Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Unlike your iPhone, Apple's batterygate controversy refuses to die

The root of this

would appear to be the makers of iThings making them with insufficiently specced batteries for a reasonable lifetime. They are by no means the only culprit - I had an HTC phone a few years back which, after a year or so, had a battery that would last about five minutes if actually used, and would need an external battery pack connected at all times if I wanted to use the camera.

This can be all traced back to the push to make "slimmer" and lighter phones, which was always going to be a trade-off between size, weight, performance, and battery capacity / life. A higher capacity battery which could supply a higher current would always last longer, not only for a single charge, but the overall lifetime, as the power draw would be a lower percentage of the capacity. This means the battery has to be either larger, and heavier, or use a more advanced battery technology to up the power density.

Personally, I'd accept an extra 20g on the weight of my phone to have a better battery in it, but that's hard to do spiffy marketing on, with all the pretty colours and the flashy lights that so attract the victims of the iCult.

Boffins claim to create the world's first wooden transistor

Re: ?

And here we have it, the inevitable, "why do fundamental research" post.

Fundamental science isn't about applications, it is entirely about providing a foundation for further research, and applications down the line.

The whole purpose is to advance human knowledge, the usefulness of that knowledge is a value judgement.

So what if there's a shortage of engineers, this isn't engineering. That argument is like saying I shouldn't work in software because there's a shortage of care home staff.

Re: Linköping

If you want a desolate taxi ride from the airport, might I suggest the one into Reykjavík from the airport at Keflavík. Most of what you'll be driving past will be mile upon mile of volcanic tephra, although you will at one point pass an Iceland store, which I believe is one of a handful actually in Iceland.

Oh, and get the bus rather than a taxi, unless you're rolling in cash...

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

Re: Apple Lisa

The director will probably have an unfortunate accident between paying up that £3k and receiving the goods.

As might his replacement.

SpaceX's second attempt at orbital Starship launch ends in fireball

Re: Starship hasn't had the most successful history?

Round where I come from, the testing comes before putting it into production.

Whilst I do appreciate that testing the whole rocket assembly under flight conditions isn't the easiest thing to do on the ground, other rocket manufacturers do seem to be have a habit of (usually) ironing the failure modes out at an earlier stage than half-way-to-orbit.

Smallsats + solar sails = Photos of exoplanets at 1970s digital camera resolution

Re: Proper sailing spaceship????

The thing to remember, is that space is not a perfect vacuum. The sun is constantly pumping out a stream of particles. Planets with magnetospheres (and the sun's magnetosphere) cause the charged particles emitted from the sun to not move directly "outwards", and uncharged particles are going to continue to move in the direction they're going until they hit something, or pick up a charge (for example by being hit by an energetic photon and spitting out an electron). The result (the "solar wind") isn't just a stream of photons, and even the interstellar medium isn't completely empty, so there's stuff there to tack against, it's just it may not be very effective because the density is very low. Whether it's practical is something I'll leave to someone who wants to do the maths...

Substack copied Twitter so Twitter is copying Substack

Re: Sparta

By the way, I'm assuming you're referring to the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta, which concluded a little over 2,400 years ago (not 2,000), and, unfortunately for your line of reasoning, was won by Sparta, not by Athens (Sparta was later defeated by Thebes, but not by Athens), with the assistance of the Persian Empire, which also wasn't a communist state.

You know, if you're going to try to argue about such things, you should probably first of all make sure you know what you are talking about (try reading the wikipedia article on the Peloponnesian war, for example, although that would carry the prerequisite that you know what war you're actually referring to, which I doubt), and, secondly, not pick an argument with someone who does know a little about Greek history, having actually been there and walked around the sites where a lot of this stuff actually happened. FWIW, there are a lot of more interesting archaeological sites on the Peloponnesian peninsular than Sparti. I can highly recommend visits to Monemvasia, ancient Messini, Methoni, and Koroni, as each offering much more of a day out. The ruins at Sparti consist of a few bits of wall and an amphitheatre dotted around some olive groves, and you'll have trouble occupying yourself for more than an hour or two.

