Posts by Caver_Dave

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

Re: A simple yes/no would have done

Before I organised a commercial FTTP link for our local 4 Parishes, we had problems with the local Secondary School which served them.

Teachers would send out work as PDF (if we were lucky) or more often PowerPoint files. These would take approximately all night!, to download at <900Kbps (often much slower if it had been raining), but were impossible to upload with the answers at approx. 10KBps!

Eventually, the Head Mistress relented and allowed the answers to be brought back into school on a USB stick (despite the security implications), but insisted that everyone should have decent Internet access despite all the evidence to the contrary (and some families not having computers). I never did ask if she was in cahoots with BT who refused to update our links despite BDUK money to do so and our Parishes claiming the top 4 spots in the County Councils 'broadband upgrade needs surveys' on the first 2 times they were run.

National Public Data files for bankruptcy, admits 'hundreds of millions' potentially affected

Software development and security in its wider forms could be regulated.

In the UK, for instance, if you want to be an accountant you have to be chartered, and the same in many other professions.

There is a Chartered IT Professional qualification, but this proof of competency and ongoing CPD, is not required before you can practice as a SW Engineer. (Look up SIFA for the sort of competencies people can be measured against across the wider IT realm.)

But a larger factor is the fact that corporate finance departments don't want to pay for qualified individuals to produce quality, but just the bare minimum working botch from some offshore sweat house.

Caver_Dave CITP MBCS MIEEE

Workday beats Oracle and Microsoft in UK 'Matrix' ERP deal

Why is it tricky

HR law is the same across the UK.

Finance/payroll also have to abide by the same UK wide rules.

So, it's just a matter of getting the incumbent staff to move away from "we've always done it this way", and to work the same way across departments.

Note: I do not work for the civil service, so I probably have missed about a million reasons why they can't all work the same way.

A year after taking on Intel's NUC mini-PCs, Asus says it's ready to improve them

Re: " FSCK that for a game of soldiers"

Copula hock in lido militum?

Average North American CISO pay now $565K, mainly thanks to one weird trick

Re: CISO?

"Generally the only commonality is that if they get hacked very badly, that's the person who gets fired."

Should be the one going to jail - then you might get proper security for the high wages, rather than just a gravy-train.

AI agent promotes itself to sysadmin, trashes boot sequence

Re: Reminds me of the time...

I had one last week from "Microsoft". They asked me to "open windows please".

They asked me "what can you see?" "A lovely view of a field" I answered and the female voice said that "you shouldn't be using Windows XP", showing good knowledge.

So I said "I will open another window". She asked "what can you now see?" "I can see a road" I answered. "Hmm.. that's strange" she replied.

"What does it say at the bottom left of your window?" she asked. "British Safety Glass" I replied.

Click.....

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Re: Trance Programming

Been there and done that. 14 hours of solid Z80 assembler coding. Apparently, never left my seat the whole time. I thought it was about lunch time when I finished, but it was already dark. Worst of all my desk was by a huge window and I never even noticed it getting dark, or the need for bodily functions (input or output.)

Re: I Never Thought...

Use to be the Guru on a line of aerospace routers.

The way I use to work out the code interactions was rather like a 3D map, with villages on the hills representing the protocols or processing blocks and the roads between carrying the data streams.

Apparently I would sit there with my eyes closed, but my hands and sometimes head 'flying' through the landscape over the data packets' travel.

I had a map of around 400 'villages', and yet struggled with the names of some people I'd worked along side for 20 years!

Icon: black helicopter as that was probably what I was 'flying'

The mystery of the rogue HP calculator: 12C or not 12C? That is the question

65 comments so far and no-one has mentioned BCD - Binary Coded Decimal

Chinese server-maker Inspur claims it's on track for better liquid cooling with 'railway sleeper' design

AI reinvents

Wow! AI has reinvented the "cold wall".

Mil/aero boards have for a long time transferred heat from the devices on the board to the cold wall at the edge.

It's how you can run the latest Intel processor at 85 Centigrade ambient without fans.

Given the authors, they probably mined this from the "offsite backup" facilities "provided" by the Chinese Embassy to the Mil/aero manufacturing primes.

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

"...with a well timed question"

Used to double-team with my boss during job interviews.

My boss would do all the fancy HR type and general IT questioning, and then it was my turn.

I had a reputation for just asking one highly technical question, which generally decided it for us, if the person was any good or not. This question was usually a comparison between two things the interviewee claimed they knew in huge depth and should have been easy for anyone who did know their stuff. My bullshi1t Radar was fairly good in those days, and it usually only took the one question to find them out.

It was not unknown for the interviewee to dissolve into tears and leave. But, it's their own fault for lying! (The last crier was aged 55 and claimed 35 years experience! He couldn't explain the difference between similar concepts in two different certification standards - knowledge that was essential for the job.)

