Posts by that one in the corner

New SI prefixes clear the way for quettabytes of storage

Re: This is getting silly now

Quadrillion == million * million * million * million in real money.

(At least saying "thousand million million" gets rid of all the ambiguity)

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Re: Let it slide

PS

6 day week, 2 days of weekend means working 2/3 of the time, or 0.666... %

Re: Let it slide

He is suggesting we get more weekends per year.

UPVOTE!*

*multiple exclamation marks, the sure sign of a diseased mind (Pterry)

Re: An idea....

Both very good points in favour of AdamT's proposal - I'll go with anything that gives us a fighting chance of losing Love Island because its viewers can't figure out when to switch over.

Multi-tasker Musk expects to reduce time at Twitter, seek another leader

Calming down the commentards

By putting in a long, long moderation wait on this story, do we all get bored and go away...

Re: And there we have it

> visa holders dancing to his merry tune

Well, at least one of the (I presume) pro-Elon (or glorious sarcasm) responses agrees, although it seems modern dance rather than old-fashioned ballet:

>>He is looking for coding athletes

Do you think anyone who can say that has *any* idea what programmimg entails? This same twitterer also clearly understands the advantages of Stockholm syndrome:

>>He is looking for mindset alignment

https://nitter.net/RLCJR1962/status/1593796351552266241

I worry how the Muskovites are going to cope once reality hits them.

Volunteers to be thrown under the bus, queue here

Musk buys himself a mountain, stands at the peak and starts wildly lobbing (snow)[1]balls down. They hit the slopes and start gathering speed, getting more and more destructive as they go, crashing into anyone trying to live on the slopes - some get flung away, the rest are left battered and worried. All the guides that used to pay Musk so that they could use the slopes to sell to the touristst see what is coming and abandon the mountain.

Musk stands at the top, making snowmen and showing them off to the World ("This one is buy-a-blue-tick", "This one is called hardcore-software"). But the snowmen just topple down the slopes as well, increasing the mayhem below.

Hearing the rumbles getting louder, Musk finally looks down and notices that there is now an avalanche approaching the town in the foothills, but they haven't realised it yet. When it hits, the power will go out and all the townsfolk will be left in the dark, unable to find each other. And they will blame Musk, because they saw his snowmen.

Musk leaps into action, and does the only thing he can: he leaps into his helicopter, flies to the city and finds someone who will sit in his big chair on top of the mountain. Then, as the town disappears, Musk points up and shouts: "You see that man on top of the mountain? It is all his fault! I was over here, playing with my cars, when your lights all went out."

Google looking outside the usual channels to fix security skills gap

Widen the optical

Got to that line and was simply unable to take the rest of the article seriously.

Maybe there is something good in a later paragraph, but it'll have to wait until I've read something more literate to take the taste away. Hmmm, Jodi Taylor.

Artemis I isn't just a test run – there's science to be done

Just so long as Alexa

Starts singing "Daisy Bell" as the signal that they are out of contact with AWS and are now running on the internal database only.

Nvidia faces lawsuit for melting RTX 4090 cables as AMD has a laugh

Re: Is that AMD's fault?

According to the linked-to article, the Tesla is reducing the amount of cooling given to the AMD processor - guess what happens if you don't provide adequate cooling to a big CPU!

The article also says that other Tesla models use an Intel device that isn't overheating - because it has a lower TDP. Which doesn't mean that the Intel device is better, it means that some engineer(s) decided to bung in a different part without comparing the specs and without knowing how close to its limit the Tesla's cooling system must be! The latter alone is not a comforting thought.

As already pointed out in comments here, having failed to notice what could go wrong, they also failed to set up the AMD device to protect itself (by starting to throttle from a lower temperature before overheating causes more a dramatic response).

So, to answer the question "Is that AMD's fault?" - nope; pretty sure they publish the TDP of their devices, so it is then up to Tesla engineers to read *all* the relevant spec sheets and put two and two together.

