Posts by John Sager

RISC OS Open plots great escape from 32-bit purgatory

There is still probably a lot of 32-bit code in use doing useful things which can't be rebuilt to 64-bit economically or at all, so keeping the capability to execute 32-bit code seems like a reasonable thing to do.

UK's biggest mobile operator starts 3G switchoff, hopes it won't catch out April fools

Where's the 5G?

Voda switched theirs off over a year ago and still I get E for Eff Off! when I'm anywhere outside a conurbation. You would think they could do more than the apparently sluggardly pace of the buildout. Perhaps the plan is to replace all the 4G in the cities first & then redeploy the 4G kit in the sticks.

China's EV champ BYD reveals super-fast charging that leaves Tesla eating dust

Just look at Portillo's current oeuvre on BBC. He's in Bergen and the flexible(!) cables to deliver shore power to the cruise ships have to be seen to be believed.

As for fast charging, the Chinese have plenty of local copper and aluminium and they can just plan the capacity into their growing electricity distribution network. The UK equivalent is very mature and hard to augment, and with plenty of resistance to new pylon runs.

Flang-tastic! LLVM's Fortran compiler finally drops the training wheels

FORTRAN IV rings an ancient memory bell

I did a FORTRAN IV course in the last term at university and actually managed to write a functioning program - punched card stack and all! The debug-recompile cycle was a bit tortuous then! I've hacked on Fortran occasionally since along with several other languages, but I'm now down to C and Python mostly.

This one weird trick can make online publishing faster, safer, more attractive, and richer

Re: At this point, adtech can be considered malware

Welcome to Streaming World. I have a Amazon Prime account and the streaming is a doubtful bonus on good delivery. It used to be ad-free but now increasingly there are unskippable ads in the programmes which pisses me off mightily. I still have a Humax Freesat recorder about 15 years old. It's on its 3rd hard disk but the electrolytics in the PSU haven't gone bang yet. It is a godsend for skipping ads on commercial channels so we rarely see the complete weirdness that seems to be de rigeur in the TV ad space here in the UK.

Satnav systems built for Earth used by Blue Ghost lander as it approached the Moon

Re: Precision?

The GR effects of Earth at the Moon are much less so clocks run slower on the Moon relative to those on Earth. GPS and the other GNSS sats take care of that for Earth by running very slightly slower than the nominal frequency. Also the message includes info to cope with time and position varying effects. A Moon receiver will have to remove or ignore the Earth-related compensations and sort its own out for the much greater change at the Moon.

Precision?

Looking at the references there's an absence of information about accuracy. The way GPS works is that your position is on a sphere around each sat with radius given by the measured range. With 4 or more sats that problem can be solved to give your position. The accuracy is best if the directions to each sat are widely spaced, which they generally are on Earth.

However on the Moon all those sats are in more or less the same direction. The maximum angle subtended at the Moon by GPS sats at opposite ends of their orbit is only about 8 degrees. I hope that experiment can collect sufficient data before it freezes to death to give some estimate of expected position errors. I expect the time errors will be a lot less though.

Mega council officers had no idea what they were buying ahead of Oracle fiasco

Not too many of that calibre & experience these days. Wartime often lets the good ones float towards the top by necessity. As for local authorities, I once read somewhere that Maggie took a lot of their powers away because she was so horrified by the incompetence she found at that level.

Untrained techie botched a big hardware sale by breaking client's ERP

Re: "Unbeknown to Kane, the GUI was buggy."

The switches I use at home (Netgear) seem to have a reliable web gui. I've certainly never had a bad config. There is a pseudo-IoS cli configurator but that's really only used for saving configs as text.

Want to play billionaire for a day? This app lets you rent your own armed goon squad

Re: Here in Britain where carrying guns is only permitted for ... armed criminals

Not a scholar of Greek forms of argument, I guess.

Re: Here in Britain...

The fleet of Escalades might be a show-stopper in the UK too. Range Rovers, even Overfinches, just doesn't cut it.

Having said that, I did see an Escalade sat waiting on Ipswich docks once. Surreal.

BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows

Re: Options options...

Similarly, although some Bulgarian outfit on contract to CityFibre laid some fibre in OR's ducts in our village the other week. No idea if and when they'll install DPs nearby though.

