Posts by GruntyMcPugh

Silicon Valley roundabout has drivers in a spin

Re: Turbo Roundabouts

I assume everyone driving a Range Rover is a criminal.

Microsoft confesses April Windows update breaks some VPN connections

It doesn't affect Palo Alto Global Protect. That's the only VPN I use currently.

Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels

Re: SETI@rest

Boom! I knew someone would have remembered SETI @ Home. Elon is yet again inventing something that has already been done. IIRC a cancer charity in the UK also had a screensaver that used local processing to train image processing algorithms to spot cancer. So harnessing spare compute is nothing new. It's just a bit complicated and not that reliable.

Throwflame launches fire-spitting robo-dog from Hell

Re: Nice headline grabber

I'll wager US police depts are ordering them right now and will will program the address of their local University upon delivery.

Microsoft is a national security threat, says ex-White House cyber policy director

Hardly seems fair, when Zero-Days are a thing.

IBM accused of cheating its own executive assistants out of overtime pay

Re: "retaliating against them for accurately reporting their working hours"

IBM have always kind of done this. Annually, we had an assessment, the 'PBC Process' and one of the boxes that needed ticking was cost saving. So we were under pressure to not claim overtime so we could achieve this goal. PBC grade 1 got full bonus, 2 half, three a PIP and four the sack, so this game had to be played.

Then if you didn't book any overtime to customers for a few months, we got a nag for having 'flat' timesheet. So we were nagged to work overtime, and encouraged to not claim it.

Tesla decimates staff amid ongoing performance woe

Re: Decimated

Yeah, and many of us don't accept that recording of usage. Dictionaries record common, incorrect use of words, as well as definitions of course, so all the dictionary is telling us is a lot of people ignore the fact the word has a number in it. I don't think we should allow common use to define the value of a number, they should be absolute, shouldn't they?

Bon Jovi, Billy Eilish, other musicians implore AI devs to think of humanity

I'm trying to imagine what song an AI would come up with that had been fed Bon Jovi and Billy Eilish,... "Everything I wanted, dead or alive"?

LockBit ransomware kingpin gets 4 years behind bars

Re: Mikhail Vasiliev the “cyber-terrorist”

Our houses are protected with locks on the doors, but we still have glass in the windows. So 'protected' doesn't imply impenetrable protection.

Garlic chicken without garlic? Critics think Amazon recipe book was cooked up by AI

I like to cook with Elephant Garlic. I have a large crock pot, of course.

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

Re: The answer

...but what I want to know is what happened when they walked into a bar,....

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink tests its tech on a human

Re: sp -1

Well, clearly we are going to be able to interface with Prime, then have a fully immersive real world adventure by controlling an Optimus remotely. It will be a transforming experience: It'll be nearly as good as going outside for real.

Some sources say 12 monkeys died after having Neuralink implants. Along with ~1500 other animals that have been experimented on.

Your choice though.

IBM talks up cost savings, including 'workforce rebalancing'

Re: What does IBM do these days?

I worked for them until 2015, when I took Voluntary Redundancy. I had ten years under my belt at that point, after we were TUPEd to them in an outsourcing deal. So at that point, they did outsourcing, hosting, and still sold servers. They would project manage software development, and plan hardware installations, and entire lifecycle support. I think most of this stuff went to Kyndryl when they span that off.

Since then? No idea what core IBM does. I just know working in a medium sized organisation now, there's nothing we'd buy from them. Back in the day, there was an AS/400 here, but IBM don't sell any hardware we'd be interested in buying now. The rest, AI and all that, seems too vague, and a luxury or vanity purchase. We haven't got that sort of disposable budget.

Tesla goons will buy anything – including these $150 beers

Re: How about the flame thrower?

The Flame thrower was a Boring Company product iirc. The same Boring company that was going to make bricks from the dirt it mined out of tunnels, sell them, and become financially self supporting. I understand the planned tunnel from Ontario International Airport they were supposed to dig never happened, as costs spiralled from $45M to ~$500M, at which point, they bailed. At least folks that ordered the weed burners got one.

FTC: Please stop falling for social media scams, you've given crooks at least $650M so far this year

That happened to a member of staff where I work, a member of staff's 'boss' emailed using gmail, asking for Apple gift cards. Real boss was online in our instant messenger app, minion failed to clarify with boss and got scammed. Why are bosses too busy to buy gift cards, but able to do whatever it is they need them for, whilst so busy,... why are they using gmail when they are online,... why not communicate fully through company channels?

