* Posts by Charlie Clark

12172 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Joint European Torus experiments end on a 69 megajoules high

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: 69 megajoules

Containment over time (more than microseconds) has proved to be much, much harder than anyone imagined. The effects of the magnetic fields required are in the realms of science fiction. Imagine magnetic fields strong enough to act like gravity on everything around them.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: 69 megajoules

No, creating more energy from the reaction than you need to start it will happen almost by definition once the reaction is sustainable. The rest is a matter of scale, which is why testing things like the walls is very important.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Go

On the right track?

Sounds like the final experiment suggested that, despite much criticism, ITER could be on the right track. There is now quite a bit of VC money sloshing around in various fusion projects, all of which seem to suggest that it can be done easier and cheaper than anything the bureaucratic boffins in Toulouse can come up with. And yet, and yet: record energy release and nearly record reaction length.

I think, that as with many things, we may need to go all the way with ITER and then work backwards when it comes to doing it better and cheaper.

Of course, I'm going to put another layer of foil on the house: you can never be too careful!

Billions lost to fraud and error during UK's pandemic spending spree

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Oops, we stole it

With all due respect, I'm still of the opinion that we witnessed a staggering combination of "this time it's different" with the headess chicken syndrome, determined above all to be seen doing something.

Countries should have plans for epidemics and they need to communicate quickly and clearly the dangers, the home truths that potentially millions will die, and the rules for the first 8 to 12 weeks (doens't really matter after then).

Unfortunately, many countries quietly shelved their plans, because maintaining the inventory costs money and we need to make some budgetary savings… We can always reactivate it when we need it…

Google silences Bard, restrings it as Gemini with optional $20-a-month upgrade

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Pint

Re: Three syllables better for voice recognition

Have one of these. After all, it is Friday.

Still, I think Gemini is probably quite a good brand name for a digital assistant.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Three syllables better for voice recognition

I suspect this is just a prelude to the "Gemini" assistant with three syllables chosen as a good basis for invoking it: complex enough to be reliable and less likely to happen by accident. Right, Alexa?

BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Don't forget Cover Your Arse™. This package will ensure that, whatever happens, someone else gets the blame.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

Re: Resource re-alignment?

It's the gravy for ambitious but no so talented managers. People who haven't worked in the service industry shouldn't want to be managers, but they do. Management done right provides a service to the employees; done wrong, try to treat employees like servants.

Realignments are inevitable when it becomes clear that the last set of consultant-based reorganisation didn't work and now even fewer people who need to work together are working together. Instead everything has been streamlined and nobody knows what they should be doing. So, time for a realignment and cue the next lot of consultants arriving with whiteboards, charts and games to break the nose ice. Add some creative accounting and, while productivity goes down, it's bonuses all round as profits are juiced by selling assets and leasing them back. Then there's a round of musical office chairs as the most motivated middle managers are whittled down for allowing the most talented employees to leave.

Mine's the one with The Mythical Man Month in the pocket.

Microsoft seeks patent for tech to put words into your mouth

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Welcome to the Age of Plausible Deniability

I don't believe you said that.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Welcome to the Age of Plausible Deniability

Fraud tends to adapt quickly to whichever technology is available. Lindsay's Blow Up, Coppola's The Conversation but also Wag the Dog, The Bourne Supremacy and myriad pranks (and fake UN reports) have shown what is possible. Sometimes it takes a lot of work but some of the best stuff is quite low tech, because the key thing is the psychological component getting us to trust the messenger.

What's really new is how to create completely new fakes.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Imagine what havoc this technology would unleash

Or in a telephone fraud coming to your neighbourhood soon…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Prior Art

I suspect prior art may already exist. Text-to-speech systems have existed for decades and voice synthesis has been around for a few years. Is this another case of an American company trying to patent a pipeline? The only slightly novel thing I can think of is maybe getting Einstein to speak Klingon correctly, though I wonder if the all the voice shifts are possible? I know that my voice changes depending on which language I'm speaking.

CERN is training robot dogs to spot radiation hazards at Large Hadron Collider

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: We're all going to die!

