Posts by Henry Hallan

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

Interchangeable Parts?

The whole back-to-office thing reeks of the management anti-pattern that "personnel" are "resources" - fungible, interchangeable parts that can be moved or ordered around without consequence.

The survey says that 1/3 are seriously considering quitting, which means that 5%-10% actually will. But quitting is easier for those whose talents are most in demand - the ones managers can least afford to lose.

Will managers realise this? Some will, most won't. But you can help them to realise it, especially if you are "top talent" yourself.

You might even get more money as well as more time with your family!

Christmas 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

Glory Days

The Pi 400/500 are doing a little more than recapturing the glory days of the BBC micro. The ARM CPU that gives them life was designed by Acorn, intending to be a coprocessor for the BBC micro.

They are more like a descendant - they carry Acorn DNA, as it were.

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

Evil Midnight

Many years ago and in another country, a security company ended up one digit away from our home phone. That meant calls from their customers when alarms went off in the small hours.

The only thing we found that would fix things was answering the phone, assuring them that someone was on the way, and going back to bed.

I don't know if they changed their number or went out of business, but the calls stopped.

NASA wants ideas on how to haul injured moonwalkers

Giant Steps Are What You Take?

An astronaut who weighs 120kg (with suit) on Earth weighs 20kg on the Moon. Can't their colleagues just pick them up and carry them?

Boffins explore cell signals as potential GPS alternative

Cell transmissions do include timing data and location data - you just have to interpret it. There is a network-wide timebase transmitted in the control channels (4G and 5G use these to share access) and the pilot channel will include a unique cell ID which can be used to find it on a map.

Using the time delay part of neighbour cell measurements of three cells can give location to within a few metres - technology that has been available since the 2G days.

The networks know where you are - they always have. Anyone who can access your neighbour cell measurements does.

There is nothing new about this

The billionaire behind Trump's 'unhackable' phone is on a mission to fight Tesla's FSD

Re: Trump?

The reason is obvious - to provide a chain of evidence that it really was him that did it.

If his phone can't be hacked, then the defence of "my phone was hacked" is not going to work.

The future everyone wanted – in-car ads tailored to your journey and passengers

I am in GDPR-land :-)

I have two words for Ford, and one of them is "off."

Another reason to buy a car from a GDPR-land manufacturer

Re: Another strong argument...

I use Graphene

https://grapheneos.org/

Red team hacker on how she 'breaks into buildings and pretends to be the bad guy'

What "high-level execs" often do have is authorisation to pay out large sums of the company's money: pay bogus invoices etc.

Many cyber-crims don't want the software or corporate secrets - they want the money

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

Re: ARMed and Ubiquitous

Mistake, no. "Could-have-been?" Absolutely so!

Of all the quirky and oddball things I remember in my forty-mumble year career in IT and telecoms, ARM is the most incredibly successful - and the reason it succeeded against incredible odds is because it was so outrageously better than the competition

ARM is the hardware equivalent of Linux in that regard. It came from a nowhere budget and it is driving the corporate competition slowly but surely to oblivion

Of course my own memories are coloured by a short stint working in that old waterworks. Good times

ARMed and Ubiquitous

The part of the story you've missed is that the project that Furber and Wilson worked on in a downstairs room in the old Fulbourn Road waterworks turned out to be the dominant CPU for ... well, pretty much anything with a battery.

Which means phones. So. Many. Phones.

Apple might not have stuck with ARM - although I do wonder what pressure Intel exerted - but ARM devices are now in pockets around the world

But that seems to be a common theme: the right decision but a decade early

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

I live in rural Ireland with no charging infrastructure nearby - except the electricity supply to the premises.

We have a cheap EV *and* one of those secondhand diesels: a 4WD Duster. The Duster does about 5% of our household miles, because the EV saves so much money

Since I commute we needed two cars anyway, but diesel compared to cheap-rate electricity is a no-brainer. It really is

The only reason we would not have an EV is if we couldn't charge overnight at home

Choose Your Own Adventure with Microsoft 365

The classic BBC Basic had looping commands - you could write code without line numbers or GOTO

HMD Skyline: The repairable Android that lets you go dumb in a smart way

Re: 3 years of updates ?

If you have a Pixel you might look at Grapheme

https://grapheneos.org

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Re: Inference?

One reason to swim on your back is your lifejacket: swimming in a lifejacket is only really possible using backstroke

The advice is to wear a lifejacket so the advice is to swim on your back

Battery electric vehicles lose their spark in Europe as hybrids steal the show

Re: New cars are expensive

If you can charge at home, your budget for car payments will be offset by a reduction in fuel bills. How much impact that makes depends on your mileage, but the high-mileage cars are the ones we want to go electric first.

