Posts by Doctor Syntax

Electric driverless cars could make petrol and diesel motors 'socially unacceptable'

"2 out of 10 trains per week were late or cancelled."

You were lucky. I used to commute from High Wycombe back when the Chiltern line used DMUs. As far as I could make out the outbound trains ran on no schedule, but depended on them finding enough working units to make a train. For fun they also tended to despatch a stopping service before an alleged non-stopping service. The tracks where the latter might pass a stopped train in stations such as Wembley had been taken up so no chance there. Mentioning Wembley reminds me that there were no extra trains for the extra crowds when there was an evening match.

Then there was the occasion when for some reason, one train came up behind another, somewhere like Penn and the two trains were coupled together to make one which was too long for the platforms. After a long while stationary at Wycombe those of us in the rear coaches eventually opened the doors and jumped out.

Being relocated to a location where commuting by car was a big relief.

Re: "How about we abolish cities, people live in human scale communities where they want, and

And you can have that all, provided you're prepared to carpet bomb every city in a country flat to implement it. that's the dirty little secret of most "utopias," they start with a destructive event on an epic scale.

Not necessarily although we've gone a long way to making that the only option. But let's stop the idea of building houses on "brownfield sites". Brownfield sites are sites where people used to be employed and often within walking distance of simple public transport distance of home. Step one would be to stop change of use of such sites as remain; developers would have to redevelop them as places of employment. Crafty use of business rates could encourage employers to move out of city centres to occupy them. This leaves some vacant space in buildings in the cities. Those spaces then get planning permission for change of use to residential for those who want to work in the remaining in-city businesses.

Draconian? Overblown? No more so than the decades of planning policy that brought about the present mess. Make no mistake about it, the situation we have now has been planned. Not intended but planned.

Re: "Electric vehicles are the obvious solution to that particular problem"

"Parking only works because many households don't own any sort of road vehicle at all; something that has been a basic planning assumption for centuries."

Going back centuries... We'll count horses as vehicles. Some houses had garages stables. No change there. The rest walked to work and were able to do so because work places and homes were close together. In medieval and early modern urban settlements they were often the same thing.

The transport problem arises because urban growth, exacerbated by post-war planning, has steadily increased the distance between home and workplaces. That's the underlying issue. Searching for better transport is solving the wrong problem.

Obligatory Dilbert http://dilbert.com/strip/1998-10-13

Re: "Electric vehicles are the obvious solution to that particular problem"

"kerbside or under-road induction."

Frying eggs on the pavement...

Re: Moving sidewalks

"You had a dozen walkways running in parallel where each successive 'track' ran faster than the previous, so you just walk across the tracks to one travelling at a reasonable speed for your length of journey, and then back down again when your stop was coming up."

How did they handle intersections?

Re: For inner cities/battery charge

There'll need to be some smart logic a lot of investment in cars lying idle most of the day in the system so that maximum numbers of vehicles are available and charged at times of peak demand, but this is scarcely conceptually difficult.

That's assuming "maximum numbers" means "enough to meet demand". A private motorist might be prepared to invest in a car that lies idle most of the time because the journeys they make in it are important enough to them to justify that. An investor is going to want RoI over a short enough period to make it worth while.

Re: For inner cities

"it's going to (in practice) be run 24x7"

In order to do this you're either going to have to even out demand or leave a lot of dissatisfied would-be punters at rush hour.

Re: Bollocks...

"No such thing as an overnight return on scotrail, fork out for two singles even though it's literally the same as a dayshift worker's "go into work and back" just with AM and PM reversed."

That's the easy one One way for the first night, day returns work-home-work for the rest of the period, single the other way for the last night.

Re: Bollocks...

"For travelling in en-masse with a few hundred other people who are all going from Specific Place A to Specific Place B, mass transit is perfect."

Unfortunately going from Specific Place A to Specific Place C by mass transit is unmitigated hell when mass transit only leaves A towards B which is diametrically opposite the direction to C. The journey from Specific Place B then goes by separate service to Specific Place D after a 40 minute wait and arrives there, assuming it's on time, with a 2 minute window to catch the next service, which runs at 15 minute intervals, to Specific Place C.

Re: Trolley problem.

"Good grief, how many people actually die on London's roads?"

It's about 3k for the whole country so, yes, if you think the OP might have been exaggerating you may be right. OTOH he may have been counting algorithmically induced near misses as lives saved.