I'm sorry, Korev, I can't tell you that.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

We're all going to die!

Checking for radiation, a likely story. We all know it's programmed to check for holes in spacetime caused by CERN's reckless experiments where the beings from other dimensions that intent upon our destruction will be coming through.

Microsoft embraces its inner penguin as sudo sneaks into Windows 11

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

Let me know when the Linux lot gives up on the reinventing it poorly bit.

Mine's the one with 101 Things to Hate About Linux (2003 edition) by I M Grumpy.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Not so keen on permission escalation

I prefer to run admin shells when necessary.

HoRNDIS MacGyvers your Mac to get online with Androids

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Power consumption

That sounds like just effective throttling of the connection, which a good wifi hotspot should also do, if it's idling most of the time. A proper comparison would include total data transferred over time. But, if your use case is occasional use during the day e-mail checking, then this will probably work best. But anything that ones to keep a connection open, and SSH would suffice, will work against this.

I haven't had to do this for a while, but my experience the last time was: it's just best using a dedicated hotspot. You can place this for best connectivity for the uplink, which if you're in a room with modern windows, will be very important. This is where distance to the next cell and hence power draw really matters.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: If you're able to plug your phone into a USB port

I think you might be surprised at the actual energy used in any of the situations: short range wireless isn't that expensive, but the uplink to the next cell might be. Providing a hotspot for any sustained period of time is going to use the battery whichever way it's transmitted, ie. you're going to want to provide some external power after an hour at most.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: If you're able to plug your phone into a USB port

Can't argue with the security but it wouldn't suprise me to see USB acting as a brake here. Phones had faster WiFi before they had faster USB.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: If you're able to plug your phone into a USB port

I think Lee provided a good one: it's a simple way for a PAN in an environment where you may only be allowed one MAC address on a network. Though, on a plane, I'd generally give the connection to the notebook and piggyback on that with the phone. But, one of the reasons, why most of stopped using cables for this years ago was the faffing around with the cables, especially in confined spaces: I used to have a null-modem serial connection for my phones back in the 1990s when 9.6 kb/s was all anyone would ever need.

And it's true that the real problem is Apple's less than wholeheartedly embrace of standards like Bluetooth: a Bluetooth PAN should be possible, if you want it. As for the driver: because it's there is a good enough reason.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

See below: a standard wifi hotspot works fine.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Power consumption

For a hotspot power consumption is generally driven by data speed and distance between the devices. I don't think that, for similar data rates, there will be much between Bluetooth and modern WiFi, certainly hasn't been my experience. After all, modern portable hotspots use the same technology and bigger batteries. But if I'm setting up anything for any period of time, I'll be looking to connect devices to a power socket.

Bluetooth is great for for data transfer between devices, where you don't need a network at all, and are happy to wait. But MacOS and I-Phones have traditionally been shit at that: I remember when you simply couldn't send files to I-Phones. In fact, I stopped using Bluetooth peripherals with my Macs years ago because the support was so poor: connected to a speaker a couple of metres away, music would invariably cut out after a couple of hours on the Mac, but happily run all day from the phone. However, I think many Mac owners don't know or care and are happy to pay an Apple tax for some proprietary bits and a "works with Mac" sticker on the box. SWMBO has got comfortable pairing with the various speakers we have when she wants to listen to something, but usually finds it easier to ask me to do it.

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: Once upon a time....

Very scientific analysis… restrictions on charging points are starting to crop in many countries because the networks can't cope with the potential peak demand. That "rapid" charging may soon be either no longer so rapid, or come at quite a price.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Once upon a time....

I'm not sure I understand your point.

Diesel engines are better than petrol engines in most cases, but the emissions are a problem, albeit a solvable one. But I don't really see a subsidy at work here: duty on and thus the price of diesel varies a lot from country to country, but most owners spend less on fuel than they would with petrol. Of course, the efficiency of any ICE is way below what is desirable.

EVs have great motors, just a braindead approach to the power source. Subsidies are being run down because they are ruinously expensive. Also some governments are starting to get worried about the future costs for all the additional power networks and generation capacity needed for nationwide charging networks. If we wanted an EV charging point at our house, we'd have to provide the power for it ourselves.

