Posts by The man with a spanner

Trump says Nvidia can sell H200s to China – if Washington gets a 25 percent cut

How is Canada's aplication to join the EU going?

Porsche panic in Russia as pricey status symbols forget how to car

Re: /me looks at his thirty year old Fiat

I have an Idea.

(Not many other people do as they sold abismally in the UK)

Canadian data order risks blowing a hole in EU sovereignty

Re: Hang on

Is it not the case that

The Canadian court goes to OVHC and demands the data.

OVHC say, sorry mate that data is the property of someone else (OVHF) and we have no physical access to it - go and talk to them.

Canadian court goes to OVHF and demands the data, and OVHF point out that the data is in France under French law and that thay can only release it if ordered by a French court.

The court can get stroppy with OVHC but ultimatly a subsidiary has no leverage over the parent that resides in a completly seperate juristiction. You cannot hold someone in contempt of court when they have no responsibility and no way of implementing the request even if they wanted to. The only circumstance a sovereign countries court can impose its will in this context is if the country (Canadal) is going to back the court up and bully OVHF and France.

That sort of approach is more the perogative of the good ol' USA under the Donald (Duck) Dictatorship..... (Sound of angry duck noise on the right.)

Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant

He needs to wait for palm Sunday for a handy miracle, and while he is waiting he can watch Jesus ride into town on his ass.

UK's Ajax fighting vehicle arrives – years late and still sending crew to hospital

Re: Typical MOD bid scenario

Speaking as someone who hasn't a clue..... What if you said to your potential suppliers - Guys you are the experts...we want a thingie that has these broad capabilities, that has a mtbf of x hours, is easy to maintain in the field etc. We wish to pay £ Z,000 per unit and we want #y units by (choose a date). What can you provide?

By the way the contract will be at a fixed price. You write the spec with our oversight.

Critical federal cybersecurity funding set to resume as government shutdown draws to a close - for now

Re: Not over yet

Its no way to run a fish stall !

Musk gets approval for bumper Tesla payout but, unlike his robot, there are strings attached

Re: When I read about these insane pay packages

If it is a pay packet how big would the paypacket be?

I guess that the unit of measure should be the Cyber Truck.

Re: The board has no choice

If we are optimistic it may be, though personally I doubt it, that Mr Musk may achieve many of the targets but fails to achieve the full enhancement of the share price. Competition isn't going away and that will likely depress profitability.

In that situation the shareholders will have diluted their shareholding without shares growing enough to compensate.

Also Musk is a gambler who likes to go "all in". Sooner or later lady luck will run out.

What happens if he has a medical emergency (prolific drug use is hard on the body)? The gamble the shareholders have taken on Musks rabbit and hat tricks will be up shit creek with no paddle.

There is too much to go wrong and reliance on an unreliable single point of weakness seems a not daft to me.

Microsoft will force its 'superintelligence' to be a 'humanist' and play nice with people

Let's assume and worship Microsoft's benevolent Omnipotents.

Who wants to know what a superintelegent AI would look like as created by Mr Musk?

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

Re: Still harping over forum passwords

Good for a techy user.

What proportion of normal users would even think of this let alone implement it.

Wherever possible avoid giving the user the opportunity to screw up. They will, of course, still screw up, just less frequency.

Re: Password rules make for weaker passwords

I particularly like <MyPassword#>11 for this month.

What could possibly be wrong with this?!

In effect it is as strong as MyPassword# but if you are going to force me to change password every month, not allow me a password manager on my corporate system and not allow me to right it down then I have to have some strategy for remembering it, or I will frequently resetting the password.

Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope

Re: Well done Norway !

Opps.... I did mean Musk

Re: Well done Norway !

Its a weird conundrum.

The markets see Trump as integral to the success of Tesla, and "tank" when there is a threat to his position as there is the view that he could up sticks and go elsewhere.

He is erratic (is this the ketamine talking) and may well do things that hurt his own position.

So, if he were to throw his toys out of his pram, as the biggest shareholder, he would be injuring himself.

I wouldn't put it past him, but it is good that the clear eyed Norwegians call his bluff. They are doing us all a favour.

International Criminal Court kicks Microsoft Office to the curb

However, Microsoft making this admission removes any possible doubt or ambiguity.

VodafoneThree to offshore UK network jobs to India

Re: Isnt this what people want?

The argument that there aren't people buying the product is a steaming pile of bullshit. Between Three and Vodaphone they have a huge proportion of UK customers.

