* Posts by Uffish

861 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Aug 2012

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BT: 'Quantum radios' could boost 5G network range

Uffish

Boffinish

Apparently calling an antenna a receiver is part of the new order.

Mirror mirror on sea wall, spot those airships, make Kaiser bawl

Uffish
Pint

Re: Tucker Microphones

Many years ago one of our teachers, he of the two tin legs, described the spaced microphone system. He said the hot wire sensors were mounted on Helmholtz resonators, whether made of kilner jars or not, he didn't say. He also said that the time of arrival to distance plotting was done with horse tail hairs. It is really good to have this more complete information after 60 years.

Google fined €500m for not paying French publishers after using their words on web

Uffish

Re: "fair use"

US law is US law, French and EU law is French and EU law. In this case there seems to be up to half a million Euros of difference between the two systems.

Enough, probably, to make even a big rival to Qwant pause for thought.

Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 Gen 8: No boundaries were pushed in the making of this laptop – and that's OK

Uffish

"the factor"

Nope. It's because it works (for me) much better than the other solutions.

I never felt the need to move up from two finger typing because most of the stuff I have typed has been text composed in my head and two finger typing is plenty fast enough for that.

Dutch officials say Donald Trump really did protect his Twitter account with MAGA2020! password

Uffish

Re: it's utterly messed up

One: - the USA elected Trump. That was an utter mess-up.

Two: - the USA didn't elect Trump for a second term. Not a mess-up.

Three: - Biden defeated Trump. Not a mess-up, a pretty spectacular achievement in fact, given the state of American irrationality.

Dear USA, congrats on your new President elect and try to stay sane in future.

How the US attacked Huawei: Former CEO of DocuSign and Ariba turned diplomat Keith Krach tells his tale

Uffish

Reads like a Hollywood Movie

Slightly aged good guy says enough is enough and takes on young,fit and nasty bad guy and wins. Standard script "based on a true story".

Windows kernel vulnerability disclosed by Google's Project Zero after bug exploited in the wild by hackers

Uffish

Shock news “El Reg is available on the web”

Anyone can read it and benefit from it. Many do. Many of those know what IOCTL does, some don’t - so what.

I mainly come here for the sarcasm - and the info.

Video encoders using Huawei chips have backdoors and bad bugs – and Chinese giant says it's not to blame

Uffish

Re: State Sponsored Industrial Sabotage

It doesn't surprise me that there is a lot of handy freeware floating around China to help Chinese industry get nice cheap stuff out there bringing in the foreign currency. And it doesn't surprise me when it is found to contain dodgy but potentially 'useful' code.

Anti-5G-vaxx pressure group sues Zuckerberg, Facebook, fact checkers for daring to suggest it might be wrong

Uffish

Covid 5G

Whilst it is nice to hear that Zuckerberg is being sued by a bunch of looneys I am more interested in the 5G/corona virus conspiracy theory. It really is a flight of fancy of quite extravagant inanity. Well done loonys, you've just jumped the shark, and an anti-censorship court case thrown in for free.

Steve Wozniak at 70: Here's to the bloke behind Apple who wasn't a complete... turtleneck

Uffish

Re: Woz not Jobs

Dave 126, you say "Focusing on developers in important, but ultimately developers don't exist in a vacuum - their efforts can only be judged in the context of bringing benefit to users or aiding worthwhile tasks...". Are you saying that creative engineers are worthless unless they support a business enterprise? If not what are you saying? Genuine question etc.

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

Uffish

Re: But if you were regularly importing CSV ...

"But if you were regularly importing CSV into a spreadsheet, wouldn't you write a macro that set the column types first, then imported it ?"

No, I would continue to expect the spreadsheet to treat my data as data and not pre-mangle it into corrupted data. If some of the data required cell formatting I would do that, as and when I wanted.

Bloody stupid marketing departments !!!!!!!!!

If you think you've got problems, pal, spare a thought for these boffins baffled by 'oddball' meteorites

Uffish

I have forgotten even my primary school physics but...