Subsidies are probably unavoidable to encourage demand at scale to support manufacturing at scale. But there are plenty of other options available to lower emissions: speed limits, parking pricing and restrictions as we're going to see in Paris and other cities. Smaller, lighter vehicles could be encouraged through regulation: no small car needs 100hp. And we could start switching to electric motors in wheels which only need generators. All this could be done without subsidies and wouldn't mean more expensive cars.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Most hybrids are just a way to get subsidies with ranges around 40 km for the electric motors. In some city contexts this can mean they generally run electric all the time, but then why have all the additional weight and complexity of an ICE? Smaller, lighter EVs would be possible but the prices would be lower and thus the industry generally doesn't produce them. That might change as countries which do care about things like the size of vehicles, such as India, go electric. But that will just hand the advantage to manufacturers there. Western companies are still obsessed with upselling larger and heavier vehicles.

We've still got a long way to go to produce non-ICE vehicles with a long range at a reasonable price.

Rust can help make software secure – but it's no cure-all

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "Security is a process, not a product. Nor a language"

Wanted to make a similar point. As other areas of engineering have shown: security and saftey are cultures and require a no-blame environment so that when problems occur, and they always will, minds are focussed on solutions and not on blame.

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: ValiDrive

Thanks very much for the link!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

From what I've read recently, yes. Had a no-name stick die on me at some point recently: it wasn't in use and was hardly used, just handy for the out share of photos, etc. Got Sandisk as a replacement and I'll see how that goes. The premium for the brand isn't that much but data transfer rates can be significantly better. Ask me in 5 years whether it's still working!

With the cheap sticks, I think we're seeing what we know happens with tools, cleaning supplies, etc: at some point they are so cheap that they can only be crap. Not that you always have to buy the brands, some of which are guilty of the same tricks, but it needs consideration.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Priorities

Despite its manifest problems, I really don't like HS2 being held up as the whipping boy for wasting public money. It should be compared with similar projects only, and if you want to look for something that did less and cost more, mile for mile, then you need to look no further than CrossRail, which also illustrates just quite how skewed infrastructure investment is towards London and the South East.

By all means debate the pros and cons of high-speed rail (and additional freight capacity), but do this for the whole network rather than cherry-picking things to bash. I remember clearly when the TGV line down to Marseille was under construction how one French farmer asked why he should lose fields just so that the journey time would be halved. This is a very valid question but also a false equivalence. High-speed rail has been shown to reduce both car and air travel on the routes served within integrated networks, which is why many of the Spanish lines remain of dubious value.

But I think HS2 also highlights the fake dichotomy of big versus small projects. There are good technical, geographical and political reasons why the existing West Coast Main Line couldn't simply be upgraded to a high-speed line. But parts of it certainly could have been significantly improved while work was done a new high-speed line. And other parts of the network could and should have been upgraded (electrification of many branch lines on hold since the 1960s) to ensure real network effects; George Gideon Obsorne deserves at least some credit for pushing this idea.

And it's the same for science: innovation and development for and from CERN have helped projects in all participating countries. Yes, there's the WWW but also work done on really large magnets, superconductors, tunnel making, vibration damping, particle detection have often been groundbreaking in their fields. But good scientific discovery works both ways: many projects improve on, adapt (often at much reduced cost) stuff from the larger ones because their focus is narrower. This, indeed, has been one of the main claims of the scientific method with investments generally repaying themselves many times over, if often indirectly, which is why tax-based funding is a good idea™.

Okay, rant over, I'll take another dried frog pill!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: But is Dark Matter real?

I find the term "dark" the most difficult. It is supposed to stand for "unknown", but why don't we use that? Or possibly something derived from gnosis to allow for a more precision definiton in the context: TBD mass (you're right, it doens't have to be matter at all); TBD expansion. With TBD standing for To Be Determined or To Be Discovered, as a way of underlining the very theoretical nature of the supposition. This might also help in reframing the point that it's not necessarily bigger particles smashers we need, but different ones that might reveal what is currently unobservable (ie. neither invisible nor dark).

