* Posts by Andy 73

685 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2009

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Third time is almost the charm for SpaceX's Starship

Andy 73 Silver badge

> At first it managed to maintain intended attitude (tiles-protected belly first) well into the altitude where plasma builds up.

Not in the stream I saw. There appeared to be continuous rotation before and throughout the door testing that did not appear to be deliberate or controlled.

Throughout reentry, the tiles rotated in and out of alignment at around 1 RPM. The fins went to maximum deflection a number of times suggesting that they were attempting to stop the spin.

Combine the loss of the booster, rather shaky door demonstration, odd failure to show anything around propellant transfer and complete absence of re-ignition test, and it looks like SpaceX have a lot of work to do. Musk's absence during the proceedings suggest he does not have great confidence at this stage... the clock continues to tick.

Brit chip industry wonders if UK budget will put its money where its silicon is

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: “lack of funding to support later stage growth … to scale up and become globally competitive”

This is a nonsense argument based on the psychology of bullying - "If we don't form a special club together to keep everyone out, they'll be mean to us".

Note particularly that the argument is made only when needed - we rely on foreign countries for fossil fuels and energy generation. We rely on them for fresh fruit, coffee and a good portion of the food on our table. We rely on them for mobile phones, working satellites, TV screens. We rely on them to provide a vast amount of our manufactured goods. We rely on them for rare earth minerals and metals. We rely on them to provide low cost, dirty labour in places we don't have to look too closely at. We rely on them for most of our renewable energy infrastructure.

Where are the calls to create "fortress Britain" and save ourselves from these dependencies? Strangely, the concerns about owning the means of production are seen as completely different to the concerns about immigration - it's funny how we draw the lines according to our political leanings.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: If our chips are that good...

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. If the UK is "25% poorer" due to the decline in Sterling, then it's 25% cheaper for the global market to invest in Britain - which do you want it to be?

As it is, FDI in the UK appears to be broadly the same, though we've had massive volatility over the last decade for some very obvious reasons that are global, not domestic in origin. It's also worth reiterating that contrary to popular opinion, manufacturing has not gone away in the UK, but in common with most Western countries, services have massively grown over the last few decades.

Of course poor countries are developing - that's where the cheap labour is. It's what gave China decades of growth (that's now slowing as their labour costs and quality of life increases), and what is driving industries to India and South America. The West will not see growth like that in our lifetimes - which is why investors keep pumping money into meme stocks and technology bubbles. Expecting otherwise is ridiculous.

Nor should it be surprising that the UK is struggling, when most of our political classes have a poor grasp of economics and just want to argue over minor readjustments in the budget. If you want to see serious growth, you need to encourage an environment where many options can be tried without investors and companies having to risk their existence each time. That 'support for risk' is what has allowed America to dominate the tech industry. Conversely, the tendency for political groups in Europe and the UK to want to tightly control the direction of investment and innovation is one strong reason for our relatively poor performance. It turns out politicians are both slow and ineffective when it comes to picking up tech trends.

Unfortunately, as usual the discussion is framed in terms of how many handouts can be directed to the right people rather than how the wider economic environment can support increased activity. In that sense, Brexit Britain is a myth - in or out of the EU, our environment for innovation has not changed due to the usual institutional feet of clay. Arguing over tax breaks and handouts is missing the point that we need more change, not less.

FAA gives SpaceX a bunch of homework to do before Starship flies again

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Moon landing

Quote of the day "Several, though most of those exploded".

And yet again - the recent landers have shown that zero lateral velocity on a remote body with very mobile regolith is not as easy as neatly marked, perfectly flat landing platforms surrounded by telemetry and sensors. Or do you think calculating relative velocity can be done entirely on-board with no external reference?

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Moon landing

I'm not sure if you've fully grasped the physics here.

3 tonnes of mass (random figure for illustration) around the nose of Starship (50 meters up) has the same rotational inertia as it does on Earth. 20 tonnes of fuel at the bottom has one sixth the weight (and therefore exerts 1/6th the stabilising force). In essence, Starship acts like a rocket six times taller when it comes to trying to balance it on the moon. That's exactly the problem the two recent landers have had, and they didn't go for the Buck Rogers 'tall thin tube' design.

