Posts by that one in the corner

Supercomputer pinpoints exact origin of 'Black Beauty' meteorite from Mars

The chances of finding out where it came from on Mars are a million to one, he said.

Hmm, haven't quite got the scansion right.

That emoji may not mean what you think it means

Re: Confusing emojis

Never knew that was meant to be a high-five. Because I've not yet seen it drawn as anything but the hands (add in some upper arms and they'd be golden).

So not only are we suffering weird picto-euphemisms but also rubbish graphic design <sigh/>

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

Re: Mostly agree

Not being a regular reader of the NASDAQ I was wondering what MSFT referred to - some specific subdivision of Microsoft?

Googling it wasn't much help - but nice to know that the Manchester Farm Swim Team is right at the top of the list.

Perhaps I should have Binged it instead?

US EV drivers won't be able to choose vehicle safety alert sounds

Take a cue from Cyril Kornbluth

and make the car sound like it is reving hard and going like the clappers; feed this into the cabin interior (CK even included the roar of jets) as well as the outside speakers. Give the boy racers the feeling they're pushing the limits as they reach 25 in a 30 zone.

While we're at at, put in random noises of clattering and bottoming out when going over a speed bump too fast: encourage pedestrians to point and laugh as well as being warned that they in the presence of The Driving Morons.

Elon Musk had secret twins in 2021 with Neuralink exec

Re: We already knew that Musk was an idiot

Now I want to watch again James Burke's single-take (by necessity!) walk-and-talk alongside the Saturn rocket. "And it all leads to this:" - beat - launch occurs behind his shoulder.

Re: Population collapse....

"What caused this?"

Better education.

Systemd supremo Lennart Poettering leaves Red Hat for Microsoft

Re: It is about a better UX

Can we get some concrete examples of what these bits of "basic modern functionality" are and how, say, systemd (or PulseAudio or whatever) does them better?

In all honesty, looking at the boxes around me, the newest tech I see is USB that actually works (all wired LAN btw, anyway WiFi is hardly new) - everything else is just "the same as it was decades ago, only more of it and it goes faster". I now need 64 bit addresses to use all the RAM, so that is new-ish, I guess?

Now, this is probably just because I'm simply not hip and with-it, but if you don't actually clearly give some examples of what I'm missing then comments like this are about as useful as "'cos I say so, no takebacksies".

Tech professionals pour cold water on UK crypto hub plans

Royal Mint NFT: lese majeste

Will we be getting images of currency with HRH in different hats and colour schemes: Sad Maj ?

Arrogant, subtle, entitled: 'Toxic' open source GitHub discussions examined

On the edge of my seat

I've worked my way down to 27th May and have to stop reading (SWMBO calls) just as the plot thickens: will the s/w be chucked from Debian?

This, and many other questions, will be answered in this weeks episode of: simh!

Tencent Cloud slaps googly eyes on a monitor, says it can care for oldies

Good thing we kept xeyes

After all the arguments whether xeyes should be removed (because it is useless), we now realise that it just needed to be spruced up and given the AI gloss!

PowerShell pusher to log off from Microsoft: Write-Host "Bye bye, Jeffrey Snover"

Re: But... it's so random

That isn't PS causing the problem, it is down to whoever is writing the specific objects that you are attempting to use.

So, yes, overall the entire system that you interact with via PS *is* designed by committee. Quite possibly by people who don't even want to be exposing stuff to PS and really don't give a monkey's whether their stuff is self-consistent, let alone works beautifully with everything else.

California's attempt to protect kids online could end adults' internet anonymity

Re: anonimity ? Internet ?

Your ISP knows who you are because the first hop, from your VPN endpoint running on your PC, is sending all of the traffic, encrypted, to your VPN provider. What the VPN is doing is to prevent your ISP connecting their knowledge of your identity to any services you access via the VPN provider.

