Posts by cageordie

Lawrence Livermore lab repeats fusion breakthrough – yep, still kinda works

And for their next trick

After they get net positive energy for the whole facility they can solve the problem of where the fuel is going to come from.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Re: Ah! The perfect addition...

I was in the office above Juicero when they were in the Googleplex. I was working on a 70GB/s flash array. We met one of their people as we went out to lunch one day and she told us about the product and the backing they had. We were polite and didn't laugh in her face. Anyway, can't complain about startups, they got me the house I'm in how. And out of the Bay Area.

It's not a Thorens Reference

So... just another great way of taking money from fools who don't mind surface noise and think they have 'discovered' a better way to listen to music. Been there, done that. Went digital and would never go back. Save me the BS.

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

Perhaps they can address storage too?

The first Samsung S23 I looked at is $1000 for a phone with 256GB storage and $1134 for $512GB storage. A Samsung 512GB microSD is around $40. Retail price for a 1TB microSD from a reputable manufacturer is around $100. iPhone 14 pro price difference between 256GB and 512GB is $100 on the same site. So how about mandating a microSD slot while they are mandating the replaceable battery? It can be internal, it's not like I'd change it often. But it would free us from rip-off memory pricing.

Whistleblower claims Uncle Sam is sitting on hoard of alien vehicles and tech

Been watching Paul?

Douglas Adams was a sad loss.

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

I have actually updated recently, but from really old machines

I had a little Dell system as a media PC and that was impossible to update for Windows 11, so I swapped it for my main machine which was a six year old Ryzen 7 1700. I updated that old machine to Windows 11 Pro, which required adding a TPM to the Gigabyte motherboard.

I am not updating my 2014 Dell M6800 laptop because that installed Windows 11 Pro quite happily and is still fast enough.

That's the thing with most of these machines, I use at work and home, they are fast enough. My work laptop gets changed every three years, but my other assets, the lab machines, they soldier on for at least ten years. We mostly use them as serial terminals into embedded hardware. So a twenty year old machine would do if we could get the updates for security requirements. We only keep the FPGA development and science machines up to date, because those take significant time to run their compilations and to execute their models. I don't need a 13th generation processor to run Word, Outlook, and MobaXterm.

Unless your machine is very very old that's not accurate

I have WIndows 11 Pro on a Dell M6800 that's at least nine years old. I am also running 11 Pro on a Ryzen 7 1700 which is about the same age, in that case I had to add the TPM to the GigaByte motherboard, which was hard to find. So no, Windows 11 doesn't require you to change all the systems.

Europe lagging behind South Korea, Japan, US in 5G rollout

And why should I care?

I have a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and right now it says I have 5G. Absolutely zero improvement on 4G in my house. Not that I need it with WiFi6 and gigabit fiber, but still, all that talk and no action. However, outside of this university town, we notice significantly poorer coverage with the S22 that with the 4G S10. The phone is somewhat faster, and the screen is a bit bigger, but I'd have been just as happy with another S10 to replace the one that was bulging apart. I replaced the battery to see if I could and now my daughter has a perfectly good phone and I could have saved a thousand dollars.

Re: 5G has a lot of drawbacks for users

I have to try that. My experience of 5G so far is that the coverage is less and the data rates make no difference.

SpaceX reportedly fires staffers behind open letter criticising Elon Musk

If they can prove their diversity allegations this could get expensive

I guess we'll find out, if they sue for the wrongful dismissal. Personally, not how I would handle it. There are plenty of other jobs.

I was fired for blowing the whistle on cult's status in Google unit, says contractor

Re: For once

Oh sure, Google who watches everyone has no responsibility for what goes on under its roof. So if a religious sect is taking over its departments that's just fine and not their concern. LOL! Someone tried this at Motorola when I was there, HR told them to cut it out or leave. They were contractors too. HR was in charge of how people behaved in their office.

