Posts by Martin an gof

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Re: Yearly tasks....

the presenter almost read out the time before the 3pm news as being “almost 10am”

I think even our mostly quite dim and engrossed in their own thoughts presenters would have noticed the difference between 3pm and 10am! In our case, changing the time would have involved disconnecting the serial line from the clock (carried on standard audio-grade shielded twisted pair IIRC) and then adjusting the clock in the usual manner.

It's a while back, but it's possible that the AA in the studio movement was only for backup and the power actually came up the serial line from the central unit too (I don't remember the clocks being plugged in to the mains, but my memory is pretty rubbish). Looking back I don't remember changing the AAs very often, but then given that we're talking about four or five clocks, me only being there for six years or so and the AAs in clocks at home often lasting two or three years, even if they were entirely battery powered at most I'd have done fewer than 20 battery swaps in my time there, assuming my boss didn't do any himself.

M.

Re: Yearly tasks....

Seems like the systems in the story were synched directly from the radio time signal services. I would have thought even back in Novell Netware's heyday crystal controlled precision time sources would have been de rigeur and I imagine those precision sources would have been optionally synched from the wireless time services.

In my radio station days the (analogue) clocks in the studios had fairly bog standard Quartz movements, but they were synchronised back to a laser-trimmed unit in the central racks, which was itself synchronised to MSF and optionally (I think) DCF. No NTP or GPS (for proles) back in those days. The racks unit had a Lead-acid backup battery kept floating, but the studio clocks just ran from bog standard AAs if I remember correctly. In constant use, a clock slowing due to loss of synch or stopping for a dead battery would have been noticed pretty quickly and reported in no uncertain terms to Engineering the first time a DJ with half a million listeners crashed the IRN bulletin at o'clock!

As for TOA, it seems odd that if the servers stayed running, the external clock stopping would have caused their internal clocks to reset...

M.

Meta goes to war with FTC over right to profit from kids' personal data

Re: Age-based restrictions are problematic

I understand the motivation. But how is this to be implemented?

...

If age is to be verified ... how?

Simple. Forbid all monetisation of data. Make Facebook (and similar) subscription-only and see whether people think it's valuable enough to pay.

M.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: I AM clicking on the screen!

And of course, while Richer Sounds specialised in supplying DVD players which were "region free" for a couple of quid more than the price of the region locked version, other players had official or unofficial methods of swapping regions manually using some arcane combination of buttons and power cycles. Problem was that many of these players had a limited number of swaps which could be carried out before locking themselves to the last region. Often it was as few as 5 or 6 swaps.

I do find it interesting that if you buy a DVD these days (well, the cheaper ones rather than just-released), more than you might expect are "region zero" - that is, will play in any player, and while DVD had six regions in addition to zero, BluRay reduced that to three plus its equivalent of zero.

M.

Another AI image

What the heck is going on here then?

M.

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

Back when* the norm was one or two sockets per room (at most)...

More recently than you might imagine. The house I grew up in was built in 1967. The ring fed one single socket in each of the four bedrooms upstairs, and three of those four sockets had a spur running to a single socket downstairs; that is three single sockets for the whole downstairs - apart from the kitchen, which had two single sockets (fridge and washer) and a cooker point with socket (but a gas kettle) - of a large family house. Oh yes, there were also two radial circuits (or maybe it was one) supplying one fused outlet in the dining area and one in the hall, goodness knows what for.

The first owner of the house, which was built without central heating, decided to fit radiators downstairs in about 1970. One of the radiators was placed directly over one of the three sockets, but that was mitigated (slightly) because he also ran a cable from that socket out to the garage.

In other words, for a large chunk of the 1970s and 1980s I lived in a house with just two accessible mains sockets downstairs. You can guess how many three-way-plugs we had, later extension leads etc.

By way of a contrast, current house was built to regulations in force in 2019 and the Onsite Guide has some very interesting recommendations for numbers of sockets. Our smallish living room has a total of eight double sockets, for example.

As for socket safety covers, many years ago we were marked down when we had #1 sprog because we refused to fit socket covers. That was merely the beginning of our not-terribly-good relationship with the health visitor.

