Posts by steamnut 334 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2015
Why did Renault give so many of the car owners details to a supplier?
As Renault hold the original data and, presumably, passed the data on to their suppliers, the Data Protection responsibility probably still lies with Renault in the first instance for giving the data to a third party.
The ICO will have an interesting time working out who to fine. Renault too will be looking for compo from someone.
Another week another database hack.
The chip has two 1553B channels which does indicate that it is aimed as a device for space systems. Any new chip ought to have 64 bits though as the low memory size will be a limitation.
The idea that India can be independent with it's own chip business is undermined by their recent cosying up to China which has lots of chips ready to go without spending money on foundries.
In the post-war and cold-war eras companies like GEC, Rolls Royce and Marconi had fat contracts for supplying the UK's defence forces. Those companies make fat profits for themselves and their shareholders. Who wouldn't put GEC in their pension fund? Then Labour, and later the Conservatives, realised that Britain was not earning enough to let this process continue and, mistakenly, we were shrinking our defence capability.
If there was a single event that illustrated this it was the cancellation of TSR2 by Wedgie Benn.Then the disastrous fixed-price contract with Lockheed bankrupted Rolls Royce while developing the RB211 jet engine for the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar.
As a radio amateur I was always conscious of the musical sounds of LORAN on Top Band (1.8-2.0 mHz). GPS and money saving effectively killed it.
It seems that we have come full circle. With lots of local processing LORAN would be much easier to use than the original system which relied on good operators.
Attempts by Britain and now the EU have always failed as they were usually over budget, way over time and not what the actual machine builders and users wanted. Remember Inmos and the Dram chips that arrived too late to make any money. The Transputer was a brilliant design with lots of clever software but only the military used it as the rest of the world built bigger and better 8086X based PC's.
Harold Wilson's "White heat of technology" was an expensive failure. The EU is just repeating the same errors.
Like a lot of EU ideas this one sounds like a good one right now. Once the various multilingual committees have added their six-pennyworth we will have a totally unworkable scheme that will cost loads of Euros and will, therefore, be silently dropped. Ditto the EU chip scheme which recently lost Intel's interest and no other EU company has stepped into the breach have they?
You cannot just replace Google overnight as they are too far ahead of any other search engine (sorry Bing). When people use the web they want the URL of their answer. Google is now accepted as a verb; no one says "shall I bing for it" do they?
When the whole EU grand chip scheme was announced many commenters here noted that it was likely to be doomed to failure. The budget is relatively small and the ambitions quite delusional. With the great white hope Intel putting a lot of it's expansion on hold, including the EU, this report was never going to be a gold star review.
So, your server gets updated when U$soft decide - not you. And, when the patches go wrong, what happens? After the hours of U$oft denials before social media storms show the problem to be real we then need the techies to fix it. As the "patches" are automatically applied then the techies will have no idea what happened.
After hours of unplanned downtime causing lost sales, profits and customers, what will the compensation be? Answer; as usual, nothing.
No team with any amount of experience of U$oft "patches" would allow their company to receive patches at any time that suits U$oft. I know we are called control freaks, but it is with good reason as most of us have experience of patches and reboots that we didn't want and didn't allow - but they happened anyway.
Thankfully, most core systems now run under Linux; with a number of Win11-incapable PC's to follow. Enough!
In 1999 I was an external contractor for a major UK Bank (no names, no pack-drill..) as a tester. As well as Y2K testing, which was fairly easy to do and verify, I worked on a new counter application that was going to released just after Jan 1st 2000.
I found some serious problems with it. These were formally reported. But, the pressure to release the application was such that they released it anyway.
When the problem appeared, as I knew it would, a different team was tasked with fixing it. So, the development and release teams looked like they had (almost) met their timescales and budgets. The fix team had an ongoing budget so it didn't matter quite so much. Talk about smoke and mirrors!
The problem with Birmingham and other councils with similar issues, is the budget is covered by the rate payers and is almost limitless in quantity. Unless and until people actually lose their jobs when they screw up, this situation will continue.
