Posts by Stoneshop

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.

NASA, SpaceX weigh invoking Dragon to take Hubble higher

32-year old hardware

"Since there's no expectation of 32-year-old hardware working that well on Earth, let alone in orbit,"

Most of the problems that beset computer systems are caused by people fiddling with them. Witness the walled-in Novell server just chugging along for years, and b0rkage dropping to surprisingly low numbers during a change freeze.

Tesla Megapack battery ignites at substation after less than 6 months

Re: Wait until we get te cheap Chinese knocks-off

combustion engined cars catch fire far more often than EVs

Now correct that for vehicle-miles.

Tesla faces Autopilot lawsuit alleging phantom braking

Re: Last week

2 Seagulls & a wood pigeon fly into then bounce off my windscreen.

Only bird-kill while riding a motorcycle was second-hand: straight two-lane road somewhere between two villages, pheasant coming in at right angles from the left, gets hit by a van approaching in the other lane, bounces off its windshield and with a few cartoonesque saltos lands exactly in line with my front wheel.

In contrast, the late evening ride over the dike from Enkhuizen to Lelijkstad netted about 17.3 gazillion insects in a several centimeter thick layer on every bit of frontal surface. Including my visor.

California to try tackling drought with canal-top solar panels

Re: Reduced Evaporation

The ambient temperature is pretty much the same.

However, the surface temperature as well as the air temperature immediately above it is not

Germany orders Sept 1 shutdown of digital ad displays to save gas

Luxury [citation needed]

"We collected the liquid oxygen that formed as dew on the icicles hanging from our noses, and sold that to the Cryogenics Institute for whatever they would offer, earning a few pennies that way so we could buy scraps of mouldy bread to go with the poisonous gravel that was our regular dinner"

Re: Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine,

You get a Papal banner then it's a Holy War

Make sure you have a sufficient supply of Holy Handgrenades.

Re: Exceptions for such dual-purpose signs have been arranged.

though to be fair I understand the energy and material cost of replacing a perfectly functioning existing light

Around the time when LED arrays started to appear as a replacement for incandescents in traffic lights (generally just replacing the bulb and the reflector with a disc full of LEDs) I read that the energy savings plus the longer lifespan (less replacements) paid for them in three to five years. The same holds for train signals.

Before that you could occasionally see traffic lights that appeared to be lit by a coiled-up fluorescent but those were usually total replacements or new installs as far as I could determine.

For street lighting the pole and the luminant are often separate items, and it's a rare manufacturer who will not supply replacement LED-based luminants. For the borough/council/department/whoever, it's again a matter of energy cost against cost of retrofitting.

Smokers that race between traffic lights?

The ones I know tend to be short of breath already to a varying degree.

Re: Exceptions for such dual-purpose signs have been arranged.

Solari boards (Wikipedia:Split-Flap Display)

The large ones in the central hall of the larger railway stations (and in airports) tended to have flaps per individual character, as they had to be able to display any destination on any position, essentially shifting the displayed lines up every few minutes. The ones on the platforms usually had flaps displaying one or more stops or the destination in its entirety. There were also roll-sign displays which made the world move up after they'd stopped rolling down displaying a new departure.

But the most common (and still in use) method is just printed sheets, commonly ordered by general destination if not just as a large list of departure times.

Re: Exceptions for such dual-purpose signs have been arranged.

A printed note isn't going to work for something like a major train station timetable.

One wonders how they coped before digital timetable displays appeared.

NASA scrubs Artemis SLS Moon rocket launch

This is literally _not_ rocket science. It's 100% rocket _engineering_.

Exactly.

We were promised integrated packages. Instead we got disintegrated apps

Re: Rocker switch and finger

I don't think you'll want to use the Pico itself as a rain sensor, but just measuring outside brightness will probably be sufficient already.

The mechanical timer switches I have here, some from more than half a century ago, still work fine. There's even one that has its own gang reserve, using a motor only to wind the clockwork spring when it's unwound sufficiently to close a microswitch. The more recent mechanical ones, made from cheap Plasticum Chinesium, not so much, but they've been disposed of.

And for relays I'd use SSRs, although your average mechanical relay rated at 50.000 closures, would at a couple of switch events per day still last at least a decade. SSRs also have the advantage that they can be driven directly from any output that can drive a LED.

The actual course of events

It's dark.

Harry is eaten by a Grue.

Game over.

There's one

Conclusion: iOs and Android need a command line and all the usual stuff (sort, uniq, grep, sed etc.)

