Posts by HorseflySteve

S Twatter: When text-to-speech goes down the drain

Gude Moaning

Arthur Bostrom's hilarious mispronunciations as Officer Crabtree is all the funnier if you know that he is actually fluent in six languages including French!

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Re: Micro- and Soft- Brain ?

20 years ago, an erstwhile colleague opined, "The day Microsoft make a product that doesn't suck will be the day they start making vacuum cleaners".

With AI, I'd guess those vacuum cleaners would suck up the furniture & leave the dirt! And will require a 60 amp supply.

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

Re: "colored pencil office"

"So, I take it that a striped donkey is a Zedbra now?"

It always was. The "d" is silent in pronunciation and people keep forgetting to put it in when they write it down.

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

"the tendency of certain people who insist that using long fancy words badly, instead of short, pithy and correct ones"

I propose the name "Twatish" for this language.

Any seconders?

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

"If you can't even spell things properly, what else is wrong there?"

This exactly. There seems to be a school of thought in the UK that correct spelling isn't important as long as the reader manages to figure out what is meant.

At the end of the school term before the summer break this year, a number of "Public Exhortation" type posters, presumably generated by the local primary school pupils, appeared on various bits of street furniture around the village.

These included such orders as :

"Please do not liter"

"Pick up your rubish and help the enviorment"

"Don't drop your sigaret butts on the floor"

Laudable though the intention behind these posters may be, my immediate thoughts were "What does this say about the quality of education these children are receiving and what does it do to the reputation of the school?".

As a general rule, if you want to tell people what to do, make sure you spell it right otherwise they're perfectly justified if they ignore you, claiming "What do they know, they can't even spell"

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

Re: Bring out the comfy chair!

"Funny how some people get religious fervour as they get older."

I read somewhere that Sammy Davis Jr. converted to Catholicism on his death bed, having previously converted to Judaism in his younger days. He described his final conversion as "Fire insurance"

Bose kills SoundTouch: Smart speakers go dumb in Feb

Re: open source & self-build

I'm running moOde on a 1st gen. Raspberry Pi Zero with music stored on a 128Gb memory stick.

It's a very capable solution & works very well - check it out @ https://moodeaudio.org/

Amazon grounds drone deliveries in Arizona after two crashed into a crane

Re: Well that's not surprising

The problem isn't just the damage to whatever they hit, it's the fact that they then fall out of the sky in an uncontrolled manner.

Here in the UK, drones are limited to a maximum height above surface of 400ft (120m). Anything that falls out of the sky from that height is likely to encounter the surface at a little over 100mph (nearly 170km/h) which is likely to "modify" anything that already occupied that point.

Consumer class drones massing < 250g are permitted to fly over built up areas and people (but not crowds), 250g or more are not without special permission, a pilot holding a Certificate of Competence, and public liability insurance. Even then the operatort must maintain visual line of sight throughout the flight.

These Amazon drones are quite likely to cause serious harm if they fall on someone; it's reasonable to assume that people would have been working near the crane that was hit so it sounds as though Amazon have been lucky in this instance, no matter how they try to spin it.

Square Kilometre Array is so sensitive, its datacenter needs two Faraday cages to stop RF leaks

Re: Modern cars are not good in proximity either

The ignition noise on petrol engine.s is mostly radiated by the high voltage leads.

The spark plug gap typically breaks down at 15 20kV depending on the gap size and Air-Fuel ratio of the mixture in the cylinder. The arc usually burns at approx. 2 kV for 1.5ms during which time it draws as much current as it needs. The rate of drop from 20kV to 2kV and the rise of current from 0 to whatever is what determines the bandwidth of the EM waves generated. With copper wire leads, the dv/dt and di/dt are HUGE and so is the bandwidth. Modern ignition leads are carbon impregnated fibre with a substantial resistance which limits the both of these, massively reducing the bandwidth.

It won't fully eliminate the rf emissions so spark ignition engines would not welcome anywhere near the antennas.

The first radio transmitters were indeed spark based as electronic oscillators were yet to be invented.

Although EM waves had been predicted by James Clerk Maxwell, it was Heinrich Hertz who discovered them when he discharged Leydon Jar (capacitor) across a Riess Spiral & saw a spark jump across the gap of a separate nearby one

Re: Are they are two separate cages?

The article implies that one is inside the other as there is an interlocked door system to prevent any leakage during entry or egress.

Microsoft declares bring your Copilot to work day, usurping IT authority

Re: Fecking hell

Have you tried deleting it & making a read-only, undeletable dummy ai.exe?

If you can't use AI then it's bye bye, Accenture tells staff

All you need to know about Accenture...

