* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Take-off crash 'n' burn didn't kill the Concorde, it was just too bloody expensive to maintain

John Smith 19 Gold badge

A big difference between Concorde and SR71 inlets is stability.

I did not realize this.

IIRC the SR71 had something like 13 different operating configurations, with different doors (some active, some sprung loaded) opening and closing at different flight stages.

I'd guess axi-symetric inlets were were easier to analyze. Quite an important issue given the limited computer power available for the era.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"he challenges.. doing synchronous replication over long distances are still often misunderstood."

True.

One of the reasons Lotus Notes was (for certain tasks) very attractive.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

America, you went to the Moon, but we got Concorde.

Actually in terms of cost and technical complexity they were quite similar.

But Concorde lasted several decades longer and (as a percentage of all the passengers it carried) killed a much smaller percentage of the people it carried.

M2 flight is quite easy if you can a) Carefully select height and weight limited (A 6' guy in a modern combat plane. No chance) physically fit aircrew and b) Don't have to worry about the fuel bill.c) Put them in a tiny space so the only air they need is enough to fit in a face mask.

Try that with fat sweaty businessmen. Yet that's exactly what Concorde allowed.

BTW Concorde's mistake was it met the noise standards for the previous generation of turbojet passenger a/c, rather than the later turbofans, because it took so long to get into service and the world oil price rose 4x (to $12 in 1973 $. I can hardly imagine such a time. :-( ).

And when played blind recordings of a Concorde takeoff NYC residents found the subsonic jets louder (they're not called "noise abatement manoeuvres" for nothing). However the time it took to deal with these objections killed a lot of interest in buying more Concorde's from other (potential) operators.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
IT Angle

Particularly as a lot of them do test flights with large crews..playing with all the computers.

Each of the 4 Concorde engines had 13 computers. IIRC they ran the inlet (complex), the engine (probably more monitoring than adjusting) and the outlet (full adjustable reheat and altitude/speed adjustment)

That said some of these were analogue computers, hard wired to take scaled voltages and currents, mash them through a bunch of operational amplifiers and drive some actuators. Good for near instantaneous response to certain parameters.

Others met the more modern description, with executing programs in ROM. Built to mil spec by Elliot Brothers?

I'll note it took 66 flights to plan the "schedule" of spike positions on the SR71. While Concorde's speed range was lower it was design to cope with "unstarts" where the inlet expels the shock wave (a potentially fatal event on the SR71 requiring immediate pilot action) automatically.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

I think..it's the air getting hot during pressurisation by Concorde driving into it,"

Actually skin friction drag is the big item that rises in the M0.9-M1.5 range.

It's the reason Aluminium is fine for subsonic aircraft, OK up to M2.2 (IE Concorde) dubious at M3 (Phantom II "Peace Jack" programme for extended "dashs") and above that probably best going to Titanium, high temp steels, Nickel based superalloys etc.

Consider the X15. No air breathing on board yet designed win Inconel X due to 750c skin temps. At 70 000 ft the outside air temperature is 10s of C below zero.

Concorde was surprisingly like the SR72. Both grew and both leaked fuel on the ground. However I don't think the Concorde designers needed to use it as hydraulic fluid as well.

Hands off! Arm pitches tamper-resistant Cortex-M35-P CPU cores

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Shock news. Smart streetlights *already* exist

In fact I believe the whole of the Motorway and A road network use them.

Other countries power their street lights off a separate network but UK practice is to hang local street lights off of the nearest house supply, making control through the mains (used in other countries) unworkable.

What are they used for? So section of Mway can be gradually dimmed down when there's no one actually on them at 3am on midweeks. They can also report bulb or *gear" failure (or even impending failure) without waiting for some member of the public to phone in saying "Do you know...?"

The best systems fail safe. If the control fails it fails with light full on. then it's under the control of either a timer or photocell in the lamp.

And if councils insist on hooking this up to other systems where there is a way in there's someone likely to use it, if only for the s**t and the giggles.

