Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

Re: "Bring the popcorn" issues.

It would be excellent for power savings. DRAM bits are just charges in a tiny capacitor. Ii has to constantly refresh all the bits or they fade away.

Re: There's no way there aren't already nukes in space

Nobody needs to have them. You just need everybody to think you do so they blow their GDP trying to play catch-up. Even if you're the only country without them, you still don't need them. Again, convince the other countries that they need to detonate their space nukes as a preemptive defensive move. No need to waste your own money destroying all the sats in orbit.

Re: Not *everything* is a file

"Everything is a file" has similar problems to "Everything is a URL path" in REST.

The file representation only works with tree-like data and simple concurrency requirements. It already starts to get a little weird with some devices having a hardware GUID, and assigned GUID, and a name all at the same time. What if you need to perform an atomic operation but the data is split into multiple paths? COW the base path? That wouldn't work at all.

I'm thankful that the abstractions aren't taken too far.

Re: Denatured alcohol?

You can buy industrial anhydrous isopropanol. I use it for cleaning small hobby projects and repairs. Wiping down a whole Cybertruck with that might cost around $80. There's a pretty good chance you'd set your arm on fire in the process, so reserve another $60000 dollars for 'Merican medical bills too.

Re: Lucky for them...

Old cars were light weight, had narrow tires, and they had a lower steering gear ratio. Parking without assistance was difficult but they were drivable. I imagine it would take incredible strength to control a Tesla without power assistance. And the steering wheel would have to be bolted on correctly.

Re: A fine idea but...

People fear human greed.

Silicon Valley remembers all the chip fab toxins illegally dumped. There are still extraction machines and dead zones here and there. It wouldn't have cost much to recycle those chemicals but it there was money saved dumping it.

Repeat convicted felon and annihilator of cities, PG&E, has new permission to raise rates to maintain investor profits during equipment safety upgrades. That money really is super-honest going to fix infrastructure problems this time, unlike the last few decades where maintenance records were falsified and the money was pocketed.

Re: Less "connected" means less likely to be hacked and randsomed.

I'm not sure about that. Floppy disk hacks have been around longer than the Internet. Those device drivers were written long before there were spare resources for luxuries like bounds checking.

Computer science is the study of computers. Most security vulnerabilities should be covered by understanding how computers and their algorithms work. Command injection, XSS, exploitable race conditions, MITM, sabotaging handshakes, replay attacks, extra/inconsistent states, ... That's all computer science.

There are exceptions, of course. There's a category of security measures about having a second layer of protection for people that have been tricked.

Cloudflare was never about keeping nasties out. They're about creating an ecosystem where they're needed. Phishing gangs, hackers, political extremists, ... all part of healthy ecosystem where you sell protection.

Re: Economy 101

Oil is a lot easier to distribute than hydrogen. If you look at a US map of hydrogen fueling stations, it's three metropolitan areas in California. That's it.

Re: Only $14K?

The sentencing is tiny too. I'm guessing he gave up enough information after his arrest that prison is more protection than punishment.

It's all interesting. I would not recommend Huawei gear because of their ethics and mandatory allegiance to the Chinese government. I wouldn't recommend Cisco for similar reasons.

Re: What could go wrong...

The video shows a small conventional jet in the nose providing power for everything. Assuming that this is simpler and less stressed than a propulsion engine, it should be extremely reliable. The air steering looks vastly simpler than mechanical steering. Still want it more reliable? If the unpowered state is a stable glide, emergency gas canisters could provide emergency landing maneuvers.

The engineering geek in me in in awe of how simple and effective this kind of a jet plane could be.

Re: Bring back the art of low bandwidth coding

No thanks to old GSM voice codecs. Those old voice codecs count on being able to find a small number of strong tones in a voice. They can work for a radio announcer kind of voice but fail miserably on some others. I never used a cellphone for voice calls until VoLTE because you had to really concentrate on figuring out what people were saying and ask them to repeat.

5G does work well with a weak signal. T-Mobile in the US is using standalone 5G for their long-range 600MHz band. The original LTE packet latency was all over the place, tens of milliseconds to tens of seconds, and TCP simply wouldn't work. It's sluggish but usable since going to 5G.

When people hate 5G, I'm betting it has a lot to do with the implementation. Non-standalone 5G is still around and it's likely the #1 reason people hate 5G. Did the world learn nothing from FTP? Some telcos have their best frequencies reserved for 3G or LTE.

Re: NR71

It's only part of UHF. The US reallocated the higher numbered channels that were perfect for small devices needing very long range communication.

The only TV hardware change is that mast amplifiers need a different low-pass cutoff. These things rust out every 5 years so odds are you'll have a new one before there are enough cellular deployments to cause interference.

I'm not sure about UK TV but this might have already happened for >700MHz. The original TV spectrum is enormous.

Re: Used for landscaping

The purple pipe water is a bit salty and it kills some plants, especially some decorative redwood trees. Evaporative coolers, pee, soaps, detergents, and processing all add salts.