Posts by UCAP

Craig Wright's crypto wallet claim against Bitcoin SV devs back before judges

Re: Puzzled

Even code changes may be ineffective if the security layer is based on an encryption algorithm whose keys have been lost/stolen (as claimed by Craig Wright).

Puzzled

My understanding of Bitcoin and its forks (and I could be wrong) if that the blockchain security explicitly makes it impossible for someone else, even a Bitcoin admin, to access any wallet that they don't have the access keys for. If so this makes Craig Wright's whole court case a complete waste of time, since even a court order is not going to open the doors.

Warren Buffet cashes out of TSMC, which splashes cash on fabs

But they could make it worse

"We are re-investing the profits and any other money we find down the back of the sofa into Twitter since it clearly has a highly profitable future ahead of it"

Learn the art of malicious compliance: doing exactly what you were asked, even when it's wrong

Old timers advice to the young married man... when you're asked to wash the dishes after dinner ...

... go out and buy a dishwasher.

BOFH: Generating a report the Director can show the Board – THIS is what AI was made for

Re: One line.

That's at least two bits more than some Directors I have known.

Re: Basic Business B****cks

Always remember that the word "consult" is formed from two elements: "con" (to fool), and "insult".

The BOFH & PFY using ChatGPT

A combination that is likely to keep people awake at night, wondering what is going to hit them in the morning.

Oh well, could be more interesting than the bottom of a stair well.

Curiosity finds clearest evidence yet for water on Mars

The discoveries made by Curiosity about the geological history are fascinating and ground breaking (almost literally). Lets hope it has plenty of time before the inevitable shutdown to further learn about our near-neighbour.

Will be raising one (and maybe more than one) this weekend in celebration -------->

Eager young tearaway almost ruined Christmas with printer paper

Re: Overflowing the burster

This was back in the days when banks, etc had branches and actually cared about their customers.

Sorry, but I cannot believe there is an El Reg reader who is THAT old!

Re: Procedure update

I knew one accountant who was definitely as smart as hell and also had loads of common sense. My late father.

The best piece of advice he ever gave me was to NEVER become and accountant. I was very careful to follow that advise to the letter.

Sad face, because after over 22 years I still mix my old man.

Prepare to be shocked: Employees hate this One Weird Clause

Re: How long is contract valid for?

The answer to that is well know: they don't make their beer, they simply recycle it.

Re: Mental

Join the government. Any one will do, they are all as bad as each other.

No, you cannot safely run a network operations center from a corridor

Re: Huh?

... often take trains so no-one has to be designated driver

Someone was to be the designated driver of the train.

I remember once (about 25 years ago or so) having to go over to Japan to witness some factory acceptance tests (ultimately successful, but not without a major screw-up on the way), before ending up in Tokyo to witness a site acceptance test for a new satellite NOC. These latter tests where not successful in any respect; in fact I think that I failed them on just about every item we looked at. Basically they where woefully unprepared, and I suspect where expecting me to just sign on the dotted line rather than actually check things.

One of things I realised from this trip, however, is to be careful not to make the situation worse when dealing with the Japanese. The loss of face was already considerable, there is no need to push them deeper into the quagmire of shame. Because of the way I handled things, they specifically asked me to come out a couple of months later to rerun the tests, with results that meant that not signing on the dotted line was out of the question.

Google ready to kick the cookie habit by Q3 2024, for real this time

OK, this looks like it could be easy to disable

Looks like the whole sandbox privacy thing is based around a series of JavaScript APIs that can be called by embedded scripts inserted by the Ad slingers. Noscript should be a pretty simple way of disabling that, backed up by Adblock just in case something slips through.

McDonald's pulls plug on Wi-Fi, starts playing classical music to soothe yobs

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than British McDonald's branches

I am not so certain of that statement, have you looked at the current occupants of the House of Commons recently?

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

Re: Forgotten Chargers

OK, they didn't really say G'day!

Are you sure you weren't in Australia?

Space mining startup prepping to launch 'demo' refinery... this April

Not quite - the Nostromo was towing an automated refinery that was processing (if my memory serves me correctly) something like a million tonnes of crude oil while en route to Earth.

Re: How does this work?

... will solar panels cut it?

Only if you have a large enough area; the actual power generated by solar panels is not great (even with modern technology they are not very efficient in converting light into useful energy), and I suspect the power requirements for any commercially viable refinery device is probably going to be pretty high.

