Posts by Tom66

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Re: "Test flights in January proved out the concept [of Boom Supersonic]"

> It probably can't financially work if the only market is commercial aircraft. The decrease in flight time is overwhelmed by the total trip time when you count the trip to the airport, security theater, waiting, boarding, taxiing, then taxiing, deboarding, and waiting at baggage claim, and trip from the airport. Maybe it makes sense for long haul e.g. LA to Tokyo but again it will be much more expensive than regular aircraft.

A lot of that stuff goes away when you travel business though. You can get things like TSA PreCheck (minimal security based on a background check, you skip the line), you'll have a limo to the airport, express check in to board quickly and you can bet the premium airlines will be paying to get the best slots so they depart quickly. Money makes a lot of problems go away.

For economy class yeah, it almost certainly won't make sense, but Boom have been pushing their product as a business class aircraft only.

Re: "do the opposite"

No, the role of the opposition is to hold the government to account. If a policy is manifestly sensible then they -should- support it, but of course no one agrees on what "sensible" is. And quite often this can lead to parties contradicting each other; for instance, the Tories opposed Labour's winter fuel allowance changes, and then criticised them mostly reversing the changes! To add to it, whilst in government, they *supported* WFA means testing. There isn't any consistency (and this goes for both sides) because it's not politically beneficial to say "yeah, the other side is correct about this".

Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists

Strange. Tried it twice and it used past tense in both cases and said "sadly he passed away in 2001, so this is only hypothetical". What prompt did you use?

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

At least Greggs don't pretend their coffee is fantastic. It's like £2 for a machine made latte. And it tastes fine.

Re: Fooled me.

We spent £250 on a coffee machine, so a bit more than yours, but still worth every penny. I make that as roughly 59 coffees to break even going by Costa or Starbucks base price, ignoring the near-zero ingredient and electricity cost. So it paid for itself in the first 6 months easily. And we don't often drink coffee when we're out - but now we bring a thermos with exactly what coffee we want in it.

Coffee shops are essentially a cost for the unprepared.

Google admits depreciation costs are soaring amid furious bit barn build

It allows you to claim a corporation tax deduction over a longer period of time, smoothing out any large expenses. It's mostly an accounting fiction.

Re: There is no business case for AI.

I find LLMs very useful for the odd programming problem or puzzle. And I'm enjoying that they're free to access.

The problem is that computationally it will never be cost-effective to provide even something as simple as GPT-4o-mini for free.

And when you charge customers $20/mo for the premium tier, you find only heavy users on there, costing you more than that in server utilisation.

A puzzle for sure.

£136M government grant saves troubled Post Office from suboptimal IT

Especially when there's effectively no cost control on the contract as a result. ICL/Fujitsu can just charge whatever they like for the next round since their customer is locked in.

Guess what happens when ransomware fiends find 'insurance' 'policy' in your files

I would be curious why there aren't laws that ban paying ransoms for cyber attacks yet. To the point of it being a criminal offence if someone does authorise the payment, not merely a civil penalty, it should be misconduct in corporate office or whatever the equivalent is. And it should go up the chain, none of this forcing the low level IT guy to take the rap, this goes up to the top if it happens.

I can totally get that it might be seen as the only way out, but if you do pay ransoms you create an immediate financial reason to go after the next target. If you make it so that it is literally illegal to do so, it doesn't matter how many companies ransomware gangs hit, they won't get paid.

It would probably result in some pain at first where the gangs try to see if anyone breaks, but in the longer term make the sector safer for all.

Microsoft goes native with Copilot. Again

Re: How do I set up a Bluetooth headset on this device?"

My favourite error message is:

Error: The operation completed successfully (0).

I guess this presumes that the engineer normally expects the operation to fail!

This happens when a programmer blindly treats any erroneous return value from a function as failing due to an OS error and they include the OS error string in it, assuming that contains something useful, but it doesn't half make for a stupid error message.

Mega council officers had no idea what they were buying ahead of Oracle fiasco

I suspect the reason councils appear to be stuffed with incompetent morons is that public sector wages are much lower than private sector. And so the public sector is left with the least competent individuals who couldn't get hired elsewhere.

