Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Suckers for punishment, we added a crawler transporter to our Saturn V

slow starting

gearing will still be needed to slowly start the stack moving

What about some sort of PWM control for the motors, to get maximum torque without too much acceleration? Maybe there's something in a Mindstorms set?

Happy New Year: Jan 1, 2021 security cert expiration causes havoc for some Check Point VPN users

Surprised, much?

others have been unable to apply the patch due to organizational policies,

Sounds like the kind of companies which require passwords to be 27 non-alphabetic characters and changed every 3 weeks, etc. Ludicrously unrealistic policies in the name of "security", yet they don't even bother to work out how to apply essential patches when required.

Techies start growing an Alphabet-wide labor union: 200-plus sign up, only tens of thousands more to go

the AWU is aiming more toward setting high standards of ethics at the internet giant, ending retaliation against workers, and helping those outside engineering.

That's the "mission statement" of every union. If they admitted that it was just a way to give the finger to 'the man" while enriching the union organizers they'd have even fewer members.

As Uncle Sam continues to clamp down on Big Tech, Apple pelted with more and more complaints from third-party App Store devs

Re: Has Big Tech gotten too big?

Might be an Apple crumble...

Re: Has Big Tech gotten too big?

Have I been eating too much during Xmas lockdown?

Just a trifle.

What can the 1944 OSS manual teach us before we all return to sabotage the office?

as a form of humor,

Or perhaps as the very embodiment of the techniques in the book itself.

All I want for Christmas is cash: Welsh ATMs are unbeatable. Or unbootable. Something like that

Re: Social Distancing

had to make “queuee” up.

I'd have thought that a "queuer" would be one who queues, a "queuee" would be one who is queued for?

Then again, since the main reason for being there was not to queue in itself but to collect, would they not be collectors?

Roma, we've had un problema: When every flight's final destination is a date with Windows Boot Manager

Re: "I started drinking"®

North to South, always better to start with the lighter ones.

UK on track to miss even its slashed full-fibre gigabit coverage goals, warn MPs

Re: "At least a POTS landline will be good for many days"

Without power even your local exchange won't be able to operate for many days,

The larger ones have generators, and smaller ones can be supplied with brought-in portable generators before the many days of local battery power runs out. It's rare for any exchange bigger than a shed-in-a-field concentrator to lose power. This document makes very interesting reading, most mobile phone coverage was lost after an hour. After the first few hours the only two-way communications service still running was the traditional phone network which continued to work in most places until power was restored 4-5 days later. Even one-way comms like radio/TV had severe issues.

Why is the UK so shit.

It isn't, but sadly the tabloids sell more by claiming it is. If you look at the actual figures you'll see that the UK is above the EU average for fast broadband rollout & speeds.

Re: FTTP costs

Yes, if power goes out you'll lose landline. You can either keep a mobile phone for emergencies, or get a UPS for your ONT and router.

None of which is any good if good if the cabinets/repeaters lose power for more than the 4 hours they have backup for. At least a POTS landline will be good for many days.

And yes, it's rare for power to be out for that long, but when it happens (floods, usually) having a reliable phone to contact emergency services can be quite literally a life-saver.

Your ship comms app is 'secured' with a Flash interface, doesn't sanitise SQL inputs and leaks user data, you say?

Re: Shipping network security

If the owner of the ship doesn't care, it's no skin off my back.

Until the miscreants sail one loaded with fertiliser into your local port & detonate it, that is.

We're not saying this is how SolarWinds was backdoored, but its FTP password 'leaked on GitHub in plaintext'

Re: That's the sort of password

I'd guess it was one of those situations where one developer puts a simple password into some internal test code, assuming that no-one would be daft enough to want to share it, and then some other developer decides to share the test code, assuming that no-one would be daft enough to hard-code a password in it.

Oh, no one knows what goes on behind locked doors... so don't leave your UPS in there

Re: VAX/VMS!

These day's it's this one: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/janet. Ah, the days when 8 Mbit/s made it the fastest X.25 network in the world!

