* Posts by Number6

2291 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

Number6

My first thought was that the browser had lost its cookies. Then the login attempt failed and I wondered which of my recent posts had earned me a ban.

My cat was highly offended that I couldn't upload all the latest photos of him.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

Number6

Re: Unique IDs

That's because they're not all assigned by a single master authority. If you're the only one issuing the numbers then you can guarantee that they're unique. Except human error will invariably transpose a couple of digits somewhere.

Texas judge turns out the lights on federal survey of cryptominers' energy consumption

Number6

Texas has a power grid isolated from the rest of the country. Perhaps the EIA could draft a new regulation covering 49 states and excluding Texas. After all, if they overload their own grid and jack up energy prices for the locals then that's their own problem, and if the locals don't like it, they can vote in state officials who will address it.

Australia passes Right To Disconnect law, including (for now) jail time for bosses who email after-hours

Number6

My work phone sits on my desk and goes on Do Not Disturb at 5pm. Sometimes I don't notice I've missed a call for several days, I look at it that often.

However, sending work emails after hours is fine. I do it, because if I want to go do something else in the middle of the day I might be catching up on stuff in the evening to compensate. However, I don't expect a response until the following day, and that's where the line should be drawn. If I notice an email during the evening and it's a two-minute fix then I'll respond, otherwise it can wait until morning.

Obviously I have a more enlightened employer than some.

How did China get so good at chips and AI? Congressional investigation blames American venture capitalists

Number6

Choose a Chinese manufacturing plant and within six months, your cheap competitor will appear on the market.

Actual practical example of this observed, tore down one of their products because one of its features was basically the same as ours. Superficially the design was similar in the same way that a couple of cars might look similar due to form and function requirements,, but I don't see why they bothered to etch one of our part numbers on the copper on the PCB like we did if it wasn't a direct copy.

Number6

Re: Money can't buy intelligence

But the Scots have a reputation for engineering, even as it extends to starships. Clearly something stuck, even if their politicians screwed it up in general.

Save the Mars Sample Return mission, plead Congresscritters

Number6

Re: Beserk

The thinking was that as technology develops, certain tasks become easier. Some of it is also potentially solving other problems too. The current Mars rovers are all very limited in their navigation capabilities, they rely heavily on commands from Earth to do anything, which is partly why it takes them so long to get anywhere. One of the challenges in the competition was that of navigation; how reliably can you navigate when you don't have a compass (no decent magnetic field on Mars) or GPS, and on uncertain terrain so wheel odometry can't give a reliable indicator of distance?

The starting premise was that the "lander" containing the recovery robot would be in a known position, accurate to a few metres, based on being observed by passing satellites. The locations of the sample containers is known to a similar accuracy. Thus, the task is to navigate autonomously from the base to an approximate area and search, allowing for the fact that there may not be a sample in the area to find, if it's been buried. This is where it gets more interesting, because some teams used an approach that moved from sample location to sample location, collecting them all, before returning to base and disgorging the lot. Other teams worked on the principle that if a sample was found, return it to base immediately, which also gave opportunity to reset the navigation to a known starting point. The first approach clearly reduces total travel time, but is literally carrying all the eggs in one basket if the rover failed, whereas the latter would mean that if it failed after one or more successful recoveries, there would still be something worth sending back.

Also in there was object recognition, which was a lot less mature ten years ago - it was necessary to recognise the sample container in order to pick it up.

As for recovery, the plan was that the base station would be a rocket capable of reaching orbit, where it would rendezvous with an orbiter that was designed to reach Earth orbit, after which they could drop the sample package for retrieval in a manner that has since been demonstrated.

Given that they've got mobile rovers, adding an extra gadget to obtain and package samples is a relatively low incremental cost and risk, which is what's happening now. They may yet decide to leave them there if other technologies overtake it, but remember that this was long-range planning from many years back, trying to predict what advances would be made over the next 30 years or so.

From memory, over the five years they ran the competition, I think only three teams managed to get samples back to the platform under field conditions, and an impressive demonstration of the eggs-in-basket scenario when one of the otherwise more-successful robots decided to head off through the boundary fence instead of returning to base, due to a programming error. Some teams were university teams, some were one or two people doing it for fun, others were slightly larger groups.