Unless, of course, the Tesla internal spec sheets don't accurately describe the limits of the cooling system...

India follows EU's example in requiring USB-C charging for smart devices

Re: Does anyone remember

Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?

IT manager's 'think outside the box' edict was, for once, not (only) a revolting cliché

Re: On the floor?

My current PC is in a case that is 50cm tall - which is shorter than the one I had in the 90s. This wasn't the largest case available, but it makes a nice addition to the desk - the laptop cradle fits nicely on top, keeps that out of the way.

Last job, had three 50cm tall towers arrayed under a desk.

Do people *really* keep their tower PCs sitting on desk tops? Hope they remember to keep the castors locked!

Hide and seek at El Reg

Came looking for a Friday On Call, nothing to be seen.

But, Lo, here it is, shyly peeking out of Personal Tech.

Come on out, we're not going to hurt you, everyone is nice here.

(Leaps onto very short "story", demanding to know if that is all we're getting, I waited a whole week for *this*?)

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Re: Easy choice Elon

Ah, let him have one - they both have funny shaped things on the roof and, from this distance, they are both over in that direction and close together.

You knew what he meant.

Re: Easy choice Elon

Spot on.

We're all probably going to get at some point, best not everyone at the same time.

Re: All praise the imbecile. He has money

> I can think of a few things to call Elon, but imbecile is not one of them.

> Seek professional help.

Like Joe, I too used to suffer from "Musk is an imbecile" syndrome.

I did as you advised and consulted a professional[1] and am happy to report that I shall no longer call Musk an "imbecile".

Instead, I shall use one or more of: ninnyhammer, clodpole, cuddy, loggerhead, gander or mome.

[1] lexicographer

Re: interested in the stock of his companies

> Shorting 101

Musk: still trying to figure out how to make Tesla stock only available in NFTs as a safeguard against short selling.

Evernote's fall from grace is complete, with sale to Italian app maker

Re: I used it for a while

Titan Pocket? From the KS?

Collaborative document:

Markdown (or force a minimal subset of (La)TeX) with the file maintained in the VCS of your choice (I still like svn 'cos TortoiseSVN is simple enough for the non-techies: update and commit, simple words).

Build machine (or cron or a never-ending Windows dot-bat) gets latest copy, tops and tails with cover sheet, contents, headers & footers, bibliography etc then formats it into PDF and HTML on the shared drive (whether that is LAN fileserver, DropBox or whatever) and website.

For big docs, one input text file per chapter/section.

For people editing on their phones & tablets, the tricky bit is the VCS - can probably bodge that with the Build job and per-person shared folders. Merge conflicts still painful.

Confluence - or pretty much an Wiki-style environment - is good for collaborating on a Page or set of Pages that are going to mostly be read online, but trying to get a proper "document" out of it is (was?) a pain in the backside. A document with the correct Corporate coversheet, dictionary of terminology, contents, appendices, index etc, that you can send off as a PDF to the auditor.

I've got a pile of programs and scripts that can (well, could - 99% chance the format has changed again) collate Pages and add the missing bits to spit out a usable PDF. But only from a Confluence dump - trying to get it to work "live" within Confluence wasn't working (then I left the job - if there was still a free self-hosted tier I'd be tempted to keep this code going, but the Cloud kills).

Re: Irrelevant

How about adding rendering of diagrams written in pic, chem, eqn and the like?

Bring back the classics, easier to than dragging shapes with fat fingers.

tsoHost pulls plug on Gridhost service with just 45 days' notice

I must get around to using one of these "IDE"s one day, they sound awfully clever.

> the IDE would highlight any attempt to pass an int as an argument to a 'char *' parameter

Gosh, just like my compiler, eh? Well I never.

Sorry, bit snarky, but having had arguments because someone's IDE would require fewer keystrokes for him, if only we'd rename every member variable in all of our sources (no-one else seemed to have this trouble). Someone else demanding we redo the build system because he didn't know how to make his IDE invoke our existing makefiles, And so on over the years, I get a bit twitchy when someone praises IDEs a bit *too* much. Not that I want to see Hungarian notation, no sirree.