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

East Lothian?

Are there any EVs up there? It's hardly representative of the UK in general. Sounds like the boosters of this idea didn't ask the right people for a technical appraisal before going ahead. Not an uncommon occurrence...

It's not just Big Tech: The UK's Online Safety Act applies across the board

Re: Something tells me...

This! Very definitely. We've seen the burden of State control of us proles increasing steadily over at least the last 2 decades. It's not just a Left- wing thing either - the Tories seem to have been just as willing to circumscribe our freedom to do stuff in the name of various Menckenian Hobgoblins.

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Re: Any system...

I wish all languages would get rid of the ternary operator

I saw a multiply nested one of those today so it took me a moment to understand the logic. I'm not fussed though and I use them myself. Its more succinct and more expression-like than if - then - else.

SpaceX will try satellite deployment on next Starship test

Re: Important

I guess he's entitled to his opinion just like all those outside the US who have or still do criticise & insult DJT.

He certainly got TTK's attention judging by his response today. Winding up politicians should be an international sport anyway to keep them on their toes.

As for the CCP, I'm half expecting a large red CCP flag to cover much of the face of the moon before I pop my clogs.

Former NSA cyberspy's not-so-secret hobby: Hacking Christmas lights

Re: They have

The string I have has 100 lights on a 10m string. Unlike the WS2812 the data line doesn't daisy-chain - it's connected to all the lights in parallel. I still haven't worked out how they tell each light what position it is in the string. It looks like they manufacture the string in long lengths & cut off 10m or 5m etc for sale so it needs to be one-time-programmed later.

My first driver was a Pimoroni Pico 2 plus with a single WS2812 as a level shifter. That complained about driving the string after a day or two so I've changed to a Pimoroni plasma 2350W. Sadly the wireless bit doesn't work yet but the level shifter is plenty beefy enough to drive the light string.

Asda decided on a 'no go' for 'mass rollout' of store IT conversion

Re: "Since when do retail make ANY system changes in December?"

Not so far. That is still very hit and miss. Having used Google Pay for some months now, Tesco is the only place where I have a problem

Re: "Since when do retail make ANY system changes in December?"

Well, Tesco have just done so. 2.5 years ago they did a software update that made their bar code scanners a complete pile of crap - several seconds to register a scan, and the same delay for repeat scans of the same item. In some parts of our usual store it took a lot longer because of the WiFi coverage.

So a couple of weeks ago I went into the store and all the scans are now pretty much instant, just like Sainsbury's have always been.

Having complained bitterly originally via their CEO mailbox, I thought I would write and congratulate them on having the balls to do a software upgrade just before Christmas! A pity it's taken them 2.5 years to sort it out though.

SpaceX rocketeers get fresh FAA license for next Starship launch

All true except for the space mining. The earth still has vastly more of everything we need. The only constraint is economic, though the Greenies might think they have a veto. It will always be more economic to mine stuff here rather than on asteroids far into the future.

Also, if there were an economic bountiful supply of, say, platinum in an asteroid, then as soon as you start mining it the price will come down to the point where it starts to become uneconomic to mine the asteroid further.

Contrary to some, traceroute is very real – I should know, I helped make it work

Re: One of my favotire tools

It's an in-reference to another well-known blog in certain circles. It's author even used to write here once upon a time.

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Re: Keyboard layout

Sisterce, denarius?

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

In the 80s I wrote a serial link concentrator running over RSX11T on a PDP11. It used a 3rd party 16-port serial card for cost reasons and I wrote a driver to implement the serial protocol. Getting on for 15 years later when I had moved on a few times, my old boss contacted me - they wanted to replace the PDP11s with a VAX. Did I still have the software? I dug out a listing hiding under a bunch of other mouldering docs for him. I don't think I had a copy of the s/w as the RSX11M dev system was long gone. I think they eventually gave up on the idea.

That was the last time I wrote anything serious in Pascal - the Oregon Software compiler. From then on it's been C, C++ and Python mostly.

A closer look at Intel and AMD's different approaches to gluing together CPUs

Plenty of simpler ARM Cortex devices around to play with, and plenty of vendors selling bits and bobs - Pimoroni, Sparkfun et al. If 32 bits is too much then ATMEGA devices are still mainstream.

