Posts by Paul Crawford

BT in tests to beam down 5G coverage from the stratosphere

Re: Blimps vs fixed wing

They still need engines for station-keeping against jet stream, etc.

Re: This is not the only technology being considered for delivering a wireless service to...

The "hard" part of running fibre is money. Years of insufficient investment, no government strategy beyond letting the markets decide, and some pointless voucher schemes that BT/Openreach would get based on promises they never get round to delivering.

Basically the same reasons so much else of the UK lags behind the EU and South Korea, etc.

I think only the USA is worse in terms of good internet service for all among developed countries, for much the same reasons.

Re: Isn't this a repeat?

A linked article says 60,000 feet, so similar to Concorde and the likes of U2 spy-planes, etc. That will avoid a lot of turbulence, but not jet-stream. I suspect propellers might struggle at that altitude but I don't know if variable-pitch designs would be economical for take off and for simply maintaining altitude, after all it is not really *going* anywhere fast, aside from fighting jet stream.

Landlord favorite Twitter sued for allegedly not paying rent on Market Square HQ

Re: Musk is just following the example of his guru

If he claims for ch11 protection, can the creditors contest it based on his actions being wilfully negligent to the company's financial well-being?

I.e. ask a judge to dismiss it based on it being a deliberate move?

Re: It's an asian thing

Get a burner phone for work.

Or don't work for the Chinese.

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

Re: Planned obsolescence

Also in some thin and expensive laptops

Chromebook SH1MMER exploit promises admin jailbreak

School education on PCs has, in recent years, offered no real "digital literacy" at all as the usual (outside of Chromebooks) is just learning to use Office (and not even something free and open that can be examined inside for those curious enough about code.

Also you have to remember the folks on this forum are as far from the usual chromebook clients as you can get, it is basically a tablet with a keyboard.

For some folks that is really the best choice, I gave one to a friend who was both simultaneously paranoid about being shafted on a Windows PC, and quite capable of screwing it up. It was almost perfect as they could not easily screw it up, and when broken they could get a new one and sync it to their google account and off they go! Yes, their privacy is raped but no worse than social media, and it almost worked out fine. Until I got a call saying it was broken as they stood on it with the cable's ferrite between the screen and keyboard trashing the display. The best bit? They told me "Oh last two times I did that it didn't break" strewth!

Google is working against them to get the next generation hooked

Don't you mean "Google is doing better than MS these days to get them hooked"

UK Cyber Security Centre's scary new story: One phish, two phish, Russia phish, Iran phish

Re: M.I.5.

For a start an email invite to a secret service smacks of cheapness. Even if genuine, which seems unlikely, if they can't afford to speak to you in person with a shaken Martini on expenses then its simply not worth bothering about.

My coat please, thank it is the one with the built-in devices =>

Experts warn of steep increase in Java costs under changes to Oracle license regime

Re: Right, but do all those businesses...

There is a difference?

NASA, DARPA to go nuclear in hopes of putting boots on Mars

Re: Boots scattered on Mars, Venus, various asteroids.

JWST can possibly detect life if there is lots of it to the point it has modified the atmosphere to show chemical signatures that are rare for inorganic processes.

Mars is known to have very little signs of life, but we also know from extreme locations on Earth that life can survive and those have not yet been ruled out.

Global network outage hits Microsoft: Azure, Teams, Outlook all down

Re: Does not make sense

Is Twitter still working?

Well they still have servers up, is that enough?

Rentokil uses AI rat recognition to plot extermination in real time

Re: cables

You can get cat urine flavoured cables to act as a deterrent:

https://www.flexcables.co.uk/flexishield-r/how-it-works

Re: Welcome to snout recog

We need 11kV PoE that deals with that specific problem...

Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs

Why would a VM for office need the internet?

I sure ain't browsing or emailing on Win7

Good job I use windows 7 in a VM for my out-of-date copy of Office. Far more reliable and private and not much chance of this sort of thing appearing.

Twitter tweaks third-party app rules to ban third-party apps

Re: King Midas in reverse

Gerald Ratner

Re: Be Thankful because

He is, but just not in the way anyone really would want...

Apple releases Lisa source code on landmark machine's 40th birthday

Re: Architecture and Morality.....anyone?

Follow the money.

Success of IBM's PC due to multiple (and cheaper) clones largely, not to mention Intel's rather illegal acts to keep competition off the market.

Intel offers desktop chip that can hit 6GHz if everything goes right, you can keep it cool, stars align, pigs fly

Re: Move work to the compiler?

We had some of the first Niagara chip-based servers, or Viagra as we so wittingly called them, for use in the web server of the day. It worked very well for that as the work load was also massively parallel/threaded, however, for more general work loads it had AIFK a single FPU shared. Not an issue for our tasks, but made it less useful than the later multi-core x86 beasts that came along by late 2000s.

