* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Brit semiconductor tech ended up in Chinese naval railgun – report

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: China

"have a look at the Landwind X7 and see if you can spot a slight resemblance to the West Midlands’ f

finest."

Given that they purchased the tooling, most of the factory and everything else except the name (BMW held on to that), it shouldn't really be a surprise.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Yellow Peril", much?

Seriously folks, just about all the IGBTs being churned out in China are going into their bullet trains.

As for Railgun tech - The USA has been working on it for decades, as have many other countries and like the Nazis all the way back in the 1930s, nobody has yet been able to solve the problem of the barrels shredding themselves after a few shots.

Being able to fire the things is another matter and relatively easy. IGBT or other technology is just a fancy switch which might allow lower kinetic energies to be achieved and save some barrel wear but that comes at cost of reduced range and velocity.

Being "at a comparable level" with the USA isn't saying much given the lack of actual progress in the part that matters, since 1937 (ok, you can get 20-50 shots out instead of 3-4, but that's not much use when you actually need to use it outside of the laboratory)

Vodafone signs deal with CityFibre to connect 5 million homes with full fibre

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Low-hanging fruit again

"most of the potential customers are turning their nose up at VM"

Given the contention ratios and speeds seen in evenings on VM around here, I can understand why.

Copper feel, fibre it ain't: Ads regulator could face court for playing hard and fast with definitions

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: A question of degree, perhaps

"The issue is that the limitations of copper, particularly 40+ year old installations, as a high-speed communications medium are really beginning to bite. "

Claude Shannon predicted the limits in the 1940s.

The problem is that for nearly 150 years (until the end of the 1990s) telcos dictated how much phone and data we wanted, not the other way around. they're still trying to live in that mindset.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fibre vs Copper

(copper) " From the cabinet it’s a fudge."

So much fo a fudge that since my VDSL was installed, the achieveble speed has dropped from 96Mbps available (80Mbps delivered) to 65Mbps and is starting to dip below that - telco and ISP tell me "there's nothing we can do, sorry" - but they don't offer any discounts for speed drops either.

That's _entirely_ down to the sheer number of VDSL connections interfering with each other, not line degradation.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fibre vs Copper

"I have yet to see a residential Fibre network that is glass all of the way to the computer."

On the other hand there are plenty that are glass all the way into the back of the router.

https://en.avm.de/products/fritzbox/fritzbox-5490/technical-data/ for one example. See that SC connector?

There are also a bunch around that are a lot cheaper than the Fritz.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not all wires are Copper

"A lot of the time if we see an Openreach van in the road working on someone else's fault we are braced for the inevitable connection problems that will cause us."

I wonder if you can arrange for 'certain criminal gangs' to helpfully steal the aluminium cable?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Agree

> Using the Ads regulator logic, all the internet is "fibre"

And using the same logic back in the old days, every ISP claimed to have a 2MBb/s feed (or 1.44 for USA ones) based on the fact that the primary is that speed, even if they were only using a couple of channels inside it (@ 64 or 56kbps apiece)

The ASA and others let them get away with that fraud too. It's no wonder that when BT and the other telcos moved into the ISP game that customers went to them on the basis that Big Phone Companies could be trusted not to lie. *ahem*yeahright*ahem*

Alan Brown Silver badge

"But BT's service is fibre: why is yours better?"

"BT's service isn't fibre, they just claim it is and the ASA lets them, just like they let them claim to be selling unlimited broadband which was capped at 10GB/month. The ASA isn't a regulator, it's a trade association of publishers and he who pays the piper calls the tune."

That'd make a few piggies squeal.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"However a full fibre network when working properly should be able to work at full speed regardless of distance "

For some values of "full speed"

I've spent time in a certain country in SE asia where the feed is fibre but the speed is only 128kb/s and for that you have to mortgage your grandmother.

Why: 1 - gov monopoly (because they can) and 2 - with the average income being less than $5/day it ensures that locals don't get to see the unfiltered parts of the world the government doesn't want them seeing.

