* Posts by John Sager

800 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2008

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The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

John Sager

Re: Thank you!

No thank you. They are what Just Stop Oil and other eco loonies may become when their frankly impractical demands don't get met.

UK and US lack regulation to protect space tourists from cosmic ray dangers

John Sager

Re: Look...

Not everything needs regulating to the last dot and comma. The whole business of regulation consumes both human & capital resources that could usefully be used elsewhere. Caveat Emptor seems a good common-sense response, though I have to say that excessive wealth does seem to destroy that facility in some of them.

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

John Sager

Re: changes to things like police and military uniforms, and signage on official buildings

I once visited Baldock radio station and it is one of the very few government (now Ofcom) buildings opened by Edward VIII with a plaque to that effect.

As for the Scots, Nemo Me Impune Lacessit!

Singapore's monetary authority advises banks to get busy protecting against quantum decryption

John Sager

So what financial data needs to be protected for the length of time before quantum computers likely get good enough to break existing public key systems?

Not a lot, I would suggest, and despite NIST's efforts, the current candidates for PQC don't look that great.

Researchers remotely exploit devices used to manage safe aircraft landings and takeoffs

John Sager

Re: “NSAllowsArbitraryLoads”?

So these are Apple Ipads? No choice of alternative platform suppliers?

"Nobody ever got fired for buying Apple". The airline industry is pretty conservative, for obvious reasons, so it was probably a no-brainer given Apple's closed environment reputation.

That runaway datacenter power grab is the best news for net zero this century

John Sager

Re: Zero

Another addition to the meme - you will own nothing, eat insects, and be happy. Who is going to be the Fat Controller who decides who is (un)worthy, or are you pointing at yourself?

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

John Sager

I didn't know that. Years ago I chose a 2 letter domain root that wasn't used for an existing country and so far the various wars and disputes haven't spawned a new country that wants to use it. I'm not going to re-jig my DNS server to a new standard though. Sometimes being different is useful.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

John Sager

Re: Needless!!

Yes, another example of Chesterton's Fence.

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

John Sager

Re: Human Nature

Perhaps levers and moments are no longer on the Physics GCSE syllabus.

Disease X fever infects Davos: WEF to plan response to whatever big pandemic is next

John Sager

Re: WHO Is Too Much At The Mercy Of Political Winds

No chance! WHO can advise all they want but it should be down to national governments to set and enforce rules.

Is it time for 6G already? Traffic analysis says yep

John Sager

IoT

The article mainly focusses on improved data rates and capacity, but one of the supposed benefits of 5G is use by IoT services using just a few carriers in the multiplex. This is enabled by an arcane spec change over 4G (carrier phase offsets) but I wonder just how many IoT providers are using or planning to use this feature?

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

John Sager

Workspaces

The really useful adjunct to terminal emulators on Linux. The only permanent windowed apps on my laptop are the Firefox and Thunderbird. I have, currently, 11 terminal emulator windows scattered over 3 workspaces, plus browser & email on another. It's just convenient to have different CWDs on the various terminal windows. I do use other graphical apps like Audacity, IDEs and graphical editors, but even building apps for Espressif, Zephyr, etc I prefer the CLI.

Polish train maker denies claims its software bricked rolling stock maintained by competitor

John Sager

A good write-up

This has appeared on Hacker News.

Hershey phishes! Crooks snarf chocolate lovers' creds

John Sager

Re: dafuq

US M&Ms do taste a bit better than Hershey's, but there is still that lingering off taste that you don't get in EU or UK M&Ms.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

John Sager

The good bits of HP went to Agilent over 20 years ago and some of that now resides with Keysight.

Having said that I used to have a HP laptop at work many years ago, which was excellent for the time, not least because I loaded Linux on it and it just worked.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

John Sager

The Met Office updates their climate model

It tells them that CO2 is pretty much inconsequential - it's the Sun wot dun it, and we'll have a nice warm century but then the next ice age starts in 2100.

IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups

John Sager

Re: Can't stand IT

Small companies are better at keeping a handle on expenditure. Not so much large companies - it's only shareholders' money after all. I wonder where the turnover point is when companies grow larger - the point where they decide they need a HR department?

UK throws millions at scheme to heat homes with waste energy from datacenters

John Sager

Re: Assumptions

As with almost any idea, technically possible, just doesn't make sense in the real world

Looks like the govt didn't ask the right people if it would work before chucking our money at it. Sadly this isn't uncommon:(

If it made sense economically then the data centres would be on it already as an extra income stream, not needing the taxpayer to pay for it.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

John Sager

Re: On the flip side of that coin, sometime users are right!

