Posts by that one in the corner 5492 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
If you click to enlarge the picture of the laptop, the text being shown could just as usefully be the desktop wallpaper.
Anybody who looks at that advert, words containing so little actual information, and thinks, "yup, that looks like a good summary of my meeting notes, it would be great if the machine typed it out for me" is going to - absolutely fall in love with this! Spot on marketing, HP.
>> liteLLM, a critical piece of AI middleware present in 36 percent of all cloud environments
Are these "cloud environments" ones that are actually any good? Or just a random selection from a list of "cloud thingies" created by flinging out into the wild the question "do you run cloudy stuff; if so, are you happy to tell us what it consists of?" and getting back reams of marketing guff about "leveraging the latest AI to polish your frammistans (we have over 27 users at the moment and tell our VCs that we predict that to rise by 0.75 billion users next quarter)"?
Let us not forget the words* of the great sage, Theodore Sturgeon: "Yea, verily, I say unto you, even to the 90th percentile, all thine eyes do see is unworthy of thine consideration; it may truly be called crud."
Considering that truth, 36% of all cloud environments may be worth but a flea's fart.
* The precision of quotations may go down, whilst the value of the sentiment expressed may yet rise in our hearts.
I'm going to assume the downvoters are just jealous that they weren't privileged enough to be at the 1995 Royal Albert Hall "Generations" con when Ms Sirtis made that quip!
(and Patrick Stewart showed he could project his voice into the entire hall!)
Let him keep his name prominently on show against this law.
Then keep reminding him of what that'll mean if he - or anyone - pushes too hard and they end up forced to deliver a mangled pile of machinery with a "Discovery" plaque sticking out the side.
Perhaps then some politicians may take the engineering of this seriously.
In the next few days, I plan to dismantle - really dismantle - and swap bits between laptops, in the hopes of getting one working one the way *I* like it.
I would really like some AR specs that cost less than the laptops, weren't tied to any specific device/subscription but could display the relevant photos from the laptop manuals overlaid onto the real thing: so I can be *sure* I'm tackling the correct screw at the correct time. Oh, and track where I put the screws and highlight the next one to put back in, even if it is the one that rolled under the backplate, that'd be neat ('cos it seems I think I am being neat when putting the pieces onto the worktable, but reality disagrees).
If it could then do something similar whilst I'm trying to thread this blasted sewing machine, all the better.
(click >here< to upgrade your subscription*)
* for your convenience, allowances and rates will automatically scale up by a factor of ten each time you exceed your new limits. Click >No< if you don't disagree that this isn't what you don't want us to avoid doing[1])
[1] I may have lost count myself!
Does anyone know how much power the replica Babbage engines require? Are any El Reg readers working at one of the museums that own an engine?
After all, if you are looking for a design able to withstand the radiation in space, you could do a lot worse than all that lovely brass.
We'd probably end up using William Gibson's measure of computing power, the gear-mile; efficiency in horses required per gear-mile, a measure colloquially known as the Hansom.
He can spend 20 years building the mass driver on the Moon, then use it to shoot himself, and a big parachute, to Mars.
With a couple of litres (sorry, sorry, pints) of water in his suit he can survive the landing and walk around for a bit, before shrivelling up, spending his last hour shouting to the heavens that his Tesla-branded Magnetosphere *will* work by 2051.
> ventures that others didn't see any opportunity in
Others have always seen opportunity in the two things that actually work from Musk's empire[1]:
Tesla was a going concern before Musk - and electric cars were well on the map from other manufacturers, as shown by the fact that electric cars have been around since the dawn of motor vehicles. Although advances in related tech, including, IT, were important in moving from the mere daily use of electric vehicles in the 1930s on to meeting the speed requirements of the travelling salesman: the desire and eye to the opportunity were always there - held back mainly because of the lobbying by the internal combustion guys.
Reusable rocketry - it wasn't moving as fast as we'd've liked, with things like the cancellation of the DC-X Delta Clipper. Although advances in related tech, including IT, were important in allowing engineers to move on from a test item to fully working vehicles. As even the Wikipedia the timeline shows, there has been a pretty much continual interest in private companies in space operations, including launch.
