Posts by that one in the corner

Dream Chaser mini-shuttle set to take flight at last

Dream Chaser will evolve into a crewed spacecraft

Hopefully that will evolve it into a much-delayed update to the Dyna-Soar and not just leave the project dead as a dinosaur.[1]

Although, looking for images of what the launch configuration is supposed to be, the Dream Chaser seems to have changed from looking just like the artist's impressions of the Dya-Soar, proudly visible on top of the stack, to being shyly hidden in the faring, which means the wings now need to be foldable.

[1] come on Boeing, did you really believe that your project wouldn't go extinct after naming it like that?

Huawei's latest smartphone features mostly made-in-China components

Re: Shocker!

> "ok, but how good is it?

From the description given, way bigger & faster than my 'phone and, aside from screen size, leaves the tablet I'm using now (2013 vintage Nexus 7) way behind.

So this Huawei [1] would be vastly OTT for my needs. You'll have to judge for yourself if it would be good enough for you - or for the people who actually make up the bulk of the Chinese market.

[1] why is this thing trying to "correct" Huawei to Hussein? Who has been feeding the Android algorithm this week?

Palantir's CEO calls 'woke' a 'central risk to Palantir, America and the world'

Re: tl;dr - Anyone who uses "woke" as a derogatory term is a POS

> But this one lasted much longer than we expected.

Oh come on, you are supposed to finish that with "muaaah ha ha!" at least.

Just can't get the evil maniacs these days.

Big brains divided over training AI with more AI: Is model collapse inevitable?

Re: > Im off to the Cayman Islands soon and I wont be looking back.

Anyone else get the feeling this "Tomi Tank" has been watching too many Bond movies?

He has a "super weapon" and reckons he is getting rich from a nefarious scheme to ruin the lives of everyone he encounters, even if he has to attack us piecemeal, one forum at a time, threatening to return when faced with a ban (and he forgot to add "when we least expect it"; you just don't get same class of villainy these days).

And like every Bond villain, incapable of realising that, if he really *did* have the unstoppable power he imagines he does, he could make so much more if only he was capable of working *with* society.

Instead, he cackles on, laughing at what he sees as the little people, who don't share his vision. Hope he remembers to get a cat, as that will be the closest he'll find to loyalty and friendship in his Cayman hideout.

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

Re: Input validation

Bit late, but as I have been impugned:

> stored somewhere in plain text ... Are you seriously arguing that's good practice?

Well, no. Ahem,

>> passwords, (hopefully!) stored accordingly

And what is appropriate storage for a password? Hmm? Give up? Well, Doctor Syntax has been good enough to supply a few answers in my absence from here, for which I thank him.

And the letters you supply aren't decrypted and shown to the phone operator (again, unless the system is as appallingly designed as you believe it has to be): the operator just types your answers into their terminal and presses "check". The system then does the password-style processing[1] and comes back yay or nay. If you get it right then, yes, *you* have just told the operator that subset of your code, but if you missed one then the operator (again, hopefully) can't even tell which one (or two or ...) was incorrect.

[1] hopefully (that word again) you know that passwords aren't checked by comparing the plaintext, whether by decrypting the contents of the password database or by, shudder, storing the plaintext in the database.

Isn't that sign for the bit of land which belongs to old Tractor Tim? The farm with the rainwater runoff risk of reducing ground to mud? Warning you that the side road Tractor's Turning is Tractor's tract where tractors turning in torrents are treacherous

Not to be confused with the Lorry's Loading, where despite the labelled loads laying 'longside the layby by Laurie's Lading, the signwriter just got it wrong.

Although the odd extra comma or two would've made the thing easier to read!

Re: Input validation

It's ok, he doesn't really mean "password" in the way we mean it (but I'm willing to bet that the website calls it that!).

If you really haven't come across this system yet, is a hang over from moving to the web from 'phone banking, where you would (still do) have to tell the person a subset of the "secret phrase" so that the phone operator couldn't learn it all and type it in when they aren't in a recorded call with you.

Think of it as 8 to 12 totally independent, but very short, passwords, (hopefully!) stored accordingly.

Re: By eck!

> wuthëring hëights

They were a great metal band, but make sure you start with the third album, with that great ballad about the Shadows hiking in Dorset, "Walkin' on the heath, Cliff"

Re: BS7666

>> CharacterString: a sequence of alphanumeric characters

> to ban apostrophes. As well as hyphens, colons, brackets etc.

