Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: When you feel old

It won't be long before "now" and the first Moon landing will be longer than the time between the first powered flight and the first Moon landing. I wonder if the next people to walk on the Moon will be before that anniversary?

Re: Really the perfect setup

I wonder if they started with the intention of screwing up so badly, ie had malice aforethought, or is this just a bunch of frat boys who's business surprisingly took off and they not only had no idea how to run a real business, but didn't even realise they didn't have the skills or knowledge to do it. On the other hand, it did become clear to them eventually, when they started trying to hide stuff from people who actually did know how things are supposed to work.

Re: Driverless

Other reasons for "train captains" include vandalism when there's no one "in authority" to deter it.

It is estimated "mothballing" the Ebbw Vale Cableway...will save Blaenau Gwent council £41,000...the lift had to be stopped 252 times between its opening in 2015 and 2017 and following the link from that article to the earlier report, "Blaenau Gwent council said some of the breakdowns were due to vandalism and incidents had reduced since the introduction of "on-site personnel""

Likewise, look at the mess of e-scooter hire, people leaving them all over the place in some case, and even when they must be "off hired" to certain places, are often left badly parked and can be trip hazards. And many have suggested the likelyhood of autonomous taxis being pigstys, especially on Friday and Saturday nights.

Many people are dirty and/or nasty bastards if they think they can't be seen or caught[*]. And that;s not even starting with the lowlife, low level criminals in hoodies and balaclavas avoiding even the best CCTV.

[*] many stories here from readers regarding the filthy staff toilets and kitchen areas in offices caused by people you'd not really think off of "vandals".

Re: Seems there would be an easier solution

"A signal on the 68000 microprocessor"

An excellent bit of fault finding. Especially under a CPU that didn't make into personal computers till a few years after :-)

The PET had an 8-bit 6502, not a 16-bit 68000 that later turned up in Amigas, STs and Megadrives :-)

Re: google earth had Mars for years

Yes, but Google Earth was using an older much lower resolution.

Re: Welcome to the jungle - you'll never walk alone

"The actual past masters of information warfare are the House of Windsor; that they aren't absolute bollocks/monarchs is a tribute to other players occasionally outsmarting them."

I think you'll find the British monarchy haven't been absolute monarchs for a very, very long time and haven't been in a position to become so for most of that time. There's a thing called a Parliament, and a constitution even it it can be a bit difficult for some to access, what with it being a collection of multiple documents rather than a single one.

Re: Remote Control Lights

I remember years ago when my MIL bought a wireless doorbell and asked my to fit it. It had only 3 channel options. Tried Ch. 1 and the neighbour next door, who had recommended it to her, came out wondering who was at her door. Tried Ch. 2 and another neighbour, two doors down the other way came to the door. Last chance, tried Ch. 3 and a neighbour across the road came to his door, wondering who had rung his bell. Took it back to the shop and had a bit of an argument convincing the shop assistant that no, it was useless since it could not be set to a channel that didn't ring other peoples door bells. "We've sold loads of them and no one ever brought one back before"" she tells me. LOL, well expect more if you sell lots of them.

It's just as well I was installing at the weekend when the neighbours were at home. If I'd done it mid-week, it might have been days, weeks even months of confusion and hilarity in that street before anyone twigged :-) Absolutely no security of any kind in this case. And bell push could operate any bell with a 1 in 3 chance of already being on the correct channel. Great for kids playing knocky door neighbours with far less chance of being caught!

Re: The last thing the world needs

"fast" and "slow" is relative. I suspect a jet engine powered cruise missile in "slow, fuel saving mode" is still quite quick in relation to a small, electric prop driven drone.

Re: Why

"If you're still manually controlling your headlights instead of leaving it to an automated system built into the car and paying more attention to the road, sigh."

Seriously? Knowing how and when to turn lights on or off is a distraction from driving? For a fraction of a second?

If automatic headlights actually worked *properly*, then maybe they would be a good idea. but they don't. The settings for switching on are massively over cautious, turning them on long before they are needed and leaving them on long after they are no longer needed. And I've yet to see an "automatic lights" system that even has the *concept* of side lights, let alone "know" when to use them. It's not unusual to be driving through a cutting and see peoples headlights come on and then remain on even though being back into bright sunlight when the sun is low in the sky and I still need sunglasses on as the road bends towards that low sun.

Many UK drivers seem to be unaware of The Highway Code rules on Lighting Requirements. Admittedly, there doesn't appear to be a rule telling you NOT to use headlights at certain times, but honestly, it's implied by when you MUST use them that outside of those conditions you probably ought not to be using them.

