Posts by Red Ted

Facebook is the internet's cigarette: Addictive and laced with nasty stuff – 'shocking images, graphic videos, headlines that incite outrage'

Massively difficult to change Facebook

The difficult thing about Facebook in particular is that now it is such a massively rich company it can afford many lobbyists to push their interests in government. It is also a company still run by Zuckerberg, because he managed to float the company, but only sell shares that had little or no voting rights. He retains the majority of the votes, so whatever he wants goes.

A classic "One man, One vote" system, where Zuckerberg is that man and has that vote (with apologies to Terry Pratchett).

.uk registry operator Nominet responds to renewed criticism – by silencing its critics

It'll get voted down...

As the minority of the votes are controlled by Nominet and the biggest domain registrars.

We've got a money printing machine

... and we're not afraid to use it.

'Mindset reset' contributes to £1bn extra costs and another delay – 2 years this time – for Emergency Services Network

Re: Coverage

That's why EE keep announcing all the rural cell towers that they keep putting up. They are meant to be providing the 97% geographic 4G coverage required for the ESN.

Astronomers get more than they bargained for, as Mars probe InSight's instruments detects solar eclipses

New Reg unit of inclination?

The angle subtended when a five franc coin is elevated on one edge by one silver atom...

But the important question is what to call it?

The Phobos?

Or perhaps just the “Bugger All”, as I quite like the idea of having to use units of Mega-Bugger-Alls!

Overbudget and behind schedule, UK's Emergency Services Network reaches 500th base station milestone

Coverage

The 95% coverage is of population and the 97% coverage is geographic, so that an awful lot of base stations to build in the middle of nowhere to make that apparent 2% change.

Whoops, our bad, we may have 'accidentally' let Google Home devices record your every word, sound – oops

Damn those lone rogue engineers

It was never corporate policy to acquire lots of data to train an as yet unreleased system. Oh no not at all.

Aviation regulator outlines fixes that will get the 737 MAX flying again

Re: the plane may find eager customers

Even if you can find out the type of aircraft before you board, how well is it going to go down with your boss when you say that you couldn’t make the meeting as you don’t like flying on that type of aeroplane?

The world's nonsense keeping you awake in middle of the night? Good news. Go outside and see this two-tail comet

Re: So many comet flops

I remember watching Hale-Bopp though, without trying to hard.

That's what makes them worth waiting for. When you can see them clearly when strolling back from the pub of an evening that makes them all that more splendid.

"the naked eye may do just fine"

Not with my prescription it won't. Without my gasses (which need replacing urgently anyway) I struggle to see much beyond the end of my arm!

The reluctant log trawler: The buck stops with the back-end

Dear little Johnny

You inserted an order from one MR J DROP TABLES?

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

Re: Thank fuck for that

Is there any station at 192kbps?

Only one: BBC Radio 3 as their listeners really appreciate dynamic range! The rest of the beeb channels are at 128kbps.

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

Re: problems getting started

I have a policy of not down voting posts, but you *really* owe me mind bleach right now!

Happy birthday, ARM1. It is 35 years since Britain's Acorn RISC Machine chip sipped power for the first time

Cheers...

I'll drink to that.

If I recall correctly the first one appeared to draw no power at all, and it turned out the power supply wasn't wired to the chip correctly. However it could draw enough power through inputs that were driven high to operate.

Famously flawed, it is 30 years since the Hubble Space Telescope was launched

Re: Is It Just Me Then....

The engineering that went in to that was also quite splendid. They called Ron Javis out if retirement to design the bogies!

Invar

Invar itself has a whole special place in history and the developer (late 19th century) won a Nobel prize for its development.

I wonder if I can buy a small bar of Invar and do some science with the kids, say comparing it to the behaviour of a brass.. :-)

Keen to go _ExtInt? LLVM Clang compiler adds support for custom width integers

Re: Sounds like a good idea

It also describes the mechanism by which the first Ariane 4 launch ended in a loud BANG!

They reused one of the systems from 3, but the parameter it measured was larger than it was on 3, so it overflowed the type conversion before it was sent to another flight computer. The overflow then caused the first system to generate error messages that were then interpreted by the second system as valid data.

Mayday! Mayday! The next Windows 10 update is finally on approach to a PC near you

Re: Just wait

It’s the corona update

Where “every bubble has passed its fizzical”?

Absolutely everyone loves video conferencing these days. Some perhaps a bit too much

Re: Paris...

Sounds like further justification for why I have never travelled to Paris on any thing other than the train for the last 30ish years. Before that it was mostly train with a bit of ferry or hovercraft(*) in the middle, and that was with a period of working in the Loire in the late 90’s.

* Top tip: catching the last hovercraft service before they cancelled the service that day because the sea was too rough wasn’t the brightest idea. A hovercraft mostly rides on the surface of the water, so you go up to the crest of one wave and then just drop in the base of the next. At the start of the trip the hovercraft seemed so futuristic, but by the end I never wanted to see one again!

