* Posts by Justthefacts

1200 publicly visible posts • joined 22 May 2014

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Third time is almost the charm for SpaceX's Starship

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Re: 150 tonnes of fuel and oxygen combined

Hmm, you’re right. I had a number in my head, possibly from a very early version, but your number seems right for current ones, which is what matters.

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Fuel usage

I haven’t run the numbers on Starship specifically. But actually launcher waste far less fuel than people think. A Falcon9 uses a total of 150 tonnes of fuel and oxygen combined. For comparison, a 747 jet maximum fuel load is 200 tonnes. And that’s all fuel, therefore much more CO2 for the 747 (if that’s your concern). Plus, amongst launchers, Falcon9 Merlin engines run on (space-grade) kerosene, really rather similar to standard jet fuel. As opposed to, say, Ariane second stage, which is hydrazine - horribly toxic.

To give a real feel for this, a current satellite on its way, Eutelsat 36D, was recently flown to Florida from Toulouse aboard a purpose built Airbus Beluga, for launch on the Falcon9. The (return) flight of that transport aircraft will have burnt more fuel than the launch. And particularly if you add in the flights for all support personnel.

No App Store needed: Apple caves, will allow sideloading in EU

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Re: Your freedom weakens my security.

Let me just google that for you….

“ Android malware apps master list — stay away from these titles at all costs”

https://www.phonearena.com/news/android-malware-apps-master-list_id149175

“https://www.indiatoday.in/amp/technology/news/story/new-dangerous-android-malware-found-in-14-apps-delete-them-immediately-here-is-a-list-of-apps-2481526-2023-12-28”

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

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Re: These services have to make money somehow

“Frankly I'd like to see the likes of Google, Meta and Microsoft broken up. “

Sites that you claim not to use, and therefore have no impact on your life….you want government to forcibly intervene and shut down? Even though the vast majority of the population, do use them, and find them valuable?

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Re: Great Idea!

Targeted “based on the content of the show and typical demographic of the viewer.”

Exactly as targeted internet ads are. The difference is that many (really all) relevant modern web platforms have dynamic content, not static. Eg an Instagram feed, there’s simply no equivalent of a static channel with a given viewership. It’s all dynamically generated targeted based on assessment of the individualised preferences. Even the non-ads.

Instagram literally *is* targeted, some of the posts being ads. That’s how it is defined. Asking for ads to be non-targeted on Instagram doesn’t parse as a grammatical statement, it’s a type mismatch error.

That’s what Instagram is. Don’t like it, nobody is forcing you to use it. But legislating against their core product, that other people do want to use, is just nuts.

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Re: Great Idea!

Well, like most on this forum, you are confusing targeted advertising (which is all advertising), with what is called in the industry *native* advertising, which is the ads shown on unrelated websites/blogs/forums etc. It’s *native* that everyone here hates, because it’s all they happen to come into contact with, but it only forms about 5% of online ad spend. It costs almost nothing to run native ads, because they are known to be remarkably ineffective. Precisely *because* the targeting is so poor (even *with* the tracking), the volume has to be vast.

None of this has anything to do with the vast bulk of ads, on Facebook, Google, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, MailMetro, Bing. Those targeted ads run *on their own platform and their own website*. If you don’t go to their website, you don’t see their ads. At all. Instagram running targeted ads is no different to ITV running ads on TV. If you don’t want to see ads served by ITV, don’t watch ITV.

And yet the EU Commission want to tell them what to do on their own website. That’s the problem.

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Re: Great Idea!

Yeah, because white middle-aged males like you are being discriminated against. By not being allowed to view ads for “SKKN by Kim” makeup. It’s suddenly hit me: a weave is what you’ve always wanted, *normally* used by Afro-Caribbeans but who are we to say. And you just don’t know where in the local area to get one. They’re hiding it from you, it’s a global conspiracy to prevent you getting a weave and nail extensions.

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Re: Great Idea!

TV advertising is *highly* targeted. I have no idea why you think otherwise.

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Re: Great Idea!

“Except perhaps some very approximate geographical stuff as there's no point running ads for, say, an Australian product if the viewer is in Europe but happens to be looking at the Australian based website”

Indeed. And of course gender. Because there’s no point in serving ads for tampons to men. Plus, of course, age. Because it’s actually illegal to serve ads for gambling or alcohol to under-18s. And while you’re at it, not very sensible to target ads for holidays for a company literally called 18-30 to 65 year olds.

Paying 30p per click, how long do you think it is possibly to stay in business blanket-advertising tampons to 65year old men?

An engine that can conjure thrust from thin air? We speak to the designer

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Re: So much missing info!

The *designer* hasn’t necessarily got it wrong, it’s just not what it is presented to be. He’s just a PhD student, he’s got a technical idea that he’s working through, butdoesn’t have the breadth of industry knowledge or systems experience, nor should we expect them to.

The *funding agency* is DARPA. This is a military program in disguise. They know what the true use case is, and why even if the Conference Poster is rubbish, it might have a useful outcome to them. But they certainly aren’t explaining that in public, and almost certainly neither the PhD student nor his department professor know.

