Posts by Ian Johnston

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

Re: Return Journey

Since any human launched to Mars in 2028 will be dead of radiation sickness within a year, the return trip's timing probably isn't critical. On the upside, and are lighter than people and don't need to breathe.

What is it about Musk's fans that leads them to talk airily about returning whole humans from Mars soon when not even a gramme of rock has been brought back and when NASA's final proposal said it would take until 2040 and cost $11bn? Ok, NASA is expensive and inefficient, but four years from now?

Re: Return Journey

How big and heavy is this propellant factory? Has one been made and tested on earth?

European consumers are mostly saying 'non' to trading in their old phones

What's the trade in value of my current Pixel 5, which stopped getting OS upgrades 18 months ago? Or the Nokia 2.3 I had before that and which lives in a drawer?

My German account has one of these, but they have just changed to an app.

Salesforce study finds LLM agents flunk CRM and confidentiality tests

Re: LLM-based AI agents fail to undertand....anything!

That said it can likely replace a lot of sales staff at the bottom end of the intelligence scale;

And is wildly overqualified for any job in HR.

Re: LLM-based AI agents fail to undertand....anything!

Many years ago at a large university, the internal helpdesk.

Me: Hi helpdesk can you tell me the VAX printer queue name for the printer next to my office.

Helpdesk: Have you tried rebooting your PC?

Me: ..... bye (hangs up)

UK students flock to AI to help them cheat

Re: Glorified calculators

Big difference: calculators work.

LibreOffice adds voice to 'ditch Windows for Linux' campaign

LibreOffice has matured, prompting the project to change its version numbering system last year, as we explained in 2023. Like Ubuntu, the project now emits semiannual releases. The current version is LibreOffice 25.2, which as the name suggests launched in February.

Golly. Linux Mint has just upgraded me to 6.4.7.2 ...

Researchers claim spoof-proof random number generator breakthrough

Re: Thought Experiment

Leaving aside the question of the nature of knowledge an empiricist would minimally require you to perform a large number of coin tosses which should result in a binomial distribution around a mean of 50% head or tails and a variance of 0.25×Ntosses.

Not necessarily. It depends on how it was tossed and how the starting orientation was chosen. Start a coin heads up and "heads" requires 1, 2, 3, 4 ... full turns in the air while "tails" requires 1/2, 1 1/2, 2 1/2, 3 1/2, and these are not equally likely in sum.

Re: von Neumann

Also.. and this is a concept that's long been lost to the ages... but the truth is people are complex ...

A truth which Gen Z will come up against as they grow up. Meanwhile they display en masse the self-assurance and absolute believe in their own correctness which in my student days was only found in the loathsome creatures of the Christian Union.

Who generates and stores the hash chain?

The launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests

"I often say that the greatest contribution to nuclear medicine in the world was the German admiral who scuppered the fleet in 1919," Maurice Chiodo, research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge and one of the co-authors, told The Register.

The German fleet was scuttled, not scuppered.

Spy school dropout: GCHQ intern jailed for swiping classified data

Re: Is this really appropriate

Yes he was stupid. Yes he failed to follow the rules, but seriously 7 and half years.

I presume this means that they really, really, really don't want anyone to know what the software he was working on does, and really, really, really want to discourage anyone else from spilling the beans.

Re: Imagine if he'd hoovered up millions for useless PPE, or....

Usually followed by the apologists when some hard of thinking bell end sets fire to a hotel "ackshually methinks if you read what they said they didn't tell anyone to set fire to a hotel"

Henry II did penance when his words were similarly "misinterpreted".

Re: Imagine if he'd hoovered up millions for useless PPE, or....

For clarity, what exactly is my 'ilk' ???

Defenders of incitement to racist murder.

Re: Imagine if he'd hoovered up millions for useless PPE, or....

It would be an extremely difficult to task to prove that anyone read some nobody's facebook feed and was inspired to commit an arson attack. Once again, a 31 month prison sentence was completely disproportionate to the offence.

It seems that both the first court and the court of appeal disagreed with you on both counts. Plus she pleaded guilty.

Re: Imagine if he'd hoovered up millions for useless PPE, or....

It really doesn't. Saying "for all I care", is equivalent to saying "I don't care if". That's not incitement.

"We are unable to accept Mr King’s argument that a close textual analysis of the offending tweet (quoted in paragraph 4 above) leads to the conclusion that it was no more than an expression of emotion, which could not be taken seriously. The words of the tweet are on their face an incitement to serious violence." - The Appeal Court ruling

Also, she admitted it and pleaded guilty.

Re: Imagine if he'd hoovered up millions for useless PPE, or....

Regardless, handing a 31 month prison sentence to someone with no previous criminal record, for a facebook post that was subsequently deleted an hour later, is Stasi-level insane.

"At the time she had about 9,000 followers on X. Her message was reposted 940 times and viewed 310,000 times, before she deleted it three and a half hours later." - BBC News

Lying about the facts of the case does your argument no favours.

