Posts by vogon00

Space-power startup claims it can beam energy to solar farms

I volunteer to do an EICR at the sattelite once it's installed. I'd love to see the diameter of the cable, as well as the Z_e and Z_s :-).

Re: energy beaming

Plus loads for the reference to Cutie. I came here to say the same thing, and you beat me to it.

Just goes to prove there is very little going on today that hasn't been thought of before (decades, probably!).

Porsche panic in Russia as pricey status symbols forget how to car

How time changes things...

FIAT used to stand for 'Fix it again tomorrow'. At least you could fix things yourself then. You can keep your modern 'tech nightmare' on wheels!

My current runabout is a 2001 Renault Clio...which you can work on yourself quite easily.

_{Also : Ford - Found on road dead. Lotus - Lots of trouble, usually serious. BMW - Bavarian manure wagon. (YMMV)}

Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL

"Cue vizio shifting their software"...

They are free to do that with *their* software if they wish, but *not* with the software written by others (kernel, libs, shells, tools etc). ISTR that using GPL-licenced in your product obligates you to releasing the source code.

Expect your licence to be honoured? Well, honor the licences for the other components in the build..

Unofficial IETF draft calls for grant of five nonillion IPv6 addresses to ham radio operators

Re: Don't forget

Here in GB, the Amateur Radio licence was (is?) granted for the purpose of 'self-training in wireless telegraphy'. Us engineering bods had much fun making antennas, receivers and transmitters and test equipment. So much more fun than buying commercial gear. I was into packet radio, and spent my time converting commercial radios for use at VHF/UHF nodes, and building TNCs for myself and others. Great bunch of people, all sorts of trades, ages and attitudes.

Things have got simpler now. Decent, simple hand-held transceivers can be bought for peanuts, with and without the 'digital' stuff. You can also buy all singing, all dancing HF multimode radios for big money if you want (I know one guy with a radio costing in excess of GBP10k!). Most stuff these days is computer controllable, with some of the serious 'contest' stations relying heavily on automation.

Fascinating hobby, bloody good training in a range of disciplines, plus great people, usually..

_{I am a G7, and the only spectrum I am on is 2M and above:-) You can keep the HF 'DC' stuff and the associated humongous antennas!}

KDE Plasma sets date to dump X11 as Wayland push accelerates

Re: Man o man

"Windows users being bug testers"

There have been more and more occurrences of serious bugs making it out into normal user-land, something that would not have happened in 'The good old days' (How the F did you and whatever testing is left not notice 'broken' loopback functionality!). The complexity of Windows has increased massively since those 'Good old days', and we all know the more complex the software, the more chance of bugs.

I just wish Microsoft realised the impact on people who just want their computer/laptop to work and lack the ability to locate the fault and fix it themselves. I have seen several people become really frustrated when things stop working after an update... they range from the young-but-not-technical to the elderly.

I'm lucky as I can (1) act on or work around a known windows issue, and (2) avoid item #1 by using Linux:-

The last time I suffered from a Linux update breaking something was when openssh deprecated some of the key exchange methods and ciphers used by some of the elderly Cisco gear in my home lab...and that was my fault, not openssh's!

Russian spy ship theories sink after Orkney blackout traced to wind farm fault

Re: Undersea cables...

Someone's already written a song about this. The chorus at 00:50 says it all.

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Re: Norfolk

Percentage is even worse in Ipswich.

Re: "Tales from the pit"

Me, I'm at best average in both disciplines. However I used to work with very, very good software engineers...and some who were absolutely stellar. The stellar ones were also 'barking' to some degree!

Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query

Hardened Data

"Hardening ingestion of Cloudflare-generated configuration files in the same way we would for user-generated input"

Should have been done already. IMO, you should sanitise/check input data no matter what the source...maybe even more so for auto-generated stuff. Just because you got it from another computer in the same company doesn't make the data quality any better.

Auto-generated data is just data that has been written by a 'Human Nth removed' programmer. If they are bad or don't understand the task, then of course things like that will happen.

