Posts by Henry Hallan

When it comes to catastrophic space weather, the UK is holding a cocktail umbrella

Re: While a repeat of the Carrington Event...

Another Carrington Event isn't the worst it can get. The carbon-14 record includes Myake Events, which are far more severe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event

SETI admits its search for alien life may be too narrowly focussed

Re: More Power!

All those arguments are dealt with by antenna theory. And antennas work. ;-)

Re: More Power!

That's not how grids work: for multiple generators to operate on one grid, they need to be synchronized. The whole grid of Europe is synchronized, for example.

And, with a wavelength of 6000km for 50Hz, the European grid might as well be a point source.

Re: More Power!

The problem with a crater is that it's not big enough.

Basic physics suggests that the electrical machines of alien civilizations will be limited to tens or hundreds of cycles per second - and a 50Hz signal has a wavelength of 6000km. The Moon's diameter is only 3200km, so diffraction might be significant - but a little itty bitty crater will offer hardly any shielding at all.

The highest frequency generated by a working electrical machine in the hundreds of kilowatts is the SAQ transmitter in Sweden, which runs at 17200Hz. It's a beast - but dwarfed by actual power stations. They still run it at Christmas, and you can pick it up with a long wire and soundcard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimeton_Radio_Station#Technical_description

The engineering challenges show that no engineer would choose so high a frequency for power. And, as aliens developed their power grids, they won't have enough technology to use anything but transformers for long distance transmission. Tesla was right and Edison was wrong: to build a grid with electrical machines requires AC.

More Power!

When I was studying engineering at university four decades ago I was told that the difference between electronics and electrical engineering was that, in electrical engineering, anything less than a kilowatt is basically noise.

For a long time I've thought that SETI is looking at the wrong frequencies. The most powerful transmissions on Earth are at frequencies of 50Hz and 60Hz, leaking from our power grids.

These frequencies are somewhat attenuated by our ionosphere but that effect varies according to solar output - and the difference in power between grid and broadcast is so huge they're still worth searching for.

The biggest problem would be shielding the detector from Earth's emissions. Maybe put it on the dark side of the Moon?

RSS dulls the pain of the modern web

The thing RSS does for me is an algorithm-free news feed. Not as an alternative to the Web but as an alternative to social media.

And yes, El Reg is on there - and will be as long as you support RSS

Bankrupt scooter startup left one private key to rule them all

Just Ask

In many countries the thing to do is to ask in the shop if it will run without the Internet - and record the answer. Then, when it is delivered, immediately find out if they were telling the truth, for example by turning off your router.

If not, money back.

Works in the EU, in the UK, etc...

Not until Henry Ford is dead and buried, no.

UK urged to unplug from US tech giants as digital sovereignty fears grow

Re: Not enough

There was a company called Acorn. They'd probably be a distant memory except that you can almost certainly reach out and touch a device using their RISC architecture.

There's a good chance you're reading this on one - I'm certainly writing on one.

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: Open Source

It also has to be legally unencumbered. Remember .GIF?

Open Source

PDF and DOC/X are editable by open source software and will survive the collapse of their parent companies.

There are very few technology companies that will survive 50 or 100 years: at the moment I can only think of a couple. (IBM is a shade over 100; Ericsson will be 150 years old in 2026.)

Open standards (and open source) is the secret of longevity.

Pebble, the e-ink smartwatch that refuses to die, just went fully open source

Re: Tempting! Bit square though..

For me (bangle.js not pebble) the advantages of a watch form factor are

1) monitoring things like pulse rate

2) the ability to check who is calling/messaging without the disruption of getting the phone out. Meetings are the obvious example, but a more dubious example (that no-one here would condone, I'm sure) is that it is not normally illegal to look at your watch when driving.

Blinded by the light: Tesla fixes glaringly bright Cybertruck headlights

Re: FFS...

If you slow down enough they'll work out how to overtake. Don't brake check, just lift your foot off the pedal and wait.

Librephone battles the proprietary binary blob

Type Approval

Those "proprietary blobs" include software like DSP/Layer 1 and protocol stacks, which form part of the unit that is type approved to make the phone legal to transmit.

Replace them with something else and you invalidate that type approval - or take the phone into a radio lab and hook it up to protocol analysers in anechoic chambers etc. etc.

I used to work in handset development and those "proprietary blobs" represent millions of person hours of development - as well as hundreds of thousands more annually as the signalling protocols evolve (6G and so on)

It's nice to have a hobby, but the FCC part is more than legal. Getting type approval is a significant engineering challenge in itself.