Guess I just like using separate editors, debuggers, profilers, compilers, build tools and so forth, mixing and matching to fit the job, rather than one super-duper do-it-all IDE. Or, worse, more than one IDE 'cos they target different parts of the system!

But down with Hungarian notation, anway: long, pronounceable, names for the win.

Open source community split over offer of 'corporate' welfare for critical dev tools

Re: It was nice

Almost forgot:

> This is the trap of FOSS

Why is this a "trap"?

Are you referring to some commercial program that is only available on a commercial/non-free OS and having a FOSS counterpart would mean you could get away without the commercial OS, but you can't find such a FOSS program? Or an alternate commercial package that runs on your OS of choice?

Re: It was nice

You are correct that Open Source Software tends to be all about the programmers solving their own problems: "scratching their own itch".

But I do find your examples to be backwards to my experience. Everyone wants to work on office packages, that is why they are there? Really? How many office packages are there (LibreOffice, OpenOffice, ??) and how many of those were actually started as FOSS when someone had an itch to scratch? (Hint: neither of the two I mentioned).

On the other hand, proper text editors for programmers, there are far more of those than wordprocessors. And highly functional (but not at all pretty) packages for consistently formatting text into convention posters, publishable papers, formal reports, books etc.

If you look back on the old collections of FOSS that were passed around on floppy and CDR, you'll find that most of it (once you skip past the games) was written by and/supported by scientists, researchers and the like. Lawrence Livermore Labs was a name I became very familiar with, good software came from there (no doubt still does). We knew about this because, well, you bought a CDR and that was pretty much all of the FOSS available; indexed alphabetically, you couldn't escape knowing about it. Which was a refreshing eye-opener: prior to that you only heard about programs if you happened to read a newsletter or paper that mentioned a new release, or it by word of mouth (literally - Usenet, and access to it, came later!)

Now, with so much available, perhaps you are only aware of the stuff that is publicised, reported on (El Reg included), that everyone knows about and/or what you yourself have looked for. There is still a very rich vein of FOSS outside of the mainstream, but in an odd turnaround we are back to word of mouth and occasional random references in El Reg comments to obscure packages.

Having said that, sponsorship is always going to be useful, so long as there aren't too many strings.

Chips in space: Reprogrammable AMD AI SoC cleared for liftoff

Re: Danger Will Robinson Space Warning re Reprogrammable AI SoC Products

Well, this is a subject that amfM is an expert on (if only we all had such powers of introspection).

Intel says it can sort the living human beings from the deepfakes in real time

Re: So deepfake software developers will learn from this

Unless we have a scheme to keep changing what the deepfake detector looks for, so that it becomes impossible for the deepfakers to learn, at least in a short time period (which determines the rate that things are changed).

My suggestion: we all learn about microexpressions from a series of Derren Brown specials on C4, who also publishes a book of "One Thousand Facial Tics You Can Practice At Home". Faced with a deepfake of yourself you just have to demonstrate that the video shows the wrong tic for the claimed timestamp.

This is only a hurriedly dreamt up scheme (literally, at gone midnight) so you may find some flaws in the protocol, but they can be fixed. For a start, how to let the detector know which is your correct tic on that date? Clearly, we will need a NGO to keep a register the detector can consult - this would be OfTic. High profile targets, like politicians, will be served by a formal governmental body, the Ministry of Peculiar Faces.

Finally, to ensure against faking whole-body videos, we will of course rely on selecting random gaits provided by the Ministry of Funny Walks.

Only iPhone 15 Pro models will have higher data transfer speeds on USB-C – analyst

How many people use wired data transfer to/from a phone nowadays anyway?

Well, all the easy and successful data transfers to & from all the phones, tablets and ereaders in this particular household are done using cables.

