* Posts by jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid

395 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Aug 2020

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Sunak's defunct SaaS scheme spent seven percent of budget designed to help 100,000 SMEs

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

It was just accounting software, big deal?

From what I recall, the scheme was just about accounting software and similar generic business management stuff. It didn't include software and services that enabled anyone to actually do science and engineering.

If I were more cynical, if say it was a scheme by the government to help SMEs correctly pay their taxes to the treasury, not to actually conduct or grow their business.

An engine that can conjure thrust from thin air? We speak to the designer

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

As often, sci fi gets there first

Elite, fuel scoops.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: I had an awkward moment like that once

Awkward moment a few days after an interview for me once. I was working for a large company as part of a big team working alongside our prime customer - sharing offices, that sort of thing.

I was seconded into the customer for a week of off-site fieldwork, alongside about a dozen of their staff. I had had an interview with the customer's organisation a few days before, but in a completely different area and was still waiting for the interview result. One evening in the bar, with me and all the customer colleagues, one of their senior folks says very loudly to me for everyone else to hear "how did the interview go?"

Cue a few moments of embarrassment followed by lots of good natured "good luck, hope you get it" type comments. I did get it, was still there over 15 years later and worked closely with a few of those people who were in that bar at the time. Something must have gone right.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Similar mistakes not limited to public sector

Not quite as dramatic but local doctor related: our landline telephone number is identical to a local doctor surgery, except for one displaced digit on the keypad. Back when we had a landline we often got calls intended for the doctors.

Sometimes I answered them and told people they had the wrong number and what the right number is. Usually they were apologetic but one lady rang me back straight away and insisted she had the right number. I think someone somewhere was repeatedly giving out the wrong number.

We frequently got calls from a "District nurse" leaving messages quite specifically asking for the doctor to call them back asap because they were with Mr Smith right now and they think he really does need to see the doctor quite soon. Another time a distressed person was pleading into our answerphone for the doctor to call them as their husband was in a bad way and she was desperately worried.

Sally there was nothing we could do, we told the surgery a few times, but the calls kept coming. Eventually we changed the answerphone message to "this is not the doctors, the number you want is...", then later unplugged the landline phone as no longer needed.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: BBC article

If you were born on February 29th, could you have two birthdays in each non-leap year? The day after 28th Feb and the day before 1st march?

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

Not a leap year issue, but I had a classic y2k one only the other day. A spreadsheet at work required me to enter a future date for something. Being lazy, I entered "1/1/30" and it parsed it to 1st January 1930. A bit of experimentation revealed some logic in there that was something like "if YY<34 then year =19YY else year = 20YY".

Partly my fault for entering a 2 digit year, but I do think the interface should have returned "use a 4 digit year, you plonker!"

Fox News 'hacker' turns out to be journalist whose lawyers say was doing his job

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: and then altered recordings to mask their origin,

"It's a bit like you rob a convenience store cash register and the Feds are like: 45 counts of aggravated theft of a dime, 24 counts of aggravated theft of a quarter, 6 counts aggravated theft of a 20 dollar note, etc."

Years ago, there was a case in the UK of a driver getting caught speeding on a motorway by multiple cameras, and received multiple fines. In court his defence was that he didn't drop below the speed limit between the cameras so therefore only one offence was committed. It worked.

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: THIS!!!

"Much of your software is so bloated and inefficient you have to have multiple cores just to conteract it."

Yup and yup so many times. I got into CAD at home a few years ago and my first foray was using a web based system via a browser. The 3d rendering was slow and clunky, which I put down to my very old laptop not being powerful enough. I was close to blindly buying a new laptop in the pursuit of ever more flops when I simply tried another browser instead. Result: worked perfectly on the other browser, I never looked back (and still use that same old laptop now).

And yes, both browsers were modern and up to date.

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Tom Cruise to the rescue

"The other great thing about films, is that there's always a handy timer. "

And if the scene was realistic, the computer would be running windows (because most companies do) and Tom Cruise's lines would be "it's ok, we've got 11 hrs to cancel this transfer, oh, now just 2 hours but that's still loads of time, heck it's now only 5 seconds! Phew, it's stopped now, or has it frozen? Is this touchpad working? Now it's closed, did that cancel or did it happen?"

https://xkcd.com/612/

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

"Irrelevant as we are talking about body panels"

Completely relevant because the body panels need to deform as they are the first thing that hits a pedestrian.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Flip Side

Your definition of legitimate interested won't be the same as the website owners. Their's will be based on a legitimate (ie a probably, barely or maybe legal) business arrangement to sell them your data.