EY exposes 4TB+ SQL database to open internet for who knows how long

Re: Ernst & Young

It should always be referred to as the ex twitter. Thus encapsulating the stupidity of the pointless name change.

Re: Ernst & Young

EY - Ernst & Young.

Accountants and business consultants.

Area of expertise - Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, with particular skills in charging for guidance on the appropriate time to engage door shutting best practice processes.

Dame Emma Thompson gives the 'AI revolution' both barrels

Re: Self-inflicted problem

She is deflated with all the work.

Re: Self-inflicted problem

My LaTeX wife did the corrections

Blinded by the light: Tesla fixes glaringly bright Cybertruck headlights

Re: FFS...

I would imagine that when the led pulse is on the light is indeed very bright and that the sensors in the eye saturate. That would be fine if they desaturated in line with the light pulse but there is quite a prolonged after image whilst the sensor desaturated/resets. The result being that the average actual light intensity is reduced but due to the saturation of the sensor the visual effect is virtually the same as full continuous power.

Making the power free parts of the pulse longer will work at some point, but risks causing flicker and may give different results for different people. Actually just reducing the power should work.

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

Re: A case of oops rather than UPS

A powerfail joke Shirley?

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: “breakfast or Earl Grey?”

"Hybrid teas"

You drink roses?

SAP users still wrestling with business case for S/4HANA

Re: 95% of legacy users

In effect this is the "right to repair" for software.

In an ideal world the open sourcing would take place 6 months before support ended.

Re: 95% of legacy users

What would be the implication if someone (hypothetically the EU) made it a requirement that if a company greater than <think of a number> size was required to open source any software that it was ceasing to support?

Chamber of Commerce sues over Trump's $100K H-1B paywall

Re: USA how to slowly go broke

Who put the crac in democracy?

Raspberry Pi OS, LMDE, Peppermint OS join the Debian 13 club

Re: It's a free OS that lives on a $5 storage card in a $35 computer.

...and in Guineas please. Only the riff raff use shillings.

Managers are throwing entry-level workers under the bus in race to adopt AI

Trump - The prick that burst the bubble

BBC News - Fears over AI bubble bursting grow in Silicon Valley

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz69qy760weo

Speaking as one who was around during the Dot.Com bubble this scenario feels almost inevitable.

AI is undoubtedly useful in certain use cases, but nothing is ever a panacea, and there a lot of concerns to be addressed.

Crazily priced valuations thought the industry are a big warning flags.

Circular investment should be illegal if it isn't already as it is only sustainably as long as the plates keep spinning.

The large quantities of power and of cooling (also power) required are problematic.

So far the valuations have held but it only takes a relatively minor shock to blow the stack of cards down. Don's deteriorating relationship with CHINA doesn't help in this regard.

The orange Don's trade sanctions are just starting to bite so the realisation that the US economy is weak could well be the precipitating factor.

Donald could well be the prick that bursts the AI bubble.

Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings

Obviously no flare for business

Struggling to heat your home? How about 500 Raspberry Pi units?

Re: Interesting idea

Certainly an interesting idea. Paired with one of these you only need to run at 57 degC

https://sunamp.com/en-gb/hot-water-solutions-thermino-range/

ICE plans to scour Facebook, TikTok, X, and even defunct Google+ for illegal immigration leads

Drinks ?

Ice and vodka Vlad?

Apple ices ICE agent tracker app under government heat

...and while your at, make a version for the Palestinians.

Re: Read a comment recently

Now, stop callin' your brother names. You will grow out of it when your 6.

Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast

Re: Oh really ?

My apologies !

Re: Oh really ?

"No. HR exists to protect the company from the employees.".... Whilst coating themselves with a sugary excrescence for the employees to feed on.

Nadella hands Microsoft money machine off to new commercial CEO so he can visioneer the future

Visualisation or Delusion

I am pleased that Mr Nadella will now have time to "Visioneer" the future - presumably like engineering, but staring into the near future.

Anyway it will clearly be better than his predecessor who only managed to envision the future, while Old Bill and his mate just visulised the possibilities.

! ! FFS ! !

Trump demands Microsoft fire its head of global affairs

Re: "It is highly unusual [. . ]"

"I am not sure that is the case. There have been plenty of disreputable presidents in the past.

Perhaps not quite as disreputable as this one.

He seems to combine small minded petty vindictiveness with a complete lack of empathy and ..... Well actually a display of all the traits of a psycopath to a high degree.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

Trump says Michael Dell is part of the team buying TikTok, with Larry Ellison and maybe some Murdochs

Re: Wasn't this the opening of a James Bond movie?