..is encapsulated in this paragraph:

"We are investing in upskilling our reinventors, which is our primary strategy," said CEO Julie Sweet in an analyst's call [PDF]. "We are exiting on a compressed timeline, people where reskilling, based on our experience, is not a viable path for the skills we need."

The fact that Julie Sweet thinks training people not to think, or do original research, fthemselves is "upskilling" and people that actually can do this themselves & don't want to use AI are being booted out tells me that Accenture is committed to dumbing down their workforce so they can reduce payroll while bullshitting customers into signing up for a never-ending stream of AI generated slop at enormous cost.

Once their customers realise the can get similar results by using ChatGPT themselves, Accenture will become less mega...

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

The Labour party is not noted for its sensitivity to the concerns of the Jewish community. anti-Semitism is rife as I recall from their last few sessions in opposition.

What the House of Lords is for..

Those of you that wonder why we have a second house that is full of people who weren't voted in are about to find out why it's there.

The Introduction of Digital ID for all adults was not in the Labour party manifesto at the last general election so the government has no mandate for it. This means that the law introducing it must be passed by the House of Lords.

It will almost certainly be rejected by them & the only way the government will get it passed will be to include it in the manifesto at the next general election & win.

No, we'll all have QR Codes tattooed on the backs of our necks, a bit like hitman 47 but with more data

The first rule of liquid cooling is 'Don't wet the chip.' Microsoft disagrees

Not water...

I doubt they'd use water in this scenario, no matter how pure, as it's physical properties would cas serious problems. Water is an electrically polarised molecule which means it has:

Strong cohesion and adhesion leading to high surface tension and capillary attraction. Once it's in the microtubes, good luck getting it out again.

Solvent properties. It can dissolve so many ionic & polar substances, it's known as "the universal solvent"

Low solid density. If it ever freezes in the microtubes (e.g during transport), it'll explode the chips - see https://youtu.be/YpQwQx2lMGk

I think they'd use a far more inert fluid for this job.

Trump admin says tech companies are abusing H-1B visas, slaps $100k a year to allow entry

Re: Reality check

I'm sorry if my description of police procedures in the UK doesn't match the in-depth research you have made that makes you an expert in UK policing.

Perhaps you'd be good enough to share the links to the 2 videos you mention so we can all review these 'incidents'

Re: This is illegal

I don't know TBH. I could tell you what I was doing when I posted it but that would be TMI....

Re: Reality check

"How many of them were arrested for saying these things?"

I'll answer that: none. Anyone arrested during these rallies would probably have been arrested on suspicion on public order offences, not on the basis of their opinions. They would have been detained and either released without charge, or charged to appear before a magistrate where, if found guilty would most likely have been given a fine or conditional discharge. It is highly unlikely that they would be jailed.

'"Mohammed". I'm glad Muslims as a group have apparently settled on the "correct" spelling. It's a welcome sign of improving education and integration.'

There are still a few variations in the spelling, however I believe this is a case where cultural influences are skewing the statistics.

Traditionally, UK families of non-muslim faith tend to name their sons after significant family members, such as fathers, grandfather's favourite uncles, etc. sometimes as first names, other times as middle names (as in my case). However, in Muslim faith families, I suspect that it is traditional to name all sons Mohammed (or variant spelling) out of respect and use middle names in everyday conversation.

Thus, of 100 male children born there may be 10 named Mohammed, 8 named Oliver, 5 named Bernard, Robert, Arthur, Charles, James, John, Luke, Mark, Bruce or Eric, etc with a smattering of Steve's, Dwaynes, Jays, Finlays and Donalds.

So in this example, Mohammed is the most common first name but only given to 10% of the children.

Re: This is illegal

So what? Trump will get his chums in the Supreme Court to rubber stamp it.

Even if they don't, they've granted the President immunity from prosecution so there'll be no consequences and, given he's stated that "you 'll never have to vote again", he may well be in office for the rest of his life.

When are the majority of people in the US going to realise that they now have a dictator who is above the law and the much revered US Constitution, designed to stop exactly that, has been torn into squares that are hanging on a nail next to Donald Trump's presidential toilet?

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

Re: muffin != fairy cake

Got to agree about English muffins, although I'd describe them as more like congealed wallpaper paste rather than PVA

VAT

Oh, I'm not laughing about the millions in VAT but, let's face it, tax rules frequently throw up odd distinctions because of their sometimes arbitrary nature.

For instance, edible snails are defined in the EU as "fish (land based)" so that snail farmers in France could get the same subsidies as fish farmers.

