Posts by DJO

Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper lines

Re: It worries me that *everything* is being forced............

Of course, it's a giant conspiracy by a cartel of UPS and generator manufacturers, it's obvious when you look at it.

Though seriously you do raise a valid point about PSTN having an independent power supply but during my last power outage I still had a signal on my fibre so the fibre distribution cabinet must have an independent power supply too. (Assuming the gear in there uses power, I suppose it could all be optical but I doubt it) I've no idea if that's piped in or if there's a UPS in the cabinets. One can hope the proposed sets for vulnerable people will have some form of battery for use if mains power is lost.

Mechanical mutts make it official: Now full-time at Sellafield's hot zones

Re: The cover up

...spent significant time not generating power but being used to create materials for the atom and H bomb projects.

Well, sort of both at once. To get the best quantity and quality of enrichable spent fuel you have to remove it from the reactor when it's only about 60% spent which you'd not do if you were only interested in generating electricity. Also early extraction and enrichment creates far more hard to handle waste than using the fuel to it's full potential.

Calder Hall where it was said: "Electricity too cheap to meter", unsurprisingly that got abandoned pretty quickly but rest assured, if fusion ever becomes a viable reality, some idiot will spout the same old crap.

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Re: Teenage boys will be salivating...

The roadrunner stuff has been tried out, LIDAR equipped cars spotted the deception while cars with camera based systems crashed head first into a large sheet of painted paper.

Nudify app proliferation shows naked ambition of Apple and Google

Why? They are both behaving as expected, it's financially better for them to break the rules, take the profit and pay any meagre fines that are imposed than it is to obey the rules and lose the revenue generated.

The penalties need to be far greater before they will do anything more than pay lip-service to the rules. It must be cheaper to follow the regulations than it is to break them, currently this is often not the case.

Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge

It cannot be easy to disentangle "AI" losses or gains from all the other geopolitical and macroeconomic pressures at the moment, it's a horrible thought but maybe (but probably not) "AI" stalled the worst of the damage caused by the orange menace.

I wonder if there will ever come a time when "AI" does not need the inverted commas?

Lawmakers urge FTC to probe Trump Mobile over 'deceptive' marketing

Re: Warren might want to consider

In Zelensky's case it's in the Ukrainian constitution that elections are suspended in time of war, the US constitution does not have any similar rules. The were elections in the USA during WWII so there is no precedent for suspension of American democratic processes during wartime.

Re: Warren might want to consider

...USA makes up about 70% of the bulk of nato...

NATO active servicemen:3,240,410 (inc USA)

USA active servicemen: 1,315,600

It's easy to find the actual numbers so please don't invent them.

...potentially an act of war...

If it's in response to an attack on a sovereign nation such as Greenland then that Rubicon is already well and truly passed. A better response and one more likely to concern Trump is the promise that all American owned assets (including military bases and equipment therein) in Europe would be confiscated if they were to attack Greenland.

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

Re: Hotel. More like Airbnb

The ISS has some protection but not a huge amount, a week on the moon residing in a shielded habitat would probably give our hypothetical tourists a similar dose to a month or 2 in the ISS.

Although I suspect the presiding opinion here is anyone daft enough to go there can come back glowing and nobody except their lawyers would care much.

Give it the credence you think it deserves, but a friendly "AI" had this to say: Radiation exposure on the Moon's surface is approximately 2.6 times higher than on the International Space Station (ISS)

Re: Hotel. More like Airbnb

This is just the start. An inflatable dwelling, not a problem, there's been an inflatable at the ISS for a while. Radiation, again not really a problem for the occupation durations expected, people have lived in the ISS and earlier space stations for months with no radiation problems experienced - there again, everybody who's been sent to a station had to undergo months of training first, will our tourists go through the same sort of training first, of course not.

