Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Equinix pilots use of fuel cell in 'shipping container' outside datacenter

The chain Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Electricity has an overall efficiency of around 30% which is appallingly bad.

That depends on what you pay for the electricity. If it's, say, from a wind turbine that would otherwise be paid not to run (as can happen in some areas of the UK because the grid can't handle the flow) then it doesn't really matter if that efficiency is pitiful, it's still a positive outcome, and the same is true for solar or hydro. Any time the supply of cheap electricity exceeds the demand, being able to use the surplus somehow is always a win.

If a cheesy '80s flick is a good metaphor for how you run projects, something is wrong

There can be only one

I think Microsoft's takeaway from Highlander is more likely to be "Embrace, extend, extinguish".

Disney claims agreeing to Disney+ terms waives man's right to sue over wife's death

Disney may not be to blame, but they may well be responsible, there's a significant difference.

Indian telcos to cut off scammy, spammy, telemarketers for two whole years

Re: I feel a game of...

Whack. Spell it right.

The original arcade game used "Whac".

UK's 'electricity superhighway' gets green light just in time for AI to gobble it all up

I've also seen reports that wind noise with the T-pylons is much higher than from traditional lattice pylons, and is upsetting people who live near where they've been installed.

Greener than burning trees at Drax, at least...

Especially when they are trees that have been shipped in from the US, in diesel-powered ships.

It's all drying up: Microsoft to erase 3D Paint from digital store

Unless you're down on the S. Coast, where you get offered peng to go with your veng...

NASA's NEOWISE asteroid spotter turned off for the final time

Re: Well Done!

> pity we can't get domestic kit with even a fraction of this reliability.

We can, if we're willing to pay for it. Most aren't.

Under-fire Elon Musk urged to get a grip on X and reality – or resign

Re: I Feel Sorry For GB

at least we have the Constitution with the Bill of Rights

That would be the constitution and bill of rights based on, and still containing text copied from, Magna Carta (1215) and the English bill of rights (1689)?

Glad you finally caught up.

All y'all love AI, right? Get ready for Gemini in Nest cameras, Google Assistant

We must be close to the tipping point where "AI inside" is actually seen as a negative even by general consumers.

EVs continue to grow but private buyers are steering clear, say motor trade figures

Re: Second Hand?

There's also a tremendous amount of energy put into making petroleum fuels that makes the end-to-end efficiency pretty dismal.

Which is completely irrelevant to the topic of having a small EV. All that petroleum production is happening in a refinery somewhere, you aren't dragging it around with you. The point about small EVs is that batteries are big, heavy and inefficient when compared to a tank of hydrocarbon. With a large vehicle those inefficiences have proportionally less effect, you have space toi spare, but a little car barely has room for a small engine, small fuel tank & small luggage space. Even a moderate increase in battery capacity in a small EV can have a huge effect on the space available for other purposes, the difference between, say, a 35litre and 45litre fuel tank is relatively insignificant, in weight or space.

Re: Naysayer

"Refunds for hotel nights skyrocketed because of the lack of autonomy of EV compared to ICE so people couldn't get home"

Not an issue with autonomy, but with uneducated users.

Domestic charging is 7p for ~4 miles (1.75p/mile)

Users on business trips are, by definition, not going to be within range of domestic charging, so that's a pretty nonsensical comment. Even an educated user on such a trip would have to charge the car at a public charger, where they're more likely to be paying 60p/unit, and that assumes they can be without the car for long enough on a business day to put a full charge in.

I'd go further and drop VAT on AC charger supplied electrons to 5% (or even 0%) to match domestic supply.

Very nice, for all the taxpayers who'll be subsidising it.

I'd leave the VAT at 20%, the same as for petrol/diesel, and then add the 35% fuel duty charge as well. That would be a more level playing field.

Re: Second Hand?

I don't think anyone has suggested that EVs are the cause, all cars are getting bigger as they're inflated with extra safety features, it's just that batteries have a far lower energy to size/weight ratio than liquid fuels. For small sizes of car the batteries take up proportionately more space, and add more weight, so there's a real problem of diminishing returns. For something like a Fiat 500 the EV version carries a 40% weight penalty over the petrol version (1400kg versus 980kg), and has 1/3 the range. Look at a family saloon-sized car & the difference is less marked, as is the price differential. A small EV makes little sense economically.

Keir Starmer says facial recognition tech is the answer to far-right riots

Re: Only for the Far Right

Look at how well it worked in Northern Ireland.

The problems with policing in NI in the 60s weren't specific to the force being a civilian versus military one, but that it was a civilian force which drew its members almost exclusively from one section of a very divided community. When some policing duties were delegated to the military after August 1969 there was only a brief honeymoon, before that situation became part of the problem. Today, with the PSNI being more (albeit not fully) representative of the community it serves, things are much better. I can't see a gendarmerie-style force working at all there.

