Posts by Caver_Dave

Microsoft research shows chatbots seeping into everyday life

My experience of chatbots ...

.. could be compared with ... arguing with a truculent 3 year old, holding a script of wind-up phrases

Irish Excel whiz sheets all over the competition in Vegas showdown

Re: Congratulations Diarmuid

And used for the wrong reason so many times - writing letters, as a simple database, etc.

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Medical systems are a nightmare

My company tried to get us to use a company wide password vault.

One on the early items in the training was how a wonderful feature in the vault allowed you to share passwords.

At which point anyone with sense dropped off the call.

Even the HR droid monitoring the call noticed this drop in attendees and everything has gone quiet on the compulsory use of the tool.

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

Re: Let me just file this...

Seems like a scare story to get more work for him and similar bottom feeding lawyers, conflated with a real issue.

Indian government reveals GPS spoofing at eight major airports

Re: No Silver Bullet

They used to be used on commercial airlines

NASA nominee 'committed' to uprooting Shuttle Discovery for Houston trophy piece

Re: Rubber bands

Serious comment here.

I was thinking about towing it, as it is a glider after all.

Waymo chalks up another four-legged casualty on San Francisco streets

Re: Animals can't handle cars.

The rural roads where I first started driving had a problem with Badgers, who dart from their place of hiding in the hedge at the last moment.

Took the the front wheel and suspension of my Mini off with a cub and the next week ran two wheels of an Escort van over a brock - it must have faced me and put its head down at the last moment as it threw me onto two wheels and there was no bodywork damage. As I reversed back up the road, it just stared as me for a bit and then ran off. They are the size, shape and sturdiness of a medium sized pig!

Deer are the main problem where I live now, but they are good and just stand on the verge watching you pass.

Another open source project dies of neglect, leaving thousands scrambling

Re: WTF?

Real time, deterministic, space and time separated, hypervisor OS developer/certification person here. I would say that my work is niche! However, I have used FFmpeg for video stream work at home. Doesn't everyone experiment?

Atlassian ran a tabletop DR simulation that revealed it lived in dependency hell

Thank you all for your helpful replies

I'm doing a different level of disaster recovery at the moment for a charity I have been associated with for 40 years.

The one part time member of staff has resigned and now I'm compartmentalising the files and email to allow different volunteers to take over control of their areas of responsibility. (We estimate that it will take us 3 months before we can get a new person in.) Sorting the files and emails into silos e.g. moving from general minutes to minutes for committee A, committee B, etc. has taken 60+ hours.

But the most frustrating part, and still not resolved, is Microsoft charity account licenses - we had one license before for the single member of staff, now it seems that we need 6 or more to cover all the volunteers doing all their individual parts, and we will go back to one license when we have a new staff member. I keep being told that someone from a different Microsoft department will contact me in 2-3 days, and then get the same message from the next person. Ad infinitum it seems!

I also have to bring the email into the Microsoft environment (currently multiple independent emails set up during Covid) so that we can have centralised, but compartmentalised access. I can certainly see the business model for Microsoft certification now, as every online resource seem to have at least one crucial piece of information missing to stop you doing it yourself. e.g. I know that I need to change the MX to move the email routing to the Microsoft infrastructure (I wrote an email system decades ago), but it's not clear where to set it to point to and how to set Exchange up to receive it with our domain name. And don't get me started on the number of disparate places you seem to have to configure users in Exchange!

I can see why no-one wants to give free Exchange advice to a charity.

Needless to say that Microsoft is not my area of expertise, but there is little chance of getting a new part-time member of staff without everything being in their environment.

Anyway, our simple disaster recovery plan (checked each Christmas break) has worked in so much as we can still communicate via email and see our files (although it all has to be farmed out manually by me to volunteers to deal with at the moment.)

A disaster recovery plan is only as good as the last test of it, so I applaud Artifactory for going public with their findings.

Old-school rotary phone dials into online meetings, hangs up when you slam it down

Re: Well done + random thoughts

I made one just before the turn of the century with a Nokia 2210 inside - The battery for the ringer was nearly as big as the bells themselves! It could also be powered by a cigarette lighter socket.

