Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Olympic-level server tossing contest seeks entrants – warranty voiding guaranteed

I think I'd probably put my back out if I tried that style of tossing. Are we allowed the hammer-throw spin-and-release approach?

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

You can't assume that dates like 2100 will only be of concern to programs that deal with "now", though. Anyone born today has an excellent chance of still being alive in 2100, so any programs that are expected to deal with life assurance or pensions for them may well have to handle dates up to 2120 and beyond. You don't want pension forecast reports to fail just because someone didn't care whether 2100 was a leap year or not.

Re: How many days in a leap year

And presumably it will continue to fail for the next 12 months.

Re: Add the Swedish ICA supermarket chain to that list

And Paris street lighting, some French papers are reporting that it all went out at midnight on the 28th, and had to be switched on again manually.

Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden

Re: Came to say the same thing

which sends and records your GPS position continuously.

No it doesn't, that would be illegal and unusable (there are over 250 million cars in the EU). eCall makes an automated call to the emergency services if it detects that the vehicle has been in a crash, or if someone pushes the "help" button, and will then transmit position data.

The system description is quite clear:

" Your eCall system is only activated if your vehicle is involved in a serious accident. The rest of the time the system remains inactive. This means that when you are simply driving your vehicle, no tracking (registering your car's position or monitoring your driving) or transmission of data takes place.

When a call is made through your 112-based eCall system, your personal data is processed according to EU data protection rules. This means that the emergency services only receive the limited data they need to deal with the accident situation, your data is not stored for any longer than necessary, and is removed when no longer required.

It would be a violation of GDPR to do anything else.

Re: can I turn them off

Somewhere in the car there must be a SIM Card

These days it's an embedded SIM - pure software, no physical card.

Re: These days...

only with better software

Sorry, not the current models, they have same crap software as VW & Audi.

They do have real knobs for some things which are touchscreen-only on the "upmarket" VWs, which is another plus.

These days a Skoda is a VW under the covers, just like an Audi is. The only real difference is a few more pennies spent on the quality of the interior plastics and fabrics for the VW and Audi. A Dacia isn't quite at that level, it's more like last-year's model Renault, but with fewer gadgets. Makes it quite appealing, more chance that the electrical bugs will have been worked out & fewer silly gadgets to get in the driver's way.

Re: There is way too much 'Because they can' in todays vehicles,

Your dashboard lights up with warnings about Front Assist system problems. Happens every time it snows...

Re: Came to say the same thing

Chinese manufacturer BYD already outsells Tesla worldwide.

Lenovo to offer certified refurbished PCs and servers

My wife and I both bough laptops (Lenovo & Dell) from one of those refurbishers, and are very happy with them. They even offer a build-to-order service, choose your keyboard/memory/storage etc. and they'll assemble it for you.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

Corey is aware this was probably not his finest moment.

Unfortunately it's the sort of moment you regret the day you walk into a meeting for the job/deal of your dreams, and find Growler sitting behind the desk...

Oracle Cerner system implementation risks future patient deaths, coroner warns

Re: £7.9bn

The system was written by Cerner, which was acquired by Oracle in 2022 (lafter the health trust installed the new system). Oracle may have buyer's remorse now...

New solvent might end winter charging blues for EV owners

Re: I know why they didn't discover this earlier

Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym

CLWNPA? Perfectly pronounceable in Wales, I'd think.

Plans to heat districts with datacenters may prove too hot to handle

This means heat exports during the early years could be light, creating uncertainty for the stakeholders in a district heating network.

I'm not sure that's a valid argument, if you consider the whole picture.

An apartment building will need to be heated, say from a heat pump, and will consume a certain amount of electricity which can be known/planned. If the data centre is empty, then all the apartment heating comes from the local pump, but as DC capacity increases and heat generation rises the flow to the apartments will increase, and their electricity consumption will drop. At the same time, the DC consumption will increase. Rather than consider DC heat ouput as "waste" which can be used, consider the DC + apartment block as a closed system. Worst-case the apartment heat pump will be oversized at the start.

I'm still sceptical about the overall idea. I know people who live in buildings with a district heating system which is so uncontrollable that they adjust temperature by opening windows, even in midwinter, which is hardly an environmentally-friendly solution.

