* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

China wants to bring home moon rocks in moon vacuum

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: How old hat ...

"So NASA carried their samples in a box"

The samples were bagged in the box. Recall what happens when you take the air out of a freezer bag.

This is a much easier/lighter way of transporting things than having to build a (inverse) pressure vessel and transport it to the moon.

I applaud the chinese for the thought, but there are simpler ways of bringing things back from space.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: How do they get the vacuum in there?

"What will be a bit more difficult is preparing the vacuum examination chamber, but that will be on Earth and, therefor, a pump will be available."

The absolute best vacuum pumps on the planet still can't pull anything as good as the partial pressure you find up at ISS level, let alone what's found on the moon.

Disclosure: I work with people who build/test spacecraft parts. They have these pumps.

Brits unveil 'revolutionary' hydrogen-powered car

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: brake-energy-recovery systems

"Also are all those air conditioners in our server rooms transferring all that heat into the buildings heating system - or just pissing it out of the window?"

Having investigated this for our site....

The cost of server room cooling equipment which can produce useful heat for the building heating system outweighs the benefit of installing it. It's only worthwhile doing if you're cooling more than 100kW

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nuclear power

"The reason is that nuclear powered cargo ships have been tried and they are far too expensive to operate"

Which had nothing to do with the nuclear reactor.

Discounting icebreakers, the ONLY nuclear powered civilian ship built was a mixed cargo/passenger thing at the dawn of the container age. Even after conversion from nuclear steam turbine to conventional steam turbine it was uneconomic and that had a lot more to do with its inability to handle containers than the propulsion system.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: So what about congestion

"The congestion that you see, is a result of people living life as it is today."

In other stories recently, It's been calculated that the effect of vehicle automation (and people therefore not paying as much to use them for taxis, plus being able to hail one easily and therefore not feeling as much pressure to buy a car) could be a reduction of urban car ownership by 70%

The world market is large enough that manufacturers would still sell new cars even at that reduced level of ownership.

Hello Johnnycab.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @ Rol -- Hydrogen filling

"Would Exxon, or Mobil (same thing), or Shell, or BP allow their franchisees to hook up to the local Gas company to convert somebody else's (not mine) methane to hydrogen?"

They already allow franchisees to sell CNG which is compressed from the local gas company's supply.

CNG tanks are bad enough when they go boom, even if the gas doesn't ignite. The safety clearances around a busy hydrogen filling station due to the tank sizes and pressures is enough to make them impractical for any urban area.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Key to the car's economical performance is the braking system"

"When you stop a 1.5 tonne vehicle using your brakes you are converting a lot of energy, "

How much: at 30mph, using E(k) = 0.5 * mass * v^2 = 134,670 joules braking down to zero.

Or enough to run a 2kW kettle for about minute - which is more time than it takes mine to boil a cup of water.

Braking from 60 to zero would dissipate 4 times that much.

Would someone please show me a supercap capable of safely holding half a million joules, given they're limited to ~2.7V and run to about 50Wh/kg at best? (50Wh==180,000 joules, but at 2.7V there's a lot of current so you're now stacking them in series & playing with complex regulation to ensure any given one in the string doesn't go funny and then explode, meaning you have no braking ability left.)

Don't forget it has to be rated to do this repeatedly for a decade and have a suitable safety margin built in at the _end_ of its lifespan (a factor of 3-20 depending on regulations) to not fade after several panic stops from full speed.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"because the Prius is putting it in to batteries"

Not for lack of trying. Supercapacitive regeneration has been toyed with for years. The problem is that ones capable of holding that many joules are quite bulky. (one of the ideas regularly floated in hybrids is to dump braking load into supercaps and then bleed that into the batteries if needed.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not hydrogen powered, just hydrogen storage

"Hydrogen is either achieved by electrolysis (very inefficient process from leccy) or by breaking down hydrocarbons (wasting a whole lot of the energy in the hydrocarbons). Both are inefficient."

The Haber process can theoretically be used to directly produce hydrogen from water and air, given enough process heat - but that would require (big scary) noo-cle-ar sources to be viable (the same heat sources would work well in cement kilns and would drop concrete's CO2 footprint by half overnight)

More to the point with all these pie-in-the-sky things, Hydrogen is bloody hard to contain when under pressure, and makes metals (and other materials) brittle and generally needs stupidly high pressures for storing practical amounts(*) in a car, which is a bad idea when coupled with the "brittle" part above.