"Things like [Crossrail] start to make sense: 160m long trains, 30 trains per hour each carrying 1,500 people."

Fine if you want to travel from somewhere near a station on thing like Crossrail to somewhere near another station on same thing like Crossrail. If you want to travel to somewhere on another line sharing a station with the first line it gets less convenient. By the time you've made a couple of changes of line it gets distinctly unpleasant.

Re: "Electric vehicles are the obvious solution to that particular problem"

"Second flaw in argument: where is the space where all these night - time charging stations can be installed?"

Your vehicle is currently being charged in Didcot. It will be returned in 3 hours time and will have 3 miles usable range left after it has driven itself back to your address in East London.

Re: "Electric vehicles are the obvious solution to that particular problem"

"Let not even mention the power stations needed to generate all this extra electricity."

More pixie dust Unicorns on treadmills.

Why is it that when I read articles about how wonderful the future will be with all-electric/autonomous/both cars I start feeling as if I'm Dilbert having the PHB expounding the company's latest idea?

User left unable to type passwords after 'tropical island stress therapy'

Re: Government staff: need I say more?

"Nine times out of ten they wouldn't call me back."

Please tell us about the tenth.

Re: One week at Bigger Blue.

"If in any doubt, you should ask."

Given that up to that point his contact would have been an HR droid I think we can guess what the answer would have been.

Re: One week at Bigger Blue.

"There are some shops that require support staff to be in trousers/shirt/tie/nice shoes because it is what looks professional."

I had a short gig setting up a system at my client's customer's site. Client insisted on my wearing a suit to promote their professional image. This was in the middle of that English rarity, a heat wave. The customer had a more relaxed approach to their head office staff. There's something a little bizarre about wearing an increasingly crumpled suit in a meeting with the customer manager in T-shirt, shorts & sandals.

UK spookhaus GCHQ can crack end-to-end encryption, claims Australian A-G

Re: "Me thinks the UK bod really was implying that you install spyware on one of the devices "

"He also probably didn't want to make the AG's brain explode with too much complexity."

Maybe it did explode but nobody noticed.

Fake Newspaper steals Reg design to spruik storage upstart

There's one significant difference. Their website belongs to the over-large club of those which do very little unless you allow their javascript run riot over your browser.

What can you do with adult VR, some bronze gears and a robotic thumb? On a Friday?

"Historians reckon the device was designed to calculate a variety of astronomical positions."

Was that one you intended?

Feynman, inevitably, had his own story about the Antikythera mechanism. Back in the days before the museum had realised just what they'd got he was visiting Athens and introduced to the director. Being Feynman of course the mechanism, stored somewhere in the reserve collection, was the one thing he asked about. The director couldn't understand why, given all the beautiful art objects he wanted to see some dirty old bit of metal junk.

Kerberos bypass, login theft bug slain by Microsoft, Linux slingers

Re: Open Source is necessary, but not sufficient

Sorry, access to the code is a necessary condition. No need for the "access" to be open to everybody

It's a statistical thing. The more eyeballs that can access it the greater probability that the right pair (or single eyeball, let's not be binocularist about this) will come along.

Bupa: Rogue staffer stole health insurance holders' personal deets

"Data breaches provide a distribution hub for malware for years to come."

Quick, at least partial solution to that: change email address. It then requires another leak somewhere to get the new one. And far easier if the original was bupa@mydomain - just change it to oops@mydomain.

Brickbat unwraps in lap of crap Snapchat yap app technocrat brats after stock splat mishap

"I bet you can't say the title of the article 10 times really fast without making a mistake!"

the title of the article 10 times

Short headline

Lawyer* persuades shareholders to sue shareholders.

*There's always one at the bottom of things like this. Shareholders are suing a corporation. Who are the corporation? The shareholders. Who gets the fees?

Wi-Fi firm Purple sneaks 'community service' clause into its T&Cs

"We have acted quickly to be the first Wi-Fi provider to be fully GDPR compliant."

Ever heard of hubris?

Re: Nothing new here.

"you will be compliant"

Providing your business is resident in a jurisdiction where it's allowed to be compliant.

PC sales still slumping, but more slowly than feared

"Both analyst firms suggest that rising component prices have led to rising PC prices which has led to falling enthusiasm from buyers, especially consumers. DRAM, LCD panels and solid state disks prices all share some of the blame for the rise, as all are in short supply."