(They used to have a firewall tighter than the Vietnamese one - which in turn was tighter than China's. now they just use extremely high costs to restrict access). That's going to break when Elon's satellite constellation shows up but I fully expect them to make ground stations illegal and attempt to locally jam them.

Java EE renamed 'Jakarta EE' after Big Red brand spat

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What about an anagram?

Didn't anybody consider an anagram of Java?

How about Jive?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XxsasUHzaQ

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Unsurprising outcome

When you want to force the use of a particular name which you've already decided on in committee, you give the greater group a choice between the one you want and something or somethings completely unpalatable.

I'm surprised noone stood up and actually pointed this railroading tactic out.

MIT gives one-star review to Lyft, Uber over abysmal '$3.37/hr' pay

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Judge by what people do, not what they say they want.

"..., there were so many taxis in New York (more than 12000 at peak, or double what the numbers are today) that taxi driver became synonymous with thief, rapist, etc"

Yup and that's happened all over the world. Regulation to control numbers and make sure drivers aren't crooks always ends up becoming a way of maintainkng a cartel or monopoly. The pendulum swings the other way for a while and then back.

And libertarians are fantasists. They don't like it when you point out that Ayn Rand was welfare dependent. Nor would they consider living in a real existing "libertarian paradise"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Judge by what people do, not what they say they want.

Worstall, as usual misses the point - which is picked up by commenters.

Uber and Lyft work on the basis that "driving" for them is _NOT_ a fulltime job. The gig economy of this model is predicated on people already heading in the right directions for other reasons and picking up fares to offset those costs.

That's not what actually happens, but that's the model they use.

The other point is simply that Uber/Lyft/etc long-term goal of market dominance is that having meatsacks at the wheel is only a temporary measure.

They lose sight of the issue that once autonomous hire vehicles become the norm they're going to be going up against private operators doing the same thing and bus companies downsizing their vehicles to around 8 seats. (the latter with encouragement from local authorities, as heavy passenger vehicles inflict amazingly high levels of damage on the road for their carrying capacity vs one car per passenger. The only gain is in congestion reduction and autonomous vehicles can entrain themselves in peak periods which solves that problem nicely, whilst eliminating the massive expense of running a 45 seat vehicle on offpeak schedules where it may average 4-6 passengers.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: VC's and Investments

"I worked for a company that was preyed on by the VC's."

I've seen this particular version of the story happen so many times that my usual advice for anyone working for an outfit that gets infested with VCs is to abandon ship before everyone else does and floods the job market.

Hypersonic nukes! Nuclear-powered drone subs! Putin unwraps his new (propaganda) toys

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Saner MAD

"nuke your own country"

Scorched Earth policy is nothing new. The Russians have been using it for centuries to keep invaders at bay.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Re. MAD

"Direct hit on a reprocessing plant would be a doomsday scenario that would dwarf Chernobyl and qualify as an extinction level event in its own right."

Wrong.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Little reactors?

"SL-1 reactor [a small reactor that was SO dangerous it exploded from an accident during routine maintenance]."

Actually it went prompt-critical and because it was partially drained of water the resulting extra large steam explosion was what killed the maintenance crew. (incidentally it was also prompt-criticality and a steam explosion which blew the roof off at Chernobyl)

It's because of SL-1 that nuclear reactors are always kept full of water when being maintained. The idea that a 100kW (thermal) reactor could generate 20+GW of heat for a few seconds was known about but hadn't been drawn to the attention of the people tasked with designing maintenance procedures.

SL-1 was one of the incidents on Alvin Weinberg's mind when he set out to eliminate water from nuclear reactor cores. The idea of 600-1200MWe steam bombs scared the shit out of him and he _designed_ the original PWR reactor.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Little reactors?

"The main reason that nuclear jet engines were abandoned is that they're just TOO HEAVY to be practical."

It wasn't the reactor that was the problem. other ensuring they didn't spray out masses of radioactive exhaust.

All the weight was in shielding to keep whatever was at the controls from being fried (meatsacks and electronics are equally susceptable to high levels of radiation)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Mutually Assured Destruction - MAD

"Would it help if we all clubbed together and bought Vlad an extension operation for those vital few extra inches?"

