Posts by John Robson

Amazon puts 'creepy' AI cameras in UK delivery vans

Re: Bad Behaviour

Well, one thing I haven't noticed is any deaths or serious injuries caused by people on electric scooters - unlike the thousands every year caused my drivers of motor vehicles.

Linus Torvalds debuts 'boring old plain' Linux kernel 5.18

Re: boring old plain 5.18

Signing code doesn't have to be closed source - that's rather the point.

I haven't looked to see whether or not it is open source... and there is some gall in buying a chip with a feature artificially locked.

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

Re: New Browser, New Rules

Maybe a title bar toggle which says "this page contains something I might want a cookie for" which you could turn on for either shopping or login pages...

Then it could offer you the cookies (listed order to be determined by the browser) so you can accept the relevant one (or two).

Or we could absolutely ban any non login/shopping cart etc based cookies.

If it's essential to making the site display correctly (not to track people across it) then it's OK. "This site is designed so that we need cookies" does not count as essential.

Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests

Re: So technology works as intended...

Yes - the DC chargers were unexpected.

When looking at range and comparing it with comfort breaks, I'd take ~80% of the real world (as opposed to WLTP) range, since you'll want to rapid charge from 10-90 (ish) rather than 0 (nervewracking) to 100 (slow at the end).

Re: So technology works as intended...

Technology Connections (can't remember the other channel he took along) - and he wasn't lucky, he specifically chose hotels which provided that service.

Re: So technology works as intended...

Well since you picked an ICE with a pretty decent range, and since seriously rapid charging is now being seen as the way to go... I thought I'd pick the current cream of the crop (and it isn't Tesla, not by a long way).

Oh, and the infrastructure is all being rated to support this, that why the CCS standard is so nice. The car tells the charger what voltage and current to deliver, up to a thousand volts and three hundred and fifty amps...

When you only need twenty minutes.. you'll find the chargers are not all that busy, but even on a nice weekend... what's the issue? You plan for one stop, but you pick where you stop so that you can move on if there is a wait, exactly the same way I used to when I drove an ICE vehicle.

I can't remember the last time I had to wait at a charger.

I use less energy because an EV is inherently significantly more efficient than an ICE.

So much more efficient that you could use the dino juice input material in a power station and I'd get more miles from the energy contained therein than you would in an ICE using the same source material. Of course not all the power we use - currently less than half of our power (and we're exporting 10% of our demand) - is dino juice, so that's an effective doubling down again (at least in consumption terms).

Re: So technology works as intended...

"The "hype machine" isn't mythical."

What you see as a hype machine clearly isn't what I see.

But then I am looking forward to assistive technologies giving independence to people who are currently denied it.

I am looking forward to vehicles on the roads being reasonably predictable - and safer than the current average motorist (not nearly as a high a bar as you make out).

This test is like criticising a GSCE student for not being able to do degree level maths.

Re: So technology works as intended...

Wow - so you can drive a car all the way without stopping - that probably makes you the slightly tired, not quite concentrating motorist we're all concerned about.

I can drive all the way to cornwall and back from the midlands, and I do it in an EV that isn't a Tesla. It takes me fractionally longer than it used to in an ICE vehicle, but I use substantially less energy and arrive much more alert...

With the current "best" in charging (i.e. 800V systems, which CCS chargers everywhere deal with happily) the breaks are far more limited by people's own timing (planned breaks, loo stops etc)

To do your hypothetical journey in a current fast charging EV would (ABRP planned, Ioniq5 selected) add a 25 minute break at Lancaster (half way) in a 4 hour 20 minute journey. That's exactly where I would want to break for a few minutes anyway, stretch legs, visit the facilities, relax the eyes and brain.

You'd then park in a car park with a charger, so would set off later in the day with a full charge and do the same on the way back.

Of course in the mean time you have waited for precisely zero time refuelling for the rest of the year.

Re: So technology works as intended...

Depends what you read and believe from this mythical hype machine.

In certain situations (and I'm thinking motorways predominantly here) I am fairly confident that we can have higher level autonomy in a reasonable timescale, one of the biggest challenges will be working out how to safely return control to a disinterested meatsack (either in the event that that's needed en route, or more typically at slip roads). In neither case will "drop control at the human" be sane.

