Posts by Ian Johnston

Joint European Torus experiments end on a 69 megajoules high

I can't help thinking that a "Fuck it. This is the last run. Let's see what this baby can do. What's the worst that can happen?" attitude may have driven the final experiment.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

Re: But is Dark Matter real?

It does sound a bit like the Copernicans raising cash for a bigger, better orrery with even more epicycles.

Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong acquitted of stock manipulation charges

"The judge reportedly cited inadmissible evidence and a failure to prove both intent on Lee’s part and that the misleading of shareholders as playing a part in the judgment."

Perhaps it made sense in the original Korean. And that the misleading of shareholders ... what?

Ketamine is an anaesthetic.

Survey: Over half of undergrads in UK are using AI in university assignments

Re: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

I find it hard to imagine any sort of pure maths exam in which a calculator would be of the slightest use for anything except basic arithmetic.

Still no love for JPEG XL: Browser maker love-in snubs next-gen image format

Ivy League students are not used to having their wishes ignored.

Space exploitation vs space exploration: Humanity has much to learn from the Voyager probes

No, I remembered that but thought it was probably past the glory days of perfection over which rose-tinted glasses were looking.

Re: no society has lasted anything like a thousand years so far.

And Australian Aboriginal society goes back uninterrupted for about 30,000 years ...

Electricity has been a useless toy for a very long time.

Volta invented the battery in 1800. Michael Faraday made the first electric motor in 1821 and Robert Davidson demonstrated an electric locomotive on the Glasgow - Edinburgh railway another 21 years after that. By the end of the century electric railways, tramways, lighting and motors were common.

Hunt notes recent issues with NASA's Artemis program and says, "I wonder whether we would have had some these problems in the old days with NASA working the way it did…"

<cough> Apollo 1 .... <cough> Apollo 13 ... <cough>

Affordable, self-healing power grids are closer than you think

Re: Well, duh.. Time for DC?

Historically appliance motors (washing machines, vacuum cleaners etc.) would have been AC synchronous, connected straight to the mains and ran at a speed governed by the connected grid

Synchronous motors are of very little use when the supply frequency is fixed, because they have to be spun up to speed by something before locking in, and too bit a load causes them to lose synchronism and stop. Just about the only domestic use of synchronous motors is, or was, in clocks like the Smith Sectric. These had to be started by pulling or twisting and then releasing a spring-loaded knob - that's what spun the rotor up to speed.

Domestic appliances typically use AC induction motors, which always run slightly slower than the rotating magnetic field pushing them along. In a four-pole machine that field goes round 25 times per second, 1500 times per minute, which is why most small AC motors run at 1450rpm or thereabouts. The 50rpm slip is what generates voltage, and therefore current, and therefore magnetic field, in the rotor.

Re: Scotland and wind

Green H2 is mainly made from excess electricity (otherwise ppl just sell that power to the grid if possible - they're not silly).

So you agree, then, that turning electricity into hydrogen and back (round trip 50% efficient at best) only makes sense when there is electricity to spare? Which hardly ever happens. In fact, just about the only place it has ever made sense is Orkney, and that's only because they have a lot of renewable capacity and a very small connector to the mainland. That's being upgraded, at which point teh economic case for hydrogen will collapse, even there.

LockBit shows no remorse for ransomware attack on children's hospital

What's more, it apparently thinks a nonprofit hospital has the funds to pay a $800,000 ransom.

It doesn't take long to find that they take around $350m per year from patients, so $800k - though immoral - does not sound impossibly high.

"Saint Anthony holds cybersecurity and the privacy of patient information in its care as top priorities,"

The word "now" appears to be missing from that statement, though the sound of galloping hooves disappearing into the distance is easy to discern.

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

Re: But ... I thought computers didn't do Scottish

"Down south" is simply England.

I have colleagues in Inverness who (without irony) refer to Glasgow as "down south" and I have colleagues in Shetland who (without irony) refer to Inverness as "down south". I have never heard any of my fellow Scots use "down south" to mean England specifically.

In fact the only place where I have hear a geographical description serve as a shorthand for national distinction is in Ireland, where "the south" and "the north" are frequently used on both side of the border to mean "the other bit".

