* Posts by Kernel

766 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Nov 2011

Tesla's autonomous lane changing software is worse at driving than humans, and more

Kernel

Re: Tesla test coverage?

"Whoops! Added to the list for V2.0 - thanks for being a beta tester!"

We hope the wreath arrived - the florist promised they'd get it to the crematorium on time.

We also extend our condolences to your nearest and dearest.

That's a hell of Huawei to run a business, Chinese giant scolds FedEx after internal files routed via America

Kernel

Re: the real enemy

The US has to get hold of 5G technology somehow, least they be left (further) behind the comms infrastructure of developed countries.

Kernel
Trollface

Re: Youtube link - NOT "Edinburgh, Scotland", thank you.

"Just "Edinburgh". WE know where it is."

I'm sure you do - but the difference between you and the rest of us is that WE know there is more than one 'Edinburgh' in the world.

If servers go down but no one hears them, did they really fail? Think about it over lunch

Kernel

Re: "Black power"

Many years ago I was asked to take a look at a hifi system that no longer worked. This system had been transported from the US to New Zealand (along with a lot of other 110 volt home appliances) by a a couple who had moved to NZ so the husband could take up a position at our local university.

For some reason this couple were under the impression that they wouldn't be able to get normal household appliances here so they brought everything with them - anyhoo, checking the amplifier I found that most of the transistors were stuffed. It wasn't until sometime later that my ex revealed that the lady of the house had plugged the amp in to 240 volts using a stack of adaptors that supposedly not only matched up the plug and socket, but would drop the 240V to 110V as well - guess which bit she forgot to use.

Kernel

Re: re One should always check the current standards for voltage before plugging in

"Now many devices (especially portable ones) can adapt automatically to the voltage it finds."

There's a trap here in that a device (such as a phone, tablet or laptop) sold in 'rest of world' will typically come with a power supply that can handle 110 or 230/240 volts, but the exact same device in the US market will often come with a purely 110 volt power supply.

Let's make laptops from radium. How's that for planned obsolescence?

Kernel

Re: Stop it.

"With the cost of disposal having already been paid, and that money having been thoughtfully distributed to councils and other entities responsible for our waste, it would have the effect of cutting council tax, be squandered on totally unrelated things, "

There, fixed that for you.

That magical super material Apple hopes will hit backspace on its keyboard woes? Nylon

Kernel

Re: Apple keyboard malfunction issues and IFixit.

"My first encounter with computers was via a teletype (a keyboard that would come out better than you if you decided to hit it!) which probably still has an effect on the way I type!"

Generally teletypes responded better to the rhythm typing technique rather than the more familiar touch typing.

My wife was, in the past, a telegraph operator (yep, including morse code) and learnt typing on a Gentex 100% mechanical teletype - even today she still sometimes breaks into rhythm typing on her laptop once she gets going on a sentence.

WikiLeaks boss Assange acted as a foreign spy, Uncle Sam exclaims in fresh rap sheet

Kernel

Re: This will be fun to watch...

"Though I suddenly think that in one case in particular, which is treason, the law is probably more strict with citizens than foreigners... I guess?"

Can a person actually commit treason against a country they aren't a citizen of?

I can't see how - in fact, it's not entirely unheard of for a citizen of country A to be required under threat of punishment to carry out actions against country B which make them a hero in country A but a traitor if, as a citizen of country B, they took the same actions against country B.

NASA boffins may just carve your name on a chip and send it to Mars if you ask nicely

Kernel
Facepalm

They've got to find funding for the space craft somehow, and selling your details to earthly marketing companies seems to work for other organisations..............

Twist my Arm why don't you: Brit CPU behemoth latest biz to cease work with Huawei – report

Kernel

Re: Since when have...

"There are a LOT of things sold in the US that have ARM licensed chips irrespective of where they are made.

Like a Mafioso protection racket: "Would be a shame if all those things couldn't be sold any more"

Do you really not see the problem those two statements describe - and I don't mean a problem for ARM.

