* Posts by Peter2

2941 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

Qualcomm reveals it's not selling to Russia during Twitter spat

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

With respect, I think that you are drastically overestimating how much has survived from previous centuries.

You appear to be assuming that something like a majority of all paper communications from every source survives multiple centuries. This is very, very far from being the case. The substantial majority of all paper documents are destroyed within decades of creation, a miniscule percentage survives centuries and this is why diaries like the Samuel Pepys diaries have been so valuable, illustrating what a single person thought about contemporary events.; Fragmentary sets of letters become deeply important primary resources and are published by the tens of thousands.

Even if you assume that nothing but comments pages on El Reg, The Guardian, & The Daily Mail survive two centuries (and these are already being archived by just the UK national archives) then this contain thousands of times more data about what normal citizens thought about current events survive that was the case from two centuries ago and this would be enough in itself to prevent there being a "historical dark age".

If something like Facebook or Twitter gets archived? Obviously there are tons of dross, but it'll be historically invaluable for future historians wondering what the common people thought at the time. The loss of some data on random digital media is probably in fact not going to be a major loss, simply because statistically most of this sort of stuff is lost anyway.

And this ignores that a few archives will no doubt survive; they always do. Even if it's people passing down dads/grandads/etc collection of family history bits and some random files that nobody ever looked about because they didn't really give a rats ass but realise that it should be passed on, and besides it's only a few gig on a terrabyte drive now, and then an exabyte storage crystal (or whatever) in a centuries time, this being the then equivalent of small USB stick) and nobody can be bothered to sort out that random stuff that takes up practically no space.

Up until somebody does look in a few centuries and it turns out to contain an IMAP download copy of great, great great great great grandfathers email account back when, which contains plain text copies of most data inside of the messages as well as awful HTML formatting.

Hey presto, a huge quantity of data survives to be a goldmine for a historian in the far future.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

And as a seperate point: Qualcomm is an American company. They are simply saying that they are following the law of the country (the USA) that they are based in.

You don't really need to announce that your complying with sanctions any more than you do a PR announcement stating that your not going to murder the last person that pissed you off.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

I'm an amateur historian serious enough about my subject to belong to a couple of paid for very serious specialist professional historical bodies.

Honestly? I doubt that this is going to be a "historical dark age" due to things being posted on Twitter or Facebook. You do realise that serious organisations like the British Library, National Archives &c do back this stuff up for future generations, right?

I would suggest that on the contrary, the problem is going to be the complete opposite of the existing problem which is that content is on paper in archives. With paper, the problem is inaccessibility. To give some scope for the problem, back in "ye good olde days" where records were kept in paper, when occasionally mailbags were captured they were sent in so that contents could be exploited for intelligence windfalls.

You know what actually happened? Somebody in the civil service said "hell no" and threw them in a warehouse until they were old enough to go in the archives, where they have sat untouched as far back as ~1650 because nobody had the patience to read through christ knows how many billions of letters to find the important bits. Historians had the right to request them and go reading, but the same problem applied. This has been the case up until somebody funded a team from 2018 through to 2037 (presumably their timesystem runs on *nix...?) to open each individual letter, tag it with a reference and summary, scan it and tag it with appropriate keywords etc on a system for future researchers.

Now that's the problem with paper; it's inaccessible. Even centuries worth of dedicated researchers have barely made a dent in the existing archives simply because the information is near utterly inaccessible in paper form. And we've now got the added problem which is that people have stopped using pens, and read most text that's been typed on a computer. Kids today already have trouble with reading contemporary handwriting, let alone 300 year old scribbles with a bloody quill and realistically that's only going to get worse as the generations who have used pens slowly shuffle off this mortal coil.

Anyway, coming back to where I said the problem is going to be the complete opposite of the existing problem? In the future if you archived the entire internet then some poor bloody historian is going to have to search through literally tens of billions of irrelevant bits of dross on the net for practically any keyword they search for along with the useful nuggets of information. The problem is more likely to be a total information overload beyond any reasonable ability to process it than a lack of information preserved.

Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: For the relatively few

There have been companies that have done that for a good 20 years now.

New Windows 11 build boasts inbox updates and UI tweaks

Peter2 Silver badge

Ah yes. Remember some of the advertising for Office XP back when Microsoft had at least something of a sense of humour and listened to the majority of the userbase?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWpR3VYmNDY

ie; Office eXcluded Paperclip. Sadly this version will probably build upon the pioneering work of Microsoft Bob and Clippy to produce something capable of delivering greatly increased levels of frustration and annoyance.

Sony Interactive Entertainment pulls PlayStation from Russia

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: War ... huh ... what is it good for?

A point which China is probably noticing.

This may well have caused China's invasion of Taiwan to be shelved, since China now has to take into account the potential of all of these sanctions if they invade.

They also have to take into account that their 3rd rate knock offs of Soviet tanks will almost certainly fare worse than the Russian originals to anti tank weapons, and the originals are being liberally blown to bits by people with western lightweight anti tank weapons with comic ease. And again; that's the lightweight stuff, not even the more heavyweight vehicle or air mounted kit.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: "the minister has continued to write to more tech companies"

That's what he's doing.

When shooting starts, the minister for digital transformation has very little role to help with the shooting stuff. Pretty much none, in fact. On the other hand, persuading more companies to take part in the "Special Economic Operation" bringing a complete economic and digital transformation to Russia's economy and markets thereby forcing them into ceasing their "Special Military Operation" appears a reasonably productive use of time.

Europe's largest nuclear plant on fire after Russian attack

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: looks like starshell to me

It does look very like a star shell, probably because it is one. And yes, it is a bit of sensationalism; probably because their country is being more or less indiscriminately bombed by the Russians and they trust Russia not to shell that about as much as they will now trust the Russian security guarantees that Russia would never Ukraine if they gave up the nukes that the Soviet Union left them.