You can magnetise a lump of iron by banging it with a hammer. It needs to be in a magnetic field when you hit it of course. Could the same sort of process occur in a chunk of a planetesimal body? This would require a halfway decent magnetic field somewhere out there but the hammer could be replaced by a lot of the stuff already whizzing around space.

Incredible artifact – or vital component after civilization ends? Rare Nazi Enigma M4 box sells for £350,000

Uffish

Ghoulish, inglorious failure.

The continued use of the inglorious failure helped the allies win the war. "Can you keep a secret"? "Of course, our cryptography systems are the best in the world and are constantly being improved".

Uffish

Re: "Ghoulish"

The auctioned Enigma is not just ghoulish it is an epic fail as well. All that money for a thoroughly inglorious failure - doesn't say much for the idiot that bought it.

Bad news: Your Cisco switch is a fake and an update borked it. Good news: It wasn't designed to spy on you

Uffish
Trollface

Re: "a LOT of effort"

All that effort is just a further education programme for a country's engineers. Whichever big organisation buys some shiny new gear also budgets for some good engineering analysis of said shiny product and publication of the information obtained.

If you were running a developing country with big ambitions you would likely have introduced a similar system. And after all, you bought the shiny products so you can do what you like with them,

Psst: Want to know who else has their snout in the Copernicus trough? (spoiler: it's not the UK)

Uffish

Re: Racal

"Ah, Racal," I thought, reading your comment, "whatever happened to Racal?"

The Wiki article starts, like so many other Wiki articles about once proud British companies, "Racal was".

I don't know why so many of our companies get driven into the ground. Don't blame Thales - ask why Racal was put up for sale.

Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users. It's meant to work like that, right?

Uffish

Re: 'Relevant' ads

No doubt the algorithm is ten times as long but the result is always the same - more of the advertiser's budget is spent on the likes of Google.

Uffish

AI Hype

I have much respect for the people of google, not much for their overall policies now that they are allowed to be evil and none at all for their approach to advertising.

Every time I get totally inappropriate 'targeted' adverts I cringe. Is this the best that a large number of the finest minds in the business can do for an algorithm. It clearly is not doing a good job of reaching out to potential customers, as opposed to 'targeted' customers.

Oh, I had a thought, Googles advertising methods are clearly working for google, perhaps that is the only thing they were supposed to do.

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

Uffish

re: "black and white copy"

Here in France a fax has a certain legitimacy whereas a printed out email attachment doesn't, probably due to some arcane mix-up in the law. Professionals such as doctors and pharmacies keep using it for that reason, and also the sheer simplicity of the procedure.

Far-right leader walks free from court after conviction for refusing to hand his phone passcode over to police

Uffish

Re: "extremists in EVERY"

Put simply and the most accurately "There are extremists". Limiting the statement to specific groups is somewhat extreme wouldn't you say?

Register Lecture: Can portable atomic clocks end UK dependence on GNSS?

Uffish

Re: 100 gram atomic clock

How much does the battery weigh ?

If you're appy and you know it: The Huawei P40 Pro conclusively proves that top-notch specs aren't everything

Uffish

Re: "the long game"

True that Huawei didn't have much choice in the matter but that's not the point. The point is that Huawei has played the hand it was dealt competently and with no lasting damage. Now what happens?

Anyone want to help Trump build a trade wall round China? It could all get a bit tedious. The long game is in China's interest not ours.

Quick Q: Er, why is the Moon emitting carbon? And does this mean it wasn't formed from Theia hitting Earth?

Uffish

Re: And this is why it's always a bad idea...

Feel better now? Better out than in I always say.

We dunno what's more wild: This vid of Japan's probe bouncing off an asteroid to collect a sample – or that the rock was sun-burnt

Uffish

To quote WikipediA ...

The total flight distance would be 5,240,000,000 km by the time the sample return capsule re-enters Earth's atmosphere. Not a bad range on one tank of Xenon.

