* Posts by Richard 12

6047 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2009

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: “Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads” (Doc Brown)

Who's on sixteen?

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

Richard 12 Silver badge

FTTP should do that.

The fibre terminates in a box that's got an RJ45 and (optionally) a phone socket on it.

The RJ45 is actual Ethernet.

In other words, you don't need the ISPs hardware at all, just a PPPoE capable router.

That said, the ISP needs to tell you that username and password.

I'm also somewhat bemused that NordVPN say PPPoE is "no longer widely used".

VR headsets to shift 30 million units a year by 2027, vastly behind wearables

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Magical thinking and hype factory

Walking in VR is still nauseating for many people, the moment you go further than your physical room.

There's a reason why almost all of the successful VR games fling things at a more or less stationary player.

With a few spectacular exceptions, like Eye of the Temple, any virtual space larger than around 2m x 2m has to use teleportation to move the player or else the majority of potential players will simply vomit.

Mastodon makes a major move amid Musk's multiple messes

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: This could have been so much easier.

Email client?

How many "retail customers" do you think have an email client other than Microsoft Outlook/Mail or the email app that came with their phone?

Thunderbird has perhaps half a million users, and it's almost certainly the most popular 'other'.

Unless you convinced Microsoft, Apple, Google, or (perhaps) Samsung to add it, no email client feature is ever going to be mass-market.

A standalone app/webapp is literally the only option. It's also what a lot of (most?) people prefer - "everything" apps are often quite annoying as you have to go through many layers to find the thing.

US military F-35 readiness problems highlighted in aptly timed report

Richard 12 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Optional Extras Not Included.......

Engines are usually an optional extra when buying an airframe.

The manual lists the ones that are officially supported, just like server hard disks. Though it's somewhat more risky to fit an engine that's not on the list.

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

Richard 12 Silver badge

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

A wipe down and a few weeks to dry out, it'll be fine.

Signal adopts new alphabet jumble to protect chats from quantum computers

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Regev's algorithm

Well, if it works then quantum doomsday is only a continual "decade away", rather than the continual "twenty years" we have at present.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Hmmm, it's not just governments that exhibit magical thinking ...

There's a lot of things that you want or even need to keep secret for a lifetime.

Though very rarely longer than that.

AWS spins up more cloudy Mac Minis, now with M2 Pro silicon

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: "At that rate, an on-prem M2 Pro Mac Mini pays for itself in about eight weeks"

If you're a chip shop et al, you hire an app company to rebrand a white label iOS and Android app.

You don't do it yourself!

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: "At that rate, an on-prem M2 Pro Mac Mini pays for itself in about eight weeks"

Nobody ever "just wants to compile a few times a year". Absolute minimum to release an iOS app that actually does something is of the order of several weeks of rebuilds and "test flights". It takes several hours to get a Mac configured to build once, what with all the keys that need installing - most of which can't be done automatically as it deliberately requires a human in the loop.

And of course, to remote desktop into that cloud Mac you effectively need a Mac of your own anyway. The Windows/Linux VNC is so incredibly slow as to be almost unusable, and you can't do everything over SSH.

As to why Apple insist you need a Mac to compile for iOS - it's the only reason for Macs to still exist.

If and when Apple permits building iOS apps under any other operating system, they're signalling the end of the Mac as we know it.

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

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: But they do disappear

Then they rebuilt it, and that one slipped down't hill.

Then they rebuilt it, and it fell down the hill again.

Then they dropped a load of concrete blocks across the road and gave up.

Intel slaps forehead, says I got it: AI PCs. Sell them AI PCs

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: orthography

Those are just marketing terms these days, sadly.

UK Online Safety Bill to become law – and encryption busting clause is still there

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Why?

Depending on your local ballot, that may be an effective way to ensure you get the MP you despise and fear the most.

I'd recommend you look closer, and possibly hold your nose and vote against someone.

First past the post is horrific. It needs to die.

As TikTok surveils staff's office hours, research indicates WFH is good for planet

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Good for the planet?

I would love to provide a reference to an article in a distinguished scientific journal, but it seems they have all been captured by the religion that is Climate Science and refuse to publish anything which goes against the orthodoxy evidence.