Also; a star shell burns like a frigging star, and it does this by burning things. That means that it's burning at christknows how many degrees, and it's generally something which you don't want landing in the cooling pool with spent(ish) nuclear rods, for instance. On on the coolant lines, or on anything vaguely flammable such as the diesel generators and their fuel supply.

Ukraine asks ICANN to delete all Russian domains

Peter2 Silver badge

If you were fighting a war and had been captured, wouldn't you want to phone home? That's a pretty natural reaction, especially if you hadn't been allowed to speak to your family for the last month or so by your own army.

On the other hand, it's quite clear that the Ukrainian's are basically telling them that "we'll let you phone home if you ask your parents to spread the word about the fact that Russia is invading" so they are being used. However, that's not particularly unreasonable given the circumstances.

Peter2 Silver badge

If they source their information from their state controlled media then they will be getting an answer to that which is probably plausible, although utterly lacking in objective truth.

Peter2 Silver badge

Given that the term "invasion" or "war" has been banned from the Russian general public and they are being shown prewar footage of Kyiv before Russia started bombing it misrepresented as being current footage with "see, no invasion..." followed by "reports that Russia is bombing Kyiv is false, as you can see" then I'd suggest that's a much, much more productive idea.

I am getting the strong impression that the Russian general public is genuinely under the impression that there is a minor peacekeeping exercise in the east of Ukraine, with a small minority of the younger types who can read English and whom have smartphones and whom are evading censorship getting the full picture.

They also don't know that anybody has been killed; let alone a death toll of six thousand on their side, and rising fast. The really, really scary thing? That actually appears to extend to good parts of the Russian army.

In the Russian army, the people operating the tanks are conscripts. Navigation is done by officers; there are enough videos of Russian conscripts floating saying they are on exercise when confronted angrily by Ukrainians for it to make sense why there an awful lot of Russians just run away when confronted with serious resistance. There are reports of an invasion force staging a mutiny when they realised they were doing a hostile invasion when they started taking fire and another video floating around of a couple of blokes parking a tank in front of a police station and wandering in without any form of weaponry and asking basically "hi, we're here to liberate you and have run out of fuel, could we have some more please" only to break down in tears when gratuitously abused for invading them.

It's genuinely possible that the majority of the people in the Russian army who aren't on the front lines may well actually not know that they are invading somewhere, and others might actually be under the impression that they are coming as liberators with the support of the public; which is a bit disturbing in the information age.

Peter2 Silver badge

And unless you're a dummy or too young to read about WW1, you know that doesn't work. It actually has the perverse affect of rallying the ordinary citizen behind even a mad man.

I take it that you just read the bits about the fighting at the front during WW1, and skipped the wider geopolitical and socioeconomic aspects relating to WW1?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918

Result:-

Abdication of Emperor Wilhelm II

Monarchy of Germany and its 22 constituent monarchies abolished

Suppression of leftist uprisings, including Spartacist uprising

End of the First World War

Establishment of the Weimar Republic

Maxar Technologies: The eye in the sky tracking invasion of Ukraine

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Image quality

My guess is that there is simply bugger all that the Russians can do about it; happy or unhappy. They can't shoot the satellite down, they can't jam it, and it's obvious that diplomatic complaints whining about it are going to be filed in the round filing cabinet under the diplomats desk.

Also with bridges blown and side routes blocked by burning tanks that have eaten a guided anti tank rocket from a ditch a mile away those tanks and trucks are largely sitting still with little forwards progress. It's two degrees out there, so the stationary resupply convoys are probably sitting there with the engine on to keep warm, and so still burning through fuel while not making forwards progress. Which means you need to resupply the resupplies with fuel, and so on ad infinitum.

Russia is the advanced persistent threat that just triggered. Ready?

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Out of curiousity, does anyone know

Generally speaking, it'd take time.

Countries wishing to join have to fulfil the entry criteria about being a democracy, free market economy, rule of law, minimum military capability, training and interoperability etc. For instance, all NATO countries use the same sorts of ammunition, ie bullets, shells and interoperable command control and communications gear.

Ukraine was short on basically all of those areas as of 2008 and had been given an action plan towards membership which they were steadily working through.

Finland is realistically already at a point where them joining wouldn't be an issue tomorrow morning.

Sweden is more of a problem; while they meet most of the criteria they fail dismally on the "minimum military capability" part. NATO is supposed to be an alliance full of powerful members willing to fight for each other, not practically undefended countries wanting somebody else to garrison them so they get the defence, plus the economic benefits of the troops being based there and spending money in their economy from somebody else's tax base, as Germany has been doing from the fall of the Soviet Union until this weekend. (note their sudden doubling of their defence budget)

Could that be ignored? Yes. Will it? Up to the politicians in charge of each country as I think you need a unanimous agreement between all NATO countries to add another member.

AI really can't copyright the art it generates – US officials

Peter2 Silver badge

What he's trying to do won't and can't work.

In law there is the concept of a legal entity which is capable of ownership, suing and being sued, entering into contracts etc. Existing laws provide for this being a human being, or a correctly registered company. He's arguing that the organisations should ignore the legislation and act beyond their powers, which they can't legally do. If they chose to do so anyway then somebody would simply appeal to a court based on that decision being ultra vires aka "beyond lawful authority to do that".

And there's no point trying to do anything in court either; they only interpret existing law. Changing this would require a rewrite of the enabling legislation, and you'd have to persuade a majority of politicians to support that change.

The only way forwards would be for him to register his AI as "AI Ltd" then the company "AI Ltd" could as a legal entity be the legal owner.

EU digital sovereignty: Cloud players unconvinced

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Talk about a day late and a dollar short - Elvis has left the country.....

