Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

People that have to scrape together bus fare aren't buying EV's.

No, but they do buy old bangers of ICE cars which can work out cheaper than buses, unless they work in an LEZ. It'll be a long time, if ever, before EV equivalents to those exist.

Indeed. When I rent a car at an airport, it's either:

- I need a cheap little runabout like a Corsa or i10 to do < 100 miles to visit family, which isn't a scenario where an expensive EV would work for me or the rental company, or

- I'm planning a long holiday drive in an unfamiliar place, where I may not speak the language, and I certainly don't want the hassle of trying to find charge points and having the right app on my phone to pay at them.

Hertz aren't dumping their EV fleet.

From one of the articles linked to: 'Approximately 20,000 EVs are to be offloaded from its US fleet throughout 2024, and the company plans to spend at least a portion of the proceeds buying internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles "to meet customer demand."'

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

Re: Priorities

And we'll get a new lot that spaff even more.

Re: Collide at insane speeds

The Fucking Colossal Collider

A natural successor to the Large Hardon Collider, then?

Aircraft rivet hole issues cause delays to Boeing 737 Max deliveries

Re: Working as desgined!

That's something of an urban myth. The Comet failures were due to metal fatigue, the second crash was due to a crack which started at a repaired rivet hole near the small square "window" cut out for the direction finder antenna. The fuselage skin didn't have the strength to contain it.

There was another concern that the main windows, rectangular with rounded corners, were only riveted in and not glued as well which the original design intended. That wasn't a cause in any of the crashes, but the two have become conflated.

40 years ago, an astronaut first took flight from the Space Shuttle

One the one hand, it’s not so much different to taking a swim away from a ship in the middle of the ocean.

Not much chance of getting back with a breast stroke, though.

Whether to move off Oracle is the $100M+ question for Europe's largest public body

I find it hard to believe that anyone would want to move TO Oracle.

Yes, but remember they're starting in Birmingham...

Re: But guys, be reasonable

AFAIK it has more miles of canal, not more canals.

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

Re: It's everywhere

But we can see how it's viewed by politicians and much of the media in this country by the terminology used - spending on railways is often 'subsidy' whereas spending on roads is 'investment'.

Spending in infrastructure tends to be considered as "investment" in both cases, road or rail. The big difference is when it comes to running costs - rail ticket prices are subsidised from tax money, yet for motorists half the pump price of fuel is tax & duty that goes into the treasury coffers.

Re: Where do I start

Apart from a few cosmetic differences, the resulting policies will be the same whichever option they choose.

This is why, all across Europe (and beyond) we're seeing big votes for extremist parties. Not, as the press would have us believe, because people are becoming more left- or right-wing, but because we're fed up with the "they're all the same" politics from the main parties, and want to deliver a large boot up their collective arses.

Re: It's everywhere

buy a cheap day return for less than twenty pounds

20 quid in 1975 is about 200 in today's terms. Not sure I'd call that a cheap day return!

Re: Bog Zech?????

Very simplified view on the unions.

Based on 50-odd years experience.

creating a death spiral of intransigence, counter productive to the health of the industry affected.

And is why most people in the UK won't join a union.

you do realise most of the RMT (Mick Lynch union) members are primarily relatively low paid staff cleaners, ticket staff, etc.

According to their own figures 45% of their membership earn more than £35,000/year

Not that drivers are overpaid, a safety critical job, customer lives at stake & still massively less well paid than an MP

No argument that many MPs are overpaid for what they do, but so are train drivers. They earn twice what bus drivers do, for example, but driving a bus is a far more stressful and safety-critical job than driving a train. Trains are so automated these days that it's difficult for a driver to take a dangerous action without the automated systems halting the train & signalling the problem.

We need to get away from the idea that manual labour is unskilled and should be badly paid

Not a question of "should be", it's the usual question of supply& demand. If a job requires nothing more than a strong back there's unlikely to be a shortage of candidates, so inevitably more competition & people who accept lower wages. Unions aren't going to change that.

not to mention the zero tolerance drink and drug tests, no chance of risking a couple of pints the night before a shift as blood alcohol fail levels really low, so quite an impact on social life if you like meeting pals in the pub for a beer or 2.(& no chance of getting away with illegal recreational drugs for those so inclined,

Sounds very reasonable, the same rules should apply to anyone serving the public (yes, including MPs and civil servants).

