Posts by Alan Brown 15045 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"those air vents are smoke inlet vents in the board room"
No need for that, just lock the doors and ensure that the inert gas fire suppression system has an outlet in there.... After all, smoke damage is hell to clean up.
And it's in there because they saw all that space being used for computers and decided they'd have it for the boardroom - relegating all the servers (and IT staff) to an unventilated space situated in the basement under the toilets.
"Strangely what was supposed to be a 15-30 min test lasted only 2-3"
Funnily enough, a Telecom NZ had the opposite problem whilst preparing for y2k - a 15-20 minute test resulted in a 20 hour outage for 20,000 customers and 6-8 weeks of chaos as several years worth of database logs of number changes were replayed.
Yes, they'd been backing up just fine - but they were backing up corrupted data and noone had noticed for a _very_ long time.
Sometimes the UPS testing and recovery procedures work just fine - but the anciliary activities (like a "precautionary restart" of critical equipment) are where you find your shoelaces have not only been tied together but someone superglued your feet to the floor too.
" and the not-so-innocent vapour from batteries being charged."
_That_ only happens under 2 conditions:
1: You're putting too much current into them (unlikely as static batteries are usually far larger sized than vehicles ones - and in any case solved by reducing RPM)
2: The batteries are fully charged and above float voltage - in which case the vehicle would have been regularly shagging its batteries anyway.
You don't need 500A jumper cables for this kind of scenario and they're a liability due to their current capabilties. Normal cables and a _VERY LARGE_ (as large wattage as you can get) 12-24V lightbulb in series work better.
"Italy, deemed to have the most insecure and counterfaited IDs in EU"
As opposed to Ireland - whose documents are neither insecure, nor counterfeited much, but where identity documents are based on baptismal records and "certain groups" have form for getting babies baptised in a bunch of different churches to take advantage of that in later life.
Meantime in the UK it's STILL possible to copy the plot device acted out in 1960s classic "Day of the Jackal" and take over the identity of a dead baby.
"It took a long time for solid state electronics to catch up with vacuum tubes for high (kilowatts) power, and high (gigahertz) frequency applications."
More or less, it took FETs to catch up - which isn't surprising considering their principles of operation are broadly similar, whilst junction transistors are playing with quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (which is why they're noisy, you're hearing quantum variations as things jump the junction)
Mind you, one of the reasons that tubes _could_ operate at such high powers/frequencies was simply that their size and heat meant they were easier to cool despite being inefficient as hell(*). After all, all you really had to do was prevent them getting so hot the vacuum could be breached (softened glass or metal), vs keeping FETs under 100C or so.
(*) One of my lecturers used to regale us with stories of UK TV broadcast sites (powered by klystron-fed transmitters) which radiated so much waste heat that the end of the nights broadcast was the signal for folk in a nearby caravan park to put on shirts and go to bed - even in early winter.
That's a HF one - as evidenced by the connector - relatively low power - and can't be any good for more than about 10-15MHz.
It wouldn't last long attached to the output of one of THESE: http://maritimeradio.org/himatangi-makara/himatangi-radio/harris-collins-1_1200/ (I spent quite a bit of time in the back of the left hand unit (#118) in 1989-90 keeping it running long past its use-by date)
Scarily, all four of the pictured units were originally intended as ship transmitters, not for shore use. (Even more scary was the fully operational 100kW late 1940s era transmitter opposite them.)
> there would be substantial path loss between aerial and "target"
The distances involved were never stated but the area in question wasn't particularly large (Ark Royal wasn't a large carrier). I wouldn't be surprised if the cameraman in question was more or less standing 1-2 meters in front of the nosecone - and I'd be even less surprised if the dummy load _was_ an inline attentuator as this is more or less standard for the kinds of frequencies in question (usually our telco ones would have a suitable small load attached, but the end might have another 30dB attenuator and probe on it instead - that makes attaching the pointy end trivial (and probably normal for calibration purposes without frying staff)
"If stealth was totally useless why are all major nations persuing it?"
The question isn't why they're pursuing it, it's how much they're spending in doing so (not much) and what level of committment they're giving to it vs other forms of aircraft (not much, it's just experimental)
Superiority might have been a SF story, but in large part it was based on Nazi vs USA approaches to WW2.
