* Posts by werdsmith

7096 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Feb 2011

Elon Musk orders Tesla execs back to the office

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Victorian values - what made Britain great.

Much of the Empire was gained by finding the local chiefs/leaders/kings etc and doing a deal promising them much wealth and benefits in exchange for controlling local resources and trade. The fighting was mainly against other European nations competing for the same lands or when the Imperialists didn’t deliver on what they promised the locals.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Ego Musk

For all the outer refinement of an electric Merc or Jaguar, "under the hood" they're still a few steps behind Tesla.

I would put Mercedes EQ cars ahead of Tesla, in fact they are eating Tesla’s lunch, especially the EQS which is ground up an EV. Jaguar haven’t followed up the I-Pace introduced 4 years ago, probably lack development funds.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Ego Musk

Model Y is available in the UK so it must pass local law.

It’s just not very popular though, because of its dodgy styling.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Land of the Free

I worked in several locations in the US and it was absolutely fantastic. However, I was there on secondment and didn’t really concern myself about my future within that part of the organisation. Had a blast!

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Tesla obviously don't use workday

All these time recorders are shit. So is the concept of time recording. Not one single time record ever is the truth. It’s all fudged, stretched and moulded to fit with no small amount of fiction.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Ego Musk

Tesla isn’t even a leader anymore, compared to the Mercedes EQ cars they are starting to look a bit of a joke. Putting too much effort into making ordinary cars into dragsters.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: 40 hours a week, minumum?

It was the late 80s and into the 90s that I remember people in the UK doing the long hours culture thing.

It mainly involved wasting time having pointless meetings, standing round chatting all day. Then sometime after 6PM there would be a who would blink first contest, because nobody wanted to be seen to be the first out.

Thankfully this is gone now, at some point people realised that you could get more out of people if you took care of them, I think we learned from the EU.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: 40 hours a week, minumum?

Therefore, employees did not really take time registration very seriously anymore and just put in some numbers. Nobody seemed to care.

I thought this was always the case everywhere. People fudge time recording to make it fit what management wants and it bears zero resemblance to actual activity. I’m considering using the software api to write an automatic time recorder using random values to add up to something about right.

TomTom to chop 10% of workforce, blames automation tech

werdsmith Silver badge

Pre-installed satnavs in many cars are TomTom, they are a supplier of these systems to many automotive companies.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: "Lifetime Updates"

There was a fuss about stopping lifetime updates, but it was misinformation. My ancient TomTom still gets updates, though I've had to cut Western Europe down to UK because the maps are bloated and won't fit anymore. When on trips with other people it always used to offer the better route than Garmin.

I always used proper SatNav units and not phones because, frankly, the phones were crap at it. But the TomTom has been languishing in a drawer for a few years because I've not had a car without built in SatNav for so long.

IBM's self-sailing Mayflower suffers another fault in Atlantic crossing bid

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Electrical problems

MSubs is the engineering partner. They are pretty good at marine engineering which I would guess is the reason that the vessel is still sound.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Electrical problems

Are you saying that MSubs Limited don’t employ marine engineers?

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Electrical problems

There is no evidence that the engineering is being done by software or IT people.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Electrical problems

I'm supposing they didn't install the 30 cent version from Costco, so how did that happen ?

I’m interested in the Costco wherever you are. Around here they are not a cheapo retailer.

Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go 2: $599 for 11th gen Intel CPU

werdsmith Silver badge

You are correct. People like to spew off this pub-bore talk without knowing what they are talking about.

4GB is not luxury performance, it does have some slow moments, but it does the job as long as the job is not too demanding. And that covers a lot of users.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: 4GB???

I guess there is plenty we don’t know then.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: 4GB???

I have a 4GB Windows 10 laptop as a work spare. It's perfectly fine for running Windows and general apps like browsers, office etc. I'm not going to attempt to use GIMP on it, as I don't have a week for it to load.

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Now Do an Article About the Top Ten Linux Apps

There's always one horsehair shirt wearer.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Not be happy ... to reinstall my OS from scratch every year or two

Does it matter?

France levels up local video game slang with list of French terms to replace foreign words

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Programmers complaining about languages

Could the same thing happen to Python?

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: E-sports professionals?

Sport = Hunting Animals.

Game = The animals that are hunted.

Strange language.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Now that is a fine example of administrative busybodies

It's worth remembering that a "week day" in English means the working week Monday to Friday and excludes Saturday Sunday which are also part of a week but not week days.

NASA's 161-second helicopter tour of Martian terrain

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: which then relay that data back to Earth at between 500Kb/s to around 3Mb/s

RF is an amazingly effective medium for transmission when there is line of sight without hard obstructions.

The Ionosphere doesn't even trouble the signal too much at the frequencies involved.

Consider your own retina can receive the reflected sunlight from Mars without too much trouble if you point your eyes in the right direction. It's more effective with a telescope. So replace telescope with directional gain antenna, and you have your RF link with only noise to worry about.

New York City rips out last city-owned public payphones

werdsmith Silver badge

I remember 2p to make a local call, the beeping sound that released the slot so the coin could drop in and the call would connect. Then those bizarre green phone cards. Also, the convenience of a traditional phone box was too convenient for drunk Busby on his way home from the pub. They stank.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Mommy Mommy I don't understand!