Re: Sparta

Ah yes, the old "everyone who doesn't agree with me is wrong" line of reasoning. First, label them all as the same (in this case "lefties") and then assume that this means they all are the same, then create a straw-man argument (some shite about intellectual diversity, apparently written with no sense of irony) to dismiss them. Job done! QED. Long live the Alt-right, or whatever you identify as.

All the while amply demonstrating the attributes that you seek to dismiss in others are alive and well in your own ideology.

Pillock.

Re: "rat"

You're going to need a bigger shoe-horn for that argument, I think.

Re: Dig Deeper !

Ah, you got me, I'm secretly zombie Karl Marx, back from the grave, on the hunt for the brains of the bourgeoisie. Sadly, when I got to you, I didn't find any.

Re: Really ?

No, no, no, he said "innoculation", not "inoculation", that's where you make a small incision in your upper arm and insert a country pub into it.

Re: Sparta

Wow, that's some serious historical revisionism there. You'd have to have a pretty warped idea of what communism is to try to overlay it on the Spartan society, which was a military hierarchy.

As for trying to apply the left-right paradigm to a society that existed a couple of thousand years before the French Revolution, when those terms were invented, it's almost like reducing everything down to "me vs The Left" loses some of the detail from political and social ideologies, isn't it? It could even be said that such oversimplification makes your whole point, well, pointless. It's certainly a load of uninformed bollocks at any rate.

Re: Yeah, No

I'm still trying to work out what an "Information Sphere" (proper noun) is, or whether this loon is trying to refer to the Greek city state of Sparta (well, technically the city part is Sparti), or some acronym we are all supposed to know, or whether his Caps Lock key is broken. I guess yon Information Sphere isn't working properly, and I've not been adequately indoctrinated with that information yet.

Re: Musk

Hi Elon, How has your first month of commenting on El Reg gone? It seems you haven't worked out yet that RWNJs will get mocked mercilessly here for their efforts at shilling, and that most people who work in IT aren't suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect in the way that you appear to be.

[tl;dr; I'm calling you a thickie]

Nurse!

It's happened again!

Student requested access to research data. And waited. And waited. And then hacked to get root

Re: Not caught either... Or they never caught up with me

As the adage goes, security by obscurity is no security at all. You have to read literally anything written by Bruce Schneier to be aware of this.

The corollary to this relates to why you shouldn't try to invent your own security mechanisms. Doing security properly is Hard, and just because you can come up with something you can't break yourself, doesn't mean someone else can't come along and crack it in seconds.

Re: Not caught either... Or they never caught up with me

I've no idea why you've accumulated down-votes for that. I don't always agree with your posts, but you're bang on the money in this instance. Seemingly innocent functionality in web-sites such as unrestricted file uploads can cause whole classes of attack vectors, and serious headaches for the unwary.

Re: Not caught either... Or they never caught up with me

There are good reasons that web servers should be configured to tightly control both where files can be uploaded (directory traversal attacks such as adding ../../bin/ or similar to the start of the filename are a serious attack vector) and what can be done with files in those locations (no execute permissions, and no permissions to serve them up directly, to avoid injection attacks into web pages).

It's one thing to create a vulnerability in an internal web-site (which is still bad because they can be used by attackers from within the organisation), and quite another to let these into the wild. It's why there's a whole industry based around pen-testing.

BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries

Re: Evil,..... moi?

They're still warming up in the bucket of steam.

Hey Siri, use this ultrasound attack to disarm a smart-home system

Re: One C, one R

I like to live dangerously and use a chisel as a screwdriver

Paid and legacy Twitter verification now indistinguishable

Re: Zuck on that

And the only principle in play seems to be that they're cheap.

I think the principle at play here is actually customer choice. They have the choice of whether to pay for a service, and have, quite rightly, decided that it's not a "service" worth paying for, so have not.

It doesn't matter whether you're the richest guy on the planet, or up to your neck in debt, the same principle applies; a waste of money is a waste of money. The outlay vs reward equation remains the same.

What you have just amply demonstrated is that you don't know, or can't tell, the difference between a supplier and a publisher.

To take your contrived example, a paper mill supplies the raw paper to the NYT, who pay to have their words printed on it, and then pay a distributor to take those printed copies to places where they are sold, where the vendor pays for them and then sells them on to the consumer at a small profit.

