Posts by John Brown (no body)

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Re: What's 2 degrees away from Earth?

...and shit on the parcel DPD left "near by" for you because your were "out".

Re: Auto-correcting antenna aiming! Amazing!

Oh, I don't know. Maybe some "Howard" was trying to impress a girl, late one evening :-)

Re: Variation

You had a can? All we had were sea shells. Bloody whooshing interference on the listening end too!

Re: Off topic

"Our polytechnic had a ceefax adaptor on one of the beebs in one of the labs. 1k per page refresh (every minute or so) for the freebie of the week."

I had access to one too. And the software to download as many pages as you wanted to a local disk, just set it going and come back after a coffee or three and get "instant" access to all the downloaded pages :-)

Re: Off topic

"Yup.....tedious! In 1983, my trusty Osborne 01 had a 300 baud modem, used to communicate with Prestel."

First time I used Preset, it was a 1200/75 modem. I never knew it worked with 300/300 too.

Re: Talk it up

"Let BT marketers get at that information and it will be described as Stunningly-Fast Broadband at the Speed of Light..."

...and the poster child for why providers never talk about latency :-)

Re: Voyager 1 & 2

"No management consoles if you accidentally turn off networking on the remote system"

But, as per the article, they allowed for that by giving it a program to auto-recalibrate and reconnect if comms are lost :-)

Would you need a management console to restore networking if the remote server, by default, waited for the comms for a length of time and if nothing is received, auto-roll back to the previous config?, eg you changed and fat fingered the IP address and lost contact, or downed the wrong Ethernet port?

Florida man accused of hoarding America's secrets faces fresh charges

Re: In jail with DJT

I'm hearing 10cc's Rubber Bullets in my head now!

Re: … flooded "a room where computer servers were kept."

Is it actually an air hole or a vent to a membrane such that membrane expands and contracts inside the drive to allow the air pressure to equalise? I thought they were supposed to be dust proof. Or is it a hole with a filter? I must admit I never looked that closely, it just looks like a stick on bit of latex or similar from the inside.

EDIT: Never mind, as you were. It's a filter, not a membrane or diaphragm. DDG to the rescue :-)

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

Me: "You forgot Reagan and Trump. Or do those examples not fit your narrative?"

You: Reagans dead, something about Trump and then a lot of "But what about...."

Thanks mate, typical answer LOL

BTW, what is the Dbc? Did you mean BBC (as opposed to the also incorrect Bbc)?

This last question is entirely optional and not meant to detract from my original question, but I will just add that both Biden and Starmer come in for a kicking on UK news on a regular basis, including from Left leaning sources. ALL leaders are up for ridicule and criticism across the news spectrum. It helps if you use multiple sources rather than just those pandering to a single point of view though,

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

"1 thumb down"

Well, come on then Mr/Ms downvoter, don't be lazy, provide the links.

Oh, right, because you can't! Hilarious!

That's why they are secret!

Re: … flooded "a room where computer servers were kept."

"I would presume the pool was fresh water"

Chlorinated "fresh" water. Along with any other "pollutants" introduced by the pool users and, assuming it;s an outdoor pool, any other debris blown in, dead insects etc. So, yeah "fresh" as opposed to "salt" or "sea" water, but not pure fresh ;-)

Re: In jail with DJT

Actual and genuine question. What is it with orange jumpsuits? Is that something specific to federal prisons or something? I've seen plenty of US tv both fictional and documentary that shows prisoners dressed in all sorts of different ways, depending on what prisons they are in. The apparently ubiquitous "orange jumpsuit" actually seems to be quite rare in reality. Has this just become a trope due to some TV show that happened to be popular for a while?

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

"The El Reg office has decided that only left wingers get a positive review, regarsless of how bad they are doing their job.."

Would you care to point to all the positive articles published by El Reg about Kim, Xi and Putin please? I seem to be missing them.

Meanwhile, here in the real world...

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

"Biden, Feinstein, McConnell etc etc have their senior moments live on TV. These are the leaders of the free world."

You forgot Reagan and Trump. Or do those examples not fit your narrative?

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's pop artifact stash now heads to a museum

Re: Relics

The heavy breathing?

Re: Kirk's Chair

Yeah, it's a pretty impressive item to have, but up close and out of context looks like a bit of poorly made, cheap stage dressing, Sad really.

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Thanks for that. Can I have some Paracetamol now?

I thought they built a wall to keep out illegal aliens? What's that you say? Alien spaceships can fly higher than the wall? Well, build a bigger wall. And make them pay for it!!

What's a dhead? Is that like a dickhead or more like a fucking dickhead? The puritanical censors haven't reached El Reg yet.

"Welcome to Fintlewoodlewix. Care for a light trim, sir?"

<Sigh>How much is it this week? One deciduous forest or two?

"So if Trump didn't leak it, it can only mean he, too, is part of the conspiracy.