NASA dusts off FORTRAN manual, revives 20-year-old data on Ganymede

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"5 unit tape, last time I used that was in 1967."

That is old old school tech.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

" I believe the current British Research Concils mandate that experimental data is kept."

I'd like to think all research organizations have some sort of archiving and retention policy on the experimental data they collect.

"Damn good point. There is no point in having the raw data if you don't have the calibrations."

Exactly. I was gobsmacked to see a NASA NIAC presentation (IIRC) that said upgraded calibration targets on weather satellites had made significant changes to the interpretation of climate change data, but I can't recall if it was for better or worse.

IOW the readings you thought you were reading were not what you thought.

Which is kind of important. I'll also note with regard to land weather stations you see the "heat island" effect as what was a site in the middle of a field is now a site in the middle of an industrial park. Again, have you allowed for this?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"If there's a moral to the story it is look after those backups" Not really.

What research organizations should do is make

a) The raw data from the experiment

b) The data acquisition model (IE what those numbers are from, what resolution, sample rate they are from)

c) The instrument specs.

On accessible servers. The data should be secure from being changed but not downloaded.

As others have noted the datasets are (by modern standards) not that big and as the story notes it seems some of them have never had a detailed review.

IOW Fresh meat to the army of Asto/fusion/geo physics PhD's candidates out there looking for a topic, glory and possibly a shot at a Nobel.

I bet there's a lot more to be mined from those data sets.

Graphene-wrangler Paragraf slurps a cool £2.9m

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

something rather similar happend with Carbon fibre.

Huge potential but ballsachingly difficult to make in quantity.

Lots of failed projects before IIRC the Royal Aircraft Establishment got something close to being able to be scaled up.

So starting small may be a very wise move and (hopefully) a very good investment.

I wish them well with their tech, whatever it actually is.

Javid's in, Rudd's out: UK Home Sec quits over immigration targets scandal

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coffee/keyboard

" using various masks to try and discover the secrets of the Thunderbirds machines"

I think subconsciously I've been trying very hard not to think of that image.

That is just so wrong on so many levels.

And yet, so right..

And I was getting to like this keyboard....

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"Gove.."a huge asset - brave, principled, thoughtful, humane,..always thinking of the impact

of policy on the vulnerable"."

OK That's at the top of my current "Are you f**king kidding me" list for 2018.

I know, still 8 months left to go, but I think it's going to take a lot to top that pile of merde de taureau.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"I wonder what she got from her Boss to take flak for her and fall on her sword."

Good question.

a) Something very nice or

b) The promise of something very nice "When the fuss dies down. Look Amber, just keep your head down, don't stir up any Remainers in the Party to mutiny and I'll look after you when the time comes."

Of course if it's the latter the question is who's making that promise?

If it's May it may not be worth the breath it's written on.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Alien

"I don't know what they put in it but it seems to turn every entrant into an illiberal,

authoritarian Home Secretary in short order."

Well, TBH sometimes it take a little longer for the parasite to take over their frontal lobes.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

"the disgusting little wrecker Smeagol Gove was considered for the post. "

Don't be shy.

Tell us how you really feel.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Assuming May lasts that long and we don't have another General Election first."

Of course she will.

She's got the support of that nice Mrs Foster of the DUP, and her other 9 stout hearted Ulstermen. *

Besides, JRM hasn't put the finishing touches to the warrant for "Crimes Against Brexit" and you can't whip up a PCP lynch mob over night. You have to convince the fence sitters that she's friendless before you can move in for the kill en masse.**

*WTF you do, don't call them Irish. **Apologies to Leave voters for talking foreign.

Bill Gates declined offer to serve as Donald Trump's science advisor

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"No man is so ignorant as one whose livelihood depends on his ignorance"

As Upton Sinclair put it.

And boy is Trump ignorant.

And damm proud to be.

Americans. This is what you (just about) elected.

