* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

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

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: up to 2TB, it makes no sense to go mechanical

"But when a drive failed, only about one third of the time was it preceded by SMART monitoring errors."

Conversely: IF you know what you're looking for, monitoring SMART can tell you a drive is having trouble long before it even issues a SMART warning

Alan Brown Silver badge

"But the competitors are SSD drives."

There's SSD and there's SSD.

SK Hynix have shipped some utterly shitty NVME drives (less than 140MB write speeds and 300MB/s read speeds) which HP have bundled into their desktops and sold as premium product - but because they refuse to publish specs on what they put in their products they got away with it.

HP Europe response to complaints has boiled down to "We got your money. Tough luck!"

Our response was "You blew any chance of future sales and jeopardised tens of millions of dollars of nationwide future contracts on the supply framework we use. Oh dear, how sad"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Another good reason to be an El Reg reader

"And thanks to Chris Mellor's article, I specified the old 64MB cache version (model WD40EFRX, CMR) rather than the new 256MB cache (SMR) drive."

A lot of vendors are shipping EFAX models anyway. The retailers don't know the difference.

Alan Brown Silver badge
Mushroom

Chickens coming home to roost

(Disclosure: I'm the one who brought this mess to Chris' attention along with various tech mailing lists and notified ixSystems about the F/W bugs. Chris verified the issue, got admissions from WDC & SGT which they'd refused to give to consumers plus a voluntary statement from Toshiba about their use of SMR in consumer products - I'd assumed Tosh had been more ethical in disclosure up to that point)

ixSystems have withdrawn their recommendation for the SMR drives - and they verified my report of FW bugs in RED SMRs.

The reason they gave that recommendation was that WD RED CMR drives have been hellaciously reliable. My old REDs have run 8-9 years 24*7 without missing a beat whilst other drives tended to only last 5-6 years. WD built a reputation and trashed it in a matter of 18 months.

As for the Class Action - this COULD be a submarined way of WD heading off consumer protection "death of one million paper cuts" in US courts. By certifying a class in USA courts it means anyone filing in lower courts (small claims) is likely to find their claim pulled into the class action.

Don't forget: WD, Seagate and Toshiba have been explicitly marketing SMR drives as suitable for home and SOHO use. That means the "Get out of jail free" card that was used against misleading advertising litigation in the past ("these are business devices and businesses must do their homework") is ripped up and thrown away. WD compounded the crime by selling the things explicitly as suitable for RAID use when what they meant was "Mirroring", then gaslighting consumers who complained (as did Seagate) and then issued press statements gaslighting the public (Say kids, Can you say "Exemplary Damages"? I knew you could.)

In this case the class action is targetting WD. I doubt it will be the only one and I'm doubtful consumer protection agencies around the world will sit on their hands - particularly when they look at the combined actions of the three companies

If the rollout of DM-SMR in consumer drives had been "coincidental", then at least one of the makers would have disclosed it on the spec sheets and/or would have released SMRs at a considerably lower price point than their CMR product and/or would have pointed out what the others were doing.

If it looks like a cartel behaviour duck , quacks like a cartel behaviour duck and walks like a cartel behaviour duck, it's highly unlikely to be a coyote.

Icon, because Micron have parked SSD tanks on HDD maker lawns.

You can buy their 5210 ION "cold storage" (meaning 0.2-0.8DWPD, something akin to archival SMR HDDs, not "powered off") SSDs for twice the price of Enterprise HDDs of the same capacity (or about 3 times the price of a RED/IronWolf/N300 - and the quoted endurance of 180TB/year for RED or IronWolf or N300 NAS drives is a lot LESS than 0.2-0.8DWPD)

Not bad for an ENTERPRISE drive that draws ~2W, has power failure protection and a 5 year warranty (the HDDS referenced above are all 3 year warranty)

RIght now on Insight, UK IONs are listed at £308/4TB($380), £580/8TB($680) +tax - and the way SSDs are still falling in price they'll rpobably hit parity with the Enterprise SMR drives by the end of 2020

Raspberry Pi Foundation serves up an 8GB slice of mini-computing goodness

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Pi a great project

"That BBC Micro naming is *why* there are A and B series Pis"

Where's the raspberry Electron?