Uncle Sam to blow millions on mind-control weapon tech that can be fitted without surgery

Kernel

"allow a blind person to see using the eyes of someone sighted, by reading the sighted person's brainwaves as they look around, and wirelessly stimulating neurons in the blind subject's brain to project the sighted person's view into their mind. "

The beginning of the evolution of what will eventually become the Babelfish! - now we know how it came about.

Oh 4G, I'm speechless: EE network outage smacks rare breed of customer that talks into their mobile phone

Kernel

"and thousands of Openreach engineers which means we cant use the callback systems."

No joking matter - the call out engineers for one of my customers now have dual SIM cellphones, with the second SIM on a competitor's network, after a major failure on their own cell network meant they had extreme difficulty contacting anyone that could fix it.

Now Chinese-made drones rubbing US govt up the Huawei: 'Strong concerns' DJI kit threat to national security

Kernel

Re: Been Asleep Long?

"Like Huawei, it's a camel's nose in the tent,"

Does that mean that Cisco is the camel's arse?

Kernel

Re: Start offering evidence

"So.. help me out. how do i untether it and make it my OWN controllable camera?"

The obvious solution, and the one that I had in mind, was not buying a camera that was tethered to a cloud server in the first place - my local electronics store has a number of such devices available off the shelf - they even sell complete systems with cameras and server that you can install at home and configure however you want.

As with many technical things, research before purchase, not purchase before research.

For a start, here is one link to setting up the necessary VPN server at your home - as a side advantage, once you've got this set up and working you will have secure* access to all your home network, including any NAS, printers, etc. I also use it when connected to public WiFi as I am confident that my fibre connection at home is less easy to hack than some random WiFi access point with the password prominently displayed.

https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-vpn-server/

If you enter "set up vpn server on rasp pi" into DuckDuckGo (or Google, if you must) you will get a number of links that will guide you through doing this, some may suit your needs better than others.

I personally have found DuckDNS to be a reliable way of dealing with having a dynamic IP address on my home internet connection, but I've no doubt there are other such services for a similar price ie., free. I've set my system up to ping DuckDNS every 5 minutes, so I'm never more than 5 minutes away from being able to access my VPN should the IP change.

*secure against the casual hacker, not necessarily secure against determined law enforcement, criminals or government level spooks.

Kernel

Re: Start offering evidence

"So you want internet access to you home video? You need a Google/facebook/Huawei/Mi/younameit account."

Or you could go to your local electronics store, purchase a few cameras, an off the shelf security video server and something of the nature of a Raspberry Pi and set up a VPN to allow you remote access to your own standalone system - no accounts needed.

Your statement might be valid on a consumer forum, but I'd like to think that here we can come up with a few more options.

Russian bots are just for rigging US elections? They hit home, too: Kid stripped of crown in TV contest vote-fix scandal

Kernel

"Sad but true that Russia has a corruption problem, always has had, and always will have."

So you're saying this is somehow more reprehensible than a another large country that allows lobbyists paid by large companies to push fat brown envelopes in the general direction of politicians and government officials?

Yes, communist regimes do have a corruption problem - but at least they do deal with the problem in a significant manner when it becomes a major public issue.

Big Tech leapt on the blockchain bandwagon but its applications are stuck in cryptocurrency

Kernel

Re: Coffee chain

"What exactly would be the benefit of a blockchain in such a system, compared to a traditional centralized tracking system? I'm guessing there's no real benefit, just substantial costs."

More importantly, if the bean is going to end up at Starbucks why would anyone worry about its adventures before it got there - what happens to it after they've got their greasy little paws on it is sufficiently horrific that anything that happened to it before then pales into insignificance - no, since you ask, I don't consume Starbucks' made up coffees, even with a double shot of triple distilled unicorn pee.

Quit worrying about killer robots, they are coming whether you like it or not – and they absolutely will not stop

Kernel

Re: Has anyone...

"Spoken to the Norks about these treaties? Iran too (to a lesser extent)?"

Never mind them - there's another country that fancies itself as defender of the world which has a history of not signing up to treaties intended to make war more 'humane', along with a reluctance to hold its military to account for the occasional events that most other countries consider to be war crimes.