We hear of 'Move fast and break things'....looks like someone did!

Icon is for their change control and risk management.

Now you can share your AI delusions with Group ChatGPT

No difference....

We've all worked somewhere where the chat contains at least one person who generates plausible-but-actually-bollocks, comments*.

So, it's not gonna be much different with AI content..I suspect most people doing 'chat' are already adept at sorting the wheat from the chaff.

*_{You know, like the stuff I post here}

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Re: Program / Programme

"Yeah. They can't even get localisation right for American/UK English."

It's not just them. US words are frequently being used instead of the 'proper' en-GB word:-) I was reading a BBC news article the other day and was surprised to find them talking of 'flashlights' rather than torches. Yes, it was a local uk-related article. ITV do it as well, plus some other really annoying stuff (Typos in article body, errors in page/tab titles etc. etc., very occasional bias).

Re: Well, it compiles!

That's almost as useful as backing up to NUL.

_{(That's /dev/null for those of you fortunate enough to be ignorant of MS's device names).}

Cisco suggests a stubby chassis, shrunken servers and router, to tame the edge

Re: When i worked supporting a number of retail outfits…

I used to work at a firm that produced mobile computing platforms for people. These contained various mini PCI-e cards to provide whatever function was required.

On one job, we supplied over ~200 machines each fitted with a cellular modem and GNSS receiver. If you've not dug into one of these, configuring the thing to function as you need it to is a bit of a challenge as it's sodding complicated, the documentation for the device is only about 85-90% accurate, and even then the behavior is not as quite as described in the docs. All of which meant the perception of our overall product was tied to the very 'fussy' configuration of this internal module.

I set the config-change password to a non-default value, deliberately preventing the end user messing with it, at least without talking to us (Well, me) first. This worked well for a few months, with the end user saying 'can it do this instead', me trying it, and the passing the info on what to do,how to do it AND why it's done. The people I worked with knew what they didn't know and were very happy with the arrangement.

A few months later, there were changes at end-user 'X'. They now no longer liked the arrangement and wanted to do it all in-house. Knowing their skill-set, I argued against this, but my boss+their boss over-ruled that and I therefore disclosed the necessary passwords, and provided instruction on how to take and restore the configuration backups for these 'embedded' devices.

Turned out to be a bad decision. I was forced to spent hours logged in remotely (using the simple 'remote support' tools I'd insisted was included) fixing problems caused by them. Turns out they were changing things after reading sketchy info from the web, or manufacturer's docs for a different product, and then not checking things worked as they expected. Dickheads.

Google Cloud suspended customer's account three times, for three different reasons

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

ISTR that depends on your authentication methods. POP3/IMAP using password Auth=a no-no, even if you 'allow less secure apps: I'not even sure that's possible now...so.....

i don't have any problem with TB at home, where I use an OAUTH authentication method with Gmail.

MIT Sloan quietly shelves AI ransomware study after researcher calls BS

2/10, Must try harder

Had a quick read of it and came to the conclusion that I am not competent to comment seriously.

Others are though. Based on their assessments, I have to say I expected better from MIT. Having said that, MIT Sloan is a school of business/leadership...what on earth made them think they were competent to comment on or research the technical subject of hacking with AI when most of the ROW can't make sense of it. Just re-spinning the hype to suit their own agenda.

MIT Engineering qualifications still appear trustable, the business school qualifications less so -)

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

Re: Remember Dark Star

"Oh, alright. But this is the last time!"

The race to shore up Europe’s power grids against cyberattacks and sabotage

Attack which layer?

Most people seem to be talking about logical sabotage by messing with the comms and data etc. of the control system. Yes, you can do a lot of damage that way, with various degrees of stealth (See Stuxnet).

Don't forget that the physical infrastructure is just as vulnerable to physical attacks. Just have a quick think about how you might fiddle with the bits of the grid that you can access! Most of us know which ethernet cable or power plug to remove to cause the maximum damage.,...same deal on the Grid, you just have to know which but to attack.