Number6

Re: Beserk

They had to do it this way because of the funding. To propose the whole thing in one go would have been highly risky and expensive given the technology of the day, and would never have been given the green light. Each mission did a bit more and advanced the technology - rovers have been proven, now they've got one that is packaging up samples and leaving them to be recovered. A few years back they did a public competition to evaluate navigation and searching for samples and delivering them back to a base (see links), which was eventually achieved after five years, which means they could decide how best to do the recovery phase. OSIRIS-REX demonstrated recovery of samples from space to ground, and so in theory they can do it now if they've got the money.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/with/28859200974/

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/stmd-prizes-challenges-crowdsourcing-program/nasa-awards-750k-in-sample-return-robot-challenge-for-autonomous-technology/

<disclaimer - I was on one of the teams participating in the challenge>

Raspberry Pi 5: Hot takes and cooler mistakes

Number6

Re: Crimbo

If done properly, pretty much zero after the initial scream.

China requires any new domestic Wi-Fi kit to support IPv6 and run it by default

Number6

Re: The Cultural Evolution - little leap forward :)

My ISP gives me a /64 to play with. Everything just works, anything on my home network that supports IPv6 picks up an address and can be used. My router tells me that last month 49.49% of traffic was IPv6. If I want to run a server accessible from the outside, I do have to add a rule to the router, so at least it comes up in a relatively safe condition by default - if you scan the address range from outside then you will only see those few holes in it, regardless of what's happening on my side of the router.

Looking at my webserver logs (external hosted server), I see a decent amount of IPv6 traffic too, so there are plenty of others who are probably using IPv6 without knowing it, too. A lot of mobile devices will have IPv6 allocated, so if you're browsing using your phone, chances are you're using IPv6 by default. Unless you're reading El Reg, of course, which appears to still only be IPv4.

Twitter says it may harvest biometric, employment data from its addicts

Number6

Nearly time to leave

I still have my Twitter account, mainly because to delete it requires effort on my part, so it sits there, occupying some of his hard disk space. As soon as he requires some of my cash or some of my data to keep using it, I'll finally cross the threshold and dump the account, assuming he doesn't dump it first.

Number6

You're assuming there is a bottom? Turtles all the way down...

80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office

Number6

For a while I had a commute that could be as bad as 1.5 hours each way due to my employer moving location. After the first week I started looking for a new job. Now I have a fully remote job with a commute down the stairs each morning, and even before that I had rough limits on how far I was prepared to commute based on known typical traffic conditions.

Cross-country driving with almost zero traffic is fun. Going through busy areas is a lot less so.

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

Number6

Google probably has more interest in getting people back to the office than a lot of companies, given how large an office footprint they have in the Bay Area. There's still that large area by Diridon Station in San Jose that they bought up for redevelopment into another huge campus (albeit right next to a major public transport hub), will be interesting to see how that fares.

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Number6

Re: Not a lift but…..

I "helped" one once - broadside across the river, blocking my path, so I just shouted for everyone to keep hands inside the punts, and to brace for impact, and ran the front of my punt into his, which turned him parallel with the bank and got him out of my way. Then I retrieved his quant and brought it back to him (lack of if was partly why he was stuck). I miss punting.

Number6

Re: Not a lift but…..

I learned early on, fortunately by observation, that when faced with the choice, it is better to let go of the pole than the punt. I think I only lost the pole once, and it was on a deserted stretch of the Cam so only the other occupant of the punt was witness. I'd gotten the thing to move quite fast and the pole hit a patch of sticky silt on the bottom and resisted just long enough that I had to make the call.

As for the chaos on the Backs, I remember following one of the "professionals" (as in they got paid to do it and generally knew what they were doing) as she approached a mass of punts all over the place and managed to keep about 10ft behind as she threaded a path through the mess and we both emerged unscathed out the other side with our passengers.