Seems people are still a bit naive. I saw a story recently that a gang in Nottingham were approaching young adults, and telling them about some Crypto investment that was a sure fire winner. They then asked for the mark's mobile phone, so they could add them to a social media group, and just walk off with the phone, at which point accomplices appear, and tell the mark to let it go.

I'm an ABC'er, Assume nothing, Believe nothing, Challenge everything, seems a lot of people skip these steps.

Twitter, aka X, tops charts for misinformation, EU official says

Re: Well, as long as the IPCC and their syncophants have accounts

If someone animated that, I'd watch it. There's some advert with Pandas doing Tai Chi, I wish that bit were longer, it would be some great ASMR relaxation material.

Elon Musk has beef with Bill Gates because he shorted Tesla stock, says biographer

And the thing is, if Gates had profited from the short, he'd probably have used the money for some philanthropical purpose eventually, whereas it's a rather tenuous claim that Tesla is leading the charge against climate change.

Morgan Stanley values Tesla's super-hyped supercomputer at up to $500B

Re: always connected ?

Training on a supercomputer is fine, but can you perform logic simplification for AI? Quine McCluskey for neural nets, so they can be run on in car systems?

Re: Tesla

Yeah, surely if 'Dojo' cost ~£1Bn to develop, it adds maybe a few $Bn in value over it's lifetime, tops. Anyway, until Tesla start paying shareholders dividends, it's just a massive Ponzi scheme, and whoever is left holding stock when the music stops loses. 'Dojo; is just another monkey to crank the handle.

Re: What if

Er, no. Musk might manage a stable of companies, but that doesn't mean it's legal to give companies in that circle preferential treatment. There's fiduciary responsibility to get the best deal if it's being offered for license or rental. If Musk owned all the companies outright, yeah, he could do that, but he has to answer to investors and shareholders.

OpenAI urges court to throw out authors' claims in AI copyright battle

Yea, verily.

Re: Adversarial inputs, anyone?

Same, I've asked it for chapters of various novels and each time it's mentioned copyright, and suggested other sources if I want the whole thing. So the data might have been ingested, but it's not being reproduced, and the case may stand or fall on that.

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

Re: Must be easy to hunt, though..

I wonder if the boar are radioactive enough that skewering them on a carbon moderator rod would make them cook themselves,... : -)

I was at 6th form. We gathered soil and water samples from various places around the school grounds into labelled containers, (old 35mm film canisters) marked where the samples were gathered on a map, went back to the Physics lab, tested them all with a Geiger counter and,... well,... were a little disappointed.

Musk's latest X-periments: No more headlines, old posts vanish, block gets banned

'Xcreeted' you made my day. And I'm totally stealing that. It's the weekend, have a beer on me ->

Start rummaging: Atari's new 2600+ console supports vintage cartridges

Re: No shipping

I started as a Saturday lad at Woolworths in '83, and we sold, sorry, stocked the Atari 2600, but we sold far more Commodore Vic-20s and '64s, Amigas, etc. The Coleco and Vectrex were better selling games consoles at that point.

IBM sells off cloud business – yes, we mean Weather.com

Re: I see Apple mostly ditched them a while ago - and predictions improved

I've never used Weather.com, so I just went and had a look. It fails to find my UK postcode, and offers me instead the weather report for Charing Cross, which is over 100 miles away.

Oh, it's worse than that. It fails to find any city name I type in and defaults to Charing Cross. $2Bn huh?

Computer graphics pioneer John Warnock dies at 82

Re: In 80pt bold please :)

"The Cuckoo's Egg", that was a good read. I started working as a Computer Operator in 1990 and a colleague lent me that book. I'll check out some of the other titles you mentioned, maybe it will rekindle my love of computing. It all seemed to exciting and new back then.

IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak

Well, IBM probably bill extra for delivering service with a smile.

LG's $1,000 TV-in-a-briefcase is unlikely to travel much further than the garden

and with that spare change you could get a portable power station like a Jackery, £200 gets 240WH capacity, so we still have some change for a cooler and some beer.

Lost voices, ignored words: Apple's speech recognition needs urgent reform

We've had a couple of funnies with Teams telephony sending transcripts for missed calls. One user reported a potentially abusive message to us from 'Mistress Spanky', when the message was from Mrs Stransky. and another from 'ADP Foreign Security' which turned out to be 'ADT Fire and Security'. So we've now got a small worry that transcripts of meetings contain howlers, and people in meetings might be seen to be agreeing with them, and whether this could be a subject access request / FOIA embarrassment.