Re: Imagine if he'd hoovered up millions for useless PPE, or....

"Hurty words" = "calling for people to be burned to death".

UK dumps £2.5 billion into fusion pipe dream that's already cost millions

Re: Pipe dream

flying was a pipe dream for millennia too

The real mystery about flying is that it took so long. The Romans could easily have built quite a decent glider, and powered flight was achieved almost as soon as suitable engines became available.

Re: Enough with the laser fusion hyperbole

"There is a 50% chance of it working 20 years after you seriously fund the science".

And no true Scotsman wears anything under the kilt.

Re: exceeded the amount of energy that went into the reaction chamber

at least one company thinks they can do it

s/thinks/tells\ investors

s/investors/suckers

Re: Electricity from fusion is basically fake

I would say there are a lot of organizations and a lot of billions of dollars going into this so-called "fake" technology. I suspect it may actually be real.

There are a lot of organizations and a lot of billions of dollars going into AI, and that definitely isn't real.

Re: Seoul National University ... high-temperature superconducting magnet cables

Your link doesn't say anything about HTS magnets ready for commercial deployment, just that they are trying to raise £125m to develop them. As people have been trying to do for well over thirty years, and coming up against the same fundamental problem every time: HTSCs have lousy critical currents in LN2 so you need to run them in LHe, at which point you might as well use niobium based conductors which are better in almost every way. For a start, the Lorenz forces means that SCs need to be strong, and HTSC are weedy ceramics.

APT took forever to build and get working, but it was completed. It just wasn't purchased because it wasn't better than the alternative in service at the time.

Remember that the APT project was completed under a prime minister who did not once use a train during her time in office. Total funding for the project (including one gas turbine APT-E and three electric APT-Ps) was around the costs of three of the first TGV trainsets. Of which the French government bought a hundred in it's initial order for the Paris-Lyons line. In other words, the APT team did miracles with very limited funding.

Agreeing with you, by the way, except for the for the reason for non purchase.

Reaction engines derived from a stupid idea (HOTOL) in the first place.

Bloodhound was a pointless waste of effort from the start, verging on a scam for funding.

You're right about the APT, but most of the technology developed for it was used elsewhere. Pendolinos have hydrokinetic brakes, for example.

engineering problems and not fundamental physics ones

I don't think there have been any fundamental physics problems in fusion since 1st November, 1952. It's been engineering all the way since then.

Helion Energy and Zap Energy are hopefuls

Has anyone ever counted the number of startups who claim to have solved fusion (or indeed fission) reactors with a new design which just requires some VC funding? It sounds like an ideal new field for Elizabeth Holmes to work in, when she gets out.

I know the joke is that fusion energy is *always* 10 or 20 years away from becoming reality, but that shouldn't stop us.

Ten or twenty years shouldn't stop us, but ten or twenty years kicked repeatedly down the field for almost seventy years (Zeta was 1957) should give us pause for thought. The fusion world has been consistently terrible at making accurate progress estimates. Perhaps that's just lying to secure funding, but it's also possible that they don't really know what they are doing and that the funding could be better spent elsewhere.

Or as a famous person once said, we should do it not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

No, we should do it if it looks like a likely source of power. Splurging squillions on things just because we can't do them is ridiculously wasteful.

I'm not against fusion research, by the way, but right now it looks more like a century long boondoggle than something which will produce interesting science or useful engineering.

Once the engineering of the tokamaks is sorted out ...

Now that's an optimistic handwave, including as it does the assumption that the engineering can actually be sorted out.

Just another ten years to go.

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

Re: ... or some cosmetically waxed neanderthals

uunet relay at Kent was my friend for these sorts of adventures. I won a bet in - I think - 1989 by getting an email to an oil rig in the middle of Hudson Bay. Eight bangs in the address, if I remember correctly.

Kids today ...

RIP: Bill Atkinson, co-creator of Apple Lisa and Mac

Re: Watching the Old Guard fade...

t was a cable linkage to the gearbox, as I recall, which gave all the problems and was soon replaced. And while I'm picking nits, the Maxi used the E-series OHC engine, which was a new design. The Morris Minor used (after its Series MM side valve incarnation) the A series, which was introduced in 1951 for the A30.

Re: Watching the Old Guard fade...

Computing is not done.

Under the covers, maybe not. Maybe. But as far as users go ... there really isn't any significant difference between using my first computer, an Atari Mega ST2, and the Lenovo desktop running Linux Mint on which I am writing this. Sure, files are bigger and some of the folders they live in are elsewhere. Sure, some of the programmes I run live inside browser windows instead of their own, but that's all minor stuff.

If I want a friendly graphical machine with an irrelevant "on" button I have an Android tablet. Programme it? Who the hell wants to programme a computer? Well, a few people, obviously, but for 99% of users it's as pointless activity as changing the wiring in your television (and there is a copy of "Newnes Practical Television" on my shelf as an example of what users were expected to do in the 50s).