The VPN supplier can, of course, track where it sent your traffic and this data can be correlated with your ISP. Which is why you want to choose your VPN supplier carefully.

Consider: you can use the VPN the old-fashioned way, with an endpoint in your LAN and an endpoint in another LAN you have access rights to, say at work, and then just share resources between the two without anyone in the middle eavesdropping. Both ISPs are fully aware that the LANs are talking to each other, and for how long, they just can't read the actual content. You can even go from your work LAN onto the rest of the Internet and, tada, your work is now behaving exactly like the generic VPN supplier; so does your work have the ability to track your access to the Internet? Then so does the generic VPN supplier.

The value of a VPN for general browsing is at the furthest end from your ISP, where the Big Website Provider only sees lots and lots of traffic from the VPN supplier and trying to apply tracking techniques to that means your small bit of the traffic gets lost in the noise. Hopefully.

But all of the bytes are always going via your ISP. And they know where you live.

Visual Studio adds ability to edit code in All-in-One Search

Subtle marketing by nerd sniping

I find the description of this so weird that it is almost tempting to get VS just to marvel at the ingenuity.

Almost.

First Light says it's hit nuclear fusion breakthrough with no fancy lasers, magnets

What are the consumables?

(Bit late to the party but never mind)

Deuterium, tritium - the usual for fusion.

Tungsten - the projectiles aren't going to be reusable, are they? Mining and fabrication costs?

And reading the above, there is talk of gunpowder!

How sustainable are projectile based systems compared to magnetic confinement that is just consuming some of its own output?

Soviet-era tech could change the geothermal industry

Re: Is 500°C (932°F) hot enough?

Thanks for URL.

That article headlines the use case that comments here are suggesting - using the FDH to feed into existing power stations' turbines - before covering the more important topics, such as Kaiju.

Although it is a bit worrying - they say that this tech isn't what destroyed Krypton, but the picture at the top clearly shows a chunk of planet blown off and flung up into the clouds!

Battle Beneath The Planet

Keep your ears pressed to the ground - They are coming!

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061387/

Re: How deep?

Blockchain! It'll work, trust me!

Re: Is 500°C (932°F) hot enough?

1970 - and it was only because we provided the extra energy to let the Silurians power their de-hibernation machines!

Whatever hit the Moon in March, it left this weird double crater

Re: Chinese Junk on moon

Deckard? Korben Dallas!

Wi-Fi hotspots and Windows on Arm broken by Microsoft's latest patches

Re: In other news

> Poor doggy

They only use carefully selected Labradors, because the poor sods are genetically unable to *not* eat anything put in front of them.

Look, it's wagging it's tail, this batch is good enough to be sent out. QA all done.

Re: Testing?

But which rights would you be signing away?

You don't have a right to be able to run Excel, you are being offered the chance to give it a go and if it does work, yay for you.

The Ts&Cs are more concerned with telling you what you mustn't think you can do with Windows (so no more using it on a medical device which is being used to drill for oil in a nuclear powered digger).

Even if you go down the route of merchantability and "a reasonable person would expect to be able to" print a letter on A4 paper, the obvious reply is "What, haven't you been reading the support forums? Nobody can get that to work!".

Metaverse progress update: Some VR headset prototypes nowhere near shipping

Re: Yay, another single-use VR/AR headset

FWIW I do think of "playing games" as pretty much a single use, but I know that coding for consoles is open enough that "real world" applications have been found for the current crop of headsets.

I was really thinking about all the different headsets that appeared through the 90s onwards and which have either vanished completely or are only used in small numbers, either literally locked to a single application or so costly that no-one would bother (I was demoed a nice military unit quite a few years ago; not expecting to be able to afford to buy one of those for my little experiments and if they let me try it probably wasn't their best!).

The old "you know, we could have progressed so much further by now, I can't see why we haven't - oh, yes, I can now".

