Posts by Dagg

5G satellite briefly becomes brightest object in night sky

Won't work

From the article

In March, research showed the number of Hubble images photobombed in this way nearly doubled from the 2002-2005 period to the 2018-2021 timeframe, for example.

as these even stuff Hubble

Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard

Re: Not sure I'd do this

Then again its my car and my battery which I payedpaid for.

Here in Australia if you enter into an agreement with your power company to use either your house battery or car battery as a grid connected battery they (the power company) will pay you good money. You can set the limits that they can draw down to. The power company will also charge the battery for you (at a cheap rate) when they have surplus power. Your battery allows the power company to balance out usage.

If you have just a house battery or use your car as a house battery then the power companies can't touch it.

As we are in spring we are in a temperate stage and don't need heating or cooling.

However we run our washing machine, dishwasher and cook lunches in the middle of the day to use the free energy from the solar panels.

Re: Don't get it

The charger/inverter in most EV's isn't substantial enough to run an entire house

Actually are wrong they don't use the inverter in the car it is linked to the inverter from the solar system or a separate inverter. Systems like this exist and are in places here in Australia.

IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week

Re: Why do people assume it is only upper management that supports back to office?

the point is working at the same place as the others, so you can talk to them face to face

I hate that, I am much more productive being left to actually code. Having some idiot wandering around and talking to me completely stuffs my productivity!

For those that actually need a question answered, this means that actually need to think about the question and write it out in an email. In the process they may find they have an answer. It also means you have an audit trail of question and answer.

Mozilla calls cars from 25 automakers 'data privacy nightmares on wheels'

Re: US conservative "fear" meme

First, smart meters are still meters, not shutoff devices

Yep, here in Australia the shutoff devices are possums, the get plated across the wires.

Re: It's total lunacy

BMW however thought they could play things a little differently: make drivers pay monthly rents to "unlock" features in cars.

Ah, the old IBM approach.

Re: A long time ago...

RFID proof wallets already. I have had one for years.

Re: It just keeps getting better

And don't forget paint.

And where is the gasolinepetrol or diesel going to come from and how much per litre!

Aerial cable tangles are still being strung up, but carriers are slowly burying the problem

Re: Stringing cables on a pole is easier

It also puts the cable at the mercy of the weather

Here in aussie in mainy places we have coms cables in the ground. The problem being is when it rains the in ground pits and ducts fill with water and as electricity and water just don't mix....

Microsoft makes some certification exams open book

Re: Would about do it for me...

"modern" approach

Nope, this is not a modern approach. I did my first open book exam for my comp sci degree in the 1970's.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

Re: "Luna 25, by contrast, tried to make the trip in nine days"

I didn't know I was a socialist until I lived in the states and experienced the american medical system.

Space lasers

The Sharks are not on the moon they are fricking Space Sharks in orbit.

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

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

The yank government did exactly the same

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-10-04-mn-53213-story.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_radiation_experiments

Starlink satellites leak astronomy-disturbing EM radiation, say boffins

Run fibre... (please note spelling, commonwealth English), Yea, right! Try using this solution in the middle of the Australian outback or the middle of the ocean.

Terrestrial radio doesn't work. To get the distances (1,000-5,000km) you require you would need to use HF frequencies and these are dependant on skip and time of day. And there is no way you can get any sort of bandwidth in the HF band, it is ONLY 30mhz wide.

Memory safety is the new black, fashionable and fit for any occasion

Re: Wrong

I’ve worked in consumer electronics

I worked in the complete opposite. Industrial Process Control, one small mistake and a chemical plant goes boom. Testing was extreme, so extreme it did take the joy out of coding.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

German has two sorting orders:

Interesting where I was brought up in New Zealand the local city Dunedin had a very large Scottish population so in the local telephone book "Mac" and "Mc" were sorted together. Problem was I had a friend with the family name "Machin" which I think was German and he got slotted in with the Mac/Mc mob.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Don't you mean "English - US"!!!! For some reason Americans need to remember that their engish is one of many. Little things like the use of Z instead of S. Colour instead of Color etc...

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

Re: Why the down vote?

You don't even need that to take out POTS. Some idiot with a car and a lamp post or a backhoe...

