Posts by AndrueC

Wireless powersats promise clean, permanent, abundant energy. Sound familiar?

Yup. My thoughts immediately returned to Terror by Satellite that I read as a kid. Written in 1964.

He wrote some fun adolescent books.

Journey to Jupiter (1965)

Mission to Mercury (1965)

Spaceship to Saturn (1967) (ISBN 978-0-571-08137-0)

Nearly Neptune (1968) a.k.a. Neptune One is Missing

Passage to Pluto (1973) (ISBN 084076457X)

I really liked that series of books and it's a shame they appear to be all out of print. Although I used to joke that the reason he jumped from Neptune to Pluto was because the only title he could think of was 'Up Uranus'

:)

Amazon delays return to office work until 2022 at the earliest

Re: Return to Office

when there's someone stood next to you giving you puppy-dog eyes waiting for a response, the urge to respond to them ASAP is somewhat stronger...

The urge to kick them is sometimes almost as strong in that scenario :D

Re: Return to Office

Not only is it very possible but it also gives you a filter. If you've got your head down on a problem you can just ignore the chat app until you come back up for air. But if you're in a communal office there's nothing you can practically do to prevent those annoying gitsyour co-workers from interrupting you with an ill-timed question. Or worse still being interrupted because you overhear them asking someone else a question.

Re: Return to Office

Plus knowing that you can force your minions to come into an office makes you feel like you are in control. Everything else you are responsible for might be going to hell in a hand basket but by God your staff are at their desks when you told them to be. You are da manwomanperson.

A lot of managers also assume that 'at their desks' means 'doing good work'. This is probably because they lack the skills (or inclination) to correctly assess their underling's performance.

Full Stream ahead: Microsoft will end 'classic' method of recording Teams meetings despite transcription concerns

The 'integration' with .NET is very nice though if you already have a .NET ecosystem.

The UK is running on empty when it comes to electric vehicle charging points

Re: Sooner than many think.

But I do wonder how the same car with the same engine and an additional 50-100 kg load of batteries can be less polluting.

If I'm undertaking the same journeys in the same way and consuming less fuel then it's less polluting. There's nothing complicated about that.

But I do have some idea of how that efficiency is achieved:

The unavoidable losses during generation and storage would even make me think that using the ICE engine simply for propulsion can't be much more polluting than using that same ICE engine to also make electricity

You're overlooking the fact that ICE engines do not have a linear performance curve. In particular ICE engines are horribly inefficient under light load. What Toyota's system tries to do is charge the battery at times when the extra load pushes the engine into a more efficient part of its power curve. Thus, at that moment in time the engine is doing more work than it needs to but it's extracting more energy from the fuel than it would have been. The surplus energy is stored in the battery for later use.

Later use can be:

* To allow the ICE to be switched off at low loads.

* Allow a smaller/more efficient engine to be fitted with the battery providing a boost if the driver needs more power. The engines used in Toyota's hybrid synergy drive run on the Atkinson cycle.

But the bottom line is that my driving habits, journeys and journey times are the same as they were before but I consume less fuel. It is undeniable that Toyota's hybrid system works.

Actually since EVs can trickle charge we're probably not talking about slots anyway. We can allow EVs to trickle charge together and likely that just means you typically only need it to be left on charge for three or four hours at some time during the evening/night. Whether that's 6pm to 10pm or 1am to 5am doesn't matter for most people.

Although ground/air heat pumps and better insulation could mitigate that.

Re: Sooner than many think.

My Toyota Corolla 1.8 has about the same performance as my old Honda Jazz (slightly more if I choose to abuse it). Certainly I drive it on the same journeys in much the same way. My Honda Jazz averaged low 50s throughout the year. My Corolla is over 60 mpg (Covid means I can only base that on one year's driving).

Now those are figures for someone who has always taken saving fuel seriously (I hate using my brakes for anything other than stopping) and I drive with half an eye on the ECO gauge that Toyota provide but nonetheless I'd say that's a pretty good improvement at least on a day-to-day basis. What means over the entire lifespan of both vehicles is harder to quantify.