And finally - socket dimensions. I thought there was something in the BS about these? I keep getting annoyed at extension leads where there isn't enough plastic "above" the earth socket to prevent someone putting a plug in upside-down. Standard wall sockets have plenty.

M.

Re: Other folks' DIY

run pipes where they should be (in the centre of the joists, not notched into the top)

For future reference - if you should be doing any work requiring new joists - open web joists are your friend. Downside is less ability to adjust them on site if your measurements aren't quite right, but apart from that they solve a heck of a lot of problems.

I always found it frustrating, when electrician-ing, that the regulations (in the UK) had very strict rules about where and how to run cables (regarding joists this stipulated where across the length of the joist it was acceptable to drill, what size hole was allowed and absolutely forbade notching) but plumbers seemingly got away with murder.

M.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: 2G is perfect for this

my experience here in the US

Also worth pointing out that 2G technologies in the US are substantially different to those in use in most of the rest of the world, which also has an effect on robustness and propagation. For example, I believe that the system used in the US suffers from "breathing" effects which GSM (rest of world) doesn't - as the number of subscribers in a particular cell increases, reception at the margins reduces. It's possible that as more people migrated to 3G over time, loading on 2G cells reduced, thus improving reception at the margins and giving the perception of a more robust connection to remaining users.

The frequency ranges themselves are not that different; there were allocations around 850MHz (US and some others) and 900MHz (rest of world) and 1900MHz (US) and 1800MHz (RoW). The first 3G allocations were around 2100MHz IIRC and later a lot of clearance was done between 700MHz and 850MHz (UHF TV bands as part of the "digital dividend") and some 3G and 4G services were put on those bands with 5G to follow.

M.

Re: 2G is perfect for this

It should never be phased out

Does anyone actually have firm plans to phase out 2G? 3G, yes - EE keeps sending me texts telling me I need to upgrade my phone as it's 3G-only, despite the fact that I actually swapped it out about six months ago, got a new SIM from EE and (after a short period where it seemed to be restricted to 4G) have been using 5G ever since. I get the feeling that it's entirely possible that some networks will just leave 2G hanging around until the equipment dies :-)

M.

Corner cutting of nuclear proportions as duo admit to falsifying safety tests 29 times

Re: How did they find out?

Honestly, for verification test equipment like this, calibration probably doesn't add anything

Once upon a time I was a Part P registered electrician and so I had to have and maintain my own test equipment for things like loop impedance, insulation resistance, RCD workings. Every year it went off to be calibrated and came back with a printed report which essentially said "within stated tolerances, no adjustment necessary". I think there was a very small tweak on one instrument once.

When I stopped with the electrician-ing I kept the instruments and they mostly lived in the coat cupboard in the hall, but also spent some time in the attic and a garage.

When I was wiring up our house rebuild, I found a local electrician who was willing to keep an eye on me and spend a couple of days testing and documenting the system. I dug out my old kit, which at this point hadn't been calibrated for perhaps twelve or thirteen years and used it as I went along, more as a sanity checker than anything else, reasoning that even if it couldn't be assumed to give me an accurate reading for something, it would at least give me a close enough figure to spot glaring errors like swapped or missing connections, damaged cables and the like. It didn't spot anything obvious other than one RCBO (combined RCD/MCB) which didn't pass the trip-time test.

When the real electrician came to make his measurements I was pleased to learn that his, on his newer, calibrated equipment, were pretty much the same as mine, certainly well within typical tolerances.

My testing kit wasn't exactly state-of-the-art when I bought it, and although at heart it was from Fluke, it was their cheaper, Robin brand. Good going.

M.

How did they find out?

Did something fail which shouldn't have?

Just as importantly, why did it take so long for this to come to light?

M.

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Re: Semi-wise

Worked in a radio station where the loudspeakers in the office had a switch... to swap from the FM service to the AM service. It was sort of mandatory for staff to be aware of what we were broadcasting.

Us "engineers" (both of us) down in the basement had our own HiFi in the transmission racks because my boss wasn't a fan of the types of music we shovelled out and would rather bring his Prog Rock CDs in. Or occasionally Michael Nyman.

M.

