Posts by John Sager

NASA unsure Boeing Starliner will ever be certified for human flight

Spacex now have a vast store of hard-won in-house expertise in that department. No need to hire outsiders unless they have valuable skills not already covered.

As another UK prime minister bites the dust, a contradictory tech legacy remains

Whoosh!

FAA grounds SpaceX’s Starship after another launch mishap

Re: Expected

If SpaceX were ESA then, yes, it would be a terrible track record. But given SpaceX's "move fast & break things" approach, then they aren't doing too badly. Don't forget they deliberately do stuff 'out of the envelope' to stress things so they know where they do break or at least they know they have margin in practical operation. This is standard test pilot stuff with aircraft but on a rather more humongous scale. The FAA thing is bog standard flight safety stuff from any half-way responsible regulator.

Starship shows it can deploy satellites, but Moon mission clock still ticks

Re: good progress!

It's not much use at Vandenberg. That can only launch polar orbits.

Lab worker built a fake PC to nuke his lunch

Re: Radiation hazards are often overblown.

That glass was quite popular at one time with its green fluorescence. A friend of ours has quite a collection.

The prep room of our school lab doubled as a darkroom, and under the bench was a big jar full of a Uranium salt solution. Used for some type of effects processing of wet chemistry photos. That tells you how long ago it was.

Taiwan's train cyber-trauma reveals a global system that's coming off the tracks

Re: Analog computers have their place, just not in the 21st century.

Not very performance though. What digital systems give is performance approaching the Shannon limit, and you can pick the tradeoff you want - performance versus robustness.

As for security, the operating acronym is CIA, strangely enough. Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability. Decent crypto-based solutions can give you the first two - the communication is secret, for various definitions of that, and when you receive the data you can be confident it hasn't been messed with.

Availability is harder. Radio signals can be jammed. Fibres can be cut, but various redundancy techniques can mitigate that.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Maths

Not at my primary school (this was the 50s) but a couple of years later I learned about prime numbers and the Sieve reading Martin Gardner's books from his SciAm columns. What a trove of goodies they were!

Go straight to sell! Windows second-chance setup hawks Microsoft services at IT's expense

Steve Ballmer called...

Somebody needs to pay for all those high-priced AI wizards they are hiring, so the punters need to pay up!

I chose Linux decades ago.

Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job

Lots of countries have strict rules about food and vegetation. They *really* don't want interlopers establishing themselves. That guy had to do the check almost on pain of death.

The only serious customs check I have ever suffered was going into NZ in the early 90s with the family. They looked through all our stuff, even the kids' rucksacks.

Re: Illegal Border Crossing?

Yes, I did that back in the 90s on a trip to San Diego. Just walked across into TJ, no MX border control. Main drag full of farmacias & stripey burros on street corners(!). On the way back there was a queue going into the US. When it was my turn the agent just looked at the I-94W stub in my passport & then me in without even a word. I wouldn't do that again today!

I must be in something of a minority, having visited the US numerous times back when I was working, and a few times as a tourist since. I never had any trouble with US Immigration agents, including the time when visa waiver had just started. I had a still valid US visa in my expired passport so I just used that. The agent at SFO took a look at that & said I should have used visa waiver instead. However he let me in but cancelled the visa.

Britain seeks views before it drops the hammer on signal jammers

Re: Incomprehensible

Well, lots of us own such kit, and have a licence to use it, but not as a jammer, obviously. You could see an end game here where we have to declare each item of such kit as with firearms certificates. I can see lots of budding bureaucrat jobsworths rubbing their hands in glee.

Microsoft locks out VeraCrypt and WireGuard devs, blames verification process

I vote Incompetence

It's not as if MS don't have lots of experience in that field. Despite what the MS drone said, I don't really believe that Jason would have missed emails warning of a change in process.

The company's biggest security hole lived in the breakroom

The worst offenders are probably cameras. Mine are on their own VLAN with severe firewall rules. They still try to talk back once a day though.