That someone got a PhD by proving something that's demonstrably obvious by just leaving the disputed products uneaten for a few days & observing how the change is, perhaps, funnier.

Slimy layer

That'd be the Jaffa orange preserve from which the cake gets its name.

Without it, it would just be a Cake.

Re: South Up Map

We in the Northern hemisphere do not believe such things exist, rather like custard in France

Re: cookie != biscuit

Agreed cookie != biscuit. A cookie seems to be an amalgam of ground cereals and nust bonded with a soft edible thermoplastic, but not as soft as used for flapjacks which, in some ways, they resemble.

More tea & biscuits/cakes/cookies/flapjacks needed for investigation, methinks!

If there's one thing I've learned about the internet, it's that there are always other people that share your tastes, whatever they may be. It's not always a good thing, though...

Re: Definitions ...

No, the UK is definitely on the right side of the North Atlantic; just look at any world map.

No, your personal preferences do not change the reality. It just means you have to open the packet a couple of days before you want to eat them, which suggests that you have admirable restraint.

I never understood the cake-or-biscuit controversy over Jaffa cakes. It's simple:

A cake is soft when fresh and goes hard as it gets stale.

A biscuit is hard when fresh and goes soft as it gets stale.

A Jaffa cake is soft when fresh & hard when stale so it's a cake! Yes, I know the chocolate layer on the top is hard but that applies to all chocolate-topped cakes & doesn't stop them being cakes.

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

Re: Where is nano11?

To be fair, the article did not say they were related and implied that they were two separate projects, but a link would have helped.

Re: We need to go back to an unbloated OS.

How about QNX4? From Wikipedia:

"To demonstrate the OS's capability and relatively small size, in the late 1990s QNX released a demo image that included the POSIX-compliant QNX 4 OS, a full graphical user interface, graphical text editor, TCP/IP networking, web browser and web server that all fit on a bootable 1.44 MB floppy disk for the 386 PC.'

I remember playing with it at the time & being mightily impressed with its capabilities.

I was a part-time DBA. After this failover foul-up, they hired a full-time DBA

Re: You should do this

Legally important words, such as must, may, should, and, or,etc, are to be interpreted in the UK as instructed by the Interpretations Act 1978 as ammended. See https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1978/30

The importance of this was illustrated when the EMC directive was incorporated into UK law more or less verbatim. It stated that the CE mark "must appear on the product, packaging or documentation"

Unfortunately, the Interpretation Act defines "must" as compulsory and "or" as exclusive, so it meant that the CE mark had to appear on one *and only one* of these places. Placing it on on more than one was, therefore, illegal in the UK.

They had to amend the EMC legislation to sort out the mess.

In case anyone is wondering why the CE mark wouldn't be on the product, there is a legal minimum size and spacing for the mark and some product are just too small, hence the reason for the alternatives

Junk is the new punk: Why we're falling back in love with retro tech

Re: Why ? Surely no one can't work it out ?

The only time I noticed digital artifacts on audio CD was when I was listening to one very loud using headphones. One track had a very long fade out that I heard quantisation distortion in the last half second.

I thought I'd heard something odd on an ogg encoded CD ripped audio track once but it turned out that the piano that Keith Emerson was playing during the recording had a slight squeak in the sofa pedal mechanism; I never noticed that on the original vinyl!

Audiophile quality Hi-Fi

The fundamental problem with Hi-Fi is that, by the time you can afford a system that will give you the the best quality reproduction, you are too old to hear it properly.

I recently gave a young (i.e. less than half my age) friend an old stereo record player that had been up in the loft for 40+ years & had to explain that she should separate the two speakers to create an apparent audio sound stage between as she had no experience of stereo except with headphones/earbuds

Toy Matinee

Excellent but short lived partnership between Patrick Leonard and the late, sadly missed Kevin Gilbert that produce just the one superb album.

I bought the Unitone Recordings Special Edition that was released in Kevin's memory in 2001. It has 2 additional tracks plus some alternative versions/demos of the original release. Last copy I saw on eBay went for >$60

Make sure you're sitting down before you look up the price of "The Shaming of the True" on Amazon...

Hyundai: Want cyber-secure car locks? That'll be £49, please

Re: What do we think of those who buy our cars ?

That applies to pretty much all manufacturers unless they're forced by legislation.

I recall my brother's 1965 Ford Corsair could be opened and started using a wide flat-blade screwdriver;

I found this out when I accidently slam-locked the driver's door while the key was in the ignition with the engine running as I was working on it for him..