For my commute the monthly car payment would have been (I paid cash) less than my monthly payments for diesel. It was a no-brainer to replace my ancient Ford Focus with a new EV.

This. This here.

If our lords and masters want EV adoption, they need to provide cheap AC charging in the places where people park overnight.

Overnight AC charging is better for the grid (low demand, at a time when there is surplus capacity) better for the batteries (because slow) and cheaper (because AC chargers are cheap and don't require enormous infrastructure.)

All this idea of more and faster DC chargers is distraction. EVs should be charged while their owners sleep and the grid is idle.

I have owned an EV for years, but I wouldn't own one if I couldn't plug in overnight.

Deepfake CFO tricks Hong Kong biz out of $25 million

Re: Corporate Culture

The company I work for (and, incidentally, one of the nicest employers I've ever worked for in 40+ years of mostly contracting) has an explicit "speak up culture" that should catch this sort of thing.

We also have a system of security emails and other communication designed to educate people in how to spot phishing and the like.

I suspect this is one case where doing the right thing is good business sense

Corporate Culture

One thing that will affect an organisation's resilience to this kind of fraud will be the corporate culture. If bullying by C-Suite types (or management in general) is common then this sort of thing is much less likely to be challenged

Windows 12 fan fiction shows how Microsoft might ladle AI into the OS

Re: Good guys

They have. It is called Linux.

To get the "do not slurp" button you need to download a .ISO from someone like Debian or Ubuntu, copy it to storage and boot from it.

Your "do not slurp" options will then appear...

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland

I don't know if our resident vulture watched the YouTube video all the way through - but it finishes with the rocket exploding

How the tech toy century has troubled Santa's sack

Re: The creative maker ... has never had it so good

The Arduino chips are programmed in C, but PIC devices are in assembler. If you really want to go low level, gadgets like PAL/GAL devices are still available.

The larger SMD packages (I use 2512 resistors, for example) are really no harder to solder than through-wire components - but they give significantly better RF performance. As I approach my 6th decade, my hands and eyes seem to still be managing

The last assembler I used was Blackfin - and I was paid to do it.

Re: The creative maker ... has never had it so good

I disagree. The maker movement is active and growing and feeding into the amateur radio community. Yes, you can build using modules, or you can combine software with Pi or Arduino, or even construct with discrete components.

Thanks to Internet, webpages, YouTube and social media, constructor knowledge and knowledgeable advice is easy to access, and projects on GitHub and the like allow makers to cooperate on things far outside the scope of one hobbyist.

We literally have never had it so good

Danish techies claim they can predict your next move (and your last)

Given that the whole shape of my life was altered by the old schoolfriend of one of my lodgers visiting and deciding that she should be married to me, it's hard to imagine what predictor would suggest that.

Maybe it could have predicted her choices - I don't know - but I can't imagine how it would have predicted the effect on me

(Get my coat because, well, I pulled. :-) )

'Return to Office' declared dead

The sort of manager responsible for this sort of directive often doesn't realize that they employ people at all: they think they employ "resources" - interchangeable units rather like coffee-powered photocopiers.

Then they're surprised when productivity falls off.

Think of it as economic Darwinism

IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups

There is always an escape. We are employees (or contractors) not slaves.

Self-important bosses deserve to be abandoned by talented people everywhere

Car industry pleads for delay to post-Brexit tariffs on EVs

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

The battery on mine is the same as the Leaf. And yes, I know Leaf owners who have had individual battery modules replaced.

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

Agreed. There should be cheap (=domestic night rate) AC charging everywhere cars are left overnight. That is the missing piece. Get onto your politicians, your local council, your landlord if you have one. That is the blocker for the EV adoption that the governments want.

Fast charging is not the answer: it wears the battery, it loads the grid at a time when it is already loaded, and the chargers are expensive. Overnight AC charging is the answer, and it needs to be ubiquitous if EVs are going to be widely adopted.

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

The point is that a module failure is not a replacement battery. It is a replacement module. The battery on my EV is 96 modules. The overall battery costs about 8000 euros, so an individual module ought to cost 80. In real life, motor parts don't work like that, but it's certainnly not thousands.

The overall battery doesn't fail, it fades away. The range goes down. If my car has 75% of the range at 100,000 miles, that is not "conked out," it's just less range. If it has 25% of the range at 500,000 miles, that will also not be "conked out," either. And, if your local battery recycler won't pay you for the battery, find another one. Lithium is valuable and is going to get more valuable as time goes by. You don't pay to have lead-acid batteries taken away, do you?

