Posts by Chris Miller

Tesla S P85+: Smiling all the way to the next charging point

@Mike

Since the first cellular 'handheld' (though it did weigh >1kg, so you needed strong hands) phone was demonstrated in 1973, and commercial systems were operating in Japan by 1979, I think your memory may be faulty.

Re: If only..

You're right, Graham. It may be that even as I type, some genius has thought of a better way to store energy*. Only it won't involve electrochemistry, because we understand these properties quite well and are already pushing the boundaries of what is physically possible and it's a similar story with capacitors. And if someone makes that discovery today, it'll be a decade or two before it can be fitted into something like a Tesla. So, unfortunately, this is as good as it gets, for quite a while.

* Or maybe the Lockheed skunk works really will get their mini fusion reactor to work.

Comet Lovejoy's greenish glow visible with naked eye this weekend

Re: > much better view of it with a telescope or good pair of binoculars.

Just come in from comet watching using a 10x42 monocular. Fuzzy monochrome ball - TBH Jupiter is far more impressive at present. The trouble is that the naive public sees long exposure telescope shots like the one adorning this article, and expect to see something similar above their heads (and blame the astronomers when they don't).

I remember (strokes long grey beard) as a teenager on holiday in the west country, a 'proper' comet with a coma and a long tail (2-3 degrees) looking like a Giotto painting, this must have been around 1967/8. Everything since (visible from the UK) has been a fuzzy blob.

Re: > much better view of it with a telescope or good pair of binoculars.

Forecast for SE England is currently clear skies tonight. But don't expect to be able to make out much more than a slightly fuzzy dot or to see any colours, even with bins. For that you'd need darker skies than are available within 100km of London :(

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Hot Spanish tongue action

Tongue not gone

Most decent British butchers stock sliced tongue - very nice with salads or in butties. You can even buy it in supermarkets. I'd draw the line at cooking a whole one yourself, unless you're planning to feed a family of ten for a week.

Healthcare: Look anywhere you like for answers, just not the US

Re: @Chris Miller

Your suggestion is extremely sensible, and therefore it will never happen.

Re: THE NHS IS NOT A SINGLE ENTITY!

Didn't they try the 'single IT system for the NHS' and ended up pissing away several billion before calling a halt to the clusterfuck (to borrow Tim's favourite expression)?

Competition and choice

A couple of years ago my brother had what turned out to be a (fortunately, relatively minor) heart attack. The ambulance was there almost before his wife put the phone down (it was a Sunday morning) and the crew correctly diagnosed the problem. "Where would you like us to take you?" was their question. He lives roughly equidistant between three hospitals. He knew absolutely nothing about how good they were at treating cardiac problems (and nor, it appears, did the ambulance crew), but getting to hospital A involved a short section of M25, visitor parking at hospital B was widely known to be terrible, so he opted for C. He was lucky, and it turned out that they'd just had a major refit of their Cardiology Dept, had all the latest kit and fixed him up a treat, but we did end up wondering what the point of patient choice was.

Stale pizza, backup BlackBerrys, payroll panic: Sony Pictures mega-hack

Re: absence of disaster recoevery

What I don't understand, is not the absence of DR - most organisations (though Sony has been around a long time) will startup, grow and fold without ever experiencing a real 'disaster' and can therefore get away without a 'plan'. But in my experience a company as large and high-profile as Sony will experience cyber attacks (not necessarily APTs, just DDOS, boring old viruses etc etc that still have the potential for serious disruption) several times per year (if not per month). The very first time it happens, you may not have put together an incident response plan, but surely after the 20th time, even the most clueless operation will begin to think that something better than headless chicken syndrome might be a good idea? Obviously not.

Really, govt tech profit cash grab is a PRIZE-WINNING idea?

Re: "wealth creators"

It's a Tim thread, not an Andrew thread (though the latter does get an honourable mention).

The Shock of the New: The Register redesign update 4

Re: Thanks!

Concur. Though in Chrome links from 'The Channel' don't show as visited (the same problem existed on the 'old' web site) - works in IE, I imagine it's something to do with the different web site (channelregister.co.uk).

Independent inquiry into British air-traffic-control IT nightmare

Re: If it works, don't fix it.

I suspect Matt (Viscount) Ridley had written the article before the NATS problem, but found it a convenient peg to introduce the subject, even though all Reg readers would know it's actually irrelevant.

