* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Digital version of Universal Credit still pricey, wobbly, failing to deliver – MPs

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"its IT suppliers, which included Accenture, IBM, Hewlett Packard and British Telecom,""

A veritable "dream team" of s**t programme delivery right there.

"and had failed in their professional duty of care to their client."

Are you f**king kidding me?

These are con-tractors. "Duty of care" is an idea from real professions where there are actual legal penalties if you violate it.

Linux 4.16 arrives, keeps melting Meltdown, preps to axe eight CPUs

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"...when there's Minix and Java ready to go on every Intel chip out there?"

Wheather or not you asked them to be there.*

*Regardless of wheather they could be shut down or not either.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

However,..recall it was also the design of the custom coprocessors by Jay Miner

that lent a serious helping hand.

Indeed.

Looking it up it seems although the Amiga did not have a proper Motorola MMU, it did have shall we say "hardware assisted" memory mangement?

Also it's O/S was not Linux (or a Unix port) but something called "Tripos" which came out of Cambridge University and was written in BCPL, the precursor to C.

The Atari ST, not so hot.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Blackfin is Analog Devices, not AMD.

I stand corrected.

I thought Tile was something to do with IBM (some kind of co processor?)

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"the absence of an MMU was a PITA..."

I'll just bet.

I'm thinking of Tannenbaums book on "Mimix" written for an actual 8086 PC with no MMU.

Multi tasking without hardware support.

Nasty.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

And so fairwell blackfin, cris, frv, m32r, metag, mn10300, score, and tile.

Of which I only even recognize Blackfin (AMD?) & Tile (IBM?)

Designing a "better" architecture (for some task) is not that difficult.

Designing a better architecture others will buy. Not so easy.

Details of 600,000 foreign visitors to UK go up in smoke thanks to shonky border database

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

"Where I dislike such things is when having, and carrying, it becomes mandatory "

Push the bayonet in, Comrade. If it finds fat, push harder.

Do you doubt that's how the UK Home Office would behave, given the chance?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"I could never figure out how she could become PM "

Easy.

Govists hated Johnsonistas who hated Daviesites who hated Govists

As May had never shown any inclination to independent thought she was the compromise candidate. Not actively disliked (very much) by anyone.

That works fine at Ministerial level but once you make it to 10 Downing Street you actually have to set the direction, not follow it.

And no one's ever told her how to do that.

Meanwhile JRM circles ever closer, like a well dressed and well spoken shark. Or fanatic of the Inquisition, which is what he sounds like if you stop listening to how he sounds and listen to what he's saying. The complete ban on all abortions (including victims of rape and incest) gives you some idea what he means by "Radical social policy."

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

People who think brexit will solve all their immigration woes are bonkers.

That part is true.

The rest of your post got you a down vote.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

"and Johson was sent back to the UK on the first available flight."

So, "Johnson* whipped out at airport" would be a valid headline?

*I do find it very helpful that it's an old US slang term for the male member.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Annon because I still to take the bus through the area.

Then if you're > 26 according to M. Thatcher you are a failure.

Understand the model for bus operators by Thatchers advisor was that in Chile.

Not that of a country in the G7.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

What did John Reid say over a decade ago... "the Home Office is not fit for purpose".

Unless of course it's "purposes" are

Inciting hatred against foreigners

Improving sales of tabloid newspapers encouraging Brexit.

Avoiding blame for the incompetent motherf**kers in senior management and the succession of sock puppets who've been the Minister (T. May being the last) by blaming the EU.

Expanding surveillance for 24/7/365/ of everyone in the UK.

In which case it's doing an outstanding job. Otherwise I'd call it a "Centre for Evil" in the UK.

What's silent but violent and costs $250m? Yes, it's Lockheed Martin's super-quiet, supersonic X-plane for NASA

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Yes after 6 decades they've come up with something slower than Concorde. But......

If it works then people will at least consider a large passenger jet at > M1.

OTOH if the hooter needs to be that long to cut the boom for M1.4, what will it be like at M2? Or M2.5? Or 3.

This is the first project I've seen for a long time which really does need a backronym.

SNAPE or DURANTE perhaps?

