Posts by Electronics'R'Us

Forget GameStop: Keyboard warriors and electronic trading have never mixed well

Re: Ignisecond, n.:

One of the places I worked at in the late 90s into early 2000s was a spinoff from SRI (which used to be RCA labs) in NJ.

The place was populated, to a great extent, with PhDs who typically were incredible researchers but with almost zero common sense and perhaps no concept of what was actually going on around them..

They retained a locksmith on staff to open up cars that had been locked with the keys still inside (and often with the engine left running). They also had a group of those nice people in white coats to help staff who needed some extra mental health treatment.

Big Tech workers prefer 3 days at home, 2 in the office. We ask Reg readers: What's your home-office balance?

Office only when required

I am working primarily from home, but I go in to the office on an ad hoc basis when it is actually required for various reasons. I must say the company is highly supportive of that including all the equipment including desks and chairs for home office if required.

Currently that is averaging out at about 1 day per month in the office.

Nominet claims effort to replace its board with 'safe hands' is invalid, refuses to put it to member vote

Re: Childish...

I am not in this particular part of the industry but it seems to me that GoDaddy et. al. might not want to have the icky brown stuff splash over them even slightly and may simply choose to abstain rather than ending up in a position where they have to defend a position to retain a clearly corrupt board of directors..

This is not in the mainstream news (yet, one hopes) but I suspect there are a lot of very private conversations being had over the possible fall out effects of supporting such leeches.

One can but hope.

Forgot Valentine's Day? Never mind, today marks 75 years of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer

Re: Smaller and lighter...?

You may not need delay loops for the 'real time experience' if it were written in Intercal.

UK watchdog fines two firms £270k for cold-calling 531,000 people who had opted out

Spoofing unused codes

There are a lot of unallocated dialling codes in the UK.

I have had calls (Indian accent but that simply helps confirm things) from what appears to the uninitiated as a call from a UK landline, but a quick check showed the dialling code was not actually used.

A pretty common trick used by would be scammers (We often get the "This is Microsoft calling about your computer" - quite amusing when I tell them I design computers for a living and besides, the computer is currently turned off).

Housekeeping and kernel upgrades do not always make for happy bedfellows

New and updated commands

Oh the joy.

I was working with a mixture of SPARC and UltraSPARC (Solaris) machines and some SGI Indys (IRIX) in the late 90s. A lot of the 'standard' commands (such as at) had totally different command line options.

Even on the same machine where /usr had not changed in a long time but the OS had undergone a number of releases, differences could exist between apparently identical commands in /bin and /usr/bin

Confusion reigns!

Happy days.

The unanswered question at CentOS community Q&A: How can we trust you now?

Re: Trust

It's not just the software / OS world that is built on trust; the best vendors in technology realise this.

I had $BIG_VENDOR decide to EOL a bunch of products with no possible last time buy. They got moved to the 'Do Not Use' category really quickly.

In high reliability and other areas that need true long term support (think decades) the trust in the vendors to continue to support specific parts becomes a major part of the decision making process at the design stage.

If a part (especially in some areas) becomes EOL, it may be necessary to re-qualify the equipment (and even partial requalification can be $$$$$$$).

A vendor who has lost the trust of any of the larger companies in those areas (and others) will slowly but surely lose design wins to companies who actually keep their word. Word does indeed get around - it is not that huge an industry and many of the people in it are pretty connected even if they are in competition.

Design win on a product with a long lifetime requirement == long term sales. Keep your word and design wins++. Rinse and repeat.

Note that the vendors do not have a contractual arrangement to supply parts for that amount of time (unless you want to use a die banking service - $$$$) but they are acutely aware that the trust of the developers is their single biggest asset.

Lose that trust and those designers will never use your products again wherever they happen to be working.

The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality

Re: Had a call...

I left a job once and after finding the new job atmosphere was depressing (virtually nobody ever smiled, as I recall) I left* and went back to the old job as a contractor (I was the only person who really understood the diagnostics for an enormous video on demand system).

The time involved was about 6 months IIRC.

I got my old desk and I had voice messages and my IT account still worked and had a few months worth of various crap in the email client.

Security - we've heard of it.

