* Posts by ArrZarr

1180 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2015

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Space exploitation vs space exploration: Humanity has much to learn from the Voyager probes

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: no society has lasted anything like a thousand years so far.

Arguably the Romans as a culture lasted 2000ish years from the formation of the republic in 500ish BC to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

It's very tempting to view the fall of Rome in the late 5th century as the fall of the Romans, but realistically the Eastern Empire were the same culture.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: no society has lasted anything like a thousand years so far.

There is a society in the Vicinity of the Lower Nile*, with people who call themselves Egyptians.

Before independence, they were part of the British Empire.

Before The British Empire, they were part of the Ottoman Empire.

Before the Ottoman Empire, they were part of the Islamic Caliphates.

Before the Islamic Caliphates, they were part of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Before the Eastern Roman Empire, they were part of the Roman Empire.

Before the Roman Empire, they were part of a splinter faction of Alexander's Empire.

Before they were part of a splinter faction of Alexander's Empire, they were part of Alexander's empire.

Before they were part of Alexander's Empire, they were part of the Persian empire.

Before they were part of the Persian Empire, they were ancient Egyptians.

*By how the Ancient Egyptians measured it

NASA extinguishes experiment about setting things on fire in space

ArrZarr Silver badge
Happy

"I'm sorry, Martinez, but if you didn't want me to go through your stuff, you shouldn't have left me for dead on a desolate planet." - Mark Watney

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: We dont go for "uptime" records

I think they're talking about stuff running slowly for a bit after the reboot, which sounds like it's just the software being diligent and only loading certain modules into memory when needed, then keeping it there.

Might be wrong though.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: This must rate as the most moronic management policy ...

Apologies for the potentially dumb question, but does antistatic packaging drain batteries somehow, or otherwise harm them?

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

ArrZarr Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Best name?

I mean, I agree that he's done wonders for cricket, but I don't see the connection to Physics.

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Toner cartridges do not need chips

There's a simpler mechanical way to solve this issue - a magenta cartridge should only fit in the magenta hole, a cyan cartridge should only fit in the cyan hole etc.

There's probably a good reason why it's not done this way (something something, one cartridge production line to rule them all), but in my experience, printers which have a black cartridge and a colour cartridge already use this philosophy - you cannot put the colour cartridge in the black slot or the black cartridge in the colour slot.

Musk claims that venting liquid oxygen caused Starship explosion

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Musk is known for being on the left

Yes. That's kind of the point ;)

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Musk is known for being on the left

Eh, I'm a libertarian in the sense that, with the caveat that you aren't harming others*, you should be free to live your life (but that's not the same as free from the consequences of your own bad decision making). The authoritarian tendencies of the current conservative UK government or the insanity of the GOP are horrific to me.

An example is that I very much dislike being in the vicinity of somebody smoking. It's a horrible, disgusting habit. That being said, I am against a general smoking ban because it's none of my business what people are doing with their lives

*And where the line is drawn should be the source of lively debate.

ArrZarr Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Re:Musk being on the left?

As said above, politics is complicated and somebody can have views on a single topic that are both progressive and conservative.

Joe Rogan has complicated views, apparently being in favour of same-sex marriage and gay rights while being of the opinion that Ron DeSantis would make a good president (despite the blatantly anti-LGBTQ+ work of the DeSantis governorship of Florida).

He said he would probably vote Sanders in 2020 but encouraged his listeners to vote republican in the 2022 midterms.

Using a reductio ad absurdum fallacy doesn't help your case.

ArrZarr Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Musk is known for being on the left

Did it a while ago. Left of centre, extremely anti-authoritarian.

Even then, the political compass has its own problems. Given the sheer complexity of politics, going from one dimension to two is not much better (but it gets to a point where a single visualisation is totally inadequate to show all the data quite quickly).

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Musk is known for being on the left

For what it's worth, the left/right axis for political position is woefully inadequate. In some ways, Musk is quite progressive. In other ways, he's an utter bigot.

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: s/unable/unwilling/

Private Eye reports about £83k as an average for legal fees from the defendants, so that also needs to be considered with the compensation.

