Posts by Phil O'Sophical

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

Or "Update completed, system will reboot in 10 minutes. Please save your work"

Going green Hertz: Rental giant axes third of EV fleet over lack of demand

Re: "As the law stands today"

China has, apparently, banned the export of rare earths (wonder why nobody is talking about that).

It hasn't. It's banned the export of the processing technologies, presumably so it can have an effective monopoly on the supply of the rare earths themselves.

Yeah, and "return full" is tricky if you have to plan a couple of hours charge time on your way back to the airport.

Drivers: We'll take that plain dumb car over a flashy data-spilling internet one, thanks

Re: ransomware

That's why most FW these days is encrypted & signed, so it's almost impossible to hack custom versions.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Re: Time for legislation

Budgets should be baked into the contract and legally enforceable (if you SAY you'll do it for £x then that is what you get and if you got your costs wrong, tough luck!)

That only works if the other party to the contract agrees never to make any changes to the software. They'll never agree to that. Unlike, say, a bridge or a skyscraper, there's a general mindset that software is easy to change, and so additional requirements can be incorporated without any significant extra costs. That's what needs to change.

Trump-era rules reversed on treating gig workers as contractors

Re: "a move that will decrease flexibility and opportunity"

There were literal riots in France because they raised the retirement age by two years, while in the US retirement is increasingly something people can't afford to do.

They soon won't be able to afford it in France either. French pensions are redistributive, pensioners today are paid from the contributions of today's workers. Unfortunately that system was set up when the ratio of workers to pensioners was 4:1, today it's 2:1 and falling. The pension system is running out of money, and legally it cannot run at a loss, so at some point it will fail. Either people have to work longer, retire later, or pay larger contributions. No amount of street rioting is going to change that basic equation.

Latest tech layoffs: Twitch, Duolingo, Citrix parent ditch hundreds of workers

Re: Companies that can't make money?

there is only so much advertising $$$ in the world

Indeed. What "we are now sizing our organization based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future." really means is "we're still making a loss, and can't pull the wool over the eyes of the VCs and advertisers any longer".

COVID-19 infection surge detected in wastewater, signals potential new wave

Re: Why did everyone get vaccinated?

Smallpox, polio, mumps, measles, rubella, HPV. Pretty sure these stop you catching and spreading those viruses.

Nope, how could they? All any vaccine can do is make sure that your immune system reacts quickly when you do catch a virus. Ideally that should be so rapid that you never feel too ill.

Collectively vaccines can stop a population from catching and spreading a virus, because an individual rapid response prevents it becoming widespread in the population. They can't stop an individual from being infected.

Re: Why did everyone get vaccinated?

They said it was safe, effective & would stop you catching or spreading Covid.

No, they said it was safe, effective, and would limit the severity of the effects if you caught it, and reduce your chances of spreading it. All true.

No vaccine can ever stop you catching or spreading any virus, that's not how they work and no reputable doctor would make such a claim. Vaccines simply prime your immune system so that it jumps on a virus more quickly if you do get infected, hence limiting the severity.

In the UK this winter, fewer people are being vaccinated (I'm no longer in the 'right' category for a booster vaccination, I was last year) apparently because most people have already built up immunity. Whether that's correct remains to be seen.

America's first private lunar lander suffers 'critical' fuel leak en route to Moon

Re: Cryptocurrency????

Were they hoping it would have become more valuable when they got it back again??

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

Re: The real lesson...

Most compilers have a switch to control whether unaligned memory accesses are permitted, it's still perfectly possible to have a build environment set up for a 68020 which will generate code that crashes on a 68000, in any high-level language.

Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight

Re: She called it "a concern"

Well, at least one of them lost the shirt off their back, so not quite a free upgrade.

Re: Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight

whether the plug was inproperly installed during production or possible removed and inproperly re-installed as a part of service / maintenance work.

Shouldn't such plugs be designed like the doors themselves, only removable from inside the plane and held in place against the frame by internal pressure? I'd hate to think that their integrity was dependent just on a few bolts.

Ransomware payment ban: Wrong idea at the wrong time

Re: Wrong

And if the only way to save critical infrastructure is to pay the ransom, the board should authorise that in the full knowledge that fines and jail time are in their future. The alternative being to allow the infrastructure to fail, and be fined and jailed for that instead. Both options might focus their successors' minds on better security.

After injecting cancer hospital with ransomware, crims threaten to swat patients

Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

It should also be easier to track down the makers of hoax bomb/SWAT calls than finding ransomware hackers. The police are pretty good at doing that already, especially for the crooks who think just blocking caller ID will hide their phone number...

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Charging points need to be able to accept a debit or credit card just like every self service petrol pump in the land.

And to have the price displayed on the charger screen, if not on a sign at the entrance.

There are chargers in a local car park which do work that way, but for the chargers at a recent hotel stay I found that I needed to download an app to even find out the cost, which was £1.50 just to connect, and 40p/kWh. Not worth it, app deleted.

