* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

If we can't find a working SCSI cable, the company will close tomorrow

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Always check the hardware as well as software

"Yes. And before you say this is illegal or the contract unenforceable, we know some good friends high up in the police forces..."

Can they get you out of kidnapping charges?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Always check the hardware as well as software

"If it's a padlock break out the bolt cutters,"

No need - you can break most small cheap locks with a couple of spanners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jJP0CcuJyE

"If it's a key lock built into the case see if it can be jiggled around/forced with a screwdriver"

find ballpoint pen of approximately the right size. Heat the end to soften the plastic and jam it into the lock. Wait till it cools and then turn. Usually works (and works for bike locks too). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0q7Bnp8ZvY

Alternatively - keep a selection of case keys.

It's much easier to invoke the SEP field generator though.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Always check the hardware as well as software

"Took the lid off and nearly died from dust bunny inhilation. "

Careful with that if there are smokers around - nicotine infused dust bunnies can be nasty (they're concentrated enough that it can be absorbed through the skin).

Don't forget to warn the user that "thou shalt not put machines on the floor or (worse) under a desk, as they suck in every bit of airborne dust around them"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: AC

"A good bit of armoured 10Base5 with a vampire tap on the end was far more durable"

But there were older networking standards in widespread use before they came along.

My "bit of fun" with network cables relates to cheap 10Base2 terminators with centre pins that would disappear inside the terminator (bad soldering).

Finding a dodgy terminator on such a cable isn't the easiest of tasks as what you see tends to be intermittent.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"A 9-pin D connector on a serial mouse has a female connector "

A 9-pin D connector on other types of mouse had a male connector.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture

"How did they cope with things like Christmas, unless they paid someone to come in and perform/check backups ?!"

My system does it over that period, tells me that it's suceeded and sends distress calls if anything goes wrong.

Christmas is easy.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Pournelle's law, well one of them anyway...

You mean "always suspect the connectors"

Especially in cars.

BOFH: I found a flying Dragonite on a Windows 2003 domain

Alan Brown Silver badge

"machine's 'owner' is a connoisseur of beers and guess what I'll be getting paid"

Given the time sunk into it, the payment had better be in palletloads.

Security gurus get behind wheel of driverless car debate

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: There's no rush...

"The Google approach, limiting them to creeping around at 25mph"

Is a pragmatic approach, given that such vehicles are subject to far lower regulatory barriers than faster vehicles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhood_Electric_Vehicle

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Updates?

" The fly by wire accelerator"

The fly-by-wire accelerator in _my_ car has no haptic feedback motor in it. Nor do any in the Delphi part book.

What kind of car are you driving? and are you sure that you didn't have a mechanically faulty pedal that got changed out?

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Or use them to run people over."

This is a bigger worry for self-driving trucks. Cars tend to take major damage very quickly if they hit something with the mass of a human.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"3. Set the malware to automatically drive all those cars to a specified location"

I'm reminded of this 1990s Toyota advert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS20kOEJ9WY

Alan Brown Silver badge

"My own personal view is that the Manufacturer should be responsible. "

That's a fast way of getting government mandated vendor lock-in on maintenance.

Dear Tesla, stop calling it autopilot – and drivers are not your guinea pigs

Alan Brown Silver badge

"their autopilot has logged only about 130 million miles and they've already had their first fatality"

In a condition where a truck driver turned across oncoming traffic and it's not even known if there was sufficient time for a human to react and avoid it if he was 100% in control.

Also, where the evidence seems to have been tampered with (the driver was known to use a dashcam at all times, yet the dashcam is missing) and the truck driver claims to have _heard_ a portable DVD player over the noise of his own engine from 20 feet away - which is pretty suspect to say the least.

Not to mention your cherrypicking of statistics. You can't compare long-established rates with 1 incident in this milage. GIve it another 3-6 sampling periods and you might be right, but right now there's insufficient data to draw any conclusion.

Congrats, Linux users – you're finally officially alpha males... on Skype

Alan Brown Silver badge

saw it, tried it, uninstalled it

You can only tolerate so many retrograde steps

Ivory tower drops water bombs on dumpster fire

Alan Brown Silver badge

" there's history of dealing with crooks in the whitehouse."

The purpose of a president is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from those who do.

I continually wonder what the fuck they've got planned that they need either type of attentionseeking in the oval office.

Lily Cole: Profit still looks almost Impossible.com

Alan Brown Silver badge

"The site won £200,000 from the Cabinet Office, funnelled via innovation quango Nesta (now a charity, and therefore un-FOI-able). Remarkably, Impossible.com won the funding even though it failed to meet the published criteria."

As a recipient of govt funding it's perfectly FOIable. They'll deny it but an appeal to the ICO for a declaration of coverability is the next step.

