Posts by briesmith

Iceland - not the shops

Volcanic heat and hydro in vast quantities and all pretty much free once the plant costs have been written down should mean that Iceland - and similar regions/countries around the world - could become significant hydrogen gas producers similar to the methane gas producing counties in the world we already depend on for much of our imported energy.

We already have the ships and we know how to build the terminals, perhaps we could persuade some billionaire that this makes more sense than sending up 1,000s of microwave ovens into space?

All we have to do then is convert 43 million gas boilers to run on hydrogen and find a way of keeping the pesky stuff confined within our existing gas networks.

Best Pairing Ever

Audacity and MuseScore.

Missed Opportunity?

Why didn't they put a couple of $100 drones on the lander? There is enough atmosphere for parachutes to work so I am guessing there is enough for a drone to bite on?

This one costs £99 with dimensions 29.5 x 20.5 x 9.3 cm and weighs 690 Grams. Some software revisions to make it fly patterns without control from base with automatic reconnection for recharging and you could map a whole lot more of the surface than the lander can cover. Just saying.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/EACHINE-Distance-1200Mah-Foldable-Quadcopter/dp/B089LVQ42H/ref=sr_1_6?adgrpid=53635035819&dchild=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA1eKBBhBZEiwAX3gql_NFT7BiWUXQy05k22RnQyldWI09i3NZqdNwZq5yPRqnwlrFKHMT6BoC6SgQAvD_BwE&hvadid=259045035030&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1007004&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=b&hvrand=6702146350854066137&hvtargid=kwd-295218097859&hydadcr=14850_1829006&keywords=drone+with+good+camera&qid=1614354728&sr=8-6&tag=googhydr-21

What about the client?

What did Santander think about this decision (to move support to that hotbed of English language speaking, Bulgaria)? Did they run it against their own employment policies and practices? Did they carry out a risk assessment? Did they seek documented and quantised assurances from IBM before agreeing to the change?

Or did the offer of reduced costs from IBM switch off any concerns they might otherwise have had? Shipping jobs offshore should simply be banned. We will soon need every last one we can find.

Options for the NHS

https://youtu.be/eGOtZDk6wRc

Missing Features?

How do I register my (2) antibody tests proving I have had Covid?

How did we get things so wrong?

When I pick my phone up - fixed or mobile - nobody and nothing asks me for a password. I simply have access to the network and it's up to whoever I've called to operate security etc. This applies to point to point and conference calls.

That's how Teams, Zoom, Meet Google and all the rest should work. They are all massively over-engineered with user-unfriendly workflows (with the possible exception of Meet Google which is only handicapped by its pretend insistence on participants having a gmail account when it doesn't actually need one to let you in.)

As long as nobody can join a video call without the rest of the callers knowing, the phone call model works well and has done for 100 years now.

Tendering - Fair or Not?

I'm assuming that this article is a bit of an attempt at distraction. The UK will get contracts from the ESA commensurate with its financial contribution. That's written into the treaty that governs the workings of the organisation.

What's more important post-Brexit is the continued working of international tendering law. Is El Reg chortling at the thought of the UK not being allowed to join international competitions or, somehow, being excluded from winning any as a result of non-EU participation?

I imagine the US, Israel and not to forget Norway and Switzerland might be unhappy about that? And that's not to mention China, South Korea, Japan and so on; pretty much every country in the world which bids for big international projects.

What were they reading?

Xerox, Polaroid, Kodak, Walkmans (men?), unsmartphones (Nokias basically). The writing was on the wall although I am a little surprised because I always thought that Olympus favoured the professional/motivated amateur photographer as opposed to the consumer sector? Clearly they were in the prosumer market?

And their audio products (dictation, handheld recorders etc) market is also under pressure. Sell Olympus I suppose is the smart, obvious?, move.

There Really Is No Point

No Bluetooth based contact recording app will ever work reliably.