The main point of the article is that government ought to stop (and perhaps is actually stopping) trying to deliver giant multi-year, multi-billion pound IT projects and instead adopt agile development methods, a sentiment I suspect many on here would agree with. As an article on a technical subject, written by a non-technician for a non-technical audience, I don't think it's too bad (if you delete the first couple of sentences mentioning NATS - agile development is not necessarily the best approach for safety critical systems).

Whether the GDS, civil service mandarins and (more importantly) politicians would be capable of successfully participating in agile development is another question entirely (A hae ma doots).

No apologist for Matt - I was one of the many criticising his earlier article about replacing pilots by automated systems (I use the same handle on The Times).

Re: If it works, don't fix it.

"there should have been a parallel system to failover to"

Parallelism doesn't help if it's based on identical hardware running identical software and the failure is the result of a software error. (Unless you have an independent system produced by an entirely segregated group of developers - some safety critical system work this way, but then you may need a third system to vote on which of the two disagreeing systems has actually failed.)

Is there ANOTHER UNIVERSE headed BACKWARDS IN TIME?

!daehbus eciN

Just sayin'

The Great Unwatched: BBC hails glorious digital future for Three

Yet, as Andrew mentioned, there are occasional nuggets. Our War and Bluestone 42 for me, no doubt others will have different opinions. I don't know how much you have to pay for basic channel + HD bandwidth on Freeview, is that where the savings are coming from?

Confused about 5G? So are we, say carriers

What is it for?

Please help, I'm struggling to understand what benefit I would get from 1 Gbps to my mobile device - the ability to stream (multiple simultanous) 4K movies to my 4 inch screen? I realise that there are some areas where a physical line is practically impossible (or, at least, hugely expensive), so a 5G service might be a good alternative to a fixed broadband wired connection. But what I (and I bet I'm not alone) want from mobile data is reasonable speed (a few Mbps) that works everywhere and on the move and (preferably) doesn't flatten my battery after an hour's continuous use. Instead of building out new 5G networks in city centres, let's improve 3G so that it extends to 98% coverage by location (not by population).

Drone in NEAR-MISS with passenger jet at Heathrow airport

Re: MI6 on a test run?

It might look a bit like this.

Shhhhh! It's a Swiss Sunday shutdown. Kill the lawnmower, punish the kids with CHEESE

Re: Sunday shutdown...

Germany as well (mowing on the Sabbath) - though I think it's a local ordnance rather than a national one. Always remember how laws work in Europe:

In Britain, everything that is not prohibited by law is permitted.

In Germany, everything that is not permitted by law is prohibited.

In Russia, everything is prohibited, even if permitted by law.

In France, everything is permitted, even if prohibited by law.

In Switzerland, everything that is not prohibited by law is obligatory.

Misty-eyed Ray Ozzie celebrates 25th birthday of Lotus Notes by tweeting about it ...

@AC

I don't want a database that also does mail, I want an efficient, reliable email client that helps me read and deal with my email with the least amount of aggravation

If you're using Notes purely as an email system, you're using the wrong product. But you can (with skilled developers) build impressive corporate workflow systems, that would be much harder to achieve on any other platform.

OTOH The versions that I used to have to administer (c. 2000) leaked memory like a stuck whale. I remember having to reboot our Notes server every 24 hours to avoid it running out of memory - even with a (then) humongous (and humongously expensive) 1GB of RAM.

Yotaphone 2: The two-faced pocket-stroker with '100 hours' batt life

Clever and innovative - rather like Apple used to be. I imagine they're manufactured in China/Taiwan rather than Siberia!

Quantum computing is so powerful it takes two years to understand what happened

Thanks, Forget It

So, if I understand it correctly (probably not), the method only works to factorise numbers that have two odd factors that differ by a power of 2 (e.g. 56153 = 233 x 241), and so could be easily defeated (for cryptographic purposes) by minor tweaks to the choice of the two large prime numbers used to compute the private key.

Hawking: RISE of the MACHINES could DESTROY HUMANITY

Demonstrating once again that being a world-leading authority in one area of expertise, gives you no credibility whatsoever in another, unrelated area.

SUPER-SUEBALL heading IBM's way in Australia

Re: Are you listening UK Gov?

I agree, but the problem is that bidding for government mega-contracts is so complex and expensive (and, inevitably, ends in failure for most participants). that only huge operations can afford to play. You or I (or the small, competent computer shop round the corner) may say "bloody hell, I could do that for a tenth of the price and still make a huge profit", but we can't possibly afford the cost of the bidding process. The result is that the only people in the frame are a handful of large players (IBM, Crapita, ...) who all have a long track record of constructive (or should that be obstructive) incompetence.

