Posts by Fursty Ferret 201 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2016
I, on the other hand, am not so impressed with the Affinity model. You can keep using the older versions that you paid for, but once about half the people you work with have upgraded you've got no choice but to follow suit as the older versions won't so much as look at anything produced by the newer one.
On top of that I paid for the full package about 2 weeks before v3 was released, and Affinity's response to me asking for an upgrade (or even a discount code) was a big fat middle finger and ****-you via email. So now I pay for Adobe CC mainly out of spite.
Every so often I turn off my ad-blocker in response to one of the guilting "Do you want us to starve?" pop-ups, but swiftly turn it back on when I realise what I'm getting. Smaller sites are suffering because of the decisions taken by big content providers (lookin' at you, Future) to bury the actual interesting stuff in a mixture of ads and sponsored advertorials.
To be honest, having the option to make micropayments in order to browse ad-free is quite appealing, but only to the extent that I'd like to add exceptions to ensure the particularly shitty websites (see previous on Future, or Reach) stay clear of my wallet. And they would be the first to take advantage anyway, probably hiding a million pixel-sized individual ads.
On Airbus that's no real problem, Airbus has automatic de-icing, so when ice is detected the de-icing is switched on and the cold wet air cools the inlets.
Just to clarify, the reason this doesn't affect Airbus aircraft is because they use a different inlet and a different version of the LEAP engine which won't melt if you fly with the engine anti-ice on in non-icing conditions.
Boeing can make working ice detection (ish, it mostly works on the Dreamliner but has a few bugs), they never fitted it to the 737.
Airbus has always had distributed production on account of being a pan-European business. Final assembly takes place in Toulouse and Hamburg. Airbus has a very different philosophy to Boeing from the ground up and are very difficult to compare on a brick-by-brick basis. Your typical Airbus has countless features to mitigate against the biggest risks in modern aviation. Boeing hasn't introduced anything new in over a decade apart from fixing a bug that allowed the autopilot to stall the aircraft.
That motor can apply significant force to the steering rack, easily enough to overcome most drivers. I've had the Tesla try to get into the wrong* lane before and the force required to overcome the computer was much greater than anticipated (you couldn't do it with one hand, and most people who hold the wheel lightly in two hands would have been surprised).
There's something funky with this setup because normally the steer assist disables with the lightest touch during a lane change.
* When I say "wrong", I mean the feckin' gap in the barrier on a dual carriageway to allow cars to turn right. And there was even a car in the space.
What's happening is that the spoofed position is about 60 miles west of the true position. When the incorrect position is first calculated, it's rejected by the flight management computers (FMCs) as it differs significantly from that derived from inertial positioning. Plane continues trundling on the correct course. So far so good.
Over time the FMCs start to take a closer look at the GNSS signal, and consider that it's been like that for a while. So they begin to give it a little more credence. What if it's right? So they start to bias their calculated position with an element of the (incorrect) GNSS location. You're still within the required navigation performance limits, but with some uncertainty. Various non-critical navigation systems have failed at this point, including position reporting and look-ahead ground proximity warnings.
Finally, your FMC locks onto a basic navigation beacon on the ground. Aha! We only know the line-of-sight distance from the beacon, but that's enough to confirm position to within a mile. Except that what's happened is that the sneaky Iranians have built a radio beacon that broadcasts on the same frequency as the one that your FMC is looking for. The FMC discovers that the calculated radio position matches the spoofed GNSS location and thinks "shit, I'm off course".
Remember how the spoofed position was 60 miles west of true? This means that to re-acquire the correct track you need to fly east by 60 miles, which is just enough to put you nicely inside Iranian airspace without permission. I think it's very unlikely that you'd be shot down, but a Western airliner forced to land at an Iranian military airfield is an enormous political bargaining chip. Would the Iraqis provide a warning that you were off track? Possibly. But given the Americans named the primary navigation waypoint in the country "Rag-head" and have vetoed attempts to change it for years, I doubt they'll be hugely interested in helping.