In order to be competitive with another cloud you'd have to be able to run things on other clouds. If the EU turned around and said that in light of the Privacy Shield Framework being found inadequate by the EU courts for transfering data to the USA that anybody sending data to the US is subject to GDPR fines then then you immediately wouldn't be able to transfer any private data abroad from the EU without risking fines of up to 10% of annual turnover per incident.

At that point companies would have to either use local clouds or on prem, even if those options were more expensive and less capable.

Is that likely? No. Is it impossible? Also, no.

Your data centre UPS could feed power to the smart grid, suggests research

Peter2 Silver badge

Fusion hasn't finished being developed. It's likely to be the long term solution to humanities power generation requirements, but it's not an immediate prospect.

We need to be building things right now (as in today) to keep the lights on in the next 5 years which means things that have been developed and actually work here and now. Drax is apparently going to build a new gas plant to replace the coal capacity lost, however this is subject to legal and physical attacks from increasingly delusional green types who despite the obvious issues pointed out above say that it's not required, and we should spend money on batteries and wind turbines instead.

As above, wind turbines aren't working. You can see the math on batteries on another post below, but 1GW of battery storage for 24 hours would cost approximately £96 billion. It'd also last ~5 years until the batteries would need replacing and 1GW storage capacity for 24 hours is in any case far short of any useful requirement.

96 billion quid would for general context be enough to build 5 nuclear sites of the Hinkley point design outputting 3.2GW each so would generate 16GW total. A glance at the graph on Gridwatch for the last year will immediately show what impact this would have on us burning fossil fuels; simply put our gas generation for electricity would fall to occasional spikes of 5GW and we wouldn't be burning *anything* for at least 7 months of the year.

Peter2 Silver badge

The typical small scale UPS kicks out a Kilowatt. A Megawatt (the next unit up) is a thousand kilowatts. A Gigawatt (national grid scale) is a thousand megawatts. Therefore, to back up one gigawatt for one hour, you'd need 1*1000*1000= one million killowatt scale UPS's.

At ~£400 each this would cost about 4 billion quid, exclusive of a building to put them in and the power supply stuff. So a gigawatt worth of storage for 24 hours would cost £96 billion quid, and would need replacement in 5 years. (which is the battery lifetime)

In comparison, building a carbon copy of Hinkley C would cost ~£20 billion and would generate 3.2GW for 60 years, with possible lifetime extensions if it's in good condition in 2080.

Grid operators don't "invest" in battery storage because everybody can see that it's a stupid idea.

Peter2 Silver badge

What this shows is desperate people clutching at increasingly feeble straws.

Gridwatch suggests that electricity demand is at ~42GW load at peak.

In terms of generating capacity we have:-

30GW of gas turbines

7GW of nuclear (rarely all online at the same time due to maintenance and refuelling)

4GW of (mostly mothballed) coal

3GW of coal plants converted to burn trees

= 44GW.

So bluntly, excluding imports and wind we have just enough power generation to survive one nuclear plant doing maintenance or refuelling and then we have a blackout.

We do of course have 25GW worth of wind turbines, which should be supplying over half of our energy needs. Unfortunately, the graph showing the feed in for the last year on gridwatch shows those actually generated about 5GW worth of power for something like half to two thirds of the year, and 10GW in the remainder.

Which means that the prevailing energy policy has completely and utterly failed at generating electricity (although it has generated good money for jobs for the boys the green industry by increasing the price of the power that is actually generated) and we are now left staring at the probability of blackouts as old capacity with actual power outputs is decommissioned and replaced with replacement wind turbines with "up to" power outputs that everybody but the terminally delusional knows will never actually be reached.

In terms of lost capacity, Dungerness B (1.3GW) closed last year, Hunterston B (1.2GW) has just started decommissioning , Heysham 1 (1.3GW) goes in 2024, Hinkley point B (1.3GW) goes in 2024 and we are committed to decommissioning coal by 2025 (3GW) which is 8.1GW of generating capacity gone in the next 3 years with nowt but wind turbines and prayer (to mother nature that the wind will blow continually) as replacements.

Hinkley point C might come online in 2026 if it's on schedule with 3.2GW worth of juice, meaning we'll be down 4.9GW worth of capacity.

And of course, people are being asked to decommission gas boilers for electric heat pumps and go with electric cars, so demand is going to increase over this time period.

How do you deal with that? Well, this suggests that asking everybody in the country with backup gensets UPS's to feed in supply when the grid is desperate is the next plan.

UK pins hopes on 'latest technology' to whittle down massive National Health Service waiting lists

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Oh FFS

That does sound fishy, given that 30 second with google came up with this:-

https://www.thelocal.fr/20181009/what-are-the-average-waiting-times-to-see-doctors-in-france/

Jean-Paul Ortiz, the president of the Confederation French medical unions told France Info that it would be another eight or nine years before waiting times improved.

Ortiz said one of the main reasons for the long waiting times was simply a shortage of doctors.

“France cut the number of doctors in the 1990s because they said 'the less doctors, the less prescriptions, meaning more savings' as a way of cutting health costs,” he said.

He also blamed the fact the heavy paperwork burden on doctors in France for reducing the time they are available to patients.

Joint European Torus more than doubles fusion record with 59 megajoules

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: MegaJoules? Watts?

I believe that this is the official list.

https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Dead Cat

Newsflash: Newspapers these days have increasingly little to do with educating or informing their readers and instead aim to indoctrinate their readership with the aim of using the readership as a pressure group to achieve whatever political aim the editor of said newspaper has.

They all do it, no particular newspaper is actually better than another.

Arm's $66bn sale to Nvidia is off: Deal collapses after world's competition regulators raise concerns

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Worthless?

