Posts by Alan Brown

Google robo-car in rear-end smash – but cack-handed human blamed

Re: What do the statistics tell us?

"If the accidents are happening to Googlemoblies significantly more often than to conventionally driven cars"

Except that:

1: They're not

2: The US highways administration estimates that more than half of minor collisions are never reported and freely admits this makes generating minor crash statistics virtually impossible.

If this was a non-autonomous wagon whack the odds are good that it wouldn't have been reported, whereas Goo and Delphi are reporting everything from paint scrapes to near misses.

Happy NukeDay to you! 70 years in the shadow of the bomb post-Trinity

Re: No mention of the neutron bomb?

"The soviet solution was to wrap the fuel tanks, containing rather a lot of hydrocarbons, around the crew. Hydrogen has a good capture cross section for neutrons."

Water is even better and it doesn't have the inconvenient tendency to catch fire.

Re: No mention of the neutron bomb?

"but the explosive yield is reduced."

Over that of a thermonuclear bomb, yes.

It's still a nuclear weapon and still highly destructive in the immediate vicinity out to 2-3km.

Re: What worries me...

"Have they been safely gathered and decommissioned?"

Most of them have been used to power USA reactors - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program

The russians were strapped for cash and paying them to dismantle the bombs was beneficial all around.

The 1950s designs for Orion launchers are reputedly extremely efficient with very little fallout and still classified.

It helps that they're small - 60-80kt or less.

IMO they're the only practical way to get the amount of material required to build a space elevator into orbit, but it's doubtful one will ever launch from Earth's surface.

Intel TOCK BLOCK: 10nm Cannonlake delayed to 2017, bonus 14nm Kaby Lake to '16

8086 JIT compiler inside. x86 hasn't existed as a piece of silicon for decades.

The actual chip is different. It'd be "fun" to expose the real internals to direct programming rather than have to go through an interpreting interposer at all times.

(FWIW, the chinese x86 chips are MIPS inside with an interposer and AMD's original K5 series were 29000-series RISC chips with an interposer - the AMDs ran 50% faster clock-for-clock than Intel on integer operations)

Re: Patterning, overlay and EUV

ISTR reporting about x-ray lithography being on the drawing boards 20+ years ago.

Given the features in question (14nm) are much smaller than the wavelengths of light being used (violet = 380nm, DUV is 248 or 193nm), it's not surprising that it's bloody hard to do lithography at this scale.

The miracle is that it's possible at all.

You care about TIN? Why the Open Compute Project is irrelevant

"Not that he's wrong when he says that there's no way you can build and run and maintain a datacentre as cheaply as Microsoft or Google or Amazon. Of course you can't."

Perhaps, but every time I've priced their services for what we do (big storage and heavy compute loads), they work out at least twice as expensive as running our own.

I let mangelment go out and get schmoozed about cloud periodically and make sure they get full pricing for what they want to do. They get the idea fairly quickly that cloud is fine for intermittent or light loads and hopeless for more.

BT circles wagons round Openreach as Ofcom mulls forced split-up

"My main concern is where the investment would come from for continued improvements."

From the customers, same as it is now. The difference being that BT is just another customer, not hoovering the profits out via creative account methods.

It's worth reating the NZ Ministry of Commerce reports on the separation there.

http://www.comcom.govt.nz/dmsdocument/11002

"From the moment the government announced the Separation plan on 3 May 2006, Telecom's behaviours in the market place changed. Before separation it viewed its wholesale customers as unwelcome campers on its network. The moment separation became inevitable, it immediately started to recognise them as valued business partners."

"Whatever comes after it needs to be at least as good and looking at other such 'breakouts' (Network Rail, anyone?)"

Network Rail is different in that it inherited a clusterfuck of regionalisations which itself was a mishmash of dozens of smaller clusterfucks that got nationalised.

Openreach is a uniform company across the country.

Re: Do it!

"Other utilities operate complete monopolies, in that there are no competing networks in the areas they operate."

Openreach effectively has this across most of the country other than city cores and some areas where Virgin operates. Even where Virgin is present, going 1-2 blocks either side often results in the choice being Openreach or Openreach.

