* Posts by david 12

2346 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009

Japan lacks the expertise for renewed nuclear power after Fukushima

david 12 Silver badge

Re: "..has declined by 45 percent.."

It's not just Nuclear Engineering -- the whole Boomer engineering workforce has reached End-Of-Career. In 'normal' times they try to balance workforce reduction by new hires and encouraging people to stay. Every thing that triggers a 'temporary' workforce reduction - COVID, Fujushima actually enacts a total workforce reduction.

Next-gen Qi2 wireless charging spec seeded by Apple

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USB-C charging is compulsory

USB-C charging is compulsory: this is the response. I was downvoted for suggesting that the response to the EU requirement that charging must use USB-C would be increased push to wireless charging. Dunno why: no explanation was given. From where I stand, this was entirely predictable.

Man wrongly jailed by facial recognition, lawyer claims

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Re: Helo Ametica

My relative was detained for having the same name as a wanted man. The wanted man was black. My relative is white. Evidently they find 'recognition' difficult even with white people, and even without computer vision algorithms.

Patients wrongly told they've got cancer in SMS snafu

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Re: Is this common?

text said something along the lines

If this is true, please contact the editor so that the article can be corrected:

"corrections@theregister.co.uk"

Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

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Re: Aren't many APC UPS models made in the Philippines?

Does APC make rotating-machinery live diesel gen-sets? I think not.

Computing's big question for 2023: How many more questions can we endure?

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I can see author is not an Edge user.

If the author was an Edge user, article instead would have been "would you like to use Chrome" and "would you like to use Google"

The questions I get asked in different forms, every f-g time.

NASA may tap SpaceX to rescue ISS 'nauts in Soyuz leak

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Re: Escape pod???

capsule failure, and what to do about it, was not considered earlier.

For some of these scenarios "and then they all die" was considered, and is the expected outcome.

Southwest Airlines blames IT breakdown for stranding holiday travelers

david 12 Silver badge

Blame the Computer

After running closer and closer to the wall, eventually we realized that we just didn't have enough crews and planes to run scheduled operations.

So we had to abandon our scheduled operations, and run a skeleton operation while we did crew off-time and aircraft maintenance.

Then, since our scheduling system wasn't able to schedule 5 flights into 6 flights, we blamed the software.

SouthWest has a specific problem: a larger-than-normal fraction of their flights are loops, rather than out-and-back flights. With an out-and-back flight, when one airport is closed, and you cancel one "out" flight, the corresponding "back" flight is also cancelled, and you still have a plane and crew in position. With a loop schedule, when one leg is cancelled, the entire loop is cancelled, and the plane and crew isn't in position for off-time and maintenance. They also have a general problem: there isn't any fat in their operations, and they don't have enough spare crews to cover crew down-time and aircraft positioning when the schedule is badly disrupted. Blaming this on the scheduling software is disingenuous.

I did a simple optimization problem for cutting shapes out of sheet stainless-steel. I understand that there is no closed-form solution for allocating the position of shapes withing a shape. Sometimes you wind up with off-cuts where the total area of offcut is larger than the next small piece you want to cut. But your offcuts are thin jagged pieces, not the circle or square you need next. But at some point, a "better optimisation system" isn't what you want. What you need is more sheets of stainless steel.

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

david 12 Silver badge

can you set the cruise control to a speed which is illegal on a given road?

"illegal" is a big elephant in the middle of that sentence.

There is a sense in which something is 'illegal' even if the courts and police do not enforce it, but there is another sense in which 'legality' is what the courts decide it is.

Is the 'right to bear arms' conditional on a 'well formed militia'? Does it include the right to operate an anti-aircraft battery? Who decides what the law means, and after it is decided, do the words "legal" and "illegal" apply to what the courts think, or to what you think the legislation "clearly means"?

University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

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BioChemistry Student

Around here, Arts-Law or Commerce-law are common double-degrees, but Arts-Science is uncommon, because it is difficult. The target mode of thinking for science students is fundamentally different than that required for high-school essay writing. It's not just that the students learn different content, and different skills. I won't bore you with my own experience.