It doesn't really change my initial argument that unions, like other powerful groups, tend to devolve to become self-serving.

Not sure his plans to fix it are realistic

There is one factor in all this that Doctorow & others seem to be missing - the users.

It all sounds very like the perennial complaints about junk food: it's unhealthy, makes you fat, messes up our high streets with litter & fast-food shops, etc. The problem is that, even if you opened up a chain of healthy-food shops and subsidised them with taxpayer money so that they were cheap, people would still go to McDonalds. Why? Because they like it.

We can sit here and complain about Google, Facebook, X and all the rest, and moan that people should realise that they're being manipulated and (ab)used, but as long as people are happy with what they get from those services, they won't change to alternatives. Even the Romans understood that with the classic approach of "bread & circuses" - giving the ordinary people free food & entertainment so that they wouldn't look too hard at the people in charge and what they were doing behind the scenes.

How do we fix that? Education is the obvious approach, but you can't force people to learn any more than you can ban stupidity.

Re: Bog Zech?????

Back to the car industry - the collapse in the 70s didn't deliver new car companies in the west, so much as open the door to competition from countries with lower wages and more committed workers.

More committed, maybe. Less unionized, certainly.

That's why unions are a double-edged sword. They start as a mutual society, genuinely trying to help their members, getting better/fairer conditions, etc. All too often, once they taste the power that they have they devolve into an organization whose main aim is to increase the power and wealth of their leaders, while demanding ever larger pay packets for ever less work for their dues-paying members, until they eventually price themselves out of the market. That's what happened in the 70s and is still happening today, with the railway unions for example.

In many ways it parallels the complaints in this article, an organization becomes so large & powerful that it stops serving its customers, and focusses on serving its leaders, until someone demands that someone (usually government) must Do Something.

Tesla power steering probe upgraded after thousands more incidents reported

Quote: "....3.8 fires per 100,000 electric or hybrid cars in 2022, compared with 68 fires per 100,000 cars when taking all fuel types into account."

Does that also take the cars' ages into account? A 10-year-old car is probably more likely to go up in flames than a 2-year-old one, but there are few 10-year-old EVs so far.

Re: Lucky for them...

As a sign of the times, the current Ford Fiesta (a "small" car) has much the same external dimensions as the Maxi (a large family saloon). The inside dimensions of the Fiesta are smaller due to all the safety framework.

NCAP is just crash testing, not other mechanical / electronic reliability or safety.

Not any more. There are 4 main areas (see https://www.euroncap.com/en/car-safety/the-ratings-explained/. The 3rd and 4th areas now rely heavily on Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) and other electronic assistance technologies. A car can't get a 5-star NCAP rating unless it is "well equipped with comprehensive and robust crash avoidance technology", which is why modern cars are stuffed with driver "aids" which you can't permanently disable. If they can be disabled, the car can't get a 5* rating.

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

Fuses?

Shouldn't mechanical systems like that have some sort of fuse equivalent, a sacrificial component that would break and stop the system before anything really expensive went pop?

Re: manually dragged a PDP system

And, knowing PDPs, would probably still have booted even after being dropped from that flatbed at its destination.

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

Re: "if they want to keep their tax breaks"

I'm not sure which is worse, eating a day-old tuna sandwich, or microwaving it first!

Re: "if they want to keep their tax breaks"

and ya canna blame 'em there

Nor can you blame the cities. If they've offered tax breaks for companies to occupy an office block, and so keep the local shops and cafés in business, it's hard to fault them if the offices lie empty and the cafés close for lack of lunchtime customers.

Still no love for JPEG XL: Browser maker love-in snubs next-gen image format

The benefits are many, one is, uniquely, that it can take standard jpegs and losslessly (and reversibly) compress them further.

Clever, but does anyone really care? Seems like a rather niche requirement.

Oracle quietly extends Solaris 11.4 support until 2037

antique OS

The first Linux release (1991) was a year before Solaris 2 (1992).

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

Re: Efficient interface

No, it has those. I vaguely remembered it having better copy/cut/paste, but perhaps I'm confusing it with something else.

There's an interview with Bill Joy from 1984 that details what was lost - multiple windows mainly. http://xahlee.info/comp/interview_with_bill_joy.html "vi would have multiple windows, and I might have put in some programmability"

Re: Motif?