Alan Brown Silver badge

"another RPi to sit in my desk drawer"

OpenHab - just a thought.

Playing with tasmotas here

Alan Brown Silver badge

"640 Kelvin is the temperature the next generation of Raspberry Pi is going to run at"

Fahrenheit 451, shirley?

Clearview AI sued by ACLU for scraping billions of selfies from social media to power its facial-recog-for-cops system

Alan Brown Silver badge

"There's also the question of whether downloading an image and using it for a commercial purpose is a breach of the photgrapher's copyright."

That's not a question, it was settled long ago. The answer is "yes" and is why we have image libraries

Alan Brown Silver badge

GDPR

I wonder how many EU citizens are in Clearview's database without permission - and if Clearview execs - or anyone using their data - is planning to travel to the EU in the reasonable future?

That customer list looks like pretty reasonable warrant fodder

Surprise! That £339 world's first 'anti-5G' protection device is just a £5 USB drive with a nice sticker on it

Alan Brown Silver badge

5G might not give you coronavirus, but it is quite likely to transmit Hentai viruses if you don't practice safe hex

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Sure they just change the socket 90% of the time just to force us into that extra upgrade and not because some new chip model actually requires it"

Intel: yes

AMD: no

Even to the point where the latest AMD APUs use the same AM4 socket but can't be run on older boards due to bios constraints (the older APUs can only address 16MB in real mode) and vice versa. There are some kludged workarounds coming to allow it on enthusiast boards but they involve serious hackery of the underlaying codebase to make it all fit

Intel would change the socket and force the issue

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: $$$

for comparison: Intel were flogging 24 core Xeons for $5-7000 apiece this time last year. I drew the line on one system because the CPUs the user wanted were $13,500 apiece.

Having convinced him he could survive on 8 cores less per socket, we were able to knock $12k off the total price

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: $$$

Price doesn't scale linearly with number of processors. the 16 and 24 core ones are a relative bargain

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: AMD Dreams

I was just thinking about that quote myself.

Memories of sitting in computer class in 1982 and calculating that the current rate of memory increase in systems, 1GB would be the norm by Y2K and be pushing 64GB systems by 2010. Then thinking... "nahh"

It wasn't just a few credit cards: Entire travel itineraries were stolen by hackers, Easyjet now tells victims

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: On this Michael O'Leary has a point

Ah, yes... "cheap flights"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVASZ2lCY5Y

Chicago: Why I just grin like a dork... It's my kind of Bork

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Jumped up quiche?

which makes you wonder how desperately hungry someone was, to eat snails,considering that without mountains of flavouring (and a lot of butter) they have a taste and texture not essentially different from "chewy snot with lumps in it"

If American tech is used to design or make that chip, you better not ship it to Huawei, warns Uncle Sam

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Also Microsoft

"Wow that's really going to screw over Applied Materials."

At some point, US companies are going to start decamping North America

DBA locked in police-guarded COVID-19-quarantine hotel for the last week shares his story with The Register

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: How far away is home?

"I lost count of the number of people who were very surprised at this asking how we travelled so far in a day."

I lived in New Zealand - which is only about the same size as the UK. Driving 100 miles each way for a decent coffeehouse and night out wasn't considered unusual. Even in a country that size it was perfectly possible to live places where the nearest neighbour was 20-30+ miles away.

Then again, consider it can take 2-3 hours to drive the 19-20 miles _across_ London, vs under 2 hours to travel the ~100miles between the ring motorways connecting London and Birmingham or that it's 90-120 minutes on the commuter network from the outer London suburbs to St Pancras Station, vs a fraction over 2 hours to Paris from St Pancras).

