Posts by cyberdemon

EV world in serious trouble if China cuts off rare earth materials

No, the main reason for the magnets is to improve efficiency and low-speed torque. Induction motors are incredibly inefficient at low speeds compared to permanent magnet synchronous motors. They have better cooling too, with all the electric current being in the stator, not the rotor. Very hard to cool a rotor.

That said, Synchronous Reluctance motors are very interesting. Better than induction motors and no rare earths

You still need a lot of largely Chinese-controlled minerals for the batteries, though.

'Almost every Apple device' vulnerable to CocoaPods supply chain attack

> You are sneering at Apple, and yet there's a Linux snafu published...

Hardly the same level of borkage.. RTFA on the regresshion bug you linked - it's inherently rate-limited with an incredibly low chance of success - so no "proof of concept" beyond a denial of service, because it would take forever to successfully run remote code. Very few are affected anyway, since it doesn't affect older distros, and newer ones had already patched by the time the article went out.

> Despite the regreSSHion bug, Qualys had nothing but positive things to say about the OpenSSH project, saying that the discovery is "one slip-up in an otherwise near-flawless implementation."

> "Its defense-in-depth design and code are a model and an inspiration, and we thank OpenSSH's developers for their exemplary work," it added.

Whereas this CocoaPods thing seems to be a very, very severe security flaw which had apparently gone unnoticed by Crapple for years.

So why, in two separate posts, are you saying "but but.. Linux has a security flaw too!!"

Desperate to defend your cult membership?

Not to mention of course.. OpenSSH isn't even Linux! It's just OpenSSH and it runs on lots of platforms. It's no doubt running right now on your beloved cackbook.

American interest in electric vehicles short circuits for first time in four years

Re: The sight of a Telsa accelerating with a half million watts of power is heartwarming

> It isn't fantasy.

And was the power and range of the newly electrified car equivalent to the original? Was the cooling system up to the same spec in terms of time at full power at max ambient temperature? Does it meet the same safety standards?

Or, in saving weight for a :face_with_symbols_on_mouth: youtube video, did they install a low-powered motor and an undersized battery, skimp on the cooling, and forget about safety?

Re: The sight of a Telsa accelerating with a half million watts of power is heartwarming

I'm not anti-EV, i just think they should be smaller, lighter and less powerful (along with cars in general). Large long distance vehicles such as trucks and lorries should not IMO be electrified using batteries, due to the weight and (environmental) cost of the battery that they have to lug around, which increases their energy and pollution impact. SUVs (of all types, electric and otherwise) should be taxed, because they are a profligate waste of resources and a danger to pedestrians and cyclists. Currently electric SUVs pay little or no extra tax compared to more responsible EVs, and I think that needs to change.

It's not FUD to point out that electrification won't save the planet if it causes us to use more resources and not less.. That's why I have criticised EV zealots in the past who seem to think it is feasible to replace all petrol/diesel pumps with 300kW+ fast chargers, while continuing our current road usage

Re: The sight of a Telsa accelerating with a half million watts of power is heartwarming

> What would you say about retrofitting a car with recycled EV components and only increasing the curb weight of the vehicle by ~25 kilos?

That it sounds like the sort of thing that only a YouTuber could pretend to pull off..

Re: The sight of a Telsa accelerating with a half million watts of power is heartwarming

Upvote for mentioning tyre pollution. The heavier the cars and the faster they accelerate, the faster the tyres (and the roads) wear out.

Although one interesting point is that a significant (though not as significant as tyres) proportion of road particulates comes from brake pads. EVs in theory -should- never need their mechanical brakes, except in a dire emergency. Except for maniac drivers who take off like a rocket straight into a red light, have to stop so hard that it will probably make any car think it is a dire enough emergency to use its mechanical brakes. And the thing weighs so much that it perhaps uses them even more than a similar ICE vehicle. (IF driven by a nutter)

I think there needs to be some sort of tax on overpowered EVs, or at least the profligate driving of them, spending their kilowatt-hours tearing up the roads instead of conserving the energy for long trips. e.g. take the time-integral of the square of acceleration and tax that.

Microsoft CEO of AI: Your online content is 'freeware' fodder for training models

> It's like Microsoft took ... and absorbed it as SOP.

Hasn't that been Microsoft's SOP since day 0?

I explicitly deny OpenAI and other content-scraping agents any rights to the content of this post.

Yet I am certain they will slurp this text into their bullshit machine, and, so I understand, it is impossible to remove it from the model weights once it has been ingested.

So what are my rights?

