* Posts by GreenJimll

48 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Nov 2011

UK immigration rules hit science just as it rejoins €100B Horizon program

GreenJimll

Um, wasn't some of that period when the phrase "Over paid, over sexed and over here" was coined?

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

GreenJimll

An AI driven strategy?

Maybe, just maybe, someone in this drama is letting one of the AIs advise them, and this weird few days is the result? The AI will of course be learning about corporate politics and what it takes to disrupt one or more large companies ready for future application elsewhere...

GitHub alienates developers by force feeding them AI recommendations

GreenJimll
Coffee/keyboard

Where's Elon then?

Can I just check... has Elon sneakily bought GitHub (or Microsoft)? Will it soon be "XHub"?

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

GreenJimll

Until we manage to screw up with orbital debris

Using satellites is trading one risk for another though: if we have an orbital debris cascade your emergency system will be stuffed if it relies just on satellite communications provision.

Emergency systems need to be resilient, and that means a variation on "defence in depth" with lots of back ups, alternate paths, different technologies, etc.

Microsoft wants you to think inside the Dev Box from July

GreenJimll

"If you like the idea of building software on Windows in the cloud, this may be for you"

That's sort of along the lines of "if you enjoy cutting yourself, this blunt knife may be for you".

Professor freezes student grades after ChatGPT claimed AI wrote their papers

GreenJimll
Headmaster

Re: Artificial Irony detector required

Back in my day as an undergraduate, the lectures were optional to attend but the tutorials weren't. Lectures were there to give people who didn't read around the subject the groundings that could get them a 2.2 or maybe a 2.1 if they were lucky and had a good memory. Reading around and doing all the tutorial exercises were what you needed for a decent 2.1 or 1st.

At least one of my lecturers just read their lecture notes out in lectures, which turn out were actually an old numerical analysis text book written by someone else. They assumed no undergrads would spot this... only this undergrad had the text book because he'd inherited from his brother who done a similar course at another Uni some years before. Handy, as I was able to "read ahead" and be ready for the "trick questions". Also meant that the staff assumed I really understood numerical analysis because I seemed to be able to predict what would happen next when we were discussing in tutorials.

FCA mulls listing rules after Hauser blames 'Brexit idiocy' for Arm's New York IPO

GreenJimll

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

> Plus, those voting remain knew what they were voting for. Those voting leave, all wanted different things.

You should have attended one of the pre-Brexit hustings I did. Only two Leavers on the stage - a total xenophobic gammon and a young, well spoke chap who was planning to offshore his tech company due to EU regulations but was holding off to see what the referendum result was. On the other hand there were four or five Remain campaigners who started off well enough by attacking the more obvious Leave campaign fibs, but then turned on each other because they all had a different view of what remaining in the EU would mean. That ranged from "carry on as we are", through "liberalise and privatise more of the EU" and "a different (green) Europe is possible" to "we should wave all our previous vetoes and join the Euro/Schengen Area/etc". That was an unexpected but entertaining twist.

As was the anarchist who would normally have been a weird minority voice but in the resulting argumentative chaos "tear up your polling card as both side have it in for you anyway" seemed to make more sense than it normally would.

Academics have 'no confidence' in Edinburgh University's response to its Oracle disaster

GreenJimll

Re: Update

Encouraging less students to go to the University, and thus less income to support the functioning of the institution, including paying its staff, might not be the in long term best interest of their staff. Possibly not the fallout the unpaid staff and researchers would want?

Suppliers on the other hand probably have less to lose by this strategy.

US watchdog grounds SpaceX Starship after that explosion

GreenJimll

Re: Car

It's actually Mary's car (Boca Chica Gal) who works with the NSF. She was OK with it being used like this and was aware there was a good chance it would get damaged.

