Posts by Spazturtle

Do SSD failures follow the bathtub curve? Ask Backblaze

Re: What I Wanna Know ...

Most SSD failures are due to the controller dying which you can't predict. As the actual NAND chips wear out you will see the reallocated sector count rise and eventually the drive will switch to read only mode.

MOXIE microwaved Mars air into oxygen, but now it's time for a breather

Re: What happens to lots of carbon monoxide

"The Earth's magnetic field protects our atmosphere."

That's actually an unsubstantiated hypothesis, and the more recent evidence indicates that magnetic fields actual cause the atmosphere to be lost faster.

Toyota servers ran out of storage, crashed production at 14 plants in Japan

Re: Lost in Translation?

"they didn't know the consequences of their actions and hadn't done proper resource planning."

Or maybe they knew they would need a new server soon and decided to demonstrate why.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Re: Great job!

The government bailed out the banks by forcing them to issue new shares which it bought, so the shareholders did lose out as their shares were diluted by a large amount (since the share price had dropped so low the banks had to issue a large amount of new shares). This is why the government ended up owning a large amount of shares in several banks.

Re: Great job!

"The government could have taken over the banks and reformed them, but it didn't - it bailed them out"

Bailing out the banks IS taking over them, that is why the government is a major shareholder in several of them.

The world seems so loopy. But at least someone's written a memory-safe sudo in Rust

Re: Perhaps /etc/sudoers more of a problem than perhaps C memory safety

"It is possible to write safe C code as well. "

The issue is that it is not possible to guarantee that C code is safe, given how many times memory issues have been found in critical c code written by experience coders.

Another thing AI is better at than you: First-person drone racing

Re: The death of speed

F1 cars already used to have the turnings pre-programmed into them before the race so they would take the optimal turn, they eventually banned this as they wanted to keep the human factor.

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

Re: Resiliency – we've heard of it

They said that they would be able to fix it very quickly and if won't cause disruption if it happens again. So I suspect it might simply have been that nobody working there even knew they had to manually clear invalid flight plans and it took 4 hours to get in touch with the guy who retired 30 years ago.

Southern Water to drink up tech deals worth up to £358M

"invest the £300 million into sorting their sewage overspill problems instead"

They are not allowed to do that, Ofwat only allows new sewage plants to be built when the existing ones are routinely going over their red line, but Ofwat tends to set the red line above the plants maximum capacity so the red line can never be reached.

Two teens were among those behind the Lapsus$ cyber-crime spree, jury finds

Re: Hold on...

"...and the difference between "been guilty" and "done the thing" is ?"

In the UK being found guilty requires that both your body is guilty (so you did the thing you are accused of) and that your mind is guilty.

"Nope. Sorry. It showed that they wanted the money and that's all."

Yeah it was all about the money, they are still refusing to hand over their crypo wallets. They should be detained indefinitely until they have over the money they have squirreled away.

Apple's defense against apps vandalizing other apps still broken, developer claims

"Do apps on MacOS get installed in user space or something"

Apps are just uncompressed zips that to install you just drag and drop into your Apps folder.

From what I can tell Apple's security stops apps from directly changing other apps without user input, but it doesn't stop the file picker from selecting other apps files, so you can open TextEdit and open the settings file for another app, make changes and then save them.

Judge snuffs man's quest to have AI-created art protected by copyright

Re: Hollywood beware

"Add a little bit of "AI" to the mix and you have the risk that copyright in a movie or tv production could be challenged on the same basis: that humans didn't do the whole thing, only a part."

No as the studio would be claiming that the operator of the computer was the creator.

This case was about a guy trying to claim that the AI itself should be credited as the creator and should hold the copyright, the court told him that that wasn't how the law worked and that he was the creator and should register the copyright in his name.

Tesla knew Autopilot weakness killed a driver – and didn't fix it, engineers claim

Re: But is it difficult?

Using LIDAR makes it all so much easier, but Musk refuses to use LIDAR since he had a falling out with all the major suppliers and publicly denounced LIDAR. With Elon in charge Tesla is doomed to be left in the dust, camera only systems can only take you so far.

Re: "Autopilot"

Auto Pilot and Auto Land are real, Auto Land requires the airport to have the equipment for it and needs to be initiated by somebody in the cockpit.

Former DEC employees to rally against stagnant pensions post-HP

Re: Drivel

"The problem is that the pemsion fund's rules didn't include cost-of-living increases"

If it was a fund then the pension would increase in line with the performance of the fund's investments.