The dead need right to delete their data so they can't be AI-ified, lawyer says

Digital resurrection vs Hollywood Resurrection

Hollywood has been resurrecting real dead people on film for about a century, which has upset their relatives on several occasions (such as the ship's officer on RMS Titanic who was falsely depicted as shooting one of the steerage passengers, then himself).

I honestly don't see how this would be any different, aside from the visual image being more accurate.

In all cases, there is a danger that history is rewritten which should be discouraged but, again, Hollywood does it all the time citing "artistic licence" and I bet that there are now people who think that the American forces captured an Enigma machine from U571, when it was actually the British, as a result.

UK secretly allows facial recognition scans of passport, immigration databases

Re: right to privacy

"Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence."

Define "respect" as a legal term under UK law. How was it defined by ECHR?

Re: Always remember RIPA

If you aren't hearing people complaining about local authorities using RIPA to spy on residents, I would suggest that you book a hearing test.

The Snoopers' Charter has been the subject of much complaint since it's introduction.

Prohibition never works, but that didn't stop the UK's Online Safety Act

Re: Ignorant politicians

Living as I do less than 5 miles from Hinkley Point C (note the spelling) construction site, I can assure you that no corners are being cut as the Office for Nuclear Regulation are very proactive in their oversight of the project.

Quite apart from that, the Chinese are only investors, it's EDF that actually running the construction.

Microsoft eventually realized the world isn't just the Northern Hemisphere

Re: Oh, whoopee doo

On behalf of the United Kingdom, I'd like to apologise to the United States for the Industrial Revolution that you like to think you invented.

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

Re: HDD spindle bearings

Thank you for the beer, though I suspect it'll be a contributing factor to my failing memory :)

I tend to remember things by association to the products that were being developed at the time rather than the actual years so, thinking about it, it was probably nearer 1988/1989 as the Deskpros were used with Intel I2ICEs to develop & debug 80196 based products, whereas COBEST was 80188 & 8032 developed on Intel Series 4 & AUTOMATE 450 was 8085 developed on Genrad.

Re: HDD spindle bearings

Moving to Australia wouldn't fix it as it's only the moon , planets that are upside down :)

Re: HDD spindle bearings

Actually, we turned them on their side as this gave a fitting orienttation for the HDD that complied with the data sheet but they'd all been running for a long while so I'm guessing that the bearings were already compromised.

Re: HDD spindle bearings

Not so in this case, definitely a WD 40 MB IDE. I know because I used one of the more reliable ones that had been replaced to make a 286 PC from parts that were evaluated & rejected when we were trying to make our own PC from parts to put into our engine analyser products. I used the PC for the first two years of my Open University degree.

Of course it's possible that it was later than I thought when they got the the Deskpros, it was rather a long time ago now....

HDD spindle bearings

I image that the HDDs couldn't spin up because the spindle bearing lubricant had got sticky with the cold.

There was most probably a minimum operating temperature specified for the drives by their manufacturer that was not complied with in this case.

I remember when, in about 1984, the design engineers got Compaq i386 PCs that had Western Digital 40MB IDE drives. After a year or so (i.e. just out of warranty), one of them stopped booting up. I was asked to investigate & found that the HDD wasn't spinning up because the spindle bearing had seized, the reason for this being that Compaq had ignored WD's fitting instructions and mounted the drive upside down, thereby putting the load on the bearing in the wrong direction.

With a gentle bit of hand rotary motion of the whole drive with it the right way up, I managed to free it and it spun up normally but there was no way without serious modification that it could fitted into the PC the right way up. Over time all of the other Compaqs failed in the same way.

Ex-CISA chief slams MAGA 'manufactured outrage' after sudden West Point firing

Re: Shame!

He doesn't care about approval ratings as he already told them they "won't need to vote again" once he was back in office.

Problem PC had graybeards stumped until trainee rummaged through trash

Re: He was lucky

I would imagine that drawers in a general access area should not be considered limited access unless marked as such and/or secured. The fact that it could be opened and contained candy wrappers and soda cans indicates that it was neither, so the only one(s) that should have been carpeted were those installing the gaming software and dumping their rubbish in a drawer rather than the bin

Struggling to sell EVs, Tesla pivots to slinging burgers

Re: Well, he had to do

That explains where all his bullshit comes from!

Scientists spot massive black hole collision that defies current theories

Re: Wondering

Angular momentum is related to the moment of inertia which, for a sphere is (2/5)mr². Assuming the singularity at the centre is both spherical and has a non-zero but vanishingly (literally!) small radius, the angular momentum may not be as large as you may imagine.

That said, it's a situation where a small change of n in the x 10^n part of r is likely to make a colossal difference given the size of m

Intriguing questions....