* Actually I got myself fired - this was New Jersey and when someone over the age of 45 (IIRC) was let go, state law at the time assumed the company had engaged in age discrimination so I got a decent settlement for agreeing not to pursue an age discrimination claim against them.

Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit used by police

Re: Too big to be bug free

Many AI / ML algorithms are learned on the fly and the algorithm being used cannot be confirmed or even well known.

This is a well known problem in AI.

So if this is such a piece of software (MATLAB is great for doing whizzy mathematical things) then defending it will become very difficult indeed given the stakes involved.

Having been an expert witness, I remember when one lawyer told me that a jury will believe the expert witness who is the most credible in their eyes as they will almost certainly not understand the testimony, but that is a separate issue.

In Rust we trust: Shoring up Apache, ISRG ditches C, turns to wunderkind lang for new TLS crypto module

C has many reasons to use it

In microcontroller embedded development (small standalone systems with perhaps a serial interface) C is perfect.

Let's look at the 2 major problems that can crop up.

Dynamic memory management. In these types of products that is simply not an issue. Any buffers are declared using a const (not malloc()ed). This is pretty much standard practice in this area.

Buffer overflows. Pretty trivial to catch. I already know the size of the buffer(s) involved (because they are defined by a const rather than try and keep track through an assigned variable) and can easily bounds check them. In many function calls, I actually specify the buffer size being passed by reference.

The one area that could catch someone out is communication buffers. Once more, it is trivial to simply stop receiving data if an overflow would occur (once more, because I know the size of the buffer).

Yes, there are parts of C that can produce unsafe code but there are many applications where those issues simply do not exist.

Given that if I am writing a bare metal application I will, of necessity, need to use pointers because that is precisely the use case for internal dedicated hardware registers. Provided the headers have been properly written (doesn't happen every time, admittedly, but that can be checked via proper testing) then I use the definitions from the headers and not magic numbers.

Oh, and -Wall.

Certainly there are things I would not necessarily write in C but remaining aware of the pitfalls (particularly if I am maintaining some older code) keeps things clean.

Re: Real problem mentioned first

Well said.

I have been doing electronics for money for over 50 years and programming for 40 - and I am still very much in the game.

Before others say something like "but you are stuck in old methods" I will mention a couple of things (the list could be longer but just as a starter):

1. We have not yet repealed Ohms Law and some might be surprised at just how many faults can be analysed with that alone. Mr. Kirchoff's rules are also rather useful to this day. Ohm's law was proposed by Georg Ohm in 1827 and eventually accepted in the 1850s. Does the new crowd think that is outdated?

2. I have my name on a couple of high speed (multi-gigabit) networking standards (one of which is used by so much stuff that it is ubiquitous now) so I am not 'stuck in the past' - I have moved with the industry.

Old and still in the game should indeed give a bit of advanced warning.

Obligatory quote

"If carpenters built buildings the way programmers write programs, then civilization would be destroyed by the first woodpecker to come along".

Re: Real problem mentioned first

I (and many others like me) who have been programming for a few decades are fully aware that new languages are available and use them where they make sense.

C is perfect in embedded microcontrollers for numerous reasons (C constructs map very nicely onto such hardware) but it wouldn't be appropriate in some other contexts. It is telling to note that the (mostly free) IDEs that are available for microcontroller development support C and C++ out of the box (or download).

When doing 8 bit microprocessor / microcontroller designs (yes, those are still very much alive and well) I may even drop into assembly for some stuff.

Many modern languages are in response to a particular set of use cases that other languages were not really suited to; there is no universal language (I may have just started a holy war there).

So we are very much aware of new languages, but using any language in an application it is not really suitable for is a poor design choice. That will be as true for Rust as it is for any other language..

How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

Re: Back in the day....

Two amusing tales from days gone by (where health and safety was not such a concern as it is today).

As a youngster in the electronics repair shop, we would sometimes amuse ourselves by charging up an enormous capacitor to the limit of the bench power supply of around 80V (2500 microfarad, 100V part IIRC). We would then clip one end of it to a metal plate and holding the other lead with insulated pliers, proceed to engrave rude things on the metal plate by keeping the lead at a distance across which an arc could form.

When I was in college, there was an enormous wirewound inductor encased within a Perspex cover and it had a blade switch.