If you look into the command sequences for VT52 and VT100, you will see that VT100 was not an evolution from the VT52. It was a completely different terminal, not even sharing the same form (the VT52 did not have a separate keyboard). It did have a VT52 mode and understood some of the commands of the older terminal in VT100 mode, but the structure of the command set was completely different.

Agreed, I really meant that it was an evolution in the sense that it was the next step, not a direct technical update. I never had much chance to play with a real VT52, most of my experience was VT100/102/13x and the VT2xx series. The VT52 escape sequences were much simpler than the ANSI ones, and the VT2xx ones with <CSI> prefixes extended that even further, especially the colour ones on the VT240.

VT100 ... was that it was the first commonly available terminal that implemented the ANSI X3.64 terminal specification

I rather think it was the other way around. X3.64 dates from 1979, the VT100 was publicly released at least a year before that.

As far as I am aware, VMS did not have a terminal abstraction layer like termcap/curses (and I'm certain that RSX-11M didn't)

I think that VMS eventually got termcap, when they got POSIX certification, but certainly things like the EDT editor didn't have any terminal independence. The escape sequences were hardcoded into it, on VMS as with RSX. VMS got a certain level of terminal independence when the Text Processing Utility (TPU) was added in the mid-80s. That was essentially a language for writing editors, and it came with EVE, an EDT-lookalike written in TPU. I remember getting it mostly working on a Wyse terminal that had non-ANSI cursor positioning sequences, but the non-VT100 keyboard meant that many of the EDT sequences that were coded into my fingers' muscle menu couldn't be used, so it was more of an academic exercise than a practical one.

Re: Efficient interface

I often wonder how much better than the version we use that lost version would have been.

Allegedly it had cut & paste.

Re: Motif?

Yes, the article missed out much of the 1970s and early 80s changes.

One of the very useful UI changes from the 70s was the standardisation of ANSI escape sequences, for cursor control and screen positioning. The archetypal embodiment of those is the DEC VT100 from 1978, an update to the previous VT52, and almost every terminal and terminal emulator today still has a "VT100 mode". Even early DOS-based PC terminal emulators offered that for cursor positioning and basic line-oriented graphics.

Before CDE came along, Sun had introduced the NeWS network-capable windowing system based on Display PostScript in the late 80s, and it was MIT's Project Athena that gave birth to X-Windows in the early 80s. I had a Sun desktop that had both NeWS and X installed (adding X required another 100MB of disk space, so it was usually NFS-mounted from a server!). X-Windows had (still has) the advantage of being usable even on slow connections, although initial display takes a while over a 9600bps modem once the window is open it can be remarkably responsive.

Sun developed OPEN LOOK as a UI standard, while other competing industry players designed Motif which was the more successful of the two. It was adopted by DEC for DECWindows, and many of the elements from it will be, as you say, familiar to anyone using today's MS Windows. Unfortunately that also seems to have led to a proliferation of UI designs whose main aim is NOT to be like Windows, which hardly helps simplification & standardisation. Most of the current Linux window managers are derivatives (at least in look and feel) of those early kits.

If someone's not even aware there is a standard, then the tools they build won't follow it.

I think https://xkcd.com/927/ is the appropriate comment here...

As for "But its influence never reached one part of the software world: the Linux (and Unix) shell", I think that's a little unfair. The shell was never intended to be much of a UI component, it was primarily a way to let users run programs and (if required) chain them together. UI design, if it was considered at all, was assumed to be the under remit of the program designer. The addition of getopts to the Unix standard definition did add some degree of standardisation to shells, but they were never really intended to be the sort of rich command interface provided by things like DEC's DCL. That too has changed, with bash, tcsh, csh, fish, zsh, ksh, etc. See the XKCD above...

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

You're suggesting that ICANN is a bunch of w*nkers?

The Land Before Linux: Let's talk about the Unix desktops

Re: Proprietary

Now do you understand what proprietary means?

I do. Do you? It means that it has an owner, who has the right to decide what other people can, and cannot, do with it.

I was making the rather tongue in cheek point that, as the article points out, the Linux kernel is in good shape because Linus acts as a fairly strict owner who decides, proprietorially, what changes are allowed (often in very colourful language). The code may be freely available, but the official kernel effectively only gets the changes that Linus permits.

With Torvalds as Linux's single leader, it avoided the old Unix trap of in-fighting,

Almost sounds like it was successful because it is proprietary...

