Posts by jake

Re: Tesla never said it's driverless

It allows drivers much more awareness of surroundings ... starting with the insides of their eyelids.

Re: Alternatives to Autopilot in the USA

"I would say the U.S. has the monopoly on manufacturing "gas-guzzlers" though."

Starting with those great Yank marques like Rolls Royce, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini and Ferrari, right?

Frankly ...

... anybody who trusts a computer to drive their car within a mile or so of the Northern 85/101 interchange is asking to die. It's one of the worst sections of freeway in the country, and has been since the intersection opened in 1965.

Re: Tesla never said it's driverless

Pretty fucking thick. Which Tesla owners all seem to be, at least from a technological perspective. And sadly, the so-called "autopilot" seems to be better at controlling the vehicle than most of the dim-bulbs behind the wheel.

(Source: Direct observation in Marin, Sonoma and Napa counties these last several years.)

Re: Glib rejoinder

Cold fusion? Probably not. But I agree that quantum computing isn't going to be all that useful even if it does take off. Fusion power, on the other hand, will probably be more of a game changer than steam power was.

You don't buy tin foil hats, silly. You have to make them for yourself ... the purchased ones are all bugged by the government. Everybody knows that.

Re: Stupid is as Stupid does

"What do you call things like this?"

That would be a retired space probe. What do I win?

Snowdon's an interesting walk. Recommended. Just don't confuse it with an actual mountain. And you can even get a cuppa at the summit, and take the train down if you're tired from the walk! Very civilized. Unfortunately.

Ben Nevis is nobut an 'ill, lass.

Tioga Pass in California is over twice that height at 3,031m ... and that's a pass, not a peak. Tioga Road, aka Highway 120, is a very a pretty drive, being the Eastern entrance to Yosemite. Recommended. (Note that it's currently closed for winter. Check CalTrans for road conditions before setting out.)

Re: I doubt he was bright enough to build a rocket

To be fair, California has by far the largest population of any state in the Union with about 40 million people. The second most (Texas, with about 75% of Califonia's population) also is a hot-bed of nutters. As is the third (Florida, with about half). And the fourth and fifth (New York and New Jersey, with just under half and under a third, respectively).

Large populations equal a large number of stark raving loonies, at least in a fairly free society. Only stands to reason; it's the ol' bell shaped curve, innit. Try to remember, the mundane lives of the vast majority of us don't make the news in your tiny little corner of this dampish rock that we live on ... you just hear about the statistically meaningless ones that are out of the ordinary (or "newsworthy" if you prefer).

No, bob.

So-called "creation science" is not even wrong, and you know it.

"You can't move heat from the cooler to the hotter"

Your refrigerator and air conditioner do just that. They take excess heat from the coolness inside and dump it to the warmer outside.

Re: detection feature scans the memory of all processes

Not talented so much as a good admin.

It's not exactly rocket surgery.

Re: Hybrid children watch the sea

I have 10 digits (plus a carry bit, but that's irrelevant in this situation) ... that's 1,048,576 servers, or several hundred thousand more than I personally have stashed around the place.

Re: Cockroach syndrome

I've got code running one of my greenhouses that I wrote around 40 years ago. For the first 30-odd years it ran on a Z80/S-100 system with no problems. That's one machine, non stop, except with power-offs for a routine vacuuming out once in a while. The code is pretty much unchanged after all these years (it ain't broke ...), but is now running under emulation on an old headless Slackware laptop. The whole kit & caboodle is going to be replaced with a dedicated system based on the ATmega328 RealSoonNow[tm]. Maybe.

Re: Your local garage's floor jack ...

Sounds like a terrible state of affairs, AGD ... Around there here parts, the owner IS the mechanic ... at least at garages I frequent. There is less overhead when the owner doesn't need or want a manicure, and the savings are passed on to the customer.

"though it would be more professional (and perhaps fractionally more secure) to avoid revealing details of the O/S."

Yeah, because security through obscurity works so, so well ... especially in mass-market operating systems.

Your local garage's floor jack ...

... might crunch a bit (or bits) of your local mechanic if it fails. The mechanic is fully aware of the state of his jack, and sees no real need to have it inspected. (Does any government actually have a Department of Floor Jack Inspection? Wouldn't surprise me, in today's "please protect me from myself because I'm stupid and I like it that way" society ... )

When Windows fails in a POS (or other "used by the masses" system), there is a non-zero chance that it will compromise the financial security of the intended end-user.

