Posts by Doctor Syntax

Strong electric car sales expected for 2024, but charging grid needs work

Re: Cheaper

"Literally everyone on this website understands where in the producer-to-consumer chain the problem lies when electricity is generated with coal."

Indeed. What we don't see is what's being proposed, in a reasonable timescale, to deal with that and the rest of the infrastructure.

The refining and distribution infrastructure for ICE was built up over decades alongside the build-up of number of vehicles on the road. If targets are to be met to replace those ICEs with EVs then the infrastructure has to be implemented on a much tighter time scale. Are there even any feasibility studies for this, let alone plans?

Do we see any alternatives being planned such as doing away with unsustainable mass-commuting into larger and larger cities? The only govt. initiative on that was Moggie complaining about lack of bums on seats.

Do we see any sign at all of the sort of large-scale entire-system thinking of any sort?

Re: Cheaper

"It takes a few seconds to hook up and tap a card"

Hook it up to what? Does some charger magically spring up out of the ground wherever you park?

Re: Cheaper

"and on long journeys the car beats my bladder."

I suppose on long journeys you're relying in there being an unoccupied charging point when your bladder calls time. That works when a minority of vehicles are EVs. Imagine the case when the majority of vehicles are EVs. What proportion of motorway server station parking spaces would need to have charging points for you to continue to rely on that? What level of power supply would be needed for the service station for that to happen? Is that power supply feasible today? How long to make it feasible?

These are all questions the politicians either didn't think about when drawing up the policy or else they assumed that having declared it to be policy they didn't need to do anything to make it happen or even conduct a feasibility study first.

Re: Local infrastructure is not the major issue

Even Mr BMW driver is unlikely to own his own substation. This isn't a problem if none of his neighbours are other Mr BMWs. If they are then they all have a problem. The charger at the wall doesn't make electricity - it draws it from somewhere else and it's getting the somewhere else up to spec that's a significant part of the problem.

Shouldn't Teams, Zoom, Slack all interoperate securely for the Feds? Wyden is asking

Given that email already has long established standards, mostly being followed, there are only a couple of changes, neither very radical that need to be made. One is to ban the use of any that don't follow the standard - I wonder who that would be - and the other is to roll PGP into the standard. In regard to the last PGP itself has been available in email clients for years, nothing new there.

Public key distribution would appear to be the main issue. It's not as if serving small text files is a massive technological leap. The only problem is telling the punter where to find the server. There are a few possible alternatives. One is to add a new type of record alongside the MX record to point to the key server. Another is to extend SMTP to allow the mail server to query the location of the key server. A third would be to have the mail server function as the key server and extend SMTP to request the key.

Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher

Re: My Bullshit Meter Just Exploded

I'd like to think you're right but if the share price goes up it shows at least some people are still believing him.

Waymo robotaxi drives down wrong side of street after being alarmed by unicyclists

Re: re: taxi seemed to be driving rather more aggressively

On reconsideration, maybe that should be a polycycle.

Re: re: taxi seemed to be driving rather more aggressively

A multicycle?

Did the vehicle discuss it's reasoning with the PR dept? Is there any reasoning log kept as to how it makes its decisions and scoring scale for caution with abundance marked on it?

US government reportedly ponders crimping China's use of RISC-V

Re: Fight open standards? They'd be more successful wrestling fresh air.

The US political class bears a remarkable resemblance to King Cnut's courtiers and is in need of the same lesson.

Re: Election Year

Or, the way things seem to go these days, it gets worse before it gets worse.

"Unless the RISC-V guiding body and design teams/committees are American, the American government can take a flying leap with the penchant for trying to dictate terms and policies to the world at large."

The governing body anticipated something like this some time ago. It's now based in Switzerland.

Senate passes law forcing ByteDance to sell off TikTok – or face a US ban

Re: Nobody needs $app

"You need infrastructure and staff to take care of traffic, illegal content, marketing and so on."

OP points out that in this case "you" would be Musk.

Re: OK, let's follow this through then..

