Posts by ChrisC

Re: Exactly what destroyed the UK car industry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry_in_the_United_Kingdom#Assembly_plants

There's still a LOT of vehicles being built in the UK, and a lot of vehicles built for "UK" manufacturers (at least ones that the average person on the street would think of as being UK, regardless of what their actual ownership is - e.g. JLR...) so unless your definition of "UK car industry" is so narrow that you're referring specifically to a) cars vs any type of vehicle, b) cars built in the UK, AND c) cars built in the UK by manufacturers under UK ownership, then you're somewhat off the mark in suggesting we don't have much of a "UK car industry" any more...

Re: I see this everywhere

"Brilliant. Simply, effing brilliant. /s"

I had much the same conclusion about the choice of colour scheme for the centre console on the OHs old Ford Galaxy - silver-grey buttons with red backlighting. During the daytime, the ambient light illuminating the cabin meant it was trivially easy to make out the symbols because they were nice and dark against the light background, but at night...

At this point, some readers will be going "yeah, at night, what's the problem?", whilst others will be nodding their heads and going "yeah, they didn't think about colour vision deficient drivers there did they"

Because, to those readers in the former grouping, I should explain that as someone with red/green colour vision deficiencies, I see red things rather less vibrantly than someone with normal colour vision, which means that what to you would look like a bright red symbol against a dark background, looks to me like a rather dark red symbol against a dark background. Which, when you're scanning the controls trying to find, say, the one for demisting the windscreen, makes the task rather harder than it ought to be...

Re: Main B Bus undervolt

And comparing the film dialogue to the actual mission control recordings can be a jarring exercise, given how the dialogue switches from being a verbatim copy of what was actually said, to then going off onto a flight of the scriptwriters fancy, before returning right on cue to the real world again. Mind you, what's even more of a jarring realisation from the recordings is realising just how much of a combined team effort it was across all of the mission control teams, whilst anyone familiar only with the film adaptation of the story would be entirely forgiven for thinking the entire mission was handled by Gene Krantz and his team.

Re: "the civil aviation sector of terrorist Russia"

"I suspect that Boeing and Airbus each produce more aircraft each week than any given Russian manufacturer produces in a year"

Exact figures aren't easy to come by, but based on what's available (for airliners) it seems that the weekly output of Boeing and Airbus combined equals the annual output of all Russian manufacturers, so you're definitely in the right ballpark there...

Re: Tat

What are you doing to those poor mice? Ever since Microsoft started getting a bit funky with their Intellimouse designs (early-mid 2000's) I've standardised on Logitech mice across all the fleet of PCs I administer at home, and without fail every single one of them has provided excellent servivce over however many years they've (so far) been in use. Not had any fail on me - the oldest is now 19 years old and still going strong, and even the youngest is coming up on 2 years of service without any issues.

And since I stopped being able to get hold of (for a price I'd be willing to pay) either genuine or good enough copies of the Dell SK8115 keyboard, I've also switched over to Logitech K120s for home and work, which suit my requirements to a tee and also give me years of solid service, needing to be replaced only once enough of the keycaps have worn away that anyone else trying to use the keyboard struggles - usually after about 5 years of daily use, which doesn't seem like an unreasonably short lifespan for something costing a tenner plus loose change (or not even that if you pick one up when they're on sale).

So far the only Logitech product I've had to replace due to it failing entirely was the first headset work provided just before we went into the first lockdowns, due to one of the cores within the USB cable failing after a couple of years of daily use (plus being thrown into my laptop bag a couple of times a week once we shifted over to hybrid working). That was a touch disappointing longevity-wise, but it's also been a clear outlier in terms of my experience of using quite a few of their products over the last 2 decades.

Re: Heaviside brought back memories

His green [1] and purple bricks (aka Engineering Maths and Further Engineering Maths, 3rd and 2nd editions respectively) got me through my Electronics Degree despite the best efforts of the maths lecturers [2] to make me think I'd forgotten everything I knew about maths inbetween finishing my A-levels and starting at uni... As such, they've earned a coveted spot on the small bookshelf I was able to squeeze into the corner of my home office.

[1] or possibly some other colour in that general region of the colourspace mapping - the part of my brain that tries to warn me when my colourblindness may be more responsible for what I'm seeing than the actual colours of the things I'm looking at is ringing alarm bells as I look over at the bookshelf now...

