Posts by John Robson

SpaceX Starship Flight Test 13 takes issue with the 'flight' bit

So this is the same way that Sainsburys is "welfare" recipient from all of it's customers?

Re: Destack

"Starship was scheduled to do orbital testing 4 years ago and a landing on the lunar surface two years ago."

Only if you listen to Elon Time.

What that "schedule" has done is enable some pretty rapid testing and development, it was never realistically acheivable.

Re: Artemis schedule is political nonsense

The whole point is to test hardware, see what the failure modes are.

They'll still have explosions, but since they're actually getting quite good at launches now, that'll be on occasions when they're pushing the limit.

Photovoltaics are still running after a year under Swiss trains

Interesting data point... I have a fair area of flat roof which could be quite interesting to cover... but it is three storeys up, so there are some installation and maintenance challenges

Re: No, the real challenges are technological and economical

There is - but we're also perfectly capable of resolving that "problem" using flexible demand. The power is locally generated, and if my neighbour has excess solar then I should be encouraged to run the washing machine whilst they export, or indeed heat up my hot water cylinder, or charge the car, or whatever flexible electrical load there is.

Car parks tend to be adjacent to workplaces, where power is being used... Not hard to find local use for quite alot of power 5 days a week.

"A big part of that issue is everybody thinking they'll shove that solar production on the grid and then, profit. It may be better to find ways to use the energy locally. "

And when it's really a problem, that's what will happen.

Octopus already do this in the UK with things like their intelligent Go tariff. When there is plenty of renewable energy flooding the grid they can turn on in excess of a GW of car charging. At some point they'll realise that there are other controllable devices as well (immersion heaters are the really obvious ones).

In winter they have a storage heater specific tariff that will do the same for storage heaters, giving a boost during the part of the day with the best wind conditions.

In countries where there really is a glut the sale price of export drops, and people shift to using the power locally instead. When my solar was installed the export rate was awful, so I didn't export at all if I could avoid it. Now however I'm encouraged to export, so I do.

Re: 19MWh? are you sure?

I have 6 panels and generate a little over 2MWh/year.

So 48 panels would be ~8 times that, which is ~17MWh/year.

My panels are likely quite a bit older than those installed in this trial.

I am substantially further north than Switzerland, but I also have panels at a slightly better angle, albeit compromised by a little shading in the morning (from a neighbouring house) and in the depths of winter (from a tree about 4 gardens across as well as a neighbouring garage).

19MWh seems within the likely margin.

"Yes, it does. Panels are around 25% efficient with optimal placement both of the panels and the sun, "

No - the efficiency doesn't change with orientation etc.

The thing that changes with orientation is the solar flux.

Oh but just you wait

There will be people coming along saying that doing this will stop trains running at night or some such nonsense.

There will have to be a robust mechanism for isolation for maintenance and in the, rare but inevitable, case of an 'incident'. Neither of which are significant blockers.

Lucky 13: SpaceX aims for July 16 Starship flight test

Not everyone, some people will have bought and rapidly offloaded... some people will have bet on it falling.

UK government wants 'trusted' news sources promoted above the social media noise

Re: For trusted medai ...

You are so far wrong that it's not funny.

You're very good at ignoring evidence in order to support your own conclusions... I can only assume that you've taken to drinking meths.

Re: For trusted medai ...

"Fabricating data is the kind of thing shows like Panorama used to investigate, but there's no chance of the current Bbc looking at the Met Office's records."

No - they might want to look at where your brain has gone though - it's so far beyond reality it could provide some interesting new physics from another galaxy.

Have you looked the subsidies paid to the FF industry, it makes 227 billion look like chump change.

Of course you'll argue till you're blue int he face that those aren't subsidies, but anything that could be considered payment for energy will be a subsidy for renewables. You're just so blind to the truth that it's not even funny.

And remind them that they have a mandate to educate, not a mandate to find any crackpot they can to counter any serious point being made and then not even lob any soft questions their way.

Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access

Re: "winter2023!"

Often it's quicker if you can enter the password, rather than going through the forgotten password dance.

Re: "winter2023!"

Yubikey...

I clearly edited that out of my original post, but it probably helps understand the "Makes a mockery of MFA" comment.

Re: "winter2023!"

I can't forget my password, because I don't know it...

