* Posts by Persona

879 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2018

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I work therefore I ache: Logitech aims to ease WFH pains with Ergo M575 trackball mouse

Persona Silver badge

Re: Never found a replacement for the Trackman Marble FX T-CJ12

Those things never ceased to surprise me. I occasionally saw them on peoples desks but not very often. However whenever a floor at work was emptied out for refurbishment there were always three or four in the pile of discarded kit in the corner of the room all destined for the bin. I now wish I had picked them up as you can get a lot for them on ebay.

Worn-out NAND flash blamed for Tesla vehicle gremlins, such as rearview cam failures and silenced audio alerts

Persona Silver badge

If only they had a battery available they could have used RAM ........

Tax working from home, says Deutsche Bank, because the economy needs that lunch money you’re not spending

Persona Silver badge

Re: Tax failure to consume

Raising the tax rate too high is counter productive. The laffer curve is real and we can see it working e.g. when you tax doctors too much they retire early. The only argument is about the shape of the curve and where the peak lies.

The car you buy in 2025 will include a terabyte of storage. Robo-taxis might need 11TB

Persona Silver badge

Re: Good luck with that.

I'm a bit baffled why people are talking about cars, trucks and taxis when most trains have drivers.

The Victoria line opened in 1968 with trains that could operate without a driver. The fact that they still have drivers over half a century later is not for technical reasons.

Persona Silver badge

Good luck with that. Your current car almost certainly has anti lock brakes that stop the car skidding if you hit the brakes too hard and might even have Electronic Stability Control. Advanced Emergency Braking is already mandatory on some vehicles and going to be mandatory on all cars pretty soon. Think about the airbags too: they are autonomous except for being able to disable the passenger one if a baby carrier is present. Cars have dozens of autonomous systems.

H2? Oh! New water-splitting technique pushes progress of green hydrogen

Persona Silver badge

Re: 3x the energy density of petrol?

I can't help but thinking the most pertinent words in your story were "when" i was married ...

Excel Hell: It's not just blame for pandemic pandemonium being spread between the sheets

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Re: Relax...

The programmer may say you can use Excel for a while but I need the budget to do a replacement now because one day this will fail and you probably won't even know

The programmer then went on to code the Post Office accounting system and some users were convicted of fraud when the money that supposedly had been collected was not there.

There are bugs everywhere. Government IT solutions have a habit of taking years, getting cancelled before they deliver anything and when they do deliver the results are still wrong.

If the Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition doesn't make you a fan, we don't know what will

Persona Silver badge

Re: A 600£ or 700£ price is now considered not hard to swallow? For a phone?

I buy phones from the cheapest reliable dealer. My phone contract is SIM only at £5 per month. I get 3 years life out of a phone so my total expenditure would be under £400.

Persona Silver badge

Re: A 600£ or 700£ price is now considered not hard to swallow? For a phone?

Yes it's a ridiculous price. When I look at the headline

If the Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition doesn't make you a fan, we don't know what will

my immediate thought is perhaps if the price was under £200.

Microsoft will release a web browser for Linux next month. Repeat, Microsoft will release a browser for Linux – and it uses Google's technology

Persona Silver badge

Edge was good for tablets with low memory as Chrome swamped them, but since Edge took the Chromium rendering engine it's now probably just as bad. The immersive reader mode of Edge is good

Another week, another dual-screen phone, this time a T-shaped LG thingamy

Persona Silver badge

Re: I actually like this idea

I looked at it and though "ugh" why? But your use case makes perfect sense. It's not something I would use it for, but you are probably a more representative user than me.

India flies Mach 6 scramjet for 20 whole seconds

Persona Silver badge

Re: Amazing.

Whilst the UK invests in some Indian companies it no longer gives aid money directly to the Indian government

Rocket Lab boss Peter Beck talks to The Reg about crap weather, reusing boosters, and taking a trip to Venus

Persona Silver badge

Venus is a terrible place

https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/

Dell: 60% of our people won't be going back into an office regularly after COVID-19

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Re: I would hate to own commercial real estate

In reality there are no services

Well the road outside gets repaired to "some" extent, the police come round if there is a break in and the fire brigade turns up to put out fires. So there are services, the argument is if they are good value for money.