Warning: Colleagues are unusually likely to 'break' their monitors soon

Over priced and under sized

Seems expensive for a 32" monitor. As luck would have it I use a 43" Samsung TV as a monitor. 4K and only $279 when I bought it. Works perfectly. But then I've never found a console, with its clunky controls, attractive as a games machine. I'll stick to the PC for games.

Semiconductor industry growth to slow in 2022, warns IDC

Have you tried to find FPGAs recently

The only ones we can get right now are the ones we already bought and have in stores. Lead times for high end Xilinx parts are all over a year. It doesn't seem likely that a few fab plants will change that.

OpenVMS on x86-64 reaches production status with v9.2

I wonder how many people still remember how to use it?

I wrote quite a few thousand lines of Ada on VAX/VMS 5.5 and 6. I also ran a few machines for several years before moving to SunOS, Solaris, and Linux. I wonder how many people would know how to stop the print queue without losing the in progress job. Not that I want to go back to that job.

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Re: Cool Running

I'd forgotten about building the defect list. And low level formatting drives over a period of hours. Hours of overtime installing an Emulex QD34 and a couple of Fujitsu M2333s. Two 270MB drives and the controller cost about 10,000 quid.

Re: Is $261 per hour that much in the IT world?

I'm with you. I paid a plumber more than that and was glad to have his expertise. People who want to work for free are probably not in business. The plumber's call-out fee was $100. Given travel time that seems reasonable.

He ain't heavy, he's my brother: Bloke gives away SpaceX ticket because he was over weight limit

Maybe he was a carrier pilot.

He's a CRJ captain for Endeavor Air in Florida. He may have been a carrier pilot at one time, but that's like calling me a rugby player, which I gave up 40 years ago after my friend got his femur broken in the first game in university.

Re: Let me fix that.

He's a CRJ captain for Endeavor Air in Florida.

5G frequencies won't interfere with airliners here, UK and EU aviation regulators say

Re: Told to turn off?

I've never heard of any proven claims. It's your claim, provide a link to proof. All I find is "well it's bound to" and "well it must have".

On the other hand, I have received text messages and images from a friend flying over Nevada in a Cessna. GA pilots do it all the time. Thousands of phones are left on on flights every day.

Phone jammers made my model plane smash into parked lorry, fumes hobbyist

Re: Failsafe?

Seriously, you think a receiver can't tell it's being jammed? This isn't high end electronic warfare, it's just noise. Why would loss of control signal not allow a failsafe to operate. These things are pretty crummy and simple, but spotting a loss of good control signal is trivial.

Re: Failsafe?

Believe it or not this was thought about half a century or more ago. The solution was to apply some rudder, cut the power, and wait to see what happens. A well setup plane will circle down slowly to the ground and, with luck, land somewhere accessible without getting trashed too badly. Even uncontrolled gliders used this, they stuck a glowing wick, known as dethermalizer fuze, which burned down and broke an elastic band which allowed the rudder to be pulled to a set position. People have been ingenious and attached to their many hours of work for many decades.

We're all at sea: Navigation Royal Navy style – with plenty of IT but no GPS

Re: Reg units need not apply

It says here that 1 nautical mile is 2025.37 yards.

Originally the nautical mile was one minute of latitude at the equator, but was standardized at 1852 metres.

Always helps to actually be right when correcting other people.

Re: Reg units need not apply

The fuel gauges were unserviceable. Broken. The 767 can usually tell you fairly well what it has in the tanks. With the gauges U/S they had to calculate the fuel load instead and set it in the FMC. Normally the three digital readouts below the fuel pump switches in the middle of the overhead panel tell you what you have in each wing and the center fuel tank, plus the total, and the fuel temperature.

Re: Reg units need not apply

Check your facts. It was a 767. Actually, go and check all your facts. Neither the crew nor the ground crew could do the numbers. They did worse than run short, they found out by getting low fuel pressure on a fuel pump, followed closely by the other three. They flamed out when they were still at high altitude.