Japan's mission to mine Mars' moon is cleared – now they've filled out the right paperwork on alien world contamination

Kernel

Re: Almost no gravity

A self-feeding drill, similar to an auger bit used for low speed drilling into wood?

Kernel

Re: Too much fuss about contamination

"You could easily survive there with a suitable space suit. However, if you were on Earth (already wearing that space suit), and something hit you hard enough to propel you to the Moon, how do you rate your chances?"

For myself (or for that matter, any other life form big enough to be visible) not very highly - but as they say, F=ma, so if you have as little mass as a virus does then the force needed to produce the necessary acceleration is not that great.

A flea can jump to many times it's own height and land safely afterwards - why can't elephants do the same?

Hi! It looks like you're working on a marketing strategy for a product nowhere near release! Would you like help?

Kernel

Re: Cost centers

"- Mostly they're the other type. 18yr old secondary grad working PT as a team lead at McDonalds who decides they telling others what to do. "

It gets worse than that - many years ago I did a Management Studies diploma at university - the professor who took us for the HR module had left school, gone straight into uni and worked her way up to a PhD and a Management Studies chair - her entire work experience of actually managing staff was an 18 month stint in charge of an admin group at the same university.

Sushovan Hussain told me to fiddle revenues, says Autonomy sales chief

Kernel

Re: @STOP_FORTH

"They may be right, until something bites the customer on the bum that a specialist would have avoided..."

If I had to guess, I would say that the necessary chip will be phased out in the interests continuous improvement making more money and the only way forward will be to purchase the new and improved Agilent 9001 device - for an eye-watering price.

Amazon agrees to stop selling toxic jewelry, school supplies to kids, coughs up some couch change ($700,000)

Kernel

Re: "I've been a customer of theirs since 1999 when they only sold books"

"However, Chinese companies have already been found guilty of putting lead into almost everything under sun, including milk formula. What kind of utter asshole thinks that was a good idea is beyond me."

I have read that lead has a sweet taste, so it is possible someone though it was a good way to reduce the sugar content - it would also be a way to get the right package weight while including less actual product.

You will probably be horrified if you search Youtube for clips about 'gutter oil' as well.

Tech giants get antsy in Northern Virginia: Give us renewable power, there's a planet to save... and PR to harvest

Kernel

"Dominion seems to get 18% of its energy from coal as well, something this article should have mentioned.

That was my first thought - what's going to be the effect on Viginia's coal industry and it's employees, and who are the state government going to care about most - the likes of Goggle, or the people who vote for them?

CryptoQueen on the run from Feds, lawsuit after her OneCoin slammed as 'an old-school pyramid scheme on a new-school platform'

Kernel

" 'an old-school pyramid scheme on a new-school platform'"

So, not too much different to any other crypto-currency then - other, perhaps, than this one was streamlined by removing the whole tedious and increasingly expensive mining process from the equation (or apparently, lack of equation in this case).

Portal to 'HELL' cracks open in street – oh sorry, it's just another pothole

Kernel

Re: "The motor was able to clamber out of the Hellgate"

We have a place named "Hell's Gate" in New Zealand, complete with steam, boiling mud and much smell of sulphur in the air - but I certainly wouldn't recommend trying to drive in through it, or even stray off the paths.

NordVPN rapped by ad watchdog over insecure public Wi-Fi claims

Kernel

Re: In all fairness

"But I was talking specifically about making WiFi connections secure in the face of the inadequacy of WPA2. "

I'm with JohnFen on this - if I'm using WiFi anywhere, especially public WiFi, the connection is via VPN to my own VPN server at home. Having once seen how effective a DNS cache poisoning app on an Android tablet was at intercepting traffic from individual devices on a public WiFi network, I'm going to side with NordVPN on this one. Everything, and I mean everything, was displayed in clear text on the intercepting tablet.

True, my traffic could then be intercepted between my home and destination, but intercepting the fibre connection under my desk is probably beyond the skill set of the average 'l33t h@k0r'.

Cool story, brew: Utah karaoke crooners receive cold, refreshing shock as alcohol authority refuses beer licence

Kernel

Re: me no understand

"There was an era where drunks hassling church-goers was a thing."