And no app will be worth the battery power expended which relies on a ping going off on a mobile phone saying, "You've been in contact somewhere unspecified with someone unnamed who has tested positive for Covid so please lock yourself away for 14 days (yes, we know this is the 9th time you've had such a contact and have hardly been outside your house in nearly 6 months, except for the odd 8 days when you bumped into a Covid sufferer but that's how it goes)."

And did someone really authorise the spending of £108 million on a single app? Really? In the few short weeks the development fiasco lasted, how many people did they persuade the government were going to be working on the project? Can we see the timesheets?

Anywhere, what is Covid infectivity anyway? I have had Covid (antibody tested twice). My wife (with whom I live etc) hasn't. What issue are we actually trying to address here?

Next Opportunity for some Fascism

I'm happy with this innovation; never used two spaces since WordStar came along in the late 19th century.

What I would like to see would be the automatic excision of commas in address blocks, salutations and signature blocks.

They've been deprecated since the Second World War when the Civil Service calculated that they cost more typist hours than boot polishing cost squaddies in the army, or something like that.

Not only are they a waste of time, they are really ugly. Come on Microsoft, while you've got your fascist hat on, tackle these pointless commas.

Why COBOL?

COBOL was part of a systems development mindset that basically revered error elimination. Systems were either accurately or precisely defined, sometimes both. Specifications were scrubbed until they gleamed. File definitions and record layouts were cast in stone and checked for consistency. Programmes were flowcharted before a single line was written and the flowcharts were examined for sensibility. Programmes were then, often, written in a near English language and desk checked. Then the coding started with each line commented as to its purpose, author, date etc. Compilations sometimes took hours so there was definitely no fail early, fail often attitude. And everything was documented.

So I suppose what was written was accidently massively resilient and so it has turned out.

The thing that trips up COBOL systems are the one-off programmes usually written to cater for some irregular event like the year end. These were rarely documented, were often written in extremis and constantly re-written or modified at least, every time they were run. Old hands remembered them and when to run them and when they didn't or were not around anymore, disaster often struck.

It isn't just the COBOL language that is obsolete, it is the entire development culture it was part of. Now, languages come and go at a head spinning rate, the stuff written in them has the shelf life of a summer ice cream and the systems themselves are throw-aways.

COBOL could be and has been revitalised over the years through the development of IDEs which overcome a lot of the wordiness and improve syntax and variable typing but the "get it right first time" culture it was part of will never come back. It's OK to write stuff that doesn't work these days, you just rewrite it until it does. Back in the 60s and 70s, it wasn't and programmers that did were frowned upon.

And today's developers never get to feel that stomach tightening frisson of fear that "Enter Assembler" used to produce as you wrote it on your coding pad.

I'm sorry, excuse me

I think those other universes should just get out of our way. We're the humans and our universe is the best. They should know their place.

Zooming not Easy

The difficulty Zoom users have is that their settings aren't persistent and for some reason known only to Zoom, questions have to be answered before you can join a session. I've absolutely no idea why the Zoomies consider this a "good thing".

It's also clear that they have no idea what baseline IT facility amongst the general public is. To save them doing a lot of research, I will tell them.

It is zero, absolutely no facility, no confidence, no adaptability whatsoever. And no interest in ever acquiring any. The least question dismisseth them.

What should the workflow be? Submit correct credentials via a link? OK, you're in. No further fandango.

Regardless of its other flaws, MS Teams manages this quite well. Accept an invite and there you are, live and working.

Hopes Dashed

I'd sort of hoped we would build our own duplex system so location data could be sent back via the satellite as well as being received from it. I wanted to believe we could put an end to aircraft, and ships (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Derbyshire), disappearing without trace. But never mind, at least we've got control back, haven't we.

What's the problem?

Every Star Wars director has solved this problem so I am at a loss to understand why this is even a question.

Fighters take off from the planetary surface, transition into space where they dog fight and do other retro stuff before leaping into hyperspace so they are home in time for tea.

