* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Teensy weensy space shuttle flies and lands

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Actually not much like the Shuttle at all

The Shuttle was a fairly conventional body-and-wings design like a normal aircraft.

People go with lifting bodies because they want to minimize the wing are, and hence the area you need to cover with a heat shield.

Otherwise LB's tend to have much worse handling characteristics than body-and-wings (which is an impressive feat, given the Shuttle handled like a brick).

DC is actually the most cutting edge tech seen for ISS resupply. It's a crew rated (given it has to berth to the Station) all composite (carbon fibre) human sized lifting body. Nothing has all those things together in one package.

Linux 4.14 arrives and Linus says it should have fewer 0-days

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"an automated vulnerability-checker that scours kernel code for issues."

Sounds like a clever idea.

You'd hope all OS developers use something like that.

I wonder if they do?

Metal 3D printing at 100 times the speed and a twentieth of the cost

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Boffin

"It's the metal quality that I'm more interested in. "

Discussed a couple of paragraphs before the end.

"The metal fuses creating a density of between 96 and 99.8 per cent, according to Desktop Metal. "

So near full metal density.

If the standard spec metal was borderline you would probably have to switch metals. In terms of powder metallurgy I think the nearest is where the metal is compressed in a mold and has an electric current put through it.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Boffin

Re: 3D PCB

A further note on Low Temperature Cofired Ceramic.

There are also tapes that incorporate both piezo electric precursors and ferromagnetic particles. A new technique developed (and patented) by Sandia labs allows Full Through Thickness Features (as opposed to ink paste layers of around 1/2-1 mil (12-25.4 micrometres) by CNC punching from the back supporting plastic film to the front, screen printing without a special mask) and acting as a "liftoff" lithography system, peeling off the excess with the backing tape.

PZ and FM allow you to make in situ actuators for MEMS, or (in principle) speakers and microphones, along with (in principle) memory devices, all good to very high (by Silicon) operating temps.

There are (sort of) semiconductor pastes (ZnO and TiO) but the joker is there don't seem to be any viable ways to dope them to change their conductivity. If there were you could make big (and therefore slow, c30 micrometres) transistors that could operate comfortably at 5-600c+ down a borehole.

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"Though no idea how it'd handle for stuff like cam shafts."

Well the metal quality might be OK but the surface finish is the issue.

That said there are a number of "liquid polishing" techniques. One of which is called "liquid honing." It use a proprietary mix of plastic beads with embedded abrasive in to give a surface finish below 64 microinches (1.6 micrometres) and even to 0.4micrometres.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Boffin

Re: 3D PCB

Already exists.

It's called Low Temperature Cofired Ceramic.

It's been around about 30 years. the layers can be CNC punched or laser cut and are in 2,4.5,6.5,10 and 20 mil (0.001inch units) thicknesses. Various ink pastes can be used to make conductors, resistors, inductors or capacitors inside the boards by screen printing. Cavities for chips can also be made, protected by a carbon paste that burns out during the bonding process.

The tech is also good for making MEMS. It's also a hell of a lot cheaper than making custom chips.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"Sintered gears have been in mass production for decades. "

F1 teams were using 3D printed gears in the early '00's.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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The joker here is that session in the furnace.

How long is it?

How hot is it?

How much does it shrink the object by? Is it predictable? Is it repeatable? Is it the same in all axes?

Large(ish) high power furnaces are not cheap and take a while to heat up.

Potential game changer, maybe, if it hits its speed and cost targets.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Suddenly the 3d printed plastic gun is no longer the problem....

You're a bit late

Android at 10: How Google won the smartphone wars

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

" just about good enough, and its parent was prepared to cross subsidise it hugely."

That's exactly how Windows was developed and how Microsoft won on the desktop.

Expect the same "We are not a monopoly, other options exist" BS from Google ad infinitum.

And yes, all your data belong to us.

"Do no evil." Who are they f**king kidding.

You wanted robo-butlers. Instead, you're getting robo-BOFHs

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BMC still in business.

Wow, that's a blast from the past.