Law's changed, now cough up: Uncle Sam serves Microsoft fresh warrant for Irish emails

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"They should have called it the : Amuricah World Police F*ck Yeah ! Act..."

But that would have ruined the apparently user friendly (but deeply citizen unfriendly) backronym.

So it's no longer safe dealing with US subsidiaries if you want your data secure.

Don't deal with US companies for data storage or transmission at all.

Intel outside: Apple 'prepping' non-Chipzilla Macs by 2020 (stop us if you're having deja vu)

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Intels not having a good 2018, are they."

Not while they've still got their BFF in Redmond to ensure their OS will slow down their next generation of hardware.

Until that little co-dependent facilitating partnership is broken up they will be BAU until the chips get down to 1 atom thick insulators on the gates.

It would totally help, EU told, if data we held on migrants was accurate

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

TL;DR: Storm in a teacup...

And yet you post AC.

If you have nothing to hide surely you have nothing to fear?

After isn't that the point of your post?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

3 words...

"Buttle, not Tuttle." 3:20

You know what I'm saying.

And yes, biometrics. WTF when your prints are swapped with a shoot-on-site terrorist.

Data sharing. Yes. Central data repository. No.

And FFS do the data cleansing before the migration, because I guaranf**kingtee it won't be done after.

Storm brewing? Weather buff uses deep learning to predict patterns

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Tornadoes are notorious..Those of us who experience them regularly have a healthy respect for them.

As I imagine anyone who's lived through being hit by would would also.

I once did a very rough calculation of the power of a Tornado.

It came out about 1000 GW, or 1 TW.

Top tip.

Getting into an argument with Mother nature will probably end badly.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"deep leanring" --> prediction *without* insight

Researcher "Why do you think this storm will have dangerous hail"

NN "Well because the others with these characteristics did."

But what are the key factors? What are the factors that are less important?

And BTW that's 88% correct against existing predictions.

So it's 12% less accurate that the existing predictions.

So how accurate are they to begin with?

Wanna work for El Reg? Developers needed for headline-writing AI bots

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

William Morris?

Bloody armchair Socialist.

Hurrah! TLS 1.3 is here. Now to implement it and put it into software

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"The point is that when you're at work it's not "your" connection."

Exactly.

Something a lot of people just don't seem to get.

So doing it this way improves the chances of it being accepted by most companies, as well as home users.

That's important because the truth is the internet is only as secure as its weakest link.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

The "Edge inspection" setting sounds like a reasonable real world compromise.

No doubt it will flush out a few middle boxes written by code monkeys from a bunch of code they trawlered up from some code repository they barely understood. *

So cautious thumbs up.

*I wonder if this will include the hardware that implements the UK Snoopers Charter, supplied by the BAe subsidiary formerly nown as Dettica, formerly known as Smith Associates.

Let's go to Mars, dude: Euro space parachute passes maiden test

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Boffin

Note that space'x engine restart at c30Km let NASA cut their "supersonic retro propulsion"

project budget from about $80m to about $10m.

But yes low ground behavior is going to be tricky to simulate as Mars surface atmospheric pressure is 1/160 of that of Earth.

Why you shouldn't trust a stranger's VPN: Plenty leak your IP addresses

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Ahhh. Javascript. The tool that just keeps on giving.

Your private details to anyone who can work out how to query it.

Boffins laugh in the face of Twitter's API limits. Now they can slurp info to their hearts' content

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

I presume that's pronounced "scrape-y"

Which IIRC is also a disease of sheep.

If not, does it have a big brother called "Scooby" ?

UK.gov: Here's £8.8m to plough into hydrogen-powered car tech

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

"its a whole lot easier to use fireless steam than any of these new fangled ideas."

Actually true.

Unfortunately you're looking at looking at another pressure vessel, but at 200atm, not 666atm.

And it'll be around 300c.

About the operating conditions (without the radiation) inside a PWR (while a modern coal fired power station runs around 540c and is therefor much more efficient, and cheaper, than a nuke).

Not impossible, but a challenge.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

haven't really had consumer EVs for long enough..what the costs..to replace the batteries

True.

I doubt there's even a Lithium battery recycling factory in the UK. IIRC the car and truck batteries go to France for reprocessing (but I believe it's quite an effective process).