Sadly, there doesn't appear to be any rules on how bright headlights are allowed to be either, so those cars with high intensity lights are allowed on the roads, despite the fact that their "normal" dipped headlights, under certain normal road conditions are dazzling other drivers at times, which actually IS breaking the law. No one seem to care enough to do anything about it though. Or Volvos, which drive around with headlights permanently on.

I have little issue with LED headlights and other more modern forms of lighting most of the time, it's the high intensity ones which are the real issue. They stand out in a line of oncoming traffic because compared to all the other cars, they seem to be on full beam. Some of the very bright but more targeted headlights can be in issue over the brow of a hill or bumps in the road too as it can seem like a camera flashing going off in front of your or in the rear view mirror. Very distracting if not actually dazzling and often can seem like blue flashing lights when seen from a slightly off angle for a moment or two, especially in the rear view mirror.

Re: They copied all the source code, entered it into ChatGPT, and inquired about a solution

"Everything said during a session is not ingested into this model, because the model can't do that. It is trained once and if you want to put some more data in, you have to start training it again from scratch, so that never happens."

Really? That's a pretty shit model. Surely the whole point of an "AI" is that it can continue learning. That would be like a human leaving school and then never, ever learning anything new ever again. Obviously what it is allowed to learn would need to be curated since it's probably not a good idea for it take every session as gospel when $random users are interacting with it. I can see how easy it would be to "poison" an "AI" with say, a group of Redditors or 4Channers asking questions in conversation and report correct results as bad and vice versa, but basically marking a cut-off point in the "AI's" learning feels very very wrong.

Re: received the same response everyone else has been getting of late: a single poop emoji

"the Space Karen emoji "

And everyone named Karen across the world cried out in despair!

I do wish people would stop creating unneeded labels and others would stop promulgating them.

Re: what do I do with my dad on an 80th birthday?

And the "AI" chatbot responds with "what other ingredients do you have available and how many will you be serving at dinner?"

Re: Good enough

They're probably banking on an economic up-tick by the time the production line is ready to run in 2-3 years time.

"NTL as it was at the tine"

And for completeness, NTL:Telewest, as it was at the time, because prior to the VM branding, the smaller Telewest "bought" NTL in a weird kind of reverse takeover due to contractual agreements between Telewest and the UKTV channels which would have been null and void if NTL had instead bought Telewest and allowed UKTV to renegotiate a much more favourable contract with the no much larger entity.

Re: Wayland?

"The problem with Wayland's simplicity is that it pushes the complex problem of things like accessibility out to the app developer..."

And, unless things have changed, the Wayland team are NEVER going to copy or emulate the X11 client/server functionality. So when I want to run a graphical application remotely, I'll need an entire GUI running on the remote machine and have to use some kind of remote desktop tool instead of just doing an ssh -X $client and run the app I want with no other GUI or overhead running on $client. In effect, downgrading to the Windows RDS model because the X11 client/server model is too hard and they claim hardly anyone uses it.

Re: time limits stipulated in the UK's 2002 Enterprise Act

Investigations can take years when the issue is complicated and the company involved is global. The 6 month time limit relates to the time from the end of the market study to the issue of the notice of the beginning of the formal investigation.

From the article "The law, under the scenario advanced by Apple, requires that the CMA's June 15, 2021 market study notice be followed by a proposed investigation notice within six months – not a year later, on June 10, 2022, when the notice was actually published. Similarly, the law also requires the CMA to begin its consultation within six months rather than a year."

That implies there are no time limits on the market study or the later formal investigation, but only on the time between the end of the former and the notice announcement of the latter.

Re: Opening hours

Don't business bank accounts charge for each and every deposit and withdrawal there? Or is it just that that works out cheaper than the credit card charges? I know of businesses here in the UK that will only take debits cards because there's a fixed minimal fee per transaction, unlike credit cards which, I think, are a percentage of the transaction with a minimum charge higher than the debit card transaction.

Re: First to field

It's also worth remembering the the German military was very "unmechanised" in the main. They deliberately went about making sure newsreels etc only ever showed mechanized equipment while much of the infantry and supplies actually travelled on foot or in horse-drawn carts.

Re: Bring it on

Yeah, it's generating a strong feeling of Déjà vu in me.

I'm quite excited to see this all going on, but a definite feeling of "we already did all this years ago". Test launch to orbit,manned mission *around* the Moon and eventually an actual landing. I do hope that the US will be "achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." Oh, wait, that was 1963, not 2023 :-)