Posts by MachDiamond

China's top EV battery maker announced a breakthrough, but top boffin isn't convinced

Re: I thought the US liked battery cars...!

"And according to the US Department of Transportation, typical home, workplace and public level 2 chargers can take a battery from FULL TO EMPTY in anywhere from four to ten hours."

When talking about anything coming from a government agency, there's no end to how things can get screwed up.

I don't think that my brain could ever construct a sentence with the word "charger" and "Full to Empty".

It's even more silly when most EV owners don't drive their cars until the battery is flat any more than people will challenge the fuel gauge gods and wait until the needle is well and truly on the E before buying petrol. People charging at home/work/shopping will plug in if they are leaving their car parked and there's an open spot. A really slow set of L2 chargers at a train station is a good thing if people are commuting by train and will be parked up for 9+ hours at a time. If those are cheap, they'll likely fill up first. If you have off-street parking at home, slow is fine too and means it can be easier to provision.

Wait, batteries are rated in km?

It's great we don't have to worry about the mass of the car, driving conditions, driving style or charger power any more.

Lithium Titanate batteries charge like stink. The downside is they aren't as energy dense as LFP. Fine for a bus, not as good for a passenger car. Other types of Li batteries are less prone to self-immolation and further types are great for lots of cycles. It's going to be a combination of traits that makes for the best battery for a particular application.

When people are looking at speakers they'll be impressed by lots of power handling as the sole criteria, which is silly. I could glue a voice coil made from a coat hanger to a Lead cone and have a woofer capable of absorbing all sorts of power until the Lead melted. Other than the melty cone, the sound output would be pretty feeble and the frequency response would be very limited, but 3kW of power handling shouldn't be an issue. Oh, did you want lots of sound for that power? Hmmm, maybe some other factors such as efficiency are important too. If size isn't a big constraint, I can offer some plans for a subwoofer that will rattle the neighborhood with a very modest power input. In the days when a 50W amplifier was a monster topped with glass tubes and the ability to heat a cinema, efficiency was super important.

The moral of the story is to not get too fixated on one metric while ignoring others that can be just as important.

Hold the Moon – NASA's buildings are crumbling amid 200-year upgrade cycles

Re: It is a tragedy...

"Landers and rovers can do science there, for less money."

Take a few days to read "Roving Mars" by Steve Squyres. Steve was the principal investigator on the MER rovers. The book is an amazing look into space science.

A geologist can do more work in an hour walking around with a hammer in hand than a rover can do in a week. A Rover is very good for some initial reccy and even more in-depth work someplace as far away as Mars. The moon, on the other hand, is close enough that it could be worth having a meatsack with opposable thumbs bumbling about every once in a while. So use a rover to find the most interesting things for an astronaut to spend their time to investigate.

Re: NASA is responsible for it's budgets

"Anyway, "put a businessman in charge" is a common political line. When it happens we invariably regret it."

I don't have a reference on tap, but I don't see how installing an attorney with no business experience or credentials in other subjects is a better option.

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

Re: Owners hype their cars

Everybody is keen to hype their decision to buy anything over a certain amount a genius move on their part. Somebody spending the gobs of money it takes to buy a Tesla isn't going to turn around and claim they made a huge mistake very often. Any make or model of car for that matter. I can firmly state I did zero research on the car I currently own. My sister bought it new and sold it to me so cheap when she wanted something bigger to haul to toddlers around in I would have been stupid to say no. I needed another car at the time as well so it all worked out. My mom leased a new car, my sister got her Nissan Rouge and I got a deal on my sister's car. If I was going to indenture myself for 5 years to buy something, I'd be renting my top choices every weekend until I had a good feel for what I really needed. I know what I want and the budget isn't going to stretch that far.... ever.

Re: There is no possible fix

"That might work in some cities in the US but out in the rural areas? Forget it. Some Good Ol' Boy will insist on driving his unfeasably-large truck (with attendant gun rack natch) into the controlled roadway "because of muh freedumbs"."