I must have had too much time on my hands before children!

I wrote the noise reduction and echo cancellation assembler code for the 2210 many years before, and so had a few lying around that I could play with and knowledge of the development tools.

I had a Land Rover at the time and it looked completely weird with a white dial up phone Velcro'd to the dashboard top.

Makers slam Qualcomm for tightening the clamps on Arduino

Re: Yuck

In my experience it is always resource contention. Some times in very unexpected places.

I work in the development of certifiable operating systems and I can assure you that avoiding jitter, by avoiding resource contention, is not trivial.

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

Re: Where were the grown ups ?

In the UK not divulging the encryption passkey carries the same penalty as the core offence! So destruction is much the better option.

BOFH: You know something's up when the suits want to spend money

Re: "colored crayon office"

Marketing/Strategy/etc.

1. They use the crayons to draw all the pretty pictures - usually someone else will actually then convert the drawings to PowerPoint for them to drone in front of

2. Cannot be trusted with anything sharper than a crayon

3. Crayons also used to cross out on the menu of "blue sky" terms they use in every missive - pivot, leverage, etc.

SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew

Re: A bit opposite from "The Martian"

"strings for company" I read that as "strings for support"

UK agri dept spent hundreds of millions upgrading to Windows 10 – just in time for end of support

Re: Cloud…

The charity Microsoft Office account that we have for the Young Farmers County Officer is being dropped in January.

The only free account that we can then have for our one, part time member of staff, has to be cloud based.

For big charities, with office based staff, this will be effectively no change.

Most of the rural parts of our county do not have mobile phone signal, let alone enough service to access a cloud account.

So we will be forced onto a paid account that allows us to use a local copy of Office (as we have now).

Another less obvious way that Microsoft is screwing people over.

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

Re: The Devil is in the details

Great quote!

How many politicians or billionaires and their minions could this apply to?

NHS left with sick PCs as suppliers resist Windows 11 treatment

Re: Oh please

But of course, this is difficult as everyone wants integrated care. Instant access to scans and test results, etc. and not waiting for a week for something to get to my Doctors in the postal service from the Hospital.

The perfect AWS storm has blown over, but the climate is only getting worse

A resilient edge

Back last century I built a system (H/W and S/W) to conduct the front end transactions (transparently multi-protocol) with hundreds of Pharmacist ordering drugs from a wholesaler (some ordering many times a day). '486SX with 50 modems talking to a mainframe (it was an early '486SX PC and so that dates it for you). The mainframe was so unreliable that front end had to transparently buffer all of the transactions until the mainframe appeared again and was updated with the orders, on a very regular basis. And because the IT Manager of the wholesaler had recently heard about TSR's, the contract insisted that the front end ran as a TSR! It ran without interruption 24/7 for nearly 10 years until decommissioned. A resilient edge has been a thing for a long time.

MPs urge government to stop Britain's phone theft wave through tech

IMSI is simple to use

From what I remember, when a mobile device powers on and attempts to connect to a network, it transmits its IMSI to the network during the initial attachment process. Part of the IMSI is used to identify you eligibility to join the mobile network. It is not rocket science to lookup a list of stolen phone IMSI numbers at this point and refuse access to the network if it is flagged.

NB I have not worked on mobile phones since the days of the Nokia 2210 where I did the noise reduction and echo cancellation filters in assembler (all paths took exactly the same length of time without the use of no-op waitstates).

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

How often do we change jobs?

I am willing to rummage around once every 15-20 years rather than this.

Amazon's AI specs aim to stop delivery drivers getting lost between van and porch

Re: They'd be better off improving their delivery routing

I once came across two loose horses (after dark in the winter) on a single track country road and spent some time encouraging them back towards the field they had come from - approx 600yds - along the mile long road.

An Amazon driver (liveried van) drove down the road in the opposite direction blowing his horn at the horses in the road. I had to run past them and speak to the Amazon driver - inform him that what he was doing was incredibly dangerous and of the very short detour he had to make to get to the next village on another road. Now, I was on the wrong side of the horses, but the same side as my car and I suggested that he could follow me to the far end of the road, on the route I just described to him, from where he could carry on and I could get the horses going in the correct direction again.

