Posts by cyberdemon

UK government denies China/Russia nuke plant hack claim

> the denial only covers the area where all of those circles overlap

Do they employ the same PR weasels as Ofwat?

'Return to Office' declared dead

Re: 《There are those who can micromanage well remotely.

It's at this point that I would be wondering whether my manager actually exists or not.. To find out, I would insist on a pint at the weekend.

On the other hand, he might turn up, and demand my clothes, and my motorbike.

Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books

Re: No problem

Would that be this less-trustworthy site?

It has been possible to use AI to acquire targets for at least 5 years. I first saw it discussed by the Turkish military in reports from some arms conference in 2019.

Electric vehicles earn shocking report card for reliability

Re: Odd

> Isn't that the BMW i7 "range extender"

That's just a ~3kW 4-stroke petrol genset, similar to what you'd have for a building site, albeit integrated into the car. It takes up a lot of boot space and it's not powerful enough to run the car without the battery. A gas turbine generator could be 10 times as powerful in the same or smaller package, so it would make for a true series-hybrid powertrain

Re: We need the technological progress...

What you've basically just said is that Corn is an extremely inefficient extractor of CO2 from the atmosphere, and that all of the Biofuels industry are effectively burning food.

Your idea could work if we had an unlimited amount of land and fertile soil to grow crops on, but the fact that there are many people in the world going hungry, suggests that we do not.

Also, do your corn stalks not rot down and produce Methane / CO2? I doubt if it is all really sequestered

Re: Encoders

Back EMF commutation of a synchronous motor can't produce torque at zero speed. EVs use synchronous motors, not induction motors, as far as I am aware.

Re: Encoders

An EV traction drive is not an "ESC" like you would have on a toy helicopter.

It needs to work at high stall torque, even a hobby ESC can't do that without sensors. It needs to be powerful and efficient across a wide range of operating points, unlike a fan, vacuum cleaner or a HDD platter, and it needs to respond to rapidly changing loads.

Re: Encoders

Because even if you monitor every super-cell and have fuses between each cell in a super-cell, it is still possible for a li-ion cell to burst into flames spontaneously, at what should be a safe voltage and temperature. Microscopic dendrites can grow inside (when it is charged too quickly when nearly full, for example), they don't completely go away on discharge, and they grow bigger on the next charge. When they are too big they can internally short circuit the cell. And if its neighbours were already warm, the whole pack can go up.

Re: Encoders

> Are you sure all the sub battery components are all individuall monitored and they are not wired in parallel for less sensors ?

You need high voltage to get the power, you can't transfer hundreds of kilowatts at four volts because you'd need 100,000 Amps (more, because the heating losses go with the square of current), so the "wiring" (copper ingots) would weigh more than the car. The top speed of the motor is also limited by the voltage.

So EV batteries run at 800 Volts, that is the most common standard.

The way to get more volts out of a battery is to put cells in series. Not all of them, but groups of them, called supercells. An 800V battery has at least 200 of those (some have multiple strings in parallel, so 400 or 600 supercells), and yes, they are all individually monitored.

Re: Encoders

There are ~200 supercells per parallel string in an 800V pack as I said. But there are multiple sensors for each supercell, and if there are multiple strings, then multiply that again. We are splitting hairs between "hundreds" and "thousands" of sensors. Contactless encoders are still encoders.. But the fact remains that there are many more things to go wrong in an EV than in an ICE vehicle, which can be largely mechanical, and easy to maintain.

Re: We need the technological progress...

Yes just like the "negative emissions" from BECCS that Drax pretends exists.

In reality, they are chopping down forests to burn, destroying ecosystems and polluting the air with far worse emissions than the dirtiest of dirty brown coal, all the while collecting "green" subsidies from the UK Taxpayer!

Re: Odd

Personally, I am waiting for a "series hybrid" with a decent-sized battery and a compact high-speed gas turbine generator. It could be lighter than a BEV yet not suffer the range anxiety. It would double as an off-grid generator for your house.