Number6

I had a 5Si once. Bought it for £250 used. Had to refurbish some of the rollers, but it had the duplex unit and the 2000 sheet feeder. Built to last, it was. Unfortunately I had to part company with it when I moved from somewhere with proper electricity at 50Hz to somewhere else because as far as I could tell, I'd have to swap out some parts to work at 60Hz. I vaguely remember being able to lift the printer off the sheet feeder, although because it was high up, it was easier to pick up than if it started on the floor. I was younger and fitter back then, too, although I can still lift 100lb if I'm careful.

Google Street View car careens into creek after 100mph cop chase

Number6

Re: For readers outsie the US

I've not seen anything faster than 70 MPH in California, but like in the UK, you're unlucky to get pulled for less than 80 unless you're doing something else daft. I-80 through Utah is 80MPH but they'll pull you for even a hair over that. A lot of the big western states typically have 70 or 75 limits on interstates. Montana was "Reasonable and prudent", don't know if it still is.

Number6

Re: Florida driving license

Generally, emergency vehicles don't just blow through intersections, in the dark or otherwise, except in movies. They usually slow right down and check for idiots before proceeding, especially if they don't have a green light. Otherwise you can be sure that Murphy will make sure they do meet one of those idiots.

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

Number6

Re: Hmmm

Having done a clean install of Mint 21.2 this past weekend, I note that /bin is a link to /usr/bin, /sbin to /usr/sbin, and a bunch of /libxx are now links to /usr/libxx. I guess that's a half-way house, lets things run from one place for stuff that wants to, but provides a catch-all for legacy software looking elsewhere. I notice a lot of scripts still have #! /bin/sh at the top.

Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff

Number6

Re: Another

I compromised, I have /usr mounted on a 64GB SSD (it's a few years old now) and everything else on a big spinny disk. The other thing I discovered is that a lot of modern HDDs use SMR encoding and last time I changed disk and ended up with one of those, things got noticeably slower. This weekend I dumped that disk for a CMR type and things are suddenly a lot faster again. CMR costs more but not that much.

for those who've not met the acronyms yet: Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) drives write data on a hard disk in tracks that do not overlap. Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) allows tracks to overlap, which results in higher data densities, but slower read and write times compared to CMR drives.

You don't want SMR drives in your NAS box or on servers.

Number6

I like Mint, been using it for quite a few years now. A bit of a hiccup when they dropped KDE support, but now I just install the XFCE version and then add KDE on top for desktop machines (laptops I tend to leave with XFCE). Takes a bit longer, but still pretty painless. I just did a clean install onto a new hard disk this weekend on one machine, and managed to copy most of the settings from the old disk.

I think the only quibble I have with the installer is that it won't let me easily do custom LVM partitions - I can have a clean install with two, but the custom partition option didn't seem to have a way of building up LVM so I had to do it manually in a terminal window and then run the installer.

Clingy Virgin Media won't let us leave, customers complain

Number6

"I'm moving to a different country" worked pretty well when I cancelled. It was true, too.

The other one I've heard is to tell the rep, assuming you can get through to one, that you're going to jail next week and won't be needing the service for some time.

Clippy designer was too embarrassed to include him in his portfolio

Number6

Clippy was a really annoying feature, but he deserves his place in history, provided he remains there.

Duelling techies debugged printer by testing the strength of electric shocks

Number6

Unless there's smoke, it always starts as a software problem, if only because a lot of stuff is now so complex that you need the software to drive the hardware to demonstrate which bit of the hardware is the problem.

Apple's outsourced Lightning cable plant in India goes up in flames

Number6

Re: Link?

More likely the I'm Alright Jack.

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

Number6

Re: Bypass This Encryption!!

Trivial stuff. Now, double ROT-13 is way more challenging.

By order of Canonical: Official Ubuntu flavors must stop including Flatpak by default

Number6

Re: future of apt on Ubuntu?

Isn't this pretty much what an AppImage is? A complete run-time environment for an application.

Longstanding bug in Linux kernel floppy handling fixed

Number6

I still have a machine with floppy drives on it. I don't remember where I picked up the drive unit, but it's a single half-height 5.25" form factor and has both a 5.25" 1.2M and a 3.5" 1.44MB floppy in it. As far as I know it still works, although I've not inserted a 3D model of a save icon in there for some time. There's probably a 3.5" USB drive somewhere on the shelf too, as well as a Zip drive.