There is a solution to this problem and it's what OP essentially suggests, bin off private contractors, have councils hire internally, and up the pay to compete with the private sector. In the end, it'll mean the budget shifts more from private sector work to staff salaries but is that any bad thing? Obviously, there will need to be a massive shakeup at council offices, and I doubt this would be done entirely painlessly (plenty of cruft to shift), but I'd actually be minded to suggest that no council should be willing to sign off on a £10m+ IT contract without first asking the very reasonable question of "why aren't we insourcing this?"

Re: Formula 1 Scam

From what I remember the big issue with Access was scalability - it's bloody dog-slow if you try to do more than a small businesses' worth of work on it. At one of my old gigs, an electronics manufacturing company, there were some 10,000 components set up in an Access database. Opening that, and making a change, and saving it could easily take 5 minutes. The other issue was access control, ironically, Access did not do that well. If two people were accessing the database, it became write-locked to protect it, and you might only find out when you went to 'save' your row. Usually you did have two engineers needing to update it, as well as stock management and goods in. So it all became a major pain in the arse.

It was ultimately superceded by an actual CRM system which was bought in with actual money rather than just a site licence for Access, but it did work without any major catastrophes like that for a good 15 years. Somehow.

Another company I worked for implemented their own CRM, which worked quite well. But napkin maths was it took one senior engineer about 6 months to do that with all the bells and whistles. It probably would have cost less to buy one in. But, it did integrate really nicely with the on-site production, the engineer had written interfaces to the pick and place machines so that every time an order went out it would automatically deduct all of that stock and a completed board would be registered in a new stock item once it left the oven. So it could be argued that it was worth the expenditure, since it was business critical.

The older I get the more I realise sometimes the best solution isn't the perfect one but the one that just works, it might be a bit slow or a bit expensive but if your £10m+ business depends upon it, then it had better work.

Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

SSE4.2 goes back to 2008 Intel Nehalem architecture (original i3/i5/i7 brand CPUs). That's 17 year old hardware. Or 14 year old if it's AMD (Bulldozer). There aren't many PCs that wouldn't fail on other hardware requirements like TPM2.0 support, that are that old. Not sure it's such a big deal to require SSE4.2 at this point.

I'm a security expert, and I almost fell for a North Korea-style deepfake job applicant …Twice

Re: Old scams in new jackets

Realistically, if you're going to spend, say, £70k+ a year on a senior software engineer, £2k for round trip flights plus a stay in a hotel is a good insurance policy. It needn't be done for every candidate, but can be part of the final interview.

If the company has no office, then they can rent an office or conference room for a day near to the interviewer, or the candidate.

UK armed forces fast-tracking cyber warriors to defend digital front lines

£40k is better than most junior roles, but what about those who have 5 years+ under their belt? I know of cybersecurity professionals on £100k+. If we want the best, we need to pay the best, and that means matching private sector pay.

Arm gives up on killing off Qualcomm's vital chip license

Re: The best possible outcome for ARM

I really don't understand why UK Govt didn't purchase a decent share (say at least 10-20%). The French government owns EDF - and that works out quite well for them. We ought to do more of the same. We don't need majority shares but strategic investments would be a good idea, especially in nationally significant infrastructure. Another one: It's absurd that something like say, the ExCeL centre is owned entirely by Abu Dhabi, for instance.

Trump nukes 60 years of anti-discrimination rules for federal contractors

Re: He's just shotgunning

Obama did have 59 senate seats (including caucusing independents) in 2008, so it might have been possible with a flip or abstention from a purple state, but it would have been tough.

Re: He's just shotgunning

Just like how Congress should have passed a law legalising abortion federally instead of relying on the very shaky legal grounds that Roe v Wade was based on. But no, by keeping RvW as a threat that could be gone at any moment, the Democrats gained yet another political football, legalising it would take that away from them. It's all absurd politics at the end of the day.

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

Re: Location

I guess the numerical amusement here is that you could think of cars in London as being on very long 16A extension leads, and that would be enough (in the net) to run them!

A bit like how fuel economy ends up breaking down in units nicely. For instance, 5L/100km, well litres is volume so that's volume divided by a distance = area? Works out to be the cross-sectional area of a fuel pipe that would be required to refuel your car continuously for that journey.

Re: Sounds like a BT infrastructure project to me.