I see a system where you pull up to a blocked entry and you can't enter until the car is linked and the barrier comes down. It could also be that if the car isn't linked, a barrier is raised if somebody tries to enter which would be easier to maintain. Nothing can be fool proof as the quality of idiots is constantly altered to exploit any gaps.

Re: There is no possible fix

"The solution is to require that every vehicle on the road interacts with each other. "

I see too many ways to mess with that sort of system as there is no way to make those comms secure. It might not even be malicious but just one car that's had its black box pop a cap and it spewing out random noise or bad information. The owner of that car may have no way to even know the car is borked and it's one more thing to break and cost thousands to fix, if it isn't past its support date.

Re: Risk tolerance

"They may not advertise in the traditional sense, but they have an effective PR machine. "

The official PR department is Elon. He fired everybody in that department ages ago. The main PR machine in fanbois and that's the problem. Tesla needs to be countering the mis-information and especially the outright dangerous memes that show up and find their ways into what can vaguely be called proper news outlets these days. If they don't, then Tesla is lying through its silence.

This just in..

After Waymo vehicles had a little episode when there was an AT&T outage in San Francisco, the next week a Waymo Chevy Cruise failed to yield for a firetruck and caused an accident with said firetruck. Oops. SF has placed limits for the time being on autonomous taxis operating in the city.

These sorts of accidents do happen with human drivers, but autonomous vehicles are supposed to be far more vigilant and all seeing. It's also one of the most obvious scenarios that a robo-taxi should be able to handle with ease.

Re: Whatever happened to self responsibility?

"Elon could tell me and prove the software could handle any situation in self driving."

Yeah, like anybody such as Elon gives a squirt whether you live or die. Besides, you've already bought a car from him so he has all your money.

Re: Its probably not the cross traffic.

"Just have the insurance companies demand performance regulators be in place for lower premiums."

If you put the car in "eco" mode, it dials back the performance, but it's not always clear how to switch modes and some cars have the controls where it's easy to knock them without intention. Some EV's have a "teenager" mode where the car can be dialed way back and locked into that mode, some with a 'key' that engages that function automatically. It's the same as a valet mode that limits performance and will make things happen if the car is driven too far from where the mode was engaged. All that sort of stuff is easy to do with an EV, but I'd never hand control or raw information over to an insurance company. Mine has offered to reduce my rates if I fit a driving monitor in the OBD port. Sod that. The discount was very minimal as I'm already getting the best rates and I have no information about how their scoring works. There's a couple of places where getting on the motorway often means giving it the go rather hard. There's also a few places with short slip roads when getting off. I expect I'd be dinged for those and it might wind up costing me more rather than getting me a discount.

Re: Its probably not the cross traffic.

"This Tesla owner is 'older' -- in her early 80s -- and is quite sentinent (together) but the ride wasn't very pleasant because she couldn't drive the car smoothly. "

My mom drives like that. She's either on the gas or the brake all of the time. It makes me worry about her skills as she gets older. The price of petrol has trained me to be a much smoother driver. My brakes also last a really long time.

Re: Its probably not the cross traffic.

"Not that many drivers have ever driven sub 8 seconds to 60 mph cars, far fewer sub 5 seconds and hardly any sub 4 seconds. This will be an increasing problem with EVs capable of high acceleration flooding the second hand market."

I've seen plenty of "wrong pedal" accidents where somebody pulling into a parking space in front of a shop hits the accelerator rather than the brake. The instant torque of an EV means they tend to launch further into a shop before a driver can correct their mistake. There's plenty of examples on YT.

A person I know put a 5L Ford V-8 into a Bugeye Sprite. The fat tires and posi rear end made the thing frightening to drive. He did eventually wreck the car when it broke loose and went flying off the road. In a straight line, it's the fastest accelerating car I've ever pushed hard. I know there are faster EV's out, but I've had to behave myself with the few I have driven. I have no doubt that there aren't a lot of people that can handle the most extreme settings without putting themselves and many other in danger. My old V-6 Buick had pretty good pick up, but pales in comparison to a really high performance car.