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Re: Sorry to pour cold water on a plasma jet

“A few hours per day with sun on the solar panels might be enough”

I’m afraid the orbital mechanics for this don’t work. Firstly, the orbital period is about 90 minutes, that’s the length of your light cycle period. But if you only thrust on the half of the orbit when you are in the sun, you don’t maintain orbit altitude. Instead, you push the height of the orbit up, on the opposite side of the Earth where you are thrusting. Very quickly you get an elliptical orbit. And the bit of the orbit opposite the dark side just decreases in height without being held up at all, and hits the ground quite quickly.

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Re: Sorry to pour cold water on a plasma jet

“ 70 to 90 kilometers”. At 80km, pressure is about 0.01mbar. No, I don’t think “airbreathing engine” is the correct perspective. It’s an ion thruster, backed by an air ram as a propellant source (instead of xenon tank, as per norm), and powered by solar panels.

“You have no idea what plasma systems eat or why”. Ad hominem, and not useful. It’s clear that we come from different industries, you are from the aero side; whereas I come from the space angle. Almost all the latest class of geo satellites are now electric thruster. The mass saving from reducing the chemical propellant tank is sufficient to compensate for the several months of orbit-raising via ion thruster. But if I take say a Eurostar E3000 EOR variant, it has 5kW thrusters fitted. The total bus power budget is up to 25kW, with 15-20kW payload power now routine. So, no, the electrical power draw of the thruster is not the be-all-and-end-all, it’s just one consideration in a large tradeoff matrix.

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Re: Sorry to pour cold water on a plasma jet

I worked in the space industry for over twenty years, designed and led several payload equipments, and later overall Program Management responsible on two spacecraft.

Apparently, you can’t read. That was exactly what I said: there’s a hidden assumption on the solar panel config that needs it to be in sun-synchronous, but it can’t be.

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Re: Sorry to pour cold water on a plasma jet

I agree with your conclusion (this isn’t practical), but not your reasoning. “If you rely on superhigh exhaust velocities, your thermodynamics become inefficient”. Yes, but you’re making the assumption that thermodynamic inefficiency is unacceptable. However, today spacecraft use ion engines routinely with exhaust velocities 30+km/s upwards, and the thermodynamics *are* inefficient. The atmosphere is sufficiently thin that the thrust required is low enough (milliNewtons), that the spacecraft tradeoff is in favour of over-provisioning power to save stored reaction-mass, up to a point.

The reason that *I* don’t think this will work is: one has to allocate a large fraction of the frontal area to the intake ram. Because even at 30kps exhaust velocity, drag is a fixed large fraction of thrust. The solar panels have a massive area, so they have to be aerodynamic, ie edge-on to direction of travel. But you can’t just fix the solar panels like this. The spacecraft is orbiting and constantly turning relative to the Sun. It *must* point them separately towards the Sun, otherwise for large fractions of the orbit you have no power, and no thrust.

Now, there’s a bodge, which the designers of this might be aware of but not understood properly. If you choose a sun-synchronous (polar) orbit, you can have the panels fixed and edge-on to direction of travel. But only a small range of orbits can be Sun-synchronous. That orbit relies on a coincidence due to the earths equatorial bulge, which needs an orbital altitude 250km+, otherwise it’s unstable. As low as they want it to be (within the upper atmosphere) the simple orbit equation naively seems to allow it, but you’d need to use an unthinkable amount of delta-v to keep the inclination stable at 96degrees over the year. I think what happened is that they’ve *seen* an existing operating example, but not understood it. GOCE satellite indeed does have low altitude, uses electric-propulsion, and has fixed aerodynamic solar panels. And that does work….because GOCE is in a Sun-synchronous orbit! But GOCE orbit altitude intrinsically isn’t low enough to gather sufficient propellant to maintain orbit, so it has onboard propellant. There’s just no overlap between the constraints “propellant collection rate”, “solar panel power / area / pointing” and “sun-synchronous orbit”.

I think a (military) spacecraft operating on Nuclear Thermal Battery, plus aero-ram, plus ion engine, could work though….

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

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Re: Who are their lawyers?

No. The EU changed the law, retrospectively on the *purchase*. The law is the law, and overrides any statements made by manufacturer. Apple don’t need to regurgitate it on the packaging and have no responsibility to do so. The purchaser is expected to know and apply the law.

Manufacturer of a knife doesn’t have to write to previous knife purchasers “your previous rights to stab people have been made illegal; if that’s what you bought the knife for, you can return it for a refund”

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Re: Who are their lawyers?

It really doesn’t. If this is important to your business, you need to consult a lawyer specialising in EU law, ASAP. Just reading EU law yourself isn’t going to cut it: they’ve redefined the words they use.

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Re: Who are their lawyers?

Wrong. People within the EU borders. Plus if the EU want to add the extra restriction “only EU citizens within our borders”, that’s up to them nobody else cares.

But it’s certainly not an OR, it may be an AND

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Re: Who are their lawyers?

The law *doesn’t* apply to EU citizens, as indeed it can’t. Countries can’t make laws that apply outside their sovereign boundaries, citizenship is irrelevant. In just the same way that an Afghan citizen attempting to claim protection for marriage to a child by Sharia law within the borders of France will get short shrift.

