Posts by mutt13y

Miniature nuclear reactors could be the answer to sustainable datacenter growth

What waste

This is a fallacy. There is actually very little waste, especially if its a fast breeder reactor.

If all you are trying to do is make power and not plutonium the waste is easily manageable.

Aviation regulators push for more automation so flights can be run by a single pilot

two or zero are the only options

Many accidents where pilot error is the cause were precipitated by errors in monitoring or automation that were then mishandled by the pilots.

So if there is no pilot you do remove one of the last lines of defence.

There are probably many incidents where the automation went crazy and the pilots just handled it as they were trained and so we never hear about it.

That said there is a rule against having one person in the cockpit because of the spate of murdercides. So who is going to be there to make sure the one pilot does not intentionally crash the plane?

Lufthansa bans Apple AirTags on checked bags

Re: GPS

Yes, Exactly what I thought. They won't transmit unless they are queried by a nearby device and all nearby devices should be in flight mode.

Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice

Why

why would you pay for or even install Libre office on macos where you have pages, Numbers and Keynote included as standard.

Bonkers rocket launch sees craft slip sideways, barely climb and tear up terrain

Re: Nice recovery

Agreed 100%

Propulsion needs some wotk . But Guidance AMAZING give that team a medal

Senators urge US trade watchdog to look into whether Tesla may just be over-egging its Autopilot, FSD pudding

Re: I am kind of surprised...

It gets worse. Mercedes drive pilot (arguably better than tesla's drive pilot)

Reads the signs and if enabled changes the cruise setting to that speed.

Now you get foreign trucks on the motorway with (90) [Kph] on the back. Car sees that and sets the cruise to 90Mph!

Currently even the best systems only work in close to ideal road conditions. Bad lane markings, heavy rain, snow, fog and they cant cope.

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

Re: Add YOUR perhapslessthanformal Alternate Ideas HERE, Goys and Birls! :-

How about "Richard"

We have never given census data to anyone – not even the spy agencies, says the UK's Office for National Statistics

Not volunteered the data to MI5 LOL

MI6 probably has every other countries census data so its pretty absurd to believe MI5 wont have the UK data.

Getting access to restricted data is kind of their entire operation.

Missile systems software dev leaker has sentence almost doubled after UK.gov says 4½ years was too soft

Re: Veracrypt's deniability feature?

That is a huge problem you know?

Let's say you are using an encryption system with this feature but you didn't use it.

Police ask you for you password, as you don't want to go to prison and there is nothing much of importance in the encrypted data so you hand it over.

They find nothing.

Now they want the other password (which does not exist)

Of course they won't believe you and there is no way you can prove you haven't used the deniability feature.

so its 2.5 Years in prison for you for using an encryption system with this feature.

Robot wars! Scandi automation biz AutoStore slings patent sueball, claims it owns Ocado warehouse tech

Re: So...

These are quite different to a tape library. Usually there is one tape arm which is attached to the frame.

These warehouse systems use autonomous robots on a grid of tracks. They move quite fast and there is some sort of orchestration to (mostly) avoid collisions. The robots are like 100+Kg.

Also below the robots there are stacks of bins. I have never seen a tape library with more than one tape in a slot.

IMO there is plenty of scope for patentable algorithms and mechanics.

Bad news: Your Cisco switch is a fake and an update borked it. Good news: It wasn't designed to spy on you

Re: What's that old saying?

Mumma take this switch off of me, I don't need it anymore

UK government shakes magic money tree, finds $500m to buy a stake in struggling satellite firm OneWeb

Re: It Could Be Made to Work ???

Like GSM in order for the satellite internet to work all transmissions from various ground stations must arrive in sync. Therefore the ground transceiver must know the exact range to the satellite.

The problem as you correctly point out is that we would not have an exact position for the satellite.

You could potentially model this quite accurately and transmit the ephemeris data out of band.

Also you can have fixed ground stations verifying the exact position of each satellite the same way GPS does but have the clocks on the ground.

It will be clunky and probably never make it into consumer GPS but if what you want is a solution for the military in case we go to war with France then probably it will do the job

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

Re: The future is behind you ....

DAB has way less bandwidth than FM and many many stations are mono! So it's more like comparing CD to MP3.

DAB is *potentially* better quality than FM but that is not what they did.

I reckon most radio listening happens in cars these days. Well over 50% of which can not receive DAB

FCC boss orders probe into 'unacceptable' T-Mobile US outage after carrier plays dog-ate-my-homework card

Coincidence?

Backup failed at the same time indeed!

IME

Either the backup was active/standby and not tested at least not in the last 12 months.

or it was active/active and crept over 50% utilisation and no one noticed or cared.

GitHub to replace master with main across its services

OTOH

In git you can push master

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

No standard

Unless there is an agreed international standard for contract tracing app protocol its gonna be kind of useless.