Where I live now, I can _see_ Canary wharf on a clear day. It takes 2 hours at best to get there (3-5 on a bad day). Brighton Beach is 3 times further away but I can be there in 45 minutes. You eventually start thinking of things in terms of travel time rather than distance

It's a common failing of organisations outside the UK to assume all distances are equal when planning appointments for technical staff - which can lead to some "interesting" conversations with manglement who really don't understand that "it's only 5 miles, how can it possibly take 90 minutes??"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: How far away is home?

"those of us who don't fully comprehend Australian-style distances"

Australia is about the size of the US lower 48 - or would completely cover western Europe right up to the Russian borders: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/united-kingdom/australia or https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/united-states/australia

Darwin to Sydney is about the same distance as London to Moscow (or London to Tel Aviv, or Seattle to Houston)

China is about the same size as Australia: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/united-kingdom/china or https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/united-states/china

Plugging in a few equatorial countries (try Ghana vs United Kingdom) can give an understanding just how distorted the standard Mercator projection makes our view of the world. It's a navigator's map, not an accurate sizing one.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Perfect example...

"suggesting there was an initial wave in UK/Europe last autumn..."

1918 seems to have started around Kansas - already deadly when it struck there and travelled to USA military camps - and went to Europe. It changed and came back to the USA. Nobody tries to argue that what left the USA was "Wave 1"

In the case of what's been found in Europe/USA, it's clear it was out and circulating sooner than people thought - but that could have been a less virulent form too. My GP is already suggesting the "extreme flu" I had in late December-early January (and still suffering after effects from) was Covid, although I'm personally doubtful and tend towards H1N1. Without swabs at the time or accurate antibody tests it's anyone's guess. (Amongst other things I lost smell entirely for a couple of weeks and went completely deaf for 3 days/impaired for 5 weeks)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Perfect example...

"You had a cumulative known total of 321."

That was a cumulative total of people who had died in hospital after confirmed diagnosis, when there were no fucking diagnostic kits available.

You can warp stats around in any number of ways if you restrict the way you express your datasets

The best overall proxy for covid19 death rate is the excess population deaths over the 5 year average deaths for this time of year and that's painting a VERY bleak picture.

It was only when the FInancial Times started weighing on how appallingly bad things are that the rest of the media started sitting up, stopped reportng the govt "official" figures as if they were gospel and started making noises to say "hospital deaths" or other footnotes to say the numbers were incomplete

https://www.ft.com/content/40fc8904-febf-4a66-8d1c-ea3e48bbc034 - currently pointing out that ONS stats show 50,979 deaths vs the govt's claimed 32,065 - the curves showing at the bottom of the page are nice, but they make it clear that this is the FIRST wave of the disease and there is worse to come(*)

At the time the UK government was saying "22,000 deaths" the figure was already PAST 45,000 and when they said 32,000 (after "Adjusting for care homes") they're still missing out around 1/3 of the recorded deaths above the baseline.

An awful lot of people are dying at home, or in care homes _without_ the benefit of a covid diagnosis and medics are afraid to put "possibly covid" on the death certificate without a test result as the health authority manglement have been making various noises about funding, etc. They know they're going to be facing corporate manslaughter investigations and the better they can make numbers look, the harder it is for prosecutors

This is going to be the Potters Bar event for public health investigations and politicians will be held to account. There have been too many deaths for the to deflect to 3rd parties.

Opening up too soon will result in things taking off like an exploding boiler. Wuhan, Singapore, South Korea(**), Germany and other places are already finding this out the hard way

(*) Every pandemic in the last 150 years has had multiple waves with the second being significantly larger than the first (even the last Ebola outbreak). looking at https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/three-waves.htm should be eyeopening

Some countries actually TEACH this stuff as part of history due to the impact it had. Samoa lost almost 1/3 of its entire population in 12 days in 1918 - and the British governer behaved almost exactly like Boris - refused to allow quarantines, then to accept responsibility, running away to New Zealand as fast as he could - leaving his assistant to deal with hundreds of grieving families - then back to England when investigators tried to detain him for a commission of enquiry. Most Pacific Island countries saw 20-25% death rates - that's why they locked down tighter than a snail's arse when this one came along.

