Posts by Johnb89 162 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jan 2022
Focus things amaze me. They work sooooo badly that I cannot believe anyone did any amount of testing with anything like real world data/situations. The errors these things make are trivial to see.
Conclusion: MS and apple at least don't test in house. And that includes eating their own dog food. Reason: That's what users are for!
I've never had anything sync reliably. One app, when a sync decided that I wanted new content that I'd added on one device on neither device, told me "Tis but a bug, but its actually permanently gone. Sorry." This is dozens of things over 30 years. I won't have the little apps that onedrive, google drive, dropbox et al want to install, and don't use apple cloud sync, because none of them have proved reliable.
Hint: Don't using syncing except for unimportant things, IMHO.
Is syncing really this hard?
The comments so far are about UK resident's rights (mostly). For me, the true comedy of this order is that it gives the UK government access to ANY icloud account in the world. Which I'm sure all other governments would be fine with, but would the UK government be happy if say Brazil or Botswana granted themselves access to a UK citizen's account?
I used Due on my iphone for reminders, for the simple reason that it doesn't arbitrarily mark a thing as done all by itself like apple reminders does.
And I use pcloud to backup my photos because I don't want to be trapped in the apple Photos ecosystem, and I want my photos as files in folders with useful file names (date and time of photo).
My experience with wifi calling, on good broadband, is that it doesn't work at all well, particularly with regards to latency.
One person I regularly call uses wifi calling at their end. Hopeless. If we talk on whatsapp its fine. Yes, I appreciate that my end is different in those cases too... but I make mobile calls all day and its only the wifi calling ones that have problems.
I'm currently in <back of beyond, beach island in Asia> and can consistently stream HD on youtube via my phone hotspot on 4 bars of 5G, pretty much anywhere in the country. When it does drop to 4G I can speedtest upwards of 40 Mbps. There is rampant competition and advertising here for the mobile networks, which can't hurt the quality of service.
Planning restrictions aren't a thing here though, let alone safe water or food hygiene, so good mobile service isn't a function of money.
As I've seen it this order applies to all data held by apple, not just on 'UK users' whatever that might be defined as. Which does seem slightly over reaching.
Imagine if Brazil, or France, insisted apple give them access to all apple worldwide user data. The UK government would be opposed, so how does this square that circle?
When a Tesla using ASS hits another car, I assume that Tesla blames the human and takes no responsibility for damages. And has the logs to prove Tesla isn't at fault, which it won't share with a court or the user or the police, but trust them, it is never the car.
Do the courts agree with that? Has it been tested? Some might suggest that a self driving car should be responsible for its actions.
Or does your insurance cover such things when you buy a Tesla and that's already in the policy?
I'm sure the motorcyclist had previously signed a water tight legal document absolving tesla of any all liability for injuries or death resulting from tesla testing their alpha quality death machines on real roads.
We've all signed that. Don't you recall doing it?
At least that's what tesla's lawyers will tell the court.
My condolences to the motorcyclist's family.
Perhaps I'd print more if my printer would actually print.
- You can't print black&white because you don't have Magenta ink that you have.
- Your debit card has expired so you can't print with the ink and paper that is already in your printer.
- The cartridge you are using that worked perfectly well yesterday is now illegal and the police have been called.
- The wifi connection that worked perfectly well for the last 13 years is the wrong polarity/style/font. Have you tried restarting your computer?
- Are you in a rush? Bad attitude detected, please wait.
Ok, so I guess some people still need to use google for something, but seriously there are search engines that at least try to pretend the results are related to what you searched for. And that at least purport to respect your privacy.
The argument that doing those things gave you worse results because reasons is long over now that google has their AI results.
The good news is that the google AI results are hysterically funny, so there is that.
Tesla, near as I can tell, is run as a tech startup. LEAN. Move fast and break things. All that. It's an interesting experiment. Dramatically increasing and decreasing staff numbers based on quarterly results, pivoting, announcing vapourware... these are all tech startup things.
Cars, however, are not software. Cars are heavy and move fast, they have momentum when they hit things. They are physical objects that can't be updated virtually (see cybertruck pedal).
I'm very happy I live somewhere where Teslas don't drive themselves, because I cycle near cars a lot. The kerb strike comment struck a nerve, because I could be the kerb, but also because somehow Tesla tries to pretend it is the 'driver's' fault, even when the car is in FSD. Classic tech startup mentality.
Its an interesting experiment, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Hopefully the world will learn that killing people isn't just a bug to be fixed in a later release.
So when I threw away (aggressively) my HP printer because the firmware update caused it to stop using the ink cartridge that had been in it for some time and worked perfectly well, I bought an Epson, because they'd always been good and fine with 3rd party cartridges.
Then lo, one day, it tricked me into doing a firmware update on the printer... security stuff, it said.
Shockingly, it then rejected the 3rd party ink cartridge that was in it that had worked perfectly well until that point. So Epson went on my shit list.
Never again anything HP, and also Epson. Sigh. Good that I don't really ever print anything.
