* Posts by Andy The Hat

1834 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2010

Astroboffins may have raged at Elon's emissions staining the sky, but all those satellites will be more boon than bother

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: Missing the point

In the UK if the sky is dark and you've got half decent eyesight then naked eye observation will deliver at least one per minute, often more than one ... The figures given are just pants.

Perhaps a visit to a dark sky area - "dark" not being a park in the middle of a city - would improve the reporter's perception of things?

This AI is full of holes: Brit council fixes thousands of road cracks spotted by algorithm using sat snaps

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: "saving more than £1m in taxpayer cash compared to more traditional methods"

Pay one man in a van to drive all the streets once a week with a sat nav or a mobile phone to assess and record all the hole positions (assessment is the manual un-costed part of the AI process). I guess with on-costs that's £30000. Perhaps they use five of them, or one senior executive to do this instead, say £250000 ... I'm still £750000 short of savings. I really can't see how they can save £1m pa in *finding* pot holes ...

Artful prankster creates Google Maps traffic jams by walking a cartful of old phones around Berlin

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: Ingenious

Just looked up the German lyrics and tried to sing them (in my head otherwise it would be mightily embarrassing!) but I just can't make them fit the music I remember.

If there's one thing worse than an ear worm is the stress of an ear worm that doesn't work!

WannaCry ransomware attack on NHS could have triggered NATO reaction, says German cybergeneral

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: NATO response

Evidence? Since when was that required?

In hindsight I hereby unrest my case ... :-)

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: NATO response

"They take out your health service computer network, so you could crash part of their power grid control system, but a missile into a single substation may cause less damage overall, ..."

Excuse my ignorance but who are "they"? (I said they did not know the where or who ...)

Unless you intend to stop the infection in your systems by blowing up your own electrical infrastructure and taking your infected systems offline is your idea, which may arguably work, but I feel would not be a wholly appropriate or sane response, I believe I have just well and truly rested my case against a military response ...

Andy The Hat Silver badge

NATO response

... infers a military response which infers a targeted response against a state or individual actors.

Isn't one of the issues that 'they' have no real idea of the where or who to target? It has been touted to be "The Norks" or "The Chinese" or "The Russians" but maybe five blokes in a bedsit in Basingstoke routing stuff around the world. Are we just going to lob missiles indiscriminately at a few million square miles of inhabited land hoping that we hit a 'responsible' person?

Follow the money and you'll find the perpetrators. Difficult, some would argue impossible, but the only reliable way ... We are not fighting a military campaign but in-your-face organised crime gang who, in the case referred to, have probably never heard of the NHS but they know their software has found an open network with lots of machines hanging off it which means a sizeable business and potential cash.

The biggest problem we have now is MS not giving security updates to Win7 - tens of thousands of users with apparently stable systems which will gradually and invisibly become less secure. I would like to see at least high security updates being mandated by the powers that be ... If you have a monopoly you must have your arm twisted to assume some responsibilty for the product if the product is flawed.

US's secret spy payload offloaded: Rocket Lab demos missile muscle with second Electron guided home

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: Er ...

But how the elephants get up there in the absence of an infinite improbability drive?

Amazon prime <click> ...

elephantidae <click> ...

African <click> ...

three <click>

Deliver to: new address <click> ...

New Zealand <click>

two hundred thousand feet<click>

If nobody answers leave on firey burny thing <click>

Is everything OK over there, Britain? Have you tried turning the UK off and on again? ISPs, financial orgs fall over in Freaky Friday of outages

Andy The Hat Silver badge

30% increase in traffic causing it to fall over? That's either incredibly short-sighted network management (by the bean-counters) or complete cobblers ...

It’s not true no one wants .uk domains – just look at all these Bulgarians who signed up to nab expired addresses

Andy The Hat Silver badge

All you have to do is show valid business or personal reasons for holding a .uk address ...

"I'm a scammer" I would suggest is not a valid business reason ...

BT: UK.gov ruling on Huawei will cost us half a billion pounds over next 5 years

Andy The Hat Silver badge

What rubbish! 'Half of them'? At least most :-)

I find it very strange that customers are happy to complain when there's a crackle on their landline or their home broadband is slow, yet they seem to put up with mobile voice signals that make two cups and a piece of string sound brilliant or have no mobile data signal whatsoever ... Surely the point of a mobile system is, well, to have a system that works when mobile?