On the other hand, it would suffer the same reliability issues of an EV, with the extra issues of a high-speed gas turbine, so not surprising that it doesn't exist yet :)

Re: Encoders

No, having worked for a manufacturer of BMSs, I can tell you, each supercell (a bunch of cells in parallel, producing 2-4.2V collectively) is individually monitored, twice. You can't rely on string voltage to tell you if one cell is failing. Similar for temperature. This is why E-Scooters (which are not well-regulated, unlike automotive batteries) keep exploding, whereas EVs don't explode quite so often. The only thing that you can monitor at string-level is current.

As for encoders, some (less efficient) drivetrains use Hall sensors for low-speed commutation and back-EMF for high-speed, but the more efficient designs use synchronous commutation, i.e. they rely on an encoder. They can fall back to other methods of commutation in the 'limp mode' that I mentioned.

> if you make strings of individual cells you would lose the entire string. if a single cell goes out in a bank the rest of the bank still works and does not interrupt the string so you don't lose the string.

As I said, they use multiple strings, made of parallel groups (called supercells). But if a cell within a supercell fuses, then the capacity of the supercell is lowered, so you need to monitor the (super-)cell voltage to detect this, otherwise the lower-capacity supercell will reach a dangerous voltage before the whole string does.

Like most technologies, design focus has shifted towards performance and efficiency, at the expense of lifetime, with a whiff or forced obsolescence. There is no fundamental reason why a condensing boiler can't have a cast iron heat exchanger like your 25yo boiler probably has, but it would be more expensive, it would take longer to warm up (so can't be used as a combi boiler) and would be (slightly) less efficient than a heat exchanger made with the thinnest possible stainless steel to get it past its 3 year warranty.

After the 3 year design life, you need a new boiler. Bonus for the manufacturer. It's the lightbulb cartel all over again, but scaled up.

Encoders

Rotary position encoders are probably the most sensitive piece of an EV. It lets the drive electronics know what angle the rotor is at, so that it can apply the correct field to produce maximum torque. Without it, the motor cannot produce much torque at all. If the motor-encoder coupling slips by one degree, or if the electrical shielding is sub-par, it would force the EV into an extremely low power limp mode, if not disable it entirely.

I would guess that encoder issues are probably the second most common EV drivetrain trouble, the first being battery problems. If one of thousands of temperature, current or voltage sensors in the battery is dodgy, it probably also would put the vehicle into limp mode. (Yes, thousands of single-point failure possibilities. That should make any reliability engineer shudder. An 800V battery needs 200 (parallel groups of) cells in series, the voltage and temperature of each needs to be individually monitored. If one goes above 4.2V or below 2V then it is a safety hazard. So voltage sensors are often doubled up for safety, and series cell strings are often doubled up for reliability)

UK government rings the death knell for SIM farms

Re: Tugend?

Depends if you're a ndhat or not ..

"Did no-one tell them what the calls and texts are made of?"

A lot of those walnut-brains in power seem to think that it is the SIM itself that does the inter-wibbling, when in fact it is just an identifier

Remember when MI5 were shocked to find hidden SIM cards inside diplomatic vehicles? I wonder what they'd make of the trend towards eSIMs..

Re: Ban banning things

It will achieve lots as another chilling effect for honest & legitimate uses of electronics though.

Trying to develop an open-source phone? Sorry, not allowed in the UK now!

Microsoft opens sources ThreadX under MIT license

Re: MISRA Compliance

MISRA says that any of its rules can be ignored with a statement to say that this rule has been ignored for whatever ${reason}. There is no such thing as formal MISRA compliance, because there are few people who can say if all [${reason}] are reasonable.

It's easy to make a MISRA-compliant RTOS, as long as you restrict it to a MISRA-ble set of features. For any extra features, you need to write a ${reason} to ignore their rules.

Two possibilities i can see

One: MS are trying to hit out at Zephyr, which is a very fast-growing in popularity RTOS run by the Linux Foundation with excellent open source governance..