> But he's also been proved wrong on several occasions.
That gives us two (count them, two[1, again]) times he has continued - admittedly, with a certain "flair" - to get other people to fund things that were ripe opportunities that the relevant private industries were already well aware of. Now, those have grown in size and popular exposure, but the count is still two.
Now, how about things where, in fact, (except a certain breed of, what is the word - charlatans) "others didn't see any opportunity": hyperloop, boring holes for even more roads, solar panel shingles, flame throwers amongst them. Plus the "opportunities" that he "spotted" for his actually functional companies to work on: Cybertruck, the battery-powered big rig (what am I forgetting here?).
We all expect things like VC funding to have hits and misses - and if Musk restricted himself to claiming to be a VC we'd probably cut him some more slack. But so far the rate of spotting successful opportunities that others missed - and making them work - seems to be very close to zero. Getting funding for opportunities that others were all too aware off and speeding them up, okay, granted.
> more accurately, his engineers have achieved
Very true.
[1] No, not counting PayPal, for obvious reasons.
You have to give the Elonophiles some more time: they are currently unable to type, still exhausted and quivering from the multiple Muskasms they had whilst reading the claims. When they've caught their breath, they'll watch a few YouTube replays to extend the afterglow.
And then, *then* they'll come at us with all the might of the downvote!
> gets another pallet of "burgers and fries" flavour ration packs without using up a skilled pilot
So they could've saved all the costs by getting in a fleet of Amazon/McDonalds* delivery drones?
* I'd've made a crack about feeding McDonalds to the troops being a war crime, but remembered the CiC's idea of a banquet...
A blast from past: All your base are belong to us: Strava exercise app maps military sites, reveals where spies jog, The Register Jan 2018.
* note: "man" may not be part of the same military as you
If Strava is like other sites* then it'll show you random data from total strangers in "your feed" - all it takes is for someone to spot this strange running track and wonder why it is in the middle of the ocean...
May have started out as innocent as "that is a very large cruise ship, wonder which one it is" in the mind of someone who has loads of "running buddies" (that he's never actually met) who habitually run around floating gin palaces of the type that, according to the telly box, all have regular murders solved by the onboard entertainment.
* nope, not gonna create a profile to find out, happy to stick to "if" and wild speculation...
Cavor was a johnny-come-lately; Cyrano beat him to the moon travelling by rocket (as the bottled dew didn't even get him to the Karman Line).
However, as, unlike Cavor, Cyrano neglected to take a documentary film crew with him, his trip is often forgotten.
blackjack>> I have been never as motivated to install an Android alternative as I am right now
Sorry...> This is more motivating than the blanket ban they'd originally proposed?
Of course it is! Now they are just toying with us Android users: when the time comes (*IF* it comes, if th3 deadline passes and they stick with it) now there is a horrid decision to make: do I enable this ability? If I do, should I enable it just for one week (and regain the bit of protection against scammers) or do I enable indefinitely? Aaargh, questions, questions, I can't cope, will have to take the easy route out and install an Android alternative!!!! Now, which alternative has a supported build for my phone model? None? Never mind, just rebuild from source, that is still easier than this "wait for 24 hours" insanity!
/s, btw
Don't go around being accurate and quoting what Google's blog says, you're asking to get downvoted here today.
Anyway, it isn't (just) a one-off 24-hour wait; you'll be able to opt to have the unverified install ability revoked after 7 days, which means that you'll then have to wait *another* 24 hours! Or you could take the option to retain the ability indefinitely, but then you'd also have to give up the option to *complain* about waiting for 24 hours, which would just take all the fun out of it.
> their stupid new rule would stop this
Their "stupid new rule" being - the one that the article is telling us about, which is the one that *allows* you to install your APK? Or do you mean the *previous* new rule, the one that the new new rule is modifying, which was indeed going to prevent you, but which is no longer going ahead in its original form, so in practice won't prevent you from installing your APK?