SPACES!

That definition strictly read bans SPACES!

(Ok, not the first person to point this out, but - SPACES! And it isn't even as if the N. Yorks folk speak *that* fast)

Tesla devotee tests Cybertruck safety with his own finger – and fails

Re: Can only be closed by the button or an app on the phone?

No, no - you only need the phone to close the bonnet. To open it, hang onto your groceries and just give it a swift kick under the front grille, the bonnet will fly open.

Don't charge it after midnight.

Re: Bonnet. Buh-on-et.

Our family's early 1960s, dark green, VW[1] used to carry our holiday luggage under - the bonnet. Although when I think back, the idea of that car towing the big trailer for the day boat around twisty Irish country roads is a bit scary!

[1] not a Beetle, it was too early for that name.

Bonnet. Buh-on-et.

The lid at the front is the bonnet.

Frunk! I swear, by my pretty floral bonnet, what a ridiculous monicker.

America's War on Drugs and Crime will be AI powered, says Homeland Security boss

Without AI we can't do the blindingly obvious

> We may have a task force that is investigating a narcotics case on the West Coast, and a different group of agents working in an international money laundering scheme on the East Coast. And there is no perceived connectivity between the work of the two,

> But we are now ingesting their criminal investigative reports into a database, and we will be able to use AI to identify connections that we otherwise would not be aware of.

Only NOW they are combining reports from across the US into one database? What, they hadn't figured out before that if Bad Guys could arrange crossing international borders then they could probably manage a coast to coast phone call, maybe a Weekender Away flight to catch a show and do some in-person negotiations!

You could only hope that this is actually an old-fashioned boondoggle, where "the money for expensive AI" actually gets redirected, say into buying in some decent human intelligence.

Started out in the late 50's as a San Fran Seaboard band, The Wharf.

They really got into The Groove by '67, leading to *that* review in Rolling Stone when the typesetter's mistake led to the band changing their name. And the rest, as they say, is history.

AI Catholic 'priest' defrocked after recommending Gatorade baptism

Re: would actually read the rule book of their religion

Joshua looks suspiciously like Obi Wan resorting to a woodsaber - on his way to Alder-an?

Today's Lesson: practice what these guys preach and create an LLM prompt for that hokey old religion[1]. The best one wins the coveted title of "Jedi for the straight guy".

May The Fourth Be With You.

(click) psssshhhh thrmmmm thrmm bnngg bnngg krssshh

[1] please, no midichlorians, we are a respectable Original Trilogy congregation.

Clock is ticking for NASA to fix bucket of issues before next Artemis mission

Have to carefully manage the Huawei hate

Apollo was funded and pushed to succeed purely as a political stunt to beat the commie Ruskies, without going all out and deliberately heating up the Cold War.

Although it is getting close, the current anti-China posturing has to be very carefully managed: we need to get the US into the correct "beat the commie Chinese" attitude and then into Space Race II but without getting into "beat their faces into the ground" territory.

We currently don't have anything that is both as physically safe and as startling as Sputnik was, to put the proper wind up Joe Public and John Politician: paranoia about "them listening in to all our phone calls" isn't quite the right push (even though it is really all just about the fact that "they" mustn't get to beat "us" at our own game).

Perhaps if anyone has the right contacts, you could drop a copy of Arthur C. Clarke's "Watch This Space" onto the desk of Huawei's chief of marketing: if we see a Red Moon Rising then the Right Stuff will Rise to The Lunar Surface once again, if only to sweep it clean.

It also needs the right sort of push, a bit of "we actually want to see this done" from the politicos, to get the designs a bit closer to "what do we actually need to get this to work" and a little less "we'll make the biggest thing possible right from the start, how hard can in-space refuelling be anyway!".

I hope so too. The comparison of number of launches is scary.

Boffins suggest astronauts should build a Wall of Death on the Moon

Will it be cheating to wear rollerblades?

Less running, but faster means more centri(petal and/or fugal, your choice) force needed/imparted and hence more leg strength, heart pumping etc.

(jmch beat me to it, so I won't continue by saying that is one step away from "Rollerball - on the Mooooooon!")