It might help more if you got his boyfriend some plastic surgery.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: How many countries (or parts of countries) has the US annexed recently?

You missed Hawaii (annexed in support of US businessmen and the United Fruit corporation, later Dole)

Samoa (that was WW1, so maybe allowable to take it off Germany, but New Zealand handed the part it took over back to the locals after the war whilst the USA kept theirs)

The Marianas (arrived in WW2, never left)

Guam (arrived, brought snakes, destroyed the ecosystem)

They didn't "try to" invade Cuba - they did - in 1899 (a war against Spain started by a faulty steam boiler exploding in Havana Harbour and the mechanations of William Randolph Hurst wanting to sell more newspapers), then lost it to the Cubans and failed to invade it again.

Virtually all of central america and the carribbean (at one point or another)

etc.

The USA has a very long history of invading other countries in its very short existence - it's been more prolific at it than any of the older european powers.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Mutually Assured Destruction - MAD

"In any case, the only thing he did NOT do is pound his shoe on the podium..."

It pays to read the whole speech and not just focus on the shoe.

Niki was raving on about how Russia has endured many invasions and buried many invaders after the forces have left. Soviet policy was about establishing buffer zones between Moscow and anywhere that might want to invade (which given the history of invasions is about right if you're paranoid about being invaded again). Given the way the US has been shown to export "freedom" (and the type it exports) over the last few decades, that paranoia is arguably justified.

On the other hand, Vlad is simply poking a stick into a hornet nest - and perhaps attempting to get the USA to spend even more on its military defence technology than it already does (which is unaffordable, well beyond the official 2% GDP and already causing substantial damage to the fabric+infrastructure of american society) in the hope that it will emulate the USSR's implosion on military spend.

If that;s the case he needn't bother, the F35 project is doing that already.

Argentina eyes up laser death cannon testbed warship

Alan Brown Silver badge

"We don't have any land based antiship missiles in service, unfortunately as they are a lot cheaper for defending a coastline than a warship"

Why not phone up China and buy a few DF24 or DF21-Ds ?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: .Sarcasm, I take it?

"laughing about the state of the Argentinian fleet is easy. It is surprising they have anything at all considering the economic situation in the country."

The economic situation in the country is the REASON they keep huffing and puffing about Las Malvinas. It serves as distraction for the populace from the government's clusterfuck (smart Argentinians know and ignore the huffery, however the UK doesn't have a monopoly on mentalities associated with Daily Mail readers.)

As soon as the Argentinian economy improves, the huffery will go away. They don't want the expense of maintaining the islands anyway.

'Maker' couple asphyxiated, probably by laser cutter fumes

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Its possible

"Refrigeration you say? I'd been wondering what they used it for."

Large sites typically still use ammonia for refrigeration. It's more efficient and much cheaper than CFCs whilst being safer than propane (which is a wonderful refrigerant - so much so that scammy car dealers will use it in AC loops after scavenging the CFCs) and you have the luxury of mandatory safety check procedures that won't happe in domestic installations.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This happened in Berkeley?

"Typically it's often made by partitioning and existing structure like a garage or as a small addition done without a permit. "

This happens in the UK too. Fines when caught can be extremely large (and the structure is invariably demolished)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This happened in Berkeley?

"at some time fitted with a back-boiler type central heating system"

Which haven't been fitted in UK houses since the 1970s.

Incidentally, ~50% of the NOX in London comes from boilers and almost all of it (along with extremely high levels of detectable CO on streets) comes from back-boiler installations. It's so bad that individual sources can be identified (Like woodburners, there aren't that many of them, but there are no laws able to be used to condemn them - yet. Also like woodburners, their owners are fiercely resistant to replacing the things even when offered payment to do so)

There are a bunch of other good reasons for replacing these ancient dangerous installations - even when correctly vented, changes in local wind conditions can result in them huffing CO back into the building without warning (one of my friends was nearly killed by this. Cause was a neighbour's extension creating an eddy right over the top of the boiler vent when the wind blew in the "wrong" direction.)

US Navy gives Lockheed Martin $150m big frickin' laser cannon contract

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: They just can't help themselves, can they ...... and that is a fatal addiction.

http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html

In the meantime it keeps them occupied and not invading too many of their neighbours.

