Posts by SImon Hobson

Lapping the computer room in record time until the inevitable happens

Re: Green energy

I'm not sure, but I think it was the university bods behind the Bang Goes the Theory" series did something along those lines to demonstrate how much energy we use - and waste - in a house. They set up a set house and moved a family of volunteers into it - without telling them exactly what the experiment was.

Meanwhile, in the warehouse next door, there were something like 100 bikes sat on generator rollers. The generators charged the batteries, and the inverter flattened the batteries to power the house. When they saw on the big screen that someone was going in the shower - "quick, more people, pedal faster". A few times the human power station lost and the house blacked out for a bit !

A character catastrophe for a joker working his last day

Yes, the lockout system is well established and well known across all industry sectors - although not all older kit actually has facilities for lockout.

For the TL;DR version - basically you disable/turn off something, put a lock on it, and take the key with you while you are working. In theory, that physically prevents anyone from powering something up/starting it while you are inside not that it stops someone just taking a bolt cutter to the lock (which has happened).

I've had a few tales over the years.

The oldest goes back to when communicating with north sea rigs meant using tropospheric scatter - put a microwave transmitter on top of the east coast cliffs and put out lots of power so that some of it will scatter off the particles in the air and reach the rig over the horizon. Narrow peaks, but peak power measured in megawatts. One of these was being commissioned, and someone had to do some work inside the waveguide - and being before lockouts were a thing, all he could do was remove the fuses, hang up a sign, and take the fuses with him. While he's busy working, someone else comes along, ignores the signs, assumed some **** has stolen the fuses, and finds some spares in the back of his van. The guy in the waveguide realises what's happening and manages to get out, but not before the microwave energy has done to the vitreous humour in the eye what boiling an egg does to the white.

In another case, a friend of mine had a job to do fixing a machine in a Lancashire mill. The electrics were old and had no lockoff facility - so again he switched off and hung up a sign. Gets to the machine to find the power is on - goes back to the switchroom to find the sign on the floor and the switch on. After a few rounds of this, he switches off and hangs the sign, then stands behind the door - and very quickly another machine operator comes in, throws the sign on the floor, switches on the power, then finds himself on the floor after a well aimed punch. Turns out one supply fed several machines, and they were all on piece rate - so keeping going trumps anyone else's safety. The operator was escorted off the site and told not to come back, my mate was escorted off the site for his own safety !

Re: hit the right button

Which is why, in any sensibly designed and implemented system, the "emergency stop" or "fill the room with extinguisher gas" buttons should be behind break glass of lift up covers.

Reminds me of a time when I was with a mate back when he did some rallying. Another competitor was just going through scrutineering as we arrived - and the scrutineer asked him to demonstrate the external emergency power off (battery disconnector) which is commonly a T-handle that when pulled will knock off the battery isolator inside. There's also often a similar T-handle that triggers the plumbed in fire extinguisher. At which point I suspect many are ahead of me here.

The labels were on the bonnet which was up, and he'd pulled the wrong handle. When we arrived, there was white foam running out the doors and dribbling on the floor - and the scrutineers wryly saying something along the lines fo "I don't think you meant to do that".

UK immigration systems delayed by extra Ukraine visa work

OK, would the downvoter be kind enough to say what they think is wrong in the above ?

It's OK, you're entitled to your opinion, but I am interested to know what it is.

Microsoft Teams outage widens to take out M365 services, admin center

I'd be looking at it more from the PoV that while I might not get anything out of it, I'd done my bit in terms of making it a problem for Sky when their engineerstechnicians screw up other people's systems. IN this case, by being just plain f'ing ignorant, the tech has caused problems for many people - and will suffer exactly zero comeback for being an ignorant sh*t.

But for that to change means that everyone with an issue like this needs to make it an issue for Sky - only then with Sky bother making it an issue for their technicians who pull this sort of stunt.

But then, I'm working towards a masters in the Grumpy Old Gits university.

At which point, the action should be to send a large bill to Sky to cover both the cost of the call out and compensation for all the affected users.

I expect the management company won't have the gumption to do that, or the balls to follow up on it - and if they did, Sky would spend more effort finding excuses why "not my problem guv" than it would cost them to say "oops, sorry - hears a little something by way of an apology". Meanwhile, the clueless f'wit who thinks that's an OK thing to do will carry on with no comeback.

Smart thermostat swarms are straining the US grid

Re: fully manual

Hmm, I'm trying to think of the mechanism for that being an explanation.

My experience when systems have lost some gas is that they reduce in cooling ability - but don't freeze up (seen it several times). In normal operation, hot compressed gas enters the condenser, is cooled, and at some point it starts condensing (at which point, it doesn't change temperature any more unless part of the condenser contains only liquid, where it can cool some more).

As refrigerant is lost, the quantity of liquid will reduce - and initially little will change WRT performance unless the system is already up against its limit of condensing gas due to the outdoor temperature. There would be a slight reduction in the part of the condenser which only contains liquid, and that would only make a small difference to the temperature of the liquid line back to the indoor unit. As long as there is still some liquid phase, then the system pressures would be barely affected.

At some point, there will no longer be enough refrigerant, and the liquid line will start to contain a mix of liquid and vapour. Here's the clever bit (one of the few bits I recall from doing this at university [cough] decades ago), while the volume flow rate through an orifice is higher for vapour than for liquid, the mass flow rate is lower. Thus a simple orifice or capillary tube can be self regulating - if there's vapour in the line, the mass flow rate reduces, so allowing the compressor to "catch up" (if it has the gas to do so).