It's as mad as the USA ending up as the biggest economy in the world via a century worth of increasingly brazen IP theft from Britain. That's historical fact

China is just doing exactly the same thing to the USA, and chances are that in the long run attempts at stopping China stealing American IP won't be much more successful than British attempts at stopping IP theft by the USA were back when the USA was doing it.

My prediction is that it'll stop for the same reasons it did with the USA; at the point they run out of things to steal and start coming up with their own ideas from what was stolen. At that point they'll want to stop those ideas being copied.

Amazon stretches working life of its servers an extra year, for AWS and its own ops

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: "servers have a useful life of five years"

Why 5 years?

Because servers come with either 3 or 5 years warranty and at least 99% of components will reach the maximum available (5 year) warranty. If you say 4 years then you can pretty much guarantee that everything that works when you plug it in on day one will still be working in 4 years time.

You can run modern server equipment for 10 years quite happily; I have a server which is just shy of that. It's had a single (redundant) PSU fail in that time. That server has had far better uptime over that time period than Office 365 has had.

Prince of Packaging HP Inc snaps up zero-plastic bottle maker

Peter2 Silver badge

Oh, those links to absurd packaging stories bring back memories. Back in 2007 we'd just ordered an entire offices worth of gear including racks etc and received a pallet just for the server 2003 CAL's/CD in a separate delivery to the servers and the rack.

Our assumption back then was that the shipping departments at HP, Dell et al were deliberately competing to get covered by El Reg with their absurd shipping choices, but to be fair they could have expected that pallet was going to go with all of the others and we might overlook it if just sellotaped to the packing on one of the other orders.

Brocade wrongly sacked award-winning salesman who depended on company insurance for cancer treatment

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: the solution to the PPE debacle.

The "army" (ie; Royal Logistics Corps) were called in because the NHS logistics operation had a warehouse of PPE, but didn't know what was in the warehouse because they didn't have an inventory system, they didn't know what was in the boxes because they hadn't ever been marked, and didn't have a plan for getting the PPE out of the warehouse and distributing to where it was needed, or for checking things like if the PPE in storage was age expired. It wouldn't be unfair to say that their system had completely collapsed under the weight of it's own incompetence.

Hence they called in the RLC, whom posses logistics experts, and have access to prodigious quantities of manpower for doing things like opening boxes, adding them to a logistics system and then getting them in trucks for distribution, using army trucks if suitable numbers of vehicles couldn't be hired in. This does not strike me as being unreasonable, in fact far from it.

Frankly, a better plan than handing the job back to the people responsible for that mess would appear to me to create a civil branch of the Royal Logistics Corps under their direction and training and progressively take over any Government logistics operation with performance below theirs; the government already has the expertise inhouse, even if it's the "Crown service" rather than the "Civil service". Why waste the expertise and do things more inefficiently?

In terms of the headline ~8.7Bn loss on PPE, £4.7 billion is a book value writeoff as the cost of PPE has fallen since it was bought and another billion quids worth of PPE didn't end up being used before it's expiry date as the estimated requirement was much higher than the actually level required before looking a, which knocks that total down to £3 billion before you start looking closely at things like the NHS suing suppliers for supplying equipment not to the spec in the contract.

I'm not sure it's as bad as is made out by the Daily Mail or the Guardian.

Tesla to disable 'self-driving' feature that allowed vehicles to roll past stop signs at junctions

Peter2 Silver badge

From my perspective, human drivers are occasionally bad. They get punished by the laws of the land, or killed by the laws of physics.

The prospect of being killed by a "full self driving" car that frequently fails to achieve the level of safety as safely as a drunk BMW driver is not appealing, and should not be allowed on public roads until the thing can consistently pass a driving test.

HPE has 'substantially succeeded' in its £3.3bn fraud trial against Autonomy's Mike Lynch – judge

Peter2 Silver badge

Quoted just to save people the effort, the link above is the Judge setting out the findings of the case.

This has been an unusually complex trial, 93 days long. Dr Lynch was cross-examined for 20 days. There was a database of many millions of documents from which there was extracted a trial bundle containing more than 28,000 documents. These documents have been the most reliable source of evidence. But there were also hundreds of pages of hearsay evidence, largely comprised of transcripts from previous proceedings in the United States, both civil and criminal.

The determination of this matter in its plainly natural forum has been made the more difficult by the concerns I have had about the reliability of some of the Claimants’ witness and hearsay evidence, which bore signs of having been fashioned, rehearsed and repeated in the course of multiple previous proceedings in the US and the preparatory stages for them, and in some cases, of the constraints (such as the terms of promised immunity) under which it had been given.

The level of concern recorded as to the reliability of HP's witnesses is pretty damming to HP.

But enough so that it might actually provide sufficient grounds to prevent extradition? Not sure on that. I'm pretty sure that Lynch's legal team will be mentioning it though, it's not as if they have much to lose.

Also, this is of interest:-

I have however provisionally determined that even if adjusted to take account of the fraud, HP would still have considered Autonomy, with its signature product, IDOL, a suitable acquisition whereby to effect transformational change. I would expect the quantum to be substantially less than is claimed.

For "quantum", read "damages".

My first thoughts are that HP doesn't really have a great basis from which to celebrate.

How can we recruit for the future if it takes an hour to send an email, asks Air Force AI bigwig in plea for better IT

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Old machines

His complaint also cited it restarting ten times a day with updates. That sounds rather more like Win10 (without setting the never restart during these hours) than Win7 or Win8 to be fair. If so, it needs the active hours thing setting via group policy.

Ten year old hardware also isn't a problem if managed appropriately. Personally I am just retiring a bunch of core 2 duo boxes that are almost certainly as least as old as their gear. However, they had an SSD, a Quadro card for a second monitor and 8GB of RAM as a life extension 5+ years back.