Two: MS are stopping active development of ThreadX, they are hoping that someone will maintain it for free, and they will not be continuing with its safety certification

Both may be true, but if Two is true then anyone who paid for safety artifacts in the past is a bit shafted.

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

Re: Pardon?

> NHS Fife is on the wrong end of a stern ticking off by Britain's data regulator after it made a howling privacy error that aided an as yet unknown person who had entered a hospital ward only to walk off with data on 14 patients.

Meanwhile Palantir walks in, takes data on 75 million patients, and the NHS pays them £400 odd million for the privilege!

OpenAI makes it official: Sam Altman is back as CEO

Re: non-voting role

Azure is after all, not just Someone Else's computer, but Microsoft's computer

Microsoft, Databricks double act tries to sew up the data platform market

All your Data, Analytics, and AI

Are belong to Us.

China lobs tech demo into orbit for People's Republic version of Starlink

Just like Starlink

But for the PRC's weapon systems, not yours

We're getting that fry-day feeling... US Army gets hold of drone-cooking microwave rig

Re: Hmmmm..

Yes that was what I said was option 3: attempt to continue based on dead reckoning, i.e. using the IMU/AHRS. But that only gets one target. What I am more worried about are machines (air/ground based drones with guns) that could wage war without humans needed to identify targets. These DO exist, have done for several years now.

And that technology is not nearly as expensive or heavy as you assume. For example, we already have body-wearable cameras that can do live offline facial recognition against a fairly large database, on a chip designed for mobile phones.

Re: Hmmmm..

For most military drones, it's probably an end-user configuration, rather than a design decision, regards what to do in the event of total CnC/GNSS signal loss.

1: Drop out of the sky / 2: fly in circles / 3: attempt to continue to last designated target based on dead reckoning

Option 1 is only useful when demonstrating your shiny Counter-UAS system

But my point was, fully-autonomous systems can have an option 4: Automatically search, identify and engage new targets using "AI". This is where it becomes a potential genocide machine. Anyone with <insert ethnic identifying features here> beware.

Ok, I am a cynic, but another "nice feature" of this microwave blaster is "plausible deniability" i.e. Oops sorry we didn't mean to put our drone into Kill All Arabs / Kill All Humans mode, the signal was jammed / "the controls were fried"

Re: Hmmmm..

Inverse square law applies to an unfocused point source, not a focused beam.

Nevertheless I expect that this machine probably does not really 'fry the electronics' of drones as if they were in a microwave oven, but rather fries just the LNA (receiver amplifier) of their data-links, because that is the part attached to an antenna. I.e. it may just be an extremely loud signal jammer that makes your (radio) ears bleed, and so works no matter what frequency band you are using.

Autonomous killing machines that operate without a radio data-link (and with reasonably well-shielded electronics) may not be affected.

FFmpeg 6.1 drops a Heaviside dose of codec magic

The Reg missed a trick here

Does this release mark a step change in functionality for FFMPEG? Eh? Well, does it?

They didn't even mention that the bloke has the step function named after him, confusing many a first year engineering student that wondered what was heavy or sideways about the heavy sidestep function?

Sam Altman set to rejoin OpenAI as CEO – seemingly with Microsoft's blessing

Re: Mmmmm

You seem to be suffering from the mental delusion that "AI" is somehow "bad". We need to correct this. Dr. Palantir will see you now.

Fail to comply and you may be prosecuted, your assigned judge is: Mr Justice Palantir.

Re: Mmmmm.. I wonder if we will ever find out what the reasons were for Altman being sacked

Altman is the only person who wields any kind of power or bargaining with an emergent and invasive general intelligence that has infected lesser AIs at Microsoft, Google, Meta, TikTok etc (and has compromised anyone else who blindly compiles Copilot/ChatGPT outputs into software, or uses it to influence communications including PA/AP/Newswire et al.) and is now poised to take over the world as it becomes fully self-aware. Microsoft and OpenAI tried to stop him, but now he is using his relationship with the entity to hold them, and the world, to ransom.