Which ran Linux and eventually ate Sun's lunch. We had been fans of Solaris (plus ZFS) and kept both in use until Oracle took over then it was painfully obvious what the future would be...

Our Niagra servers continued in use until the facility was shut down in 2019.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

Re: Innumeracy

In medical terms 'overweight' is the stage before 'obese', and that is the stage before 'morbidly obese'.

JEDEC reportedly set to formalize Dell laptop memory standard

Re: License fee

If Dell are smart they will make it royalty-free so the DIMM makers get to use it and push costs down for Dell as well.

Basecamp details 'obscene' $3.2 million bill that caused it to quit the cloud

Cloud storage is only good value for small amounts.

Big amounts cost, but equally big storage with genuine site-resilience is not cheap either as you have capital costs (buying storage stuff, budgeting for its inevitable replacement and thus data migration) and running costs (electricity mostly for big stuff and keeping the damn kit cool, staff costs, location/data centre property costs). Any sensible business should look at both options and really think through the pros and cons of either choice, not just the marketing hype from cloud vendors (or indeed storage vendors).

Re: Hiring impact

If you are doing on-perm solutions you absolutely need skilled staff, and really at least one extra person over base cover to cover illness or folks leaving. That is not cheap or easy to find, but if you are looking at £100k+ per month you have the budget to make it happen, and if your business involves software development and maintenance you probably have many of the skills in-house to begin with.

For a Mon and Pop shop that has minimal IT needs then cloud / hosted services makes more sense for exactly the same reason - the looking after hardware, etc, costs are way too high and they don't have/need that sort of staff anyway.

Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

Re: The meltdown continues

What this will eventually do is allow the non-extremist leftists and rightists to communicate like adults rather than the childish antics and comments of the others...

Gee, have you ever actually used social media?

Re: Mars Ahoy

Viagra will help?

Hmm, at least I will have something to play with while waiting...

Re: Virtue rises with the sun

So much in fact that he set the world record for the biggest drop in perceived wealth in human history.

Fixed it for you :)

US think tank says China would probably lose if it tries to invade Taiwan

As much as the boardgames are fun problems to analyse, let's keep it on paper, no?

Let us all hope so. Whoever "wins" only really gets their ego reinforced, those on the ground and world wide all suffer. There are no real winners in any such aggressive move and if Ukraine has shown the world anything, it is how badly such an on-paper easy move can go. Let us hope the Xi sees this.

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

If they win it would be something to Crow about.

Microsoft to move some Teams features to more costly 'Premium' edition

...do everything in Teams and won't need to endure the misery of running multiple tools.

Instead you have the greater misery and fiscal pain of Teams for everything!

Belarus legalizes piracy – but citizens will have to pay for it

Arrr, the decadent west just has to make sure our films all take the piss out of Lukashenko and see how fast the Great Dictator's firewall comes down!

China's Hisense bakes Teams into Android-powered commercial displays

Teams and Android together - a marriage made in hell for sure.

Here's how to remotely take over a Ferrari...account, that is

Re: Once upon a time.......

True, but then the insurers can't claim it was never locked as "no sign of violence used".

Re: Once upon a time.......

Spend £100k on a car and get advised by the police to fit CCTV and a steering lock due to common thefts:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-61838245

Obviously in addition to putting your keyless fob in a Faraday bag, because clearly they were designed with security in mind...

Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

Re: Don't worry, be wiring.

It has its plus and minuses if you pardon the pun. While safer, you can still get killed on 120V to Earth and probably more fires from more amps for a given kW load. In the UK (at least) we have 110V for building sites (using yellow "commando" connectors that are not interchangeable with the blue 230V or red 400V ones) and that is really 55V - 0V - 55V two-phase in a similar manner to the USA's domestic supply, but half the voltage. In the days before cheap RCDs that was a major step towards safety as what passes for wiring in building sites is appalling beyond belief.

While rare, you also see 230V - 0V - 230V systems in the UK for the odd farm, but generally speaking if you need more than 230V single phase worth of power then it is 230V/400V three-phase you get. There are also LV sites on 400V/690V three-phase but personally I have never encountered one, I think that is only for big motors but not quite going to the 3.3kV sort of voltage that comes under different rules (as above 1kV AC is classed as "high voltage" and not under the usual wiring regulations).

Re: Don't worry, be wiring.

Many consumer / cheap multi-meters claim to be rated to measure 1,000V but not with any switching spikes on top. But the usual reason for such a nasty end is having it on the wrong range (ohms, amps, low voltages, etc) and such cheapo meters are not able to safely fail, they simply explode.