Yay, another single-use VR/AR headset

Instead of a "good enough" headset that can be used with whatever software the User wants, develop an expensive over-engineered headset that 99% certainty will be tied to FB software only, and vice-versa because you can't conceive of separating one from the other.

So when only a tiny number of headsets get sold (after a h/w revision to block that trick that someone used to unlock the headset and attach it to a Wii, 'cos why not), declare the whole thing a bust, throw away all the dev work.

Round and round we go, never to have mass produced, "good enough" headsets that can be used for different purposes by different people (and, with luck, just quietly ignored by those who don't want to use 'em; that is the real fantasy, of course).

AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

Re: Chinese Room

Yes, yes, Thank you.

Sigh. I got the first three letters of her name right then it went wrong :-)

And the wrong Uni - I was so sure I'd met her at Milton Keynes.

Never could get the hang of Thursdays.

Re: The whole article

Turing Complete != Turing Test

Hm, but is Turing Complete a necessary precondition for passing the Turing Test? Pretty sure I've met some adults who don't meet that precondition...

Re: Chinese Room

(If anyone can fill in the blanks I'd love to know - yes, I've been Googling...)

Back in the early days of Channel 4 they had a late-night academic discussion programme, broadcast from the Open University studios. One episode had (IIRC) Roger Penrose versus Mary (sorry, the name has gone - she was a Professor at the OU and wrote the first AI text I had) discussing AI: Mary for, Roger against.

The Chinese Room discussion was in full fling and Mary had Roger on the ropes, about to adminster the final blow, when the programme's host butted in and changed the topic! The whole thing was derailed and the programme started wandering about.

According to a cameraman friend of mine, when they went to the next ad break the producer came storming out onto the studio floor, yelling at the host "Why did you do that? She had him!" (but probably with some more forceful language).

Re: The whole article

Press F7? Review my command line history?

If AI chatbots are sentient, they can be squirrels, too

Re: "different voices for reading aloud kids books compared to horror stories"

You want to do WHAT with a wabbit?

Plot to defeat crypto meltdown: Solend votes to seize, liquidate whale account

Re: Reinsurance spiral....?

But will we see any of the Crypto-Names riding a Penny Farthing around the streets in protest to the crypto-shenanigans?

(that picture, and a total lack of empathy for their "plight", being what I most remember about the Lloyds crisis)

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

We can do better than 8.3 these days, can't we?

I can not understand why people are still using 3-or-fewer characters for their "new" file types. Especially as I had the impression that the number of us who remember being bound by the 8.3 limits (outside of some rare, probably embedded, cases) are the now minority.

My personal hatred is the use of .md for Markdown (and I know who I blame for that monstrosity).

John Gruber would support .markdown - https://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/01/08/markdown-extension - whillst I very much like the (and I wish I could find the original suggestion, but you just try Googling for it these days) using .markdown.txt - that's right, take *TWO* file extensions into the shower? Yes please!

Give someone the file fred.markdown.txt and *everyone* can click on it and read it - anyone who knows what Markdown is can use their viewer of choice and everyone else just some sees it in Notepad (other simple text editors are available). Just the way that Markdown was intended to work (ref Mr Gruber).

But, no, of course, .md is uniquely Markdown, no-one ever wanted to use GCC Machine Definitions and anyone who ever wants to read their old MuseData musical scores should Simply Know Better.

Will optics ever replace copper interconnects? We asked this silicon photonics startup

Re: The medium is the messenger

Whoosh?

Leave that sentient AI alone a mo and fix those racist chatbots first

Re: Chat bots: we've already got our AIs, now we need something better

As you say, the human can choose whether or not to evaluate the source of the material and I think we agree that we prefer those humans who do choose to do so.

So we'd want our bots to make these evaluations (assuming the resources are available), but we wouldn't give them the choice not to: once again, we want the bot to be better than human.

More verbosely:

Humans evaluate their sources once the mind is old enough to be taught and then to develop this skill and even then that is a skill that is easiest to apply to fresh input: it is very difficult to go back and rid oneself of the (full effects of) the input that arrived in the earliest stages.