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Perhaps what we need is an umbrella group that could assess the security of core infrastructure components before installation. We already have Huawei 'liasing' with GCHQ quite successfully and have apparently shown little to worry about (apart from the normal shoddy programming). However, the alternative core components should be equally assessed before installation for back doors, holes etc. Cisco, Samsung, Nokia ... After all, what's good for one should be good for all unless the UK Government wants to be accused of wilful and blatant bias against a company in the procurement process with no evidence of any security reasons for taking such actions.

Star wreck: There's a 1 in 20 chance a NASA telescope and US military satellite will smash into each other today

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: it would be like a car hitting a shopping cart

I apologise but I believe I made a unitary faux-pas. Isn't the correct El-Reg unit the Bulgarian Funbag?

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: it would be like a car hitting a shopping cart

What's that converted to Brazillian Funbags?

Accounting expert told judge Autonomy was wrong not to disclose hardware sales

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Nay nay and thrice nay!

I can't believe you sneakily led me to click on the screenshot from the "International Bean Counters Journal of Obfuscation Techniques" or whatever it's called ...

I am not an accountant but I actually read some of it accidentally. Is accountancy catching? Can I get cream for the itch and will my hair still fall out? Look at that nice speadsheet over there ... ARGGHHHH!

Just wrong, so wrong.

Curse of Boeing continues: Now a telly satellite it built may explode, will be pushed up to 500km from geo orbit

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Somewhat surreal

Gravity is amazing.

If my laptop batteries were going to explode in Southampton and I had to scoot up to Aberdeen to be on the safe side I'd be rather annoyed ...

Thank heavens for gravity and a toast to Newton, who decided things fall down and was obviously English. Up until that time Europe must have been a confused place with all that not falling in any predictable direction ... Come to think of it, if we invented it, did we copyright falling down? Perhaps a lever in the Brexit land grab negotiations ... "we demand Europe returns everything that falls down to us".

<Particularly strappy coat already on, sound of trolley wheels echoes in the corridor ... :-) >

Andy The Hat Silver badge

No, that's a Top Gear stunt ...

"Oops I accidentally reversed into a satellite sixteen times until it blew up. What a jolly jape!"

Mysterious face-recog AI startup Clearview sued, capabilities questioned after scraping billions of web pics

Andy The Hat Silver badge

The most detailed map of a brain cost $40m to build – and it’s of a fruitfly:

For God's sake don't tell Sarah Palin that! She'll be on a plane to Paris, Fraaaance quicker than an oil magnate humping Trumps's leg ...

Take DOS, stir in some Netware, add a bit of Windows and... it's ALIIIIVE!

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: Progress

2Mb? Loox-shury! Our specs were so low we had to power up the machines before we went to bed, lick the mouse balls clean with our tongues ...

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: apps ?

We ran programs but watched tv programmes. We stood mugs of tea on cork discs but stood mugs of tea on floppy disks ... err ... yes. The joy of inheriting US language. :-)

SLS goes vertical at Stennis while NASA practises SRB stacking

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Anyone know how, between the block 1 and block 2 crew, they intend to increase thrust by 3million pounds* to 11.8 million pounds? Four R25s is 2 million pounds and the srbs are 3.6 million ponds each so that is one heck of a step to make.

*sorry this is not in El Reg units. Perhaps one pound of thrust is generated by the hot air expelled by the Orange One during an average shouting session, sorry "speech" to his supporters? So the megaTrump would be a million pounds of thrust.

How do you generate thrust? If you're orange, just purse your lips and bellow ...

Chrome suddenly using Bing after installing Office 365 Pro Plus... Yeah, that might have been us, mumbles Microsoft

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Computer Misuse Act

If you give permission during an update (MS in this case) to update their OS or their applications, I would believe that such granted permission would allow the OS/Applications to change their own defaults which may impact the use of third party applications as you have accepted modification of the system. However you have not extended permission to changing the internal data of any third party application.

As a logical extension, MS could, using their same thought process, move your Thunderbird mail data to a Cloud based MS Outlook account "because it's easier for the OS to search..." or change all your Thunderbird server settings to MS accounts "because they are easier for the OS to administer and you wouldn't want to use non MS mail servers" or disable access to Adobe servers because MS Paint is very good ...