Parity's $280m Ethereum wallet freeze was no accident: It was a hack, claims angry upstart

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Piece of p**s to think up a new crypto currency.

Very f**king difficult to design one that's secure.

But keep in mind what's a "real" currency?

Most of most people's net worth is actually negative.

Most of (negative or positive) is actually just a set of numbers held in what wethink of as "secure" databases called banks.

Uber loses appeal against UK employment rights for workers

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"I'm pretty sure that Zero Hour Contracts have kinda rendered this point moot."

Indeed.

What is this "IPSE" ? I've never heard of them.

Sound like some sort of astroturging outfit.

Motto "Work is freedom" ?

UK Home Sec thinks a Minority Report-style AI will prevent people posting bad things

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British Home Secretary x Comment on AI x comments on terrorism/whateve-du-jour -->

Usual s**t spout.

The British Home Office.

Should be a designated Centre for Evil

Scientists think they've found primordial goop whence life first sprang

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"you'd have no trouble concocting a plausible primordial gloop"

In fact various groups, over decades have done exactly that, usually using a mixture of gases.

One particularly interesting effort bubbled them through volcanic sand and got a mix of proteins out (although no one tried to eat them).

A book called "Synthetic Food" by a Dr Magnus Pyke has proved most entertaining on this.

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"As for life, there's a huge fuzzy area between "organic chemistry" and "life" "

Yes.

The borderline between "Really clever self catalyzing molecule" and "has a reproductive cycle"

Very clever chemistry or very simple life form?

The answer is of course "yes."

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Interesting idea. Now how difficult is it to make DAP given the environment of the early Earth?

But yes having fewer first ingredients (or first catalysts) that make more of the precursors in one go does make it potentially a more likely route.

But in fact there is no reason why there has to be a single route to day zero.

I could imagine a most probable (of several possible) route and a most successful over time but insisting on a single path from raw chemicals to "life" seems like a human desire to reduce complexity. The world is not designed for human comprehension. If it were many of the processes we have studied and (eventually) understood would have been much simpler.

No venture capital please, we're British: Why a pair of storage startups went it alone

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Go

"Good to know you can build a sustainable tech business in the UK from scratch"

Or reading the story a couple, or maybe even four of them.

Ousting an Oracle based system from ITN was particularly impressive.

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"more pleasant work environment. In 2006 they moved to..Cardiff in Wales."

Where they were able to snap up staff from the AA's main in house IT operation?* (Are there other Cardiffs in the UK?)

You'll note all of this is niche, high end, probably high markup, no use to home users, stuff.

Which is fine as far as it goes but.

Just need a few thousand like them and the UK economy should be in great shape.

* Trivial Pursuit, IT version.

Activists launch legal challenge against NHS patient data-sharing deal

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FAIL

"We are the Home Office. We are s**t at our job, so please do it for us."

And let's not forget the fun to be had when someone mistakes "Buttle" for "Tuttle." (or is it vise versa?)

The truth is there are many ways that illegal immigrants could be detected by the Home Office which are under it's direct, or indirect control.

But that would require senior managers to get their f**king fingers out and make their systems work better and talk to each other.

It might also mean taking the view that if they pay taxes and don't get arrested their immigration status is not that important.

IOW it's not the NHS's job. Which it isn't.

Boffins: We can identify you by your typing, and we're gonna sell the tech to biz, govt – yay!

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"that's three universities we know their researchers to take ethics modules"

Indeed.

The words "Moral blindness" come readily to mind.

Literally the complete lack of any sense of the consequences of their work.

American upstart seeks hotshot guinea pig for Concorde-a-like airliner

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And most of those noise objections disappeared when...

A. people found out that concorde did'nt hang about once it had taken off

and B. Someone played the noise of concorde and another aircraft to a bunch of congress critters and pointed out concorde was the quieter of the 2 and the noisy fekker was airforce 1 ....

Boom is claiming that it's design will be 30x quieter than Concorde.

