Posts by Stoneshop

Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

We know what a cloud is!

Yes.

That white, grey or even blackish fluffy stuff you can encounter in the Big Blue Room which turns it less blue, area-wise. Leaking clouds are commonly called rain; if the leakage is kind of solid it's snow or hail.

British Library's candid ransomware comms driven by 'emotional intelligence'

Re: Reading the report...

I've worked on DEC systems sitting in computer rooms brimming with IBM, that had been brought in to get one IBM system to communicate with another IBM system.

So elementary, in a way, yes, but it couldn't always be done without additional hardware.

Tesla Cybertruck turns into world's most expensive brick after car wash

You sure?

Like it doesn't drive off on its own?

Unintended acceleration leads to recall of every Cybertruck produced so far

Re: Remind me

Yes.

Re: Remind me

They really have not thought this through, have they?

Do they ever?

Fix things as you go is the current method, and if not it's fix afterwards.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Re: All the more reason

the next edition of "The Meaning of Liff".

which should have the good fortune to fall through a timewarp into a past some three decades back from now, and then there's the matter to get it back here again.

Re: All the more reason

So, the Tesli sold in California are manufactured within California, and those sold in New Hamster are manufactured there?

And the Self-Driving software installed on Texan Tesli is actually written in Texas with no part copied to, or from other states?

There appears to be an aspect of interstate commerce in play here.

The lies about the capabilities of the software don't stop at any particular state line either, but that probably doesn't count as commerce.

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

Fully agree with your comment, except for the 'Sorry'.

Spacewalk turns into spacework as cosmonauts grapple with ISS leak

Re: Space age technology.

And then there's the matter of the outside temperature.

Raspberry Pi 5: Hot takes and cooler mistakes

Re: Thermodynamics

Argon should start making a version of their One for the Pi5: metal, slightly sloped, all connections at the rear.

One under each foot looks ideal to me.

British boffins say aircraft could fly on trash, cutting pollution debt by 80%

Aircraft flying on trash

So RyanAir and those other budget airlines' passengers now go into the tanks instead of the cabin?

AI girlfriend encouraged man to attempt crossbow assassination of Queen

Or maybe, you know, Kipling.

AFAIK I've never Kippled.

Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine

Re: Hmm

Given your history it's useless to suggest you look up the meaning of 'proportionally' and 'disproportionally', but I'll do so anyway.

Re: Hmm

Forgetting of course that the wealthy people are the ones who disproportionately pay the tax

Oh really?

Maybe in absolute value they'll be paying more than you or me, but not as a percentage of their income.

Just about the first thing these people do is hiring tax avoidance wizards. Which obviously pay for themselves, otherwise hiring them would be counterproductive.

Re: The CEO on board the sub fired the director of operations resposible for safety....

I can look at the images on my phone now on a train between Portsmouth and Waterloo.

Damn, I'm not even close to that train route now. I was much nearer on Monday, but then I was unaware of this matter developing.

Is there a way that I can see them from other locations?

Care to list a part number for such a device?

It's obviously not an off-the-shelf part as you need to have it made to fit where it's supposed to go, but moving parts passing from an atmospheric pressure environment to 400 bar is something that's done in not just a few chemical production processes, for instance.

So, a solved problem.

you want to open it at the surface

Err, you want to open some ventilation port that has a 121.3% proven method against water ingress. The craft is positively buoyant without ballast, but it's not going to stick out of the water high enough that ocean waves aren't going to slosh over it.

You are unlikely to be able to bolt it from both sides as then you need a rotating shaft or a few that can sustain 400 bar pressure

This is an engineering problem. A solved engineering problem.

that you are floating in the middle of nowhere undiscovered and can't get out

The bigger problem is all of the crew getting out before the craft fills with water and returns to the ocean floor. Mind, oceans are rarely dead calm and without waves, plus you have to be sure your hatch is fully above the surface anyway in the first place. And then? Bravo, you're somewhere in a vast and pretty cold ocean without any life support equipment like isolating flotation overalls, locating beacons or whatever else that might help you being rescued instead of merely recovered.

or you are picked up in distress and they can't get in quickly.

The one situation where time might be of the essence is fire, and that would likely have been fatal already if it started while still under water. In every other case a few minutes will hardly make a difference, especially since rescuers on the outside can deploy any tool they have at hand and for instance start by demolishing the viewport dome. That means fresh air, and then time becomes somewhat less of a factor.

Re: Beacon

A ping a minute sounds good enough to me, given the speed at which movement (and indeed, most things) tend to happen under water.

Re: Lots of things are possible

Even if we locate the sub on the ocean floor now there is no way to get to it

The type of ROVs deployed have manipulator arms and possibly other tools to grab one of the extremities it has (at least a set of legs it rests on while on the launch/recover platform), pull it free and remove the ballast if it's still at depth.

Once topside there should be someone with a big-ass angle grinder cutting off the viewport dome (softest part of the construction I'd expect) once it's secured and sufficiently above the surface. Then the hatch bolts, never mind that that would fsck this techbro's toy beyond repair.

