* Posts by ITMA

1036 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2019

Whistleblower cries foul over alleged fuselage gaps in Boeing 787 Dreamliner

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Devil

The pic used for the item

In cast anyone was wondering, this is (I believe) the aircraft which had the "bloody nose":

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/aaib-report-boeing-787-8-inadvertent-nose-landing-gear-retraction-whilst-parked-on-stand-london-heathrow-airport

18th June 2021

;)

Why making pretend people with AGI is a waste of energy

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Devil

Re: Artificial bowel intelligence

"A conversation is easy and natural for humans (not a challenge)"

With the exception where one of the humans is a politician.

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Devil

Re: Two men say they are Jesus. One of them must be wrong.

"The test of truth is an experiment."

Unless it involves photons and slits.... Then it just gets really confusing...

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Devil

Re: The sad fact is ...

"It's all about power, dominance (and money, obviously). It may also be about a profound sense of insecurity."

You had to bring religion into it.... LOL

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Devil

Most peoples' (and businesses) use of the word "hologram" is nothing like a real hologram. So I don't hold much hope out for "robot".

Hyundai picks Palantir to help it build automated navy ships

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Devil

Ladies and gentlemen.

I present unto you the standard Russian (was Soviet) fishing trawler. Packed with all the latest covert spy equipment and (I wouldn't be surprised) armed to the teeth with rather more than a wet haddock.

Fancy building a replacement for Post Office's disastrous Horizon system?

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Unhappy

Re: EPOS - not Tesco

Could be worse - you could have ended up in prison for having the nerve to complain...

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Devil

Re: New Bidder

Nope - wrong sort of Kray

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kray_twins

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Devil

Re: EPOS - not Tesco

Please remove unrecognised postage from the bagging area....

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Devil

New Bidder

I hear that the Krays are going to bid for this.

After all they have all the right skills - "thugs in suits" :)

Do they have the internet in Broadmoor?

Post Office slapped down for late disclosure of documents in Horizon scandal inquiry

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Devil

Re: The Most Reverend Vennels

"Some effing Christian spirit!"

At the risk of taking flak, organised religion has rarely been about "love, kindness" etc. It has traditionally been about domination and control and the destruction of anyone who's views differ from the doctrine.

Ye olde "You are either one of us - or you're a heritic and the Devil's own spawn and should burn in hel. Where's the firewood and stake?"

Which seems to fit what appears to be coming out as the Post Office's attitude to anyone who dared question the infailibility of the god Horizon.

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Devil

Re: Why is Paula Vennells still walking the streets?

"<taxi-driver-daily-heil-mode>String them up! </taxi-driver-daily-heil-mode>"

The Post Office sells string...

Microsoft unbundling Teams is to appease regulators, not give customers a better deal

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Devil

Re: total frustration with teams

Maybe...

But without more specifics on EXACTLY what happens when they try "to get into" Teams, it is all just speculation.

"If Teams cannot deal with or clearly explain what needs to be done, Teams is at fault."

I've dealt with lots of software, much of which is NOT Microsoft's, where error handling/fault recovery is utterly dire.

One of the biggest bugbears I've had with Teams is Microsoft's inability to make, what should be, a simple thing like "sign out" work properly.

I mean, how hard can it be to make "sign out" work properly?

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Devil

Re: Don't just consider the cost savings...

As Throatwarbler said - name them....

Put your money where your mouth is, nail your colours to the mast, which ever experssion you like, but name them, with costs.

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: total frustration with teams

Ever thought that there is bascially just something wrong with your account which needs fixing?

We use it all the time for both internal and international client meetings.

I wouldn't say it is "wonderful", but it certainy works.

As others have said, it has it own oddities but then what doesn't. They all have them.

We don't need a "chat" app. We mainly just need video conferencing with the ability to share documents/presentations on the screen - not the document files themselves.

And for that, it does a reasonable job without having to shell out yet more money to yet another supplier.

The integration with the rest of MS Office is ok.