Students using ChatGPT beware: Real learning takes legwork, study finds

'Echoing' depends on the lesson, not the teacher.

"It found that participants who used ChatGPT and similar tools developed a shallower grasp of the subject they were assigned to study, could provide fewer concrete facts, and tended to echo information similar to other participants who'd used AI tools."

I'm broadly anti-AI and pro-Human, however in fairness I think the last bit re echoing is a bit biased.

I rather suspect that if someone had looked, they would have found that people also 'tended to echo information similar to other participants who'd used traditional non-AI tools'.

In my experience, it's both the what and way you are taught that makes things stick and shapes your understanding. Ever had something explained to you and still felt confused at the end? Every had something explained to you and then had the light-bulb moment?

One of my lightbulb moments was visiting a site for some knowledge and experience training on a hard-to-configure product. The explanation I received on one area of the thing 'clicked' and made sense of a bunch of other things I'd always been unsure of.I still explain that concept (Ethernet switching priorities, actually), pretty much the same way it was explained to me, adjusted to keep up with the technology/speeds.

Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong

'So yes, "it's always DNS" is a half-step away from "this outage is caused by computers." '

DNS failure was a symptom, with a cascade of failures in the DNS-dependant upper layers as a result.

The root cause (Of the original DNS fault) was human-induced somehow.

Reddit to Perplexity: Get your filthy hands off our forums

"Reddit is orders of magnitude better than the cesspits"

OK, but I still can't see *why* perplexity want reddit content. I gave up looking for answers and/or useful info on there pretty much as soon as I started:-) I'm sure there is some decent stuff on there, but you have to wade so much 'That didn't work for you, but it did for me, so you must be an idiot!' and nit-picking bullshit, not to mention downright 'wrong' stuff.

I can't see what Perplexity hope to gain by trying to 'learn' from that 'noisy' environment.

Unless, of course they've decided to turn out a product that suits it's name - perplexed!

"called out Perplexity for running web scraping bot"

I'm not a fan of AI,and lately not of Perplexity...for no other reason than the YouTube adverts for them that keep getting shoved at me.

The theme of these ads is that "<Ai Name>is giving straight-up wrong answers" and that Perplexity "scans the entire internet in less than a second". The first is just competition-bashing, the second is plain old lying bullshit.

OpenBSD 7.8 out now, and you're not seeing double, 9front releases 'Release'

Warning : GPIO != RS232

"So, you should be ready to wire up an RS-232 connector to your Pi 5's GPIO connector.

No, you should not.

The GPIO signals on any Pi use 'TTL' level voltages of 0 - 3.3V, whereas 'RS232' ports operate with positive and negative voltages that the Pi's GPIO Outputs cannot drive successfully, and - crucially - will damage/destroy the Pi's GPIO signals.

Yes, the serial data format is broadly the same (a series of digital 1s and 0s with specific timing) but the voltages used are very, very different.

For "RS-232", the signals use positive and negative voltages (Typically -12V to +12V, -9V to +9V, -5V to +5 nominal*, depending on the age of the attached equipment and compliance with the spec.).

It's perfectly OK to attach the '3v3 TTL Serial Port' used on the Pi to another '3v3 TTL Serial Port', and it's OK to attach an 'RS232 Serial Port' to an 'RS232 Serial Port', but you cannot mix the two for the simple reason that the physical layers (the electrical bit) are totally different. It won't work and you'll probably damage the usually 'unbuffered' TTL side without adding some electronics.

Even today, "RS232" serial port interoperability can be problematic at an electrical level. There are plenty of 'USB to serial' adapters out there with 'relaxed' electrical characteristics that lead to them either not working at all, or in one direction only. Anecdotally, the latter is very confusing and makes you doubt your reading ability, soldering ability and sanity before breaking out the oscilloscope, then cursing the device manufacturers for hours.

And before you go wild with RS232, all you need to connect for basic functions are TXD, RXD and GND. The other signals are for more 'advanced' functions. For these '3-wire' connections, you set your terminal emulator's flow control to 'None' initially. After things are working, you can try XON/XOFF if you need flow control, but both 'ends' of the link need to support it.

