* Posts by Christoph

3311 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Dec 2007

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Christoph

Re: Device Names

Alpher, Bethe and Gamow.

Cutting-edge robot space surgeon makes first incision in Zero-G

Christoph

"I'm not a doctor I'm a miniaturized in vivo robotic assistant !"

WATSON picks up slack on Mars for SHERLOC as Perseverance gadgets show age

Christoph
Alien

Does this mean that the rover can no longer zap Martians with its Heat Ray?

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

Christoph

There has to be one

named Clanger

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

Christoph
Trollface

Why weren't they warned?

Why didn't Edinburgh University's Koestler Parapsychology Unit warn them that this was going to happen?

India to make its digital currency programmable

Christoph

Re: A tyrant's dream

Does the programmability allow them to make the money expire after a certain date? Forcing everyone to spend rather than save.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Christoph

Re: I once had ....

Back in the 80s we had to install a bridge to isolate the consultancy section of the office. They all used the then new Amstrad PC compatibles, which would randomly stop forwarding the tokens on the Token Ring Network and bring down the network for the entire building. We separated them with the bridge and let them get on with it.

Leaked email: Unit4 ERP system leaves some school staff with 'nil pay'

Christoph

But it's hardly their fault that they have trouble with such a new and unconventional function as computerised payroll. I mean it's not as if running payroll went all the way back to the very first ever commercial use of computing and should have been totally sorted many decades ago?

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Christoph

See also: mail-in rebates, HMRC tax refunds, etc.

And way way worse than that - any kind of Benefit payment.

Wait, hold on, everyone – Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair

Christoph

Re: What “market share”?

If there is no value in using a particular browser then please explain why the other browser makers are so intent on excluding Firefox.

OSIRIS-REx's stuck asteroid sample canister finally cracked open by NASA

Christoph

Re: Finally

They should have used percussive maintenance.

Poor communication led to complete lack of communication

Christoph

Did he seriously not think of that? It seems so obvious that I would expect it to be in the initial spec, not missed until after the system went live.

Tech billionaires ask Californians to give new utopian city their blessing

Christoph

They are carefully not mentioning that the local laws for this city will be set up to keep executive power in the hands of the rich sponsors with no rights at all for the hoi polloi.

Christoph

"It's been said countless times before, but people like that don't really want or support "freedom" or "freedom of speech" (*2), and never did. They want freedom from consequences, and only for themselves."

Conservatism: the idea that the law should serve but not bind the wealthy, and should bind but not serve the poor.

Swarms of laser-flown bots visiting a planet light years away – and more NASA-funded projects revealed

Christoph

The tiny interstellar spacecraft propelled by laser is Robert Forward's Starwisp

NHS England published heavily redacted Palantir contract as festivities began

Christoph
Big Brother

If the data is ever held in the United States then the NSA will grab the lot.

No, I have no direct evidence for this. But given their known past behaviour it would be ludicrous to suppose that they would not grab it.

Palantir will of course be forbidden to say anything about the grab.

30 years and still sunbathing: SOHO probe continues work as a space weatherman

Christoph

This stuff is critically important. If there's another Carrington Event we need advance warning or we are in very deep trouble.

Musk floats idea of boat mod for Cybertruck

Christoph

Re: The vehicle almost floats

Hey, with just a tiny bit of reinforcement he could take it down to have a look at the Titanic.

UK will be HQ for high-flying next-gen fighter jet treaty with Italy, Japan

Christoph

Will these be able to fly from the UK carriers? If not, what will they use instead?

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Christoph

Re: Every single time

Reminds me of a post on LiveJournal some years back. The IT staff came back to the computer room after a long weekend (Easter?) to find two things:

1> An angry note from a non-IT higher up pointing out that they had gone off and left the air-conditioning running when nobody was in, and he had had to harass Security into letting him in to the computer room to switch it off so as not to waste all that power.

2> Lots of very unhappy servers which were no longer serving anything.

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

Christoph

Re: Beware the law of unintended consequences

Creating sapient beings as pleasure toys? Did they never hear of the 13th Amendment to the US constitution?

Paging C'Mell

FAA stays grounded in reality as SpaceX preps for takeoff

Christoph

Flight two of the Starship Super Heavy improved on its predecessor, but only if you imagine that your self-driving electric car did not crash into a tree and catch fire. Instead, it made it a bit farther down the road, and then caught fire. Who knows, maybe it'll get all the way to the shops before catching fire on your third go?

Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up.

US Air Force wants to see some atomic motors for future spacecraft

Christoph

JETSON

I see what they did there.

GPS leading your phone astray? We can just fix that in code, startup claims

Christoph

Re: And I need this why?

the use case is for autonomous vehicles

They need very high accuracy everywhere, including where things like WAAS may be unavailable. Plain GPS may make a car think it's in a different lane or even on a different road.

Where do people feel most at risk of being pwned? The pub

Christoph

But then how would they solve pub arguments if they can't google?

UK policing minister urges doubling down on face-scanning tech

Christoph

Re: 'No question' it will solve more crimes, Tory MP claims

"because additional checks and balances are in place to confirm identification following system alerts."

Which is very reassuring to the person they reluctantly release after hours of interrogation.

And to the person who gets stopped on a daily basis because they resemble someone the police are looking for (e.g. they are both black).

Florida man jailed after draining $1M from victims in crypto SIM swap attacks

Christoph
Flame

he obtained log files of people's email address and password combinations

They should also be jailing whoever is logging people's passwords!

Boston Dynamics teaches robo-dog to recognise speech, respond using ChatGPT

Christoph

even as we gave it ever more absurd 'personalities'

GPP - Genuine People Personalities. Specially licensed from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Christoph

A friend discovered that a program he'd written when just starting out was still in use decades later. Helping to run the National Grid.

