Posts by Phil O'Sophical

European Gaia mapping satellite is retired but proves very tough to kill

Re: What computer is it running ?

AFAIK an ERC-32 is a radiation-hardened SPARC chip, so I'd guess it's running Linux, or maybe some VxWorks derivative.

Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage

Re: Tyrant sounds familiar

In many places, a former employer can't say anything negative about somebody if called for a reference.

In most places I worked it was policy not to. Too easy for it to come back and bite you and really, if someone like that wanted to leave, it was in our best interest not to stand in their way. Just give a neutral reference and leave it at that.

Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried

Re: Not Enough Compute Speed?

'just make denser silicon!'

Both germanium and gallium arsenide semiconductors are 2x the density of silicon...

UK govt data people not 'technical,' says ex-Downing St data science head

Re: a training program to help civil service technologists become "AI engineers"

Civil servant: Oh I see, yes our infrastructure needs mending of course, sorry about that! Here is additional funding, of course I approve.

And then "Look Mr Boss Mandarin, my department is now twice the size it used to be, aren't I doing well!".

Jeff Bezos can now taunt Elon Musk: I'm building a moon rover for NASA, when can Tesla do that?

I may be old, but not quite that old as I don't actually recall Fireball XL5 on my TV as a kid.

I do, so I must be old...

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

Re: VMS was where I started

X.25 was only a thing in Europe back in the days when it was the only service(?) the monopoly telcos were selling.

Not at all. The difference was that if you had offices 2000 miles apart in the US you could go to AT&T or MCI and rent a leased line that was easily provisioned, (relatively) inexpensive, and ran on one company's infrastructure from end to end, so in the event of a problem you had a single throat to choke.

A similar length link in Europe might have crossed 3 or 4 countries, each with their own (often state-owned) telco, so provisioning a 2-wire or 4-wire leased circuit was a bureaucratic and technical nightmare, and cost a fortune. If there was a problem on the route they would all point the finger at each other and wait for someone else to fault-find. X.25 (and later Frame Relay) had all the advantages that IP has today, you just bought a connection from the local company at each end, it had good error recovery, and it wasn't your problem how the packets got routed.

It wasn't purely European either, at one point some of the world's biggest networks used X.25, including the airline SITA network used for exchanging PNRs for flights. Lots of financial networks, such as ATMs and early electronic point-of-sale terminals used it, it was cheap and easy to set up a new terminal and features like Fast Select were ideal for that sort of short connectionless exchange. Even until quite recently you could look at a credit card receipt, and spot the X.121 address used for the connection. The most recent version of the coloured book standards that I remember working with had even updated some of the timing parameters to allow it to be used on satellite links.

Re: VMS was where I started

I still have 3 RL02 packs (RSX11 distribution media) but never had the drives to read them. They're untouched for maybe 35 years, so status unknown but the shockwatch indicators are still intact.

Re: VMS was where I started

removable disk packs (about 10MB istr -- which model would that have been?)

10MB removable was probably an RL02, although they were rare on VAXen, more often used on PDPs.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: six runways around London for national resilience

CDG is a horrible airport, I'd take LHR any day, indeed for 30 years of transatlantic travel I always prioritised LHR and AMS. FRA was ok, apart from the long walks everywhere.

I flatly refused to use CDG, even before one of the terminals fell in and killed people.

Re: How?

The people who should be ashamed are those who are perfectly capable of working, but prefer to live off the hard work of others who pay the taxes that fund the benefits system.

Of course there are many people who genuinely need and deserve benefits, and we should support them them. Unfortunately there an increasing number of people who don't take advantage of their publicly-funded education, don't bother to earn any skills or qualifications, and just assume that somebody else will pay their bills if they don't want to work.

Those people need a reminder of how the real world works, and it's a pleasant surprise to see a Labour government grasping the nettle that successive Tory governments ignored for years.

Re: TITSUP

Supporting the downward ones is probably more of a concern.

Re: How?

The state owns only 51% of AENA, not all of it, it's essentially a private company where the state has a golden share.

It also runs Luton airport, hardly a poster boy for competent management.

Re: Really...?