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

ArrZarr Silver badge

In Edge's defense, I find that some Google tools don't work on Chrome, but do work on Edge. (They would probably work on other Chromium derivatives or on Firefox, but I don't have those installed.)

And for the snobs out there who are judging me for using Chrome, it's usually the best tool for the job, and too many support teams will ask for you to check on Chrome when you run into issues.

Welcome to 2024: Volkswagen really is putting ChatGPT into cars as a gabby copilot

ArrZarr Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Message to marketing depts if they are reading (doubt it)

Sadly, Dan, I've met my parents.

Both of whom would be wowed by this and show it off to me as some cool feature.

Not that they're likely to buy a VW these days as they are reaping the economic benefits of being upper middle class pensioners.

BOFH: The Christmas party was so good, an independent inquiry is required

ArrZarr Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Plagiarism?

I think you'll find that Cummings went to Durham School, not Eton.

Not that I'm bitter about sharing a secondary school with him, or anything.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: I guess the truth hurts.

So is the whole computer ;)

Last Vega rocket launch delayed over fuel tank vanishing act

ArrZarr Silver badge
Windows

Re: One-off risk?

Indeed, my previous post in this thread could itself be a bad faith argument designed to defame you and ruin your reputation.

It wasn't, but you're going to have to take that on trust - exactly like how we are supposed to take your CV speaking for itself on trust.

All I have to go on is that you can post posts that sound knowledgeable on rocket science and can pull out examples where you were apparently correct on the issue ahead of the investigation results being released, your username and the tone of your posts.

Oh, I can also check your post history. Of course it's true that you have a life outside of commenting on El Reg. articles, but unless you've hidden it, even your point (C) on the Ariane 6 upper stage test abort, pointing it out and getting "A bunch of downvotes" does not appear to be true, unless this was made on a different site, which I'm not realistically able to check.

edit: Double checked A and it checks out. Not sure why you got downvoted for it, but then I'm usually not sure why I get a random downvote on a chunk of my posts.

ArrZarr Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: One-off risk?

Or you're cherry picking the times you were right and carefully sweeping the times you weren't right under the rug and hoping that nobody goes through your comment history to find all the times you were wrong.

This is the internet and bad faith arguments are a dime a dozen.

I don't have an opinion on whether you are competent or qualified on the subject matter, I only have an opinion that the internet is full of bad faith bullshitters and scepticism must be the default stance in these discussions.

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: I have to wonder

A strong understanding of Social Geography seems like it would be incredibly useful to have a strong understanding of as somebody working at any level of government, as that's what should be informing infrastructure & service needs on both a micro and macro scale.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Well, duh

The points you make are good, but it is complicated.

Heat pumps only cover heating needs as opposed to other uses for fossil fuels (lookin' at you, transportation), so if renewable hydrogen production really takes off and economies of scale kick in, then it may end up being cheaper to do exactly that, with a low cost of hydrogen. (Yes, it's probably better to burn the hydrogen at an all up power station to power individual home's heat pumps, but air-based pumps are at their worst when people need them the most and ground-based pumps are so much more expensive to install).

In the event that we go the simplest route as a society and just change burning coal/oil/gas for electricity and petrol/diesel/kerosene etc for transport to renewable-generated hydrogen, which itself is an inelegant but functional way to deal with the biggest weakness of solar and wind (there isn't necessarily enough sun or wind when we need the power), it wouldn't surprise me if homes really would be built with Hydrogen boilers/furnaces rather than heat pumps, to keep the house costs down. Not saying that's a good idea, just saying that it wouldn't be surprising.

ArrZarr Silver badge
Boffin

An Air Con unit is a heat pump.

If you run the refrigerant through an air con unit in reverse, you have a heater.

The reason people are talking about needing garden space or under street pipes is due to the fact that heat pumps get less efficient as the outside air gets colder. Modern air heat pumps work well below freezing, so most of (e.g.) the UK is fine with a wall-mounted device.