_{* Think yourselves lucky - old mechanical teletypewriters used to use >80V DC! For those that don't know, the abbreviation for teletypewriter gives us the 'TTY' still used in Linux etc today.}

UK calls up Armed Forces veterans for digital ID soft launch

Re: Nasty tactic

"always remember their service number"

...or other people's. Never served myself* but I remember the service number of two of the important people in my life....my Dad, aka 1634196 and someone else who reportedly had 954024 and a surname of Milligan.

_{* Apart from teaching secondments to Army and Navy}

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: HMRC taken down

"Eliminating all single points of failure in a complex system is hard.

Yes and no:-)

The real issue is that reliability and the removal of SPOFs etc. is expensive....which is why it hasn't happened yet.

How many times have you architected a properly resilient system, only to find it's been decimated by people counting beans:-)

UK and US security agencies order urgent fixes as Cisco firewall bugs exploited in wild

Re: Meanwhile @Cisco

CEO, CFO, CTO: Payday

Probably true. However don't forget the CEO/Board are responsible for delivering value to the shareholders and needing to meet the analyst's forecasts. That's another form of pressure the C-suite are under.

Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery

Re: should have left this job to the hardware team...

LOL!

"Hardware" vs. "Software" always has, and always will, be an issue. I was an integration/test body for a while and was sometime stuck in the middle (e.g. "If the hardware team had just done this" or "Those software engineers can't wrangle electrons" etc. etc. etc.), and usually enjoyed the show...right up until time got pressing, at which point it became frustrating.

One of the more brilliant colleagues officially switched between 'software' and 'hardware' during a redundancy exercise (Easy, they knew they'd be fools to let the person go)....we had a laugh when I asked him 'Who are you going to blame now?':-)

_{Pint is for Kiran P. (The HMG Guru) if he reads this.}

Firewall upgrade linked to three deaths after Australian telco cut off emergency calls

Commitment required.

Back in the day when I was playing with the UK PSTN, emergency calls were of paramount importance and were treated as such by any entity with a stake in the 'emergency' process> Things got tested to death during our development / test, and doubly so pre- and post- each upgrade. We all took this seriously - my lot as exchange / system manufacturers, our customers as exchange/network operators and the industry/country as a whole.

In those days, we had very detailed call records with a Call Termination Reason field (Records were generally used for billing, but they were also very useful telemetry for us!). Standard procedure during our automated testing was to 'grep' call records for emergency calls and examine these CTRs in detail and investigate if anything other than a 'normal' call termination occurred. Us testing types were allowed to be far more creative and to take longer with the '999' tests than with any other feature.

Admittedly, it was easier to do then, as things were simpler, moved slower, and people generally gave a shit, instead of treating things as an exercise without any real-world consequences for other people.

Standard procedure both during and after any real-world upgrade included a period of monitoring (Statistically and from human feedback) to catch any outlying 'edge' cases and - here's the rub - explicitly check the operation of the '999' system. In fact, there always was a 'background task' running to monitor the performance of emergency calls. There probably still is :-)

Reading the article shows someone in Optus-land got it wrong. They don't have the monopoly on cockups in this area, see this. The scale of these two seems similar to the Optus hiccup, and the causes (Human error, procedural error) look similar also.

Why did I choose "Commitment required" as the title? Because you MUST be committed to avoiding stuff like this. IMO, there are way too many technological fuckups - ones with either actual or potential real-world serious consequences for others, that is - that can be avoided if people gave more of a shit and accepted that this giving more of a shit in the important areas wasn't a financial liability. There are times where it's more importance to be altruistic than make a monetary profit for yourself or others. Allowing people to reliably call for help is one of them.

_{Here endeth this too-verbose rant.}

French jet left circling while Corsican controller caught Zs

Re: Remember that old song of ours?

Nothing to do with IT or ATC, this...

One remembers Saxon, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden etc. and still listen when time and company permits. Still have the long chain on the keys and wallet. Still wear denim occasionally. Ditched the leather..mistake?