Just find it a lot easier to plug into a computer and use the big keyboard, mouse and screen to manage moving files around: the computer has one nice consistent interface and can see the file servers and DVR without having to piddle about with installing more apps that may or may not connect this time.

Actually, I tell a lie: the calendars get synced by WiFi to NextCloud - and even though each calendar change can hardly be measured in kB the number of notifications that they failed to sync is bleeping annoying.

Your mileage may vary. Data over cables can go up or down.

Re: Lightning

> Trade shows - meh

Pretty sure everyone who goes to trade shows, on either side of the booth, are going to agree with that sentiment.

And without trade shows, how is anyone supposed to find out about the new shiny shiny?

Re: Lightning

True - but did anyone say otherwise? It does work best with a wired connection though, for power and data, to provide a neat little package that doesn't fight against, or contribute to, the radio congestion.

Microsoft makes a game of Team building, with benefits

Now it'll be a mandatory entry on your timesheet

and added to the KPIs on the management dashboard.

Heard in the morning standup:

"Can you explain why none of you have played IceBreaker once in the past two months?"

"Well, we were talking about this over our daily tea and buns run, and all we decided that"

"Don't talk back! You are going stop wasting company time on buns and start playing IceBreaker! We need you to be building up your relationships within the team!"

Windows 10 – a 7-year-old OS – is still having problems with the desktop and taskbar

The software giant is using its Known Issue Rollback (KIR) feature...

I'd assumed that the two paragraphs about KIR and use of Group Policies would just be copy and pasted verbatim into these articles, but no, they are slightly different each time.

Thank heavens for that bit of editing, or we'd never be able to tell these MS stories apart.

Twitter refugees seek asylum in an unusual place: The Matt Hancock app

Re: Thank goodness for "tooted"

Hmm, as a life-long Brit, I don't associate "toot" with "fart" - it would rather ruin the phrase "toot your horn" and you'd have to stop telling younglings that Percy the engine goes "toot toot".

At the risk of taking this too far (too far, on El Reg? Is that even possible?), I'd point out that a "toot" describes a sudden short sound and what kind of self-respecting fart would that be!

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Re: "such as triggering an explicit request to a server "

Thank you for repeating yourself.

You only need do that 98702 times and your version of reality will come true.

On your marks, get set - GO!

Re: So what happened to this freedom of speech thing then?

Musk has explicitly referred to the US First Amendment when talking about "free speech", so let's keep the discussion within his terms - just makes thing easier. So:

The First Amendment provides that Congress make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise. It protects freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/our-government/the-constitution/

There you go - Right to Free Speech is purely about whether the US government is allowed to stop you.

Re: Sooooo....

True - and the relevance of that to Elon's winge about the Android app, as opposed to any other front end that invoke the same microservices?

Re: Sooooo....

If the naughty RPC calls are in the server, why is the Android app affected more than iOS or the web front end?

Musk was only targeting the Android app...

Committed 17000 commits last week[1], top engineer, keep him.

Only committed twice last month[2], fire her butt.

[1] search and replace to update the date on all the (C) notices in the source

[2] after 3 weeks poring over logs and wireshark dumps, found the chain of events that created a circular reference that prevented memory bring released and caused a key service to restart and reload its data every 3 hours.

One tweet did respond by pointing out that Frohnhoefer failed to include cover sheets with his RPC reports, which is why he had to go.

Re: Not engineering but...

NFN : ner-fen (would be ner-fun but, you know, Norfolk, fens)

Re: Experts are always Experts of legacy systems

> the motor industry has done pretty well at solving the problem of efficient manufacturing.

Lest we forget, Musk also "knows more about manufacturing than any other person on the planet" [1]

[1] sorry, haven't got a URL for that clip, but go watch Thunderf00t's latest YT video...

Re: "was coined to refer to a specific architecture for distributed execution."

The specific architecture is the one called RPC - with the behaviour that has been described in many comments here, but put as simply as possible: your code invokes a procedure/function wibble() and it works (or returns a failure code). Your code has no idea if the function is satisfied locally or by invoking network traffic to a remote server: your code simply waits for the function to return. All data conversions required are hidden by RPC library.

