Posts by Natalie Gritpants Jr

Europe's largest local authority settles on ERP budget 5x original estimate

Strange that all banks and utilities can provide accuracy down to the penny, yet Brum council are happy to have accounts accurate to the nearest £1000. Is that per item or for the annual accounts total?

Cryptocurrency policy under Trump: Lots of promises, few concrete plans

Please Santa. Make someone use AI to design a quantum computer to find all the bitcoins so we can get past all this nonsense.

AI Jesus is ready to dispense advice from a booth in historic Swiss church

At least it won't rape your children

Musk, America PAC sued for allegedly rigging $1M election prize

Has Musk been reading Knuth? I think he said something like "Random numbers are too important to be left to chance", but I don't think he meant what Musk thinks he meant.

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

Ugh. OK so an infinite amount of monkeys will produce Shakespeare, but you'll never find it amongst the infinite pile of Jilly Cooper

UK energy watchdog slaps down Capita's £130M smart meter splurge

The minute I hear about them remote disconnecting is the time I will be lining the meter cupboard with tinfoil.

O2's AI granny knits tall tales to waste scam callers' time

More theatre, while not taking action to block scam calls. There's a conflict of interest here, as the phone companies get paid for all those scam calls. They know exactly where the scam calls come from, otherwise it would imply they don't know how to bill precisely, and their business model would collapse. They could just block the origin of the calls altogether until the phone company originating the calls gets its act together. We do this for certificate authorities on the internet.

Schneider Electric ransomware crew demands $125k paid in baguettes

Re: Errr...

there

A Kansas pig butchering: CEO who defrauded bank, church, friends gets 24 years

Re: Use an offline, encrypted wallet

Probably got squeamish after the key holder bled out

No-Nvidias networking club convenes in search of open GPU interconnect

Patent lawyers will be sharpening their quills

Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers

But if you cut him open he smells of pine.

The horror that is VHS revived for horror movie release

Re: They did it for the publicity

Given that no one in their right mind will go to the trouble of unboxing and playing it, I predict they will just relabel a bunch of old unsold stock.

Who can forget the joy of finishing a kids movie only to find the last 20 minutes of a grumble flick that had been overwritten by the guy at the car boot sale.

41-million-digit prime crunched by datacenter GPUs

If you really want to see the full version of M136279841

In binary, it is 136279841 ones.

SuperHTML is here to rescue you from syntax errors, and it's FOSS

Re: would like to see a switch back to plain old static HTML

I edit my personal wiki using MD files in emacs and publish via a filter to convert md to html in apache:

# Apache configuration directives for the local wiki pages.

ExtFilterDefine md-to-html mode=output intype=text/markdown outtype=text/html cmd="/usr/bin/pandoc --from=gfm --to=html5 --template=/var/www/html/pandoc.tmpl"

<Directory "/var/www/html/wiki">

Options +FollowSymLinks

AuthType basic

AuthName "Wiki"

AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/htpasswd

Require valid-user

SetOutputFilter md-to-html

AddType text/markdown .md

</Directory>

Google hopes to spark chain reaction with nuclear energy investment

Don't forget - radiation is only harmful to lifeforms that live long enough to die of radiation caused cancer. Let's keep the reactors away from whales, elephants and tortoises. Humans are not endangered

Hold my Pimms! Wimbledon turns to tech for line-ball calls

Looks out to me even on the hawkeye playback at low speed.

SpaceX accuses 'meme-stock' rival of 'misinformation' over Starlink signals waiver

Meme stock?

I worked on the <redacted> for AST PGA. It was designed from the start to communicate with 5G phones, and so doesn't need to blast a huge are to operate. Starlink birds were designed to communicate with dish antennas, not phones.

Mega supermarket spots stock discrepancy of tens of millions amid ERP system migration

Re: $10m

At the self checkout select Bananas, dial up to 6, then put your giant jar of Nutella in the bagging area

Re: So-poor-markets

First mistake - kale. Second mistake - not living in Brighton

A look under the hood of the 3D-printed, Raspberry Pi powered 'suicide pod'

For 17k

I could get a hotel room, a nice Chianti, an escort, a scuba tank full of N2 and a scuba mask

Lebanon now hit with deadly walkie-talkie blasts as Israel declares ‘new phase’ of war

Re: end Game

This is an IT publication, we count from 0

Apple AirPods Pro 2 can be sold as hearing aids, says FDA

In 10 years I'll be a pensioner and I grew up with the BBC micro and then 1G mobile phones. My older brother built an Amstrad kit radio as a teenager. The pensioners in the very near future are tech savvy.

So you paid a ransom demand … and now the decryptor doesn't work

Re: Hope springs eternal

There's nothing to stop a ransomware gang having a different name per victim. They are not selling anything, so don't need branding. If they are worried that a victim won't pay an unknown gang, they can send a free decrypter that restores 10% of the files as proof of ability (a bit like a kidnapper sending a finger, but less damaging)

Keen to bring it on home? Private cloud appliance pitched at compliance-conscious

Re: In my case ...

I'm the same, but nowhere near as advanced as your setup. My only worry is what will my family do after I die. I need an apprentice.

Wanna watch a movie? Sure! Lemme just park the lounge room

Clearly just a designer wankfest

The front wheels are so far back you have to climb over them to get in the front seats.