Under the Iron Sea: YES, tech and science could SAVE the planet

It isn't a bureaucracy, it's a religion

We've all offended against Gaia, the Earth Mother, and now we must all be made to suffer for our sins. Proposing quick, cheap and effective solutions (or even suggesting that they could be worthy of investigation) is simply missing the point, which is penance.

Lord Lucan, Murakami's Strange Library ... and a hitchhiker's guide to the Computing Universe

Bugs

Please put a stop to this idea that the use of the word 'bug' comes from a problem caused by an insect trapped in the workings of an early computer. It's a nice story, and may even be true, but the use of the word 'bug' in the context of a glitch or problem is far earlier than this. Thomas Edison used the word in its later sense and it was well-established (in the US) during the 19th century. It probably derives from the original meaning of 'bug' (Welsh bwg) as a euphemism for a goblin or the devil (cf 'bugbear') - the use of bug to describe a class of insect is also a derivative of this form, after it became popular the archaic use gradually faded away.

Sacre vache! Netflix ne parle pas le Frenchy ... zat is against ze LAW

Does this imply that anyone making their wares available over the Internet must produce Ts&Cs in Khmer, on the off chance that someone in Cambodia decides to make a purchase?

Reuse the Force, Luke: SpaceX's Elon Musk reveals X-WING designs

A superlative idea, sir, with only two minor flaws:

1. We have no idea what kind of material could support its own weight over a length of tens of thousands of kilometres; and

2. We have no idea what kind of material could support its own weight over a length of tens of thousands of kilometres.

Now, I realise that, technically speaking, that's only one flaw. But it's such a big flaw, I thought I ought to mention it twice.

© Red Dwarf

Get a job in Germany – where most activities are precursors to drinking

I wonder where William is working in Germany (I would guess NRW, in the Cologne-Düsseldorf area)? German Länder are quite distinct - culturally, politically and even economically. There's a world of difference between Hamburg and Munich, and traces of the Ostie approach of 'we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us' persist in former DDR areas.

Leaked screenshots show next Windows kernel to be a perfect 10

@Frank

Yes, in my case it was an even older 1240U model. It runs quite happily in Windows XP mode.

Re: It's not like many people complain about the Windows kernel

What most people complain about is inability to support existing peripherals after an upgrade. If a new kernel requires new drivers, then what are the odds that the manufacturer of your 5=year-old flat-bed scanner will write an updated one?

I need a password to BRAKE? What? No! STOP! Aaaargh!

What GPS really needs

(and it shouldn't really be hard to achieve) is an option to omit all roads unsuitable for wide vehicles. I've lost count of the number of times I've watched an artic (semi for our American cousins) trying to reverse up our narrow country lane because its GPS decided that trying to get down it would shave 5 minutes off its journey.

Renewable energy 'simply won't work': Top Google engineers

There are (proven, certified) reactor designs that can't experience the problems that loss of coolant caused at Fukushima. No-one is proposing any new reactors based on the RBMK installed at Chernobyl (for very obvious reasons), though there are still 11 being operated.

And Chernobyl was caused by: an antique flawed reactor design that no-one but a Stalinist state would ever have thought of building; and an approach to operational safety that can only be described as bordering on lunacy. Something only slightly less strong could also be said of Sellafield/Windscale (a zeroth generation reactor whose only real purpose was military). Bundling these all together and then scaling it up for a putative thousand plants is like applying accident statistics from the Wright Flyer to modern airliners, completely barking unless you have a (not very) hidden agenda.

So the only nuclear accident that has happened to anything resembling a modern PWR facility (and even that was nearing end of life, and to a design chosen for political not engineering reasons) was caused by a magnitude 9 earthquake followed by a 14m tsunami (which themselves causing tens of thousands of 'natural' fatalities, including one broken dam) and had a death toll of precisely zero.

The cloud that goes puff: Seagate Central home NAS woes

Re: Arm and a leg?

All good points, Martin. My upload speed has just increased (thanks to FTTC in rural Buckinghamshire) from 1 Mbps to 20, so I'm lucky*. But I uploaded 150GB (I guess you must shoot a lot more video than I do) in 3 weeks on the 'old' line.

* I could have had a 'residential' service (50M down + 5 up), but have gone for a 'business' option (75M down + 20 up) at an extra cost of ~£5 a month - no contention issues so far.

Arm and a leg?