^{Or it could be it's just a load of bollocks. But it's definitely one of those two."}

Bollocks do usually come in pairs, so both could be true :-)

Re: Looks like the reverse engineering hasn't gone too well

Exactly. If the US wanted an expensive boondoggle multi-State pork barrelling employment project, why spend $billions on a throwaway rocket you can only launch once ever year or two if you have alien spacecraft to back-engineer? I'm sure they could have gone with something just as impressive and created more jobs, like, I dunno, trains capable of an astounding 100mph across the whole country, nationwide broadband for all that's faster than 25Mb/s

Re: The clue is in the 'U' part

I think that's part of the reason "they" decided to use UAP instead of UFO. What people are reporting may be neither Flying or Objects even if as yet Unidentified.

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Or a Pringles "cantenna" at each end if it's not quite that far! :-)

Re: What is a parking garage?

Same in the UK, to be fair. Many towns have a "parkway" leading to them and many people park their cars in the drive, The A174 on the south side of Middlesborough is called The Parkway, and there's the Sheffield Parkway from the M1 to the city centre.

Re: What is a parking garage?

I think that now faulty logic has already been demonstrated at least once with an EV car fire spreading to other cars and the building.

No idea if this one was EV related or not, but it was pretty devastating for an above ground multi-story car park fire.

EDIT. Apparently it was a 16 year old car (so not EV) that had been modified to be "differently fuelled", so possibly a home/back street retrofit to cooking oil or LPG.

"(all rights to password privacy have gone by the time it gets to this stage. They can change it after if they're bothered , as long as they arnt straight back on the phone)"

If I did that at our place, I'd have to report myself to infosec for asking the user to do that. Then report them for doing it :-)

I'm only allowed to trigger a password reset for them and leave them to deal with it, or at best, show the poor dears where to click.

Infineon to offer recyclable circuit boards that dissolve in water

Re: I was going to say this is ridiculous but...

I have visions of the early unleaded solder concoctions and unexpected long-term whicker growth, which over time seems to have been mainly solved now. As others have said, try it out where the use cases match which brings experience, development and bulk production pricing.

Re: High humidity environments?

"This does not bode well for the technology being discussed."

At a temps approaching 70C and high humidity, you're probably already outside the recommend operating parameters for many electronic circuit boards and/or devices and into "special environment" areas. So these boards would probably not be suitable for your application, same as they will not be suitable in some other applications, eg rigid, not flexible (although they didn't define what they mean by rigid. I remember circuit boards being pretty damned brittle and any flexion could be enough to break tracks where as, for example, modern PC/laptop system boards allow for a few degrees of flex, indeed is often required to fit some laptop boards into the case.

Tesla's Autopilot boasts, safety probed by California AG

Re: EV range

It isn't hard to note the current charge level and the rate of drop in real time, averaged over some period to produce a more dynamic range estimate than waiting for a drop to 50% charge and suddenly wildly dropping the range estimate.

Maybe they didn't actually write the algorithm and just ripped off and adapted the MS Windows file transfer time algo?

Re: TSLA crashes

"I wonder what Musk will have to do to thoroughly crash TSLA."

Enable FSD?

"and I really do not understand the recovery."

Skittish markets. It's something we see all the time. the slightest hint at a problem with a listed company and the price crashes as the markets "panic". Almost invariably it turns out that most sensible people didn't really see the blip as a serious problem and clever ones start buying when they see the price falling and make a quick profit as the price recovers both because of the initial "panic"being overblown and the buying spree of now-cheap stocks in what is a perfectly viable business. Just look at stock falls when a company doesn't quite make it's predicted $billions, even though they are still beating last years profits.

It's generally the "get rich quick" short termers causing this. people in it for the long run are looking years down the line, not just next week.

Re: re: How in the world has Tesla

"Tesla does not advertise."

Yes. At least, they don't *pay* to advertise. They (and Musk, especially Musk) just release wild PR and the media does it for them :-)

And, of course, designing a product with a specific shape and corporate logo on it is also advertising, emblazoning the Tesla logo on the "superchargers" is advertising etc etc etc :-)

Not making TV, print or online adverts doesn't mean they don't advertise.

Re: Litigation moves at the speed of a sedated sloth

"Seriously? If this is true, reselling the car would make it drop tens of K's in value."

The same applies to software controlled enhancements you pay BMW for. You pay for "lifetime" heated seats, but when you sell it, the heated seats no longer work unless the new owner also pays again for those same heated seats. Or you pay-per-month on a subscription model, the preferred way as far as BMW are concerned as they want the regular income after the one off sale of the vehicle. They are all at it or heading that way. Even the sale of the car is falling out of favour as lease companies are targetting private individuals these days rather than corporate fleets.

Re: EV Version Of Dieselgate?

