Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: "an essential part of doing business in the auto industry"

"Tesla still haven't figured out how to make rubber trim stay on the car, or front axles that don't vibrate until they eventually snap and fail. Why anyone would believe they're close to solving FSD is a mystery to this Tesla owner."

And yet, you bought a second one! Did the first not suffer those issues or did you not have it long enough for them to manifest?

Re: Neutral?

Worse it says:

"The touchscreen is the preferred method to manually shift. However, in the unlikely situation in which the touchscreen is unavailable and therefore can't be used, the drive mode selector on the overhead console automatically activates and must be used to shift (see Shift Using the Overhead Console).

If you try to shift when it is prohibited by the current driving speed, the touchscreen displays an alert, a chime sounds, and the drive mode does not change."

And the link to "overhead console" option states:

"In addition to manually shifting on the touchscreen, you can shift by pressing P, R, N or D located on the overhead console. In most situations, these buttons are not available until you press the brake and touch one of the buttons to activate it."

So the "emergency option" is in the "overhead console" and may not even work in an emergency if the vehicle speed is in the wrong range and "computer say no", ie the braking system has failed.

Re: Soap up, folks!

"Reminds me of a story my late friend told me. They were driving on the freeway and there's a car next to them. The wheel comes off, and for a brief time actually gets out ahead of the car, before the laws of physics asserted themselves."

Despite driving up to 60,000 miles per year this last 30 years, I've seen that happen only twice, both times when in a previous job that only had a 15 mile each way commute. One was on a bridge crossing, two lanes in each direction, no central divider, 40mph speed limit and a front wheel came off a car coming towards me, both of us in the outside lanes so only feet clearance and a relative closing speed of about 80mph. Luckily for me, his wheel folded flat under the car and he somehow kept it straight and in lane! The other time, I'd just got into work, looked out into the car park and saw a wheel bouncing over the kerb from the road and into the car park, missing all the parked cars and slowing enough to roll in a circle and fall flat :-)

Re: Not surprised

Shirley you mean "Ludicrous" speeds!

Re: The clock is ticking - Aside 'thin state'

Well, the horizon for an averagely tall person is about 3 miles away so the complainant would need to be on the upper floor of a fairly tall hotel to get a see view, over 300' feet up. It'd have a be a pretty clear day too, something not common in humid States.

Of course, if the complainant was a flat earther it might get all philosophical :-)

"Best not buy a Lotus Elise, pretty much the whole chassis is glued together"

Or fly on a carbon fibre bodied aircraft :-)

Re: "Tackling Bounce Back Loan misconduct is a key priority for the Insolvency Service."

"is a key priority

is the key priority"

They can have more than one key priority.

Re: This is Statesmanship?

I take your point, but I'm not sure "A government account of the meeting notes that since 2019 Apple has invested over $16 billion in Vietnam – making it the largest source of foreign funds." could be classed as "lip service".

Likewise, not seen the offending videos, but from the reported depictions, I suspect many jurisdictions would feel the same about showing them and even if Twitter had a vague sense of morality, they'd voluntarily block them. Maybe AU are stretching their ban too far and broadly, and that's the issue. I can't tell from here but if the video are showing the actual violence happening, as reported, then I'm pretty sure hosting and making them available breaches UK and probably most EU countries laws too, at the least.

Re: Car wash mode

"That said, a "Don't fold the wing mirrors" setting would be useful."

Don't they normally only fold in when you lock the car? That's how all the ones I've had with that feature do it. Just switching off or fully off, even removing the key (where that's still a thing) doesn't usually fold them in.

Re: I see a collab

"*I am assuming that a heavy downpour is somewhat like a car-wash, so how does this truck survive IRL? https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/20/cybertruck_car_wash_mode/"

Tesla will soon be launching a national network of Tesla Superwash stations around the country, guaranteed to be within only a 3 hour drive of any Cybertruck owner. It can wash 80% of a Cybertruck in only 15 minutes using special chemicals and a final rinse in distilled water, filtered[*] to perfection.

[*]I know, I know, but this is Tesla Marketing!

Re: 'the deep state liberal jewish cabal'

"and immediately be removed just like Boris was."

Immediately does not equal approx. 3 years in my book. You seem to working with a previously unheard of definition of "immediately" than I am.

Re: Remind me

"I could go on, but I think the point is made."

You forgot, strategically placed heaters for de-icing, but none on the cold, LED headlamps, which you need to clean manually. Good luck driving through a snowstorm with that.

(For those who may never have driven in snow shower/storm, you get a build up on the front of the car. Incandescent headlamps get hot and under most conditions, prevent snow build up on the lens. LED lights need heaters to prevent that)

Re: ROTM?