Isn't it time you sorted out that election system of yours?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"“not a good use of my time”"

Well he's right.

Imagine.

You have a personal fortune in the 10s of $Bn.

You want to spend your time explaining complex ideas (you might not fully understand) to some verbally incontinent, attention deficient Ahole with near total contempt for his employees*?

Anyone smart enough to do the job is smart enough not to touch it with a barge pole. $Diety know what moron he'll actually get to fill it.

*Fires people through Twitter, lips always flapping, lies often coming out.

Facebook furiously pumps brakes on Euro probe into transatlantic personal data slurping

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Delaying tactics. SOP for US corporations.

Because as Corporate US lawyers know very well "Sloooow justice (where we might lose) is the best justice."

Unless of course someone might have taken their client for $0.02 in which it must swift and without mercy.

Grab your lamp, you've pulled: Brits punt life-saving gravity-powered light

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

Quite neat. And tricky to engineer well.

May turn out to be one of those little products that makes just a bit of a difference to a great many people.

I wish them every success, but I agree, a good quality affordable rechargeable battery is a tough problem.

Let's be Frank: Bloke drags Google to the US Supreme Court over $8.5m privacy payout

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

""experience as a trial judge taught me to be skeptical of unsworn statements from lawyers,

especially when it comes to conflict of interest issues.""

Hell yes.

This is basically "No Your Honor I will gain no direct or indirect benefit (from bunging my old law school several $m). "

Basically you're relying on the lawyers honor that they make this statement.

And as we all know most lawyers don't have such a thing to begin with.

And let's be real. The Google case is not just a conflict of interest it's a blatant stitch up.

Autonomy ex-CFO Hussain guilty of fraud: He cooked the books amid $11bn HP gobble

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Oracle..claimed that Autonomy was shopped to them for $4bn only months earlier "

TBH the only way I can see this happening is some truly monstrous chemically assisted egos urging each other to more and more excessive behavior.

But maybe that's just because I've watched "Kill your friends" again.

So just the monstrous egos at work then?

When you're dealing with what is basically a software house it's entire resource base is

a) The development team. b) The current and expected sales and support contracts.

It's all people or paper.

And in this case it looks like most of the people was of the toilet variety.

The question is should the auditors have spotted that fact?

Windrush immigration papers scandal: What it didn't teach UK.gov about data compliance

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

Funny how the Home Office does it, is it not?

Disembarkation cards. "No sorry, had to shred them. Illegal to hold them, too much space blah blah"

DNA data "No you can't have it destroyed, even if the EU CoJ says it's illegal for the police force to hold them. Even if you are not actually guilty of a crime."

As for Rudd going.

No this will not leave the Department "Rudd er" less.

They'll have another sock puppet house broken to their PoV within a week.

Paperback writer? Microsoft slaps patents on book-style gadgetry with flexible display

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

we might go some of the way b increasing the thickness... Just a thought - can I patent it?

This is the USPTO.

Of course you can.

If it hasn't already been patented of course.

Which (because this is the USPTO) it probably has.

High Court gives UK.gov six months to make the Snooper's Charter lawful

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

The switch from DRIPA to IPA *alone* should tell you deliberate confusion is a tactic in this

Data fetishists at work.

Look for the senior civil servants with a PPE and a deep air of entitlement.

IRL who is "Bryan Thomas Reynolds" ?

Double double, soil and trouble, fire burn and heat shield bubble: NASA cracks rover, has dirty talk with ESA

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

time to revisit miniature pumpe propulsion?

The team at Lawrence Livermore under John Whtehead did a lot of work on pumped systems, effectively fluidic oscillators which scaled down better than turbo pumps and were more powerful (IE much higher Isp) than pressure fed systems.

What they needed were a) Full thermal vacuum test b)Small, high pressure (IE 1000psi) combustion chamber.

With this IIRC something like SSTO to Earth was possible.

Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie, oi oi oi! Tech zillionaire Ray's backdoor crypto for the Feds is Clipper chip v2

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

'assume a lock nobody can break,'

The fail is right there.