Not really. From any wafer there will be fully functional chips and a few or sometimes more than a few on which only some of the cores work. If users want less cores but oodles of cache then those chips go into the market rather than landfill.

IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4, argues APNIC's chief scientist

Re: ipv6 is a mess and ipv4 will not die anytime soon

If your network is of any size then the better solution for v6 is to get your own allocation. There is plenty of address space available! You still need a v4 access point but then you could run a NAT64/DNS64 combination to map remote v4 addresses into the local V6 space. Some ISPs already do this, including mine. I could in principle go v6 only but older hosts like the TV don't support it and I still need an inbound VPN solution from v4-land.

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

Re: Mental image

Who could forget Rhinocratic Oaths - "Excuse me sir, I have reason to believe you can.. turn me on".

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

Re: I've not really used Windows much for 15+ years

Snap! However I've just built a new laptop for my wife (win10/Office2016 on a modern Lenovo) - she won't abandon Word for LibreOffice so I can't persuade her to go Linux. I've just turned off Fast Boot having read these comments. Thanx for the info!

700K+ DrayTek routers are sitting ducks on the internet, open to remote hijacking

I thought that too once, when I had a Vigor 120 modem for ADSL which was fine. However I then had two Vigor 130s for VDSL. The first died after a year or so. The second worked but the raw downstream rate was up and down like a yo-yo - on a line < 200M from the FTTC box. I now run an old BT ECI modem reflashed with OpenWRT and that is solid at just over 80Mbit downstream raw rate. It's odd because they both use the Lantiq chipset though with different firmware builds

Bring the joy of train delays home with your very own departure board

Re: a very realistic product

That site is really nice but I pissed off Greater Anglia recently by demanding some refund for a train that was 15 1/4 minutes late into Liverpool St. They nixed the refund swearing blind the delay was only 14 minutes. They did eventually cough up when I pursued it though. That makes me wonder about the accuracy of realtimetrains vis-a-vis the 'official' database.

The other excellent nerdy sites are traksy.uk and signalmaps.co.uk. The latter even shows points settings as well as signals. Try Ely for a complex junction with reversing trains etc. (e.g. Liverpool to Norwich).

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

Re: Hard truths

I think I'll do a Chou En Lai and say it's too early to tell.

250 million-plus unused IPv4 addresses should be left alone, argues network boffin

Ho hum. This has been done to death before multiple times on El Reg.

TL;DR: you end up with a V6 lookalike.

Re: Well...

I have had IPv6 from A&A for several years and I run a dual stack network with both Linux and Windows machines with no problem. A&A provide a 6-to-4 gateway/DNS service so in principle I could go v6 only. However I have devices that are v4 only on the network so it's easier to keep v4 going. One arcane issue I had was with my VPN tunnel back to the home network. That is currently v4 only but when I visited my daughter recently the tunnel wouldn't work on her network. She had recently changed ISP to a fibre provider that was dual stack, so my phone acquired a v6 address on that network. The browser on the phone then picked up the v6 address of the server on my network it wanted to connect to, but it wouldn't route over the v4-only tunnel! Happily, merely adding the v6 address range of my internal network to WireGuard's AllowedIPs list on the phone solved that one.

WHO-backed meta-study finds no evidence that cellphone radiation causes brain cancer

Sadly a lot of people do live that way. Physics is a minority sport and to evaluate the nonsense and dismiss it you do need at least the basics of physics and the capability to do back of envelope calculations. Plus a questioning mindset.

SAP CTO bows out over 'incident' at company shindig

Respect is something to be earned, not given out for free.

For me, insisting on specific pronouns that aren't obvious from appearance, is not a respect-inducing attitude!

Sounds like he wrong-pronouned the wrong person. We'll no doubt find out in the fullness of time.

The amber glow of bork illuminates Brighton Station

Yes, I got that - 4 ticket machines at Stevenage with what looked like a partial restart screen. It was lucky that the lady behind the ticket counter was functional.

As for train info, the National Rail app is ok for departures and arrivals but is totally borked for planning any journey in the future. The Greater Anglia app does that for me, even for other bits of the UK.

For the more adventurous, traksy.uk and signalmaps co uk provide interesting info about train movements, and realtimetrains co uk does timetables and real time updates if you know the headcode.