Re: VAX/VMS!

they typically ‘borrowed’ access to machines running in big companies.

Those were the days when systems like VAXen shipped with default passwords on the administrative accounts. VMS had three, and although admins would often change SYSTEM only the most diligent changed FIELD, and hardly anybody remembered about UETP. JANET was a fun network to wander about in the 80s/90s. Simper times...

Re: Americans and tea

without the taste (or any taste at all, for that matter)

Better than most American tea, then?

(cue jake in 3.2.....)

What does my neighbour's Tesla have in common with a stairlift?

Re: F-150 engine

a hybrid pickup with its own onboard generator

It's only a matter of time before a company like Ifor Williams comes out with an EV "touring trailer", an extended trailer with a generator, fuel tank, and fast charger on-board at the hitch end, leaving the rest of the space for normal trailer/holiday packing.

Google Cloud (over)Run: How a free trial experiment ended with a $72,000 bill overnight

Re: Not so free after all

Just like credit card companies, who set a credit limit, and then "generously" increase it because you've almost reached it & will clearly need more.

Reading El Reg while working from home? Here's a pleasant thought: Kaspersky says 1 in 10 of you are naked right now

Re: a "growing new interest in nude cleaning in British society"

It's easier than cleaning the ones who are clothed. A quick pass with a Kärcher should do it.

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

Re: BASIC Loop on a VAX

? despite the program being killed it had a massive spool full of swear words ready to send to the screen.

CTRL-O was your friend for that. It flushed the pending output buffer.

Re: Those were the days

And this particular Fortran system had no way to deal with recursive functions.

Fortran in general didn't allow them, the language didn't allow for a stack so local variables were implicitly static, and hence reused on each call. I've seen some 'creative' Fortran programs that tried to get round that with an array & local index that was incremented on each call. I think that restriction was lifted after F77.

Running joke: That fitness gadget? It's, er, run out

The headline

Reminded me of one of my favourite Bestie cartoons (SFW, if you're wondering): https://twitter.com/bestie_art/status/1044253915506790400

Glastonbury hippy shop Hemp in Avalon rapped for spouting 'plandemic' pseudoscience

Re: Sums up the current state of things...

yet utter bollocks & mental gymnastics of the highest order proliferate.

Nothing really new, 200 years ago the people peddling the nonsense had no internet, so they promoted their wares from caravans at travelling shows, and the credulous bought pamphlets and phials from them.

or the spittle-flecked rantings of a bloke sitting in a truck on YouTube.

Or in the Oval Office, for that matter.

When it comes to taxing tech giants, America is out, France is in, Canada and Indonesia are going their own way

The logic would say that if you do business here, you pay tax here

The problem is in the definition of "here".

The EU would like "here" to be defined as "the EU", but its members all have different tax codes. A true fiscal union, which is what the Eurozone implies, would have a single set of tax laws for the whole zone, but the EU members will never agree to that. An alternative would be to treat each country as a separate place to do business, but that goes against the ethos of the union. Since there is no chance of actually fixing the situation, they rely on ever-more complex meta-rules to plug loopholes, and tax lawyers find ever-more sophisticated loopholes. It's an unwinnable arms race.

The same thing happens to an extent in the US, where states have flexibilty to set tax codes.

Re: With Covid emptying States' coffers, and those companies seeing increasing revenues....

In the first case who do you think the customers will blame, Amazon or government?

Oh, when the order has:

Total xxx

VAT yyy

2% GAFA tax zzz

I think they'll know exactly who to blame.

Re: With Covid emptying States' coffers, and those companies seeing increasing revenues....

trying to raise taxes on people and local companies already hit by the situation won't be wise.

Those are the people, who'll get hit anyway. If France decides to tax Amazon at 2%, who do you think will end up paying, Amazon customers or Amazon shareholders?

PC makers warn of battle for air freight capacity, will have to fight for cargo space with... the COVID-19 vaccine

Re: Fright or freight

The big problem with -70C shipping is that it uses dry ice, and you really don't want cargo aircraft filling up with CO₂ in gaseous form. It's hard to leave a vent open at 30,000ft.