Re: Only for the Far Right

The gendarmerie, by the various names it's known in different countries, is a branch of the army. Britain is rightly proud that it's police forces are civilians, I don't if many in the UK would want a military gendarmerie-type force to handle policing.

Need to move 1.2 exabytes across the world every day? Just Effingo

Just effingo

That's how a lot of people feel about Google.

Bugging out: 53 years since humans first drove a battery-powered car on the Moon

Re: Peter Fairley

Indeed, I still have my copy of that, somewhere.

Breaking the economy of trust: How busts affect malware gangs

I wonder if there's any scope for an OS to use technology (I hesitate to say AI) to detect when ransomeware is running? Perhaps spot large read/encrypt/write patterns and pop up a warning? It shouldn't be impossible to spot unusual patterns like that, the security services do it all the time. It would mean they wouldn't have to look for specific malware signatures, so would be less dependent on having frequently updated signature data.

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Every office has one.

Seems to work for many alcoholic drinks: `"a sherry", "a scotch", etc. Presumably because it's implicit that it means a <defined measure of> beer/sherry/scotch.

Not wine, curiously.

Re: Every office has one.

the use of the Englsih word 'billion'.

Common usage gives it as 10^9, but I was taught that it means a million millions or 10^12, my dictionary agrees with me.

It used to be that in English 10⁹ was a milliard and 10¹² a billion, but US usage considers 10⁹ to be a billion and with the general Americanization[sic] of everything even the UK press now uses Billion for 10⁹ .

Microsoft whiz dishes the dirt on the Blue Screen Of Death's colorful past

I miss the days when consoles were hardcopy printers. You could tell the distinctive sound of a VMS system crash from the other end of the room.

A perfect Microsoft error message: it doesn't tell you why it crashed, nor what the last update it wants to rollback was.

Tesla that killed motorcyclist was in Full Self-Driving mode

"Use of Full Self-Driving (Supervised) will be suspended if improper usage is detected."

What does this actually mean? Does the car pull over safely until the driver takes manual control, or is it just "Beep!, hey meatbag, wake up and drive" and then disengages FSD while still barrelling along at 70?

It is 60 years since a US spacecraft first took a close-up of the Moon

Re: My first thought was

And when you replaced the valve and noticed it getting much too hot, you could measure voltages quickly to diagnose the problem before things went too far. Transistors just go 'click', and you're back to square one...

Re: My first thought was

And only 15 years after the invention of the transistor, and about 5 after the IC. Much of the technology they were planning these missions around was still in its infancy.

UK Electoral Commission slapped for basic cybersecurity fails

Re: As always

And of course "sufficient protections were not in place" makes it sound like no-one's fault, and really should be "we did not put sufficient protections in place".

I understand the reasoning behind not fining public bodies, but why not personally fine (and fire) the incompetent managers who signed off on the process?

Meta's AI safety system defeated by the space bar

Re: Parsing free text input has laways been an exacting problem for developers to solve

H O W D O W E S O L V E T H I S D E V E L O P E R S E X A C T I N G P R O B L E M ?

Isn't that what https://expertsexchange.com/ was for?

French internet cables cut in act of sabotage that caused outages across country

Re: Transport technologies

The usual 'gotcha' here is that you take the trouble to route physical links over geographically diverse/difference routes in the infrastructure you control, only to find later that all of the protected paths end up in a single building/power zone/underground ducting etc.

Yes, you carefully provision 2 links from 2 different suppliers, then 5 years down the line company A buys company B and decides to 'rationalise' their plant. You only find out when someone puts a backhoe through what turns out to be your single non-redundant fibre backhaul... Been there.

The secret to better weather forecasts may be a dash of AI

forecast models up to five days

Five days? It would be nice if they could get it right for tomorrow. Maybe they need an AI that can look out of the window?

BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe

Re: "blamed our own fuck-ups on a well publicised but unconnected problem"

Top marks for an entry box that puts in the space automatically so you don't have to flip a coin.

As long as it can tell the difference between the 4-4-4-4 of Visa/MasterCard and the 4-6-5 of AmEx

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: super thread drift.. but..

If you're stationary with your foot on the brakes it won't matter what way your wheels are pointing. Locked wheels will slide in the direction you're pushed, which will depend on whether you're hit square on, or at an angle.

AI models face collapse if they overdose on their own output

Re: This phenomenon needs a name

Oozlum?

How a cheap barcode scanner helped fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs in a flash

Our home ISP provides a router which allows the creation of a guest WiFi network. I have the credentials for it printed as a QR code, so when a visitor asks, often hesitantly, if they can use our WiFi I just hand them the paper "scan that". After initial surprise "wot, just scan this thing ?!" they're instantly connected and well impressed at how clever I am. They've clearly not stayed in any of the hotels I got the idea from, and I'm not going to tell them :)

Kia Niro electric vehicle defies physics with record-breaking 114 million miles on the clock

I'm guessing there's some safety regulation insisting on that.

Nope, just marketing.