He seemed to sit still for a while, so I set off on my own to the other end of the road (panicked horses are approaching a ton in weight and move at up to 30mph).

I approach the other end of the road to see the two horses at full gallop emerge onto an A road, pursued by the driver still blowing his horn. They then ran along it for a while between sparse cars (who stopped) and then departed on another lane.

I reported the driver to Amazon, and asked that I be informed of the action taken so that I could inform the horses owner.

I heard nothing back and have to assume that they ignored the report. The local NFU also asked Amazon and received a blank.

I asked the next Amazon driver I saw and he said that they could not deviate from their assigned route. I asked what he would do if a road was closed or a bridge was out and he just shrugged.

No common sense - driver or company!

AWS admits more bits of its cloud broke as it recovered from DynamoDB debacle

How on Earth did we allow HMRC, with so much personal data about almost everybody in the UK, to be hosted by what is commonly being described under the current leadership as a rouge state?

Frightful Patch Tuesday gives admins a scare with 175+ Microsoft CVEs, 3 under attack

Re: Oh look, so many, many patches you Win10 holdouts won't get

Bearing in mind time zones, El Reg needs to check if Windows 10 users will get the updates across the world.

Ofcom refuses to bite over Openreach's fiber freebies

£26/month for Gigaclear 500/500Mb How?

£43/month for Gigaclear 300/300Mb is the best I could get last time I tried earlier this year (after ringing up and getting a discount) - but then they are the only pony in town as BT refused (even with BDUK money and me personally meeting the regional manager, to upgrade our village).

The infrastructure costs the same to run once it is installed (and our build cost was paid off over 9 years ago - I know because I was heavily involved in it), so why is it cheaper in some places than others?

OFCOM ought to be looking at this as well as stopping the introductory offers for switching (which of course most Gigaclear customers cannot do as there is no competition.)

Kyndryl sued for firing non-white workers, disabled vet

Policy

Just this week (but I have previously questioned this with our DEIS lead, in their now defunct position thanks to Trump), we recieved an email from our upper managment saying how "we all develop as one team."

And then the next paragraph is encouraging employees to join the Special Interest groups - Hispanic, Black, Disabled, Veteran, etc.

WTF!?

So long as a person can do the job well and write clearly in English, I only need to know 2 things about them in our global company:

(1) Which days of the week they work

(2) Which timezone they work

Nextcloud withdraws European Commission OneDrive bundling complaint

Inaction does not equal actively investigating

How does "It is with a view to ensuring that all European consumers and businesses can reap the benefits of the development of cloud that we are actively investigating antitrust allegations regarding the sector."

Match with F* All done since 2021 complaint was raised?

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

I saw it described as the "Golf of America" on a TV news last week!

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Re: Another one

I just print in turn |/-\ to the same place (i.e. with a terminal backspace between) on a regular period during the main loop of the code.

If it is a particularly long run that is still occasionally crashing then I use an incrementing count instead, so that I at least have an idea where and why the crash occurred.

India's tech talent pipeline is sputtering

What is the issue

I have a lot of sub-contractors in India (and other parts of the world).

I don't really see much difference in employing someone straight out of an Indian University or a 10 year veteran.

Both will need significant training on how we perform our Certification work.

The recent University graduate will ask why they can't use AI for everything. The veteran will ask why they cannot do half a job as they are used to (and will tend to argue more about it).

Our main issue with Indian subcontractors as they will come to team meetings and ambush you with an edge case that they "desperately need an answer to right now". You give them an answer stressing that it is just for that one edge case and then you find out a week later (often longer) that they have changed their complete way of working to cover that edge case, rather than use the correct way that they were trained to use and works for 95+% of the time.

Hundreds of orgs urge Microsoft: don’t kill off free Windows 10 updates

Re: Nothing In The UK News About This

Click was OK and was on regularly on a Sunday morning.

Recently it has been replaced by some abomination that has nothing of interest to the average Reg reader. Full of flashy graphics and no substance.

UK's digital hospital plan meets analog reality check

My wife works with this system

My wife is an Independent Prescribing Pharmacist.