Re: Do it!

"I'd be staggered if Openreach had a single operational structure across the UK. If it does, then it's overdue for break up, and if it has regions then the dotted lines are already there to tear along."

I can think of an operational monopoly like Openreach which doesn't have regionalisation.

Railtrack.

Re: Do it!

"I don't know how changing the name over the door improves anything."

Go and look at what happened in New Zealand.

Openreach might be notionally separated from BT Wholesale/retail, etc but the dead hand of BT head office is able to see over all the chinese walls and direct business strategies accordingly.

New Zealand forced Telecom NZ (Now "Spark") to divest its lines side (Now "Chorus") precisely BECAUSE of the market abuse documented in the UK. Telecom NZ was pushing for the UK model.

Telecom New Zealand made precisely the same arguments against separation that BT is doing now, right down to the claims that a separated lineside company wouldn't have as much investment happening and couldn't survive.

The reality is that without the anticompetitive activities of the mothership restricting things, investment has surged and Chrous is actively seeking out customers to sell services to (unlike the old days where they were difficult-to-impossible to deal with, just like Openreach are now), is flogging dark fibre and leasing duct space to outfits which were once deadly rivals (cable companies, etc)

As a result of the splitup, New Zealand should have copper to the house eliminated within 7 years, according to friends within the industry there - that's with a far lower population density and far more challenging geography than the UK has.

The most likely loser in the event of a splitup of Openreach from BT will be BT. Many companies are dealing with them because they have to and despite claims of "equal treatment" it's clear that BT favours its own in all aspects from installation to fault handling.

Telecom NZ (Spark) is suffering from this right now. It's currently moaning loudly that Chorus (regulated) line charges are far too high and it can't possibly make money providing dialtone over them - this is despite those charges being based on figures Spark provided pre-breakup and being about half of what it used to charge its competitors - who are all very happy with the current arrangement because it means they're paying less whilst the rotting infrastructure that Telecom NZ asset-stripped over the last 30 years is finally being upgraded.

Natural geothermal heat under Antarctic ice: 'Surprisingly high'

"If we enter an age of energy and carbon austerity that the AGW-ists want us to"

Only the extremist nutters want that.

The rest of us want safer nuclear plants as they're the only way to provide the amount of reliable energy required to pull the entire population out of poverty. The alternative is to see africa rapidly become one of the largest net carbon emitters due to industrialisation and deforestation (Africa is far larger than north america, western europe, india and china combined, with a population to match)

Yes, you could build solar and wind, but they're variable, poorly controlled and not energy dense enough to do the job without a 80% reduction in per-capita electricity usage. This is despite needing to replace gas-fired boilers and petroleum burning cars with electric sources.

Don't even think of suggesting solar in the Sahara. For starters, the output of that farm would go to Africa, not Europe and it's not enough to even come close to satisfying the needs of a population there with per-capita demands like ours.

If you have fast-reacting nuclear plants like LFTRs (immune to xenon poisoning) to handle the spiky generation patterns of wind/solar then you also have fast reacting nuclear plants which can supply baseload and cater to peak power demands too, with that wind and solar shit being an expensive nuisance that should be banished from the grid.

Because LFTRs are intrinsically safe and can't do all the stupid things that water-cooled plants have done over the years, you could build them closer to your population centres/away from water sources (they run hot enough that they don't need watercooling) and use the heat output for district heating/refridgeration schemes (see solarfrost.com for an explanation of how to drive cooling/AC systems from hot water or other lowgrade heat sources) - bear in mind that even the best turbine setups only run at 45% efficiency with the rest being waste heat.

Yes you could still have a steam explosion or fire at a LFTR plant, but that would be non-radioactive output, the same as any of the same things at a coalburning plant.

Large windmills and solar PV farms are greenwash, not green. So are tidal schemes.

"with only a small number of mass-extinction events."

Most of which were associated with CO2 spikes..... :)

Re: Its still a wonderful excuse to tax some more

"while selling the coal burning plant direct to China for them to use...."