(**)Seoul: 1 carrier, one epic pub crawl to celebrate the night of the easing of lockdown. 30 confirmed infections already, another 7200 people exposed. It only takes a couple of carriers to restart the blaze

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: due to the ineptitude of Boris and his cohort of fuckwits.

Really? http://offloop.net/covid19/ (which I assume you're looking at) shows "reported hospital confirmed covid deaths", not "excess deaths above baseline" for the UK. That big jump in the curve was when it was adjusted to "reported hospital and carehome confirmed convid deaths" for the week.

In reality it's up near Belgium and Belgium has 1/6 the population, mostly geriatic. Offloop's admin is aware of the ONS API but it runs a week behind the government announcements ( I asked him to plot UK excess deaths as a separate line)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What a shit hole

and 32,065 "hospital deaths" is significantly different to 52,000+ "excess deaths above baseline"

Unless there are some REALLY stealthy ninja assassin squad carving their way across the UK countryside it's a sure bet that Covid19 is the culprit for most-if-not-all of the line above the "normal for this time of year" figure.

(especially since "influenza" "road crash" and other "accidental" causes have taken a general dip - the first for general reporting reasons, but the other two because they genuinely have dropped - it's even more pronounced in South Africa where the rise in Covid deaths has seemingly been outweighed by the drop in the murder rate.)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What a shit hole

"Population density seems to be a bigger factor."

Not really.

Packing hundreds of confirmed infected seniors off to care homes and telling those care homes that they will lose ALL funding immediately if they don't take them (yes, really) is on par with trebucheting infected corpses over the wall into a beseiged town

It's no wonder care homes across the UK are seeing staggering death tolls with most seeing between 1/2 and 2/3 of their residents die in the last month - one site reported losing 85% of their residents in a single week.

The words "corporate manslaughter" are appearing more and more often in connection with covid deaths

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What a shit hole

"Competent countries do actually have pandemic plans in place"

Whereas the UK fared so badly in BOTH of the last 2 pandemic planning exercises (the germane point being they were under the same government) that UK dot gov kicked the results under the carpet and ignored it whilst whistling loudly if anyone bought the subject up and talked about the exercises before those.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What a shit hole

"hiding behing the science and the data "

Except there was clearly none of either, as what was being pushed was party line, not WHO recommendations or in line with what any sane medic was recommending

Covering a turd with vanilla sprinkles doesn't make it any more edible.

Users of Will.i.am's Wink IoT hub ask 'Where is the love?' as they're asked to pay for a new subscription service

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Let's start a new fad

"the convenience factor is being able to instantly adjust the lighting or heating as you walk in or out of a room "

Get it _right_ and the lighting will adjust as you walk in/out of a room, heating will sort itself out and NOT come on in rooms with the windows open, etc.

It's a bit more fiddly to setup and put the sensors/bridges where needed but if you tie it all together it means you have a system which works and you don't need to touch anything - and if you really want you can even setup some old fashioned "light switches" (433MHz transmitters) wherever you find convenient rather than where the sparky decided to shove 'em 40 years ago.

Alan Brown Silver badge

cloud == someone else's stuff

openhab on a pi :)

Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket's tanks just disintegrated in Earth's orbit

Alan Brown Silver badge

Laser Brooms (Re: Irresponsible?)

It's been pondered - and the general concensus is that lasering from on-orbit is impractical and even more problematic than lasering from the ground.

Laser Brooms are perfectly feasible NOW. The problem is that they can be used to bring down other countries' satellites as well as debris and technically the debris that's up there is the responsibiilty of whoever made the mess

Unless/until there's an international treaty and an international organisation tasked with doing the job that has FULL transparency/oversight from all parties, any one party deploying one could be construed as an Act of War by other spacefaring nations

Good luck getting the USA and China in the same room to agree on this, let alone China and India or India and Pakistan

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Telescopes should be in space and not below 100km of atmosphere.