Ubuntu Touch offers a fairly competent command line shell.

Which will make you long for a proper keyboard, which the Planet Communicator offers.

Unfortunately, the one I have here is fitted with a clavier Francais, which causes a mismatch between the clavier and the OS language that my fingers are accustomed to. And while in 99 out of 100 cases you can type as if it's a QWERTY keyboard, there's of course always one case where it sticks to AZERTY.

Re: Rocker switch and finger

Now try turning your light on at home when you are in a hotel room, on the other side of the world

To make it appear there's someone home? And you then having to take the time offset into account? That's what a RasPi is for. Runs on local (to your house) time, and with a handful of sensors can detect conditions like overcast skies and rain, adjusting the switching moments accordingly.

or in-flight to populate Mars.

And you haven't had to sell your house and consequently making turning the lights on and off SEP, to be able to buy a ticket? In that case you are likely able to pay someone to live there while you're away, not only to turn the lights on and off but also to water the plants, weed the garden and dust the rooms.

Japan reverses course on post-Fukushima nuclear ban

Re: Wind and solar

There's surprisingly little energy in even a humongous lump of rock dropping several hundred meters.

Re: Wind and solar

Wind turbines mostly kill big birds

With one of the turbine's blades painted black, or all three of them painted black over a third of their length (tip, middle and centre) the number of bird strikes is significantly reduced. It makes the birds more aware of the actual movement of the blades

Problem is that humans tend to dislike this.

Amazon has repackaged surveillance capitalism as reality TV

Re: Apathy is the problem

And, here I thought it only recorded what was immediatly in front of it.

What rock have you been living under? With the resolution those units have they already show a clear enough picture of someone starting to walk up the garden path ten meters away to be able to use that for identification purposes. And their coverage combined with the resolution has already been the subject of several articles here on El Reg.

Banned Tornado Cash code reuploaded to GitHub in free speech test

Re: Cold weather report from Hell

The first amendment prevents theUS government from interfering with your right to speak/publish/etc.

Australian wasps threaten another passenger plane, with help from COVID-19

Re: Incredibly delicate technology

and is that long enough for a wasp to sneak in.

Oh, definitely. But not long enough for one to start building a nest and having the mud harden, which is where the problem lies.

But maybe those pitot intakes should have a mosquito screen fitted permanently.

UK launches 'consultation' with EU over exclusion from science programs

Normal people don't smile looking at a car crash either.

Depends. If it's the esteemed Mr. Musk being extracted from a seriously pranged 'self-driving' Tesla I'll have to take care that my ears won't disappear into the corners of my mouth.

Google teaches robots to serve humans – with large language models the key

Re: "going over to pick up the can, throwing it into a bin, and getting a sponge"

So it's not smart enough to empty the can down the sink first?

Depends. If there's still some coke in the can[0] the robot should just put it upright again after wiping down the underside[1], then clean the spill. If it's empty it can go into the bin. "And if you don't put in the recycling bin as it should, you'll be going in there yourself after reprogramming you with a large axe."

[0] surely it should be able to subtract the known weight of an empty can of the type picked up from the sensed weight.

[1] oh wait, it's one-armed, so that should be "get sponge, put down sponge, pick up can, wipe can on sponge, put can down elsewhere, pick up sponge, wipe puddle"

Security needs to learn from the aviation biz to avoid crashing

Re: "The same needs to happen in security"

The only problem is that, when an airplane crashes, deaths are involved and the number of specialists that analyze the issues are limited and highly experienced.

Also, compared to software security breaches, airplane crashes are rare. Because of that disparity in numbers, airplane accident investigation boards (usually a government/government-adjacent body) can be staffed with far fewer investigators while still being sufficiently effective, than a country-wide CERT team responsible for, or at least overseeing, security breach investigations.

Starlink satellite dish cracked on stage at Black Hat

Re: a bad move.

There is no 'end' of the universe, any more than there is an 'end' of the earth.

Topologically speaking.

It is expected that in about 7.6 billion years, as the Sun goes into its helium-burning phase and starts expanding into a red giant, it will engulf the Earth which is then absorbed into the Sun's mass. This, you might say, would be the end of the Earth.

Somewhat similarly, the Universe could end in a Big Crunch (the End that the Restaurant is at) or a Big Chill; in the latter case the final state of the Universe will be a dilute bunch of photons and other subatomic stuff. You're free to consider the Universe as still existing at that point, but I think you'll agree it'd be a somewhat different one than the Universe we're looking at today.