By the way “EU citizenship”’ is a very slippery legal concept, and not in the end a useful one. First off, it’s not recognised at all outside the EU - as far as the USA or Switzerland or anyone else is concerned, you are a French or German citizen. If, for example, you were detained by in a 3rd country, you have a right to contact your national consulate, but not the EU consulate. Second, the citizenship criteria can diverge subtly but importantly from national citizenship. There are a dozen edge cases where people can be eg French citizens but not EU citizens, and people who are EU citizens who are not nationals of any member state. And in every single case, the legal rights follow the national citizenship(s), not the EU one. EU citizenship in itself can’t confer any rights in circumstances that national citizenship doesn’t cover, so it’s a redundant concept.

The only time you see the phrase used is as an inaccurate shorthand by people who don’t really understand it, and EU Commission. The courts themselves are always really careful in the rulings to use phrases like “violates rights laid down in EU law”. Occasionally you do see something like “violates the rights defined for EU citizens”, which if you think really carefully with your legal word telescope, does not mean the court is handing down the judgement *because* this particular person is an EU citizen. Merely that it applies to all EU citizens (of whom this person is a part of an overlapping set) and (who in this particular case is covered by national adoption of this EU law)

Chip lobby group SEMI to EU: Export restrictions should only be used in self-defense

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Re: As a Dutchman I'm pissed off

It’s got nothing to do with the USA, this is an EU Commission problem. You surely know as a Dutchman, that France (STMicro Crolles) has been sabotaging ASML for over a decade, for subsidies.

From France point of view, EU chip industry must be in Crolles, and if it isn’t they’d prefer nowhere. If you want ASML to survive in Netherlands, you need to leave the EU. Otherwise, they’re gone within ten years.

EU-turn! Now Apple says it won't banish Home Screen web apps in Europe

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Re: Illegal under the DMA

So, you’ve had to dig an article from *2015* to show a single exploit event of significant malware on the App Store? You couldn’t have made my point better if you had tried.

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Re: Illegal under the DMA

“That’s what a sandbox is”. Is it really? Because *Apple customers* think that by far the most important bit of the sandbox is the review process of what is allowed onto the Apple App Store in the first place. It’s *you* who has too limited a technical understanding to understand what the sandbox is. Process wins over technical guardrail every time. And you know this perfectly well (or should do) as an IT professional. For employers that give their staff locked-in laptops, who have an IT policy as to what programs they can install…..how impressed do you think they would be, if a user decided to install a “sandbox” on their laptop? “But it’s a sandbox, it should be able to contain any malware”. That employee would get fired. Because it’s insecure.

“Oh, but I own this iPhone, I should have the right to install whatever I like, I’m not an employee”. Right. And I own *my* iPhone. *I* should have the right to install whatever *policies* I like to ensure my own security. And I’ve chosen to outsource hire Apple as my IT department, to vet the security for stuff I don’t want to waste my time with. What business is that of yours, to decide that I’m not allowed to do that?

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Re: "We have received requests"

The latest couple of generations of iPhones work just fine after being dropped in the toilet. Mine has been at the bottom of a swimming pool overnight with no ill effects.

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Re: Illegal under the DMA

Ah, the guy who thinks he knows how somebody *else’s* software should be architected. Based on the fact that another bit of software they’ve worked on had been done that way, and therefore everyone must do it that way.

Or, and it’s just a thought, why not let consumer choice take care of it? If it truly is a crappy architecture, in a way that affects the customer, then they won’t buy it. Simple.

The fact that IOS is, by some margin, the dominant software ecosystem in the world by profit (rather than turnover), shows that consumers actually rather like it. For reasons you don’t understand.

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Re: "We have received requests"

No, for hardware they’ll just make one for the EU market and one for the rest of world. The Rest of World will meet IP68 maximum protection for liquid and solid ingress; EU they will just do same as a LandfillDroid: none at all.

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Illegal under the DMA

Except that Apple’s *new* solution, they *can’t* let people pick their own browser. Select Firefox, get Apple WebKit if and only if PWA.

Because that’s technically required by IOS architecture. And that’s illegal under the DMA. As Apple told you the first time.

Uncle Sam explores satellites that can create propellant out of thin air

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Problem: solar panels

Nice idea, but I really don’t think this is going to be practical (except, see last paragraph). If you are flying low enough to be collecting reaction mass, you experience drag from the medium in exactly the same ratio. The drag is proportional your velocity through the medium, orbital velocity 7.8km/s, while the thrust is proportional to the ion engine exhaust velocity, typically 30km/s. From first principles, for thrust to match the drag, the mass collector must intercept at least 25% of the frontal area. That’s difficult, as spacecraft are usually designed totally un-aerodynamic. But it might be just marginally possible. Except…. Solar panels.

You would have to make the solar panels point aerodynamically edge-on to your velocity, since they are about 5x the area of everything else put together. Otherwise, they’ll drag the whole thing down.That is what is shown in the diagrams for this, so they do understand that. However, it is normally critical for the solar panels to be motor-pointed and locked onto the Sun position, for continuous power delivery. The spacecraft is going round the Earth, so constantly turning away from the Sun. This is a huge problem…..especially as the power from the solar panels is exactly what is driving the ion engine thrust. If you turn the solar panels away from the Sun, there’s zero thrust…..