Prof asks court to protect his Unfollow Everything 2.0 extension from Facebook's ire

Re: Hitman of the browassault (man v. mountain)

Has someone been fiddling with the steam boiler on amanfrommars's CPU again?

Patch up – 4 critical bugs in ArubaOS lead to remote code execution

No idea what ArubaOS is[1]

Which I'll take as a Good Sign, as it indicates that people *are* investigating issues in software other than The Usual Suspects.

[1] which probably means it actually Does Important Things With Infrastructure instead of just being another boring OS to run yet another tiresome spreadsheet on.

Google Search results polluted by buggy AI-written code frustrate coders

"We move fast and try innovative new ideas regularly"

Translation:

+++ "We throw any old crap at it and see what sticks to the wall"

> Despite the challenges

+++ Despite our total lack of ability to even test before we publish

> Duffy expects AI will improve over time

+++ damn it, we must get lucky someday! More monkeys, more typewriters!

More big city newspapers drag Microsoft, OpenAI hard in copyright lawsuit

"Along with our news partners"

> we see immense potential for AI tools like ChatGPT to deepen publishers’ relationships with readers and enhance the news experience

Sigh. All they had to do was deepen publisher's pockets.

The shorted sightedness of OpenAI et al is mind-boggling: if they had just bothered to pay for a subscriptions up front from all the big publishers then they wouldn't be getting attacked by the very people who can publicise their misdeeds.

And if OpenAI weren't being attacked by Big Players then they could just have shrugged off a few complaints by individuals - aka the little people, fodder - as silly little incidents. Instead of priming the media to have a reason for presenting the individual's accusations as (rightfully) problems that need addressing (instead of daft incidents to fill a gap).

As it is, they went right ahead and created this situation so perfectly you would almost believe it was planned.

OpenAI slapped with GDPR complaint: How do you correct your work?

Hmm, never before come across anyone implying that not having call centre staff would doom an economy.

Wonder what the real figures for the value of call centres actually is (my Google-fu isn't up to the task this evening - found a 2003 figure from Yale, giving India a $2 billion per annum figure, which is probably(!) out of date, and a bunch of infographics from random "web analyst sites" that are too flashy to inspire confidence in their accuracy).

It is probably one of those startlingly large numbers that is frightening to consider and which really put the pittance pais to NASA into perspective.

But back to your point:

> Just because AI has issues doesn't mean it doesn't fill a useful role

Indeed. It is probably true that ChatGPT (which is what we are discussing, not all of AI, btw) may have a role it could fill and be useful (to the users, that is - it is clearly already "useful" at making large sums of money flow through the fingers of OpenAI et al).

Just - do you think you could possibly bring yourself to actually describe that role to us? And explain to us why that is useful to us, as users? Why we should support it? Pretty please?

PS

I don't accept your claim that *ALL* call centre staff have the same "issues" as ChatGPT.

Some[1] are bad, of course (May I show you a graph? Note this bell-shaped curve...).

And the worst ones - where they have been given a script that is downright malicious (e.g. scam call centres) - those centres are breaking regulations, yet the industry as a whole would survive even if we properly enforced those regs and shut them down. Actually, the industry would get a better rep with the public and improve if those bad players *were* shut down, so they ought to be calling for those regs to be tightened.

[1] yes, yes, we all have tales of that one call centre person - or even that one entire call centre (ref scams etc above) that was a horrible, horrible experience. But unless you have actually been keeping track of the stats and can genuinely show they are *ALL* suffering these same "issues" then those tales are nice (!?) anecdotes but not evidence.

> While a made up DoB has little legal impact, other fake facts could be.

Absolutely nothing that comes out of ChatGPT should have any legal impact at all.

Sadly, it probably will - and that is a situation entirely created by the hyping of ChatGPT, the misapplication of the technology, not the technology itself[1].

[1] although you can argue that, given the state of the thing and the altercations it is causing, there was no need to create the technology, just leave it as an interesting bit of CS without a practical application - yet.

> How can you erase something that doesn't exist? We are told that the requested DOB is not on the net, and is therefore not in chatGPT's training data and so cannot be removed from or corrected there.

> But to suggest that chatGPT is producing personal data from thin air, whether accurate or not, is ludicrous.