The first priority in this sort of situation is safety, especially of the firefighters. It wouldn't surprise me if the widespread power outage was an intentional decision to maintain safety while they understood what happened, and prepared a proper and complete response. Automatically switching to a backup system isn't always the right choice, which is why good DR plans always have a person in the loop. Lets wait until we have all the facts.

Re: How?

Spanish airports are state-owned, but privately run by AENA.

Re: Really...?

Exactly. There are many events which could close somewhere like Heathrow for a day (weather, a crash, water or power outage etc.), and their DR planners will have evaluated the most likely and most serious and prioritised them. At the end of the day an airport closed for the day, with no-one hurt, is an inconvenience, that's all.

I would guess that the reason for the big power outage at the moment is that they've had to switch off all power to the substation to protect the firefighters who are extinguishing the burning transformer. Once that's been made safe and cleaned up they should be able to turn power on again, bypassing the damage.

At this scale, transformers are custom-built devices with something like a 2 year waiting list, so it will undoubtedly take some time to get back to normal, but they will have ways to work around the fault.

Re: How?

You appear to have no idea how badly and inefficiently run things like airports were when they were in public ownership.

What about waiting to find out what actually happened before jumping in with irrelevant party-political moaning?

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

> sticking to the schedule it's always had - 10 years away.

So, about the same time as we get AGI and fusion power? Not holding my breath...

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Re: [citation needed]

If you lack the capability to understand that your choice of interpretation of a word is not necessarily the same as that of the person using that word, that's very much a "you" problem.

Neither is GIMP.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: "I think that transducer has incorrect coefficients"

It's always the bl00dy reciprocating dingle arm.

Or the Diagonal Steam Trap ?

Re: Power cycling bigger kit is not a hobby I would endorse

I think it was more that EU power calculation rules were based on vacuum cleaners that did gradually lose power as the bag filled. Since his didn't lose suction over time, he argued that the rules treated it allegedly unfairly.

Re: hot plug

Not really. A 13A BS1365 fuse will take 20A pretty much indefinitely. It must blow at 25A for 30 minutes, progressively quicker as the current increases.

The reason such plugs get hot is usually due to poor construction and/or oxidation of the fuse contacts.

Boeing's Starliner future uncertain as NASA weighs next steps

Re: two weeks notice

Twenty-five, year-old, gentlemen. Sounds about right, mentally speaking, for Chump and his pals.

'Once in a lifetime' IT outage at city council hit datacenter, but no files lost

Re: Looks like it affected their DR site too?

But at a certain point it’s about risk assessment.

That's the first part of any business continuity planning - decide what might go wrong, how probable each event is, and how much damage it will do if it happens. That gives you a prioritised list of things to prepare for, and then you can work out what the cost of protecting against each is compared to the business cost of not implementing them.

One of the most irritating things I found about customers looking for DR was how many of them would say "I've bought your DR product, how do I configure it to protect my business", which is completely backwards.

China's EV champ BYD reveals super-fast charging that leaves Tesla eating dust

Re: Fast charging

That's the problem with EV charging stations today, people get their car to 80% in 20 minutes, but insist on leaving it plugged in for another hour while they have lunch, to get up to 100%, ignoring the queue of waiting vehicles. Doesn't sound like this technology will change that. I suppose it could shut off at 80% after 5 minutes and direct you to the slow charger queue if you want more.

Give these megawatt flexible cables 5 years of forecourt (ab)use, and I forsee some spectacular rapid unscheduled disassembly events coming up.

Curious tale of two HR tech unicorns, alleged espionage, and claims of a spy hiding in a bathroom

Re: If the letter was sent to two executives and lawyers...

That's the whole basis of the allegations, that somone connected to the competitor's execs and/or lawyers passed the info on to their spy.

Google’s broadband balloon laser comms tech floated out as independent company

Birds block lasers

You just need bigger lasers...

Re: WISP services

Forget the internet, just find a pub with an open fire.

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

Re: The UK should be paying attention

It is amusing that the leader of the Labour party is more of a Thatcherite than any of the recent Tory leaders.

OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining

Re: Yeee Ha!

Making America Greedy Again?

Starliner astronauts' stay drags on as Crew-10 launch scrubs

If I was her I certainly wouldn't be doing any EVAs, in case her badge didn't open the door to come back in.