Hence why in overregulated-Germany smoke detectors are NOT mandatory for the kitchen

Smoke detectors are not mandatory in a UK (domestic) kitchen either (I suspect also commercial, but I don't know), and advice is to fit a Rate of Heat Rise detector instead. There are also types of smoke detector which are less susceptible to cooking fumes or bathroom steam (I think the optical type is better than the ionisation type). Then again, apart from the RHR in the kitchen, we have optical detectors throughout and - I dunno - one of them must have been faulty or something because we had regular false alarms, often in the middle of the night. I took to disconnecting them one by one. All I have to do now is buy a compatible replacement (they are interlinked). The little switch in the utility room with the button that silences all except the alarm which triggered was very handy, except that in most cases the triggering was obviously transient because pushing the button caused all the alarms to silence :-/

In Wales, of course, new builds now have mandatory sprinkler systems too. It's amazing how many people believe that it only takes a match to set one off, and that once one goes, they all go.

M.

Re: So, shoot the messenger is still well and alive

As the owner of a Berlingo with AdBlue I'll have to have a good scout around for a secret tank of special sauce.

Had the emissions light come on in the Berlingo a year or so ago - but not until about 20 miles after I'd noticed a huge plume of vapour from the rear end and hastily pulled over, expecting it to be a blown gasket or something. Stepping out of the car and finding my eyes watering with the smell of urea I reasoned the thing was safe to drive after all. Then the light came on along with the little warning "take the car to the garage now, or it will refuse to start in x hundred miles". Took it to the bloke who usually does our cars who said "known fault - had one in last week - it's the AdBlue injector. It falls apart and dumps the entire tank into the exhaust in one go". Bosch (IIRC) marked "Citroen" was quite literally twice the price of the same Bosch part without the marking.

And then, a few thousand miles later, the timing chain snapped. 50-ish thousand miles and the timing chain (not a belt, mark you) just disintegrates. Again a "known fault" but this time Citroen have admitted it's a manufacturing fault and repaired the car - though the story behind getting to that stage is long and convoluted. Frankly I think it should be the subject of a recall, so if anyone here owns a Stellantis vehicle with 1.5dCi AdBlue engine, post about 2018 I think, it might be worth asking if it's one of the affected models before you end up with a bag of scrap rattling around in your sump only to find that they've withdrawn the free repair service.

M.

Signal shoots down zero-day rumors, finds 'no evidence' of device takeover

Re: “turn off features that you aren't using”?

Not at all familiar with messaging apps other than Signal, but at least two of those three reasons don't apply to Signal. My main reason for turning off link previews is because it uses additional data, but even that's becoming less of an issue these days.

Personally, on Signal, we leave link previews on but we have various settings for media - videos don't download by default when on mobile data, for example.

55-inch Jamboard and app ecosystem tossed into the Google graveyard

Re: Another Solution In Search Of A Problem

a traditional whiteboard or, worse, a blackboard

Leaving aside the dust problem, the one advantage a blackboard has over a whiteboard is longevity. Give it a couple of years in a typical classroom and a whiteboard goes grey with all the pen which doesn't quite wipe off any more, and if some idiot cleaner tries to use a "product" to clean it up and damages the glossy surface (granted, that's sometimes necessary when a different idiot uses a permanent marker instead of dry-wipe), it's even worse. When a blackboard (traditional or roller) starts to go grey, give it a wash with plain water. If that doesn't work, the traditional type can be repainted and back in use in a few hours (or be a regular summer-break job for the school caretaker).

And don't get me started on the way that Epson seemed to have cornered the (UK) market in classroom projectors with their "lucky if the LCD module lasts three years" units, when DLP would have been much more robust... hopefully less of an issue now they have mostly ditched discharge lamps for lasers.

M.

Israel and Italy have cheapest mobile data out of 237 countries

Re: Who is the UK provider selling at $0.08 ?

Smarty (an MVNO owned by Three) has a couple of deals at the moment too. Freshers' fairs are currently handing out £15/month for "unlimited data, calls and texts", "no speed caps" and "unrestricted tethering" so in theory that's near enough £0.00 per GB I suppose :-) (it's their normal £20/mo package discounted for 12 months). They also do 200GB @£17 which works out at 8½p*, which I know isn't quite the same as 8¢ but it's close.