French pensioner ejected from fighter jet after accidentally grabbing bang seat* handle

Uffish

Fail, moi?

Excuse my French but, from the French report ," Cette rupture a eu lieu en raison d’un serrage incomplet de la vis de retenue de la ligne dans le corps du sélecteur." In other words an incompletely screwed up retaining screw allowed a cable to be forced out of the front seat ejection sequencer by the blast from the rear seat pyrotechnics going bang. This meant that the front seat didn't go bang.

The front seat belt-tightening and canopy-smashing pyrotechnics did work because initiated by a different cable from sequencer.

Someone didn't fully tighten a retaining screw - fortunately.

Uffish

Re: "probably a design or manufacturing fault"

Nah, connector disconnect due to badly screwed up securing sleeve. If you ask me it's the base commanding officer that needs to be disciplined, the accident report is a masterpiece of comedy except that the matter is serious.

It beats me how the plane, pilot and passenger survived such a series of errors. Mind you, in a way, it is a good advert for the plane manufacturer (and not a good advert for the French Armée de l’air).

NASA mulls restoring Saturn V to service as SLS delays and costs mount

Uffish

Re: Sensible idea

The moon has been a golf course for nearly fifty years, and as you say the bunkers are awesome.

See https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2019/02/06/astronaut-alan-shepards-out-of-this-world-round-of-golf-on-the-moon/

White House turns to Big Tech to fix coronavirus blunders while classifying previous conversations

Uffish

Re: Testing in US is not as bad as reported?

Fuck testing - the one true problem is that the human race has no immunity to this new (for humans) virus (excluding probably those who have caught but survived covid-19).

If you have a strong immune system you will beat the virus, if you have a weaker immune system you will get very ill before beating (or not) the virus. It is the sheer number of people with weaker immune systems (or no luck) that frightens most governments - no one runs a health care system sized for the worst worst-case scenario. Hence all the emphasis on flattening the peak infection rate, not reducing the overall infection numbers.

The overall infection numbers are "close to everyone". The question for politicians is "how many dead before I'm toast".

Linky revisited: How the evil French smart meter escaped Hell to taunt me

Uffish

Re: "infuriatingly but also admirably bonkers"

Whereas all the English could come up with is Brexit.

Google's Fuchsia OS Flutters into view: We're just trying out some new concepts, claims exec

Uffish

Re: Accurate Ads

"we see better results from targeted ads than untargeted"

Funnily enough I am reasonably up to date on most things I might want / need to buy, I really don't need some geek's idea of a targeting algorithm to clutter up my reading or viewing etc.

For some reason Google seems to want to restrict my own product searches / comparisons and replace it with theirs I wonder why.

Trump: Huawei ban will be lifted!
US Commerce Dept.: Yeah, about that…

Uffish

Never twice the same product.

Many years ago a company I worked at drifted into a 'constant improvement' mindset. Products were changed to suit new contracts, newly available or cheaper components, response to competitors etc etc.

Manufacturing gamely tried to keep up with the changes but but many 'insufficiently documented' variants were manufactured and delivered. This seemed acceptable at first but customer complaints mounted and mounted. They never really recovered customer confidence.

Pull up your SoCs, it's rubber-glove time: European Commission to probe Broadcom over microchip supply deals

Uffish

Singapore or Delaware

I thought that Broadcom announced it would relocate its legal address from Singapore to Delaware. Hasn't happened yet? Ah, promises promises.

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

Uffish

Re: Flying Fucks

Everyone knows the American way of doing things. But this latest bit of drivel from the US only serves to weaken their chances of getting an extradition. I suspect that they don't really want to get him into their legal system because it is so tediously nit-picking about things, and the good ol' boys can't deal with nit-picking.

Maker of US border's license-plate scanning tech ransacked by hacker, blueprints and files dumped online

Uffish

re: "a new stealth model"

They are still using flash units on the cameras in the USA? How quaint.

