Posts by David Hicklin

Self-imposed climate change may have killed Martian life

Re: Just curious

That sounds like an error in the text - the atmosphere would have had little effect on the core temperature

People still seem to think their fancy cars are fully self-driving

Re: Last time I checked ...

I was taught to drive as smoothly as possible. No sudden acceleration, no sudden braking.

They key phrase you are looking for is anticipation , taking your foot off the accelerator before you reach the bend to allow the speed to drop without having to hit the brakes.

iPhone 14 car crash detection triggered by roller coasters

Re: Rollercoasters are a bit niche

replace a helmet after a collision?

same thing applies to unauthorised horse dismounts, mine had a 1.5 inch crack up one side where my head said "hello ground!" (which was not friendly at all) after going out the side door (horse spooks left and like cartoon style you hang in the air and drop!). Thankfully no memory of the fall, all I got was the group of us yelling "lets go" as we cantered off then lying on my back in the mud.

Yeah and head mounted camera's, a nice bulky object just waiting to punch a hole through the top of the helmet when you fall on it!

Make your neighbor think their house is haunted by blinking their Ikea smart bulbs

Re: neighbor ???

"land of the free"

It is about time that there was some for of tag/id on these words so that they are spelled according to the language of your browser

Come on! It! cant! be! that! hard!

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

Re: Slightly larger scale

freezer that "appeared" damaged

That should have been a liability claim on the kitchen fitters.

Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister

Re: This is a local internet for local people, there's nothing for the likes of you here.

Thatcher

She did have a spine

She knew where we were better off - Inside rather than outside in the cold

She got us the best deal possible - rebate and op-out - but we still had access to a single market on our doorstep.

Block this: Using satellites to plaster ads over our skies could work, say boffins

UK will be OK then

Its always cloudy here

USB-C iPhone, anyone? EU finalizes charging standard rule

Re: Ouch - who left that plug there?

With the main disadvantage being it likes to lie on its back (pins up) waiting to be trodden on in the dark.

That's a design feature, how else do you find that dropped lamp lead in the dark ?

Online romance scamlord who netted $9.5m jailed for 25 years

people who fell for the scam are so well off in the first place.

Problem is they were not rich - many borrowed heavily to fund the scam

Chipmakers cut output, investment – but government bucks never go out of style

Hummm demand may be down for top end CPUs GPUs but the rest of the industry is STILL crying out for semiconductors.

But many of these need the older processes whilst most of the new plants are aimed at the high margin cutting edge ones.

Hopefully they will still keep on building them, after all these announcements are just for memory?

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

MOSFETs:

When I was still an apprentice (early 1980's) I was helping put together a switched mode PSU they were playing with in the lab complete with a birds nest ball of components (none of this fancy breadboard stuff!).

connecting up to a load bank of big resistors, after we had been testing most of they day I decided to have one more play and turned up the wick a bit too much......I got a lesson in thermal runaway as the output voltage slowly dropped until there was a POP! and glowing balls of the MOSFET innards went floating across the bench.

Got a good lesson in learning about heatsink design - those devices were bloody expensive in those days!

Wind, solar fulfill 10% of global electricity demand for first time

Re: Explosives do, what politics did not

"But why do that, when you can just keep the valves shut?"

Because now they can say we are ready to turn the taps back on and the "technical problems" are fixed but "Oh but the USA** blew the pipes up"

** Other scapegoats are available

Europe just might make it easier for people to sue for damage caused by AI tech

Re: AI?

"it's just machine learning,"

Totally agree, the human mind has the capability to leap out of the box and come up with completely new and novel ideas.

Machine Learning is constrained by the data set it has.

Uncle Sam to unmask anonymous writers using AI

Re: Defeating Computerized Author Attribution

Google Translate

They will have all the original texts to compare with in that case

Scientists overjoyed after DART smashes into asteroid Dimorphos, contact lost

Re: NASA insurance hike

"NCD only protects the percentage discount on your policy."

Fully agree, had a friend who was stung by this. He was quite upset!

Teardown shows Apple iPhone 14 Pro is not pro-repair

Re: Hard to make something pro repair and anti theft

" stolen at a club"

We had that, got sold on to somebody who even rang us up to ask us to unblock the phone!

Malwarebytes blocks Google, YouTube as malware

"adservice.googles.com"

I would have hoped that anyone blocks that by default

Arm execs: We respect RISC-V but it's not a rival in the datacenter

Re: NOW, we're in the third phase...