Those are the type of statements that are both totally correct and at the same time painfully at odds with the real world - or, to be more accurate, the presentation of ChatGPT to that real world.

The problem is simply that ChatGPT is being presented as something that you *can* query for usable results and it is freely available for everybody to use. Which is being responded to as though all of the responses it generates are being published (no matter that they are, as you point out, highly likely to be transient and simply rephrasing the prompt could generate an entirely different result).

The sad result is that we can safely publish the statement "When I asked him, my three year son said that Fred was born on ..." and it is a silly anecdocte that no sensible person would object to, even if it turned out to be correct, but publishing "When I asked ChatGPT..." it is treated differently. At the insistence of all the people who have invested in these LLMs.

So, the bottom line is that you have been completely correct in your statements about the tech, but the people who are hyping that very same tech have created the situation for themselves where they do have to comply with GDPR et al; no matter how ludicrous that situation is when viewed from a techie's side, it is the one that they created for themselves.

PS

The stuff about logging is entirely a red-herring; you can - and should - keep logs of when inaccurate data is generated. Keeping those logs is not against GDPR or the like, whether it is NOYB or OpenAI or The Register or any who grabbed a screenshot of the story who are keeping them. Snipping out the inaccurate data and publishing that on its own, without the context or any other disclaimer that it is inaccurate, would, however, not be a good idea. It is a bit of a shame you included that.

Re: Why do they still keep treating LLMs like databases?

> Some kind of blockchain/SSL on data. [1]

AAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Not the bleeping blockchain! Combining the two biggest wastes of electricity and compute into one! Ye Gods!

And can you imagine the arms race that that would create? "If we can get 51% of the blockchain that guards all known human knowledge, we can rewrite history!"

"Mr. President, we must not allow... a blockchain mining gap!"

Re: Why do they still keep treating LLMs like databases?

> AI is a database. It is multi-dimensional vector mostly with relational databases providing training and structured authenticated data - your bank's fraud detection uses AI on a relational database of authenticated data

Re-read your own comment - you got it right in the middle but then veered off course again:

> AI is a database

Nope.

> your bank's fraud detection uses AI on a relational database

Correct!

AI is *not* a database. But you *can* use AI[1] as a front-end to work *with* a database.

The DOB error is present - and incorrectable - because ChatGPT is not backed by a database and too many people are pretending that it *is* a database.

[1] or techniques derived from AI research, even if they have been so constrained that you are saying "that is too simple, it is not AI": remember "If it works, it isn't AI.

Re: Why do they still keep treating LLMs like databases?

> Yes, but

Hmm... not sure that you are actually responding to (disagreeing with) anything that I've actually said, but skipping over that...

> making up a random date when you don't know the real date is not an "intelligent" response.

> If for example you know when they attended university, you can make some sort of educated guess at the year of birth from that, based on the typical age of people attending that particular university, with a high degree of uncertainty, though they are more likely to be older than younger.

Yes, but :-)

That line of argument is not relevant to using LLMs on their own. LLMs are not intelligent, they do not contain that sort of logical reasoning[1] so talking about how *you* mght calculate a good approximation is - well, not relevant. NOW, there IS a line of AI that does allow a machine to do what you've just done: Expert Systems and all things related to them. Sadly, although those work nicely in small(ish) domains, we've not got a set of rules big enough to do provide that chain of reasoning in *every* domain that ChatGPT is being applied to.

Although, if you re-read my comment:

>> let us call it a "database"

you can replace "database" with "XPS"...

[1] disclaimer - they *might* be able to generate a line of "generic reasoning in a really, really restricted area" just because it is a pattern they have spotted, but it won't be generalisable (i.e. it may be able to "do" simple multiplication in response to one prompt and totally fail the same arithmetic in response to another prompt!

Re: irrelevant minutia like a wrong birthdate

> chatGPT doesn't store that information, it just goes and find it every time it wants it.

ChatGPT qua ChatGPT doesn't go and find anything.

A search engine that was front-ended by (something like) ChatGPT *could* go and find it, but

> I suspect that isn't the case though

Good suspiscion instincts.

> Similar to the challenges Google had years ago when it was clear they were trawling the web and storing search results preemptively, not finding them on the fly whenever requested.