Intel throws chips on the table, Microsoft plays the Copilot card in wild bet on AI PCs

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Devil

Re: Kill it with fire

Microsoft, being well Microsoft, will just wait a little while then force it on anyway.

I've uninstalled it from five of my machines and last night up popped CoPilot on one!!!! WTF!!!!

Just like having set search on the taskbar to be an icon on the taskbar, Microshaft changed it back! AGGGHHHH!!! Eff off Microsoft.

I'm not enrolled in any preview stuff so why are they forcing it on my effing computers? Surely this should be covered under the Computer Misuse Act?

Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard

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Devil

Re: Taking the piss?

They are not called PeeSees for nothing...

Cloud server host Vultr rips user data licensing clause from ToS amid web 'confusion'

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Devil

Re: The problem is all or nothing "agreements"

Ah, you are clearly thinking of further monitisation (to the benefit of the prostitute or his/her "managing agent") of the "user participation event" though streaming of said event, are you not?

AI hallucinates software packages and devs download them – even if potentially poisoned with malware

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We recently did some tests to assess the use of offline generative AI in a particular application.

We gave it specific prompts asking various model to summarise a particular patent.

Twice we got the "reasonable" response aloong the lines of "I can't do that as I don't what that patent says" - remembering that this is "offline" so nothing can get back onto the internet for privacy reasons.

The rest of the time (the vast majority of it) they literally made it up as they went along. We got summaries of multiple different patents which had NOTING to do with the one we specified.

Artificial Intelligence? More like Artificial Imagination.

For the most part they churned out pure fiction.

It looked really credible and convincing - but still utter shite.

Windows Format dialog waited decades for UI revamp that never came

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Re: Easy to use, direct and no fuss

Ye olde phrase "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"....

Way too many of the changes in Windows fall into that category.

And many of the rest fall into that other infamous category "We need to justify our jobs, quick change something to make us look busy/productive"

Microsoft gets new Windows boss as Start Menu man Parakhin 'to explore new roles'

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Devil

Re: Exploring New Roles.....

I think the relevant "management speak" is:

Heading up a new task force, of which they are the only member, the objective of which is to find a new job.

Nominet to restructure, slash jobs after losing 'major deal'

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More than a passing resemblance to the great RBS fiasco of (stripped of the Sir) Fred "the shred" Goodwin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_ZWGuQ07Q8

When he left Clydesdale Bank to join RBS they threw a leaving party for him - after he had gone to celebrate the fact he'd f***ed off.

Everything driven by greed to get their bonuses no matter what and to ensure their remuniration is geared to making fat bonuse no matter how bad or, in the case of RBS catestrophic, the decisions.

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Devil

Re: I don't remember learning this in economics!

Which is, if I recall, very similar to what happened at GEC Marconi.

New bunch of suits at the top who wanted to do "exciting things" to justify their salaries to the "markets" and ended up virtually driving the company into the ground.

They also burned through an mountain of cash.

https://www.london.edu/think/the-destruction-of-marconi

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

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Devil

Re: Keyboard jammed

And they didn't even offer you one.... Greedy sods!

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Devil

Re: Off topic

The thick "sticky brown" coating of nicotine on the keyboard of the management accountant at a previous place of work was bad enough. That was when smoking in the workplace was still common.

A full hazmat suit was needed anytime I needed to go and see him.

Microsoft hits Inflection point, peels off top personnel to form AI division

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Re: Is this in any way related to the brief Sam Altman side project?

Definitely prehistory modified decades ago as it was environmentally unsound.

It had to follow the overriding principle for camping "leave nothing behind other than your thanks and best wishes" - so burying burnt tin cans was a no no.

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: Is this in any way related to the brief Sam Altman side project?

Ye olde.... If you can't beat them, buy them then bury them.

Virgin Media sets up 'smart poles' next to cabinets to boost mobile network capacity

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Is it just me, or does their "smart pole" looked pissed?