"if American trailers had 'barriers' fitted underneath them between the tractor unit and the rear wheel(s"

I've thought about that and haven't seen that many accounts of cars winding up under trailers where preventing that happening would have made much of a difference. The car involved was making a go of playing highway pinball and was impacting all sorts of stuff. Getting lodged under a trailer vs. being bounced off and over the edge of the highway having the same outcome.

The cost of fitting those barriers and hauling them millions of miles may not be a good trade if they only prevent a small number of deaths.

"Well in the US marketers have pretty much free rein to claim anything they want, with weird exceptions - like if I sell something as an unregulated medical "supplement" I can claim without any basis or evidence that it will help de-age your brain, fix your erections, give you more energy and cure acne and I don't have to mention the side effect that you start growing hair on the soles of your feet and it causes teeth to fall out in 1 out of every 10 people who take it for a year."

Not really. Anything being advertised as a cure or treatment for a specific ailment has to have done proper third party testing done and get approvals from the US FDA (in the US, obviously). One give away on supplements is they will state that the are so many "IU's" rather than it containing a percentage of Recommended Daily Allowance. There are plenty of hack recommendations for this herb or mineral on the internet with all sorts of vague testimonials that drives the supplement market.

With the legalization of pot and cannabis derived products in the US, there have been a bunch of cases of crack downs on the health claims of various preparations. Since it's still illegal on a Federal level and has been for a long time, there are zero recognized US studies to back up the claims. No permit would have been issued to do the research. I don't disbelieve the anecdotal claims outright, but I do believe that many of them are unsubstantiated and there is little clear good advice on dosing, purity, compounding, etc. That hasn't stopped mainly CBD makers from making claims no different than older 'Patent' medicines were making years ago. See: Snake Oil.

Re: Tesla is simply making a financial calculation

"I'm personally just hoping Toyota's solid state battery tech pans out"

Keep moving that air in and out.

Re: Tesla is simply making a financial calculation

"Stop at any traffic signal and you're likely to have at least one and often two or three around you"

In larger cities of Texas or California, you may be correct, but not so much in the Dakotas. People in rural settings don't seem to allow themselves to be led around by the nose so much.

Re: "Autopilot"

"they still cannot be fully trusted and the pilot must still remain alert to take over."

That's provided that the pilot is able to do so. There's been a couple of stories this last week of the pilot dying on passenger jets. The emergency autoland systems that a passenger can activate on a small aircraft seem like a good start.

Re: Is this time really any different?

"I could see the "lane keeping" causing that if some of the road markings are more worn than others and the lane marking nearest the edge of the road (left or right depending country) so the lane keeping system follows the well marked line which lead up the sliproad/exit. "

That would infer a very one dimensional navigation system. I'd think that if the highway was continuing on straight that the car wouldn't veer off to one side if it were also looking at the GPS. If the system were just "lane-keep" assist, perhaps, but not FSD which implies more smarts.

If I'm relying on lane keeping, I'm not engaged enough in driving the car. I've gone decades with being able to keep my car in my own lane. Not 100% perfect, but no accidents and the more crowded the roadway, the more I'm paying attention.

California DMV hits brakes on Cruise's SF driverless fleet after series of fender benders

Re: How do they stay in lane anyway?

"Waymo cars only know the initial road conditions, as they were mapped. Any kind of modification (pedestrians, other moving objects, potholes, etc.) will confuse them."

It's more like they can spend more time working out those variable targets that aren't already mapped and identified. Humans do that sort of thing too. A lot of what we see is from seeing it before so we can lose things like our keys in plain sight.

Re: How do they stay in lane anyway?

"To create a map for a new location, our team starts by manually driving our sensor equipped vehicles down each street, so our custom lidar can paint a 3D picture of the new environment."

This is why the cars also have to be able to phone home. The amount of data is too much to load into the car at one time for the whole city so unless each car is only going to service a very limited area, it has to be able to load that detailed survey information on the fly. Cruise and Waymo also have to have GPS base stations deployed for differential signals so the car can be pinpointed with much more accuracy. I seem to recall that Waymo was even given permission to paint some calibration marks in a few places that the cars could use to really fix their position in case of drift.