Maybe a nuclear reactor (not RTGs) might do the job, but launching one of those is going to raise all sorts of hackles.

Dear Stupid, I write with news I did not check the content of the [Name] field before sending this letter

Re: 'Stan didn't design this dastardly DB.'

Would be more appropriate if it was a "Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines" (aka "Catch the Pigeon") DVD.

Re: This would be the flip side...

I don't think its real, but I know several Civil Servants who wish it was!

Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs

Re: Death to subscriptions

Why wait until their work flow is screwed up - just hit the devs anyway. Even better, nuke 'em from orbit - its the only way to be sure.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

Re: What a load of cobblers

Passive smoking is one thing that we can all agree is bad. However, there is no such thing as passive eating!

Tesla faked self-driving demo, Autopilot engineer testifies

Re: Full Self Denial

I think they need to be walking in front waving a red flag. The bell was used for lepers.

"He Who Must Not Be named"

All hail Hastur

AI lawyer to fight first legal case in court, startup claims

Re: How is an AI legally a lawyer?

No, and you can't.

Two reasons why this is unlikely to fly.

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

Yep. Fat fingers again

display -> disable

OK, its Friday and I have fat fingers.

My wife used to be a teacher, and at one time was giving adult education classes in Borden (small town south of Aldershot that, at the time, also hosted a significant army camp). One day she was interrupted by someone who suggested that she might like to go outside because "there is a problem with your car". The problem turned out to be Army Bomb Disposal - my wife had parked about 100 yards from the main gate of one of the barracks, and (while this was perfectly legal since there were no parking restrictions) the gate guard had got nervous and called it in as a threat. The Army Bomb Disposal guys had rolled up and were about to perform a controlled detonation on the car to display any devices; fortunately they stopped when my wife identified herself as the car's driver.

Oh yes, the car she nearly got blown up was actually mine!

Games Workshop once again battles scariest monster of all: ERP gone wrong

Re: That's what happens when...

Or the plague god Nurgle is striking back

German cartel watchdog objects to the way Google processes user data

Re: Good for Germany

You can use Ghostery to block Google-analytics, and indeed loads of other trackers.

Texts from your dog and brain-free astronomy: The best of the rest from CES

Text messages from your dogs ...

Any messages from my two dogs (1 lab, the other a rescue lab x) will be along the lines of "are you sure its not dinner time"

China's Mars rover hibernates for a scarily long time

Mars is not a nice place for solar-powered missions. Apart from the distinct possibility that the solar panels have been covered with too much dust, another possibility is that the intense cold during the Martian winter (temperatures could easily drop to -100C in even lower) has damaged something that the rover needs to help it wake up.

On the over hand, congratulations to the Chinese for getting a rover on the surface of Mars in one piece; that's a tricky thing to do at the best of times.

Mixing an invisible laser and a fire alarm made for a disastrous demo

Queue insane laugh from Dr Evil

Cleaner ignored 'do not use tap' sign, destroyed phone systems ... and the entire building

Re: University blues

Well they needed *something* to brag about at the time.

Re: University blues

Yes - Aston! I'm amazed that someone recognised it from the description.

University blues

When I was in university way back in the 80's, the CompSci department and the associated computer/server room was relocated from the edge of campus to two swanky, recently refurbished floors of the university's main building. This building was (apparently) the largest completely brick-built building in Europe, and included several large shafts that ran from the ground to the top floor that was originally used for heating (that heating system was long gone by my time). The CompSci department had decided to install a relatively new technology called "Ethernet" throughout the university's main building, and they used one of the air shafts as a conduit for the main backbone cable. Not being complete idiots, they used a cable that ran through an armoured steel shell just in case of unforeseen circumstances.

Meanwhile the next couple of floors above the new CompSci department had started to be refurbished (this was an on-going task at the time that lasted several years). The builders had discovered the air shafts and had decided to use them as an easy way to get the demolition rubble down from where they were working to ground floor, at which point they would cart it into the skips. Unfortunately everyone quickly discovered that the armoured Ethernet cable, while cable of surviving anything an drunk undergraduate (or postgraduate for that matter) could swing at it, was not cable of handling 50 tons of building rubble dropped from a great height.

I'll leave it to yo to image the conversation between the head of CompSci, the Vice Chancellor and the building contractor management.

Patients wrongly told they've got cancer in SMS snafu

Re: Is this common?