Ooooo "lickspittles" - straight out of the George Galloway speachmaking guidelines.

I do agree with you though.

The thought of having Trump in my scrotum will give me nightmares.

Not sure if it would enhance my e-wrecktion or cause it to shrivel.

UK Home Office dangles £1.3M prize for algorithm that guesses your age

Re: worth a shot

Palentir will hoover up the contract. All they have to do is connect up to St Peter's Human Universal Database (Phud).

Re: there's no way to precisely judge someone's age just based on their appearance

I don't know how silly this question is, but nevertheless I will ask it.

Tree rings are a known and accurate phenomena and for longer timescales you can use carbon dating.

So, are there any biological markers that would give an indication with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

I am expecting the answer to be no but without a very high degree of confidence. After all a few decades ago individual identification was not possible until the advent of DNA testing.

Re: "a known degree of accuracy,"

I can get within +/- 30 years with a 95% accuracy 99.9% of the time just by looking at them. Unfortunately I need time to sleep and have holidays.

Re: Predict???

The trick would be to accurately access which are the edge cases and employ other methods to those.

If you have an algorithm that has say 50% with a high accuracy then you only have half the work to do. The higher the accuracy the better.

One potential wrinkle is varying accuracy in different population group, so 90% accurate with white people, 70% accurate with brown people and 30% with black people is not very good in an immigration setting.

We shall see, but concerns are valid.

US cuffs 475 at Hyundai–LG battery plant – feds tout largest single-site raid

Re: Hmmmm, what day is Kristallnacht this year?

Where did the figure of 8 million come from is this apocoliptic inflation?

And yes, the mental attitude that classes a sub group of people as somehow sub human and therefore fair game to be persecuted is a valid comparison.

Reference also the attitude in some quarters with the current civilian inhabitants of Gaza.

Re: anti-EV

"

Not if you have the learnings and the sins and cosines "

Surely the sins and co-sins . . .there is an awful lot of sinning going on.

Tesla Model Ys recalled Down Under for overly enthusiastic electric windows

"

Note to self: avoid Teslas when out dogging!

"

But don't forget to pee on the tyre as you go past

No more Blocktoberfest? German court throws book at ad blockers

I dislike ads, but if you are supporting free content with ads then i suppose it is a fair deal - I don't have to access the site, and I have no god given right to do so.

HOWEVER, it is completly wrong that anyone should be tracking, monitoring or stealing my private details at all, and particularly as the price of me accessing a web site. This should be totaly banned regardless of whether I have "given my permmision" via some convoluted processes or not. You would not need ad blockers but you would have more paywalls and a more straight forward ad supported site model.

Re: How would they enforce this?

If Google et al were to inject an ad into the page this would be modifying the page would it not?

The publisher may have created some code to facilitate Google, but non the less Google is adding to the published document in a way not controled by the publisher.

Boy riding bubble realizes what he's on, asks for more air

Re: People Do Love Bullshit

"People are very excited to see computers "thinking" ... and are ready to believe the most amazing bullshit in general."

Thats because they have been fed a diet of Sience fiction fantacy that pollutes teenage boys minds and normalises the inevitable titanic struggle with good (us) and 'bad actors' (them).

Unfortunatly our best and brightest tech bros see this as a blue print for the type of society we should aspire to.

If the tech bros are right welcome to a world where we have facism on steroids and a polarised world with mass unemployment. Not a utopia.

Marc Andreessen wades into the UK's Online Safety Act furor

Re: The ReJester

As far as I understand the situation Mr Helcat the group known as "Palastine Action" is dedicated to highlighting the situation in Gaza by direct physical action, but explicitly NOT atacks on people.

They got onto a military base and splashed paint on some aircraft, This is criminal damage, not terrorism. The real question here is how could a group of civilians with paint cans get on a "secure" military establishment.

The government after months if not years of ignoring the criminal activities of the IDF in Gaza decided to shut Palastine Action up by proscribing them. (The whataboutist will raise Hamas as an issue, however it is currently the IDS that are shooting civilians in food queues and comprrhensivly laying wast to the whole of the area causing widespread disease and starvation as a means of control).

This is simply unaceptable!

As Palastinian Action is proscribed it would be a criminal offence for me to support the group. Although I note that I do support the concept of my goverment taking action in Gaza and I support Palastinians in this regard.

It is ironic that many of the people arrested at the PA rallies have been pale skinned grannies and grandads who now find themselves described as terrorists.