* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Russia drags NASA: Enjoy your expensive SpaceX capsule, our Soyuz is the cheap Kalashnikov of rockets

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Foot in mouth

"But I wonder if China's seats are big enough for American astronauts"

China _started_ with scaled up Soyuz capsules and grew them. The obvious racist dig is rather misguided - my own family is full of hobbits and at 5'6-5'8, the average chinese guy towers over them

FWIW most US astronauts (and test pilots) are _short_ - tall people have a tendency to have their knees removed by the instrument panel when they eject. The Mercury/Gemini guys were mostly 5-3-5'4 or thereabouts. Big people are a liability in spacecraft (It's been joked that a double leg amputee would make an ideal astronaut as they've had 1/3 of their mass removed)

As for toilets in microgravity - they're all awful and will leave you going "ewwwwwwwww" - bear in mind the air is recirculated, not all of it goes through the filters and now imagine how bad a space habitat smells to a new arrival.

EU aviation wonks give all-electric training aeroplane the green light – but noob pilots only have 50 mins before they have to land it

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Reserve power?

"Lithium-Air batteries have a theoretical specific power of 11.4 kW/kg, compared to the theoretical maximum of 11.99 kWh/kg for Jet A-1, so very close."

They have a slight problem in the _rate_ that they can deliver that energy though.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Reserve power?

"Wasn't there some scam recently where somebody tried selling some ignorant managers that a diesel electric airliner was possible?"

*Ahem*

It's _possible_ that a single *core* could directly drive an attached fan and an electrically coupled one (although it might make more sense to just use a generator and drive 2 electric fans, or find a way of mechanically linking the second fan)

This has been advanced as a way of trying to avoid the never-ending growth of fans on wings, but I suspect it's chasing the wrong rainbow

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Can't Wait

" It gets blooming noisy here on training days "

Combatting this is one of the primary aims of electric trainers.

The fact that those vintage technology Lycoming engines need servicing every 50 hours and tearing down to the last nut and bolt every 5000 hours makes them _extremely_ expensive propositions.

For training aircraft like a Piper Tomahawk, when soloing fuel is only about 20% of the overall operating cost. The labour costs of the engine and wings eat up 90% of the rest.

Even if an electric trainer needed to be recharged on the ground for 2 hours to get 50 minutes flying it would be a viable proposition to have 3 of them vs one conventional trainer. Longer endurance is needed for longer stuff but 50 minutes is a good duration for circuits and suchlike. I can see tradeoffs being advanced - putting more batteries in to give greater endurance at cost of restricting operation to single seat use due to MTOW/MROC limits (The Tomahawk is a good example of tradeoffs: It's cheap and only has a 110hp engine. You _cannot_ get off the ground with two average sized adults, full fuel and more than an overnight bag as baggage, but I've used it for 300 mile solo weekends away, lugging a reasonable amount of junk between family members whilst doing so)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"the Cessnas and Pipers of this world are basically using 1930s technology."

For the simple reason that piston engines were largely abandoned for aeromotive use about then. Light/ultralights tend to be on Sport/experimental licencing rather than GA, which heavily restricts what you can do with them

surprisngly it wasn't engines which was their undoing - What _really_ killed GA for the most part was litigation-happiness in the USA - airframers suffered the death of a billion papercuts because families of people killed in GA crashes sued everyone possibly involved. Even fighting off vexatious litigation is expensive

Now you've done it: Cyber attack targeted Australian brewery 'n' dairy biz Lion

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Don't care: Cooper's is still brewing!

"The biggest fun with beer making is bottling too early and the bottles going off in the middle of the night."

Or in the case of my father and his friends, storage sheds all over the valley doing it.

Ironically enough, within earshot of what's now the Rocketlabs launchpad at Mahia

Red Hot Chili Packets! New submarine cable to land in home of cult Sriracha sauce

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Transpacific

If you want hot cable packets, then it needs to land in La Havana (Habanaro) - but the USA might object

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Sririacha sauce is Californian

"It's a hair on the sweet & mild side for my taste,"

Not knowing the history and having only relatively recently run across it I found the same thing - certainly nothing like the fireball it was being painted up to be.

