Posts by Headley_Grange

Satellites with lasers and machine guns coming! China's new plans? Trump's Space Force? Nope, the French

Microwave It

@Kev4d: ignoring atmospheric loss, the free space loss at 2.4GHz for a LEO at 100 miles is 144dB. If you used Jodrell Bank, with a gain of 63dB at 2.4GHz, and put in a terawatt you'd get about 7kw at the target, probably not much more than a medium-sized satellite gets from the sun.

A bigger dish is what you need; however, one with 144dB gain might be difficult to aim cos it'll be about 900km in diameter.

Caution - just got back from the pub so there might be some errors. Don't start building anything without checking the calcs.

Re: Anti-Satellite isn't that hard

One problem is that if you destroy the enemies' satellites by kinetic or explosive means then the debris is likely to knacker your own kit a few orbits later.

Re: I wonder how they will overcome Newtons 3rd Law

Simples - every gun has an equal and opposite gun that fires at the same time!

(Hopefully this post will go up without the mad spell-correct that seems to be going on in this thread)

Apollo 11 @ 50: The long shadow of the flag

Re: Armstrong the LEM pilot

We got a Pet at school in 78 or 79 which had a lunar module landing "simulation" on it. If I remember correctly it didn't have graphics, just a read-out of altitude, descent rate and fuel and you had to enter burn time for the landing rockets. It was bloody hard not to crash. The Rhino game was much more fun.

Qualcomm fined €242m over 'predatory pricing' that helped to knock off British competitor Icera

Uber

I don't like Uber, I don't like its business model, I've never used it and I don't ever intend to.

Having said that, comparing Uber [clean cars, polite drivers, punctual, know where they are going, upfront pricing and the ability to pay with a credit card] with the Hackney and Private Hire cabs in my town [NOT(clean cars, polite drivers, punctual, know where they are going, upfront pricing and the ability to pay with a credit card)] would be a bit of a stretch. If Uber puts them out of business it won't be just because of pricing.

Literally rings our bell: Scottish eggheads snap quantum entanglement for the first time

Re: No it's three dimensional

@werdsmith: When I was a kid, every few years we had a photo of the whole school. Because of the width of the shot the camera was some sort of rotating affair which moved fairly slowly and it was rumoured to be possible, by running fast enough along the back row (who were stood on benches), for one pupil to appear at both ends of the photo. I assume this is how the double slit thing works;-)

I never saw this in practice. Teachers knew the risk of us trying it and the groundsman was stationed behind the back row to take down, with severe prejudice, anyone who tried it.

Reg Distances

Offas?

Re: Scotch eggheads???

A.J.P. Taylor's view on Scotch:

"Some inhabitants of Scotland now call themselves Scots and their affairs Scottish. They are entitled to do so. The English word for both is Scotch, just as we call les français the French and Deutschland Germany. Being English, I use it"

Re: How entanglement really works, how to prove it

It's a shame you don't believe current quantum theory. If you did you could have got out of both sides of the bed at the same time and not be having such a bad day.

We have the best trade wars: US investigating French tech tax plan over fears it unfairly targets American biz

Re: Taking a cut?

'On top of the 20% VAT they already take from those citizens on their purchase, that is?"

@Phil - you're assuming that all those Chinese sellers on eBay and Amazon are VAT registered.

Re: Its not

But the men and women on the street aren't annoyed enough to stop spending their money with these companies, are they?

As HMRC's quarterly deadline for online VAT filing looms, biz dogged by 'technical difficulties'

Re: But apparently ...

@Roland6 - I wasn't saying that real-time invoicing would make payments happen sooner. I meant that HMRC would get sales data sooner and so GDP measurements would be more accurate (in time).

Re: Digital VAT

You don't have to pay for software. There are free packages available - I was going to post Portico but someone else here already has. Never used them (don't do VAT) and not affiliated but I heard them on Money Box on BBC radio a couple of weeks ago.

Re: But apparently ...

@JetSetJim: agreed, but once the system is up and running reliably then it's only a couple of small steps to real-time reporting whereby the VAT data are reported immediately the invoice is submitted. Many businesses run on cash reporting, so their VAT returns can be months behind the the work being done, especially if they are on rip-off 120 day terms. Giving real-time invoicing data to HMRC could reduce the delay to less than a month since most of us try to invoice customers at least monthly.