The intro to that Nazareth track gave me a different earworm. Best version of that song I've come across so far...

Just sayin'

The Notepad that knew too much: Humble text editor gets unnecessary AI infusion

Microsoft must have too much time on their hands..

Look, notepad had been around in one guise or another for ages. It sat there doing it's thing perfectly ("Working as designed" with out being bloated), and was simple and ideal for drafting with, and stashing format-less text into for later use. It doesn't need any AI pixie-dust on it.

Lately, and particularly with the addition of tabs and non-volatile-close, it's been becoming more and more like Notepad++ (MS playing the 'Embrace + extinguish' game?) which was - and still is - my go-to text editor on Windows.

If Copilot/AI is as intrusive in notepad as it is elsewhere (Thanks, market development people - NOT !) then Notepad++ is still the best alternative I've found for a simple editor. To this day, It's one of the first things I install after a clean build / fresh install.

Terminators: AI-driven robot war machines on the march

Re: We're not going to make it, are we

Terminator : "It's in your nature to destroy yourselves"

John Connor : "Yeah....major drag, huh?"

Only adding to locky's quote to point out it's our own fucking fault when it happens:-)

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Re: Doom, anyone?

Again, many moons ago when I was traveling a lot, one made some firm and like-minded gaming-type friends among colleagues overseas who worked for the same firm/conglomerate, which was big enough to have it's own 'Global ATM network' linking the various establishments together*. Never could get people to agree on the policing of traffic across international boundaries!

I got a gentle talking to re international bandwidth use by the Quake server I put under the floor for 'teambuilding' matches:-) Gotta love those mines-)

_{* In those days, we had a whole /8 allocated to us, and router 89.0.25.1 ruled the roost.}

Re: Wheely Chair Races

"we improvised a cricket bat"

A long time ago in a place called New Horizon Park, us bored night-shift people of ED0618 and ED0619 brought in real bats, and improvised the ball..

The ball was foam torn from SIU transport boxes and bound with Sellotape into something roughly spherical and about 3" in diameter. The 3" bit was important as there was a stash of 3" pipe lying around that was used to transport compressed air around the place. You can see where this is going, I'm sure.

Despite the long corridor used as the 'pitch' being pretty wide (For forklift trucks etc.), it was too narrow for decent shots, so points were awarded based on the batsman's ability to hit defined 'targets' on the nearby walls....and some of us got very, very accurate:-) So accurate in fact that it got boring, and the challenge became maintaining accuracy as the distance between the compressed-air-cannon 'bowler' and the human wielding the bat increased. This distance got further and further, and finally required complete removal of the pressure regulator used to feed the cannon. I forget how much pressure was available, but it was pretty decent!

We stopped when someone popped out of a door half way down the 'pitch' and collected a 'ball' at high speed on the thigh:-) Hurt like hell, I'm told, the the bruise a few days later was impressive!

ISTR that following this, one of the more lunatic people suggested re-shaping the 'ball' into a baton round and playing pseudo-dodgeball. That never took off for some reason or other :-)

Fun times!

Oracle boasts $455B backlog from AI boom, but not all its new friends will live to pay up

Re: Autonomy(-ous) System?

Autonomy? More like Enron-style book keeping!

UK unions want 'worker first' plan for AI as people fear for their jobs

I've spent most of my career being a 'knowledge worker' with the 'every day is a school day' mentality. That means I've acquired a reasonable amount of knowledge on the way...but crucially with the understanding to go with it.

When it comes to "people fear for their jobs", I guess that depends on what you do for a living. I'm damn sure that AI can't do anything in the physical world so any worker who is 'hands on' like the trades / services etc should be fine. It's the more ephemeral 'knowledge' people like me that'll suffer, as 'knowledge' is only a quick search away these days, meaning my collection of reference *books* is largely irrelevant - I have to look something up in 'the library' less and less these days.