In the US there was also a period where church-goers were hassling drunks - they called it "Prohibition", and we all know the great contributions that made to today's US society.

Take a hike: Grab a flask of tea – South Korea is opening hiking trails in the DMZ

Kernel

Re: I quite like tourist trails...

"... but I'm not sure where I stand on landmines"

I believe slightly to one side/not at all is the usual recommendation from the manufacturers -it's in the "Getting Started" section of the handbook, normally found immediately after the page that says "Congratulations on your purchase of the new and improved Acme landmine. For best maiming and killing results please read this handbook completely before attempting to use the product."

Don't be Russian to judgement but... Bloke accused of $1.5m+ tax filing biz hack, fraud

Kernel

Something's wrong here

"If convicted, he faces up to 27 years in the slammer. "

Wouldn't it cost the US taxpayers considerably less if the US government, out of the goodness of their hearts, just gave another $1.5M to those who were defrauded and wrote off the loss?

Parents slapped with dress code after turning school grounds into a fashion crime scene

Kernel

Re: I'd ban North Face clothing.

"I'm having a hard time visualizing where one would want to wear pink camouflage as camouflage implies "not being seen"."

But you're assuming that all animals have the same level of colour vision that we humans do - and that's not the case.

Even for humans, in dense bush (such as in NZ where I live) orange, red and pink will fade to grey as soon as the sun began to set in heavy bush areas - my son, who is a hunting type, tells me that colours such as NATO Blue are the best for standing out in such circumstances.

Camouflage needs to be customised to a specific environment to be effective.

Now, how to boost fibre throughput to a stonking 240Gbps? With frikkin' spin-lasers, of course

Kernel

Re: Bollocks.

"The point of this is that you can increase the bit rate *per transmitted frequency*. Yes you can fire multiple frequencies to up the overall bandwidth, but this allows each frequency itself to be increased too.

But you go ahead and assume you know best. Let me plump up that armchair for you."

I think you may be the one assuming that you know best.

Current DWDM systems transmit at up to 500Gbs using paired frequencies or 260Gbs per single frequency - the systems I work with transmit up to 99 different frequencies (we usually call them 'lambdas' in the trade), with 260Gbs per lambda currently being the more common.

The company I work for is actually in the process of phasing out some of its older 260Gbs transponders and replacing them with improved items - longer reach, better error correction. So yeah, 260Gbs per lambda, over distances measured in 100's of km without regeneration and with remotely controllable routing of individual lambdas along the way, is old tech.

Such products have been available from companies such as Cisco, Cienna, Nokia (Alcatel-Lucent) and Huawei for several years.

Cops use bread and riot shields in desperate bid to contain crazed swan running amok in streets

Kernel

Re: Not what it appears

"Frequently enough to not be a black swan event, then?"

So that would be several hundred times a day then?

Here in NZ black swans are not only common, they're considered to be a pest species - white swans on the other hand are very rare birds indeed and I haven't seen one of them in the wild for years.

NASA's first all-woman spacewalk outside ISS cancelled – due to lack of spacesuits that fit

Kernel

Re: Batteries

"Inside the passenger compartment....??? So when you go to refuel it, you put the hose in through a door or window? No wonder the downvotes."

Not unheard of - many years ago my father owned an earlier model Landrover (Series 2, I think) in which the fuel tank was the support for the driver's seat - refueling involved lifting the seat, removing the filler cap and adding petrol from the hose which was either passed through the window, or, more conveniently, through the driver's door.

NASA admin: What if we switched one delayed SLS for two commercial launchers?

Kernel

Re: What was good enough for Challenger...

"I guess it's possible my downvoter isn't familiar with the particulars but if Mr Bridenstein isn't familiar with it, that's a problem in-and-of itself. Because it's Challenger that makes his attitude seem so utterly mind-bendingly out-of-touch, insensitive, and hubristic."

No, my guess is that your downvoter had spotted that you didn't fully comprehend the article - to quote

" We need to consider all options to meet the Exploration Mission-1 target launch date of June 2020, including launching on commercial rockets. pic.twitter.com/fR5b2NzPtg

— Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) March 13, 2019"

What he is saying here is that they need to consider whether they should look at buying space on commercial services that are currently flying in order to achieve this particular goal, rather than just blindly continue with their own project which has yet to leave the ground and miss the target.

