Posts by Gideon 1

Shakes on a plane: How dangerous is turbulence?

Bad Science

"The flexing and bending of a wing in flight is intended by design, and a very rigid wing would break much more easily. Skyscrapers are also designed this way, to actually sway a little – it makes them far more robust."

Nonsense.

They could make the wing more rigid, but it would weigh more, reducing payload, range, and efficiency. They don't actually care how much it bends as long as it doesn't break.

For civil engineers, it is cost vs bending, though the deflection limits are normally set by Building Standards/Codes.

Intel loses its ARM wrestling match, kicks out Atom mobe chips

Missing the point

When the chips are down (pun intended) ARM does the same functionality in less silicon area, so the chips cost less, and Intel could never price match and still make a profit.

BT hauled into Old Bailey after engineer's 7-metre fall broke both his ankles

Re: More than reported here?

A fall while wearing a Harness & Lanyard can cause suspension trauma, which can be fatal if not rescued quickly enough. Do not use a harness while working alone.

It has been Openreach policy for a while that their employees are not allowed to enter attics, maybe this incident was the cause? When they recently fixed my parents phone line, they left the cable dangling through an open window and left instructions for me to put it through the attic and connect it to the socket when I got back from work. It seems that these days if you want decent rural broadband you can upgrade the Openreach cable yourself ;)

iPad bricked by iOS 9.3? Don't worry, we'll get through this together

This is all part of the cunning plan to persuade their customers to upgrade their devices. After all, they need the revenue.

Better mobe antennas a stretch goal for radiocomm boffins

I read 'magnetic isolation' as in a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulator which was used in first generation mobile phones to help prevent the transmit signal jamming the receiver. 2G phones and WIFI use Time Domain Multiple Access so don't transmit and receive at the same time.

The article isn't very clear about the mechanism, but is it changing the antenna shape by heating?

Knackered Euro server turns Panasonic smart TVs into dumb TVs

Re: TV problem?

Try adjusting the spark gap first.

Lithium ion batteries banned from passenger aircraft holds

As usual, journos don't check the story before publishing. The rules for air shipping Lithium batteries are a lot more complex than just 'banned'.

Good thing this dev quit. I'd have fired him. Out of a cannon. Into the sun

Precedence Rules OK

One of the classics in C is swapping in >> where you had a /, forgetting both the precedence and rounding rules.

How a power blip briefly broke GitHub's boxes and tripped it offline

Single point of failure

By having all the Redis servers on identical hardware they all failed in the same way at the same time, which is a kind of single point of failure. No redundancy of design.

Did they ever test their ability to withstand power failure by interrupting the power to part of the installation and see what happens?

Random ideas sought to improve cryptography

Re: Way back when

"So you're better off with crap generated inside the server box (such as a microphone picking up noise from the fan)"

The microphone might also pick up the voice that you are trying to encrypt, and the fan (or other part directly connected to the power supply) will vary in sympathy with processor load, potentially leaking entropy or even clear text into the random generator, compromising the encryption.

Verification not generation

It's interesting how many Commentards didn't understand the article.

Boffins switch on pinchfist incandescent bulb

Re: "waste" heat?

"Converting it to light would be nice, but materials which can absorb heat and generate light don't, AFAIK, exist."

That would be an incandescent light bulb filament.

Lithium-air: A battery breakthrough explained

Oxygen makes things burn brightly

Recharging an electric car sized battery would release large quantities of oxygen gas, which is a major fire hazard. NASA learnt this the hard way with Apollo 1.

Now VW air-pollution cheatware 'found in Audis and Porsches'

Re: TDI and TSI

"The way they make diesel engines run fewer NOx emissions is to make it run hotter and on an oil burner, that means pumping in more fuel. On a petrol, you do the opposite, you lean the mixture off."

No, in diesels, hotter burn = more NOx, but higher efficiency. Later, slower, or tailed off burn reduces NOx but reduces efficiency. Another way is to lower the compression ratio, but that makes the engine difficult to start.

On petrol, lean mixture causes hotter burn = more NOx, but higher efficiency.

Linus Torvalds fires off angry 'compiler-masturbation' rant

GCC is at fault here

for giving noobs non-standard-compiler-feature ammunition to shoot themselves with.

How Microsoft will cram Windows 10 even harder down your PC's throat early next year

Re: Evil

"lot of it requires outdated versions of IE"

Seems you need urgent upgrades your software anyway, so maybe Win 10 is a blessing in disguise.

Laid-off IT workers: You want free on-demand service for what now?

Non story

You can't make anyone work for free.