The only real problem with these 30-day continuous credit card authority contracts is that they don't include "extras" such as calls to premium rate numbers which you would pay in arrears with a conventional contract (with Smarty you make an additional payment ahead of time but we're not in the habit of calling premium rate numbers). Roaming is an issue with nearly all contracts these days it seems. Gone are the days when you didn't have to think about taking your phone on your trip to Europe, other perhaps than making sure it was activated...

M.

*Smarty** also does a 10% group discount, so if you are able to group your phone with at least one other, that £17 becomes £15.30 meaning the effective price per GB reduces to just over 7½p

**Not a particular advocate of Smarty - it works for some of the phones in this household but we also have phones with The Phone Co-Op (MVNO using Orange), Orange and GiffGaff (O2)***

***The spread is because of a holiday some years back when we realised that the three phones we had back then were all using Orange infrastructure, and Orange had no coverage at the holiday house. However, one of the other networks did have a signal because the phones had "Emergency Calls Only" displayed. Since then we've tried to diversify

Re: Market pricing factors

Having four different providers...

I have some bad news for you: Vodafone Three deal to create UK's largest mobile firm. I'm a bit worried about this one because Three's own-brand MVNO (Smarty) has some quite good 30-day deals while Vodafone's (VOXI) really doesn't. With a couple of phones on Smarty, I'm worried I'm going to be looking at price hikes over the next few years.

And, of course, it's only a few years ago (well, 12 or so) that Orange (EE) merged with T-mobile; before then we had five MNOs (originally, two (Vodafone & Cellnet (O2)), two more came along with 2G (Orange and One-2-One (T-Mobile)) and then Three was added when 3G launched).

And yet there are still areas with poor or no coverage. There may be change on that front though, as the MNOs have agreed (or are in the process of agreeing?) equipment-sharing deals to put infill transmitters at sites set up for the new Emergency Services Network, which is run by EE.

M.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Re: Cleaning Printers that are full of dust

we chartered a couple of helicopters on stand-by incase we needed to get engineers or kit there in a hurry

Wouldn't it have been simpler to send a couple of engineers down in a camper van a couple of days ahead of time and supply them with deckchairs, dark glasses and a 'fridge full of cold drinks?

M.

Re: Dirt

not a single one ever seemed to fail

Or, just possibly, at $5 even if it broke after a couple of months, the purchaser wouldn't bother bringing it back and would just buy a new one so you'd never know the actual failure rate?

M.

Re: A 1980s minicomputer at the bottom of a mine ?

Wasn't RS-485 an option on a minicomputer serial output? RS-232 is single-ended and voltage-based so susceptible to interference while RS-485 (or a similar protocol like, erm, 422?) uses balanced lines and is capable of driving cables over a kilometer I believe. Current-loop based signalling can work over even greater distances and I can't imagine it wasn't an option for a minicomputer.

Then again, as someone with a very distant ancestor who was found guilty of filling his Cornish Tin ingots with a (cheaper) Lead (I think) core, penny pinching in the Tin mining industry obviously has a long history!

M.

Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

What would Sophie Say?

Or Steve, or Hermann, or Chris?

M.

If you like to play along with the illusion of privacy, smart devices are a dumb idea

Re: Why would a Washing Machine require my Date of Birth ...

teach the children how to use the washing machine

Or in my case, the record player. Rather than making my dad's pride-and-joy off limits, teach 4 year-old me how to set an LP going properly so I could listen to Johnny Morris reading the Railway Series. Fortunately this particular unit was "fully automatic" so no real danger of me doing something nasty with the tone arm but the same principle applies I think. In later years, we did the same with ours and the VHS player (etc.).

M.

I'll see your data loss and raise you a security policy violation

Re: No local storage allowed ?

Attachment size limits...

M.

Re: No local storage allowed ?

A problem does arise though when IT doesn't consider how users need to use their machines. Blocking USB ports, for example, is all very well, but if I need to transfer data in and out of my machine to third parties? Oh, you've blocked me from using WeTransfer (etc.) as well, and Sharepoint only allows users with local logins. How do you suggest I get this (very important, needed for a meeting in 30 minutes) file from this external contractor onto our network, eh?