"It's instructive to compare the history of the James Webb "

The problem with spacecraft is that launchers are sodding expensive.

Which means you only get one launch and one spacecraft, (and maybe a backup if the first goes bang)

Which means you heavily invest in making sure your spacecraft works

And also means that you add every bell and whistle you can think of to your spacecraft, because you only have one launch

Which puts up the launch mass and complexity

Which means you need to invest even more heavily in making sure your spacecraft works

Which means you build hundreds - if not thousands - of test articles

Which means in the end, your spacecraft is valued in $billions, but only has an actual materials cost of a few million - and you have a backup in case it didn't fly - and if you wanted to build several of them you'd be able to without even making much dent in the project budget

Except that doesn't happen

Because space launches are primarily a dick^H^H^H^Hflag-waving exercise and the science is in a distant second place by comparison to the "Gee, aren't we great!" behaviour when the thing is launched.

And space launches are like that because they're so sodding expensive.

Cheaper launches means simpler payloads are more easily justified, and really cheap launches means you can even afford to send up a dud occasionally without it being a career-ending move.

And it might even mean that development moves fast enough that a mission might actually take less than someone's entire career from first concept to actual use in space (seriously - taking 20-25 years from inception to launch is par for the course. There are several spacecraft sitting around that were completed and have been waiting to be launched for 20+ years, thanks to "funding issues" that cropped up along the way.)

James Webb is a good example of old-school thinking. It's big but hideously complicated because it was _too big_ for any existing launcher when first designed. The fact that better/bigger launchers now exist hasn't caused a redesign, but a redesigned JW might be flyable sooner because the single most problematic part of it is the sunshade and those problems are vastly reduced if you can have more launch mass and/or payload volume to work with. (The foldout mirror wings is another issue but not as problematic as the sunshade)

With something the size of starship, at the price of starship you could launch something like JW in two parts (instrument and sunshade/spacecraft) mate them in orbit and send them out to L5 with a tug sent up on a 3rd launch and STILL have change leftover from the cost of the original project.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Honest question....

"The problem with this case is that the launch vehicle was empty of fuel once the satellite was in GTO."

They're _supposed_ to be put into GTO so that the booster ends up atmosphere-grazing - that way if everything goes pear shaped before separation then it will all come down quickly.

The russians fucked this up in more ways than one. Exploding fuel tanks are a known issue on orbiting leftovers and why protocol on western launchers/boosters which can't be left in atmosphere-grazing orbits is to open all valves and vent EVERYTHING at the end of the mission

CEO of AI surveillance upstart Banjo walks the plank after white supremacist past sinks contracts

Alan Brown Silver badge

"From the above, it looks more like he committed a crime, ran, informed on accomplices to avoid jail-time and then proceeded to cover it up."

Yup, and at that point you have to start considering what else might be covered up.

He's running a company in an area which _requires_ transparency and as such not only demonstrates his own unsuitability for the job, the company (plus any more he might "start", join or have worked for) is irretrievably tainted by association to the point that goodwill(*) has instantly been destroyed and the bottom line badly damaged by the disclosure.

(*) goodwill as an accounting term for an intangible asset - it's usually the single largest intangible a company has on its books and the easiest one to blow

Alan Brown Silver badge

> How long before a person can be forgiven for past actions? How long before they are rehabilitated?

When you work in that kind of field you need to acknowledge ALL your past if you're going to tell your backstory. The fact that he selectively edited out is enough to make one wonder what else he hasn't owned up to.

'We're changing shift, and no one can log on!' It was at this moment our hero knew server-lugging chap had screwed up

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Ah, ye olde tricks to ID machines..

> Not that we needed a reboot once it was stable - we deliberately left it running at the end of the project, just to clock a full year uptime :).

I had a linux box on a customer site (mail gateway/leasedline router before the days of DSL ) that clocked just over 3 years of uptime.....

A cleaner unplugged it in order to use her vacuum cleaner. Despite the DO NOT SWITCH OFF label on the socket and DO NOT DISCONNECT on the plug

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Er ...