If you're going to mess around with making portable fuels then move the extra few steps along from producing hydrogen, tack on a few carbon atoms and make something much safer to handle, like propane/butane (LPG) or even..... octane. Keep the hydrogen in low-pressure pipelines or consider producing methane and pumping it into the existing distribution networks. It may be an economic way of ensuring you can run your LFTR nuclear plant at continuous full power instead of load following.

(*) Yes, I know about metal hydrides and their abilities to soak up hydrogen like a sponge, but having to pay £30,000 for the fuel tank would make any car impractical.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Stupid aerodynamics

This has been optimised for 50+ mph when as a city car it could have the aerodynamics of a brick wall and it wouldn't matter.

Why do makers constantly make this mistake with cars like this? I'd far rather have something shaped like a Suzuki Wagon-R which is tiny, but actually surprisingly practical.

Ofcom must tackle 'monopolistic' provider BT, says shadow digital minister Chi Onwurah

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I live in West Kensington, London, and our Fibre rollout is barely in the planning stages."

1: BT isn't getting govt grants for these areas

2: Your lovely neighbours are putting in planning objections left, right and centre against the cabinets.

The result is that BT can't be bothered because digging through the objections is expensive.

You (and your neighbours who _want_ FTTH) may want to take note of the objectors (this is all public information) and let the area know who's blocking their better broadband.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: FTTP is cheap.

"That's a nonsense though isn't it? If FTTP was cheaper, easier, quicker the BT would be doing it now. "

BT is only doing _anything because it's being paid (by the government and by extension by us taxpayers) to do so. Given no regulator oversight it would have continued its policy of letting the lines infrastructure rot and charging as much as it can get away with for access to that.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I don't _believe_ it

"On a purely technical point has anyone got any idea about how durable overhead spans of fibre are (or would be)? "

30 years ago I supervised the commissioning of a 15km pole-top-run to a comms station on a mountaintop in New Zealand (the kind where you have to helicopter in during winter because the snow is 20 feet deep and wait for safe weather in summer or risk being blown off a cliff whilst driving up). It's still operational, as is a 60 metre aerial FDDI span at current $orkplace that's been in place for more than 20 years.

Armoured aerial fibre is probably more robust than the equivalent armoured aerial copper drop on any given span. I'm fully inclined to believe claims of 50+ years.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I don't _believe_ it

"The up - front costs of rolling out FTTH must be eye - watering, "

Which is why BT has been given large grants to roll it out - which it promptly pissed against the wall in areas unrelated to the FTTH rollouts.

This _was_ a perfect opportunity to force unbundling - by making the grants contingent on separation of the companies. That's how New Zealand did it.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Priorities

"If the Openreach arm of the business was taken back into public ownership"

It doesn't need to be. As long as well-regulated to prevent monopoly abuse it will work - and because it's not selling dialtone, a line-only company has no incentive to treat any comers differently.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Level Playing Field?

"As she seems to think that the current network should be discarded and replaced wholesale, she will presumably call for Virgin and others to be compelled to cable up areas that are less populous than central London, Manchester, Glasgow etc."

Look to what happened in New Zealand.

As soon as the dead hand of the incumbent was removed from the lines company it was free to sell to anyone and promptly did so, including leasing duct space and dark fibre to the NZ-equivalent of Virgin.

Once that happens, VM rollouts are trivial by comparison with tearing up streets.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Clueless

G.Fast has nothing to do with the economics of small cabinets. The average G.Fast node is going to have to be up the pole (where lines are distributed aerially) or buried every 4-5 houses.

Once you get to that level of complexity you may as well run fibre and use GPON. It'll be cheaper than the work needed for G.Fast.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Clueless

> And that the Govt ensured that everyone got good internets because they bunged cash to SK?

With hooks that meant SK had to do what it was told or the gotv would take the cash back.

The korean govt hasn't been shy about jailing company execs in the past either.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Is the issue Openreach

"or the "others" e.g. Virgin media, no bothering to invest?"

When you have a rapacious monopoly which can (and does) react to competition in the marketplace (ie, people running their own cables or setting up RF links) by lowering circuit prices to below those of the new competition, 3rd parties don't see much point in investing.