Call me (call me) on the line

Call me call any anytime

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Word Star

I just wrote AX25 when I meant RS232 because I was fishing around in my memory and they are both in there.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Nobody's mentioned LaTeX yet?

I still use a for, of if to put maths up on web pages.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: WordPerfect

The PC’s memory also creaked when you did that.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Word Star

WordStar on CP/M used an 8080 or Z80 computer with 8 inch floppy drive and no display. It talked to a “VDU” like a VT100 DEC compatible terminal over AX25. How I had to adapt quickly from my home micro experience into business personal computing. The computers had a “card cage” with separate boards for disk, comms and CPU slotting into edge connectors on the BUS board.

I feel my youth coming back.

A>

UK opens national security probe into 2021 sale of local wafer fab to Chinese company

werdsmith Silver badge

What took Kwast so long?

We have bigger targets than beating Oracle, say open source DB pioneers

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Oracle and MySQL

If you just need a database, just a transactional database to do a general job then Postgres or MariaDB.

MySQL carries the risk of Oracle coming after you with lawyers.

Postgres has spatial extensions, it's excellent and I love it. Even though I've made a lot of career out of commercial databases.

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Software Junk

I run an old Toshiba Chromebook with Linux. It's very old, I bought it many years ago and it was already used.

Vehicle owner data exposed in GM credential-stuffing attack

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Sure, blame the victim

I work on systems that are secured down so tightly that I can't get into them, even though I officially have access. It starts with a 2 factor authorised VPN with local certs that I can only use from an secure-issue laptop that is locked down so I can't change anything. Once that VPN is up then I connect to a virtual desktop, and then from there I start one of another selection of similar VPNs depending on which part of the network I am working on. I connect into that next part of the network on another virtual desktop, from which I can use tools to reach the resources I am after. I frequently forget how to reach some parts of the system that I don't often access. Before I can do any of that I have to have a current DV clearance.

No GM customer is going to tolerate that.

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Forbidden Fruit

Malum.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: That input problem

Alternatively, why don't we have physical QWERTY keyboards on phones any more?

The market isn't interested. And the manufacturers don't want to be making so many different versions of keyboard layout for whatever territory, when you can just make a soft keyboard. You can seek out a Planet Computers phone if you like. They have just about found enough interest to create three evolutions of it. I use their first one, Gemini because it allows me to ditch Android. Not interested in any of their follow ups.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Crap article

But you could ignore it and use your own choice.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Crap article

What if you wanted to buy an alternative ECU for your Toyota and also wanted to keep your five year warranty?

Or indeed, if you wanted to fit a different engine, or bolt a turbo onto your existing engine within your five year warranty period? Of course you could do it with a bit of hacking.

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Just a quick question.

Le Manège enchanté. if you name your servers after stars.

The dog was actually a British character.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Just a quick question.

We must have all seen it on the instruction manuals that come with cheap electronic devices from far away.

"When folding, please fold back the Show arms and then folded in front of the arm, Expand the opposite!"

This from Eachine E58 folding drone quadcopter.

Microsoft sounds the alarm on – wait for it – a Linux botnet

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Dear Microsoft.

Before you start crowing about how insecure the competition can be, take a look at your own utterly abysmal track record of fatal security flaws

Here we go again. Whataboutery of the first order. The massive chip on the shoulders of people who have to make this about OS wars was amusing but seems increasingly emotionally immature.

Dear Microsoft, Thanks for the help MS, we will address this and be ready for the inevitable next one. Any more help you can give us, will be more than welcome. Because that's how the grown ups operates.

Start your engines: Windows 11 ready for broad deployment

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: The bottom line is anyone who values their freedom has to switch to Linux

Why Linux? Hopefully there are other alternatives without having to dirty yourself on Linux.

FreeBSD 13.1 is out for everything from PowerPC to x86-64

werdsmith Silver badge

Imagine yourself being lectured in a condescending and sanctimonious fashion by Jeff Albertson.

werdsmith Silver badge

FreeBSD. Where I get time I will be looking at this as a possible escape from the toxicity of Linux. I’m not talking about the usability or functionality, I mean the stigma of the Linux world.

America bucks global smartphone decline with help from Apple

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: eWaste 'Я' US

Apple has realized that this is coming, which is why they want to offer a leasing scheme: you pay them $X per month, and they'll keep sending you their latest shiny, every year.

So a scheme that’s already been normal for some years, Apple will adopt it and call it their own? Where have I heard that before?

Voyager 1 space probe producing ‘anomalous telemetry data’

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: 41 hours of latency sounds bad...

It's as good as, if not better than, some of the LoRa links I've messed with.

Will this be one of the world's first RISC-V laptops?

werdsmith Silver badge

Absolute bullshit. I would buy a RISC V laptop tomorrow but that quite elderly windows laptop with a UK keyboard is never going to be it.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Obvious Fake is Obvious

It's even got a £ sign on the 3 key. A UK keyboard, so not even a decent attempt to hoax us. If it was in China I don't expect a UK keyboard. A US one might be believable.

Microsoft-backed robovans to deliver grub in London

werdsmith Silver badge

Yhey don't have far to go, they are short range delivery vehicles.....

Yes, people do tend to make a big deal when one does something strange. But there are thousands of deliveries on the 200 vehicle MK fleet that go without a hitch. Starship reached over 1 million deliveries last year. So they are doing OK.