> [users firing up dhcp servers] I also found that if you have an assistant, its better all around if you have your assistant disable the port (and the 2nd port they move their dhcp server to, and the 3rd port

I found it's better to have a switch smart enough to notice unauthorised DHCP servers and shut the port down all by itself. Also smart enough to notice (l)users who've decided to manually configure their system - with the IP address of the network gateway - and do the same thing, only in that case it STAYS disabled until we "have a chat" with them. Ditto if a port suddenly starts seeing multiple MACs (unauthorised switch, DoS attack, rogue VMs and in one case unauthorised wireless bridging)

Dickheads who wander around a lab causing every port to get shut down for security violations tend to find themselves rather unpopular with everybody else trying to work.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Labels people, and read them!

"Or slap em on the bezel/vanity cover. Even if it's removable. "

Put one on front of a drive bay. If it's a laminated type it's peelable and a label ISN'T going to appreciably obstruct airflow despite what some Karens might think.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Labels people, and read them!

"LABEL THY PRODUCTION SERVERS. Even if it means you print a label out of paper and cellotape it to the front of the server."

THIS is why I insist on labellers being in the server room with supplies of appropiate tape.

If the labelmaking kit is right there, there's no excuse not to do it (Brother TZ labels work out at about 5p each, so not exactly bank-breaking.)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Labels people, and read them!

>>A big organisation should have had more than 1 DHCP server

> But not on the same subnet, otherwise arguments happen.

Why would you be assigning random IPs to MACs that just happen to appear on your network? Security FAIL right there.

If you have IPs assigned in dhcpcd.conf then everything works - and rogue boxes don't get an IP address.

Of course if you have 802.1x, they don't even get onto the vlan in the first place

Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer

Alan Brown Silver badge

"There is no visible bill until you visit the bean-counter with a detailed report about 6 hours of wasted time. Which might not play out so well in some environments."

And in the days before phone cameras, this kind of thing was likely to be heavily disputed.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: There should be an IT Driving Test

The only people I know who have a ECDL are people I wouldn't actually let near a computer and constantly need handholding. (but they constantly remind you that they have a ECDL.....)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Back in the early 1990s I did just that.

The organisation in question had setup email as an experiment (uucp on a 14k4 modem), with the understanding that my assistance was on a best effort basis and might take a few days to sort out as they have their own people who should be able to deal with things

Fast forward 6 months and I'm on holiday on the other side of the world. A paniced phone call comes in "email's not working, it's critically urgent. we need you here now!"

They weren't impressed when I said that as I was on holiday - which they'd been told both before I left and when they phoned the office insisting on speaking to me - I could be there in 2 days and it would cost them $3000 in callout fees plus whatever the airline charged for a walkup return flight, which I estimated would be not less than $12000 for a business-class seat, given they'd want me fresh enough to work on the issue as soon as I arrived, having crossed 12 timezones and flown for 26 hours.

Funnily enough, they declined. When I got back I was told they'd found one of the secretarial staff had emailed 200+ copies of "the dancing baby" clip (at 4MB apiece) to friends offsite. 14k4 was about 1MB/hour. Those emails got flushed, the link got upgraded and people got a lesson on how experimental systems can become critically urgent when useful

There's a black hole lurking within 1,000 light years of Earth – and you can see stars circling it with the naked eye

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Dark Matter

"Well, I guess we are now starting to understand where all the so called "Dark Matter" is then"

Even if this accounts for them, that wouldn't account for "dark" energy

China successfully launches its biggest-ever space truck to fire up its space station ambitions

Alan Brown Silver badge

Just like all that V2 technology the USA developed all by itself?

Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Experienced tester.

"You want to make sure that regressions don't occur, but that's only one string of a test, the more creative testing is far more valuable."

ONLY if the developers actually take note of the reports.

I can think of plenty of software where I've been filing the same bug reports for years and they can't understand what the issue is, because they simply don't have enough imagination to see why it's a problem.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Experienced tester.