Ummm, only sort of. Pre-storing (or just re-using) genuine search results still produces (produced) correct search results. They were just perhaps not as up to date as they could be, but they were still correct. And it had a really useful effect: Google used to provide you with a link to their cached copy, which was *really* useful (repetition for stress): you got faster access to a page on a slow or down server (good when it was DDOSed or, as we called it, Slashdotted) *and* you could read embarrasing material for a few days when it was retracted. Oopsie - "Right to be forgotten" (which is a Good Thing, don't misunderstand me) put paid to that, as it is just simpler to drop the whole idea than to correct piecemeal and face continually doing that for all eternity. And we lose the nice bits as well as the bad, hey ho.,

The problem with the "information" in ChatGPT is that it isn't held in a nicely cached copy of the original data, so you can't just delete that page (or just stop caching completely). So Google was faced with a problem, but one that had a very clear solution (although it was resisted because that solution has a day to day increase in costs). ChatGPT does not have a very clear solution at all. So the challenge for ChatGPT is at a far more existential level than it was for Google (no matter what Google claimed).

Re: Good luck with that

> You seem to think that blocking LLMs will clear the way for what comes next

How very kind of you to point out to me what I think.

Please compare your sentence to mine:

>> undirected and uncontrolled LLM

>> fling it all in a bucket and call it an LLM

Notice the subtle nuance I've applied to their development methods?

> "blocking LLMs"

Nope, try "using them appropriately" - and using them as databases is not appropriate.

> There has been research in AI for at least 50 years, and this is the first time it has actually produced something useful enough that businesses are able to use it.

Even your opening sentence is twaddle (came from ChatGPT did it?).

In that 50 years, AI groups have produced many useful results which many, many businesses have, can and do use. From things that you will dismiss as "that isn't AI" but is still what they developed, to daily use of neural nets (i.e. the tech LLMs are based on).

As the mantra goes, "If it works, it isn't AI" - tongue in cheek self-deprecation.

> , if not you doom your economy to falling behind the rest of the world.

Your first paragraph has spot on. Well done.

Then it started going down hill, gathering speed until it went totally off the rails with the last few words, as quote above.

You do realise that your whole comment comes down to "our economy is reliant on something we *know* is uncontrollable, inaccurate and not correctable": if that is true, think again about whose economy is at greatest risk.

> So what's the point of using it?

ChatGPT? None.

Well, there are times random twaddle is useful - Lorum Ipsem is neat but using English twaddle text geared towards his interest may sway the buyer of your web design. Expensive way of doing, though.

Other LLM-based systems? So long as you avoid the obvious issues (mainly comes down to attempts at fraud), pretty-picture generators create, well, pretty pictures and we have a never-ending desire for them and Lissajous gets boring after a while.

Other neural nets? Really, really useful, especially in areas where the costs of checking and dismissing a false result are outweighed by the value of an otherwise too easily missed true result.

Damn shame the crap gets all the media attention - but then, the bridge that falls down is the one that gets the news coverage.

Re: OpenAI claims to be true

> any inherent biases or problems with the OpenAI model will also be embedded in Microsoft's product unless those specific issues have been tweaked and fixed during MS' refinement process.

The biases and problems were built up over all the years of running massive amounts of compute to produce a tangled and incomprehensible pile of nadans. There is absolutely no way to "tweak" that pile, other than doing it all again from scratch and keeping your fingers crossed that *this* time it won't be quite so bad. Maybe you could consider checking the training materials and removing any initial bias there - oh, but the whole basis of their approach is that the bulk of the training inputs hasn't been hand-checked, tagged and filtered (no matter the cost of hardware and energy - carbon - to build the crude way, that is just peanuts compared to the cost of hand-checking everything).

The best they can do is add some form of post-processing[1] as a "quick fix" - and we saw how that goes badly, look up the "AI now can not create images of mixed-race couples" for an easy to see example. And tales of working around "safeguards" by rewording prompts.

Those biasses are in there to stay.

Why do they still keep treating LLMs like databases?

The article says it: the geezer's date of birth isn't known to the LLM, so why is it a surprise when it comes back with the wrong one?

This thing isn't a database, no matter how much people want it to be. If you want accurate data spat out, including nulls, then it has to be attached to some kind of - well, let us call it a "database" - whose contents can be verified, updated and even erased in a demonstrable fashion.