The surgery where she works has a scheme like this and my wife picks patient questions off the list that are simple, within her areas of Independent Prescribing, within her specialist knowledge areas (HRT, etc.) or drug based.

There is one Doctor per day assigned to this list and there is also an internal list that my wife and others (nurses, podiatrists, etc.) can use to clarify things with the Doctor in real time. That list is also used to assign follow up questions from the Doctor to be made via phone by the reception staff (made from a separate room, not from reception), and then the answers go back in the internal queue.

It seems to work well.

My daughter is a Doctor and often works on telephone follow-up calls (the first instance is generally in person, unless it is trivial). This also works quite well, although my daughter thinks it is mundane and she misses the in-person interaction.

As always the lack of support and availability of secondary care is a major problem, with lots of ongoing primary care contacts when timely secondary care would resolve the issue quickly e.g. mental health crises and pain management whilst waiting for surgery.

Is it more efficient? Both health settings think so.

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

I have done that on purpose when it meant that I could get away with a single sided board, as it made the tracking so much easier.

Brits warned as illegal robo-callers with offshored call centers fined half a million

Re: Do people still use the phone ?

And Police and Councils, etc. Despite many times being told that they should just report the CLI of the main switchboard.

Microsoft agrees to 11th hour Win 10 end of life concessions

Pissed

I bought a computer just after Windows 11 requirements were first muted. I made sure that everything was covered, TPM, memory requirements, modern processor. Then when Windows 11 was released, Microsoft decided my particular processor (but others in the range) is not supported.

Pissed off!

Already running Linux Mint on most of my computers, but SWMBO and offspring will not jump off Windows. Also the charities that I do free Tech Support for.

In the last month everyone is complaining that the Windows interface is becoming less responsive, missing key strokes, etc. as though something is grabbing a large chunk of CPU time, but I can't see anything in the Task Manager. Is this a punishment to try and make people move al la iPhones?

Slow Wi-Fi? Add houseplants to the list of suspects

Re: WiFi by Leaf

Up vote for the T&C

Make Windows 11 more useful and less annoying with these 11 Registry hacks

Windows 11 install is so big ...

... because it contains the Microshaft coloured pencils department way of doing something

AND

a much more usable way of doing it.

Li-ion roars can predict early battery failure, MIT boffins say

New application of old ideas

Last century I was tasked by a Jet Heritage charity to identify when an engine was starting to fail, rather than just using the manufacturers stated number of hours.

First of all we got it written into the contract that this was on a best try basis and unexpected catastrophic events could still happen without warning!

What follows is a simplification.

I built up a profile of all the jet engines they had during normal starting cycles using the energy profile required by the starter and the typical sound it would make.

This was then built upon with each subsequent start of each engine.

Any sudden change in either profile, or a gradual drifting out of a standard deviation over all the engines, strongly suggested that the bearings (the only moving part in a jet engine) were getting worn and needed looking at.

It saved them a whole lot of money compared with just swapping out on number of hours use and to my knowledge did not result in any Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly's. (And yes, that term was in use then!)

Curious connections: Voyager probes and Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Re: Documentation

Even if it was 'externally' generated then it was still available to the support teams in perpetuity.

I had the complete ROM listings for the Epson PX4, Epson EHT-10, etc. About 4 inches thick of fanfold made into a book for each.

Documentation

The original Spectrum was very well specified. I have the complete ROM disassembly book still on my bookshelf.

1,200 undergrads hung out to dry after jailbreak attack on laundry machines

Re: Temporary workaround

When my brother lived at home while doing his year placement at a farm as part of his Agriculture studies, he gave our mother a huge box of washing powder for Mothering Sunday!

Digital payments in The Netherlands

I was recently travelling around The Netherlands for a while and tried to use the launderettes at the camp sites.

All three attempts (with 2 different cards tried at each launderette) failed with money taken and no credit added to the machines. None had the option of using coins and all were run by the same Laundry management company.

Said company refused to answer emails and phone calls, and in the end I had to go through bank and credit card company to reclaim the money (on principle!)