Quite. I've been using 10A granny charger as my main charger needs a bit of TLC (it is 7 years old to be honest, just needs the RCD in it replacing, common fault on older Rolecs). And I'm managing pretty well with that - it obviously takes quite some time to charge up but I doubt I'll have any issue with my typical usage for the next few weeks. Normally I'd use the 7kW wall charger and that can fully charge the battery in about 6 hours.

Re: Is 1 charger for every 100 cars enough ?

For passenger cars the calculation is:

9,000 miles pa average, 30 million private vehicles.

Charger can dispense ~12 miles per hour of range

Each car therefore needs 1 mile per hour of usage (avg car spends 95% of time parked up). Let's assume this is primarily done overnight when the user parks up. So they need an average of 24 miles per day charging, but they will utilise the charger for the full time.

If they have a 150 mile range battery (winter worst case), they need to charge this up every 6 days, assume 5 days to give some buffer. And a charge every 5 days for 24 miles per day of charging requires 10 hours of charging - which is fine for an overnight charge.

So we need around 6 million EV chargers. However, about 50% of people can charge at home on their driveways, so the real figure is probably around 3 million, plus say 10% to account for visitors, high season and so on. Rapid chargers deployed appropriately could probably replace many of these chargers, rough calculation would be one 150kW rapid charger would replace 40 slow AC chargers, so a single 'EV station' with 8 rapid chargers in a town could compensate for a lack of 320 slower chargers.

It's definitely a long way off happening, with the UK government currently in a paralytic state where they assume the Free Market(TM) will deal with the problem.

For rapid chargers, the situation is better, because they make a lot more money for operators.

Re: Sounds like a BT infrastructure project to me.

You don't need 40A to charge an EV. 16A is more than enough for a car. The issue is probably more the placement of cabinets. The pilot charger they put in was about 30 ft from the cabinet. At which point you wonder why it is even related to the cabinet in the first place. It'd be better just to place it wherever the street ring main runs.

Re: Location

Streetlamp charging has been widely adopted in London, there are thousands of posts now, with "Ubitricity" and "SureCharge" being the biggest groups. Most are 20A, some are 16A - this is more than enough for normal overnight charging. (16A is roughly 12 miles per hour of charging). Outside of London, agreed, not so much - but mostly due to lack of funding and demand, not lack of capability, since most EV users in suburbs charge on their driveway, and most people who park on streets don't buy EVs, the situation is still a bit chicken and egg.

Most street lamps have fairly large feeder cables due to electrical design regulations. When you have a street lamp that is connected to a source capable of supplying hundreds of homes on that street, you need a fuse that's capable of interrupting kiloamps of current. It's actually quite difficult to build a fuse that's rated at, say, 1A, that can safely interrupt 10,000kA prospective short circuit current. And you have to ensure the fuse matches the cable rating, so the cable won't burn before the fuse opens. It's certainly possible to do this with careful design, but a more common approach is to fit a street lamp with something like a 20A fuse, use 20A rated cable, and be done with it. Far easier to terminate 20A cable onto the ring main too. Once past the 20A distribution fuse, the street lamp itself will be protected by a low current MCB, but the feed can be tapped off before this MCB for an EV charger.

So most street lamps do in fact have the capability to be upgraded to 16A charging, and a few can manage more, especially now the luminaire is an LED lamp and requires only around 100W, well under 1A, to operate.

Tariff uncertainty looms large over budget conscious CIOs

Re: In some ways it doesn't matter.

There's also a possible benefit for UK, if US charges differential tariffs but we can manage a 'sweeter' deal. But even if the tariffs between UK and EU remain the same, there will be businesses that set up shop in UK/EU to avoid tariffs, instead of USA. It really is just Trump shooting the US economy in the foot. Be very interesting to see what happens over the next few years.

EU demands a peek under the hood of X's recommendation algorithms

Re: Musk is just going to refuse to cooperate

Well, for one, Ramstein AFB is the forward operating base for all US air force missions in that part of the world. Could the US operate without bases like that? Probably. They would lose a metric tonne of soft power, including airspace around the Baltics and Russia, and missions towards Israel and the wider Middle East.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

If face ID is permitted, then it will be trivially easy to bypass on a PC since the Windows camera API allows you to create a fake webcam. That is one way that Teams scam calls with deepfakes happen.

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

Re: Is there anywhere Doom has not been implemented?