My PC is broken, said user typing in white on a white background

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I calmly turned the mouse upside-down and pointed out the strip of gaffer tape that one of their colleagues had applied to the sensor for a laugh. "

I once saw a user destroy a telephone because someone had done this to the hookswitch and they couldn't figure out how to answer incoming calls.

Organic battery tech could work better than a woolly hat in the cold

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Impressive... but

Concur. For shits and giggles I used to see how cold I could take some of our equipment in the environmental chamber before it stopped working (real world excuse - we used it in unattended stations up mountains and not needing auxiliary heating was "handy"). Most 1980s analogue tech would cease to function around -30C or so (but the batteries and solar panels would expire long before then)

Full shift to electric vans would melt Royal Mail's London hub, MPs told

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Can't they upgrade it?

"The generator at Smithfield is the old Port of London Authority site, now privately owned and operated primarily for a medium sized heat network,"

it's also been broken for much of the last part of 2017, with a bunch of media stories and complaints from residents about the problem.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fag packet calculation time...

"Apparently the owners have gone bust. "

That's hardly surprising. The only thing being farmed at most windfarms is subsidies and the rate they eat gearboxes means the best way to make money is to keep them stationary and be paid to NOT connect them to the national grid (36k/month per turbine apparently)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fag packet calculation time...

>> Cars should come with solar panel outer surfaces.

> That'll be great until some local scrote decides to key it

Given that the area of a car rooftop is going to give you around 100W _at best_, a day's charging from that panel is only going to get you 100 yards down the road anyway.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fag packet calculation time...

" so to recharge all those vehicles from the grid would require more than doubling electricty production. "

Now factor in replacing all the gas/oil boilers with electric heating

Now factor in replacing as much industrial processing which consumes carbon with electric or other heating

You need to do a lot more than double it.

_IF_ you carpet the UK in windmills and put solar PV on every single rooftop, you can just about match the existing electrical production capacity. I'd like to see the greenies and renewables fiends explain where the rest is going to come from.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fag packet calculation time...

"Add more hydro"

The easy pickings are gone, the upfront costs of small scale hydro are high compared with the returns and the direct environmental damage of hydro is surprisingly high without even factoring in methane emissions from dams in the larger ones.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fag packet calculation time...

" we can't even legislate for new builds to have PV as standard "

We can't even legislate for new builds to comply with european requirements for minimum living space and insulation, let alone anything else.

One of the more amusing wheezes of the 2007 crash was when apartment builders tried to sell unsold product to councils - who found that the lovely £750k high end products being flogged off didn't meet minimum requirements for social housing (size, insulation, windows, noise isolation, etc), so wouldn't touch them.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hmmm

"they got rid of all the bikes a couple of years ago. "

Yes, because posties are carrying more packets and small parcels than ever before and they don't fit on bikes anymore. Vans are the only practical logistical way to get the goods to the rounds.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hmmm

"Solar and wind on the roof with batteries. It may not power a whole fleet of 49,000, but then it doesn't have to right away."

You'll be lucky if it charges _one_ - in a month.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Either we solve the problem as a country or we cancel the ban on new ICE from 2040"

"Da Guv has announced £400m for charging points and infrastructure."

Bearing in mind that Heathrow T5 cost something in excess of £5 billion, how much does £400 million get you?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hmmm indead

Oak Ridge was a very good proof of concept.

Amongst other things, they used to shut the MSR system down on Friday afternoon and fire it up on Monday morning because noone wanted to have to stick around over the weekends to keep it running.

You simply CAN'T do that with a PWR/BWR fuel rod design.

The oft quoted "corrosion problem" is FUD too - what was found was almost no corrosion, significantly less than existig PWR/BWR systems and it was believed with further research they could eliminate even that - which was supposed to be the focus of the next research round that Nixon killed off.

Never mind, the chinese are going full speed on MSR research, as are the Dutch and Danish. Whoever gets low cost Modular power systems deployed to developing countries first will dominate the world's economy for the next 2 centuries.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hmmm

"the vans could charge up during the early morning when there is excess capacity on the grid."