AI isn't good at writing university-level essays. It doesn't have to be good to be better than BioChemistry students. BioChemistry students may be dumb, and can't write good essays, or smart, and pointed in the wrong direction.

KaRIn to hitch a ride on NASA's water-tracking sat

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Coat

new types of trackable data

A flood of new data

Tech supply chains brace for impact as China shifts from zero-COVID to rampant COVID

david 12 Silver badge

just not among the elderly.

Is this deliberate/considered? People don't like to hear it, but early death in the elderly is a simple economic benefit, and has some secondary economic effects which may also be beneficial.

Google datacenters use 'a quarter of all water' in one US city

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Uses more water than my house!

"The Dales" is 16,000 people on a steep bit of the river. It's not London.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Closed cooling?

It was always cheaper for large power stations to use cooling ponds or direct outlets if the water was available.

Large cooling towers were always expensive, but because of "Legionnaires disease", it's rather more expensive and complicated to run cooling towers than it used to be.

(Also, the 'steam' coming out of those large cooling towers was a marketing disaster. People always thought it was 'smoke')

In praise of MIDI, tech's hidden gift to humanity

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Re: I beg to differ

Reasonably priced internet for 'things' didn't really arrive until about 2005-2010, Before that it would have added $USD100 to the price.

When we asked how you crashed the system we wanted an explanation not a demonstration

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Re: ... half a brain

about to put the third (and last) copy

My employer had been a contractor at a business where, when the day shift came in, they found that the (IBM) hardware had self-destructed, the back-up copy had been destroyed in turn, and the night-shift operator was trying to get into the safe ...

GCC 13 to support Modula-2: Follow-up to Pascal lives on in FOSS form

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Re: Uni

something with real world application.

Pascal had real world application up until comp-sci courses stopped teaching it, Development shops shifted away from it when they couldn't hire graduates.

Personally, I worked on a transport ticketing system, an agricultural cattle-tracking system, and finance-treasury system.

I've heard two arguments for why comp-sci shifted from pascal to c:

(1) They actually didn't like the tighter/safer environment and prolix syntax (they had to do their own code entry instead of using a typing pool)

(2) They wanted to teach operating-system design.

It certainly wasn't the case that c had a lock on 'real world' applications. Although I was working in Pascal, most of the existing enterprise systems were Fortran, BASIC, COBOL or assembler. The business schools were using IBM or business-oriented mini-computers, of which unix was only a minor player. The IBM people laughed at unix and c: memorably, unix was 'not a real operating system' -- a phrase the comp-sci students later adopted without knowing the origin or why it hurt.

Email hijackers scam food out of businesses, not just money

david 12 Silver badge

Re: IBM Engineer...

You leave my base alone without consent!

All your base are belong to us.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: small potatoes and "critical infrastructure"?

I doubt companies that small would qualify as critical infra.

I guess it depends on how it's counted. We were 'critical infrastructure' during part of the COVID lockdown -- the part where the carefully constructed definitions were in use -- and then not 'critical infrastructure' in the later part of the lockdown, when the categories were defined by a press release from a minister's office.

Being small, we were only critical for a small number of customers -- off-grid residential, the odd telecom tower, bits of railway infrastructure :)

In any case being suitable for use with the odd remote community or railway system, the equipment is designed not to fail, and we go from one century to the next without any actual critical incidents.

Apple 'created decoy labor group' to derail unionization

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Local union affiliates?

American unions can't represent workers unless management agrees, or they are certified:

unlawful "to picket or cause to be picketed, or threaten to picket or cause to be picketed, any employer where an object thereof is forcing or requiring an employer to recognize or bargain with a labor organization as the representative of his employees ... unless such labor organization is currently certified as the representative of such employees"

As I understand it, American labour law is very complex, with rules and exceptions. Like the tax code.

US could save billions in health costs if it changed wind energy strategy

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Re: Dubious claims, In My Bombastic Opinion

But I do not believe that any of this is a problem inside the USA in the 21st century.

https://www.lung.org/blog/covid-19-mortality-and-air-pollution

"researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute also looked at the impact of long-term exposure to fine particle pollution on COVID-19 death rates. They examined 3,089 counties, accounting for 98% of the United States’ population. The researchers found that..."