Look to what happened in New Zealand when they forced the split of Telecom NZ(Spark) and its lines company (Chorus) - it's worth noting that it's the former incumbent dialtone company which is looking sick now, despite screaming from the rooftops that a split would be the death knell of the lines company.

Terrified robots will take middle class jobs? Look in a mirror

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I'm more worried about stability of society than displacement.

"There is a self-checkout line where you scan and bag your own stuff,"

Which works fine if you have less than a dozen items.

If you have a big shop, a human operated till is much faster.

Virgin Atlantic co-pilot dazzled by laser

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: How about adding the penalty of......

"Red and green are just very common light colors and exactly the types of colors used for all kinds of safety related stuff."

Including approach slope indicators on the ground. I'd imagine not being able to see those wouldn't make for a happy PIC.

Red/green colourblindness is the most common form. It's a pity other colours weren't used.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Cars?

I wish it was easier.

By the time the cops show up, the scrotes are long-gone. As mentioned earlier if the police helicopter shows up, they dunk into the nearest pub when they get bored of painting it.

They _know_ to the minute how long it takes the police to arrive after a 999 call and will simply melt away a minute or so before the cars show up.

Alan Brown Silver badge

You'd think so, but they somehow managed to retain their license after multiple busts for serving underage drinkers (one was 15)

The neighbours have been complaining about the place for years but I suspect the cops want all the local villains in one place.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Cars?

"Given how some hooligans delight in dropping cinder blocks onto traffic from an overpass or pedestrian bridge, I am surprised this isn't done more frequently to cars."

It is. It's less reported on than lasing aircraft, but having been lazed with a high-powered device (it fucking hurts) and having seen a driver in front of me swerve violently when lazed, it's even more likely to cause mayhem than lazing an aircraft.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Apart from the clueless f**kwit who decided to shine one at a Police helicopter with high quality video recording, most are unlikely to be caught other than by chance."

They regularly get away with lasing the police choppers.

All you need to do is stand outside a pub. When helicoptor comes over, step inside and blend in.

The local "sports bar" CCTV system has outside cameras but they're always on the blink when the cops want to use them to see who was lazing aircraft.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: How about adding the penalty of......

"Given that commercially available lasers use only a few restricted light wavelengths, isn't it possible to add filters for these to the cockpit windows??"

Yes (and they exist), but.....

They need to be certified as safe for aviation use, not interfere with daylight operation and have a lifespan in place of at least 10 years.

I got lased on the ground (whilst driving) a few years ago(*). These bozos aren't using 1-5mW green laser pointers from Maplins. They're high powered and they HURT

(*) The kind of oik who lases aircraft thinks its funny to lase passing cars and trains too.

Google to snatch control of Android updates from mobe makers – analyst

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Don't get your hopes up

"Their customers are already used to all the S-alternatives to the G-* apps."

In my experience the S-alternatives get removed from the main menu pages as soon as the user starts personalising and removed if possible.

.

Back-to-the-future Nexsan resurrects its SATABeast

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Impressive capacity.

You don't need an extra-strength rack.

You DO need one that's 1200mm deep, even for the older units. If you try and shoehorn any of these large storage arrays into a smaller rack you will spend a lot of time cursing and swearing when trying to run cables - if you can even get the back door closed.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Ironically

I've just switched 3 satabeast2 units OFF for the last time.

I've got Netapps, Beasts and Xyratech sumos. The Nexsans were the best of the lot (really good rails, unlike the Xyratechs, and the Netapps just feel flimsy/gimmicky.

The writing's on the wall though - For the price of drives certified to go into these things, Samsung's enterprise SATA/SAS drives are only a small bump up in price - and the bottleneck in ALL of these dedicated raid units is the raid controller, not the drives, with the laughable ram cache in them not helping (yes, I know Netapps have ssd caching. I've got it, it doesn't help that much)

For that reason the latest bulk storage purchase was a TrueNAS Z30 with 60-drive JBOD drawer under it (again, one with good quality rails AND it comes with decent cabling arms) running ZFS. With just under 1TB SSD read cache, 128Gb of ram cache in front of that holding the filesystem metadata and ZFS is handled in CPU (much more power than any raid controller), it's at _least_ 20 times faster than the Beast-based server it replaced in terms of IOPS and 2-5 times faster in sequential access. (1TB no-change incremental backups now finish in 1-2 minutes instead of 12 hours and 1TB full backups in 5-6 hours on a fileserver being accessed by over 100 clients, without the users noticing). For the critical-IO filesystems we run a few TB of pure-ssd storage on the same box and _nothing_ I have thrown at it so far can make that pool sweat.