People like OpenAI *could* have created a system that worked like that - and even used the same training concepts to have had the machines populate the database, tagging the material with its origins[1] etc. But that isn't mystical, magical, revolutionary - i.e. can't be done just by shovelling in data, buying more GPUs, pouring in data by the bucketload, buying more GPUs, pouring in data by the skipful, buying more cycles - no, it takes design, thinking and runs the real risk of not getting a working database (all queries met with silence). Doing it the way they have, at each stage the system will always puke out *a* response that can be sold to the gullible, with the promise that it'll get more bamboozling - sorrt, more complex and therefore good and "useful" - next year: money, please.

[1] you know, all the stuff that was being argued about in these El Reg forums last year, all those repetitious comments about "the LLM isn't storing the data verbatim" - "oh yes it is, otherwise how can it reproduce quotes?" - "because..."

> Not good for the next technical revolution

What? It is going to be absolutely fantastic for the next technical revolution, whatever that turns out to be, if the EU (and hopefully UK, but...) aren't wasting their time and money on all this undirected and uncontrolled LLM twaddle.

Oh, wait, you thought this OpenAI stuff *is* the next revolution? Bwaaa ha ha!

No, no, this "fling it all in a bucket and call it an LLM" approach isn't working and won't. Well, it is "working" but only so far as any Ponzi scheme does: the last one to buy into it will lose, big. But that isn't tech working.

They could try creating a system that is useful (hint: as this story shows, don't treat the contents of the LLM as if it contains factual data; there is a better way to store data...) but that takes more subtlety than those people are capable of putting in.

ChatGPT Plus remembers everything you forgot you told it to remember

while the plan is for GPTs also to have their own memory, it won't be shared.

Well, no.

Because nobody has offered them any money to do so. Yet.

You will be amazed how easy it'll be to arrange sharing once the chequebooks are opened.

In the meantime:

> For example, if ChatGPT knows a significant other is a big fan of kittens, that information won't find its way into the Artful Greeting Card GPT or vice versa.

But it may just so happen that Artful are surprisingly good at guessing that every now and again, as the CEO of Artful is emailed copies of chats that resulted in sales after "an admission of accidental leakage from another GPT, for which we apologise (winky face)".

UK lays down fresh legislation banning crummy default device passwords

Re: Default passwords are allowed?

> Default, serial number, passwords are not fixed passwords

And many of the factory set, one code used everywhere, default passwords are not fixed either. Plenty are, but not all.

And plenty of SN based one are fixed (especially ones based on MACs, presumably because the people who are too lazy to burn separate SN into a device are too lazy to consider security).

> I've never had a device that I couldn't initially login to and change the password

Two things:

1. Lucky you

2. But are you - or anyone here - the target for this?

So you bought a device with an initial password set, you went in and changed it. Good. As you should.

BUT that IMMEDIATELY takes you out of the group of people who leave the initial password; you know, all the people whose gadgets can be broken into using the factory set password.

We *know* that group of people exist, or this would not be a discussion.

And a factory set password based on the serial number is barely, if at all, stronger than setting them all to "MySecret12" or any other fixed value: both would be leaked to the Web and tada, the door is wide open.

>

Re: Default passwords are allowed?

> . That leaves the issue of how they supply that to customers.

Hardly a massive problem to solve. They just need to be bothered to do it.

The same way that some routers are supplied with a plastic card (and even a place to keep that card) wth the pre-set SSID and password for the WiFi. Or, if not considerate, a sticker at the back of the manual (put it somewhere convenient for you) or even, ick, a sticker on the bottom of the device.

And the best manufacturers should provide a blank card or space on the sticker, with a note in bright colours that you can write your own choice of password in said blank and here is how to change it on the gadget. But that is getting into pipedream territory.

Oh, and NOT using the device's serial number, or a trivial transform of it, for any part of the credentials!

You should be able to tell people (e.g. help desk reps, people on advice forums who know that number is in the range where the gadget had such and such a quirk, ...) the SN without them then knowing immediately how to log into your widget.

Teardown confirms Huawei's Pura 70 contains SMIC 7nm process node

Language used here sounds a bit desperate to demonise

> markings on the Kirin 9010 "technically new but remarkably similar" ...

The markings on this newer Motorola IC are remarkably similar to *this* Motorola IC, hmm, sounds fishy.

