour had an Amstrad PCW. The main program for it was the Locoscript wordprocessor, which was integrated with a modified CP/M so that the whole shebang booted off a single disk: clunk, click, whirr, and you were away. You could also get other programs, such as spreadsheets, which ran on CP/M.

Talking one weekend, he says he's bought a spreadsheet but it won't run, so he'll have to send it back on Monday.

I offer to take a look, he shows me the PCW and the offending spreadsheet disk.

I ask, "have you got the CP/M floppy which came with the machine?"

"Somewhere probably, why?"

"You need to load the OS before programs can run on it."

" * "

Gartner to wearables biz: Through failure comes success!

steelpillow Silver badge
Meh

"I really wanted to find a use"

Three things I would use are phonecall/message status, a big navigation pointer while walking strange streets and voice-activated dictation while driving (as the thing is already in the right place. No talking back to me, mind you!).

An external interface for clip-on medical sensors might come in handy later, if I ever get diabetic or something.

steelpillow Silver badge
Coat

Surely Project Jacquard must be looming close.

OneDrive is broken: Microsoft's cloudy storage drops from the sky for EU users

steelpillow Silver badge
Thumb Up

Classic!

"The fact that Microsoft has a wide variety of images to illustrate failure..."

ROTFL

I wonder if any of them is compered by Clippy?

It's all a matter of time: Super-chill atomic clock could sniff gravitational waves, dark matter

steelpillow Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Huh?

It's more subtle than that. Mass and energy tell spacetime how to curve, the curvature of spacetime tells matter and energy how to move. Gravity is effectively the local curvature of spacetime induced by the presence of mass and energy, so as mass moves around the curvature follows it and as the curvature changes so the mass follows it in a tight feedback loop. Depending where you are looking on the loop, effects on/by are interchangeable.

On time dilation, redshift is just how time dilation is measured, regardless of whether it originated in motion or gravity. A "gravitational redshift" is a measure of gravitational time dilation and is a perfectly sensible way to express that.

Oh, and gravitational waves are indeed "gravity", just as light waves are "light".

Pulses quicken at NASA as SpaceX gets closer to crewed launches and Russia readies the next Soyuz

steelpillow Silver badge

Drugs assurance

To be fair to NASA, the issue is more about risk management and assurance than a lone TV incident. What controls does SpaceX have in place to minimise the risk of doped-out or coked-up staff making dangerous manufacturing slips? Company policy, an inspection and enforcement regime, and corporate culture all play into that mix.

Fair enough. But they should also be asking about the risk of exhausted and sleep-deprived workaholics making similar blunders.

Baroness Trumpington, former Bletchley Park clerk, dies aged 96

steelpillow Silver badge
Pint

Re: A Good Life

My Mum got much the same job with the Admiralty, and at much the same age. Though the coded messages were ours, they still carried the same horror. And she smoked Black Russians afterwards, not cigars. She in turn taught me what was "important" for the rest of my life.

I'm sure the Baroness needs someone to talk to. This beer's for you, Mum.

Microsoft reveals terrible trio of bugs that knocked out Azure, Office 362.5 multi-factor auth logins for 14 hours

steelpillow Silver badge
Happy

"Unfortunately on this recording the audience were anticipating the story and kept interrupting the flow with laughter."

Oh, some of us have been doing the same with Microsoft for a very long time.

steelpillow Silver badge
Megaphone

System engineering

This is what happens when you don't do your system engineering properly before rollout. Every part of this multifaceted crap was foreseeable, testable and hence avoidable.

Facebook spooked after MPs seize documents for privacy breach probe

steelpillow Silver badge
Black Helicopters

History lesson

A super-rich, arrogant little twonk sets himself up against the government that invented modern democracy several hundreds of years ago and has been dealing with super-rich, arrogant little twonks ever since.

Zo long, Zucker.

Mobile networks are killing Wi-Fi for speed around the world

steelpillow Silver badge

Regional variations

Was staggered how fast a 4G connection is at St Pancras station, massively beats my home WiFi/router/BTcopper-cos-sod-you-Sir. A fair bit slower in most provincial towns, but still comparable.

Home 4G is a bit weak and consequently stutters/cuts out a lot, so can't really judge its native speed.