So the mass flow rate has reduced, therefore so will the heat input needed to evaporate the liquid also reduce - hence the system will suck less heat out of the air, and the coil should run warmer.

[lightbulb moment]And now I see a mechanism for what you've observed. If the system is an old style on-off constant speed compressor, it may (depends on compressor design) draw down a lower pressure on the vapour side of the system. At a lower pressure, the liquid will boil off at a lower temperature, and part of the evaporator coil will therefore be at a lower temperature.

How that manifests will depend heavily on the design of the coil. In some designs it will allow that part to freeze up with the result that the refrigerant will need to move a little further along to boil off - and so the coil will slowly freeze up from one end. In other designs, while a little bit may freeze up, the already boiled off (and warmed up elsewhere in the coil) vapour will come back along a different loop and control the freezing.

A modern inverter design shouldn't have this problem at all as the compressor should run slower to maintain the same low pressure as the mass flow rate reduces - hence no change in the boiling point of the refrigerant.

Doesn't change the fact that fi the compressor fails to run, there's no way the system is going to freeze up because of that - it's far more likely that the compressor not running is a result of whatever else has caused the system to ice up.

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I might add that A/C service engineers are (like service engineers in any other field) not averse to providing "interesting" ideas for why something isn't working. I once had a call from a client at a previous employer where the A/C in their server room wasn't working properly - it had all the symptoms of a lack of gas (turned on, didn't really cool much, then tripped). Bear in mind that it had been working fine for 2-3 years before the service engineer told the customer that "it can't possibly work in that room because it's not insulated and the heat input through the ceiling is over-powering the unit". There was actually insulation in the ceiling (I'd had to go through it when running network cables), and they'd been out to e builder's merchant and bought a roll of glass fibre to add to it. After a few days of this "it's not working, it used to work", "it can't possibly work because ..." to and fro I called the company and spoke to their service manager. I described the setup, the fact that it had been working for a couple of years, and the symptoms - and he instantly agreed that the diagnosis "didn't sound right". An hour later he called back to say they'd found the problem (a stuck reversing valve) and fixed it.

Re: fully manual

You won't get ice build up if the compressor fails to run. More likely the unit is icing up, and then the compressor trips (or in a modern unit, just runs slowly) due to lack of load.

The icing up will be due to one of two things : poor control system (any half decent modern system has automatic de-icing these days, but some cheaper ones won't); or wrong choice of system for the conditions.

As to conditions, if your air is drier than the system is designed for, then it will ice up - at which point I suspect a few people will be scratching their heads and having a WTF? moment at the suggestion. But I'll explain ...

When in cooling mode (you can switch everything around for heating mode), liquid refrigerant is passed into the avaporator coil in your indoor unit - via a valve or capillary tube. As it passes at a controlled rate into a space at lower pressure, it evaporates - and thus takes in it's latent heat. To supply this latent heat, heat needs to be conducted in from the air being passed over the coil by the fan - thus cooling the air. As I think most people realise, as you cool air, water will condense out of it once you hit the dewpoint which depends on the humidity.

Now, the heat taken out of the air comes from two effects. The first is simple cooling of the mass of air, the other is from the latent heat as water condenses out. If the air is dry then the first is the main mechanism, if the air is very wet then the latter is dominant. So with wet air, a lot of the heat comes from condensing the water out - and so the off-coil temperature (i.e. the temperature of the air as it leaves the heat exchanger) is significantly higher than with dry air where the air must be cooled to a much lower temperature to extract the same amount of heat. And as a result, the surface of the metal pipes in the heat exchanger is higher with wet air than with dry air. And so with very dry air, the metal surface is colder, and you are more likely to have what water does condense out freeze in place rather than drain out.

A good control system will detect the significant drop in temperature (which affects the refrigerant vapour pressure) and invoke de-icing - in the first place stop the compressor and keep the fan running so that the ambient air will defrost it. Or with a reversible system, it can reverse the heat flow and actively heat the evaporator coil to thaw it out. But many cheaper system will just keep pumping away regardless and the evaporator coil will get more and more iced up (and the ice even more supercooled) until eventually no air can flow. Ideally you need to be able to run the fans without the compressor so that any air that can get through will fairly quickly warm up the coil and thaw out the ice.

The last time I had to explain this was to a friend who had responsibility for his employer's server room. They had A/C installed, it didn't work well (kept freezing up), and they were "sceptical" of the installer's suggestion that the air was too dry - in reality they'd been sold a completely unsuitable system as it couldn't cope with dry air.

Re: Nothing new - just a bigger scale

... as people didn't really understand even the simple controls there and would turn the thermostats up in an attempt to warm the office quicker ...

Yup, been there. In a previous job the office heating etc. came under my remit. At one time, there was this office with a quite decent reversible aircon unit - quite a high capacity for the space. Regardless of how often I (carefully and slowly) told people the basic principle of a T H E R M O S T A T, it would rarely go more than a day or two before someone fiddled. The moment anyone was either a little too hot or a little too cold - which is actually all the time, and both at once if you have an office full of women (sorry ladies, just an observation) - it would get fiddled with.