IMs design and learnings have nothing to do with SpaceX's own design - other than to point out that this is a non trivial task, where basic design can make things significantly easier or harder. Pointing out that the Starship geometry is intrinsically less stable (no matter what the distribution of fuel is) is not to say they cannot do it, just that they have chosen a design that makes the task more difficult. How many times has SpaceX successfully landed Starship on Earth so far?

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Moon landing

Great appeal to authority there. It would carry more weight if two groups of exactly rocket scientists hadn't both independently failed to land rockets upright on the moon.

Turns out some jobs are difficult - who knew?

Andy 73 Silver badge

Moon landing

Should a Starship ever make it to the moon, the plan appears to be to land it upright on bare regolith. Given the height of the thing, and a large number of engines that would probably not be very happy eating moon dust, the recent Intuitive Machines' landing failure makes this particular idea seem very... brave.

Apple's Titan(ic) iCar project is dead as self-driving dream fails to materialize

Andy 73 Silver badge

Made semse

It made sense for them to be in that space - they have custom silicon, some of the top industrial design and manufacturing experience and a presence in a lot of people's daily lives.

On top of that they have the problem of "what to spend the profits on". For a company the size of Apple, the only bets to make are big ones. They can't be seen as dabbling in small inconsequential markets (which is a shame because they could make a difference) - only stuff of global significance. Then it doesn't matter if the project succeeds or not, it's a tax write off anyway and there might be some useful patents and discoveries along the way.

That said, sustaining such a project needs an evangelist, which is subject to the usual rotation of senior management and depends on being able to demonstrate at least some progress. If, with all their skills in silicon, cameras and vision processing, they couldn't see the way (no pun intended) to some sort of product, then it's time to pull the plug.

Of course the question increasingly becomes: If others aren't even hanging on to see their competitors launch a product, is this evidence that level 5 autonomy is beyond our ability to produce? Even if you can't do it yourself, if you've got presence in the market and know that your competitor is going to launch something that works then it makes sense to hang on - you might be able to ride on the coat tails of their technical implementation and you'll almost certainly get the investor buzz of being in the right space. From this angle it certainly looks like Apple don't think Tesla (Waymo, Cruise and the others) are a serious threat, which is a bit of a problem for companies that want to be the "Apple of cars".

Google sends Gemini AI back to engineering to adjust its White balance

Andy 73 Silver badge

The irony..

The irony is that if this were actual artificial intelligence, rather than a statistical parrot trick, then these "AI Tools" would be able to understand the context of their responses and adjust them according to some wider social expectations (don't give out bomb making instructions) and target audience.

Instead we get crude hacks attempting to bias the entire output towards whatever is the social expectations of the day - which is of course a problem when asking for historical accuracy.

Not so much a question of "you can't handle the truth!", as "you have no concept of truth in the first place, just probabilities"

Europe's data protection laws cut data storage by making information-wrangling pricier

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Law of unintended consequences

Nope, I'm saying that an overly vague and poorly considered regulation turns out to be both ineffective and expensive - achieving few of its stated goals.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Law of unintended consequences

So you make "doing business" 20% more expensive in an attempt to reduce competition from the big American companies... how's that working out?

Or alternatively, this is about privacy and encouraging users to have control and receive value for their data... again, how's that working out?

This has basically shifted revenue over to an entire class of compliance officers and consultants that spend most of their time trying to reduce functionality.

1.7 million for an SMB? Just wait until they add in compliance for AI regulations.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Musk? Who trusts this guy?

From what I understand, Blue Origin are contracted for a separate mission that's due to land some four years after SpaceX's attempt. Given Musk's special ability to miss deadlines (and the fact that there's less that two years to SpaceX's scheduled moon landing and they haven't even got a non-explodey rocket), it's entirely possible that Blue Origin will beat SpaceX to the moon.

Blue Origin appears to be taking a more incremental and more traditional route to development - which means they don't get quite the hype cycle SpaceX currently receives, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are behind their schedule, or incapable of getting there in time for their contracted mission.

Certainly the rivalry between the two owners means that both companies will be throwing everything they have at the problem. Place your bets as to what will stick.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Musk? Who trusts this guy?