I'll stick to my caribbean pepper sauce depth charges (they go off in your stomach, not your mouth)

Dough! Jobs microsite for UK's data watchdog set hundreds of cookies without visitors' consent

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: That is something the ICO is well aware of

Just tell them you can fix it for six figures

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Given up with the ICO

The "Japanese solution" then.

Meaning that back in the 1990s, we found the only way to get Japanese companies to secure their networks was to hand the details to Japanese media, who would happily mug the high ranking directors on national TV.

Contacting regulators or the admins would result in utter silence, or being blocked entirely.

There's enough media interest in GDPR breaching that ongoing public naming/shaming wouldn't go amiss - and the repeated opportunities for the ICO to avoid being interviewed would be telling all by itself.

It could be 'five to ten years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Simple solution?

IPv4 support will be needed for quite a while to come.

Selling IPv4-only services as "Internet" should be banned.

It's a walled garden and even if the walls are only a foot high at the moment, they're slowly growing.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"If you have a sufficiently large block of IPv4 addresses, I agree. There really isn't a major technical reason Ito adopt IPv6 at the moment."

I can think of a very sound one. There are increasing numbers of sites and companies with IPv6 ONLY connections. You're sitting in a walled garden.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Time for Elon & Linus

I can see Elon saying that Starlink is IPv6 only. There's a good business case for doing so

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: One for every grain of sand...

"I haven't seen any IPv6 home routers, but they may exist."

I haven't seen any home routers that AREN'T IPv6 capable for over a decade. On the other hand I've seen ISPs disable it in their custom skins (AHEM*BT HOMEHUB*AHEM*)

What junkbox are you trawling through?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: 30% in the UK

"In fact I'd welcome anyone naming any UK ISPs that are categorically saying they will never deploy IPv6."

TalkTalk - they've been saying "real soon now" to their customers on forums for over 12 years - but they unequivocally told their resellers to fuck off when pressed and their resellers dutifully came back with the statement that they have NO INTENTION WHATSOEVER to deploy IPv6

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Every 10 or 20 years....

Flying cars exist.

The way people drive, would you risk EVER taking one on the road or parking it anywhere, knowing that some asswipe would sideswipe it when parked or change lanes into you and what was a relatively expensive paint and panel job is now a complete engineering teardown and flight recertification?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Doomed to eternal limbo

"Communications protocols were designed to connect users directly together (eg original ICQ, the DCC features of IRC etc), nowadays since users can't connect to each other directly all communication takes place through a third party server which decreases performance and reduces security/privacy."

As a GLARING, REAL WORLD CASE of this, just about every single DVR and webcam using Huawei(HiSilicon) SoC - and that's 95% of them - is capable of being broken into if it's on the Internet - this is a direct result of that "third party server" policy coupled with hard coded passwords and replacing it with a "port knocking" policy when called out that's trivially defeated (it slows attackers down by about 6 seconds)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Doomed to eternal limbo

"Having a single nat gateway under you control is also nowhere near as bad as one provided by the isp that you have no control over, or multiple layers of nat."

If you want to experience how bad the fuckupery of multiple NAT layers is, go to Myanmar.

You'll find yourself behind between 3 and 7 layers of NAT to the outside world. If you're REALLY lucky you might be able to achieve 2kB/second or see ssh latencies low enough to type a couple of lines, look up and see them appearing on your screen - and Myanmar is entirely connected via cables, not satellites (the ISPs I was using were anyway)

Thailand is a little better, as is Vietnam. Laos and Cambodia are much much worse and interactive sessions are effectively impossible. This applies across large parts of Africa and India too - and not sparsely populated areas.

The "developed countries" got 95%+ of the IPv4 space and the longer we cling obstinately to it, the harder we're collectively fucking over the developing countries

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Doomed to eternal limbo

"And it means that every device becomes publicly addressable."

Funny. All my devices have SLACC and have unique public addresses.

You still only get to touch them - or even see that they exist at all - if I say you can - and unsurprisingly that's the router's DEFAULT setting (it tracks IPv4 firewall holes and uses the usual assistants on both protocols to open/close ports as needed)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"My ISP is EE, a 4G provider. They cannot provide me any IPv6 connectivity,"

WHich is quite odd, isn't it, as 4G _requires_ IP6 internally to work.

IE: they're bridging IPv6 to IPv4 NAT but they can't offer IPv6 native?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What has it got in its pocketses?