Except, whacking the controls up to full, or down to min does affect the rate of heat-up or cool-down when you've a big A/C unit with variable speeds fans etc. So it would always end up as : someone's a bit cold in the morning, so set it to 30˚C; not long after, everyone's too hot so it gets turned off; then by early afternoon it's hotter still so turned on and set to 18˚C; then when everyone's suitable frozen it gets turned off again. But of course, having been turned off overnight instead of left on it's timer, the office will be cold in the morning meaning that the 30˚C period starts as soon as the first person gets in.

And then they moan at me when the unit's set at 30˚C and they're hot; or they're cold when it's set at 18˚C.

When we got the whole-building, chilled water system in, I arranged for electronic controls with no user access. Amazingly nearly everyone accepted that.

Disentangling the Debian derivatives: Which should you use?

Re: Devuan

Having looked at many of these shell scripts, one thing I would never describe them as is "simple".

A fair bit of that is not actually to do with init, but with other (related stuff). An init script can be just a couple of lines (I've done that occasionally). but some package maintainers do seem to enjoy making them somewhat more complicated than seems to be needed.

A systemd unit file, OTOH, is something I worked out how to do simply by looking at one at changing 2 lines.

As already pointed out, this is where systemd really screws you over. In effect, it's moved a chunk of those "complicated" scripts into a black box of compiled code that you can't fiddle with. I'd go further than suggesting it's like trying to diagnose a modern engine just by the warning light - more like trying to diagnose a modern engine when it craps out but doesn't even put any warning light on.

With a script you can put some judicious echo (and other) statements into the script and (for example) dump to state of the environment into a file together with some "I got here" messages which can allow you to peek inside the system at the time the problem is occurring. OK, that's not "shell scripting lesson one" standard, but it is doable for someone with fairly basic shell skills - and 100% better than a black box that "just doesn't work right".

But this whole unit files vs "complex" shell scripts debate is a bit bogus anyway. There are alternatives to SysVInit, and several are supported (to a greater or lesser degree so far) in Devuan - and from what I recall reading, at least one of those has a config setup similar to systemd unit files. One of the things Devuan offers is not just the ability to stick with SysVInit - but to use your init of choice (apart from SystemD - you have the choice to go back to Debian for that).

Re: Devuan

Just stop selling the lies that you can't use the OS with sysvinit.

It's an even bigger lie to suggest that Debian will reasonably do much without systemd - unless, as already pointed out, you do a Devuan on it to fix all the gratuitous dependencies. The reality is that it's not really about init - it's about all the other stuff the systemd folks decided needed "improving" (improving in quotes there as some of the replacements are clearly inferior to what they replace - like using sntp instead of ntp).

You try really excluding systemd from a Debian installation and you'll find ... not a lot of packages that will install.

Now, that could have been sorted - "all" it needs is for package maintainers to support both the systemd and non-systemd ways of doing stuff. But they aren't, and the systemd folk appear to have a policy of making their systemd replacements for previously working stuff incompatible with the other alternatives. SO if you have to do two ways of logging, two ways of another thing, two ways of something else, ... then that's a lot of work and I can understand package maintainers not wanting to do it.

I recall when the completely fudged vote was done, there were claims that "you'll still be able to ..." - but even back then I could see that was never going to last even a short time, and it wasn't long before I could see that that was the case.

TL;DR - it's not really about the init (PID1) although that's a big part of it. It's the attitude of just trampling over everything and fixing stuff that wasn't broken, and gleefully removing choice that really pees a lot of people off.

EX-Debian user.

Browsers could face two regimes in Europe as UK law set to diverge from EU

Re: Quo Bono?

But on the other hand, I think it's fairly safe to assume that there will be some elements of the EU machinery who would be more than happy to find reasons to punish us for daring to leave their brave new world. Also, cutting off the USA would cause massive damage to the EU, while cutting off the UK - I suspect they would consider that a positive thing as it would probably persuade some to move their operations to the EU for an easy life.

So USA is big enough for them to work hard to find a plausible reason to allow data transfers to carry on for another few years until the courts declare that method invalid. The UK, "who cares".

CityFibre loses appeal against Openreach discounts for ISPs

So CityFibre don't want to compete by offering their own discounts

Apart from the issues already mentioned (OpenRetch have the ability to cross subsidise from other revenue streams and are massive by comparison) it is much more subtle.

From my reading of the article, OR made a conditional discount based on the proportion of orders for fibre and copper lines. In other words, sell x% as fibre and you get a discount - though it's not clear exactly what that discount would be on or how widespread it might be.

So lets say that an ISP sells 1.5x% of its lines as fibre, but half of those are in a CityFibre area and they use CF for them. It's now only buying 0.75x% of its OR lines as fibre - so fails to get the discount from OR. Unless the cost from CF is sufficiently below that from OR, the ISP is now worse off than if they'd just bought all the fibre lines from OR.

So on the face of it, it does sound like OR designed the discount scheme so as to disadvantage altnets which by their nature have less coverage than OR has. That wider coverage isn't in itself an issue (after all, they've had a long time to build that up), but it is if you then abuse your position of a very dominant participant to distort the market in your favour.

Hive to pull the plug on smart home gadgets by 2025

Re: Reciva Radios

I am dreading the loss of my wired phone connection - to be replaced with 1 hour battery backed fibre VOIP systems.