TCP is a wire-centric protocol being forced to cut the cord, painfully

Re: "a lot of work and you might run into licensing issues"

QNX comes to mind, as that has all drivers and networking in userland.

Re: Surprise?

"One thing that appears to be missing from the IP protocol is a concrete way to indicate network congestion to endpoints by signals originating at the affected point in the intervening infrastructure."

Erm, yes there is. Indeed congestion signalling and control is the critical core and often misunderstood part of TCP. It is achieved by ramping up the packet rate until the round trip time starts to increase, as that is when the packets start to fill the queues in the routers along the route. There is no point in having more than one or two packets in any queue. This maximises the throughput while also sharing the bandwidth equitably with other traffic.

Rambus decides to enter the semiconductor chip manufacturing game

Re: Manufacturing ain't in this company's DNA.

Yeah, their royalty rates fell after smack-down by the European Commission:

http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/case_details.cfm?proc_code=1_38636

Power Bar: EE was warned of safety risk BEFORE user was burned in explosion

Re: Hydrogen

Lithium cells are at risk of thermal runaway due to deposition of lithium metal within the cell, which can be caused by overheating, overcharge, over-discharge, charging below 0 Celsius, or mechanical damage. The venting gas is a mixture of Hydrogen and CO2, and smaller amounts of CO, CH4, C2H4, and C2H6 due to high temperature reactions of the cell chemicals. Hydrogen ignites when it reaches sufficient temperature in the presence of oxygen, but that temperature is caused by the thermal runaway within the cell.

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2013/ra/c3ra45748f

To meet EC regulations, the cells must have electronic protection against charging below 0 Celsius or too high a temperature, overcharging, and over-discharging. Cells in series must have cell balancing circuitry. Has anyone done a tear-down and verified that the EE power bars have this protection circuitry?

Wait, what? TrueCrypt 'decrypted' by FBI to nail doc-stealing sysadmin

CRIB

The FBI will have known which documents he had access to, giving them very large cribs to attack the ciphers, without even considering the password. They were looking for known knowns, not known unknowns or unknown knowns.

Microsoft open-sources Sora software-defined radio

Re: I want a kilowatt output, 8-bit register only allows 255 watts. Help.

You missed the point, which is cheaper hardware. A good example is Realtek ethernet MACs, which are as cheap and simple as they could make them, offloading most of the functionality to the driver software. The phy will be next, because it typically has a dedicated mask programmed DSP, but as CPUs get DSP like instruction sets the signal processing can be done there instead. The same cost reduction could be applied to computer radio interfaces too.

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

Re: Intel has rivals?

Yeah, the smartphones.

Boffins demo 'memcomputer', plot von Neumann's retirement

Optimal memory != optimal processor

Silicon baking processes are optimised for what they are trying to make. Microcontrollers integrate processor, ram, and flash memory all on the same silicon by compromising the foundry process to get all the parts to work, but they all end up sub-optimal which is why microcontrollers have lower performance and smaller memories than their dedicated counterparts.

“We show an experimental demonstration of an actual memcomputing architecture that solves the NP-complete version of the subset sum problem in only one step and is composed of a number of memprocessors that scales linearly with the size of the problem”

Yeah, but the interconnect between all these memprocessors rises exponentially. Similar to an FPGA, you have to program all that interconnect too, and that takes a long time, and can only solve one problem with each programming.

Mastercard facial recog-ware will unlock your money using SELFIES

Remember that this is in the US, where they are only just starting to roll out chip and pin.

Apple CORED: Boffins reveal password-killer 0-days for iOS and OS X

Re: But shirley...

"So all debuggers have to run with root privs?"

No, the debugger can run the app as a child process, retaining the ability to peek into its innards.

Reddit joins the HTTPS-only stampede

"Reddit jons the HTTPS-only stampede"

Is that joins or jons?

Zionists stole my SHOE, claims Muslim campaigner

Re: A few pointers

Before making accusations of ignorance, may I suggest that you first research the Koran, the Hadiths, and the culture. There are exhortations of the 'kill everyone who doesn't agree with them' type in there, thankfully most submitters to the religion don't do that these days. Along with the positives, there is also a rich history of jihad, subjugation of women and minorities, and other things that Western culture consider to be negative.

Re: A few pointers

" It's a dumb narrative as there's 1.6 billion muslims in the world from every walk of life and one thing that I certainly do agree with this guy on is the danger and idiocy of Islamophobia."

That's an implied threat against anyone who questions that religion. It is a regression to pre-Enlightenment attitudes of religious repression of thought and speech.