Science doesn't care about your opinions. It cares about evidence.

Would you go jump out of a tall building? Gravity is just a theory, after all.

Oracle at Europe's largest council didn't foresee bankruptcy

Richard 12 Silver badge

Over a year of not being able to reconcile the spending with which budget it's supposed to come out of?

That alone is enough to sink an organisation!

That's before the £80 million overbudget - and does that including the additional staffing costs of trying to run Oracle?

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

Richard 12 Silver badge

'Cos they drive killer amps

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Should this be so easy?

Saudi Arabia is doing exactly that.

It's an exciting time.

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

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: The scheme includes secondments for experts from industry and academia

Oh, but they did use that URL, for many years.

Hence the standing joke.

And of course most of us had search filters configured to remove that site because it was absolutely useless.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Unity Ads

There's some indication that the goal was to force mobile developers to use the Unity advert platform, as they seem to be waiving the fee if you do.

Of course, if it worked then that is a slam-dunk monopoly abuse case.

And if it doesn't, the company dies.

A strange choice.

Richard 12 Silver badge

The big ones will leave rapidly too

This isn't a "share of revenue". It's a flat charge per install for as long as the game is being sold.

Even if you believe yesterday's version of the FAQ, it means the developer gets charged every time the end user replaces their device.

You sell your game once, Unity charges you for it repeatedly. You can't budget - how many of your users will upgrade their hardware this month?

Worse, freemium and ad-supported games make 1-2 cents per user. So they'll instantly make a massive loss if they trip the line, and cannot risk using Unity.

So a huge swathe of devs are gone, instantly. That includes a lot of large dev houses - Pokémon Go is definitely well over the line. As written, this would bankrupt Niantic!

And even if they've arranged a special deal, once the hoi polloi leave, there's no canaries finding bugs before they do, raising their costs and delaying releases.

Apple's iPhone 12 woes spread as Belgium, Germany, Netherlands weigh in

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: "the iPhone 12 was approved by the FCC before sale"

The FCC don't test it, though. Any more than the EU does.

FCC is a paper exercise, you fill out the forms, sign the dotted line and you're good to go.

They can do spot checks if they feel the need, but you you really think they'll do that for products sold by a company the size of Apple?

It's now pretty clear that Apple did exceed the limits, and nobody noticed because nobody tested them.

Most likely this came about because someone noticed a strange result while testing something else, and tracked it down to the phone in their pocket.

Richard 12 Silver badge

EU rules, local enforcement

Each country is responsible for enforcing the rules within its borders.

The EU Commission and Parliament just put together regulations and vote on whether to accept them. Each member state is then responsible for enforcement, there's no EU-wide police force or anything like that.

The regulations usually specify which state has jurisdiction when it's cross-border to avoid that wrangling. To some extent, anyway.

Apple-backed California right-to-repair bill just a bite away from governor's signature

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: "Apple-backed..."

Yes, but I do trust the bench repair tech who used to sit next to me.

Or the small computer repair shop just down the road.

US amends hypersonic weapons strategy: If you can't zoom with 'em, boom 'em

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Pebbles

Gravel is sufficient, no need for special materials. At those speeds it takes very little to disrupt flight surfaces or destroy the engine, and they cannot be effectively armoured due to the weight.

The trouble is that you need to scatter the gravel in front of the incoming weapon, sufficiently accurately that it will pass through the bulk of the cloud, and sufficiently close to it that it cannot avoid the collision.

That's a pretty tight box to aim at, especially as the entire point of hypersonic weapons is that they can manoeuvre. You have to launch the "kill vehicle" before you know where to scatter the gravel.

On the bright side, it doesn't need to go as fast or as far, so it can stay in flight regimes that are better understood and use simpler rocket engines.

Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

Richard 12 Silver badge

Instead of talking, they sicced their attack lawyers on her.

Defending against a mob of attack lawyers is expensive, even if you have a cast-iron case and win immediately.

I doubt she has that kind of money behind the sofa.

MOXIE microwaved Mars air into oxygen, but now it's time for a breather

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Chemisty is not my strong suit....

Free O will react extremely quickly with whatever is nearby. They use a catalyst to get as much O2 as possible.