Take a 14-mile trip on an autonomous Scottish bus starting next month

GreenJimll

Less scary than some human drivers

When I was a teenager the local bus company employed one driver who would occasionally sort of stand up whilst the bus was in motion and make an odd grunting/howling noise. Really disturbing the first time it happened but the local folk got used to it. I assume it was some sort of tic but not deemed to be a safety issue (or at least not enough of a safety issue in 1986 to care).

I still think I'd have preferred him to have been there supervising an AI though.... a few decades too early unfortunately.

Attackers hit Bitcoin ATMs to steal $1.5 million in crypto cash

GreenJimll

A more general cloud computing reminder

I think I'm going to have to print out this quote to stick on the office wall for use when anyone at work suggests moving valuable data to a share cloud hosted platform:

'General Bytes said it is shutting down its cloud services, noting it is "theoretically (and practically) impossible to secure a system granting access to multiple operators at the same time where some of them are bad actors."'

Facebook building 'on-demand executable file format' that self-inflates using homebrew compression

GreenJimll

Start your engines virus folks...

I see another fertile battle ground emerging for the virus/anti-viral code hackers to start working on... ;-)

New mystery AWS product 'Infinidash' goes viral — despite being entirely fictional

GreenJimll

Unrealistic job requirements aren't new

Many years ago, when the Web was young (and so was I), I had a headhunter cold call me on the phone about a position at the AA. Probably as a result of me gabbing on www-talk mailing list. One thing he said the company wanted was "4 years experience with Netscape".

When I told him that might be tricky, because Netscape had only existed as a company for about 9 months at that point and before that all the cool kids had been using NCSA Mosaic, there was a silent pause on the line for a few seconds and then he said, "well that's just the sort of detailed knowledge of the field that they want - you sound perfect!". 10/10 for brass balls and a quick come back.

Microsoft customers locked out of Teams, Office, Xbox, Dynamics – and Azure Active Directory breakdown blamed

GreenJimll

Graph API too

Unsurprisingly this also affected Graph API calls into the Microsoft Cloud. Luckily my code is used to dealing with flakey Microsoft Graph API responses. It does get a lot of practice after all.

Not on your Zoom, not on Teams, not Google Meet, not BlueJeans. WebEx, Skype and Houseparty make us itch. No, not FaceTime, not even Twitch

GreenJimll

I agree about the lack of interoperability - the many years of standards development seem to have been swept away for walled gardens. Hopefully consumer pressure might help tackle that once the major players are pretty much on a level playing field of features.

However I do disagree about the need for video conferencing in general. It means I can attend meetings, chat with my colleagues and sit in on workshops in the USA without moving from my lounge. That's a win as far as I'm concerned. I've been trying to do, and get others to do, video conferencing instead of having to spent hours travelling about for decades. The first time we used it in anger was with the MBONE (remember that?) back in the mid/late-1990s to virtually attend an EU funded meeting for a couple of hours without having to spend two days either side travelling. I'm amazed in a way its taken two decades and a global pandemic to get more people to catch up with that and realise its value.

Wired: China's Beidou satnav system, 35th bird in orbit. Tired: America's GPS. Expired: Britain's dreams of its own

GreenJimll

And next: commercial positioning

I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that Elon's Starlink that SpaceX are launching at a rapid rate of knots contains some kind of positioning subsystem. The Chinese have put their 35th Beidou satellite in orbit after 20 years of effort. SpaceX launch 50-60 Starlink birds on each Falcon 9 launch. Even if current Starlink birds don't to positioning, that rate of deployment and tech iteration means they possibly soon could.

While waiting for the Linux train, Bork pays a visit to Geordieland with Windows 10

GreenJimll

Re: Need a bit of Raspberry Pi action

> The problem with that is are there MDM systems that can manage an entire fleet of Raspberry Pis

> (or any Linux machines) from one keyboard/mouse?