Just one example - there are plenty of other scenarios with similar outcomes. Company-wide removal of deskphones and installation of softphones? My computer has no speakers, no camera, no microphone... how's that gonna work? There are many occasions where the "one size fits all" computer really doesn't; the joy lies in finding an IT department which recognises that :-)

M.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Re: Mountain rescue

Devon based RAC patrol being assigned a job in Orkney

It's for a different reason, but around here (let's say Cardiff) systems often tell us our nearest "something" is on the other side of the Severn, perhaps in Weston Super Mare or Minehead. People over there probably get the same in reverse.

Relative was looking for a second-hand car recently, had a shortlist, asked for vehicles within 30 miles and probably about a half of the top search results were 30 miles in a straight line, significantly further by road due to the whole big-river-estuary-in-the-way thing.

M.

And as reported here fairly recently, so does Samsung and others are also looking at it. The iPhone version (as I understand it) only allows texts to the emergency services and requires a subscription after two (three?) years while the Samsung version allows texts to any number but only a certain amount each month and requires a subscription much earlier (from day one?). There are also Bluetooth-connected devices which can add similar functions to any smartphone - I looked one up for a relative fairly recently.

M.

natural language is constantly self correcting

But w3w doesn't seem to take advantage.

For an example of (mostly) well thought-out resilient natural language, one need look no further than the phonetic alphabet used over noisy links. Compare with the British version used during WWII and consider why Able Baker Charlie Dog was changed to Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta (etc.) Wikipedia

M.

Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

Re: Just saw this morning

.thetimes.co.uk

Paywalled, of course, though the top of the image *just* poked above the "give us your details" banner so I was able to "save image as".

For those who can't be bothered, a hand of cards is shown, 8S, KC, AH, JD with "joker" on top being Shapps, holding a rifle in a somewhat incompetent manner and asking "which bit's the trigger?"

HTH

M.

Re: Question

I have always said that

Isn't that © DNA? (quote 33).

M.

Re: Question

[contd page 94]

Have an upvote for Private Eye reference.

M.

China's top EV battery maker announced a breakthrough, but top boffin isn't convinced

Tesla already had the idea

If the story you are referring to is the one I remember reading many, many years ago... I'll keep an eye open for TV aerials with wiggling fingers :-)

M.

IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak

Re: Dad Jokes

Not sure about that. I had occasion to fit a radio mic to someone at work the other day. I was met with:

How many sound engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?

One-two, one-two, one-two

as if I thought it would be funny.

Even the children who had arrived early for the performance looked blank.

M.

Re: You don't have to be from IBM or middle-aged

In fact, as far as I can tell, there are only two marginally non-awful jokes on that list.

Someone was on the radio the other day (or maybe it was the BBC News website) moaning that the way this "competition" is run is that comedians - or more likely their publicists - submit the jokes a couple of weeks ahead of the festival itself and they are judged "offline" as it were. This favours artists who script their entire performance and disadvantages those who are better at reacting to events on-the-fly or ad-libbing. It also disadvantages new comedians who are not familiar with the way things work, and especially those without publicists to work for them.

The other thing the competition is for, and arguably what it is really for, is not to help up-and-coming comedians, it's to get the name of the sponsor onto all the news websites, newspapers and TV and radio "and finally" segments.

M.

South Korea's biggest mobile telco says 5G has failed to deliver on its promise

Re: 5G Sucks!

a way to force the radio back to 4G

On my phone running Lineage OS, Settings... Network and Internet... SIMs (tap your SIM), scroll down to Preferred Network Type, get acronym overload :-)

M.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: Not holding my breath

Last time I looked, the only real reason to have a black box fitted was if you would otherwise not be able to get insurance. The discounts on offer for voluntarily fitting boxes seemed to be absolutely minimal. They don't just log your speed, they also log acceleration (in the proper sense) as an analogue of your driving style and hours of use. So they won't just calculate your premium on how many times you do 35 in a 30 zone or 80mph on the motorway (or 40mph for that matter - can be just as dangerous), but also on whether you are regularly driving at midnight, doing extra long journeys without a break and in particular how hard you use your right foot, especially if it seems you are often reacting suddenly to events in front of you, rather than anticipating them from a distance.

Disclosure - I do know someone who could only get insurance with a box, and after six months (IIRC) with the box that insurance company also withdrew the insurance because the data showed a very poor driving style. This person has recently moved to London for work and has decided they can manage without a car.