In certain other situations (emergency braking) they are already a great help (though much of that is, as is typical with safety improvements) being absorbed by drivers relying on it - risk homeostasis.

So technology works as intended...

And this is newsworthy because?

These are L2 vehicles at best, but appear to be L3/4/5 tests.

Boeing's Starliner CST-100 on its way to the ISS 2 years late

Re: Halfway there

Be good to see them get a little assistance to human rate it soon.

Re: Just the two failures then..

"As long as the vehicle still makes the required maneuver and still has a bit of redundancy, you're fine."

Isn't that what they said about the shuttle SRB O ring seals... Or would you have considered a third ring to be "still got some redundancy left?

Re: Rushing it, much?

Severe failure?

The first was an erroneous clock setting, that caused too much fuel to be used to complete the mission, and the capsule was safely returned.

The second was valve failures, and the capsule never left the ground

This flight has had further valve failures, and that's a little worrying, but I don't think there is any evidence yet that the capsule won't make it back home.

The failures have been public, and embarrassing, but they don't (yet) qualify as severe failures I don't think

Re: Competition

Not bad for spacex at all...

It's prudent to have multiple independent vehicles capable of these trips. The fact that we can no longer rely on cooperation from roscosmos highlights this. In this case the "safe bet" didn't work, but the "somewhat out there" upstart did.

That's an encouragement to competition (and one reason I really want to see some working BE4 engines, so that starliner doesn't end up hitching a lift on F9).

Intel plans immersion lab to chill its power-hungry chips

Re: @AC Cloudy climate change

Given that grid losses are very well quantified but you fail to mention them... the rest of the whinge is a bit pointless.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that we should be moving to EVs and Heat Pumps (both offer significant advantages even if we still power them with dead dinosaurs), but your fears for the grid are somewhat misplaced.

However I absolutely agree that we need to get behind more distributed nuclear options. To me motorway service stations are a perfect location for micro plants - they already have decent grid connections, and can have them upgraded, they are generally a little way away from nimby territory and can use the "waste" heat to keep the buildings warm.

EVs have the potential advantage, and I know this isn't yet available, of being an extremely large domestic battery. A domestic load is trivial for the battery to handle, and cars have these nice big DC pins. If we could run the vehicle as a load balancer, since we only need the full range a handful of times a year then the grid would benefit from EVs. In the UK a typical EV would need 4-5kWh/day (20 miles, 4-5m/kWh), and battery sizes are overwhelmingly >50kWh (compared with 13.5 in a powerwall).

"For the last week of April and the first week of May, the UK had almost no wind, and used a horrendous 6TWh of gas-fired electricity over those two weeks."

Nuclear would be an excellent replacement, but the 6TWh used here... are 6TWh that we *don't* use for the other weeks... That's not a bad trade off, although a different marginal source would be good - and that's one reason I lean towards a large number of distributed micro nuclear plants rather than a couple of big ones.

Re: Yes, but...

Two things:

At scale you don't bother servicing/replacing an individual unit.

The hot things now significantly include the VRMs, and increasingly the PCB on which things are mounted - which are less easy to cool conventially.

Re: Cloudy climate change

"Which, given the marginal fuel of choice in most countries is gas; any demand you add to the system that wasn't there before is by definition, gas powered. This includes electric cars!"

And given the efficiency differences between electric cars and ICE vehicles... you can burn oil in a power plant and get more miles than you can by refining that oil and putting in an ICE vehicle.

That we can use gas instead of oil is an even more significant improvement, and the ability (though not yet realised) to use that giant battery as a plug in home battery will make a huge difference to the very concept of generation/supply.

(i.e. I agree, but that storage doesn't have to be grid scale, it can be simply very large numbers of domestic scale systems).

Pricing incentives, and cars/inverters with a network connection are the way to go.

It should be obvious but I don't see this as the whole solution, but we *must* move in this direction, and do so rapidly - so that EVSE equipment is built with the capabilities built in.

Voyager 1 space probe producing ‘anomalous telemetry data’

41 hours of latency sounds bad...

But it's probably easier than remote support to certain parts of the world (generally defined as a location where they share their screen on which they have remoted into another host and from there remoted into another host which has some access to the device you actually care about), where the latency is so bad that you can type a whole command line before a single character appears, and you get 10% character loss - so you really have to type at one character every 6 or so seconds (substantially longer if one of the characters doesn't make it, since you need to be confident of the timeout and then start again).