Chat bots can apply weightings to the source of the input just as well as they can to the usual metrics, such as the frequency of an input (what is repeated most often stays): assuming that you provide them with multiple sources and attach the metadata to the chat, a generic learning system will just add that to the mix. When the weighting for a source goes negative, the bot would disagree with the input and seem to form its own opinion.

This requires even more training time than without the metadata (I assume,but am willing to argue my case) so we only see the results as the bot gets older... And applies the new weighting immediately to new input whilst still acting under the influence of the older inputs (whose effects may get weeded out over time). Sounds familiar.

Chat bots: we've already got our AIs, now we need something better

"The big problem with AI bots ... is that they absorb any old shit you feed into them. Examples of data bias in so-called machine learning systems ... have been mounting for years, from Microsoft's notorious racist Twitter Tay chatbot..."

Just like a human, then, when they are in their "starting from nothing learning phase", aka toddlerhood onwards. They also absorb whatever they're fed - there have been and certainly still are children spouting racist crap 'cos that is what they've been exposed to. And similarly stupid ideas (Creationism, ...).

So our Chatbot AIs are already behaving just like humans, it is just a shame that we don't really *want* them to after all: we'd rather that they were better than the bags of mostly water that created them.

Airbus flies new passenger airplane aimed at 'long, thin' routes

Re: Long and thin eh?

Lunch will be served by our steward, Boudicca.

Re: Why

But can you bear to go back to your own seat after a visit to the loo?

Unless you took the fruit and the can with you, which would probably mean they'll just tape over the door and leave your unconscious body there until the landing.

I was fired for blowing the whistle on cult's status in Google unit, says contractor

If this goes on - maybe we'll find out.

Consultant plays Metaverse MythBuster. Here's why they're wrong

Each piece of hardware tied to its single use/single content company

With the AR sets in particular, each piece of equipment seems to have been dependent upon one company for both the hardware and the (limited) software, the latter in particular being locked-down and limited in use. When that one company loses interest in the device both hardware and application become defunct. The hardware wasn't compatible with any other manufacturer's, assuming that at that time there actually is another manufacturer making anything similar enough to be usable.

Since the 1990s I tried to find (what we now call) AR displays. After all, a working one had been shown on Tomorrow's World (IIRC basically an endoscope cable attached to one arm of the glasses, reflecting off a semi-silvered patch on the inside of the lens; mostly analogue), an affordable product must be available soon!

My niche use-case was simple enough: I always wanted to be able to VNC into my desktop so that I could use the s/w tools I'd setup just the way I like whenever I was watching over a colleague's shoulder; I'd even got a funky one-handed chording keyboard to learn. No more "just search for alpha charlie - no, just type a then c, no, I didn't say put a space between them, here, let me type - gaah, why do you have that key mapped to delete paragraph? What do you mean, you don't have grep, there is a Windows exe on the share you were told to add into PATH". Or during a meeting, discreetly look up the email (I know where *my* copy of it was stashed) without crouching over a laptop (when they actually became usable as a desktop replacement) or, these days, squinting at a 'phone, but instead at least looking like I was paying attention to the presentation.

Over the years, there have been plenty of products that could have made that possible (there is a list somewhere in my notes, now mainly a list of defunct URLs) but either they were pricey-but-I-could-manage-it gadgets whose maker vanished almost as soon as someone could publish a review or they were insanely priced along with the only software package that could drive them, usually medical or military. And those never seemed to last much more than a year either (the URLs certainly didn't), no idea if they ever made any sales.

More recently, we had Google Glass (sneaky camera, data slurping and stop making the damn display run an entire Android stack with Alexa/Siri/Cortana/whatever added in, I just want a peripheral display) or Hololens (yes, lovely AI driven API or whatever, not interested, gimme a basic peripheral) or even a slew of Kickstarters (only talks to their iPhone app and/or focussed to appear 10 inches in front of you).