The difference these days is that the overcomplex tinker toys belong to the USA and whilst other countries are playing around with stealthy shapes they haven't committed virtually their entire aviation R&D budget and purchase committments to such aircraft nor are they hiding vast amounts of GDP overspend into military budgets at cost of investment in education, basic infrastructure and public health.
"if the aircraft has it's bomb bay open"
Or it's wet (which was also the case) - stealth is primarily a fair weather technology as sheeting water (conductive) on the outside of the aircraft starts messing up all the lovely optimised surfaces.
Even flying through a nice fluffy cumulus is reputed to pick up enough moisture to seriously affect the radar signature of low-reflectivity designs.
WRT "stealthy from certain angles" - right on. The F35 is only designed for stealth on a 35 degree cone from the nose boresight. It's not particularly stealthy from other angles, which is a problem if air defenses and ground communications are working in the areas being flown over (think: radar tracking from behind, directing missiles launched from in front). This is because it was _originally_ designed as a ground support aircraft: only going in once the F22 had eliminated all the airborne and ground-based threats to aircraft (selling it as an air superiority fighter is somewhat overegging the pudding. It might work when firing missiles from 20 miles away but the moment the opponent sees it, it's game over)
"Careful, blinded experiments with people who claim to be electrosensitive have found they cannot tell if equipment is on or not."
Yup. Back when I was a RF guy we'd get complaints flooding in within days of antennas being erected - usually weeks before cabling was run to the building that was going to house any equipment, let alone equipment being installed.
If you _REALLY_ want to wind people up, bolt 1.5 metre microwave surveying dishes on the back of a pair of trailered cherrypickers and drive around town with them, telling anyone who asks that it's the latest TV detector setup and they can triangulate unlicensed sets to within 5cm from 5 miles away.
"Very high RF field strengths can induce current flow regardless of frequency. Now it may only be a small current in living tissue but would you want to bet that it has zero long term affect?"
Electric blankets have been in existence for over a century and sleeping on/under one puts the sleeper well inside the near field of the wire.
If there was such a problem it'd be statistically obvious by now.
"Being burned with EME is no laughing matter, whether microwave, VHF or other."
But the amount of microwave energy required to trigger a flashcube at close range is close to the stated level and a bunch of them going off at once would easily give the smoking effect described - the cheaper mechanically triggered ones had a nasty tendency to go off if merely knocked, didn't have much protection against the hot bulb melting the front of the enclosure and after we found they'd go off around 15kW CW SW transmitters, some experimenting with high frequency kit found that sticking them in front of low power (1W) 4GHz and 6GHz uncapped waveguides would set them off too - at which point the heat of all four bulbs combined would make a smelly mess of the entire polystyrene assembly.
As the allowable level is 10W per square metre, low level pulses are nothing to worry about. On the other hand you really don't want to stand in front of an uncapped aircraft weather or nav radar - a friend of mine on apron duty was unfortunate enough to have this happen in 1993 when the crew of a Dash-8 forgot to turn theirs off after landing and spent a long time in hospital as a result. (Hint: The liquid humor inside of your eyeballs reacts much the same way to being heated up as egg whites do.)
"It's a very, very good fridge. But unless you're very space constrained, it's cheaper to use something twice as thick and a tenth of the price."
There's one thing it does even better than thermal insulation for the next best thing that's twice as thick - SOUND insulation.
Aerogels are extremely popular for uses such as installation on common walls in terrace houses, as the cost is nothing compared to the loss of living space incurred with any other option (for actual thermal insulation if the building isn't double brick then the insulation is best hung on the outside of the brickwork to prevent the fabric of the building getting cold and damp, at which point thickness isn't an issue anymore and aerogels cost far too much)
"eats its way through steel drums"
Um. nope. That was plain old everyday rust. Water+iron+oxygen, etc. (and low quality metals and "good enough for government work", etc)
Anyway, radioactives which are hot enough to worry about tend to become inert in a short period of time (and detectable whilst they're dangerous). Chemical nasties are much harder to detect. Ask the folk at Minimata Bay about that one.
"If a hydrogel could take forces of 1 atmosphere needed to contain the air pressure, and if it could survive space debris, then you could make balloons out of it."
I'm minded of those 18th century fanciful paintings of folks navigating the skies in bathtubs held up by evacuated copper spheres
> (ancient Greeks knew the earth is round, they had even calculated its size rather accurately).