M.

Re: Not holding my breath

That's a village, not a city.

Define?

In the UK at least, all "cities" are in fact lots of "villages" or "towns" which have gradually been joined up by infill development. In London for example you might live in Hackney. Hackney is a village (or town) in its own right, and is highly likely to have pretty much all the things you need within a 15 minute walk or cycle journey. Next along is Stratford or Islington. You wouldn't travel from Hackney to Stratford to go to a corner shop when you have two or three closer ones, but the residents of Stratford are equally happy with those near them (and are lucky to have a huge shopping centre too, which you can get to very easily by public transport or by car if you must).

M.

Re: Not holding my breath

one size fits the affluent parts of London (etc.)

But you are not arguing against 15 minute cities there - you are arguing against badly-planned housing developments, and privatised bus companies refusing to run non-profitable routes. I completely agree. The whole 15MC idea is a planning idea, it's an aspiration, not an implementation! They are not going to stop you travelling more than 15 minutes from your house in the middle of nowhereville, starting next month, but if a locality takes up the idea of a 15 minute city, they might encourage a corner shop to open nearby, they might (yeah, fat chance) re-route a bus or open a new route so that you can access it, they might install cycle lanes or better-lit walkways, segregated from cars and vans and lorries.

Two examples.

A huge new housing estate was built the other side of town from me. Yes, there were busses, but they were on an odd kind of in-and-out route because said housing estate only had two or three entrances and they were all on the same "side" (a later - almost as large development nearby has only one entrance!). An older building between the estate and the town was being redeveloped; most of its grounds went for new housing while the characterful building itself was turned into a community facility. The promise was that as the new new houses would "infill" between the old new houses and the town, it would now be possible to run a through bus service on a circular route which would be much more convenient.

Did they do it? Of course not! The road that could have joined the two developments instead became a couple of extra houses.

I live near a major cycle route. In theory I could get to my nearest town shops by bike in about 10 minutes, and to another town about 10 minutes beyond that if I use the cycle route. There is also a village with a smaller selection of shops a 15 minute cycle ride in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, the nearest "access point" for the cycle route is about a mile away from my house along a busy - and distinctly bike-unfriendly - road. I've done it, but every time the children want to do it I cringe and they often end up walking their bikes along the pavement for at least some of the way. If some solution to this problem could be found (for example, it might be possible to create a closer access point) then we would do much more of our shopping by bike, effectively turning my little hamlet into a "15 minute village". Instead I end up taking the car and coming back with two or three bags of shopping, which does seem a bit of a waste.

M.

LG's $1,000 TV-in-a-briefcase is unlikely to travel much further than the garden

Re: Students?

The BBC archive is VAST. but even we licence holders only get to see a tine, tiny percentage of it

The BBC also has a mandate to make as much, commercially, from their archive as they can. If it were all available all the time that would be nigh-on impossible. Think of the fees they must rake in from all those "clip shows" which seem to infest the airwaves - often of non-BBC channels! The museum I work for has a general policy of not including BBC archive in temporary exhibitions unless there is a compelling reason, simply because obtaining the rights to do so is so convoluted and expensive.

There are snippets of programmes I'd like to obtain for personal reasons too, though these days it's not always the BBC which holds the rights. Two tiny examples. Firstly, there is a very small news item from BBC Wales Today in the early 1980s where I feature for just a few seconds. It would be great to have that in my personal archive. More recently, my children were involved in an hour-long (might have been more) musical production for the Urdd Eisteddfod some years ago. I know that it was recorded because S4C showed a few minutes of clips of it on the day, and different clips later in a highlights package. We managed to record some on our personal cameras, but it's not quite the same.

I'm sure many people have similar experiences.

M.

Re: Students?

We have two state-owned[1] broadcast companies: the BBC and Channel 4

Channel 4 is not really state-owned, but is partly state-funded. Not forgetting S4C which is (now) largely funded by the licence fee too, and for which the BBC produces a lot of programming. It does seem a little odd that a (very small) part of the licence fee paid by every TV owner in the UK goes to fund S4C, which is a station aimed mainly at Wales (interesting parallel with BBC Alba), but the previous situation where S4C was funded from general taxation was essentially the same I suppose.

M.

Students?