Re: Transponder

Besides, the company themselves are unlikely to be absolute idiots.

... classing agencies only focus on validating the physical vessel. They do not ensure that operators adhere to proper operating procedures and decision-making processes – two areas that are much more important for mitigating risks at sea. The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure. As a result, simply focusing on classing the vessel does not address the operational risks.

Adhering to proper operational procedures gets a little difficult the moment you're being squashed by 4km of water column.

Skipping technical certification because you deem proper operational procedures to be sufficient smells very much like techbro arrogance.

Re: Jerry-riggedness?

The pressure is outside of the vessel, not inside. Its walls are loaded on compression.

Beacon

The beacon should be external to the pressure vessel, therefore having a gradual increase in pressure anyway.

Also, it should be pinging from the moment it's released from the launch platform so that whatever happens to the sub and the beacon, they'll know where it was when it happened.

At least

Developing something like that to for a submersible is should be possible

Just a standard black box, and a tiedown strap.

Child hit by car among videos 'captured by Tesla vehicles, shared among staff'

BS department

Muskie is running that department on his own, at the same output level but less polished.

Beancounters, and JIT manufacturing.

are the biggest factors there.

Charge cards

I seem to be doing fine with just two RFID cards. One is from my home energy provider and is thus somewhat cheaper but isn't accepted by some of the chargers, the other works nearly everywhere. Tap the first one, LED stays green? Tap the other.

Flat phone battery?

Your bum is sitting on a powerbank to dwarf the average pocketable powerbank, and even when your EV battery is flat-ish (you kept driving until the last electron?) the accessory socket should still work.

Cales, connectors

Cables and connectors should be available from the pump, you should not have to carry your own connector. And 1 or max 2 standards worldwide for all cars

'Pumps' are an antiquated concept. You can find charge points in public and shopping parking lots, for instance. They're very often unattended. They can be as simple as the common home-use charging box with an RFID reader, mounted to a wall. Some provide a socket, some have a fixed cable and connector. For the ones with a Type 2 socket I use the cable that's part of the car's outfit, like the jack and a spare tyre; when the 'pump' has a fixed cable and a Type 2 plug I get out the Type 1 adapter.

Standardize on Type 2? I still need an adapter, and I don't want to gamble on one being available at the 'pump' so I keep one in the car, as I do with the cable and the granny-charger. Standardize on $other_standard? Same. Retrofit all cars to that $other_standard? Surely you're joking, and of course there will now be n+1 connector standards around that must be provided for.

If you have a fan, and want this company to stay in business, bring it to IT now

A fan of fans

First case: computer room with six 11/785s, two 8650s, couple of 11/750s and mVAX 2's, and two PDP 11/70s, with their assorted disk and tape units. I happen to be in there when suddenly the soundscape changes, although at first it's not clear what caused it, then it hits me that the low rumble of the aircon is missing. Which means the kit present is adding several tens of kilojoules per second to the room that should be taken out again but aren't. Sprint to the sysadmin pen, and alert those present to the problem. A couple go on a hunt through the offices, seizing whatever air moving equipment they come across, the others start shutting down anything not utterly indispensable,with only a few comms devices and the systems they connect to left running. It's the only time I saw a thermograph needle move.

Second case: small computer room, with not even that much equipment (couple of mid-size Alphas), but it was in a wooden barrack with a black tar-paper roof directly over it. And half the cooling capacity was out of order due to an unfixable pinhole leak. To try and keep sufficient cooling capacity they had installed a pair of garden sprinklers underneath the heat exchanger, and warm summer days required the tap being turned on around 10 o'clock already. Hot summer days would see a double door being opened to the outside, and four large floor-standing fans pointed at it. The tap, and the door when open, could often not be closed before 20:00, which must have been a nice overtime earner for one of the contractors. Suggestions to dump some buckets of white paint on the roof, or put a couple of rolls of reflective bubble foil over it were dismissed with "this is a temporary building" (but also because "overtime", obviously). Similarly a timer-controlled valve. And the overtime claims would easily have paid for fixing the aircon, or a replacement. As it was a government site it should come as no surprise that the situation was still unchanged five years on.

Debian dev to the rescue after proposal to remove Itanium from Linux kernel

Itanic

I always have an Itanium server ready

Yes, electrical heating is the future, but is better done using heat pumps anyway.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: Don't forget

It follows that the time 24:00:00 doesn't actually exist, and is an illogical construct.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

Only the 3.5" variation.

I think you mean "all but the actual floppy ones, so the 8", 5.25" and 3.25" versions". The stiffies/crackers are all oblong to some extent, some more than others, while the IBM 4" floppy would be a square stiffie if it didn't have half of one edge slightly angled inwards.

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

Particleboard used to be 1220x2440, but tends to be 1250x2500 now. It's available in 2070x2800 and 1250x3050 as well.