If you see a website that doesn't have a "click to reject" option as prominent and easy as the "accept all" option then they are in break of the GDPR rules (in Europe and UK). This is the point where you should report the website to the ICO (in the UK) or your local equivalent. But I'm not going to suggest you "do as I say not do as I do", because I rarely report infringements, it's easier just to click away (or continue and clear all cookies on exit).

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: The enshittification continues

It's not even new. Micropayments or "microtransactions" are a known fraud technique that the US department of justice are trying to crack down on. The fraud relies on the simplicity and low value of the microtransactions to go unnoticed by the victim, but when scaled across a large number of valued customers, I mean unfortunate victims, it's profitable to do.

IBM Japan and NTT think they can make datacenter aircon adjust to different workloads

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Laws of thermodynamics

That's exactly what I was thinking - that (almost) all input electrical power ends up as heat.

I was trying to think beyond the words in the article and was wondering if they are monitoring the output temperature as a proxy for processor temperature. This could allow them to save energy and money on cooling by allowing the processors to run as hot as they dare.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Priorities

We in the UK could scrap less then one fifth of HS2 and pay for the whole of the FCC. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/hs2-costs

Or we could save up the brexit dividend for about a year and again, FCC is paid for. https://images.app.goo.gl/rEEDJcGVLZz7a1y67

Perhaps we could have worked harder to stop Liz Truss getting into power and the Treasury could have bunged the £20bn they lost as a result to the FCC and it would have been paid for. https://fullfact.org/news/pmqs-snp-uk-economy-truss/

Or, every EU citizen pays less that €3 a year, it'll paid be paid for by 2040. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Population_and_population_change_statistics

If we all groom our own pets instead of paying others, FFC could be paid for in about 5 years. Sorry to all you professional pet groomers, but there might be some jobs going at CERN. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/pet-grooming-services-market

20Bn isn't much in the grand scheme of things.

Building a 16-bit CPU in a spreadsheet is Excel-lent engineering

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Always impressive

"Actually it didn't use live bacteria, it was a simulation -- [paragraph 2] PhD student researcher Lauren "Ren" Ramlan has coaxed a simulation of the humble E. coli bacteria into a rudimentary screen capable of displaying the iconic video game."

I read that to mean that it was still bacteria but just a harmless bacteria that simulated E. coli, probably to reduce the bio containment level it had to be done at.

Fujitsu finance chief says sorry for IT giant's role in Post Office Horizon scandal

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

"He fucking hasn't though, has he."

Of course not. It's far too early for Sunak to actually do anything, he'll be keeping that powder dry until a lot closer to the election. Then he'll whip it out and feign anger and frustration at how awful this has been, that he's had enough and he's personally sorting it out now, because he's man of the people who stands up for honest hard working folks and you can trust him, good old Sunak. Definitely not because an election is coming up in a few weeks and he desperately needs the votes.

AI PC hype seems to be making PCs better – in hardware terms, at least

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: AI is nearly as big as the discovery of electricity

I wanted to downvote because that future you describe sounds horrible and I don't want it to happen. But I upvoted you because as ghastly as that future sounds, I think you're right and it will happen.

And that's the whole point of the article: regardless of if it is wanted or needed, AI will be everywhere and will drive hardware demands up and up. The analogy of how Windows drove hardware in the same way is something I view as a lesson from history that we have failed to learn. Compared to 20 years ago we now have massively powerful laptops and desktops that are little more productive because of the extra power having to be diverted to pointless GUI shininess or other useless guff (chrome on my laptop runs 7 processes and swallows quarter of a gig of ram to merely exist and do nothing). Gaming and hard core number crunching like CAD are legitimate use cases, with useable outputs. AI proliferating like suggested, not.

GPS interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Is it naive to suggest ...

Putting something into space is never simple. Far simpler to leave it on the ground and crack the gain up. If it's taken out by enemy forces, just pop another one in its place.

If you really must have your jammer off the ground, just pop it on a drone.

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Is it naive to suggest ...

Not naive at all, such antennas do exist. Some provide attenuation to low elevation signals that are more likely to be ground based, others provide a bearing to ground based signals allowing you to actively form a null in the antenna pattern in that direction. Not foolproof though, just providing some resilience against jammers rather than complete resistance.

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Galileo to the rescue?

Yes Galileo is more resistant then NAVSTAR because the satellite signals are higher power and have better encoding for processing gain. But that just raises the bar, it doesn't guarantee resilience.