The real problem is the infrastructure around the "hotel" - oxygen and water recycling and reliable energy are just the start, the tourists won't want to walk to & from the landing/launching pad so a ground vehicle of some kind will be needed along with a vast selection of EVA suits in every size imaginable, one-size-fits-all is not (currently) feasible for EVA suits. Catering is an obvious problem, a box of frozen microwaveable meals washed down with recyc is not the experience the customers will be hoping and paying for. A staff of at least one person is essential as expecting a bunch of super-wealthy tourists to survive with nobody to wait on them and to show them how to safely use the equipment is a guaranteed recipe for disaster.

I suppose it's a good thing it's just a scam, the obstacles for anybody doing this for real are substantial.

Tories vow to boot under-16s off social media and ban phones in schools

Re: Just noise

Not only that but the Tories have a long and proud tradition of never fulfilling any election promises.

Very tough microbes may help us cement our future on Mars

The trouble with lichen (© John Wyndham) is it grows slowly even in the most ideal conditions.

While bio-regenerating Mars would (sort of) almost certainly work, there is the slight issue of time to completion: it'll take thousands if not 10's of thousands of years to achieve anything useful. By the time it's done, we'd either have died out or will have had a better idea.

Starlink claims Chinese launch came within 200 meters of broadband satellite

Re: More bullshit investment

Over the duration a lot of the cost will be for power & water which have to be sourced locally. So while you are basically correct, the India:Everywhere Else ratio won't be quite as bad as you imply.

Also Nvidia, Intel, Arm, AMD and many others have significant manufacturing capacity in India.

Have some sympathy, the poor guy probably only has a multi-million$ pension to fall back on.

Here we go again: Microsoft in UK court over cloud licensing

Re: Curious

I know, it's shocking that my education did not include a course on common Greek rooted Italian surnames, a serious omission that I hope the UK Ministry of Education will address with the upmost urgency if it hasn't already been added to the curriculum..

Anyway, I asked the question and it was answered for which I'm grateful. Hardly "bizarre", the Stasi were well known in Europe before the fall of the Iron curtain, so Europeans old enough to remember that will probably think of them first when seeing the word.

Re: Curious

An abbreviation and not an acronym, it's short for Staatssicherheit and as such is written "Stasi" not "STASI" so apart from context, it's not obvious.

Curious

I would love to know how Dr Maria Luisa Stasi's family acquired that name. And perhaps, why they kept it.

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

Congress quietly strips right-to-repair provisions from US military spending bill

Re: It's the economy, stupid!

Never forget, the real reason for the American Revolution was the British East India Company absolutely screwing the colonies.

If you are obliquely referring to the shenanigans at Boston in 1773, the complaint was the tax on tea was reduced for large corporations (such as the East India companies), there was no additional burden for the American citizens.. And since then the US has systematically reduced the tax burden on corporations while increasing it for it's citizens.

No matter how much things change, they stay the same.

Anyway the real reason was a culmination of lots of factors, no single event triggered it.

We'll beat China to the Moon, NASA nominee declares

That's going to require a lot of Tritium

Ah, the overlooked problem with D/T fusion. The Earth due to interactions in the upper atmosphere produces under 500g per year. CANDU reactors produce a few kg per year which is most of the commercially available tritium. Rather costly too.

Neutron bombardment of Lithium-6 maybe

While Lithium is an abundant element, Li6 is a tiny proportion and tricky to separate. it's currently about $150/gram and a reactor would need tonnes of it to exploit the neutron/Li6 reaction (which has never been demonstrated beyond small scale lab experiments). While fusion is a clean reaction with little problematical waste, breeding tritium this way does produce some quite nasty waste products.

Kids: If you want to be richer than Croesus, find a scalable, cheap & clean way to make tritium.

...especially radio astronomy from the back side.

Why, How? Any radio telescope on the far side will indeed be shielded from the Earth but exposed to a sodding great unshielded fusion reactor 1 AU away for half of each orbit rendering it pretty useless during the lunar day.

The poles are the useful places, up (or down) there are craters that never see sunlight - that's where you want to be if you want lunar radio telescopes.