Climate goals go up in smoke as US datacenters turn to coal

Re: I just hope

It takes years to build a thermal power station. The AI bubble doesn't have that long to live

Starlink is burning up one or two satellites a day in Earth’s atmosphere

Re: We used to watch out for an "Iridium flare"

"Iridium flare" wasn't re-entry, just reflected sunlight.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare

California cops confused after trying to give ticket to self-driving car

Re: Science upended by the desire for entertainment and revenge.

That's not how air accident investigation works. In almost all cases (the ones that don't get politicised) the primary function of the investigation is to find learnings to stop it happening again.

Any of us who fly as well as drive will know this.

The end of Windows 10 means early Surface Hub hardware will be bricking it

All is not lost

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Microsoft/SurfaceBook

Ubuntu is available too, apparently :-)

Don't cave to Euro censorship or backdoor demands, Uncle Sam warns US tech firms

Serve Two Masters

One "concern" is that, faced with conflicting legal instructions from EU and US, American social media companies might give up on the EU altogether.

That would leave Europe's population served only by homegrown social media, cut off from the likes of Meta and the site formerly known as Twitter.

However will we survive?

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Easy Solution

The solution is easy - call the work that needs doing "AI."

At this point it's all manglement buzzword bingo anyway.

Tech bro denied dev's hard-earned bonus for bug that overcharged a little old lady

In fairness, if the dev knew that they had to abnormally terminate the session, checking how much the customer was charged should be obvious. If the charge had been reversed before the customer noticed then most of the anger and embarrassment would have been avoided.

This is other people's money. A dev that is careless with that doesn't get much sympathy from me.

(And yes, I've done development in payment processing systems.)

The real reason why Trump is killing the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawai'i

Re: Terry Pratchett observation

Does $38m of lobbying so far this year help with the explanation?

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries/summary?id=E01

It's not about ideology. It's about the $$$

Trump's budget bill opens wide swath of spectrum for sale

Refunds?

The CBRS band had a spectrum auction a couple of years ago, which raised $billions. Will they be giving refunds?

https://www.networkworld.com/article/969089/cbrs-wireless-yields-45b-for-licenses-to-support-5g.html

/e/ OS 3.0: Slightly less clunky, slightly more private

GrapheneOS

GrapheneOS is Android with the Google bits in their own sandbox, unable to get at the rest of the phone.

It just works.

Only problem is it's Pixel-only - but I can live with that.

AI ain't B2B if OpenAI is to be believed

"Who cares if consumers use AI for helping a friend plan a road trip, informal therapy sessions, or astrological readings? The stakes are low, and the providers of wrong information derived from the internet are generally not held legally liable."

https://www.techspot.com/news/107925-woman-divorces-husband-after-chatgpt-reads-coffee-grounds.html

That's probably not low-stakes to the people involved.

UK 'extremely dependent' on US for space security

The "sovereign space capability" was called Black Arrow, and launched a satellite called Prospero.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow

Britain is the only nation to have achieved orbital capacity and given it up.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

Re: Simulated Inertia

An external clock isn't needed - the grid can provide that. What is needed is to vary the phase of the current fed to the grid according to the frequency of the voltage received from the grid - just as the armature of a real alternator would.

If the grid is running slow, current leads voltage. If it's fast, current lags voltage.

This effect can be powered by local batteries which can also be used for storage.

The algorithm should be trivial for any competent DSP engineer

Simulated Inertia

For those if you who think the only way to stabilise the grid is coal, here are some experts:-

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10457945

The TL;DR is that spinning metal can be simulated.

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

If your neighbour uses your car or electricity you experience real loss: fuel, wear, maintenance for the car, and an increased bill for the electricity.

GPS can't be "used up" or "worn out."

At best the loss is similar to that of patents or copyright. And the solution is the same - DRM GPS and watch the world switch to GLONASS or Galileo

PIRG's 'Electronic Waste Graveyard' lists 100+ gadgets dumped after support vanished

Yarr

It's not quite as bad as it seems. Lots of devices that are abandoned by the manufacturer have open source software - projects like OpenWRT and LineageOS breathe new life into old hardware

What we do need is for the manufacturers to be compelled to release design information on products they have abandoned. This is part of right-to-repair.

Hobbyist makers will do the rest

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Re: Stand up, stand up for meetings

I have seen two "stand-ups" cut short by someone collapsing halfway through.

Lots of people have health conditions that aren't always visible

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.