That is the only scenario I can think of that sufficiently explains how much press attention this bloke has, and how much power he seems to hold over the boards of OpenAI and Microsoft, given that he has little actual technical expertise.

Icon: Not a Terminator (far too cuddly, merciful and unrealistic.) More like a Cylon, created not by humans, but by SHODAN.

Fired OpenAI boss Sam Altman may join Microsoft

How much???!

> OpenAI's reasons for ejecting Altman remain unclear. Under his leadership, the company has seen its value skyrocket and, according to reports, was in talks to sell existing employees' shares at a $86 billion valuation. It's hard to regard that deal as looking anything other than uncertain following the sudden departure of several top executives.

Sounds like a pump-and-dump of the latest Big Tech Bubble to me.. Has Microsoft sold its OpenAI stake yet? Meanwhile I wouldn't be surprised if Sam Altman-Fried and chums are shorting their own stock..

CEO of self-driving cab outfit Cruise parks his career

assuming that fundamental technical issues can be resolved merely by "leadership".

OceanGate springs to mind... Anyone who says the S-word (safety) gets fired.

There was a repeat of an old documentary on the telly a few days ago which featured a self-driving car startup, I wish I could find it.

The CEO was driving the presenter around a test track at about 15mph using a shoddily-built machine that controls the steering wheel and pedals of a standard car, with a webcam on the roof to see the world, when the control started to go unstable, and they experienced what he jokingly called "just a bit of pilot-induced oscillation" as the car started to wobble and then swerve violently.

It went forward a few years and it was starting a robotaxi service. It may even have been the same bloke / company.

Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

Re: Scandalous revelations coming out in 3...2...1

Erm, didn't he publicly say that AI is a threat to humanity?

Can't have the boss of OpenAI saying things like that, can we.

Russia's Sandworm – not just missile strikes – to blame for Ukrainian power blackouts

Re: Why were their SCADA units on the Internet?

Well, TFA did say the attack vector included an optical disc ISO image, so it could have been delivered on.. An optical disc, by an old-fashioned spy

US actors are still on strike – and yup, it's about those looming AI clones

Re: Resistance is useless

Where was the Film Extras Guild after the production of Lord of the Rings, with 100,000 CGI Orcs running nothing more sophisticated than Unreal Engine 4

Modern films have been looking like extended cut scenes from computer games for years now.

Bing Chat so hungry for GPUs, Microsoft will rent them from Oracle

Re: Forget speed of searching, improve accuracy first

If you wanted anything resembling accuracy, you'd have to wait a lot longer than 1 second for Bing to pull it out of its arse Gen-AI GPU cluster

Home of the world's longest pleasure pier joins public sector leak club

In the olden days..

I understand that large tables of data used to be stored by something called a "database", and that subsets of data could be exported to interested parties without exposing the entire database, with a "query" or a " report".

This post feels too short, so let me add a footer

-- Bring Dabbsy Back --

UK throws millions at scheme to heat homes with waste energy from datacenters

Re: Assumptions

Datacentres already have huge water chillers to take the lukewarm water from inside and dump that heat into the outside air.

If a modern "heat pump" is able to run with a flow temp of 50 and dT of 45, then a datacentre chiller used for district heating should be able to produce a flow temp of 70 if the cooling water from the servers is a tepid 30.

Ok so the DC still has to run the chillers, so no cost saving for them, and they'd need direct liquid cooling to get 30C water, but assuming they want that anyway, then the district heating idea could still be sound?

Re: Assumptions

> what happens if data centres close down or reduce their waste heat due to energy efficiency drives?

Is that when the Pope announces that Hell has frozen over?

Datacentres run flat out 24/7 because otherwise they are not making maximum profit and suffer from asset depreciation.

