Posts by Red Ted

Meta offered one AI researcher at least $10,000,000 to join up

Re: Requires 20 years experience

“Kansas is going bye bye”

There, two film references!

AI coding tools are like that helpful but untrustworthy friend, devs say

IP Protection?

"One good method for dealing with the inherent flaws is to start a session by prompting the agent to review the codebase structure, documentation, and key files, before then giving it the actual development task"

Am I alone in reading that as "pour your IP in to the AI that belongs to someone else"?

Old but gold: Paper tape and punched cards still getting the job done – just about

Re: Fascinating stuff

Minoan Linear B script perhaps?

Currently the oldest understood European language. It was preceded by Linear A and a hieroglyphic script, but they are currently undeciphered.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Re: Office relocations

Some numpty at IBM once managed to get the RJ11 modem socket next to the RJ45 network network socket on certain models of laptop. Those using them with dialup (this was a few years ago) were forever managing to plug the RJ11 plug in to the RJ45 socket and spending some time wondering why they couldn't connect and then finding that the landline didn't work so they couldn't phone Tech Support to help sort it out!

Intuitive Machines blames dim lighting and dodgy data for second lunar faceplant

We collected the most detailed imagery of the lunar South Pole on mission two

"Most detailed" because the camera was facedown in the lunar regolith?

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

Americans and Brits speak dialects of English that are almost mutually comprehensible

"Two countries separated by a common language" is, I think, the quote you are looking for!

Brain-inspired neuromorphic computer SpiNNaker overheated when coolers lost their chill

Re: Auto-Slowdown/Shutdown Systems

Snow at Easter isn't unknown.

In the UK it is statistically more likely that at Christmas.

Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way

Re: Coders have to code

On a course about C++ aimed at C coders where a number of us worked in embedded systems, the presenter said "code as is up have limitless compute and storage"!

He looked hurt when a significant fraction of his pupils laughed at him.

Windows 11 poised to beat 10, mostly because it has to

Trying to make 2025 the "Year of the Linux Desktop"?

The first of my home machines has now moved to Mint and the other will probably follow suit before the October deadline hits (although it could go to Win11, but my experience of it at work has put me off that idea).

Also, enough of the tools I use have Linux versions now and for the small number that don't, Wine seems to "do what it says on the tin".

ISS resupply and trash pickup craft postponed indefinitely after Cygnus container crunch

Perhaps they shouldn't have used Evri to ship it?

I expect there was an email to say they couldn't deliver as no one was in at the Space Center when they arrived, or perhaps they just stuffed it behind the bins?

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

Re: Bodge job

The new SpaceX corporate song: Harmonic Generator by The Datsuns!

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Re: Back of the envelope

The UK has four pump storage schemes in use: Cruachan (440MW) and Foyers (300MW) in Scotland, and Dinorwig (1800MW) and Ffestiniog (360MW) in Wales. These give a combined storage of 32GWh.

Work has started to upgrade Cruachan to 1000MW (using the same reservoirs so the storage capacity doesn't change).

Another one is probably going to be built in Scotland, the Coire Glas Project, which would provide another 1300MW, but with a capacity of 30GWh (full power for a whole day) and there are a couple of others that are at the proposal stage.

UK government insiders say AI datacenters may be a pricey white elephant

Non-infrastructure development

The (British) government's record on development of anything outside infrastructure seems to have a really poor record.

Picking aviation as an example, I give you R101, the Brabazon and Concorde. Interestingly at almost exactly 20 year intervals.

Boeing going backwards as production’s slowing and woes keep flowing

Hitchhiking in space

Hitch-hiking or summoning an Uber are not options in space

They must have lost their Electronic SubEther Signalling Device or “Electronic Thumb”?

Mine’s the one with the ‘guide in the pocket…

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Re: Micros~1 declares 2025

In my case Win11 is finally the push that moved me to the Linux desktop.

Enough of the tools I use are now available on Linux, so that's stopped being the blocker it was and the small number that aren't seem to work ok under Wine.

Apple's backwards design mistake and the reversed capacitor

Re: Picture looks odd.

They *are* different pictures. The perspective of the two connectors changes from one to the other.

I think the damage is visible in the first picture (if you look at the high re copy), but the corrosion has run between the copper and the green solder resist. The silk screen is on top of that so appears undamaged.

The solder resist and silk screen probably came off when the board was brushed with flux remover after desoldering the caps.

Re: Ahh, silkscreens

"It's very easy to put all your big decoupling caps in a row, beautifully aligned with the positive bar at the top and curved negative side pointed down. Then you slap a bunch of GND at the bottom and slap in the power net labels at the top... Forgetting that one is negative and needs to have the cap flipped. Sails through review because everyone focuses on the "hard" sections and it just looks right."

Yes that's my take on this too. Has anyone found a copy of the schematics yet?