Re: Hmmm..

Another that always comes to mind is the cost to insure EVs vs a comparable ICE vehicle - I haven't asked those nice meerkats to do a recently recent comparison, but when I did one last year to see where the market was at the time, the quotes I was getting back for EVs were quite frankly insane

I think that's more because they have little data on the likely safety and life of batteries after even a minor bump. Rather than sanction repairs which might come back to bite them, they're just writing-off EVs that have anything more than cosmetic damage, in case the battery has hidden damage. Even a small accident then becomes a 30K+ payout, instead of a 3K repair.

It might change after 10-20 years of experience.

Re: Think of the Grid!

Which is how much average person drives in a month

Averages are meaningless, you need to look at totals.

In 2021, road transport in the UK consumed 38 MToE (megatons of oil equivalent) of petrol/diesel, or 420GWh. Slightly less than half was by light vehicles, HGVs used slightly more than half. That's around 200 GWh of energy for cars & vans. Even if you assume EVs are 3x as efficient as ICE vehicles, that's almost 70GWh of additional electricity you need to find, each year, which means more than doubling grid output. Then add it again for HGVs. Then add in heat pumps.

Re: Think of the Grid! - running costs are a thing.

The problem is how you replace fuel duty when electric cars can be recharged from household or other electrical sources and where some of these sources can be solar, hydro or other non-grid electricity. Pretty much every solution that tries to put a levy on car charging comes up against "User has control of hardware and can/will circumvent control systems".

Exactly. An ICE car getting, say, 50MPG, will use 240 gallons, about 1000 litres, for 12k miles. That's around £750 in fuel duty and 20% VAT, or £14/week. Add that to your electricity costs and any advantage vanishes.

Re: Think of the Grid!

Might explain the erratic letter delivery schedule...

Re: Long-term profit opportunity???

Not to mention all the ways of interpreting "new" and 'bought":

What if the manufacturer simply leases the cars, instead of selling them, a bit like the aircraft industry does?

What if the manufacturer sells the new ICE cars to a subsidiary somewhere where that's still allowed (opportunity for IoM or Channel Islands to become "ICE havens"?), and then that subsidiary sells the delivery-mileage "used" cars to the actual buyers?

There's a whole new refurbishment industry waiting to be created, buy 10-year-old ICE vehicles, and bring them back to new spec. They rarely rust away these days, and modern engines are good for 6-figure mileages, so it's mostly cosmetic + replacing wear&tear items.

Re: Finding a working charger

weighed against the 4.5p/kWh that I pay at home to charge the car, the overall cost is lower than using an ICE.

That's because almost half the cost of diesel/petrol is tax & duty, compared to only 5% of your home electricity. If the exchequer has to recover that revenue from EV drivers the difference vanishes.

Google to start third-party cookie cull for 30 million Chrome users

Cui bono

audience information and remarketing ads are stored on the device

So I can charge them for hosting their advertising?

Nvidia slowed RTX 4090 GPU by 11 percent, to make it 100 percent legal for export to China

Re: Slower Version

Didn't Clive Sinclair start off in business by buying bulk lots of transistors that failed to meet the specs like hFE, retesting them, and selling them to the hobbyist market as lower-performance devices.

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Re: VMS File Versions

The ISO 9660 filesystem for CDROM also supports file name versioning, although the only time I've ever seen it appear was when mounting a CDROM on a VMS system. I'm not sure what happens if a CDROM with multiple versions of a file is mounted on a Windows or Linux box, I must try it sometime.

Re: Seamless Clustering

They shared the filesystem, but not the process space, or network interfaces, or logical names, or IPC, or anything else.

Not at all, there was certainly no shared process space, but each node could see processes on other nodes, and there certainly was clusterwide IPC, clusterwide logical names, redundant clusterwide access to devices (including network), distributed lock manager, etc as well as a shared filesystem.

The “totally different concept” is precisely the point: it rendered VMS-style clustering obsolete.

I disagree. The VMS clustering model was designed to handle business applications in a high-availabilty environment, supporting hundreds of users accessing files, databases, etc. and maintaining full service even in the present of faults. It's also been implemented in various Unixes (Solaris, HP-UX). Linux has several implementations of varying degrees of sophistication, and it's still far from obsolete in business environments.

The million-node HPC model you describe is aimed at the High Performance Computing market, as the name suggests. It's more intended for non-interactive compute-intensive parallel processing, with little need for things like shared file & DB access. The two approaches are complementary, not hierarchical.

Re: Seamless Clustering

you had to choose which node to login to, and processes on one node could not directly see what was on other nodes.

Not so. You could set up a network address for the cluster, and the load balancer would assign your login to the least-loaded node. It was also streets ahead of most modern clusters, with things like clusterwide semaphores (you could create a semaphore, wait on it from any cluster node, and set/clear it from any node), a cluster filesystem with full shared locking, etc.