It would be a pain for small outfits who would almost certainly have to invest in more software with absolutely no benefit to themselves, but HMRC would love it.

I'm not saying that this is a good idea, just speculating..

Openreach needs to snap that BT umbilical cord, warns Ofcom

Re: Mobile is faster

"it's crazy how poor the old copper is".

I'm on twisted pair that must be at least 40-years old and originally designed to carry 4kHz analog voice. It's laid in-the-soft, about 200yds from the cabinet and I still get 8.9Mbps down. I'd say it's crazy how fast the poor old copper is, considering.

Stop using that MacBook Pro RIGHT NOW, says Uncle Sam: Loyalists suffer burns, smoke inhalation and worse – those crappy keyboards

Re: Customer service?

@Jove - good call. It's been a long time since you could top up a battery with DI water. You aren't even allowed to put the acid in yourself now when you buy a new battery. It has to be done in the shop due to acid attacks.

Re: Not having a 'Plan B' is madness

Agreed - I might go over the top a bit, but it's saved my bacon once when I had a PSU failure. I run a normal TimeMachine backup plus a fortnightly TimeMachine to a USB disc which I keep in the shed. I also run a fortnightly plain file-synch of files to a USB disc so if I needed to restore to an non-Mac OS I could and this lives in the shed too. Then, every month or so, I dig out my old MBA (from the shed), update the OS, apps and files to the latest state of my working machine. As long as my shed and house don't burn down together I'm sort of covered.

Really important personal stuff - photos, music, etc., is also stored on a USB disc at my folks' in a different county and I swap it out with an updated one when I visit.

I might be going over the top, but it's not much of a pain once it's all up and running.

There's that phrase again: JP Morgan CIO told Autonomy's first HP boss it was 'a shit show'

Class

Off topic (sorry, it's past beer o'clock), but the pic at the top of the story made me think of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4QuSZ2Vvj4

Have a good weekend everyone.

Brave urges UK's data watchdog to join Ireland in probing claim Google adtech breaches GDPR

Comical

Johhny Ryan and Brave Lawyers is surely a comic book waiting to happen. While reading the article I couldn't get the image out of my head of a trio of suited lawyers, chins and chests thrust out, hair blown back in the wind holding pink-ribboned writs like light sabres.

Maybe I've had too much coffee this morning.

You won't guess where European mobile data was rerouted for two hours. Oh. You can. Yes, it was China Telecom

Re: That's what happens when you use a Huawei router....

Is China Telecom better and cheaper than British Telecom? I'm thinking of changing ISP.

Firefox fires blockers at trackers, Exim tackles command exec flaw, and RDP pops up yet again

Problematic?

This might be a problem for some users. I set FF privacy blocking to "strict" by default, which blocks (what Firefox thinks are) trackers and 3P cookies and it breaks a fair number of sites. It's OK for me cos I can decide whether to make an exception for sites but users like my mum will just be confused when sites won't load. I guess it could change sites' behaviours if they see hits declining, but I doubt it.

When it comes to DNS over HTTPS, it's privacy in excess, frets UK child exploitation watchdog

Novel

"The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. LeGuin is a decent read which is partly set in a quasi-anarchic society.

Garbage

It's debatable as to whether a truly anarchic society could design and build a garbage truck.

Could you just pop into the network room and check- hello? The Away Team. They're... gone

Re: At home

I think that most surge protectors are to designed to protect kit from induced voltages rather than direct hits from lightning. There's not much that can protect electronics from a direct strike.

We are Google, we are proud, English football is moving to our cloud

Finally...

...we might get data-based answers to the important questions that have been knocking around football years, such as:

Who did eat all the pies? and How much bigger is our shed than this?

Apple arms web browser privacy torpedo, points it directly at Google's advertising model

Re: What about sites that detect ad blockers?

"Or modify their content to look like ads so it "accidentally" gets blocked, forcing people to turn off their ad blocker for that site to see the content?"

Then I don't see the content. Fair dos - they have a right to get paid for their work, but my experience is that most sites abdicate responsibility for what advertisers can do to the web page, browser and PC cos it's easier for them to do that than to take responsibility for their sites. If it's news I'll search elsewhere for it if I'm interested. Otherwise I'll struggle by without it.