As the +16V rated capacitor had -5V across it and there was little load on that circuit it wouldn't have been picked up in Design Verification.

The "fun" begins when you swap the electrolytic for a tantalum. These are much more fussy about polarity and I have had the through hole version vaporise the orange body (with a suitable "bang!") on power-on, leaving you with the challenge of finding the two legs poking out of the PCB with no tell tale scorch marks to give you a clue that they aren't just a couple of test pins!

Google to wrap up Christmas Island with new subsea cable

Cartographers unite!

There are just so many things wrong with that diagram supplied by Google!

Mysteries in polar orbit – space's oldest working hardware still keeps its secrets

Re: Photon Propeller

Just to be pedantic (and I know that's uncommon around here) it is a Nichols radiometer as it is radiation pressure that provides the force.

Photon Propeller

The photon propeller that keep it rotating so as it is evenly heated by the sun, is very ingenious too.

There are four VHF/UHF antenna that are painted black on one side and white on the other, so the difference between the absorption and reflection of the two sides imparts a rotation force on the satellite.

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

Plug in hybrids

Some evidence seems to suggest that these are a bit of a failure, as they are often not plugged in.

This results in it behaving as a (non plug in) hybrid with the weight and cost penalty of a bigger battery and the power converter for the external power connection.

Pirate programmer walks the plank for role in massive TV streaming operation

The classic argument

The court heard that the operation affected every owner of a TV show in the US, costing millions of dollars in losses to the industry.

My understanding is that these losses were from the lack of royalties for streaming the programmes. Which, as with Napster et al, all those years ago, raises the question of would the people using Jetflix have paid to watch those episodes via legitimate means? For certain, a percentage of the subscribers were using Jetflix to get the episode on the cheap, but there would have been a significant fraction who simply would not have watched the programme at all, which could be argued that it is not lost revenue.

Brit telcos to clash in high-speed mmWave spectrum showdown next year

Re: 3G Auction

why not just say "this is the price of the licence to use this portion of the spectrum"

Because it is very difficult to decide the correct price for something when it is such an unusual market. It wasn't the open market situation with lots of trades of a similar commodity that you could use as a reference point. An auction isn't a bad choice for finding that level in that particular scenario.

Also remember it was at about the peak of the dot com bubble and so money was (almost) no object. Then the bubble burst and reality set in.

3G Auction

Reg readers with long memories will no doubt recall the 3G license auction around the turn of the millennium, when the UK's mobile operators almost bankrupted themselves trying to outbid each other for the available spectrum.

Am I supposed to feel sorry for the telcos in this instance, and by implication that the British Government shouldn't have done it?

Personally, I feel pleased that the British Government managed to make that much money out of them. It made a change from all the stories of how they always overpaid public listed companies for services and represented the single biggest payment against the national debt.

SpaceX Dragon gives ISS a helping hand with altitude

Re: 7/100 of a mile

The next common imperial units down from the mile are the furlong at 1/8th of a mile (220yards) and the chain at 1/80th of a mile (22yards).

So 0.7miles becomes about 6 furlongs and 0.07miles becomes about 6chains.

For greater precision you can combine with the next unit down (like you do with specifying someone's height in feet and inches) so the 0.7miles should be correctly described as 5 furlongs 6 chains and 0.07miles should be described as 5 chains 13 yards.

There is a sub division of the chain in to the Rod (also called the pole or perch) which is 1/4 of a chain so comes out at 16.5feet, but is not too useful here and is considered archaic.

Simples!

Babbage boffin Ada Lovelace honored for computer science contributions

Maybe she only used binary...

No, the Difference and Analytical Engines worked in decimal, which meant that any storage location had to store ten different states.

When Konrad Zuse designed the Z1 mechanical computer (a century after Babbage had worked on the Analytical Engine) it used binary, so each storage location only needed to be one of two states and that simplified the mechanism.

I do recommend going to see the Z1 replica in the Deutsches Technikmuseum.

Disney kicks Slack to the curb, looks to Microsoft Teams for a happily ever after

"Teams is horrible."

Seconded.

Need to move 1.2 exabytes across the world every day? Just Effingo

Re: Updated for the modern era ...

microSD cards would be the way to go, rather than tapes.

Conveniently, Randall Munroe has done the sums in a What If?

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Re: Who, me?

Thank you so much for your confidence in me, but it was a typo!

On reflection it does work rather well though, “reds under the bed” and all that!

Re: Who, me?

I think you'll find it's that "rouge engineer" who previously worked for VW diesel emissions control department and then at Boeing developing the MCAS.

Raspberry Pi OS airs out some fresh options for the summer

...you can choose your Wayland compositor

Umm, what's a compositor, and why would I need one?

I realise I am starting to sound like Mel Smith in the HiFi Shop Sketch from "Not the Nine O'Clock News" all those years ago!