Maybe both firms replace all their staffs' PCs every year and suppose the rest of the world tries to do the same (the "my use case is universal" fallacy).

NAO: Customs union IT system may not be ready before Brexit

Re: dichotomy and delay

"it wasnt such a difficult thing if they would just accept it and commit."

They are committed. May's objective from the start has been to get out of the ECJ's jurisdiction and this is how it's done.

"It is almost like their desire to remain is so strong they would burn the country than free it."

A neat inversion of the truth. The Leavers' desire to leave was such that they would rather burn the country than stay. Thanks for showing us that when it all goes wrong we're going to see the "no true Scotsman" explanation.

Re: dichotomy and delay

"Right, about as difficult as cancelling a magazine subscription."

Get real. Nothing's as difficult as that.

Re: Not to worry. Brexit probably won't be ready by Brexit either.

"wonder if the government actually wants to piss off the whole of Europe"

They want to ingratiate them with those voters who voted leave and who do want to piss off the whole of Europe. Neither government nor voters have thought through the likely consequences (see article for an example). The government also hasn't realised that those who voted that way were never going to vote for them as a party and that a good many of those who previously did but also voted remain are now not going to vote for them as a party (see the recent election results).

Re: Not to worry. Brexit probably won't be ready by Brexit either.

"Time will tell how accurate a description of the new software this turns out to be."

Quite so but I reckon it's a pretty good description of what it needs to be.

Re: Wishful Oxford PPE & Classics + Crapita thinking

Nope we'll be "wrecking"

Join the queue. There's quite a bit of that going on already. The ship hasn't hot the rocks yet so nobody's really noticed.

Re: Wishful Oxford PPE & Classics + Crapita thinking

"They never finish.

They never work."

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Usually it's only the latter that make reported headlines.

OTOH I agree this particular one has more than a whiff of wishful thinking about it. In fact, it's the sort of thing that should have been taken into account when Article 50 was drawn up but presumably nobody expected it to be actually used.

Flight Centre leaks fliers' passport details to 'potential suppliers'

“I don't really want to get into ongoing Q&A.”

Translation: We really don't want to tell you how bad it is. or No, I don't know any more 'cause nobody tells me any more either.

€100 'typewriter' turns out to be €45,000 Enigma machine

Re: I dream of this...

"Problem is, people have the internet these days"

Don't be too sure. A little while ago Bargain Hunt picked up a silver item inscribed as a gift to William Crookes. Nobody seemed to have picked up on the fact that that was a rather significant name - where would all those telly people be without Sir William Crookes' discovery of cathode rays?

Was the dedicatee really that Sir William? A quick look at wonkypedia would have confirmed the date. A little further research would have revealed that the donors names and initials corresponded with another FRS, Augustus Desiré Waller and Alice Mary Waller, both physiologists at a time when women in science were still rare. I'd have loved to have been at the auction when that came up.

Blue Cross? Blue crass: Health insurer thought it would be a great idea to mail plans on USB sticks

" I'm sure it started as something innocent: a marketing ploy"

Innocent and marketing in the same sentence?

AI vans are real – but they'll make us suck at driving, warn boffins

"Now it's just a bottom-rung handler"

I suppose it'll make a nice change for them, getting out and about instead of staying in the depot throwing the fragile parcels backwards & forwards.

Re: The future:

"they can all be sent off to park out of sight when not in use so streets become open, friendly places again."

Sent where? At the side of the open, friendly streets?

Re: road signs and traffic signals

"sleeping off their hangover on the way to work down the M1"

I've had too many jouneys on the M1 where a wake-me-up-when-the-traffic-moves device would have been quite useful.

Re: Automate the signals

"And why do the lights at some junctions have the green light cased in a box so it is almost impossible to see?"

And why does everyone agree that the traffic flows better - for all routes - when our local traffic lights are out of order?

Re: The future:

"There's no such need, how many hours per week do you really use it?"

Not many but if you use it to commute you need it about the same time as everyone else needs theirs. Now go back and do your maths calculating how many cars would be needed to meet your 3 minute criterion at peak times, how much of the day they'd spend idle and what the consequent per mile cost would be.