You do realise that you can extend the backup time yourself ?

The simple way, and I suspect only way "permitted" by OpenRetch, is to just plug the power adapter into a UPS. That's a bit inefficient given the multiple conversions involved.

Assuming (I've not seen the kit so can't comment) the termination equipment just needs a single DC power supply (and is fairly tolerant of voltage variations) then it's probably OK to just power it off batteries that are on float charge normally. A lot of modern kit fits that bill - just a generic 5V or 12V DC adapter and internally it's got a switch mode regulator to get the voltage(s) it needs. Having the internal SM regulator means it could cope easily with an input that varied from 10-11V (battery running down) to 13.8V (battery on float).

Either way, your backup time is entirely down to how much battery storage you throw at it.

Choosing a non-Windows OS on Lenovo Secured-core PCs is trickier than it should be

Really, is anyone actually in the least bit surprised ?

Secure boot came in, and was originally easy to turn off - so "don't worry, you can turn it off and boot somehting else".

Then it became always on and this signed shim was needed.

This is simply the next step - put an extra obstacle in the way of someone performing unauthorised computation with the hardware they thought they had bought. Good god, anyone not running Windows must be some sort of criminal. At least, that would appear to be the approach being taken in Redmond.

Judge rejects another Microsoft appeal against surplus license reseller suit

It's not just a licence code - it's multiple licence codes, for large quantities of software, over many years. If you RTFA, you'll see it talks about surplus corporate licences, government departments, etc. These aren't one-off shrinkwrap packages like you might find on eBay - they could be licences for many thousands of users.

Re: "We believe that was both legal and the right thing to do"

I agree, I can't recall a single instance of a dispute over licence terms ever getting to court. It is my opinion that pretty well all the standard software licences have clauses that are unenforceable for various reasons - moreso when the customer is an individual rather than a business when the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contract Regulations (UTCCR) would have a number of stand clauses automatically voided.

For a vendor, actually having their licence held to be invalid in court would be ... rather more than just embarrassing as it would open up the flood gates for claims.

Boris Johnson set to step down with tech legacy in tatters

Re: Sub-sea nukes

the wind is always blowing somewhere

But is it blowing somewhere useful ?

Sadly I don't have a citation, it being in an engineering journal before I'd even heard of the internet. But someone did a study of wind records across the whole of Europe and Scandinavia. So, the argument goes that when the wind isn't blowing un the UK, it'll be blowing in other countries we can import the power from. The study found that this was not the case at a surprisingly high frequency - several days/year IIRC.

In addition to this, it's not all that uncommon to have a high pressure zone sat over a large part of northern Europe and Scandinavia - for as long as a couple of weeks. So that's a massive area with little wind generation, and a rather long time - certainly longer than your typical "few hours to a day backup" battery capacity.

The consequence of this is that realistically to have 100% renewables would mean having over-capacity of a massive scale - my "stick a finger in the air" guesstimate would be in the order of 5 to 10 fold over-capacity. And you'd need some very clever, and immensely large, energy storage solutions to harvest a lot of the over-supply on good days in order to fill the gaps "when the wind bloweth not".

And as pointed out, the current market allows the renewables suppliers to completely ignore all the incidental costs of their intermittency when calculating their prices.

Europe passes sweeping antitrust laws targeting America's Big Tech

Re: Not good

We don't have to look too far to see where the endgame of such regulations can lead. By your logic, it's the Russian people's fault that they keep re-electing the same corrupt people who then restrict what information they are allowed to hear - e.g. by restricting TV to only showing pro-Russia "news", where Putin is a hero for freeing Ukrainians from the tyranny of Nazism, etc., etc.

The argument that people can simply elect a different government only holds where there is actually choice, and where the people actually have the information to be able to make that choice. Once one side holds the keys to controlling that information, they are only one step away from engineering their re-election.

2050 carbon emission goals need nuclear to succeed, says International Energy Agency

Sounds about right.

There's a long way to go before 100% renewables is a practical proposition, with most explanations of how it will happen "soon" relying on a combination of fairy dust and unicorn poo. "Handwaving" away questions like "and what about when the wind isn't blowing and the sun's gone down" by just saying "batteries" is, with current levels of technology (and overall renewables supply), much the same as relying on fairy dust or unicorn poo. Perhaps in a decade ... or two ... or three ... And while we're waiting for that, we've a triple-whammy of existing reactors going offline when they run out of practical life, possibly long term supply issues after the turmoil in Ukraine, and at some point, a significant increase in demand as we are forced to switch to EVs and heat pumps.

Nuclear won't be "cheap" (but on the other hand, it doesn't have to be as expensive as it is) - but it can surely be cheaper than some of the alternatives ?

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

Ah, brings back memories.

A few jobs back, I did the "if it's vaguely technical, they ask me" gig in a small manufacturing and sales company. They used various letterheads and coloured papers - and the same "nobody use [name of printer]" call out before pulling the tray and adding some fo the paper they were going to use. Not just the one or two sheets, but a few sheets - and no, they didn't take out what they didn't use. So over time, the tray filled up with a stack of random papers.

When I was sorting out printing from the Unix hosted ERP system, I took the opportunity to utilise the printers' capabilities - those useless features like using multiple trays, or god forbid, manual feed. So all those wanting to print on (for example) letterhead needed to do was select the manual feed printer* right next to the tray feed one* in the list, then stroll over and put the letterhead on the manual feed.