The Euro NCAP safety assessment requires "active safety" devices in order for a car to get a 5* rating, if they can be permanently disabled then they don't qualify so the car won't get 5 stars. No manufacturer wants to create a situation where their cars seem less safe on paper, so they all make these devices come on by default.

Philippines wipes out its legit online gambling industry to take down scammers

Re: Bad for everyone

> no good outcome for anyone

Except the ones running the casino, of course.

Mozilla Thunderbird finally gets system tray notifications

Re: Sorting folders in TB

recent releases insist on THREADS

It's irritating that they default to threaded display, but can't you just select Unthreaded from the menu? Admittedly I was so pissed by the supernova changes that I've refused recent updates in case they've borken something else, but the threaded/unthreaded option is there on all the recent versions I've seen.

CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor also linked to Linux kernel panics and crashes

Re: "We're in the process of operationalizing an opt-in to this technique"

If they write their code in the same convoluted way no wonder it's crap!

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Re: Internal Shelter Area

Wouldn't matter where the explosion was. An explosion outside would create a pressure gradient that could just as easily suck the glass out of the windows into the street.

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Automated updates from a SaaS service like CrowdStrike cannot be tested in isolation.

Why not? You have a list of sacrificial test systems which are permitted to get the update on day 1. After it's complete they run a functional test suite to make sure that all is behaving as expected.

After that, a report is sent to the admin who can decide whether the automated update is provided to the production systems. If you're willing to take the risk you could make that second phase an "automatic unless the admin says no" option, although I wouldn't.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Related?

Or your kernel detects the faulty module and rolls back the update to a known working version, while alerting your management software (you do have that?) to the issue.

Re: Related?

Who needs Y2K when you've got Microsoft?

Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

Microsoft 365 remains in a degraded condition wiith many services unavailable to some users.

Business as usual, then?

Europe's largest council could face £12M manual audit bill after Oracle project disaster

Re: how different can councils be

Two councils may provide identical services, but purchase them from two different suppliers with two different sets of billing and accounting procedures.

Only two? Our council seems to use several suppliers just for the services from that one council. Hence the 7 recycling bins, collected by 4 separate lorries, that we have to use.

Iran's MuddyWater phishes Israeli orgs with custom BugSleep backdoor

Re: Bravo

the genocide being committed by apartheid israel should be commended.

And what abut the genocide called for by Iran, who openly call for the total destruction of the state of Israel?

Cyber attacks on Israel could be interesting. I doubt if Mossad will bother with pwning command/control servers or such niceties as international arrest warrants.

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

Re: The more process you have the less agile you are.

Give them a steer on what you want, hold informal checkins on a semi-regular basis, and then get out of the way.

All too often that leads to the situation we've seen at Birmingham council.

First, define exactly what your users need. Write it down, and agree a change control process.

Then let the good engineers loose on it.

Evidence for Moon caves emerges as humans hunt for hospitable hideaway under lunar surface

Re: Temperature

Since there's no atmosphere, what exactly is at 17 degrees? The cave walls/floor?

the BBC's version of this story was claiming that Mare Tranquillitatis was the site of an ancient ocean. I see that has now vanished -

Someone pulled the plug and it drained away through the tunnels, obvs.

SpaceX's Falcon anomaly could have serious implications for the space industry

Re: RUD - Rapid Unexpected Deflagration/disassembly??

It's generally taken to be Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Good

The vast, VAST majority of drivers aren't skilled or trained enough to get the maximum braking force out of a car without ABS. The vast majority of drivers aren't skilled or capable enough to handle a starting skid without ESP and would be doomed without it as they wouldn't be able to recover it anyway.

ABS makes no difference to braking force, it is intended to prevent wheel lockup and so maintain steering control even under emergency braking. It's only used in emergency situations, and although an experienced driver may not need it, and may never trigger it, it doesn't hurt to have it there as a backstop.

Likewise for EPC/TCS systems. They handle the situation where a car is at the limits of control, so an experienced driver should never get into a situation on a public road where it comes into action, but if it helps a novice who overdoes it on a curve so much the better. EPS does have one downside, it's not useful on snowy hills where it tends to drop engine revs to the point where the car stalls, but that isn't an emergency situation & there's plenty of time to push the "Off" button in those rare cases (except in modern cars where that option is 5 clicks down in a touch screen menu system :-( ).

Both are a far cry from things like lane assist or automatic braking, which intervene all the time and can be actively dangerous. In my personal experience lane assist is very dangerous on narrow country roads where it can misinterpret road makings as lanes, and tries to nudge the car away from the verge directly into the path of oncoming HGVs or coaches. Similarly I've had the emergency braking system slam on the brakes, with a blaring siren, just because I eased off on the brake as I approached a line of stationary traffic at a red light, or when the road curved and it mistook a car parked safely to the side as being stopped in my lane. I was still in full control, but the siren startled both me and my passengers and had I not recognised what it was it could have caused an accident. It certainly startled the car behind when my car braked hard and totally unnecessarily.