Did mock cop bot trot on fraught tot? Maybe not

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: That bot looks suitably menacing

> In most places, the mall cops can't pack "heat".

And in places that do, mall cops are the perpetrators of a statistically significant amount of murder and other serious crime.

Even in places that don't, mall security is more dangerous to most people(*) than what they're supposed to be protecting them from.

(*) Mall _staff_ in particular.

As for "kid ran into robot" - that wouldn't surprise me. I've seen kids run into the sides of parked cars and stationary pedestrians. Upvote for the comment about 360-cam and I wouldn't be surprised if there is one, which is where the "reviewing data" came from.

SHOCK! Robot cars do CRASH. Because other cars have human drivers

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Luddites

"Transit took twice as long but monthly passes were convenient,"

Where I live, getting into the heart of London takes about 45 mins by train and about the same by car - at night, under ideal circumstances.

During the day, driving can easily take 2 hours, usually 3 and occasionally 4. Exiting the city has the same kinds of delays and these can continue well into the night.

IE: optimising johnnycab for public transport is best.

Going in the other direction - to where I work - the nearest bus stop is 2 miles from the destination and there are only 5 busses a day. It takes 2 hours to get there, vs 25 mins to drive. The optimisations are quite different.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Evidence == "Invasion of Privacy!"

"If they're taken with a camera which is an integral part of a car owned by an individual, I can't see any reason why the images are not the property of that individual"

the moment you hand the car over to the insurer, it becomes the property of the insurer. Cars already have rudimentary black boxes on board (the airbag computer is continuously recording conditions in deployment and near deployment) and those have already been used to deny insurance payouts (one example being the mercedes which was recorded at 100+mph a few seconds before it crashed on an urban road with 30mph speed limit.

Insurers have handed telematics data to police for prosecution too.

London seeks trials of Google's robo-cars

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @Lost all faith... - Have they decided on the ethical issue of life presevation?

"The car like a human driver does not know everything"

It doesn't need to. The simple fact is that most drivers are barely competent to point a car vaguely in the direction they want to go and can't cope with anything unexpected.

A robot pays 100% attention 100% of the time and reacts within milliseconds to changes, vs hundred of ms for humans. It also doesn't enter "stunned mullet" mode when faced with impending doom like so many humans do, which is the prime cause of failure to avoid an oncoming hazard - many humans don't even brake. On top of that it _won't_ get impatient and attempt a dangerous overtaking manouvere _OR_ drive at 30mph on the open road like so many geriatric drivers do, leading to a long line of fuming drivers banking up behind them and the inevitable overtaking attempts.

With regard to blowouts, etc - tyres actually give plenty of warning before failure(*) and the reason they happen on the road is because drivers ignore them. Again, a robot won't ignore the warnings, so there won't be many "sudden catastrophic failures"

(*) One example I can think of is a truck I was following on single carriageway whose trailer tyre was clearly deflating and out of round for over 10 miles before it finally flew apart and flipped the trailer. The driver admitted he knew something was wrong but pressed on regardless. A robot would detect the early warning signs and put in for repairs before this happened.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: There won't be any driverless cars for a long time.

" From the time driverless cars get the green light (pun intended) it will be 5 years max until the requirement for a licensed human back-up driver is removed."

And about the same amount of time that the licensing bar will be _significantly_ raised for new drivers, plus about the same again that existing drivers will face mandatory retesting when it's obvious that most crashes (not accidents, those are what a 3 year old does in his pants) are caused by humans and made worse by humans.

The danger period for automated vehicles is caused by them being surrounded by irrational monkeys controlling heavy machinery, not by the robots.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Small autonomous vehicles and firing all the meatsack drivers - perhaps not

"There's already a recruitment issue in the ambulance service in that younger drivers don't automatically get the C1 entitlement on their licences"

Which is sensible and a bloody good thing. Being old enough to have a C1 automatically doesn't make one _COMPETENT_ to have it, (I have tractor qualifications on my licence, but I've never driven one)

" and have to take training and the test at their own expense prior to joining."

Which is stupid and a symptom of employers who refuse to train properly. The "just desserts" for this selfishness is that qualified drivers become harder to recruit and _signifcantly_ more expensive to hire/retain. (See southeastern ambulance service attempting to save money by delaying callouts, leading to several deaths and the CEO who set this policy merely being sacked with a large payout instead of imprisoned for manslaughter)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Small autonomous vehicles and firing all the meatsack drivers - perhaps not

" there will be a need to drive cars manually."

Or by remote control.