For good measure I have a BBC Micro B (modified a bit) with dual floppies, although probably no original media to use with them.

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

Number6

Re: Don't forget mischief

I don't care what the signs say, I look both ways. Just because traffic is only supposed to be coming from one direction, doesn't mean it will always be the case. I speak from experience, having nearly been taken out on a one-way street by a van which had done a U-turn and come back the wrong way.

UK bans Chinese CCTV cameras on 'sensitive' government sites

Number6

Firewalls

I have a bunch of stuff on my network that is blocked from talking to the outside world and is set up to talk to a local server. I know that can be circumvented by various means, but it adds an extra layer for someone to get through.

When it comes to routers and other stuff, I tend to buy equipment that will work with OpenWRT and replace the on-board software with that. Perhaps a half-way house for those who are concerned but not ultra-secure, is for an open-source camera software effort along the same lines, where we could still buy the decent hardware and reprogram it. Always assuming the hole isn't in the bootloader, of course.

Nvidia faces lawsuit for melting RTX 4090 cables as AMD has a laugh

Number6

I am somewhat shocked that the GPU is pulling 450W. Admittedly I'm not a hardcore gamer, my system is running quite happily with a GTX750 board, but then the entire machine of similar age. The UPS thinks the entire system, including monitors, is pulling about 100W as I type this.

Number6

I would think that preventing the batteries from overheating is way more important than the infotainment system. Just cut the power to that if things are critical.

Chinese researchers make car glide 35mm above ground in maglev test

Number6

The Shanghai Maglev is fun, I've used it a few times now. It's cheaper than a taxi from the airport into the city and a lot less scary. It finishes up at a Shanghai Metro station so if you plan in advance you can use that to continue your journey.

As for the car, the way to do that is to have a contoured field with two lines of magnets, one down each side, so there's enough field in the centre and moving to either side is a bit like climbing a hill, so the car will naturally stay in the magnetic depression.

NASA just weeks away from trying again with SLS Moon rocket launch

Number6
Facepalm

Of course, the real reason they postponed after the second attempt failed is because otherwise the moon was going to be full when the delayed rocket arrived.

Scientists use supercritical carbon dioxide to power the grid

Number6

The problem is that it is mixing two units, 10kW is the power provided, and just under 10kWH is the total energy, given the "nearly an hour" comment.

Yes, it's true: Hard drive failures creep up as disks age

Number6

I start getting nervous when I spot a drive over 5 years old (near-24/7 run-time so 43,000 hours or so. However, I've had one that didn't get replaced until something over 80,000 hours (9 years) and it was still functioning. I just replaced a couple that were around 75,000 hours and not showing signs of failure. I suspect my nervousness comes from earlier generations of drives and that newer models do last longer, plus have better monitoring to warn of impending failure.

NASA: Mars rocks won't make it back to Earth until 2033

Number6

A shame they are ditching the rovers, it was an interesting challenge to build a self-navigating robot to go find and collect samples and return them to the base station. NASA crowdfunded it a few years ago. It's a lot more challenging than one might think.

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/centennial_challenges/sample_return_robot/index.html

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Number6

The hidden cost of doing business in China is that for a new product with innovative features, it shortens the time before there's a cheap competitor. If they have to tear it down and reverse-engineer it to make a copy, that takes time, but if you've given them all the drawings, it's much easier.

Yes, I've seen it a couple of times with offshoring, once with an Indian company whose boards worked perfectly in our system and looked remarkably similar, and their EPROMS (yes, that old) were identical to an earlier version of ours apart from where they'd used a hex editor to put their name in instead of ours (good incentive to have a short company name). Turns out some years before the company looked to have the Indian company manufacture for them. The other one, more recent from China, was a subsystem in a competing product that was almost identical to ours. The killer there was that while all the mechanical parts had different part numbers on them, the PCB had our part number etched into the copper. The product was made for us in China.