Re: "Neither, we were told, does it read road signs"

"the guy down the hole who suddenly experiences the pleasure of an AI van landing on his head"

Back in the '50s my cousin was driving in a thick fog when she suffered a severe jolt. She stopped to look and found she'd crossed an unmarked narrow trench in the road. Then a head popped up...

It might be coincidence that a few days later a track rod failed.

Re: Obvious study is obvious

"I'm sure tractor drivers have lost the key skills needed for riding a horse too."

The tractor driver doesn't find him or herself suddenly in control of a horse with about a second to react to avoid an accident. A human driver could find themselves in the equivalent situation unless the autonomous car is so good that this is never ever needed.

By the way I referred to the tractor driver as him or her because my neighbouring farming couple both drive tractors as required and she also rides a horse (no, not at the same time) so your certainty is a little over-rated.

Re: Complete or not at all...

humans are poor drivers and don't drive "properly"

Order of magnitude calculation. There are about 3,000 road fatalities per year in the UK. There are, I think, about 30,000,000 vehicles. That comes down to 1 fatality per 10,000 vehicle years. Multiply the number of vehicle years by the annual average mileage to get the rate in terms of miles. Apparently the average for cars is 7,900, vans over 12,000 and presumably HGVs higher still. Let's say 10,000 for an order of magnitude estimate, so one fatality per 100,000,000 miles.

At what date do the autonomous vehicle manufacturers reckon on being able to beat that?

Dial S for SQLi: Now skiddies can order web attacks via text message

"... highlighting the importance of regular infrastructure security audits," Recorded Future concludes.

Is Recorded Future in the business of providing regular infrastructure audits, I wonder.

I'd have thought a simpler approach would be to make the site secure in the first place and then leave well alone but I suppose site owners just can't resist tinkering and installing the latest sieve plugin to whatever framework they run.

WannaCry prompts promise of extra cash towards NHS security

"Local organisations should be aiming to have isolated, moved away from or be actively managing any unsupported systems by April 2018,"

That phraseology struck me as being the wrong way to say the right thing. We all know stuff can't always be done instantly but "by April 2018" gives too much wriggle room for managers to assign lower priorities in favour of - well whatever takes their fancy. "As soon as possible and certainly no later than April 2018" would have been far better. "As a top priority" would have been better still.

Uncle Sam says 'nyet' to Kaspersky amid fresh claims of Russian ties

Re: Only in Russia

"foreign governments might have to ban Microsoft/Google/Intel/etc"

I suspect it's in response to Russia insisting on foreign companies locating their servers in Russia if Russian serfs citizens are to use them.

Given that the US legal system is also working very hard to ensure that other countries follow Russia's example it looks as if the US govt. is going to end up banning a lot of products from around the world.

Did anyone say "trade war"?

NASA flies plane through Earthly shadow of Kuiper Belt object

Re: I'm lost

"in front of a star" would probably have been clearer.

It certainly would. What's el Reg coming to?

Astroboffins spot tiniest star yet – we guess you could call it... small fry

"I thought that red dwarfs were not optimal, because their goldilocks zones are so close as to force tidal locking for any earth-like planets, thus rendering them non-earth-like."

I suppose it depends on what they mean by Earth-like. It might simply be Earth-sized and rocky irrespective of habitability.

Russia, China vow to kill off VPNs, Tor browser

"A bit like a Conservative 1922 backbench committee"

I think Conservative frontbenchers sometimes count the 1922 committee as terrorists. They don't have to spy on them, however; they'll find out what the committee's thinking pretty quickly.

Ransomware-slinging support scammers hire local cash mule in Oz

Re: Fraudulently set up a company

"The way I see it the only reason you'd have more than one is so that you get more chances to go bankrupt, leaving honest suppliers / customers in debt."

OK, let's try and think of a few reasons.

1. You have business A, say a shop. You have some spare money and decide to start up a second line of business B, say student flats. Both are going well but you decide that in future you just want to concentrate on B. If you have them in the same company then all you can do is close the shop, sell the stock and give up the lease (or sell the property if you actually own it but I think rental is more common). That doesn't really give you the value that the shop has as a popular local business. If A and B are separate companies then you sell company A as a going concern which rewards you for the effort you put into building it up.

2. You have a simple but successful small business, A. You then decide to branch out into something which has a much more complicated regulatory regime, B. Do you really want to impose the regulatory regime of B on A? You might unless they're separate companies.