Yup, you've guessed it, I never managed to persuade the majority to use it.

* The system didn't have the concept of specifying options in the print dialog - so I had to create multiple virtual printers, so for example there might be "accounts", "accounts-m" (manual feed), "accounts-l" (landscape, handy for doing jobs designed for the old 13" fanfold), "accounts-lm".

UK govt promises to sink billions into electronic health records for England

Re: Spyware

I wouldn't be too sure about that.

Re: "backed by £2 billion [..] in funding"

the selfish behaviour of the public sector

To what are you referring ?

the horrifically bad modelling by SAGE causing poor decisions and unnecessary costs

Is it bad modelling, or poor decision making by those making the decisions ?

AIUI SAGE did the best they could given a lot of unknowns - and I am confident given the scientific background of those involved that their advice would have been carefully expressed in terms of "if x,y,z then the result is likely to be foo" - with added caveats that "we're not exactly sure what x is at the moment, nor y, now z". I strongly suspect that once conveyed to non-scientific people it will have been interpreted as "foo will happen".

While there is plenty of experience from previous pandemics, covid has had significant differences which means you can't simply plug numbers into an existing model, wind the handle, and get sensible numbers out.

IBM settles age discrimination case that sought top execs' emails

Re: Why???

There's always an element of risk in proceeding with litigation. Plus, there's the stress of it all - especially as the opposition will do their utmost to smear your good character etc. etc.

So given that there is a risk that you'll "crap out" from the stress, a risk that you'll have your good character ruined, and a chance that you'll lose and face financial ruin, and while this is all going on you might have no income to live off - there will (almost) always be some level of offer that will be acceptable.

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

Re: Clean desk policy

I recall in the dim and dark past, every now and then we'd have a "clear out" edict. One engineer in the office would open the drawer and dump the contents into the bin - on the basis that if it were in the drawer then it can't have been accessed for several years (since the last clear out) and therefore wasn't needed. He'd then transfer the feet high piles of papers on his desk to the now empty drawer - and the process would repeat of fetching things out if needed, otherwise they'd sit there until the next clear out.

Yes, we supposedly had a clear desk policy, he just had a different idea of what "clear" meant.

Re: Son of a 'b'

Ah the memories ...

I used to admin such a system. We actually started when it was Chameleon CS/2000, and then upgraded to CS3. The hardest part was keeping up with disk space demands which quickly started to rocket after we migrated from an older customer system (with a fraction of the capabilities).

Ukraine's secret cyber-defense that blunts Russian attacks: Excellent backups

Re: "Maintaining offline backups is expensive and a lot of boring, repetitive work."

Not forced - it was the logical choice at the time in terms of cost, capacity, and performance.

From memory back then, DLT was horrendously expensive for both drives and media, SLR (correction to above, it was SLR we used for our weeklies, not DLT) was similarly expensive. Smaller tape formats (the mini version of the SLR) didn't have the capacity or performance. DAT apparently met our mix of constraints - for a while at least - and had a conveniently small media size which helped with storage.

Re: "Maintaining offline backups is expensive and a lot of boring, repetitive work."

Robot ? Would you be referring to one of those expensive machines for handling tapes - the sort that our manglement would never ever have considered paying for, even if it would have been of practical use to us.

We were a fairly small outfit - so manual operations - pop into the server room, pull the tape out of the drive, pop the next one in, send the tape off to our off-site storage (our warehouse far enough down the road that if it went up along with the main site then we'd not care about trying to recover). DAT tape for the nightly backup of live data, and DLT for the weekly full system backup - with a fairly large store (OK, filing cabinet drawer) holding a couple of months of the nightly tapes, and a couple of years of the weeklies. We only got all that because tapes can be sneaked out of the op-ex budget !

And before you ask, no we didn't have spare drives we could test read the tapes on :-( And we didn't have spare hardware so we could do useful things like test full restores :-( I can tell you, major upgrades - of the "back up, wipe the disk array & re-configure (with more/bigger disks), restore" sort were "bum twitching" 8-O

What surprises me is that Russia didn't know this

Ah, you talk of "Russia" as if it's one whole, a people all in agreement, and crucially - where people are free to tell their superiors what they think. What has become clear over the last few months is that the last bit is far from the truth - for whatever complex reasons, this is Putin's war, and his top brass were not able (or willing) to persuade him of his misunderstandings.

At various levels, "reality" is failing to influence those at the top. Whether it's the cannon fodder on the ground realising that the ""Ukrainians will welcome you as liberators with open arms" story was an outright lie, but facing a choice of either carrying on and getting killed or (if they're lucky) captured by the Ukrainians, or turning back and being shot by their own side. Or whether it's the officers up the chain who manage to change "we're getting slaughtered and getting no-where" to "everything is going as well as we could have planned for" by the time it reaches the top.

I reckon a good few people really did "know this" - but were unable to persuade their superiors of that, unable to penetrate the reality filter protecting each level from anything inconsistent with the "official reality".

I don't know Ukrainians, nor to be honest, much about the culture of that area. But your comment that "if you knew any Ukrainians you would not be surprised" is no surprise - with a neighbour like that, you would be totally mad not to assume there'll be hostilities sooner or later.