Want to feel old? Ethernet just celebrated its 50th birthday

Re: Rings

If the monitor it was still powered on, if the cable wasn't disconnected or broken.

In the early days I saw it all. People would move the computer to a different desk and just disconnect the cable. In once case with coax ethernet they added a 5m dropper, we ended up using an oscilloscope to see the echo reflecting back up the dropper, sh*t.

At least now with twisted pair you (mostly) just stuff yourself up.

Re: Rings

I Hated token rings, we would always lose the bloody token!

Third MOVEit bug fixed a day after PoC exploit made public

Re: 'Safeguard their identity'? How, exactly?

Looks like someone doesn't understand sarcasm...

Re: 'Safeguard their identity'? How, exactly?

How, exactly?

Easy, this is America, buy more guns buy bigger Guns... Need more be said.

NASA to tear the wings off plane in the name of sustainability

Re: Not this again

The fact that the Me 262 had an adjustable tailplane is a give away as all modern transonic aircraft have this feature as it is the only way to control pitch past the speed of sound. It as this tail plane that enabled the pilot to retain control.

Bad times are just starting for India's IT outsourcers, says JP Morgan

Re: I am glad

Each time they have had to engage additional workers to replace me

I was brought on in a company that had been bought by an Indian company that was going to move it to India. However once they tried to get everything up and running they found they just didn't have the skill set. So they keep bits of the old company in Australia and used locals to fill the gaps. Ha Ha

10 years after Snowden's first leak, what have we learned?

Re: Time expired secrecy - small correction

A lovely suggestion, if not for the fact that US ALL agencies regularly ignore and even intentionally trample any applicable laws

There fixed

In the battle between Microsoft and Google, LLM is the weapon too deadly to use

Re: Pandora's Box, again

Maybe that inside Pandora's Box is schrodinger's cat

Today's old folks set to smash through longevity records

Re: Longevity in the US

Scotland: Death by deep-frying

Yes, Samsung 'fakes' its smartphone Moon photos – who cares?

Re: Photography today = digital manipulation

Look at the glorious pictures on the wall

Ah, yes just like in the movie "Falling Down"

Boffins concoct interference-busting radios

Re: Selectivity

Exactly, mixer-first architecture was what we used in late 70s and 80s, Low/high pass filter (depending of local osc freq), wideband diode ring mixer, xtal filter and only then amplification. Meant you could sit close to large signal without overload.

Microsoft swears it's not coming for your data with scan for old Office versions

Re: Industry-standard software applications

I suspect that you would have used Windows devices.

Mix, the tills were windoz the back end paired store servers were AIX boxes with mirrored databases. Cloud is still a risk if you can't access the cloud, little things like a backhoe cutting the fibre cable.

Re: Industry-standard software applications

In a few years the "industry-standard software applications" and user management will all be in the cloud allowing us to use any operating system/desktop as long as it has a supported browser.

Yep, no cloud access from one of several faults means a nice single point of failure. In my long life I've seen this happen too many times. A major retail store that I was involved in actually got to the stage that each till (PC with scanner and draw attached) could standalone. Backed up by the whole shop being able to standalone.

US sanctions drain Huawei of homegrown advanced chips

Re: American trade protection

Ok, so it is bad when America does it to China, but good when China does it to Australia...

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Re: Time is an illusion

Ah, that explains why the friday lunch hour is always 2 hours long.

Eggheads show how network flaw could lead to NASA crew pod loss. Key word: Could

"TTE is also used in aircraft and energy generation systems"

This means that anyone that has access to said aircraft or generation system could just plug something in.

Maintenance engineer per say... Even someone like a cleaner in the cockpit of an aircraft.

USB-C iPhone, anyone? EU finalizes charging standard rule

Re: Another EU bad idea

Apple's magnetic Qi connector

But you do realise that apple will change it for the next phone release and force you to buy the latest shiny shiny version...

USB-C plugs and cables don't melt!!!

Ohms law watts = volts x amps. On a thin cable if you use a higher voltage with the same current you get a higher wattage.

Re: Ouch - who left that plug there?

nah, the Type I as used in Australia and New Zealand is much better..