At least 41 hours is so much latency that it's "plan the message, send the message, go home for the weekend"

Rocket Lab is taking NASA's CAPSTONE to the Moon

Re: Is more negative up or down?

The loss is a movement "down" in terms of financial reporting.

Lunar gravity is a bit wobbly...

The NRHO is a good orbit, and should avoid most of the pitfalls of that rather lumpy gravity well...

This is more confirming how much station keeping fuel they will need, rather than confirming that it's stable.

Wikipedia says it better: "verify the calculated orbital stability"

NASA said: "Verification of near rectilinear halo orbit characteristics for future spacecraft"

In amongst the list of half a dozen mission objectives.

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Re: The curse of overchoice

Saying no to all the telemetry options was my approach as well, but I had to *read* them all to know whether they were asking "Do you not want to fail to disallow the prevention of transferring your first born to MS?"

Windows update was probably the majority of the time - and that's not something I see on Linux, partly because I mostly use a net installer, but I still reckon I could update gentoo* faster than windows.

It also whines like a baby until it's all been updated (which is good), and licensed (bad), and... And then it still whines that you haven't set up a MS account to sync your life to.

* For those who don't know gentoo is a distro which distributes source code, and you then compile it locally to update.

Re: The curse of overchoice

It is a false choice in many ways...

What you're really choosing is the package manager, and who maintains the curated list of packages and dependencies. You may want to be "as open source as possible" or you might accept binary drivers as a pragmatic solution. That's probably one of the biggest decisions to be made (and you can change your mind even on that).

Any of the major desktop distributions will have you up and running in short order, and without much fuss. Here it is definitely a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

Re: The curse of overchoice

I had to recently - installed it on a VM because I need access to a specific piece of software (at least in the short term).

It took forever and a day (ok, it took two days).

Takes maybe forty minutes to get a linux install up and running on the same virtualisation setup, and since I use the network installer versions I don't even have to update the iso often. (I do have the advantage of a decent net connection, but that advantage was available to the windows VM as well).

I'll grant that some of that time was me being unfamiliar with windows and double checking what I was doing - it has been a significant number of years since I've had to touch it at all - but it did also just take a _long_ time.

Re: The curse of overchoice

You mean take a full day to install, and then another to add patches, can't help.

But the linuxmint.com download page has three reasonably well described choices (Cinnamon edition looks fine).

You can even run it live, which you can with most linux variants, and that's also something that can't be done with MicroSoft offerings.

Problem is Windows now looks nothing like I remember it looking, so I don't really know what you are looking for...

Google keeps legacy G Suite alive and free for personal use

Re: But for how long?

Well, it's a been a signal to look at migrating... And to be honest if they could just get their act together and allow stuff to be migrated wholesale to personal gmail accounts there would be alot less kickback.

If they can do that in the next twelve months, and then try again - I don't think there would be nearly as much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Python is getting faster: Major performance tweaks on horizon

Microsoft Python 3.11

What could go wrong?

BOFH: You'll have to really trust me on this team-building exercise

Wouldn't let me on the cardiac ward

That was genuinely funny... now everyone is looking at me...

We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

Either that or "have you forgotten again?"

Apple to replace future iPhone Lightning port with USB-C next year, this guy claims

That's one option for how to use a portable device.

Note that I used the word portable rather than mobile.

My current machine sits plugged into an eGPU (for driving multiple monitors) basically all the time - it occasionally goes into an office with me (either in the UK or stateside), where it gets plugged into monitors etc. I can't recall the last time I needed to use it as a *mobile* computing device. I *do* use my phone to look stuff up on shared documents, I'm not going to write war and peace, but I can update a tracking spreadsheet etc...

Last time I worked on the bus/train/plane I grabbed an iPad mini and folding bluetooth keyboard. Worked an absolute treat (though the keyboard is a touch smaller than I'd like, but it's really compact when folded).

I've used the keyboard with the phone as well, though there's a less clear use case there (since you don't want to do huge amounts of stuff on the small screen).

Though there is always the option to have a thin and light with a battery in the keyboard (to weight it down) and a usbc port - that would then connect to any phone, and the next one, and potentially (though possibly with a dongle) to the back of servers etc.

tldr - multiple different needs, not everyone the same, bear's catholic, pope defecates in the woods.