One day, the instructor demonstrated an effect known colloquially as 'inductive kick'.

He moved the blade switch to supply DC to the inductor, then turned off the lights and moved the blade switch to remove the DC current.

There was a blinding flash of light and a sizzling sound; very impressive but I am not too sure how bad it was for the eyes as such a flash has quite a lot of UV.

Both things that health and safety inspectors might be aghast at today.

Decade-old bug in Linux world's sudo can be abused by any logged-in user to gain root privileges

Re: How is this possible? - Real programmers don't each Quiche

C actually works extremely well for embedded microcontrollers which can have quite large programs as the architecture often maps very nicely to C constructs.

Certainly, a lot of discipline is necessary to write large C programs, but it is perfectly possible to write bug free code if you follow a decent coding standard and thoroughly test.

Courses for horses and all that.

Re: How is this possible?

Commandment 5:

Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''.

This rule is perhaps one of the most important and f it is not adhered to then very bad things can happen.

The Ten Commandments for C Programmers

What happens when the internet realizes the stock market is basically a casino? They go shopping at the Mall

Re: Stocks market needs to die

How much is a company worth?

This reminds me of when I was studying macroeconomics many years ago.

The mantra was (and remains) Any product is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it.

Back to the office with you: 'Perhaps 5 days is too much family time' – Workday CEO

The company I am currently with

Is making flexible working (work from home unless you really need to come onto the site for many) the default position for now and the future. Most of the office space has been turned into meeting rooms.

There are some people who have to be onsite (production, physical test and so forth) but I can analyse a problem from my home office just as well as in an office (and possibly better). When I need to talk to onsite people we do a video call and share screens to explain issues and solutions. Seems to be working well so far.

I do go to the office when it is really necessary (a piece of equipment being tested is exhibiting a very unusual failure mode, for instance, so I need to physically see what it is doing hands on with the test equipment).

There are some people for whom this does not work very well - families with young kids in a smallish house / apartment and young grads who may only have a bedroom, small kitchen and bathroom come to mind, but the company really has done everything they can to enable WFH.

I work from my home office in south east Cornwall, while a manager (not mine) is working from his home in Montrose (in Scotland) where the primary office for both of us is in Plymouth and we seem to be getting things done properly.

Hollywood drone pilot admits he crashed gizmo into cop chopper, triggering emergency landing

Re: Damage to main rotor

If the helicopter is moving forward at speed, there is virtually no downdraft, so the risk can exist.

On aircraft structural integrity; I worked on a lot of different military aircraft in years gone by from helicopters to fast jets and they are designed to withstand enormous stresses and forces but only in a specific manner.

Take any number of fast jet aircraft (and indeed commercial aircraft); you will often see the words 'NO STEP' painted large on some wing areas. The reason is that although these areas can withstand enormous aerodynamic forces in flight, the weight of a single person (much less force than going at mach 2) that happens to be doing downward pressure on the surface is enough to damage it.

Rotor blades, likewise, are designed to withstand aerodynamic forces but don't do so well when the forces are from an unintended direction, so blade damage, while unlikely, is a definite possibility.

Union warns Openreach that engineers are ready to vote for industrial action over new grading structure

Re: Openreach [..] engineers

A friend of mine wrote an article titled (I think) Everyone who is nobody is an engineer.

I started off as a mechanic and moved up as I learned more through technician to engineer (including being a design authority for safety critical products).

As a mechanic, I had to understand transistor and vacuum tube theory (apart from all the other good stuff like filters, resistors, capacitors and lots more). I strongly doubt that any of the openreach 'engineers' understand transistor or amplifier theory and based on that they are non electronics mechanics from my perspective.

I had no problem being called a mechanic - it accurately described my capabilities at the time and it makes it far simpler to understand who can do what (design engineers who have never been mechanics and had to fix things can design stuff that is impossible to access so starting there certainly has had its advantages).

Some time ago, our washing machine decided to give up the ghost and as it was in warranty, I called and was told they would 'send an engineer'; I responded that all I needed was a fixed washing machine, not someone to design a new one for me. Quite amusing.

