Posts by Jon 37 742 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2009
In an act of massive stupidity, a dual 13A socket only has to be designed for a TOTAL load of 13A, and can have a 32A fuse at the consumer unit.
Good brands will exceed the legal minimum and design for 26A total, which is 2x13A.
(Disclaimer: I found this out a decade ago. Regs may have been fixed in the meantime).
They know they have N pension members.
A competent engineer would want to do a load test "what happens on launch day if all N pension members log in for the first time".
Most managers would say that testing is a waste of time - "oh that won't happen, not everyone will log in at once". They won't have any evidence for that, but will be unshakable in their belief.
The money you put into any bank is invested by the bank. The bank promises to pay you back when you ask. But in the meantime, the bank can invest that money however it likes (subject to following the law and regulations).
NS&I invests your money by lending it to the government. Because the government can borrow some money from NS&I, it doesn't have to borrow as much using government bonds.
(All numbers made up to explain the idea):
Suppose there's a 1 in 10,000 chance that, sometime in the next 10 years, Starlink causes huge amounts of space debris in LEO. This wipes out all satellites in LEO, including Starlink. Suppose that SpaceX would have to pay an extra $5bn/year to reduce that risk to 1 in a million.
SpaceX may look at the numbers and decide that for them, it's worth the risk. It's very unlikely to be a problem, and fixing it is unreasonably expensive. Sure, if it does go wrong it may bankrupt the company, but the people involved would just move on to other jobs elsewhere.
The rest of the world may look at that same number and decide that for humanity, it's not acceptable. SpaceX needs to mitigate it or safely deorbit Starlink and stop operating.
This is one of the reasons we have regulation. Where a company can cause damage to other people, the government says what level of risk is acceptable for the rest of us. Then they ensure the company operates safely.
The other thing is that companies suck at considering the risks. Maybe it's actually a 1 in 100 chance. Making SpaceX prove it's operating safely, to a regulator, helps expose the risks.
That doesn't prove he lied.
He may have genuinely planned to join an academic institution. Then Intel offered him a job and he changed his plans.
I don't think we have enough information to judge either way. Let's wait and let the legal process run it's course.
The problem solved by Section 3.2 is: "What are the emergency number(s) for this phone".
Some are agreed internationally, and specified in the GSM standards. Those will always trigger an emergency call. For example, 112 or 911.
But I don't think 000 is one of those numbers. In other countries, 000 might be used for something else.
So there is a way for the SIM to tell the phone "in addition to your built in list, 000 is also an emergency number". Different countries will have different SIMs that specify whatever the local number is.
But, as your edit says, this is completely unrelated to the actual issue being discussed in the article.
Migration isn't instant. They may need additional VMware licences before their new system is ready. They may need support before their migration is complete.
The ability to continue to buy VMware licenses and get VMware support is guaranteed by their contract. So they may have relied on that when making contingency plans for how to move off VMware.
If you have cryogenic propellants, such as the shuttle's liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, then they will boil off and vent The shuttle would be venting gasses as it sat on the launch pad. Perfectly normal.
It's like how an ice bucket works. Sure, some of the ice melts due to the heat around, but most of the ice remains and can be used. For a short enough duration, it's not worth the extra bulk and complexity of a refrigerator to keep all the ice frozen, it's simpler to just start with more ice than you need and let some melt. The ice bucket is insulated to slow down the melting.
Similarly for cryogenic fuel, it's not worth having a cooling system on board the spacecraft, as that would be heavy and complex. It's simpler to just load extra fuel and accept that some of it will boil off. The part that boils off cools the remaining fuel. The boiled gasses have to be vented in to space to prevent the tank from building up pressure and exploding. (Remember that weight is everything on a spacecraft, so the tank cannot be strong enough to handle high pressures, because that would make it too heavy). This is not a "leak", it's deliberate venting of the gas. And the tank is insulated to reduce the amount of boil off.
Linux has the option of building filesystems as "kernel modules". Those are your "drivers that run in the kernel".