That said even the full size one is 1/3 the size of Concorde, so it should be somewhat quieter.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"Naturally, it also needs a good number of very think brown envelopes to be passed around"

You have to understand.

Freedom ain't free. Democracy is expensive.

Now I've got to go and drop off a few such packages to some greedy needy causes.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Howsoever, it did not..have the sustained cruise capacity of the Concord "

Actually the whole point of the plane was sustained M3 flight.

While other M1+ planes were designed to stay inside the "shock cone" of it's nose the XB70 used "compression lift" caused by the engine package to raise the air pressure under the plane, and the flip down of the wing tips to trap the pressure under the fuselage.

AFAIK it was the first (and last) "shockwave rider" design

Still astonishing and advanced (built in steel honeycomb to be affordable as 1 XB70 was 10x bigger than an SR71 in payload) even 7 decades after its construction (and you won't find many turbjets that big anywhere either).

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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As for forgotten aircraft tech....

You did not need an SR71 to get to M3 even 40+ years ago with competent engineering and a good starting design.

CFD was still in its infancy then so I'd guess things would be more likely to run right first time (or at least in the ball park) than then.

Still doesn't eliminate the boom though.

The other real challenge is getting politicians to lift the M1 speed limit over the US (for "suitable" aircraft only of course).

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"memory..eposide of 'Thunderbirds' ..a supersonic aircraft..engines on either side of the tail?"

I think it was the pilot.

This was the "Fireflash." The worlds first nuclear powered civilian airliner.

Historically this was due to long distance jets needing "engine out" capability over water and earlier generation engines not having the reliability.

Today only Dassault still make 3 engine biz jets. Modern engine designs are reliable enough that most mfg's go with just two.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

I've seen their site. The story does not add up.

Hmm.

Innovations

"Area ruled fuselage"

Developed in the US in the early 50's. BTW subsonic airliners also use it in what are called "Küchemann Carrots," or "anti-shock" bodies.

"Chines"

Used on the SR71 and in Lockheeds SST entry, AKA "Leading edge strakes"

"Refined delta wings"

Well given the 6 decades from the design of Concorde and the Shuttle you'd kind of expect a bit of refinement, wouldn't you?

"Propulsion"

J85-21.

Turbojets without after burner, to be replaced by a mid flow turbofan in design.

BTW this was already being planned for the Concord B, described here

Most of this stuff has been around for decades. Could a modern spin on the design do better? Yes it should. Will it do better enough to make it worthwhile? On a budget that commercial investors can afford? Time will tell.

But the size of this thing is just strange. This is pretty big for a biz jet and tiny for an airliner. Concorde, at 100 passengers, was viewed as borderline for economical service in the 1960s, at 1960 fuel prices. Most studies seem to think 300+ passengers are needed to make a design close. And if you can't radically lower the boom carpet you've still got a huge problem to deal with.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"Interesting how the XB-70 Valkyrie has been completely forgotten."

Not really.

The problem with such a design (part of what killed Boeing's SST design for the USG as well) was it relied on a couple of very big parts moving into the right positions at the right times, otherwise the aircraft falls out of the sky.

Civilian designs that depend on this (or active lift systems, like those on the Starfighter and Buccaneer) have never succeeded because if they fail in take off or landing (which is when they are usually most active) it is a very bad day for the passengers and crew.

The real triumph of Concorde's aerodynamics was it achieved adequate performance outside it's core flight range (IE M2.2 at 40 000+ ft) without massive slabs of moving metal to do so.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"There's also a lot of aerodynamic subtlety to the shape of Concorde's wing"

True.

And the Russians did not appreciate it, hence the canards retrofitted in the testing phase.

Dumb autonomous cars can save more lives than brilliant ones

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casualties per 100k km data..getting marginally worse.particularly poo..elderly,death rates

per capita 5x the best

So even normalized to a standardised section of road (100K Km?) they still come out badly.

As for death rates among codgers being 5x that of other G7 nations well...

Think of it as "evolution in action."

Gotta cut the welfare bill somehow.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"and imagine US drivers arriving at that. "

Some years ago the USG had a web site page that revealed the #1 killer of USians abroad.