Backers of Planet Computers' Astro Slide 5G phone furious after shock specs downgrade

This seems plausible

"We tried two or three avenues to actually get the processor, and all the feedback from all the different avenues we took was, 'look, we cannot support smaller manufacturers on this. We can license you the 800."

This is not particularly unusual in electronics (particularly for devices targeted at the consumer market). I was designing a rugged XDA (designed for truck drivers) and I wanted to add GPS.

The space inside anything like this is constrained so solution size was important. We found a silicon vendor with a device that would have been perfect, but they wanted a minimum commitment to 10,000 per month. We did not expect to sell more than a thousand over the product lifetime. (I did find another solution that was marginally larger).

One particular manufacturer of a wide range of electronics used to do batch runs of a few million, but unless you were buying several hundred K of those parts, you would be at the end of the line (provided any were still available).They have since improved (a bit) but about 30% of what I can find on their website has never existed except in verification form (so not available).

MOQ can be a killer for small outfits.

Linux developers get ready to wield the secateurs against elderly microprocessors

Re: Dear me

If you take a flight on an older B777, there is a good chance that the primary flight control computer (well, one lane of three) is running code on a 486. Each of the three lanes requires processor dissimilarity.

There was a technology update some years ago as getting new parts was virtually impossible (and therefore building new boxes for new aircraft was becoming impossible) unless we used a particular company (there are companies out there who will bank processor dies and even package them for you but the cost around 10 years ago was about £1,000 or more per piece).

Note that I am referring to the original type of B777, not the B777X, of which many horror stories abound.

United States Congress stormed by violent followers of defeated president, Biden win confirmation halted

Re: For so many years...

Indeed so.

I lived in the USA for 22 years and contrary to many opinions here it is not that bad a place - like all countries it has plenty of idiots. The issue of health care is strange to many here, but I would remind them that we (UK) were in the same place at the end of WW2. Injured soldiers coming back from the front were treated better than in previous conflicts (discharged and no way to earn a living). Glass houses and all that.

Our benefits system when I was much younger was not anywhere near as generous as it is today. (So if some think it is not generous enough, remember it is far better than what we had).

I was ok as I always had insurance and in fact many tech companies (and probably many other industries) use health care subsidies as a lure.

I studied the constitution simply because I found it fascinating; the idea that a country did not have a ruling elite and that religion was best left to the choice of people (even if there was collateral damage in the early days of the republic).

What is interesting from that study is that the Executive was supposed to be the weakest part of government.

From my time there I think the optimal solution is President from one party and the senate controlled by the opposition; it forces compromise on many things such as federal appointments.

Just my take.

New year, new rant: Linus Torvalds rails at Intel for 'killing' the ECC industry

Re: I don't see it that way

ECC simply adds an extra 8 bits of the same memory device to a 64 bit interface for DDRx SDRAM systems (which is what just about everything in this arena uses).

So the cost of parts is 12.5% more for the memory device (and probably far less than 1% at the system level).

The ECC is done in the memory controller (part of the microprocessor) and as it is a standard thing, the marginal cost of adding it is tiny - a little bit more silicon real estate.

There are some extra PCB tracks to be added but given how many are already present they add little cost (might make PCB routing more interesting but it really is not that much more complexity). Initialisation of memory takes a bit longer (every memory location has to be written a valid value for the ECC to be valid) although it is possible to simply initialise a process space when it is first used.

The only reason I can see for Intel to take this stance is to make sure that those with a need for ECC have to pay a hefty premium.

I have done designs with ECC for decades and the marginal cost doesn't really even show up in the grands scheme of things.

Julian Assange will NOT be extradited to the US over WikiLeaks hacking and spy charges, rules British judge

Re: This confused me

Indeed so; the key here is that people who are expected to need access to classified information see it all spelled out in gruesome detail and that was my point.

I never saw a clause in the (admittedly short) forms where secret information from another state was necessarily a UK secret. There are occasions when that is true and I have seen such specific occasions but in general the OSA protects UK secrets.

This confused me

Judge Baraitser also dismissed Assange's legal arguments that publishing stolen US government documents on WikiLeaks was not a crime in the UK, ruling that had he been charged in the UK, he would have been guilty of offences under the Official Secrets Acts 1911-1989.