4GB was adequate for Win7 but Win10 struggles with less than 8GB. Do these boxes have adequate memory in them? Most of those problems could be attributable to lack of RAM, especially with 2 AV programs arguing. Easy solution; whichever the old AV program is needs to go.

That then just leaves the logon time, which he says was over an hour yesterday and an hour 20 mins from sign on to opening outlook. Roaming profiles across the wider network or something? If so, ruthlessly trim down what actually gets stored centrally in the profile to the mission requirement as there is obviously a lot more in there than needs to be if it's taking an hour.

None of it is insoluble, even without replacing the PC's.

You might want to consider the cost of not upgrading legacy tech, UK's Department for Work and Pensions told

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Fingers crossed

You think the replacement is going to be better?

I admire your optimism.

Tesla driver charged with vehicular manslaughter after deadly Autopilot crash

Peter2 Silver badge

I'm not familiar with the road in question. I am however personally familiar with several roads in the UK where you come off of a highway doing 70mph (our national speed limit) and are faced with traffic lights on the exit ramp before a roundabout that looks to be just shy of 200 metres judged by the distance scale in google maps, which I suspect is probably 200 yards, having been there since well before we went metric. I can think of many, many more that have about double that sort of distance.

If the vehicle took an exit like this without decelerating under the mistaken impression that it's still on the highway (our satnav often doesn't notice when i'm driving until we are going around the roundabout) then at 70mph your covering 31.5 meters a second, or 34 yards per second. It's going to cover 200 yards in 5.88 seconds. The (British) highway code has a table in the back which recognises that a driver paying attention is going to react to a threat and hit the brakes in three quarters of a second before coming to a halt approximately one hundred yards (or 91 metres) after noticing the threat requiring you to stop. Paying 100% attention you would therefore have approximately two seconds to realise that a self driving car had been stupid and left the highway at a junction and apply the brakes to stop at the lights, assuming that the slip road was completely empty with no cars were parked at the junction to hit.

Any human "supervising" a self driving car for any sort of time period is going to have mentally switched off to the point that it's likely to take the average person at least 5 seconds to realise that the self driving is about to become self crashing, come to the realisation that they need to assert control and go for the brakes. Then you need to move your feet from their rest position to go for the brakes which is likely to take at least three quarters of a second; which leaves you in a position where your foot has depressed the brake pedal around 13 milliseconds before impact, which sounds tragically descriptive of this incident.

This is why self driving cars were, are and will always be a stupid idea. While the driver is of course legally responsible for driving their vehicle, the self driving AI ought to have it's licence revoked.

Oh, that's right. Self driving cars can't drive well enough to pass a driving test. So why should they be allowed to be in control of a vehicle? The apologists for Tesla will of course point out that "auto pilot" and "full self driving" are just driver assistance tool like ABS or cruise control, which ignores that "autopilot" and "full self driving" are explicitly marketed as being fully self driving to people who can't understand the (serious) limitations of this technology. Tesla are certainly morally liable for the people their autopilot has killed, and while people are reasonably willing to accept Tesla drivers killing themselves they aren't anywhere near as likely to accept this killing other road users who are driving safely and legally.

Email blocklisting: A Christmas gift from Microsoft that Linode can't seem to return

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: I am not surprised

Welcome to El Reg; the home of cynical sysadmins the world around and congratulations on your first two posts.

Do you actually individually check the IP for each and every email you've ever received and if it's spamming or not? Because I have to say that running my own spam filter myself that appears like an immensely huge amount of work to go through and find all emails from a particular IP range and then determine that they are all spam, as that's going to have to be done manually and banning IP ranges is always subject to a high level of false positives.

What tools did you use to do the checking?

Anonymous employee review site Glassdoor research: Tech companies dominate the best places to work

Peter2 Silver badge

This is a breakdown of the population by percentile points of income, along with what that income is from the HMRC.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

Summarily for those who can't be bothered to look:-

The 1% percentile makes 12k p/a

The 25% percentile makes 17.8k p/a

The 50% percentile makes 25k p/a

The 75% percentile makes 37.8k p/a

The 90th percentile makes £56.2k p/a

The 99th percentile makes £175k p/a

*This typically excludes people who are "contractors" instead of "employees", which can people working at McDonalds or Uber at the low end, and at least 800 BBC presenters in the top 1%, which suggests that ways of avoiding paying tax is prevalent enough to skew these figures. Still, they should be reasonably accurate.

Out of IT jobs, first line service desk jobs are about all that can reasonably be expected to make less than the top 50% of the population, and even then not by that much.

A stark reality is that tech companies are staffed with reasonably sought after employees with transferable skills, who other companies would be reasonably happy with recruiting and who's employers would be somewhat put out at losing. As a result, most jobs come with much better conditions than employees in lower wage brackets who are often treated as disposable and easily replaceable.

Secure boot for UK electric car chargers isn't mandatory until 2023 – but why the delay?

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Petrol provides more energy per £ than mains electricity

EVs sit at about 95% efficiency socket to wheel

That's an interesting assertion: you appear to have improved charging and discharging efficiency by at least a good quarter, completely eliminated transmission losses and battery drain while stationary and the use of passive alarms etc which all drain power while the vehicle is stationary.

In fact, your obtaining perpetual peak efficiency from the electric motor as well, since that's between 70% & 95% efficient.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Secure boot is going where?

Or a diesel generator to charge the EV.

Even desktops showed up on growth radar in global PC shipment stakes for 2021

Peter2 Silver badge

Ok, during the pandemic people picked up PC's as you needed them for work and school, and were banned from going out and socialising unless they worked at 10 Downing Street, and laptops were sold out. Perfectly logical.

I'm not convinced though that this means that they have permanent growth when people are allowed to meet up in person again to socialise where they want with no restrictions, and people are back to school and working from an office again. Even if it does totally displace working from the office, that is simply going to eliminate the replacement of all of the PC's that were at the office, so wouldn't it be a net neutral in terms of install base in the long term?