Except, of course, most "newspaper" business these days is online, so there is no paper or distribution involved. The NYT produces content, which it publishes on its web site, and charges users for access. Other publishers may have decided to wholly, or partially, fund their operations through advertising (as it often used to be with "free" papers).

It's hardly a surprising business model, and if Elon Musk thinks he can come along and take a cut for allowing them to use his service (which is currently largely funded via advertising, although he has done plenty to piss advertisers off), he is going to find that his business model doesn't work quite as well.

Whilst the supply of paper is vital to the production of printed newspapers, the supply of Twitter is not vital to the production of online news content, and His Muskiness seems to be unaware of its actual place in the online ecosystem.

Defunct comms link connected to nothing at a fire station – for 15 years

Re: Paper Label Fail

I've got a Brother one, which also uses thermally blackened tape. My wife uses it extensively to label various folders and storage boxes, and I use it to label my work laptop with the machine name, so I can remember the SQL Server instance name more easily.

I don't think we've had a label come off anything yet, unlike those lumpy Dymo ones which fall off the moment you turn your back on them.

Re: "NEVER SWITCH OFF"

I've been on the other end of this. When you're in an organisation with an at best opaque internal hardware department, and you've been using a service that is provisioned by someone else, for someone else, who has left the organisation, or moved to another department, and an email goes round saying "is anyone using machine ABC-XYZ-01?" you don't recognise that this is the machine running your vital DevOps deployment service, or whatever.

At least our place doesn't actually dispose of the hardware right away once it has been switched off, so we do get a chance to work out what was running once something disappears, and provision a new server running a version of Windows that hasn't been discontinued to replace it.

Uptime guarantees don't apply when you turn a machine off, then on again, to 'fix' it

Re: Automation needed

If anyone really cares, this phenomenon is known as thixotropy

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

Re: Nut on the loose

I don't know if it applies in Java so much, but in C#, the idea that an exception should only be thrown for something exceptional, and not be used as a means of an "early return" stems largely from the fact that throwing an exception is much more computationally expensive than returning a result.

You see some situations where certain code-style choices lead to worse code than you would otherwise find. For example, if someone is enforcing a rule that all methods should only have a single return statement, which in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, you might find resulting code that, as a result, throws exceptions, rather than returning early. That, or having such a code chevron from nested if statements, that the actual code is somewhere off to the right of you in the next room. Sometimes, rules need to be broken, you just need to be able to justify why you are breaking them, and if it is non-obvious, leave a fucking comment explaining why!

Re: Nut on the loose

Ah yes, the modern-day language equivalent of "ON ERROR CONTINUE".

To be fair, there's some code I've written recently that does follow the above pattern somewhat, but it's a special case, where it's trying to log errors that have occurred to a database. In the situation where you can't do that (for example if the original error was due to the database not being reachable), you really do want to catch the exception, and not re-throw it. You probably want to at least log it as an error to something like Serilog though, so someone can see it in a log file (assuming the software can actually write those as well).

"What to do if the software doesn't perform as expected" can, on occasion, be the main part of the work. What distinguishes the decent developer from the shoddy one is the existence of that try...catch in the first place, and not just assuming that code which might throw an exception won't throw an exception.

Re: I see this a lot

Just get ChatGPT to write your unit tests. I mean, they'll look like proper unit tests and might even be testing the right things a high % of the time, but since, after checking the first few, a human will never lay eyes on them, the purpose and scope of what you are testing will slowly drift over time, until the software is doing something completely different to the design.

Do you want Skynet? Because that's how you get Skynet.

Student satellite demonstrates drag sail to de-orbit old hardware

I suspect it doesn't contain tomatoes, that's why.

Also, 30cm x 10cm x 10cm is not a cube.

It's more like a bundle of fourToblerones than a tin of tomatoes, so we can probably blame Mondelez for the light weight.

TikTok cannot be considered a private company, says Australian report

Re: Every Chinese company of sufficient size is a state company

Wow, some joyless bastard didn't get the reference.

Re: Every Chinese company of sufficient size is a state company

Use of Boing® outside of the Palais de Boing® is illegal in MC1 and carries mandatory cube-time, perp!