The reason for the waste product being CO is twofold:

1. Carbon is quite reactive. It'll grab something else, probably O2 and oxidise back to CO2 quite rapidly, releasing a lot of heat. CO is less reactive so easier to avoid that happening.

2. Carbon-Carbon compounds are solid at reasonable temperatures. It's quite difficult to get rid of a solid, so if that's your output the machine fills up with soot and stops working. CO is a gas, so is quite easy to eject.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Short sighted?

There basically jsn't any free oxygen in the Martian atmosphere - any that forms reacts with the dust almost immediately.

MOXIE is breaking down CO2 into oxygen and carbon monoxide.

When it's burned, it becomes CO2 again, released in the gravity well.

Aside from that, the volumes in question are miniscule on a planetary scale. A few hundred tonnes isn't going to make any difference - terraforming Mars would take a huge effort over hundreds of years.

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: It was only after the implementation began that they revealed that they couldn't.

Absolutely.

However, there are two major problems:

1. Every country has at least one major political party who is ideologically opposed to the concept of a skilled and expert civil service, often even the very concept of a neutral civil service.

The moment that party comes into power, they start to break up that team by various techniques, such as cross-promoting or even spinning off entire departments as separate private entities, destroying any capability that had been built up during the previous administration.

2. Private companies will try to poach those skilled workers, and will succeed often enough to ensure a "brain drain" within said civil service.

The only way out of this mess is going to be some kind of Open Source ERP, but it'll take a very brave set of councillors with "safe seats" to start that ball rolling.

IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week

Richard 12 Silver badge

Per person. Even leaky as heck, if there's 100 people in there it's not 100 times the heating bill.

Though sometimes one suspects this is actually because they set the thermostat to the legal minimum temperature...

Richard 12 Silver badge

It's reasonable to assume that heating/cooling a home is less efficient per person than heating/cooling an office.

However, it's also reasonable to assume that the actual marginal difference is very small, because people need to heat/cool their home for some proportion of the time it is empty during the day, to ensure it is habitable when they return.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Silly Mistakes

It's very common in the USA. Almost every house is fed that way.

They usually have half the circuits on A, half on B and then a few "dryer sockets" which have both A and B for 240VAC.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Silly Mistakes

You don't test it, you measure impedance and calculate the prospective short circuit current. Then make sure the breakers are rated to handle that worst possible case.

Most circuit breakers will only interrupt their maximum rated breaking current once or twice.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Silly Mistakes

It's AC, so impedance is more correct as it's never entirely resistive.

22 million Brits suffer broadband outage blues and are paying a premium for it

Richard 12 Silver badge

The vast majority of properties have the choice of exactly one actual broadband ISP carrier - Openreach - aside from a very few places that have Virgin cable and FTTP.

Almost every ISP is an Openreach reseller. The banks of modems are long gone.

All you're paying extra for is bypassing the CGNAT, and a nicer person to phone when Openreach break it. So it's not surprising that very few people do.

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

ChoHag, that whooshing sound is the point going over your head.

Cliffwilliams44 says their neighbour controls it now, and not only is it not permitted for Cliffwilliams to ask anyone else to help get their property back, they're not allowed to try themselves either.

It's a strange worldview, if I may be so bold.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Ships have a tendency to move around.

There's very few things that stand still in the sea.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

So if your neighbour breaks down your door and changes the locks while you're out, you'll gladly accept being homeless because they own it now?

Didn't think so.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: So Musk has blood on his hands

They already have.

It's just going to take a while (and quite a lot of blood) before the Russian government will accept that and enter into serious talks.

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

Richard 12 Silver badge

The 32bit version of XP supported 4GB.

An individual application would only get access to 3GB of that - unless compiled with a Large Address Aware linker switch to indicate that they could cope with the full address space.

That limitation and switch still exists in Windows 11, as it's part of the 32bit Win32 ABI.

There was also a 64bit version of XP, though I never saw that in the wild.

UK admits 'spy clause' can't be used for scanning encrypted chat – it's not 'feasible'

Richard 12 Silver badge

Though they haven't yet understood that the multinationals will simply finish their move across the Irish Sea, leaving nothing whatsoever for them to confiscate.