It was known fairly early on. The well-known example from the ancient Greeks is part of a lesson for students.
Civilisation has been through a number of "resets" and "setbacks" and it's a shame the library of Alexandria ended up being used to heat bathwater.
"When life expectancy was 35 it didn't mean people were actually expected to die at 35. It's just >50% babies died in infancy, averaging out everyone who made it to 50/60/70)"
Which underscores that "certain groups" where the males DO tend to die off before 40 are unusual (and they exist as a subculture within the UK).
"much of the innovation is trying to meet more stringent efficiency and emissions requirements"
Given that China's pretty much electrified its _entire_ freight network (the high speed passenger network is 100% electrified), what would that achieve?
"Being able to send longer, heavier trains could be a key factor in the Chinese plans. Do they have that technology already?"
The Chinese do. Where they run into problems is where they interface into Europe at the Turkey or Poland (although the gauge change in and out of Russia is vexing too)
Berne loading gauge was standardised 104 years ago and just about everywhere uses it (or significantly larger) in Europe except the UK and the tunnel under the Bosphorus Strait (it's not the tunnel that's the problem, it's the silly-tight curve leading into it).
USA, Russian and Chinese loading gauge is a fraction taller/longer/wider than Berne and Berne derived gauges (G-series) have been tweaked a little to allow for intermodal containers. The result is that a Berne-gauge set can go nearly anywhere, but GA/GB/GB+/GC etc have to be carefully checked to ensure they won't hit anything when travelling outside their home areas (ESPECIALLY into France!)
China's global domination plan is to restore the Silk Road and not have to crossload their freight onto different wagons/bogies or locomotives to get it to destination - all the way to Africa. I can see them paying to upgrade loading gauges on strategic routes to make this happen.
I can also see them deploying vactrains beside or in addition to the existing high speed rail routes. 300km/h is simply too slow for some of the distances they're travelling and aircraft are going to be increasingly grounded in coming years due to CO2 concerns - with ground-based routes frequently being significantly longer due to the need to go around mountain ranges.
"Actually, I am kinda hoping that the massive mess we have got into now might be the end for FPTP."
The electoral system can only change if the parties in power allow it - and it's not in their interested to allow a change from FPTP - which is why the "Proportional Representation" referendum of a few years back was for the version with the least proportionality and the greatest resemblance to FPTP.
The correct way to do it is what New Zealand did (it took 30 years to get to that referendum and ONLY because politicians feet were held to the fire over promises made whilst in opposition)
1: Should we keep FPTP or change to something else?
2: If we do change to something else, what should we use?
In that case, MMP (a form of Alternative vote as used by Germany) won the day, despite both main parties AND all business interests heavily campaigning against it.
20 years later when the public were asked if they wanted to keep it, move to something else or move back to FPTP, they voted to keep it.
However this is Britain, home of the half arsed implementation of everything, so it'll never happen.
"Facial Recognition is about failing to catch everybody else."
Facial recognition which is used by the plod to help narrow in on someone might be useful - as in "I've got something that looks a bit like who you're looking for, but you need to check it".
Facial recognition which can't pick up people being looked for is useless.
Facial recognition which is being used as an excuse to harrass the innocent is a menace. "Computer says you match Ronnie Biggs. I don't care if you're obviously an 87year old black grandmother, you're fucking nicked"
Unfortunately, it seems to be all about the latter. Not the Nine O'Clock News pieces on PC Savage weren't supposed to be a documentary.
Then again, Alan B'stard wasn't supposed to exist in real life either.
Indeed There are some interesting shenanigans going on in various forces that don't get reported (such as fiddling speed measurement stats to lower reported speeds and set camera trigger points lower as a result and/or not take action on dangerous residential roads because the fiddled stats show speeds aren't dangerous)
"So it may turn out that in fact he has been closely engaged in AI for many years."
AI has been many things to many people, but it's mostly dumb, rules-based shit.
And for 99.9% of vehicle operation that's exactly what's needed. Problems usually happen when people DON'T stick to the rules, exceed the limits of the available physics or attempt to put 2 objects in one space - with the worst offenders (as I've noted above) being _slower_ drivers who tend to blame everyone else for crashes but are the cause or catalyst of most of them.
"Recent events show what happens when that process is 'streamlined' to save money through cheaper dev/test and/or reduced or sub-contracted certification."