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

It's M$, what did you expect?

That the real downside of having a useful, and arguably vital, resource for Open Source owned by Microsoft. We're no longer in the Ballmer era but it sure looks like we're effectively heading back that way.

Britain spends £180M to work out what time it is

A bit light on tech

For a tech news site I would have expected a bit more tech than just "180 million quid on new time stuff". A link to the actual nuts & bolts of the proposal would have been good. Perhaps there isn't one and this is all government vapourware so far?

This NPL press release is the only thing I could find with a quick look, and that is as vapid as the article.

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Medical systems are a nightmare

a business or organization is so underfunded that that choice -- security vs near-immediate patient death -- is truly binary

I can think of at least one organisation where this is true. But that's almost certainly down to misapplication of funds rather than lack of funding per se.

Makers slam Qualcomm for tightening the clamps on Arduino

Re: Yesterday's tech

I never really did anything significant with Arduino, I was mostly doing stuff on Linux. When I decided to dip my toe into non-Linux embedded stuff again I went to STM32/FreeRTOS, and latterly to RP2040/2350. However Arduino has been seriously good at raising a cohort of software people who also understand the nuts and bolts of the software/hardware interface and its foibles. Sad that that avenue is effectively cut off by legal issues. We don't want to have to bone up on legal foot guns or pay lawyers to do it for us.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Re: Implausible to say the least.

We were doing that at work in the same timeframe - 300 baud thermal printer terminals! We got listings back overnight using DataPost. I never saw the phone bills...

SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew

I can't imagine Trump saying FU if the Chinese asked. It would be huge publicity for the US if they managed it, many dB better than SpaceX pulling Boeing or of the ordure.

Re: Try it on earth.

You can't do that in a month, which is the more or less necessary timeframe.

Also, even if the Chinese manufactured to a published spec that SpaceX used, they have never jointly tested, which is a necessary first step for manned spaceflight.

SpaceX shows off progress on its lunar Starship

It takes as long as it takes

They aren't building suspension bridges, which these days is pretty much a mature process. Space is hard and building the hardware and testing it is definitely not yet mature. Look at all the other current attempts to go there from Blue Origin down. Lots of Oops, try again stuff going on. SpaceX is currently well ahead of the game with a well ordered process to suss out the gremlins. They'll get there but not on NASA's, Congress's or Trump's timetable.

Starlink tells the world it has over 150 sextillion IPv6 addresses

Re: 2^128 addresses

I've got a /48 from my ISP, and only used a /64 until the other day. Now I've just used another /64 to upgrade my private VPN to carry IPv6. I guess I'll need to use some more if I start using v6 IoT stuff.

SpaceX pulls plug on 2,500 Starlink terminals tied to Myanmar fraud farms

Locatable terminals?

Dunno if Starlink do this but putting a GPS chip or software into their antenna terminals and doing a low-level 'tell me where you are' scan would be an obvious check. Some terminals could have 'anywhere globally' accounts (e.g. aircraft) and some could be 'no more than 1 km from declared location'.

Mobian makes Debian's latest 'Trixie' release pocket-sized

Various apps wouldn't work

I would have a Linux phone but several apps I use just wouldn't run for security or DRM reasons.

Also I could rhen get IPv6 to work at home on my phone. Like all my other hosts, the phone will get an address prefix from the Router Advertisements but unlike rhem it won't use the RA to provide a default route. adb shell doesn't give me any clues either but does show me how complex the network stuff is - just try doing 'ip rule show' in adb shell!

.

SpaceX is behind schedule, so NASA will open Artemis III contract to competition

SpaceX never tried. They've got a Mk II or is it Mk III Starship & booster for the next flight. Probably still suborbital. Whereas NASA try to get it right on the first try, with the issues we have seen. Everybody hates Musk but SpaceX is doing OK with it's strategy.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Re: Nothing offensive, just impossible

Snap! FORTRAN IV for me- a 1 term course at uni and some punch-card bashing for a new ICL1904 where they were letting us have some free time. I left FORTRAN almost behind but the antenna modelling s/w Nec2 is written in it and I've hacked on that a bit in the past.