Here, I checked for you:

At this point, Quintal proposed landing at the former RCAF Station Gimli, a closed air force base where he had once served as a pilot for the Royal Canadian Air Force. Unbeknownst to Quintal or to the air traffic controller, a part of the facility had been converted to a race track complex, now known as Gimli Motorsports Park. It included a road race course, a go-kart track, and a dragstrip. A Canadian Automobile Sport Clubs-sanctioned sports car race hosted by the Winnipeg Sports Car Club was underway at the time of the incident and the area around the decommissioned runway was full of cars and campers. Part of the decommissioned runway was being used to stage the race.

Re: Reg units need not apply

No dude, it's THE Royal Navy. The Royal Navy was the first Royal Navy, so it gets to call itself The Royal Navy. All other Royal Navies, like the Royal Australian Navy, have to say whose they are. The RN owns that term. Permanently.

American gliders use knots and feet.

Re: "two main reasons why the Royal Navy no longer uses [paper charts]"

Believe it or not, the military has heard of EMP and they have been taking steps to avoid being killed by it for decades. Back in the 1980s Nuclear Event Detectors were standard parts in the weapons I was working on. EMP isn't the only way a nuke can kill outside its blast radius. But still, I'd like to think I'd sneak a few paper charts aboard, just to be on the safe side.

Everyone cites that 'bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production' research, but the study might not even exist

Well, I can name one that cost a fortune to fix

We worked with a company that put WiFi in hotel rooms with little short range transmitters in the Ethernet sockets. They worked OK in test and each single one was OK. When they got to the real world customers used both wired and wireless at the same time. Badness happened and network connections were dropped. They hadn't used interrupt driven I/O. When the load increased the system couldn't cope. So switch on interrupts. Easy. But no, they had not included a remote programming technique. So the fix was to visit every hotel room, take the cover plate off, plug in the jtag, reprogram the fpga and software. That cost a hell of a lot more than 100 times.

If I fix a bug now, in development, it's just fixed and nobody even hears about it. I was rotating a frame of reference for a sensor and one axis came out as zero all the time, easy fix, I'd copied to the Y axis twice, so Z was always 0. Even if the problem was found in testing it's going to be at least hours, and then the release it was intended for will be delayed and the regression testing will take a month. Testing a complex system takes a long time.

So 100 has always seemed very conservative to me.

Gung-ho tank gamer spills classified docs in effort to win online argument

Re: Does OSA apply if you are outside UK?

UK and US work closely together. So the UK will not be impressed at anyone leaking US secrets. Post Trump I think it will be a long time before the UK trusts US security though.

Re: In the public domain

Serious question? No. The OSA does not require you to have signed it, that's just icing on the cake. Ignorance is no defense. Classified is classified and the laws apply. Just like speeding when you claim you didn't see the limit sign, even if you turned on from a side road and there wasn't one. So if you find something interesting and decide to give it to the BBC that's pretty bad, if you decide to sell it to the Russians or Chinese then you may not have to worry where your next meal is coming from for quite a few years.

How to keep your enterprise up to date by deploying the very latest malware

Re: Been there - on a Nuclear Power Plant

You trusted PCs to run the reactor? Holy crap! I interviewed at Rolls Royce Associates once, they do reactor controls for nuclear subs. They told me in the 1980s obsess over analyzing every component mode failure for discrete and small scale integrated parts, then throw their hands up and say it's too complex for the large scale ICs. I did some not entirely unrelated work for UK MoD. We didn't trust any commercial operating system for our safety critical work. PCs later killed US Ticonderoga class guided missile cruisers. Over the years the USN has talked down the severity, but I took some classes with one of the engineers who was on the ship at the time and he said they were dead in the water and needed a tow. To this day I would not use a PC to run a critical system.

Pre-orders open for the Mini PET 40/80, the closest thing to Commodore's classic around

OK, but why?