No. Recent events show what happens when lobbying and flat out corruption allows "self regulation" and regulatory capture.
Boeing has had the FAA in its pocket for quite some time. Look into the 737NG counterfeit parts scandal and the shortcuts taken in the 787 approval process that should never have allowed the lithium ion batteries used to be flown. Corruption is somewhat like a rotting fish and somewhat like dry rot in a house - it starts at the head and works its way downwards - when you see it, it's spread throughout the entire system and it's usually so rotten that the entire shell can collapse with a good hard poke.
That's entirely different to the processes happening with cars - simply because UNLIKE the aviation market which is controlled by a few companies and where aircraft making is a matter of national pride, regulators in every country have a deep interest in cars not killing their citizens.
"The self-driving feature on any AI car tends to only be enabled in optimal circumstances."
You mostly mean "boring ones" - which are the ones where humans lose attention, do stupid things and crash.
The harsh reality is that despite the hating - and despite the high profile twats taking the piss by changing seats or sleeping in the driving seat - crash rates are statistically lower on cars with driver assist features and on Teslas quite noticeably so. They ARE keeping people out of trouble.
They're not robocars _YET_ and they won't be for a while, but they're improving. In the meantime they need a cattle prod in the seat cushion to ensure the driver is awake and watching what's going on.
The _long_ term outlook for robocars is a sharp _reduction_ in the numbers of vehicles on the road, because people who don't feel they need to drive don't feel they need to own a vehicle and are more likely to use a hire vehicle - as the most expensive part of a hire vehicle is a driver, robocars lower the cost of hiring dramatically AND they encourage the use of public transport over longer distances because it makes hire vehicles more likely to be found even if you need to go to some remote spot in the middle of nowhere (a robot doesn't have to go home to sleep, or have 12 hour limits on driving).
The effects of robocars is even more marked in HGV safety - given that the vast majority of HGV crashes are down to tired drivers reacting too slowly or impatient drivers pulling something stupid on highways, automating this part is likely to have a big knock on effect - especially as it's hard to recruit new drivers in most countries.
"stop testing *on the road*."
You have to test on the road - the point is to make it iterative and to make the introduction gradual.
My 18-year old car has adaptive cruise control which only works down to 20mph and 30% braking. It was only after experience and confidence with technology that makers were confident enough to allow it to apply harder braking and let it run down to a full stop/start setup.
We've been talking about robots taking over for decades. They already have in many areas - when was the last time you saw a room for of ledger clerks scratching away? or (more recently) keypunch operators? It's a gradual process, Tanks don't "suddenly get parked on lawns" unless someone's been holding out for years, refusing to adapt in the face of constant change (like British shipyards did) and finally find that they HAVE to do it all at once or go out of business.
"If a smart 12 year old cannot get a license why would an autonomous car which is far far more stupid."
The problem is not intelligence. The problem is emotional driving.
Humans are dangerous because they drive angry, drunk and distracted, or simply well beyond their abilities, use vehicles as weapons and as penis extensions.
The easiest proof of this is the way people race off at green lights - a green light is not a facing "GO" signal, it's an indication you may proceed if and only IF the way is clear to do so and you have checked nothing is coming the other way. Drivers and cyclists forcing their way through pedestrians still crossing are amongst the most dangerous things on the road imaginable.
The _vast_ majority of people objecting to robocars are doing so on the basis of feeling emasculated, not on actual safety grounds. They're the ones who shouldn't be driving in the first place. (It's the same issue as power attracts the corruptible and those who seek it should never be allowed to have it)
"My own take is that an awful lot of drivers are already overtaxed by many road situations and increasingly rely on other drivers doing the thinking for them. "
Ditto. I've been a passenger in a UK car driven by a middle aged guy who ignored the lane markings at a traffic light and used his basis of "left lane for straight ahead and right for turning right" - on a T intersection with the turn to the left - and then wondered out loud why everyone on the intersection were leaning on their horn at him for blasting straight through and causing them to swerve around him or emergency brake to avoid hitting him.
He'd been driving that intersection for 15-20 years and never bothered looking at the lane markings. I later realised he's functionally blind (both in terms of focus and cataract dazzling) - but refuses to admit it.