Re: How do they stay in lane anyway?

"Dunno what the road marking in SF are like, but my wife just pointed me Las Vega Blvd Sth webcam[*]"

It gets so hot in LV during the summer that car tyres pick up the asphalt and coat the painted lane markings. You mainly have to go by the texture more than color.

Re: Are these "robotaxis" really operating without anyone behind the wheel?

"Are the robotaxis really operating with nobody behind the wheel?"

They are, but they aren't as autonomous as people think they are. This is why they came to a halt when AT&T went down and they lost their link with the home office in San Francisco.

Re: Emergency Vehicles...

"They do. They have flashing lights and sirens. If the AV doesn't respond properly the blame's on the AV, not the EV."

Those should be the two items with the most weighting. A radio signal in conjunction could be added if people use lights and sirens to fool AV vehicles. Honestly, I don't see free roaming AV transportation to be a huge boon. I'd rather see systems such as trains to be using it first.

Re: Siren detections not easy, but probably not impossible either

"The car obviously shouldn't just stop whenever it hears something, or a passenger with a recording on their phone could troll it."

Of course not, but it's one piece of information that's useful and can be localized.

If I rhino sees something, it tells them to sniff the air to find out what it is. Humans will smell something that might cause them to look for something. When I worked on rocket landers there was GPS and an IMU that were weighted differently as inputs to the navigation system. We had also done work with outside entities that were working on vision systems to be able to 'see' potential landing sites using several bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Failing the easy part

" "The AV's ability to successfully chart the emergency vehicle's path was complicated by the fact that the emergency vehicle was in the oncoming lane of traffic, which it had moved into to bypass the red light.""

This is what emergency vehicles often do and why people on both sides of the road are supposed to pull over until it has passed and no more are coming. I know people are anxious to get to their destinations and taxi rides are billed by time and distance, another 30 seconds for a bit of added caution isn't going to cause the sky to fall. Of all of the things an autonomous car needs to avoid, emergency vehicles should be right at the top. It's also one of the easiest since they have flashing lights of a certain color and even the noise of a siren should be able to be detected and localized to a direction.

LG's $1,000 TV-in-a-briefcase is unlikely to travel much further than the garden

Re: Money saving idea

"Nerve attenuation tonic - - >"

If I can see through it, I consider it watered down.

Re: Money saving idea

"Cut out all the hassle and expense - stay at home, camp out in the garden, and when you want to watch TV, go back inside the house and watch TV from your favourite comfy chair/sofa"

That would make my Nerve Attenuation Syndrome even worse.

Lesson 1: Keep your mind on the ... why aren't the servers making any noise?

Re: Tabla Rasa

"So you prefer to take the sensible, forward-thinking, approach to problems? Clearly not management material!"

I prefer to work for a living. Odd of me, maybe.

The non-technical person/bean counter will think, "Hey there's some wiring already there, why can't we use that and save some time/money?" Somebody who's been to a few rodeos will start backing away slowly and figuring out a way to get all the work done when management isn't looking.

"My dad will never let a ringing phone interrupt him. His motto is: "I got it for my convenience, not theirs.""

Precisely!

Tabla Rasa

I've often found it better to completely tear out the old and install the new rather than trying to use something existing "to save time/money". A couple of buildings I leased had the old 25pr cabling for a 1A2 phone system that nobody bothered to remove long after it was deprecated. One place was using pairs for this and that and I have to admit that in those cases it might have been more expedient to do that than run new cabling. I just asked for early entry to the building to get power and low voltage stuff all installed and ripped out the previous old wiring. When we made our big move over a weekend, the phones, computers and machinery all worked right away. A bit of forethought and planning goes a long way.

"There's a lot to be said for coding through the night, while normal people sleep!"

When I had a manufacturing company, I would get a lot of my work done after 5pm. At that point I could ignore the phone, faxes, email (eventually) and people knocking on the door. I was also the chief design engineer which was something almost impossible to do during the day.

" Even when on the phone they'd come over and tap me on the shoulder until I answered."

--------Hmmm, I'm not sure, you should ask the supervisor/manager.