I get that as a customer with a problem too. In the early days of ISPs I had to change ISP because the previous one went bust, and then my Sure Signal femtocell device from Vodafone stopped working. Now, knowing something about network security I guessed that my new IP address wasn't whitelisted on their firewall. However trying to get Voda to sort it out was 'difficult'. The young lady on support did pass me on to her supervisor eventually but his reaction was 'Oh, that's a different department'. So we went round the houses about responsibility and I eventually persuaded him to own the problem in Voda for me. About a fortnight later it started working, and they did actually tell me the problem. That IP address range was originally used in Belgium so it hit their geofencing blocks in the firewall.

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

John Sager

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

The manufacturers have probably got more clout with the government than we have. We stop buying EVs, as we can't be compelled to buy them, and when the fines start to bite, the manufacturers will just stop selling any vehicles here. That might concentrate a few minds in Westminster. Otherwise I guess we'll turn into Cuba, maintaining old bangers for decades.

John Sager

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

True. But I've no idea what it might be

Nuclear! No, belay that. It would have been a good idea if we had done a France when they did, and carried on now when they have got cold feet. Oil and gas will run out eventually so we'll be back to coal before they do. The only other option is a low energy agrarian economy like we had centuries ago, but then we need the low population density to match...

Cue the Soylent Green factories.

ULA's Vulcan Centaur hopes to rocket into Christmas

John Sager

Re: New Galilleo Launches

I doubt that would go unnoticed. The Galileo time reference works independently, as does the USNO one for GPS. The GGTO, on the Galileo navigation message, is only telling you that there is a small offset, that will no doubt vary with the precise behaviour of the two time references. If the US tried to wobble the USNO reference then that would seriously screw with GPS, especially the military part, and Fuchino would rapidly notice that too.

CEO Satya Nadella thinks Microsoft hung up on Windows Phone too soon

John Sager

Re: Regardless what you think of Microsoft,

After the Nokia deal went down I was chatting with an American friend. I suggested that Nokia let the vampire in the door when they hired Elop, and so it turned out.

Want a clean energy transition? Better start putting cash into electrical grid

John Sager

Re: I would be willing to agree that ...

than we be dead or suffering greatly due to climate change

Someone has swallowed the kool-aid good and proper. Despite what you have been told, you ain't going to die by boiling or whatever the really scary threat du jour is today.

Sadly Sunak didn't go far enough as we still have the Climate Change Act on the books with all its malign consequences.

You've just spent $400 on a baby monitor. Now you need a subscription

John Sager

Re: Yet another bloody cloud device

I have Reolink cameras. They do have a cloud system for viewing the camera or recorder output but you can set up the phone app to work locally so it just works over the VPN. I've also blocked the cameras and the recorder from making outbound connections. I can unblock that temporarily if I need to do a software update.

John Sager

Yet another bloody cloud device

They all have a limited lifetime.

Nice that it'll still work locally though. A bit of VPN using WireGuard would sort that for remote use. Are there any off-the-shelf border routers that support that though? I only found GL.iNet routers and that's not a mainstream brand. Of course OpenWRT supports it but that's not an option for most people.

Kaluma squeezes JavaScript onto the Raspberry Pi Pico

John Sager

Python semantics

We all do indentation anyway for readability so losing curly brackets doesn't seem too much of an imposition.

As for the RP2040, it's a nice device to play with, and I've just built a nice little app (in C though) that listens for the RF signal from the doorbell button so I can get a 'bing-bong' in my headphones when someone rings the doorbell.

The pico-sdk does put quite a few functions into RAM though for speed, as flash is over a QSPI interface so cache misses will be slow, so that does take away from available heap space.

Tweaked Space Shuttle Main Engine gets ready for final testing

John Sager

Re: A similar option for HS2?

Upvoted for inventive cynicism!

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

John Sager

Many windows on a landscape screen, with 5 virtual desktops to spread them out on - this on Xubuntu. Of course us hard cases have multiple terminal windows on different virtual laptops too. Then you can resize windows to whatever aspect ratio you desire.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

John Sager

Re: "......the mine had closed."

It's probably under several hundred feet of water. I believe those mines were wet and filled up once the pumps stopped.

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

John Sager

Process failure at Google

This is like all the other stories we get about Google. People attempt to contact the company for all sorts of reasons, and it's like a big black hole. I read a story the other day about Google spending billions with cell providers for search & Chrome exclusivity. You would think they could spend a fraction of that on product service. It's not customer service because we aren't the customers, we are the product.

Britcoin or Britcon? Bank of England grilled on Digital Pound privacy concerns

John Sager

Privacy? What's that?

We haven't got to the point yet where those issues have been raised; we're at the technical design point

She said this in regard to privacy issues. I would have thought that a suitable solution for privacy features would impact significantly on the technical design. It's definitely not an extra bolt-on goody!

