* Posts by John Robson

5178 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2008

James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at its new home – an orbit almost a million miles from Earth

John Robson Silver badge

Re: ...and "blow" through a "whopping" $10bn in funding

It's 5% of 1% of the US GDP for one year...

Billions of ${currency} sound alot until you scale to a population.

Given the joint nature of the project we should be distributing that cost over a population of ~800 million people.

So that's ~$12.50/person over 25 years (or maybe over ten years for the duration of the science mission rather than the build process).

Almost there: James Webb Space Telescope frees its mirrors and prepares for insertion

John Robson Silver badge

And spent thirty years *not* forgetting them!

Could BYOB (Bring Your Own Battery) offer a solution for charging electric vehicles? Microlino seems to think so

John Robson Silver badge
Flame

Re: Battery swaps

Or even 12.5kg carried into work, and then carried home...

Can't see why every desk won't support a kettle (see icon)

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Battery swaps

You're assuming a monolithic battery - but I like the idea of it being on wheels (less so for people in flats).

Call LiIon 200Wh/kg, that's 5kg per four miles or 25kg for an average UK daily mileage - maybe have two 12.5kg batteries - maybe have them clip together if you can carry both.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Hits the sweetspot for me

32.6 kWh

Even using a three pin plug, that's about eleven hours - hardly a whole weekend - you could trivially do that every day.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Hits the sweetspot for me

So driving twenty miles in a vehicle with a range six times that would give you range anxiety?

You must be fun in a petrol car... Oh no, the needle isn't resting on the "full" stop, I need to fill up...

John Robson Silver badge

25 minutes... when my commute was last that by car (from a town across rural roads to the edge of another city) I started cycling.

It took about 6 months to get reasonably fit, and in that time the journey time dropped from ~55 minutes to ~30, barely more than my car driving colleagues (one of whom lived in the same town I did).

It's not an option for everyone, but it did allow us to drop to being a one car family, which has worked very nicely. cars are expensive things to run.

John Robson Silver badge

Because urban != London.

I agree that this makes no sense in London, but there are plenty of towns where there is no reasonable public transport option for many people - and it is much more pleasant to be enclosed when it's raining.

I'd really like to have the time and money to put together a velomobile with decent battery assistance - they are incredibly efficient vehicles, and starting from a velo rather than a car (even a bubble car) is going to end up with a more efficient vehicle - and they have kept up with modern materials and methods, so there is less to change anyway.

The issue is deciding what version of registration etc you want to go for - I think I'd target the quadricycle/tricycle legislation to really keep weight down, but allow (effectively) unlimited electrical power, and not require a motorbike helmet.

'Please download in Microsoft Excel': Meet the tech set to monitor IT performance across central UK government

John Robson Silver badge

Seems reasonable to me - better than spaffing 20 billion on a unified web interface that won't be delivered until 2039, and then won't actually support dates past the 32 bit "issue".

APNIC: Big Tech's use of carrier-grade NAT is holding back internet innovation

John Robson Silver badge

Re: I've said it before and I'll say it again

You have an allocated area of memory for an eight bit number... you put in 254, then add one, then add one... what will the computer do.

11111110 -> 11111111 -> ????????

It might crash, if it has decent memory bounds protections.

More likely it will add one and you end up with 00000000 in your eight bits, and a 1 written just before them - i.e. an overflow bug.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: I've said it before and I'll say it again

There are some "reserved" spaces which we could use here... but the difficulty is what do you do when your address isn't a "valid, routable" address, but just indicates you should use IPvX?

Because there isn't an invalid IPv4 address, you can't put 256 into an octet, you just wrote zero, and overwrote someone else's data somewhere.

Tesla driver charged with vehicular manslaughter after deadly Autopilot crash

John Robson Silver badge

I think the (erroneous) point was that any attempt to reduce damage is only worth it if it completely eliminates all damage.

aka. Auto braking that only saves lives and reduces damage isn't worth having if you still scratch the paint on your bumper.

John Robson Silver badge

But at the same time if it brakes assuming ice all the time then it will never be enabled.

