Posts by Red Ted

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?

So we're going back to the Moon: NASA triggers countdown by firing up spacecraft production

Re: That Trump fellow's not so bad after all

‘Bad’ as in ‘about to be subject to an impeachment investigation’?

Are you a Nim-by? C-ish language, gentler than Go, friendlier than Rust, reaches version 1.0

Re: I see not a few pascalisms...

instead of evolving a language, he designed new ones

I see that comment and raise you the Python 2 and Python 3 situation that has existed for the last ten years.

Re: I see not a few pascalisms...

All hail Niklaus Wirth

UK.gov's smart meter cost-benefit analysis for 2019 goes big on cost, easy on the benefits

Just a disaster from start to... well... it probably won't end.

Not only do they cost lots, fail to work with other suppliers, there's also the extra opportunity for the back end to mess it all up. There's this article in the Guardian where they misconfigured the meter to be a pre-payment one, so it rapidly ran out of credit and cut them off.

Tut – you wait a lifetime for an interstellar object then two come at once

Re: Rendezvous...

...with Rama?

I liked the first book, but gave up on the second one.

Bus pass or bus ass? Hackers peeved about public transport claim to have reverse engineered ticket app for free rides

Re: Free buses

Even they realised that. What they say is "...public transport free at the point of use for everybody."

Electric vehicles won't help UK meet emissions targets: Time to get out and walk, warn MPs

£800m to deliver 54 charging points?

That's almost £15m each!

World recoils in horror as smartphone maker accused of helping government snoops read encrypted texts, track device whereabouts

Discussing Uganda

Ohhhhh, stoppit, please.....

Storied veteran Spitfire slapped with chrome paint job takes off on round-the-world jaunt

Re: Biggin Hill

Also available at the Duxford Aerodrome, again for a price that make a flight in the de Havilland Rapide a cheap day out!

Summer vacations put an end to rampant desktop crimewave

Re: "humans remain more effective than machines when it comes to securing digital assets"

To err is human. To really foul up, you need a computer.

Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours

"CPIOM is effectively a mini computer"

I think it's probably a fully fledged computer, unless you are implying it's a 1970's style mini-computer with core-store and Winchester disks?

Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who

Re: There was a second card

Excellent article, have beer.

I do wonder if the serial numbers for that batch of cards started at 20,000? This would then allow Pan Am to issue these as publicity stunts and keep the 00001 issue for the board of directors etc.

50 years ago today Apollo 11 slipped the surly bonds of Earth to put peeps on the Moon

That's a lot of fuel to burn in two and a half minutes

"four and half million pounds of propellant"

If you're going to insist on using imperial measurement system, then use appropriate units as that's 2009 tons or 486 KiloJub!

Bloodhound gang rides again: That's the Super Sonic Car bods, not the bawdy novelty pop act

Re: Andy Green...

As he probably really doesn't want to be the UK's PM, he sounds ideal for the job.

From Douglas Adams:

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

Imagine an Upside Down world where a vastly inferior OS went on to dominate... Stranger Things have happened

Glitches

Whilst V1 may have had programming errors in it to glitch, by the time they got to V3 there is court evidence of MS coding them in deliberately so as it threw odd errors if you installed it on Digital Research DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS.

14 sailors die aboard Russian cable spy, er, ocean research nuke sub after fire breaks out

Re: Nightmarish stuff

In my defence, I was told that by a Finn, that I consider a friend, whilst standing next to the Vesikko. I suspect it is a sort of cultural self depreciation.

Re: Out of interest...

They are not wanting to break the cable (which would just piss everyone off), but intercepting the signals passing through them, preferably without the user of the cable knowing.

Re: Nightmarish stuff

Ah yes, the "Vesikko" from the fleet of Finnish submarines...

They had a grand total of two, which apparently allows you to call them a fleet!

UK competition bods to stick probe into worrying lack of said competition in online advertising

Re: Lack of competition?

I’d love FB and G to delete all the data they have on me, and I’m sure it’s a lot, but as I don’t have accounts with either of them, that could be tricky.

Will that old Vulcan's engines run? Bluebird jet boat team turn to Cold War bomber

Re: Napier Deltec

The clever bit about the introduction of the Deltics was the use of the reliability and supply contract that the engines (power plant not locomotive) were supplied and maintained by English Electric. This meant the availability of the locomotive was much better than other diesels.

See "I tried to run a railway" by Gerry Finnes and "The Deltics a Symposium". The latter has a GA for the 4400HP 'Super Deltic'.

Re: 11 years from Lancaster to Vulcan

"Steam turbines between 1890 and 1901."

Parsons in the Turbinia at the Spithead Review is now what would be called a 'Disruptive Technology'. There were two possible outcomes of a stunt like that, either getting thrown in jail or suddenly having a bulging order book!

Turbinia at Speed is an amazing photo, the bows are out of the water and the person on the conning tower is having to lean in to the wind quite a lot!

11 years from Lancaster to Vulcan

I always find it amazing the level of technological development that occurred between 1941 (first Avro Lancaster flight) and 1952 (first Avro Vulcan flight) to enable that advancement of aircraft design.

This weekend you better read those ebooks you bought from Microsoft – because they'll be dead come early July

It's a book

You read it, you put it down, you make notes in the margin, you stick labels on the important pages. You shouldn't need to charge it, or have it vanish from your bookshelf when someone's server gets turned off.

As summed up by this book.

Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices?

Re: Or possibly

+1 for the Terry Pratchett reference.

I do recall that they did put the HDDs from his computers though a stone crusher too, after they had been run over by the steam roller!

Re: Wonderful, have one of these...

Entirely splendid article Mr Dabbs.

I know this problem as the Critical Need Detector that exists in all machines and can detect when you really need some thing to work and will then break at the critical and most frustrating moment (such as needing a printer to print the notes for a presentation you have to give in five minutes, or the thumb drive that has the presentation on it, etc etc.)

The Eldritch Horror of Date Formatting is visited upon Tesco

Re: Dates? Don't talk to me about dates...

The most frustrating thing about the American's use of the imperial system is them not using all of it.

One of the important points of the imperial system is there a unit bigger or smaller that you can go to if the numbers start getting too big or small. Take length, you start at inches, then move on to feet, yards, chains and miles. With weight you have ounces, pounds, stone, hundred weight and tons.

So why do they insist on specifying the weight of a car or locomotive in pounds?!