I can't find anything that shows that it is an invested fund, from what I can see it looks more like a defined benefit pension like the NHS pension where you give up part of your salary in return for the promise that they will find money from somewhere to pay you when you retire.

"cost-of-living increase"

Where is the money for this meant to come from?

From what I can see it doesn't look like the DEC pension was an invested fund that people paid into, so why would anyone expect the value to go up. If it isn't invested then how is it expected to grow in value?

Bank of Ireland outage sees customers queue for 'free' cash – or maybe any cash

Re: It's a bank, of course it's not free money

They have an internal printer in them that prints out a log, that spool will be changed when they refill the cash machine and be sent of to be scanned so they can verify all the transactions. So if the ATM doesn't give you your money then your account should eventually be refunded.

Beijing's silent treatment topples Tower Semiconductor merger with Intel

Re: Quick question

This is normal in mergers, the 'buying' side agrees to cover the administrative costs and loses that the 'selling' side incurrs as a result of the merger process.

You're not seeing double – yet another UK copshop is confessing to a data leak

Re: Where's next?

Scotland has already had a breech this week, they accidentally published all the personal details of all adopted and fostered children in Scotland.

Ford SYNC 3 infotainment vulnerable to drive-by Wi-Fi hijacking

Re: firewalled

They connect these units to the canbus so that they can read engine data and use that for their fancy mpg indicator and stuff like that. The canbus was never designed to be secure and I doubt you can properly firewall parts off.

So much of cars is digital now, there hasn't been a mechanical linkage between the accelerator and the fuel injectors in a long time, breaks are still mechanical but have ABS which is controlled by the computer and some modern cars use full electric power steering with no mechanical linkage.

Honey, can you shrink the plugin? Mozilla allows desktop extensions on Firefox for Android

Re: Do I know something they don't?

Since the rewrite of the mobile app they have had a dozen or so whitelisted extensions for testing that they had vetted. Now they have finished adding all the APIs back and are opening it back up to all extensions.

Virgin Galactic sends oldest-ever Brit and first mother-daughter duo into space-ish

Re: the edge of space by US standards

There is no internationally recognised line between the atmosphere and space.

The Kármán line is ~84km which Kármán calculated as the altitude at which in order to generate enough lift for level flight you would need to be traveling at orbital speeds, most space organisations round to it 80km, the FAI who are an aviation sports body are the ones who round to 100km.

Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

Re: I ditched HP printers

Hewlett Packard is a different company to HP, they split back in 2015 to form two different companies.

Infosec imposter syndrome is real. Here's something that can help

Re: Hunger is essential

"later I will no longer be satisfied with this comment"

And quite rightly so, since you forgot to put a full stop at the end.

Ukraine's Victor Zhora: Russia's cyber 'war crimes' will continue after ground invasion ends

Re: International laws needed to bring accountability

The Russian government put out the contract to make the 'Recapture of Crimea' medals in 2013 before the Euromaidan protests. They were always planning to invade Ukraine.

Re: cyber "war crimes"

"A war crime is a horrendous ending of human life."

Which is what happens when Russia hacks into hospitals and disrupts systems causing civilians to die.

TV and film extras fear generative AI will copy their faces and bodies to take their jobs

Re: IANAL But...

"What they are collecting is personally identifiable data."

GDPR doesn't prevent you from choosing to sell your personal data.

UK voter data within reach of miscreants who hacked Electoral Commission

Who doesn't have ID? You need ID to get a job, claim benefits, rent a property, buy a property, stay in a hotel, open a bank account, register your child at a school, ect.

Palantir lobbied UK pensions department for its software to tackle fraud

Re: showing how the DWP might "recover large amounts of fraud"

The DWP is already causing another scandal on a similar scale, with the benefit claw back scheme for people who they have randomly decided were not in the UK during Covid.

Tesla hackers turn to voltage glitching to unlock paywalled features

Re: I need heated seats like…

The output of lithium ion batteries drop as they get colder, below a certain temperature the batteries can't power both the motor and the cabin heaters. If you want heating during the winter in an electric car then heated seats are your only option.

Two US Navy sailors charged with giving Chinese spies secret military info

Re: Does the US pay that badly?

Their old one is an old Soviet carrier that they refitted and that one is running much better then the one the Russians use, their new one is their own design.

Re: Does the US pay that badly?

Even if they got the designs to a US ship it would be useless to China, they don't have the metallurgy to build any ships to those designs. Look at their new carrier, the flight deck is already buckling.

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

This might be a good thing...

because it makes it easier to block all the bloated services they keep adding to Windows.