That may be the case, but Musk has sufficient control of the general direction of SpaceX (committing to contracts, general process of development, business direction), that he still appears quite capable of introducing uncertainty, if not complete rabbit holes.

Certainly the solution they have committed to for Artemis appears to be extremely poorly architected and planned, and the payments for development are... interesting. Regardless of how clever the folks are at SpaceX, they've been put in a position where they may be regarded as the single point of failure for a hugely (and possibly unnecessarily) complex mission, required to solve too many novel problems to meet the deadlines and without sufficient budget to complete the development process without huge losses.

Musk is not just a figurehead at SpaceX - he controls the money, and with it their obligations and overall direction. I'm pretty sure Starship would not have the current architecture (or even exist) without his direct influence.

ANZ Bank test drives GitHub Copilot – and finds AI does give a helping hand

Andy 73 Silver badge

Insert snark here

I've got to do the joke: isn't "Python Expert" an oxymoron, like "Military Intelligence"?

OK, Coding tools can genuinely make a difference, and where you have a write-compile-run loop, even one fewer laps around the circuit can make a significant reduction in time taken. I'm all for tools that improve that.

However, switching regularly between Java/IntelliJ and C++/VisualStudio, I note that the language has a big impact on the ability of the tooling to make useful suggestions and interventions. A strongly typed language with regular conventions and no pre-processor (Java) allows IntelliJ to do some remarkable code generation and refactoring tricks - as a small random example I can write a call to a method that I haven't written yet, and a single keypress will generate that method signature and body in the correct file elsewhere in the project. In C++, it often doesn't even know if a method I've just written actually exists when I try to call it from another class. VisualStudio regularly imposes additional compile cycles just to find out if my code is 'complete'.

In those cases where the language doesn't assist the IDE in making useful suggestions, checks and refactoring options, then I would imagine an AI solution may become more useful in improving poor tooling - though not as an absolute guarantee that the suggestions being made are going to be correct (once more around the compile loop).

But... I may be wrong.

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

Andy 73 Silver badge

Hmmm..

A lot of the early EV hype was based on "these are only going to get better!" - and in the first few years, they did. Better range, better driving experience, better charging, lower costs...

But then, rather than continuing that cycle, the improvements have noticeably slowed. Range is good, but not great (and occasionally, actually lousy). Battery technology has stopped delivering significant weight loss or price reductions. Driving experience is still dominated by the massive weight. Costs are.. not actually magically free as early evangelists claimed. Depreciation is pretty much the same as for any other car.

And the bottom line is that once you go beyond the core market of enthusiastic early adopters willing to pay a premium on an already premium product, you find out that the majority of the market wants a cheap and easy way to get to work and the shops. Worse still, most people live in cities where a car *of any sort* is a less and less attractive option.

Lots of people are emotionally invested in various of the players in the industry, and want to see "winners" and "losers", or magic answers to environmental issues - but the reality is that the incumbents (like Ford and Toyota) and the newcomers (like BYD and Tesla) are going to continue to thrash around trying to beat the laws of physics and exploring new ideas for keeping us mobile for a long while yet. I'll bet good money that battery EVs in the form that are currently being sold and developed will almost certainly not be the dominant "answer" in ten years time.

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

Andy 73 Silver badge

Bog Zech?????

Now that's either a famous Russian chip designer, or a great typo.

Not sure that unionisation will deliver better services and value for end users (remember the car industry of the 70's had effectively gone through a similar growth and stagnation process), but the diagnosis is accurate

The challenge here is scale, which is hard to fight. Whilst the big game studios hire and fire tens of thousands of overworked staff, the indie scene (which isn't paying CEO salaries of tens of millions of dollars) struggles to afford development costs.

Back to the car industry - the collapse in the 70s didn't deliver new car companies in the west, so much as open the door to competition from countries with lower wages and more committed workers.

Missed expectations, zero guidance: Tesla's 'great year' was anything but

Andy 73 Silver badge

The numbers show a halving of the margins that were a key selling point of the stock. They also show growth in revenue dropping to below industry peers. Note this is the industry that Musk has been calling 'legacy' for years. They would be good numbers only if you thought you'd bought into a mid tier auto company, not a disruptive market leader.