According to the Met Office, the mean minimum temperature for England sits around the 1.5-2.7 between December and March, which is below the minimum optimum temperature for heat pump heating efficiency (about 5 degrees), but well above the point where the heat pumps are less efficient than burning gas.

Therefore, most of the time, a wall-mounted reversible air-conditioning unit would replace a gas boiler for the purposes of heating a UK home, and would do a fine job of acting as air conditioning in the summer.

On the days where it's coldest, when the need for heating is greatest, wall-mounted heat pumps would be working at their least optimal efficiencies, which is why ground-pipe heat pumps are a preferable solution since once you get about 2-3 feet down, the temperature is extremely consistent all year round.

IBM takes a crack at 'utility scale' quantum processing with Heron processor

ArrZarr Silver badge

I can get my head around it, but that doesn't stop me feeling like we're exploiting a loophole in the laws of physics that's about to get patched!

ArrZarr Silver badge
Windows

Of all the fields of scientific progress and achievement, I don't think I'll ever be able to stop believing that quantum computing is witchcraft.

It always reminds me of Discworld passages where a bit of misdirection or trickery is directed at the universe as a whole and works. For a while, at least.

EU running in circles trying to get AI Act out the door

ArrZarr Silver badge
Holmes

Re: First to legislate?!

Came here to write the same thing.

The best I can come up with is that the EU is probably a sufficiently large block that getting decent regulation out the door first will shape what the tech companies will do with their AI offerings and grasp the narrative early, before other countries that have more lax rules about what can happen with personal data shape it first.

Therefore it feels like it's not about what regulation the US puts in place after the EU sets its own regulation up, but to get the places working on various AIs to play ball appropriately.

The thing that's most interesting to me is how language affects availability of AI products. This isn't a situation like GDPR where an EU citizen is an EU citizen, this is a situation where an AI is probably going to be more fluent in English or Chinese than in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese etc etc. Now that the EU doesn't have a major (Sorry, Ireland) country where the official language is English, it's possible that non-english speakers will have been somewhat insulated from the majority of raw text data grabs used to train the LLMs.

tl;dr: EU is a big enough block that companies will probably think its worth it to work within reasonable EU regulations, but that depends on whether the e.g. Swedish market is big enough for an AI worth developing in that language in the first place.

Microsoft dials back Bing after users manage to recreate Disney logo in fake AI-generated images

ArrZarr Silver badge
Trollface

Re: My new AI killer app, exclusively revealed on El Reg.

Ah, but how will you determine that an AI is speaking to you? It's all very well and good now, when AI things tend to be labelled as such, but what about when it's not completely obvious?

Will your software use an AI to determine the AIness of what you're talking to?

ArrZarr Silver badge
Devil

Are you sure that we are not allowed to copy the Mona Lisa?

Not talking about passing off a forgery as the real thing, but I'm pretty certain that the image is now in the public domain as not even America's copyright law is "Lifetime of creator + 505 years" yet.

Taxing times: UK missed out on £1.75B because of digitization delays

ArrZarr Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Tax law complexity

As much as it pains me to in any way defend Westminster, there are a couple of things I'd like to point out.

First, HK/Singapore's tax codes have fewer considerations to take into account. I suspect that even if there are non-urban sectors of their economy (farmers, miners, etc), those sectors make up a considerably smaller voting block and lack the weight that those blocks do in the UK, meaning that they won't get the same level of attention in their tax books. Statista shows that Services are 93% of HK's GDP with Industry being around 6% and agriculture being 0.1%.

Second, HK and Singapore had a hard break with their respective overlords (Singapore had 2, with independence from Britain and Malaysia), which gave them an opportunity to reset their tax codes to a sane degree and they have had considerably less time to expand upon those rules.

That being said, it would not surprise me in the slightest that rather than spending time actually trying to do anything useful for the country, Westminster has spent the last 13+ years working out the best way to make sure their friends keep as much money as they possibly can while the people who work for a living pay for their cushy existences.

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

ArrZarr Silver badge
Devil

Re: How was it basically the VPs fault?

The article states that the keyboard was slid underneath the desk when she stood up, so it would not have been visible unless she got her very important head down to eye level with the gap.