I started my business with a Turbo Pascal application. I used Paradox too. When Delphi came along is was a no brainer and I used it for a lot of applications.
When Embarcadero took over the business the costs, even of upgrades, went sky high so I stopped using it.
Add to that the lack of Linux compatibility and I chose to move to Lazarus.
In these columns we are becoming accustomed to yet another delayed Oracle project. Oracle get paid either way so they don't take a hit on their bottom line. They don't seem to "bat back" at the criticisms either so reputational damage is something they don't worry about.
Whilst the alternatives are few at this scale and the risk of moving to, say SAP, is far from small, how could this situation ever change? Oracle will just get richer by the day.
Councils, NHS and others just have to suck it up it seems.
Intel must be really worried about the PC market to try and "invent" this again.
For a previous "exercise" I still have a couple of Intel Pentium II 2 CPU Processor SL2HD's kicking about. Totally useless of course after we found at the time.
The problem is all-in-one motherboards are cheap to make. A string of surface mount machines and a ready to install motherboard is ready to ship. Once you add daughterboards, connectors and linking cables you add a lot to the cost. If AMD decides against this folly then it would be game-over for Intel until they saw sense again.
My college computer, which I spent too much time on, was an Elliott 803 with 4K of memory! It ran Algol and I still have the teletype printouts from my project (sad I know). I might just see if they will compile and run - for old times sake.
The most common error I used to get was something like SUBSCROFLO (subscript overflow) which was the result of me declaring an array that was too large for the 4K memory.
Happy days....
I am learning Welsh which is a tricky language for sure, and one which has even trickier poetry rules.
I asked ChatGPT for a Welsh poem, printed the results and showed them to my tutor. He said it was a fairly good poem. I then fessed up to it being an AI generated "cerdd" (Welsh for poem) which shocked him.
At this year's Eisteddfod, and at the last minute, it was announced that the Drama Medal (Cyfansoddiadau a Beirniadaethau) for Welsh Fiction was not going to awarded. No reason has ever been given but a number of people are suspicious that the potential winning text was created, or refined, using AI.
Hwyl.
My neighbour keeps bees, How about we find some very rare bees and sell hives of them to protestors? They could let the bees out in strategic places and there would bee (sic) no need for the usual protestor shenanigans just a note to the planners about the, previously unknown, colony of rare bees.
Another upside is you could sell the honey to raise funds.
Sounds like a win win.
I used to look after a server which collected data from different time zones. The whole DST issue was a nightmare. In the end all data was stored with UTC timestamps.
When collecting data the greatest problem is the moment the time changes; what do you do with the extra hour for which there is no data? Or, the reverse,what do you with the data for the hour now gone?
I wonder how much SpaceX is charging for the change to the next crew mission?
There will now be two spare seats to spare Boeing's and NASA's blushes further. Like all contracts the extra profit is made with "variations". I would bet that the FAA fine is more than covered.
Musk has the upper hand here so the FAA/NASA/Boeing will have to suck it up else those extra astronauts might have to rely on the Russians to bring them home.
Boeing got $4.2billion for their Starliner contract against SpaceX's $2.6billion. So far SpaceX is delivering and is making Boeing look like amateurs. Boeing's cost per seat is also 60% higher than SpaceX.
So why are NASA still dealing with Boeing at all? Their next "test" launch looks like 2026 and good luck with that!
NASA are spending public money so a serious audit of the viability of the Boeing space program ought to be carried out.
Without a very significant investment we are always going to be too "little too late".
We should never have allowed ARM to be bought by Softbank and, let's face it, ARM was the best in the world. Prior to that, only the failed project we called Inmos comes to mind. Inmos was too late with it's DRAM chips to make any profit, but the Transputer should have been a bigger hit than it was. The Transputer concept was ahead of it's time and the use of ADA rather than a C compiler put developers off.