Either that or give them a wrong answer if you wouldn't be in the line of fire from the shrapnel. The same thing you'd do if asked to train your replacement after being made redundant.

"One of the many reasons I script things, so interuptions don't disrupt my thought\task process & that things are done consistantly."

It's great if you can do that and it's something that should be taught in school. Other times when the task is much more creative, it's much harder to work efficiently if interrupted a lot.

I had a great mentor/boss years ago that taught me a bunch about planning. It was a home theatre/electronics company and we were often in the field. A big issue could be leaving parts or tools behind at the shop and not being able to complete a task. Before we left for a job, we had a list of tasks that we needed to complete and would sit quietly and walk ourselves through the process and make written notes on the parts and any special tools we might need. The time spent was much less than having to revisit a location to complete something or have to knock off early before getting all of the tasks planned done and dusted. Those lessons have been very useful for decades.

"This means that I have to start from the beginning, or sit for a long while staring into space wondering where I was before the interruption."

This is also why working in an office can be inefficient depending on the sort of work you do and how much outside input you need.

I love the line from a Nik Kershaw song, "I'm sick and tired of answering the call of Alexander Graham Bells's invention". It made me stop and think and come to the conclusion that a ringing phone can be ignored (or a text, etc). At the time I had a phone answering machine so if it was important, the caller could leave a message. If they didn't leave a message it wasn't important and likely spam.

I hated it when I got into a flow designing something and a coworker would bother me with a question they could have found the answer to elsewhere. It was 10 minutes or more before I could get back to the same level of concentration. At the end of the working day I'd make notes to help me get started the next morning or I'd effectively knock off when I hit a natural stopping point and fiddle around filling out my work journal or a bit of documentation.

"I love BigClive's channel.. ;)"

Clive is great. Sponsoring a meetup with him if I won a lottery is towards the top of the list of things to spend money on. I think I would decline any carbonated Jagermeister.

SpaceX, T-Mobile US phone service will interfere with ours, claims rival

Re: Frequency allocation

"So why does the US not allocate earth to orbit frequencies in line with the ITU guidance that everyone else uses?"

Ajit Pai(d)

Google 'wiretapped' tax websites with visitor traffic trackers, lawsuit claims

"Different pages manage different parts of your tax return. Adding additional sections or pages to stocks and shares portion, property, or employer give lots of useful info without ever saying what people earn. Not to mention how long they spend on each of those pages."

As long as I can, I am going to submit my returns on paper filled out by hand. With reports from my accounting software, my business stuff it just a matter of transferring the data from one piece of paper to another. All of my personal stuff is rather easy to do. Even if it takes a day, it's going to take an auditor more work to digitize and analyze over returns that are submitted digitally and can be machine scrutinized.

Re: El Reg has possibly better ways to track anyway

"I've not tried migrating from Wix for a couple of years. I'm *cough* sure *cough* they've sorted that out by now..."

Those large web hosts are not sorting that out. They WANT to lock people in. It's dead simple to use their templates and tools to build a very good looking web site rather quickly, but, you're correct, they don't have much depth to their functionality so if you hit a wall with their services, you have to start from scratch again. You also have to hope that whoever did the signing up in the first place didn't subscribe to the plan where that host owns the domain name. I've seen that happen to a few people and all they could do was pay the increased pricing for that service for a couple of years while they worked to get their new domain name established while forwarding people from the old one they never owned.

It's more work to not use those big hosting companies and their tools, but I find it worth it to avoid them in the long term. I also avoid hosts that advertise a low first year price that doubles or triples afterwards. If they want to kick down free migration assistance some more space, great, but I'd rather have a much more level monthly/annual hosting cost. I also want the freedom to be able to pick up my site and take it someplace else in an hour or so.

Re: El Reg has possibly better ways to track anyway

"If you don't use our patented snake oil you're but an amateur, and everybody will scoff at you."

If you don't pay us for keywords or place ads, your web site will never rank.

Re: El Reg has possibly better ways to track anyway

"other than slight convenience."