ESA gives gravitational wave space probe LISA the nod for a 2035 launch

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Adding sound...no need, already done

"If we imagine that, so far, with our astrophysics missions, we have been watching the cosmos like a silent movie, capturing the ripples of spacetime with LISA will be a real game-changer, like when sound was added to motion pictures."

Interesting quote from the project scientist there. When the first gravitational waves were detected by LIGO, the chirp was already in the right frequency band to be audible without any jiggery-pokery, just feed the signal into an audio output. Google for LIGO chirp and you'll find videos of it (with sound).

Ok, so I admit I am massively underselling the considerable effort that got us to the "just feed the signal into the studio output" stage, but when I saw the quote about adding sound, that's what I thought of.

DPD chatbot blasts courier company, swears, and dabbles in awful poetry

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: As Arthur said

I used to be surprised by how often suppliers don't want mis-delivered stuff back. But I realise now that the admin involved in handling the restocking or disposing of a faulty piece is a liability they can avoid by not doing it.

I once bought a largeish piece of flat pack furniture from a famous Scandinavian brand. It was damaged so they sent a second one, I was expecting them to collect the damaged one at the same time but no. The second one was damaged as well in the same place so a third one came. This was damaged as well but differently, so I was able to assemble them all into one perfect piece, one acceptable piece and a third damaged but still functional piece which I gave away to a good cause.

Another time I bought a piece of kit that was several hundred pounds. A £10 serviceable part on it quickly failed and I asked the supplier to simply send a replacement part. Instead they sent a whole new piece of kit and told me to keep the old one. I bought a replacement part for a tenner, repaired it and sold the new one!

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

There's a building on the south coast of England, that is a training facility and has a round swimming pool inside for said training. First time I went there I stepped out the lift on the 10th floor and thought it was a silly thing to put a swimming pool on the 10th floor. I looked over the edge into the water and quickly realised it was on the ground floor.

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Windows update is doing me over right now...

Reading this reg article on my phone whilst waiting for my windows laptop to reboot, as part of my trying to fix a broken print spooler. And suddenly the dreaded "configuring windows updates" blue screen of doom is on. And this despite all my best efforts stop Windows update ever happening. Not optimistic that this is going to end well for me.

Need to make some 3D models but lack the skill and talent? Say, have you tried... AI?

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: It may be hard...

"If you can't copyright the content (and you can't because it's AI generated)"

I thought it wasn't that AI generated stuff can't be copyrighted, just that the creating AI can't claim the copyright? If so then you as a human can use an AI to generate something, and you claim the copyright?

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

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Re: Sounds like...

"It will require you to prove an equivalence between the statistical methods used on the training material and human intelligence"

Not to mount a legal case claiming copyright infringement you wouldn't. Arguing an equivalence between AI training and human learning is not relevant in law, because (in the UK at least), copyright does not apply to a person's memory.

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Sounds like...

"Anything sitting on the Internet is fair game."

Not in the UK it isn't. Even if you have permission to view it, if you download and store material from the internet for any commercial reason, then unless you have permission to do so in some form of license you've infringed copyright. There are some "fair use" clauses that would allow you to do it, but only for private non commercial purposes. It's the "for commercial use" clause in the UK Designs, Copyrights and Parents Act that stomps over any claim of fair use.

Like others have said, training an AI causes copyright issues not because of the training, but because of the copying and storing of the copyrighted material that it is presumed OpenAI and others have done when training their models.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Hmmm..

"Most EV owners don't need anything more than a 13A plug to charge their 10-30 miles overnight"

That seems about right. There are 33.58 million cars in the UK, covering 658 million miles per day. That's an average of 19.6 miles per day. At 4 miles per kWh that's about 5kWh. Just looking at my fairly standard kettle here in my kitchen, that's equivalent to that kettle running for about 2 hrs. It's well within the capacity of a 13A socket, not even running overnight, just for a few hours, to deliver an annual daily mileage.

A standard 13A socket can deliver almost 3kW. Using that to charge overnight for 10 hrs will deliver 30kWh, or 120 miles.

I hunted for some distributions of individual car journeys to see how many single day mileages exceed 120 miles. The best I could find was some US data taken from drivers of one particular model (a hybrid by the way, so no range limitation). It suggested that while there is variation across the week, on no single day are more than 4.5% of daily mileages greater than 200km (about 124 miles), on average (mean if you were wondering). Or to put it another way, if the US data translates over to UK driving, then a 10hr overnight slow charge from a domestic socket will be good for over 95.5% of driving days across the whole population. It might be be even better than that in the UK as average mileage is lower than in the US (19.6 miles per day compared to 37 in the US).This might translate into lower individual day mileages if the general distribution of daily mileages has the same profile across the week. That 95.5% might be more like 97.6% if that were the case.