So, why are they doing this, are they stupid? No, I think this is a military program in disguise. The solar panel issue goes away if you power the spacecraft with a Nuclear Thermal Battery, which civilian programs aren’t allowed to launch, instead of solar panels. As noted, the thrust scales in exact ratio with the drag, so long as you have the power. This means that you can fly as low as you like, ie as dense as you like (within limits). If you remove the solar panels from the satellite, and cover it in stealth material, it becomes nearly invisible. The plume from an ion thruster is visible in a darkened room, but that’s about all. So I think this is for military systems.

Meta seeks ASIC designers for ML accelerators and datacenter SoCs

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Bengaluru

It’s a small fraction compared to software, but if you put together Google, Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, Samsung, plus outsourcers WiPro, Mirafra…..it’s pretty massive.

Rivian decimates staff to put a brake on spending

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Cash burn?

So, they’re burning $10bn a year to build 57000 vehicles?! That’s $170k per vehicle. That doesn’t appear to be R&D, just what it’s costing them per vehicle to build and sell. Because allegedly the vehicle is ready for prime time.

First, 57k vehicles per year barely needs a factory to build it. They employ 16000 people. That’s 3 vehicles per worker per year. You can literally coach-build cars at 10-20 cars per worker per year, and half a dozen sports car companies within a hundred miles of me do exactly that.

Secondly, when they did their sums of “is this a business”, they seem to have forgotten they’d need showrooms. They’ve only just opened 11 showrooms….as an afterthought, and astonished that touching and test-driving the cars is something buyers would want to do before parting with money. They’ve not got a realistic plan for this, nor costed it.

Persistent memory to replace DRAM, but it could take a decade

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Re: Not quite right

Ah, I see I’ve re-invented the wheel. Shouldn’t have surprised me, as it was an obvious development, and there are always *some* niches for the non-standard requirement.

I revise my comment to: in those niches where non-volatile RAM is considered a benefit, there’s an easy solution already out there which doesn’t require a big tech development. It’s a niche, so the costs are a bit more. But if the uses became more general, the product would have a larger manufacturing volume and the prices would drop. I still don’t see a niche for a *new* non-volatile technology. MRAM also already exists, and fills yet another niche perfectly adequately on the low-size end.

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Not quite right

The RAM refresh is done in sections. The overall actual refresh interval for DDR4 is 64ms, from when a particular row is refreshed, to when it is done again. We can ask a separate question: if we hooked some separate refresh and power circuitry to the DDR4, such that when the CPU was powered down, the refresh still ran….well the RAM itself is taking maybe 3W when fully active, but the refresh is only maybe 0.5% duty cycle. I don’t have exact figures, but it might consume only 15mW in refresh-only. That’s still more than you can hold in a capacitor, but it’s easily in the range of a small on-module Li-ion battery for a week or more, if one chose to do it.

And that’s the thing: you don’t need any complex technology developments, just a bit of engineering on the PCB. The fact that nobody *does* choose to do it, says to me that “persistent memory” in and of itself is not really useful to anyone.

ChatGPT starts spouting nonsense in 'unexpected responses' shocker

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Rose-tinted spectacles

“One human can explain the reasoning for its answers to another human.”

Really? I mean, yeah *sometimes* humans do, when it is a simple logical chain. But if it *is* a simple logical chain, then you will find ChatGPT produces a plausible and correct explanation when you use the simple (and now well-known) prompt phrase “take a step-by-step approach”.

And then, mostly humans *refuse* to justify their actions giving some variation of “Because I say so”, “Twenty years of experience”, “Research shows”, “When I was at company X, we did that”. If you take the conversation down the “research shows” route, they usually give something which may or may not back up what they say, and more importantly is clearly *post hoc*. They are providing a justification, rather than their actual internal reasoning. Which again, ChatGPT can replicate that very nicely, just ask it “is there any published data or research backing up your conclusion”, and it will find some. And then if you point that it doesn’t back up the initial answer, it will indeed identify the logical gap and revise its answer. None of this is very different from the vast majority of human interactions, except that humans persist in their own errors for far longer.

ChatGPT isn’t an Oracle. And it isn’t close to writing the Great American Novel. But honestly, it outperforms 99% of *actual* human interactions which are largely at the reflex level.

Apple makes it official: No Home Screen web apps in European Union

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Re: No problem

I agree the broad angle, that’s a plausible account of what actually happened. They will also have had: Snr Product Manager to give a view on the current PWA take up rate and project a financial impact (with numbers). And from engineering, a Snr Architect for Job-To-Be-Done, Director for resource estimate, Sr Director for impact of resource allocation on other programs. What I don’t know, and nobody who doesn’t work on IOS at Apple knows, is what the numbers actually are on that spreadsheet.

And at the end of that, the decision would be an easy “seems like costs outweigh revenue, drop PWA’s in EU, build a business case for their re-introduction if necessary. And it’s got the added benefit of starting the internal process-change of having a separate EU IOS, which the next or next next regulation is going to force anyway”

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Re: No problem

Well, *my* worldview (and career experience) is that in a large corporate tech company, the kind of meeting where those decisions are taken, is an eyeball-stabbingly dull place. Typical discussion is about deadlines, existing commitments, staffing levels, technical risk, overcost, and our friends SAM and ARPU. The unspoken subjects are internal politics, whose fault it is, departmental responsibilities, compensation alignment. External politics? Taking revenge on a government? That sort of lack of self-control and poor judgement is going to get you taken aside after the meeting, asked if everything is Ok at home, and whatever it is they don’t GAF but either way leave it at home or be re-assigned to the Quality Department.