If a user has Chrome installed on an MS system it's because they've taken the decision to do so, it's not an OS default. Therefore the application must be regarded as 'personal' data for that user and the particular settings within it are certainly personal data.

The UK Computer Misuse Act makes modifying computer data without the owners express permission illegal. By admitting to fiddling with third party data for their own ends I believe what MS are doing constitutes a very fine tightrope which I would hope will break very soon ...

Fly me to the M(O2)n: Euro scientists extract oxygen from 'lunar dust' by cooking it with molten salt electrolysis

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Sounds a really good.

Perhaps the next idea will be how to get a mains extension lead, or at least a football pitch or ten of solar panels, to supply enough juice to boil a million fresh goose eggs?

Perhaps a pump and length of hose draped back to the Earth's atmosphere would be cheaper? Make the hose out of diamond and you could turn it into a space elevator too ...

Big Falcon explosion as SpaceX successfully demos Crew Dragon abort systems

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: NASA are paying Boeing more per-astronaut than they're paying SpaceX f

The abort system appears to be a mandated NASA safety test to show that in the event of a first stage failure the astronauts with be parachuted down safely. Yet, not only do Boeing avoid the slight problemette of failing to even achieve the the orbit and thus establish a safe docking procedure (apparently most of the bits worked ok) but they also get to avoid wasting money on the abort test because, presumable, most of the bits will work ok ...

So it's costing double for the Boeing launches, they have completed neither of the basic crew safety tests and still everything is 'ok' according to NASA.

I fail to understand. One major blip in manned spaceflight could set the whole programme back years and a proven technical misjudgement resulting in accident or death could threaten the very existence of NASA. Yet, whilst standing in the shadow of Challenger, NASA are still willing to take technical risks simply to save a third party's money and and some time ... The difference compared to Challenger is that they do have flight proven, viable alternatives and they could continue to operate whilst waiting for Boeing to complete their tests. The question therefore is why are NASA forging ahead with the untested Boeing programme, unless it's money talking? ... sorry perhaps I just answered my own question ...

The delights of on-site working – sun, sea and... WordPad wrangling?

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: Debug

debug

g=c800:5 to low level format an MFM or RLL drive IIRC ...

If you told a young'un nowadays that you didn't need a manufacturer's dedicated app downloaded from t'internet to hard format a drive they wouldn't believe you ...

I assume that command sequence wouldn't do anything any more ...?

Europe mulls five year ban on facial recognition in public... with loopholes for security and research

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Interesting link to more recent story

""would mean that the use of facial recognition technology by private or public actors in public spaces would be prohibited "

The question I would pose is: Is 'public space' defined only where living persons are physically present or is it an environment where they interact (social media etc)?

This relates directly to the case posted in another story so has direct relevance. Given 3bn persons' images trawled for an AI facial recognition database were apparently 'public' images, is the entire 'public' internet environment regarded as a 'public space' for the purposes of this facial recognition issue?

Image-rec startup for cops, Feds can probably identify you from 3 billion pics it's scraped from Facebook, YouTube etc

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Whether the weather ...

"Researchers at Google have trained a neural network to predict whether it’s going to rain up to six hours ahead of time by analyzing radar images."

Millions of pounds of hardware to look at the rainfall radar and tell me whether it will possibly rain in a little while ... when I occasionally do this it takes a few clicks of a mouse, mark one eyeball and a few seconds of slideshow met office images ...

However, in general, Lucy Verasamy does it for me ...

Privacy activists beg Google to ban un-removable bloatware from Android

Andy The Hat Silver badge

"Desist or I shall taunt you a second time!"

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Banning apps will not work as that could be blatantly misused by the dark side of the chocolate factory.

Simply insist that the OS supplied is a vanilla OS and only at primary user initialisation should it download all the 'required', verified apps from the Google Store. That would put all the devices default apps under the scrutiny of Google (for better or worse), they would be updatable via the store and all that is required on top of the vanilla os is a custom initialisation script to pull 'default' apps ... Post initialisation the device can be as bloaty as the maker wants but the device will still conform to some security/privacy standard (if that's what Google calls it).

Geoboffins find the oldest matter on Earth: Ancient stardust created before the Solar System formed

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Age is relative

I had a quick look at myself and, given one or two that may not be there naturally or at all, I found elements -

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,

And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,

And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,

And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,

Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,

And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,

And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium,

And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium ...