This is true of Star Trek shuttles as well.

And there's not a teapot (or lavvy) to be seen. (Although there might be some we haven't been shown on the shuttles given they are much bigger than X fighters.) Simples evidently.

There is one important lesson to be learned from the life-cycle of COBOL and that concerns the predatory behaviour of vested interest or, more generally, manufacturers.

COBOL's development was strangled by manufacturers and their competing agendas. They "owned" the committee that oversaw the development of COBOL and they pursued what, in their view, was a clever twin strategy.

They proclaimed that portability and backwards compatibility were essential and they used that argument to prevent anything other than glacial change in the language, for years. At the same time they made sure they wrapped their version of COBOL in all sorts of "enhancements" that destroyed any chance of portability. Job done.

Lesson to be learned; don't let anybody with a commercial interest anywhere near the management of a language's development. If you do, there won't be any.

It's just the important bits, Sir.

Why do all these projects fail when push comes to shove?

They always fail at a transition point; all the stuff in between, the flying around making a lot smoke and noise stuff, is always OK. But try and change flight profile and bang; it's crashed.

The answer is obvious; just point the noisy, smokey things straight up and fire them off. We can then watch them for the next 40 years as they very slowly, very slowly indeed, exit the Solar System.

Basically, I'm asking, "What's the point"? It's all so marginal. They are sphincter rending dangerous. They can't carry anything. They can't bring anything back. They are snailish slow. And they cost a fortune. The Celts had the common sense not to try and build a trans-Atlantic shipping industry based on coracles. Why are we so much more stupid?

The British Disease

It's been mentioned on here before but it will do no harm to revisit it. In 1942, when Britain had been at war for 3 years, the German Navy sailed most of its navy out of French ports in the Bay of Biscay, through the Channel and up the North Sea to home ports in Germany. While this 2 day voyage was going on, the British largely did nothing. And the reason for that inaction was the usual British disease of smugness; and infighting.

It will have been the same during the 2 days a drone has brought Gatwick to a halt. The warnings over the years about drones will have been ignored; that's the smug bit. We've had drones for 10 years or more, even the kind of idiot that rises to the top in British military and civil service institutions could have foreseen that problems were looming. But smugness would have been their comfort. "If it ever happens, old boy, they'll probably crash or something, get eaten by birds or simply fail to find the airport. And if it does, I'll send Barkiss down there with me Purdey to take the bastards out. Nothing to worry about, old chap, must be lunch time now surely?"

At the airport, the management will have been transfixed because no one has told them what to do or what to do it with. After all you don't get multi-million pound salaries for making decisions, well, definitely none that can be traced back to you. The police will be trying to find the right crime code on their reporting system while all the time saying it's the job of the RAF surely and advising that until they get a human rights decision from the CPS their hands are tied. The Army will be saying they could bring an artillery unit down in a week or so - probably get one back from Germany or something - and that'll be that. The RAF would help but they don't really want anything to do with drones, "No pilots, you see, not our sort of thing, old boy".

And all the various services will have stood around, each waiting for the other to take ownership of the problem so they can immediately start to brief against them on the grounds that they told them their plan wouldn't work and only a fool would have ever contemplated doing that.

Whoever the idiot with the drone is, he should have waited until early Sunday morning (like the Germans in 1942). If he'd done that, he could probably have shut Gatwick down until the new year. Pretty much anybody at any kind of senor level in British political, military or public service life will have been long gone for the Christmas break by the time Sunday rolls round.

In case it helps, the contact number for the West Sussex Council's Resilience and Emergencies team is 033 022 22400. Resilience and Emergencies advisers are on call 24 hours a day. Apparently.

Obvious Madness

When I first heard they were contemplating using mobile - cell - technology for emergency services comms I thought, they're mad.

You need only listen to a phone-in programme for a few minutes to hear just how uselessly unreliable mobile telecoms is.