I have to admit, over the last few months I've been seriously impressed with Ukraine's ability to carry on. Not just with IT, but every update seems to include (or included, they seem to have stopped including them as "non-news" now) something along the lines of "Russia knocked out Gas|Lecky|Internet|something, Ukraine has restored it" piece.

And something we in the UK ought to consider, especially after the example just the other week. One of the reasons Ukraine has kept internet access working for so many people is that they have massive diversity - different providers, with separate fibre networks, etc, etc. In the UK, the majority of us are reliant on one provider - doesn't matter who's name is on the bill, the connection come curtesy of BT OpenRetch, and one hiccup can take out millions of connections across all providers. If we suffered an attack like Ukraine did, we'd go dark in minutes.

Re: "Maintaining offline backups is expensive and a lot of boring, repetitive work."

Yeah, a lot of it is easy to automate - but then there's that boring stuff of removing media and taking it off-site, putting the right "next set" in place, etc., etc.. That's the bit that always got me back when I was doing daily (well, overnight) backups for ${day_job}. Oh yeah, and labelling the damn tapes.

But in spite of zero budget beyond "if we don't have backups the auditors will fail us" minimum, at least in IT we were confident we could recover from total devastation - in as long as it took to get new hardware plus another day. No idea how that would fit in with the "if we don't recover in ${time_period} then don't bother because the business will be toast" figure as the business never did any analysis down that route (manglement were prompted).

EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of combustion engine cars from 2035

Re: In other words...

Batteries in EVs last substantially longer than you might expect

Let me correct that for you. "Batteries in EVs might last substantially longer than you might expect if cared for well". As per my example above, this wasn't an old vehicle with 1/4 million miles on the clock, it was a run of the mill car with a run of the mill milage. Based on model, it can't have been more than around 8 years old, and at (say) 12k/year that would be under 100k miles - yet it had a battery that had degraded to the point where the car was realistically an economic write-off.

When batteries can do 1/4 million miles, regardless of how the driver(s) treated it, and/or it's actually economic to replace it - then get back to me. Because at the moment battery life genuinely IS a serious issue.

And when I say "regardless of how it's been treated", there's a whole raft of advice for battery longevity : "don't go below 20%", "don't go above 80%", "don't fast charge". Deep discharge kills them, fast charging kills them, apparently fully charging kills them.

Re: The charger numbers seem a bit low.

73% have off street private parking

Ah, a meaningless stat that gives a meaningless suggestion.

"Has off-street parking" is not the same thing as "has off-street parking for all their vehicles". A number of houses round here have off-street parking for (e.g.) one vehicles, but not for all of them.

And then a heck of a lot of "private off street parking" is not suitable for having a charge point installed. Take the rental properties we have. Of 9 properties, only 2 of them have direct access to their private off-street parking space - the rest have the car park between them and their parking space. So to run a cable means getting permission to take a very long cable around the perimeter (crossing other properties) or they have to dig the tarmac up. If they come along and ask to run a cable across my property I'll "not be enthusiastic", and if they want to dig up the tarmac I'd be even less so as that would introduce a patched areas with joints liable to premature failure and hence future maintenance costs.

Or look at blocks of flats (or apartments). You live on (say) the 10th floor, and your parking space is in the basement - good luck everyone running cables from their apartment to their parking space. Of course, the answer there is for the building management to install chargers off a common supply - but then you have the issue of charging (money) for the lecky without it suddenly becoming very expensive (someone did the sums and worked out that in the USA, it could cost more to run a Tesla using their public chargers than it costs to run a similar spec petrol car).

So "73% have off street private parking" is very very much not the same thing as "73% of vehicles can be charged at home".

Re: The charger numbers seem a bit low.

Imagine all the infrastructure needed to get oil out of rock miles below the north sea, get it to shore, refine it, distribute a toxic explosive liquid around the country to enough cars that every household can use one.

Do recall that in the early days of automobiles, there was no infrastructure as such - petrol was sold at chemists in the same way you'd buy lamp oil. Over time, as owning a car started filtering down from a rich mans play thing to a tool for the masses, then the infrastructure started appearing. But the important thing - the infrastructure didn't need to be there from the outset as petrol was just a different form of oil that was already widely distributed.

Also, to build a petrol station is basically very simple. You find a site with road access, put some tanks in, add the pumps, and you have a petrol station that can service however many cars can come through at something like 5-10 minutes each. To build that petrol station doesn't need access to a fuel pipeline - it comes by tanker.

Charging is a different matter. Yes, at the moment people are putting in chargers that just need to tap into the local distribution network that's already there. But there's a finite amount of spare capacity in those networks, and pressure on that will come from other demands as well. Upgrading that, as will be needed if we go all electric as fast as is being suggested is going to be very expensive and very destructive.

I'm lucky - I have my own off street parking and overnight charging would be a doddle. Looking down the street, I'd say only about 1/3 of us have that, and most don't have enough spaces as they have cars. Most people can't even guarantee to park outside their own house. And that's typical of this part of town.

Re: In other words...

NEW EVs yes, 10, 15, 20 year old EVs won't still be doing "hundreds" of miles on a charge. It is people like you failing to take into account that batteries degrade that are spreading the false narratives.

As it happens, I was having a similar sort of conversation not long ago with some friends. One pointed out, quite correctly, that my problem isn't that I can't afford an EV - it's that I can't afford a car as new as a decent used EV is going to be. But by the time they are old enough and cheap enough for me to be able to afford, then the batteries sure as hell aren't going hold much charge.