Bitcoin 'inventor' will face forgery claims over his Satoshi Nakamoto proof, rules High Court

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: The Court's Staff (has a knob on the end?}

The Judge will make the decision. The staffers may type it either from audio dictation or notes, but that's largely style, formatting and grammar rather than content. The content would come from the Judge.

Peter2 Silver badge

Asking the court to believe he allowed something that valuable to be lost to negligence or chance events like a disk failure

Disk failures usually aren't. What fails is not the stored information, but the motor on the arm in the HDD, which leaves the data trivially recoverable by any number of companies with labs equipped to do the job using their own arm to recover the data from the drive.

And yep, I agree with you on the defence being to transfer some BTC in that original block.

Heart attack victim 'saved' by defibrillator delivery drone*

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Good for the old man

Figures from BHF research show that 60% of the population would simply walk past. A large number might get their phones out and start livestreaming the person's last moments on Facebook Live, but most people would simply walk past.

As a reasonably experienced First Aider, your statistics are way off. Saying that 60% of the population who notice a situation will walk past is fairer, but presumably is judged on people stating if they would stop or not, rather than being based on the number that actually do stop at actual accidents.

Anybody who has ever been crouched over a body will tell you that the number of people who will notice things can be extremely, extremely low. Most people have utterly appalling situational awareness, especially if they are on a "routine" trip somewhere done on mental autopilot. And how many people stop in a car at the scene of an accident? It's certainly not anywhere near 6 in 10 and it varies depending if it's in a town or out in the country; out in the country with smaller and stronger communities despite much lower levels of footfall you rarely fail to have have several orders of magnitude more people stop.

Also people don't tend to livestream the persons last moments on Facebook live. This is typically a urban issue, and what you have is people taking a video and saving it to be able to sell it to the media which makes for some interesting issues; people will hold a phone and use it to video somebody dying instead of doing something beneficial such as you know, using the phone to call an ambulance.

And, as noted they get rewarded by being paid by whomever they sell the clip to. The person that actually saves the life or usefully contributes via phoning an ambulance typically gets nothing other than mental trauma, which leads to a morally perplexing reward distribution for particular types of behaviour.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Know the defibrillator's box code!

You phone 999 and the call centre worker gives you the code; they have a database of the numbers.

It's to prevent people from nicking them, which was a disappointing early issue.

Wifinity hands customers bills for Wi-Fi services they didn't want but used by accident after software 'glitch' let 'fixed term' subs continue

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Why are soldiers being monetised for profit like this?

I'm for free wifi in principle, however thinking about it suggests that in practice a lot of military bases tend to be on a rather large scale, the smallest units of which are orders of magnitude larger than most of us work with.

Ok, picture the Imperial War Museum at Duxford which many of us will have been to if living in the UK. It's huge right? It's a good mile from the entrance to the land warfare hall. And that site is actually small for an airfield; The M11 was built through the top third of the site and the town the other side of the A505 used to be inside the base perimeter for the people living there, which in Duxfords case has (presumably) been sold off as housing. If the post office were assigning postcodes to that sort of space then it'd probably be several dozen postcodes at the least.

Single buildings (eg; hangers) are larger than entire business estates and would require a reasonably sophisticated mesh of wifi nodes to provide halfway decent cover before even considering covering the external areas where people go to smoke or sit and eat. I'm assuming that the military aren't going to want to risk opening up their secure military network by sticking wifi nodes on it, so presumably they are going to want a separate network.

This is not a case of "here's the wifi password" because most places won't have a network at all in the first place, and my mental calculator is coming up with "expensive" as the likely cost of doing a halfway decent job, in which case is it fair that substantial amounts of money for equipment (eg things that go bang) go towards wifi networks for purely personal use? The Guardian et al would have a field day with news stories of "X amount of public funds for military equipment wasted..." at the expense of the people signing off the expense.

I'm assuming that they got a private contractor to do a job free to the MOD with the cost recouped by billing the people using it, which is at least understandable, even if the billing screw up isn't.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: 8-bit

Anyway this should be tested with a large sample of images - the one in its site is a computer-generated one, for example, and that has a different pixel distribution than a photo, where there could far more subtler changes among pixels.

https://qoiformat.org/benchmark/

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: No, it could be useful for the web

It's certainly very interesting work. Note that the decoding takes a third of the time relative to PNG. Encoding takes a twentieth of PNG.

From the article: I don't expect it to appear in web browsers, where compression ratio is much more important, anytime soon.

If your using a VDSL line then the performance increase relative to the minor bandwidth increase in any circumstance; the bandwidth cost is immaterial. It's mobile where the compression ratio would really be most important; most mobile users still have fixed bandwidth limits.

After deadly 737 Max crashes, damning whistleblower report reveals sidelined engineers, scarcity of expertise, more

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: False

Because if they admitted MCAS was a change to the flight systems then they'd have to design it properly as part of the flight controls using the correct formal safety processes and train people on it. That becomes a new design and so there would be no reason why the sales people at the airlines shouldn't call Airbus.

What is happening is expected, but disgraceful. Employees are left in no doubt that they will be fired if they do not do a managers will, they do what is demanded while raising their concerns to the managers, and when the problems come home to roost the management are then pointing the finger at the very people who warned them.

It's the sort of corruption that you'd expect to find in a third world country and the fact that it not being stamped on probably surprises nobody, but it is disappointing as it shows a total lack of will to detect and prevent similar issues, which will continue occurring throughout our society despite the devastating impact it has on our ability to produce competing products with competitors (eg; China).

Intel's mystery Linux muckabout is a dangerous ploy at a dangerous time

Peter2 Silver badge

AMD has been selling lower core count CPU's since forever. Remember the x3 cores back in the Phenom days?