SparkyLinux harbors a flamboyant array of desktops

Since it's the opinion of one person, "I" would sound rather less like an appeal to authority. Just a suggestion.

Re: Linux Cars

Yes. That was my point.

Re: Diversity of design

I thought the whole point of snaps, flatpacks, appimages and so on was to include required libraries with the executables. So if your executables are all statically linked you don't need to supply separate libraries with them, do you?

Re: Diversity of design

Who says this is the primary goal of 'Linux'? Where is that goal written in stone?

Ubuntu Bug #1?

Re: Analysis_paralysis

If they could get rid of all this diversity, and just settle on one design of car, maybe they would be more popular.

Seen many cars with the clutch, brake and accelerator pedals in a different order? With the driver's seat at the back instead of the front? There really is very little difference in fundamental designs.

Re: Diversity of design

They’d step into a supermarket, and be completely bewildered about why there needed to be half a dozen different brands of laundry powder, or a dozen different kinds of toothpaste.

That's why I like Lidl and Aldi.

Re: Diversity of design

* All binaries statically linked, no shared libraries at all (cf. Suckless sta.li or Oasis)

* Only Appimage packages, or maybe Snaps. Flatpak is too hairy underneath, the swan of cross-distro packaging: looks elegant on top, but underneath, frantic flailing

Wouldn't the first of these preclude any need for the second?

The OpenBox-based Minimal GUI, a 1.5 GB download which installs into 3.5 GB of disk, and Minimal CLI, which is half that size.

Minimal is 1.5GB now? Mind you, even the latest Lubuntu is 2.7GB and it's not that long since it fitted on a CD.

As we've said before, we feel that the Linux desktop world badly needs more diversity of design.

"We"?

Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will fly no more, but is still standing upright

Science has being flying a helicopter on Mars after landing it and its mothership from a flying crane. Meanwhile religion is getting bent out shape about pronouns.

Firefox 122 gets even more competitive with Chrome on translation

The latest MuseScore is only available as a Flatpak for Linux Mint. And won't run, because it needs a C library which isn't in Mint. What the fuck is the point of a Flatpak if it doesn't contain everything needed to run?

In Glasgow, the word "fucking" is just a general indication that a noun is on its way. - Frankie Boyle

Re: Shame on the Reg

Mozilla wants to participate directly to the packaging effort? Fine. But somehow that's a problem for you?

<Package> is straightforward to install ought to be the default position, but with abominations like Snap and Flatpak around it sadly is not. So while it's nice that Firefox is helping avoid these, that does indeed reflect more on how lousy package management has become than on how wonderful Mozilla is.

Re: Shame on the Reg

The truth is Firefox is not a very good browser.

You've been downvoted to hell, but I agree. The best you can say about Firefox at the moment is that it isn't as bad as it has been but it's still not a patch on Chrome. Like far too many open source projects its developers seem obsessed with introducing new features rather than getting the basics to work.

Firefox is much slower and more resource hungry than Chrome on Linux Mint too.

Re: Since the translation DB can't be held locally ...

Somewhere I still have a copy of Netscape 0.9c - the first one which worked. It fits on a single 3.5" floppy, along with Trumpet WinSock.

Wait, security courses aren't a requirement to graduate with a computer science degree?

Computer science is not the same as computing or IT. Expecting a computer science graduate to have taken cybersecurity courses is like expecting a maths graduate to have taken book-keeping courses.

Top-tier IT talent doesn't stick around in 'mid-market' organizations

This assumes that employers correctly identify talent. Is there any evidence to support this assumption?

Major IT outage at Europe's largest caravan and RV club makes for not-so-happy campers

Amongst the suspects: every single non-caravan-or-motorhome driver in Britain.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

I use XFCE with Linux Mint, which is generally nice but even then the abomination of the new GNOME interface is creeping in. Thunderbird has to be asked nicely to display a menu bar )(for how long will that be an option) and far too many things think that having two "gearwheel" icons top right doing completely different things is a Good Idea.

OK, Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation first, but the GNOME developers should be next against the wall.