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Priorities

I think you make the point much better than Mr King. Of course, in an ideal world we shouldn't be forced to choose between such prestige projects and bread-and-butter ones, and it's one of the reasons why CERN, and similar bodies were founded, as a way of pooling the resources necessary for developments that individual countries couldn't afford. And it's been my experience that the removal of funding always happen after the agreement for the prestige project, ie. the new development is used as a fig-leaf for cuts.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Priorities

I think it was a bit of rent-a-quote. € 20 bn over 20 years for the membes of CERN isn't a lot of money and DARPA is happy to spaff that much every year on much weirder shit. Bigger problem for the UK is ensuring that it has a proper seat at the international research tables.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: But is Dark Matter real?

I think your assumption about an assumption is incorrect. "Dark matter" is the term applied to an observed phenomenon for which we have no coherent, let alone validated, explanation. I don't think it's a good name because it suggests that there are some particles we just don't know about. The same is true with "dark energy" which is really a reframing of the observable acceleration of expansion.

An accelerator such as the one proposed might be required to test such explanations as we continue to try and resolve the manifest problems associated with the idea of quantum gravity. But it's also going to need astronomical experiments, though LISA is unsuited for that particular task.

Biggest problem as I see it, is potential budget and schedule overruns.

The spyware business is booming despite government crackdowns

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Nothing learned from the wars on…

If demand is great enough, and it seems to be growing, the market will supply. Government intervention may, at best, limit supply but also drive up prices.

For a fraction of the money spent on these schemes, research projects into more secure hardware and software could be supported; hopefully going beyond the kind of thing that got an airgapped Windows NT system certified as secure.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Why are vendors allowed to market?

The answer is simple: in the US, software is exempt from standard product liability requirements and manufacturers just have to promise to release updates with the fixes.

EU repair rights bill tells manufacturers to fix up or ship out

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I haven't read

Many of the boards are made in entirely automated processes, which is fine. What is missing is a way of processing broken boards quickly and efficiently so that components or materials can be recovered for reuse.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I haven't read

I don't think that schematics would help for much of our modern electronics: if the mainboard is broken, you're out of luck. But it is true that far too much stuff "breaks" purely because of a faulty capacitor or power circuit.

Get the conditions right, and just as you have with cars, it's easy enough to create a market for this. But, and here's the rub, don't necessarily expect devices to much cheaper over their lifetimes.

Alaska Airlines' door-dropping flight was missing bolts

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I read somewhere that emergency doors are designed with this kind of protection by design, but the plugs are an option (not offered by Airbus) which allows even more seats to be squeezed in.

MBAs despise the kind of overengineering that became standard in the airline industry precisely to save lives: the engineer must assume there is a risk he hasn't thought of; the MBA wants a to be able to price risks in order to determine which are acceptable.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Major major cock-up

I think he's making an oblique reference to the DIY experience of ending up with more bits than you started with. I think we may all have experienced this at home, but in a workshop, it should set off red lights. In The Meaning of Liff (Douglas Adams and John Lloyd) said that <a href="http://tmoliff.blogspot.com/2011/08/exeter-n.html>Exeter</a> could be used to describe this.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Door opened for civil suits

Responsibility hasn't yet officially been apportioned but the statement by the CEO makes this almost a formality. It wouldn't surprise me to see civil suits, which is how America disciplines its companies in lieu of effective regulation, coming on this, and the C-suite might have to worry about ones from investors who will have a good case to make about the company trashing their investment.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "poorly drilled rivet holes"

A couple of reasons for the spin-off: new contracts with the new company can help reduce future pension liabilities; new contracts can mean lower starting wages for new employers; keeps the plebs workers further from decision-making. But I think the main reason would be to mask capital costs as operational expenditure, thus "freeing up" capital either for acquisitions or gifts to investors.

Aircraft rivet hole issues cause delays to Boeing 737 Max deliveries

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: How can a company be that bad...

If it was Airbus, we'd see exactly the same inspections and bans on flying. But, in the case of the plug, this wouldn't happen because this cost-cutting option isn't available, precisely because it introduces risk. You see this reflected in the customer profiles of both manufacturers.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: How can a company be that bad...