Other drivers pull such atrociously inattentive shit that I wonder how they manage to stay on the road and I've demanded to be let out of the vehicle on more than one occasion.
You can criticise younger drivers as much as you want, but they have to pass rigorous tests that older drivers didn't and it shows in the lack of care and attention older drivers pay to what they're doing (there are a few younger drivers who are gung ho, but they're a tiny fraction compared to utterly dipshit 50+ year olds - I'm in the latter age camp and the sheer number of older incompetent drivers _scares_ me. The latest political push is to reduce speed limits on various roads to accomodate these dipshits but that just compounds the problems. They need to be removed from behind steering wheels, not pandered to)
Rabbiting on about driver assist features misses the point that they're not particularly common on cheaper cars which younger drivers can afford. If they're masking incompetence, it's in older, wealthier drivers.
"regulators may also choose to prevent some of the worst drivers from getting the behing the wheel."
This in spades. As soon as a computer can approximately match a half-decent human driver most humans will let them do it - which is a good thing because a half decent computer will stay half decent all the time. vs even a good human spectacularly losing concentration at least once every 5 minutes.
It actually takes a pretty bad series of errors to cause a crash (not all of them made by the driver - roading "designers" are frequently unqualified utter numpties, particularly in places like the UK where road speed limits and layouts on major roads are not signed off by qualified engineers but by local politicians operating on a knee-jerk response - and such numpties frequently engage in victim-blaming instead of sorting out shitty designs that kill people.)
Insurance actuaries are going to be the deciding factor. It's been known for 60 years that drivers who travel substantially slower than the herd have a significantly higher crash incident and claim rate(*) than the norm whilst those who travel substantially faster than the herd have a higher per-claim level(**). People who drive too slow when they have black boxes fitted may well be putting their premiums UP...
As soon as robocars can show statistically lower crash rates in various scenarios(***) I can see premiums for manual control skyrocketing and/or insurance companies insisting on enhanced driving training before they offer coverage at all - whilst much higher standards of driving competence will eventually be demanded by regulators simply because robots will set the minimum level to be reached..
(*) The 2 most common insurance claim categories are "backed into another car whilst parking" and "my parked car was damaged by a hit and run driver" - usually in parking lots. Going slower doesn't make up for poor spatial judgement, rotten eyesight, etc. The next few categories involve changing lanes into another vehicle without checking or low speed scraping walls, poles, curbs etc.
(**) higher speeds == higher crash energies == bigger mess.
(***) Particularly highways/urban/suburban highways. There will always be situations where the robots can't cope but the response without an advanced driving certificate is likely to be to either allow manual driving at a low speed or to switch to a remote handler - and you can pretty much guarantee that cloud learning will be applied. Whilst Uber spectacularly fucked up their programming with assumptions based on politically motivated traffic laws (instead of safety-rooted ones), Google's done quite well at hazard anticipation and handling (particularly pedestrians and other items on the roadway)
"In reality the most common sources of failure are operator error and firmware/software defect, in that order, so most of the time that's not enough."
Fans come in third though, and most of them aren't field-replaceable items (Says me, who's had to resort to changing bearing races in PSU fans for one model of disk array that Xyratex stopped making 7 years ago, thanks to budgetary constraints making it impossible to replace the arrays - yet)
The trick is to explain what you want done in small words, in writing (so they can't argue about what was said), have a copy of the regs to hand where they can see you have it and most importantly, make sure they understand that if they don't do it to a working, certifiable and satisfactory standard, they don't get paid.
This last bit is crucial to getting their complete undivided attention AND have them ask questions if they think the task is odd, instead of just bodging it.
For added attention you can add that if someone else has to fix it, you'll bill them for the rework.
"bought the spare PS, sat on the shelf, 6 years later, replaced that item, power supply still sits on the shelf."
PSUs are cheap. Callouts are not.
Anything containing a moving part should be considered a high risk potential point of failure
I lost track of the number of times as a field tech I set out on on a job with "You only need XYZ" and found that I needed ABC JKH and NOP too. The days when I packed the wagon with EVERYTHING imaginable were the days when I found that someone had wired the power to the wrong circuit (non-essential power, etc) on the customer premises and my responsibility consisted of running a temporary extension lead so our batteries didn't go flat and telling them it needed to be fixed within 5 days, when I'd be back to checkup & sign off the fault or have them charged at full callout rates.
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