I'm going out on a limb and saying that if you drive more than about 120 miles in any one day, you are part of 2.4% of the driving population on that day, or about 1 in 42, which goes to show that Douglas Adams was right all along.

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Think of the Grid!

I'm going to do some maths on this, hold tight everyone, here we go! And if anyone else here is seething like I am at how so many contributors here are conflating power and energy as if they are the same thing, relax, you're in safe hands here.

UK government stats says that in 2022, roughly 250bn miles were driven by cars in the UK - just cars, not vans or lorries etc. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/road-traffic-estimates-in-great-britain-2022/road-traffic-estimates-in-great-britain-2022-headline-statistics

How many Watts does this translate to, if all those miles were driven by EVs and were all charged nice and slow overnight to keep the grid demand down? To put it another way, what would be the grid demand if we all moved to electric cars and could all charge slowly and gently, could the UK grid cope with this extreme minimum demand?

250bn miles in a year is about 685million miles per day. If we assume an EV efficiency of 4miles per kWh, that's 685,000,000/(4x1,000,000) = 171 GWh per day. If we all slowly charge over the same 10hr period, that's a grid capacity increase of about 17GW (maintained for 10 hours), just for electric cars. That's about 26% of the 62GW peak in 2002 quoted above and a bit more (but not much) than the quoted 16% drop in demand since then. So, rough calculation suggests that it's possible for the existing grid to meet EV demand.

This all changes of course if everyone insists on rapid charging like we do currently with petrol and diesel. And I haven't worked out how many daily kWh are needed per car, and therefore if the domestic 10hr overnight charge would be enough, on average.

I look at this challenge as needing a culture change, the way we have changed mobile phone charging. We mostly slow charge our phones overnight these days because they don't last all week anymore. Some power users/drivers will be driving long distances everyday and that's the use case for oil powered hybrids or range extenders, like how some people carry a power bank for their phone today.

Is it time for 6G already? Traffic analysis says yep

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Who's really driving the bandwidth demand?

"This is an important research question because we can see mobile traffic going up over the next decade by a factor of 10 or even a factor of 20. So if we don't do anything, the power consumption of the base station will go up by a factor of 10 or 20,"

I wonder how much of that is driven by the operators touting faster networks in the pursuit of profits, rather than genuine consumer-led demand. Probably tied in with the handset manufacturers needing to make and sell "better" handsets year on year to keep shareholders happy.

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Pretty sure you can't change the laws of Physics...

"If I pay for a subscription for a home broadband wifi router, I should be able to automatically use that subscription for unused bandwidth on anyone else's home broadband router"

That's what BT have been doing for years here in the UK. A BT home router also pumps out a number of wi-fi networks with names like BT home hub, BT fon, openzone etc. that any other BT customer can use. Used to annoy me at home when lots of my neighbours were with BT and each router was pumping out at at least 3 WiFi networks, whilst I was struggling to find some spare channels I could safely put my own single wi-fi network on.

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

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

"More often than not, that single thread will be hanging on I/O (on a disk that's being hogged by something else that's badly written), or on a network request".

Windows has always struggled whenever the network isn't responding. Back in version 3.11 if the network was slow, it would hang the machine for a moment even if you the user weren't actually doing any network stuff at the time. XP seemed to be okay in that you could still do something locally albeit a bit slower than usual. Today, on W10 any network issue seems to take the entire computer completely out of action until it's either resolved or that one process finally gives up and gives back use of the processor to something more useful, like moving a mouse or something else more satisfying than watching a high spec PC fail to be able to animate a tiny spinny wheel anymore.

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: "Yes, I could buy an ad-free version, but why should I?"

"Nobody wants to pay for software that they already had again"

Couldn't agree more. I've never updated anything on my laptop or my phone because I wanted to, except maybe when I moved from DOS on a 286 to (probably) win 3.11 on a 486. And that's the point of the article - how little real progress has been made since then.

Phones have now gone the same way, not surprisingly since really a phone is just a computer and the same constraints are coming back to bite us. The act of software development has changed a lot, it's so much easier now to create complex software than it was 30 years ago with all the tools now available. But a consequence of that is all that software has to run on a standard operating system built to try and account for every possible use case so it's all so constrained. There is no equivalent today to writing 8 bit machine code in your bedroom, where you could do anything the actual hardware was capable of. Yes the hardware had limits, but at least you could program up to those limits. Now you have to go through a bloated operating system instead that most of the time feels like it's designed to physically stop you using the limits of the hardware.