The point being that you don't need the accessories if it's all TB, those exist at the various locations you want to do stuff.. and the phone is still useful, even if you wouldn't choose to use it for a large spreadsheet on the train.

The other point being that I wonder if we're actually close to the point where it's a reasonable approach. Don't know if the M1 in a phone would work - might need a copper pad on the back for some extra cooling though.

I've been waiting for it for 15 years now, I suspect it will be a little way off for a while though

Indeed - it's had a decade of consistent support, which is more than you can say for most other phone charger "standard"s.

Even just a few years ago a phone cable was used for data, but that's less and less the case now - so at what point do we drop them entirely? Or are we close to the point where a phone can plug into a thunderbolt dock and be a useful productivity machine?

100W charger on a phone?

I think we need new battery tech before that becomes reasonable.

Google Docs crashed when fed 'And. And. And. And. And.'

Re: Absurd

Highly language specific, and since code *must* be machine readable (and very strongly should be human readable, but that's a secondary consideration) having a system which highlights syntax to aid with the secondary aim, whilst also supporting the primary aim is a good thing.

Can I code in vi*? Yes

Do I code in vi more than anything else? Probably because I am mostly hacking about stuff to stop a specific breakage, and mostly in python, over ssh, in ~minimal containers.

Does that mean that vi is the best tool for the job? In the sense that it is basically always available - yes, in the sense that other tools have assistive features I'd benefit from - absolutely not.

* Other editors are available.

Re: I can think of legit sentences with lots of ands together

I like the repetition of had - less sleek, but rather mind bending.

In the grammar test James, whilst John had had "had", had had "had had", "had had" had had a better result on the teacher.

British motorists will be allowed to watch TV in self-driving vehicles

Re: Too early.

Apportioning the entire cost of the any product to the first user doesn't make sense - there will be value for the second user, and that value will be

If at 10-15 years the battery is down to 75% range (not unreasonable from the figures I have seen) then there is a serious life remaining for those batteries as home storage... probably the same number of charge cycles again (more, fewer? evidence either way?). So does that second use get a zero cost rating for batteries, or do we amortise the cost of production over the entire lifecycle of the battery, and then amortise the cost of recovery/recycling over the *next* battery lifecycle?

In any event the lower energy usage (even accounting for grid and battery cycle losses) is a net benefit.

Re: Step #1, define your terms

Step #2 read the proposal"

"

It should be possible to switch off intelligent speed assistance, for instance, when a driver experiences false warnings or inappropriate feedback as a result of inclement weather conditions, temporarily conflicting road markings in construction zones, or misleading, defective or missing road signs. Such a switch-off feature should be under the control of the driver. It should allow for intelligent speed assistance to be switched off for as long as necessary and to be easily switched back on by the driver. When the system is switched off, information about the speed limit may be provided. The system should be always active when switching the ignition on and the driver should always be made aware of whether the system is on or off.

"

I have an early version and there are three issues that I come up against:

- It doesn't remember what the speed limit was at the start of a journey (i.e. when it hasn't seen a sign, because it's just pulled out of a parking space)

- It sometimes forgets that after turning at a crossroads the new road has the same speed limit, despite not having a new sign

- It sometimes gets the NSL wrong, particularly when a road changes between dual carriageway and single carriageway (or vice versa)

I have also been in vehicles just a handful of months newer which don't suffer from any of those issues, partly because they back up the sign recognition with mapping data.

Re: Too early.

Or less than 15k miles if you listen to independent analysis:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-do-electric-vehicles-become-cleaner-than-gasoline-cars-2021-06-29/

Heck it's ~8k miles (or one year) if your electricity supply is clean (as per Norway)

To get to 80k miles you'd need to use purely coal based electricity

img

And where on earth do you get an expected battery life of 7 years?

Second life batteries will absolutely be a thing, because EVs are about the most sensitive use case to Wh/kg - it's just that there aren't very many, because even decade old EVs aren't being scrapped because their batteries are still fine.

Starlink's Portability mode lets you take your sat broadband dish anywhere*

Re: "If Starlink detects a dish isn't at its home address, there's no guarantee of service"

We know that the comms with jets aren't an issue with the antennae deployed on jets.

Do we know those are the same as those on the ground - hardware *and* software?