Tynemouth huh? I started on a 32kB pet just ten miles from there. I got used to "Please press play on tape #1". I got started in software by learning to cheat at Battleships by taking out limits. But those machines were desperately slow. I just don't need something that reproduces the waiting experience. And if it doesn't then it's just a keyboard reproduction, except the one I started on in 1979(?) had the proper keyboard. It was a good trick, but that was all.

Samsung Galaxy S21: Lots of little downgrades, but this phone is more than the sum of its parts

Re: MicroSD

Oh, right, the one that didn't sell. I went from the S5 to the S7 because of that. The S5 wasn't good enough, but the S6 wasn't acceptable, so we waited for the S7. That was OK until the S10 came out. I don't see a compelling case to upgrade to the 5G phones for my current use. I wonder if S21 will go the same way of the S6 and be a flop because of this one missing feature.

EU says Boeing 737 Max won't fly over the Continent just yet: The US can make its own choices over pilot training

Re: If the software hasn't been changed to use redundant sensors

It's not just the three sensors. Internally the aircraft has a dual redundant control system, not triple like the 747/757/767/777/787, or more. Airbus can lose whole sets of systems and still keep flying. The 737 has plan A, and plan B. If a single failure happens in both systems then you are back to their much vaunted pulley system. Basically the 737 has a flight control system from an earlier era, tarted up to look modern. All other Boeing commercial aircraft since the 747 have reasonably logically laid out triple redundant systems. Just take a look at the overhead panel on the 737, it shows the history of the aircraft in the mixture of display and switch technologies used when each feature was added.

Re: @DS999

The Loughead brothers would be rolling in their grave. Lock-Mart is a separate company. Boeing bought MD and inherited the bean counting corporate cockroaches that ran the Douglas company into the ground. They are serial offenders, but they have become rich along the way.

Re: @DS999

The MCAS software was done by an Indian subcontractor. Boeing's own engineers did the fly by wire system for the 777, which works very well. Boeing took the cheapest possible route on the 737, to maximize profit come what may. Well that worked out for them, didn't it? Boeing proves again that their management didn't learn the harsh lesson from contracting out work on the 787.

Re: MAX design

LOL! You so missed the point! The 737 is a cut down 707 designed in the 60s but based on a late 50s design. The low bypass JT8D engines allowed short undercarriage legs to be used and got the 737-100 close to the ground so that stairs could be used easily. Older 737s are still in service in the far north of America since they are the only western passenger jets than can be fitted with a gravel kit for operation from dirt strips. Boeing is stuck with the consequences of the design choice they made in the very early 60s. Even with the changes they made to accommodate the larger engines the MAX still has an 8.6" smaller fan on their LEAP-1B engines than Airbus has on the A320neo's LEAP-1As. Do you want me to explain why size matters to fuel economy? This is a crappy old aircraft. But Boeing management wouldn't pay the money to design a modern aircraft. So now they have lost the money, an more, in a PR disaster. This is the second time that their attempts to prove their own engineers are over paid and self important has cost them billions. At least $20 billion on the 787 program and then the thick end of another $20 billion here. Do you need that explained?

To be more accurate it was contracted out to Indian software subcontractors who did it cheaper than the self important Boeing engineers that Boeing management despise.

Fancy renting your developer environment? Visual Studio goes online

My company PC developers might, but I'll just stop updating

I am fine with Visual Studio 2017. I only use it for prototyping algorithms anyway. My company is vast enough that there are probably IT types who will go for this, but on engineering programs I'll use Linux if I need a PC hosted tool. I mostly develop for embedded operating systems, but I don't rent anything.

Flight Simulator 2020: Exciting new ride or a doomed tailspin in a crowded market?

Will it have more accurate aircraft models than X-Plane? By more accurate I mean engine performance, including modeling fuel burn and thrust changes with weather and altitude. Will it fly correctly? Will MCAS shove you into the ground on a 737 Max? Will it have all the switches on the overhead live and controlling the right systems models? If it won't then it's another junk toy. If it will then I'll take a look.