It feels like we have hit the buffers of the "pile it high, sell it cheap" model of IT. Good quality specialist software still exists but it takes to much specialist skill, time and money for it to be for the masses.

Creating a single AI-generated image needs as much power as charging your smartphone

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Power or energy? Disappointing reporting

Yeah, the general thrust of the article is fine but it looks like it's an early draft that hasn't been through review.

Change "power" for "energy" in the headline and probably everywhere else in the article as well. "Power" is fine when taking qualitatively about energy use generally, but not when you are getting specific and actually citing energy figures. To be fair on The Reg, the original paper has "power" and "watts" in the title, uses phrases like "power hungry" and then presents data in energy units.

The graph is described as measured CO2 emissions, but it's not measured, only modelled. The labelling on the graph even says so. Again, the paper includes the words "measure ... the carbon emitted"

The word "image" (I presume) is missing from the first sentence of paragraph 4.

I'm being harsh, the original paper is quite sloppy and it's maybe unfair to expect The Reg to do the critical paper review rather than just report the headline.

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Green buttons to exit.

I always do a mental stumble when I see those green buttons to open a door. I worked for a long time in a place where there was strict access control and the green buttons were emergency exit buttons, not for regular use. I still haven't totally gotten out of that mindset.

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Click, click, click, nothing happens

Reminds me of a common trick we used to play in the office from that era, probably still works today if people weren't so keen to lock their screens.

Close all windows and take a screen grab of a user's desktop. Set that screen grab as the desktop backdrop and then delete all or some of the actual desktop icons. All the icons appear as normal, but obviously don't do anything. A variation was to modify the desktop screen grab to be one pixel shifted, and leave all the icons in place so they appear fuzzy to the eye.

UK's cookie crumble: Data watchdog serves up tougher recipe for consent banners

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Why 30 days?

Why give them more time to come into line with the law they have been breaking for years already? Just prosecute now.

If you confront a serial offender, it doesn't seem right to say "you've got 30 days to stop or we'll prosecute"

I can only assume there is some legal hoop they (the ICO) have to jump through by giving notice.

Half a kilo of cosmic nuclear fuel reignites NASA's deep space dreams

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: significantly lower power degradation over time

I was wondering exactly the same. The NASA document linked to near the end of the article seems to imply that RPS is a generic term and RTG is a subset - a particular type of RPS.

The NASA document goes on to mention several different types of RTG, such as MMRTG (in the Reg article), GPHS-RTG (General Purpose Heat Source RTG) and "Next Gen" RTG, which is an enhancement of an existing GPHS-RTG.

Other than that, I'm none the wiser and not bothered looking harder. If anyone else does please post here.

No more staff budget for UK civil service, but worry not – here's an incubator for AI

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Ooh ... so could we have an AI in the cabinet ?

"And while Valance is now claiming, with hindsight, that we should have locked down sooner, he was on TV two weeks before saying that we should pursue a herd immunity strategy. However, somehow the inquiry hasn't pressed him on that"

Actually that was discussed at the inquiry, yesterday I think. Chris Whitty said that government wasn't pursuing a herd immunity strategy at the time and that he was trying to persuade ministers to not discuss it on open, as it would give a misleading picture. But because the debate about it (herd immunity) was happening in public, it looked like it was a government policy. Whitty confessed this was a mistake saying "We didn't help the public by having a debate that I think quite rightly upset and confused a lot of people"

Francis Maude mulls mulligan on muddled merger of UK govt tech services

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Re: Francis Maude

"If anyone can explain and give an example of the actual difference in handling between 'OFFICIAL' and 'OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE' please let me know."

According to https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1166145/Government_Security_Classifications_Policy_June_2023.pdf

"The -SENSITIVE marking should be applied to OFFICIAL information that is not intended for public release and that is of at least some interest to threat actors (internal or external), activists or the media."

A practical example might be a list of roles at a government facility being OFFICIAL. If the same list had names and contact details of the people in those roles, that might be OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE. As for handling, OFFICIAL can be emailed in the clear, OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE can still be emailed but only with accredited encryption.

To pay or not to pay for AI's creative 'borrowing' – that is the question

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Two questions for the price of one

The copyright, designs and patents act in the UK is explicit in that this sort of temporary storage, where only to facilitate use, does not infringe copyright.