Death rates as a function of air pollution are still a fact, even in the USA.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Air pollution in the home

So put the cooker hood fan on while doing your fry up.

I suppose one possibility is that you live in a home where the range hood is much better than any home I have lived in, or any commercial kitchen I have worked in.

Massive energy storage system goes online in UK

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Frequency trimming?

My understanding is that the inverters on wind farms are network-synced, and so can't drive the frequency.

All generating systems are network-synced, and go off-line if they lose network-sync, and have some ability to drive the frequency.

There are network standards for what generating systems do, and there are several large "generator equivalent" systems in the world that match the typical standards for rotating-machine systems, but none of that comes free, and when wind farms were added to the existing systems, the emphasis was on taking advantage of the new capabilities, not recreating features of the old system that were already in place and did not need to be replicated.

The unfortunate thing is that sometimes the thinking trails behind the doing.

NetBSD 9.3: A 2022 OS that can run on late-1980s hardware

david 12 Silver badge

MSDOS 2.11

I've always wondered why there are people writing that "DOS didn't even have command line editing".

I understand now. They're the people who, back in the day, were unix users.

Patch Tuesday updates spark errors when creating Hyper-V VMs

david 12 Silver badge

MS Edge on Win7

As MS has repeatedly reminded me, MS Edge has reached end-of-life on Win7. Somebody forgot to tell MS.

I had the 'canary' distribution (that's canary as in coal mine, a bleeding-edge distribution). Unfortunately, after telling us that it would not be updated any further ... it was updated. With a version that does not work on Win7.

Trying to fix that by rolling back lost all bookmarks, so I'm not feeling pleased.

Fresh version of Xfce, the oldest Linux desktop of them all, revealed in Xubuntu builds

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`Windows style single-panel?

What alternate universe is this?

Linux kernel 6.1: Rusty release could be a game-changer

david 12 Silver badge

Re: The programmer's fault

My day job involves designing systems that people can use efficiently, without errors. In my world, "it would work if the users didn't make errors" is not considered a useful characteristic.

First-ever orbital satellite launch from British soil will be delayed

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Re: Translator Service

Well they would, wouldn't they.

I don't know about this case, but perfectly legal ordinary licenses sometimes take a very long time to achieve even when there are 'no problems at our end'. Look at how long it takes to get a license to practice medicine: you're looking 6-10 years.

Depending on how you look at it, aircraft certification is either embedded in a mass of unnecessary red tape, or a mass of necessary red tape. Either way "no problems at our end" doesn't mean "sorted mate".

Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest

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Re: OOBE

I wish they would make 23H2 "Admins Friend" edition to prevent wasting our time.

Small Business was only ever a niche between "home" and "enterprise", that MS exploited when somebody else owned those two.

Home users don't have an Admin employee, and Enterprise uses scripted rollouts. Microsoft isn't trying to be your friend anymore: you aren't an important customer block.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Market size

Yes, recently did XP phone activation.

Annoying though. Internet activation doesn't work anymore because XP doesn't have the required cryptographic providers for HTTPS/SSL/whatever.

Startup raises $30 million for wireless power delivery system

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Devices

50W is a 10A USB connector.

My opinion is that this is a Blue Sky speculative investment that provides jobs for the management team, and after a while they'll move on to Flying Cars, or Deep Sea Mining, or something else, but I'd say that the interest from the military is for re-charging devices, not electric cars.

Programming error created billion-dollar mistake that made the coder ... a hero?

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

I'm a left-handed touch typist. Keys under the little finger of my right hand are always more difficult for me than text. Even upper-case number keys #$% are slightly slower and more difficult.

A proper language would use simple text that can be typed at for speed for common structural statements. .EQ. .LT, .GE. (For younger readers: the dots in those operators are part of the syntax)

I'm not opposed to functional languages, or significant white space, or multiple inheritance in it's right place. I don't yearn for GOTO or FILE 7.

But damn, I'm sorry that a language for right-eye-dominant hunt-and-peck typists who did their own code-entry with one index finger had so much effect on subsequent languages.