"rogue engineer"

After seeing it misspelled as "rouge engineer" so many times in these comment sections, allow me a moment to congratulate you on spelling it correctly :-)

Thames Water to datacenters: Cut water use or we will

Re: Nobody in charge

Yeah, the sory on not reaching national house building targets is currently in the news this week, but I didn't seen any mention of infrastructure to support all that development. I mean, we *STILL* have the situation of new builds only being provided BT ducting for phone/broadband, no one else seems to get the opportunity to provide fibre/cabling into a new build. There's probably old legislation still in place mandating "Post Office" telephone cabling but other providers have to pay, and so don't bother.

Re: Nobody in charge

"From the 19th century right up to privatisation, it was routine for the municipal water companies for coastal areas in the UK to discharge raw (untreated but filtered for solids) sewage through short-outfall pipes. Those of us old enough should recall seeing the pipes at the beach - they were still there in the 1970's and 1980's."

Oh yes, I also have clear memories of those too. Most noticeable when there was en especially low tide.

"It's interesting that you note that within a few years, there was sharp drop - did water leakage rates then stabilise (not continue to improve) at that point?"

Good question. It would make sense to set an achievable and properly enforced (with significant fines!) leakage targets and then adjust the targets downwards when everyone is meeting the original targets. It's a diminishing returns calculation, obviously, you can never reach zero leakage, but I'm sure there are experts who can reach a consensus on what is a reasonable end goal, eg 2% or 5% or whatever.

"The idea of a combined sewer and rain water drainage is something we need to get away from."

On the other hand, those heavy rains help flush all the crap through the sewers and give them a "spring clean" every now and then. Agreed though, capacity is the major problem. Maybe the run-off water needs a diverter at the entry to the sewage system so excess gets channelled elsewhere. Where that "elsewhere" is I leave as an exercise for the reader :-)

Re: someone please explain

"I too would be interested in how water is used and contaminated during the cooling process in DC's these days?"

I would assume that because it's an evaporative process that the "waste" water has far higher concentrations of minerals etc than the original source because the cheapest way of doing evaporative cooling is to vent the vapour into the atmosphere. Even in a closed loop, I'd assume the evaporator fins/riffles/whatever get a mineral build-up that has to be properly maintained and probably isn't.

Re: Usual rip off

"This bizarre standing charge concept that an entire street/town is charged on the basis of everyone's usage combined divided by the number of homes in it is mad."

Whether you use only a small amount of water as a single person compared to family 6 in a larger house, make little to no difference the cost of providing the pipework to supply your home. That's what the "standing charge" is for. You are correct in that the use of a water meter would almost certainly mean you'd pay less overall than a large family but, on the other hand, water is a necessity so why should it not be paid for "socially"? You as a single person in a small property are not paying the same as someone in large house with a large family since water bills are based on rateable value of the property, ie if you can afford a big house, you pay more for your water and for the majority that works out relatively fairly.

On the other hand, pension funds are more likely to be in for the long term with consistent and ongoing returns, not asset stripping for a quick buck and moving on to the next victim. If they don't have the regular income, they start to look like a Ponzi scheme with contributors cash going straight out to pay the claimants, a bit like State pension schemes.

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

Re: Question

It sounds like you are saying, in effect, that we can't just replace bits of current electronics with superconductors to improve things in a meaningful way but might have to effectively develop a whole new range of components to take advantage of the effect, reinventing electronic circuits, which sounds entirely reasonable.

Re: One comment I saw about it gives me pause

If it can be made economic to use in mobile phones and laptops, manufacturers will be falling over themselves to invest if they can offer users and an extra hour or two between charges. After all, that's one of the primary driving forces in developing better batteries :-)

On a slightly more serious note, I'd not be surprised at all if that was the driving force to mass production of room temp, ambient pressure superconductors, assuming the science actually is good and reproducible. Doing the science is the "easy"[1] part. Commercial and economic production and "killer app" use case is the "hard" part, ie convincing industry to invest in something new.

[1] Comparatively :-)

Re: Even if its not a superconductor

Yep, bulk manufacture to bring costs down requires an economic industrial use case to drive the development. After all, the very first lasers were little more than expensive scientific curiosities with some applications in the research environment. Now, you can buy throwaway laser pointers and cat toys for pennies :-)

Re: Even if its not a superconductor

"You'd probably want to bury black stony cylinders of lead/copper apatite rather than hang them as wires but that doesn't seem impossible."

That turns into a materials science problem. Few would probably have believed flexible glass fibre was an economic possibility not that many years ago, let alone a world spanning network of them :-)

Re: Apatite

A_aX and A_ax?

You may need to post more to be allowed to use HTML :-)

Re: Apatite

"Rounded corners, perhaps?"

...on a mobile device?

"If your method can't be followed to reproduce the data, fabricated or not, you did not conduct your science properly."

Or, maybe, just didn't write it up properly so there's a missing step, or something. Benefit of the doubt until confirmed, IMV. The author should be able to clarify and/or help others to replicate who can then check if the process is actually correct. If he can't then yeah, bad science.