First US nuclear power plant built this century goes online

Re: ROI?

The cost for both reactors is $28b.

They will make around $876m a year per reactor so $1.75b a year (gross profit) and electricity prices are only going to go up over the reactors life.

The plant has a total running cost of $0.023 per kwh, so each reactor will cost $225m a year, so $450m for both.

So that means the plant will have a net profit of $1.3b a year (at current prices)

So assuming electricity prices don't rise it will take 22 years to break even and then have another 40 years of profit, in reality they will break even much sooner.

Brit broadband subscribers caught between crappy connections and price hikes

Re: Genuine question

The UK has has a Net Fixed Capital Growth of 0% for 30 years, so whilst we are producing more wealth the cost of our imports has also gone up and they cancel each other out.

Having money help you make more money, and when the pie stays the same size this means that wealth begins to accumulate amongst the already wealthy.

For comparison Germany has been at 1% for the last 30 years.

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Don't tell me, show me.

"Have you SEEN the shit that people babble about on antisocial media these days?"

And who would believe them? I'm not saying the claims about aliens are true but we have seen multiple times in the past where self declared critical thinkers and sceptics have 'debunked' a leak about some government program which has later turned out to be true.

BT and OneWeb deliver internet to rock in Bristol Channel – population 28

Re: What about Starlink?

"an unbelievable amount of money"

$500m is not really a huge amount when it comes to government spending, and the government's stake is currently valued at $600m.

Amazon sets up shop at Kennedy Space Center to prep Kuiper broadband satellites

Re: Jeff's BO putting the cart before the horse

"The generally accepted definition of space is 100km. "

The generally accepted definition is 80km, the only people who use 100km are the FAI who are an aviation sports organisation, an they are considering switching to 80km.

Karman calculated ~84km (52 miles) as the altitude at which in order to generate enough lift to sustain level flight you would have to be traveling at orbital speeds. Most countries round this to 80km and the US rounds to 50 miles.

Nickelodeon probes claims of massive data leak as SpongeBob fans rejoice

Freely =/= free

For example: Titanic is a freely available film as anyone can go out and buy a copy.

Post Office Horizon Inquiry calls for compensation to be brought forward

Re: BBC investigation

Yeah you can silence the media with lawyers, same reason that in all the articles about the infected blood products scandal none of the media companies dare name the company that extracted blood from US prisoners (reusing needles), mixed it all in big vats and then when the FDA told them to stop selling it because it was infected with HIV and Hep C they decided to ship it to Europe and sell it. It was Bayer btw.

Viasat says latest broadband satellite failed to fully deploy antenna

Re: Very shady dealing

ViaSat-3 and the two others are fully insured including against deployment failures, so I am not sure they were legally required to declare it.

NASA 'quiet' supersonic jet is nearly ready for flight

Yes but if flying at twice the speed only costs your 50% more fuel then you don't need to carry as much fuel.

"Today's borderline transonic will always be more fuel-efficient than pushing sonic booms aside"

That's only due to the specific impulse of kerosene, if you instead use hydrogen which has a much higher specific impulse then engines can remain efficient into hypersonic speeds.

Microsoft's 10,000 job cuts didn't quite do the trick

Re: Massively profitable company

"or they weren't in which case why were they employing them in the first place and wouldn't it make sense to start with the most highly paid of them?"

Microsoft and Google have been hiring people and assigning them to pointless projects just to dry up the pool of engineers so that start ups have nobody to hire. Now that interest rates have shot up and startups can't get investment they no longer need to do this.

Experts scoff at UK Lords' suggestion that AI could one day make battlefield decisions

The UK already operates weapons that use autonomous target selection such as the Brimstone missile.

None of these 'experts' seem to actually be defense experts.

Missing Titan sub likely destroyed in implosion, no survivors

Re: "craft's carbon fiber hull"

"oompressive stress is a bit easier to deal with than tensile (ripping apart) stress.."

Other way around for carbon fibre, it is much weaker in compression.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

But then you need to put the battery in a hard plastic or metal case instead of a foil pouch, which means you need to make the battery smaller and thus have less capacity.

The ZX81 finally gets the keyboard it deserves

Re: Well...

You could use Topre switches instead which are each individual rubber domes.

Thousands of subreddits go dark in mega-protest over Reddit's app-killing API prices

Re: Why not make it better?

3rd party apps are not blocking ads, Reddit refuses to serve ads to them.

Huawei could be banned from 5G networks across the EU

Re: Very well

What 5G equipment does Cisco make exactly?