Yes. We use the open source Screenly OSE controlled by our own web fronted management system to run Pi's all over our (large) campus, but if you buy the Screenly commercial offering it gives you could based display fleet management too. See https://www.screenly.io/features/

GreenJimll

Need a bit of Raspberry Pi action

Always amuses me that people pay a fortune for digital signage when a Raspberry Pi and a bit of OSS software can usually accomplish the same thing more cheaply, using less energy (Pi's sip juice compared to some Windows digital signage PCs I've come across) and with less tendency to spectacularly blow up in public.

Microsoft Teams gets off to a wobbly start as the world and its cat starts working from home

GreenJimll

May be a learning experience...

...that we might all be better off using inter-operable open standards rather than proprietary walled gardens that don't talk to one another.

A nice bit of XMPP or IRC anyone?

Even tech giants find themselves telling folk not to use default passwords on Internet of S**t kit

GreenJimll

> Customers may still think of devices like printers and phones as appliances

Probably not helped by lots of computer system vendors selling folk products called "appliances".

Learn Bluespeak with IBM: Internal buzzword-bingo memo schools staff on this newfangled thing called The Cloud

GreenJimll

That's the sort of "marketing speak" nonsense that is a sure sign lots of techies at Redhat will soon be polishing their CVs or outsourcing themselves as paid consultants.

Crunch time: Maplin in talks to sell the business

GreenJimll

Re: Remnant of the 1980s

I take it you've never been in the Stratford-upon-Avon branch? Not exactly in the tourist hot spot in the town. I have been in repeatedly, but usually come out empty handed because they don't have what I want. The staff are friendly and helpful but it just can't compete against the value & convenience of likes of Amazon and eBay.

Brit firm unleashes drone-busting net cannon

GreenJimll

Re: I call fake...

I guess it depends if the disobedient souls get it first?

Computers abort SpaceX Falcon 9 launch

GreenJimll

Not the first Falcon 9 FT launch

This is the second payload to use the Falcon 9 FT (aka Falcon 9 v1.2) stick. The first was Flight 20 - the Orbcomm-OG2 launch late last year, which was also the F9 first stage that did the neat return to landing site trick after stage separation. The reason you might have been confused is that SES-9 was originally slated to be the first FT launch, but they switched it round with the lighter Orbcomm birds. This was so that a second stage test could be done after the Orbcomms were away (specifically a relight of the second stage Merlin to boost to a higher orbit, which SES-9 needs and Orbcomm-OG2 didn't).

Cabling horrors unplugged: Reg readers reveal worst nightmares

GreenJimll

Comms rooms are not cupboards

I've seen (and probably contributed) to cabling nightmares over the years. One mess that springs to mind though was in a newly built gym. We had a lovely dedicated comms room, with two full height racks - one for the patch panels and our switching, and one for some sports governing bodies who were located in the building (they'd put their equipment in that rack and then cross patch into the patch panels in our rack as they moved around offices, etc). It wasn't the patching that was the real problem (at the time - it probably is now due to "organic" growth): it was that the facilities management guys gave a key to our comms room to the folk running the gym.

I got called in to patch in some extra sockets, and upon opening the comms room door, a load of weights rolled out, followed rapidly by an exercise crash mat falling towards me. The gym folk had mistaken "comms room" for "general storage cupboard" and filled it with spare gym equipment. I had to empty this all out into the corridor to get to the comms racks to do the patching.

After doing the job I went to the gym reception, asked if they had a key to comms room, took the one they gave me, explained that it was our comms room, not a cupboard and then told them that their spare gym equipment was neatly stacked next to it. The key came back with me and my then boss asked FM nicely to not give random building occupants keys to our comms rooms.

GreenJimll

Re: Neat wiring doesn't fail

> OK I have never tried any of this on a three-foot bundle. In theory it works.

I have - sometimes it does work, sometimes it doesn't. Depends if some joker has put "joiny blocks" inline in cables buried in the bundle. That's hours of fun for the whole family.