I await the evidence outcome with baited breath. Maybe some manager at Apple brought their politics to work. But I bet you 10:1 odds they didn’t.

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Re: No problem

So, ironically, whether your solution works or not depends on whether you are correct about Apple doing this deliberately and maliciously.

If I am right, and this is just a necessary technical consequence (for Apple) of EU legislation…..then yes your solution will work. But if *you* are right, and this is intended to deliberately disable features within the EU to poke them in the eye…..then Apple will just add a GPS location check. So if you are correct, then you *are* screwed. But if your company survives, then your entire paranoid world-view is wrong. Quite a puzzle eh. Do the experiment, find out.

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Re: I

I believe you are confusing two separate things here: Apple’s relationship with developers who release stuff for its platform, and Apple’s relationship with consumers who bought its devices.

“App developers cannot release a new version of their PWA which works because Apple has blocked all of them.” Sucks to be an EU-based developer then. But Apple have no contract with them. IPad purchasers, the people who do have a contract, are not affected by that aspect. Sorry, you just have to put that argument aside, it doesn’t affect anything.

“It is not simply that the sausage maker chose to go vegan only. It is that they have also entered the houses of everyone who bought their sausages and removed them, even though they had no need to do so.” Maybe….let’s deconstruct that: does Apple have the right to force-deprecate Apps? Well, they can’t (and don’t) force upgrade people’s IOS version. They can (and do) routinely upgrade IOS version at the users request, which has the effect of deprecating some of the Apps on their devices, those ones that don’t support the newer version. As long as Apple have informed you that upgrading the IOS will break a particular functionality, and you do it anyway, that’s your choice. So no, that argument doesn’t fly.

“They are doing that to try to punish the regulators for having made the change that they don't like. This is not supposition no matter how you intend to characterize it.” Yes it is supposition, and I don’t particularly believe it. And even if true, it doesn’t matter, because as long as the act is lawful, intent doesn’t matter.

“They could have allowed other browser engines, and those engines are capable of running PWAs inside themselves. Those engines probably would need to have code added to interact with some of the hardware, but that's the job of the people writing those engines, not Apple.” I 100% agree. 3rd party browser authors have spent years arguing that they shouldn’t be forced to use WebKit…and now they’ve been handed the keys to the kingdom we discover that they haven’t bothered to code any of the hard edge-cases, which they expected just to use WebKit anyway. Now that Apple is saying “well you’ve opted out of WebKit, so you can’t use it” they’ve been found out. Do we know that if/when any of the other browser manufacturers implement WebKit-like functionality, PWAs won’t work? I don’t know that at all. PWA’s now open in-browser. If Firefox make push notifications work in their browser, then….push notifications will work in their browser. Is that technically possible? I have no idea, and there’s no reason Apple should care, that’s Firefox responsibility.

“Existing PWAs could run in WebKit because that is what they're already set to run in” No they shouldn’t, Apple does *not* have that legal freedom. The EU made it a legal requirement that the user be allowed to opt out of using WebKit. This is what that looks like in practice. You absolutely cannot require a company to manage the situation where people “sign a legally binding opt out from WebKit”, the users selection doesn’t work, and Apple have to fall back to the working solution, with the risk of getting sued because they did something that the user has opted out of. This is the carbon copy of the GDPR problem. “Do you accept cookies that this website needs to do its job”….user clicks “no I don’t accept”….website says “well, I need them to do my job, so I’m going to ignore your non-acceptance and set them anyway”? Results in getting sued. Sorry, no. If you don’t accept cookies, the website may not have its full functionality, or indeed any functionality.

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Re: Thanks Apple...

“Could they not use Safari for PWAs and allow other browsers for normal surfing”

That’s easy. No, the *EU law* does not allow it, and people could sue Apple if it did. The browser makers asked for, and got, the EU to legislate that consumers be given the choice to opt out of WebKit. If the consumer has chosen to use a browser that doesn’t contain WebKit, the law says that their choice must be respected. It can’t just automatically fall back to Safari on those use-cases where “Firefox doesn’t support it”, whatever the technical reason for that.

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Re: I

First, data-deletion: this doesn’t hold water, given the way that IOS apps/versioning has always worked. Sometimes apps get installed compatible with some IOS version but later IOS versions break it. Your app/game may well have saved data/progress. The app developer then has to release a version that works with the newer IOS version. If they don’t, the app dies. Your saved data/game progress dies with it. If you want to blame Apple for that, you can, but nobody else does. The onus has always been on the app developer.

“It is not the inexorable result of the regulations. It is the result that Apple prefers.”

So what? An analogy: let’s say I make sausages, and then the government makes a law on animal welfare that adds some costs and admin to the butchering. Assume that the regulation is desirable, and that the intent is to push the sausage-maker to higher welfare standards. But the sausage-maker then looks at their own business and the extra complexity of compliance, and decides “well in that case, I’m going to sell vegan sausages instead”. That’s not “malicious compliance”. The sausage maker has no *moral* duty to continue to sell meat sausages.