Based on industry information provided by Toyota no part of my car (including the battery) is likely to wear out faster than that of any other car.

Except that people will expect that plug in means charge now, I might be going out again in an hour.

Unless their next trip is hundreds of miles it won't matter. Most domestic vehicle travel is 20 minutes or less. So if you miss your chance to catch up after the school or work run you still have enough charge to pop out to the cinema for the evening.

It just means you'll need a bit longer when your car finally does get a charging slot. Since your abeyance from charging earlier in the evening probably means that another vehicle got an early charge there will likely be a later slot to ensure everything is fully charged by the morning.

You seem to have fallen into the classic human fallacy of 'black and white thinking'. It's not a choice between 'one big fill up' and 'lots of small fill ups'. There is a middle ground of 'Mostly small fill ups with the occasional slightly longer fill up and possibly an occasionally really long fill up'. Nuances are wonderful things ;)

Re: EVs are not the plan

Nah. It's only a problem with PHEVs. EVs don't have an ICE taking up space under the bonnet so the batteries can go in there. I haven't actually checked but I'd hope that EVs have just as much boot space as an ICE car.

Re: ??

Curiously (and I know it's comparing apples with oranges to an extent) but my Corolla hybrid actually gets much improved mpg in stop-go traffic. I once had the misfortunate to be trapped outside(*) Abergele on the A55 for nearly an hour in exactly the same kind of conditions. When I arrived at the back of the queue the car's dashboard display was showing mid 60s mpg. By the time I finally cleared the queue it was nearly up to 70 mpg.

For the record what the car started doing was running the engine for a minute or two at about 1,200 rpm to charge the battery two about a third full then switching off and letting the battery move the car, run the A/C and the radio until the battery dropped to a quarter full. There were probably times when the engine was also helping move the car if it started to charge the battery when I got a chance to creep forward but most of the time it was just the battery pushing the car.

Whether 'most of the time it was just the battery' was coincidence or actually the result of ECU programming I don't know. But my Corolla can go a surprisingly long way (or does it just feel like it, lol) at low speed purely on the battery and it doesn't seem to care whether it's slow crawl or stop/start (though I always try to moderate my speed to avoid stop/start anyway).

(*)On the plus side at least I wasn't trapped inside Abergele itself :)

Or just link your car's unique ID to a payment system and have the car identify itself to the charger when it's plugged in.

No need for the driver to carry payment around and possibly no need to even bother with a PIN. Just rock up, plug in, wait, drive off. Payment all handled seamlessly in the background.

If you could add 500 miles range in a minute or so, then yes service stations are the answer. But they can't so every parking place needs to be a charge point, adoption is easy and service stations are top up in transit.

How often do you drive 500 miles in a single journey? How often do you think most people do?

Most people drive their car 20 minutes (often less) in the morning then 20 minutes in the evening. It takes about half an hour to top the battery back up and if you have a charger at the office that's fifteen minutes at home.

Re: EVs are not the plan

Don't be silly. In 2030, everyone will be driving some form of hybrid, which they won't bother to ever plug in, because they are much cheaper and do what we expect (you fill your tank in 5 mins and then drive 400 miles).

Not all hybrids have a plug. Those that don't can be quite a bit more environmentally friendly if the owner is sensible. My Toyota Corolla averages around 60mpg over the course of a year compared to around 50mpg for my previous Honda Jazz driven in the same way on the same journeys.

And I think that the reason your comment is not 'silly' is because the incentive was given to fleet drivers. Most of those are salespeople or managers who just don't care about little stuff (or lack the capacity to care) and hence the debacle that ensued.

I have (some) faith that when Mr & Mrs Wibble buy their next car and choose a plug-in hybrid they will do so in the full understanding of how to use it. It will be plugged in whenever it is practical to do so and will significantly reduce their running costs (financially and environmentally).