Section 28a of the act says:

Copyright in a literary work, other than a computer program or a database, or in a dramatic, musical or artistic work, the typographical arrangement of a published edition, a sound recording or a film, is not infringed by the making of a temporary copy which is transient or incidental, which is an integral and essential part of a technological process and the sole purpose of which is to enable—

(a)a transmission of the work in a network between third parties by an intermediary; or

(b)a lawful use of the work;

and which has no independent economic significance.

Rivian bricks infotainment systems in 'fat finger' fiasco

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: What, no speedo?

About 20 years ago, I temporarily borked my OH's car's dashboard by discovering a hidden test mode. Holding down the trip computer reset button whilst turning on the ignition sent it into a diagnostics mode with all the dash lights flashing and all the dials flicking up and down.

The car still drove ok so we got home, but had no instruments. This persisted through an ignition cycle and even removing the battery. Eventually found that simply pressing the trip reset button again reset it back to normal. in hindsight, that was fairly obvious but I didn't think of it at the time.

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Wrong security certificate?

"the wrong build with the wrong security certificates was sent out".

IT security is not my forte, but can someone explain how something with the wrong security certificate was advertised and installed by the car? I presume it didn't really on users clicking ok on a "incorrect security certificate" type of message.

Wanted: Driver for rocket-powered Bloodhound Land Speed Record car

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

"Don't tell me steering, because at that speed you aren't going to be doing much of that."

Andy Green has been quoted many times on the internet in interviews that actually yes, there is a lot of steering to do.

UK MoD braves the weather to train maritime AI capabilities

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Data-driven exercises like this demonstrate how AI can enhance our military capabilities

"That... seems a little premature. The exercise wasn't driven by data, it was to collect data."

I suspect this trial and data collection was influenced by previous trials, rather than being the first ever one of its kind. So probably yes, a data-driven data collection activity.

Astroboffins spot high-power 8b year old radio burst from pre-Earth event

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: "we find that more than half of what should be there today is missing"

"Okay so, given that we're finding that rogue planetrs are a dime a dozen, does that have any impact on that evaluation ?"

If you're suggesting that rogue planets might constitute a significant proportion of the missing mass, that's a reasonable question. But for the answer to be yes, it would take an awful lot of rogue planets. If our solar system is typical, that is pretty unlikely.

The sun constitutes about 99.9% of the total mass of the solar system. Even Jupiter (the most massive planet in the solar system, it has more mass than all the other planets and the asteroid belt combined) is only about 0.1% of the mass of the sun. So for rogue planets to be a significant portion of the missing mass, you would need something approaching 1000 Jupiter sized rogue planets for every star. If it's earth like planets we want to consider, you would need about a million for every star (I'm rounding to the nearest power of 10 because the numbers are so huge). It seems very unlikely that each star would form that many planets (the gravitational forces that drive stellar formation just don't work that way) and then for each star to lose nearly all of them as they go rogue.

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

"most gas boilers put out 20-30kW of heat, even the largest common heat pump rated at 16kW will leave a larger house cold."

But isn't the point of heat pumps is that they operate at a lower power but continuously? Our house has a standard gas boiler and with our central heating on 24hrs a day (boiler regulated by the room thermostat) I reckon it's actually burning with a duty cycle of 20%. So if your figures are correct we could get away with a continuous running heat pump of about 5kW. Of course, this is just space heating, I wouldn't make the same claim for water heating.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

Re: Makes you proud

I can't claim credit for this, but a friend can. I spent a week once at a holiday camp. On site, there was a dusty old monitor hanging from the ceiling displaying some slightly useful information - the queue length at the swimming pool or something like that. It was just a text window in what looked very much like Windows 3.11. A few weeks later I told my friend who had worked there for a summer job whilst at school 20 years earlier. They said they probably wrote that programme. Part of me wanted to believe that it had been running continuously ever since.

Brit competition regulator will make or break Vodafone and Three union

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

When gas, water and electricity were all privatised, they were already considered critical infrastructure, probably hence being closely regulated from the start. It's only in recent years that mobile networks have been viewed the same, and long after the mobile industry was established. Perhaps the government are just taking a long time to catch up, or there is genuine reluctance to enforce that level of regulation onto an established sector.

It's 2023 and Microsoft WordPad can be exploited to hijack vulnerable systems

jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

"I miss the days when computers did what they were told"

Computers still do what they're told, just these days there are so many ways for others to tell your computer what to do.

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