This is why copy'n'paste should be banned from developers' IDEs

GreenJimll

Source code control fun

Many years ago I was doing some contract work for a company that was one of our suppliers (which was OK with my bosses as we were also one of its shareholders - its was a complex relationship). I was at their offices and was finally given access to their source code to help track down a bug we'd been experiencing.

The first source file I opened up had an SCCS control header comment in it detail the name of the file, when it was last checked out, etc. That's good I thought - at least we can go back through the deltas to see where the bug appeared from and why. But my hunting took me from that source file to another. And this file also had an SCCS header comment.

The same SCCS header comment.

The _exact_ same SCCS header comment.

I quickly looked through several other source files of the many in the directory and they all had exactly the same SCCS comment at the top, referencing the name of the first file I'd looked at (which was the entry point for this program). I queried one of the development managers there and he was pleased to confirm that they had used SCCS for some years, after another contract programmer had showed them it. Except by "use" he meant that all of them just cut and pasted the same comment template at the top of each new source file and sort of assumed that some deep magic then kept track of the file, without ever really understanding how source code control systems in general, and SCCS in particular, worked.

When I explained it to him and a few other programmers there I could see the life force draining out of them. It always amazed me even back in the 1980s that Universities and Polys never seemed to mention version control systems to their students.

What goes up, Musk comedown: Falcon rocket failed to strut its stuff

GreenJimll

Re: Fascinating that they can pin it down to a strut....

Falcon 9 is one of the most well instrumented launch vehicles ever made. They have over 3000 channels of telemetry data being sent back during the launch, which is just as well otherwise they'd never have found this.

Elon Musk's $4.9bn taxpayer windfall revealed

GreenJimll

Sure that only works if you and your neighbour are the only tax payers in your country? Otherwise your $1000 tax break is spread out over the other millions of tax payers.

GreenJimll

The author seems to be subtly implying that the $4.9bn in "government support" is "tax breaks". I wonder how much of it is actually government spending (ie the US Government wanting something and then paying one of Musk's companies to provide it)? If that sort of spending is included in "government support" then there's a fairly hefty chunk of NASA funding that is nothing to do with "tax breaks". Its money spent for providing services for the commercial cargo flights SpaceX provide to the ISS (one of two US commercial providers, although the only one flying at the moment) and development of US manned spaceflight back to Low Earth Orbit (a facility the US lost when it retired the shuttle and again not the only company funded). In these cases SpaceX are proving to be considerably cheap than the alternatives, so its actually saving the US taxpayers' money.

So you've been told to build a cloud. No one was fired for buying HP hardware, er, right?

GreenJimll

Re: Giant Heads Descending

As long as we don't have to wear a bright red nappy... :-)

I'm the wire starter: ARM, IBM tout plug 'n' play Internet of Stuff kit

GreenJimll

Re: Potentiometer + cloud

Folk want to vector you into the cloud so that they can be involved and flog you an ongoing service, rather than do what sane people would and buy the product outright and have the management internal to your own home. Heck, its not as if web based management interface need a Cray to run on.

Steve Jobs had BETTER BALLS than Atari, says Apple mouse designer

GreenJimll

That's not the only blooper. I assume El Reg's proof reader is having a few days off...

Boffins publish SciFi story to announce exoplanet find

GreenJimll

Like ISEE 3 before it

That space probe in the story is probably out of luck. Nobody will talk to it because NASA will have junked the "obsolete " hardware required to transmit a message decades before.

Britain'll look like rural Albania without fracking – House of Lords report

GreenJimll

If it's really 2015 we're stuffed no matter what happens...

If blackouts are on the cards by 2015, no amount of pro-fracking hype is going to help as its mid-2014 now and it'll take a good few years to:

a) get permissions for exploratory wells in geologically suitable areas,

b) drill exploratory wells,

c) get sample data and analyse it,

d) if viable economically, attempt to get permissions and agreements for production wells,

e) if successful in d) build out infrastructure to support production wells (eg pipelines, distribution facilities, waste handling, etc),

f) drill production well sequence and start fracking.