Having been subject to the official secrets act for many of my years (I have signed the form that I understand my responsibilities etc. etc. more times than I care to recall), I could understand a successful prosecution for publishing UK secrets in the UK, but not US secrets (unless they are shared NATO secrets, but I don't recall any of that being the case).

I would appreciate if someone might enlighten me here.

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Re: "They should have a law against old dying dinosaurs buying up innovative companies"

Red Hat has been doing very well for itself for a long time. If they had not been, then IBM would not have ponied up $34 Billion for them.

I don't think Red Hat needed a buyer, but an offer was made that its shareholders and board believed to be of great value to them.

Such is the way of corporations.

FOSS has been very successful for Red Hat pre-IBM buyout - this looks like IBM pushing to get more paid licences in contradiction to the IBM statement that "...vowed to keep its new unit independent...".

This simply smacks of IBM being In Beancounting Mode.

Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty

Re: WD40

Many years ago when I was at (what was) RNAS Portland I was working in the electronics repair workshop for a while.

In the summer we were plagued by large flies (particularly in the crewroom, probably because of the presence of sugar and other assorted snacks).

Some of the crew used to get the cans of WD40 with the tubes fitted and they made pretty good miniature flamethrowers although the fly remnants were sometimes difficult to remove.

US aviation regulator issues safety bulletins over flaws in software updates for Boeing 747, 777, 787 airliners

Common platform?

This appears to be the flight management computer (FMC) and although auto-throttle has been around a long time, the flight control computers are in the 777 and 787 (although different) but the 747 is not a fly by wire aircraft and therefore does not require them.

It would not surprise me if this is a common platform across the models and it is highly likely to be made by a different company.

This does not excuse Boeing who are supposed to run these in the rigs and exercise them against all possible issues (including the specific scenario addressed) and if there are issues go back to the supplier and tell them about it.

Note that Boeing would have sent whatever company it is a requirement specification (which used to be great from them but not now, it appears) for whatever upgrades they were suggesting.

It is not unusual for features to be added to avionics over the life of the aircraft (and they are often subject to redesign due to obsolescence) but I find it interesting (and appalling at the same time) that such a pretty standard issue clearly did not get thoroughly tested.

How to leak data via Wi-Fi when there's no Wi-Fi chip: Boffin turns memory bus into covert data transmitter

Re: Early WiFi ? (LOL)

Although I agree that it is not really 'WiFi' for the reasons you cite and more, a Faraday cage is actually not what you need (there is often a misunderstanding of just what a Faraday cage actually is - it is often a mesh with the mesh size chosen to be too small for the energy to pass through).

Faraday cages are really good at containing the E (electric) field and in really old kit (think vacuum tubes) where high impedances abounded this was a good solution. In the cases where something is labelled a Faraday shield that has no openings it is really a magnetic shield.

The higher the impedance of a circuit, the more dominant the E field becomes the lower the impedance the more dominant the H (magnetic) field becomes.

Modern memory interfaces (and high speed serial links for that matter) are very low impedance (DDRx runs between 30 and 60 ohms single ended, comms interfaces are usually around 100 ohm differential with around 65 ohms on each one in the pair - the reason it is not 50 each usually is due to differential pair coupling).

In these interfaces, the H field is dominant and to contain it requires a magnetic shield; far harder to do than a Faraday cage (I know, I have had to do it to pass EMC on a few occasions).

A magnetic shield has to completely enclose the energy source and even then there will be some radiation due to imperfections in the housing.

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Re: Misses the point

Until then, how do you support the websites you rely on?

I have a 'premium' subscription to a national newspaper; this means I get the dead tree version and all the content of the web site.

The problem I have is that they still fling page upon page of ads at me even though I am paying hundreds of pounds a year for that subscription.

That website gets the Firefox + NoScript treatment (the only domains allowed are the ones that actually let me sign in).

I did an experiment to allow all the ads and scripts one day.

The result: the laptop (which is no slouch - dual core 2.4GHz 7th gen I7, 8GB RAM) got maxed out with almost 100% CPU utilisation- the fan started up almost immediately which is unusual unless I am running something such as a circuit simulation in LTSpice.

I took a look at all the domains running scripts and it was so long I had to scroll down three times to see all of them. It was also interesting to see that the scripts listed only on the home page is quite short (and virtually all blocked anyway now) so that means that a script from a third party domain is calling other scripts from other third party domains and so forth.