Generated by `openssl rand -base64 23` I can't be bothered to come up with repeated memorable passwords for something that requires me to change it repeatedly.

Makes a mockery of MFA, but at least I'm unlikely to lose both of the things I have (one of which also requires either something I know or something I am to access)

David Potter, the man who put Psion in the palm of your hand, logs off at 82

Re: Coolest gadgets ever..

I know exactly where my psion5 is.

I still think (or maybe just hope) there is a market for an updated psion5...

US auto regulators want to kill robotaxi brake pedals

Re: Bah!

Not something you find very often where you need an emergency stop on fast moving machinery - it's great for "shutdown this server" or for controlled environments like a power plant control room, where there is pretty low direct physical correlation with the "oh shit" moment, even in extreme events like that at Chernobyl.

That's kind of the point here... The whole point of autonomy is that the vehicles shouldn't need human interaction - mandating that a passenger should be able to stamp on the brakes in a complex environment is not a safety feature, it's a recipe for disaster.

The equivalent of passengers shouting "stop" might be a reasonable compromise - but having that research done should happen before legislating for a specific solution.

Re: Bah!

True, but the intent here is clearly an emergency operation... and most emergency stop functions are not concealed beneath a flap.

Re: Bah!

If it's under a flap then it's basically useless.

If you're concerned about it being the right place then surely one at each seat would be the answer.

A handbrake lever would be a centrally mounted and pretty well understood interface, but the real question is "should it be mechanically connected to the brakes" or should it have the same effect as a passenger screaming "stop"

Re: Bah!

Yes - but on a train there are other safety systems preventing a collision if your train unexpectedly stops - not the case on the road.

In a lift there is no chance of another lift changing shaft from the adjacent position and running into you.

The "manual" call button isn't something that physically triggers all the sprinklers in this and all adjacent buildings.

The point here is that if a vehicle is capable of driving itself then manufacturer shouldn't be mandated to give the idiot inside a direct physical control of the brakes. They can still have any number of other "stop now", "pull over now" or similar options, but they're not mandating that they should have a physical brake pedal which is highly likely to be used in error more than in anger.

Blue Origin insists New Glenn will rise from the ashes this year after explosion deleted launchpad

I can only wish them well

And it's nice to see them moving at more than a glacial pace for once.

They do *seem* to have majored on the "step by step" and somewhat ignored the "ferociously"...

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Not quite... but very close to it.

The disks were basically the largest available at the time.

Servers were stacked: opteron dual core, dual socket, machines with IIRC just shy of 10GHz combined clock speed and a crapload of ram for the time.

No doubt today it would have been an EPYC based machine with insane amounts of spinning rust storage, and a couple of SSDs for boot drives.

Drove a serious storage server home nearly twenty years ago, was taking it for EMC testing the next day.

Spent a chunk of the journey realising that it cost substantially more than my car, and then the sheer bandwidth of carrying 24 massive 2TB disks home.

Waymo hits the brakes after robotaxis keep missing the signs for freeway construction zones

Re: Driving Tests

And even the bar in the UK is too low, and the bar for removing a licence from someone who has clearly demonstrated that they shouldn't have one is astronomically high.

Re: Driving Tests

They very deliberately added "whenever possible" (or "if you can" in the current online version)

Re: Driving Tests

Highway Code Rule 201

Would a self driving car reverse, or attempt to, from a drive way?

Let's quote the whole rule:

201

Do not reverse from a side road into a main road. When using a driveway, reverse in and drive out if you can.

"If you can", so it's certainly not banned.

The reason for that rule is to avoiding crossing a pedestrian zone with the reduced visibility of a reversing motorist, and it has

Nowadays I'd feel safer reversing off my driveway in terms of knowing there's nothing in my path - because the relatively tall bonnets on modern cars, combined with the slope of my driveway mean you could easily hide several five year olds in front of me, and fencing and neighbours hedging make it impossible to see the pavement to the right of my driveway (where they're likely to come from at certain times).

At least reversing out I have a low mounted, wide angle, camera to show me everything behind the vehicle. In front all I have are the Mk1 scanners and four parking sensors (which to their credit to pick up people if they're in the right spots).