What really worries me about AI is that everyone will have access to all the knowledge they want, but without truly understanding or comprehending what they've been presented with (hallucinated or otherwise!). IMO, anyone who *relies* on AI is just dumbing themselves down. By all means, use it as a tool to train yourself but don't just rely on it.

Yes, every day really is a school day...just remember not to listen too much to the new AI 'teacher'. They have less experience than you at leaning.

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

"on VHS tapes, and sometimes on TV."

For me, it was usually delivered on 3.5" disks (Yes, floppy in name). Long while ago now, but ISTR some of the GIF89a animated porn and some of the custom 'video' player programs hadn't accounted for CPU clock speed changes, meaning that toggling the PC's "Turbo" button to high speed, mid-watch, meant that the poor guy on screen started to work *really* hard and fast.

I was working nights early in my career, and some of my colleagues would occasionally bring in tapes and a camcorder. We'd hook the CV output of the camcorder to a CRT monitor that was part of a test rig and ...... discover that it's a bizarre experience to watch acrobatic shagging on a green-screen monitor with long phosphor persistence.

Fun times:-)

The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn’t one

Now, I don't know jack about succession - apart from the fact it's a risky time.

The sole reason that the Kernel - and all that depends on it - has been so so successful is that there has *been* a Benevolent Dictator. The fact that that is currently the guy who started this Linux kernel thing is incidental (Well, it's not, but you know what I mean!).

Whenever Linus logs off, there needs to be someone with the same level of independence, mission-awareness, intestinal fortitude and altruism as Linus to ensure that Kernel development take place with the goal of benefiting the entire ecosystem, not just a greedy corporate sub-set.

In particular, whoever takes over must insure that the Kernel remains build-able from source by anyone, i.e. completely without BLOBs as far as possible.

Linux works form many reasons, but mainly because of the ethos behind it. IMHO, Linus' replacement *must* continue to act as a dictator...preferably a benevolent one. Change that idea, and you will change Linux beyond recognition...it will end up as the same corporately-driven and competitive fuck-up that is the rest of the software world. The trick is to find someone who has enough smarts to keep development both flowing and neutral to ensure a level playing-field, for the benefit of all.

Personally, I'd be starting the search NOW, and handing over sooner than later to ensure that the new body has the time to become accepted in the role by the rest of the ecosystem.

Deepfake detectors are slowly coming of age, at a time of dire need

Lol! Not even the tobacco industry would have the nerve to spawn a toxic product and then facilitate it's use to detect the problems caused by it!

It's like the anti-virus wars all over again:-) Whilst I personally hate the idea of 'AI', I'm not saying it's all bad - just that it's another tool in the 'bad' box available to human nature.

Let's just say that at the moment, AI is on a par with the tobacco industry - everyone knows it's bad for you, but no-one admits it, and it's a habit you are most unwise to take up..

Devs are frustrated with AI coding tools that deliver nearly-right solutions

Code vs Codebase

Full disclosure : I am NOT a fan of AI, and haven''t even bothered to try it for code generation. That said:

I can see the attraction of having AI write your code for you, but what most people appear to have forgotten is that you still have to debug it. IMO, debugging real human code (aka 'Actual Intelligence' code) rather than the artificially generated stuff must be easier, as there will be fewer errors or 'hallucinations' to deal with¹.

I can see that AI generation may be a way to accelerate production of a codebase, but not to a trusted codebase. Getting a codebase to trusted and mature status requires commitment and effort (AKA test and/or debugging). This may be a 'old-skool' attitude, but AI ain't anywhere ready for use until it can write the code AND reasonable unit tests. Why do I say this? Because you have to understand the code, or the intentions behind it, before you can write good unit tests.

I'm not even going to look into the repeatability of AI generated code. I bet there will be subtle or not-so-subtle differences every time you ask for the same result with an identically-phrased request.

¹_{Where does this come from? I'm porting some legacy code (cpp, bash) over to python and it's hard to keep the code working when you're inexperienced with python like wot I is.}

'Trained monkey' from tech support saved know-it-all manager's mistake with a single keypress

Re: There is only one thing to be said to such manglers .....