Of course the extreme unconventional energy field a lot more than just fracking... you've also got Underground Coal Gasification and Coal Bed Methane proposals, all competing for time, resources and dwindling fossil fuel investment now that some big players are starting to divest from coal, oil and gas investments. We've dicked about so long over nuclear that its not going to have the first new reactor online until 2023 (just about ready to power HS2 in 2026!) and renewable build outs are constrained by cash, political power plays and the physics of low power densities.

Energy efficiency measures could have helped but again we've not been moving quickly enough on those as a nation. I think we'll probably find that those "accelerate" come the blackouts.

Brit boffins brew up blight-resistant FRANKENSPUD

GreenJimll

Non-GM blight resistant spuds already available

The use of GM methods to produce blight resistant spuds seems pretty pointless (not to mention expensive) given that the Sarvari Research Trust over in Wales have been breeding blight resistance in using multiple defence lines using conventional, non-GM techniques. Their Sarpo Mira, Sarpo Axona & Blue Danube varieties are widely available (I bought some from Wilkinson store in January for example) as there are no legal limitations to their sale in the Uk & EU.

I grew some last year & they grew well, taste good & store well. The only problems I had were that the slugs liked them too, and if allowed to grow on too long we got huge spuds but "hollow hearts".

Why I'm sick of the new 'digital divide' between SMEs and the big boys

GreenJimll

Enterprise often means half baked

The marketing folk and salesmen seem to say "enterprise" when they want to stress something is rock solid reliable, scalable to large deployments and has a long supported shelf life. When we actually buy "enterprise" gear off them we often find its half baked code that needs multiple revisions to get it anywhere near stable, the scalability of their idea of "enterprise" doesn't actually match the size needs of our "enterprise" and support is a twisty maze of support calls all the same.

So if you're doing IT development or support for SMEs I wouldn't be too quick to run to spend cash you don't have on "enterprise" solutions anyway: they might not be as five-nines as you'd hope they'd be for the money.

Cisco slip puts hardware at risk

GreenJimll
Facepalm

So we've all got weak passwords stored in newer Cisco kit and they expect us to "gradually migrate to the new password type"? Jeez, thanks Mr Security!

Netbooks were a GOOD thing and we threw them under a bus

GreenJimll

Work bought me an Asus EeePC 1018P a couple of years ago, to replace a Libretto that I'd run into the ground. I don't drive and have to walk all over the site (and elsewhere) so something small and light that slips in a backpack with decent screen, keyboard and battery life and USB ports to run serial consoles were the main requirements. The 1018P has all these, runs Debian Linux like a champ (I believe it came with some version of Windows pre-installed but that got nuked from high orbit using the Deb installer the first time I turned it on!), and has a decent enough dual core CPU to make watching videos, etc perfectly possible.

For a network tech/sysadmin/programmer/webby chap on the move, a netbook like this is a definite requirement. I've tried tablets from various manufacturers (inc Microsoft's Surface RT) and the only one that comes close is the Asus Transformer, which seems to try to give you the best of both worlds. Now if it could just have Debian sneaked on there instead of Android....

Speaking in Tech: Like Kinect - only a THOUSAND times better

GreenJimll

The Leap Motion is interesting tech, but appears to only track hands/fingers. This hardly makes it a Kinect killer as the Kinect, when coupled to libraries such as OpenNI, can track multiple people as full skeletons. I guess it really depends what your doing though and what user input needs your applications have. The Leap might be great as a touch screen replacement for situations where you really don't want people to touch the screen (eg workshops where engineers have greasy, oily hands but still want to scroll through online manuals, control diagnostic software, browse pr0n sites, etc, etc).