Apple hardware priced so high that no one wants to buy it? It's 1983 all over again

Being oldish

When the IBM PC came out in 1981 there were already 8MHz 68000 machines, because the TDI Pinnacle and Sage IV were reviewed in the same issue and ran the benchmarks faster. So to be producing a 5MHz 68K in 1985 is ridiculous. The Atari 520ST was released in June 1985 with 512KB of RAM and an 8MHz 68K. It cost a fraction of the price of anything Apple shipped and was faster too. Apple made a really good attempt at failing.

What happens when a Royal Navy warship sees a NATO task force headed straight for it? A crash course in Morse

Re: Full speed ahead

That's one of those post hoc ergo propter hoc things, which is true, for a change. The reason the Exocet hits where it does is because that's where the CIC is. If the CIC was usually somewhere else then the Exocet would be designed to hit somewhere else. So no matter where they put the CIC that's where the missile is heading for. And Exocet is the least of your problems, take a look at P-500 Bazalt, or more recent things.

We told them not to do that

FWIW, which is little. Many years ago we were talking to people like DGDQA and our various project offices and we told them Windows was a really bad idea for realtime mission critical systems on ships and in Army use. For Eurofighter I think they were mandating VxWorks and 68040 when we were bidding. That we didn't have an issue with, it was the late 80s after all. The called it COE, the common operating environment. They eventually told us to use Windows for the management and configuration systems. I dealt with that by automating all the tasks that the management system was supposed to perform in the realtime system, which was bare machine 8051! Because a ten quid microcontroller is what the software guys get in a box containing three and a half grand in Altera MAX 10000 parts, which were the latest and greatest in 1996. No worries about hacking and random crashes in our software. MS were trying to sell us WinCE and Windows NT RT. What GARBAGE. At least we never sank low enough to use Windows. Do you remember when NT stranded a USS Yorktown? 1997 off Virginia. A bad database entry resulted in a divide by zero that took down everything, including propulsion. PATHETIC! It still makes me angry that such amateurs had a job in military software.

Millennials 'horrify' their neighbours with knob-shaped lights display

Worthless without pictures

No pictures of a visual story? How's that work? Not very well.

Ex-Intel engineer tried to make off with 3D XPoint secret sauce on his way to Micron, says Chipzilla

They were in a partnership. From what I remember Micron were the developers... weren't they?

SQLite creator crucified after code of conduct warns devs to love God, and not kill, commit adultery, steal, curse...

Religion has no place in business. Unless your business is a church, and even then only when the employee affected shares your religion, and it doesn't break any other laws.

Sky customer dinged for livestreaming pay-per-view boxing to Facebook

Re: THAT Price for one View?

> It's not a single boxing match - it's a night of boxing.

The rest of which almost nobody wants to see.

This is the same argument used to sell packages of cable TV channels, almost all of which are complete garbage, which is why I no longer have any cable, or satellite, TV. If it was available in the US I'd just pay the BBC license fee and watch Aunty Beeb.

Watching people brain damage each other as a sport? Not paying a penny to encourage that anyway.

UK lacks engineering and tech skills to make government's industrial strategy work – report

Re: All the jobs were sent offshore to get it for cheap....

That isn't subsidy, it's investment, you tool.

Disk drive fired 'Frisbees of death' across data centre after storage admin crossed his wires

Re: Lathes

That sort of thing really is common. In ten weeks of workshop practice we had the same idiot put one piece through the roof while turning between centers and then, not two weeks later, explode the stone on the cylindrical grinder. When a stone breaks at 5-9,000 rpm it has real energy, and the parts head out of the machine at speed. Even old 14" hard disks had nothing like enough energy to get out of the case.

The Next Big Thing in Wi-Fi? Multiple access points in every home

Prior art much

What counts are AAA? Symbol was doing distributed wireless switches back in 2003 when I joined them. By about 2004 we had Kerberos and other login security as well as always following the latest encryption standards. By the time I left in 2007 we were meshing access points so we could cover parking lots and large campuses without wiring infrastructure. So what was new in 2012?