I am not sure exactly of your anti-pollution measures in your power stations, but it's a lot easier to fit a scrubber to a power station than to a Kia diesel. But a quick Google talks about a 74% reduction in NOx emissions from Britain's energy sector: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/emissions-of-air-pollutants/emissions-of-air-pollutants-in-the-uk-nitrogen-oxides-nox

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

Do you have a source for that efficiency of a petrol engine?

Consider this: burning a litre of petrol gives about 9.5kWh of thermal energy -- source https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/fuels-higher-calorific-values-d_169.html

So my EV was built with a 40kWh battery that gives about 200 miles range: 5 miles per kWh. If your car can get 40% of the 9.5kWh out of a litre of petrol, and is not harder to push down the road than my EV, then it should get at least 19 miles per litre -- more if my EV is less than 100% efficient -- or 85 1/2 miles per gallon. Does it?

Re: Sacrifice all to the God

If you want to see a really compromised supply chain, take a look at where your fossil fuels come from.

The world has suffered decades of oil wars. Time for a change.

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

There are a couple of standard pieces of anti-EV FUD in there.

The first is "batteries conk out." EV batteries are modular and, if a battery module fails, it can be replaced for hundreds rather than thousands. Compare your fossil-powered engine, where the failure of a piston ring will necessitate lots of labour to rebuild the engine, or a complete new engine for a similar price to a complete new EV battery pack.

The failure mode that is happening with EV batteries is wear: which means their capacity and so range reduces. So your EV which previously did 200 miles now only does 190 miles (about what has happened to mine after 50,000 miles and 5 years of driving.) But even when it has been driven 100s of 1000s of miles and is reduced to 100 miles range, it is still useful to someone. When your diesel Kia has a worn-out engine it will be scrap value.

The second piece of FUD is "move the emissions from my tail pipe to a gas fired power station." Firstly the gas-fired power station extracts far more work from a given amount of fuel than your car ever will, because there are no requirements for a power-to-weight ratio in a fixed power station. Secondly the emissions that are giving little Timmy next door his asthma attacks are best moved to the power station, where scrubbers can remove the nitrogen oxides from the exhaust in a way your car never can -- that power-to-weight ratio again.

But the last point is the big one. If you buy a brand new diesel car, it will spend the next few decades being powered by diesel. If you buy a brand new EV the fuel used will change according to the fuel mix used for the grid. So, even if it is fossil-powered today, who is to say it will still be fossil-powered in 20 years?

There are real problems with widespread EV adoption -- lack of affordable overnight charging is the biggest one -- but most of what you've read about EVs is FUD. Check it first!

US senator victim-blames Microsoft for Chinese hack

For it to be "victim blaming" the victim ought to be blameless.

Microsoft have a decades-long history of poor security. They are hardly the blameless victim here.

Shouldn't customers have an expectation that their data will be secured?

Typo watch: 'Millions of emails' for US military sent to .ml addresses in error

I seriously doubt Uncle Sam can invade a country for $9.95

http://www.point.ml/en/faq.html

The obvious and most likely cheapest fix is for the US DoD to register those domains with the Mali name authority.

Then they can set up a server and intercept/bounce/whatever the typoed mails.

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

Re: Why the down vote?

Sorry, no.

Yes, the amplification is done optically, typically using a laser to provide the "pump" energy for the amplification -- but the laser is still powered electrically, via long wires.

Since the induction that makes major solar storms so destructive involves distortion of the Earth's magnetic field, it affects anything on or near the Earth's surface: including overhead and buried cables, and cables at the bottom of the ocean.

Long wires are vulnerable.

Re: Why the down vote?

Long distance fibre relies on repeaters, which are powered by copper powerlines that run alongside the fibre itself. Those copper powerlines are long wires.

Also, there are a lot of exchanges that are served by fibre but still use copper for the "last mile" connection. Again, long wires.

Fibre itself is not affected, but the infrastructure is. Replacing every 10km repeater on a transatlantic fibre is essentially the same as re-laying the thing. And, if the relay cabinet on your street corner is fried by its power lines, the signalling technology is irrelevant.

Hopefully, those of us wih HF radios, UPS and generators will have the good sense to unplug the antennas.

Re: Satellites are a good idea if:

Any major solar event that knocks out satellites is also likely to kill anything connected to a long wire -- which means POTS phones and exchanges.

(Icon for the other event that has a similar result.)