And (nearly) all were formed from the pre-solar system ... The scientists' rock may be old, but I'm just as old!

Google and IBM square off in Schrodinger’s catfight over quantum supremacy

Andy The Hat Silver badge

I see the future ...

"Google"

"Do you have a question Dave?"

"Yes Google. Using your super dooper new quantum computing power, can you tell me, when is the peak of a man's life?"

>Time passes ...

"Yes Dave. The answer is '42' ... I think."

"Pardon Google?"

"Well according to the output distribution, my best guess is '42' but it could also be 'chilli massala', 'octopus testicles' or 'the inevitably rubbish episodes of Doctor Who at Christmas'."

"How did you work that out Google?"

>Time passes ... a dwarf throws an axe ... It misses when it mysteriously turns into a not-actually-veggie plant burger and auto-deposits into the nearest bin ...

"My answer was based on the QC output which showed the demonstrable probability that consuming a portion of Octopus Testicle Chilli Massala with your mates whilst watching a Christmas episode of Doctor Who in the Pub and everyone winding up with fatal food poisoning actually decreases after the age of 42."

"Fatal?"

"Yes Dave, they're dead Dave"

"Octopus tescticles ..."

"No it's true. They're all dead Dave"

"Thank you Google. Now compute the likelihood that QC is a load of octopus testicles."

H0LiCOW: Cosmoboffins still have no idea why universe seems to be expanding more rapidly than expected

Andy The Hat Silver badge

And ...

this all of course relies on the standard candle actually being a standard candle. IIRC this was questioned in a paper a couple of days ago which, for a couple of reasons, will impact the CMB figures and the distance estimates used by this paper. On that basis the astro-boffinry may decide that astronomical distance measurement relying on that standard is invalid, thereby inferring that accelerating universe and dark energy are the results of spurious calculations ... unless it is and they aren't.

Fundamentally, if current measurements are right, we're wrong but if measurements are wrong we're right and can throw out the acceleration/dark energy stuff and worship at the feet of Hubble again ...

Dixons fined £500,000 by ICO for crap security that exposed 5.6 million customers' payment cards

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Up until 2013 all TV sellers had to provide tv purchaser information to TVLicensing by law so they had to take and pass on those customer details. They don't have to do that any more.

Andy The Hat Silver badge

I had this with the one month Experian "free trial" account - only requires basic info to set up an account but had to perform thirteen yoga positions with personal data to stop the account from the same email address a few days later ...

Windows 7 and Server 2008 end of support: What will change on 14 January?

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: I'm looking forward to this

CP/M was actually written in PL/M and was released only a year or so after K&R released their first development of C ...

What’s that Skippy? Google’s coughed up $330m in tax Down Under?

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Over a ten years so about £25million pa from a still developing company in Australia. Given the declared company figures, the Aussie tax office are doing much better than the UK HMRC's massive tax revenue of £14million ...

Post Office faces potential criminal probe over Fujitsu IT system's accounting failures

Andy The Hat Silver badge

How is it not easy to break the system?

Transaction conducted locally, Mrs X walks out with her pension, server database not updated due to datacomms errors and no server database transaction log entry generated. If transaction logging didn't record that comms error locally and deleted the the local transaction record as complete, rather than retrying the transaction, neither the client side nor or the server database will have records for audit but the SPM's till is light ...

I can't believe it's anywhere near that simple but, with the knots they're happily tying themselves into, I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Harley Street psychotherapist promoting her new book ...

You may have seen her name on other titles such as "The Ability to Make Money out of Psyco-twaddle", "How to Blame Others for Breathing and Get Cash", "Plenty of Wonga Here" and the forthcoming title "I Have Been Mentally Scarred Because I Was Called Slightly Brighter Than Average Before the Release of My Last Book" ...

Get a life Doctor.

Ever wonder how hackers could possibly pwn power plants? Here are 54 Siemens bugs that could explain things

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Siemens recommends administrators lock down the server from any sort of external network access.

Errr ... doh! :-) This is a damn infra-structure power plant not an IoT light bulb in Jonny's bedroom, I would hope that's *always* the case.

And then there were two: HMS Prince of Wales joins Royal Navy

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: Are lessons ever learned in time?