You can also choose to compile them directly into the kernel. Bear in mind that Linux runs on a wide range of devices, and on small fixed-function embedded devices, where you are compiling a custom kernel just for that device, it can be smaller and simpler to disable the kernel modules feature and just compile everything you need into the kernel.
On a general purpose PC, using modules is usually the best choice for most things that can be modules, and most distros do that.
You can also disable any filesystem you want when compiling the kernel.
So if you build a Linux kernel from source, you can choose whatever way works best for you.
Many people use a "distro" kernel, where their chosen Linux distribution compiles the kernel and provides binary packages. In that case, the choice is made for you by the distro maintainers.
This article is about one distro choosing to tweak their kernel configuration, to disable a filesystem. End users can still decide to get the kernel source and build just that one module to use with their distro kernel. Or get the latest source for that filesystem from somewhere else, and build it as a module to use with their distro kernel.
This "petty" CDDL vs GPL license issue was because Sun invented CDDL with the deliberate intention of being incompatible with the GPL. They wanted to open-source their code in a GPL-like way because that was trendy and good PR. But they did not want to actually use the GPL, and/or they wanted to make it so Linux was unable to use their code.
You can't mix CDDL and GPL code in the same program, and legally distribute it.
Some people are happy to gamble that they can get away with it. You might be happy to make that bet yourself. But there are plenty of people who are not willing to take that risk.
(See: The SCO vs The World lawsuits, where the fact that Linux scrupulously follows all licenses meant that SCO had no case).
There are also people who consider breaking license agreements like that is morally wrong. (According to their personal morals, everyone has different morals and that's okay).
The way that sorted of thing normally happens is you write a good spec, then the developer picks a small number of test cases and writes code to those tests, not to the specification.
The programmer wrongly claims it confirms to the spec because it passes their tests.
That's not a spec issue, it's a programmer issue.
Intel Foundry is in serious trouble.
Intel the chip designer is in trouble, although part of that is due to their close ties to Intel Foundry. (Other parts are due to their disastrous failures in the mobile phone chip and graphics card markets. And by graphics cards I include blockchain mining cards and AI cards).
Intel needs to spin off Intel Foundry into a separate company. That can go bust, or be bought, or be cut up for parts, or maybe even make a miraculous recovery. That gives the fabless chip design business a chance to survive.
Different reactor designs use different fuels, with different levels of enrichment. You can't use a fuel with the wrong level of enrichment, just like you can't put diesel in a petrol [US: gas] car.
Civilian reactor designs in general are limited to less than 20% enriched fuel, as anything higher is considered too close to weapons grade and is restricted to military use only. Most civilian reactor designs use less than 5% enriched, because there are stricter rules for the 5% to 20% range. Weapons need 90% enriched Uranium.
Iran's reactors are designed for less than 5% enriched fuel. Not sure the exact number, but it might be 3.7% enriched. So Iran has no plausible reason to enrich to the 60%+ that was detected, except for making a nuclear weapon.
They are considering SpaceX Starship coming in for a landing. So it has rockets that will have to fire to make a precision landing on the "chopsticks" catch tower.
Maybe a bird into the engine area might manage to take out an engine, so that final landing burn fails?
(I mean, the whole thing is impractical and not very useful anyway, birds are not the biggest problem. But birds could be a problem).
They try to justify it by saying that a whole bunch of extra software licenses are included, for extra VMware features. You may not want those licenses, you may not want to use those features. But they won't sell what you want any more, they will only sell the big bundle or nothing.
This is clearly unethical. But whether it is illegal, depends on what country you are in and whether your previous license promised you could renew it.
All people choosing closed source commercial software are taking the risk that their supplier might do this, or might just discontinue the product or go bankrupt and stop supporting it.
The suggested approach to Rust is not to do a "big bang" rewrite of your big software. That's doomed to failure, for any large software.
Instead, the approach people are trying to take is to let people use Rust for writing new features. Then port some existing code to Rust. Then gradually repeat until all code is Rust.