Microsoft makes it harder to avoid OneDrive during new Windows 11 installs

Re: > make public all the M365 client/cloud APIs so .. LibreOffice could seamlessly front end 365

Possibly Borkzilla could be forced to release a locally hostable 365 server along with said open API, which shall NOT require a MS account or connection to the mothership.. But it would be a cold day in Hell..

> make public all the M365 client/cloud APIs so .. LibreOffice could seamlessly front end 365

Oh God, please No. But have mercy on Roland6 for he knows not for what he wishes..

MacroSlurp would just *love* to slurp up all the data from LibreOffice users in the same way as it does Office users..

Then there's Office, which always tries to save to OneDrive by default

Engineers risk blasting US missile defense to smithereens, say auditors

Modelling

Never a complete substitute for actual real-life testing

But if you think it's bad in the world of defensive interceptor missiles, it's much worse in nuke-land.

Airbn-bye: Barcelona bans short-term apartment rentals for tourists

> Make AirBnB cough up the names and addresses.

Don't forget to prosecute AirBnB for being complicit ..

Humanity's satellite habit could end up choking Earth's ozone layer

Re: Colour me (not at all) surprised.

Agent Smith was absolutely right.

Human Beings are a disease. A cancer of this planet. You're a plague, and we, are the cure.

Re: Do some maths

I think there was a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek irony implied in AC's post ...

Phoenix UEFI flaw puts long list of Intel chips in hot seat

Re: TPM

No, the concept and theory was to allow various three-letter agencies a backdoor to access any Intel-based machine, and to prevent any third-party "open source" OS from having full hardware access or even being able to boot at all without the say-so of Microsoft.

So i'm not at all surprised that it has vulnerabilities, as that was basically the whole point of Intel Management Engine that is baked into all their UEFI firmware..

Battery electric vehicles lose their spark in Europe as hybrids steal the show

Re: Nope

Then bring an extra jerry-can for your hybrid and you can make it all the way to das krapital.

That was my point - you can fill up a hybrid but you can't just "fill up" an EV. But there should be a sweet-spot for plug-in hybrids where while you are in town you don't use the petrol engine at all - until you need to make a long journey, or if the krappy power grid fails.

That said, I do tend to agree about the environmental impact of EVs, i.e. wtf is the world going to look like if there were as many EVs as there currently are petrol/diesel cars, and how do we go about recycling them..

Surely it's a lot cheaper to 'fill up' at a plug? So i'm kind of surprised.

But I think the issue is that you can't actually 'fill them' because the battery is so tiny on most hybrids compared to the petrol tank. So the cost doesn't really make much difference, because you can't charge up for a long trip on battery.

If the manufacturers were a little more daring, then they could halve the size of the tank and double (or more) the size of the battery. If the battery has a 150 mile range then it doesn't matter if the tank only has another 150. Stopping every 150 miles for 5 mins to fill a small tank wouldn't be an issue for someone making a long trip, whereas stopping for an hour to charge a battery is.

Also, series hybrids. If you're doing most of the driving on the battery, then you don't want to have the motor coupled to an engine. This also means the engine doesn't have to be coupled to the wheel speeds, so it can be smaller, higher speed, more efficient, and it doubles as an off-grid generator

Meta warns bit flips, other hardware faults cause AI errors

Re: are they really saying our storage/ram/hardware is so bad?

Clearly that's the excuse they're going with as to why their software is so bad.. straight out of the BOFH excuse generator.

Bit-error-rates are incredibly low in modern computers located on earth (as opposed to in space, or in a radioactive waste dump) and even the ones in space have had ways to cope with memory corruption etc. since the 60s

If they were as high as Meta seems to be claiming, then there'd be a high chance of some of the pointer-arithmetic that my kernel does all the time, going wrong, and i'd be having regular BSODs. Yet I do not

Half of Dell US staff reportedly opted for remote work

Dell brain-drain

Is that what they're calling their new line of AI PCs?

World's top AI chatbots have no problem parroting Russian disinformation

Re: you'd hope the bots would be able to disprove or argue against any and all bogus Russian claims

Sometimes i think the manufacturers are just trolling. E.g. the airline peanuts warning "contains peanuts", or the sainsbury's cake boxes that said "do not turn upside down" on the bottom

Tiny solid-state battery promises to pack a punch in pocket gadgets

Re: What about fire risk ?

I'd say there is more of a correlation between (energy density * power density) and fire risk.

Capacitors have a high power density but low energy density and low fire risk. Solid State batteries have a high energy density, low power density and low fire risk. Power-and-energy optimised lithium polymer batteries of the like used on drones and e-scooters on the other hand...

