* Posts by Lord Elpuss

2284 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Aug 2009

Your snoozing iOS 15 iPhone may actually be sleeping with one antenna open

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: It appears to be difficult

Define 'waste'. There are very few, if any, smart multifunction devices on the market these days that provide 100% of the features any given customer wants, with 0% of the features they don't. One person's "waste" is another person's "must have".

iPhones are brilliant, amazing tools for people who value the features they offer. This may not be you, in which case feel free to move along and buy something else, but that doesn't make what they do offer, waste.

"I" value the 'track when turned off' feature highly because I live in a - ahem - 'less than salubrious' area, where the local scrotes congregate of a weeknight around street corners, and 'lift' from passers-by with gay abandon and dearth of consequence. Police almost don't regard phone theft as a crime any more, because they're too busy tackling issues that people really care about; such as misgendering, wearing a culturally appropriated hairstyle and so on. Which means if my phone gets half-inched it's down to me and a couple of my less reputable (and more pungent) leather-jacketed mates to go and get it back. Which I can and will do, if the pond scum of humanity that stole it doesn't keep up to date on his tech news and doesn't realise it can still be tracked.

Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Try Scooters in Madrid

Are you familiar with the expression: "When in a hole, stop digging"?

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Try Scooters in Madrid

"So your average speed, including stopping for traffic lights, was the same as the cyclist. No hold up at all then..."

No; it was only the same because they'd been stuck behind the cyclist for miles. If they'd been able to overtake earlier, they'd have been through the lights way ahead and there would have been no issue.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Try Scooters in Madrid

"Did it not occur to you that this simply demonstrates the futility of the overtake at any cost mindset? Or that maybe you, and all the other drivers annoyed but not in the slightest inconvenienced by the non-delay might have been better off riding bicycles themselves?"

If the cars had been allowed/able to safely overtake earlier, they would have got through the lights at least one cycle ahead of the cyclist, and would have been way ahead. Being stuck behind idiotic, selfish and inconsiderate cyclists for miles on end will result in non-insignificant delays; as well as increasing the risk of a serious accident (and quite probably shortening the lives of everybody involved as a result of the increased blood pressure).

And no, the answer is not 'relax'; the answer is 'be considerate to your fellow road users'. Something many cyclists know VERY little about.

Believe it or not, I'm writing this as an avid cyclist who is frequently disgusted by the shockingly antisocial behaviour of my fellow cyclists on city roads.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: So technology works as intended...

"As you state, they're level 2 systems that seem to perform as described in the manual (I have an L2 myself). Fully autonomous driving *is* hard, which is why we don't have L4+ cars on the road yet, but this test / article says nothing about the capabilities of L4-L5 platforms."

*You* know this.

*I* know this.

Car manufacturers' marketing departments however, do not seem to know this.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: So technology works as intended...

"I don't know whereabouts in the world you are but here in the UK they've been turning motorways into "Smart Motorways" for the last decade or more and have generally caused complete chaos in the process."

The UK's definition of 'Smart' in this context beggars belief. It's designed to increase capacity at the expense of safety; nothing more; and it's an outright insult to anything carrying the label 'Smart'.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: So technology works as intended...

"These are L2 vehicles at best, but appear to be L3/4/5 tests."

They're L2 vehicles, but the marketing blurb (AutoPilot, CoPilot, EyeSight and so on) most definitely implies they are L3 at least; and Tesla's Full Self Drive doesn't just imply it, it outright states it. Therefore it's fairly reasonable to put these claims to the test, even if we know the likely outcome.

LIDAR in iPhones is not about better photos – it's about the future of low-cost augmented reality

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Reality distorition field

True. It'll be the 2050's version of misgendering. Sigh.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Oh Apple...

You get a downvote from me because your comment is utterly irrelevant to the content of the article.

Mars Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance are talking again

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Should have a nuclear drone carrier

This time round, Ingenuity was nothing more than a technology demonstrator - a tryout to see if the concept of controlled flight on Mars was feasible. Now they know this, who knows what they'll put together next time to build on this concept!