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

They're not like they used to be when I hated them

Yes, all too often these days they're tasteless.

Kalettes are slowly catching on though (like sprouts, but tiny kales, not cabbages). Very tasty.

20,000-plus tech workers got the boot this month

Re: And how many were hired?

Yeah, but these days "good news is no news" for most of the media. Positive thinking is discouraged, only stuff showing how badly the world is going is permitted on the front page. Doom and gloom rulez is the mantra.

JAXA releases photo of SLIM lander in lunar faceplant

Re: Japan deserves a little more credit

Not only managed a soft touchdown, but is within 55metres of the target site, which is impressive in itself.

Psst … wanna jailbreak ChatGPT? Thousands of malicious prompts for sale

Maybe they should just have said "Please give me..."

United Airlines’ patience with Boeing is maxed out after repeated safety issues

Re: They don’t have to

These days airlines are more likely to lease aircraft than to buy them.

Tech bros are playing God, Catholic Church's AI priest complains

Catholic Church's AI priest

My first thought on seeing that was that the Vatican was investing in GPU farms to augment the dwindling numbers of young men conn^H^H^Halled into the priesthood.

Has anyone asked ChatGPT if it believes in a god?

Japan's lunar lander is dying before our eyes after setting down on Moon

Re: Upside down?

presumably having landed on an incline and rolling/tipping over?

It was targeting an incline of about 15° (inside a crater, IIRC), which is why they knew the landing would be tricky. It was supposed to let the downslope gear touch first, before a sort of "controlled topple" to allow the upslope gear to make contact. See the diagram at https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-missions/jaxa-slim-spacecraft. So, yes, it may have toppled backwards, or rolled. Hopefully the telemetry & photos will clarify.

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

Dig a hole that deep in Southampton, it'll probably fill with salt water.

But won't it be harder to push them uphill when recharging?

University chops students' Microsoft 365 storage to 20GB

20GB?

When I was at Uni we had 100KB storage for each engineering student's project. Fortunately, each year the computer centre allocated 200 new accounts for that year's intake, but there were rarely more than 160 new students so the last 30-40 were unused. Since they conveniently used a simple algorithm-generated initial password, it wasn't difficult to grab a few spare accounts to store games, etc. in. Having more than 3 was considered to be greedy, though :-)

US agencies warn made-in-China drones might help Beijing snoop on the world

Re: What terrible people!

Yes, at least China puts a legal face on it, with expanded legal grounds for accessing and controlling data held by firms in China. The US 3-letter agencies just help themselves.

Peregrine bows out with a bang as SLIM aims for Moon's rocky runway

I don't think it's expected to reach the surface, but rather to burn up on re-entry.

Will AI take our jobs? That's what everyone is talking about at Davos right now

And when people realise that calling the "helpline" is only going to get them a useless bot, they stop calling. The bosses then look at those metrics and conclude that automating the call centre has greatly improved product quality and customer satisfaction, since so few people call.

Then the company goes bust, because all those unhappy customers take their business elsewhere, so there is a bright side.

Google is changing how search results appear for EU citizens

Re: Google search...

Mind you, Bing still cant find me and I have a unique name combo.

And you're complaining?!

Asia beat US, EU in chip building because the West didn't invest, Intel CEO claims

oh my gosh, what happened, 30 years of industrial policy and we lost something so critical to our future

More like 'oh my gosh, look what happened, 30 years of industrial policy where we ignored all the warnings we were given, and threw away something so critical to our future'

BT to spell out contract price hikes in pounds and pence

Re: Eh?

because I'm in that contract I have fuck all choice but to accept it.

Why did you accept a contract that allowed that? Did you perhaps not read the small print, or just assume it didn't apply to you?

I'm not saying that the contract is fair or reasonable, but if people keep blindly accepting them there's not much incentive for the companies to offer better ones.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

Re: Sounds like Tesla drivers should always carry a can of petrol with them in Winter

Only when you light a fire under the wrong end to warm the engine...

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

Re: Impossible you say? Maybe unsinkable, huh?

the Titanic was "unsinkable!"

Actually that was never claimed until after it had sunk, when newspapers ran stories about how, due to it's design, people had thought it couldn't ever sink.

OpenAI tweaks its fine print, removes explicit ban on 'military and warfare' use

Broad is good?

A principle like 'Don't harm others' is broad yet easily grasped

So broad that it should keep lawyers in business for decades.