You'll be happy to know that China capped its emissions last year and managed to reduce emissions since January by more than the UK's _entire_ CO2 output.

When you have pollution events as bad as they're seeing in such a short timespan from almost none, there's an incentive to clean up that wasn't seen here in areas like the Black Country. China's long-term objective for energy has always been nuclear plants (they're investing in research on a number of technologies, but MSR looks best for the long term) with coal regarded as a kickstart only.

Re: So this has just happened suddenly?

"the relentless biassing of the carbon cycle through increased transfer of carbon from geological stores to the atmospheric and oceanic stores is stressing those climate systems. "

Exactly - and it's worth reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event - the authors are careful to avoid trying to draw parallels between past events and current ones but it's entirely possible that in 60 million years whatever intelligence might be on Earth is scratching its collective head and wondering how the heck an anoxic event happened without corresponding mass basalt fields of the same age.

Re: What would happen if a supervolcano lay beneath Antarctica?

To get a supervolcano you need a subducting oceanic plate such as the ones under Yellowstone, Toba and the Oroanui field. There aren't any that I'm aware of under Antarctica.

Re: Surprisingly high: Compared to what?

"A higher temperature would increase melt and glacier velocity."

But only in the vicinity of the geothermal heat. The entire continent isn't being warmed, not even the entire edges, just a few local spots.

Re: So this has just happened suddenly?

"In fact there is more sea ice round Antarctica now than there has been since the 70s."

There's so much fresh water coming off the continent at the moment that it's affecting salinity levels and in the heaviest flow areas there's a layer of freshwater a few metres thick overlaying the salt stuff - something that used to only be seen in New Zealand's Fiords.

Bear in mind that seawater freezes at -15 to -17C and fresh at 0C.

Bear in mind also that this is WINTER sea ice. It disappears very quickly once it gets the sun on it and summer ice extent is so far much the same as it was.

In any case, ice sitting on water doesn't change sea level. The worries are about land-based ice above sea level and that's currently sliding into the ocean at a rate of more than 150km^3 per year. (roughly 4700 tons per second. That's a lot of olympic swimming pools)

Re: Geothermal Power

"as far as I can see, no attempt to harness even a small amount of this"

Attempts have been made. The problem is that rock is a piss-poor conductor of heat, so once you start extracting energy that's percolated up from the magma chamber you're limited in what you can take by the influx from surrounding rock or the temperature declines and thermal efficiency of your turbines drops. Many geothermal projects have discovered this the hard way.

Pumping water in just makes it cool faster.

The icelandic geothermal plant is slightly different because magma is very close to the surface and being fairly constantly topped up. There aren't many places like it.

Re: It puzzles me too

"the oceans are still alkaline, you know."

If you like shellfish and crustaceans, or things which eat them, you'd better hope they stay that way.

Brit school software biz unchains lawyers after crappy security exposed

Wrong move.

"Slip's advisory gist disappeared from GitHub soon after the letter from Impero's lawyers Gateley arrived in his Yahoo! Mail inbox. El Reg has seen the full exploit, and withheld publishing specific details in the interests of responsible disclosure."

As soon as any outfit starts threatening lawyers over a bug discovery it's time to publish everything.

_Anything_ else is irresponsible. The fact that the bug exists and has been mentioned means that bad guys will find and exploit it within days or hours but the company will continue to lie to its customers that things are secure (Customers probably have a pretty good civil case against the vendor for attempting to cover up vulnerabilities)

Full disclosure policies appeared precisely because of this kind of response by companies with insecure software.

US yoinks six Nigerians to Mississippi on '419 scam' charges

Re: Crime across boarders

During the mid-200s, the FBI was running joint operations in Lagos with Nigerian police to go after 419ers.

Several raids were filmed, but of course nothing more was heard. This could be why they're now trying extradition instead.

Re: They'll get great jobs in the USA afterwards...

"they need fresh ideas"

In which case a bunch of tired old Nigerian scammers won't help.

I CAN REMEMBER SEEING THE 419 LETTER CHATTERING OUT OF A TELEX MACHINE IN THE 1980S - ALL CAPS OF COURSE.

