Posts by UCAP

China orders trial of aged care robots that can cook, clean, and provide emotional support

Re: "provide emotional support"

But the day some mechanical contraption is supposed to be my emotional support is the day I'm asking Dirty Harry to put me out of my misery

Do you feel lucky ...

Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1

Let us just hope that the Blue Danube is not translated by distant aliens as a declaration of war. Unless their entire war fleet is small enough to get swallowed by a dog.

Mines the one with the dog-eared copy of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" in it.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

The flip side of the coin

Nearly 20 years ago I did some work for a customer during which I wrote some C code that was used to generate derived telemetry parameters for a satellite system that was, at that time, being developed. When I finished I delivered a comprehensively documented, carefully formatted C module along with the test results that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it worked. A fun couple of months.

About 18 months later I got a call from the lead developer asking if they could have a couple of weeks of my time since the satellite had been launched, but the code I had written needed to be tweaked because some bugger had wired a part of the system incorrectly. The satellite still worked fine, but the derived parameters where generating incorrect values. Unfortunately, I was busy on another project so I had to tell them that I could not be made available for about 6 months. The response I got was: "that's all right, I had a look at your code and it was so well documented that I could figure out what I needed to change in about 2 minutes - it's working now".

After more than half a century, the voyage of Kosmos 482 is over

RIP Kosmos 4782. Your long journey is finally over.

ESA feeling weightless and unwanted amid proposed NASA cuts

I've spent over 3 decades working in the space agency on the right-hand of the pond; much of that time involved working on ESA-funded programmes. I can say, from first-hand knowledge, that ESA would prefer to work with partners such as NASA simply because it is easier to do big projects when the costs of spread across multiple partners, plus having multiple perspectives can enhance a programme and bring in completely unexpected benefits. However, ESA has a huge capability to stand on its own two feet (more so than many detractors understand or accept) so while cut-backs at NASA are not great news, they are not as catastrophic as some like to make out.

(Mine's the one with the blue touch-paper for an Ariane-6 in its pocket).

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

Copyright is not IP

Would Linux have evolved without the GPL?

I'm not certain why you are mentioning Linux and the GPL in an article about IP law. The GPL is all about copyright (or copyleft if you are pedantic) and has nothing to do with IP.

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

... had a hand in the previous incumbent's firing - "dead man's shoes" ...

With a rolled carpet, a large bag of quicklime, spade and some discrete movements late at night. That way, you make sure that "dead man's shoes" is not just a figure of speech.

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

I stand here in complete admiration. That was more devious than the contract negotiations I am currently sleeping through.

One for the weekend.

The Reg translates the letter in which Oracle kinda-sorta tells customers it was pwned

... it's no big surprise they're still telling porkies ...

Business as usual for Oracle.

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Re: 70-year-old technology

Or the opening credits from UFO - spinning tapes AND an IBM golf ball teletyper.

'Copilot will remember key details about you' for a 'catered to you' experience

Re: Where will Copilot store its memories ?

Guess

NASA doubles odds of Moon hitting near-Earth asteroid

Re: Mmmmmm. . . dinosaur. . .

I'll have the crocodile madras and make it snappy

Ubuntu 25.04 beta takes flight – but this Plucky Puffin is still molting

Re: Interesting

I run KDE on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, so your comment about SUSE & Gnome may only be applicable to Leap.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Re: Ones Aurora

In the same way that the demon Crowley encourages his houseplants to grow

Crowley never actually murdered his plants in front of the rest. He would take them around the others to "say goodbye" then carry them off; sometime later he would come back with an empty plant pot. The implication was there, but never the deed.

Mines the one with the dog-eared copy of "Good Omens" in the pocket.

Microsoft is redesigning the Windows BSoD to get you back to work ‘as fast as possible’

Re: Hey Microsoft

Well my Dell laptop has never crashed in since I brought it a year ago. Of course, I don't run Windows on it ...

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

Re: start ms-cxh:localonly

The more you tighten your grip ...

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

... the Windows codebase became fragile and bloated ...

That's new, how?