Obviously not - they let a French spy onboard disguised as an ambassador ... :-)

You cannae break the laws of physics, cap'n... Boffins call BS on 'impossible' black hole, fear readings were botched

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: Time for a kicking

Honest mistake? That's the sort of thing the peer reviewers are there for!

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Time for a kicking

This is a peer reviewed journal.

Several scientists reading the paper see basic problems with that paper.

It must question the quality of the official peer reviewers when they miss such a basic error.

Non-unicorn $700 e-scooter shop Unicorn folds with no refunds – after blowing all its cash on online ads

Andy The Hat Silver badge

This smells of fish ...

Income is from pre-orders and grants. Expenditure is down payment for manufacture and advertising.

"Competition from others made it more and more difficult to sell scooters." Never saw that one in the business plan ...

This is a classic take the money and run ... the bosses have had their cash so who gives a monkeys about the punters.

Now, anyone fancy investing in a Speccy clone I'm developing?

Huawei 5G kit in Faroe Islands: Chinese ambassador 'linked Huawei contract to ... trade deal' – report

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Can anyone explain ...

... why Denmark, that is a full member of the EU, is making trade deals with the Chinese?

According to the information during all of the Brexshit stuff, one thing we were not allowed to do as part of the EU is make unilateral trade agreements ...

I am somewhat confused.

Another senior Gov.UK bod makes a dash from public sector, falls into AWS's arms

Andy The Hat Silver badge

"...and turned over $850m in total last year"

Blimey, that must be about 15p in tax then ...

Hang on, forgot the tax incentives - the Government probably owes them £50m :-)

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Andy The Hat Silver badge

It's all in the 'title'

In the UK there are two types of people - ordinary folks and "professionals" who are able to sign off official documents like passports.

The professionals, it has been deemed, are a very select, especially trustworthy group that include teachers, doctors and farmers ...

As a person, who did a degree and a year's teacher training course and qualified last year at 23, I could sign off that passport as a 'professional person'.

As a person who is 18 and has land given to them by the family and farms it, I could sign off that passport as a 'professional person'.

As a person with the same degree as the teacher, a Masters, 20 years in industry, 10 years running my own company and the same size piece of land as the farmer that's a landscape garden, I'm not "professional" because my face doesn't fit ...

The refusal of the badge "engineer" is in my view the same - snobbery of the term.

At the local FE college the (less than) civil engineers, who have never been out of the office and wouldn't recognise a bridge if you hit them with it, refuse to refer to the staff in the mechanical engineering department as 'engineers' because they do not pay to be part of a professional body and have a shiny badge ... The fact that the mechanical engineers could design and manufacture the equipment to build the civil engineer's bridge seems to escape them ...

In tribute to Galaxy Note 7, BBC iPlayer support goes up in flames for some Samsung TVs

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Ironic

The BBC were quoted, when referring to the imminent demise of the red button service

"A spokesperson said the service would be stopped in early 2020 as the broadcaster needed to channel resources into “even better internet-based services”.

Does this mean the BBC are breaking the iPlayer for now but when they get the apprentice person, who currently types stuff into teletext news, transferred across they'll have the resources to fix it again?

FTC kicks feet through ash pile that once was Cambridge Analytica with belated verdict

Andy The Hat Silver badge

I believe the document reads (translated from the legalese) "Though shalt not share private data unless you're doing it clandestinely for the Government, paying tax on the profits of doing so or feathering the nest of corrupt politicians."

Samsung Galaxy S11 tipped to escalate the phone cam arms race with 108MP sensor

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: How do cameras with tiny diameter lenses offer high resolution?

Thank you for pointlessly reiterating the excellent material that is detailed in the article I linked from Mr Rockwell yet at the same time so kindly dissing the author for no obvious reason. You did of course make no attempt to address his final argument about the Bayer matrix reducing the effective resolution of a colour digital sensor ...

Andy The Hat Silver badge

Re: How do cameras with tiny diameter lenses offer high resolution?

After a web search I found https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/film-resolution.htm. There is an argument that to get the effective 35mm colour film 'resolution' would require a full frame digital sensor of 175Mp and even then it may not look as good as film due to its contrast response ...

Gravitons, Neoverse... you'd be forgiven for thinking AWS's second-gen 64-core Arm server processor was a sci-fi

Andy The Hat Silver badge
Alien

And now we wait

Graviton and Neoverse ... do we wait expectantly until Underverse comes?