16 years and counting: How ESA squeezed oodles of bonus science out of plucky Mars Express probe

Remote software updates

I am still so impressed with the "Over the Air" software update process that works on a system that is in orbit of another planet.

I would imagine they consumed a few beers after they found it had actually worked!

Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42

The explosion at the end of the first episode...

...is something I have always wanted to play on a Wembley Stadium sized PA, with the amps wound up to 11.

Energizer Hard Case H280S: A KaiOS-powered blower that can withstand a few knocks

Re: Nokia's already there with an almost identical device

Have an upvote just for the quality of the info.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a flying solar panel: BAE Systems' satellite alternative makes maiden flight in Oz

Going that high

The U2 aircraft flew that high (nearer 80,000ft in fact) and an English Electric Lightening managed to intercept one during a NATO exercise in the mid 80’s. The lightening then turned over at about 90,000ft and passed it again on the way down.

So I rather suspect that there are a number of offensive aircraft that could intercept it.

Starliner snafu could've been worse: Software errors plague Boeing's Calamity Capsule

What happened to GEC

George Simpson is what happened to GEC.

Right after ruining another big British engineering company Lucas Industries.

German scientists, Black Knights and the birthplace of British rocketry

Nammo - purveyors of rockets to Land Speed Record cars

Nammo are supplying the rocket to go in the next version of the Bloodhound LSR

Also it's called "Bloodhound" as Ron Ayers worked on the missile design too.

Rockstar dev debate reopens: Hero programmers do exist, do all the work, do chat a lot – and do need love and attention from project leaders

Rockstar devs with Rockstar egos

Whist I have enjoyed working with a number of very clever people over the years, the last pleasant to work with were very clever and knew it.

If the words 'new', 'AI', 'for', 'the', 'physical', 'world', 'accelerate' and 'Facebook' scare you, click this headline

GPS and Compass readings in a building?

I think that's one part of the simulation that won't survive the transition in to the real world.

Who honestly has a crown prince in their threat model? UN report officially fingers Saudi royal as Bezos hacker

Re: How a video can be delivered through ...

It occurs to me that once the phone is infected and someone has root level access, they could update the video file to remove the exploit code (or even plant it having removed the original exploit from elsewhere).

The delights of on-site working – sun, sea and... WordPad wrangling?

Re: I've played hunt the source code before!

I had a colleague who just never could understand how Version Control Software worked. Several of us in that office tried to explain, several times each. The best he could ever manage was committing zips of the source tree under different names!

Boeing aircraft sales slump to historic lows after 737 Max annus horribilis

Re: "This is what happens when you scrimp on software dev, testing and docs"

However the former chief executive Dennis Muilenberg will receive $62m in additional compensation, despite being almost-but-not-quite-fired. So the risk in it for him for overseeing this mess was what exactly?

Boeing, Boeing, gone! CEO Muilenburg quits 'effective immediately'

Golden parachute

That was my thought too.

Even my contract means that if my employer asked me to leave tomorrow they would owe me three months pay.

I would imagine that the CEO would have a 12month notice period including bonuses, so really quite a lot of money, because they are worth it.

No box shifting, no Buck Rogers. Bezos-backed Blue Origin blasts off once again

Which will win?

My understanding is that the the best result is that none of them win per-say. It's the act of having the competition between them that will drive them on in a way that NASA on it's own would never do.

Register Lecture: Can portable atomic clocks end UK dependence on GNSS?

Re: Interesting

Microsemi (now part of Microchip) make chip scale atomic clocks in little modules you can mount on a circuit board:

https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/clocks-frequency-references/3824-chip-scale-atomic-clock-csac

Absolutely smashing: Musk shows off Tesla's 'bulletproof' low-poly pickup, hilarity ensues

won't have to worry about it's paint quality.

Hmm, you need to look at an unpainted DeLorean. There are finger prints all over them. Most of the ones I have seen in real life have been painted, just because they look so awful after about ten minutes of anyone being near them!

Close the windows, it's coming through the walls: Copper Cthulu invades Dabbsy's living room

Kraftwerk

With the kitchens I have observed the opposite problem too, with people tutting at the slightest coffee-cup-ring..

Like the Kraftwerk, I was expecting "Pocket Calculator" though. Who cannot like:

"By pressing down a special key, It plays a little melody"

Why can't you be a nice little computer maker and just GET IN THE TRUNK, Xerox tells HP in hostile takeover alert

"legendary technology biz"

Nope, that bit got carved off just before the Compaq merger, initially as Agilent and now renamed to Keysight.

You wanted flying cars and colony worlds. Instead, IKEA furniture-building-ish AI robots

Labelling the connectors

"Crucially, the boffins took the IKEA manuals for each of these pieces of furniture, modelled each part in Unity, and labelled all the connectors."