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

And the 3" disk as used by the Amstrad CPC and PCW computers was even more oblong; the drive and disks I have are currently in a box in the attic so I can't give the actual dimensions, but here's an image of one.

But AFAIK the medium itself was indeed 3".

Try Deepl:

Reindeer length is an old unit of measurement of length used when moving reindeer. Reindeer length is the distance a reindeer can travel between (reindeer) urination breaks. Reindeer cannot urinate while running, and running too long can cause them to become paralysed. The maximum distance a reindeer can run is up to 7.5 kilometres.

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

Bicycle wheels are measured in inches in Germany.

Not only there. Inch size is part of the ETRTO (European Tire and Rim Technical Organisation) size code.

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

Re: Bendix

They do, and the cat 3 equipped dishwasher can put the dishes in the cupboard if that too is cat 3 equipped.

Re: "whether the car has an in-cabin camera"

And a likely consequence:

Good morning. The car's interior temperature is 16 degrees, the estimated driving time is 34.7 minutes. Mrs Müller, you weigh 28 kilos more today than last night. Mr Müller, should I put the passenger seat in the reclining position, like last night?

Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

Re: Critical

It being water ingress to the wiring in the street which I think put another live phase on to my neutral.

Neutral wire upstream of your house or a couple of houses goes fzzzzrk, and the neutral voltage downstream of that break is now at the mercy of the load between each of the phases and neutral.

Which is rarely sufficiently balanced that neutral is still more or less neutral.

Nvidia RTX 4090: So hot they're melting power cables

Re: Not surprised

<ducks half-empty bottle of amphetamine-loaded whisky thrown by some resident investment banker>

That final word appears to be incorrectly spelled, starting with a letter rather near the end of the alphabet.

Twitter, Musk, and a week of bad decisions

The federal gov will play things by the book,

Which is obviously thick and heavy.

And can be thrown.

UK facing electricity supply woes after nuclear power stations shut, MPs told

Re: Funny

Magma tends to churn. And there's a fair bit of it for the waste to get mixed into, so I doubt the magma-plus-radioactive-waste that would come out of the nearest volcano would be even marginally more radioactive than any fresh unpolluted whole-grain biological non-GMO magma.

Apple exec confirms iPhones will switch to USB-C because 'we have no choice'

The chip probably costs more than making the cable properly in the first place though

You think the Chinese sell those cables at a loss but making it up in volume?

Flinsy cable can save a lot of copper aluminium conductive wet noodle.

Re: Contact life span

How did you manage that?

USB-A plugs should have been a little wider so they couldn't fit in an RJ45 socket. The cutouts in the USB plug's metal shield don't help in getting the thing out again without damage to the RJ45 contacts.

Government IT provider UKCloud goes into liquidation

New here?

Are you an AI gibberish generating bot?

UKCloud goes into liquidation

Isn't that commonly called condensing, or colloquially rain?

Tesla reportedly faces criminal probe into self-driving hype

But they won't

People who think "Autopilot" means autonomy, need to spend 5 seconds googling that topic.

And five seconds will just be long enough to skim a list in which the first four entries are not about autonomous movement of aircraft.

They're not even about Tesla, or Musk.

They're about some Microsoft product.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

Re: Live Printer

I've told this before, but anyway, back several decades ago, an uncle and his family were moving house, and my dad, his brother and I were helping getting some preparations done before the actual move. One of mine was mounting a couple of lights.

In one of the bedrooms I happened to brush the back of a hand against the wall, and felt an ominous 50Hz buzz. Not very strong, but definitely present. Checking this out some more I found that you could get a voltage probe screwdriver to light up if you also touched the bare metal valve body on one of the radiators, and the indication was strongest along a line straight up from a particular wall socket. Showing this to my uncle he declared it Not Good, and suggested I take a look at whatever was hiding under the plaster.

This turned out to be the standard (for the time the house was built) metal tubing for the wiring to the socket. It had been hammered nearly flat, with dents and jagged-edged rips, by the workmen who had redone the plaster in that room. Unfortunately it had not caused a hard short, but only sufficient leakage to get to feel it the way I did while the plaster was still slightly damp.

Re: "just" static

m and removed a 1500 mm pole, then another and another.

Each of those is already a six foot pole, so together it was a ten foot pole with 80% safety margin.

Yes, that copper chain mail overall. Thanks.

Re: Live Printer

Having seen some shocking (pun intended) wiring recently on supposedly good quality products

Couple of months ago I bought a rackmount powerbar; nothing special, just 10 or so C14 sockets. As it came with a standard Schuko plug and I needed to plug it in to a PDU also sporting C14 sockets I got out the security bits set and opened it up to perform an input cable transplant.

The powerbar innards were by and large just as I expected, the row of sockets spot-welded to three bus bars, and the input cable crimped on to those. However, there was also a yellow/green striped wire coming from an eyelet screwed to the metal case and crimped to one of the outer bus bars, i.e. not the ground one.

I have a grave suspicion the UPS would not have liked that.