For example, the aim with the Linux kernel was to first allow writing new drivers in Rust. That would allow the kernel folks to get some experience with Rust, and to prove whether or not Rust works well in the kernel. If successful, then, over time, more code could have been moved to Rust, until eventually the majority of the kernel was written in Rust. This would have taken years, possibly decades. However, there has been significant pushback to that plan, so I'm not sure if it's going to happen.
Another example is some of the basic Linux command-line applications. Since each app is so small, it can be rewritten in Rust. Over time, more of the essential Linux userspace apps can be made available in Rust versions.
As an alternative, there is some work being done on a memory-safe subset of C++. That may work better for some people. However, it's still a work in progress. (I say "subset", but the idea is actually to first extend C++ with a few small features, and then define a subset of that which is memory-safe. And standardise both the C++ extensions, and the subset, in future versions of the C++ standard. The extensions would be available to all C++ code, so the memory-safe subset would be a true subset of normal C++).
According to Wikipedia, Grasshopper was based on a rocket 3.7m diameter and was 32m high. Grasshopper was based on a real Falcon 9 first stage.
According to the article, Honda's rocket is 0.85m diameter and 6.3m tall. Honda are using a very small rocket, not something you'd use for real launches. It's a scaled down prototype.
Rust is fairly new. We don't have the many decades of experience & training with Rust that we have with C++.
But that argument is basically "we should never do anything new. We should never try new approaches to fix the issues with our current approach".
When cars came out, we didn't have the centuries of experience with them that we had with horses. There was a big community of people who could use horses but not cars. People understood horses but not cars. The supply chain for the first cars probably included horse drawn wagons. There were a limited number of car suppliers compared to lots of horse breeders and sellers. But ultimately, the advantages of cars meant that, over a period of many years, all that changed.
But there have also been many other attempts at major changes that haven't worked out.
It's too soon to know if Rust will succeed or not. Maybe in 50 years a few enthusiasts will be going "remember Rust, shame that didn't take off". Or maybe people will use Rust and look at C/C++ as legacy languages like Fortran and COBOL.
Your argument is that a good programmer can write memory-safe code in C++. In theory, you are correct. In practice, there is many years of evidence of memory safety bugs being found in C++ code. And lots of programmers are not good.
So large programs written in C++ are highly likely to have memory safety bugs. For applications where those bugs are security vulnerabilities, that is not acceptable. The other advantages of C++ are irrelevant if it's impossible to write secure code.
Any Rust code that does not use the "unsafe" keyword is memory safe. This is enforced by the language and compiler.
There has been talk of having a memory-safe subset of C++, and making the compiler enforce it. Right now, that does not exist. There is some early development work on how C++ could be extended to allow that. If/when it does exist, then existing libraries will need to be ported to it or wrapped in bindings. It's basically a new language based on C++, with all the work needed to establish a new language - which Rust has already spent years on, so Rust has a big head start.
If they wait a few months, the USA may have withdrawn it's troops from Taiwan. Either because the USA can't afford them any more, or because Taiwan won't pay for them at the price demanded by the USA (perhaps "give us TSMC or we withdraw our troops"), or because Trump just doesn't want to support them any more.
Not in the UK's experience. Hinkley Point C is located on the same site as Hinkley Point A and B. They started planning it in 2008, so 17 years ago, and it's still being built. Might get some power in the early 2030's, so 22+ years.
Git uses SHA-1 for hashing, not security. That is okay.
However, as soon as someone writes code to "get the code with this SHA hash from someone else's Git repo and run it", then the SHA is being used for security. It's the only thing authenticating that the code being run is what you intended to run. That's one of the options that GitHub provide.
Now, you might be happy with that level of security. Or you might not. Personally I would be a lot happier using SHA3-256, although even SHA256 would be an improvement.
It would probably be cheaper to just populate more RAM.
What you're describing requires chip, OS and application support, to put the right data in the right memory.