I don't think anyone disagrees that he's a right-wing bigoted opinionated self-obsessed childish prick, but do you think that as a tech publication you could focus on the tech news side of things? Ultimately SpaceX has driven the industry further and faster than at any point since the race for the moon, and that particular aspect I find interesting.
Musk is like Trump, he revels in controversy and publicity. Not mentioning his name at all is the most effectively way forward to silence the man-child, while we still get to enjoy the news of SpaceX etc.
This comments section is depressing. I would normally associate Register readers with intelligence and the ability to select out conspiracy theories and news peddled by GB News and big oil companies, but apparently not.
1. The grid will not collapse (source: National Grid[1]). The average person drives less than 10 miles per day to work, so that's about 3 kWh of electricity, filled up when there's an overnight surplus. Charge at work? Even better.
2. We won't run out of lithium. There's loads of it, it'll just be more expensive to dig out of the ground. The quoted figures are, as others here have suggested, based on current mine capacity. If there was an upcoming lithium shortage, you won't find in products literally sold to be thrown away (those awful vapes), and it doesn't seem to stop people buying phones.
3. Big energy companies like Octopus have been campaigning for the link between electricity and gas prices to be broken. This is what's driving the disparity at the moment. I don't disagree that Instavolt and Osprey etc are predators.
4. Laws need introducing to protect charging facilities. For example, Tesla put 20 Superchargers in a Marriott carpark at Heathrow but f***** up the contract. Marriott now charge £5 just to plug in, before any electricity is delivered. Can you imagine BP or Esso having an access charge on their pumps?
5. There is a massive education problem (see these comments ^^). EVs don't randomly run out of electricity on the motorway, and if stranded in snow etc will outlast most internal combustion vehicles without the risk of poisoning the driver. FWIW, a modern diesel may not produce enough heat to keep the cabin warm when idling.
[1] https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars
It might not look like it but the 14 inch MacBook Pro is a brick in comparison to the Air. You need to balance out whether it's worth it for the brighter / faster screen and extra ports. I think the speakers are identical between the two (if not, the ones on the Pro are stunning for a laptop).
I use an iPhone while occasionally gazing jealously at the old featherweight Pixel 5 that sits on the shelf. However, the fact that iOS lets you block intrusive ads in Safari is enough to keep me there. The difference is stark if you open a page in Chrome via the Google Discover feed - mobile browsing is pretty much unusable anywhere without ad-blocking these days.
Except (especially in the US) the professor teaching a university module sets the textbook. Which is conveniently their own work and contains homework assignments that change every year.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with using Libgen for this situation, especially when you consider that the university library often doesn’t have a copy and the price of the textbook is upwards of $200 in some areas.
Thankfully when it was all done the owner was very forgiving, though it had cost an afternoon's online sales. And he did dock Jeff's pay for the cost of relisting everything.
Riiiiiiight.
Are all these stories made up now, or just part of them? You can't dock the pay of an employee for an innocent mistake.
Your house is far more likely to burn down from an unbranded phone charger than a home battery.
a. It’s LiFe, which is incredibly stable.
b. It’s in a metal box, protecting it from damage.
c. It’s monitored thoroughly by a BMS.
d. You don’t think they thought of this?
But you go right ahead and store 80 litres of petrol in your garage inside something that’s designed to set fire to it.
This is actually a pretty clever request. Given the nature of Autopilot all this information should be available, tracked, collated and searchable.
So although it sounds like 830,000 is an insurmountable request in reality if their record keeping and SMS is up to the job it should be relatively straightforward.
If on the other hand they ask for six months so a team of interns can go through the hard copy with a highlighter pen, it suggests there are more fundamental problems with the safety case.
You get ~23GB in a single burst before it slows down (and it's a bit rich to call 50Mb slow when most of the country is on less). How often are people downloading more than this on a regular basis?
I draw m'lud to EE, which caps you to 0.5Mb when they decide that you're being a bit unreasonable.