AMD's MO has always been to test the hardware and then disable a core if it doesn't work properly and then sell it as a treble core for a bit less than the full quad core. Sometimes you could re-enable the additional core with software, and sometimes it worked properly most of the time without problems.

More than half of UK workers would consider jumping ship if a hybrid work option were withdrawn by their company

Peter2 Silver badge

This presupposes that your working in somewhere like London and have to commute in from outer Mongolia because the house prices where you work are a thousand times your annual income for a property roughly the size of a shoebox.

Peter2 Silver badge

More than half of UK workers would consider jumping ship if a hybrid work option were withdrawn by their company

If they could find another job offering working from home with the same pay.

The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...

Anybody with any intelligence considered it long ago and realised that the sums don't add up even remotely and the consequences for the existing path of travel are both dire and counterproductive to the stated intentions.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...

it matters that the specific funding proposal would only allow you to build them at the pace I mentioned. In that context, it doesn't matter whose responsibility the costs of storage and disposal of waste would be, it only matters that the costs exist and weren't accounted for, therefore the total cost of the nuclear power generation would exceed the budget that would be made available by diverting renewable subsidies.

If you are following the discussion carefully then you'll note that even the Guardian says that the costs are built into the price of the minimum guaranteed electricity price, which is currently under half the current market level.

Given the ~£9 billion a year spent on wind subsidies is ok, and it costs ~20 billion for a nuclear plant then you could either build a new plant every two years paid for in full from the existing subsidies (and get the power ten years later) or build a batch of 5 nuclear plants and spread the cost over those ten years. Upon completion in ~2031 that's 16GW worth of fossil fuel generation that would drop off the power generation net forever; which given that at the moment we are drawing 16.57GW from gas turbines means that this would leave the largest CO2 emissions from power generation as being the 3GW worth of "biomass" generation, which in plain English is trees chopped down in South America, shipped to the US to be made into wood pellets and then shipped to the UK to be burned. This is of course counted as green renewable energy at the moment.

If it turns out that it's not possible to solve the problem with wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and battery storage, sure, nuclear's the next least worst thing to add to the mix (unless I'm forgetting something). But you should probably at least work through all of those first.

Wind is a strategy of committing to gas turbines forever with wind just used as greenwashing. Look at the chart on Gridwatch; it shows the level of productivity of wind turbines. Imagine that you quadruple the number of wind turbines, requiring payments to the very rich owners every year at a level above the defence or education budgets to keep the lights on. You still have entire months where the power is coming from gas because the generation line will simply be 4x above where it is now for wind, and four times nothing is still nothing.

With battery storage, this is an IT site so i'll assume that you are familiar with a bog standard UPS. If not, google it. A typical UPS provides around a kilowatt hour worth of electricity. Multiply that by a thousand. That's a megawatt hour worth of storage; so you need to multiply that by a thousand again. That's now one gigawatt hour; which gives a rough idea of the amount of space and expense required to store one hours worth of electricity.

1*1000*1000=1,000,000. So your looking at approximately the space and expense of one million UPS's. For one gigawatt hour worth of power. To smooth out small daily variations of about 5GW for 24 hours would therefore require 5*24=120GW worth of battery storage. How much space would 120 million UPS's take up? The mind boggles. And that's the low end of the useful requirement, as if you were running purely on wind power given it effectively vanishes for a month at a time you'd want a months worth of power stored; 40GW*24*30=28800 Gigawatt hours, which would be a requirement of 28,800,000,000 UPSish size and cost equivalents.

A kilowatt hour UPS cost is about four hundred quid. Let's arbitrarily reduce the real world cost by a factor of eight to £50 each allowing for what out in the real world is an absurd and unachievable efficiencies of scale and cost. But just for the sake or argument; multiply by the requirement of 28,800,000,000. The rough cost of a months power stored would be £1,440,000,000,000. That's one trillion, four hundred and forty billion quid. And it'll last about about one thousand charge cycles before the amount of energy stored drops by >70%. That's typically about 6 years in service which is why things like laptops and smartphones are always replaced on a five year cycle.

That amount would pay for 72 nuclear reactors of the Hinkley point type assuming no efficiencies of scale in cost, generating >230 GW of power which is enough electricity to totally decarbonise transport and heating for the entire of western Europe and would last the next century instead of for about 5 years.

Even 24 hours worth of storage at that scale would buy you 2.5 nuclear plants of the Hinkley point type. And frankly, I doubt that you could ever do it at that price; that's based on £50 per kilowatt hour. Musk says his solutions through life cost is $300 per kilowatt hour on his new Tesla Megapack.

So yeah, unviable.

For instance, your own earlier tossed-in idea about water wheels. I've no idea if that's at all practical, but again for the purpose of argument, let's say it's a genius idea that would entirely solve the problem: why don't we just do that now? It would still likely be a lot cheaper and faster than building a bunch of new nuclear power plants.

Because while individually the cost is low so is the generation capacity added. It's a stupid idea, just less stupid than wind turbines which are positively idiotic, and it at least has the virtue of adding capacity that works 24/7 unless the rivers freeze, run dry or burst their banks, which I think everybody can agree are reasonably uncommon occurrences relative to the wind conditions required for optimal function of wind turbines.

It also sensibly makes use of the engineering of the rivers done to facilitate waterpower that date back beyond recorded history. (the 1066 doomsday book lists 6000 waterwheels...)

If it turns out that it's not possible to solve the problem with wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and battery storage, sure, nuclear's the next least worst thing to add to the mix (unless I'm forgetting something). But you should probably at least work through all of those first.

Wind we've done to death, and I trust that in light of the figures above you'll see how absurd battery storage is.