Also you can't add a socket on the end of the fast RAM bus, because that would slow down the bus even when talking to the "fast" soldered-on RAM chips. You would need extra RAM channels that are dedicated to slow RAM. That means more pads on the CPU and more tracks on the motherboard, which adds a lot of complexity and cost.
Modern RAM busses run at ridiculously high speeds that push the limits of modern electronic design. The wires going from your CPU to your RAM have to be really carefully designed, with length matching so the signals all arrive at the same time, careful choice of geometry to keep the specified impedance, and no stubs ("dead ends" that cause reflections and also act as antennas to transmit and receive interference) or branches in the wires. This avoids reflections and interference. Having a connector on the bus is a major problem - it's likely to introduce impedance issues. You can do it, but the tradeoff is slower RAM bus speed. So the RAM will perform worse.
Note we're discussing RAM performance here, not how system performance might be affected by a choice of how much RAM to fit.
Some customers will need a written quote, perhaps in a certain format.
Some customers will insist on paying 30 days after they get the goods/services. Or 90 days.
Some customers will insist on certain terms in their contract.
Some customers will have a bunch of questions before they add a supplier as an "approved supplier".
It's not just a matter of "add another payment method". It's all the nonsense that some big companies insist on for the privilege of supplying them.
This is why resellers mark up the price so much. That covers their cost of dealing with this nonsense.
When The Post Office was privatised, everyone knew this might be coming. So the government promised the soon-to-be new owners of the Post Office that the UK Taxpayers would pay any compensation. The government is paying the compensation. The Post Office gets off without any financial impact.
TikTok is a business which takes in money and pays out money. Using banks. The banks operating in the US can be told to block transactions going to or from TikTok. That way, TikTok gets no income from US advertisers and can't pay US content creators.
Additionally, TikTok will have servers in the US for better performance. Those servers will go away.
A slow website that doesn't pay content creators and can't accept advertising from US companies, is a lot worse than the current app. Lots less people will use it.
And it won't be profitable. It will have to pay more for Internet traffic because it's now paying to send that traffic across an ocean instead of having local servers. And a large revenue source was cut off. And there will be less content so less view time so less scope for adverts.
Apps do compete on price, where there are multiple basically-the-same apps from different developers.
In that case, lower fees mean they could reduce prices further. And if their competitors do that, then they may have to do that. That means consumers save money.
That doesn't apply to all apps, of course. But it does apply to some apps.
The safe, sane subset of PDF is called PDF/A. It just lets you have a document you can view and print, which is what most people using PDF files want.
The full PDF spec has extensions for video, scripting, forms, DRM, encryption, digital signatures, and more. Some people want and use those features. Most don't.
Depends if he knew he was working for ransomware people.
If you're asked to do something like "write code to print a message on every printer", that's not illegal in itself. There could be legitimate or at least legal uses.
If you know that you are working for criminals then it becomes illegal.
However, if you are asked to write code to disable Windows Defender, then most people would suspect that they might be working for criminals.
And if you're given source code to ransomware and asked to add features, that is clearly illegal.
Because that is entirely theoretical at this point, and has no immediate impact.
Using quantum computers for decryption is theoretical, but people can record encrypted data now and feed that into a quantum computer if/when they become available. So nation states that want to keep their Top Secret information secret for decades, are starting to worry about quantum computers now.
> How does making "non-important" people cold benefit them?
It prevents the entire electricity grid from collapsing if there is insufficient generation.
Third world countries often have rolling electricity blackouts due to insufficient generation. The UK can of course do that, by turning off parts of the grid, but that would affect everyone in an area.
Smart meters allow the blackouts to be targeted to individual houses.
The UK has got rid of it's big reliable coal power plants, and the reliable nuclear fleet is aging out and retiring. Simultaneously, the government is pushing for electric cars and electric home heating (heat pumps).
This leaves the UK massively reliant on gas power stations, using half imported gas. There is a lot of wind and solar on the grid, but neither are reliable sources of power - you can't decide to turn them on during a calm wind-less evening.
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