European Space Agency will launch giant claw that drags space junk to its doom

Re: They should have gone with the James bond scoop design

"Ultrapure copper for an ultrasensitive dark matter detector"

Any day now it'll turn up in speaker cables. Probably with connectors plated in gold mined from an asteroid.

Calls for 'right to repair' electronics laws grow louder across Europe

Re: @Dwarf

So we choose to buy this stuff because it's cheaper ... or more expensive ... ?

Yep, both. Some people want the latest Apple shinyshiny, so that they can show off to their friends how rich and hip they are, and if it breaks they can afford to replace it. Others buy the cheapest stuff on the basis that it'll be obsolete in 2 years anyway and so they might as well treat it as "disposable" from the start. I can sort-of understand person #1, even if I don't do that, but not #2.

Then again, I'm happy to replace oven fans, dishwasher pumps or switches, and most things in a TV. Quite apart from the cost & environmental issues, it's more fun. I do find it steadily harder to get hold of service manuals though, so legislation like this is to be applauded.

It may date back to 1994 but there's no end in sight for the UK's Chief customs system as Brexit rules beckon

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

Most leave voters still do. They'd love a fair and reasonable trade deal with the EU. They just want political separation.

Precisely, and that should be good for the EU as well, if they could get past their "must punish the UK for leaving" mentality and look at a compromise that works for both. They may finally be getting there.

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

The French trialled their boarding system which added 70 seconds per truck to processing time

That's pretty good, and will undoubtedly get better with practice. Remember Heathrow T5? That's assuming the French unions don't start a work-to-rule for more staff, of course ;-)

you're an IT guy, how many major projects have you worked on that were still planning a few weeks before they went live ?

You would be horrified at the list, I'm sure. Let's not talk about the time I was still compiling code at 23:30 for a midnight 'go live'...

How many of those weren't abject disasters ?

I've never actually been involved in any real disasters, although a few have meant some fire drills for certain customers.

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

When I go to the states I need to give at least 72 hours notice in order to be confident of getting an ESTA (although that is then valid for a couple of years, so it's not that big a deal).

Mine usually come through in 15 minutes, same for the Canadian version. India can be slower.

I've not been following the proposed schemes for what used to be a very easy process of going to our neighbours...

The Schengen countries have been planning an ESTA-like authorization called an ETIAS since 2016 (before Brexit). Much the same process, fill in a form online, pay €7, and it's valid for 3 years. It applies to citizens of any country outside Schengen that can travel to Schengen visa-free (62 at last count). It was always a grey area for the non-Schengen EU members, they can't be prevented from travelling within the EU so ETIAS probably couldn't be enforced for them. So far it's been 4 years and they still haven't actually implemented it.

The current situation for entering the EU from the UK is that you'll need a passport with at least 6 months validity left, and may need a visa for a stay of over 90 days. Presumably UK passport holders will need to complete an ETIAS if it ever actually gets implemented. For most siutuations it's basically "no change".

Re: I sincerely doubt that this deal will be offered again

I suspect we'll be talking about that in 50 years or so.

When the retired MEPs are crying into their Kronenbourg about the good old days, when the UK was the biggest problem they had and the euro was actually worth something?

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

All one has to do is read your very own Brexit posts on this very site to see that it's a sound argument to make.

Citation required?

Unlike many (most?) of the remainers here, I have actually spent half my life living in the EU outside of the UK, so my opinions are at least formed from personal experience of the political and economic disaster the EU is turning out to be.

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

The leavers keep banging on about the blue passport

Some do, most don't care.

, whilst the remainers said that was nothing to do with the E.U.

They're correct, but it is tiresome that they keep banging on and on about it.

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

And yet it was one of the things that leave voters were sure about.

Some of them, sure. Just like some remain voters were sure that it was the end of Spanish holidays. Voters can be stupid, on both sides, this is not news.

The standardisation was nothing to do with being machine readable (predating that by about twenty years).