Hydro is lovely, but gives the term "expensive" a bad name and we don't have enough valleys etc to dam and flood, and besides the people living in them tend to complain somewhat about being forced out of their homes. The proposals for tidal power are feel good pipe dreams to distract from the reality that they are several orders of magnitude too expensive to deploy at a useful scale.

With regards to geothermal, we aren't exactly Iceland. In the UK you can get a reasonable list of cost effective locations by looking up where we have hot springs >30 degrees. That leaves 6 sites, 5 of which are in a world heritage site and grade utterly untouchable listed. That leaves one reasonable site which might possibly be able to generate "up to" 0.1GW if it roughly doubles what Iceland manages from similar sites.

Solar? IN THE UK?! Have you perhaps confused our near perpetually overcast weather conditions with Saudi Arabia? Do you even want to do the sums on it?

Suffice to say that it makes battery storage look sensible. It only make sense when your have a solar system installed and are getting paid several times what it costs for the utility company to produce the power; which means your bills go down for the power you "feed in" and then get basically "free" power later on in the evening and get a lower bill. This has the effect of increasing every other users electricity costs to pay for the chap with the solar panels and so only works when a handful of people have them. What happens when everybody has one?

(Answer; the feedback costs would exceed the generation costs of the electricity; and see the current crisis with energy companies collapsing when required to sell for under the electricity cost as to why solar feed in schemes have been closed to new entrants...)

Which brings us back to Nuclear as being the sole sensible option if you want bills under half today's level rather than at the current level or even double this.

Don't get me wrong; you can generate sort of enough power otherwise and you could even do it in a way that could be described as green if one was willing to indulge in sufficient denial of reality (cough, biomass, cough). It just requires not eliminating CO2 emissions and taxing the poor on their electricity bills to pay the rich subsidies (to generally not produce electricity) on a level equivalent to several multiples of the defence budget. And making transport and heating things for the top 40% of the population and beyond the grasp of the other 60% unless they impoverish themselves.

Which given that everybody gets a vote each creates conditions that outright require the creation of a British populist analogue of Trump, and hands this putative politician about a 60% vote share on a platter when he demands that the policies of "tax the poor to create the rich" cease and completely fairly points the finger of blame at the hippy types who have impoverished the majority of the population.

Should this come to pass then you'd assume that when the future populist gets voted in then he's going to want to deliver lower electricity prices within his term. Since nuclear build terms are 10 years or 2.5 political terms if you start immediately he won't do that; he'll probably build a quick and cheap option that can be up in 3 years from commencement and deliver lower electricity prices immediately thereafter; coal plants, and probably fracking for cheaper gas prices. The green types protesting against building them at that point will probably very literally get lynched.

Which brings us back to Nuclear. ;)

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...

Well, that covers the cost of building them, I guess. (Over a period of rather more than 30 years, or, at least 10 years too many)

The physical building time is 10 years. Hinkley point spent ~20 years worth of political arguments about if it should be built, how it should be financed and who should be involved.

Now account for the costs of handling and storing (short-, long- and very long- term) nuclear waste, and the costs of decommissioning the plants at end of life.

Oh comeon, even the Guardian says that's a cost to the operators.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/30/hinkley-point-c-developers-face-72bn-cleanup-bill-at-end-of-nuclear-plants-life

edit: I should clarify, if it turns out we actually need nuclear power to supplement or act as base load for renewables in the long run, then we should use it. It's still a better choice than fossil fuels. But based on its track record so far, I don't have a high degree of confidence that it's ever going to turn out to be particularly cheap, in full life cycle costs. If newer reactor technologies can finally help with that...great. But let's wait and see.

You can use a website called Gridwatch to see what our current electricity requirements are, and how they are provided. It's live to the current minute. Previous data is stored in the graphs below in week, month and year.

The first and most obvious point is that the UK has 24+ GW worth of wind turbines. We have never generated 15GW worth of energy from wind, ever. It's noteworthy when we produce half of the nominal capacity of the installed wind capacity; eg 12GW. As can be seen by looking at the "yearly" graph wind turbines produce more than 10GW perhaps a third of the the year at best. No possible storage technology could deal with that sort of shortfall, even if you quadrupled the installed capacity.

When they are not working, which as you can see is effectively all of the time the capacity is generated by CCGT; combined cycle gas turbines. A strategy of generating power via wind turbines is nothing less than a deliberate policy choice to use gas turbines as the primary power generation and then using wind turbines as occasional partial load reduction on the gas turbines with the wind turbines used as greenwashing.

Quite why people thought wind turbines was a good idea eludes me; refitting every waterwheel in the country for electricity generation would have at least delivered usable power consistently and constantly as long as the water continues flowing through rivers; a more common thing in the UK than it blowing a gale.

As a policy choice though the existing strategy precludes mass adoption of electric vehicles because we don't and won't have the power generation available, and it prevents using existing technology to decarbonise heating by moving from gas central heating to electric heating which could easily be done with technology which was boring in the 1980s such as electric storage heaters backed up with fan heaters on a thermostat. This would work if electricity was cheaper than gas; which it won't ever be when the electricity is generated by gas and then has transmission costs added on top.

Denying this in face of the obvious facts is willful ignorance. There is no storage technology either invented or looking promising in the lab that can work on the scale required even if you increased the number of wind turbines by a factor of ten.

Therefore it is obvious that the only carbon free electricity generation we have on a workable scale at an acceptable price is nuclear; ergo if you want carbon free cheapish electricity to decarbonise EV's or heating without impoverishing 80% of the population (all of whom have a vote; and who will not vote for anybody impoverishing them) then there is no current workable alternative to building nuclear plants quickly and on a large scale.

If you are enraged by this logical statement of offensive yet irrefutable facts then consider a downvote in lieu of doing something constructive to help the situation, such as admitting the existing situation is absurd and supporting changing it. ;)