Odysseus probe moonwalking on the edge of battery life after landing on its side

Re: Failure is an option

The design should accommodate this.

Moon Weebles?

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

Re: "replete with AI-based noise cancellation"

If they could find a way to cancel all the noise about AI, I could be interested.

BOFH: In the event of a conference, the ninja clause always applies

Re: Biscuits

Pink wafers? What sort of subversive are you? You can't call them biscuits.

Are we allowed butter?

AI comes for jobs at studio of American filmmaker Tyler Perry

So what's new?

Even when using real scriptwriters and directors Hollywood is quite capable of making films so bad that they're never released. Is "AI" really going to make things worse?

NASA warns as huge solar flare threatens comms, maybe astronauts too

There's not much to ionize between the sun and the earth.

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

Re: Why?

In my part of the Midlands they can't even find enough candidates to stand in local elections, so some posts get filled by cooption after the election. Basically anyone who sticks their hand up is in, and there are still vacancies. Adding exams wouldn't help in the slightest.

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

Re: changes to things like police and military uniforms, and signage on official buildings

In Scotland, you’re far more likely to find a GR or even VR postbox than an EIIR one.

There are still a few around the UK with Edward VIII, and he never even made it to a coronation.

Boeing-backed air taxi upstart Wisk plans to fly you across town at UberX prices by 2030

Almost there...

personal jetpack

https://gravity.co/flight-experience

Duo face years in prison over counterfeit iPhone scam

Re: Phoney

How could you not know you've bought a bag with a phone in it, are Walker's crisps especially heavy?

Biden asks Coast Guard to create an infosec port in a stormy sea of cyber threats

Re: Not quite a stationwagon…

Loaded with pieces of 8, or bytes as we prefer to call them?

Italy's military mulling space-based supercomputing cloud

Re: Why?

All that free power inevitably ends up as heat, and getting rid of heat in space is very non-trivial. It's hard enough on Earth, with oceans and air on hand.

Persistent memory to replace DRAM, but it could take a decade

One benefit of replacing DRAM with persistent memory is obvious; it keeps its content even without power,

That's going to upset Microsoft support. What will they do when switching it off and on again doesn't work anymore?

Insider steals 79,000 email addresses at work to promote own business

Slap on the wrist?

Which is exactly why this behaviour will continue, it's not considered any more serious than nicking pencils from the stationery cupboard. At the very least, this moron should be required to personally compensate everyone whose email he compromised.

Vietnam to collect biometrics - even DNA - for new ID cards

Ministry of Public Security

Good name, very "Big Brother"

there will be a QR code linked to a mass of identifying data.

So all stored on some internet-connected website reachable via an HTTPS link? What could possibly go wrong...

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

It took until the late 1980s for equipment like inexpensive 32-bit computers with onboard graphics, reasonably fast expansion buses (and thus, reasonably fast networking as a fairly cheap option) to start to be mainstream. Then Unix acquired networking support, as it still has.

I'd date Unix networking more from the late 1970s when UUCP became standard, or perhaps around 1975 with RFC681.

Southern Water cyberattack expected to hit hundreds of thousands of customers

Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

Mixing up France with the whole of Europe is a common mistake, often made by a certain kind of Briton

What a bizarre comment.

France was actually one of the earliest countries to have proper drains, largely due to Napoleon, but at that time they didn't appreciate the advantages of separating foul and rainwater drains. The disadvantage of being an early adopter, others learn from your mistakes.

When I had a garage built in the UK, I wanted to have it plumbed for a washing machine, and one problem for the builder was extending the foul drain to keep the two systems separate, as required by local law.

The previous poster implied that the UK was behind Europe, in not separating the systems. I'm simply pointing out that this is a nonsensical generalisation.

Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

built separate sewage and storm drains like they do in Europe.

You've never walked around a French city and smelled the sewage drifting up from the drains in the street, then?

Population increase could have been *planned for*.

Like in Gloucestershire, where Thames Water has been trying to build a new reservoir for 30 years, but been constantly blocked by NIMBYs, who nevertheless complain constantly about hosepipe bans?

Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

A stern letter might even get sent.

I don't know about that. It might make a staffer cry, and then there'd be calls for resignations for bullying.

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

Re: It's the cost that gets you in the end

No-one needs a 100kWh battery in their car

Well, you could argue that no-one needs a car at all, there are countries in the world where private car ownership isn't viable. I would not want to live in such a country.

On the other hand, if you want an EV with similar range to an ICE vehicle, you do need a battery of that general size.

You seem to have forgotten everything else on a car which is needed to make the petrol do anything useful

Not at all, but most of them have equivalents in an EV, you may not have a gearbox but you still have a transmission. You need a heat pump for heating/AC and various things which are driven from the engine in an ICE vehicle need electrical equivalents.

The simple check is to compare the weights of equivalent cars, for example an ICE VW Golf weights in at around 1250kg, the e-Golf at 1540kg.

and it's already quite possible to convert an ICE to EV

With equivalent performance? Citation Required.

V2G is already popular amongst those who can do it.

There will always be fanbois. I admire your optimism if you think it will ever work for the whole driving population. It is naive to assume that a V2G grid will be run for the benefits of the consumers rather than the suppliers. Once your vehicle becomes a resource on their grid, rather than a customer who pays for supply, they will decide when you get power, and how much. Not my idea of motoring.

Re: Trailer brakes

I'd also considered tapping off the vacuum from both sides of the brake booster, then using this to control air, or vacuum, or hydraulic, or whatever for trailer brakes

Works for trains... :-)

but then it's probably just as easy to tap into the hydraulic brake lines.

I'd imagine it's not so easy to allow quick (dis)connect without letting air or moisture into the lines, so taking a feed from pedal or vacuum is probably more reliable. Or perhaps go for an electric/servo model.

Re: It's the cost that gets you in the end

FUD territory much?

Where? The figures are correct.

EVs don't need to weigh more than an ICE vehicle, but *all* cars are grossly overweight nowadays.

You know of a 100kWh battery that weighs the same as 50l of petrol? EVs are generally 300-500kg heavier than the equivalent ICE model. I do agree that all vehicles are excessively heavy, but that's at least in part due to obligatory safety equipment and "driver aids".

We seriously need to have a two part VED: an emissions rate (based on point of use emissions) and a mass rate (based on the cube of axle weight) - you pay both, so a heavy car would pay more than a light one, and a more polluting car would pay more than a less polluting one.

If you're going the be that specific, then perhaps there should also be a tax based on the environmental costs of production, like mining minerals and rare metals, maybe on a reducing basis with age over the expected life of the car as the production "eco damage" is amortised? Won't be great for EVs, though.

Of course, beware of unexpected consequences. Paris has just brought in punitive parking charges to penalise SUV drivers, but they included a weight-based element. Even allowing BEVs to have 400kg more than ICE, it's still causing a lot of upset because many EVs are caught. It'll be cheaper to buy a fairly recent ICE vehicle than an EV if you need to park in Paris.

So no, overnight won't become "peak"

I didn't say it would, I said that off-peak will disappear. The total UK energy use for road transport is much the same as current electricity use. Once that all comes from the grid, in evenings and overnight as people come home from work & charge, the demand curve will flatten and there will be no need to bribe people to use electricity overnight. It'll be the same price all day.

the grid will operate more dynamically, since there will be substantially more "delayed usage" loads which can be intelligently scheduled. V2G will also be able to support the grid at times of high demand, reducing the demand for peaker plants - and therefore reducing the cost of *all* energy.

I admire your optimism, but I believe it is misplaced. People like certainty and consistency, and I can't see V2G being popular, it's too altruistic for mass adoption.

so long as you have hot water when you open the tap

Which is why people are delighted to rip-out old hot water tanks and storage heaters, to use gas combi boilers instead, there's a guarantee of heat on-demand, no worries about whether the tank will have been heated enough. It's a question of perception.

Re: It's the cost that gets you in the end

remember Brown pushing diesel to save the earth?

A classic example of a government picking one easy-to-change issue in isolation and pushing it to be seen to Do Something about climate change while ignoring the big picture. Just like they're now doing with BEVs.