C'mon, any fool knows that the real Mossad calling card is a shekel on the pillow... especially intimidating if you wake up to find it on your pillow.

Virgin Galactic will get into space 'within 18 months to two years'

Re: Being picky...

"In some cars you're correct, but for the majority of cars on the road there isn't. I drive a Peugeot 107..."

Synchromesh on reverse is unusual, Peugeot even have a patent on it: http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US4640141

Re: Being picky...

In most manual gearbox cars the only thing preventing you inadvertently selecting reverse gear is some kind of extra selection device, e.g. a pull-up collar on the gear stick, or a push down mechanism on the stick. If you really really want to select reverse whilst travelling forward at speed, you can.

Your servers are underwater? Chill out – liquid's cool

Re: Have you tested this theory?

Capacitors have more of a problem with low pressures, especially types that do not have a hard case, e.g. resin dipped tantalum. The airworthiness directives are a good guide.

Easy ... easy ... Aw CRAP! SpaceX rocket ALMOST lands on ocean hoverbase

Re: Needs One of These

Many of the good ideas have already been invented. They could make the entire deck of the barge out of that grab grill, the landing wouldn't need to be so precise, and the rocket exhaust would go straight through, reducing the landing flare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_flare) instability.

Everything's code, 'zero tolerance for assholes': Yup, it's ChefConf

Ah okay, you'd have kicked out Steve Jobs?

Ex-cop: Holborn fireball comms outage cover for £200m bling heist gang

Early signs of dementia include paranoia. Maybe time to go see your doctor?

Marvell: We don't want to pay this $1.5bn patent bill because, cripes, it's way too much

The main issue here is that Carnegie-Mellon took so long to file suit. If Marvell had been challenged earlier they could have raised their selling price for the chip by the 50c patent license fee. Carnegie-Mellon should be penalised for taking so long to take action against Marvell.

Take a deep breath, Apple: Europe snaps on gloves for vigorous iTunes stream pat-down

Re: Not a surprise

> In any case, all this article is about is the European Commission asking some questions to see if a investigation is required into a service Apple hasn't even launched yet.

This is the European Commission asking some questions to see if some illegal contracts have been signed between Apple and the music industry.

Free Windows 10 could mean the END for Microsoft and the PC biz

Re: Stop and think a bit, please...

"I suggest you read the upgrade EULA before clicking through, it's possible to give away your current rights even if MS cant unilaterally remove them."

EULA != the law, consumer rights trump EULAs

TERROR in SPACE: ISS 'Nauts end panic by switching computer off and on again

Re: What did you expect?

There are several RTOSs on the ISS, including eCOS and QNX. RTEMS is also frequently used in space missions.

World's largest ship swallows 900 MEGATINS of baked beans

900 meellion cans of beans at 415g each would weigh 373500 tonnes, while the ship has a gross tonnage of 186000. It would sink!

Soundbites: News in brief from the Wi-Fi audiophile files

"96Khz or 192khz? - 44.1 Khz is a higher 'resolution' already than my (and your) ears can hear. At 96khz and with the right equipment you are either tormening your dog or delighting him with bits of your music that you will never hear."

Higher sample rates improve the phase accuracy of high frequencies, not an issue for mono but in stereo it helps you pick up the direction a sound is coming from.

Higher sample rates also make the anti-aliasing filters much easier to design, and reduces their effects on the audio you can hear.

What the BLOCK? Microsoft to gobble Minecraft-maker 'for $2bn'

My kid has already got bored of Minecraft and moved on to other games, like Roblox which allows greater user game creation possibilities. If this the sale goes ahead Notch may have got his timing just right.

Data entry REAR-END SNAFU: Weighty ballsup leads to plane take-off flap

Re: Weigh the bloody thing

Much simpler: A strain gauge (resistor printed on a piece of sticky film, responds to stretch or compression) on the landing gear strut will measure its load.

Gamma's not a goner! UK ISP sorts out major outage

Not Gamma

We're on BT business broadband and got taken offline by the fault, so either it was BTs fault or BT route their broadband over Gammas network.

Boffins brew TCP tuned to perform on lossy links like Wi-Fi networks

Re: Fixing at the wrong layer

Retries are bad, especially if the round trip time is long. Better is to increase the forward error correction to compensate for the radio link quality as it adds a much smaller overhead to both the local radio channel and the long distance fibre links, keeping the retry rates down. WiFi needs more of the redundancy coding goodness developed for LTE.

These studies often only consider their own data throughput, selfishly grabbing bandwidth at the expense of other users sharing the same links. TCP/IP was carefully designed to allow efficient sharing of limited bandwidth, and that is where many of these proposals fail.