You Musk be joking: A mind-reading Neuralink chip in a pig's brain? Downloadable memories? Telepathy? Watch and judge for yourself

Persona Silver badge

Re: So pigs are like people?

That doesn't sound right to me. All those cat videos on the internet show there must be more to it. They can't all be covered by the food category. Hmmmm ?

Persona Silver badge

Re: Reductionist science, thus fatally flawed speculative tech.

After a couple of hours of use he demonstrated instinctive flinching from an object moving towards him while blindfolded.

That must have been fun for the person controlling the object especially as Kevin was blindfolded so couldn't tell if said object was a balloon on a stick or a baseball bat.

IT blunder permanently erases 145,000 users' personal chats in KPMG's Microsoft Teams deployment – memo

Persona Silver badge

Re: What the . . . ?

Chat logs are basically smoking guns. If you get a legal disclosure order requiring that they be divulged you have to comply sure in the knowledge that not only is recovering the data from multiple overlapping backups going to be time consuming and expensive but also that many things in them will at least "appear" to be incriminating. A solution is to make sure that they never hit a persistent backup and implement a policy that scrubs them as quickly as your users can tolerate. That way you can stand there with hand on heart and say "sorry they are not retained".

The biggest joy your lawyers have in a legal disclosure exercise is finding that documented policy is being followed meaning the data wasn't retained. The second biggest joy is finding something really really incriminating "just" outside the disclosure window.

Physical locks are less hackable than digital locks, right? Maybe not: Boffins break in with a microphone

Persona Silver badge

Re: WD40?

Hmmmm ..... I had a new boiler installed the other week. On the back of the installation manual the plumber has written the date, the boiler inlet pressure, the meter outlet pressure and the boiler fan pressure. I think he was a Mario.

So long, Top Gun... AI software waxes US F-16 pilot's tail 5-0 during virtual dogfight drills

Persona Silver badge

you can see why having these sorts of forces off centre line would play havoc with aircraft control

Just a degree or two would make a big difference to aiming accuracy and certainly help put a bit more lead on the passing target. As for the control impact, an AI pilot should be able to not only compensate for these highly predictable forces but also incorporate them into the attack "solution".

Persona Silver badge

Very obsolete if it gets down to dog fighting range. The gun on a fighter is fixed to the airframe so to aim it you point the plane. If the gun could be aimed over an additional arc the pilot would not be able to control it and fly at the same time. An AI pilot could both pilot the plane and independently aim the gun while pulling 9G.

Uncle Sam says it's perfecting autonomous AI-powered drone, vehicle swarms to 'dominate' battlefields

Persona Silver badge

what happens when they inevitably go rogue

Just make sure they come with very limited options for recharging their batteries.

Persona Silver badge

Re: A Better Tomorrow

But they will only be used for Good.

Of course ....... though probably not for yours or mine for that matter.

As hospital-based infections set to rise, best not change the vendor behind the system that tracks them, hm?

Persona Silver badge

Re: PHE

You may well be right. With the total number of Covid-19 patients in UK hospitals currently being just 1,067 and with only a quite small proportion of the normal "routine" numbers of doctors appointments or hospital admissions being undertaken. PHE with 5,500 employees does look anomalous.

First rule of Ransomware Club is do not pay the ransom, but it looks like Carlson Wagonlit Travel didn't get the memo

Persona Silver badge

I recall video piracy was branded as financing organized crime. It always made me laugh to think that the drug and prostitution business was such a loss maker that they need to flog a few pirate DVD's in order to keep in business.

Persona Silver badge

Just make paying a ransom a criminal offence, punishable by, say, ten years in prison for the CEO. Sorted.

OK say you become CEO of a small firm and I work for you. I get caught by a phishing attack and pay a £50 ransom out of petty cash to get the data back. Later on you and I have a falling out about something else so I report the ransom payment to the authorities and you go to jail for 10 years......... Sorted.

Is it really important to stop people paying these ransoms?