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

We are human ...

... and to be human means that we all screw up sometimes.

GCC 15 is close: COBOL and Itanium are in, but ALGOL is out

OMG - COBOL

As a post-grad research student in the 1980s, I spent 3 years taking tutorials on COBOL for both under- and (MSc) post-grads. That got dumped on me since I was the only person in the CompSci department other than the lecturer who gave the COBOL who actually new anything about the language (or at least, the only person who would admit to it).

Just so the students know what was about to hit them, I would start the first tutorial comparing a C "Hello World" program against the corresponding COBOL programming.

Get off that old Firefox by Friday or you'll be sorry, says Moz

Re: Forced obsolescence

All certificates have an expiry time cooked into them; this cannot be changed and defines the life of the certificate. Mozilla have stated that the root certificate is hard-coded into that version of Firefox, so you probably need to go to a later version to get a new root certificate.

UK must give more to ESA to get benefits of space industry boom, says Brian Cox

Re: Um....

With ESA, when a project is given the go ahead, funding is allocated for the entire duration of the project. With NASA, they have to grovel to Congress each year to get the money for the next year for each project. I know which is the better approach!

Re: Um....

ESA was established long before the EU came into existence. The EU has tried several times to take control of ESA on the basis that they both have the word "European" in their name, but each time has resulted in ESA saying some very pointed words to the EU.

Raspberry Pi launches CM4 variant that laughs in the face of frostbite

Re: I wonder if...

I know they tried putting a Compute Module 4 on a shaker table to see if it would survive launch vibration. The answer was a definitive "no" - bits all over the place.

US stocks slip as Trump pulls trigger on Canada, Mexico, China tariffs

Re: Why is it...

I think the similar scene from the Temple of Doom is probably more appropriate.

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

'ello, 'ello, 'ello, what have we here then?

Einstein Probe finds two stars that have spent 40 million years taking turns eating each other

Re: could something blow up, flare up, collapse or go kablooie?

It has The Edge - a bit like an equator but rather more abrupt when you go over it.

Re: Disappointment

I heard about some stars that emit a lethal jet of radiation through their poles when they go boom, and these were calculated to be lethal for over 1 million LY in the direction they happen to aim.

That only occurs when a giant star goes supernova via a core implosion, where the core then collapses right the way down to a black hole. You tend to get high-energy particles emitted in a pair of very narrow polar jets. These are suspected to be the source of the long-duration gamma ray bursts that hit earth.

You are correct for a Type 1b, Type 1c or Type 2 supernova - they are all caused by stellar core implosion and the star needs to be at least 8 solar masses to trigger it. However a Type 1a supernova is caused by the deflagration of a white dwarf; it only needs to be somewhere around the Chandrasekhar limit.

Re: Disappointment

"Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!"

Ad-supported Microsoft Office bobs to the surface

Short answer - no

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

They were gunning for him

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

Re: Anyone on Gnome team actually use Nvidia?

Hmmm ... another long-standing KDE user here, using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a Nvidia-powered laptop (so I have the latest-and-greatest KDE, Plasma & Nvidia drivers installed). I've not had any issues running KDE under Wayland, its been pretty much rock solid. However SUSE do seem pretty good at getting desktops to work the way you would expect, so this may be a reflection on their capabilities than Wayland.

Saying that, I tend to mostly stick with X11 since (1) I normally auto-login to my account when I power the laptop on, a use case that Wayland simply cannot handle for some reason, and (2) I honestly don't see what benefits Wayland brings to the table over a mature, well-defined and widely-used technology such as X11 (which I have been using for over 35 years now).

There's a slight chance Asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit Moon in 2032

Re: Soup Dragons Beware

Who must be told - the Soup Dragon?

(I'll get my coat)

DOGE geek with Treasury payment system access now quits amid racist tweet claims

Re: nullllptr has been core dumped

For likely someone sent a SIGQUIT to him.

Microsoft quietly erases Windows 11 TPM 2.0 bypass workaround from help page

Re: As long as they don't remove the workaround

The more they tighten their grip ...