Spot the difference and win a beer.

But OS/2 has never been EOLed

See EComStation and ArcaOS.

Re: Freebies

"They'd invented t-shirts back when OS/2 was around?"

OS/2 is still around. I use it in several places, where it makes sense. See eComStation and ArcaOS for more, if you are interested.

With that said, OS.2 was released in late '87 ... I have a Big Brother and the Holding Company tshirt from 1968 and a Country Joe and the Fish from 1969.

But MyffyW ...

... that's all silicone, not silicon.

Re: Clueless he is.

It's about 2:20 AM Pacific time. I'll bet a plugged nickle that that one downvote will change to about 4 inside 10 hours. That's what the pattern has been, anyway ... suggesting that there are a total of only 4 pro-Trump ElReg commentards. Maybe there's hope for the lot of us yet?

Those 7900 drives were early '80s, while SPARC was late '80s ... amazing how much shrinkage storage experienced in those few years, no?

I wonder how far behind we'd be if today's elfin safety nazis had come into existence in that decade. Probably still stuck with the VLB bus and half height 5.25 drives ... with silicon being built on 6" (`150mm to you euro-types) cookies.

Re: And yet...

Drifted back to what the article was about? I refer you to the first six words of the first paragraph of the article. To wit "Penetration testers looking at commercial shipping".

And I refer you to the comment in this thread that I was responding to: "It's been nearly 40 years since Superman 3 yet no one seems to have done the 'hack ships to do stuff' thing in anger.".

I know SCADA stuff is vulnerable. I've been bitching about it (on land, sea and air) for literally decades.

I did not pick clear weather. I even mentioned cloud cover, at night.

The McCain incident should never have happened. It's cause was, quite simply, high ranking muck-a-mucks putting entirely too much faith in unproven technology. Again, I'm pretty sure I'm agreeing with you on the underlying issue at hand ...

Re: And yet...

No. It's a transform fault. One side is moving North, the other is moving South. There is no vertical movement to speak of.

Roger's Creek hasn't moved in a century, or thereabouts. When it finally shifts, it might take the Healdsburg fault (the Northern extension of the combined fault zone) and the Hayward Fault with it (Rogers and Hayward are joined under San Pablo Bay) ... a total distance of about 120 miles could rupture, probably producing a Mag 7.5ish quake, which will pretty much cock up the entire San Francisco Bay Area.

I'm hoping for smaller pressure-relief type quakes, but I'm prepared for the worst. Not paranoid, pragmatic.

Re: "bridging designed gaps between...engineering control systems and human interface"

Since when did one need a license to use weapons on the high seas? Who is the licensing authority? How is it enforced, and by whom?

I've seen this on most commercial ships that travel in dangerous parts of the world. I wouldn't expect to see it on shipping between, say, France, England and Denmark.

From what I understand from the Captains who actually do it, jettisoning "illegal" weaponry when entering the waters of countries where they are frowned upon is routine. Guns are cheap, cargo is not.

Re: "bridging designed gaps between...engineering control systems and human interface"

None that you know of, perhaps. Did you have a need to know?

Re: So, the ship is 300M long...and you don't want to walk

As long as you're both of age, and willing, who am I to question your choice of recreation?

Re: And yet...

Apparently you have never hear the term "topic drift". It's part and parcel of online forums, and I would wager a guess that it's the reason most commentards use this forum.

I'm on record as saying that I've been telling manglement that PLCs (and other bits of industrial SCADA haberdashery) should never be reachable from outside the local network. Here's a link to one ElReg post of mine on the subject from way back in 2011 ...

Yes, I know how common rail engines work. They should not be accessible outside the LAN if they are being used in critical systems. Making them accessible to all and sundry is effectively slapping a large KICK ME note on your own back. Sounds like I agree with you, no?

Re: And yet...

We have that covered here at Chez jake ... but being intelligent, we also have a largish stash of people food. Not for the doom-sayers apocalyps, mind ... rather because we live a couple hundred yards from the Roger's Creek Fault. When, not if.

Re: "bridging designed gaps between...engineering control systems and human interface"

"Not hard to guess why!"

Because they are fun to play with would be my guess. And besides, why not? There's plenty of room to store ammo on board, unlike, say, aircraft or armored vehicles.

Re: "bridging designed gaps between...engineering control systems and human interface"

Every merchant vessel I've worked on had a gun locker of one description or another. Granted, I only worked on them in port or on delivery and test runs, not while going about their business (coms, computers & controls mostly).