Biggest risk to Risc-V as noted in the article is extensions fragmentation - they could become the next Android forked all over the place

Don't say Pentium or Celeron anymore, it's just Processor now, says Intel

Re: Given their namings….

"They might be better off reducing the range of products."

I always understood that the model it is sold as depends on its performance when being tested, so partly "duff" chips can still be sold as a slow performance chip

Voyager 1 data corrupted by onboard computer that 'stopped working years ago'

Re: 07734

Similar here - 1980's tech Casio FX-82, still in daily use

The International Space Station will deorbit in glory. How's your legacy tech doing?

Re: A strange set of priorities

several commercial supersonic projects on the go now

Fireflash ??

Tesla faces Autopilot lawsuit alleging phantom braking

Re: Bad human drivers

anyone can have a bad day

The trick as you drive more is that you start to anticipate such drivers - just the way a car twitches or slow/speeds up can tell me they want to cut across me - that's after 40 years driving!

relatively minor sensor data interpretation problem

Try telling that to the driver following

Anyway this is not just Tesla, I have a friend who has a Golf that does the same thing...been in the garage more time than the road and still not fixed.

Germany orders Sept 1 shutdown of digital ad displays to save gas

Re: FRA airport is very nearly in compliance with this law....

and the airport has four runways

Unfortunately aircraft have wind limits and if it is blowing strongly in the wrong direction...

People in Kegworth hate easterly winds as the aircraft from East Midlands will use runway 09 instead of 27 which goes mostly across empty countryside

T-Mobile US and SpaceX hope to deliver phone service from space

Re: Hardware not compatible

Downlinks are the easy(ish) bit, it's the uplink that's going to be the real problem. Especially if it's meant to work with current 5G handsets

Exactly, you might get one sat to focus on that phone but the phone will reach many other sats, precisely why they don't like phone being use on planes - it not the plane but several dozen cell towers being in reach at once

Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'

Re: Photocopier challange

"I must admit I don't often turn around to look when reversing"

I used to do that a lot until I got a horsebox van that does not have a rear window (just the horses rear end in view !) and thus forced me to use mostly the wind mirrors

Google says there's no Waze forward, carpool app axed

Re: Just restore speed limits in driving mode please

I was impressed by the instructors honesty that "shit happens" and people are prosecuted for speeding when there has been a failure of signage.

Not quite my case of a failure of signage for my 2 courses, removing signs where it went from 30 - 40 for the last 30+ years caught me out both times, almost like muscle training, you have done it so long and automatically speed up.

Windows 10 update breaks audio for some systems

Re: *nix

"Brother laser printer from Windows. Windows just sits there apparently unable to "wake" the printer from it's slumbers"

I had the same issue only it also affected windows 7 O/S as well, try as you might windows says "printer offline" when it well and truly is not - it is also very random and the PC usually printed off the documents when it was rebooted and you logged back on....

Solution was the port configuration: it configures the printer name/IP address with something like BRN001BA9AE7621 or WSD-[mass of hex characters] - replacing that with the fixed IPv4 IP address solved it. I also suspect the IPv6 gets involved there as well...

WhatsApp boss says no to AI filters policing encrypted chat

Re: Of course Child Protection groups are all for this

"Automatically scanning all messages without any evidence or sufficient reason to think it contains illegal material"

That would be the equivalent of opening and reading every letter sent through the post !

Micron's 232-layer NAND is a game changer for database workloads

Re: Not so long ago

> 100meg zip drives

with probably a worse endurance than 3D NAND

Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area

Re: What, no nukes?

> Even a few houses - 5 or 6 maybe.

then 5 or 6 more....repeat a few times and you have your 300 eventually

Microsoft Teams outage widens to take out M365 services, admin center

Re: Probably due to MS updating the emoticons on Teams

You noticed as well?

I thought they had just got a bit "redder" to match the temperatures in the UK earlier this week

Is Microsoft going back to the future on release cadences?

Re: Agile is pretty much the way to develop software

. Nope, that's the problem with Waterfall, sit and think and think and think, then realise you've forgotten something far down the line.

No, that is very badly managed waterfall. Even in waterfall projects you should break it down into smaller stages. After all you can't build the walls of a house before the foundations are laid. So oh look - you already had agile.

Agile is just lots of mini-waterfalls, it works better for some things than others i.e. Horses for Courses.

At the end of the day many an agile project has that one, last critical waterfall before you get a working product.