A colleague at work was telling me the other day that he went to look at a used EV at a dealer. He took along his OBD interface and software to interrogate the system - which showed the battery was already down to below 50% capacity. As it happens, a replacement battery was near enough exactly the same price as the dealer was asking for the car - and he told the dealer the car was effectively worthless. It would seem the dealer (of a well known "premium German make) was upset at this suggestion and "asked him to leave" the premises.

But this brings up an issue. We already have problems with people buying cars which turn out to be lemons. I think we're going to see people buying used EVs and being more than a bit disappointed when they find out that the car they thought might handle their needs can hardly get between charge points.

UK competition watchdog seeks to make mobile browsers, cloud gaming and payments more competitive

Re: Government

Err no. Moving your money to avoid tax IS legal. Moving it to an illegal tax evasion scheme is illegal - just ask Jimmy Carr et. al. The key bit being that you stay within the laws laid down.

Re: Government

The thing to remember is that tax avoidance is COMPLETELY LEGAL, and I bet few people here in this forum do not use at least one tax avoidance scheme - even if they don't realise it. Got a company pension ? Got a private pension ? Got a government endorsed ISA ? All of those are tax avoidance schemes - and completely legal.

It is true that a very small outfit will struggle to match the tax advantages that come with being a massive multinational with the flexibility to move its profits around. But all the same techniques are available to the smaller business if they wanted to take advantage of them.

The issue is scale. In the same way that a "man with a van" haulage operation based well oop north could not compete with a massive international that might be able to keep moving it's wagons around to support flagging them in a foreign country for better tax treatment.

Changing the way tax works in an international setting means getting the agreement of (most of) the rest of the countries in the world. That's difficult to do, as at least some of the key players would be losers. And even if you manage to set new rules, you can be sure the big multinationals will have come up with new avoidance schemes before the rules come into effect.

512 disk drives later, Floppotron computer hardware orchestra hits v3.0

Accompanied by "adverse comments" from SWMBOs from every house in Britain with a shed.

Not that I'm applying any gender bias or stereotypes here.

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

Re: Yeah, that was me....

Let me dredge the dark recessed of the mind ... It would have been something like :

PR#1

RUN

PR#0

PR#1 would, assuming the printer card was in slot 1, redirect all screen output to the printer instead, and PR#0 would bring it back again.

But the mind boggles, WTF was i able to recall that, after ... too many ... years ! Must be over 3 decades since I last touched Apple DOS. But I still have my old ITT2020 in the attic and boxes of 5 1/4" disks.

Ah but that's a different world. Instead of one where the developers have gone to great lengths to figure out how people think and work - and made tools to handle that - you are in MS land. There the rule seems to be that everything goes via the same sort of usability assessments - but anything that users seem to find easy is picked up and flagged for complication. And for good measure, just in case users do mange to master the new "MS improved" version, the interface will be changed in the next version.

Not to mention, I reckon there must be a competition between MS development teams to see how many different systems they can layer up to create something. A bit like the way Sharepoint layers thick slabs of lipstick on an underperforming database in order to create something that File Manager does in a slick and easy to use fashion as a web version that runs like treacle and seems designed to make doing anything difficult. Then the Teams team come along, and add their layer of lipstick to create a new "improved" idea for managing files.

You may guess, ${day_job} is heavily into O365 and forcing us (some of us kicking and screaming) onto Teams. Don't get me started on the number of ways Teams devs have come up with to intrude into an otherwise bearable presentation.

Re: Similar...

Ah, an acquaintance of mine once told me how he used his redundancy money from a local very large engineering firm to setup his own consultancy - including buying the very expensive CAD software they used.

He got one job where they had this file that took ages to load (try 1/2 hour !), and then was even slower to work with. It was a complex mechanical arrangement in a compartment - with loads of pipes etc. The pipes had flanged joints which you might expect had been depicted with simple discs ...

When he drilled down, he found that each flanged joint was actually the two flanges complete with holes. Then the bolts all all the detailing for the hexagonal heads and threads, ditto the nuts. So someone had carefully done a detailed nut and bolt, duplicated it for all the bolts in the flange, then duplicated the flange for all the flanged joints in the compartment, ... The drawing was massive, really massive.

So he earned his fee by returning them a drawing which loaded in a fraction fo the time, didn't slow the entire system down for everyone (multiple users running off one VAX), and yet still did everything that was needed from a drawing of that scale.

Oh yes, this was back in the 80s, and I recall when they brought this system in (I wasn't involved, I worked in a different bit of the business). A whole special space was set up for the CAD terminals - subdued & diffused lighting, anti-static carpets, etc, etc. The CAD terminals were a piece of furniture in their own right (electronics, massive digitiser, etc. etc. all built into it)- none of this "plonk a load of stuff on a desk" business. I recall there were loads of complaints that the system was slow - but it was also suggested that the company was running at least twice as many terminals off each VAX as the vendor recommended.

Ah yes, the "word processor is a typewriter" brigade. I still meet them.

Twitter shareholders to vote on Elon Musk's acquisition

Re: hey, what's $1 billion to the world's richest man?