Lithium Thionyl Chloride (Li-SOCL2) primary (non-rechargeable) batteries go up to 680Wh/kg and 1280Wh/l, but are usually fitted with a current limiter because of their propensity to go off like a bomb if abused..

Vietnam's internet again in trouble as three of five submarine cables go down

> Don't dismiss simple incompetence

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

Asda IT staff shuffled off to TCS amid messy tech divorce from Walmart

[*] generous in HR terms

You get to keep your company-branded mug?

But not the red Swingline stapler ofc.

Meta accused of trying to discredit ad researchers

Re: I have a browser without adblock...

It wasn't the advertiser who showed you the ad, it was the ad broker. You watched the ad, so they got paid. They don't care if their customer (the advertiser) makes any money out of you or not..

Re: Ads?

> What are these things called "ads"?

Unfortunately, (especially in the case of political 'ads'), just because you and I don't see them, doesn't mean they are not a problem.

Wells Fargo fires employees accused of faking keyboard activity to pretend to work

Re: Whatever happened to measuring output?

Of course. But that doesn't mean that your pointy-haired boss won't try to use AI to replace you, and suffer all of the consequences that I mentioned.

I didn't actually say that AI is useful, only that it will start doing jobs quickly, cheaply and badly. Probably not even better than a job not done at all..

Re: Whatever happened to measuring output?

TBH, "review this document and highlight any problems" is the sort of job that will get taken over by AI. It might not spot every problem and it might imagine some that don't exist, and it might exfiltrate your confidential document to third parties, but at least it's fast and doesn't plug in the mouse jiggler and take the dog for a walk while not actually reading it..

Re: Whatever happened to measuring output?

No, evidently they measure productivity by who is most often 'online' on Teams ...

Tesla shareholders agree to pay Musk staggering sum of $48B

I don't know what that boardroom are smoking..

They voted to give him 10% of the supposed value of the company, while sacking over 10% of its staff...

Are they going to short their own stock now and let Tesla crash and burn faster than a borked SpaceX rocket?

Google datacenters in Nevada to go full steam ahead with geothermal energy

By capstone turb[ine] do you mean this: https://www.capstonegreenenergy.com/products/capstone-microturbines/c1000s

It looks like a plain OCGT with CHP, which is exactly what I meant in my first reply. Lots of high quality waste heat if you can use it, but if you can't then it's only 33% efficient.

But it's so much cheaper and more reliable than a fuel cell that it out-competes them despite the efficiency.

I agree though, a fuel cell would be nice for residential use where noise is an issue. But why methane and not hydrogen?

Doesn't a gas turbine also create waste heat?

It's a lot more power-dense too, more reliable, cheaper, more available and fewer exotic materials. Not 'poisoned' by impure fuel either.

But, i'm struggling to find many figures on the efficiency of methane fuel cells. Google suggests 60%, which is definitely better, but not _that much_ better than gas turbines.

Geothermal, fine, so long as their next site isn't Yellowstone.. :P

Brazil recruits OpenAI in brave bid to slash court battle costs

Finally a meaning to the name of the film

Monty Python's Brazil, loosely based on Orwell's 1984, where computer automation of government functions meant the wrong man was pursued as a terrorist, nobody understood the opaque and inscrutable government system but went along with it.. But the film had nothing to do with Brazil, until now!

And you thought you couldn't make it up

Volvo recalls all of its 72K EX30 cars due to software bug that obscures speedometer

Re: Who.........

There's an impressively long thread on it with some anecdotal remedies but no definitive fix.

My FP4 runs the stock de-googled /e/OS and that's fine for me.. It's apparently somewhat risky to install anything custom onto the FP4, because of the bootloader eFuse issue which can deliberately brick the phone if you install an earlier version of Android than whatever later version ran on it previously.

It's probably easy enough, but the threat of a bricked device was off-putting enough for me to avoid tinkering with it. Kind of a chilling-effect for a phone that is supposed to be tinker-friendly.

Re: Who.........

True. Mine actually is a fairphone and it does have a replaceable battery and microSD slot at least. But even that doesn't have a headphone jack or more than three physical buttons.. It also has some occasional nasty glitches with touch input which if present on a car would definitely force a recall.

(Sometimes the touch screen 'goes crazy' with random spurious input and the workaround is to immediately hit the power/lock button to reset the screen. It's a known issue with FP4 unfortunately)

Plus it still has the evil Google bootloader that prevents downgrading to an earlier version of Android by blowing an eFuse in the CPU with each new release

Still miss my old Nokia N900 with its slide-out mechanical keyboard and native Debian-based OS

Re: Who.........