There's no rule which insists the driver NEEDS to be in the car, as long as the senors and cameras are working well enough to see what's around the vehicle.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @Voyna I Mor - I think she's missing a point

"Unfortunately you get greedy councils like Westminster who decide that charging motorbikes for parking is a sensible move :-("

Westminster is a parking company with a council attached - and autonomous motorbikes would be able to park elsewhere.

The interesting thing about all this is how councils - who are _not_ supposed to be profitiing from parking and enforcement revenue - are going to handle the plumetting of parking and enforecment revenue that theu're illegally(*) profiting from.

(*) I've been at council meetings where the justification for increasing parking charges (and eliminating 1/2 hour parking charges) was to make up for shortfalls in government funding. There was an uneasy silence when it was pointed out that making up funding shortfalls from parking was illegal, and the motion proposed by council staff was passed anyway. Within 12 months parking revenue had dropped 40% as drivers decided they could easily shop elsewhere and businesses started going to the wall as custom dropped off. The council's response? Raising business rates to make up the shortfall.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I think she's missing a point

"A lot of London roads would be absolutely fine but for on-street parking which reduces them to single track."

Believe me, this is a good thing. Most of those roads are residential and the single track reduces traffic speed (noise) and traffic count (safety). Rat runners are generally distracted and dangerous.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: two class system

"So what happens when one of the cars in the "train" breaks down or runs out of battery?"

The others can push it.

50 CELEBRITY SECRETS EXPOSED scores year behind bars

Alan Brown Silver badge

SWATting == attempted murder

2 years seems rather low.

Revolutionary Brit-made SABRE hybrid rocket engine to burn in 2020

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Meanwhile NASA prepares its Apollo v1.1 ...

"Skylon is making a lot of design choices that hinder its final mass ratio."

Skylon is designed to get people and biological fragiles safely to orbit and return them - safely.(*)(**)(***)

If you want heavy lifting then call in a Falcon XX heavy.

Assuming one device will be used for all loads was what turned shuttle into a fustercluck.

(*) The vibration that launch loads are subjected to would literally liquify passenger brains if they weren't sat in expensive well-padded, vibration isolated seats, mounted on more vibration isolation and shock absorbers.

(**) It's also the basis of a "skipper" for rapid longhaul flights (think of a stone skipping on a pond and visualise an aircraft which does the same thing, dipping into the atmosphere to light the engines and provide more thrust). 90 mins to 2 hours to Australia is good, as the vomit inducing ride would likely make anything longer completely intolerable.

(***) Being bunged in a capsule which returns to the ground the way soyuz or dragon do might work, but it's not "safe" and it's certainly not what most revenue-paying passengers will put up with.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Meanwhile NASA prepares its Apollo v1.1 ...

"Neglecting the specific improvements to the SLS's engines compared to their Shuttle, Saturn, and Centaur predecessors, there's something to be said for simple chemical rocket engines and vertical takeoff."

Yes: They're not as good as a Lofstrom loop, but we don't have any Lofstrom loops.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Meanwhile NASA prepares its Apollo v1.1 ...

Even at peak spend, NASA got less than the USA public spent on takeaway pizzas (or outboard motors) in the same year.

Ironically most of those pizzas were consumed whilst watching rocket launches.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: More Eu funding to be renegotiated

"From the European Space Agency, which was created in 1975 and is unrelated to the EU."

Except that it gets most of its funding from the EU and the EU is likely to start using that to dictate terms.

You can buy Windows 10 Enterprise E3 access for the price of a coffee

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: you pay 7 bucks for a coffee?

"Most every Linux deployment to replace Windows has come with higher initial support costs."

We've been running a mixed environment for nearly 20 years

80% of the desktop support load is generated by windows (and MS services such as live.outlook.com) despite only being 15-20% of the fleet.

On servers, the 2 windows servers (software which can't be ported) generate about half as much support load as the rest of the fleet combined (30-odd systems)

Windows requires a disproportionate amount of support load.

Tupperware vehemently denies any link to storage containerisation

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: No

"No tupping, eh?"

It's only allowed if you're a walrus.

A journey down the UK's '3D Tongue' into its mini industrial revolution

Alan Brown Silver badge

@dropbear

Don't confuse low quality DIY and hobbyist 3d printers with the more expensive kit you can obtain.

3D-printed aircraft parts are 3-20 times stronger than the parts they replace and usually come in at 40-70% lighter with far less time required to fabricate them.

fab time is a big issue. It's possible to 3dprint a truck driveshaft that's lighter and stronger than a cast one, but it costs 20 times as much and takes 50 times longer than a cast one. That said, if you're at a frontline army base and you need a driveshaft it's faster and cheaper to print one than ship one out.

Facebook ‘glitch’ that deleted the Philando Castile shooting vid: It was the police – sources

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Social Apps

There are a number of apps that livestream upload video. It's kind of hard to delete something when it's already in the cloud.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Guns don't kill people....