Toyota servers ran out of storage, crashed production at 14 plants in Japan

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Out of space

If PHB won't buy a disk, then they sure as heck aren't buying a tape deck.

Musk's mighty missile is ready for launch once FAA says OK

Richard 12 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Premature Stackulation?

The way all of this works is that the FAA get handed a massive stack of paperwork that basically says "we did some tests and simulations, it'll be fine".

Historically, the FAA then do a few spot checks on which failure modes have been considered, and that there aren't any glaring issues.

In short, for the most part they believe what Boeing, SpaceX et al tell them.

The Superheavy launch attempt have rather broken that trust. They now have to go through the entire stack and examine everything - almost certainly running their own simulations to verify the SpaceX ones aren't just "the only time this emergency system actually worked".

They may also require some physical tests of particular parts.

That all simply takes a lot more time. Same as with the 737-MAX.

Longer term the regulatory capture problem needs solving, but at the end of the day it's a small industry so a revolving door between the regulator and the businesses is inevitable. Can't regulate if you don't understand the engineering.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: OR

The FAA have the legal power to simply end SpaceX.

If they launched without a licence at all, there wouldn't be a fine. The FAA would be legally required to walk in, lock or confiscate everything and shut them down, permanently.

This would of course be followed by a few months of legal wrangling.

The most probable end result of that being a publicly-owned "NuSpace" with a new management team, with Musk (and others) permanently barred from having a controlling interest in any US aerospace business.

The SpaceX management team know this, of course, so they won't do that, no matter what Musk Xits out.

Decades-old Home Office asylum system misses EOL deadline, no new timetable in place

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Case study

Written by a secondary school kid on work experience.

Like many mission-critical VB6 applications.

I vaguely remember being that kid.

Scared of flying? Good news! Software glitches keep aircraft on the ground

Richard 12 Silver badge
Windows

NATS crashed.

The description given in public very obviously means it simply crashed on unexpected and/or bad data.

And then the backup went ahead and crashed as well, as expected. Same code, same assumptions, same data, same crash.

Worse, it clearly didn't create a useful log (or even core dump?)

If it had done then the staff would have been able to figure out which flight plan crashed the system, remove it from the automated queue and try again before the four hour "major disruption" deadline.

Or at least which small block of 10-100 flight plans contain the problem. Drop those out, continue.

Then they could manually process the funky flight plan(s), and finally set someone to work on figuring out why that flight plan crashed the software - without a nasty deadline hanging over them.

Asking someone to manually process ten flight plans in the knowledge that one of them made the automation fall over is also a very effective way of finding the flaw. Handing them 10,000 is a very effective way of making sure they ... don't.

The Anti Defamation League is Musk's latest excuse for Twitter's tanking ad revenue

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: PT-73?

Probably has something to do with the minor detail that Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding Company and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal own 4% of Xitter.

They also "facilitated" a lot of the financing of His Muskness purchase.

I'm rather wondering how much of this was simply a way to extract a large amount of liquid cash from Twitter while getting someone else to entirely destroy it.

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Abiword and rant

It now supports LF and CR line endings as well as CRLF.

Though the only time I see CR line endings these days is when Perforce has mangled the file.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: I'm torn

Every situation where W3W is possible to use is machine to machine.

I click "share location" in Google Maps or FB Messenger etc etc, you click the link.

AML automatically shares my location with the emergency services when I dial 999, 112 or 911.

I paste lat/long into an SMS.

At no point is a human actually reading it out, they all get a pin directly on the map.

And if they don't use (or have access to) the same proprietary map system as me, they can copypaste the lat/long from any of them to any other. Something that is deliberately impossible with W3W

Richard 12 Silver badge

Indeed

And this may be why W3W is unlikely to survive the next couple of years.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Amateurish, at best.

It's fairly clear that they didn't even do that, they just assumed the homophones and singular/plural forms would be a long way apart.

And they keep claiming this despite being presented with multiple cases pairs being within 10-20 miles, including in their own advertising.

It would have been relatively simple to (eg) ensure homophones and singular/plural forms were diametrically opposed on the globe.

Heck, even simple duplication would have worked better - it's generally fairly easy to determine if you're in the Pacific Ocean or Europe.