Go look at the power demand curves on Gridwatch. Now realise that if 1/4 of the cars in the UK were EVs and charging overnight, peak demand would be during the early morning hours.

And for London in particular, metling down substations/exploding pavements would start being the norm. The UK isn't that far removed from the events of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" (where the terrorists never existed, the entire infrastructure was simply falling apart and blaming terrorists was an easy way of pretending it wasn't the government's fault)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hmmm

" ignorant anti-nuclear activists."

The kind of people who equate "nuclear bombs = bad, therefore nuclear power = bad."

It's about as credible as saying "molotov cocktails = bad therefore cars = bad" - because they both use petrol.

There are plenty of objections to current PWR/BWR nuclear technology, but Alvin Weinberg (who invented the bloody technology!) addressed those in the 1950s and 1950s by developing molten salt systems and eliminating the water. He was deeply concerned about his small _proof of concept_ design being scaled up to insane sizes with massive pressures for commercial use. Richard Nixon killed the R&D and put everything back around 60 years.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hmmm

"http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/"

if you look more deeply into that you'll see that they lump a lot of things together, with more problems and deaths being caused by relocation trauma amongst the elderly (which also happens after large earthquakes and suchlike) and the generally atrocious state of medical care in former soviet countries.

The actual number of deaths caused by radiation exposure is quite low and if someone dies at age 82 instead of 83 due to exposure, how are you going to differentiate that from decades of drinking bad vodka or smoking?

Aircrew get far higher radiation exposures than any other occupation on the planet and the rate of excess deaths or cancers attributable to high energy proton/gamma radiation exposure is essentially zero. (Smokers get higher doses still, but what kills them is almost invariably chemically triggered even if the triggers are polonium breakdown products in the lungs, such as lead and bismuth)

For years, WHO was telling us that single men didn't live as long as single women based on japanese studies and missed the factor that the essential difference which hadn't been factored in was _diet_ - and once that was added into calculations, everything equallled out.

The facts of the matter is that the _only_ way that carbon emissions can be capped, let alone reduced is by moving wholesale to nuclear power and it's better to use a system that was proven safer 50 years ago before being shut down for primarily military/political reasons. Greenwashing by trying to count burning old growth forests as "renewables" is one of the more heinous environmental frauds.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hmmm

There's one other part about molten salt systems which bears thinking about: There's enough thorium to be had in those coal ash slurry ponds to make processing them for fuel an economic proposition. Whilst there is a lot more thorium kicking around in rare earth mine tailings, it may pay the cleanup costs of those older sites and avert environmental problems. The _two_ largest environmental disasters in the USA so far this century have been coal ash slurry dam breaks.

UK watchdog Ofcom tells broadband firms: '30 days to sort your speeds'

Alan Brown Silver badge

"one of my customer has two infinity lines. (fttc).

he gets, absolute max, on either, 14 down and 1 up. "

Then he has good cause to go to small claims on an "unfit for the purpose for which it is advertised" case - and should be haranguing his local trading standards too.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: ISP's knows how to "game" speed checks.

"It's interesting how quickly speeds jump back once you just access "speedtest.btwholesale.com" "

A cron job might be in order then. :)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"make it illegal for ISPs who prioritise speed server traffic"

Unfortunately the speed servers are in on the game, look at who pays for their banner adverts.

They're not going to bite the hand that feeds them and anyone who sets up on the basis of showing realworld speeds isn't going to have the money to run the system for long.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"With 7 Mbps of TCP ACK packets in the other direction."

You need to be retuning your algorithms - you'll get better speed and lower latencies if you do.

Alan Brown Silver badge

" if they have not selected the correct definition of average"

For starters, there's mean, median and mode to consider

There are also standard deviations to factor in.

Simply stating an "average" speed without any more detail is a cop out all in itself.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: But there is no legal imperative for these companies to comply with the code

"I've never quite understood why BT haven't invested in extending their IP core to IXMAN or indeed the other LINK locations "

Because they're the 9000 pound gorilla and THEY DON'T HAVE TO.