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

Re: Landers that fell over

A polar base if positioned well will have some permanent sunlight while a equatorial location has a 14 Earth day long night so power is a serious issue. Also at the poles as well as permanent sunshine there are places in permanent shade, these are thought to hold large amounts of ices, mainly water but some frozen gases like methane could be there too. Nothing like that is found nearer the equator.

It doesn't matter how relatively hard or easy it is to leave if the work you want to do up there can only be done in specific regions.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Re: Solicitors

The real reason is that fax machines send a receipt on delivery but I suspect they've forgotten all about that and have the machines set to ignore receipts and keep using them "because".

Librephone battles the proprietary binary blob

Re: I know that making something "idiot proof" is a wasted effort..

I mean, what do metal weights dropped by some random Italian guy in the 16th century have to do with anything today? It took hundreds of years for Galileo's "simple experiment" to be fully understood and then it was only person: Albert Einstein.

Er, I think Newton (1643-1727) had a pretty good idea of what Galileo (1564-1642) was doing. "All" Einstein did was to give a mechanism for gravity as distortions in space/time as opposed to it being a force as was previously assumed.

Anyway there's no evidence that Galileo performed the experiment that had already been done in 1586 by Stevinus in Delft. For Galileo (in 1589) it was a "thought experiment" rather than a "practical experiment" - The same experiment was revisited by David Scott in 1971 when he dropped a falcon feather and a hammer while on the moon.

An idea that won't sink: China planning underwater datacenter deployment

Re: Why not just put the heat exchangers underwater?

Too easy.

It's old tech, power stations have been dumping waste heat to seas and rivers for ages. There's probably even redundant thermal power stations with all the coolant plumbing and heat exchangers in place that could easily be repurposed into bit barns.

But yes, it would be a far more sensible proposition. But would it appeal to gullible deep-pocketed venture capital investors?

Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally

Re: Latency

Close but no cigar, try a 54.7 km square.

I think you square rooted 3,000,000 and then divided by 1,000 to get km^2 when you should have divided by the square root of 1000.

But you are right about it reacting to the force of the solar wind, if pointed in the right direction, this bitbarn could reach Alpha Proxima in a few decades.

Re: Let me guess

According to the interweb thingy "Solar panels in space produce approximately 300-450 watts per square metre" so to power a gigawatt bitbarn he'd need around 3,000,000 square metres of solar panels. For a terawatt death ray increase that by x1000.

If it was even remotely possible, which obviously it's not, it'd make astronomers a tad peeved.

Re: Latency

Looked up the size of the ISS heat sinks which dissipate 70kW and they are 156 m^2 (about 12.5 meters square) so to dissipate 1GW the heat sink would need to be about 3km square and fully shaded from the sun.

I suppose they may be able to improve on the ISS system a bit, maybe get it down to 2km square - I'll leave it to the reader to decide how practical that would be and how much it might cost to construct and launch.

Maybe lower his expectations by a few orders of magnitude and go for 1MW, that would "only" need a heat sink about 2,230 m^2 (~50m square).

Power! According to the interweb thingy "Solar panels in space produce approximately 300-450 watts per square metre" so to power a gigawatt bitbarn he'd need around 3,000,000 square metres of solar panel - well I suppose it would shade the heat sink.

Latency

He's only talking about primary latency when the flying bitbarn is in line of sight of a ground-station which will only be the case for about 1/4 of an orbit, the rest of the time he'll either need more ground-stations or orbital repeaters both of which introduce a lot of secondary latency. Sticking it further out in GEO will increase the primary latency but eliminate the secondary latency.

As for dissipating the heat, a big and probably unsurmountable problem if he wants a lot of compute up there.

Particle damage, given that the particles have charge, I wonder if anybody has tried setting up a magnetic field to deflect the particles enough to protect a satellite or maybe just it's sensitive area?