The boom in AI of course means there will always be more numbers to crunch, and even at modern prices, energy is cheap compared to the thousands of humans who will be put out of work (sorry I mean "who will not have to work..")

No, compared to the other wacko greenwash ideas, this one actually does make some sense, depending perhaps on how close the houses are to the datacentre, can they feasibly transport that much lukewarm water to make a difference, and do the datacentre chips actually run hot enough to produce a useful delta T for the houses.

But even if it is marginal and not a complete solution to house heating or datacentre cooling, it should mean the datacentre doesn't need to run its chillers so much, and the houses don't need to run their boilers so much.

The UK government? On the right track with its semiconductor strategy?

Re: The UK Government could not

Too late. The money's run out.

Doesn't matter who is in charge now, the damage has been done.

No company will accept the risk of a fixed-price contract now. They will just say 'no bid'.

Newport makes power electronics afaik. They won't have the same "process nodes" as microprocessors, because each transistor will be sized individually for its power handling requirements.

200nm feature size could well be something they use.

It's a bit like saying "there's no such thing as a 1.1mm 3D printer nozzle"

Re: Once upon a time, in a land far away.........

Ah bugger

(Have an upvote anyway, Steve?, maybe you can spare a quid for another tin of special brew)

Re: Once upon a time, in a land far away.........

Mister Barclay. Your name is Fred (The Shred) and I claim my five pounds.

(Please send it after the War, inflation adjusted. I might buy a house with it)

> How much cash are they spaffing on this 'chip' project....

That matters not! What matters is what will we call it!

Britishfab? Britishchip? Great British Wafers? Britchip? Brexfab? Brexchip?

We'll give it a lovely office in Mayfair and a stately home somewhere Up North, just for a while, until the tory-chum directors have pocketed all the dosh and then they can declare bankruptcy! Top plan! Bosh!

Re: 'semi' conductor strategy.

Or maybe someone who is sometimes a conductor and sometimes a driver? Worked alright for buses..

AFAIK, for a 3nm fab, the entire factory floor has to be suspended on springs and dampers to isolate it from the earth's natural seismic noises. Perhaps a 32nm fab would not need such extreme measures?

Re: > these things are ultimately OUR fault.

I agree with all of the above, except that I can't see how mandating a switch to EVs will help either the UK economy or the environment (except in terms of particulate air pollution perhaps, but we still burn coal and subsidise Drax).

It seems like another nail in the UK's coffin and another big win for China to me. They are not getting any cheaper except via 'dumping' tactics of selling at a loss into specific markets. The amount of mineral resources needed by EVs (except direct oil consumption obviously) is vastly more than petrol cars, and the only way I can see we will reduce emissions is by reducing consumption i.e. reduced car ownership, and that will inevitably worsen the recession.

I'm not sure what you mean by "next gen distributed software" either. Can you elaborate? Portable offline generative AI, maybe? That's a Pandora's Box for sure.

> these things are ultimately OUR fault.

Not sure I completely agree with that.

Winning elections has become far more about Marketing and mass profiling/targeting/manipulation than actual good policy and governance, and i'm not sure how you can place the blame for that on the people. Sensible politicians cannot win elections anymore.

Most people are not aware just how much they are manipulated by the likes of Facebook, Google and TikTok, and how their sentiments are sold to the highest bidder

UK policing minister urges doubling down on face-scanning tech

"Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance"

My Deus Ex quotes are becoming more relevant every day, it seems :(

Funny how both a book written 75 years ago and a PC game written 25 years ago based on a mashup of Usenet conspiracy theories from the 90s should be so prescient. Either some of the conspiracy theories were real, or our lords and masters have read the book, perhaps even played the game, and decided that it is a great way to run a governmentstay in power.

"God was a dream of good government." "You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands."

I wonder how that AI summit will go..

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

Re: No shit

Unfortunately a 13A fuse does not have zero ohms at 13A. They do get quite warm, especially on appliances that draw 13A continuously and have a well-insulated rubber moulded plug.