Software patch fixes Euclid space telescope navigation bug

Christoph

Re: "the telescope's Fine Guidance Sensor"

And how much fuel did it use up by all that repositioning?

Search for phone signal caused oil spill, say Japanese investigators

Christoph

Is "Wakashio" by any chance the Japanese for "Troutbridge"?

Meet Honda's latest electric vehicle: A rideable suitcase

Christoph

15 MPH zooming through a crowded station or airport? Ouch!

But I might buy one if they switch out the wheels for hundreds of little legs.

Scientists spot startlingly close black holes in Hyades star cluster

Christoph

Re: "we'd probably already be dead"

Yes, we'd be safe. Our nearest star is just over 4 light years away, so we must have had many passes within 2 light years since the solar system stabilised.

Christoph

"The team isn't sure whether Hyades is unique in its black hole richness, or whether such objects are common in other star clusters"

If that was the first one they tried and they got a hit first time, it makes it quite likely that they are common.

More UK cops' names and photos exposed in supplier breach

Christoph

"There is also a huge concern that photographs of police on undercover units, surveillance or in sensitive areas like counter-terrorism could fall into the wrong hands,"

The terrifying possibility that women in entirely legal protest groups might find out that their 'boyfriend' is an undercover Met officer spying on them and all their friends and using them as a useful tool.

IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak

Christoph

IBM gave the PowerPC chip an assembly language instruction Enforce In-order Execution of I/O.

The Assembler directive is EIEIO.

Stalking victims sue Tile and Amazon for negligence over tracking tech

Christoph

"We have never received a law enforcement report of misuse of our Anti-Theft Mode"

We have never received a report of someone finding a device which we have made impossible to find.

Boffins reckon Mars colony could survive with fewer than two dozen people

Christoph

I'm having some work done on my house. Just simple updates. This has required several different tradesmen with different skills learnt over an apprenticeship, and kept up to date by having continuous work in that speciality. Just to do simple updates to a standard house.

How many people would be needed to support those tradesmen? How long would a Martian colony last if unable to do that kind of simple job to maintain the colony?

Now look at the industry needed to produce high technology. Hundreds of small firms doing specialised jobs, each with their own skills. How is a Martian colony going to reproduce all those?

Now look at computer chips, which are now utterly essential to run our tech. These are cheap because they are sold in vast numbers, but they are produced in factories that cost multiple billions. How is a small colony going to economically produce the very large number of different chips needed to keep its tech going?

Or just the people and resources needed to mine and refine the materials needed.

I very much doubt that a colony without those resources could survive on Mars.

Bank of Ireland outage sees customers queue for 'free' cash – or maybe any cash

Christoph

Monopoly money

Bank error in your favour. Collect £1,000.

Google Street View car careens into creek after 100mph cop chase

Christoph

"According to the police statement, he told officers he worked for Google and was afraid to stop"

Why was he afraid to stop? If he is black then he did have good reason.

NASA 'quiet' supersonic jet is nearly ready for flight

Christoph
Facepalm

Just what we needed. Another plane to pump huge amounts of CO2 into the air so the very rich can travel a bit faster.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Christoph

Re: COP/EOD

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."

-- Marcus Tullius Cicero

LIGO cranks up the sensitivity to sniff out gravitational waves

Christoph

at least some of them are hoping to find a loophole in it...

They are desperate to find a loophole in it.

We have two astoundingly successful theories, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, but they give completely incompatible descriptions of how the Universe works.

At least one of them must be flawed somehow, but physicists have been trying for nearly a century to find such a flaw.

It hasn't happened. Neither of them have ever produced incorrect results in an experiment.

Curiosity gets interplanetary software patch for better driving and more on Mars

Christoph

You think that's tricky, what about the people updating the Voyagers? Megabytes? What are those?

To improve security, consider how the aviation world stopped blaming pilots

Christoph

Re: Pilot Error

"looking beyond that and finding out WHY that pilot error happened."

The pilot misheard a message about waiting for takeoff and thought it was clearance for takeoff.

Fix: Aircraft now wait for 'departure'. The word 'takeoff' is used ONLY when giving or cancelling clearance for immediate takeoff.

Result: No more Teneriffe.

Starlink opens final frontier for radio astronomers

Christoph

Re: Sorry but no.

"I'm sorry you can't see Venus or whatever due to assorted tin cans wafting about low orbit"

If you obstruct my view of Venus you will face my Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator!

Techie called out to customer ASAP, then: Do nothing

Christoph

Re: Seems there would be an easier solution

There might not be another side. Just hook it out.

Take an old wire coathanger, use pliers to roughly straighten out all but the hook. You now have a few feet of stiff wire with a hook on the end. Perfect for ferreting round in narrow gaps and hoiking out whatever rolled/fell there, or grabbing things which are just out of reach.

Christoph

Re: SLAs make work for idle hands...

Or the "Hello Nurses". Blair's lot decreed that patients must be seen within some fixed time after arrival. So you'd sit and wait and after a while the Hello Nurse would come and take you elsewhere - to another queue where you waited ages to be seen by the actual doctor. Result: all patients were 'seen' within the time limit, and a (desperately needed elsewhere) nurse had to spend all day doing pointless makework.

Welcome to open source, Elon. Your Twitter code just got a CVE for shadow ban bug

Christoph

Would this tactic work against Musk's own account, or does the code that specifically boosts his account override it?

Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

Christoph

Re: Re - speedometer accuracy

There is presumably a slight lag in GPS speedo readings? It can't measure your actual speed, it must measure the time you took to cover some distance - which it can only calculate after you've covered that distance. If your speed is changing rapidly it's not going to be instantaneously accurate.