There's a rumour going round some of the good bits of Reddit that Princess Kate moonlights as a Python developer, and spent January building 'something'. The rumour continues that she is now frantically trying to fix that 'something', which coincidentally has been the cause of these outages.
It would explain several things in on fell swoop, and thus passes the Occam's razor test.
Here in the UK our reaction to vandalism is to secure and strengthen and toughen and harden... school playgrounds surrounded by 3m tall spike fences made of 5mm steel, telecoms street furniture made of thick steel, big heavy bike locks, etc
That is not the answer. The answer is to teach the (mostly young, male) people who destroy things for fun, or think its ok to steal things, that its not ok to do that. This is a generational project.
Many countries have things exposed and don't have these problems, because parents teach their children right and wrong, and how to behave. Too many parents in the UK don't do that.
It will be found, after a time that...
'A rogue engineer' actually included code that sent your location data to google after all that totally accidentally used it for ad placement anyway and completely unintentionally stored it in a place that the warrant team 'didn't know about'.
Many of the comments ascribe these things to Musk, but I suggest that he merely gives high level instructions to his legal team to take these various things to court, or sue the bastards or whatever.
It turns out that there are lawyers out there that will park whatever ethics they might have... for money. Perhaps lots of money. But these lawsuits take time to put together and follow through and these are the people making up spurious arguments, trying to find loopholes, writing biased user agreements and so on because money.
One would think that a proper lawyer would have ethics of some sort, but reality suggests not always.
As I commented on a previous article on this incident the car wouldn't be listening for the person under it screaming "STOP!!!!!!!" and "OWWWW!!!!!", nor would it be able to hear bystanders screaming at it and hitting it and banging on the windscreen etc.
That is one of the many problems self driving cars have.
Having had an hp printer that worked perfectly well with 3rd party cartridges and then didn't I swore I'd never buy another hp thing again. Which matches my policy of never giving microsoft money. In which case I can just sit here finding this funny. Sorry to the rest of you that aren't able to make that choice.
*companies what can't do simple things properly don't get upper case. Its the rules.
I came here to note the $ in the headline for a UK article, which the 'mericanisation of the reg is getting silly.
But I still find the reg is far less click baity than most things, even the tax funded BBC which has become unreadable for the click bait headlines... so much for 'public service, publicly funded journalism' there.
So they might be checking that the applied torque matches movement including wheel slip, which would work sometimes perhaps.
But what would a human do? Listen for screaming from under the car or from bystanders. Are they doing that?
There are too many edge cases for AVs to be safe in the real world. As the other commenters note, they need to be separated.
I actually think this is a good idea. In that it is not unreasonable for a company providing a service to profit from it, either by ads or subscription fee. I suggested twitter go that way years ago, but that's another story.
But... I wouldn't trust facebook to actually do it. And I would fully expect that when they are caught 'a rogue engineer' or 'a coding error' happened, that meant the user's data would have been 'unintentionally' collected.
*if implemented ethically
Meanwhile, the place where they invented this stuff (Nobel prize winners etc) is now an office park on the east side of Harlow, Essex.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Telecommunication_Laboratories and Kaopark Harlow -https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Kao+Park/@51.770534,0.1258598,17z/
Promises of long term support from Google are like pigs and wings, politician's commitments, or 'Google protects your privacy'. Google is famous for killing off products with no notice and no sensible plan, even for people that just bought.
Ha ha ha ha! ROFL! LMFAO! All those.
Are they escrowing things to show commitment? Putting money where their mouth is? (Maybe they are, but I haven't seen so)
The article mentions lifting the car, but there are circumstances where the police would tell or motion to a real driver to 'move over there' or 'pull forward a bit' or 'don't move'.
How do authorised people tell a driverless car these things? Can they?
One could imagine the default case where there's a big red 'STOP' button on the car that makes the car stop immediately and stay that way until central control says otherwise, but I don't think they have those.
The early powerPC apple laptops (which I can't tell if this was a desktop or laptop) that I had (of which several at work) had a mean time between crash of about 20 minutes, so indeed rebooting wasn't a daily thing, it was every half hour... so this rotated monitor trick would have been more annoying that is perhaps obvious.
Totally coincidentally this was (one of) Apple's near death periods.
Picture the day. An overnight software update, announced on the large screen, with 'bugs fixes and other improvements'. But what's this, my arse is getting warm. 10 minutes later I have to stop the car because I'm being cooked.
Seat heating is on, can't be turned off. 'Tis but a bug', BMW support (at least there might be that for my monthly fee) assure me a patch will be out next week, 'right after the engineering team fix the P1 'brakes not working when turning left' bug'.
Ah, software in charge of things.
Just because Zoom et al can replace SOME meetings doesn't mean such tools are good for ALL interactions. That's it, that's the key, its easy to understand if one tries to do so just a little bit.
Being absolutist about anything is wrong. Being absolutist about remote working being perfectly fine in ALL circumstances is silly at best.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