Bug-hunter reveals another 'make me admin' Windows 10 zero-day – and vows: 'There's more where that came from'

Uffish

Re: Some suggestions....

Three sugestions only! That is a bit Spartan.

Pushed around and kicked around, always a lonely boy: Run Huawei, Google Play, turns away, from Huawei... turns away

Uffish

Re: OpenAppStore

" It can't charge credit cards or do operator billing and has no user accounts."

That's my favorite kind of store !

Uffish

Re: 100 years and its the Yellow Peril* all over again!

Yellow Peril vs Orange Peril. I know which I would bet on winning in the long term.

I've had it with these mother-fscking slaps on this mother-fscking plane: Flight fight sparks legal brouhaha over mid-air co-ords

Uffish

Re: Crotchety old person...

..that is me, and I have a bad back. The real problem though is that I, along with a good many other people, am taller than average. If the seat in front is reclined my knees get crushed, and up with thatI I will not put.

Fujitsu pitched stalker-y AI that can read your social media posts as solution to Irish border, apparently

Uffish

Re: Technological Solutions

I have been going back and forth across the Calais Dover link since the days of onboard passport checking and have come to believe that pretty up to date tech is already in use for screening and has been for some time. If you have triggered the system they (the UK authorities in the UK and, when they feel like it, the French authorities in France) will ask you to stop, get out and open the car boot. I guess that is for a very low level trigger but I guess also that is sufficient. If the authorities think this is necessary then a real smuggling suspicion must trigger a much bigger response.

Where is any sign of tech which could eliminate the need for live checks of vehicle and driver - it doesn't exist!

If the physical checks are for border control reasons it doesn't matter where they are done - they are physical border control checks.

NASA pops titanium tea cosy over Martian InSight probe instrument

Uffish

Re: tea in France (or America)

It's tea STOP_FORTH, just not as we know it.

Japanese astronomers find tiniest Kuiper Belt object yet – using cheap 'scopes and off-the-shelf CMOS cameras

Uffish

Re: Outstanding work!

Not amateurs but a research team led by Ko Arimatsu at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. But still, as you say, outstanding work and bloody brilliance to work out that "big science" can sometimes be extrapolated down to "petty cash account science" and still come up with big results.

Core blimey... When is an AMD CPU core not a CPU core? It's now up to a jury of 12 to decide

Uffish

Re: A core is what I say it is, nothing more, nothing less

... and that little nugget of truth triumphs because there is no accepted definition for a CPU core so everyone's definition can stand on it's own merit.

Brit boffins build 'quantum compass'... say goodbye to those old GPS gizmos, possibly

Uffish

Re: "3-axis accelerators are everywhere these days"

And most especially, they say, in a nice hot cup of tea.

30 spies dead after Iran cracked CIA comms network with, er, Google search – new claim

Uffish
Black Helicopters

Re: "The CIA did not respond..."

That is what you are supposed to think.

Uffish
Alien

Re: Eminence Grise

Eisenhower said it was the Military Industrial Complex, now its just the NSA, soon it will be Facebook.

Which scientist should be on the new £50 note? El Reg weighs in – and you should vote, too

Uffish

Francis Bacon

Because he invented the scientific method.

'He must be stopped': Missouri candidate's children tell voters he's basically an asshat

Uffish

Re: Democracy At Work

Seen "Democracy At Work" in the preparation of a Brexit Referendum, the implementing of the Brexit Referendum and the negotiations for Brexit. Hasn't been an edifying political process in my opinion.

Uffish

Re: "Trump, for all his faults, has swung from Democrat to Republican"

As you say Trump has associated himself with both the main US parties, but he belongs to neither. Trump is a dictator, pure and simple.

("dictator" in the technical sense of how he prefers to operate in politics).

Alexa heard what you did last summer – and she knows what that was, too: AI recognizes activities from sound

Uffish

Foley Fake Sounds

The Hollywood Foley artists are to be congratulated on the accuracy of their generic sounds.

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