" it always came down to interpretation of the spec."

THAT is a field all by itself, leading to the realisation that in English you can say "I cleaned the floor with a mop" or "I cleaned the floor with Bill" - a native english speaker knows what you mean, but someone reading things literally might take pity on Bill.

The ultimate 4-wheel-drive: How ESA's keeping XMM-Newton alive after 20 years and beyond

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Collaboration is the word

" It was the UK in this case but they aren't even the worst. "

They have been for space. They're also the lowest spending partner in ESA and lowest spending on space in the EEA of the space-faring countries (there are several who don't bother at all)

Italy gets most of the research contracts for the simple reason that they put in most of the money.

There's some feeling that the UK is nuisance value at best - especially with the anti-science/anti-intellectualism, Gordon Gecko attitudes(*) of governments over the last 20 years or so.

(*) "GREED IS GOOD" - maximise the next quarter and bollocks to long term planning.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: That is the frikkin' coolest Satellite/Telescope I have ever seen

"...more likely at at a beery Friday night engineers social..."

Or get Lovehoney to sponsor an Ariane 5 rocket launch and get their name on the side.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Gotta wonder

It doesn't matter where you add the mass: the moments of inertia will change, but having it on the side will make repointing a lot easier than if it's on the end jammed into a thruster nozzle as was done with the Intelsat (extra mass has less effect on the moment the closer it is to the centre of mass)

There have been a huge number of proposals to actually refuel satellites on-orbit and they all run into major issues, not just with the fuel connectors but the very real possibility of having something leak during the process - a satellite or probe outside of LEO limits(*) sits in a cloud of its own outgassing "stuff" anyway (which is one of the reasons why cleanrooms are used and everything is baked to hell as part of flight preparation). Having that stuff being hydrazines or other corrosive and sticky shit would be a VERY BAD THING. The current filling procedures on the ground have the filling ports not only capped after filling, but then very thoroughly encased to ensure that they can't be disturbed in flight for this reason.

The MEV system was conceived because it was realised that refilling a comms sat or science probe on-orbit would not only be impractical but the resulting contamination cloud had a very high likllihood of ruining the spacecraft anyway - even if there were grappling and fill ports available.

Refilling a MEV away from the bird to be rescued is a different matter. The MEV is designed to be flown around and can "leave its contamination cloud behind" for the most part. Additionally, anything that settles on the MEV is not going to interfere with the mission of the item to be rescued so it can be manouvered to a parking spot for a while to ensure that it's not leaking, etc before setting off on its next mission - but being a "flying fuel tank" it can be given enough fuel for a 40 year mission in the first place, so why bother?

(*) Satellites low enough to be affected by the atmosphere (anything below about 600 miles) will also have that atmosphere(**) strip away any cloud of contamination that may be flying with them, so that's less of an issue. The tradeoff is needing regular reboosting, or coming out of orbit relatively quickly.

(**) At these altitudes it's still there but the vacuum is still better than anything we can make on the ground. The friction of colliding with a few scattered molecules when travelling at orbital velocities is enough....

Tesla sued over Tokyo biker's death in 'dozing driver' Autopilot crash

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @"Shouldn't they be suing the driver? "

"Murder implies the intention to kill."

Deliberately making a decision to continue operating a dangerous machine when impaired through fatigue, drink or drugs is grounds for vehicular homicide charges, in no different way to operating a dangerous machine such as a gun in such a condition.

If you CHOOSE to operate a machine when in an unfit condition to do so, then you should face the full consequences of what may go wrong, not get a slap on the wrist and told "oh, it was an _accident_"

The fact that so many people here - and so many jurisdictions worldwide - CHOOSE to defend the indefensible is _WHY_ there is a serious problem with road crashes and driving impaired.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Tesla's "autopilot" feature also presents multiple warnings before engaging."

But it's still called "autopilot" and wilful twattish drivers remain wilful twattish drivers

IIRC Germany only allows it to be called "advanced driver assist"