Fantasy time: how about a few manufacturers making wearable display peripherals with a common interface and a variety of form factors (semi-silvered specs or dangling mirror on a headset - Ketracel White optional - or Virtual Light for the adventurous). Then have Google strap a camera to it, MS can flog you a subscription to their cloud API for the Holoadaptor, Gucci et al can put a logo on it, Swarovski can bejewel it. People with their own niche ideas can try them out whilst others just avoid tired arms from holding their phones up all day long.

Maybe then there is a chance for economies of scale to kick in for the displays, technical competition and improvements in resolution without chucking everything out and starting from scratch again.

And I can connect it to a minimalist VNC client and be quite happy in my own little world (except that I've forgotten the keyboard chords, dang).

Re: Making money in the metaverse

R&D have determined that we can fill upto 49% of the viewers' vision with ads and still keep the seizure rate below 5%, which Corporate says is an acceptable level.

Re: Specs

The only reason to wear glasses is to see things that you otherwise would not, and - aside from cost (ouch, my bifocals) - they really are not much of a burden.

If you want to see the AR or VR, wearing glasses (not huge 1980's headset) is hardly a burden. If it is to you, then just accept that you are not that interested in the AR/VR and quietly ignore it.

Former chip research professor jailed for not disclosing Chinese patents

Re: Don't talk to the police

That video has been cited quite often on El Reg - does anyone know of anything similar that covers non-US jurisdictions?

Meta slammed with eight lawsuits claiming social media hurts kids

Re: Social media is killing us

Well, at least Usenet had *real* spam, with the same message being cross-posted to so many groups that all you'd see in your combined feed is the same thing, repeated ad nauseam: spam, spam, spam, spam (bloody vikings).

Re: Social media is killing us

Usenet over UUCP was available in 1980.

If you take "The Internet" as being based upon TCP/IP, that switchover was made in 1983.

Even if you allow for the pre-TCP-only network as The Internet, it had very reduced availability compared to UUCP so was not used to carry Usenet traffic.

So Social Media was available to many (most?) well before The Internet was.

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

Re: Oh, how ironic

Whoosh!

Alibaba sued for selling a 3D printer that overheated, caught fire, and killed a man

Re: Utterly tragic, and it's awful someone lost their life without the chance to learn, but..

*Disposable* LED tape? Single-use LEDs? Yikes.

Meteoroid hits main mirror on James Webb Space Telescope

Re: Starships doomed

Hence "They are armed with lasers? Those won't even get through our Navigation Shields!"

Reg hack attends holographic WebEx meeting, blows away Zoom fatigue

Re: Holography?!

Came here to say the same thing.

In the late 80s I used to work with a chap whose Masters project was to calculate and plot diffraction patterns which were photo-reduced down to produce viewable holograms. We've been waiting since then for the display technology to get down to small enough scales to do this trick live, for the masses.

But at least the AR gadgets use stereoscopic 3D; that is a bit better than the - people - who try to claim that a Pepper's Ghost projection is a hologram (whether it is a cheap plastic pyramid on your mobile phone or a massive sheet of glass on stage at a hundred quid per ticket, it is just a parlour trick!)

Distrobox 1.3.0: Run (pretty much) any Linux distro under almost any other

Re: Multiple distros

So you are not developing anything for those distros - and is that of any importance to anyone other than yourself?

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

Re: choose how the OS will annoy you

Youngsters? We were describing programs as "apps" forty-plus years ago (older and whiter beards may go back further than that).

Admittedly, we did also call some "utils" if they weren't deemed interesting enough to be "apps" and we used "tools" to create both the apps and the utils. And that just covers the software fit to go into one of the bins, of course. So I'll agree that the youngsters are failing to spot the subtle distinctions.

China’s top court calls for blockchain to record vast number of transactions

Par for the course when blockchain is allowed on the links.