But in the case of an autonomous vehicle, there is potentially no "forwards" and "backwards" - they might have a better sensor array in one direction than the other (as my car does), but equally they may have literal 360 degree vision. There would then just be "front wheel drive mode" and "rear wheel drive mode".

Re: Driving Tests

You may have noticed that alot of computing is now based on emergent behaviour, not functional programming.

Re: Edge cases

"the safety of pedestrians, cyclists, other road users who didn't agree to the nut behind the wheel being allowed to keep a license after 12 points etc be damned."

It's not hard to see these vehicles increasing the safety of more important road users than other drivers.

Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years

Re: The squeeze

If that's directed at Micron, then that's the opposite of what will happen.

Microsoft once used its own brand of 'Lego' to optimize Windows

Re: The simple answer was responsibility.

But that's not a cost borne by the developers...

So it doesn't matter.

Council in UK's City of York outs hundreds of disabled residents with a single email blunder

Re: My privacy...

I agree that we should have a short term badge available.

But to assert that someone with a BB doesn't have mobility issues is deliberately disingenuous.

Re: My privacy...

The badge doesn't have to live in the windscreen, it can usually be stored in the glove box.

And the requirements for a blue badge aren't always obvious to others, not all disabilities are visible.

AWS rolls the dice for faster, more efficient networking

Re: algorithm?

I can't even begin to think about unpicking it, but in AWS it probably doesn't make alot of sense to be strictly hierarchical...

Windows bowls a BSOD at sports fans

One of few games

Where there are four possible results:

Win/Lose/Draw/Tie

Race against re-entry: Swift's would-be saviour straps itself to a rocket

Slightly surprised that neither Bezos nor Musk has offered to boost Hubble for the PR, rather than the dollars...

NASA's Secret: Moon astronauts will be rocking Prada underwear

Re: Just carrying on the tradition?

Yep - it's almost as if they contract with people who know what they're doing for specialist equipment.

Brit regulator finds mobile network service on trains is far from first class

Re: Does it matter?

Mostly on stuff that was local, although by no means all of it was, and this is quite a while ago. I used a PAN from my phone (that really dates it quite a bit) for connectivity.

Re: Does it matter?

Some people (and I used to) consider the commute part of the working day.

I used to watch the world go by on my local train, sit in the cafe and work at the connecting station until the train showed up for the longer leg, then I'd carry on working on the train. Get to the destination and ride along the riverbank to the office.

So I'd get about 90 minutes work done, as well as a few miles cycling, and a 15 minute "looking out of the window".

Didn't do that trip every day, but it made a significant difference to the timings and amount of work.

Benevolent dictator Zuck will give Meta staff 30-minute breaks from keylogging privacy assault

Security by leaving the door open...

Good thing they don't use any passwords or passphrase for any login, or for unlocking ssh keys etc...

UK lawmakers call on government to ditch Palantir NHS contract

Re: It should be illegal...

Start one...

Even better, start it as part of the government so that profits don't get siphoned anywhere, but can be reinvested in public services.

UK government is surely large enough

to building an internal compute department to provide a "cloud" for other departments to use.

The amount of money going to overseas companies as profit is obscene.

I know that such a department would never reap the full benefits of scale that the hyperscalers have, but for the discount there there is the massive profit margin saved over here.

Password manager Dashlane suspends customer accounts amid brute-force attacks

Dashlane did not specify whether any attempts on customer accounts were successful.

One presumes that successful attempts wouldn't have triggered the monitoring...

California passes bill declaring death-by-algorithm to 3D-printed ghost guns

Re: ridiculous

Or maybe restrict firearms as a whole more.

Certainly restricting ammo very severely would help...

Blue Origin's New Glenn makes a crater-sized dent in Artemis plans

Re: I wonder...

But we don't have the skilled trades any more which would be required to build an SV from thee existing designs.

It's not a question of having the designs, but the methods wouldn't be repeatable

Re: I wonder...

Doesn't need to be high probability if the consequences are so great...

Re: Massey's

Also they made an adaptor ring to allow them to test fire the ships on the launch pad...

Re: I wouldn't ride any.............

Only for ships, not boosters.

SpaceX sets date for Starship test that asks: Did we break anything in the upgrade?

And that 45 tons is interesting because it opens the door to be able to launch some of the more dense payloads on a Falcon Heavy (where the "new" limit is payload volume and shape)