Bank of Ireland outage sees customers queue for 'free' cash – or maybe any cash

Re: It's a bank, of course it's not free money

Many years ago, I got an extra fiver (yeah that long ago, when you could withdraw £5) I asked for £10, and between two of the £5 notes, was a folded fiver, I guess it somehow didn't get counted, I presume they detect the edges. But then I wondered if it was even accounted for going into the machine if they used the same method. So I stopped worrying, and went to the pub.

Former DEC employees to rally against stagnant pensions post-HP

OK, I think you answered my question, I couldn't understand why the pension hadn't increased in value, but if like you say, it's not an investment fund, it's just a pot of cash, I get it. My IBM pension has increased in value since I left 8 years ago, so I was missing something, cheers.

You're not seeing double – yet another UK copshop is confessing to a data leak

Re: Captain paranoid

Vexatious requests, oh dear, I work in local Govt, and luckily, some of our more vexatious citizens haven't realised FOIA means we have to respond, and instead just send emails to Councillors and the City Mayor. Most of our FOIA requests are salespeople fishing for information 'how much have you spent on Y in the last year' etc. The vexatious letters to the Mayor tend to be stuff like 'Do you shield people from the harmful effects of 5G in public libraries' etc.

Cumbrian Police accidentally publish all officers' details online

Oh, the irony.

If you're Russian to the Moon, expect traffic: Moscow's Putin a lander into orbit

No Russian Rover? Do the KGB not hire dwarves any more: -)

Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

Re: "especially in the met"

Back in the 80s, my sister worked for Lincs Police doing admin, and one of the jobs was processing job applications. 'One for the Met' was an in joke about candidates who had failed badly.

Couple admit they laundered $4B in stolen Bitcoins after Bitfinex super-heist

2,000 transactions? One wonders if they'd planned a bit more, and stolen a lot less, whether they could have got away with it.

China floats strict screentime limits and content crimps for kids

Re: It'll be interesting

Indeed, my initial thought was I spent most weekends with my best mate when I was a teen, so if we'd had a two hour limit, we'd have pooled resources, and spent two hours streaming or whatever on one device, then two hours on the other. Just like we used to pool resources when we were 17 year olds and we each rented a VHS then settled down for a sword and sorcery cheese fest many Saturday nights.

Re: "parents everywhere might just welcome the Communist approach"

Yeah, two hours for 17 year olds? It took us that long to type a game into my mates BASIC compiler. Yes, type, he had a Sharp MZ80K, games on tape were like Unicorn poo.

Baidu builds AI into cars so you can distract the kids with text-to-image tools

If the AI can keep answering 'Are we nearly there yet?' without getting testy, it's worth it. If it could clean up vomit and dropped sweets, it would be worth it's weight in gold.

White House: Losing Section 702 spy powers would be among 'worst intelligence failures of our time'

Well, Elon want to copy WeChat, so everyone gives him all their data about everything. Do we think he'll keep that data private?

US Air Force burns more money on electric flying taxis

Re: "almost 1,000 times quieter than a helicopter."

I saw a documentary on YouTube about a drone delivery service in Africa, where they use asymmetric propellers to change the tone of the drone, and it made the noise far less annoying. no idea if it's practical at this scale though.

AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay

Re: IPv6-mostly?

I work in local Govt, and we are still IPv4. I have a friend who designs networks, and every now and again I ask him if he's deployed any IPv6 and it's been a 'no' so far. Checking a couple of academic institutions I've worked at, one still appears to be on the same class B as when they were allocated back in the day.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's pop artifact stash now heads to a museum

Re: Kirk's Chair

There's documentary (I think it's on YouTube) about the Enterprise Shuttle prop, and it's a real eye opener about how poorly that was looked after.

Prices of gallium and germanium rise as China export controls loom

Re: Checkmate?

It was funny that Trump wanted Tim Apple to make his phones in America, while Trump Signature shirts were made in China.

On the record: Apple bags patent for iDevice to play LPs

Re: Had to have been filed 2021-04-01?

The only thing I miss about vinyl is gatefold sleeves. Oh, and maybe the quest you had to sometimes go on to find an album that wasn't stocked by the mainstream outlets (Woollies, WH Smith, Boots, etc).

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

Do you read 'The Independent' Science section by any chance? It's often re-purposed press release BS, without a shred of journalistic investigation or scepticism. Mind you 'Ars Technica' can be guilty of that, they promoted a story about a device that could pull moisture from the air and make water, supposedly without any energy input, and this was going to save the water starved world.