A brand new Linux DRM display driver – for a 1992 computer

david 12 Silver badge

Re: MIDI Maze!

The prediction that it would be harder to program and interface to turned out to be false, and the 8086 also had the advantage of an easier assembly language and structure..

Where it fell down was in not being like the processors c and unix were designed for, which turned out to be a critical point when CS schools moved to cheap multi-user unix mini-computers to teach OS design.

I've spent most of my career interfacing hardware to cheap 8-bit microprocessors, starting with the Z80, but I've done some 16 bit stuff as well, and of course now it's 32bit ARM. Out of all of it, the 8086 family was the fastest to develop in, and the easiest to debug. The tiny register set of the 8086 was just one of the advantages.

People trying to port compilers from a different architecture feel differently: it's easier to design compiler-compilers with optimizing for register-less design. In my world, there were far more people doing programming and interfacing than building compilers, and the 8086 had the advantage over 68000 designs.

Google says Android runs better when covered in Rust

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Good To Hear !

The documented history of c is that it just grew, and that mostly because it was associated with unix -- a programming language and OS pair that was popular in ATT because it was available and easier than developing a new language and OS for each new processor.

That is, pile it high and get it out quick.

UK cuts China from Sizewell nuclear project, takes joint stake

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Local generation

1) There are interconnectors from Texas to the other grids

That would be new then: last I looked only a small corner of Texas had any kind of connection to outside the state.

The second assertion is half correct: The Texas grid is defined for political reasons (system cost). But the result of that was that the Texas grid was not connected to the adjoining grids, and the result of that was that the grid-interconnect connections did not exist. Why would you dedicate land, local planning approval, design effort and capital to unused grid-interconnect systems?

Texas had decided that they did not want the standards, regulation, and cost associated with grid-interconnect. They may have changed their mind since the last debacle, but if there is any significant grid-interconnect now, that was done on a startlingly fast timeline: getting local planning approval for new HV transmission lines, and acquiring the land rights, is a process that normally takes years, not months.

Man wins court case against employer that fired him for not liking boozy, forced 'fun' culture

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Their "fun"..

Judges 12:5–6.

"Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him "

Singapore branches out onto internet of trees

david 12 Silver badge

At this point, I think the main benefit of FIA is just identifying trees. Which are then logged, inspected, and tagged. You can't 'send a tree surgeon around to have a look' if you don't know that you've got a tree to look at, and you don't know that you've tagged them unless you've counted them.

US bans Chinese telecoms imports – won't even consider authorizing them

david 12 Silver badge

"require applicants to have a US-based agent."

Smiled at that one. We got hit by a similar requirement in Australia. "But we don't have an import agent: the equipment is manufactured here!" Oh. Ok. Hmmm. Ok, we will approve based on your business ID where the form says "import agent" .

Don't believe the hype: HP CEO says 3D printing hasn't met early hopes

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Cloth cutting

One of the fascinating offshoots of 3-D printing, is that it's circled back to where it began.

Readers may know that the first CAD circuit board layouts, and semi-conductor layouts, were done on modified cloth-cutting machines. The basic PCB descriptions still use Gerber files: files that describe how cloth is cut. The 'maker' fad, driven by additive printing, also includes laser-cutters -- if you can produce cheap additive-printing frames, you can also produce cheap laser-cutter frames, and cutting shapes out of plywood turns out to be equally as effective as building up shapes out of plastic, with some advantages and disadvantages.

And if 'makers' are shaping stuff out of plastic and cutting it out of plywood, why can't people (mostly women), do the same with cloth, paper, vinyl, and other craft materials? Why not indeed: last time I was buying buttons and interfacing, the shop was also stocked with a bunch of CAD fabric cutting machines and CAD craft machines.