Just briefly, I'm not trying to downplay the farce of the MAX launch and the deaths of the two crashes. These were down to regulatory collusion in a broken certification process desgined solely to get the planes to market as quickly as possible. But even then, by the metrics with which these things are calculated, Boeing still has a good record. It's arguable this is down to the regulator generally doing a good job. Like I said, I'm sure there are plenty of businesses who'd like more "light touch" regulation, possibly including cheap tickets which would indemnify airline and manufacturer in the event of unexpected disassembly.

On the rest, I'm with you all the way: a good example of short term profits over everything, with the active support of US politics.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: How can a company be that bad...

To be fair, even with these fuckups, the planes still have a great record. But the real problem is the politically engineered lack of competition. Airbus is snowed under with orders and would probably face similar problems if it tried to scale up production to get even more. For decades the US plane makers didn't have to worry about competition until the European airlines finally got the planes they wanted and Airbus became a success. Consolidation and a duopoly were considered the only way to preserve profit margins jobs and US airlines were strongarmed into continuing to buy Boeing. Though, to be fair, if some of them had the choice, they'd buy the cheapest, crappiest things out there because most US airlines hate passengers that can't be transported in boxes.

Still no love for JPEG XL: Browser maker love-in snubs next-gen image format

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: pictures

On my (non-Apple) phone there's a setting for that but I suspect "No, Dave. I can't let you do that." may be all you hear on an I-Phone that's your plastic glass-covered pal that's fun to be with™

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: pictures

Ouch! I'd have dialled down the resolution by now.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

One of the many incidences of vendor lock-in.

IPv4 address rentals to mint millions of dollars for AWS

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Please put the IPv6-only strawman away. No one's suggesting that. This was a flaw in IPv6 and one of the things that held greater IPv6 adoption back. Networks still have work to do but many places are now moving to islands of IPv4 in a sea of IPv6. My ISP has been IPv6 for years but it also provides the 6to4 gateway for me and everyone else so that we don't have to care much.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

When IPv6 was being developed the shortage was indeed artificial but it is very real now. Your proposed fix wouldn't even work for India… let alone the rest of Asia. No need to worry, America, you've got all the addresses you could ever need and, as it was America that invented the internet, that's all that really matters. (Let's ignore all the work done by those outside the US to make the internet actually work).

As for country codes: what have you been smoking? That is exactly the sort of thing that would allow the internet to be broken up by those countries that think not all packets should be created equal!

Your revisionism is clear: if assignments were not supposed to be permanent we'd have seen reassignment as soon as the internet took off in Asia and it was obvious the tiny pool. There may have been no intention to make ip addresses commercial property, but the effect, known also as the tragedy of the commons, in making them so, was only a matter of time. You're also ignoring the tweaks to IPv6 that have been made as it has been adopted, not least the acceptance of the need for smooth transition. This means that we'll probably still see IPv4 networks for many years to come, though they'll become increasingly isolated as the networks around them adjust to new demands, but everything will generally continue to work.

But, of course, you're right let's ignore the manifest problems and just insist on more and more NAT as the only way that doesn't break the existing internet, except when it does!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Like I said, not enough addresses left to redistribute, even it sounds like a lot. You're also being revisionist. Sure, if we could go back to the 1970s and 1980s, reassignments, at least of company blocks would have been possible. But, by the time, IPv4 addresses scarcity became a thing, the financial possibilities were becoming clear and very few companies were prepared to give adddresses back.

I'm not claiming IPv6 is perfect, but I also don't think it's as bad as many make out, and it wasn't quite the gravy train I think you're suggesting: there have been more egregious examples of that with W3C springing to mind.

It's taken a while, but I think we now have enough people pursuing a pragmatic migration that isn't going to cause obscure and poorly maintained networks in key areas (hospitals are one area with infamously outdated kit) to fail suddenly because IPv4 was switched off. And this should be the blueprint for future changes, though I suspect the lessons about ownership will be some of the first to be forgotten.