> exposed Huawei's use of Kirin 9000s

Ah ha, we have exposed you! So much cleverer of us than just, you know, looking up the part number.

> TechInsights referred to as a "repackaged"

Just like the sneaky Chinese, repackaging as though it is cheap knockoff sneakers in a fancy new box. You won't catch us changing the IC packaging and giving it a fancy number that is obviously in the same series. Nope, DIL now, DIL forever!

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

> proceeded to roll the ball around with his finger

Very sensible, use the skills learnt in the video arcade.

(Why don't we use trackballs more? Ought to get mine out again, it was easier to use on desk too cluttered for a mousepad after all, and that does seem to be the normal state of my desk these days! Guess I too got suckered in by Big Mouse and neglected the alternatives)

> never seen a digitiser tablet with a puck

Tell them to watch the Stargate film and explain that you could also move those cross-hairs manually around the big star map (after the MALP vanishes, around 3 min 10 secs)

Re: Mouse tale

> Some once said that using a mouse is only intuitive after the user has been shown how to use it...

That is pretty much true of every bit of the computer UI, especially GUIs. I ask "why do I have to click on a hamburger to get a menu?"[1], whippersnapper asks "why do I have to click on a front-loader washing machine to open a file?".

Maybe a keyboard is actually intuitive - although you still have to mash keys to see what all of them do, you can't deduce the behaviour of the SHIFT key just by looking at the keyboard, it does nothing at when you just press it, unlike the letter keys, and then ALT or CTRL are just nightmares to "intuit" what they do.

[1] as well as "Why don't clickable items have clear hit boxes around them? Why don't buttons show they are being depressed as I start to click on them?" And, of course, "Why do I have to fish around *below* the bottom border of a window to grab that border, what was wrong with just clicking *on* the border?". Don't get me started on 'phone UIs!

Re: It goes the wrong way!

> It took Dr. Evil several months to figure out putting the mouse on the right hand side of the keyboard greatly enhanced his UX

I'm as right-handed as they come - and within the first day of being plunked down in front of a mouse (on a Three Rivers PERQ) I'd moved the mouse to my left hand, so that I could take notes with my right hand. And there the mouse has stayed.

To be totally honest, I've never really understood why just about everyone uses their dominant hand for the mouse - maybe you get better precision or speed when playing some video games, but for word processing, general file fiddling etc if you are struggling with the mouse it doesn't even need to be pixel precise (and graphics programs, CAD etc can just zoom in). And, of course, Real Programmers/SysOps/IT Deskers use the command line as much as possible!

The dominant hand is then free for the important tasks of note taking, doodling, dunking biscuits, holding the coffee cup - and, for a right-hander, operating the numeric keypad when typing into the timesheet spreadsheet.

Still, horses for courses, your mileage may vary, mice may go down as well as up etc etc.

Just know that, as confused as you are to see my mouse on the "wrong" side, I'm as confused by the position of your mouse - on the "wrong" side!

Re: Mouse balls

Picking the Right Leatherman For The Job is never off-topic!

(Clips Style PS to keyring, checks little blue ES in other pocket, leaves house confident that Things Can Be Gripped At Both Ends).

Atlassian loses half its CEOs, but customers stay solid after Server products exit support

usage-based pricing

That could be fun.

We dev drones had to be nagged into remembering to using their products most of the time, with regular orders from above...

Project Manager: you must remember to log everything into Jira as and when you do it, so we can track progress across all clients.

Customer Relations: you must update all our customer reported issues at least twice evey 24 hours until closed, to hit our SLAs.

QA: you must connect the latest automated build and test modules so they update the CTO's Dashboard.

Managers: you must put all of your meeting minutes into Confluence and all your actions into Jira.

Finance (company wide email): guys, slow down, stop doing all that!

DARPA's latest toy is a 20-foot, 12-ton tank that drives itself

Most important question: those blue slit lights fore and aft *are* full RGB, aren't they?

Otherwise, how will they flicker and change to red when the AI turns evil.

Samsung shows off battery tech it says will see you gone in nine minutes

Re: So why does everyone...

> they are expensive so I can only imagine that they are reasonably good cars, otherwise people would be spending their money on alternatives.

Have a think about "Veblen goods" and "conspicuous consumption" and stretch your imagination.