Compare this with a modern Linux supercomputer. On the Top500 list you will see many examples with a million nodes each. And each one does indeed behave like one big computer.

That's a totally different concept, more like SMP than a cluster of distinct independent nodes. VAXen had early SMP, for example 8 4-processor 8800s could be clustered into one 8-node (so 32-processor) cluster. Each mechanism had different characteristics.

A tale of 2 casino ransomware attacks: One paid out, one did not

Re: Like horse thieves

And take Caesar's casino license away, for paying the ransom and so enabling the crooks as an accessory.

BOFH: The Christmas party was so good, an independent inquiry is required

Re: Plagiarism?

the BOFH is obviously learning from the best*.

On the other hand, there's clearly a place for the BOFH in Nº10's party aftermath management team.

Merry Christmas to us all!

UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday

Re: I've just had to replace the 3rd-party trackers in our cars.

I put these in (after a previous car was stolen, stable doors and all that) so nobody tracks them but me.

Re: "Smart" cars will also be affected

I've just had to replace the 3rd-party trackers in our cars. They were 2G/3G only, which I'd forgotten about until I had to pull one to check the battery.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto stolen after Ledger code poisoned

Re: I'm sorry, what was that?

Since when did despotic governments require anything as inconvenient as proof?

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

Re: Aluminium power cable

Reason?

Aluminium is tricky to solder because of the speed with which it oxidises, but when connected with screw terminals it has a tendency to creep over time, loosening the joint and becoming a fire hazard. It was used in US house wiring for a while, and caused many fires.

It's still widely used for overhead HT links because it's much lighter than copper for a given current capacity.

More to the point, can they cope with the wrong type of snow?

Damn, even the Pope thinks AI and autonomous weapons need reining in

Re: Stick to what you know

And I wonder what ChatGPT's thoughts are on who should talk to god?

The Cabots?

the world has no need of new technologies that contribute to the unjust development of commerce and the weapons trade and consequently end up promoting the folly of war.

s/new technologies/religions/

FTFY

Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

Re: Vicious circle with high demand

the demand would dry up

Indeed, as would the jobs done by the delivery folks, who would then have no income instead of at least having a minimum wage. I'm sure they'd thank you for the new regulation.

Unite the union claims Vodafone and Three merger is about 'corporate greed'

Re: Unite the union claims Vodafone and Three merger is about 'corporate greed'

free to invest unlimited amounts of government money into infrastructure and provide a free and unlimited service to the citizenry.

ITYM taxpayers money, to provide a crap and out of date service. Based on past experience of nationalized telecomms.

GM, Komatsu partner to build hydrogen-powered monster mining truck

Re: Platinum

Well, they are all attached to a system with wheels and it's own power source. Just steal the truck.

Oracle share price slides as it misses revenue expectations

It affects the overall value of the company, which in turn affects the cost of any borrowing they need to do.

British railway system is getting another excuse for delays – solar storms

Re: Tosh!

I'm reminded of a story about a reverse variant of this. Some years ago the boffins at CERN noticed a small but regular wiggle in some measurements. It wasn't serious, but they couldn't explain it until one day it stopped for a few days, then reappeared.

Looking for more info, they realised that the pause correlated with a French train strike.

It turned out that when a TGV drawing 9MW from an overhead catenary returns it via the rails, the ground currents that are generated were sufficient to perturb the accelerator beams below them.

Re: Pointless waste of time

maximum current injected into the ground reached approximately 612A

Now that's what I call a real experiment. Can you imagine the paperwork if we tried to get permission to do that in the UK?

Re: The British 'Train' System

steam loco's had absolutely no electric systems whatsover,

Many did have electric light, at least for headlamps. IIRC they used a steam-driven turbo-alternator fed from the boiler. That would have had very low steam consumption compared to the main driving system.

Re: Tosh!

Trains are better when they have bells and whistles.

Re: So, let's review

The HS2 saga viewed from afar the indecision and changing goals underlines cluelessness of the current crop of clowns.

More likely the incompetence of the Project Manglers in the civil service. HS2 has outlived several sets of clueless clowns in Westminster.

UK mulls next-gen satellite subsidies for Brit companies

Re: C-LEO

Carry on C-LEO?

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Re: We were not gentle, and each RM03 had a rough journey

That was my first thought. A lot of those old drives could have been pushed down a flight of stairs and would have been fine after a polish and head alignment.

The 256MB packs (RM05s?) were relabelled CDC kit, was the RM03?

HP TV ads claim its printers are 'made to be less hated'

Missed a tagline

This isn't just a hated printer.

This is a hated HP printer.

Microsoft's code name for 64-bit Windows was also a dig at rival Sun

Codenamed

Not all code names are meaningless. Within Sun the 64-bit Solaris work was project Wyoming, a US state which has lots and lots of space, but is very, very sparsely populated.

Buggy app for insulin-delivery device puts diabetes patients at risk of hypoglycemia

Re: Always sanitize user input

And use standard, tested, library routines to parse the input. Never roll your own.