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: Couple of things that need to be set straight

1. Antivirus does exist for Linux, see for example ESET. Given all the threats out there, I do recommend getting anti-virus

ESET for Linux has been out of support since August 2022.

US freezes foreign aid, halting cybersecurity defense and policy funds for allies

Re: So far...

Not bad for just a week's work. Now imagine what President Elron and Official Sidekick Trump will be able to achieve in 4 years.

Sweden seizes cargo ship after another undersea cable hit in suspected sabotage

Brown trouser time

Bet the captain of the Yantar had to go change his underwear and have a stiff vodka when the sub surfaced - that's basica the RN saying "Do you feel lucky...?"

NASA spacewalkers to swab the ISS for microbial life

Re: oh goody

They've already brought space bacteria back. The Apollo 12 astronauts brought parts from Surveyor 3 back from the moon where they had been sitting for several years. When scientists looked at the parts they found them contaminated with bacteria leftover from the probes construction. The bacteria were still alive.

UK floats ransomware payout ban for public sector

The final option they will select is ...

... do nothing (no-one in government ever got sacked for doing nothing).

That subdued CES has us wondering what 2025 will look like, tech-wise

Re: CES in summary

The problem with AI is that it is all A with absolutely no I. Basically it's another South Sea Bubble that is bound to burst sooner or later.

NASA has just two Mars Sample Return mission lander options left

Re: Slippage

... reliant on the wild hope that a complex piece of equipment will still be working over a decade after the original intended return mission date for a plan that originally didn't rely on it still working ...

To be fair, NASA has a long history of over-engineering space & planetary missions meaning that they remain operational long after their designed lifetimes. The Voyager missions are a case to point.

...It all looks like it has moved from a real plan (in terms of schedule/cost/methods) into the realm of something that won't happen but no one is willing to admit that so they keep their planning meetings going anyway...

The real problem is that instead of sticking to a simple mission plan that is highly likely to succeed, they are now making things more and more complex because (a) it looks sexy and therefore might capture the public's imagination, and (b) they vainly hope that it might save money and therefore unlock the purse strings controlled by Congress. The reality is that they are forgetting the first rule of space missions - Keep It Simple!

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Re: Crashed an IBM 360 mainframe

Ahh, yes - COBOL. An abomination unto Nuggan, and must therefore be shunned.

Many decades ago, when I was a research student at university, I made the serious mistake of admitting that I had done some COBOL programming in the Real World. This unfortunately meant that my Comp Sci department had precisely two people in it who new COBOL - a lecturer who was providing courses in the language to under- and postgrad students, and myself. Guess who got to take most of the tutorials!

The biggest problem I had during this time was trying to teach the students how to work out which error message was actually the meaningful one, and how to identify and discard the many errors generated because the compiler had developed a headache and wanted to lie down. I think the record was 1 meaningful message embedded in about 200 spurious ones - again caused by a missing full stop at a critical point.

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

Re: Thank you El Reg

And yours.

(this could go on for a long while).

US bipartisan group publishes laundry list of AI policy requests

The problem with current AI ...

... Is that it is all A and absolutely no I.

Apple Intelligence summary botches a headline, causing jitters in BBC newsroom

Re: AI generated headline

Read the article!

Auntie (i.e. the BBC to those who don;t know its nickname) did not use AI to generate the headline. Apple used AI to summarise an article published by Auntie and in doing so managed to completely screw it up in a way that only AI seems to be able to achieve.

Ingenuity helicopter's flying days cut short by featureless Martian terrain

Re: CFIT

Altimeters are also heavy, in fact one might well have doubled the mass of Ingenuity.

Panic at the Cisco tech, thanks to ancient IOS syntax helper that outsmarted itself

Cisco IOS - its the reason I never went very deeply into configuring network equipment. The few times I had contact with IOS resulted in much hair pulling and the sort of language you don't want your boss to hear.

Microsoft confirms there will be no U-turn on Windows 11 hardware requirements

He also said "million to one chances occur nine times out of ten"

The more they tighten their grip, the more users will slip through their fingers.