This all comes down to your crystal ball of what Apple’s intentions are “ They are intentionally trying to break things because they don't like the law.” There’s zero evidence of that. Historically, they have a closed ecosystem. This brings them internal benefits of software development allowing them arrange their software architecture for efficiency, and in ways that don’t suit the way *you* want to characterise the internal modules/interfaces. Apparently, they use some internal functions of WebKit to do rendering for PWA’s, which is a perfectly reasonable project management and architecture decision. It’s not the way Android did it, not how you would do it, or what you think “the industry standard” is. But how they organise the internal IOS APIs is None Of Your Business. Suddenly, in comes some legislation trying to slice the architecture the same as Android, which breaks their entire architecture and test infrastructure. They can either re-architect half of IOS, or decide not to support this minor feature. The answer is obvious.

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Re: I

Agree with everything apart from the last sentence “companies are amoral beasts”. How is this possibly a moral decision? It’s a practical decision, to comply with the law, and from everything that has been said, the correct engineering decision. In fact, it falls under “ensuring that groups who took a decision, suffer the consequences of their own decision”, which is a highly moral position. It’s the opposite of Moral Hazard. Unless you enforce that, the world becomes a worse place, and surprisingly fast. Cf Banks being rescued in 2008.

It would only become a *immoral* decision if it meant that, for example, a whole bunch of EU hospitals could no longer provide healthcare because they relied on PWA apps. Do they?

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Re: No problem

Of course you are right, the client won’t have the budget to allocate writing two separate apps. Assuming you are an app developer:

If you and client are both in the EU, then yes you will have to present your client with the options: a) use these apps in-browser, b) switch to Android, c) transition to website only (no app to be written). The client can’t dump you because anyone else will tell them the same. I have no opinion which is best option. But most likely they will accept in-browser use, because there’s still an icon to dib, right? It’s just non-optimal to use on iPad. I think it’s unlikely they are going to throw $700 items in the bin, just because Push notifications don’t work. But in that case, Apple made the right decision (for them), because they’ve avoided a huge spend (and risk) on massive re-architecture for something that isn’t their fault, and had no impact on buying.

The problem (for you). is if you and client are in different zones EU and non-EU. Either way, you can’t reproduce whatever issues the client is having going forward, because it works a different way for them. You won’t be able to debug. So, you simply lose those contracts, because you just aren’t in the position to take the job. On the minus side, you’ll lose all your ex-EU contracts. On the plus side, all the EU companies can no longer contract out to an ex-EU app developer, as they just can’t do the work (or suck it up to go Android-only), so you’ll get some new customers. Whether the positives outweigh the negatives depends on your business balance. For most businesses, 80% of customers are ex-EU (for mine it’s about 98%+), so it’s strongly negative. Balkanisation. It sucks. But it’s what the EU voted for.

In its tantrum with Europe, Apple broke web apps in iOS 17 beta, still hasn't fixed them

Justthefacts Silver badge

Re: What am I missing

Ok, I agree that’s what a PWA is (as opposed to a web app), and if Apple no longer support it, then that’s not ideal. But I don’t think that’s what Apple *have* done, although the source article is filled with more heat than light and rather vague about the actual symptoms. Perhaps because the person who wrote the article, can’t actually see the “bug” themselves not being in the EU and it’s hearsay for them too.

From what I can glean/guess, what’s *actually* happening is that a PWA needs some mechanism to render to screen, and Apple happen to have chosen the browser to do so (because the function already implemented). In exactly the same way on a Windows system, that if you open an html file stored as a file in Windows, it opens in your default browser which might be Chrome or Firefox. You don’t need to be online to open an html file, in just the same way you don’t need to be online to run a PWA.

So previously Apple just used the underlying WebKit directly; but now with the new browser war they don’t want to call WebKit directly but instead “your default browser” (whatever that might be). If *you* have chosen your default browser as Firefox, it’s not just “Apple doesn’t want to”, it would actually be illegal to call WebKit. They need a renderer and “the default browser” is it. Then, if Firefox-on-IOS doesn’t handle that, it’s up to Firefox to implement the feature. It’s what they said they wanted, they literally got the government to write a law saying they shouldn’t be forced to use WebKit, they can’t complain now that they discover WebKit implements a feature they’d forgotten about and hadn’t bothered to support.

Maybe I’m wrong about the “bug”, there’s so little real info. But it makes sense of why it would be connected to the EU browser stuff, which otherwise Apple have no reason to Balkanise.

Justthefacts Silver badge

What am I missing?

So, the issue is that these PWAs do still work, but “don’t launch [full-screen] in their own top-level activities, opening in Safari instead."?

What is the difference between those two, this seems to be a difference that makes no difference? Obviously, it’s a web app, so some browser must be invoked to display it, it’s just whether that browser bit takes up screen real estate. “Full screen”? Click Hide Toolbar so the tabs disappear, the PWA would be full-screen. Literally the only real estate taken up is by the web address, which is in line with and the same size as the time, date, WiFi symbol, battery percentage; and those are there anyway whether it’s a separate app. I’m struggling to see the problem. “Top level activity” is a nonsense distinction which only web devs would care about not users.