Re: Apple Ad-Blocking?

Firefox's Content Blocking feature stops a fair number of websites working properly so perhaps Apple are wary of doing the same for Safari.

Let's make laptops from radium. How's that for planned obsolescence?

Milk Snatcher

Maggie was Education Secretary, not Prime Minister, when she stopped free milk.

WikiLeaks boss Assange acted as a foreign spy, Uncle Sam exclaims in fresh rap sheet

Re: He's not a journalist

I'm torn on the US aspect because of the free speech and public interested stuff, but I'm in no doubt that he should go to Sweden to stand trial. It's not about persecuting him, but about justice - either for him or the women he is alleged to have assaulted. You shouldn't be able to pick and choose the laws that apply to you simply by running away and hiding.

It's 2019 and a WhatsApp call can hack a phone: Zero-day exploit infects mobes with spyware

Re: Companies shouldn't use Whatsapp anyway ...

A client recently got quite shirty when I wouldn't use Whatsapp. Eventually I blamed it on GDPR and they tucked their shirt in very quickly.

Tools

Seriously - aren't there tools or procedures to check for buffer overflows?

Hate e-scooters? Join the club of the pals of 190 riders in Austin TX who ended up in hospital

Downvotes

Because they want a scooter and, here in the UK, they're not allowed them.

'Software delivered to Boeing' now blamed for 737 Max warning fiasco

Re: Proper Certification

@jonathan: it is also the responsibility of management to set the culture and environment so engineers (and anyone) are not cautious about reporting problems which might impact cost, schedule or share price. I'm not suggesting this is a factor in this specific case, but I've worked in organizations where "shoot the messenger" has been the preferred management technique and more effort is put into passing the buck around than would have been needed to fix the problem if it had been reported early enough.

Apple iPhone sales down by double digits, Mac sales knifed by Intel CPU 'constraints'

Progress

No headphone sockets, new PSU standards, no USB sockets, no memory card socket ....... etc. That's why I haven't bought any new Apple HW for a couple of years and the last purchase was a spare iphone SE. I'd like a new Macbook, but I'd have to bin a load of PSUs and buy some more, plus USB C hubs/adapters for attaching peripherals, USB C drives, etc. I know that in the overall scheme of things the additional cost of the add-ons isn't really significant, but why would I spend so much money on kit which is, for my use-case, compromised from a connectivity perspective? There's no point having the latest super-portable PC if I have to carry around a bagful of adaptors to make it work with the rest of my life safe in the knowledge that in a few years I'll have to bin them when Apple decides that something else is the new standard.

I'm sure I'm just a curmudgeonly outlier and this isn't the reason that Apple isn't selling as much kit, but it can't help.

The peelable, foldable phone has become the great white whale of tech

Re: aiming to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

Mine goes up to 11G.

Core Demographic

@Jimmy - the core demographic is that group of people which will pay money for a new phone every year or so and will then subscribe to paid-for services. The older gits (like me) are happy to hang to an iPhone SE for years as long as it does phone, SMS, mail, music and a bit of internet to solve pub arguments. No one's making much money out of me for tech: I'm SIM only so don't get bothered for upgrades. I haven't bought a new smartphone for a couple of years, and that was a spare SE. I don't subscribe to Netflix, Spotify, etc. and if I buy music it's disc shaped.

Their core demographic wants something newer, thinner, <insert something that looks good on a big screen presentation>, every couple of years - or at least they are conned into thinking that they do either by peer pressure or marketing/advertising. The problem that the companies have is coming up with something that ticks all these boxes and will convince people to part with serious money. The annoying thing is that the foldable phones are quite chunky in their folded state and if they made a normal phone that thick they could put in a headphone socket and card slot and a huge and removable battery.

Re: Industry shudders: Do we have a big problem?

Curious, isn't it. Headphone jack, memory and replaceable batteries aren't allowed because "we" want thinner phones. But as soon as "we" want foldable phones then, in their folded state, they can be much thicker an no one will mind.

Microsoft debuts Bosque – a new programming language with no loops, inspired by TypeScript

Re: Whatever happened to HP?

Fair point. Both H and P were still on the board during the times of my original post. And it looks like Carly was in charge when I bought the HP laptop. She owes me £600.

Re: What's Wrong With a Loop?