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

Saying that most of what they have recovered is large chunks does not indicate that the plastic has not broken down into microplastics. It just means they are only recovering large chunks, and anything breaking down has already gone into the food chain and swum away.

Scientists find a common food dye can make a live mouse's skin transparent

I tried it on my willy, now I have a divorce

Blood boffins build billions of nanobots to battle brain aneurysms without surgery

Re: How is this a bot?

Bunnies

TikTok isn't protected by Section 230 in 10-year-old’s ‘blackout challenge’ death

Re: At last, some common sense

Yes I do. The angle of the needle arm will cause any dirt particles to be driven deeper into the vinyl. Those clicks will never come out and your dad will know.

Green Berets storm building after compromising its Wi-Fi

huh?

How is "left signal jamming equipment to clear any trace of the attack." Supposed to work?

Kia Niro electric vehicle defies physics with record-breaking 114 million miles on the clock

Didn't realize how wobbly the lane markings were on motorways till I tried out lane keeping

Sam Altman's basic income experiment finds that money can indeed buy happiness

Re: well, if the 1% shrank to the 0.5%

No,because they have expanded to the 99.5%

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Mixed feelings about this

Cue "Just Stop Oil" protestors with orange lights

Re: The devil is in the detail

2021 Toyota Yaris owner. Its cruise control will keep the speed constant, which is handy for speed cameras at the bottom of hills. There is a bridge over a railway line near us that fools it - it floors it to maintain 30mph on the up, overshoots on the way down and emits a loud beep, shortly followed by "What are you doing?" from the seat mounted speed limiter.

The cruise control also slows down when getting close to cars in front, and will come to a stop if the cars in front stop. It's better than me at keeping a noticing the car in front is slowing, so makes for very easy driving in congestion.

You should calibrate your speed against Google maps with the phone not connected to the car, mine is 2pmh over at low speed and 3 mph over at 50 and above. I expect it will get worse as the tyres wear

UK minister recalls two planning decisions which blocked datacenter investment

Re: UK's planning depts are useless and badly in need of reform

Planning consultants seem to have the material needed to get things built. I think it's rectangular and a shade of brown

Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

Re: Bait and switch

Also Belmarsh kept him alive. Bit embarrassing to have him shanked.

T-Mobile US drags New Jersey borough to court over school cell tower permit denial

Re: "You just can't fight ignorance with reason"

As you get closer to a tower your handset reduces its power to save the battery while keeping the comms up. The best place for a tower is on top of the school so the kids phones radiate less power through their bodies.

Wells Fargo fires employees accused of faking keyboard activity to pretend to work

Re: such as so-called mouse jigglers, which can be found for as cheap as $5

In the 80's I worked on a CAD system for schematic capture written in Mainsail. When generating netlists it would frequently run garbage collection and post a message to tell you, Problem was after 20 odd messages the screen would be full, and you would have to hit Enter to continue. Netlist generation would take hours and we would try to run it overnight. We soon learned to build a stack of stationary to keep the Enter button down.

FTX's $24B tax bill written down to just $200M

Tax man should take it all

As a lesson for the crypto bros; lower government debt for a while; and we can all get cheaper GPUs

Two big computer vision papers boost prospect of safer self-driving vehicles

Re: There's an easier way

Easier to limit the self driving to it's own tracks. In your world I would be carrying an RPG on my dog walks.

How two brothers allegedly swiped $25M in a 12-second Ethereum heist

Not sure who the criminals are, or if there are any. Mev boost is open source, so the exploit is a publicly documented way of using it. Seems like the accused are just better at manipulating the block chain than the victims (who are also trying to rip off genuine users by using mev boost}

AT&T formalizes deal for space-based cellular service on unmodified mobiles

Re: Technically Curious

School roofs are the best place for moby masts, it means the kiddies phones turn their transmit power down.

Re: So, 64 square meters at 500km

It probably is, the antennas are on the underside, so no-one can figure out the configuration and number of channels they can support. I worked on a tiny part of one of the ASICs for that <insert Top Gun quote>

Return to office mandates had senior employees jumping ship

Re: Skimming the paper didn't help, it still sucks

Good luck getting that data

Google, Apple gear to raise tracking tag stalker alarm

Going to have to explain that to my better half. One car has a blackbox (using BLE) that is only paired to my phone.

Throwflame launches fire-spitting robo-dog from Hell

Keep the flamethrower, teach 'em to respect animals before a (bear/cow/kangaroo/cassowary) does

Leicester streetlights take ransomware attack personally, shine on 24/7

Re: Why are they controlled remotely anyway?

A temperature sensor would probably suffice to be able to learn day/night timings and in a few days the date would be apparent, then you can just calculate dusk and midnight.

There was me thinking they had a light sensor and a chip that figured out the date and time from the length of day and then would turn on at dusk and off at midnight. No need for a network.

US reckons it's about time the Moon had its own time zone

Surely Coordinated Lunar Time is CLT

Is LTC some sort of French phrase? Hope not because they haven't put boots on the moon yet.

UK government sets sights on £8B tech procurement overhaul

Framework: a sufficiently vague set of buzzwords I can use to build my career, together with a list of commercial partners that owe me for getting their names on a list.

Agile: a way of getting shmoozed by sales creeps, while agreeing to anything in the knowledge that when the deliverables turn up, it will be someone else's problem to mangle them into shape.