"Simple logic tells you that a dual stack solution, or IPv4-IPv6 translation, are the only possible options. We have both."

Not only do we HAVE both, we've DONE THIS BEFORE.

IPX, Netbeui, Vines, Decnet, etc etc

At some point it actually takes _governments_ to legislate that any company selling "network services" that wants to call it "Internet" must provide IPv6 - the day the UK does that, TalkTalk is the country's largest walled garden, because after 12 years of telling customers "we're working on it" they finally admitted in early 2019 that they have no plans whatsoever for consumer IPv6 and will use IPv4 for the forseeable future

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: IPv6 isn't a very good solution?

"I'm sure there is a term for this kind of argument. It's like waiting for a bus but having a reason for igoring every one that comes along. "

"Passing up lifeboat seats on the Titanic" comes to mind.

IPv4 is so badly beaten well past its design intentions that the surprise at the moment is that it works at all. It was on the verge of unusability when I first got on the 'net 30 years ago and has been saved by some very cleaver people rearranging deckchairs behind the scenes across the entire internet a number of times but eventually there just AREN'T anymore pigeonholes left to stuff the bit into - and those folk have been telling us that would happen every time they made those emergency changes. Now we're a bit past that point, with shared pigeonholes (party lines) happening and many people around the world are having to put up with the fustercluck of CGNAT

When we came up with NAT as a solution in the mid 1990s it was a messy kludge to get a couple or three computers behind a dialup connected simultaneously, not (tens of) thousands of the bloody things - and I'm not exaggerating the scale of this. There are entire asian countries of 30+ million people operating on less than a /16

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "compared to the rather thin, almost elegant, IPv4 original"

" IPv4 still works because a lot of workarounds were implemented to make the original design work "

Starting with kludging the original design which used the first octet as a routing indicator (That's what "Class A" actually meant) and the second octet for departmental subrouting within the organisation and the 3rd octet for further routing leaving surprisingly FEW addresses for actual machines.

IPv6 takes the same policy and BOTH of them took that policy from telephone system routing, but in a fixed address mask (country/area/routing/indivual codes)

The original phone systems were analog and taking extra levels of decoders on wes relatively straighforward. It only took 30 years of concerted effort afterwards to agree on a target of 12-digit limits on phone numbers and another 30 years to actually ACHIEVE it (which was promptly undone by various entities)

If you look at IPv6 address you'll see it looks like red/black trees. So did IPv4 originally. So do telephone networks to some approximation. Sparseness in the high level address space is a GOOD thing. It's supposed to be that way for very good reasons.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not be simple

" IPv6's problem isn't necessarily that the address is longer, is that they also went hex with the digits."

for the very simple reason that addresses like 123.123.234.234.123.123.234.234.123.123.234.234.123.123.234.234 are stupidly long and can be shortened by compressing strings of zeros

And yes, THAT'S what current 32-bit dotted quad format would look like if "merely" extended to 128 bits. It's unwiely as all hell to type

2001:0db8:85a3::8a2e:0370:7334 is easiyish for humans to remember (admins, the ones who have to remember this shit on a day to day basis - pattern reocgnition kicks in)

2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 is hard enough.

32.1.13.184.133.163.0.0.0.0.138.46.03.112.115.52 is going to give most people nightmares and you are NOT going to get granny or anyone else to type either of those in on a support call anyway.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: IPv6 isn't a very good solution?

"It wasn't a joke. Ipv6 requires a complete rewrite. Ipv4.1 would be a lesser rewrite."

Going from 32 to 128 bits is a complete rewrite. Going from 32 to 40 bits is ALSO a complete rewrite

There is no way to shoehorn longer addresses into IPv4 address space. Do it once, not every 30 years

As anti-brutality protests fill streets of American cities, netizens cram police app with K-Pop, airwaves with NWA

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Backwards?

Zaphod Beeblebrox III would like a word - and it isn't "aardvark"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Yes, Anon activists are back."

"I have no doubt that the guys who go home to their wives and children are perfectly nice people"

Exactly. there are photos of the staff at Auchwitz ON THEIR DAYS OFF in 1944 having nice picnics and looking like perfectly nice ordinary germans. 15 years previously they WERE perfectly ordinary nice germans. What was previously unacceptable became acceptable - not just to those people, but also to their neighbours - as what is happening on duty has become acceptable to the neighbours of those police.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Yes, Anon activists are back."