Elon Musk's solar energy biz scraps IPO liftoff at last minute

GreenJimll

Having Elon Musk on board must be a help for the company as well - there's an immediate and obvious tie in with wealthy folk buying Tesla EVs who may have properties with large roofs that can accommodate a decent sized solar panel installation with which to power the vehicle. Buy a Tesla - get a free SolarCity roof top power station thrown in to run it.

It does show the subsidies are a double edged sword though, especially if their withdrawal isn't planned and advertised well in advance (as the UK solar industry discovered last winter). And that doesn't just apply to renewables like solar and wind: the tax break subsidies for gas fracking announced by George Osborne may well stuff up that fledging industry as well if the multinationals get hooked on them and then suddenly have them reduced/removed.

Gigantic lava spirals wreck Mars ice valley theory

GreenJimll

A first year grad student getting a paper in Science? That's quite an achievement in and of itself!

'Asteroid mining company' makes classic hypegasm debut today

GreenJimll

If these guys are already all super-rich and don't need new investors for this venture, why are they bothering to tell people about it? One reason why folk like SpaceX big up their launches, etc is that it means that potential investors and customers can see that they mean business and potentially start giving them cash.

In the case of these guys surely it would have made more sense to keep it as quiet as possible so that they don't find that they've got competitors with red flags, or lots of Government folk trying their best to derail the plans early on? I can't see why they need a hype-event if they aren't looking for investors.

'We're going to have a renaissance – let's do it'

GreenJimll

Feeping Creaturism

"Oh, and just in case you were wondering if Apple would ever cross a toaster with a fridge, they're probably not going to."

Yeah, right. I seem to remember that they weren't going to get into the record business either!

170m people 'upgrade' to Google+, but how many stick around?

GreenJimll

I'm one of those 170 million users and I do occasionally flick through G+ timeline on my phone to see what's happening with the few folk I follow there. But the fact that I got alerted to this Reg article by following a Twitter link might tell you something about my relative use of those two social networking systems. Twitter is part of my regular day-to-day net use, just like email. G+ is something I do at a loose end whilst waiting for a train when the Twitter feed is up to date.

Having said that, I'm beginning to see more folks and importantly organisations mentioning that they have a presence on G+ recently. This may be a case of "covering all bases" with the same material being posted to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc or it could be more folk trying out G+ to see if it makes connecting with others easier/better/etc or it could just be a random blip and everyone will just carry on as before.

NJ lab claims plasma fusion breakthrough

GreenJimll

Re: No radioactivity?

From reading the AIP paper they did use deuterium and got a load of neutrons out. The aneutronic experiments are mentioned at the end of the paper, in the "bit we'll try next" section when they talk about using pB11 instead of DD.

Got a few minutes to help LOHAN suck?

GreenJimll

If you find the homebrew vacuum exhauster doesn't work for whatever reason, you could always nip to your local preserved railway and see if some fool would let you attach your test chamber to the vac brake system on one of their locos.

Ubuntu republic riven by damaging civil wars

GreenJimll
FAIL

I had my old laptop die on me a couple of weeks ago, so whilst on a temporary lash up awaiting my new replacement machine, I thought I'd try Ubuntu for a change and to see how "user friendly" it really is (I'm normally a straight Debian user these days, having switched from Fedora several years ago). I got the latest distro running and landed in Unity. I found it difficult to navigate round, couldn't work out how to move the launcher from the left hand side to and, as I actually needed to get some real work done, tried to find out how to switch back to a sane desktop. There were some folk saying that you could apt-get a package for a classic gnome experience but even when that was done it seemed awkward to use. So out came the Debian 6.0.3 netinst disc and back to the comfy I-can-get-stuff-done-now world of GNOME 2 based Debian.

When the new machine arrived, that Debian CD got some more action. And I'm not alone - a couple of the chaps at work have tried Unity and then gone back to older LTS releases of Ubuntu or other distros. I'm rather hoping that GNOME 2 is forked and we get a long term package appear in Debian for that.