The other issue I have with this is quite simple: ads in the print edition are subject (quite reasonably) to some due diligence, but how do they do that with an ad flung from $DEITY knows where and scripts loaded on the fly from third party domains? My view is that it is impossible to effectively do.

An observation; running scripts directly from third party domains is stupid, in my view.

What does my neighbour's Tesla have in common with a stairlift?

Re: Battery EVs

...as long as the lithium is only dug up in places that nobody in the West cares about...

There is some exploration going on into the possibility of mining Lithium in Cornwall.

Re: Charging

There is no doubt that alternative fuel is getting a lot of investment and we will, no doubt, see other (perhaps much better) alternatives in the future. My engineering experience is that there is always a trade-off; that is as true at system level and power source level as it is for components.

Sometimes 'old' technology is actually the best fit for the job; a lot of satellites (especially communications) use a vacuum tube for the final power amplifier (a travelling wave tube usually).

As I like to remind those who think old ideas aren't valid; we have not yet repealed Ohm's law.

I am not opposed to EVs conceptually; I just cast my sceptical eye over the assertions without proof and wonder just what they are ingesting (must be expensive given some of the pronouncements we have seen). Certainly they have come a long way, but it has also taken a long time. EVs are evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

EVs can make a lot of sense for the correct use case; I just have doubts over the infrastructure. Governments rarely (ever?) actually operate for the long term vision (unless it is a political ego project like HS2 that is going to cost $Deity knows how much for a very limited return).

On that note, the proposed EV infrastructure is a large government project. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Charging

I don't know what you're smoking but can I have some?

Indeed. There are a lot of issues with batteries. Here are just a few.

1. Self discharge. All batteries leak to a greater or lesser extent. Rechargeable batteries have pretty high rates (not incredibly high but it is still noticeable). That is just as true for the battery in my diesel vehicle but it has one primary duty - start the engine; it is not the primary source of motive power.

2. Charging efficiency. The closer you get to 100% charge, the less efficient the charging becomes. That is why most hybrids only charge up the battery to about 70% (this will vary depending on the specifics of the battery). Fast charging can also be detrimental due to excessive heat during the charging process.

3. Limited charging cycles. Industrial Li+ batteries certainly have more charging cycles than consumer kit but it is still limited. That means, somewhere down the line, the batteries will need to be replaced and the recycling chain for that doesn't appear to be in place yet.

The amount of extra fuel I use to recharge my vehicle battery still needs to be provided of course (but as long as I have fuel in the tank and a battery that can start it I can get going - not so with an all electric if the battery is severely depleted).

So how are these all electric vehicles going to get to this charging station when there may not be enough energy left in the battery to do so?

So called battery 'gas gauges' (there are such things - a better name would be a 'state of charge monitor') are notoriously inaccurate in these types of application until they have been 'trained' - that is because they are primarily doing coulomb counting and it needs a few cycles of the battery to adjust for a realistic measurement. When you see 50% charge many expect you can go the same distance again but this does not account for another inefficiency - power conversion. The batteries do not directly drive the power train but are run through converters which have their own inefficiencies which has a dependency on the input voltage from the batteries.

Power train power is an energy conversion issue, so as the battery voltage goes down, the battery output current goes up for a given power demand.

Electric vehicles do have (current ones anyway) regenerative braking to recover energy that would otherwise be lost to heat so that is a positive; this has been used for decades in some applications.

Lots to do yet, and I don't see it happening any time soon.

Court orders encrypted email biz Tutanota to build a backdoor in user's mailbox, founder says 'this is absurd'

Re: Dear Courts. No. Go away.

Let's do a perfectly possible scenario.

I encrypt a message (to paper) using a one time pad (the only provably secure form of encryption).

I now securely destroy that one time pad.

I put this message in an envelope and mail it to a recipient (who may not actually be the final recipient).

The authorities want to know what it says, but I never memorised the pad key (which is nigh on impossible anyway for any moderately large message and there are other things one can do to muddy the waters even if I could actually tell you the key I was working from - might be an intermediate key as is often done in electronic crypto).