I can't recall where I read the research that a significant proportion (maybe even the majority) of rear end collisions could have been avoided had the driver pressed the brake pedal harder than they did (not faster, just harder) - hence various cars now having an emergency brake detection system based on the profile of coming off the go pedal and onto the stop pedal.

In any event doing *some* braking is far better, particularly for those outside the vehicle, than doing none.

John Robson Silver badge

No it says the ability to reproduce, in diagrammatic form, the position and relative speeds of all vehicles around you on a multilane road - from an absolute zero baseline - improves over the course of the first twenty seconds.

Whilst I would like to suggest that the zero baseline is not a realistic scenario I observe people driving who have said zero baseline as a constant state.

John Robson Silver badge

You need to know what's ahead of you pretty fast, but that's only a couple of seconds at worst.

Everything else helps, but isn't essential.

If you think it takes more than twenty seconds to gain awareness of what's ahead of you then I shudder to think how infrequently you check your mirrors.

In an emergency what's ahead of you is basically all that matters, to a lesser extent anything right next to you might be useful (if braking won't be sufficient then steering is a distant second best option)

John Robson Silver badge

26 seconds?

What, from being asleep maybe.

John Robson Silver badge

"It has, however, nearly >caused< an accident (unexpected breaking can do that - especially if the vehicle behind is a motorbike). "

No - the following vehicle has nearly caused an accident.

Although if your car breaks then that's a reasonable cause for an accident. Braking however is something that you should always be leaving space to allow the vehicle in front of you to brake.

John Robson Silver badge

Mine doesn't do that - and certainly doesn't "yank the wheel" out of anyone's hands... it's enough to hold the lane easily, though I suspect a reasonably sized pothole would be interpreted as too much steering input causing it to relinquish control.

I have the forward collision warning set to it's most conservative setting, so it does whine at me a few times a month (usually when the car ahead is turning off the road onto a road I can see to be clear).

But when it does decide to brake... it will run straight to ABS level braking with no other reaction time.

I've never put myself that late... but it is also designed to minimise damage, not to completely prevent it.

Google sours on legacy G Suite freeloaders, demands fee or flee

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Bit of a faff

You could always set up a dumb forwarder to a gmail account and use the "send as" option...

Tesla Full Self-Driving videos prompt California's DMV to rethink policy on accidents

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Two Teslas

Nope...

TSRGD2002 Part 1, Section 5, Regulation 43(2):

Where the road marking shown in diagram 1001.2 has been placed in conjunction with light signals, “stop line” in relation to those light signals means—

(a)the first stop line, in the case of a vehicle (other than a pedal cycle proceeding in the cycle lane) which has not proceeded beyond that line; or

(b)the second stop line, in the case of a vehicle which has proceeded beyond the first stop line or of a pedal cycle proceeding in the cycle lane.

I agree that most cyclists quite reasonably ignore this idiotic legislation, but that's what the law actually says.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Two Teslas

"The thing that annoys me is the acceptance that cyclists can just bundle down the left of whatever vehicle they choose. Quite why the Highway Code (and associated laws) don't tell them to never go down the left of a vehicle indicating left I don't know. Maybe the authors want dead cyclists."

No sane cyclist would - unfortunately years of farcility design have tried to force that decision on cyclists.

Take a look at the legislation around the advance cycle boxes at traffic lights. I have one near me where the access into it (via the cycle gutter) is on the far left, so even if I want to turn right I have to access it and then cut across multiple lanes of traffic.. and the traffic lights for straight ahead could of course turn green at any point during that pointless manoeuvre. All they needed to do was make an exception for pedal cycles - don't need to stop at the first line, still required to stop before the second line.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: "FSD is now available to all Tesla owners, who are willing to fork over $12,000 for it. ."

There was quite a substantial amount of R&D that went into the battery and motor technologies alone.

To suggest that you are paying more than double the representative cost of the car is rather far fetched.

Buy 'em by the punnet: Raspberry Pi offers RP2040 chips in bulk

John Robson Silver badge

Brilliant little devices.

Have one doing lighting systems...

Google and Facebook's top execs allegedly approved dividing ad market among themselves

John Robson Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Firefox and uBlock

That's what a hosts file is for isn't it?

Federal Communications Commission proposed stricter rules on how telco carriers should report data breaches

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Wait, what?