Right Old Toting Toking Misanthropist

FTFY

Re: Hope no-one is colour blind!

"Professional DC designers were paid to come up with this sh*t...."

But, like architects, it's not *always* their fault when some builder or sparky or plumber decides to do things the "usual" way instead what is stated on the drawings.

"I got a minor bollocking, which was all good in retrospect. I went on to get A's in Physics (and more besides) then A's in Physics A level"

If he was a good, or even just decent, teacher, he'll have already marked out those with ability, curiosity and interest and will protect and nurture them (and all of their student, of course, but especially those likely to do well) :-)

Hah! It was a school, at least pre-1988 (approx end of 'O' level, start of GCSEs)

"so the kid had enough privileges to take the storage offline but not enough to bring 'em back online"

As other have said, shutting something down can be easy. Bringing it back might be a much more complex task. The kid likely had privileges to do both, but the not the skills to do the latter.

Re: Whoopsie!

It very much depends on the client. Just having a server and remote support doesn't mean they have money to burn and actually understand or care about resilience. At least not until something bites them hard enough to do the downtime versus investment calculation in favour of the investment. Remember, the OP was talking about the later 90's. There were lots of ad-hoc networks that had "just growed" and may never have been designed, especially in smaller companies where the "server" sat in a broom cupboard and might only ever have been intended to server half a dozen users when it was installed.

Re: newer != better

If it came to that as a solution, the "mobile base station" only needs to sit in a street or housing estate for maybe at most, 30 mins while all the nearby meters connect and update as opposed to 2-3 mins at each house plus the time it takes to get to each house and leave a "while you were out" card in many case or knock/ring and wait for a resident to answer the door. The mobile base station should have either an onboard database or a link back the HQ and know exactly which meters, by serial number are in the area and be able to check off a list of all those which responded correctly, responded incorrectly or didn't respond at all.

IIRC, another scheme mooted years ago, maybe actually piloted, was radio based meters and the plan was a van would drive around the area collecting meter readings. Then someone came up with the idea of "smart" meters on the phone network. I bet the former would have been cheaper to roll out and not be worrying about technology debts and obsolescence!

To an extent, yes. The use of CTRL-C for Copy seems like a logical thing to do. But CTRL-X for cut and CTRL-V for paste, not so much. So if cut and paste being "non-intuituve" letters were ok, why did they use CTRL-C for copy when CTRL-C had been the break command from before even MS-DOS existed, let alone Win95. It might have made a little more sense if they'd used CTRL-P for paste instead of print since by then there was a PrtSc key that could have been re-purposed as the print shortcut.

(A quick Google tells me Xerox Parc defined CTRL-C as copy, despite it already being the "standard" for kill or end a process/program since at least the 1960s, so maybe we can't actually blame MS this time :-))

Re: wide effect

But they all go to a single, central providers HQ, and the cut in the cable was right outside their front door :-)

Re: Gibberish

Except that's not how "feed based" works. It doesn't need troves of personal information because 99% of the time, the "feed based" algorithms only feed you more of what you just looked at and "sponsored" stuff that is invariably unrelated to either you or your current feed or anything else you ever looked at. If it was genuinely using the data on you and what you have looked at historically, it would be dropping stuff in your feed that you've looked weeks, months or years in the past where there is new and interesting related stuff. But that never happens. It barely "remembers" what you looked at last week in terms of the feed content.

"Exactly. Display ads to raise revenue, just not targeted, personal-data-driven ads."

You'd think all this much vaunted AI would be able to target ads based on the users direct Facebook interaction and/or the conversations they are having and target ads related to the topic of conversation by now, without ever needing any personal data or huge trove of data. It has to better than bombarding you with ads for stuff you looked at two weeks ago and bought last week and now have no interest in buying again for a while.

Re: Thank you!

It is an interesting concept nonetheless. I agree that the way they've done it, it's at the very least morally dubious and possibly illegal. If they had done it the other way around, it would probably be just fine. ie they created a subscription service from the ground up and then later offered a "free" service so long as you consent to data collection and ads. Of course, no one will do it that way around because they all want the "free and rapid growth, monetise later" model.

Re: So how exactly is this different from "reward apps" ?

"Theres an app that gives back rewards for doing as the app company wants."

Precisely what I cam here to say too! the listed "tasks" and "challenges" are all basically "do more of what the app is for". Where's the creativity like, say, find 10 websites on a specific topic or some sort of virtual treasure hunt, or find 10 science achievements of the last century. It's absolutely clear this is designed to get people using it more simply by paying them to use it more. Growth not by being good, unique, better etc, but by bribing users.

Re: Finally Euorpe united

Possibly also part of the Americanization of El Reg, where "Europe" is some sort of country in it's own right.