If you look at close up photos of the launch, you can see the bells of the failed engines are missing entirely, suggesting that they were knocked off by debris from the pad. Whether this happened because they didn't ignite is a moot point.
I'm not convinced that a big steel plate is the solution unless there's active water jets firing over the surface. Water-cooled is totally different to the traditional water suppression system, which is designed to prevent damage to equipment from the sound energy generated by the engines. If that's not addresses then the plate will just reflect the energy straight back into the engine bay.
This is not something that would be missed, so we're not seeing the whole picture.
This whole thing is ridiculous, from the concept to the claims. There is no point in fitting batteries to commercial aircraft unless there's a 1000x increase in energy density. There are no problems lifting significant weight off a runway (eg even a 787 can stagger into the air at more than 250 tonnes), but you can't *land* at that weight. Don't forget that you'll need ~1MW continuously for air conditioning / pressurisation, hydraulic motor pumps, in-flight entertainment, flight computers, pilots' heated seats, ovens etc etc.
Far, FAR better accept that aviation will need to use hydrocarbon fuels and instead to concentrate on minimising the environmental impact from aviation by carbon capture and carbon-neutral fuel production.
It doesn't work like that in a modern flight deck. GPS jamming is commonplace, as this map (https://gpsjam.org) shows. Anyone flying east will lose GPS when passing between Turkey and Iraq.
The cockpit effects are mild, because in 2023 navigation is still dead-reckoning from a computer point of view, with the aircraft position fine-tuned from external sources. You'll see an advisory message saying that ADS-B (air-to-air and air-to-ground position reporting) is degraded. Eventually, as you go out of range of ground stations, the navigation will be entirely inertial.
You can also get an advisory saying that the look-ahead terrain warnings are inoperative - that's because they directly use GPS position. There has been cases where this system generated a false "pull up" warning at cruise altitudes, which is more likely to present a threat from the startle element than anything else.
Radio altimeters will recover once outside of an area of jamming (which would have to be over a relatively small range). It is obviously possible to get jam-resistant GPS systems but the expense isn't worth it for civil aviation. Or more likely it's considered technology that shouldn't be exported from the country of origin.
>> Roll forward to the 2020s and you can't help but wonder whether the sidelobe suppression is up to scratch.
Radar is either not fitted or not used on the vast majority of Teslas because of the difficulties integrating it with the vision system. Having said that they're now refitting a higher resolution version to their new vehicles, so who knows?
Conversely, I've been quite impressed with the Bing-bot. Although it should have been called Clippy.
Like all modern tools it requires a degree of learning how to use, and many of the readers on The Register will struggle to cope with this as a consequence of their age. Once past their mid-30s most people struggle to pick up new skills without significant effort. It's easier to just criticise something as useless than it is to try it out.
You do need to be fairly specific with what you want. Personally I've found it useful for explaining concepts and it's also written some effective short Python programs. I hate Python with a vengeance and it did in 10 minutes (with a bit of back and forth where I clarified what I needed) what would have taken me all afternoon.
For the "how do I fix [problem]" Google is still faster if you append "+reddit" to the query. If you don't, then you'll probably still get a more useful answer from Bing given that Google search results are now almost entirely ads and spam.
I stopped using Google last year because the monetisation reached a point where it was genuinely unusable. If it's not direct spamming via ads inserted into search results in such a way that it's almost impossible to tell the two apart, it's the simple fact that nearly all websites now are just designed to manipulate Google search rankings with generic copy-and-paste spam.
In 2023 the most reliable way to get the answer you need is to tack "+ reddit" onto the end of the query, which is a new low.
The Tesla market and fan base in the USA is fundamentally weak, and a lot weaker than they would like people to know. It’s perfectly possible to set up the Autopilot system in their cars to disconnect without driver input or attention (just drive any Tesla in Europe and you’ll be nagged to make a steering input every 15 seconds or so), yet in the USA the system will allow frankly appalling risks to be taken. They could implement the European restrictions, but the increased safety will put off their target buyer.