Google, Oracle cloud servers wilt in UK heatwave, take down websites

Re: My airport is melting

> Apparently it is quite tricky to make a road surface that can handle extremely high temperatures

Apparently this only affects the older road surfaces, more recent ones are supposed to be specced for higher temperatures.

Re: Last night a friend was grumbling that they couldn't get into either ocado or waitrose

> Coca-Cola had to suspend/close one of its UK bottled water plants

They had to close it a they were caught out reselling bottled Thames Water tapwater

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Re: "The electronics have sunk out of sight"

After doing electronics as a hobby in the 70's and 80's, it took a back seat until recently when I got interested in PIC chips and programming them

However whilst they are great at producing really complex projects that discrete electronics would have struggled at, it seems that everything has a Pi or some other "module" at the heart of it leaving little - if anything - for newcomers to learn the trade.

Tories spar over UK's delayed Online Safety Bill

Re: I'm surprised

"Incidentally, if the UK had remained in the single market, there would be no need for that fucked up kludge called the NI protocol because there wouldn't be a trade border between NI and Ireland."

And that is where Brexit = impossible comes in: You need a border <somewhere> between Rep Ireland and the "UK".

They don't want one in Ireland, and they (DUP) don't want the one in the Irish Sea - BUT until you get one of those borders accepted Brexit will never be completed.

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

Re: Exchange

And now Confluence has replaced it

Until the web servers go down......

Re: Exchange

"That presupposes a company standard way of doing things that meets the companies needs."

Ah but which standard when it changes every other year?

Watch a RAID rebuild or go to a Christmas party? Tough choice

When I first had my DS415play I originally used RAID5 as most people do....later I changed that to 2 pairs of mirrored disks.

Why?

Well if one disk fails, both options are the same. However if a 2nd disk fails before the first is fixed then the RAID5 is 100% toast, whilst the mirrored option only has a 50% chance of toasting your data and needing a full rebuild and restore.

I could actually loose 3 disks and only half my stuff.....

Good news: Twitter fell over. Bad news: It's working again

Re: Everything green, nothing working

But the dashboard IS working !

Smart thermostat swarms are straining the US grid

"we didn't worry about bringing another coal fired power station online for the ad breaks"

That's why the UK built the pumped storage power stations: Idle to max power in under 30 seconds (according to the tour guide)

Re: Great if you want to hand out free cash!

> The leccy company put the direct debit up despite me paying them less, so now they get to cream all that interest off the money I've saved that should be in my pocket! I wont' get that DD money back for at least 12 months

Got the same here although my calculations show a decent credit building up by late summer - BUT...

..That assumes the prices **stay the same** and all indications are for a massive price increase (again) come the autumn price cap adjustment, so maybe they are trying to buffer us against them.

Boris Johnson set to step down with tech legacy in tatters

Re: Sub-sea nukes

"water levels in Lake Mead"

Isn't that down to having on of the worst droughts in living history? And if GW had not contributed to the intensity (note I don't say caused!), then what has ?

Of course it does help being insanely wasteful with the water you have.

Re: Sub-sea nukes

"It doesn't work like that."

Have an upvote

You find after a while the the mothballed plant gradually get stripped for spares to keep the active plants going - usually right at the moment you need them.

However you will need them fast, so they won't really be mothballed, more kept on standby

Large Hadron Collider experiment reveals three exotic particles

Re: Great, here we go again

2022... What are we going to end up with this time?

End of Boris ??

Re: Ever get the sense...

"Perhaps there are *no* bottom-level particles and that it's *more fundamental particles* all the way down "

At some point we would loose the particles and switch to pure energy - just like the big bang in reverse...oh..

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

Re: One Can...

...and if thirsty, the horse will drink.

Not always true!

After loading up mine in the box, driving somewhere, unloading, doing a 2.5 hour hack there is no way he will ever drink water from any bucket or trough at the venue

Always waits until we are back at the ranch and then promptly drains the water trough.........

Been that way for 11 years now.

UK govt promises to sink billions into electronic health records for England

Re: Our data, not theirs to sell

"The actions of the current Government have been to throw vast sums of money at the NHS."

What you are missing is how much of that is then thrown at private health care providers to make up for the shortfalls in the NHS - it ballooned during Covid

Returning to the Moon on the European Service Module

The "new" decimalised money, however, is not an issue

I can remember the plastic coins learning about it in Junior school