People have got DOOM to run on tiny microcontrollers that are found in printers, so short of the most basic microcontroller with no UI (like a washing machine) I'd be tempted to say it's possible to run Doom anywhere you can get a graphic display up and running and just about enough space for the art assets. You can trim stuff like the sound out and maybe remove all but the first level, but a bit like the Ship of Theseus, how much of DOOM can you remove before it is not DOOM?

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

ChatGPT's 3.5 model is 350 billion parameters, 16-bit int, so minimum 700GB of RAM. Add on 10GB for application, tokenisation, OS and other things... a Pi ain't running GPT-3.5 any time soon.

We told Post Office about system problems at the highest level, Fujitsu tells Horizon Inquiry

Re: A320, Jãger 90, A330, A330, A340, A380, A400M

A320 definitely had a hidden software bug which only appeared in flight and could have resulted in disaster:

https://avherald.com/h?article=4d97ca46&opt=0

"the aircraft came to a full stop at 30 ft before the end of the runway" due to a failure of autobraking and loss of thrust reversers, due to a formerly unknown bug in computer synchronisation; basically the flight computers each voted their partners off the bus as high rudder movement wasn't anticipated by the engineers and the computers disagreed on the rudder pedal readings.

Re: Liars the lot of them

The same needs to happen to water company CEO's. I am sick and tired of executives just shirking responsibility here.

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

I'd take a guess their SoC of choice doesn't support more than one 2.5Gbit port.

Re: So WiFi only for client connections. Really?

I've a five port gigabit switch that cost £10 and works fine years later. This shouldn't rule out the device if you really need a lot of ethernet.

The only thing worse than being fired is scammers fooling you into thinking you're fired

Re: an email that appears to be a legal notice

In the UK, a court will accept service by first class mail provided proof of postage is retained. Typically, three days are assumed to elapse from the letter being deposited with the postal service to it arriving at the receiver, so if a dispute over dates arise this may come into play. It is not required to obtain actual proof of delivery, it could be argued the courts place a lot of faith (perhaps too much) in Royal Mail.

UK council still hadn't fully costed troubled Oracle project 2 years in

Re: to deliver a critical Oracle ERP project

Projects like gov.uk are actually run very well. The difference is the government is directly employing the engineers working on the project. Contractors are used but only as needed to deliver parts of the project, the overall remit remains with the relevant department.

Government projects can be run well, and the private sector can do well too, but when there's no incentive to manage costs, the private sector is not the right way to deliver projects like these.

Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive

Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

No, because I have Python installed already and I can review the AI generated code to see if it's not a problem. 30 lines of code, not exactly a huge amount to look through.

The issue comes about when getting permission to install an EXE, I can get it, but it takes time. So I have a lot of tools written in Python for little problems here and there.

(Blame Cyber Essentials rules. Not my rules!)

Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

Just the other day I use ChatGPT-4o to write a simple Python tool. The prompt was (roughly):

> "Using Python write a tool that generates a Windows toast notification when a new serial port is connected to my system. The tool should run in the background and not require any user interaction once started."

I have a lot of serial ports on my system and going into Device Manager was a chore to find which one I had just connected. (Lots of FTDI cables, for anyone familiar with embedded systems.)

It created that tool in 30 seconds and it worked perfectly first time.

Could I have written the tool myself - absolutely. And I expect such tools are available online - but IT policies would mean I would need to get approval to install anything. So this saved me time. Instead of spending 10 minutes writing it, looking up how to generate 'toasts' on Windows, how to use pyserial to find the newest serial ports connected, I used a tool which has that information in its training data set and can generate the answer in seconds.

Would I use it for any serious production code? No. Would I use it for anything where I couldn't give the code a good look over and make sure it isn't doing anything bad? No. But it's absolutely brilliant for small, well-defined tasks.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 struggles to take off

Re: Simulating 737s?

There's a multiplayer version if you want, but the default is single player so it's just you in the sky.

iOS 18 added secret and smart security feature that reboots iThings after three days

You can set an iPad to a kind of "Kiosk Mode" where it will automatically log in. They likely already do this as iPads will need to update from time to time which requires a reboot.

Rust haters, unite! Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again

On an embedded system running Linux I have encountered malloc() failing when the heap was too fractured to allocate a 16MB buffer. On 'paper' the system there was >>32MB of free memory left, but it wasn't in a contiguous block and so malloc couldn't satisfy my request.