[2] most of them at least, wasn't until some point during my 2nd year when one of them started using electronics-based examples (as opposed to the mech.eng ones the earlier lecturers preferred) that things started to click again in my mind. Wonder if the mech.eng students who were also present in the lectures had a similar but reversed sense of understanding as things went from being phrased in terms they were familiar with to terms they weren't...

Re: "It was a super tough decision"

Err, yes, that's what I was getting at (though from the perspective of C and other more widely used languages which also use ! for that purpose). Hence "super tough" -> "!tough" -> "easiest thing ever", "super easy" -> "!easy" -> "impossibly difficult" etc...

Re: Wrong security certificate?

Assuming Rivian aren't so bad at this stuff that their OTA mechanism will blindly accept incorrectly-signed packages, then could it be that the OTA package itself was signed correctly, and the problem is that the contents of the package was *both* the firmware image AND the corresponding certificate, such that the update installed both the new image and the new cert at the same time without first checking one against the other due to a presumption that, as the package they arrived in WAS signed properly, the contents of said package MUST be correct. Right. Riiiiight???

JLR did something similar last year with Land Rovers - https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/land-rover/359090/land-rover-buyers-refused-delivery-unless-they-agree-sell-clause

Re: Gymnastics

OTOH, if the office space is significantly underutilised and at risk of either closing entirely or needing to increase charges/reduce service levels to its existing tenants in order to remain viable, then having someone like AWS park themselves there and providing a guaranteed level of income to the space provider could well be seen as beneficial to the smaller tenants...

"Hillingdon council have built right up to their border, and this bit of greenbelt land is the only thing preventing London from expanding into Buckinghamshire."

No, it's stopping urbanised Bucks spreading far enough to join up with urbanised London - as you note, the urbanisation stops at the edge of LB Hillingdon (which is also, at this point on the map, the edge of Greater London itself), so it's the boundary between Hillingdon and Bucks which is stopping London expanding any further, not the greenbelt status of this plot of land...

Re: Assumptions

"As passengers on the London Underground in summer will observe, the ability of the ground to absorb excess heat is not at all good."

Except that if you go back to the early years of the underground network (and remember that the earliest deep level tube lines have now been in near constant operation for over 100 years), it WAS noticeably cooler down there than at surface level, to the point that it was actively advertised as a benefit during the summer period. So provided you have a means of keeping the ground temperatures low enough (such as via forced extraction of that heat via a GSHP setup) to maintain the desired heat transfer away from the thing you want to keep cool, then using the ground as a heat sink makes a lot of sense.

Re: Typical Microsoft

Ah yes, had a fat battery on mine too... Still got mine somewhere, though no longer useable - the screen succumbed to the "one drop too many" syndrome :-/

Re: four decades on ...

ISTR using that on the Amiga

Re: first-class travel experience was considerably inferior

As someone fortunate enough to have had first-hand experience of what flying on Concorde was like, and unfortunate enough to have first-hand experience of what flying on RyanAir et al is like, I can say with 100% confidence that attempting to recreate the former by subjecting yourself to the latter will give you a very, VERY, inaccurate impression of just how sublime the experience of flying on Concorde was actually like.

Because it's not just about how wide your seat is or how far out you can stretch your legs (you don't even have to splurge on a business/first class ticket to better that aspect of the Concorde experience, even just a premium economy seat on BA or Virgin Atlantic will give you a more comfortable seating position than Concorde was able to provide), it's the WHOLE package - how you're treated by the airline pre, mid and post flight, and how you react physically and mentally to the stresses of the flight. And without any shadow of doubt, Concorde was in a class of its own there.

Re: Easy to work out costs.

"It will tell you how many kilowatts the device consumed."

No, it'll only tell you how much power the device *may* pull from the mains when operating as designed - barring simple devices like electric fires, kettles etc, where the maximum consumption is also, more or less, the average consumption whilst switched on, and where therefore the figure on the label would be useful for calculating running costs, anyone following your advice will end up massively overestimating the power consumption/costs of their stuff.

Re: Roll your own ... everything

"That calculation is hard"

Depends on where you sit relative to the problem the lack of investment is causing...

In a former employment, which had absolutely no shortage of cash to throw at things, but also had absolutely no concept of the differing requirements of R&D engineers vs anyone else for whom a PC was an integral part of their daily working life, I distinctly remember spending all of about 10 minutes jotting down a quick list of all the time my under-specced PC was costing me, and thus the company, due to having to wait for it to do stuff that it really ought to have been able to do far faster if only it'd been configured with the appropriate amount of memory for the tools I was running on it, as opposed to the appropriate amount for running the generic set of tools that everyone in the company was presumed to be using - Word, Excel, Lotus Notes (shudder) etc.