Switzerland to end 2024 with an analog FM broadcast-killing bang

Radio 3 bandwidth

Radio 3 has 192kb/s allocated to it, the most of any DAB channel.

The other BBC radio channels are mostly at 128kb/s.

Most commercial stations are squashed down to 64kb/s.

How many Microsoft missteps were forks that were just a bit of fun?

Don't mention Visual Source Safe

"I did once, but I think I got away with it!"

I think I might have PTSD from trying to maintain a VSS repo in a previous job. I'm not going to go in to the details of why it is so awful, as it may trigger an "episode"!

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

I think hydrogen fuel is the way to go.

Hydrogen is not the way to go...

At 1bar and 25 Celsius is has an almost negligible energy density (In the old school science experiment that produces a test tube full of hydrogen, when you put a match to it there is a pop and it's all gone. Imagine doing that to a test tube full of gasoline!).

So you have to get it up to several hundred bar to get the energy density up to anything useful, this required a big and heavy storage vessel.

Then your fuel stations need really reliably equipment for connecting a store of high pressure hydrogen to the tank in the vehicle.

There's the problem that hydrogen is such a small atom that it just permeates through the walls of the vessel and leaks away.

Finally, as fuel cells can't produce enough power, you have to burn the hydrogen in an internal combustion engine and that then generates all the NOx pollutants that you currently get.

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

Re: Sounds like ...

Moore than likely!

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: the gods invented Torx screws.

Only came across Roberstons recently wen they were mentioned in a William Gibson book!

Strikes me that a hex would have been better than a square and would have worked with allen keys. The "ball ended" type are a thing of mechanical genius!

OpenAI tells employees it won't claw back their vested equity

Re: Sounds to me like ...

“I'd keep my yap shut before I cashed out”

My understanding of the article was that they could come for your even after you had cashed out.

55 years ago, Apollo 10's crew turned the airwaves blue

Charlie Brown

I have admired it many times in the Science Museum.

It certainly looks like it has hurtled through the atmosphere at high speed.

To have been in it when it did would have required balls of steel!

Google Search results polluted by buggy AI-written code frustrate coders

Re: If you still actually use google

It all comes round again...

My spam-filled search index is bigger than yours! in this very organ from 19 years ago!

Open source Z80 clone seeks to help bring classic chip back from the dead

Recreate the more highly integrated variants

Perhaps the way to go would be to build it up in to something like the Z84C13 or C15 which integrated a Z80 with an SIO, PIO (only in the C15), CTC and some extra support logic.

Zilog Z84C15 Data here.

First Ariane 6 rocket ready to assemble as Europe begins final countdown

Why so late?

It's not like it's.... oh, wait, it is.

The eight-bit Z80 is dead. Long live the 16-bit Z80!

An end of an era, but 48 years is still very impressive

A few years ago my daughter and I built an RC2014 and she the programmed it with help of some of my 1980s reference books…

Whilst it is a pity for the firms that depend on them, it is still an amazing testament to the success of the design that it lasted so long.

Digital Realty wants to turn Irish datacenters into grid-stabilizing power jugglers

Re: Rather small

I did wonder about this too. 6MW is a fiddlingly small amount of power on a national power grid scale.

On average the UK (note, not Ireland) uses about 33GW (33,000MW) of power (all the time).

The power storage (Pump-Storage Hydro Electric) in North Wales is rated at 1.2GW (for about 6 hours, I think) and SSE are planning a new 1.5GW (for up to 10hrs) in Scotland.

Mars helicopter sends final message, but will keep collecting data

In many years time....

Perseverance, on it's unpteenth life-extension, but now missing a fair number of bits in its memory, wandering absentmindedly about Valinor Hills muttering "I am sure I left it here somewhere.."

DARPA tasks Northrop Grumman with drafting lunar train blueprints

Re: Halfway there

171 miles of HSR for $40 billion?

That's only $234 million per mile. We've managed to make ours cost about $500 million per mile! Costings from this article.

China breakthrough promises optical discs that store hundreds of terabytes

Pause for a moment…

…and open the desk drawer.

At the back are some rolls of punch tape that have been knocking about for around 50years…

Sigh nostalgically!

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

Re: RE: the bottom of the tower is reached along a pokey, dull little alley

It was on OS Maps...

The National Library of Scotland host old OS maps and Sheet TQ 28/38 - City of London Published in 1971 has it marked as PO Twr

Re: Good news....

I too have been up it a few years ago. Quite a splendid view and nice to watch it change, without having to leave your seat, at about 0.067rpm.

Famously has an exemption from the fire regulation about not using the lifts in case of a fire.

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

Something of a rum deal?

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

Re: Stainless?

Ah, but Jim was a rat gnawing at the ferro concrete wainscot.