Microsoft promises Copilot will be a 'moneymaker' in the long term

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Re: users quoted in the WSJ want it to be their financial analyst. "And it's going to disappoint"

Not to mention...

Employee "Here's the work you asked me to do boss".

Boss "Ah good. Did you use AI much?"

Employee "Yep. It was really good and did most of it! Saved me hours".

Boss "Then what the effing hell am I paying you for? Your fired!"

Forget TikTok – Chinese spies want to steal IP by backdooring digital locks

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Re: Too much tech?

Quite....

There is a very interesting related snippet in the excellent BBC series "Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution".

A guy who was one of the SS guards dealing with the currency the SS stole from those sent there, described an incident when a SS officer was sent to investigate alleged theft by the aforementioned SS guards. That is theft of their ill gotten gains by SS guards instead of sending it all on to Germany.

All their lockers had padlocks on and had been sealed until they had been inspected. When they needed to get in to one locker to remove "contraband" without alerting the investigating office, they just took the back of the (wooden) locker off.

Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 with Eye-of-Sauron camera

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Re: Hmm

Almost as big as the market of the "neuron free".

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

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Devil

Re: Pints' on me Brian

Am I the only one who remembers OS/2 as "Oh Shit 2"?

Reddit wants to raise $748M with IPO, sets value at $6.4B... and it has yet to turn a profit

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Re: Is there anyone in El Reg land

You've lost your marbles, haven't you... Go on, admit it ;)

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Devil

Re: Comparison

"That would be without the lunatic moderators .."

You had to bring up Elon, didn't you... LOL

What's going on with Eos, Nvidia's incredible shrinking supercomputer?

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Re: Cos nobody gives a flying fsck

No no no no...

Can it run SPACE INVADERS!!!

:)

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

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Re: “Everybody and their dog is coding”

Words of wisdom there.

For a long time I've always cringed at expressions like "learn to code", "we need more coders". NO!

What we need are proper programmers and software developers.

Coding, to be little pedantic, is that one single stage of translating the well thought out and designed SOLUTION into the language(s) to feed into the computer via a compiler (or interpreter). That is it. That is ALL it is. One step in a whole chain of steps.

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

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Re: HP Toner

"LED printers are basically a dead technology at the low end"

How is LED a dead technology?

The fundamental printing process is identical to laser, except the opto-mechanical laser scanning system is replaced by a solid state (no moving parts) LED array.

Just because some manufacturers appear to build down to a price point at which, fundamentally, it is shit quality doesn't mean the technology (LED) is dead. It means they are making, and you are buying cheap shit that just doesn't work.

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Mushroom

Re: You can embed viruses into cartridges

"They might even stop your printer working unless you pay a ransom."

HP's CEO is not wrong in that statement.

However, it needs clarifying by stating that the ransomware criminals are in fact HP themselves by holding your printer to ransom and refusing to let you use YOUR PROPERTY if you don't buy their cartridges.

Someone at HP needs to be prosecuted and go to prison for that. Ideally their CEO.

Tech support done bad sure makes it hard to do tech support good

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Stress?

You call that stress for a trading floor support market data feed issue lasting "several hours"?

When I did trading floor/dealer support for the London branch of an Italian merchant bank, the main "qualification" needed to do the job was the ability to get to the end of each day without:

a. Having a total nervous breakdown from the "customer attitude" and demands.

b. Having "lost it" with one or more of the traders and turned the area into a veritable blood soaked buchter's yard of dismemberred body parts and internal organs.

c. Having no access at all to firearms and other weapons including implements sharper than a spoon. The tempatation to come to work the next day and use them would be just too great.

Any technical issue which negatively affected dealers' ability to trade (and thus make money) you knew about in under 5 seconds from the very loud shouting/screaming/very foul language verbal abuse whch would be directed at IT.

Anything lasting several hours and they would have been swinging from the ceilings while chewing up their custom build "dealer desks" while threatening to lynch whoever in IT was on duty.