"It is absolutely an official method for the MPLS PD"

I can't see it being there much longer when the liability underwriters have it brought to their attention

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Yes, Anon activists are back."

"The cop that did it is rightly banged up facing a murder charge."

The 3 others that didn't intervene _should_ be facing "accessory after the fact" charges.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Yes, Anon activists are back."

"Second, this isn't the first death of a suspect from being restrained by this technique."

Third this isn't the first, second or even third case of _this cop_ having killed someone or being disciplined for police brutality

US police are not "peace officers", they are a hostile, occupying, heavily armed militia - and one thing history tells you about wars of occupation is that the occupiers cannot win them if those being occupied don't want them there anymore.

The USA has a concept of "qualified immunity", bui that's been abused beyond reocgnition to provide judicial immunity to police deliberately breaching rights, etc - and then there's the issue that the police forces seem to have unlimited liability insurance no matter what happens. One of the fastest ways of bringing a rogue company to heel is to cancel or heavily limit their insurance cover.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Yes, Anon activists are back."

"You do get young anarchists "

What you're referring to as "anarchists" are actually "chaos monkeys"

Contrary to popular belief, _real_ anarchists are actually organised at a local government level - and in Barcelona they did a reasonable job of running the city for quite a while before Franco's fascists killed them all.

Hoverbikes, Hyperloops and sub-orbital hijinks: Yes, the '3rd, 4th and 5th Dimensions of Travel' are coming soon

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Sub-orbital flight

"I'm not sure of the byproducts from burning methane, it's supposed to be fairly clean, no?"

Byproducts from burning: clean

Obtaining it is another matter. There isn't enough "renewables capacity to make the quantities required and we don't have any working high temperature molten salt nuclear power plants (LFTRs) which could produce it from wate(hydrogen)+CO2 (having done that, you can tack on extra carbon to make liquid fuels where electricity isn't practical, which are far safer to handle in normal environments than dangerously reactive shit like hydrogen)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

"If you want them to have a bit more of a sky thinking then maybe they could look at Maglev, but that is a LOT more expensive than a standard train"

Maglev levitation is relatively cheap. The Shanghai Maglev only needs about 15kW for the actual levitation part (it uses far more power for the airconditioning).

The massive power draw comes from punching a train-sized hole through the air at speed - and also comes with a LOT of complaints from the neighbours (the maglev system now runs at reduced speeds in the evening)

Hyperloop _is_ maglev - in a partially evacuated tube - Which reduces the power requirements dramatically (you use a lot less energy pulling a mild vacuum than fighting friction) along with the noise emissions.

Keeping cabins pressurised is a solved technology - we've been doing it on aircraft for decades and hyperloop vehicles can be made with considerably thicker skin. No, the pax don't get smeared if there's a leak. It's called airbraking and no, the vacuum tubes aren't needed below about 70km/h/40mph, so things can be routed at low speed without the "tubes" before moving to vacuum for high speed transit

The biggest problem with vac trains is economics. Transportation systems don't make money on passengers - passenger train systems need massive government subsidies everywhere. That means to make them work they need to be able to carry freight and to carry freight they MUST be able to be containerised which means making the system big enough to hold standard containers. As soon as the cargo needs repacking along the way, the economics of the trasport system are destroyed.

In a working system the routing system doesn't ovberly care if pods are passenger or freight. The only difference would be the origin and destination points

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

"As far as I know Hyperloop was not considered"

What the rest of the world considers high speed rail wasn't considered either. This is just express commuter rail

Vac train technology has been feasible and discussed for decades. The holdback has always been cost.

DidYouKnow: The USA once had the best public transportation systems in the world. The envy of all.

These were systemically dismantled and the technology destroyed in the late 1940s and 1950s.

As one example: it was possible to get across greater Los Angeles on light rail signficantly faster than it can be driven today - and many/most of Los Angeles' freeways are run on old light rail right-of-ways

Watch an oblivious Tesla Model 3 smash into an overturned truck on a highway 'while under Autopilot'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It is autopilot but not autonomous

" Since the human braked, did that turn autopilot off?"

Since the human braked, why didn't he try to steer around the obstacle?

(Hint, if you watch the video the twat was cruising down the road lanehogging. One might call it Karma)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It is autopilot but not autonomous

"I mean the autopilot has been in planes for decades."