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Come on now Jake, I thought better of you, going round explaining other people's puns...

Presumably experienced by Lady Gaga?

Being dismissed was probably a blessing in disguise

The alternative is continuing to work with a direct boss who clearly has zero sense of humour or empathy for her staff.

Cloud upstart offers free heat if you host its edge servers

Re: Nothing new?

How about this, I'm planning on building a faster-than-light drive. We'll be able to get to nearby stars in minutes, that's the dream. There, now that idea is out there, never again can anyone write about FTL drives or slower-than-FTL flight. The idea is old.

Fair enough, but once it has been established that the FTL drive idea has been proven to contradict the known laws of physics, so is unworkable, and anyone selling one is obviously a con-artist, any reporter worth their salt would take this into account when reporting on the next con-man that comes along and starts trying to sell his FTL drive.

I'm not saying this is a con, of course, but I also reckon that there are some problems with it that previous entrepreneurs might have run into, such as the uneven demand for heating throughout the year. If you can match the demand for computing to the demand for heating, you're all good to go, but I somehow doubt they follow the same causation, and it may be tricky to find a demand curve that correlates.

Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

I shouldn't have to point you to the second law of thermodynamics, but the temperature differences with a crematorium heating domestic hot water from cold (the best part of 1000°C) and a bunch of computer hardware heating a swimming pool (tens of degrees) mean that they are vastly different in their efficiency. Heat transfer efficiency is directly related to the temperature difference.

Typically, you will want to heat domestic hot water to something like 60°C, and the waste heat from a crematorium can do this reasonably efficiently. With a swimming pool, you want to maintain the temperature of the water at a much lower temperature (and keep the servers at something like 60°C). As that water gets hotter, you have to pump it through the cooling circuit that much quicker, and get rid of that heat faster, in order to cool the source. Water has a pretty hefty heat capacity, which is why this works when your temperature difference is around 50°C, but if the ambient temperature gets close to the target temperature, that efficiency drops. The problem arises when you want your water temperature to be below ambient temperature. A heated pool is good heated to above ambient temperature in winter, but in summer, if the ambient temperature rises above the temperature you want to keep the pool at, then you either need to extract that heat somewhere else, or continue dumping it into the pool, and see the temperature rise above the desired range. Nobody wants to swim in 35+°C water in the middle of a heatwave.

Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

Evaporation from the surface cools the pool, so warmer air temp isn't as much help as you might think.

Yes, evaporation removes energy from the water; the other part, condensation, delivers it back to the environment. Now, arguably, a swimming pool operator could vent the water vapour out of the building rather than capture all that heat back, but the result is likely to be that the air temperature and inside of the building around a pool quickly reaches equilibrium. You might notice, as well, that the average pool environment is pretty humid and doesn't have a lot of airflow, because pools are typically designed to keep the heat in, not vent it.

Yes, swimmers like water at 24-30°C. Last year, summer temperatures got above 40°C for the first time. Prolonged periods like that, which are becoming more common, where the ambient temperature is above 30°C, and the pool becomes uncomfortably warm even with the heating turned off. Evaporative cooling from the surface of a large body of relatively deep water isn't going to cut it unless you build a cooling tower over it.

Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

My point was that if you put something that generates a lot of heat in a setting where the heat can only be extracted for part of the year, then you need to also either have all the infrastructure to remove the heat for the 1-2 weeks of the year when it can't be extracted that way, or turn off your data centre in a heat wave (hint: nobody is going to accept that level of uptime in their SLA).

The whole idea here, as stated in the article, is that the company saves money by explicitly not building that infrastructure to transfer heat away, and it is going to "industrial use" instead, and the only practical example in use is of a swimming pool.

Heat waves are getting more common (not less). Last year, for example, temperature records were broken (again) in the UK for the highest temperature, and it was way above 35°C. In an extreme heat wave, either that swimming pool is going to be getting heated to bath-tub temperatures (it has to be above ambient temperature to work) or they are going to have to use expensive air conditioning to extract the heat and vent it. Just at a time when swimming pools are going to be in real demand.

Re: Great in winter ...