No, this is not even remotely common. If my GP wants to speak to me about a diagnosis then they will telephone me, leaving a message to get back to them if I am not available. They *never* use SMS for anything more than appointment reminders and nudges about flu jabs.

Actually, for something like a cancer diagnosis, my GP would not even use the telephone; they would handle it using a face-to-face consultation.

Twitter dismantles its Trust and Safety Council moments before meeting

Re: Snowflake journalism

That is a habit that may not last the rest of this year

Don't let us slow you down on the way to door marked "exit". Please remember to pick up your coat on the way out.

The cubesats lost in space from Artemis Moon mission

Re: It took a very long time...

NASA also wanted to make sure that the Orion capsule behaved itself in the open ocean, and did not do something silly such as tip over or have hatch covers ejected to early. NASA's memory of Mercury-Redstone 4 is a long one!

Re: It took a very long time...

It had, but you are taking a heat shield that is probably still cooking at several hundred degrees centigrade and dunking it into (relatively) cold water. A lot of things can happen at that point, many of which fall into the "nasty" category. NASA wants to ensure that it understands how the heat shield handles this, and that nothing occurs that could possibly pose a risk to future astronauts.

'Merge window from Hell' opens as Linus Torvalds reveals Linux 6.1

Flipers

Kernel devs that fail to follow the rules will be slapped with wet flippers until they have fixed up <<insert module from hell here>>.

Boeing swipes at Starlink as it finishes two internet slinging satellites

Re: "Having a swipe at SpaceX"

Besides, the satellites are in MEO which means they are constantly in motion relative to the Earth. So any terminal is going to "roam" from beam to beam and satellite to satellite.

Re: "Having a swipe at SpaceX"

They are launching in-orbit spares, so if they do loose a complete satellite (something that happens, but not often) then they can rejig the constellation to cover the gap.

You don't necessarily need a bigger dish on the ground terminal - depends on how they have closed the link budget. Most likely they put a bigger dish on the satellite with a huge gain; entirely feasible given modern antenna structure technology (look at the size of the antennas that the likes of Intelsat and Inmarsat are using on their current-generation GEO satellites).

I personally worked on an experimental terminal that used an antenna that was only about 60 mm high and weighed in at about 30 g. We used this to transmit terminal-to-terminal over GEO, passing IP packets back and forth, albeit at low data rates.

Startup raises $30 million for wireless power delivery system

Re: Fries

On the upside, Dad had taken out millions of dollars of life insurance on each and every one of them, before having the power beam installed so that it points in *just* the wrong direction!

Programming error created billion-dollar mistake that made the coder ... a hero?

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

A friend of mine sent me a copy of some source code I had written in the 1990's that was used to schedule observations for a science satellite mission. Well commented - yes. Understandable - yes. Well structured - not even close. Maintainable - let's talk about that some other time.

Amazingly the software worked and actually exceeded its functional requirements by a significant measure; in doing so it contributed to the satellite also exceeding its science objectives. BUT, I am definitely cringing at looking at what I wrote all those years ago.

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

Re: Physical Methods Trump Signs in Any Language

"I better should not touch it" is not really a thought that occurs in the vacuum of the heads of a disappointing amount of people

The most common thought is "what happens if I press this", often followed shortly after by "oops".

Rolls-Royce, EasyJet fire up first hydrogen-fueled jet engine

The real problem for hydrogen that still needs to be solved is a reliable and safe way of storing it either under very high pressure or in a liquid form. Because the molecular size of hydrogen is so small, it can escape from a hole that is literally too small to detect with current scanning technology. Adding to that is the fact that escaped hydrogen, when combined with atmospheric oxygen, is an explosion just waiting for a very, very small spark to happen.

NASA and other space agencies have been trying to solve the hydrogen storage problem for decades, and they are still no nearer to a solution.

How not to test a new system: push a button and wait to see what happens

Having once been the IT Manager for my previous company (and SME that really, really needed 100% uptime on its server resources) my reaction to that quotation is to curl up in a corner and whimper quietly to myself.

Boss broke servers with a careless bit of keyboarding, leaving techies to sort it out late on a Sunday

Re: Bosses shouldn't touch stuff...

"unfortunately"? I'd call that "fortunately" and probably prefix with "very".

I'm in a similar position myself, having taught a number of PFYs everything they know. However, I was always careful not to teach them everything I know.