Are you sure you're not thinking about biometric ones? Machine-readable ones appeared in the late 1980s, the same time as the old blue ones stopped being issued. The stiff cover of the blue ones would have made it difficult to use in the automatic machines. Biometric passports were introduced about 20 years after that.

As for them going back to blue, they needed to be changed anyway to remove the European Union wording so why not change the colour as well, even if only as a sop to those who care? Most of us don't.

Re: F*** Business

That was the widely reported quote by the prime minister, when asked about his response to business concerns.

No, it was his response to businesses who wanted the political organization set up to do what they wanted, irrespective of what the voters said.

Think of what your reply would be if someone suggested that Facebook should be allowed to define the rules for GDPR. That will give you the right context for his response.

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

Ah, blue passports.

They were black.

It's really funny, the only people who seem to care about the colour of the passports are the remainers.

Yes the old ones were black. There were also not machine-readable and the change to the current format was an international decision completely unrelated to the EU. We could, and can, have any colour we like, many EU members don't use Burgundy. No one with any sense gives a damn what colour it is.

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

and which could have been used to encourage the EU to get their shit together! That would have been really useful.

We spent 25 years trying, to little avail. The EU thinks it has got it's shit together, and it is going to continue digging deeper into it whatever anyone else tries to do. David Cameron came back from Brussels waving his little bit of paper and saying "Look at how well I negotiated, the EU is getting it's shit together. Vote Leave if you don't agree".

Well, he got what he asked for.

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

Dress it up however you want, make any excuses you want, the fact remains you were conned by a bus and didn't give two shits about the rest of the country.

And you thus demonstrate perfectly why so many remainers haven't a clue about the real problem. You just don't want to listen to any of the reasons that have been given why the EU is a political and financial disaster, even if you disagree with them.

If you actually even pretended a little bit to have read the opposing reasons, and could come up with concrete, factual, reasons why they were incorrect, people might take you seriously. Instead you just bang on and on about "you don't agree with me, so you must be stupid and bigoted". Not a particularly convincing argument.

NASA building network cables that can survive supersonic flight - could this finally deliver unbreakable RJ45 latching tabs?

Re: Not so much a red herring as a pink sprat

[2] What's special about these cables (apart from a supposition about latching tabs)?

Well, as the article says, they're used for special instruments:

Those instruments will fly on an F-15 aircraft that follows X-59 test flights so will need to survive supersonic flight and the X-59’s shockwave.

Me, I'd just have used WiFi between the planes.

Snap decision: 74-year-old Florida man wrests puppy from jaws of alligator

Re: Australia also has dropbears

These are far more deadly than people think.

And also very skillful at avoiding CCTV cameras.

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

Re: Programming interminable comments

The joys of statement terminators. When I started working mostly in C, after Fortran, forgetting the terminating semicolon was a common error.

Now I keep putting semicolons at the end of my Python statements...

The GIMP turns 25 and promises to carry on being the FOSS not-Photoshop

Used GIMP for a small project recently and just like every other time I’ve used it I spent as much time searching for help with using it than I did using it.

Lucky man. On the few occasions I tried it I usually gave up long before I actually got it to do anything close to useful.

Ordnance Survey recruits AR developer to build 'geolocated quests' to help get Brit couch potatoes exercising outdoors

Do they involve beer & sausages?

Trump fires cybersecurity boss Chris Krebs for doing his job: Securing the election and telling the truth about it

Re: The Truth?

First he'll presumably need to win a primary to be the Republican candidate. I'm not sure the GOP will be so keen to choose him next time.

Remember when the US used to go to war to bring 'democracy' to those countries under a dictatorship?

Ah yes, democracy at gunpoint, whether you want it or not. And the irony of that always escaped them.

Re: The Truth?

I think his problem is that he can't handle politics. He still thinks it's like business, and in business you always get another go.

He's treating this election like a takeover bid; if the shareholders turn you down you can always have another go with a bit more money, and/or sue the target to try & reduce the price. He hasn't understood that presidential elections can't be made to work like hostile takeovers.

Baby Yoda stowed away on Crew Dragon, boards International Space Station

Baby Yoda

That's a bit disappointing. I thought it might be this one.