Honestly, I'd say this is just a racing incident, to use the wrong parlance - the VIP's crime is being a horrible person so that tips us against her to a degree.

Revival of Medley/Interlisp: Elegant weapon for a more civilized age sharpened up again

ArrZarr Silver badge
Holmes

Obligatory XKCD

...Of course, I think that this might have straight up been referenced by Liam with the headline.

https://xkcd.com/297/

Remembering the time Windows accidentally sent Poland to the bottom of the sea

ArrZarr Silver badge
Angel

To paraphrase CGP Grey, The EU is such a mess of asterisks and exceptions that it's a story for another time. This isn't a physics video.

SpaceX celebrates Starship launch as a success – even with the explosion

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Units

To be fair, pounds to kilos isn't awful. I usually just divide by two.

If you want to be snazzy, take away 10%, then divide by two.

That being said, I agree it would be nice to have units in something that the vast majority of the world uses.

ArrZarr Silver badge
Boffin

Re: "The engines burned over 40,000 pounds of fuel per second"

It also really shows how much the relative thrust changes between the start and end of the first stage.

You're removing the mass of a small lorry every second for 180 seconds.

The numbers involved with this thing are really difficult to get your head around.

ArrZarr Silver badge

With credit to Tom Lehrer

Don't say that he's hypocritical,

Say rather that he's apolitical.

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.

ArrZarr Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Weren't NASA also working with Boeing on a rocket?

I think it's difficult to compare the N1 and Starship if I'm honest. Yes, designs with many small engines are harder to handle than designs with few large engines but the power of modern computers and software are functionally infinite compared to what you could fit into a rocket in the '60s along with half a century of development in the field.

In many ways the N1 is a more elegant design than the Saturn V, but elegance must sometimes take a back seat to efficacy and the brute force of the F-1 turned out to be the correct play over the NK-15 back when the race was on.*

*And while I'm not a rocket scientist by any means, five stages(!) seems pretty excessive.

You can buy personal info of US military staff from data brokers for just 12 cents a pop

ArrZarr Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: We have no one but ourselves to blame...

We live in a world run by Ferengi. Data brokers are just one type of organisation run by them.

Aside from the ears, the only real difference between the people in charge is the fact that the Ferengi were allergic to "respect women juice".

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

ArrZarr Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Shocked?

Bollocks. Well that actually makes my point stronger given how insanely heavy YT usage would have to be to pay back a YT Premium subscription.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: a useful and responsible ad experience

Not if you don't want to be charged by every website that doesn't have another income source.

ArrZarr Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Shocked?

No, that's what Facebook will charge per person.

That EUR10/month is considerably higher than the value FB will get from a regular person through its other channels - just look at YouTube Premium. The UK's CPM (Cost per thousand impressions, the initialism uses the French word for thousand for some reason) averages out to $13.75 so far in 2023, so an individual ad view can be calculated to a value of $0.1375. That revenue is split 50/50 between the content owner and YT, so we get a value per UK ad view of about seven US cents.

UK YT premium is £10/month, currently $12.24 with exchange rates - that means YT/content owners make more money from somebody who has YT premium and doesn't see about 170 ads per month than they would from somebody without YT premium. That's a heavy user who probably averages 30-60 minutes of YT content consumption per day. Extremely heavy users (like yours truly) benefit from the flat model but I'm probably in the minority.

Microsoft calls time on Windows Insider MVP program

ArrZarr Silver badge
Devil

Re: a distinct lack of exciting features to test during the Windows 11 era

Honestly I always found 8.1 to be a joy to use. even without a touchscreen.

It probably helps that when I'm in a hurry, my mouse accuracy is hardly what anybody would call precise though...

Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle

ArrZarr Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Experts

Excel is an excellent and very powerful tool, and to mangle a phrase: "When you have Excel, everything looks like a spreadsheet".

It's not an appropriate solution for anything that needs a rock-solid paper trail or anything covering sensitive information, however.