Given that the get-out clause for needing to buy a TV licence as a student living away from home is to view on a device with internal batteries, that could potentially be a niche.

Except that $1,000 buys a lot of TV licences!

(or a decent laptop)

M.

Google 'wiretapped' tax websites with visitor traffic trackers, lawsuit claims

Re: The Register uses Google Analytics among other tools to keep track of readership size

Haven't they just signed a new data transfer agreement?

There is also the question of how - or indeed whether - these things work if the viewer of a website is running a JS or ad-blocker. For a site with a technical readership such as El Reg this must surely skew the analytics sommat awful.

And El Reg has possibly better ways to track anyway - those of us who comment have accounts and many of us will be logged in across several devices - so what is the point of Google Analytics?

M.

Tesla knew Autopilot weakness killed a driver – and didn't fix it, engineers claim

can tell if I'm on a dual carriageway

Problem is that in the UK a "dual carriageway" (basically a fast road with a central divider - not always a fence, sometimes just a verge - which is not designated as a "motorway"; green signs instead of blue) can have plenty of cross-traffic. Many dual carriageways have gaps in the central reservation to allow traffic to turn across the opposite carriageway in order to access a side road, and even where they don't have these, most dual carriageways do have at-grade junctions (usually roundabouts) which by definition carry cross-traffic.

In the UK, the only (fairly) safe way to assume no cross traffic would be only to attempt to activate on a motorway where (barring roadworks) you can never cross the central reservation and all junctions (with very few exceptions, usually at the start or end of a motorway) are grade-separated.

Surprise! This is exactly what seems to be happening.

(and may I join my surprise to those who can't understand why trailers in the US don't have fences to prevent cars going under?)

M.

Re: Risk tolerance

(downvote armour donned - long rant ahead)

If I'm doing 70mph on (bog standard) cruise control on a UK motorway and pull out in good time in order to pass someone doing 60mph (a lorry for e.g.), it is not wrong. It is dangerous to get too close behind the driver in front (I can't see the road ahead), and lorries often have huge blindspots (can I see both his mirrors?) Pulling out in good time also means that I don't have to disengage cruise control and can time it so that I don't get "trapped" behind said slower vehicle.

Now, if traffic comes up behind me in (usually) the middle lane and gets cross because I'm - shock! horror! - driving at the speed limit, I have two reactions. First - you do not have a god-given right to be doing 80 or 90mph on the motorway or to force me out of your way so that you can do so. Second (in most cases) there is a perfectly good third lane available. Dumb drivers who tailgate me at 70mph and then speed off as soon as I pull in, without considering the free lane to their right are just, erm, dumb.

I will not pass back into the left lane until the vehicle I've just overtaken is a decent distance behind. What seems to annoy dumb drivers more than that though is that if this all happens around a junction I will often stay in the middle lane until I have passed the junction. Why? Well, driving the same stretches of motorway allows me to predict where traffic is likely to be joining. Very little of this traffic will be doing 70mph at the end of the slip road and it's far safer to stay in the middle lane on the expectation of joining traffic - obviously at quiet times or for lesser-used junctions this rule doesn't usually apply.

Here's a good one that is either eejit driving or adaptive cruise control at its worst.

There is a section of motorway I drive where a busy junction (lots of leaving and joining traffic) which has seen a couple of nasty accidents in the last few years (at least one of which was fatal to both occupants of the only vehicle involved) is followed about three miles later by the left lane "peeling off", leaving the motorway to continue with two lanes.

A few weeks ago, as I approached this junction in the left lane (just a reminder, this is the UK), a car overtook me. It pulled into the lane just ahead of me and behind a row of traffic I was preparing to pass - most of it slowing down in order to leave the motorway*. As the car which had just overtaken me was also slowing (he'd presumably been somewhere north of 75mph when he passed, and as I was now beginning to catch him up he must have slowed down to 65mph or less - I assumed that as he hadn't pulled out to overtake the slower cars he was also going to exit), I pulled out and went past both him and the cars in front of him, nearly all of which subsequently left the motorway. The car which had just passed me pulled out and slotted into the middle lane behind me, just a little too close for comfort. Got that prediction wrong then.

As is my habit, I stayed out to the end of the junction and once I'd cleared some slower traffic which joined, I pulled back into the left lane expecting my tailgater to put his foot down and disappear into the distance.