The concept of a plug-in hybrid is a very good one(*) it's just that the government targeted their incentive program at the wrong people. Oh and possibly PHEV was just a little too late with full EV taking over sooner than expected.

(*)The one drawback is lack of storage space. I looked at getting a plug-in but they all had vastly reduced boots. Unless I switched to an SUV I seemed to have nowhere to put my golf kit.

Re: Some things that would help the situation

However, it brings me on to a point that's worrying - the cost of electricity at the chargers. We need to be very careful that we don't overcharge for electricity

That would be shocking :)

And then there's the question of do you have enough power generation to supply all those chargers without shutting down power to households ?

As long as there is technology to 'stagger' the demand it should be fine. Don't forget that this will require a mental shift with respect to 'fuelling' your car. Instead of the current 'run the tank to nearly empty then fill it back up' we will switch to 'top the battery up when you get home'.

Current EV technology only needs 15 minutes to recharge after a typical 20 mile commute so even if you can only charge one car domestically at a time you can still recharge 48 cars in between 'getting home from work' and 'leaving for work'. And I'm pretty sure the current domestic supply can already handle more than one EV at a time on any given substation so we just need the ability for chargers to take turns. That should mean any typical number of private vehicles can be accommodated overnight.

..and that's just charging at home. Extend the concept (as we should) to 'charge any time you're parked' and the load gets even more spread out. There might even turn out to be less need to cater for those who don't have off-road parking. They just charge when parked at the shops, or work, or school.

We can't believe people use browsers to manage their passwords, says maker of password management tools

So people moan at MS when it pushes other companies out of the market and moan when it leaves a gap in the market.

Steam-powered computers: Retro cool or old and busted?

Two things continue to tempt me toward OO:

The Princess Elizabeth (what I really wanted) and an APT-E.

But what keeps me interested in N is the amount of track I can fit in a small space :D

I have a Queen Elizabeth and I give her a run now and again.

Admittedly it's an N gauge locomotive so not as impressive as the real thing would've been :)

SSD belonging to Euro-cloud Scaleway was stolen from back of a truck, then turned up on YouTube

I can believe that. I ordered a portable A/C unit a couple of months ago. It was supposed to be delivered by Hermes and their own tracking showed it being picked up and taken to their Warrington warehouse. After that no other movements were recorded. After a week the reseller refunded me and I took my business elsewhere.

There's clearly no way that a portable A/C unit (over a metre tall, weighing in excess of 20kg) can get misplaced. It's hardly likely to have been dropped and accidentally kicked under a bench. Nor is it likely to have got pushed off said bench and fallen down the back.

Something nefarious happened to it.

Subcontractors working on CityFibre's £45m Derby rollout threaten to 'rip up tarmac' in dispute over payments

Yeah there's a house near me that has been under sporadic extension for nearly three months now. This morning I heard some activity but it's the first I've heard in a week. Meanwhile their dining room is open to the air and has been for most of the time since their old conservatory was removed.

The old New: Windows veteran explains that menu item

You were doing well until you reminded me about network configuration in OS/2 :D

Thankfully my memories are now pretty fuzzy but some part of my ageing brain had a panic attack when I thought about it.

Yes, the WPS was the best shell I've ever used as far as functionality and extensibility was concerned.

Unfortunately until IBM relented and gave it multiple message queues it was also the worst. One locked application and you had to get someone else to Telnet in to regain control. My colleague and I had shortcuts on our desktops to help each other out(*).

The support for REXX (and other languages) made it pretty awesome.

Lotus implemented their OS/2 client (ccMail) entirely as extensions to WPS so the folders became just another folder on the desktop. Drag/drop to/from them from anywhere else. Pretty awesome at the time.

(*)OS/2 was also a damn good platform on which to develop DOS and Win16 applications. No more machine crashes from errant code. If the VDM barfed you just spun up a new one.