I fully expect the next storage system will be pure flash. Large SSD prices are on-track to be cheaper than HDDs within 18 months and once they hit twice the price of consumer-grade drives the market for spinners will collapse. It pretty much already has for everything smaller than 512GB.

Shopping for PCs? This is what you'll be offered in 2016

Alan Brown Silver badge

"but the specifications for that laptop were not available anywhere on Acer's website, though other models in the same range were. I knew it came with 2GB RAM and I knew I wanted to increase that, but I could not get any response directly from Acer."

The most reliable way of finding out is the Kingston or Integral or Crucial memory configurator.

Seriously.

And in cases where only one ram socket is visible you usually find the other one is under the keyboard (Toshiba are buggers for doing this)

Alan Brown Silver badge

What I want:

Enough ram to do the jobs I'm doing without swapping

Enough disk to hold them.

Enough CPU to not slow down.

Enough network bandwidth to reach the NAS where everything's held.

A big enough screen with enough pixels to not have to play stupid games with multiple monitors.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I miss VGA

"with only a little "ringing" visible on sharp vertical edges."

That "ringing" is due to cable impedance mismatches.

It's possible to work out which end of the cable is causing it if you measure the ghosts and know the timing across the screen, but the take-home lesson is that high quality vga cables with individually shielded 75 ohm feeders inside work better than cheap and nasty (usually thin) ones.

A lot of TVs have no terminators on the VGA line so the signal reflects back to the computer and gets reflected back again (basic RF stuff, same principle as TV ghosting) and the best solution in that instance is to interpose a buffer box with a very short cable to the TV.

This also applies to SCART

That said, VGA(HD DB15) (and scart) are dead standards. If you want to run long cables then use the right kit for the job. HDMI and displayport are both very tolerant if you treat 'em right (buffer units are cheap)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"All PCs are Linux PCs"

Point being that once the nickel-and-diming takes off on W10 as it's expected to, many people feel that there will be an increase in the rate of installation of Service Pack Mint.

When asked 'What's a .CNT file?' there's a polite way to answer

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not just computers

"Any other excuses I've missed?"

You was drunk.

At least you didn't try to take a whizz in the coin slot.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: cd trays

"1.2? that would be 760k or thereabouts."

No, it would be a 5.25" Quad-density floppy drive.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: SLA what's that then...

"interestingly after I countered with a complaint about recieiving a rude and sweary phone call at an unsocial hour, with my union rep enquiring whom in the HR department had shared my personal phone number the disciplinary action disappeared."

Too bad you don't record your calls. That might have been enough to allow manglement to pick up on said unprofessional behaviour.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Faith in Humanity

"The secretaries did not like going to the print room on their own"

If this happens, then someone's got wandering hands.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I love these stories, it shows what a nasty, immature disfunctional bunch we are.

"Working the tech support phone you are the face of the company. You are also there to fucking help people (hint: the clue is in the name). The people calling need help and for many of them you are the only lifeline they have"

There's definitely a problem and it starts near the top of the food chain.

Manglement treat helpdesk workers with contempt only slightly below that they hold for customers once they've lightened the contents of their wallets.

Is it any wonder companies get such poor customer service ratings?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Its True, as it actually happened to me

"One flick of the switch and not only did I fix the PC"

For a while.

Trip switches don't pop by themselves. It's worthwhile finding out what caused it, even if that's 3 2 bar heaters, the printer, copier and the kettle all being on at once.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Why!? Why did he do that?"

We charged our customers to do this stuff - and they paid.

Kept the staff entertained too.

Getting metal hunks into orbit used to cost a bomb. Then SpaceX's Falcon 9 landed

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Cautious note understood…

"46 engines were used in groups of three on a total of 135 flights, so each engine did an average of 8.8 flights - there was only one in-flight failure and seven on-pad failures and as we all know, none of these were catastrophic."