They were followed by an earnings call where Musk demonstrated he was completely unprepared for Chinese competition, despite running a factory there for years. He has lost any first mover advantage, with the new model at least two years away, which suggests development has barely started. He's stuck in a price war.

The point of all this is that the current stock price is massively over valued if Tesla is 'just' a car company. Overvalued by orders of magnitude. Investors, professional or otherwise, will not stick with it if it cannot deliver the insane 50% annual growth target that was promised, because nothing about the fundamental economics of the company justifies such a high multiple.

So this isn't about whether Tesla is profitable, is about whether it will be 100x bigger in the future. That's what the share price is concerned with, and what people are beginning to question.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: "focus the team on the launch of the next-generation vehicle"

Damn autocorrect.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: "focus the team on the launch of the next-generation vehicle"

Sinclair was late, usually because he couldn't get manufacturing going fast enough. He rarely announced products that didn't exist.

Musk on the other hand fakes product videos, claims features that don't exist and viscously attacks anyone who calls him out.

I think I preferred Sinclair's approach. He also didn't claim to be saving the planet.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Musk vs. the investor class

Yes, just wait till you find out where your pension was invested...

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

Andy 73 Silver badge

Not just lower quality..

.. search results also appear to be from a smaller, more predictable pool of sites.

Google has stopped being a discovery mechanism, a way to find new information related to your query. Instead, it serves up sites that are likely well known. The cause is the same, but the end result is there are fewer reasons to go to Google, and more to ask questions or seek answers on forums and social media.

UK public sector could save £20B by swerving mega-projects and more, claims chief auditor

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: IR35

Spoken like someone with a massive (and uninformed) chip on their shoulder.

Under IR-35, as a contractor I was still paying significantly more tax than the permanent staff I worked alongside. If you find that unfair, you are legally allowed to volunteer additional money to HMRC if you like. Somehow I doubt you will.

As it is, the IR-35 rules do not prevent those who wish to abuse the system from continuing to abuse the system. In addition, those who are "prevented from dodging paying tax" now see a roughly equivalent amount of money diverted to agency profits - so absolutely no-one is winning out on that one. And the costs for companies that want a flexible, specialist workforce has gone up. You can thank IR-35 in part for inflation, and company layoffs.

But, strangely you choose to believe the current government when they claim the system is now somehow "more fair"? Really?

Andy 73 Silver badge

The phrase is "bacon slicing"

Rather than trying to go the whole hog with far reaching projects, the government needs to learn how to "bacon slice" useful systems into existence - delivering piecemeal improvements and functionality that work together, rather than fat, inflexible monoliths that committees and architecture astronauts have spent years planning.

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: The glory days of UK IT

Note that I wasn't saying it was a conscious choice - just that the users in the US converged on a consistent, flexible and shared platform quite a while before Europe did. Still nothing to do with government intervention.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Backwards

"Eventually they'll want to do everything a fully specc'd computer is able to do" (I paraphrase).

That's an argument for giving primary school kids a Unix computer and telling them that eventually they'll be coding in Python, so they'd better learn to download endless libraries. I don't think that's how education should work.

You say that "It can't do that" is off-putting - I'd suggest that so is "Yes it can do that task, but first you have to install these five programs, set up the correct directory structure and install exactly the right versions of these six libraries".

A genuinely educational environment abstracts away as much as possible so the pupil can (a) learn some key concepts without distraction and ideally (b) be rewarded by a positive result. Yes, sure they eventually want to be able to write a full networked game in Unity, but there are a lot of steps along that path that benefit from not exposing them to the full horrors of a modern computer.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Backwards

That, unfortunately is exactly why it isn't in every secondary school in the UK - very few schools want to manage a collection of SD-Cards, SD-card writers and other paraphernalia to deal with "Miss, it's not working". Fewer still want to waste time on a constant upgrade cycle of slightly better releases, security updates and fixes. Even fewer actually understand anything about selecting a release version.

That's ignoring that there is no official "for schools" release (which would ideally drop kids into a robust environment with simple tools ready to teach, rather than a desktop and command prompt).

Again, a cheap Android tablet or even an Arduino gives a more reliable, focussed education platform than a 'easily fixed' Linux computer.