Oh no! Not a chance! The car stayed more-or-less where it was, partly in my (small) blindspot, meaning I couldn't (that is, wouldn't feel safe to) pull out in front of him.

This carried on for the next couple of miles until we got to the point where I usually start thinking about pulling in to the middle lane to carry on with the motorway. Ok, so he was playing silly blighters, I was on my way to work and not up for a fight, so I tapped the cruise control down by first 2mph, thinking he would slink past and I could pull out behind, then 3mph when it appeared as if he was slowing down too. He wouldn't go past.

Flipping eejit.

My car isn't a fast one, but it can go when it wants to and I wasn't anticipating being in a race, so I signalled out, kept the thing in top gear and reasonably briskly accelerated. Blow me if the car in my blindspot doesn't keep up! By the time I got to 85mph I realised I wasn't going to win this one (not one for speeding, car probably can't top 100mph anyway), so with barely any other traffic around us I actually used the brakes (rarely need to do that on the motorway) which either the eejit driver wasn't expecting or his eejit cruise control couldn't cope with, and managed to slot in behind him before the lane I was in actually left the motorway. In passing me he was making some very odd hand gestures that I couldn't recognise as being rude, but weren't obviously apologetic ("sorry, I can't work my car properly") either.

He then went sailing off at a good 5mph, maybe 10mph faster than the 71mph I returned to.

Left me very perplexed. Was he "cross" at me for re-overtaking him at the previous junction and was trying to force me to do something stupid? Or was it a case of adaptive cruise control latching on to the only other vehicle within range - mine, even though I was in a different lane?

As it happens, I could actually have stayed in the left lane if things had got silly and taken that exit; it makes my journey to work between 5 and 10 minutes longer (depending on traffic lights), but it's not a bad diversion, and one I often take if it looks as if there is trouble ahead on the actual motorway. That was the obvious fallback plan if the bloke had got stupid, but why???

M.

*apparently it's not the done thing to slow down before you are on the slip road, but 90% of drivers around here don't seem to have read that bit of the Highway Code

Panasonic liquidates its liquid crystal display business

So who does actually make panels these days?

I have a largeish fleet of Panasonic professional displays and projectors. Both have been very reliable (had our first plasma panel failure just a few months ago - the panel was 18+ years old). One of the benefits of Panasonic was the end-to-end production, bar the DLP units in the projectors (and possibly projector LCDs too - never been certain about that). I suppose it's time for a review of the market.

M.

TETRA radio comms used by emergency heroes easily cracked, say experts

Re: Governments and access to encrypted messages

Initiallly (uk) only 88 - 100MHz was allocated to broadcast and police used 100MHz+

I have definitely told this story before, but Gwent Broadcasting was one of the first stations to be allocated a frequency above 100MHz. For a while they used a tag line, "on the right side of the law".

That station was later subsumed into Red Dragon alongside Cardiff Broadcasting, and I worked for Red Dragon & Touch Radio (as the split AM frequencies became) in the 1990s.

Our news editor brought an old valve radio down for me to fix. It only tuned up to 100MHz, which he saw as a bonus meaning he didn't have to listen to our FM station (then on 103.2MHz) at home. Reception of our AM station was glorious on that old set.

M.

Wut?

affect the monitoring and control of industrial equipment, like railway switches or electrical substation circuit breakers

I don't think TETRA is used for that kind of thing, is it?

M.

(oh, and in the UK they are POINTS, not SWITCHES :-)

BT and OneWeb deliver internet to rock in Bristol Channel – population 28

Re: PTP

Is Lundy connected to the electricity grid? If they can do it for power, they can certainly do it for data...

M.

Social media is too much for most of us to handle

Re: Some of us figured all that out ...

News at 11

I think you'll find that it's Film at Eleven.

M.

Samsung’s midrange A54 is lovely, but users won't feel seen

Re: Budget phones

I'd pay more for the one without the full-blown spyware.

My latest wheeze has been to look at the list of officially supported phones for Lineage OS and then buy something - probably second-hand - from that list. Install Lineage without the GApps and without a PlayStore account (I just use Fdroid) and I think you deal with most of the spyware by default.

M.