Re: Always an important consideration

Keyboard shortcuts are underlined and menu accelerators are written on the menu. Except that MS have abolished both of those. :(

Not quite. You can bring them back (as I have done) through the Ease of Access Keyboard settings. Toggle the 'Underline access keys when available' option.

Also - they are all called 'accelerator keys'. It's a pet hate of mine that so many modern applications aren't using them.

I use it a lot. Creating folders, creating new text documents. Creating any random file (creating as text document then change extension).

I'm somewhat surprised that Mr Chen even has to explain it.

In the '80s, satellite comms showed promise – soon it'll be a viable means to punt internet services at anyone anywhere

Re: Can't wait...

We're all going to have to do that over the next few years. BT is turning off the wholesale telephony service in 2025 so everyone is going to need some kind of VoIP terminal and everyone will need a data connection, even luddites. Luckily VoIP bandwidth needs are low so most properties should be able to get a DSL connection that's good enough of BT relax their lower limits they impose at the moment.

And this is what makes a difference, along with the bandwidth (20-50 megabits per second)

Is that total available or the per-user average? Because it's 'adequate' for one person but if that's the bandwidth you're making available to, say, London then it's pitiful. This has always been a problem when using wireless for unicast services. Unless you use very tight and precise beam shaping it rapidly becomes a contended resource.

Make-me-admin holes found in Windows, Linux kernel

Re: The wisdom of MAX_PATH

Update: I just checked the documentation for CreateFileA() and it does say:

"In the ANSI version of this function, the name is limited to MAX_PATH characters. To extend this limit to 32,767 wide characters, call the Unicode version of the function and prepend "\\?\" to the path."

So I'd obviously forgotten that little detail. To be fair it's been nearly two decades since I last interacted directly with the Windows I/O API or had to concern myself with the size of a character. Given that most people these days are or should be using Unicode strings I think my original post stands but I will slightly modify the advice:

'If you are writing software for Windows with a modern language you can work with paths up to 32,767 characters in length simply by prefixing your path with '\\?\".

If you're still stuck in the dark ages of ANSI strings, YMMV'

:)

Re: The wisdom of MAX_PATH

Nope you're wrong and you have misread the article. In a previous life I spent 15 years as a data recovery engineer and I wrote the software that we used. I can assure you that any Windows NT derived OS supports \\?\ paths of longer than 260 characters.

MAX_PATH only refers to 'traditional' paths.

As per the text:

"For file I/O, the "\\?\" prefix to a path string tells the Windows APIs to disable all string parsing and to send the string that follows it straight to the file system. For example, if the file system supports large paths and file names, you can exceed the MAX_PATH limits that are otherwise enforced by the Windows APIs. For more information about the normal maximum path limitation, see the previous section Maximum Path Length Limitation."

The text does also say:

"Note that Unicode APIs should be used to make sure the "\\?\" prefix allows you to exceed the MAX_PATH"

That I'm not sure about. I didn't think we upgraded our path handling to Unicode until some time after we started supporting long paths (the earlier DOS and Win16 versions of the tools flattened the output hierarchy and generated a copy script to restore the original paths). But I've found a few other articles that say the same thing so perhaps that's an extra wrinkle that I'd forgotten about.

Re: The wisdom of MAX_PATH

Windows supports file paths up to 32,767 characters. You just have to use the "\\?\" prefix or on some Windows versions enable the feature for 'normal' paths.

More info here.

Cyberlaw experts: Take back control. No, we're not talking about Brexit. It's Automated Lane Keeping Systems

Re: The only automatic I want...

That's available on several UK models now. My Corolla has it (both reverse in and parallel park). I have used the automatic reverse into a space feature a few times and I'd describe that as okay-ish and actually worthwhile in a tight car park.

I had hoped it might have some degree of intelligence but I've since decided that it doesn't. I think it's just programmed with the basic algorithm and appears to have little or no ability to adjust to the gap into which its reversing. It won't start unless you're lined up within its parameters and it will stop if it detects an obstruction but your ending location will depend entirely on your start. It will happily park the car so close to another that you can't get out of the driver's door for instance even if that leaves an unnecessarily large gap on the passenger side.