>> A plane is taking off from some airfield which is now called a spaceport for some reason.
Said (elderly) plane has to overfly quite a lot of inhabited land with an unusual and extremely heavy load bolted to the wing spar. I'd quite like it to be thoroughly tested and licensed before they get to do this.
this could be a handy way round time limits on the library PCs.
That would be brave, given that to get access to library computers you have to be a member, meaning they have your photograph and address on record. If I can point out this particular line from the Computer Misuse Act:
Unlawful access is committed if the individual intentionally gains access; knowing he is not entitled to do so; and aware he does not have consent to gain access.
Personally I think it's perfectly reasonable, but the tech-illiterate plod who turns up when the librarian says that someone's been fiddling with the computers that other people potentially use for financial transactions etc may not see it that way.
Even the most basic back of the envelope maths says that with current technology, battery-powered commercial aircraft are not feasible. So many major flaws in this plan:
1. How on earth does removing 5 passengers (300 kg) get you 400 km more range?
2. Normal batteries offer about 0.2 kWh per kg at best. Unfortunately, the reason we use kerosene in planes is because it's incredibly energy-dense. Assuming our 30 passenger aircraft has 6.5 tonnes of batteries, that's only 1.3MWh and that's hugely optimistic.
3. Even if electric propulsion works for short flights, it's still pointless when you can squeeze 30x the passengers on a train that doesn't have to drag the power station along with it.
4. Airport infrastructure will be incapable recharging one aircraft during a turnaround, let alone a fleet of them. 35 minutes on the ground? Not going to work. What about smaller destinations with poor grid connections?
5. Propulsion is just one part. The cabin air compressors on a Boeing 787 pull close to 400kW by themselves, and that's before you even get to wing anti-icing, IFE, hydraulic pumps, window heaters, etc etc. Sure, a 30 passenger aircraft is much smaller but it still has big loads.
6. Inverter and motor reliability is unproven.
7. What happens if the aircraft diverts to an airfield without significant ground power? Even assuming, optimistically, that you can still 90kW into it, you're going to be waiting on the ground for a day.
8. A minor fault in one battery pack may instantly render a significant proportion of total stored power unusable.
It's just not possible. We may as well accept the CO2 issues from passenger aircraft (and maybe look at biofuels via solar power and carbon capture) instead of bothering with this. I'm not anti-electric, I drive an EV and have solar panels, but this is not going to work.
Got to admire the ability to extract money from investors, though.
Having been a passenger in a Model 3 running on Autopilot, I was very impressed right up until the point that it decided that an overhead gantry was blocking the road and jumped on the brakes mid-lane-change. This nicely exacerbated into tears because the driver behind (who was tailgating) assumed that we'd brake-checked him and promptly launched into a full road-rage tantrum.
Not sure what this is meant to show. FSD isn't even engaged in the demonstrations, so it's just a test of the standard AEB system fitted to Teslas (which is admittedly not the best compared to Volvo etc).
If you're going to use something in a media campaign against Tesla then you should at least turn on the feature you want to complain about.
The interesting thing about The Register is that although many of the readers are clearly intelligent, they’re particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias and susceptible to propaganda and miseducation campaigns run by both foreign states and commercial organisations.
You are quite correct that in the near future millions of people will arrive home and plug in their EVs to charge. That is where the accuracy of your claim ends. Firstly, the vast majority of people will charge on a cheaper overnight tariff. Secondly, the average commute is less than 20 miles, or 5kWh - and the car has all night to replenish this. For even cheaper rates still your car may also provide battery storage for peak hours of electricity use.
You are also correct that sometimes the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. That’s why nearly all new solar installations include 5-10kWh of battery storage. This will cover 99% of domestic electricity use and can again be recharged during periods of low grid demand.
What you are right about is the apathy of the government towards encouraging further investment, with no subsidies; taxes on public buildings with panels; and a refusal to redistribute the feed-in tariffs more fairly.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