I would, just based on that experience, recommend always checking malloc()'s return value, or for simpler programs you can create a wrapper around malloc that just calls exit if the call fails, assuming exiting in the middle of the call is safe enough and that memory allocation failures are always fatal.

UK energy watchdog slaps down Capita's £130M smart meter splurge

My EVSE doesn't talk to my meter - it is an older model that's not smart compatible. And my backup granny charger doesn't talk either.

I think you might be talking about a "Zappi" type solution (there are other products available that do this too). These are installed in properties with small mains fuses (or where they are looped off their neighbour's supply) where theoretically the main fuse could be overloaded by charging an EV whilst other domestic uses are operating. This works by measuring the current coming into the home with a CT clamp - and is purely for diversity reasons, nothing to do with grid stability or peak time usage. An alternative for these customers is installing a 16A EV charger, though that's less desirable as it's obviously slower than the standard 32A unit.

This is all hypothetical technology though - my car doesn't communicate with the smart meter. It would need a Zigbee radio to do that. Maybe it will happen in the future with newer cars, but then I predict a rather large business for 2.4GHz Zigbee protocol jammers that, er, just happen to be switched on next to cars at night.

Perhaps, though that would require them to issue a CCJ against someone who doesn't, and has never lived at the address claimed, so we'll see what happens! At this point there's nothing I can do besides complain to Ofgem who are famously useless with this kind of thing so I'm just waiting to see how long it takes an actual human to realise they've probably mixed up the address somewhere.

Re: No real statistics

The idea behind smart meter energy savings isn't the overall kWh's reducing (indeed they are expected to increase as EVs and heat pumps come online), but smart tariffs encouraging usage in 'quieter' periods of the day when there's excess wind or solar for instance.

Octopus via the Agile tariff has already about 500k customers, and their various other 'smart' tariffs have another 1.5 million. This is a sizeable force on the grid, so much so that if you pay attention to the UK grid frequency, you can see when all of the EVs switch on and off on tariffs like Octopus Go.

You might not like tariffs like this but you're effectively going to be paying more to operate on a non-half-hourly meter as your usage will be assumed to meet one of the standard Ofgem curves. Based on my internal metrics, my electricity bill is down about 30% from what it would be compared to operating on a standard tariff. I do have an EV - so I've compared to something like Economy7 with the car charging in the cheap overnight period - but even on days without an EV I'm able to shift things like my dishwasher, tumble dryer, etc to overnight slots where I get cheap leccy. The next step is to add a home battery to arbitrage further on this cheaper electricity.

OVO for the last 24 months has continued to bill someone at my address who does not live there, as far as I can tell does not live there, and they have the wrong MPAN anyway. I keep getting increasingly aggressive bills for a "John" whose MPAN actually codes for some meter somewhere in Manchester. Needless to say my emails to them have been ignored to this day... whatever, not my problem.

Except you can charge an EV (albeit slowly) from a 13A socket - and such electrons are indistinguishable from any other load in the house. I did that whilst my wall charger was temporarily out of action.

Amazon to cough $75B on capex in 2024, more next year

Re: Easy Money

Pfft. I found that rummaging behind the back of the sofa.

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Re: World record?

It's OK. We set the value of the rouble from being worth "one of itself" to "zero of itself", and the fine just disappeared.

Arm reportedly warns Qualcomm it will cancel its licenses

Re: Well...

Altera don't design custom ARM cores, they use licenced ARM IP. Same as Xilinx now owned by AMD with their Zynq-7000/Zynq Ultrascale, it's just a regular-degular Cortex-A9 or Cortex-A53 + Cortex-R5F in those.

I expect ARM keep the "pre-baked IP core" and "implement your own processor using the ARM ISA" products as separate licences, with different fees and restrictions.

Re: I can guess where this is leading

Are you kidding? There is huge fracture in ARM ISAs!

For instance, you can target (with gcc): each of armv5hf through armv9hf (each architecture building above the predecessor, adding new instructions and instruction modes); and you can target most of those in non-FPU configuration too. Some of those processors will have vector engines (NEON), some will not even support native integer division (looking at you, Xilinx). All of this ISA madness needs to be sorted out by a combination of compile-time targeting and varying versions of libc or whatever C library you link against, or by the OS kernel trapping undefined instructions and emulating them (which is stupidly slow).