Mathematician: sunspot could mean mini ice age from 2030

Re: What does this mean for PV?

"Large % of base load PV"

Uh yeah. Right. Whatever.

Come back and tell me how much of your baseload is being catered to by PV on a still, cloudless, winter night even before gas boiler setups are outlawed (they will be eventually)

Re: @LucreLout - "either we do not beleive you or because we do not care"

"neither is it good for a country's finances when you get a foreign organisation (EDF) to build it for you with a dodgy deal that involves paying £90 billion to France and guaranteeing to pay double the price for the electricity it generates for 35 years!"

Allowing for inflation, the price will double anyway. If the deal is double current prices with inflation on top then it's a bad 'un and hopefully it will be undercut by newer reactors.

Personally I'd prefer that EDF don't build a PWR, but we don't have GenIV reactors yet.

As for timescales: 90% of the delays are regulatory. In an "all stops pulled" build even with mandatory inspections, etc the thing could be build in a lot less than half the time.

Re: This good be good news or bad news.....

"Have you seen who has the biggest uranium reserves?"

Uranium is everywhere, just like thorium. The problem is that it's a toxic bitch to extract and needs shitloads of energy applied to it simply in order to make it usable as LWR reactor fuel (CANDU will take natural uranium, but they're not common or lightwater jobbies)

Re: This good be good news or bad news..... @CodeJunky

" For example, many aged people have become ill or passed away from stresses and emotional trauma brought on by being moved away from their homes, from loved ones, kept in evacuation centres, loss of livelihood and financial devastation from losing homes. "

The same problem occurred in Christchurch NZ after the quakes there. Rest homes moved residents to other towns because the local infrastructure was broken and ~25% of them promptly popped their clogs.

Old folk don't take change very well, if at all

Re: This good be good news or bad news..... @CodeJunky

"However, is it still the case that there have been no deaths due to Fukushima?"

Yes, unless you count the crane operator who died in the earthquake.

The tsunami killed a lot more than 1300 people.

Re: This good be good news or bad news.....

"I will be glad when Oldbury on the river Severn down the road shuts down"

I will be even happier if its waste is fed to a thorium plant.

Re: This good be good news or bad news.....

"Chernobyl: old reactor design more suited to making stuff that goes bang, badly trained staff, badly run and the staff did everything possible to make it break. "

Not only that but they attempted to cover it up for a week past the accident.

Fukushima got as bad as it did because the japanese refused to ask for external help and incompetent management kept giving stupid orders which made things worse until the onsite engineer grew some cojones and told them to fuck off - it was at that stage things started improving.

See a pattern here?

Re: This good be good news or bad news.....

"Nuclear also has the advantage that it reliably makes towns and cities uninhabitable. "

Nuclear scares people. Radiation levels are higher in the Yorkshire Dales (or downtown Helsinki) than anywhere in Fukushima province other than right next to the reactor vessels. Those big tanks of contaminated water are less radioactive than the thermal pools at Bath.(*)

Chernobyl is a bit harder but other than a few concentrated spots it's safe - and for all the fearmongering, and with those accidents and including all the military accidents and even the 2 bombs on japan, the deaths-per-TWh of nuclear generation is a factor of several thousand less than for coal (and there's still a lot of room for improvement on the nuclear generation plant)

On the subject of coal: Burning coal releases entrapped radioactive particles - the radium content alone of coal emissions is larger than several Chernobyls each year, but we don't care about that just like we don't care about the high radiation dose we get from cosmic rays every time we fly (civil transport aircrew have the highest radiation exposure levels of any profession and they're not exactly dying off like flies or even developing cancers at statistically unusual rates)

On top of that the largest ecological disaster in the USA in the last decade wasn't Deepwater Horizon - it was a coal sludgepond in Tennessee breaking its dam - there are 5000 more sites just like that which are known about in the USA (they didn't have to be notified until 15 years ago, The EPA is still discovering them).