That is the nub of the problem. Building the first item is the tricky bit as you're not quite sure what all the hieroglyphics mean[*], but then the second and third one goes together much quicker as you have all the spacial relationships in your head. It appears that this system currently short circuits that. I'd be much more impressed if they just modelled the parts in unity, without labels and then got the AI to work it out from scans of the instruction sheets.

[*] The last few items of Ikea stuff I've built have a longer H&S sheet than the instruction one, as H&S sheet is the same few paragraphs translated in to many different languages, which is why I presume they don't put any text on the instruction sheets.

UK Info Commish quietly urged court to swat away 100k Morrisons data breach sueball

Duty of care

The issue here is that Morrisons had a duty of care (or whatever the appropriate phrase for the legislation is) to prevent the data they held from becoming public. They failed in that obligation and are therefore liable for it.

How the data became public shouldn't be the issue. The 'bad apple' is always a difficult risk to manage in any organisation, but just because it's difficult shouldn't mean that they should not be liable for it.

I'm still not that Gary, says US email mixup bloke who hasn't even seen Dartford Crossing

Re: TV

My favourite is still the original from Charles Babbage:

"If, however, any mistake had been made by the attendant, and the wrong logarithm had been given to the engine, it would have discovered the mistake, and have rung a louder bell to call the attention of its guide, who on looking at the proper place, would see a plate above the logarithm he had just put in with the word Wrong engraven upon it."

With many thanks to the great Sydney Padua for spotting that!

Here are some deadhead jobs any chatbot could take over right now

Re: "Microsoft scammers"

I too have tried this tack, when I have time.

My best one was when after some time (much shorter than your record, but still in the order of 20mins) when the bloke at the other end got so fed up with me that they said

"You are too stupid to own a computer"

and hung up on me.

I was so proud!

Re: Your list

"Stands the clock at ten to three,

and is there still honey for tea?"

"Honey's off dear"

Beardy biologist's withering takedown of creationism fetches $564,500 at auction

"No it doesn't. That link is missing broken."

FIFY

Heads up from Internet of S*!# land: Best Buy's Insignia 'smart' home gear will become very dumb this Wednesday

Re: We shouldn't have skipped the time when it was the Intranet of Things

"Until a robust, inherently secure, industry standard protocol has been designed, agreed upon and adopted by all these IoT tat vendors"

There's even an XKCD describing that very situation.... oh, perhaps not.

Talk about a killer feature: Home, Home Mini gear replacements promised after fatal update bricks gadgets

"it has been very difficult for our team to diagnose this issue"

Someone at Google has just discovered that the testing requirements of a distributed computing system increase exponentially as the complexity increases.

Sod 3G, that can go, but don't rush to turn off 2G, UK still needs it – report

Re: 2G will be here for some time yet

Ahh, you should check the data charges for M2M SIMs. Whilst the volume of data is low (M2M tend not to watch cat videos) there are still a lot of devices embedded in infrastructure that will be really expensive to replace.

2G will be here for some time yet

As part of EE rolling out the mandated 95% geographic UK coverage (basically putting up lots of masts in the most rural parts of Scotland) for the Emergency Services Network (see El Reg ad passim about this pork barrel and its lateness) they are refreshing their 2G network.

As also mentioned in the article, removing the 2G networks will also break the late, expensive and generally regarded as pointless, Smart Metering rollout.

A History of (Computer) Violence: Wait. Before you whack it again, try caressing the mouse

Re: The tine of a forklift wielded like a scalpel

I've seen the results of a test rack (think full height server rack) stuffed with very expensive RF test kit that was in a packing crate suitable for international shipping being dropped off the fork lift as it was being loaded in to the plane at Heathrow.

The rack itself was bent, the controller PC was wrecked, but the RF test kit? That all still worked fine!

That's still better than the poor UK Class 70 Locomotive that was dropped as it was unloaded from the cargo ship at Newport. One end of the 127ton railway engine landed on the dock first and gave the loco an interesting banana shape!

Promise of £5bn for rural fibre prompts Openreach to reach for the trench-digging diamond cutter

Re: "BT Openreach tried to lease capacity"

Also like the early days of ADSL, when BT would declare it too expensive to upgrade an exchange, then community would get together and sort out some other sort of technology.

Then having proved that there was a market for broadband in the area, BT would upgrade the exchange, undercut the local company and put them out of business.

Linky revisited: How the evil French smart meter escaped Hell to taunt me

Re: "The Prince of Darkness"

What Joseph Lucas himself?

WeWon'tWork: CEO Adam Neumann enters Low Earth Orbit to declare, I'm outta here

Is it just me?

Or is the current round of stupidly high IPO valuations for several companies reminding me of a situation about 20 years ago, that ended so well?