There's nothing in there where he says they should deliberately risk lives with an unproven launch platform just to meet an arbitrary timeline.

It seems a fairly enlightened and pragmatic approach from what is a (presumably) very clever but still none-the-less civil servant - maybe if you were to consider it in terms of your next holiday - should you book seats on a commercial airline operating an aircraft they've bought from Boeing or Airbus, or would now be a good time to start designing your own plane and learning how to fly it?

IBM so very, very sorry after jobs page casually asks hopefuls: Are you white, black... or yellow?

Kernel

Re: Not really someone to hire

"I never tire of reminding people that IBM played a big role in the Holocaust, conducting censuses and helping those trains to the concentration camps run on time..."

Don't forget to also remind people that the unfortunates carried on those trains were trucked to the stations in Ford and GM trucks built for the German army - and the guards and drivers were probably refreshing themselves with a beverage (Fanta) supplied by the CocaCola company at the time.

It all hinges on this: Huawei goes after Samsung with its own foldable hybrid Mate X

Kernel

"Honestly, never understood the multi-screen thing. If your screen is adequately sized (and 22" and above LCDs are dirt-cheap), you don't need a second screen at all. I'm not even talking 4K resolution either."

One of the neat things about the internet is that there is always at least one person who is firmly convinced that if they don't have a need for some particular item or feature, then there is no possibility that anyone else could.

Personally, I usually have three screens at work - one showing multiple sessions of the customer's system I'm working in at the time, one showing the various manuals and fault finding/fixing processes related to that system and the third one (usually the actual laptop screen) with email, Jabber and similar stuff on it.

If you really don't understand the need for more than one screen I'd venture to suggest you don't really deal with any but the most superficial level of problems.

Treaty of Roam: No-deal Brexit mobile bill shock

Kernel

Re: So predictable !

"Some even knew that Churchill himself believed that a 'United States of Europe' was the future ideal to prevent future catastrophic wars on this continent."

Never mind Churchill - I've read that Henry VIII had a few thoughts in a similar vein.

I have to say that, from an outsider's point of view, it does look as though a lot of UK citizens don't want to have anything at all to do with the EU - except for those parts that are to their advantage.

Worried about Brexit food shortages? North Korean haute couture has just the thing

Kernel

Re: Ahh...

"Yes. As an example, we have two days supply of toilet paper in the UK. Any sort of blockage at Dover would mean that supply dries up very quickly."

Yes, I would imagine that after a couple of days you'd definitely be hoping that it dries very quickly.

Sprint subscribers: What do your updated iPhone and Tonga have in common? Both are cut off from the world

Kernel

Re: Break?

There are many possibilities - the obvious ones are ship's anchors in shallower waters, earthquakes, currents dragging the cable around, curious whales or sharks nibbling on them (yes, it does happen) and some deep sea shrimp that apparently take a fancy to the outer covering (some type of plastic) of the deep sea sections, thus letting in water which trips the power feeding to the amplifiers.

Fake broadband ISP support scammers accidentally cough up IP address to Deadpool in card phish gone wrong

Kernel

Re: Dirty Scammers

"The longest I have kept them on the phone was just under 1 hour,"

Well done!

I managed 35~40 minutes once - we were 10 minutes into the conversation before he asked if my PC was turned on, to which I replied something along the lines of "No, does it need to be?". The rest of the time was spent figuring out that I was running Linux on that particular PC, plus a small allowance for personal abuse and a graphic description of what he was going to do to my wife - she said to tell to make sure he washed the smell of the goat he last f***ed off first, so I did.

I thought this generous offer on my wife's part might have helped cement an international friendship, but he's never called back so I guess I got that wrong.

The Large Hadron Collider is small beer. Give us billions more for bigger kit, say boffins

Kernel

Re: Dark matter/energy question

"Is there a reason there can't be multiple experimental facilities at multiple locations?"