Ever since Tesla got away with selling a bug-ridden iPad-on-wheels and everyone copied it because it reduces the cost of having a dedicated instrument cluster in front of the steering wheel

Same reason all phones now look like iphones with no physical keypad or accessible battery / SIM let alone headphone jack or microSD slot

At Apple, AI stands for 'Apple Intelligence' – and it's coming to everything

Re: I have one question

> How do I permanently disable this?

Don't buy crapple

(Satisfied /e/os customer here)

Japanese vid-sharing site Niconico needs rebuild after cyberattack

Re: Begging the Question [Popular Doesn't Mean Secure]

Sounds like they were Ebiten by the same bug ...

Legendary Glastonbury farm using bovine excreta power plant adds graphene boffinry

Shit at Glastonbury

The obvious question is whether this tech can handle the rather less "pure" excrement found in abundance at Glastonbury once a year.

I was at EMF Camp this year, and as usual they used mostly composting toilets (except for next to the bar area, where perhaps the composting toilets would not handle the increased amount of liquid ...) They seem to work really well, there is no foul smell or swarm of flies. All that's needed is a cup of sawdust thrown over each turd, and the microbes handle the rest.

Not sure what is done with it afterwards, but presumably it could be fed into an anaerobic digester to produce methane, which is then either fed into the gas network. I suppose whatever gunk is left afterwards is mostly extra carbon..

Whether or not cow manure, never mind human manure from Glastonbury with all kind of exotic chemicals mixed in would produce good Graphene though is less certain but it does grab the headlines

HP BIOS update renders some ProBook laptops expensive paperweights

Did someone from their Printer dept work on this BIOS?

Non genuine HP electron detected at charging port. This laptop will now self-brick

Microsoft pulls Windows 11 24H2 from Insider Release Preview Channel

Re: Comming soon....

So, it'll be more like Windows 8 then?

Quantinuum inches closer to fault-tolerant quantum with a 56 qubit machine

Re: Quantum AI...

Your post just conjured up an image of "blockchain" at #2 on the Bristol Stool Chart..

New York Times source code leaks online via 4chan

Re: “Source code” does not make 270GB

I'd guess more likely a dump of the webserver root, containing both source code and content such as images etc. Possibly not including the actual article texts as that would usually be in a separate database. Although credentials to access said database could be in the "source code"

HP CEO: Printed pages are down 20% since pandemic

> trees for paper are just a crop with a rather longer life cycle than wheat or the like

Well, it depends..

Not all paper is from "sustainable forests" etc. Much like Drax wood pellets.

Then there's the bleach to make it white. What do they do with all the polluted water..

Microsoft shows venerable and vulnerable NTLM security protocol the door

Re: Challenge-Response

"NTLM - secure once and for all" --see icon-->

Well, I suppose now that it has been deprecated, it soon will be "secure once and for all"..

BT chief blames regulations for UK lagging in next-gen network rollout

Re: The colour of money

I assume your post must have taken a while to appear (as my last one did) and you assumed it had been lost in the er, post.

Blame the GPO British Telecom? Or more likely, the reg's database and/or staff are under heavy load :(

High-flying drones on a leash could blow traditional wind turbines away

Re: Nope

Yes, I meant "the winchgear at the ground station"

I blame this for my grammatical error and hasty typing. ---->

More layoffs at Microsoft: What's really going on here?

There's a startling similarity between the psychology of modern corporate management, and the psychology of cults.. Anyone who dare speak truth to power gets punished and/or banished.

Sodium ion batteries: Yet another innovation poised to be dominated by China

Re: Na Ion Battery surely

and Si is Silicon...

"SiB Battery" sounds like it should be made of Silicon Boride..

But maybe i'm just being a Boron Git

To solve AI's energy crisis, 'rethink the entire stack from electrons to algorithms,' says Stanford prof

Re: 'Dump the whole thing' - too big to fail

More like 1929 all over again.. Or worse. It seems like we are headed for a combination of a Great Depression event (breakdown of international trade.. Shipping, Brexit, Trump, the new Cold War) AND a Dotcom Bubble event caused by the AI hype.

Just about the only thing AI is "good" for is swindling people, poisoning democracy etc. We could have another Civil War in the US at the same time as WWIII heats up in Europe.

So I'd rather have a DotCom bubble now (i.e. let the AI bubble burst as soon as possible please) rather than the complete armageddon that I think will happen if it is allowed to carry on along its current growth curve.