"Autopilot" in an aircraft ranges from something that will keep the wings level/heading constant (AND NOTHING ELSE - you have to watch your own altitude, etc) to something that can take off, route and land all by itself.

As such it's a stupid name for a cruise control - Winnebago found that out a long time ago.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Duh....

It's an advanced cruise control.

More importantly the fucking owner's manual EXPLICITLY STATES that the car's autonomous systems CAN NOT DETECT AND STOP IN TIME FOR STATIONARY OBJECTS IN THE VEHICLE'S PATH when travelling in excess of 50mph/(80k/m for the sensible)

There are too many Tesla owners out there who clearly got their driving license out of a packet of Rice Crispies

Australia to refund $720m in 'debts' determined by dodgy algorithm

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I hope they pay big time."

Given that there has been at least one suicide, the words "contributory manslaughter" could be raised

Western Digital shingled out in lawsuit for sneaking RAID-unfriendly tech into drives for RAID arrays

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: WD Market Segmentation Blot

"I'm beyond my 15 days at Canada Computers"

No you're not - and the reason is simple consumer protection laws.

The drives are not as represented(*) and are unfit for the purpose for which they were marketed.

(*) They are MARKETED for home/SOHO "RAID and NAS use" - which means firstly they can't claim they're a business device being repurposed and secondly that consumer protection laws apply

Resellers are only belatedly becoming aware of the can of worms that WDC, SGT and Toshiba have handed them in terms of product liabilities and the ones I've spoken to are NOT HAPPY about it, however they're the ones who have to carry the can in most countries and will have to recover the losses from the HDD makers. At least one large distie has made a decision to withdraw all SMR product from their catalogs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Forcing us to the Cloud 'Solution' and Subscription Hell?

"Best I can figure is all manufacturers have lost interest "

95+% of volume in HDD sales is to bit barns and it's arguable they should have gotten out of retail years ago.

Instead all three makers have burned a lot of trust and I can't see anyone with any sense buying SSD products from a company that's seen to have been willing to commit fraud (ie: ALL THREE makers). We'd already seen them willing to gouge prices and slash warranties in the wake of 2011 Thai flooding, along with drive reliability _PLUMMET_ - this latest stuff is just the icing on the gilded turd.

SSD makers are more pragmatic:

The _smallest_ Samsung drives you can buy in most ranges are 256 or 512GB for the simple reason that there's no profit in selling something that hits retail channels at less than $80

You can't even _buy_ a sub-2GB USB stick anymore, unless it's someone's refurb or been kicking around at the back of a warehouse for 15+ years

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Correction: HGST/Hitachi

"WD acquired the business in 2012 and rebranded it as HGST and from that time, it had absolutely nothing to do with Hitachi."

More precisely, it was rebranded HGST in 2012 because Chinese regulators wouldn't allow WD to merge the company, citing duopoly concerns.

They relented in 2018, after Toshiba was sold a chunk of WD's 3.5 inch manufacturing business (in the meantime Seagate hoovered up Xratex for their test equipment and dumped the drive arrays)

At the time I commented that the Chinese probably saw large SSDs being on the cusp of being cost competitive with HDDs - they were until a fire at Hynix destroyed a big chunk of flash capacity in late 2018

It's now clear the Chinese duopoly concerns were valid - and farming out stuff to Toshiba didn't "fix" that issue.

In the meantime, SSDs with similar DWPD figures to HDD "NAS" drives (180TB/year = 0.15 D[RW]PD and unlike HDDs, reads on SSDs are "free", so 0.2-0.8 DWPD for things like Micron's ION range is more than comparable) are now about three times the price of HDD "NAS" drives - coming with 5 year warranties instead of 3 year ones and built in power loss protection (Samsung's consumer 860 ranges don't have this, let alone the QVOs. Besides, the QVOs cost more)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Silly way to drive customers away

Contact WD and demand forward replacements

They ARE doing it for UK customers

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Wrong credit.

The Datahoarder community did document it. Chris made no secret of the discussions in that or that I brought it to him in the first place

Other "journalists" have been less open about it, and there's been a lot of flat out plagarising of Chris's reports without attribution, or crediting him for the story without looking at what he wrote.