(*) A lot of the problem in Japan is down to the authorities slashing allowable radiation levels by 90% immediately after Fukushima in a total panic kneejerk. Even if the meltdowns hadn't happened most of the radioactivity levels in fish, etc would have been above those new limits.

Re: This good be good news or bad news.....

"Have you seen where a lot of the uranium comes from?"

Yes, but Uranium is a poor fuel for civil nuclear power(*) and water-cooled reactors are a fundamentally BAD idea.

Lester's been pushing Thorium(**) on ElReg for years. Do try and keep up, or acquaint yourself with LFTRs and the Oak Ridge MSRE of the 1960s.

Uranium was a great starter fuel inasmuch as proving controlled nuclear reactions are possible but the plants are wildly inefficient. Molten Salt systems are James Watt's engine to Water-based systems' Newcomen engine.

(*) It's rare, hard to extract, mindbogglingly expensive to enrich to usable levels (Gigawatts of gas centrifuges churning away in the USA producing fuel for civil plants) and you end up throwing away about 30% of the uranium as "useless" after enrichment - not good when it's a toxic heavy metal. On top of that you only use 1-2% of the stuff in a civil reactor before throwing the rest out as "waste".

(**) On the other hand we have more thorium than we know what to do with, even if thorium nukes were rolled out everywhere in the world for 11 billion people and it produces less than 1% of the waste that Uranium cycle systems do. Nice side effect - they can burn that left over waste from uranium plants too.

Re: This good be good news or bad news.....

It's not ignored. The effects from variation in solar flux are fairly minor compared to those of insolation caused by changing greenhouse gas levels.

Europol knocks out mobile cybercrime gang in Spain

Re: Premium Calls

"At least one operator I use allows you to configure whether I want to allow or restrict premium calls and SMS"

Those restrictions frequently don't work when roaming.

China's STILL holding up the full WD-HGST integration. Why?

Re: hmm

5 times the price (and falling fast), 5-10 times the warranty (not that you'll need to claim on it much)

If you can afford the upfront costs it's a no-brainer.

"While the Seagate Constellation drives are just as good"

Our in-warranty failure rate on Constellations stands at 180% (yup, that means replacements for failed drives have themselves failed and we've replaced _every single_ constellation drive in our raid arrays at least once.)

You'd be leaping from frying pan to fire.

The only thing with comparable failure rates to 3Tb drives (WD and Seagate both) have been 1.5Tb drives.

"WD have made some real stinkers in the past, and currently hold the crown for least reliable consumer grade HDD."

BOTH are crap compared to the reliability of current consumer SSDs (OCZ was an abberation).

HDD failure rates at $orkplace run at least 10-15 times that of SSDs and we're not alone in experiencing that.

"it's about reducing overhead for the merged entity that used to be separate companies WD and HGST."

And the resistance is about preventing HGST reliability fall to WD levels (they will), or that there would effectively be only 2 makers of commodity HDDs worldwide(*), both of whom are scaling back on warranties at the same time as reliability is plummeting and who are both increasingly reliant on the same single-sources for components.

If I was the chinese I'd be holding this line until SSDs are cheap enough that they're giving spinning media some real competition. It's almost there.

The HDD market in the last 5 years (Since the Thai Floods) looks amazingly like the RAM market did in the 5-10 years following the 1992 Sumitomo Fire and for much the same reason - futures traders got in on the action and screwed up a technical market in their pursuit of limitless profit.

The difference between then and now is that unlike RAM (where multiple fabs and plastics makers were able to come onstream and kill the market manipulators), HDDs are mechanically fiddly and not easy to fabricate - platters almost all come from one source, heads from another. The answer is more solid-state storage and that's happening, although not quite as fast as some of us had envisaged (3D fabs will probably change that daramatically).

(*) Toshiba aren't shipping enough to affect prices.

Trebles all round: The BBC's won this licence fee showdown

Re: But....

@Northumbrian:

The World Service and BBC world are both directly govt funded, as are BBC international radio broadcasts.

TV licensing is for stuff consumed in-country.

I don't agree with the way it's collected, but it's fairly good value for money.