Don't worry, IT contractors. New UK chancellor says HMRC will be gentle pushing IR35 rules

Won't happen

If it ends up that by contracting I have the same take home pay as I would have as an employee with none of the benefits then the answer is simple: Ill just get a permanent role.

by extension the number of people contracting will go down and therefore the day rates will go up. Also of course for perm salaries will go down.

We will reach some new equilibrium with some % fewer contractors working at higher day rates and more competition for perm roles at a lower salary.

Curse of Boeing continues: Now a telly satellite it built may explode, will be pushed up to 500km from geo orbit

Re: There isn’t time to vent the remaining fuel

Just a guess, but I imagine that the fuel is just some compressed gas.

Dumping probably involves carefully activating opposing thrusters.

Boeing, Boeing, gone! CEO Muilenburg quits 'effective immediately'

Re: MCAS =/= anti-death

It is capable of flying safely but it would not get a transport category certification because the relationship between yoke angle and rate of climb would not be linear.

Yes, the primary reason was to prevent need to retrain pilots, but it would have been a requirement anyway for certification

Re: ...maybe do some proper fucking testing.

Foget beta testing.

The fact that MCAS would repeat the trim operation when the AoA data stayed out of range is a clear example of not setting a done flag.

This kind of error should have been caught by friggin unit tests

Register Lecture: Can portable atomic clocks end UK dependence on GNSS?

Re: end UK dependance on GPS?

If you also have accurate accelerometers you could dead reckon.

You would still need the occasional* reference, perhaps from land based systems

*how occasional depends on the accuracy of your clock and accelerometers.

I believe inertial navigation is still one input to commercial aircraft navigation systems

Questions hang over Gatwick Airport after low level drone near-miss report

Re: Drones

There is some benefit.

You have a fighting chance of catching people flying a drone without a license, because their operations would always be illegal not just near airports.

Also making it illegal to sell one to an unlicensed individual will help.

It would reduce the number of idiots but not to 0.

Industry reps told the UK taxman everything wrong with extending IR35. What happened next will astound you

Re: Its about keeping the loophole open..... for the rich

>The problem for HMRC is then that they want to stop contractors using those rules - BUT NOT >REMOVE THOSE RULES for the big boys.

Exactly, and they would not have to put much of a dent in those rules to get the additional income they are after. I reckon if they increased Dividend tax by 1% they would make much more and be unambiguous.

Not 20%

I don't see how you get to 20%

outside IR35 contractors pay 19% corporation tax and 7.5% dividend tax = 26.5%

Inside IR35 20% income tax 12% NI = 32% (Because the salary is a deductible expense for the company)

so far only 5.5% worse off.

Now there is the matter of 13.5% Employer contributions but if the responsibility movs to the employer and they determine that the contractor is inside then they can pay the Employer NI themselves just like they do for all there other employees.

Don't panic, Rates will just go up, same as they do now for inside working.

Guy is booted out of IT amid outsourcing, wipes databases, deletes emails... goes straight to jail for two-plus years

Who would do any forensic analysis

> it was decided that the company would move its IT, web design, and marketing to external vendors.

then

>When officers arrived and interviewed Polequaptewa in his hotel room, he admitted accessing the company's infrastructure, according to Blue Stone's civil filing.

What an idiot

Chinese government has got it 'spot on' when it comes to face-recog tech says, er, London's Met cops' top rep

Re: No racism but...

No smiley so ill reply

they all look the same to *us* as we all look the same to them.

We use different cues to differentiate faces which a dedicated part of our brain learns as we grow up.

80% False positive.

You have to wonder what the false negative is.

Either the system is deliberately tweaked to favour false positives or if the false negative is also high, even 50% then it would make the system total C**P

Cloudflare gave everyone a 30-minute break from a chunk of the internet yesterday: Here's how they did it

Honest RFO

At least they were honest and frank about what caused the outage. It is quite refreshing instead of the usual corporate BS.

You're not Boeing to believe this, but... Another deadly 737 Max control bug found

Re: Stunning fail

I was wondering about the "feature" of the original system that switched between AoA sensors after each flight.

I can think of no technical reason to do this. It introduces instability and difficult to diagnose faults.

The only thing I can think of is that it would let me draw a line from both AoA sensors to MCAS on my block diagram.

It is with a heavy heart that we must report that your software has bugs and needs patching: Microsoft, Adobe, SAP, Intel emit security fixes

Interesting because the ones we get in England can't speak English

'Software delivered to Boeing' now blamed for 737 Max warning fiasco

Management fail

"Senior company leadership was not involved in the review and first became aware of this issue in the aftermath of the Lion Air accident," added Boeing.

That would be a failing of Senior company leadership then - right ?