Took the list to my manager, who looked it over for all of about a minute before approving the necessary memory upgrade.

So it's not necessarily that the calculations are hard, it's more a question of making sure the people who actually know how to do the calculations correctly are involved in the process, rather than leaving it to someone so far removed from the end users that they have no concept of what impact their decisions are having on them.

Working for that employer taught me a valuable lesson re the inability to assume that a company which has the ability to spend money on equipping its employees to do their jobs effectively, also has the ability to understand that its in its best interests to do so. It also taught me that working for a huge well funded employer, with loads of obvious staff perks (free meals, private healthcare etc.) isn't necessarily going to be as enjoyable as working for a smaller company who can't afford to throw money at employment packages but at least treats you more like an individual than merely another entry in their HR database...

Video encoding, 3D rendering, code build/analysis of multi-file projects where you could allocate one core per file... Sure, some of these can now be offloaded to a GPU if you've got a suitable one available as well, provided your application supplier has gone down that route, but there's still a lot of stuff that remains firmly wedded to CPU processing which could therefore take advantage of more cores.

Re: Little guy

I think your interpretation of "shoestring budget" is somewhat misaligned with the interpretation intended by the author of this article, because I really, REALLY, don't think El Reg would be irresponsible enough to publish an article which was encouraging people in such a genuinely bad financial position to be making discretionary purchases.

So in the context of an article published on a tech website and aimed at a readership that isn't that close to financial disaster, I feel somewhat comfortable to assume that "shoestring budget" was supposed to be interpreted as "someone who DOES have disposable income to spare on buying new tech, just not so much that they feel comfortable pushing out the boat to buy higher end pieces of kit, and might therefore appreciate being informed about the existence of some lower-cost-but-still-fairly-capable kit"...

Re: So answer this.

"I know of somebody who used a satnav to get from his house to the local Tesco - about 2 miles…."

Actively using it to help him navigate there, or just running in the background to provide real-time updates on traffic conditions? Probably 99% of the time my Waze app has spent running has been during drives where I don't need to be told how to get where I'm going, but I would like to know if I might need to divert off my preferred route due to heavy traffic, accidents etc...

Re: The three-finger salute

Ugh, this reminds me of a problem I had trying to play the otherwise utterly sublime Amiga conversion of DI's Tornado flight sim - the sheer number of commands meant that several of them required a two-key combo to trigger, and because the sim had been originally developed for the PC, the mapping of commands onto the keyboard had been done with the PC keyboard layout in mind, such that all of these combos were easy to enter one-handed, allowing all of the commands to be used without the need to take your other hand off the stick.

When they did the Amiga conversion however, they overlooked that the Amiga keyboard layout is subtly different to the PC one, which led to one of these combos requiring the pressing of two keys that were almost as far apart from one another as it was possible to get on the keyboard - if you were looking to deliberately choose a two-key combo that would be as difficult as possible to enter one-handed, there wouldn't have been many other candidates beside this one. To make matters worse, the command triggered by this combo was one that you really couldn't avoid using mid-flight, and when you're flying a low-level strike mission, having to take your hand off the stick even for a second in order to enter the command two-handed was sometimes a bit of an embuggerance...

Re: So.......2G will be here for while and 3G will disappear almost immediately...

Well, apart from all the ones using the first PAYG SIM the installation tech was able to obtain on the day the kit was installed or taken over from the previous maintenance company...

Re: "Stealthiness"

Not sure if we're remembering the same thing here, but this is the claim I recall being made about re-using existing RF signals in this way:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1309952/Mobile-telephone-masts-can-detect-stealth-bombers.html

Re: MAX anyone?

That too, but the fact the Airbus team actually put in the effort up front to properly consider the long-term strategy for the design and make it happen pretty much seamlessly over the years, really shouldn't be glossed over.

Whatever the reason for it though, attempting to imply any sort of Boeing-like foul play here was out of order from the OP, and their downvotes entirely deserved.

"makes me wonder how fast or far those things could go"

Those things were Honda UNI-CUB β's - https://global.honda/en/newsroom/news/2013/c131114eng.html says max speed of 6 km/h and max range of 6km...