I haven't tried the parallel parking but other owners have said it can curb the wheels if your starting position is off. I suppose it can't detect the curb but that's not nice and could be expensive.

Certain German brands will have something of that ilk I'd imagine. They appear to target a particularly 'knobby' part of the automotive market so those drivers will presumably still want to ride around in a 'knobby' fashion even when they aren't doing the driving.

The real question is whether such a switch would default to on or off when the vehicle is started.

Re: Automation

For the most part, trying to use cruise control in the UK is more effort than it is worth

That depends on driving style. If you're the kind of driver that is forever overtaking other vehicles just because they are driving at 5mph less than you or because you think shaving twenty seconds of a half hour journey is worthwhile then, yes, CC will seem pointless.

But I use it almost constantly on motorways, especially now that I have a car with radar control. I just plop myself in lane one, set it to 60mph and for the most part ignore it. A couple of times an hour if there's a long line of HGVs ahead I might pop out into lane two and get my foot down because that probably means there's a dirth of HGVs after that. Also if a hill is severely slowing them down, But otherwise I just bimble along having a nice relaxed drive and probably adding no more than fifteen minutes to the duration.

I also sometimes use it on single carriageways if I'm familiar with them. I nearly always use it on the A422 Middleton Cheney bypass though it's only a mile or two long. I'd use it along the whole stretch to Brackley (have done in rush hour on occasion) but I'm marginally better at managing fuel consumption on the relatively hilly bits so I tend to only use it where it's flat.

I'd never want to own a car that didn't have it ever again.

My Corolla has lane assist and I avoid it most of the time. It likes to sit at the right side of a lane rather than the centre which suggests it's not been correctly updated for LH drive vehicles. It also sways a bit as it goes and is constantly twitching the wheel. If I relax and let it do its own thing it moans that I'm not holding the wheel. But if I'm holding the wheel there's a constant low grade struggle going on which is more tiring than me just holding onto the wheel unassisted.

Refreshing: An Office update that won't frighten the horses

So..it wastes a bit more screen space in order to look 'pleasing'?

JavaScript, GitHub, AWS crowned winners in massive survey of 32,000 developers

Re: "developers are young"

But they obviously weren't part of the survey.

Too busy doing real work perhaps :)

Jackie 'You have no authority here' Weaver: We need more 50-somethings in UK tech

Re: Ages of IT specialists

Hmmm, how do they know this? If they are basing this on the age cohorts of BCS membership, that's a restricted and self-selecting set, and maybe not representative of actual reality.

Intriguing though. I first considered BCS membership in the late 80s and discounted it as a bunch of old fuddy duddies with no relevance to my work.

I wonder who the 50 year old members are.

I'm 54 and still programming. Still keeping up with modern practice but I admit to thinking a lot of it is ill thought out and more of a nuisance than it needs to be. I'm just waiting for the next iteration of .NET (.NET ScrewYou perhaps. Or maybe .NET BecauseWeCan). Or hey maybe the much vaunted 64-bit Visual Studio will indeed be twice as fucking awful.

I'm still here because I do like programming (except when I'm fighting VS) and I don't want to let my colleagues down. My retirement plans are in place (funded by never being out of full-time employment for more than a week or three over the last thirty years) and just as soon as the irritation level rises to a critical point I'm off.

Microsoft patches PrintNightmare – even on Windows 7 – but the terror isn't over

Re: It is about time

Why so many businesses have chained themselves to this pile of bovine excrement is one of the things that will puzzle the historians of the 22nd century... If we as a species last that long that is...

It won't puzzle anyone who understands the IT industry. Those people will understand that throughout its lifetime it provided the features and services that people needed to get their job done. That despite its numerous flaws it was still good enough to help build the complex and successful IT ecosystems of the 20th and 21st century.