Re: Never for rudeness, but..

I have worked from home for many years.

I was fairly ill one day, but joined an important, but very boring and long conference call (audio only). Where I was there only to answer any really detailed technical queries, if any occurred, which they didn't.

My boss muted me after it became apparent to him that I "was breathing deeply" - luckily it wasn't full blown snoring.

He didn't say anything at the time, but I confessed in my weekly 1-2-1 with him that I had fallen asleep and he recounted what happened.

I now stand at my desk, so hopefully it will never happen again.

The case for handcrafted software in a mass-produced world

Re: Small...

I did the noise and echo cancellation filters for the Nokia 2110.

Each had to run in an exact number of clock cycles, regardless of the input data.

All in assembler, I optimised it to the point that there was just one nop between the two filters.

Re: "I take pride in crafting the most efficient code I can."

"I take pride in crafting the most efficient code I can."

Do you check the assembler produced?

Sometimes the most efficient 'C' code does not make the most efficient assembler, as the compiler cannot "use all its tricks" on very good 'C' code and slightly "rough" 'C' code can be optimised into something smaller.

I write a certifiable deterministic real-time operating system - we have to be aware of such things, when we are proving code to be correct.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Lived at the end of a small village in the rural Midlands of the UK in the 1980's.

Sunday mornings, when everyone was cooking their Roast Lunch, our 240V could be read at around 180V.

I sent Polariod photos of the Avometer to the Electricity company, who subsequently sent a real Engineer out to look on a Sunday morning, whose comment was "bugger me, I've never seen it that bad before".

A whole new set of cables were strung from the nearest town, in addition to the original supply. Never had a problem after that.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be gone in ten years – for chump change

Re: "Curbing their spread feels like a good idea"

I have Merino Wool for base layer and socks.

They don't smell nearly as much as other clothing.

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

Re: Somehow became corrupted?

"not just blindly using something someone else wrote"

Or copied from the Internet as so much of the stuff from a certain large geographical region is.

Irked as it often takes my team longer to fix the crap than it would have taken for us to write it correctly, and we would be a much happier team and be able to more positively retain excellent staff.

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: Prison

I used to work with someone (from Glasgow, but I don't know whether that is relevant), who I would only approach on a Wednesday.

Monday and Tuesday he would be recovering from the weekend.

Thursday and Friday he was getting ready for the weekend.

At my last company everyone gathered around the departing person to present a gift (if you were lucky) and to hear you say something.

I had a very large turnout as everyone was expecting me to say plenty of contentious things, after 20 years with the company and through many owners.

I shocked them all by just holding up a banner that said "Thank you and goodbye", blaming it on knowing I would be emotional. I also knew that going to a supplier would mean I might meet many of them again.

Before we put half a million broadband satellites in orbit, anyone want to consider environmental effects?

Environmental effects

I got completely "the wrong end of the stick" when I read the byline.

I thought this was going to be about the diminishment of the suns effect on the earth due to the number of satellites. Might help on global warming by a miniscule amount.

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

Does not work for our tools team

We have to use tools that need extra custom tools to produce the reports we need for a certification authority.

Said custom tools are supported by a team that use 'scrum', not proper 'agile', but that's beside the point.

They buggered up a tool during a server change because they had never gotten around to making the 'proof of concept' work properly on any server (I suspect lots of hardcoded values). My experience here is that 'agile' = technical debt, where the devs move on to the "next new shiny" rather than actually finishing anything properly.

For 4 x 2-week scrum cycles they have push the fix onto the next scrum as it's not a 'sexy' thing to work on. Yes, it keeps making it into each scrum, rather than remaining in the backlog!

Letting the devs decide what they want to work on does not work in the vast majority of business cases I have come across.

Unfortunately the VP in charge of the department (yes we've taken it that far) just believes in the 'agile' process and says that of course the tool we desperately need will be fixed soon.

Disclaimer I am a certified Scrum Master, so I know how it should be done and was part of a highly functional team using scrum for 4 years and only manglement called it agile.

To explore caves on Mars and the Moon, take a hint from Hansel & Gretel, say boffins

Re: Olds?

There used to be "micro mice" competitions with wheeled devices trying to find their way out of mazes, or to the centre. Some of the early ones had ZX80's mounted on top, so that provides an idea of the age. Mine had a Spectrum.

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

Re: The medical test case

For rescue in caves practice, my group of caving trainers collect together out-of-date medical kit from the county's Scout groups. That way little goes to waste and we can see what actually survives the journey out. That guides the full First Aid and Rescue Kit we carry when we are training people.

It's been 30 years since I was on my first real Cave Rescue. Where I was the "stretcher Monkey" - talking to, and monitoring the casualty all the way out. Sometimes, we have to be a little "rough and ready". On that first rescue we knew the casualty had a broken leg and a hip/pelvis injury (found out later it was a broken pelvis), but we had to almost immediately lift her out of the cleft where she had landed and jammed, otherwise the winter water running over her would have finished her quite quickly.