You forgot to factor in the ones that exploded on the test stand. At one point there were very real fears it would never fly because there wouldn't be any engines to fit to it.

The quality of welding required for the Bells to prevent LH2 leakage was high and at that stage the USA had forgotten (literally) how to make seamless tubing - requiring kludges like hacking gun barrels off ww2 battleships whilst historians and archivists tracked down the last remaining metalurgists living in retirement homes (IIRC the youngest was in his mid 80s) to try and get the details about how to recreate the process.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: A bit negative...

"The SRB on the Challenger did not go boom. It just leaked a bit."

It went boom eventually - when the range safety officer fired the destruct mechanism that split the booster along its length.

Mind you that was several seconds (and several tens of km) after Challenger had self-destructed as a result of going sideways at high mach numbers.

UK IT pros love OpenStack. Who says so? SUSE says so

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The problem with Suse

Presumably you're the downvoter.

10 years ago:

£130k spent on storage kit, HP+Suse+Steeleye, packaged solution. Worked ok at first (up to 5TB). Started playing up under load.

Suse particularly useless, but all 3 parties blaming each other. Suse became less and less responsive as we added bug reports, eventually just ignoring email despite being paid £9k/year for support.

They wouldn't even respond to Novell head office queries (yes, we did escalate)

In the end we dumped Suse and installed Redhat + GFS. Whilst that's been less trouble, when there are problems, they actually help.

Suse is in our "never deal with again" list.

Earthquake-sensing smartphone app fires off early alerts of disaster

Alan Brown Silver badge

Given that the quake in chch was centred less than 14km from the city, nothing would have given advance warning (If the alpine fault pops, it would be a completely different matter)

There's a reason NZ is sometimes known as the Shakey Isles.

Hey, Intel and Micron: XPoint is phase-change memory, right? Or is it? Yes. No. Yes

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: XPoint is the new...

For what it's worth, memristor arrays are apparently used in some small embedded devices.

Given the embedded market usually going for "cheap" and "reliable", it may mean that they're able to fab small sizes but are having trouble reliably making 'em large enough to be worthwhile selling as a standalone item.

Go and whistle, IDC. The storage world's going to hell in a handbasket

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Storage = Commdity

"Yet most enterprise IT shops are still buying very expensive, high profit margin storage products?"

The main reason people buy the high-cost stuff comes down to support. If you build it yourself then you get to carry the can when it breaks. If it's bought in then the vendor can take a kicking when it breaks (in my experience, that's not "if")

There are cheaper options around - such as TrueNAS, which is one of the cheapest fully-supported ZFS builds out there and unlike OpenE or Nexenta they actually put their name on the front of the box, so you only need to deal with one point when things go funny vs having Hardware and Software suppliers pointing fingers at each other.(*)

(*) About a decade ago we had a vendor-supplied solution fail under load. HP vs Suse vs Steeleye all blamed each other - then Suse simply shut down all discussion and ran away, refusing to even respond to Novell head office. Not a brilliant response after outlaying £180k on kit and paying £9k/year for software support and a good reason to never _ever_ use them again.

Ofcom spent £10m in past 2 years desperately lobbing away sueballs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This isnt about "Bad Policy"

"This is about rich companies being able to de-rail or at least delay ANY policy made by democratic process."

The fact that they're suing is an indication that Ofcom might be doing some things right.

Of course, it also means Ofcom shies off the hard decisions. It would be nice if the telcos were forced to pay all legal costs (not just court ones(*)) when they lose (as they usually do).

(*) "Costs" is tightly defined in legal parlance. Most legal consultation costs are not covered. This makes courts very much a case of "the battle of the deepest pockets"

Argos offers 'buy now pay in 3 months' deal

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Meh!

If you take the delivery option (usually free) then distance selling legislation kicks in and you have plenty of time to return it.

Health and Safety to prosecute over squashed Harrison Ford

Alan Brown Silver badge

"The Fail might bleat on about "elf & safety gawn mad", but I raise a glass to the HSE, who have been doing a great job with little thanks for years."

The Fail bleats on in a lot of cases with good reason. H&S is frequently used as an excuse to avoid doing things and it gets on the HSE's tits - so much so that they actually sponsor a national conkers event to make a point.