This is very different in terms of how your code would use a different architecture, such as triggering an explicit request to a server - and expecting back a response that need not be handled by code anywhere near the code that caused the request to be sent.

I've not spotted anyone claiming that only one specific implementation should be considered *the* means of satisfying that architecture - can you say which one(s) you're thinking of?

Re: The app doesn't make RPC calls?

And the RPC library is free to decide whether you even need to leave the boundaries of your current thread, process, machine or network; and whether any arguments and return values need to be footled with to be compatible with the function provider.

Your code just makes a simple function call, you compile it into your own library and the support decides the efficient way to satisfy it. Hopefully.

Germany says nein to Qatari World Cup spyware, err, apps

Re: So a cellphone is mandatory to enter the country...

Not long before they issue mandatory iAnkle locking bracelets "you don't want to risk losing your phone".

AI analysis of dinosaur tracks suggests 'predator' may have been a herbivore

Re: Things that make you go "Hmmmmmmm".

This is a rounded percentage shop, for rounded percentage people. There is nothing for you here.

Re: Cold case

You aren't a Conservative MP who certainly didn't go to any Christmas parties during lockdown, are you? There is no point wasting time investigating something that happened over a year ago...

Re: Things that make you go "Hmmmmmmm".

Well, duh, they went back in time, got a few dinos, had them walk over fresh cement and photographed the results.

How else are you going to get useful ground truth to test the model against?

Starlink purchases 'Twitter takeover' ad package, Musk dismisses it as 'tiny'

Re: Still fascinated

> I would have told HR to tell him that they are going to let him go so he can find a position that is a better fit.

*Really* hoping that you are just using that wording because you know how that is how HR would end up phrasing it!

I find that kind of mealy mouthed wording absolutely infuriating and totally spineless.

"Let him go": especially in the US with the "at will" concept, there is no "letting" - saying "bugger off" is frankly politer than hearing that phrase.

"So he can find a better fit": if he felt there was somewhere he could better work, he could find it without being chucked out the door and having to look whilst bring unemployed (which is really going to help his negotiations, isn't it). Just say "we're fed up with you, please go away", at least that has a ring of honesty about it! Saying "please go away within the next month or we'll chuck you out the door" would be best.

Shocker: EV charging infrastructure is seriously insecure

Re: SDR? Why is there any wireless comms used here at all?

Totally agree. Just didn't want to alienate anyone who has their phone welded to their hand :-)

SDR? Why is there any wireless comms used here at all?

Aside from tap-to-pay, which by now should be an entirely off-the-shelf module, what is the need for wireless?

There is a honking great cable going from the car to the charge station - surely there is room in that for a little bit (more) data? A nice standardised panel on the dashboard and/or drop you phone into a cradle (if the link from your phone to your car is insecure then the problem is nothing to do with charging!)

Ditto the charger station, especially those that are grouped together (FWIW can't think of anywhere round here that has less than 5 or 6 charge bays) - they already have wires going to them, so wire them to a switch and use whatever is the most secure 'Net connection available, using all the standard encrypted links. Even if that is via radio - 4G - all that a nearby SDR ought to be able to do is disrupt the connection and drop the charger back to local control, not snarf credentials.

Hey, GitHub, can you create an array compare function without breaking the GPL?

Re: Some functions are very simple

> I've never met anyone that has attributed a dinner they cooked to the chef that wrote the recipe book either

Round these parts it is absolutely the norm to tell anyone who asks "Oh, got that from Delia" (or Fanny or Beeton, as appropriate).

Helps with Christmas pressies as well - if they liked the results (and they cook as well, of course) then they'll probably make good use of their own copy of the book. Unless it was the Corner Family Cake recipe - that we keep to ourselves.

Ditto with knitting & crochet patterns, music, circuit diagrams, LEGO models...

Guess it is all just down to the environment you grew up in.