Presumably we'll have to fill the other six swimming pools with loads of phase-change heat storage, so we can cope with the summer excess heat and hold onto it until winter.

All we need to do is work out exactly how big they need to be. My money is on "pretty fucking big," unless there's some super-duper phase-change materials coming down the line with a massive heat of fusion and room temperature melting point.

Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

But how is this going to work in the heat of summer, when the outside air temperature is 35°C and the swimming pool doesn't need heating? Where does the waste heat go then?

Meta chops another 10,000 employees, closes 5,000 vacancies

And yet...

...they are still running expensive TV ads about the "metaverse" with some seriously contrived use-cases. Methinks they are not cutting the right losses...

Windows 11 puts 'disgusting' Remote Mailslots protocol out of its misery

Re: Net Send was disgusting.

I think you'll find that the rhetorical device being used there is known as dramatic overstatement.

Everyone knows to what the OP was referring (the tendency of modern software to gain seemingly unnecessary bloat).

Re: Net Send was disgusting.

And that's on yougov where the main complaint you see in the comments is "there are too many lefties here," thus proving that there are at least a significant number of people there who are so far right of centre that they have either repeated the "daily chat" just so they can post that comment complaining about lefties, or that they have pre-emptively posted it because they assume that the whole world is out to get them...

Yes, the same yougov which was founded by a certain Tory MP who had to pay a multi-million pound penalty to HMRC for (allegedly)* hiding his income from it...

*Shhh, ye wanna get sued?

Re: The trouble is…

If you do have Internet connectivity and are still using it...

...then you won't be getting Windows 11 updates auto-installing themselves, unless the pixies are delivering them on 3.5" floppies (fnarr)

The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

You are, of course, correct. The google results there for his name conveniently put an ellipsis in there and then the bit about someone completely different (Richard Sharp) donating to the Tory party.

There's a lesson there to be learned about not trusting the google results and actually following the link (and also finding multiple unrelated sources for confirmation.)

For the record, from the article in question (which is from that horrible bastion of lefty blobs, the Grauniad), "[Tim Davie] was deputy chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative party in the 1990s and stood unsuccessfully as a councillor in 1993 and 1994."

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

Nicking the day's takings is a lot easier if you only have to cosh someone over the head and run off with the cash box, and the money is essentially untraceable.

Re: If they cared about children...

Bollocks.

Sorry, I should watch my language, I should have said "what an absolute tub full of frothing festering misinformed bollocks."

We have fewer asylum applications than we did ten years ago, but the rate of processing them has gone from around 96% to 4% in a year. It is a deliberate policy of the government to massively under-fund claims processing, and to house people who are awaiting their claims to be processed in poor housing or hotels, and then stoke up outrage about hotels being taken up by "illegals".

The proportion of claims which are successful has not changed; the vast majority of them are still approved, which also puts the lie to the claim that the asylum claims are not legitimate.

Claims that we take disproportionately more asylum seekers than other countries, or that people are "flooding here" are similarly false. If the world's asylum claimants were shared out equally amongst all safe countries, we would be taking 30 times as many to take our fair share, and to be absolutely clear here, that would not even be a bad thing, because people claiming asylum have been shown to contribute more to the economy of their adopted country than they cost.

What is actually true, despite the fearmongering from our "esteemed" Home Secretary, is that the vast majority of people claiming asylum do so in the first safe country that they reach, and most people attempting to enter the UK are doing so because they already have some link to this country, which, in itself, indicates that they have something to offer us.

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

Quite. Tim Davie is the one who donated £0.4M to the Conservative party. Completely impartially, of course.

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

It's hard to explain things slowly and carefully to someone who is screaming their head off at you and telling you to "just make it work". Sadly, I think our current government has more than one of that type.

Speaking of which, whatever is going on with those many, many allegations of bullying from Dominic Raab?

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

I can't remember the last time we had a Home Secretary who wasn't a rabid authoritarian. The only observation I can really make here is that each one is so much progressively worse than their predecessor that we find ourselves hankering after the bad old days. The likes of Blunkett and Straw were awful authoritarians who wanted to spy on everyone and make everyone carry an "entitlement card," but the current crop make them look like saints.