Re: "If Starlink detects a dish isn't at its home address, there's no guarantee of service"

I don't think they're aiming for tens of thousands of people in a city - they will generally have much better, faster, cheaper alternatives.

For ~25% the cost I get substantially lower ping (single digit ms), five times higher download and upload. But then I live in a reasonably densely populated area.

Re: "If Starlink detects a dish isn't at its home address, there's no guarantee of service"

You're assuming the airline dishes don't have additional smarts to deal with the motion.

That's not necessarily true (though I can't say it's false)

Datacenters in Ireland draw more power than all rural homes put together

Re: So 35% of elec is residential

ICT generally, but also the tech giants more specifically.

The CRU notes are significant (and different from the original news), and suggest that the DC owners aren't actually doing as much as they generally crow about in terms of managing electricity supply (no great surprise, but I had been expecting the financial advantages to be more encouragement for them).

Re: So 35% of elec is residential

Again - not convinced it's that unusual.

We're not saying "<tech giant Q> used 14% of a country's electricity", but that a whole sector, which the country has heavily encouraged, is using that much energy.

What's the largest non data centre industrial segment in terms of electricity usage? (I don't know, it's not broken out anywhere that I've seen).

In terms of energy usage the road haulage industry uses 15% of all energy, air transport takes 21%...

Between 2005 and 2019 (again, last figures I can see) services gradually increased their share of electricity consumption from 35.3% to 42.9%.

Most of the data centres also probably came with investment towards renewable generation, allowing coal plants to be retired. Between 2016 and 2019 there was a massive drop in the amount of coal being used to generate electricity and a substantial increase in renewables. (84% and 54% respectively, though coal has clearly been on the way out for a while)

Is it an industry that uses a lot of electricity? Yes

Is that surprising? I don't think so. It's long been known that cooling and power are two of the most expensive things to deal with when running computers (at least when running lots of them).

Interestingly the CSO publish "energy use per employee" broken down by sector, and that's been remarkably stable for "services and public sector" - suggesting that even as data centres are using significant amounts of electricity they are also employing a proportional number of residents.

Do they use 14% of the electricity on the island, I can well believe it. I just don't think it's particularly shocking.

Re: So 35% of elec is residential

Is it really that extraordinary?

Any new industry has the capacity to grow to use a significant proportion of the available energy supply in an area. It's what happens with new industries - and data centres are heavy on the electricity, and don't consume much "other" power, at least assuming they are built to use "waste" heat on site.

What's perhaps more surprising is that in 2018 (last figures I can see on the CSO site) businesses' electricity usage was only ~30% of their total energy consumption.

If we assume that data centres are much closer to completely electrically driven then their 20% suddenly becomes 7-8%, and immediately becomes much less headline worthy.

I don't have 2021 figures (because I can't find them), but in the decade leading up to 2018 electricity usage (by businesses) rose by ~20%, compared with a their total energy usage increasing by ~23%. Again assuming that data centres are heavy on the electrical side... they've not made a dent in the energy balance.

So 35% of elec is residential

...and of the remaining 65% the data centre businesses use less than a quarter of all the non residential electricity.

Rocket Lab to attempt mid-air recovery of descending booster

Fingers and toes

Very much crossed... should be good

Google tests battery backups, aims to ditch emergency datacenter diesel

Re: Nuke

"Who'd want a mini nuclear power station in their neighbourhood?"

Me.

Although actually I'd rather the micro ones went in substations - the very small size is actually quite useful here, both mechanically and safety wise.

At motorway service stations I'd put an SMR... a bit more space, and easy reuse of the heat in the service building. Also less nimbyism because they are generally a little way outside residential areas.

Supplement the grid with a pretty well distributed power supply.

Re: Nuke

"The consequences and costs of a nuclear accident - clean-up, compensation, environmental damage, etc"

Well, if you actually cleaned up after any of the other activities maybe we could have that conversation.

Hawaiian Airlines to offer free Wi-Fi via SpaceX's Starlink

Only on outbound flights

Aren't all flights outbound from one airport and inbound to another?

Could a leaky capacitor be at fault on ESA's Sentinel-1B?

Re: Leaky ceramic?

Thanks

In IT, no good deed ever goes unpunished

Re: Jumping to conclusions

I was expecting the hardware to be disabled...