Amazon gets green-light to blow $10bn on 3,000+ internet satellites. All so Americans can shop more on Amazon

Persona Silver badge

Re: Kessler effect

Gravity was set in LEO where space is only very big rather

As I remember it Gravity was set in a space about the size of an airport car park with Hubble, ISS and a Chinese space station all floating along in close proximity to each other, and requiring almost no delta-v to get from one to another.

Community Fibre to splash £400m on FTTP connections as it races to cover a million London properties by 2023

Persona Silver badge

Re: Competition?

Competition is an issue because each fibre provider will stick to it's own area as "demand" won't be there in the area served by one of the other 2 fibre networks. Once you as a customer have that fibre you are largely trapped to that ISP as you will never want to downgrade to a ubiquitous landline based connection.

A lock in even exists with BT. If you are with BT so have an Openreach provided FTTP connection, you would expect to be able to swap to any of the other common ISP's, however when you try (as I did recently) you discover they don't support FTTP. The only exception is Zen which pitches its price only slightly below BT.

Intel's 7nm is busted, chips delayed, may have to use rival foundries to get GPUs out for US govt exascale super

Persona Silver badge

Re: Interesting

"It would have to be either a company with fabbing capacity or the money to pay for it – Samsung maybe"

How portable are the chips at moving to different fabs that use different processes? I don't know, but would suspect they are designed to use the processes that the target fab uses.

Twitter says hack of key staff led to celebrity, politician, biz account hijack mega-spree

Persona Silver badge

Re: Celebs and Politicians Silenced

That's $100,000 in BTC definitely transferred in someones perception

Given that they were gullible enough to fall for this scam they were only ever going to be a temporary custodian of those BTC

You've think you've heard it all about automation in technology? Get a load of this robot that plugs in cables

Persona Silver badge

I once worked with a system administrator who was allegedly an ex shipyard welder. He was great but could and occasionally did plug anything into anything by applying "sufficient" force.

Persona Silver badge

Re: USB

I normally average 4-5 so if it "could" do it in just 3 ..... wow. Progress.

Tony Blair tells Russian infosec conference that cross-border infosec policies need more gov intervention

Persona Silver badge

My normal response to Tony Blair

Blair scoffed at people with concerns about the role of the state in everyday online life, saying: “When people worry about the data they shared with governments – most people share enormous amounts of data with technology companies!”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4874748/MAC-Tony-Blair-speaking-again.html

'It's really hard to find maintainers...' Linus Torvalds ponders the future of Linux

Persona Silver badge

Re: I wonder why?

That's a very poor starting position. Functional programmes tend not to have all their bits set to zero. Start with it filled with random data. That way there is a "chance" it will work first time. In the unlikely event it doesn't you will hit one of the many possible solutions sooner than starting with all zeros..

Internet Archive justifies its vast 'copyright infringing' National Emergency Library of 1.4 million books by pointing out that libraries are closed

Persona Silver badge

Excellent

Thanks to this legal action I'm now aware of this service and have been able to download a book I have been unable to find in either to the libraries I use.

Contact-tracer spoofing is already happening – and it's dangerously simple to do

Persona Silver badge

I just don't understand why this is a thing

Crime exists partially because it is easier than working. Crime is prevented, shut down, stamped on, yet it still persists.

Surprise! That £339 world's first 'anti-5G' protection device is just a £5 USB drive with a nice sticker on it

Persona Silver badge

The actuarial evidence looks good.

Clearly these things must work. No one who uses these devices has suffered any harm from 5G .........

It wasn't just a few credit cards: Entire travel itineraries were stolen by hackers, Easyjet now tells victims

Persona Silver badge

Re: Thanks, I need a fake passport to take out a loan

Don't be lazy: find it out yourself. Hint - if you want passport details, hotel reception staff are on not much more than minimum wage. No doubt £50 would get you photocopies of half a dozen passports. For a bit more you could also get the matching credit card details and address.

Persona Silver badge

What is the risk of your passport number being exposed. Mine is 509791552. Every hotel and car hire firm I have used in Europe has recorded that number so if there is a tangible risk surely I would have to have changed my passport number by now?