The follow up (never answered) question is who does everyone trust to hold such a key?

The answer (IMHO) is no one.

The USPTO once again showing it's FUBAR. Not exactly a surprise there.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

..only politicians (and their spooks) and people with a surfeit of money want this? I

Look up the term "data fetishist."

And in most countries politicians come and politicians go. It's the bureaucrats behind them that have the pathological compulsion

It makes no sense. Looking for a terrorist is already looking for a needle in a haystack (MI5 said they had 1500 suspects from 60million people in 2015. Suspects, not actual terrorists. That's 0.0025% of the population)

But they want to fill the field with more haystacks (of data).

Why? Because they can.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"the next step will be to make non-possession of phones a crime..."

My British friends tell me that for anyone claiming Universal Credit it already is

Yes folks. No phone, no credit.

Programmers! Close the StackOverflow tabs. This AI robot will write your source code for you

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Facepalm

"This is clearly a group of people who hate Java. "

Wrong.

I'd say (as a group) we hate

a) Tools that can't be reused in other languages. It's great in Java. SFW? Useless for any other application, which makes it (from the PoV of other language developers) a toy.

b) The examples given are not very competent Java code anyway. IOW you've just built a scrip kiddie bot. You might claim it's a "Work in progress" to which most would say "Great. Come back when it's progressed to someone useable."

BTW.Case sensitivity When a DEC 11 was good for a few hundred KIPS and variables were 8 characters that might be justifiable. C++ inherited restrictions. But Java didn't have to and Ada's designers thought that was brain dead. They were right.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Mid 90s Visual Studio db access stub wizards did the var1, var2 up the wazoo.

And there's a reason for that.

Because for good developers choosing meaningful names is important and they know the odds on bet is they will have to revisit this code at a later date.

Since IRL no developer I've ever met has instant and total recall of every program they've ever worked on (despite PHB types presuming they do) making your life easier for the next trip through the code is just good thinking.

So those names matter and the dimwitted generation algorithms most code gens use is pretty much useless. Especially galling given the name length restrictions are (for most modern languages) things of the past. And while I'm at it Java's are case sensitive? Are you f**king kidding me? In the 21st century?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

If the AI can help me craft better specifications,..test cases..optimal coverage..effectiveness

Because IRL that would be pretty dammed impressive?

And because doing it is dammed hard work.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"So this is just a tool that automatically inserts standard boiler plate,"

Au contraire.

It used Deep Learning to work out what stuff it should replace your request.

Which is apparently much cleverer and worthy of a DARPA grant to do.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"This project has demonstrated what can be done based on just source code "

And that was demonstrated decades ago.

OTOH if you want some actually quite impressive stuff there's always this

But that's actually ballsachingly hard to do.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"but someone will need to maintain the code for many years."

Too right.

IMHO Good variable name generation is very tough.

Hmm. "So Var1 is passed to this function which has locals Var 2 and Var 3 and..."

Versus "So MortagePrincipal is passed to AssessSuitability, which checks Age, Salary, CriminalHistory."

There's a reason people don't fiddle with the code generated by "high level" development tools. It's usually s**t to read.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

So basically reads shedloads of code, builds code template DB and looks for nearest match

When you type requirements in.

It seems the real issue is that there are 2 groups of people here.

AI researchers, who get paid to think up clever AI stuff (that doesn't have to scale or be accurate)

Actual developers who have to write code that does something, because they get fired if it doesn't.

Here's a radical notion. Why don't the AI types talk to actual developers and find out what WTF they want in terms of "AI" assistance of the development task?

It can only do this in Java? Big f**king whoops. Not even the ambition of being language agnostic.

multi level neural networks Deep learning is great where you have lots of "fuzzy" data (what is that picture, exactly? Did he say "fence" or "Pence"?) but what's fuzzy about computer code?

I wonder do AI researchers ever bother to read any history of AI system? Or are they like people who lost their long term memory. Always in the now.