"Drivers are heavily subsidised in this country"

I would be interested to see where this idea came from

From a study carried out by a left-wing environmental pressure group (Transport 2000) in the early 90s, which looked only at the costs of associated disadvantages such as congestion but ignored the corresponding advantages such as the leisure gains and ability to travel to better jobs. Like many such studies, on both sides of the argument, it cherry picked the data which supported the findings it wanted but ignored those which did not.

Re: It's the cost that gets you in the end

that there isn't a good option for you at the moment

This is the key issue. BEVs work for some people, some of the time, but seem to have exhausted the early-adopter market. They don't work for everyone all the time, and in my view they never will. Unless we accept a multi-option approach (which will inevitable be more expensive due to lack of scale) we need to find a better single solution that works for everyone.

Re: It's the cost that gets you in the end

You're ignoring the tax/duty issues.

That 79p/kWh only includes 20% VAT, so before tax it's 66p/kWh. These days a mid-sized EV gets around 4.0 - 4.3 miles/kWh, depending on weather & driving style. If we assume 4.3 then you're paying 15p/mile before tax at a public charger.

£1.45 per litre for diesel includes 52.95p duty and 20% VAT, so before tax it's 68p/litre. At 50MPG (11 miles/litre) that's 6p/mile. With tax & duty it's "only" ~13.2p/mile, so an ICE driver pays 7.2p/mile of tax & duty.

If we take your home off peak prices from a previous post, of 7.5p/kWh (7.14p/kWh), it's 1.66p/mile before tax.

We can assume that the government won't easily part with its pound of flesh and will still want that missing 7.2p/mile from somewhere, tax or road pricing, etc., (especially considering the extra wear & tear on the roads that EVs with a 30-50% weight penalty cause). That would make the EV cost 8.9p/mile at your home off-peak price, or a colossal 22p/mile at public charge rates, and it's pretty clear that very low off-peak rates won't last if overnight EV charging becomes the new peak period. You can't justify an EV on cost grounds alone.

Re: Series Hybrid

Nissan are offering a series hybrid range called E-power which looks interesting, although IMHO they missed a trick by not making it a PHEV.

Re: Purchase cost is one thing

resale value isn't important.

The resale value is crucial. The leasing model only works because the leasing companies know what they can sell the car for at the end of the lease, and they set the lease payments accordingly to give them a profit. If the resale value is minimal, then the lease payments effectively become just an installment plan for you to buy the car over the lease period.

'Scandal-plagued' data broker tracked visits to '600 Planned Parenthood locations'

Re: That's why collecting and selling location information needs to be very illegal

And if collecting and selling it is illegal, then the buyers can be charged with receiving stolen property (and perhaps conspiracy to commit wire fraud, always good for a few more years) as well. Two birds with one stone.

ALPHV blackmails Canadian pipeline after 'stealing 190GB of vital info'

Re: Curious...

250GB per day is 24Mbit/s, continuously, 24 hours a day.

As usage of a work laptop, I find that hard to believe.

Re: Curious...

You're assuming there were security measures...

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

sadly typical

There are many barriers to micropayments, such as security, scalability, reliability, and transaction costs

"I've had this great idea. Let's build it first, we can add the security later "

'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand

Not to mention that the insurance probably bought the latest versions of all the trashed components, to replace the ones in the prototype...

</cynic>

Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?

Their numbers are declining by the day

I started to use Firefox because it worked in pretty much the same way on every platform I needed: Windows, Solaris, Linux, Android. I don't need all those now, and the constant unnecessary UI changes that keep breaking things which used to work fine are really irritating. I also find an increasing number of sites that just don't work properly with it, and although I do run uBlock and NoScript I have problems even when I turn them off. I'm probably going to be one of those users that stops using it, but as far as I'm concerned I won't be abandoning Firefox, it will have abandoned me.

Work to resolve binary babble from Voyager 1 is ongoing

Thus, engineers must wait 45 hours to see if a command has the expected outcome.

Bit like when I started programming on punched cards.

Which, come to think of it, was only a year after the Voyagers were launched.

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

Make sure you keep a paper trail...