SAP hits brakes on Tesla company car deal

Justthefacts Silver badge

Re: Are they kiddin

“Speaking a different language”. Yes. “Not easy” very much depends on where you stand. I’ll suggest to you a truly complex product: pharmaceuticals.

The people who know what the problem is that you are trying to solve, are the clinicians working in hospitals - who don’t work for you, and you can’t influence. The biology of what causes the symptoms at the cell level is largely unknown for decades, has no “design”, and has hundreds of interconnecting feedbacks; it’s worked on by cell biologists, who speak a different language. Once that’s understood, a completely different set of biologist types, speaking yet another language, try to figure out a druggable molecular target. Then you need the pharma chemists, speaking a different language, who work out the drug structure that might bind. Then it’s into in vitro trials, then clinical trials (recruiting actual patients via those pesky doctors *who don’t actually work for you*). And then there’s scale-up performed by chem Eng types, who again speak a totally different language to the other chemists you had. Through this entire chain, from an initial drug to something on the market, the attrition ratio is 100:1 or more, often takes 20+ years, costs more than $1bn, and will have involved tens of thousands of people within hundreds of organisations by its completion. Through the whole “project” you are fighting the most complex set of interacting systems ever discovered, the human body, where you can’t change a thing to make the “component” design easier or more stable. Rather sadly, despite the dozens of brilliant people in that industry that I’ve known, I only know *one* who has worked on a drug that actually made it to humans in their entire career. Take a moment to appreciate just how hard that field is.

As opposed to, building cars where the entire project beginning to end has been designed rationally, not just to make your life more difficult. And where you know from day 1 what the overall architecture is, what subsystems there will be, and have a known-good working example from the previous generation. When you want to test something, just make a prototype and put in the lab. The project is staffed by people with all broadly similar background and expertise, mechanical engineering + power electronics. The amount of “language translation” is minimal. Next time you have to convene an ethics committee to decide the window mechanism, I’ll revise my opinion.

Justthefacts Silver badge

Re: Are they kidding?

“Never spent any time around automotive manufacturing”.

Its not my special subject, certainly, but evidence within my physical field of view show it’s the business, product definition, customer acquisition, supply chain issues that are the bit that is going to kill you, not the engineering of “getting a car on the road”. Whether it’s Zenos, Trident, Iceni, TVR, Sebring, Ariel, Radical, Ascari, Elemental, Caterham, there’s plenty more. Whatever else, these companies all make or made *cars*. They have wheels, engines, steering, brakes, suspensions, and even air-conditioning and a radio. Some of them are very good cars indeed.

A company like Radical employs 70 engineering staff *split between* design and actually building the things. If you have a decent size garden, you can have an entire car company over for beers in the summer as long as they don’t mind talking to each other. They are clearly smart, skilled and hard-working people, I’m not denigrating that. But in terms of project size and complexity, this is not an Apollo Space Program. As an engineering profession, the area has enough heritage that we have a very good idea of what needs doing, options and tradeoffs, and the components available. The tooling required is available in thousands of machine shops up and down the land, and skilled operators know what they’re doing. If your production volume requires it, an automotive robot costs less than the annual salary of the human they replace, and there are tens of thousands of them worldwide.

In contrast, it takes a company like Qualcomm about 50,000 people to design (several) smartphone modems, and they aren’t including manufacturing at the fab. There is *no* smartphone modem that you can design with 70 people. There is no smartphone modem chip you can take from clean-sheet to silicon with *700* people. The job is just too large, complex, and multi-domain. And when it comes to manufacture, the availability of the leading-edge chip tooling worldwide is in single digits and costs $340M each.

So, yes, by comparison to other engineering domains that I know well, designing and assembling a car is achievable by a very large number of skilled teams around the world. At very limited size and complexity. Not just a World Champion.

Justthefacts Silver badge

Re: Are they kidding?

No, re-read what I actually said. Designing and making ICE’s is super-complex. Designing and making many of the car components (which the automakers don’t do!) is complex. Being in the business of making cars, is *very* complex. The logistics and supply chain issues are murder, as in “almost every company that does this, it eventually kills them”. But that’s a business problem, not a metal-bashing problem. Deciding what car to build, which customers want to buy, that’s very hard. Cost engineering, that’s difficult. Actually assembling cars is not complex. It’s what most of their workforce are employed to do…..but it isn’t where actual value is.

The one “moat” that the legacy guys have always had, is that nobody else could make ICEs. Hundreds of companies *want* to make cars, but only a handful actually can. The rest have to buy their engines from the big guys.

If you step back from your outrage, you’ll realise that I’m correct. From scratch, Tesla didn’t have any car-making experience. They didn’t have any chassis design IP, and they didn’t know the manufacturing process. And it didn’t worry them, because that wasn’t the big hill to climb. Most of their effort went on “the new stuff”. An actual Tesla car, considered as a drivers car, is not good. People complain about the panel gaps, but that’s hardly the thing. Everyone has had a tear down of one by now, and the broad conclusion is…..the suspension both wallows and crashes painfully, which is quite a talent if you think about it. The chassis design (before the Gigapress) is right out of the fifties. The components are cheap and unreliable, and no thought at all has been put into Design for Repair so it’s almost unrepairable. None of this matters to its customers, because they are buying something else, not a car.