This is a source of some frustration, as I see again and again techies decide something is "educational" based on arbitrary convenience for an experienced developer rather than a practical understanding of the challenges of teaching in a school. Yes, I understand that these are used in code clubs, but this is not an experience that is available without experienced and enthusiastic evangelists. That shouldn't be a prerequisite for an "educational" device.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: The tube

Yes, it certainly would have. Many, many hardware designs were tested out by cobbling together interfaces to 8-bit computers of the time, since most of them exposed pretty much the entire system bus to peripherals. As an example, the Apple II had a whole range of expansion cards that allowed you to try out alternative and sometimes exotic processors and operating systems.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Backwards

I've argued elsewhere that the Pi is not an educational machine - at least in the sense that it has a meaningful presence in the UK curriculum or schools (outside of computer clubs). Our kids have sailed through primary and secondary schools, all the way through A-level computer studies without having once turned on a Pi. That's despite us living in Cambridge.

Whilst Upton has talked about it being "like the BBC", I've always understood that to mean a standalone, easily configured, hardware accessible 'building block' - that turns out to be very useful in industry, hobbyist areas and higher educational establishments where electronic design is relevant. The Pi itself is not actually particularly designed to be a 'computer for schools' - it neither fits the curriculum, nor is it actually a very practical tool for schools that really don't want the hassle of cobbling together a working system from a bunch of parts. Sure, it's cheap - but by the time you've bought monitor, keyboard, cables, mouse and all the rest, it's not very competitive with a boggo Android tablet and hugely less convenient for busy teachers.

It's low cost... but that's about the only side of it that might be considered "for education".

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: The glory days of UK IT

"Pissed away by successive governments"..

Not really, most European countries read the tea-leaves wrong and stuck with oddball personal computers when America was moving wholesale onto the PC standard. Acorn was still pushing RISCOS when it was finally bought out, and many users were still on Amigas, Atari ST's and other long-forgotten machines right into the 90's. None of that was the government's fault, so much as the obsession of UK (and European - hello Nokia) companies to chase "smart ideas" and fragmentation.

We kept trying to out smart people, when what was really needed was a consistent, affordable and compatible experience.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: The tube

I'm not sure it was the presence of the Tube that made the Beeb sell - just that it was the flagship educational machine. The Electron came later when Acorn realised they were missing out on the much larger market Sinclair had captured, but not only was it too late, it also managed to be incompatible and slightly underpowered when directly compared with the top selling Spectrum and C64. The absence of the Tube was not as important as the relatively limited and slower graphics capabilities.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Hmmm..

You can't possibly do this subject justice in the comments section on El-Reg - or even within interesting interviews - there are a lot of nuances and interesting ideas floating about.

There are two competing challenges here. The first is not the 'core processing unit', but the overall delivery mechanism to get 'computing' into the hands of many. The keyboard, display, network and storage that make up a complete working system. That's actually where Sinclair excelled. Where other manufacturers (including the BBC) were using expensive off the shelf components such as mechanical keyboards and floppy drives, Sinclair was pushing the limits of industrial design to come up with lower cost alternatives. Rick Dickinson, the designer behind the Spectrum and many other Sinclair machines came up with revolutionary techniques for delivering a computer that you could plug in and go, for a fraction of the price of any competitor. There are plenty of tales of where Sinclair himself pushed things too far (both in flaky hardware that made it to the consumer, and some of the internal projects that were cheekily referred to as "special Sinclair technology" within the company), but arguably the ZX81 and Spectrum were very close to a sweet spot.

The other challenge is accessible software. Arguably, Acorn didn't quite make it as they were pushed into the education niche, though the BBC stood way above its competitors when it came to a functional language and fledgling disk O/S. Some CP/M machines got closer thanks to the system's ubiquity, but it was IBM that finally achieved the scale that meant every tool could be found on a DOS disk somewhere. Remember though that even with the IBM machines, a simple "get you up and started" BASIC programming language was still around so that users could always write something for themselves. I can't decide if Python is a modern equivalent, or over-exposes new users to the complexity of vast, arcane software ecosystems and tools.