(Not that I probably couldn't have done a better job or anything, even if it had to be in Excel for some reason)

Mars chilled for aeons, but stayed so stressed it gets crusty marsquakes

ArrZarr Silver badge

It is worth noting that intraplate earthquakes do happen as well.

I was lucky(?) enough to be awake in Bangor in early 2013 when Caernarfon was hit by a 2.3 quake and while I'm pretty sure that there are dragons flying around there, the closest plate edge is Iceland.

EFF urges Chrome users to get out of the Privacy Sandbox

ArrZarr Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Monopoly law backfires hard

We calculate ROI ourselves.

It actually doesn't make sense to take the ROI number from an ad provider (Facebook/Meta Ads, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads) as it's based upon flawed data from the platform specific tags[1]. These sorts of tags only see the journeys that they're (a) part of and (b) they claim that if they are part of a journey, then they are obviously the sole reason that sale was made.

A proper tracking provider's tag (Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics) sees everything where the user does accepts nonessential tracking[2] including all the touchpoints of the journey but it doesn't have native access to impressions, clicks and cost data.

The objectively best and most honest approach to providing the most accurate and best possible data we can[3] is to take the Ad provider's clicks, cost and impressions, combine that with the tracking provider's sales and revenue figures and calculate metrics like ROI from that blend instead.

[1] Google Ads Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics Tracking are two completely separate entities

[2] Based upon a correct marketing tag implementation under GDPR

[3] Believe it or not, it is in our best interests to provide ourselves and the client the best data we can, and considerable effort is put into investigating where our numbers don't line up with hard truth systems like the client's own order fulfilment backend[4]

[4] We can't use client fulfilment system numbers for sales and revenue as there's no way to link that back to where exactly the sale came from, which is fundamentally critical information when you want to understand the performance of campaign X or channel Y.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Regulators are indeed a pain in the arse.

Honestly? Yes.

Google makes a killing from ads, and they've become the most popular ad provider for those in online marketing because of the quality of their targeting and the reach of their platform.

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

ArrZarr Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Waste gases

Don't worry, I'm sure that River/Tidal/Wave power is just around the corner.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Heat pumps cannot be the complete solution

You would think that you could do something clever with the location of the fan - if the loft hasn't been converted, then you could pump heat from up there to the living space of the building.

If the loft has been converted, then you might be able to do something with the existing historical flues as part of the pre-20C fireplace network. Probably wouldn't be cheap but surely all the unit needs is access to external air rather than actually being physically outside on display to the world?

Google's third-party cookie culling to begin in Q1 2024 ... for 1% of Chrome users

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: This is not about providing privacy...

It's always been that way. It means that it's basically going to be impossible to set up new tracking providers - everything will now sit in the big players' walled gardens and the competition can go to hell.

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

ArrZarr Silver badge
Devil

Re: Gotta disagree with that second point

To be clear, I'm not arguing for or against the Simulation thing, just disagreeing with the development style points.

I would say that the software *should* have a static featureset to keep as many variables static as possible during the test.

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: Bollox

I have noted the joke icon, but I would like to disagree.

There are two aspects imo:

The first is that we live in a world where the low cost of compute power means it's not economical to pay people to optimise code to a mirror shine. If a theoretical computer is able to efficiently self-optimise its own code to that mirror shine, then it would absolutely make sense for that to happen.

The second is that a simulation, while its running would have a static featureset, which does enable a position where you can optimise code to that mirror shine.

Over the past 50 years we've encountered feature bloat to a huge degree, enabled by conventions like Moore's law. If Moore's law were not true, then featuresets would have expanded considerably more slowly as compute power would remain expensive relative to developer time so paying for the code to be polished within an inch of its life would be worthwhile in processing-heavy tasks.

Tweaked Space Shuttle Main Engine gets ready for final testing

ArrZarr Silver badge

Re: A similar option for HS2?

Interestingly, two of your steaming options have been done in the past.

During WW2, the Swiss were running some Steam-Electric engines as they had plentiful hydroelectric supply but coal was very expensive. (SBB E 3/3)

Also, fireless steam engines were designed - either using a reservoir of steam or in the notable case of Fowler's Ghost, by using fire bricks.

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