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

I'm pretty sure they did think of that, but initially the idea was to keep Ingenuity as far away from Perseverance as possible whilst still maintaining up/downlink capabilities. Imagine if your opportunistic "Hold my beer and watch this" technology demonstrator managed to go up ok but then crater in on your $quillions nuclear rover during it's first flight, thereby wrecking the entire mission.

Shareholders turn the screws on IBM and its gag orders

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: "there was (and is) no systemic age discrimination at our company"

Without passing judgement one way or the other; the number of lawsuits in no way constitutes proof of any description. Don't make IBM's position stronger by contesting it with nonsense.

IBM secures DWP contract worth up to £2.1m for 6 months of cloud services

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: "IBM & DWP contract....

IBM will do EXACTLY what's in the contract, no more and no less. They're experts at this.

What will likely happen is that neither party knows exactly what the problem is, what needs to be done to fix it, or what the roadblocks are likely to be. The contract will be put together by the cheapest possible personnel on both sides, based on estimates from staff who graduated from uni six months ago and have only ever seen this kind of thing in textbooks, will be time & materials based rather than fixed fee, and will collapse in a blizzard of blame and finger pointing many months late (and many £millions over budget).

Microsoft exposes glue-free guts of the Surface Laptop Studio

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

@Cederic sure - it depends on the games of course. But then it does on Windows too - games are optimised for a specific video card, and will run amazingly on one (theoretically medium-spec) system yet stutter on another high-performance system.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Did they run any games people actually play, or just really old ones?

https://www.macgamerhq.com/apple-m1/m1-pro-gaming/

Some AAA titles (2021) running on M1pro and the results.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Yup. Steam, Epic Games, Rockstar Launcher, and the Xbox app will all run. And even through an emulator it'll beat pretty much all Windows laptops that aren't specifically designed for gaming. 2560x1440 through Steam at max settings 60fps pretty much across the board (except Sekiro). The M1Pro chip really IS that powerful.

https://www.techradar.com/news/we-try-gaming-in-parallels-desktop-again-with-an-m1-pro-macbook

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Thing is the new …errr

Size is for show, weight for a pro. I couldn't care less about size within reasonable limits, but as a traveller I do care about weight. I'd prefer to have another couple of cm on the thickness rather than another half kg in weight.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

If you think a MacBook is a fashion accessory and not an actual computer, you've never used one. Current M1Pro MBPs kick the guts out of any Windows laptop out there in terms of sheer performance and getting the job done, and in terms of looks are resolutely utilitarian; absolutely no frills whatsoever so not even close to a 'fashion' anything.

Twitter faces existential threat from world's richest techbro

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Twitter's job is to be Twitter – not to make people rich

I think plenty of tech companies start with altruistic intentions. The problem is that sooner or later big $$$ rears its head, and then the noble ideals inevitably start to become corrupted.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

It’s important in the same way Donald Trump’s various social media excretions are ‘important’. Certain groups of people will always be bored and/or stupid enough to listen comment and regurgitate, but that doesn’t make it worth keeping. The world would be on balance a better place if it quietly disappeared.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Wow

There’s nothing wrong with Musk’s brand of free speech; as long as it doesn’t become the only brand of free speech.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

The correct analogy for Twitter isn't the rainforest; it's a rancid, fetid swamp inhabited by predators and parasites, and fed with a continuous stream of sewage and effluent from the Big $ interests surrounding it.

Fixed it for you.

IBM deliberately misclassified mainframe sales to enrich execs, lawsuit claims

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: OSHA?

I would imagine that once word of these shenanigans got out, there would be more than a little physical danger in the workplace for some of the instigators...

French court pulls SpaceX's Starlink license

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: We live in a world where con artists rule the day.

Oh that's OK then. Will let the UN know, thanks!

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Bloody French. Sometimes I can appreciate their sheer bloody-mindedness, like when it comes to pushback on idiotic rules which the rest of Europe simply salutes, but they also take it too far. This is simply a question of "n'est pas fabriqué en france", and is très déplorable.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Morals

Good tip, thanks!

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Morals

Yeah but sometimes people really do need to be let go; regardless of how 'good' they are at their jobs. Like many others here, I've been in a team with somebody who was very good at the technical aspects of the job, but completely impossible to work with. Refused to comment code, didn't attend stand-ups because he thought they were a waste of time, refused to work with the integration team because "if they're too stupid to understand my stuff, that's not my problem", and lastly was personally thoroughly obnoxious in word, deed and frankly, smell.