How much?

My bet is they asked those lovely companies that methodically strip the taxpayer of billions a year - you know the ones I mean - while giving very little in return for a quote for microfilming/microfiching the slips, got quotes for several million so decided it would be cheaper to just shred them.

One of the companies that strip etc probably received only marginally less for shredding them than they would have got for filming them but, hey ho, look at the money we saved.

For any buyer other than a government department the cost of filming the slips would have been trivial, a few thousand or thereabouts. My theory as to why such a relatively simple administrative task wasn't done is all too likely. Sadly.

Old Ways are the Best Ways

This is the way to do it.

https://goo.gl/LAi7hU

Options

What's Oracle worth these days?

The figures say that Google's cap value is more than $700Bn while Oracle's is less than $200Bn.

Perhaps Google should buy it, grant itself the licence it needs then sell it on?

Might be cheaper than all the legal fees/compensation awards and so on? They might even make a profit?

One final observation. How do you find a lawyer who can persuade a chief executive of a near trillion dollar company - Google - that fair use as a defence to a claim that it's lifeblood, game changing, Android the Microsoft Killer OS relies on somebody's else's software - will fly? And how do you find that chief executive who believes them?

"Yeah, we used your software to build our OS. Yeah, it's made us billions and will make us even more billions in the future. Yeah, it's gonna change the world. What, you want us to pay for using your software? Nah, not gonna. We just used a little bit, stuff that was just lying around. All perfectly fair, no biggie." Really?

Microsoft will rue the day they abandoned their own phone. It will emerge as one of the worst corporate decisions ever made.

The smartphone is heading towards sonic screwdriver status; not to have your own screwdriver is simply crazy.

Acceptance is Hard

It is clear from comments here and elsewhere that there is massive reluctance to ever admit the sheer quality of Microsoft office tools.

They simply work very well, on their own and together. Windows is a much better, smoother experience than Android or any version of Linux and Office 365 is a much better, smoother experience than any of its competitors.

Some of the other MS products - SharePoint for example - are very poor and sometimes MS gets Nokiad as with the current internal competition between OneDrive Enterprise (SharePoint) and OneDrive (Personal) teams. And leaving WORD, for what must be getting on for 20 years now, with no reliable document preview function is unforgivable. But, on the whole, their stuff works and works reliably with a consistency of look and feel that open source software ensembles can never match.

That's why users like the Microsoft experience, an experience they continue to prefer even though it is further and further away from their smartphone experience. They seem very happy to work in two, distinct worlds. As long as none of them is Linux.

Naval Humour

Old jolly Jack Tar didn't think much of his officers in the Second World War; with huge justification. We had two ships, cruisers, in the Med - where we threw away ship after ship as we fought a futile battle against aircraft which sort of reinforced the correct view our sailors had of the officer class - one was called Penelope and the other was called Antelope.

To show their disdain, our salty types insisted that Penelope was pronounced Penny lope and Antelope as Anti lopey. Just a small piece of pointed diissing of a failed officer corps. (A corps that continues to fail to this day). It is mentioned that Glasgow was hit by a bomb that failed to explode but doesn't go on to mention that pretty much every ship in the Falklands Task Force was similarly struck; and similarly fortunate. Still it's ships that take captains to sea; why on Earth would they need to have weapons as well?

The Easier Way

Is diverting the R&D spend of the motor industry into electric vehicles a mistake? We know or, at least, I think we know that current battery technology cannot work; the batteries don't last long enough to be cost effective. And charging is an impossibility because the only methods we have currently can't scale.

We can have electric milk floats, and Harrods vans, because they can build depots with sufficient charging endurance - they are lead/acid not li on - and servicing/maintenance capabilities. Those of us in multi-occupancy buildings will never have access to our "own" charging point and the thought of throwing away a perfectly good vehicle after 5 years because it wasn't cost effective to replace the batteries is never going to fly with the motoring public.