Burnout epidemic proves there's too much Rust on the gears of open source

Re: "Burnout"

Governments really should step up and close the loophole that big corporations are using to get free R&D and bypass employment laws and other regulations.

By making open sources licences illegal, you mean? How else would you prevent someone from using work in a way the author explicitly chooses to allow?

The Post Office systems scandal demands a critical response

Re: I fail to understand

"Conservatism" only had a capital because it started the sentence. Our legal system is innately and overwhelmingly small-c conservative, whoever is in power. That's why it gives the Post Office powers to prosecute, accepts their own commercial partners as expert witnesses, believes everything they say without question and gaols the victims.

We should remember that the 900 who were prosecuted are only the tip of the iceberg. Many, many more were threatened into handing over money - in many case very large amounts of money - to avoid prosecution.

Re: It's still happening

Programmers that don't get paid to do their work, don't get to eat. So the onus is on the ones paying them to get things done.

So not a profession, then, because no responsibility to check their own work. It's very clear how the Horizon software came to be so bad.

Re: It's still happening

But even if you’re right and this was a developer mistake, ok, company hires developers who either made a mistake, or are terrible… what’s your point?

That El Reg is full of programmers saying "It's not our fault that we can't do our jobs. It's our managers' fault for not giving us enough time to fix our mistakes." That's a different issue from the behaviour of Fujuitsu management, which was contemptible.

Re: It's still happening

I don't know about you, but if I went round the software I'm responsible for programming swatting bugs as I saw fit without bringing them to anyone's attention first I would be asked what the hell I was doing.

I would hope you'd be asked why you - or your colleagues - were writing such buggy code. The programming community seems to accept it as axiomatic that they will produce terrible code and that the role of a good manager is to give them time to fix their own mistakes. Other industries do not work like that.

Re: It's still happening

Use your words. The word in this case being "no". Does any other industry have a track record approaching 10% as bad as IT's?

Her ... what?

Re: I fail to understand

Why Paula Vennels, plus the rest of the PO board and the Fujitsu board of the time and since, haven't already been prosecuted and imprisoned for perverting the course of justice fraud, perjury, misconduct in public office, false accounting, libel, false imprisonment.

Because they are - comparatively - rich. Wilhoit's Law applies: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

Re: It's still happening

The developers created the bugs. The IT world really needs to stop blaming managers and clients for its endemic inability to produce secure and effective software.

Zuckerberg wants to build artificial general intelligence with 350K Nvidia H100 GPUs

Re: Bet

I *do* believe the current AI exhibits some form of intelligence. Its responses cannot be explained by statistics alone and I believe they've stumbled on something, but no one's quite sure what that is yet.

"Anything I don't understand must be AI" is just as bad as - and more or less the same as "Anything I don't understand must be God". Perhaps current AI has learned how to pray successfully.

Re: AI

They pissed a LOT more than that up the wall on Zuck's Metaverse fantasies. Turns out that the skills needed to build an app for fratboys to use to rate women's looks aren't great for technical innovation.

Fujitsu gets $1B market cap haircut after TV disaster drama airs

Re: If government contracts with Fujitsu

Courts can only act on the basis of the evidence put before them.

The courts decide what evidence to believe, and are notoriously willing to accept some evidence much readily than others. Their willingness to believe police officers, for example, has led to many miscarriages of justice.

And why the hell were Fujiitsu staff allowed to act as expert witnesses in Horizon cases?

Re: Fushitesu

Yes. Bernie Madoff's clerical staff lost their jobs too. Boo hoo.

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

Re: Compensation?

But Fujitsu employees did testify as expert witnesses to say that Horizon was reliable. Here's one example: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252527085/Fujitsu-expert-witness-in-subpostmaster-trial-manoeuvred-into-role-public-inquiry-told

I understand that perjury charges are being contemplated.

Re: s/unable/unwilling/

So the PO can't pay the money back because they haven't kept records of who they extorted it from.

Or, presumably, where it went to. Which fuels my increasing suspicion that someone at Fujitsu or the Post Office was doing very nicely indeed out of all this.

I strongly suspect that the Post Office believes all the postmasters were guilty and got off / are getting off on a technicality.