Finally management did the necessary, and had a 5-minute meeting with him on Friday at 11am including the classic line: "We appreciate you might think it's impossible for us to do this without you, but as of Monday, we're going to try."

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Comments are bugs, too

"The amount of time I used to spend believing the comments, rather than the code. A working practice I have been completely cured of for many, many, years."

For anything written in human-readable code, yes this is true. Assembler however is essentially* unreadable without comments.

*Within any realistic timeframe

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Fuck that

"If it's my job to fix something, I'll fix it. I'm not going to hold your fucking hand for a week to make you feel better. I've got more important things to do."

Sometimes making people feel better IS the problem. That's why sales people on average get paid more than techies; because they understand that.

Axed data scientist sues IBM claiming he was discriminated against as a man

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Done quite a bit of searching and can find next to nothing about this. Calling BS unless you can cite a source.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Nothing new about this with IBM

"I got the benefits with the admonition I was to tell no one."

I sincerely hope you told every living soul within a 1000 mile radius.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Source? Only thing I can find on Google is an article from 2012 talking about one specific scenario.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: I'd agree that there's plenty of competition out there for bad employers

"Yes, IBM was a good employer; when it took me on (in 1984) it actively compared itself with the market surveys and wanted to be at the top."

When I left, IBM were just in the process of introducing market-based rates (I forget the acronym); where the market AVERAGE became this Holy grail in salary discussions. As in: if you were earning 80% of the market average for your position then you had a chance at a pay rise, but as you got closer to 100% the chance of any salary rise trended toward zero. The vast majority of people in my team were around 85-90% of the market-based rate.

The fiendishly clever bit is that IBM presented 100% of market rate as this incredible, aspirational goal that if you did reach it, meant that you could be very proud of yourself. Whereas in reality all it meant was that their very, very best people were - at absolute best - earning the average market rate.

Apple's Mac Studio exposed: A spare storage slot and built-in RAM

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: RAM

"And how often is that speed difference even noticeable?"

PCIe attached memory vs on-die SOC? You'd notice it literally everywhere. From boot to app startup to runtime and probably even screen refresh. Like the difference between walking and driving.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

@VoiceOfTruth

"Built in/soldered on are pretty much interchangeable terms when it comes to chips"

Not in this context. Soldered on may have manufacturing advantages but offers little or no performance improvement. Built in - as in: on the same silicon die as the CPU - offers HUGE performance improvements due to the astronomically fast IO bus between CPU and memory. It also makes it absolutely impossible to selectively replace, but that's the price you pay for performance.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: A contradiction of ports

"It's almost like an admission that things such as 3.5mm jacks, ethernet and HDMI ports are still incredibly useful... Which is it, Apple?"

Both. On a machine for a static workspace, they're useful. On a mobile device, far less so.

Sealed, confidential IBM files in age-discrimination case now public to all

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

"For example, one passage describes an IBM vice president admitting "that neglecting to at least make an effort to transfer at least a few of the soon-to-be-laid-off IBM employees will 'blow a hole in our rhetoric.'""

To be fair to the VP in this quote, he/she appears to be trying to be somewhat moral here; as in - c'mon guys, let's at least TRY to do the right thing. Was probably in a room full of other VP vultures doing their best to savage the workforce, and was trying to keep some semblance of decency in the discussion whilst also trying to make sure his/her name didn't get 'accidentally' added to the redundancy list for not being a team player or some such bollocks.

The IBM System/360 Model 40 told you to WHAT now?

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Corollary to this are those little graphics/messages that chip designers etch into their products which should under normal circumstances never see the light of day; e.g. on a silicon wafer which then gets packaged into a ceramic SMD. It's amazing what you see when you mill off the ceramic and examine the silicon under a microscope; everything from 'Tom Was Here' to the Simpsons to eh - something much ruder.

Microsoft Visual Studio: Cluttering up developer disks for 25 years

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: @Richard Speed -- Wait...Wha'?