Shouldn't the effort be going into removing the polluting parts of the internal combustion engine process? Solving that seems to be to be so much easier that making battery driven cars work. The fuel technologists, the carburation technologists, the engine technologists, the exhaust system technologists all working together must be odds on to solve the pollution aspect surely?

Heavy lorries with diesel engines (both the very latest designs and those retrofitted with emissions controls) are already pollution free pretty much. Cars could follow if the inefficiency of the method used on lorries could be reduced. Is this not the road we should be going down?

Take a running jump...

Why can't these very sophisticated aircraft taxi slowly on to the electrical thingy which then, and while they are still moving, throws them off the ship? I mean, it's not as though they can change their minds, the pilots that is, is it? They're going.

Alternatively, use some kind of variable clutch hooked into a system that weighs the plane as it lumbers up? My VW Passat had an electric clutch and an electric steering system. And it didn't crash that often.

Speaking of Matt Damon...

When the entry tube/airlock thing blows up wiping out the entire Martian ecology, the explosion is presaged by a few frames of film showing a whitish jet of something coming into the tube.

Is this explicable or just a cock-up/necessary error (if the jet went out of the tube, as it surely would, we film-goers wouldn't see it).?

Damon says he blew up the tube but did he?

What's the fucking point?

Millions, if not indeed billions, are spent on (advertising) network resilience yet still server centres and other installations fall over, go "off grid", suffer "outages" or "unplanned downtime".

Is it simply impossible to prevent these occurrences? Is all the advertising about resilience etc complete dishonest bollocks?

Or are the PoP operators just lying to us on the grounds that it is so much cheaper to be a crook than try and actually build in genuine resilience?

And what about all these certificates they display so proudly on their websites? Are these all lies as well? Are the awarding bodies just in on the scam and taking the dosh while they can? Shouldn't an operator suffering one of these unexpected "inconveniences" lose their accreditation? And what about some com-pen-pay-shun?

When There Were Three

There were these three systems you see: VHS, BetaMax and LaserDisc.VHS relied on terrible technology - a real lash up - to encode its tapes which came in really big cassettes making the players similarly huge. The picture quality and sound were awful and the tapes kept breaking. Betamax used really clever encoding technology which rendered really well with brilliant sound and came in neat small cassettes which rarely entangled or failed. The Laserdiscs were very expensive but the best in terms of picture/sound quality, offered random access and because they were old 33.3rpm LP record sized, could be stacked very economically on shelves etc. The players - also pricey - were thin while pretty large in plan area but, peculiarly, no bigger than the VHS players which seemed to contain a lot of air (because of the enormous loader mechanism I suppose).

Anyway, Android won and Windows 10 and iOS disappeared.

Perpetual Motion Again

Something wrong with all this?

Regardless of the chemistry used, the energy cost of splitting hydrogen away from its accompanying atom (probably oxygen - there is no free hydrogen around I know of, well, not within 93m miles or so) is at least equivalent to the energy value of re-combining it in an engine to create motive power.

How will that basic thermodynamic equation ever change?

And if that is the case how is it conceivable that the hydrogen energy equation can ever stack up against petrol/lpg which is now so cheap and likely to remain so as other uses of oil fade away?

Were petrol/lpg getting more expensive then hydrogen might have a chance but with it reducing in price how can it ever work? Particularly when its energy density and portability are factored in?

I think petrol will remain unchallenged until such time as our understanding of batteries improves to the extent there is a step change in their performance (cost, weight, recycling time etc) or we get fusion engines for vehicles.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear

Phil Collins can't sing. He has a really poor voice. It's obvious his A&R man never liked him and gave an already thin, lacking in musicality, voice a hard metallic edge that makes it pretty much unlistenable.

Phil Collins doesn't play the drums. He uses his wealth to buy lots of hittable things and then he sits down and hits them. All of them; loudly and frequently.

Where do I sign?