That's what's being sold for many things. Look at the Google push for people to "log in with Google" at all sorts of web sites even when the user already has a L/P for that site. It's more convenient just like one-click purchasing is more convenient. Auto-pay, auto-unlocking key fobs that obviate needing to use a physical key, etc.

I'm a big believer in inconvenience. It makes me stop and think about what I'm doing or it makes me more secure. I don't need to have a car that unlocks for me when I get close. I'd have my car unlocking and locking all day long as I worked around the garden/house. It could also open me up for a relay attack. I do like my wireless fob, but it's doing nothing until I press a button and it's attached to a physical key that works when the battery in either the fob or car goes flat. With bills, I've had auto-pay cost me a load of money and I find paying my bills manually makes me understand where my money is going.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

Re: Hmmm

"Yep, they haven't produced any new engineers of that quality in the last 30 years."

It's hard to get freshly minted engineers to dedicate themselves to a field with few opportunities. The Soyuz is a workhorse of a system, but it hasn't evolved much. When you look at the private companies around the world and the big players, they are all working to build new systems and that keeps interest up. If one of the top guys was 90 and those below him were also well marinated, those looking up from below might worry about having any chance of rising through the ranks. Especially so if they aren't from a certain family or don't have a patron to grease the way for them.

Re: Hmmm

"Lots of US companies have sacked their most valuable engineers, independent of age."

Having one person more intelligent than an entire HR department is going to cause resentment.

Re: "Luna 25, by contrast, tried to make the trip in nine days"

"Kleptocracy is the word you were looking for."

That's just another word for politicians/political systems.

Re: "Luna 25, by contrast, tried to make the trip in nine days"

"This is why our Left-Pondian cousins are so rabidly anti-socialist, because they think that the USSR calling itself socialist was the same as the USSR being socialist."

Unfortunately, far too many people in the US can't give a good definition of Communism, Socialism and Capitalism. They'll often combine the first two to suit their argument and fail to distinguish between implementations of the latter.

Re: I normally have a lot of sympathy in cases like this...

"Space missions are generally of benefit to all, but we just know Putin pushed this forward to "beat" India and be the first to the South Pole and would have made hay from a successful mission."

Single grandstand missions shouldn't count. What's needed is an entire program with useful goals.

I'd like to see the national/international programs lay the groundwork for commercial projects to follow behind. If NASA and other national space programs can just rent a room and a workbench from a private entity on/in the moon, doing pure science would get much cheaper.

"Blame the moon penguins"

It's geese, actually. I have a photo.

Need a decent dining spot in Ottawa? Microsoft suggested a food bank

Re: Use of AI is like a really bad review.

AI could be a useful tool, but to think that it's going to do all of the work is laughable. If you are creating something a human will use, it needs to go through a human to check that it's meaningful and useful.

As a photographer I see hysterical reports about how AI is going to render all photographers nothing more than people that haul the gear to the location and how at some point AI will just find the imagery online, clean it up and output a bazillion pixel rendering with absolute color accuracy. Tripe. It's not the tool, it's the person using the tool. Estate agents sometimes will go out and purchase a top of the line camera kit which they go on to make crap images with. Even if they send the photos off to an editor in Asia or Australia (Box Brownie), they are just getting their turds gold-plated. This doesn't mean that AI won't be a useful tool for photographers, but it won't be standalone and a novice's work isn't going to be elevated to Master class by using it.

Re: This is nothing new.

Google is almost entirely "pay-to-play" now. If you want your website to be in the first several pages, you will need to buy keywords and sign up for other advertising.

One of the things I do is make photos for estate agents. If you search for a real estate photographer in my area, you would get real estate offices, not photographers and the vast majority of those are marked as "ad" or "sponsored". There are also plenty of results from sites coded to claim they are local to anybody searching for a service. I can't even look for a plumber as many results are for companies hundreds of miles away if the site belongs to a plumber in the first place.

TL:DR

Google is useless if you aren't looking for an online eTailer (Amazon mainly).

YouTube accused of aiming ads at kids after promising it wouldn't do that

Re: YouTube adverts

...or a 100mm chainsaw that can go right through steel pipe like butter.