Regardless, we're currently at an interesting stage where there are many systems designed to fit every possible niche, from the Micro:bit to the Pi 400, via ESP-32s and Arduinos. That new ones are being launched on a weekly basis perhaps suggests that we're both benefiting from fragmentation, and perhaps still searching for that sweet spot of innovative, low cost hardware and highly accessible software.

Musk claims that venting liquid oxygen caused Starship explosion

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Eyes on the prize

You might suggest that the guy who has made most of his money from hyping his companies without restraint to private investors who don't know any better deliberately bought Twitter to have control over the largest public forum for hyping his companies. He can make whatever announcements and promises he likes on X, and there's pretty much no-one who can stop him. Convenient, no?

It also appears that he hasn't learned his lesson from PayPal - in the last 24 hours he's announced on X that he needs to double his holding in Tesla before he'd be willing to continue AI development at the company as he apparently doesn't have enough influence. I'm torn between thinking this is a naked cash grab as he's spent all his money on X and drugs, or thinking this is a false ultimatum to excuse abandoning FSD and robot development within Tesla (where he might actually have to deliver a product this decade). It's easier to launch yet another company that can pull in a load of ignorant investors with promises that are at least a decade away than actually make his cars work reliably.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

Andy 73 Silver badge

Lovely

A lovely vignette of the time..

As far as hiring practises go, the biggest problem was (and amazingly still is) knowing how to decide if someone was good for the job. Outside of academia (which was largely above the squalid battles of home computers), there were no qualifications to check, and no easy way to discern if people were capable of doing something that next to no-one had done before. You hired people, put them to the fire and saw whether they melted, exploded or achieved something remarkable. Companies weren't just figuring out how to build computers for the masses, they were figuring out how to be companies.

And these computers are still living on - there are some cracking Z80 kits (and, hiss 6502) out there, that recreate the experience of having a machine over which you have complete and utter control. Some allow you to build out interesting systems to your specific needs, and some allow you to (ahem) play games. Remarkably, quite a bit of new software is being written, from entirely new operating systems to.. yes, ok, games.

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Building software is hard...

The fact that there's rampant corruption in China's construction industry is an entirely separate issue. It makes Westerners feel more comfortable that they're not so much of a "threat". You can go back a decade or so and read similar comments about their automotive industry, which at the time was derided for producing cars with 1970's quality. The reality is that they have a genuinely different culture and we can learn a lot from observing where they are successful when compared with Western industry. And there is no question that they have had a period during which they've transformed their industry and society.

When it comes to problems with our own large scale projects, it does actually help to compare with other different approaches rather than making random (usually self-interested) statements about how "we'd do it better".

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Building software is hard...

It occurs to me that building software per-se is not hard - we really do know how to do this stuff, and there are companies that excel at it.

What is hard is building anything (train tracks, nuclear power stations, ERP systems) where the project spans multiple years and has multiple, changing owners and stakeholders.

The longer a project goes on, and the more it has to accommodate tweaks and changes and budget shifts and new ideas, the more likely it is to fail. Perhaps one reason large infrastructure projects in China are finished at lower cost and significantly faster is that a project mandated by the CCP *does not change* once it has been decided upon.

No feature creep. No changed specifications. No late discovery. No new management with a "better way to do it". No revised budget.

And in particular, no client who believes that because they are a subject expert in their activity, they are also a subject expert in implementing a software system to manage it.

NASA's Artemis Moon missions take a rain check until 2025 and beyond

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: They don't have a clue

Giving the scale of the redesigns between the Starship test launches, I'd struggle to claim anything they currently have is "tested" in any useful sense of the word.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: They don't have a clue

In a previous comment section for the last Artemis update, I was downvoted for suggesting that this whole programme is a mess, and SpaceX just going along with it - hang the consequences.

It seems that for some, SpaceX can do no wrong...

Your pacemaker should be running open source software

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Citation needed on open source software being better over time

Not wishing to be cruel, but "someone who's career is focussed on championing open source encounters a problem that they believe only open source could fix" is not exactly a shocking turn of events.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Hahahahahaha

Note I never claimed closed source is more secure - just pointed out that opening source code up does not magically make it secure, but without question does make it easier for people to look for vulnerabilities. There is an important difference here between the idea of 'security' and 'vulnerable to attack'. I can grep "software that uses library X with newly discovered vulnerability Y" in moments on GitHub.