"We take the security of our customers as our top priority.".. for it's so easy to sell to so many people at the same time

Open source maintainer threatens to throw in the towel if companies won't ante up

John Robson Silver badge

Re: There's something I don't get

Even if companies were so incentivised... the dependency tree makes it non trivial.

Someone suggested github channel membership, which could "automatically" look at dependencies, and that doesn't seem like an awful idea.

Software engineer jailed for 2 years after using RATs and crypters to steal underage victims' intimate pics

John Robson Silver badge

In no way detracting from the offense

What is up with our education of youngsters that so many of them have taken sexually explicit images of themselves (?)

Secure boot for UK electric car chargers isn't mandatory until 2023 – but why the delay?

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Petrol provides more energy per £ than mains electricity

95% is probably ambitious, although depending on your area and driving style you might get quite a boost from regenerative braking (not seen a petrol car refill it's tank when slowing down or going downhill).

From above...

"1 litre of petrol provides 34.2 MJ (9.5kWh)"

9.5kWh is enough to provide ~38 miles of typical EV driving, that's equivalent to 144 mpg (call that three times a typical vehicle):

And the cost of that travel is:

~£4.35 for petrol (average cost £1.45, but you only go 1/3rd the distance)

~£4.25 for the rather expensive InstaVolt chargers

~£2.85 for GridServe charging

~£0.90 for a fairly typical home charger

~£0.47 for Octopus Go users (5p overnight rate)

ICE engines in cars are so inefficient that burning the oil in a power station (~40%) and transmitting it across the grid is still more efficient than burning petrol directly at point of use (and that ignores the cost of refining, transporting, and pumping the petrol).

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Secure boot is going where?

Yes - it was a complete mess, but the number of chargers without a contactless payment point has plummeted to pretty close to zero in the last 12 months or so.

Gridserve have really helped there.

Some of the low power pod point chargers still use a website or an app (and have well named chargers so it's easy to type in the unique code for your charger)... can't recall any others I've been at which don't support contactless in a long while.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Solution to car charger issues...

Less stupid than it sounds... would at least ensure that the chargers got a visit once in a while.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Petrol provides more energy per £ than mains electricity

Stupid time limit on editing posts...

Second link said 200cl, I failed to replace it later.

The report did state 1/6th gallon, and that was the number I used.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Petrol provides more energy per £ than mains electricity

"UK average electricity cost is arond 18p/kWh"

Erm, and that has what to do with the price of fish?

There are two important rates for an EV driver:

- Your overnight rate (usually <10p)

- The service station rate (26p/kWh at PodPoint, 30p/kWh for Gridserve, up to 45p for InstaVolt). I'm ignoring ionity and tesla since they are mostly closed networks, or at least designed to be)

Those expensive rates convert to 6.5p/mile, 7.5p/mile, 11.25p/mile.

It is vanishingly rare that you would use any other rate.

And when you do use a service station charger, you are only doing so on the "second leg" and onwards of a long journey. I have a journey which is two complete charges of the battery in my car in the middle of winter, so two stops make it nice and easy (and coordinates rather well with loo breaks etc).

Start full, arrive empty - so we needed 1 full battery at service station rates. Recharge at destination, might that will take a couple of nights if you're limited to a three pin socket, then do the same on the way home.

That's then a "long journey" cost of <20p/kWh or 5p/mile.

Petrol at 50mpg will get you 13.2 miles for £1.45 (https://www.confused.com/petrol-prices) for 11p/mile (i.e. about the same as the rather expensive, but conveniently located, instavolt facilities).

If you get the cheapest in the country then you can save a penny... 9.8p/mile, up to a service station at 15p/mile.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Petrol provides more energy per £ than mains electricity

4kW sounds alot, but it's peanuts compared with driving, and they won't be running at full power for very long or you'd overheat (and the car would already be at temperature when you arrive at a traffic jam). Even at full power then in an hour you'd reduce your range by a nominal 16 miles.

First google hit suggests up to half a gallon an hour for an idling ICE, which feels absurd...

200cl looks more reasonable (2004 paper using 1.6l ford engine, reported by Engineering Explained YT channel) - that's ~1/6th of a gallon, so you use 8 miles of range an hour in a nominal 50mpg ICE vehicle.