OTOH I'd bet recovering the major raw materials from old EV battery packs is a lot cheaper than first mining them from the ground. I'd guess the "rare earth" magnet motors could be quite recyclable as well.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Only about 4% of hydrogen comes from electrolysis.

That alone gives the lie to any "Green fuel" bu***hit about Hydrogen.

Never mind that 3x more energy is spent either cooling it or compressing it. IOW you get out (at most) 1/4 of the energy you put in.

TBH at that pressure you could start by driving the wheels through a crank shaft linked to a couple of reciprocating cylinders IE an expansion engine, before you fed it to the FC.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Are there any unbiased, layman-friendly explanations of the challenges kicking around?

Aside from "Alternative Energy without the hot air" you mean?

Issues with H2 fuel cell cars.

1)They are not fuels, they are energy carriers, storing the energy generated elsewhere.

2) What kind? The LH2 at -253c or the GH2 at 10 000psi? BTW the USAF (who deal with quite a lot of pressure vessels, like the one that destroyed the AMOS 6 satellite on the F9 a while back), rate them by "lbs of TNT equivalent." and 10Ksi is toward the high end of such tanks.). There is a (relatively) low pressure system using metal alloys that absor/desorb GH2 but people seem to think it's heavy. Google "Interstitial hydrides."

3) A US study reckoned the diffusion and embrittlement issues are containable (so to speak) with suitable alloys. But you're looking at a whole new distro network with (ideally) all welded joints. LH2 normally uses "Vacuum Jacked Line," which is double skinned piping with an evacuated cavity between. It's a PITA to use and mfg.

4)We know how to do bulk storage of gases (really large scale) much better than store electricity.

But I'm not unbiased. Hydrogen is the physicists choice for a fuel. Not an engineers choice. IMHO

Fuel cells ¬ stupid.

Fuel cells with H2 (on Earth) very stupid.

My alternate fuel choice is the sugar solution fuel cell.

Room temp storable liquid.

Compatible wit existing supply chain .

Very safe to handle (unless there are bees or wasps around)

Renewable.

Sustainable.

Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg has flunky tell UK MPs: Nope, he's sending someone else

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

And I bet the bastards didn't fly economy either,

Remeber, for most Conservative MP's this is a step down in their usual accommodation.

Google lobbies hard to derail new US privacy laws – using dodgy stats

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

If Google is *really* a "service" then some people choose not to be known on it.

Or are they really rather more like...

<gollum>

We wants it

We needs it

We must know everything, about everyone, all the time, forever.

</gollum>

Astro-boffins find new type of super-fast supernova

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

".. Kepler completely captured the rapid evolution..constrains the exotic ways..stars die.”

So it's one of those rare events that lets you definitely rule out some theories and rule in others.

Excellent work.

The energy release from those few days must have been absolutely phenomenal. Literally an extinction level event for any nearby civilizations, although wheather they knew it was happening would be debatable.

UK.gov unveils cyber security export strategy – only thing missing is the strategy

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"UK faces a diverse range of threats from hostile state actors. "

Starting with the one located in No 10 Downing Street.

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, off you go: Snout of UK space forcibly removed from EU satellite trough

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

If you decide to become outsiders, then you must expect rational adjustments,

Rationality is not a word that applied to many Leave voters or campaigners*

*Except the ones who anticipated making shedloads of cash from more helpless, less protected British citizens.

Uber's disturbing fatal self-driving car crash, a new common sense challenge for AI, and Facebook's evil algorithms

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

I'd wonder why the womàn pushing her bike started to cross at all, with a dirty great,

Maybe should thought humans have right of way?

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Re: LiDAR doesn't work in the dark? WTF?

There's an old SNL, but the original has been deleted. This (at 1:30) gives you a flavor of what I'm talking about

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: Shouldn't lidar work *better* in the dark?

True.

And don't cyclists normally wear reflective vests as well?

The sort that LIDAR (being active) should get a strong signal off?

Good news: The only thing standing between NASA and $20bn is...

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

In perspective that's still less than the DoD spend on overseas base AirCon & pizza delivery

and about 1/8 of Jeff Bezos net worth.