Much lighter and smaller with same voltage and current and no need for a built in fuse.

And best of all hardly ever sits pins up as the cable normally exits on the back.

Australia asks FBI to help find attacker who stole data from millions of users

Re: Right to be forogtten

a govt API to do identity verification

What do you mean! Do you actually want to trust a government! No frickin way...

Scientists pull hydrogen from thin air in promising clean energy move

Re: Just wondering

capture the moisture from the air and convert it into fresh water

The process uses sulphuric acid and electrolyses the resulting acid mix. At no stage is the water ever "fresh".

Re: Just wondering

If they're going to pull water from the (relatively) dry atmosphere rather than take what little groundwater there is there to support the locals, won't that affect how much water ends up in the ground for those locals?

The problem is that it is a desert, there is no ground water! The locals rely on bore water which is high in mineral content and comes from rain that fell years ago and in a different place.

Microsoft finds critical hole in operating system that for once isn't Windows

Re: Obvious question

The BIG issue with that is you would need to change ALL the calls in the legacy code and then carry out a extremely comprehensive test.

This of course will take a lot of time and money. In a commercial world who will be paying for that! Better to just keep the old code in place doing its job and only, only replace / rewrite when you have to.

Refactoring old code to remove all the dangerous calls to things like memset, memcpy, memcmp, strcpy, strcmp etc will normally end up in a complete rewrite as the old legacy code will have had the boot prints of multiple developers over the years it has been in production. Some of those developers have been good and others well...

Some of the stuff I've worked on has been over 30 years old and has been so bodged and patched that most of the job is just trying to work out what the code does. In some cases there have been bits of code that have been logically commented out because they provided a function that is no longer needed.

This problem is not specific to any language one of the worst legacy systems I was involved with was written in COBOL.

One rule I found useful is "If it is not broken don't fix it!"

Re: Obvious question

Its called legacy code! There are billions of lines of old legacy code that is still being used. Keeps old farts like myself in a job.

Re: org.chromium.cras[s] indeed!

"A programming language designer should be responsible for the mistakes made by programmers using the language."

Seriously! Humans have an amazing ability for stupidity. To paraphrase Einstien "the universe is finite, human stupidity is infinite"

The phrases I love hearing are:

"Well it appeared to be a good idea at the time"

"Whoa did not see that coming"

"No one would ever do that/ be that stupid"

"This is only a quick and dirty fix it doesn't need to go into production..."

Re: Surprised that strcpy still exists in any code base

One of the major reasons is legacy code. I was involved in the maintenance of a very large retail system that had its roots in MS-DOS.

There were still large parts that used strcpy strcmp etc. No one wanted to refactor those as they worked. However we did have warnings maxed with warnings as errors and just added a define around each call to hide that specific warning.

The other rule was if you had to make any changes in that area which meant it would be tested you were to change the strcpy/strcmp etc. The preferred fix was to replace the char * with a std::string or CString.

Smartphone gyroscopes threaten air-gapped systems, researcher finds

Re: Let me see....

Morse code used in the 2nd world war was about 10 words per minute but it was the quality of the information NOT the volume that was important.

Amazon has repackaged surveillance capitalism as reality TV

Re: Apathy is the problem

Not only that the house is "across the road" so the house with the teenage girls is visible from the public road. Are there any security cameras on the public road?

What about dash cams in cars driving down the "public" road.

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

Re: Carbon costs of Nuclear

You will require considerably less concrete for a window farm and there is no waste to entomb and hide away somewhere safe for 10,000 years.

The issue is you can't recycle a nuclear reactor as the material is contaminated and must be entombed. At least with a window farm it can all be recycled.

Carbon costs of Nuclear

One thing that needs to be concerned is the actual carbon costs of the concrete required to build the nuclear reactor and then to entomb the waste.

Also just look at the true cost benefit.

£250k

Not sure where you get your costings from. But here in australia most installations ate about 6-10kw at about $6k so 30kw of cells would be about $30k and batteries are a similar cost per kw. so for a 30kw system (which BTW is extremely massive) would cost about $60k AUD about £35k.

Also not sure why you would need 30kw as here in aus most installation are around 6kw