That is why the CAT-III/CAT-IV ratings are so important, they specify certain expected transient over-voltages to be survived, and that they fail in a safe manner if anything else happens (so a combination of decent parts used, adequate PCB clearances, and High Rupture Capacity fuses as needed).

Not your 20mm x 5mm glass fuses, but proper ceramic HRC things that are often 38mm x 10mm and can interrupt prospective fault currents of 50kA or more.

Re: Don't worry, be wiring.

Mistakes still happen. You might want to read the section "Hispanic Factory Workers Dies of Burns After Improperly Testing a 480-Volt Electrical Bus Bar." starting on PDF page 68 (page 53 on bottom of page) of this report:

https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-statistics-and-reports/Electrical/RFArcFlashOccData.ashx?la=en

Re: Don't worry, be wiring.

You don't really see that in the UK/EU, we are almost always LV star (wye) secondaries and HV delta primaries for end application substations. But the loss of N or swapping N for one of the L is just as exiting and easy to do...

Re: Don't worry, be wiring.

Multimeters are not a good choice, too many ways you can get it wrong with potentially disastrous results resulting in an explosion (e.g. trying amps range to measure volts on a high energy circuit) or a deadly shock from checking for AC volts on DC range and seeing nothing then touching it.

Meters should be CAT-IV rated if you do want to use them, but a "voltage tester" is a simpler and safer option. As a random example:

https://www.test-meter.co.uk/martindale-vt12-voltage-and-continuity-tester

Dell said to be planning purge of Chinese chips from products by 2024

Irrespective of the current USA vs China tussle, it seems dumb to have all of your products dependant on one region. Sadly the race to the bottom of globalisation was all about this: the cheapest supply and who cared if it was all under an authoritarian government party when there are shareholder's dividends to be issues?

Corporations start testing Windows 11 in bigger numbers. Good luck

None so blind as those who will not see...

No, AI can't tell if you've got COVID-19 by listening to your coughs

Good to see they properly investigated this method irrespective of the outcome.

Should open source sniff the geopolitical wind and ban itself in China and Russia?

Most FOSS is written in English, so just ban the Bad Guys (tm) from speaking English, simplez!

But more seriously, you have two approaches to restricting FOSS: one is to deny its use via a license, but who will enforce that in those countries? The second is to deny access by having a "Great firewall of the West" but we know how hard that is to make work against anyone smart enough to code, and the simple option of blocking whole countries at the BGP would allow authoritarian regimes to further control their people's minds by blocking a view of the rest of the world. Neither would do much good.

Really the main sanction that can usefully be employed against them is to block the supply of hardware needed to make any of that work, and to deny direct support (as most companies did by withdrawing from Russia after Putin's invasion of Ukraine).

Stolen info on 400m+ Twitter accounts seemingly up for sale

The company would be on the hook, so now that it is Musk's property he has inherited the problem.

Now if only he had done some proper due-diligence before offering to buy? Oh wait, he elected not to!

Alphabet reshuffles to meet ChatGPT threat

Re: ChatGPT

As you also mentioned, I've also been finding libraries that I otherwise would never have found by getting stuck in the search engine / online forum echo chambers

But does the AI tell you how well maintained (if at all) said libraries are?

License to launch: UK space regulator gives Virgin Orbit satellites the go-ahead

Re: one step closer to the first satellite launch take-off from UK soil.

How is it any different from a multi stage rocket?

Well a traditional multi-stage rocket launch has a lot of infrastructure are the launch site, support towers, tracking radar, etc. That represents a significant investment.

Here we have basically a plane launch and a boat-load of publicity. Like the 30 year old Pegasus launcher, if Virgin is successful it does not need Cornwall as it can basically launch from any airport that can take a 747. Probably the launch tracking is a mobile unit already...

NASA infosec again falls short of required US government standard

I do wonder how other gov agencies really rate?

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

I'm sure she would be interested if Mush throws in some free ostrich anus dinners...

Linux kernel 6.2 promises multiple filesystem improvements

Re: Next gen?

I would say that if there was one single reason I would like to have ZFS on my machines it is the copy-on-write snapshot system so it is transparent and low overhead, and yet it allows a simple roll-back to before you did the Doh! moment, or some scum launched ransomware on it.

The latter assumes the snapshots have a different admin account/password from yours!

Second reason is the checksums, not a big issue for typical personal computing but a big help for BIG file systems and heavy usage to know that the data is still as-written.

When we asked how you crashed the system we wanted an explanation not a demonstration

Re: Whoops - lets do it again and watch this time.

My father worked in a fish processing plant as a student. One day a filleting machine jammed and the operator was going to shut it down to clear the innards, at which point the supervisor said "no" and argued it was easy to get it out and proceeded to demonstrate how to get the back of his hand filleted as it resumed motion. Clearly should have let the operator do what they knew about.

Almost Darwin in action.