So while I really do appreciate your reply, you haven't convinced me that there are currently any great intellectual adventures in user-facing computing. Apple did it all forty years ago, Microsoft helped a little and the GNOME developers haven't - yet - succeeded in making computers completely unusable.

Re: Watching the Old Guard fade...

I think you may be looking in the wrong place. Take cars as a comparison. Initially there was lots of innovation by inspired engineers. Benz gave us the car, Panhard gave us the steering wheel, Ford gave us the affordable car, Citroen gave us the monocoque and front wheel drive and Issigonis gave us the transverse engine. And since then very little has actually changed. For all practical purposes, all mass market IC engined cars sold today are developments of the Mini and even electric cars are really just the same with a different "engine".

And so with personal computers. Lots and lots of innovation in the early days, lots of people trying different notions from Sinclair's "Cheap at the expense of everything else" to Xerox's "Sod the cost, give 'em the works" approaches. But while lots of things have happened in the background, I would argue that nothing much has really changed in desktops/laptops since the original Macintosh, nothing much has changed in handheld devices since the iPhone and nothing much has changed in applications since NCSA Mosaic. Yes, Google does rather more than Altavista did, just as a modern Range Rover (yeugh) does more than an Austin Maxi, but the differences are all second order.

As a result, the fun of innovation has largely gone from computing. Forty years ago someone with an idea could hope to change the world, now the best they can hope for is a cubicle near the windows with a chance to be one of a team of four hundred working tirelessly to improve a widget.

tldr; There are lots of equally creative intellectual successors. They just aren't working in IT, which has, basically, been done.

Cisco president says dredging coding syntax from wetware memory wastes engineers' expensive synapses

Re: Anyone remember Syntax Directed Editors?

My colleagues who taught introductory computing with Scratch used to say that they great thing about was that any programme you could construct with it (thanks to the requirement to fit jigsaw-style links together) would run. It might not do what you expected, but it would run. Worrying about syntax could come later, they said.

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

Re: Code talks

DEI would involve the explicit discrimination by race, sex, or other 'identity' ....

Nope. Try again.

Re: Code talks

So, even if that's true, no evidence that you weren't considered or that a weaker candidate got the job. Just your outrage that you didn't-

Re: Code talks

So, sure looks like they never considered my resume because they found a diversity candidate that would fit.

Or, even if the story is true, you weren't as strong a candidate as a woman, ethnic minority or disabled applicant, which is something I suspect you would find difficult to accept.

Re: Your statement of faith

How many people do you think die on the average cruise ship, per month?

Re: Not ready at all.

Absolutely spot on and matches my (sighted) experience of Linux sound.

I moved from OS/2 to Linux (Ubuntu 6.06) because when i tried Linux, sound on PC (just) worked, as it never did under OS/2. That impressed me. I would have been less impressed if I had known that over the next 19 years I would never again have a Linux system on which sound worked reliably.

Re: Not ready at all.

PulseAudio is stable? When did that happen? Or did you mean "stable" as in "the Lusitania is stable"?

Re: Code talks

That's why you don't put political rants in your project documentation.

Re: Code talks

How do you know that they were "looking at diversity candidates" and, even if they were, why are you sure they were weaker candidates than you?

Re: Code talks

I'm all about outreach to encourage participation by any who are technically proficient enough to contribute. Your skin colour should not be a consideration.

Indeed. And that's why DEI policies are good.

Musk and Trump take slap fight public as bromance ends

Re: So who called five months?

My question is, are the people who voted for this laughing with us? Anyone who voted R care to put their hand up and share their thoughts on how this is making America great again? There's 77,248,118 of you, surely there's some who read The Register, and can string a few words together.

Codejunky seems to have gone veeeery quiet. Perhaps they are overwhelmed by all the winning.

£127M wasted on failed UK nuclear cleanup plan

I am mildly curious to know what sort of lab and equipment comes in at at least half a billion, and why the costs cannot apparently be predicted within a factor of two.

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: Tesla that burned so hot, it melted part of the road

VW Beetle (air cooled) gearboxes were made of magnesium alloy. Ignorant mechanics sometimes tried to weld them. Once.

Re: Tesla that burned so hot, it melted part of the road

Apart from Google's AI search summary, I can find no indication that chlorine difluoride actually exists, save perhaps as an ion. Such data as can be found in serious sources all seems to be computed, not measured. Of course I am happy to be corrected, but it looks as if ClF2 is an AI hallucination.

Re: Tesla that burned so hot, it melted part of the road

My uncle had to deal with the result of a welder leaving his greasy leather jacket in a nice new large diameter oxygen line at a south Wales steel works. When the oxygen was turned on the effect was ... spectacular.

Re: Tesla that burned so hot, it melted part of the road

Also known as the Freeway Italian Tune-up.