We wanted a camera, they gave us the eye of Gemini – and an eSIM

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

Key point. Not perfect at first availability but *improving*

No back camera

Now a back camera

Hinge a bit Mehh

Getting better.

Battery life not all that

Battery pack available.

Mayben not 100% at launch, but moving in the right direction. Cautious optimism.

Want to make a super-earth? Bring on the frikking lasers

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Impressive.

I always thought the way to go with this stuff is something called a Diamond Anvil Cell.

Where inside pressure are measure in 1000s of bar

Brit MPs brand Facebook a 'great vampire squid' out for cash

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"I can only tell you what’s in my heart, which is we really do want to get these things right.”"

And by "things" he means extract-maximum-information-from-products(IE users)-before-selling-it-on-to-customers

That I can absolutely believe he is honest about.

Quality bit of weaseling.

Why? What did you think he meant?

Did you guess 2019 for Intel's 10nm chip ramp up? Congratulations

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

So that's 90 atoms wide with a 9 atom thick oxide layer.

The day of FET is drawing to a close.

Tick tock.

'Alexa, listen in on my every word and send it all to a shady developer'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Here's the thing. Once you put the hook for this in what it's used for is a policy decision.

History shows giving any information out to a large organization can (and often will) be abused by someone.

I spy with my little eye ... a quantum drum with TRILLIONS of atoms

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

entanglement was maintained for nearly 30 minutes. On objects that large!

Indeed.

Compared to the more usual " X number of atoms in a gas at -200c" or similar this is quite astonishing.

Entanglement with an object you can see with the naked eye.

Blighty stuffs itself in Galileo airlock and dares Europe to pull the lever

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Trollface

"The resulting posturing towards the UK will just push us towards closer union with the US"

Obvious troll is obvious.

Do not feed.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"oh what a shame we wont get to pay for and build the EU's toy for them."

Yes, that's right.

What does the UK economy need with any part of another $13.4 Bn?

That's not even 7 Ecclestons*

*Named after the F1 bosses alleged avoided tax bill.

ISO blocks NSA's latest IoT encryption systems amid murky tales of backdoors and bullying

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

Sounds like the NSA are playing the standards version of "security by obsecurity"

Their behavior seemed suspicious.

Was.

US sanctions on Turkey for Russia purchases could ground Brit F-35s

John Smith 19 Gold badge
IT Angle

Lemons? I thought you chaps were "Limeys"?

I think the term "Hangar Queen" sums up this aircrafts performance so far.

Have they fixed the SW bug that shuts off the air supply to the pilots yet?

Turn that bachelor pad into a touch pad: Now you can paint buttons, sensors on your walls

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Paint on the floor and you have you're own permanent twister installation.

Yeay for that .

And since you have a micro controller board already generating a low power near field signal doesn't seem that tough.

Or is it that a "passive" system needs no FCC license

No doubt the chemistry is pretty clever and maybe the algorithms but why exactly?

Facebook can't admit the truth, says data-slurp boffin Kogan

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"“The company management are more than happy to deal with, and support, the ICO,” "

This is why he gets paid the big bucks.

You've got to have some pretty big ones to just flat out lie to peoples faces who actually know the facts

Clearly he is a man in possession of such tackle.

Brexit has shafted the UK's space sector, lord warns science minister

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

if the UK team turned up with a clear mandate on what they're allowed to negotiate on.

If you approach the EU with "We want to leave. What deal will you give us" should you really be surprised if you hear the voice of Katt Williams saying "B**ch, I ain't giving you s**t*"

*Especially if Mrs May has decided to take personal charge of the process.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

All this, to appease the right wing extremists in the Tory party.

Exactly.

This was only ever about a)Keeping the Conservative party together and b)Killing UKIP.

And on those accounts it's been a massive success. UKIP looks like a hedgehog that's been gone over by an 18 wheeler.

The UK Economy is simply "Collateral damage."