The mail is intercepted and read, but it is, of course, gibberish without the recipient one time pad. There are ways of knowing when an envelope has been tampered with, incidentally.

Trying to get that key from a cutout is useless as they will not have the key but they may have been instructed to simply destroy the message if any sign of tampering is found.

So they have some options, but none that are attractive. In the UK they could demand the keys, of course, but let's put that aside for now.

Do tell what is actually illegal about that scenario.

Pure frustration: What happens when someone uses your email address to sign up for PayPal, car hire, doctors, security systems and more

Email addresses with numbers attached

When I was working for $BIG_PLC I had an internal email address with the suffix 9 (I have a relatively common name - at least it lets me hide in the phone book).

I lost count of the number of times vendors would send <item> to the person who did not have any suffix but the same name. We eventually set up an email group for everyone with the same name in the company so we could ask if such and such was meant for someone else with the same name.

Cops raid home of ousted data scientist who created her own Florida COVID-19 dashboard

Re: Probs just standard operating procedure

Many years ago (possibly before I actually went to the USA permanently so mid 70s) my then g/f worked in an area in Norfolk, VA well known for problems at night. (She was working in a bar opposite a 'massage parlour').

She told me that one of the local cops had turned down a promotion because he would have had to drive a desk and he 'enjoyed kicking ass'.

No change there, then.

Apple's M1: the fastest and bestest ever silicon = revolution? Nah, there's far more interesting stuff happening in tech that matters to everyone

Re: I fear that too much shiny is taking a toll on some people's attention span.

In really high performance computing, which is massively parallel, the speed of moving the data between nodes is a key performance metric, quite apart from the speed of the cores.

You can see the state of the art www.top500.org

There are a number of things involved (latency is a key issue) but in those environments there is a huge amount of data being shovelled around.

Running joke: That fitness gadget? It's, er, run out

Re: why?

We see you have been 'marking your territory' at least 6 times today and you were not in the vicinity of a proper facility.

Can we interest you in a real bathroom?

Calls for 'right to repair' electronics laws grow louder across Europe

Re: Just because...

I think the trend towards BGAs needs to be understood in the wider context and from a designer's perspective.

BGAs have a number of things going for them. They save physical space; for a given number of contacts, BGAs are the smallest solution. When in reflow (which is basically a multi-stage oven with different temperature zones) a BGA will actually pull itself onto the pads even if it was not precisely placed by the pick and place equipment. That cannot be said of non BGA packages which will be soldered where they are physically placed.

Contrary to what is widely believed, BGAs are really not that difficult to remove and replace; it requires slightly more specialised equipment but it does not cost thousands (unless you expect to be doing a lot of them when the cost can get quite high).

The use of security devices to ensure you can only buy the OEM parts is a blight on the world of electronics in many cases but absolutely necessary in others (you really wouldn't want anything safety critical to be using anything other than the part we know really works and that can include even a die revision which is something I have seen in a particular autopilot).

When it is used to force you into using the dealer network (especially for things we used to do ourselves) it is simply wrong and needs to be clamped down on.

When designing modern equipment, the form factor (size) is often a key for marketdroids so we are forced into very high density layouts which do require somewhat specialist equipment - try desoldering (or even seeing clearly!) a 01005 component which are now commonplace in smart phones and have been since around 2000 or so.

As to adding a mezzanine, that introduces a connector. In electronics, about 90% of faults are connectors.

Deliberately soldering down memory in a system that does not really require it is just taking the p*ss but there are occasions where that is a better solution.

There are companies out there that use lock in methods to extract as much money from people as possible and it is those I avoid.

Having a robust repairability index would be a very good start.

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

Re: Funny placenames

As you take the A2 east bound from the Dartford Tunnel, you will see a sign for

CHALK

THONG

I was always amused at that one.

Near where I used to live (in Thanet) a particular sign was forever being stolen so it was eventually made into two separate markers.

It pointed to

HAM SANDWICH

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

Make

Some time ago (prior to the turn of the century) I was writing a lot of diagnostics for a product (using an SGI Indy - fun times)

One fine day, I checked out the latest branch to address a requested feature but when I tried to compile, I got many screens worth of errors.

Turns out that the previous checkout (by users unknown) had loaded the makefile into their editor which converted tabs to spaces.