IBM sues Micro Focus, claims it copied Big Blue mainframe software

david 12 Silver badge

Re: UK Case Law

" Curiously, it was not claimed that Defendant had access to the original source code or that Defendant's source code resembled Plaintiff's in any way"

So, not in any way comparable to this case. The pivotal points of this case are the claim that the defendant had developer access and that the software is a derivative work

So, did developers have access to source code? Yes. Look at the background:

"Because of the limited capacity of even large processors of that era every CICS installation was required to assemble the source code for all of the CICS system modules after completing a process similar to system generation (sysgen), called CICSGEN, to establish values for conditional assembly-language statements. "

CICS source code moved from "partly developed by customers", to "implemented and debugged by customers" to "partly developed, implemented and debugged by licensed developers"

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Venue and jurisdiction is going to complicate this

US law is the same -- specifically to protect third-party automobile compatibility. (Americans take their cars seriously). The restrictions aren't on intent or outcome or contract: the restrictions (as in this case) are on direct copying.

Study suggests AI cruise control could kill traffic jams by cutting out the 'intuition' factor

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Reactive speed limits

These cars are controlling traffic. The same can be done by reactive speed limits, in jurisdictions where drivers obey speed limits (so, not most of the USA). More overhead speed controls, slowing traffic approaching a wave trough, so that cars travel at average speed instead of high speed until the see the next traffic jam.

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

david 12 Silver badge

Re: The card should monitor and alarm beep or self-limit in such a case

The power supply detects low-voltage situations and reacts by increasing the power-supply voltage to get the correct value at card, allowing for cable drop. This is normal, it applies for other devices in the box, that stuff about 'measuring the wattage' is people who don't understand what they are talking about.

There really isn't much the card can do about it -- the whole point of the system is that it maintains a steady 12V at the card.

The problem is, that doing that with a faulty high-power cable and connector system just increases the power into the fault.

There should be more monitoring at the Power Supply. The power supply should cut out when the cable drop is high on a high-current connection. The world may move that way eventually.

In any case, high current devices like this probably should use expensive, inconvenient, high-current connectors, like those used on solar panels -- the solution they've attempted hasn't worked.

US Supreme Court asked if cops can plant spy cams around homes

david 12 Silver badge

Around here, everything has gone 'metric' and has been for a very long time. For example, dressed timber is sold in lengths labeled 90cm, 1.2m and 1.8 mm. (Why those lengths? 3ft, 4ft and 6ft). And pipe threads use the European 'metric' standard too -- British Standard Pipe

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison

david 12 Silver badge

Re: For UK residents

some people who were dangerous and committed horrible crimes in the states might get let out early

Generally, "Early Release" is subject to the random decisions of random prison guards and management. You can be bad, but prisoners have very little control of what happens to them and how 'clean' they can be.

And prisons are privately operated, and the operator has no interest in early release.

Historically, it was used in the opposite way: people who were dangerous and committed horrible crimes were kept in for maximum, regardless of court minimum. So, a person who had pled guilty to a string of 'simple burglaries' -- on a string of young women, living alone -- might serve 15 years of a 3-15 year sentence. Prison authorities were, and are, a law unto themselves.

AI analysis of dinosaur tracks suggests 'predator' may have been a herbivore

david 12 Silver badge

It's in 'scare quotes' to indicate that the 'predator' reference is to the 'initial classification' given above. I didn't have any trouble with it, but I never do 'close reading'. Odd for a person who codes for a living, but there it is: I depend on testing to demonstrate functional compliance.

Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything

david 12 Silver badge

Re: I'm so tired...of the U. S. A.

As an Australian, I started reading The Register (.co.uk) to get an off-shore point of view. I'm not particularly upset to see spelling and word-choice variants, but I sympathize with American readers if you are missing UK specific content.

Australia blames Russia for harboring health insurance hackers

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Re: Victim Blaming?

Where I live, it is against the law to leave your keys in your unintended motor vehicle. If that comes across as 'victim blaming', then perhaps

more 'victim blaming' would be good thing.

OpenPrinting keeps old printers working – even on Windows

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Re: Slight nitpicking

Author can tell Readers what was intended meaning. Readers can tell Author meaning of what was written.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: The problem is usually with printers Linux never had drivers for...

As long as the printer does PCL or PS then you should be okay.

There seems to be a problem with PS or PS printers that representation of fine lines is poor. Even our native PS printers have problems with circuit diagrams, and the older printers that do fine with PCL have the same problem (as well as being very slow) when forced to PS mode by the lack of availability of modern PCL drivers.