Microsoft Office (around £60 pa for non-business use on up to 5 systems) includes 1TB of OneDrive 'cloud' storage, which I understand is being upgraded to 'unlimited'. Of course, you'll need a decent speed Internet connection to make best use of it (I reckon a 4TB upload would take about 3 weeks at 20Mbps).

Webcam hacker pervs in MASS HOME INVASION

This was big news about 10 years ago (remember johnny.ihackstuff.com - now gone to the great bit bucket in the sky). Glad to see the government is as on the ball as ever.

CERN's 2014 Xmas gift from the Large Hadron Collider: Two new baryons

It's the beauty quark that gives the baryons their mass

Or, to put it more clearly, it's the beauty quark that accounts for their mass being so high (for a subatomic particle). They would still have mass if the beauty were replaced by a more standard form of quark.

Quebec's latest bid to break away from Canada HALTED by a single dot

Québec is also the home of the chien chaud.

That dreaded syncing feeling: Will Microsoft EVER fix OneDrive?

Re: The signal flaw in OneDrive/OneDrive for Business

I use the consumer version at home. I have a C-drive (SSD) for Win8.1 and a D-drive (rotating rust) for data, with the local copy of OneDrive on D (configured that way at setup). Unless I've misunderstood, you're claiming that isn't possible (works for me)?

NASA launches new climate model at SC14

Re: My quotes better than yours club

I'll see your quotes and raise you:

Predictions can be very difficult - especially about the future. - Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

I note all your quotes are attempts to predict the future*, whereas Miller's (no relation, natch) is simply a pithy observation about the nature of scientific enquiry, which anyone with pretensions to being a scientist ought to recognise.

* Actually, I suspect it took about a decade for Watson to be proved wrong, and Olsen was correct, except he failed to foresee the advent of the microcomputer - (almost) no-one would want a PDP 11/34 in their home.

Running equations through a computer does not constitute an experiment. - Stanley Miller (1930-2007)

Fasthosts goes titsup, blames DNS blunder

Loss of service

some folk were already demanding compensation for the loss of service

And some folks haven't read their Ts&Cs, I'll bet. Maybe a small refund on next month's sub, if you're lucky.

Disclaimer I don't have access to Fasthosts' Ts&Cs, just a generic comment based on too many years of experience.

There it is! Philae comet lander found in existing Rosetta PICS

Re: Next time, Gadget, next time!

The challenge is that these probes are always tightly constrained by mass. Putting in redundant systems means you can only have half as many systems/experiment packages.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: The MIGHTY Scotch egg

Our local butcher does a fine range of scotch eggs, all hand made by his missus (somehow managing to keep the yolks runny - a topic for further research by the SPB, I feel). The chilli ones are popular, but I agree that black pudding is the winner. I'm not sure about morcilla - fine foodstuff though it undoubtedly is, it can't compete with real black pudding, which must come from the mystic triangle, roughly between Wigan, Bury and Preston.

VINYL is BACK and you can thank Sonos for that

Re: What's the point?

Thanks for the (perfectly valid) points made, but (as I understand it, not having bought an LP for several decades) you now get download rights (and quite possibly a physical CD) bundled with your purchase. So why would I need a (somewhat inferior) turntable with a USB connection?

What's the point?

Speaking as someone still (occasionally) using a turntable and associated analogue audio gear, I can't quite see the point of buying an LP and then ripping it to digital? I enjoy the retro feel of playing LPs, but their superiority (if any) must surely lie in a analogue reproduction chain.

European Commission decides it won't have a science advisor after Greenpeace pressure

Don't forget

That much of the funding for Greenpeace ultimately comes from the EU (that would be our pockets). Nice work if you can get it!

U wot? Silicon Roundabout set to become Silicon U-BEND

epicentre

The point on the surface of an object closest to a point in its interior - normally used of earthquakes. It does not mean 'the precise centre', any more than epidemic refers to a global disease (that would be pandemic). So Old Street Roundabout can only accurately be described as the 'epicentre' of the London tech scene, if said scene is buried deep underground ... oh, wait ...

NHS XP patch scratch leaves patient records wide open to HACKERS

It all depends

If you've got thousands of desktops still running XP, you've got a problem. If you have a handful of systems that don't connect to your main network or the Internet and don't hold high-value data, I'd struggle to justify the (significant) cost of paying for extended support.

'Tech giants who encrypt comms are unwittingly aiding terrorists', claims ex-Home Sec Blunkett

Blunkett or Lane-Fox

Which is more clueless about the Internet and computers in general? Which to detest more? Decisions, decisions.