CISA: We didn't fire red teams, we just unhired a bunch of them

Re: Follow the Star Trek protocol

Didn't Spock die (temporarily) at the end of Wrath of Khan, only to be resurrected in the next film?

Britain dusts off idle spectrum for rail and emergency comms

Re: Regulator knows best?

Not if you want trains to run across borders. Rail gauge breaks are already a problem, and IIRC Eurostar trains al have two different firefighting water connectors because British and French fire hoses have different designs. Let's not add to communication problems just because we think our system is "better".

Re: Good idea, ruined

As far as robustness and bandwidth saving goes there's not a huge difference between digital comms using 1s and 0s, and Morse code...

No peace for Gandi this past weekend, after storage SNAFU breaks email and more

Re: Oh, c'mon, Elon ...

An apt anagram for Elon Reeve Musk is "Eek, venom rules".

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

Re: Maturity

Maturity, or age?

UK must give more to ESA to get benefits of space industry boom, says Brian Cox

Re: Professor Cox is busy

James Burke will always be the only space narrator for the BBC

Athena Moon lander officially FOADs – falls over and dies – in crater

Not to mention an axe and a self-righting mechanism?

101 fun things to do with a locked Kindle e-reader

The only change I've noticed is that I now have to manually tap on a book to trigger the initial download.

There is no "initial download" now. The only way to get your books is to have Amazon send them to your Kindle device/app. If the Kindle is in airplane mode you're screwed. They are sent in KFX format now, and not AZW, and removing the DRM from a KFX format book is also less straightforward.

Fortunately you can buy books from other places and still use Calibre to manage them. My local library also has an ebook lending services which works, I can borrow a book & load it via Calibre to my Kindle.

Satnav systems built for Earth used by Blue Ghost lander as it approached the Moon

Re: How?

I would like to know how that works.

As the surface of the Moon is already in a vacuum, what system are they using to suck up stuff from the surface and transfer it to the containers?

A sort of Lunar Ewbank ?

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Re: @Doctor Syntax

And then reality will hit them (and us) hard for their insanity.

And it will always be blamed on the "previous government', whoever that is at the time. It's never the fault of the incumbent, of course.

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

Re: All nighter

Why does anyone think that an all-nighter is somehow a good thing, no matter what the pay is? It's pretty much guaranteed to leave you so tired you make stupid mistakes, just like Alejandro did.

If it's really that urgent (and it almost never is), put a team together and work shifts. Solo heroics are a recipe for disaster, and Alejandro's manager shouldn't have allowed him to do it.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Re: Not computer related NSFS

Ask if he'd signed an organ donation form?

Open Source Initiative defends disallowing board candidate after timezone SNAFU

Different OSI, but the OSI you mention isn't actually a French phrase. Its English name is the International Organisation for Standardization, and they picked ISO as the short form specifically because it didn't match in either English (IOS) or French (OIN), so neither side would feel slighted. AFAIK it's actually headquartered in Switzerland. The joys of international politics...

How mega city council's failure to act on Oracle rollout crashed its financial controls

it's rare for management to press the go-live button on a system that is so woefully unfit for purpose.

If only that were true...

Windows 11 24H2 goes back to the drawing board over AutoCAD 2022 glitch

Windows 11 2̶4̶H̶2̶ is shaping up to be one of Microsoft's more problematic releases

FTFY

Mega council officers had no idea what they were buying ahead of Oracle fiasco

It's long past time we devolved power back to councils, skilled them up, burnt the PFIs and got back - if not entirely - to the days of more powerful local authorities (who - let's not forget - built the motorways)

Motorways were built by the Road Construction Units, staffed by a mix of local and Westminster government employees but run by the Ministry of Transport who set standards and controlled the money.

Personally I've never seen a local authority that could consistently find its own arse with both hands, they tend to be composed of retired or unemployed middle managers who can't bear not being in charge of something, together with some idealistic younger folks who think they can change the world but have no understanding of economic reality.

Google binning SMS MFA at last and replacing it with QR codes

Re: Downward spiral

and my sisters sometimes question even that

All sisters question that, it's the price we pay for having them...

Can you remember it as a word? For example the number to report spam texts is 7726, which spells "SPAM" on a keypad. I found that a useful way to create memorable PINs, although I'd avoid anything as obvious as 2265 ("BANK") :-)