I used to fall back on saying 'Oook' to the guvnor when he was asking for something way above my pay grade. He was a fan of Sir T and understood it, but surrounding colleagues thought I was barmy!

Cold without the compressor: Boffins build better ice box

Re: Excellent!

"Good progress. Even better would be more progress."

Burst out laughing at this. People around me probably thinks I need psychiatric help.

Who knows, they may be right:-)

Microsoft Copilot joins ChatGPT at the feet of the mighty Atari 2600 Video Chess

"the absolute confidence with which an AI can spout nonsense"

It sounds like some managers I know... I wonder who taught who?

Three goes to zero as UK mobile provider suffers voice and text outage

The ringing tone you hear as the 'calling party' has it's playout or generation etc. started in anticipation of the far end actually ringing/alerting.

Back in the day of circuit-switched PSTN/ISDN etc., there weren't many delays during the different states of the call setup, and signalling propagated around pretty quickly, especially with common channel systems like SS7 and ISDN D-Channels. Latency in the signalling paths was about as good as it could get.

Once you call a phone on a mobile network, things get a lot more complicated...the network may have to locate the called party's phone from a signalling point of view, select the RAT for use (2G/3G/4G/5G-NSA/5G-SA) and then set up the 'bearer' portion of the call that actually carries the speech.

Fast forward to now, where most voicey stuff is packet based. Being packet based, it's harder to set up the 'bearer' circuits as you may be able to use packetised speech end-to-end, or you may need to use 'packet-to-TDM' via a media gateway and/or border controller etc. There are many more steps in setting up a packet-based voice call, and so many different organisations and technologys are in use that the call setup times are now a lot longer.

In particular, the interval between you sending the last digit of the number you dial and the called 'phone (or whatever device your chosen E.164 address points to!) actually ringing/alerting is now significantly longer, especially when a mobile/cellular network is involved at the terminating/called end.

With an old-school call that traverses only a TDM/Circuit-switched path, the far end would start alerting very quickly, usually near-enough-immediately after you dialed the last digit required. The call setup times can now take several seconds, meaning you won't be hearing the ringing tone for some time. Of course, this doesn't look/sound good, so...

Ringing tone is played to the calling party as early as possible to give the illusion of fast call setup and keep people happy by indicating progress in a timely fashion. Yep, tones like dialing,ringing, re-order, busy (fast and slow!) etc are collectively known as 'call progress tones'. Doing this is - of course - rather misleading and can cause trouble in meat-space. How many times has you partner taken you to task about not answering their call?

While we're on the subject of ringing tone....ever considered where it comes from in the VOIP world? Is it being played to you locally by your own phone that you are making your outgoing call from, the called network somewhere, or some gateway in the middle? The answer is all three - depending on what technology and conditions are encountered during the very complex call set up.

You have no idea how complicated some of the call scenarios get:-) IMO, a packet-switched cellular network is about the worst possible topology to transit from a call setup point of view:-)

UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off their backs

Dunno if this is right or wrong these days... smells right though :-)

Right or wrong, this AC deserves more upvotes for the original way of explaining the world of employment with Mad Max metaphors!

_{(Even if they use Fury Road as the model).}

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

Re: kernel LDAP (was: September)

Not my proudest moment. But one of the best QA engineers with whom I've ever had the honour[sic] of working.

As I've said elsewhere, I had the most fun of my career as a testing/QA person. We got well paid to 'red team' our own products in both software AND hardware terms.

Imagine a system that switches between a 'worker' and 'hot standby' data stream based on a bit error rate (Actually SDH MSP, 1+1 and 1:N)....along comes me with a potentiometer for an STM1 (Electrical) card and a variable optical attenuator for it's optical cousin. When signals levels/SNR were right on the edge of the BER/the switching threshold, there were a large number of 'switchover' event interrupts due to a lack of correct hysteresis .....that absolutely 'killed' things, much to the chagrin of the STM1 'Common Part' card SW guys.