Both bank and credit card company said that the Laundry management company had lots of complaints, but they could do little to resolve the issue.

Get paid like a prime minister to tame Home Office IT chaos

Re: Stop it

Actually, reading (and understanding) The Register should be a requisite skill for this job.

Arm bets on CPU-based AI with Lumex chips for smartphones

Re: Weird questionnaire

Yes, my thoughts exactly, which was why I immediately thought it was an advertising survey. This was confirmed by further questions and an advertorial relating to SnapDragon on the site today.

UK Home Office dangles £1.3M prize for algorithm that guesses your age

Very difficult for humans

I've stood on the door of Young Farmers events for decades.

I know that it is very difficult to estimate someone's age with any degree of certainty.

With Young Farmers, all members have to show their membership card with photograph that clearly states their date of birth.

And I can say, with certainty, that I (and all others on the door over the decades) can be up to +/- 5 years out with our age estimates, especially so at the younger end of the spectrum (we allow 16+ at our evening events in my county, with pre-designated and signed in, non-drinking chaperones for the under 18s).

Drink icon as it is Young Farmers!

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

Yes, similar problems with BT/OpenReach. 1920's cabling between us and the exchange. Paper insulated wire known to be wet. When you complained you got switched to one of the 10 pairs in the centre that were driest (and fastest/most reliable). Then the person, who previously had that pair and had been moved to the outside, now complained.

We talked to each other in the village and could map the complaints, the service visits and the new complaint - that's how we knew exactly how many good pairs there ware!

I took it all the way to a personal meeting the East Midlands Area BT Manager. "We have already upgraded the exchange and have no plans to update the cable to your village. Your telephone work OK and we have no obligation to make broadband work." He seemed genuinely surprised when I got Gigaclear in to replace them!

Re: Job titles

Yes, some of my Indian colleagues have similarly senior technical job titles to me and yet know Jack Sh1t.

Most of our twice weekly calls with them are teaching very basic stuff that I used to drill into European Interns in the first week. And often the second of the weekly calls is going over what they didn't understand in the first - despite very clear and simple self-explanatory diagrams (shared with them during and after the call) in case it was a discrepancy between the Kings English and the abomination they speak too fast!

And some of them have actually been promoted above my job title level and get relatively higher pay than me!

If they put as much effort into doing the job, as they put into arguing about it, then we would get on much better.

Teacher icon as that is what I feel like for half of the time.

Knock-on effects of software dev break-in hit schools trust

Can I not add up?

3000 pupils and 650 staff. That's one hell of an overhead if class sizes are always reported to be more than 30 pupils - i.e. that's only 100 full time teachers.

Even with all teachers only teaching half the time, that is nearly 3 times the number of support staff compared with teachers.

Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

And lots of instances where the supermarkets turn around and say:

"We don't want your perishable crop this week"

"No, you can't sell what we don't want to someone else, you signed an exclusive deal"

"We are doing a 50% deal on your product this week and so we will only pay you half the money you expected"

Drive around the Fens in a few weeks and you will see whole crops of cabbages, etc. being ploughed into the ground as the supermarkets refuse to take them. Farmers used to put up notes saying things like "take what you want as <supermarket> won't take it", but the treats from the supermarkets soon put an end to that.

Look at the prices for groceries in the 1980's when there were lots of grocers buying from wholesale markets, compared with now when the major supermarkets screw the supply chain with their power. It's no wonder that the only people who can 'profitably' farm are the business fat cats who are trying to use it as a Tax dodge. The whole rural economy suffers as a result.

I'm still a Vice-President of a County Federation of Young Farmers Clubs and so I do hear these things from directly the affected farmers mouths. Our mental health out reach services have never been so stretched :-(.

ESA engineers trace anomaly in silent Juice spacecraft to a bug in the code

Re: Wait, what am I missing...?

It is the interaction between wraparound AND boost being on, not every wraparound.

I was explaining just such a "what happens if A and B?" scenario to one of my testers only last week.

"Reset on timeout. Reset cannot occur whilst on the middle of transmitting. What happens to the reset when it coincides with transmitting?"

[Edit: not a space program - something much more mundane]