So if the owners of the controlling stake refuse to sell there will be some large institutional investors very angry with the US govt. if they actually go ahead and close it down. OK, they may also be very angry with the controlling stake owners but in practical terms it's US politicians who will be the butt of that anger. Then there are all the US voters or potential voters who use it and the content generators who make money from it, also many of whom will be US voters or potential voters.

Sir Humphrey would categorise this one as bold or even courageous.

What might frighten US legislators when they get round to thinking about it is that it might motivate young non-voters to become voters and start taking a close look at what they, the legislators, are doing.

Re: Whelp

Sir, have you no shame?

If Britain is so bothered by China, why do these .gov.uk sites use Chinese ad brokers?

Re: An idea

"requiring all UK laws to be inscribed on lamb's vellum at a cost of £80K p.a."

You can still read documents written on vellum many centuries ago. You can still, for instance, read the Domesday book. However that discs that the Beeb produced to celebrate the 900th anniversary of Domesday? Good luck finding hardware to read that. In the few years since then it's needed several projects to move it from one platform to another. £80k pa sounds like a bargain.

Microsoft really does not want Windows 11 running on ancient PCs

It depends on the OS. In one case its purpose is to push advertising at you and make you buy new H/W. But that's just one case.

Re: What happens when

It's the normal form in some variations of English. Not worth fussing over.

Re: Alternative

"Once a typist, always a typist!"

How do you get the Typex off the screen?

Re: Alternative

"The reality is that most people DO know Windows (and Microsoft Office)."

The reality is that most people will say they do know Windows & Office. What they actually know are the bits they use regularly and including all the workarounds they discovered for the bits they don't know and all the bad habits they picked up. The robustness or fragility of that knowledge will be exposed whenever MS or an application changes the UI in some respect -possibly even just the desktop icon.

I rather suspect that the really knowledgeable users would be the ones who make the transition most easily and those most in need of retraining will be those who'd benefit most from some real training on Windows for their existing environment.

Re: Alternative

Easily avoided: https://www.devuan.org/

Re: Catching up with Linux

OTOH https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/03/19/kernel_414_life_extension/

Re: 7 years old designed for win 10

Exactly what are MS trying to prove and why should they want you to update HW, or even OS, if their aim is to sell Cloud services?

They're not trying to prove anything. They're trying to sell the Windows that comes pre-installed on the new H/W so you can use that to access the Cloud services they want to rent you.

Re: The trap

It's less clear why software developers follow suit with such alacrity

Each new PC will be supplied with a new licence of Windows. That's why it's in this particular software developer's interests.

Good engineering practice dictates...

We're not dealing with engineering practice, good or otherwise, we're dealing with marketing.

Re: Alternative operating systems are available

No, some of them are abandoning Itanic and MIPS. Is that the ancient hardware you had in mind?

Re: Is it really beyond the wit of Microsoft ...

There is a reason. Everyone who buys a new computer buys a new licence.

Re: Is it really beyond the wit of Microsoft ...

Yes, it's not just chucking the passengers off the bus but charging them again to get back onboard.

Re: What happens when

"Minimum specs for Windows haven't went up since the Vista era."

Are those the specs from marketing, the minimum requirement to show a screen and drag a cursor across it or the minumum to do something useful?

Re: Alternative

"There is also the user training issue (which probably applies as much to Libre Office or whatever than it does to the OS itself). The fanboys always ignore this."

So, I suspect, do Windows shops. They just assume everyone "knows" Windows. Or they let users train each other which amounts to passing on each other's bad habits. That explains a lot, from Comix Sans in serious documents upwards.

I, in my self-trained LibreOffice way, have edited a few books written in Word. Tables laid out with tabs and spaces. Tabs and spaces to put text down the right-hand side of an image. Images "cropped" by Word which are full-size but just masked off* so in one case the image was not only full size in the file but also duplicated because it had been inserted a second time to crop down to a different face. Yes, you don't need to train users because they "know" Windows (which obviously includes Office).

* Admittedly LO duplicates this misfeature but nobody trains authors to edit their images properly before inserting them.

Re: Alternative

Or BSOD. But I agree, after 18 years it's possible to forget BSODs.

I think that's the Microsoft version. Others may disagree.

