Posts by CommsFogey

India completes its GPS alternative, for the second time

Re: Why would mobile phones or TV be affected ?

Exactly, they require picosec timing to get phase information from the amazingly complex spread spectrum system. Each 3G+ base station has to know it's GPS timing exactly

Laser sauce, cheat code, jam seshs: The Waymo vs Uber trial kicks off

Re: One thing I am intrigued by...

AS I recall of the nanny - she had previously made a student film, and any aspiring film people, authors and commedians that I know always keep a diary/note book of ideas, observations, and just anything they think might lead to an idea one day. So if she felt she was at the beginning of a soap opera/documentuary fodder, keeping detailed notes would be expected.

The Internet of Flying Thing: Reg man returns with explicit shots

Re: Video Calling

The 40sec is satellite handoff. Ie moving from satellite over europe to satellie over America, or asia. There would be a maximum of 1 satellite change during a flight.

Cellhandoff (beam to beam in satellite parlance) is seamless basicaly (milliseconds)

'OK, everyone. Stop typing, this software is DONE,' said no one ever

Well some software does get to done.

Especially embedded software, in items, vehicles, and especially in defence.

There is no reason someone should be fiddling with my car's ECU once it is a product. (ignoring Volkwagon and others doing naughty things with their emissions).

And while at the moment the software in the F35 is under development and there are new releases and changes, there will come a point where it is done, and only gets changed to add new things in the future.

And then it will be 20+ of unchanged.

Worried about election hacking? There's a technology fix – Helios

Re: No need for something needlessly complex like Helios

In Australia we have compulsory voting. I guess this would really annoy you.

But the thing is, since you cant know how I voted, it still is anonymous. You can leave your paper blank. You can draw a pretty picture on it, or other less polite ways of performing an invalid vote.

In India they actually have electronic voting at polling stations if memory serves. With a clever distributed, non-online cheap, anonymous mechanism. In many countries where for example the UN is present supervising a vote, marking ink eg on right thumb, is used to show a person has voted to stop multiple voting.

So in the system described, I can see my vote has not been changed, but I cant be forced to show someone how I voted. Which I agree with you that is a fundamental necessity.

HPE ignored SAN failure warnings at Australian Taxation Office, had no recovery plan

Re: I'm calling BS

The problem was, as stated in article, that it was a complete service contract with HPE. It was up to HPE to specify what performance, redundancy, and disaster recovery were required for the customer's needs. SO, err no, it was not (in this specific case) for the business to sort out.

Earlier comments re sales monkies getting their cut and never to be seen again are pertinent here.

I am sure 3 PAR is great. But HPE screwed up. And of course the ATO, as was also noted in an earlier comment, should have run the QA separate to the admin so that shortcuts were not taken.

Of course, your mileage may vary

Self-driving car devs face 6-month backlog on vital $85,000 LIDAR kit

DB- have a look at short's comment previous. the price only gets down that low, once you can amortise custom silicon (processing) and fabrication tooling (lenses etc) over hundreds of thousands of units. The wafer mask (setup cost) of a cutting edge chip is now around US$10M. Otherwise you have to custom build it with lots of much larger, very expensive, parts. For example, for processing think a compute board similar to a professional (not gamer) GPU. One of these for every processing slice you need (say each direction you want to sense obstacles).

Bloke charged under UK terror law for refusing to cough up passwords

Re: Don't give them anything to get you with....

Re "virtual machine" & carry no data.

It would be nice if it worked.

The thing is...

All your data is in "the cloud" so any access to it goes through NSA, the other 5 eyes, and local government scanning if they have the capability.

I am not sure that is how I would like to record a scared person giving evidence of torture or even local government malfeasance.

Or whether the local internet connection, if there is one, would support that amount of data to setup a session.

Hence TOR and other tools for getting small amounts of data in and out without it being scanned (hopefully).

'Grey technology' should be the new black

When I was looking for a mobile for my mum, I went to the society for the blind, to see what they recommended for people with poor sight (they cover this as well as blind, and no, I cant remember the organisation's new name either- apologies).

They had a large keycaps print keyboard, and large print (and raised moulding letter) land line and mobile phones.

For myself, now I need reading glasses,whereas I used to print out in 4 point text to save paper. Heck I can still write in 4 point text.

And I agree with I think everything the author and the commentaries wrote. UI changes, not respecting web zoom,...

And for oldish history, I think it was GEMOS that had a setting for how much details the menus and apps had - 3 choices (basic, intermediate and advanced?) with progressively more changeable options in each level.

(And the pain of MS Word having multiple incompatible ways of achieving the same effect.)