In that version of make, tabs vs. spaces had meaning so I had to get an older version of the makefile and check it back in.

That made for an interesting morning.

EU says Boeing 737 Max won't fly over the Continent just yet: The US can make its own choices over pilot training

Re: Two angle-of-attach sensors not enough

AF447 had a triplex system.

In such a system, there are 3 independent computers with their own sensor feed and they vote every few 10s of milliseconds on the parameters they read.

For this to work properly, 2 computing lanes must agree.

AF447 lost at least 2 pitot tubes (and therefore 2 computing elements).

The telemetry showed this as one of the first messages was 'airspeed disagree' followed by 'alternate laws'.

This is a well known term in avionics (and in particular flight control systems).

The flight control system can no longer trust some inputs and the control laws are relaxed. With all 3 pitot tubes giving different readings there was no way for the flight control computer to actually fly the aircraft.

This is where the fact that the crew in the cockpit did not know how to fly became the issue.

Not sunshine, moonlight or good times – blame it on the buggy

Compiler verbosity

I was working with a bare metal system using good old GCC with -wall as the default setting and as happens with bare metal, many pointers are loaded into the internal registers of the microcontroller*.

So I was happily writing said code and at compile time there were loads of warnings about assigning a uint32_t to a pointer.

I went back through, meticulously prefixing them with (uint32_t *) to do the typecast and get rid of the noise and added comments:

/* typecast to silence GCC's verbal diarrhoea */

My manager looked and said 'You can't leave that in there!' (I did).

* Modern microcontrollers have so many damn peripherals internally that the init code is an eye glaze inducing list of pointer assignments into the various peripheral registers.

UX / UI

At the place I currently work, it was decided to introduce a new system for evaluations (which, in all fairness, seems to be working quite well).

A new in-house set of web forms was duly produced and clearly not given to average users to test.

The web form for recording these conversations (which is really what they are rather than the 'PDR' crap) had a bright rectangular piece of text on a contrasting background that gave no indication it might actually do anything (didn't highlight with a mouse over, cursor didn't change, no url in the status bar), but when I decided to check things out and click on said apparently inert object (the first conversations were the beta test effectively), I was whisked to a completely different page.

I had a bit of a vent about that one.

Rule 1: If a button can do something then make it clear with a visual clue.

Linux Foundation, IBM, Cisco and others back ‘Inclusive Naming Initiative’ to change nasty tech terms

Puritanism

I agree with you.

Here is a definition I heard many years ago.

Puritanism: The nagging fear that someone, somewhere, is enjoying themselves.

Re: What about non-English offensive words ?

Are we going to insist that countries or communities change their names as well?

Montenegro comes to mind along with some others, such as Isla Negra.

Will there have to be an alias in a database of countries to avoid these terrible things?

</sarcasm>

Re: Lefties

You left out the term gauche

Have another pint :)

Re: > Also acceptable: * Parent/child

Deleting text in EMACS has the perversely satisfying response:

140* characters killed.

* your number may vary :)

Watchdog signals Boeing 737 Max jets can return to US skies following software upgrade, pilot training

Stable?

From other comments long ago, I seem to recall that the 737-NG could not power out of an incipient stall, unlike the predecessors which could (i.e. applying power in the older versions could solve the problem).

The nose had to be lowered first (second nature to glider pilots).

The MAX has an instability (and a critical non conformance to the part 25 rules) in a small part of the flight envelope which MCAS was 'designed' to handle. Thus a computer that was bolted on to an otherwise dumb aircraft that had full trim authority (that was not even properly documented in the engineering documents).

At full extents, the elevators have insufficient authority to overcome it because the elevators are tiny compared to the trim area.

Aircraft automation is great, but without a proper design process it is asking for trouble.

Let's be clear; MCAS is (was) an autonomous flight control system that had crap engineering all over it (I do not blame the engineers, I blame the management as they could override engineering concerns based on business issues, not engineering risk analysis).

Where an aircraft has been designed to be fly by wire from the outset (the B777 comes to mind as I am familiar with the system) and has been properly engineered the risks are incredibly low. (I am not referring to the latest version of the 777 here incidentally).

That was clearly never done for the MAX.