@Andrew: I think I've posted this before - but I grew up with HP test gear and computers. They were indestructible and the best. My HP11C calculator was probably the first "very expensive and hard to justify" thing I bought and it still works. It doesn't get much use now, although the iPhone app which emulates it does.

When I bought my first laptop I saw an HP model and just bought it cos it was obviously going to be the best thing in the whole shop. What a fool. What a disappointment. What a lesson. Whatever happened to HP?

Those plotters though.

Re: What's Wrong With a Loop?

@Paul - I agree with you that reviewing/editing/fixing "unstructured" code is a pain, especially in the old days when there were no tools, just the tiny screen of a 9826. However, the main benefit that came out of the re-work I was heckled into doing was that I was able to pull out a general purpose subroutine for driving the plotter which could be used by others in the lab - whether directly from test gear or by putting user-generated data into a defined format. It became an ongoing lunchtime project with user change requests regularly submitted for things like auto-scaling, colour options, annotation, etc. and I think that the plotter sub became larger than the control software which spawned it. I took it back to poly. when the placement finished and it was still in use a couple of years later when I left.

What's Wrong With a Loop?

When I was a student I was in an industrial placement and tasked with writing a programme to control some kit on an IEEE bus and print the output on the brand new and magical HP Plotter (more watchable than Game of Thrones). The language was the lovely HP Basic (no sarcasm there) and I set off and wrote the programme. It worked OK - then the rest of the lab spent their lunch hours ripping it to shreds for being "unstructured". I took this pretty seriously, so spent some time getting rid of all the Gotos and "bad" loops, etc. until it met their view of what a properly structured programme should look like. It still worked in the end, but I don't think it was much better. My analogy for the GoTo is it's a bit like Jaunting: you can either spend ages driving round the one-way system but if you could Jaunt like the Tomorrow People then surely you would.

UK watchdog slaps 'misleading' Voda ad: Gigafast... maybe so – but not for £23

Re: 1/3:3/1

..... L, S, C, X, Ku, K, Ka........ etc., when I was a boy.

Re: 1/3:3/1

@Steve - I see what you did there.

Surely...

... , given that broadband isn't considered to be "fast" until it's above 10MB/s then "Gigafast" broadband should be at least 10 PB/s, shouldn't it?

Ozzy app maker cancels hump day: We've tripled profits! scream slackers

Re: Wouldn't fly around here

I guess we've all been there. I used to work for a tech company which celebrated its 60th anniversary with a free mug for all employees and a new mission statement to say that we'd start acting like a small start-up, crush bureaucracy and free the creativity. Unless you wanted to get a hotel for a business stay (boss and director's sig plus mandated list of cheap hotels so far from some customers' sites that taxis or hire cars were sometimes needed). Or hire a car (all living grandparents and a close relative of Noah had to sign before the directors would even consider it). Or buy the analysis tool that the customer specced and paid for (two alternatives and market justification required before directors signed the req. cos them were the rules for spend over a certain limit). Or....etc. - I'm sure you've been there.

This was in the days before bean bags, hammocks and free canteens, so our expectations were never raised much beyond life getting a bit easier (it didn't). Free overtime was, of course, not a problem.

iOS 13 leaks suggest Apple is finally about to unleash the iPad as a computer for grownups

@uksamo - and when you do transfer your images iPhotos will strip out any labels you've given them and replace them with its own useless guesses.

User secures floppies to a filing cabinet with a magnet, but at least they backed up daily... right?

Re: Well if the US ships want the Chinese to keep out of the way

@Graham - timely tale on the day that the Daily Star has decided to cover up its girls.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/apr/12/daily-star-covers-up-its-page-3-girls-signalling-end-of-tabloid-tradition

Re: stop me if you've heard this one....

....and I saw the key lock light as soon as I walked in the door.

Turn me up some: Smart speaker outfit Sonos blasted in complaint to UK privacy watchdog

Re: (they don't last forever)

Thanks Daniel. Your post prompted me to do a bit more "research" and it looks like it might be possible to get started without monitor and keyboard - so I'll have a go.

Have a good weekend.

Paranoid?

What if Adam Sandler finds out that you listen to very loud heavy-metal music in your bedroom on Thursdays between 6pm and 8pm? He could empty your fridge without you hearing him.