A lot of the astroturfing pushing WD smells less of Stockholm Syndrome and more like having the same grammar and language constructs as the WD PR and manglement twats I was dealing with before I went to Chris.

Alan Brown Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Storm in a teacup?

"I'm curious as to why the rebuild actually fails."

Because the drives have a firmware bug and when given sustained non-sequential writes (ZFS RAID rebuilds aren't sequential. RAID5/RAID6 may not be either) after 40 to 90 minutes they start throwing bogus internal errors "Sector ID not found" - you can see this in "smartctl -x" views of the drive internal extended log) and throw a HARD write error back to the host computer

The only way to stop this happening is to idle the drive after 40 minutes activity for 1-2 hours to allow it to write out its CMR cache area (about 100GB) before you can resume the rebuild.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Storm in a teacup?

"I would like to see some proper data on how this affects the performance of the drives in their intended use"

I kicked this off with Chris because the replacement 4TB REDs I got ti replacing aging ones in my home NAS went from 18 hour RAIDZ3 rebuilds on the old drives to failing to complete after 21 DAYS and WD were blowing off complaints.

RAIDZ3 rebuilds were _still_ 18 hours on the old REDs, and on Toshiba N300s + Seagate IronWolfs purchased to crosscheck. The "New" SMR REDs were the same price as the CMR REDs they replaced but more importantly the CMR drives were simply no longer available anyway. The N300s and Ironwolfs were slightly cheaper than the SMR REDs

That's when I started digging, found out about the shingling and realised they had bad firmware - both problems WD were denying but were fairly well documented in tech circles. THEN I found out about the SMR Barracudas and realised "ghost" networking problems my group had been chasing for over a year weren't caused by networking issues - we verified it was down to the SMR drives choking the desktop computers they were installed on.

WD and Seagate were empathically _refusing_ to tell media or customers whether drives were SMR or CMR. It was only when Chris confronted them with retailer lists (skinflint.co.uk) that they relented and admitted it.

SpaceX Crew Dragon docks at International Space Station

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: this is only half the trip

"if you hit the atmosphere at the wrong angle you might never land"

Unless you're coming in on from an interplanetary trajectory, _parts_ of you can be assumed to land eventually.

Landing at the same time and in the same place is not assured though

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: May I recommend rsyslog?

It wasn't uncommon to syslog to a remote machine which would print. We were doing that in the 1980s in telcos

Watch SpaceX's Starship SN4 prototype accidentally self-destruct in a rocket test burn

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Think Titantic...

"The Titanic's problem was that it had a double bottom but not double bilges."

Bilges weren't so much of a problem so much as the "waterproof compartments" not being sealed at the top.

As each one filled up, the bulkheads were overtopped and water fillled the adjacent compartment. If they'd been sealed it would have been swamped but stayed afloat.

That's quite apart from the deficient crush structure White Star adopted vs P&O, in order to have the big open spaces internally and a reckless captain who treated the liners like speedboats (he'd already badly damaged Olympia off of Liverpool causing it to be dry-docked for months)

TItanic's best chance of survival would have been a head on collision with an iceberg - it would have killed the entire crew of ~200 stokers asleep in the forward compartments but the ship would have survived just fine. On the other hand we wouldn't have SOS and all the marine rescue stuff that resulted form the loss.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: And FAED to black

"I don't think that's what Scott was saying-"

Scott's hypothesis is that the fuelling lines broke loose - and he showed slowmo footage of the thing blasting itself into the ground when it vented methane out the top after pushing the 20 tonne mass adaptor sitting on top off at about 100km/h (which happened when the entire stack "jumped" thanks to the explosion under the base)

ie: This was a setup/ground crew error, not a rocket/vessel failure.

China's Tencent to order ONE MILLION SERVERS as part of $70bn digital infrastructure splurge

Alan Brown Silver badge

"It is also building lots of nuclear power stations, which is why it now seeks to build them for others"

most importantly, China's investing $$SHITLOADS into molten salt systems (far safer than steam bombs) and aims to get those into production sooner rather than later.

If they get it working, it solves the "nuclear waste problem", makes the entire uranium enrichment system clearly military in scope and drops the price of the fuel by a factor of 200 whilst improving safety by a factor of at least 1000 and thermal efficiency of the generation plant by 50%

What do you do when your light water plants are shown up for being the crude, dangerous rube-goldberg contraptions that they are?