Interesting fact: In February 1961 Britain exported £76,000 of transistors. Yes, back then, we manufactured transistors. Where did it all go wrong? Probable answer - short sighted Politicians. Like the 1966 rip-up of railway tracks and routes after Beaching's report. Today, we would love to have those routes back.
All empires fail eventually.
The Roman Empire failed, IBM nearly failed, Boeing is close to failing. In the UK, GEC, Marconi, EMI, British Leyland are all gone.
They were all seemingly too big to fail.
The problem is nearly always the same one - the distance from the top to the bottom is too big. Those at the top have no idea what is going on further down. And those at the top rarely have gotten their hands dirty.
The problem has to be laid at the Company Directors' doors. They took their bonuses and share offerings whilst still enjoying good lunches in executive dinning rooms. They thought that more MBA qualified consultants would fix the problems while they rearranged the deckchairs on the Titanic. And, the big joke is that, when their current business fails, they will still offered well paid part time jobs is other companies. Recently, the Post Office enquiry paraded lots of part-timers which always "had no idea" what was going on lower down. Yet they still got paid - and handsomely too.
Over in Germany Bosch, Siemens, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Allianz, VW etc are still going strong. Remember, after WWII, we helped the Germans rebuild the VW business and the Americans Honda for the Japanese.
As others have written, there is no secret sauce here; we need good engineers at all levels of the businesses and, particularly at the top.
Yes, we still need bean counters, but bean counters on have one vision which is money. Engineers dream and, sometimes, there are riches to be had.
Boeing said it "remains confident in the Starliner spacecraft. Of course it did.
The rapidly running-out-of-patience shareholders cannot handle the reality that Boeing has lost the race with SpaceX and only Boeing's pride, and the marooned astronauts, is stopping them from cancelling the whole project right now.
If there is the slightest doubt about the software, or those thrusters, not working 100% then NASA must call it. Imagine what would happen if there is a major problem. NASA will not risk another Challenger for sure.
SpaceX could mount the rescue mission and I am sure they have already agreed a timescale and price for the job.
With the whole world trying to make things sustainable, surely the Ariane 6 is a total fail. Although there is talk of some reusability, at this time there is none.
They are underplaying the APU "anomaly". The APU is supposed to be a discriminating feature to potential customers. Without the APU a lot of multi-deploy missions will not be possible.
As the APU needs to be tested in the vacuum of space, then at least one more test launch must be done. It this too fails then it will be serious for Ariane. Extra launches are expensive and will delay the program saying "open for business". They will probably mitigate it with more low cost payload offerings but it is still serious.
Apart from SpaceX's rapid turnaround which gives them a potential launch cadence of one every three days, the first stage booster and the fairings are reused for most launches.
With Starship coming soon it is going to be hard for Ariane to compete. Of course, with all of the subsidies they get, making a profit is not a priority.
In reality, the Ariane program has fallen well behind. It is only loyal EU customers and a determination by the EU to have it's own independent launch system, that is going to keep it afloat.
The docking of Boeing's Starliner nearly failed due to a problem that "appeared to be software-related".
Recently a "serious software glitch" meant that a 737-800 plane taking off from Bristol Airport barely cleared the runway when the auto-throttle disengaged when taking off (scary). Boeing are apparently "aware" of the problem but are seemingly unable to reproduce it.
Maybe Boeing should stop kidding itself that it can write software.
Somehow this Ariane 6 seems like too little and too late.
How are they going to become profitable with just ten launches per year?
We all watched the SpaceX Starship-Super Heavy Starship have a good test flight today and, surely, that is going to take some of the larger payloads?
If the Ariane 6 test launch fails then, surely, they will need to ask themselves if the project is going to succeed at all?
With SpaceX making launches more often than my local bus service, surely a refurb mission is possible at a lower cost than previously?
If everything else is still working well then a more up to date set of gyros could be swapped in?
Webb and Hubble area team and we need them both.
It would be a lot cheaper than building and launching a new Hubble; assuming that Congress would even vote for it.
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