What I do object to is that overseas sales of stuff which was produced from license fee money isn't ploughed back into the system to reduce the license fees. Ditto franchise fees for BBC-originated programs.

Top Gear being a prime example. The UK show earns at least 10 times more from foreign sales than it costs to make and on top of that there are franchising fees rolling in from a number of countries with their own versions.

Most shows featuring David Attenborough are similarly profitable.

What the BBC _shouldn't_ be doing is trying to produce soap operas. There are already innumerable examples on tv, why add yet another one?

Re: Yeah its a tax operated by thugs

"...and BBC thugs at his door demanding to see his living room..."

Which he had every right to refuse to show them unless they could produce a court order.

I had one attempt to stick his foot in the door when I closed it on him. He regretted it and the cops sided with me on the issue.

I do have a license, but they've been accusing me of not having one for years. I'm still waiting for them to try and prosecute as I've been keeping all the licenses and demand letters. It will be good to get their incompetence and flat out harrassment tactics aired in a courtroom.

Re: @SuccessCase nailed it

"My response to anyone who shouts about how unfair the "Telly Poll Tax" is because they don't watch the BBC ..."

Mine is to ask them if they listen to BBC radio stations.

They usually do.

As do those who claim not to watch TV at all.

I cannae dae it, cap'n! Why I had to quit the madness of frontline IT

Re: History suggests it's going to get worst before it gets better.

"In the meantime we have to follow orders, even if those orders include putting the equivalent of a skyscraper on a foundation not suitable for a mini-mall. "

If you were an engineer doing that you'd be prosecuted out of existence.

In IT it's much harder to refuse but you _can_ send an email saying that in your opinion this is unwise for XYZ reasons and be sure to retain a copy.

As other posters have said, managers hate it when the documentation is covering your ass and not theirs. For some people I deal with, I _always_ carry a recording device - because they will always deny having said something when it means they'd take a hit (and deny the denial when played the recording).

"I also suspect – and there's some proof for this – the OPM's IT efforts were spectacularly underfunded for the task to hand."

They won't be anymore.

A parallel: For the last 6 years I've been periodically warning the regional office of the chain of corner stores which has one a couple of doors down from me that their CCTV system is inadequate and will be utterly useless in the event of an armed robbery.

Last weekend that scenario happened (the crims jumped the morning shift when they arrived to open up) - and as predicted the CCTV system proved utterly useless. Net result is a couple of highly traumatised staff (having a sawn-off shotgun shoved in your face isn't pleasant) and the crims likely got away with it.

Less than 24 hours later the entire system was substantially upgraded. I suspect the words "vicarious liability" were bandied around and I'll bet they haven't told the police or their insurers that they'd been previously warned about the state of the setup.

Brit teen who unleashed 'biggest ever distributed denial-of-service blast' walks free from court

Re: Unbelieveable

"I shudder to think what he'll get up to"

You could start by looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehud_Tenenbaum - and bear in mind that there's a lot that's not on that page.

Malicious Skiddies don't do well in secretive govt organisations. Mossad found that out when they recruited young Ehud (who was a shedload more talented than some twat using a reflection attack, but was the kind of person who would find the vulnerability and develop tools for click and drool skiddies to launch 'em)

There's been a steady stream of young criminals convicted of (d)DoS attacks over the years and the general trend is for them to keep offending once released. At least one ended up in USA federal prison virtually indefinitely after attempting to murder the FBI agent investigating his cyber attacks.

Dutch efforts to decapitate Pirate Bay could end up before ECJ

"We all know the stories of the reason copy write came to pass"

Your story is amusing but incorrect.

Copyright (and patents) in modern context exist to allow authors and inventors to make enough from their ideas to keep on doing it.

It's arguable that 20 year copyrights were too short, but it's also absolutely clear that death+50/80/100years is having a widely chilling effect.

Re: Stuck Watching Trailers, Eat My Shorts

"You can't bypass them, you can only fast forward them"

A lot of the Disney ones won't even let you do that.

Re: Easy Peasy...

"Just get TPB to index ALL torrents, illegal and legal"

They do.