Moral:Anyone can break shit, but to excel you need a truly devious mind in both worlds (Break UIs with unicode or other incorrect/out-of-range input, break electrical interfaces with piss poor signals or timing!).

I'm not 'blowing my own trumpet' here, just pointing out the lengths myself and my design and QA colleagues used to go to in order or make sure you 'end user' types (directly or indirectly) didn't have any problems or experience an interruption in service.

Wait until you have to try diagnosing the behavior of a distant echo canceller with nothing but two RTP Audio streams captured with Wireshark (Then known as Ethereal. Before that, it was manual or custom analysis of tcpdump data). Working with a couple of seriously 'media-savvy' SW devs and designers, it took a week to prove our non-compliance and a 3rd party non-compliance to one of the ITU 'V.' specs. Why was that important? Well, this was when VOIP was getting some traction in the national network, and we were investigating why some emergency telephones in lift ('Elevator' for east-pondians) cabins stopped working. That one 'bug' taught me to assume nothing and to examine everything.

Trump says he has a problem if Apple builds iThings in India

Re: Good joke.

...and after that I did say "(Although manufacturing quality has been in decline everywhere for a while)", which of course includes the USA.

Sure the *software* products are just as shite as everywhere else, but stuff for the physical world like Starets and Greenlee is still ahead of most things...only facing completion from the rather expensive Japanese stuff. That said, there isn't that much differentiation any more as everyone is still racing to the bottom.

Also, I just checked the Greenlee site to make sure I wasn't shoving too much of my foot into my mouth...and find they now sell a 'GX10 TUGGER™', Given the slang meaning of 'tug' for east-pondians, I may buy one :-)

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

Re: In another 50 years...

Give it an overhaul and put it exactly where it was retrieved and let it continue its mission

Didn't Gene Roddenberry et al already do that?:-)

Re: Here's hoping that...

OP of 'Here's hoping that' here...with a Mea Culpa.

In my rush to use an unambiguous date format, I wrote "2025-09-05" in error. What I SHOULD have written was "2025-05-09", i.e. 9th May 2025, NOT the original (and future!) September 5th 2025.

All hail ISO8601 (When used correctly, that is)!

To progress as an engineer career-wise, become a great communicator

Communication is the key..

I've been defined as an Engineer throughout my career (1st by the job description, then by me). I've been fortunate enough to have that take me to most of the northern hemisphere and a little of the southern. What I've learned - no matter what the spoken language - is that you'll find success hard if you fail to communicate. Take the time to talk with colleagues and customers, even through a translator, as you'll find improved understanding at the end. I've seen way too may things/jobs slowed up by a lack of communication in the planning and then execution phases. Especially the planning bits.

My favorite people to work with? Those who believe that 'Every day is a school day' and 'There are no dumb questions'. My least favorite? People who want to keep what (usually little) they know to themselves, and those who look down on you if you ask a question to which the answer is something obvious to them, but not to you.

To avoid being the latter, remember that someone outside of your field or project may not know what you're talking about. Just be tolerant and honest with your answers if you are able to. Your first answer should usually be the question 'Why do you ask?', as that lets you reply in-context without appearing condescending. Where did I learn that? Several years of 'translating' between teams with different skillsets.

That's my typically British offering, anyway.

_{Then again, perhaps you shouldn't listen to me as I've ended up single again and obviously can't communicate :-)}

UK government overrules local council’s datacenter refusal on Green Belt land

Practical Planning..

Lovely. More DC / Compute space for Cloudy AI etc. Let's go ahead and build a few of these with =>100MWe consumption.

...(some time later)...

Yippee! Building complete, internal infrastructure complete and populated....GO!

...(short time later)...

What do you mean when you say "Oooops, there is no short or medium term probability of an adequate electricity supply being available"?

It's all very well having the 'Field Of Dreams' mentality, but at least make sure there's a chance of your required energy / resource infrastructures being available at both the right monetary and non-monetary costs. I for one want to see what Three Rivers District Council et al have to say when the a DC operator applies for permission for a fleet of fission SMRs in Hertfordshire :-)