The cost of the market data feeds themselves were aboslutely eye watering. Not because they contained any "private" data.

Most of of the data was publicly available free. The free stuff was, however, typically 10-20 minutes old which for a trading floor was prehistoric. You even had different "levels" of data feed, the main differential between each level being how "up to date" it was. The closer to real time it became, the more digits you added on to the monthly cost of that feed.

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

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Devil

Re: many many moons ago

We just re-christened Quake Death Match as our prescribed "network stressing tool".

It was more fun when two of us in the IT office didn't tell the 3rd guy we were running the Bombs add-on. LOL

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

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Devil

Re: They would design it for small updates

When only 9 days from Pluto the NASA New Horizons mission suffered a "computer glitch" which caused it to switch from the primary to the backup computer system.

They also lost contact for what seemed an excrutiating length of time.

When back in contact they found what had happened and that all the careful programming for the Pluto encounter, done over a considerable length of time, had been lost in the switch over.

So with less than 9 days to go the New Horizons mission team had to rebuild and upload the whole thing again - which they did successfully.

The one absolute hard rule in deep space exploration - the planets do NOT wait.

https://news.wttw.com/2018/05/17/chasing-new-horizons-untold-drama-behind-pluto-mission

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7uv9wq

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Devil

Re: Excelent design - aliens must be proud

"Seriously though, the whole thing is going to be still severely limited and won't be based on modern systems."

In case you hadn't realised, the hardware designs of spacecraft, especially deep space ones, is frozen many many months if not YEARS before it is launched and end up "on mission".

So of course it will be "out of date".

"We can do all of that stuff now - better and more reliable than before"

We could do it all back in the 60's when the Voyagers' design was started. As for "better and more reliable" - show me ANYTHING today which has been working without having to be physically repaired or touched for 45+ YEARS and still working

The fact these 60's technology spacecraft have is utterly remarkable.

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

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Devil

Re: Yearly tasks....

Virtually all intruder alarm "siren/strobe" units (or "bell boxes" as they used to be known) use a "hold off" voltage from the main control panel to stop them sounding.

If the hold-off voltage disappears for any reason - such the alarm being triggered, the cabe being cut etc - the siren and strobe would start going.

So buy an off the shelf siren/strob unit, power it off a 12V main adaptor (which will keep its internal backup battery going) and have the clock unit battery act as the "hold off" voltage.

Battery dies, the siren/strobe starts going (and no doubt sevel people will need a change of underwear especially if very close to them and you don't tell them what it is for).

It is that or use the same "hold off" principle to have voltage from the clock battery stop a relay contact from closing - if the battery fails, the relay contacts close and connect mains voltage to some bugger's chair.

Or you could be boring and just run the clock off the mains with a battery backup.

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

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Devil

Re: Pardon?

VCRs??? VHS tapes???

Where have you been?

It is all DVRs and NVRs and PoE IP networked cameras.

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Devil

Re: Pardon?

"but leaves the CCTV recording..."

Including the cameras covering the inside of the control room - obligatory in any CCTV system large enough to have a "control room".

It is also why CCTV systems have different levels of access. Operators don't need and shouldn't have the level of access required to disable cameras or erase recordings.

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Devil

Re: Pardon?

Is that what you are high on - "Hokey Cokey"?

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Re: Pardon?

What rubbish.

That is precisely what you do not want in a CCTV system - the ability for people to arbitrarily disable parts or the even the whole system easily, let alone "tamper" with it.

If they can "tamper" with it that destroys its credibility as evidence.

AI agents can copy humans to get closer to artificial general intelligence, DeepMind finds

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Devil

"That said, I'd rather have a support bot with full(er) knowledge of what they are supporting than what we generally get."

I still rather have a person than a bot.

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Devil

But wait....

Then it won't be long before AI will get itself unionised and be demanding collective bargaining and threatening to down tools "everybody out" if it doesn't get it.

Not to mention maternity/paternity leave, paid holidays etc etc