Or, more properly, won't stop your normal company's IT people from installing the APK.
The blog (link in TFA) explicitly says "This flow is a one-time process for power users" - and it is *intended* to be annoying: a little bit annoying for you, a power user who isn't vulnerable to cons, to do ahead of time, in readiness for finding an ap to install, but VERY annoying for a scammer trying to run the con on innocent Joe and Mrs Bloggs.
> compared to terrestrial alternatives
The eternal problem with Excel, forgetting to include in the sum all those columns that the terrestrial alternatives don't have. Little things, like launching...
Except for things which require resources that *only* exist in space, when has a space-based thing *ever* been cheaper than terrestrial? We're even looking at terrestrial replacements for "it has to be in space" things, like optical telescopes (it being questionable whether there is a purely science-based reason* for replacing/retaining the Hubble Space Telescope, as we have the capability now to build earth-bound instruments which would be huuuge and costly to build initially than the HST was, but way cheaper to get into service - no launching - maintain and upgrade).
* as opposed to social out-reach or even political reasons
> a no-nonsense slide-out qwerty keyboard one with one big & decent camera on the back
That isn't a Samsung problem: I don't recognise, say, an Apple device in your description. In fact, can *any* of the 'phone makers manage to make one of those desirable objects? There seems to be entirely lost technology involved; perhaps I should offer up one of my Sharp Zaurii to be reverse engineered? They might also rediscover the concept of the removable battery and ability to carry a spare...
Didn't Opera, back in the 1990s (when the Web was the *real* Web, amd small furry creatures from Arcturus were *real* small, furry, creatures from Arcturus), have "hiding away all the UI" as a feature? Have memories of writing a presentation as a web site and showing it without any gubbins around, clicking links as required (so not just going into step-by-step slideshow mode).
I can think of a better form factor for a tyre changing robot than humanoid!
Heck, if you're going to spend the money on changing tyres, do it properly*
* I'm sure they nicked that from Mr Anderson's oeuvre
> IT Crowd ... Not sure they have a Mjolnir
We see them using Mjolnir every episode (of *course* that is Mjolnir, what else would it be?).
There might be one tucked away on a shelf, good hunting!
Sigh.
> If ... If ... If...
And after all those ifs and maybes, including actively stopping one of the servers being on the update round. Yeah. Sure.
> Changing the name? No, you missed it. The on-site IT team hardcoded the IP address, you can't change its name.
Nope. YOU missed it (and didn't bother reading TFA fully?): we were *told* that the new site was live to the WORLD, so it was using the proper name on a new IP address, but the old site was still reachable. Therefore the name of the old site was changed (either at the domain end, on the LHS of the URL, or the directory end, at the RHS of the URL).
> Sure, by asking the client to compare changes... but not prevented it
WHOOOSH! Nobody said the old site was still there to help catch the problem two years down the road, I suggested it was initially there for the much earlier approval comparisons (and then left, who knows why, possibly because the "please leave" was never given an end date?)
> but that's not what happened here. the old server was assumed to be dead
Nope. Nobody was said to have assumed it was dead. It was assumed that what Gerald saw at home was what all the non-Geralds were seeing at the office, were it not for incompetent IT staff. *Possibly* Gerald had forgotten he used to view the old site (ref my comment about nostalgia) and assumed from that - but that assumption was NOT being made by Neil, who us the one you want to blame.
> Logs ... That there were still requests on a supposedly unused machine
I covered that point as well: *YOU* are assuming (there's that word again) that it was a "supposedly unused machine". The old site *could* have been viewed, at home, by Gerald, creating traffic. YOU do not have any information about that, one way or the other. Heck, having found an old company site by luck (oooh, you've forgotten that any site visible to the world will always generate traffic!) I, as a bystander in the whole thing, may choose to return to it, because - as is often discussed here - web sites tend to get shittier with rewrites and accessing historic content is often useful.
Basically, you are still piling up a load of ifs, maybes and your own worst-case skew on all the assumptions in order to definitively state that Neil screwed up and I'm enjoying myself blowing gently on your house of cards.