Seriously considering giving myself a 4G through-the-wall thingy for Christmas. If I scrap my copper archaeology it'll pay for itself in a couple of years at most.

Shocker: UK smart meter rollout is crap, late and £500m over budget

steelpillow Silver badge
Mushroom

Cost to the consumer

With the cost of minor updates being passed on to the consumer, how much are these f*cking things going to cost us once their pwnage gets so obvious even the industry has to admit it, and security fixes start coming through - at cost plus? And how blindingly in-your-face-and-out-your-*rse is exploitation at scale going to have to get before that happens?

Amber Rudderless will get a peerage for this, no doubt.

Comparison sites cry foul over Google Shopping service

steelpillow Silver badge

Re: dissenting opinion

Upvote for standing up.

However I do find that comparison sites can be useful in narrowing down the field: typically I check several of them out, draw up a shortlist, and then visit each vendor individually. Never buy through them though (except once when a site was running an exclusive bargain offer from my chosen vendor).

Capita, Serco, Sopra Steria to write cheat-sheets for UK.gov in case they collapse

steelpillow Silver badge
Coat

Proforma living will:

"If [company name] ceases trading or delivering on its commitments to UK Gov, for whatever reason, then all its proprietary code shall immediately become licensed under a GNU Public License such as GPL3 or as appropriate to the system usage such as LGPL. Any licensed usage of proprietary third-party tools, such as compilers, used to prepare the code for installation, shall at the same time pass to UK Gov. Agents for UK Gov may take any reasonable steps to recover the source code and place it in a publicly accessible repository, and to recover usable copies of licensed toolsets. Agents for [company name] are forbidden to impede this process in any way and are obliged to support it to the best of their ability."

Hey-ho, I'll get my coat....

Behold, the world's most popular programming language – and it is...wait, er, YAML?!?

steelpillow Silver badge

Re: HTML-only calculator? I don't think so

"The CSS is only for appearance, it makes a bunch of links look like a picture of a calculator."

Wrong. You evidently didn't try cutting out the CSS between the <style> tags and seeing how the pure HTML actually renders. Try it now. Then eat your words. The key is whether or not the shit is *displayed*, and that is in the CSS attributes.

steelpillow Silver badge
Unhappy

Turning Turing?

So what was once Yet Another Markup Language now Ain't Markup Language but has become a programming language.

How long before the next iteration is made Turing complete and the first YAML code-injection attack appears? >sigh<

steelpillow Silver badge

Re: Whitespace

Markup for display needs to be able to handle white space intelligently. Coding for white space by using alternative markup characters in place of the white space itself is just a little bit mental. Every page markup language seems to have its own touch of the moon, I have never met a really clean one.

steelpillow Silver badge
Pint

Re: Yet another

...beer for the Truth, DCFusor

steelpillow Silver badge
Boffin

HTML-only calculator? I don't think so

Looking at the calc code (y'all did that before sounding off about it, right?), it comprises 21,351 lines, of which all but 15 are HTML. The remainder are CSS, there is no active javascript. So yes, it's just one giant boilerplate lookup table. But something active has to be in there to select which boilerplate, and that uses the CSS display property. This is the core feature that makes it "look" smart even though it isn't really. So the calculator is not in fact written in pure HTML, it is written in HTML+CSS, with the smarts all being in the CSS.

CSS does have some more sophisticated semi-programmatic features, such as the var () function, so it it possible that the code could be much reduced. But AFAIK that could only shrink the amount of boilerplate and bury it deeper, CSS cannot provide true programmability.

Big Falcon Namechange for Musk's rocket: BFR becomes Starship

steelpillow Silver badge

Tradition

"We built this rocket on debt and bull" can and should be improved upon.

The traditional British version would be a fraction less logically complete but rather more assonant:

"We built this baby on cock and bull."

Health secretary Matt Hancock assembles brains trust: OK, guys. Let's cure NHS IT

steelpillow Silver badge
Coat

Oh, great

More proprietary vendors dropping in incompatible boxen with ripoff support needs built-in. >sigh<

I know, how about starting with a schema/framework standard for the secure storage and interchange of personal health data. Then any fool can buy any box as long as it implements the standard properly. Why, you could even >sharp intake of breath< "publish" the schema in the public domain and >catch that bureaucrat as he faints< solicit comment.

"I had a dream last night" — John B. Sebastian