Trump demands Microsoft fire its head of global affairs

Re: Chamberlain

Indeed, the 25Hz pulse wasn't used because it was superior to working at a higher frequency like the Luftwaffe were using, it was used because we had to build a comprehensive network in a hurry and it was much easier, quicker and cheaper to implement the outdated low frequency system. All the stations being synchronized was a happy accident as it eliminated interference problems where stations overlapped.

As for the factories, don't forget we outsourced as much as we could to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and anybody else who could help.

Re: Chamberlain

What the RAF had was integrated command and control. I'm sure you've seen the films of wrens moving models around on a huge table map tracking the combat in real time each with a headset to talk directly to sector bases and to receive information from radar stations, nobody else had anything like that and it revolutionised air defence. All done on computers now but the principle was created then.

The German planes didn't all use the same radios so bombers couldn't talk to the fighter escort directly while the RAF was more coordinated. (We did have some problems with sectors not cooperating fully - internal power plays and petty politics at the top).

We also had better radar than the Germans thought. Before hostilities they sent the Graf Zeppelin along the south and east coasts and they detected a 25hz signal but assumed it was leakage from our national grid which in a way, it was. They decided the coastal towers were a range finding system when in fact they were the "home chain" radar stations. Those home chain radar stations used the 50hz mains frequency instead of local pulse generators, this also meant the entire coastal radar was synchronized making it far more sensitive. We also had (just) enough mobile stations for when they bombed the fixed ones which were generally back up within a week of an attack, strangely after a while they stopped bothering to bomb them.

After the war it was mentioned to a (former) high ranking Luftwaffe officer that we identified and tracked the Graf Zeppelin on radar and he was shocked, they were certain we didn't have that capability before the war started.

Later there was the cavity magnetron ... <17 pages of tedious technical drivel deleted> ....

Re: "It is highly unusual [. . ]"

That but also causing as much noise as possible to deflect attention from the Epstein issue,

Microsoft digs up Vista-era animated wallpaper for Windows 11. Here's how to get it

Re: well at least it'll...

I'd give you even odds that the video pauses while the system is updating itself.

Make Windows 11 more useful and less annoying with these 11 Registry hacks

Re: Super helpful...

In defense of registry-like solutions. Everything is centralized in one place,

Agreed but it rather depends on the implementation. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly MS managed to use the worst design possible.

Re: Super helpful...

And then outlook still takes forever to be useful.

I've been waiting for over 20 years for Outlook to become useful.

BOFH: HR discovers the limits of vertical mobility

Re: "There's always next week..." the Boss says, unexpectedly.

I can't help but think: "the higher they climb, the further they fall".

Is he being set up for a spectacular denouement?

Starlink outage knocks tens of thousands offline worldwide

I thought the whole point of Starlink is that it's for areas where there is no mobile or wired phone system available. So that cannot be the case here.

Maybe it's like ye olde Ceefax/Teletext and it cycles through the whole internet, you just have to wait until the bit you want comes around. Or maybe, and I'm just throwing this out as a possibility, the writer is an idiot.

Microsoft Surface 7 laptop: Nice hardware, shame about the OS

Re: ".....there was the allure of all that Copilot hardware."

Yes. To paraphrase Douglas Adams:

Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word "allure" I wasn't previously aware of.

Jaguar Land Rover supply chain workers must get Covid-style support, says union

Re: Insurance

There's no problem with the tax payer footing the bill as long as it's a loan and not a gift. One it's all fixed JLR should make no payments to stockholders and absolutely no board room bonuses until every penny is repaid to HMG.

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

Re: So the boss got away with it?

I can see his dilemma, if he frames the boss then the beancounters have a win and that is just unacceptable, far better to scare but save the boss and embarrass the beancounters thereby hurting the real enemy and getting some useful gratitude from the boss.

Johnson, Cummings met Thiel months before Palantir won NHS pandemic role

Rubbish. They don't need to shout from the roofs that X met Y at whatever but it should be on the record for any interested parties to see who spoke to whom, where and when. There is no reasonable reason to conceal a meeting if the meeting was legitimate.