Digital Realty wants to turn Irish datacenters into grid-stabilizing power jugglers

Why not lower costs instead by speccing a smaller UPS? Alternatively by more capacity solely to sell energy back to the grid without risking the DC?

It certainly increases DC risk. If there's a power failure just after the UPS has been supporting the grid for a while there'll be little or nothing left for the DC. OTOH if the UPS is big enough to support that scenario then surely it's bigger than the DC requires as a UPS so why would they be installing extra capacity themselves to support the grid?

The same consideration applies at a smaller scale to selling back power from an EV.

Over a million Neighbourhood Watch members exposed through web app bug

Re: Anomaly?

1. It is not an "anomaly" if it has been designed that way.

That depends on a rather generous assumption.

BTW "anomaly" seems to be today's word of the day in the Horizon enquiry. "Exception" seems to be taken as an alternative, both apparently furnished by Paula Vennels' IT-literate husband. Personally I think in an IT context "exception" is something quite different and specific but then this is Horizon.

I'm sure there is. It's maybe a bit old-fashioned these days.

Quite. You'll notice I deliberately didn't say first draft of what, partly because that would have requires assumptions about things like specs and designs.

Does nobody in development these days look over a first draft and start to ask "what if?" let alone ask that question while they're actually writing it?

Silicon Valley roundabout has drivers in a spin

Re: Not all a bed of roses

Also Ashton-under-Lyne except they weren't mini-roundabouts, one had a BT exchange in the middle of it. I find that once a queue of traffic has built up it's impossible to work out the correct lane because the only indication are the signs painted on the road and those are now obscured.

This is particularly effective you mistakenly approached in the right hand lane (UK version) & wanted to take first left. Of course it would be totally wrong to use this approach to bypass a long queue in the left hand lane,,,

Re: Turbo Roundabouts

"If you're in a Range Rover with blacked out windows"

It's now a very long time since I drove in London but the last few times I did I remember thinking (probably somewhere like around Aldwych) "I wish I was in a very old, battered, obviously another dent wouldn't matter, Land Rover".

"the cars that are already on it have right of way over you"

It's difficult to comprehend but that rule only came in about 1966 or 7 and before to that it was joining traffic had priority. Yes the results were as chaotic as you can imagine or even more so. Then it was reversed over a weekend quite easily as it made sense and the nightmare roundabout on my regular commute was transformed on the Monday. But you have to have been driving for nearly 60 years to remember it.

There was, and presumably still is, one at the bottom of Marlow Hill in High Wycombe. It could usefully be applied to this one with plenty of space but still a bottleneck. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.669694,-1.826892,343m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en&entry=ttu

But the Dutch design, even allowing for the ant-clockwise flow, looks horrendous.

UnitedHealth admits IT security breach could 'cover substantial proportion of people in America'

Things are at least improving about the PR response. It's not claimed to be just a few.

They may have proposed procedures which could have involved trading a smidge of inconvenience for security. Nothing like the inconvenience caused to all the victims, of course.

Voyager 1 regains sanity after engineers patch around problematic memory

Fixed by spaghetti coding!

Misconfigured cloud server leaked clues of North Korean animation scam

Re: A DPRK IP address, you say?

Earning foreign currency is frivolous?

Tesla slashes vehicle and self-driving-ish software prices as shares plummet

Re: deja vu

Who needs brake pedals when the car can drive itself? Well, it can, can't it?

"That said, I was once trained to first define a problem and THEN look for a solution. Immediately going electric feels suspiciously like there's another agenda in play behind the scenes."

The problem is well enough defined. Implementing various parts of the solution such as providing an adequate charging network is the tough bit. No, a couple of charging points per motorway service station is not adequate.

Europol now latest cops to beg Big Tech to ditch E2EE

Re: Every cloud has a silver lining.

"With no E2EE, hackers can access politicians e-mails and messages more easily"

It's not necessary when one of the group does something like handing all the messages to some journalist to ghost-write his autobiography. Politicians blab sooner or later. For them keeping a message secure is just a means of choosing the best time to reveal it. Perhaps that's why they don't understand what the fuss is about.