Number6

I've had that, sponsorship with an agreement to stick around for a couple of years post-graduation. Gave me chance to learn the real world in an environment where I'd gotten to know people while a student and expected to make mistakes. Seemed perfectly reasonable to me, although a more recent variant regarding relocation expenses and a promise to stick around for a bit prompted me to push back and tell them to add in a line to say that it only applied if I left, not if they decided to make me redundant, in which case they could eat the cost. That's what real world experience gives you, the awareness of what can happen, and the confidence to insist on precautions.

On the other hand, I get a lot of recruiters wanting to talk to me, so I reckon the shortage is real. I always reckoned I'd have ten years before there was a surge of new people but it's been {mumble} years longer than that.

Disentangling the Debian derivatives: Which should you use?

Number6

Re: Devuan

Careful, you'll be telling us that Emacs is better than vi next.

FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

Number6

Sounds like an excellent reason to stick to the used car market for now. OTOH, if it's a subscription service and the hardware fails, are they liable to fix it at their expense? That sort of turns it into an indefinitely renewable warranty.

China is trolling rare-earth miners online and the Pentagon isn't happy

Number6

There are certain states where such claims might have gained traction, but the ones that have oil and mined minerals as their main resources probably not so much. California would probably have been protesting, but not Texas.

Software-defined silicon is coming for telecom kit later this year

Number6

Re: Remote kill switch

That was my first thought. Having "bought" e-books which were then rendered inaccessible to me, I am wary of anything like this where something can be disabled without the 'owner' having any control over the matter.

RISC OS: 35-year-old original Arm operating system is alive and well

Number6

I think I've still got an Archimedes somewhere. If so, it's buried at the bottom of a box. I did find the BBC Micro, and that worked last time I plugged it in, but not powered up the Archimedes for at least ten years.

46 years after the UN proclaimed the right to join a union, Microsoft sort of agrees

Number6

Re: Why companies feel the need to setup and join trade and lobbying associations...

That sounds like the UK in the 1970s, where union leaders seemed more interested in their own political power than the interests of their workers. An awful lot of those workers voted for Maggie in 1979 because they were fed up with the state of things, and it is notable that the laws on union power and ballots and strikes has stayed pretty much intact since then and there is no real call to repeal any of it.

I'm lucky enough to have been in a career where I didn't need a union because switching job was always an option for me, but I can see that in certain sectors it's important that pay and conditions are monitored to prevent exploitation. Especially in the US, where you can be fired on the spot for no better reason than the boss got out of bed the wrong side this morning. Notice periods are a pain when you want to move on to your next job, but if the boot is on the other foot, it's a bit of a safety net that gives you chance to find another job. Paid leave, paid sick leave and other benefits also make the working experience more tolerable too, and they pretty much wouldn't have arrived without union pressure over the years.

Engineer sues Amazon for not covering work-from-home internet, electricity bills

Number6

Another thing to consider is that if you're working for 8 hours a day and you spend another two commuting, your effective hourly rate is reduced in proportion because you're getting paid for ten hours of your time rather than 8, unless your commute is such that you consider it useful time. I figure near-zero commute costs plus 90 minutes extra me time per day makes up for any additional expenses at home. However, I'm lucky enough to have the space and the equipment for working from home (my home workshop has pretty much the same facilities as I have at work), not everyone is in that position.

10x prices, year-long delays... Life as an electronics engineer in global chip shortage

Number6

Definitely an interesting time when it comes to designing stuff, even for prototypes. Had one board that was released to prototype fab, they came back and said they couldn't get one of the parts (which was ins stock a couple of days previously). Whirlwind overnight redesign of board to use a different part so we could get the boards built. Fortunately that part didn't go out of stock before they could purchase it.

How CAPTCHAs can cloak phishing URLs in emails

Number6

It comes back to my opinion that HTML email is in itself a security hazard. My system is set up to display plain text and considers the presence of HTML to incline it to bounce a message. Stick to plain text, people, you know it makes sense.

IT blamed after HR forgets to install sockets in new office

Number6

Re: Similar tale in a hospital

It's hard to spend money to make it all the way around the corners when there's an obvious way to cut them.