UK civil servants – hopefully including those spending billions on tech – to skill up in STEM

John Sager

They'll only skim the surface, even if they listen. The only beneficial outcome would be if they come to understand the depths of their ignorance and learn how to ask the right people for advice. I'm not holding my breath.

Amazon unleashes Gen AI for product descriptions, curbs it for Kindle

John Sager

UK consumer protection legislation

One assumes the AI knows all about that and will be very careful to avoid any false descriptions of any aspect of the tat

/sarc

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

John Sager

Re: Resiliency – we've heard of it

Not simple. Flight plans can be quite complex documents and doing a thorough input sanitation early on may not be feasible. I wonder if the whole truth of what happened will be released publicly. They may want to keep quiet about exactly what caused it to fail, if indeed it was a duff flight plan issue.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

John Sager

Re: Not holding my breath

I wasn't a fat bloke at the time, but I used the car to effectively go across the road in the US once. With 2 small children in tow and >100 Deg F outside it seemed like a sensible option.

We need to be first on the Moon, uh, again, says NASA

John Sager

Re: Fifty years ago...

We couldn't afford it. We went in with some Europeans. Our bit worked, one or other of their bits didn't over several tests. I think we just decided to take our ball away, stick it in a museum and waste the money saved on something else.

John Sager

Re: Just one question

Well, how come Dragon missions have been pretty much faultless, both the manned and unmanned missions, including landing the first stages? He might have the move 'fast & break things' rep but only in the development phase. He won't do stuff unless the risk is low enough - launches often get delayed because everything is not quite right.

John Sager

Re: Just one question

Well, I would probably even trust NASA over the UN. That's just a talking shop with not much love for us.

If NASA really want to get there in a reasonable time at reasonable cost, the only option is His Muskness.

Techie's quick cure for a curious conflict caused a huge headache

John Sager

With the redback, and sic an Inland Taipan on you for good measure.

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

John Sager

'Safe' batteries

There ain't no such thing as a safe battery when its energy density is the same as or more than current lithium batteries. It's no accident that the main working ingredient is an alkali metal which reacts readily and exothermically with stuff, and ever more energetically as you go down the periodic table. Even a tank of petrol/gasoline is not safe if you don't treat it right, but we've had decades of experience of making safe containers for that stuff (bar the Pinto).

Judge lets art trio take another crack at suing AI devs over copyright

John Sager

Re: Seems this is a judge not understanding "AI"

There have been judges who have made the effort to become familiar with the arena of litigation - William Alsup in California comes to mind (Oracle Vs Google). However I wonder if some think that may be counterproductive in an essentially legal judgement.

Social media is too much for most of us to handle

John Sager

Re: Some of us figured all that out ...

Yes indeed! I remember Usenet in the early 90s, and what an education that was! Quite addictive but it lost its attraction once the AOLers and succeeding waves of newbies came on. I've never bothered with Twatter or Farcebook for that reason. My wife uses FB but limits it severely to family & friends, which is the only sensible thing to do.

'There has never been a realistic plan' for UK's £11B Emergency Services Network

John Sager

Trouble is, they want all sorts of bells & whistles - PTT, group nets etc, all the stuff that Airwave currently does. But they want the cell network for data & video stuff too.

The Home Office never got the right people in to ask the very hard questions of EE. Or if they did they ignored them because they didn't like the answer.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

John Sager

Re: Poor design in my opinion

Yes, that was the one. I apologise profusely and abjectly to commentards for whom the mis-remembering of dates is an unforgivable sin!

John Sager

Re: Poor design in my opinion

I had an early Sony CD player in the 70s that was all discrete logic. One of the CDs I had was slightly off centre. I hooked up a scope to the R/W line on the RAM and it was fascinating to watch the variations caused by the offset. The disc played OK though as the RAM read out to the DACs was crystal controlled.

I think the most audiophily thing would be to put a GPS-controlled OCXO in there for the accuracy, and charge $$$$ for it.

Brit broadband subscribers caught between crappy connections and price hikes

John Sager

Re: 4G or ADSL backup

I've never used anything like 1Tb in a month. A&A's algorithm adds a fraction of unused to next month's allowance so I regularly start out with around 1800Gb on 1st of month. I would have to watch a lot of 4k streams or go mad trying a large variety of Linux live distros to get anywhere near that.

John Sager

Never had a problem...

... with my ISP, apart from local power outages, for which I now have a UPS. They were very helpful negotiating with Openreach too. I probably pay more than with the usual suspects, but you get what you pay for. The ISP? Look at the front of the alphabet.

How a dispute over IP addresses led to a challenge to internet governance

John Sager

Re: Time for IPv8

Well, my firewall rules disallow general inbound V6 traffic to all my nodes. It's only a few lines in nftables.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

John Sager

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

So what format do you use in real life, e.g. dating a che(que|ck)?

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