The meeting is not the problem, it's the secrecy surrounding it. All such meetings should be publicly disclosed.

Re: SFO

The SFO has been systematically defunded by the Tories so while they have the powers and legislation they can barely afford to investigate a school tuck shop for fraud.

Re: Britain is run by corrupt people

Jeremy Corbyn could have been an excellent Labour leader for the Labour party as it was about 40 or 50 years ago, now, not so much. Like it or not, parties change with the times.

AI Darwin Awards launch to celebrate spectacularly bad deployments

Re: The irony ... FYI

LLMs are designed to present an imitation of intelligent by deriving an 'Answer' from your input 'Question'.

So you're saying LLMs are just over-developed versions of ELIZA from 1966. Hard to disagree.

Re: 123456

Ooh, 8 characters, that's far more secure than a poxy 6 character one. Well done.

After nearly half a century in deep space, every ping from Voyager 1 is a bonus

Re: Let's hope for the best, but...

Fortunately only one, Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in Barstow, California is located in the USA. The ones in Spain and Oz are reasonably safe from american bean counters.

Anthropic to pay at least $1.5 billion to authors whose work it knowingly pirated

Re: So for clarity....

Another problem is that it ingested thousands of books without any curation thereby giving them all equal treatment.

The dodgy online repositories of books tend to pad out the numbers with vanity publishing, fan-fiction and some of the most unpublishable garbage ever written, stuff so bad it makes Jeffrey Archer look like Shakespeare. OK it's not all crap, some is just mediocre along with some good stuff which is what gets most of the ad impressions they need, but also attention from publishers (and their lawyers) so they try to avoid having too much in-copyright material.

There is of course a wealth of out-of-copyright material available, but do we want "AI" trained on works from a hundred or more years ago when attitudes were somewhat different from today.

Trump stomps feet, pulls out 't-word' again over China rare earths ban

Re: I cannot decide who I want to win this tussle ...

And you seem blissfully unaware of macroeconomics. To put it as simply as possible:

Which distribution is better for the overall economy?

A) One person with a billion £$€

B) A million people with 1000 £$€

While the billon will be invested in stocks, bonds and similar investments most of those don't really help the man, woman or child in the street. It's unlikely the money will be in ethical investments, instead tobacco, petrochemicals, armaments and others of that ilk all offer good returns if you don't give a shit about the damage done.

A million people with an extra 1000 would make a lot of difference. In the USA a large proportion of people live from pay cheque to pay cheque with negligible savings if any at all, just having a one month buffer would boost consumer confidence massively. And consumer confidence is now at an all time low.

Re: I cannot decide who I want to win this tussle ...

The heart of capitalism is the circulation of capital. The problem now is that capital is being concentrated into too few entities who just sit on the money thus removing it from circulation. If a country want to succeed economically it needs to even out the disparities at both ends of the economic spectrum (Ooh that sounds a bit like socialism - the horror).

At the moment we have leaders in many countries and companies who are doing the exact opposite, it seems some actually believe the lie of trickle-down economics, something that does not work, has never worked and will never work.

"Controlling the means of production." Well there's a phrase directly from the Communist Manifesto (and possibly Adam Smith as well) which may or may not be a good thing, what is obviously a bad thing however is offshoring the means of production in order to make short term gains without any consideration of the long term implications which is exactly what the west, led by the USA, has been doing for the last 30 or so years while China has been playing the long game all along and playing it very well. Add to the mix an economically incompetent and easily manipulated POTUS, US industry is doomed until it can recover some primary production, if it ever can.

This is a reason for the success of China, it can and does make long term plans while in most of the west "long term" means to the end of the current electoral cycle and the current penchant for dismantling the non-political non-governmental bodies that could make long term plans will only make things a lot worse. Yes QUANGOs and their ilk are not without problems but they should not be killed just on a political whim.

Australian university used Wi-Fi location data to identify student protestors

Civil disobedience, rule one

Leave your damn phone at home, or at least turn it off.