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure

Re: About Time

No, they will not drop FOSS, because of the costs involved in developing all software in-house.

Instead the sort of commercial user you are describing will get their FOSS from someone who can offer that legal throat, most likely along with a support contract. Companies like Red Hat and Canonical are already offering these services.

The effect of legislation like this will increase the market share of Red Hat, for example, but will also encourage Red Hat to audit and fix the software they offer.

In a world where software is ubiquitous, the improvement in quality will be a good thing.

About Time

The problem isn't with companies using FOSS. The problem is with companies using FOSS without examining and auditing the code, and without pushing fixes back to the community.

The result is a mess, as we have seen time and time again. Someone in their spare time put together some useful gadget (for example, a logger) and many companies with vast development budgets (compared to the original author, anyway) took the code uncritically and baked it into, well, pretty much everything.

Legislation like this will (hopefully) force the people developing software that powers the things we own to examine and audit FOSS code, and (hopefully) the FOSS licenses will force them to push back bugfixes.

So that means

1) the commercial users of FOSS will be forced to pull their weight

2) the code the poor user gets will be less hopelessly insecure

Honestly, I cannot see why this is anything other than a good thing.

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

Re: BSD?

So BSD is not Unix because nobody's paid for the copyrighted name?

What a weird hill to die on.

Some greybeards here remember the original attempts to trademark "Unix" and sneered at it back then. From the looks of the comments, a few of them are still here.

You don't seem to be convincing them.

*wishing there was a popcorn icon*

BSD?

Wait? Are FreeBSD and all the other FOSS-supported BSDs dead?

Nope, looks like they're still there.

That means Linux is still the new kid on the block, I guess.

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Re: FUD

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries#Chevron_and_Cobasys

Re: FUD

I'm going to say nuclear, which really does work 24/7

And 500,000 on an island as small as this is not "a few."

Re: FUD

On this island, which is still quite small, we are a long, long way from half a million EVs charging every night.

Go to your own grid data, work out the difference between peak and night load, and divide by the normal size of an AC charger (in Ireland 7kW.)

If you get a number less than, say, 20% of the total number of cars in your country, let me know

FUD

Like most EV owners, I charge at night when the grid is not loaded. Here in Ireland the night load is about half the day load leaving capacity spare for about 500,000 chargers. (This is a small island.) The "overloaded grid FUD is, well, FUD.

Hydrogen is the way Big Oil is trying to escape the inevitable collapse of the forecourt model of vehicle fuelling. It might make sense for commercial and aviation transport but for household EV use the solution is cheap AC home charging for every household - even where street parking is the only option.

Public charging at places like motorway service stations will still be needed, but only occasionally - I haven't used public charging in years

With Mastodon, decentralization strikes back

Re: Standards

The issue for me is interoperability - something that is good for humans but not desired by corporations. Like it or not, social media has become a public service, and it is time it was regulated like one.

ActivityPub could form the basis of that regulation and introduce true competition in the social media domain

Re: Standards

The methods of coercion vary but they are there.

Taking mobile phones (the subject of the last two decades of my day-job) the coercion is imposed on the operators. So, in order to be permitted to run a mobile phone network, you must use equipment that is verified against certain standards - in most of the world, 3GPP.

If you live in the USA, the 3GPP requirement comes from the FCC. If you live in the UK, it is OFCOM. And so on.

The voice calling processes provided by 3GPP are based on telephone numbers at the origin, and only IMEI at the destination. So the calling user equipment has no way to know the IMEI of the destination UE, and vice versa. That means neither end has enough information to exclude rival manufacturers.

In your country there will be some government body that grants licences to operators and it will impose standards like 3GPP.

In the same way standards are imposed on your electricity supplier for voltage, frequency etc. And there will also be standards for selling motor fuels.

There should also be standards for social media, and ActivityPub is the obvious candidate

Standards

The current situation where a social media account only works for one type of social media is ridiculous. Samsung mobiles can be used to call Apple mobiles, appliances can be used regardless of electricity supplier, and fossils fuel powered cars made by Ford are not limited to Ford petrol or diesel.

This is because the businesses that supply these products and services are forced by legislation to adhere to industry standards.

It's long past time for the same to happen to social media, and ActivityPub offers a suitable industry standard. With mandatory ActivityPub support, a Facebook user could follow a Twitter account, and so on. One social media account would be enough, and advertising could be inserted after the feeds were built into a timeline - for those who had not paid to be ad-free. Different users could choose their provider based on things like the algorithms used to build the timeline - real competition based on something else but FOMO

It's time we let our politicians know.