Persona Silver badge

Re: Oh dear.

So you are thinking that a burglar is going to invest in travel plans to hopefully locate a victim somewhere within reasonable driving distance safe in the knowledge that the house can't possibly be occupied by relatives or lodgers just because someone from there is on holiday?

>99% of burglaries are opportunistic. The <1% that aren't wont be targeting EasyJet customers.

Persona Silver badge

Oh dear.

So the hackers also know about my flight EZY8223 to Valencia on 13th January, oh my. The hack could also explain why my credit card company issued me with a new card with a new number even though the old one was not due to expire. Whilst having to change card details here and there is mildly inconvenient it's certainly not going to stop me using EasyJet once they start flying again.

Microsoft promises big things for Edge... and they'll be ready for folks some time before universe's heat death

Persona Silver badge

Re: "what Edge really needs is more users"

I've been using the new Edge browser for a couple of months. It works fine. I particularly like the immersive reader that you can activate from the URL bar or with F9.

Former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman calls on UK govt to legally protect data from contact-tracing apps

Persona Silver badge

Re: Oh what a tangled web we weave!

Sadly I for one did need it explaining.

Insider threat? Pffft. Hackers on the outside are the ones mostly making off with your private biz data, says Verizon

Persona Silver badge

Re: 86 per cent of the breaches were financially motivated

What on earth were the remaining motivations?

If people considered motive, the defences might be more appropriate. On top of financial, there is curiosity, bragging rights, revenge, espionage and straight malevolence.

Facebook to surround all of Africa in optical fibre and tinfoil

Persona Silver badge

Re: My gast is well and truly flabbered

It's just their long term plan to extract money from the citizens of Africa and gain profit parity with the more developed continents.

Persona Silver badge

Re: someone explaining

"goes into a magic box that works in ways I don't understand"

Upvoted for describing how it works in a way that I can understand too.

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

Persona Silver badge

Re: No love for CORAL 66?

On my first day of employment as a graduate I was handed a Coral 66 manual and told to learn it. We used it to compile code for Intel 8080 processors. It was a truly horrible language so I transitioned us to using "C" on Zilog Z80's in ~1981.

Openreach tells El Reg it'll kill off copper sales in 118 UK locations next year

Persona Silver badge

Re: long power cut = phone cut

If the mains fails at night while you are sleeping then you will be unable to use the conventional phone to call for help.

It uses 4 AA batteries which are customer replaceable. Not ideal, or what you would want in an emergency but the workaround is easy enough. People relying on mobile phones and forgetting to charge them (or their power bank) are a bigger issue.

Persona Silver badge

Fibre and copper

I'm in the odd situation of having both FTTP fibre for broadband and copper for my landline phone. Despite saying it would not be a problem during the order process BT were unable to transfer our old copper phone number to our new FTTP connection. Apparently the numbers for fibre came from a different pool so the number they wanted to give us was different (only the last 3 digits). At the time we got FTTP we needed to keep the same phone number. Despite escalation and complaints BT were unable to assign the old number to the new service so they reverted our phone part of the service to copper. Apparently being able to preserve your number when moving to FTTP was technically simple from an engineering perspective but there was no BT order process to make it happen. Hopefully they have sorted that out in the last year or so as I would like to get rid of the copper but my wife is very attached to the phone number we have had for the last 25+ years.

Persona Silver badge

Re: The reality of FTTP

BT warn that this service will not work during a power cut

Whilst the mains powered DECT and wifi phones obviously won't work in a power outage a conventional phone plugged into the Openreach fibre adapter/modem (not the BT Smart Hub) does as it has a battery backup. I can confirm this works with my FTTP.

The iMac at 22: How the computer 'too odd to succeed' changed everything ... for Apple, at least

Persona Silver badge

We used SGI boxes for CGI. The good thing about CGI was when you hit a bug in the SGI C compiler it was easy to spot because you got a very visible artefact. I guess with drug development you have to wait a little longer then count the bodies. We found several bugs in their compiler plus one we were convinced was a compiler bug but turned out to be a maths processor hardware issue.

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