"Inner cities are run by gangs protecting drug turf."

It's not about the drugs, it's about the profits.

There are better ways of torpedoing the profitmaking than trying to go in with guns blazing, or to arrest everyone involved.

UK.gov flings £30m at driverless car R'n'D, wants plebs to speek their branes

Alan Brown Silver badge

"we instead see an apparently never-ending sequence of inconveniences and costs to discourage personal transport."

A lot of london commuters are finding the inconvenience and cost of using public transport is pushing them back into private transport (southern railways). When the public transport provider's timetable bears less resemblence to reality than an avant garde poem, people start losing their jobs (no, not the Southern managers, people who rely on the transport to get to work)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Still waiting...

"You missed the bit where the fella ALSO failed to spot the trailer"

And the bit where a truck-trailer driver turned across oncoming traffic that he was legally required to let past. If he'd been driving within his legal requirements this incident would never have occured.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I think that for a long time to come there will still be a legal requirement for someone in the vehicle to be capable of taking over in the event of an emergency or a systems failure."

Why "IN" the vehicle?

A remote controller in a centre somewhere would probably be equally as effective, assuming the car has the number of sensors required to give all-round view to keep the AI happy.

Predator and Reaper spend most of their time flying autonomously with humans only dropping into the loop as needed.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Self-driving vehicles mean driverless taxis, and driverless taxis mean lower cost of usage plus a likely increase in availability

The end effect is highly likely to be far lower car ownership rates (Barcelona reckons possibly 80% reduction in actual car numbers) That in turn is made up by more cars in developing countries.

The "car lobby" isn't as powerful as you might think.

Tesla whacks guardrail in Montana, driver blames autopilot

Alan Brown Silver badge

"So how can radar and and ultrasound get confused by a white sided truck against a bright lit sky?"

It got clotheslined - not scanning more than a couple of feet from the road.

I've nearly been clotheslined - by real clotheslines - when motorcycling, for the same reason. You don't expect to find an obstacle at head height with nothing underneath it.

Regardless of the Tesla's involvement, turning across oncoming traffic in such a way that this _could_ happen is an illegal turn (evasive action required) at best and more likely dangerous driving, in most jurisdictions. In that particular case there's also the question of where did this guy's dashcam get to - he never drove without one, but none was found in the vehicle. Tampering is obvious.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"The problem is, it's already fairly difficult for a lot of people to pay proper attention to the road when *they're* driving"

The biggest problem with manual control is "tunnel vision"

It's a problem both in driving and aviation.

Reducing the load allows the driver/pilot to relax and close eyes, OR use the road reduction to scan for a wider set of inputs (which keeps you from being bored)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Responsibility

"Like too many people today if they do something stupid they start looking for someone to blame rather than accept responsibility for their actions."

Sounds a lot like Tony Blair's recent press conferences.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: No cell phone reception??

It'd be amusing if Teslas won't engage autopilot _unless_ they can talk to base.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Idiots!

It should be called something like supercruise.

Mind you this isn't anything new. Stories about drivers (particularly winnebago ones) switching on cruise control and expecting the vehicle to do everything are as old as cruise controls.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Idiots!

> If I was that officer I would write the driver a ticket for driving without due care and attention.

Seconded.

> I have a car with adaptive cruise control, that doesn't mean I don't have to be ready to use the brakes; it just means I don't have to use them myself as often. Most of the times the cruise control uses my brakes is when a car changes in to my lane in front of me.

I spend a reasonable amount of time adjusting the speed of my ACC to cater to speed changes well ahead that the lidar can't see, so that it doesn't have to brake much.

It was amusing to come up behind slower traffic and let it do its thing with a passenger onboard though. The braking could get quite hard with a 20mph speed differential involved.

Facebook deleted my post and made me confirm pics of my kids weren't sexually explicit

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Enough

"why are the police not demanding body cameras?"

More to the point, why are cops actively disabling their body cameras if they have nothing to hide?

This should be regarded as malfeasance and treated accordingly.

"The violence has always been there. What's new is the cameras"

As for "black on black" crime: The reality is that it's "poor on poor" crime and the stats are much the same across racial boundaries in any given socio-economic stratum. Black americans are disproportionately in the lower groups due to centuries of discrimination and the Jim Crow laws that never entirely went away.

In mourning for Nano, chap crafts 1k-loc text editor

Alan Brown Silver badge

At least one of the greybeards here uses jed and refuses to use anything else.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Libre liver bile

"tried to write fully functional programs into what was left of the 1KB on a ZX81"

All ROM BASIC systems had a major advantage that BASIC keywords were tokenised down to 1 byte, so as long as you were economical with everything else it was relatively easy.