Provided the money can be found, none what so ever - on the other hand, finding enough suitably qualified people to staff them all and run them in a productive manner might be a different story.

I suspect that having all the people of different nationalities working with this sort of technology in one place also puts a brake on any thoughts regarding the potential of weaponizing it - such thoughts come easier to individual governments when the facilities and staff are all in-country and under their control.

Huawei’s elusive Mr Ren: We’re just a 'sesame seed' in a superpower spat

Kernel

Nothing like the smell of ethics first thing in the morning.

"He reverse-engineered a piece of industrial equipment required for synthetic fibre production, and won national fame "

“My little invention was exaggerated into something really big and it was promoted in various media outlets, including newspapers, magazines, movies, etc. And because of such massive publicity, luckily I was chosen to be a member of the National Science Conference.”

No, you didn't invent anything - you copied what someone else's technology and then proceeded to profit from the act, completely ignoring any IP rights the original developer may have had.

Maybe the Chinese words for 'rip-off' and 'invent' are the same.

Oh Deer! Poacher sentenced to 12 months of regular Bambi screenings in the cooler

Kernel

Re: 'Murica never ceases...

"There may be some place that hunting at night is allowed, but I don't know of any."

In New Zealand 'spotlighting" for the brush-tailed possum seems to be a common hunting activity, the more so since there's no seasonal restrictions and no daily bag limit - the more the merrier, in fact.

I'm not a hunter myself, but it's a common activity so I would guess that it's probably legal.

A Christmas classic: Cloudera founder asks staff to stay another day

Kernel

Re: It depends on the company whether it's worth it or not.

"I decided to leave a workplace. I was contracted with a one-month notice period, and they couldn't find/train anyone in that time, so I stayed for three months and recruited my replacement. "

Yes, that can be a good move if it suits your plans - but there's a big difference between staying on for a couple of extra months to help out a company operating in 'business as usual' mode, as opposed to turning down a viable job offer so you can stay to the bitter end at a company that's not only up for sale but has already indicated that there will be redundancies should the sale go ahead.

One is a good idea, the other is generally a very bad idea.

For fax sake: NHS to be banned from buying archaic copy-flingers

Kernel

Re: Ban a system that works and is malware free*...

"Fax machines goes back to the 60's . Just most folks could not afford them"

Actually, the first commercial fax service started between Paris and Lyon in 1865, with the network being extended to Marseille in 1867 - Bell received his telephone patent in 1876, 9 years later.

The first experimental fax system successfully developed was by Alexander Bain, working on it between 1843 and 1846 - the quality wasn't too great, but by 1867 it had improved and wasn't too much different from the early thermal printing types that we are familiar with.

In other words, fax was over 100 years old before most of us had even heard of it.

Dine crime: Chippy sells deep fried Xmas dinner

Kernel

Re: Xmas dinner?

"That's not xmas dinner! Where's the cranberry sauce, stuffing, bread sauce, bacon, prunes and roasties? "

That's not Xmas dinner either - green salad, cold potato salad, cold ham, maybe a BBQ'd sausage or steak for those who want something hot, cold beers under the shade of a nice tree in the back yard - that's Xmas dinner.

Intel eggheads put bits in a spin to try to revive Moore's law

Kernel

Re: Other Good Consequences

"Even if Moore's Law coming to an end doesn't lead to ingenious new architectural ideas, it will have the result that computers won't become obsolete every few years. "

Aah no - the hardware vendors will just need to have a talk with their software vending mates and all will be good (in their world, at least) again.

No, you haven't gone deaf – the Large Hadron Collider has been wound down for more upgrades

Kernel

"Scale it up and everything in the entire universe works on the same basis at a massive scale;"

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the problem is not the physics of scaling up from sub-atomic particles - the problem is that what happens when you scale down from there is not consistent with what happens when you scale up.

Analogue radio is the tech that just won't die

Kernel

"@Korev I got an unlocked S9 for less than sim free price on a 24 month contract. I was effectively getting the minutes and data for free. Contracts are not always bad value."

Agreed! - I would've saved a whole NZ$10.00 by purchasing contract-free upfront instead of on a 24 month contract.