Equally there is nothing about software being closed source that prevents it from having sane data availability. Clinicians and insurance companies should probably make this a base requirement for any device they approve for their patients. The fact that they don't probably says more about how they think about such devices than the implementation choices of the manufacturers.

The same applies to updates - and I note that a family member with a pacemaker had regular updates on the 'high end' unit she had fitted, and almost none on the 'standard' one - this is entirely under the control of the medics (and, sigh insurance and government) that make selection decisions between devices. Whether or not it's open source is utterly irrelevant.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Hahahahahaha

If you want to know why this is so difficult, take a look at the American medical insurance industry and consider the issue of medical regulation.

You want both security AND the ability to easily pull data from device? You want to prevent hacking AND share all of the code with the world? (No, sharing code does not magically make it secure). You want changes to software not to put people at any increased risk AND have them every three months? You want companies to spend years and billions of dollars not only developing this technology, but also going through the costly process of approval AND have them share all their work in public for free?

That's a lot of contradictory requirements, most of which overlap hugely with regulation, safety, corporate governance, costs and highly specialised workers.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Andy 73 Silver badge

The myth of complexity.

Let's all repeat: "Scale is not complexity".

This is the core myth on which multi billion pound contracts are built. It's not just in government (though they are top of the list) but any large organisation that hasn't actually got the skill to assess what it is that they're trying to achieve (apart from in nice safe corporate speak, laced with a dash of lawyer)

They say: "It must be expensive because it's complex"

You ask: "Why is it complex?"

They say: "Because it's big"

What they mean is they can't actually describe the functions they wish to manage, do not know how to achieve separation of concerns, and cannot comprehend abstraction of their business processes. Add in a large estate to manage and suddenly the only "safe" option is to call in a consultancy firm who speak nice safe corporate speak, laced with a dash of lawyer.

And whilst there are certainly areas where being in the right crowd benefits companies (corruption), it is certainly the case that many organisations willingly sign up to incredibly inefficient and expensive projects because they cannot concieve of any other option. We see this happen in public services because they cannot hide it (forever), but it's also the case in private organisations - who may or may not hush up the hundreds of millions they've lost on a failed modernisation program, or new ERP system.

And in turn that failure of a big project is used to justify the belief that it must be complex - rather than the more depressing admission that a lot of the people commissioning such projects haven't got a clue what they're actually trying to implement.

Kia crashes CES with modular electric vehicle concept

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Standardized

Within manufacturers, this already happens. They're already pretty good at economies of scale. Remember they have been doing this for a hundred years now.

However, people like difference, they like stuff that is specific to their circumstances, budget, environment and needs. If we can't come up with an open source standard for a phone or computer, why would you think we can create an open source standard for a car?

Add in a constantly evolving legislative environment, changing demographics, new technologies and styling trends and.. nope - it's an illusion the we could magically create one standard "people's vehicle", or even components,

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

Andy 73 Silver badge

This is deeply disingenuous - Horizon struggled from day one, but the government of the time negotiated that it would still be delivered (in a broken form) to "save face" - that government being Labour. The majority of the claims of fraud, and the reports of errors from users occurred immediately after the roll out and during the eleven years of Labour government. To be clear, the subsequent investigations have lain at the feet of the Con/Lib coalition and subsequent Conservative governments, but Horizon failed on Labour's watch.

Suggesting all of those problems were the fault of the person who committed to modernising the system in the first place is.. clearly political.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: A scandal of epic proportions

Not sure about the diagnosis of corruption - whilst it's a compelling narrative that everyone involved was corrupt and lining their pockets, the reality is that much of the damage was done by people who were "just doing their jobs", who were either unaware of the injustice being done, unwilling to rock the boat or fearful of the consequences. Those people manning the support lines telling Postmasters "No-one else is experiencing this problem" weren't corrupt, but in a position where one simple phrase destroyed people's lives.