And heat pumps exist... most cars nowadays have them (AC is just a heat pump) - they just need configuring to use in either direction (don't know why all EVs don't do this) - that significantly reduces the heating load required, from an already fairly low standpoint.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Petrol provides more energy per £ than mains electricity

Heating and lights are really low power - the real change is the efficiently of the battery at running temperatures - which is why better, more expensive, models thermally manage the battery, using heat pumps...

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Secure boot is going where?

"Depending on exactly whose chargers you are using, this is already exactly how things work. Someone's got to pay for the juice, and that usually means you signing up to someone's app and logging in."

Or more typically you swiping a card (or phone) as you would any other card transaction.

Robotic arm on China's space station does a demo, swings out 20 degrees and back while holding cargo ship

John Robson Silver badge

Re: @spireite - That load has a mass

"According to state-sponsored media China Global Television Network (CGTN), the robotic arm, which can lift objects with a mass of up to 20 tonnes, had swung back and forth by 20˚."

Not sure how you decide whether you are lifting or lowering something when in orbit.

John Robson Silver badge

Not weightless just all in freefall...

About 90% of it's earth surface "normal" weight in fact.

IT labor rights group files complaint against HCL, claiming it's clawing back bonuses

John Robson Silver badge

Re: "1.7 lakhs (US$2,300)"

A grand quantity of product is generally just "a lot", and is archaic at best.

The quality might have been grand - but that's an alternative definition

John Robson Silver badge

Re: "1.7 lakhs (US$2,300)"

Three downvotes and not a single counter example?

From limited research grand in terms of a currency indicator was coined in the US, not the UK, as $1000, and was then imported back to the UK, keeping the numerical value - apparently it was used outside the context of currency in the 40's and 50's... but I don't recall ever hearing it (grand as an indicator of a number) outside the context of currency.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: "1.7 lakhs (US$2,300)"

Is it? I've never heard it used outside the context of currency.

You wouldn't say a dozen without specifying the currency, or a gross. But a fiver/tenner is an explicitly currency, as is a grand or a monkey.

The James Webb Space Telescope has only gone and deployed its primary mirror

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Obligatory

Newly discovered L2 dust cloud...

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Obligatory

18 primaries to adjust

John Robson Silver badge
Boffin

Obligatory

Where's Webb?

We have a telescope... now to make sure it can focus and detect photons.

UK government tool to monitor its legacy application estate is… LATE

John Robson Silver badge

Why

Does a system to track legacy IT need to be dynamic... surely it's just a case of maintaining a list with each having a planning process for replacement.

Of course if you want a system to track all IT systems, then that might need to be dynamic...

Feeling virtuous with a good old paperback? Well, don't. Switching to traditional media does not improve mood

John Robson Silver badge

Re: books vs screens

I now basically exclusively read on an e-reader... Having the ability to bump the font size is really valuable.

Mozilla founder blasts browser maker for accepting 'planet incinerating' cryptocurrency donations

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Expanding horizons and equations

As a temp I took the first.last@ combo at a company many moons ago. 6 hours later (TZ difference) a permie joined and ended up with first.last2@ since we shared names exactly.

I did offer to switch, but since I was in the IT office they wouldn't hear of it.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Expanding horizons and equations

"employee number hash codes."

You're an optimist... those are just the employee ID from the payroll system.

India says: Xiaomi the $88m in missing import taxes, please

John Robson Silver badge

Re: "the company could remotely enable censorship tools"

The rest of the world approves, but want to be the ones that decide on the censorship.

It takes more clicks to reject their cookies than accept them, so France fines Facebook and Google over €200m

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Reject all

Does it have configurable exclusions for sites which require login tokens to be retained?

Did you look up? New Year's Day boom over Pittsburgh was exploding meteor, says NASA

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Pedant Alert!

Thanks - I was pretty confident that fluid dynamics breaks down at that sort of speed - which possibly does prevent anything so coherent as a sonic boom.

I (idly) wonder whether that's a feature of the transition from supersonic to hypersonic... I don't imagine the underlying physics changes much from Mach 20 to Mach 100, although having any projectile survive at those higher speeds might make for a challenging testing regime.