Not in fact terrorists. Traffic accidents. Especially the roundabout.

Can't recall if it was the Transport or Commerce departments that had the page.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Now is that "10 per cent better than humans" or "10 per cent better than American humans?"

Because American drivers do appear to be epicly s**t.

"It's been just a week since a driver ran a stop sign and boom.

---

Like there was a stop sign. The street he was trying to cross (the witness said "blow thru") is so major just reference to a map would've said nuh-unh. The speed he was going on that side street was at *least* double posted or reasonable. The angle that street had to the intersection prevented seeing a whole direction of traffic. "

I guarantee that if that Ahole remembers it happening they think it shows what a superb driver they are.

IMHO the trouble with American road deaths is not the number. It's the number of incompetent motherf**kers who kill others but don't die themselves, and then get behind the wheel and do it some more.

BTW the US has roughly 5x the population of the UK and 10x the road body count, despite having no roundabouts and significantly lower average population density.

You know what's coming next: FBI is upset it can't get into Texas church gunman's smartphone

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"A law which required anyone wanting a gun to sign up to their National Guard"

Indeed.

"Service guarantees citizenship."

Did no one wonder where that idea came from?

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TL:DR. Loon with gun shoots in-laws. What? FBI don't think he's a lone gunman?

Which is a bit of a novelty for them. Isn't it normally a lone gunman?

The BS is strong in this case.

I quite like the idea of some Texan saying "Son, I don't carry in a House of God. The Lord protects me," while I'm thinking of a certain Harrold Dresden also saying "Kevlar in my coat protects me."

I know which option I'd be pinning my faith on.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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" Secondly being committed to a military nut house does not bar you from owning guns."

which is odd because I'd have thought with the manpower shortage in the US Military you'd have to be showing severe symptoms of looniness to get a bed.

Tesla buys robot maker. Hang on, isn't that your sci-fi bogeyman, Elon?

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These guyes aren't the unnamed contractor that f**king up the mfg line, are they?

'Cause Tesla never did name them.

Better filters won't cure this: YouTube's kids nightmare

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People seem to think this is a unexpected consequence of YT's ad model.

Wrong.

It's an un bothered consequence of YT's add model.

The clickbait gets clicked on.

The advertisers pay YT.

They pay the "creators."

IOW they don't give a f**k what's being shown or who it's being shown to, just that a lot of people are looking at it.

AFA YT is concerned it's working just fine.

Now if any of that material was copyright and the owners said "WTF, where's my share, this ain't fair use" maybe that would change.

UK Land Registry opens books on corporate owners

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The interesting one will be how much land around the UK is owned by the big builders.*

"Land bank, we have no land bank of site we're sitting on waiting for the local house prices to rise enough to consider building a few. This is wishy washy pinko liberal socialst homosexual fake news put out by the media."

*Along with how much is owned by foreigners or foreign corporations

More expensive, takes longer than usual, not particularly brilliant. Yes, it's your robot surgeon

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Obvious question is how fast, and accurately, do surgeons hands move IRL?

Or is the UI too clumsy?

On a more subtle note are orthopedic surgeons more muscly than say opthalmic surgeons? Watching one do a hip replacement looks more like furniture moving combined with a bit cabinet making (with a rasp) than anything else to me.

Just because surgeons don't come in design optimized for a particular class of surgery does not mean robot designers need to follow the same path.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Now imagine if you read: US UAW study "robots make no improvements in car mfg.

Stay with humans. "

Who would believe it? People would assume it was self serving CYA bu***hit to protect their jobs.

This might become the new Inhaber Report* . A model of carefully selected facts and baselines that will "prove" a conclusion.

TBH I don't think true robot surgeons will be developed in the US, or any G7 nation. I believe that will happen where there is a much more pressing need for health care and people start doing the math on the real costs. Spend 7 years and train a (maybe) an adequate surgeon or spend 7 years and build something that you can produce in as many units as you need, while expanding your industrial base in ways that can be used in many other parts of the economy?