Funnily enough, for recreational trips my group each have a much smaller and more rugged kit. A roll of narrow Gaffer Tape (with only about 1/4 left so that is fits in a small pocket) and three Tampons jammed into the centre of the roll.

For simple cuts: cut a length of tape with the lock-knife we each carry around our necks. (Works both for us and our PVC suits.)

For simple fractures: tape the affected part to the another part of the body for support.

For a compound fracture: pad with the Tampons and then tape up.

Of course we can combine our kits if necessary.

If it's much more serious, there's not much chance of surviving the 4-5 hours average time for someone to get out and raise the alert and for a rescue Doctor to get in, and so no point carrying all the extra gumf!

Yes, the Gaffer tape can be difficult to get off (that's the appeal), but the Doctor's are working in an ideal surgery/hospital setting and although they might moan, it is actually perfectly simple for them.

Re: Strangest?

Apocryphal? Probably - it would be very strange to obtain a frozen chicken with feathers.

Geese were also used in some tests. They fly a lot higher than your average chicken!

Geese regularly fly over Mount Everest for instance. Not quite the regular cruising height of commercial aircraft, but not far off.

Strangest?

"You can't go into that room until the atomised chicken dust has settled!"

The glass window from the control room where I was, through to "that room", had a windscreen wiper on it, and although they might have been exaggerating with the word "atomised", there was no way I was going into "that room".

It was in a facility that performed R&D for the aerospace sector. I can't say more because ==>

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Yes, mine does the same. I know how far mine is out and set the limiter to 20 in a 20, 32 in a 30, 43 in a 40, 53 in a 50, 64 in a 60 and 76 in a 70. All are correctly on the limit according to GPS and the ECU.

I use the manually set limiter all the time. It allows me to spend my time looking at the road, other road users and potential hazards, not constantly checking if I have accidentally strayed a little over the speed limit on a down hill.

It is especially useful in my electric car that has no engine sound for you to calibrate your speed with.

Coders' Copilot code-copying copyright claims crumble against GitHub, Microsoft

Is there not a simple test

Code something using Copilot, then run it through one of the plagiarism tools - Black Duck or similar composition analysis tools?

Cancer patient forced to make terrible decision after Qilin attack on London hospitals

Re: People who engaged in this should be done for attempted murder

Start that with the managers who would not fund the necessary IT upgrades.

Want to save the planet from AI? Chuck in an FPGA and ditch the matrix

Re: Perhaps work on the ...

Excellent description

Re: Old news?

OK, I'll bite. I was referring to the general case, whereas the researchers are referring just to LLM.

As I have been out of this field for some time, I did have to look up "self attention" mechanism.

I fancifully thought that this was referring to the usual "trumpet blowing" hype that start ups use to gather attention to themselves, until I researched.

Old news?

FPGA's were the only way to perform neural nets fast and efficiently enough last century.

A new generation make the 'startling discovery' again.

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

Re: "AI and machine learning will help flights depart on time"

Mid 1990's I designed a system to help a warehouse (for one of the major supermarket chains) to receive orders until 22:00 from 60+ stores and get the first stores goods picked and packed into an artic by 22:30 (and that could be multiple stores packed in the correct reverse order into the one artic.) The orders did not arrive at pre-determined times and so the last to arrive might be the one that had to depart first! (All stores had defined times that they could receive the goods, often set by the local council or the shopping centre, and often only a 30 minute window.) The crux was that there was only room to pick and stand 5 lorries concurrently. The last lorry had to leave at around 03:30.

Yes, the algorithms were tricky, but they worked - except for reaching the target times. I sat there for 3 weeks of nights watching the 3 ladies who performed the task manually (but with difficulty) to pick up all the 'extra' rules they applied, and coding these in the daytime. Only when my algorithms could match all service commitments for 3 consecutive days did the actual switch over complete.

The point of this story, is that even when one of the ladies was replaced while she took a holiday, with a supervisor who supposedly knew the system inside out, (and for a few days after she returned), the service levels could not be consistently achieved. Hence the requirement to replace them with a computer. However, it was not just one computer, we had to design a completely dual-redundant system, because everyone knew that, although the 3 ladies were still employed on-site and on the same shift (but doing much nicer jobs), even after a couple of weeks of not doing the job (as per when they had been on holiday), they would not be up-to-speed enough to replace a broken computer and meet the service levels.

So I say that throwing your "Mongolian Hoard" of grunts to manually move all the baggage, is highly unlikely to achieve a satisfactory conclusion.