BT promises 5G Standalone for 99% of the UK by 2030

Not in my village

There are 4G cell sites relatively close but the terrain means we don't get service in the house, even on the 700-800Mhz band. Even if they put a cell in the village centre it wouldn't cover some outlying parts, again because of terrain, so the numbers won't add up for any of the networks to put a small cell here. WiFi calling is a poor substitute for the 3G femtocell we had in the house for years.

800,000 tons of mud probably just made electronics a little more expensive

Re: No big deal

But with a star arrangement and no fused plugs, like Europe, the CU breaker has to protect the infrastructure wiring and the appliance cord. I think we are unique in using fused plugs.

Re: No big deal

That only works if the ring isn't loaded everywhere so the total load is only 30A. That concept works well in a domestic environment but not in a data centre. The other thing ring mains have to have is a fuse in every plug. You can't rely on the big breaker in the consumer unit.

VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

Reading the comments above on Tesco's attitude to business continuity, I'm now even more surprised than I was a few years ago when the handheld bar code scanners went to shit. The things took several seconds to register a scan, even for repeat scans on the same item. Talking to the staff it was just as bad for them as for the customers. They finally fixed that a few months ago, probably a change of software provider and a rewrite.

Two scrubs, one Starship: Third time lucky for SpaceX?

Some of the testing scenarios deliberately push the envelope, so failures are almost expected. However they gain valuable info from telemetry before the RUD experience. However the Starship RUDs recently seem to have been rather unexpected. Nevertheless they get useful data. The booster is mostly meeting milestones as far as I can see.

Tinker with LLMs in the privacy of your own home using Llama.cpp

Hallucinations

I tried this on my Lenovo AMD laptop using just CPU. I posed the question 'What is "Just a Minute?"'. It knew the BBC radio programme and the expression for asking people to wait. However it hallucinated two howlers: it said Dennis Waterman had been a presenter, and that John Cleese had done a TV version.

Check its work carefully!

The text came out slowly - two or three words a second - and running 'top' showed about 330% CPU and 18% memory (I have 32Gb installed).

Space industry frets as UKSA set for bureaucratic re-entry

Given the vast disconnect between government spending and income, this really is nibbling at the edges to no purpose. Deckchairs & Titanic.

The White House could end UK's decade-long fight to bust encryption

where most of the payment is made when the experts agree it really works

Nobody is going to put effort in on that basis, even if they thought they could make it work. The Home Office would have to tender for it, perhaps on 50% now, 50% on successful test (whatever 'successful' means). Cue a few snake oil salesmen.

Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well

Re: That reminds me

I found an issue with a bank's app and reported to my contact at the bank. He passed it on and their tech people were quite grateful I had spotted it. I was expecting the 'shoot the messenger' treatment so I was quite pleased it got resolved amicably.

Britain's 5G experience 'among the worst in Europe' says MedUX

No 4G where I live. There is a couple of mikes away on the main A road but we live in a hole. When Voda switched off 3G anywhere outside of a town became E country, and there seems to have been no attempt yet to put stuff in the vacated 3G band.

I'm currently travelling in Scandinavia and 4G/5G is more or less universally available in Sweden's endless forests, and Norway's endless fjords. If they can do that, why can't we?

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Whoops

Having been to the US many times in the past, I got into an auto-translate mode in my mind, so I used American words and expressions in a Northern England accent.

It generally worked though later as a tourist we travelled through Carson City, NV which has a railroad museum. There was a rally of 50s period autos going on in the parking lot there which prompted confusion over the word 'car' in the museum. They use 'car' for our railway carriages...

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.