*Not exactly the Canadian nuclear industries finest hour.

Don't worry about those 40 Linux USB security holes. That's not a typo

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None of you of course would plug a USB device you found in the street into your machine

but for the less paranoid person-in-the-street might be inclined to think "Finders keepers, losers weepers," not considering that perhaps their finding it was no accident.

The massive number does suggest there is a vacancy in the Linux kernel regular development roster with a full list of stuff to do right now.

SSL spy boxes on your network getting you down? But wait, here's an IETF draft to fix that

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"it works by essentially not trusting said equipment."

Yes, the days when intermediate nodes could be relied upon not to snoop are long over.

"middlebox interception annoys me, it's usually there for solid legal reasons. "

Why?

I'd say most are

a)ISP's wanting to snoop traffic with a view to throttling traffic and

b)Governments wanting to snoop traffic because....

You have security issues about data leaving your network?

Don't let it. Either forbid the connection and log the user and workstation who tries and/or do it through a proxy that filters any attempted file transfers.

Our oldest mammalian ancestor named after British pub landlord

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I'm fairly sure this counts as "interesting"

"Fortune favours the prepared mind" as Pasteur put it.

IOW many might have seen them already, but only he saw what they were.

This sounds like the raw material for a 1st Class Degree, provided the write up is dots all the i's and crosses all the t's of course.

'Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of proprietary lock-in we've ever seen in the history of humanity'

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Unhappy

"these "serverless" gizmos have exactly the same execution model as CICS transactions..."

I read a book on CICS ages ago and thought "WTF is this about?"

Then it hit me.

COBOL had (has?) no concept of interactive I/O through a terminal.

CICS is how you do interactive I/O in IBM COBOL.

It took a lot pages before I got to that place.

UK's surveillance regime challenged in landmark European court hearing

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

So (according to the IPA) it's legal to slurp as Snowden let everyone know it's happengin?

Are you f**king kidding me?

This has nothing to do "security," and everything to do with "Give me 6 lines from an honest man, and I'll find something with which to hang him."

The data fetishists "Need to know" (your business) trumps everything else.

It's not a sane policy. It's a personality disorder.

They do it because the technology allows it to be done at a price you (the taxpayers) can pay.

Transparent algorithms? Here's why that's a bad idea, Google tells MPs

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Unhappy

TL:DR Security by obscurity is good for you. Don't bother your silliy heads about such things

Here's a few differences.

Microwaves and cars are physical devices. They have very clearly defined properties and it's usually pretty obvious when they fail. Microwave does not cook food put in it? Not working. Car goes backward when you select 1st gear? Not working.

I especially like the "And it could affect small startups."

Like they give a f**k. Google is built on being the biggest search engine on the planet by a large margin. It's interest is keeping the real barriers to its market entry high as possible.

Boffins tear into IEEE's tissue-thin anti-hacker chip blueprint crypto

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Black Helicopters

The appearence of security (like privacy) without the actual substance of security.

You should not attribute to malice what simple incompetence can explain.

But honestly wouldn't you think a standard designed to protect major US corporations IP would be done by those companies A teams?

Post-Brexit economy SAVED: Posh-nosh truffle thrives in Wales

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Unhappy

Imagine.....

A world where Blighty wins the First Prize for Premium Quality Truffles*

And then you wake up.

*Or whatever it's called.

Your future data-centre: servers immersed in box full of oil, in a field

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Unhappy

"Didn't Thinking Machines have a liquid cooled supercomputer 30+ years ago?"

No. But the Cray 1 had liquid freon cooling (originally developed as an emergency blood substitute) in the 1970's.

Even SSI ECL gets very hot at 80MHz.

How we fooled Google's AI into thinking a 3D-printed turtle was a gun: MIT bods talk to El Reg

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Unhappy

If the image is CGI why is it "fragile" ? You can fine tune it as much as you like

Creating the perfect shot to f**k up that oh-so-clever mult layer NN system (which does not sound as mysterious as "machine" or "deep" but is a f**k load more accurate description).