Yes it matters. Shuttling half a gig between storage and RAM hammers responsiveness, also the half-gig is unlikely to stay at half a gig - memory leaks and poor management mean that'll likely be upwards of 1.5GB by the time you've finished a session. You've also got to ask what the living hell are they coding that could consume 512MB of space, unless it's horribly inefficient. Which brings its own performance issues.

Plus; with the exception of a few top-shelf Androids there aren't many phones that come with 16GB RAM (because they need it to stay afloat - Asus Zenfone 8 I'm looking at you); even the iPhone 13 Pro Max 'only' has 6GB.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

I see your VS out of memory exceptions and raise you the entire Eclipse IDE - to paraphrase Richard Branson, what's the quickest way to get 2GB into your dev rig? Start with 16GB and then install Eclipse.

Reg reader rages over Virgin Media's email password policy

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Virgin, bringing you the barely-adequate security from 2002

” According to https://d1rytvr7gmk1sx.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Hive-Systems-Password-Table-1-770x346.jpg?x54432 you're looking at 3 days with modern 2022 hardware with local decryption.“

1) I think I trust security.org over a random JPEG

2) Even assuming the table is correct, it says 3 weeks for a 10-digit alphanumeric pw, not 3 days.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Virgin, bringing you the barely-adequate security from 2002

Assuming local decryption (so no network latency), security.org estimate that a random 10-digit alphanumeric password would take around 7 months to crack. So I would tend to agree that if it's being cracked in a day there's something else going on.

Infosys, Wipro silent on their Russian operations

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

appealing, or appalling?

PayPal, Visa, Mastercard suspend Russian services

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Problem with that

"So if you stop paying your credit card bill, YOUR Bank is going to be the one sending in the enforcers, Visa doesnt give two hoots if you pay your bill or not..."

Visa has already paid your bill on your behalf; the end-creditor already has their money. The Visa bill is you reimbursing them for the payment they've made, so the OP's original point is valid.

That said, I'm certain Visa won't just abandon any money they're owed. They'll probably continue to suck it out of your bank account via direct debits as per the 'agreement' you have with them, just refuse to allow you to make any more purchases on your card.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Who is the target?

"While the aim is to hurt the oligarchs I am not convinced this will have more impact on the average Ivan. If the effects of sanctions and WWII are any examples, this will only backfire and make the average Ivan more supportive."

For any Russian who actually believes the official line of "Not a war, it's a limited military operation against the Ukrainian Nazi Government", measures like these serve a very useful purpose. You can deny reality all you like, and 'believe' Putin all you like, but it should be becoming blindingly obvious that nobody else outside Russia believes it.

I live in a democratically 'free' country which has occasionally(!) done things our media have also described as 'limited military operations'. The official messaging here could well also be propaganda (it works both ways), but if everything I own suddenly stops working because ALL of the companies have pulled out of my country in protest, I'd have to be wilfully blind to not question whether my government is telling me the truth on whether something bigger is happening.

As a secondary point, these measures tell me something too - not just the Russians. I also believe that this is actually a war and Russia is actually the aggressor (rather than a peaceful intervention misrepresented by fake news media); not because my State-owned media outlet tells me so, but because a hell of a lot of companies are actually taking action - which may hurt them financially - as a result of it.

IT technician jailed for wiping school's and pupils' devices

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Re: Wrong job description

Also don't forget his prior history of selling non-existent products i.e. fraud. This is a scumbag pure and simple.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

"Exactly why I refuse to install my university's spyware, sorry Mobile Device Management, on my personal devices. It simply means thast outside of office hours, I don't look at work email. WIn for me."

I take a simple binary approach. If the device is owned by my employer, they have a perfect right to install whatever they like on it including MDM if they see fit. I will only ever use it for legitimate work purposes and will only ever access legitimate work data, so if my employer wipes it, that's their prerogative and I have lost nothing; because none of my data is on it.

On the other hand, my personal device has no work software on it, I will do no work on it whatsoever, and can (and do) install anything I like on it. My employer has zero jurisdiction here.

Lord Elpuss Silver badge

Their budget is not my problem.

Work device? Their rules, their rights, their data, their problem.

Personal device? My rules, my rights, my data, my problem.

The two should never meet.