In big business like this, there will have been initial discussions. At some point, they will have reached the "to go any further, we need a contract in place - especially non-disclosure agreements". My guess is that the "less than 5% bots" claim came during the early discussions, but when the agreements were signed that would allow detailed discussions the questions started creeping out of the woodwork.

The current phase IS doing what you call "your homework". But it's looking a bit like the teacher was economical with the truth before you signed for your homework pack.

But this talk of a $1b walk away penalty - I can't help wondering how Twitter could enforce that if it were proved that they lied in order to get the initial agreement in place ?

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: Micro USB

Indeed, as I said, it was a case of the industry agreeing to something to ward off legislation. But because it wasn't law, Apple could stick their thumb in their nose and go "nah, nah, de, nah nah". I strongly suspect that had Apple not blatantly done it's "we don't do other people's standards" thing then this legislation wouldn't have happened.

People have got used to micro-USB, and now USB-C on many things, so consumer pressure would probably be enough to keep almost everyone in check - except Apple of course.

Re: Micro USB

You must have been hiding under a rock for a while then, because yes it was a thing. The EU mandated that manufacturers decide on a common charging port - and the industry settled on micro-USB which was (from memory) becoming the most common anyway. But I vaguely recall this was a sort of "sort yourselves out or we'll sort you out" sort of thing and the industry complied. Except Apple "sort of" complied by making an adapter so that they could say "see, you can charge an iPhone with MicroUSB" - everyone could see it was taking the urine, but it sort of complied.

I suspect it really hasn't taken over a decade to do. TPTB will have taken some time to allow the situation to settle and see how it panned out. Since Apple (and probably a few other hold-outs) took the urine, they've then legislated. But the thing is, now they have the legislation, if the industry, or consumers, went to them en-masse and said ""USB-C is fine, but things have moved on and USB-{DEFG...} has these benefits (including being backwards compatible with USB-3 chargers with USB-A connectors)" then I suspect it would be fairly easy to amend the regs to allow use of the new connector. But I suspect there will be little chance of that becoming a reality for a very long time.

Regardless of that, compared to what we had just a few years ago, it's charging heaven now - unless you have some Apple kit.

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Re: Computing smarts in the cloud

But that's fine for data that's just sat there and not being worked on.

So there you are, your word document is nicely encrypted, not even MS can see what's in it. Now you want to edit it - so you fire up your cloud hosted desktop, decrypt the file to load it into Word, and off you go ... err hang on, what was that, our file is now decrypted in the cloud, and the key is also in the cloud ?

Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants

Re: even more safer to operate?

Just to expand on that control & instrumentation issue with TMI.

I recall it being part of several lectures at university - that (if it's important enough to bother measuring) you should have an instrumentation system that reports on the actual state of something, not the state the control system "expects" it to be.

AIUI, in the TMI case, the actual valve stuck open, but the instrumentation only reported on the pilot valve position. In principle, the actual valve would always follow the pilot valve - but there are failure modes where it doesn't and you can't control what you don't measure.

In the other case I mentioned, also from uni, it was as simple as someone modifying the hydraulic systems on an oil rig - they needed a hydraulic return, and tapped into the most convenient pipe. What they didn't account for is that the flow they introduced into the pipe created back pressure - which was enough to prevent the pilot operated valve from closing fully, even though the C&I system said it was closed. As a result, (just going from old memory), a buoyancy tank slowly filled with water and the rig nearly capsized.

In both cases, the operators were given faulty information "the valve is closed" which caused them to make false assumptions and not respond in an appropriate manner.

These things are easy to spot with the benefit of hindsight - and "this is the sort of thing you should remember to avoid doing" type of lectures. A modicum of inquisitiveness and a willingness to accept that you don't know everything, and you certainly will not live long enough to learn all this through your own mistakes, also helps.

Smart homes are hackable homes if not equipped with updated, supported tech

Alas, I found in the office environment that certain people were not educable. They were supposedly intelligent people, capable of doing their jobs (mostly finance, accounts, and payroll in that bit of the office) - but could I educate them on the principle of "a thermostat" ? Could I **** !

And yes, I really did consider dummy controls. These days I'd knock up something with an interface so they could adjust the temperature, and it would give them long enough to walk away before resetting itself - that would be fun :D Oh yes, and collate stats so I could correlate amount of controls fiddling with number of complaints - not that I'd ever, ever copy any of the BOFH's methods ;-)

IETF publishes HTTP/3 RFC to take the web from TCP to UDP

Where it'll probably have more impact is with typical web pages 'requiring' 20-30+ sessions to multiple destinations where ads, trackers, cookies and general data rape occurs in the background.

Yeah, there's a real correlation between pages that are dog slow to load, and pages that have more ads than content.

The real answer would be for web site designers to actually design sites to load quickly, rather than to stuff as many bits of cut-n-paste tracking & data stealing code into it as they can. One can but dream ...

But one thing we can be sure of, as soon as anyone comes up with a faster pipe, there will be web sites quick out of the blocks to use up that extra speed to pump more sh*t at us that we don't want.

Tweaks to IPv4 could free up 'hundreds of millions of addresses'

Re: ?

True, the prefix will be the same - it's a lot like being behind NAT where you share an address.

But it completely negates one of the old (and no longer valid) criticisms that IPv6 enables tracking to the individual device by its IP. Privacy addressing has "been a thing" for some time now, so IPv6 is no worse than IPv4 & NAT when it comes to tracking by IP.