Don't underestimate how much inertia and incompetence accrues around organisations that work at this scale. Certainly there is a (fairly long) list of people who should be held directly responsible, but we know from so many failed public projects that this sort of structure and scale is inherently prone to failure. In this case it directly impacted people's lives, but more often we watch and tut as hundreds of billions of pounds are wasted on projects for the exact same reason - that we keep on piling in vast numbers of people with poor organisation, lax oversight and little discipline into projects that we treat like sacred cows. Horizon "had to be delivered", just like various NHS, Police, Customs, and HMRC projects "have to be delivered" - and we don't have the mechanisms to seriously question the massive infrastructure that has grown up to service these projects.

Andy 73 Silver badge

True, that

Agreed.

It is worth castigating the Tories for the delays in resolving the case and supporting the victims - however, it does appear that one of the reasons this disaster has taken so long to be fully exposed is that so much of the establishment have been involved. The Chairman, Alice Perkins is married to Jack Straw. Three Lib Dem leaders have acted as ministers responsible for the Post Office. ICL.. sorry Fujitsu acts as a supplier for a range of government projects. There's a long list.

Not only does this threaten a wide range of lucrative careers, it also looks to change how people are held responsible for failed public projects.

Note also, that though Vennells returned her CBE, she is still a CBE - the trinket itself is not the award, which can only actually be 'removed' by the King - which has only ever happened in a handful of cases.

Open source's new mission: To boldly go where no software has gone before

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: What but not why...

The Karens of the IT world use exactly this argument - they get to decide what the value is, not the person who has put months or even years of effort into a project.

That would be fair in a world where software and hardware is fairly priced, but given that the large corporations give software away for free (you're the product, remember?), and factories produce hardware at hyper-scaled prices, most people's idea of what a "fair price" turns out to be completely ridiculous.

And this is the point. Open source started as a way to take the control away from the large corporations. But the large corporations (a) now use open source extensively to massively reduce their costs and (b) manipulate the price of the open market using scale and reach. It is extraordinarily difficult to compete in that market, because the true cost of developing new technology is simply invisible to most end users. That's why we see useful stuff coming out of Kickstarters and other funding services, rather than GitHub.

As a grizzly old techie, there is a load of useful software and hardware that I'd love to build, and have more than enough technical experience to do so - but whilst I have to pay a mortgage it ain't gonna happen because the combination of open source, corporate manipulation and self entitled jerks means that I would be penniless if I did so. Sure, students and hobbyists contribute to projects, but the reality is that 'open technology' is being severely curtailed by people who simply don't understand the economic stranglehold we're in.

But yeah, go ahead and tell me what my project is worth.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: What but not why...

I was more thinking of the people who happily tell you "I won't buy this unless you open source it" - there are quite a few who believe they have the right to free software, and in the process devalue the work that others do.

Being told "you can make your money offering support/with ads" is the coding equivalent of "I'll pay you with exposure" for the art world.

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: an attempt to dictate how other people should behave.

I guess you've never been on the receiving end of a long rant of why the key IP for your business should be open sourced, or had users refuse to work with you because they can't see a copy of your internal code. Or users start a project to clone your product simply because you won't give it to them for free.

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: Justice should include prosecutions

Three and a half thousand people is not "only a few"

Andy 73 Silver badge

Re: How is Fujitsu not in the dock?

I suggest you watch the TV program which will explain a lot of the details.

Fujitsu had remote access that they used to "fix" the data on Postmaster's terminals, and a team within the company that did this on a daily basis for hundreds of terminals. Both Fujitsu and the Post Office denied that any such access existed or that records were being altered - despite clear evidence that it was happening from the Postmasters themselves, and it proven that both the Post Office and Fujitsu shared knowledge about these incidents.

Fujitsu overrode any audit trails, and the both they and the post office subsequently chose to delete documents where they conflicted with the version of events being used to prosecute individuals.

Further, the Post Office chose to prosecute individuals even when they knew internally that there was no evidence of wrong doing. There is even some suggestion that particular Postmasters were targeted to discourage any more protests.

Remember, the Post Office (for historical reasons) can prosecute and jail someone themselves, without reference to the Police or the normal judicial process. They actively pursued hundreds of Postmasters "just because" - this was a scandal that BOTH they and Fujitsu manufactured, and BOTH they and Fujitsu chose to lie about when challenged.

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