Justthefacts Silver badge

Re: Billions off share price

And how many of the items you mention are *made* by the badge automaker? Seats, no. Climate control, no. Wipers, no. Windows, no. Are you seriously claiming that *wheels* are differentiating thing that no off-the-shelf workshop can make? Literally any 5-person machine shop with a stamp press can do that, and *does* do that aftermarket. Brakes also are a generic, with hundreds of aftermarket makers, most of whom design to *higher* spec than the OEM. Suspension, the main components are dampers (off-the-shelf) and springs (off-the-shelf). The geometry is the main thing the automaker really owns. Automakers buy paint, not make it, they do apply it….but so can (and do) thousands of repair and custom shops around the country. Steering, ok, I’ll give you that….but we’ve been making steering for a century, this is not a cutting edge technology. None of these is a unique thing that only a unique company can do.

Automakers are *engineering primes*. They do system design and cost engineering, that’s their function. It’s necessary and is what the customer pays for, that and getting it through safety, regulatory and type approval. But just developing a car that correctly does all the things that a car has to do, if you remove the ICE, honestly any competent mechanical engineering consultancy can do it. I know that, because there used to be over a dozen small car companies in Norfolk, a decade or two ago. They all developed a perfectly workable, safe, conformant car with teams of no more than twenty engineers or so, from clean sheet on a budget less than £20M. Owning the IP of a system design of a good functioning car, is not worth literally 1000x that.

Justthefacts Silver badge

Re: Are they kidding?

Manufacturing cars isn’t complex. Or, maybe it would be, but none of the automaker brands listed actually do that. They’re just assembling parts from their ecosystem, and most of those parts manufacturers can make the design mods for another nameplate brand within a few months. The thing that’s complex is petrol engines and their ancillaries (sensors, exhausts), and the future doesn’t have those in.

Tesla has proved rather unreliable, not because making EVs is hard, but because Tesla aren’t very good at manufacturing and QA. Wait until a competent firm comes in. But it’s not going to be one of the legacy automakers, they are clueless.

Justthefacts Silver badge

Re: Billions off share price

I think it is (was) perfectly rational. First point is, Tesla’s shares aren’t “so high”, it’s VW, BMW, Ford etc that are low, and there’s a perfectly good reason for that. They have huge revenues, but wafer-thin profit margins. Toyota has 10% margin, hardly amazing, but 3x the others, and that’s why it’s market cap is so much larger. What you should take from this, isn’t that VW is smaller than Toyota; it’s that VW et al are on the edge of not existing at all. When you only make a couple % profit, it only takes a tiny fluctuation to make that negative, and then having a larger revenue just means you are losing more money faster.

The next point is that the legacy car companies don’t really have a business future in the EV era. Yes they can still make cars…but so can *everyone else*. There’s no unique expertise in electric motors like there is in petrol engines. There isn’t even any reason why the *brand* has to be the one assembling panels. In any other business, assembling panels is low-margin thing you subcontract to the hundreds of generic machine shops.

So, Tesla was high, purely because they had first mover advantage in making the new thing. But now there are a dozen alternatives, probably BYD will be the eventual winner. So Tesla is crashing.. But its important to understand that if and when self-driving finally becomes a reality (which might well not be until 2045), *NVidia Inside* could well be the automaker brand. Every other component is ultimately generic or commodity, even CATL batteries.

US starts 'emergency' checks on cryptocurrency power use, citing winter power demands

Justthefacts Silver badge

Load shedding in practice

Well, last time I remember we had load-shedding incident in the U.K. a couple years back, it seemed that our bottom-priority circuit included the rail network. Hard-wired. I agree maybe it shouldn’t be that way, but that’s what we’ve got. I’m not that keen to lose our rail network regularly just to keep the crypto bros running.

Justthefacts Silver badge

Re: Here we go again...

Fair point, it is qualitatively same issue. In my view it’s a quantitative question “is the size of harm large enough to make it worth acting”. The making of MAGA hats isn’t sucking enough power, that people are going cold in their homes during the winter. But if it did, then yes we probably would have to categorise industrial power-use as “critical”, “strategic”, “neutral” and “antisocial”; as we run short of power then brownout the industries at the bottom end first.

Justthefacts Silver badge

Re: Here we go again...

I don’t think it’s as simple as “I should be free to do X, as long as I pay for it”. As a society, we have since forever recognised the “middle way” of differentially taxing “socially disapproved” activities. Whether that’s government intervenes to tax high-CO2 cars, or harmful-but-not-illegal activities such as smoking.

In this case, the crypto miners are free-riding on the social contract: that consumer electricity is minimally-taxed as an essential utility. They’re using a government-subsidised resource, where the subsidy isn’t the average price, but the guarantee of supply and government-financed hedge against price fluctuation of input pricing. It’s a “lucky coincidence” for crypto that delivery of input supply makes it technically difficult to differentiate. If it weren’t physically coming out of one plug, it’s obvious that this activity *would* already be differentially taxed, cf “red diesel”. It’s a bit like some City wideboy figuring out that books are VAT-free, and bulk-buying them to use as furnace fuel. The activity is only economic by leveraging governments inability to differentiate vs social goods like schoolbooks, otherwise it would always be more profitable to burn the raw material for books before they had been printed.

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