The only people that genuinely think that Windows is a bad operating system are those with blinkered eyes such as yourself. For everyone else the plain fact of the matter is that Windows is still with us. It's still being used by millions of people at home and at work around the world. It didn't get there by being 'bovine excrement'.

Devilish plans for your next app update ensure they never happen – unless you start praying

Re: Do NOT mock Columbo

Bah, I got it wrong. it's Columbo Undercover. He also gets pistol whipped during this investigation.

Not that I'm a closet fan or anything..

A rarely seen episode.

Do NOT mock Columbo

That guy was good. He even (very rarely(*)) swore). 'Just one more thing' - if we all applied ourselves to little things a bit more we'd get better results. The little things are often overlooked.

:)

(*)I think he swears (mildly) at a traffic warden.

Openreach to UK businesses: Switch is about to hit the fan. Prepare for withdrawal of the copper-based phone network now or risk disruption

Re: Ahem

No (well maybe yes) but the legacy copper network is not being phased out over the next four years. What's actually being announced here is the end of their analogue wholesale service. That's the gubbins in the telephone exchange which encodes your analogue phone signal to digital and a service that provides packet routing.

You will now have to have your own box that does the A/D encoding/decoding and someone who can do the routing for the resulting data packets. If you don't have FTTP you will just use some form of DSL instead. And before you moan about not being able to get decent DSL when it comes to providing a dedicated VoIP solution you really don't need much. Frankly an analogue modem would be adequate. I think there are very, very few properties who can't at least get .1Mb/s DSL in the UK and that's all you'd need.

Scientists identify sleep-like slow waves as responsible for daydreaming and... sorry, what were we talking about again?

Re: ... staring at ...

Not quite the same but you reminded me.

You mean I'm dreaming about Visual Studio during the day? That's more like a waking nightmare.

Syria and Sudan turn off the internet to suppress ... cheating by kids sitting exams

Re: Seriously? To stop cheating?

The vast majority of what's on SO (least-wise anything that hasn't been down voted) is useful information. Of course that doesn't mean you should copy and paste it. Instead you should understand it and either rework it for your purposes or just refer to it when writing your own solution.

If you are using external sources by copy/pasting them then you'd fail my interview regardless of what the source was.

If you choose not to use SO because you think it's all utter garbage then you'd fail for not utilising available resources.

Re: Seriously? To stop cheating?

Meh. Real-world jobs provide access to the internet and any other tools the employer thinks will help. I've always thought it somewhat unrealistic to test people on how they'd perform under conditions they are unlikely to encounter in the actual workplace.

It's like those daft (to my mind) programmer interviews where they expect you to solve a problem using pen and paper. Clearly no-one is going to employ a programmer and only provide them with a pen and paper so WTF is the point? Every programmer on the planet has an internet connection and access to Stack Overflow. So test them on their ability to work with SO not on their ability to work without it.

Microsoft: Try to break our first preview of 64-bit Visual Studio – go on, we dare you

I like C# but I don't like the way they've implemented the various language framework versions. Nor do I like the way they keep inventing new UI frameworks. Both of these seem to be evidence of how MS developers are poor at designing frameworks. You shouldn't have to keep superseding frameworks if you design your framework properly in the first place.

It's putting additional load on developers and we have more than enough in the first place.

The more the 'ecosystem' evolves the happier I am that I'm now within a few years of retirement. I love programming but I'm beginning to detest VS and the mess that .NET seems to have become. If there's one thing that can push me to finally pack it in it'll be VS. And I don't think that's what the VS product development team are aiming for. It's not like they've even met me :)

UK gets glowing salute from Bezos-backed General Fusion: Nuclear energy company to build plant in Oxfordshire

Re: It's a competitive power command and control sector ...... novel energy

Are you a bot or just a random word generator?

Poltergeist attack could leave autonomous vehicles blind to obstacles – or haunt them with new ones

Doesn't have a ghost of a chance of succeeding.