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

Re: Honourable mention

I wrote a whole comms concentrator in Pascal in the 80s, along with a RSX11 driver in assembler. That worked for about 20 years, I think. RSX11T was a nice embedded platform. But then I moved on to programming in C/C++ and I've never touched Pascal again

Chinese broadband satellites may be Beijing's flying spying censors, think tank warns

Ground Stations

LEO satellites need lots of ground stations around the world because of the limited horizon. Starlink has inter-sat laser links to expand coverage but each extra hop in that increases latency.

China will only need a limited number of ground stations to cover its own territory but if it has ambitions to use the same model in, e.g. Africa, then it will need lots of ground stations there.

You could link them to geostationary sats but that kills low latency.

Juice probe scores epic fuel save after snapping selfies with Earth and Moon

Nail biting?

If I were the controller I don't think I would be doing that about the trajectory. Science data take perhaps. The trajectory was set after the first course correction. I would have checked the orbit several times after that though to make damn sure it didn't need another burn. Now I would be doing the checking several times again to see if it needed another course correction before getting to the right point in space next to Venus. If they don't need another burn before that I will be very impressed.

Rocket Factory Augsburg engine test ends in explosion at SaxaVord spaceport

Rocket Engineering is still hard

From Goddard and other luminaries and the V2 programme down to the present, the lessons learned along the way still don't inform modern rocket engineering well enough to make it a handle-turning exercise. Hence we get the kaboom videos. SpaceX are pushing the boundaries - look at the figures for the Raptor engine, lots of hot oxygen at several hundred C and 100k HP just from the turbopumps so they have sort of an excuse.

You would think that design principles and how-to-do-it guides would exist for the smaller stuff like the Saxa Vord test, but apparently not, or each new design really can't learn enough from its predecessors.

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Re: Coincidence or what !!!

On seeing the headline on the Telegraph website that was my first thought. However there really was a vicious storm in that area - I just happened to be looking at the lightning activity on Blitzortung yesterday and it was quite active down there. A sad irony.

NASA pushes decision on bringing crew back in Starliner to the end of August

Re: Get Suited

I'm equivocal about the defence thing, but why not for the other two? Private healthcare is a problem in the US but it works well in many other countries. State education in the UK has been subject to the whims of various faddish academics over the decades and has suffered greatly for it. Remember ITA in the 60s?

Re: Get Suited

Capitalism ruins everything

Well, without it we would still be living in the agrarian paradise of the 17th century. Capitalism has its faults but it has given us the modern world. I prefer it here rather than being a peasant ploughing behind oxen.

It's a political decision, not tech/safety

If they go the Dragon route then that effectively kills Starliner. NASA will be uncomfortable with that because they then only have one route to ISS (forget the Russians at this point) and Boeing are already desperately saying Starliner is safe. However I don't see how Starliner can come back from this anyway. It will need considerable re-work before they try again and by that time the ISS is headed for the Pacific Scrapyard.

Raspberry Pi Pico 2 lands with (drum roll) RISC-V cores

I built myself a digital graphic equaliser with optical I/O using a STM32H7 device. Luckily I didn't hit any issues with that, or rather the issues I did hit were solved by reading the docs more carefully and a bit of experimentation. I guess production engineering for a proper product would be a whole different ballgame.

Techie told 'Bill Gates' Excel is rubbish – and the Microsoft boss had it fixed in 48 hours

I've probably mentioned this before. I needed a SPARC architecture manual but that existed nowhere on Sun's (before Oracle) website. In frustration I emailed Scott McNealy, pointing out that Intel put all their tech documents online. A week or so later I got a copy of the manual in the post. It does sometimes work talking to the Big Boss

China starts testing national cyber-ID before consultation on the idea closes

Coming to a Home Office near you soon

Blair's ID card scheme updated for the cloud.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

I thought about that decades ago when Ferranti were having troubles. Ferranti, good old solid British company right? Bound to pick up. Glad I held off! Crowdstrike will have to eat lots of humble pie.

Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch cleared of all charges in US Autonomy fraud trial

Re: HP no longer stands for Hewlett Packard, so...

On holiday in France years ago I bought a T shirt with a slightly modified HP logo. The wording underneath was Hors Service.