China's Chang'e-6 capsule returns with lunar loot from the far side

Re: Rehearsal

All will be instantly resolved when they find it has brought back something very similar to "Columbian Marching Powder"

NASA ought to pay up after space debris punched a hole in my roof, homeowner says

Re: Sounds fair

Try saying "I like munching on a Brownie" at a Jamboree and see how much trouble you will get into.

"Officer, I just wanted a piece of cake!"

Asda IT staff shuffled off to TCS amid messy tech divorce from Walmart

Re: When

When will most people realise that any store other than a corner shop, is an an IT company that happens to sell groceries?

SuperMicro CEO predicts liquid cooling will rack up 2,900 percent growth in two years

Cool and quiet for a home PC

I've gone the water cooling route a few times, making tiny, silent, overclocked PCs. A couple of times I've had a single external radiator and one large, slow, quiet fan, another time I had a convection cooled radiator. If I had a rack full of kit to cool, I'd probably put the radiator outside, as you would with an A/C unit.

Remember that in a normal datacentre there are (often multiple) fans in each 'pizza box', plus the A/C unit. But with water cooling you can avoid all the noise and electricity consumption of the fans in each 'pizza box' and directly feed the warm water into the radiator or A/C unit replacement.

London hospitals left in critical condition after ransomware attack

Re: Plan B. Have one.

I do know of one trust that had two suppliers for a number of their services, just for this type of redundancy.

Bean counters saw this as waste and cut the most expensive in each case, despite IT and Medical managers arguments regarding resilience.

ASUS creates a substance: Ceraluminum, which fuses aluminum and a ceramic

Re: Wake me up when they have transparent aluminum

I saw some in the 1990's. It had a similar opacity to an average used UK milk bottle. Good enough to see through, but I probably wouldn't make a windscreen from it.

One would imagine that given another 30 years of research, it is almost transparent by now.

Re: "a machine that's just 1.1cm (0.43 inch) thick"

And that's why "the Register" readership are predominantly Engineers and not in Marketing or Sales.

Crooks threaten to leak 3B personal records 'stolen from background check firm'

And directors and officers facing jail time and financial ruin for their mistakes. The are paid mega-bucks for taking the responsibility, now make them pay!

UK may not hit goal of 95% mobile coverage, commons committee warns

Lack of mobile coverage

What annoys me the most is the two-Factor Authentication that seems to be required for so many things these days.

Start a transaction on my desk top, run up the hill to get the SMS code, run back down the hill again, go to type it into the computer and it has timed out!

(WiFi calling is just about OK, but WiFi SMS doesn't seem to work at all!)

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: Excessive force

Hmmm! the number of keys (entry not keyboard!) that I have broken over the years.

Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild

Oops!

Life is an education - I've spelt that wrongly for years!

Re: The bells! The bells!

Yes Bebu. But, our 'tangentenial' links should be too vague for a simple data trawler.

Re: The bells! The bells!

Don't post the name, but if you worked it out, well done!

Re: Sturdy desks.

I used to work for an Epson dealership and I fixed those type of printers.

Once had a print head that burst through the side of the printer, through the wall of the Portacabin and across the carpark!

Re: The bells! The bells!

The western edge of the East Midlands.

If you played Assassins Creed Valhalla, you will already know the name.

Ubisoft made a small donation to the village, when they found out that there was a real village with the same name, in very nearly the same place as on their map.

Reminds me of a complaint when I was a Parish Council Chairman.

Some loud mouth from a City Bank had retied in his 40's (when us mere plebs will be working into our 80's) and had moved into the largest house in our village.

He had the gaul to actually come to the Parish Council Meeting to complain about:

(a) the 1870's vintage Church clock chiming 24 hours a day

(b) the sheep bleating in the fields (which they also do a little during the hours of darkness)

(c) the Cockrell breading unit which emanated all sorts of sounds and an amount of smell

I was more diplomatic than the farm owning Church Warden, who was also one of our longer standing PC members! He also suggested that he could move his manure heap much closer to the complainants house!

The countryside is a working area where salt-of-the-earth people are trying to scratch a living, not just a playground for city folk!

[Disclaimer: Ex-Deputy President of the National Federation of Young Farmers Clubs, but working at the forefront of technology, whilst embedded in my local community and doing voluntary and charity work - so not some swivel eyed loon!]

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

Re: 200 years later - WFT!

"200 years later, we finally learn to make cars that aren't noisy and stinky." tekHedd

First electric car production - Paris (1881), London (1882) and Boston (1888)

By 1912 33,842 electric cars were registered in the US!

First petrol cars in production - Benz (1885), Daimler (1886)

Yes, Lenoir, France (1862) and Marcus, Austria (1864) did experiment before, and are often quoted, but never went further than experimenting.

The first automobile to exceed 100 km (60 miles) per hour was an electric (Jenatzy 1899)

If the electric car had been developed to the same extent as petrol, then the battery would be about the size of an adult fist and be swapped every 1000 miles!