What I do hope gets funded is the "Kilopower" (the reactor formerly known as KRUSTEE) range of reactors to power ion drives and do Mars (or Moon) surface power in globs of 10Kw each.

I wonder if line item veto could be something the Tea Party could get behind?

UK watchdog finally gets search warrant for Cambridge Analytica's totally not empty offices

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Black Helicopters

The *only* kind of UK warrant you have to give 7 days notice to execute.

Does anyone think this is an accident of poor legal drafting?

Corking story: Idiotic smart wine bottle idea falls over, passes out

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

I'm thinking "RFID tag on the bottles of wineries they partner with." Then I'm thinking

WTF am I bothering with it?

There's a reason why wine still comes in glass bottles after more than 2000 years.

Facebook's inflection point: Now everyone knows this greedy mass surveillance operation for what it is

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

"It's compliemtary. It's not free." Words to *always* keep in mind.

Orlowskis right.

It's the fact they use all that content (Like the stuff I'm generating now as it happens) for free.

Yet without it what is FaceBook?

Remember the inscription of the statue that reads "For I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. See my works and tremble" and all that's left is the feet?

Would it really take that much to turn FaceBook into the new MySpace? If a provider came along and paid for content?

El Reg deep dive: Everything you need to know about UK.gov's pr0n block

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

There are age restriction rules in browsers?

Apparently.

They keep the rug rats away from seeing any "bad stuff" you don't want them to.

As I have nothing to do with ankle biters it's never been an issue for me.

But now it looks like it will be.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Childcatcher

We have some clueless, cloth eared, inept old dear as PM. and a victory for Clare Perry

Who couldn't set the age restriction rules on her browser.

So she organized a debate (that was attended by about 6 other MPs)

Next thing she knows CMD appointed her as Czar for Child Sexualization & Exploitation (later renamed when it read like the title was for someone to support both subjects).

And the rest is going to be history.

BTW It was Perry who though gambling sites should to the age checking, before it turned out one had dished its whole customer list to CC fraudsters.

UK Court of Appeal settles reseller's question: Is software a good?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Sounds like it *could* have gone either way, depending on the method of delivery.

So, really needs a change in the law.

IE Parliament has to make the call because IRL It's either (or both).

AI software that can reproduce like a living thing? Yup, boffins have only gone and done it

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"A version of Microsoft Office..actively tries to kill you rather than passively.."--------------->

I see you are trying to escape would you like to

a) Stand still so I can chop you up.

b) Continue your futile attempts at escape.

<signed>

Gimpy (think "The Children Under The Stairs"), formerly Clippy.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

So it's genetic algorithms, neural networks, "core war" a sort of, well "Artifical life"

Gosh this ground breaking stuff is all pretty new, isn't it?

I'm quite tumescent with excitement.

Addicts of Facebook and pals are easy prey for manipulative scumbags – thanks to tech giants' 'extraordinary reach'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Headmaster

"Then there are situations such as the ESA which isn't strictly an EU organisation but "

Note.

Canada is an ESA member, and I presume a contributor.

Could be "space" may be the easiest Brexit problem to solve.

Maybe.

That long-awaited Mark Zuckerberg response: Everything's fine! Mostly fixed! Facebook's great! All good in the hoodie!

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

I see the picture and I think...

What, me worried?

Noooo.

He got the users to hand over a shedload of their personal details to them and the stockholders to hand over a tonne of cash for a business that's basically a server farm in assets and whose dividend policy has a P/E ratio measured in centuries.

Why wouldn't he think he could hand any random stranger a plate of dog poo and get them to eat it?

He already has. Twice.

Fog off! No more misty eyes for self-driving cars, declare MIT boffins

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Obvious question. Do Californian cars have rain and fog sensors so they know it's happening

Or do they need the LIDAR output to go on the blink before they realize this?

I got a shedload of downvotes for commenting that Uber seem to be the only company whose driverless car experiments have actually killed someone.

By that I meant someone who had nothing to do with testing. I view anyone sitting inside a vehicle whose motion is controlled by this technology chose to take part. And have no illusions this tech is still experimental.

OTOH Every other road user (unless the vehicles path is clearly marked in advance) is just a potential unwitting victim. They have no choice.