* Posts by tony72

675 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jul 2008

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Third time is almost the charm for SpaceX's Starship

tony72

It did appear to be tumbling before the re-entry, and there didn't seem to be much RCS thruster activity, which I would have kind of expected to happen to get into re-entry orientation. There also seemed to be quite a lot of something venting out of the rear end long after the burn ended. However it did indeed seem to find the right orientation once it got into the upper atmosphere and its aero surfaces started to work. Fantastic to watch the plasma building up under it live like that! I'm really looking forward to the analysis of the flight, so we can find out exactly what went on, but clearly another huge step forward from the previous flight.

Exchange Online blocked from sending email to AOL and Yahoo

tony72

One found emails were DKIM signed by the onmicrosoft.com subdomain rather than the actual sending domain. They set up DKIM for the actual sending domain, and all was well.

Microsoft was prompting to check this back in February, if not before, there was an alert either on the 365 admin centre or the Exchange admin page. I sorted ours on the 13th. No idea if that's actually the "fix", but emails to the one AOL contact that I know about seem to have been getting through fine in the last week.

Tesla Berlin gigafactory goes dark after alleged eco-sabotage

tony72

Where were those eco-activists when the decision was taken to turn off Germany's nuclear plants and strip-mine lignite to burn instead?

Texas judge turns out the lights on federal survey of cryptominers' energy consumption

tony72

Obviously the cryptominers fear the information gathered will be used against them for future regulation, and they have a pretty sweet deal in Texas getting paid more to not mine during peak alerts than they could ever make from mining (which passes on the cost to everyone else) and they don't want stuff like that to end.

Bitcoin haters love to mislead with this stuff. Firstly, many miners in Texas don't receive any such payments, it depends on their individual power purchasing agreements with the power companies. E.g. “Cormint did not receive payments from ERCOT to curtail its energy usage, it merely followed its economic best interest, which is to not mine Bitcoin when power prices are elevated due to high residential demand.” [Jamie McAvity, CEO of Texas-based bitcoin miner Cormint]

For those miners that do have such agreements with their power companies, the power companies make those agreements because it makes economic sense for them. Bitcoin miners indeed use a lot of energy, and as such, energy companies make a lot of money from them. They're good customers. The idea that the cost of power credits paid to the miners is "passed on to everyone else" rather than just being a tiny fraction of the profits the power companies make from the miners is rather ridiculous. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation for Riot Platforms, who were reported to have got $31 million in power credits in 2023 (based on them operating their 700MW facility for 11 months of the year, at an average electricity cost of $0.05*) says that they will have spent $281 million on electricity. Handing back a few of those dollars to free up capacity when needed is all that's happening.

*I actually just found a price of $0.035 in a Riot Platforms corporate presentation from September 2023, so it'd be a bit less, whatever, the point stands.

Firefly software snafu sends Lockheed satellite on short-lived space safari

tony72

The Voyager engineer's comment is not really fair to be honest, since he's not comparing like with like (or maybe the quote is out of context). You can afford to spend decades of time and billions of dollars trying to get a mission right on the very first try when it's a once-in-a-generation science mission to advance the boundaries of mankind's knowledge (and even then, you won't always succeed). However it makes no sense to do that when you're building a commercial launcher that's going to be launching regularly, and needs to make a profit for its builder to survive - you would go out of business before you even started. As SpaceX and Rocket Lab have shown, when you're going to be building and launching many of a rocket, an iterative approach can work, and indeed makes a lot of sense, and you can afford a few failures at the beginning while you work out the bugs.

Japan's space program seeks reboot with Wednesday launch

tony72

Yes, 19 is the record so far, but Elon said they are now qualifying them for 40 flights.

tony72

The fact that it's so hard to get an orbital-class rocket to work *once*, just serves to highlight how impressive SpaceX is with their Falcon 9 rockets making twenty-plus flights per booster. Anyway, go H3!

How Neuraspace aims to clean up orbital clutter with AI

tony72

"But would all the operators sign up to such an agreement? ESA's experience in 2019 with Starlink was not positive [...]"

I don't know where that comes from. The ESA contacted Starlink. Starlink responded promptly and confirmed that they were not planning to take action at that point. The ESA then took action. As the ESA says themselves,

"Contact with Starlink early in the process allowed ESA to take conflict-free action later, knowing the second spacecraft would remain where models expected it to be." ... "No one was at fault here, but this example does show the urgent need for proper space traffic management, with clear communication protocols and more automation.”

There's nothing "not positive" about that, as things stand, what happened is exactly what is supposed to happen.

Apple Vision Pro is creating a new generation of glassholes

tony72

I don't see a lot of people actually using the screen in front to display their eyes, it seems more creepy than useful.

They probably are, but just can't see it. According to Marques Brownlee's in depth videos, the surface is so reflective, and the front display is so dim through the lenticular lens, that in any kind of light at all, you just can't see the creepy eyes. Probably for the best.

iFixit tears Apple's Vision Pro to pieces

tony72

Re: Cnnot use with glasses so need prescription lens inserts

A 2D display can't bend light, so no amount of processing can replace what lenses do - lenses change the direction of light rays entering the eye. Now, a true light-field display might be another matter.

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink tests its tech on a human

tony72

If I was a quadriplegic, having seen those videos of monkeys playing pong with their freaking minds, I'd say "Sign me up"!

Tesla Cybertruck gets cyberstuck during off-roading expedition

tony72

Re: Why do people keep trying to go off road in those things?

As the guy in the article acknowledged himself, he's not an off-road person. There are plenty of reports from people who are that say the Cybertruck is actually a pretty good off-roader.

Japan recovers moon lander data, puts craft to sleep due to solar panels' bad attitude

tony72

Technically, it was meant to fall over. Their idea was that rather than having to have big long landing legs extending beyond the engine nozzles etc on the bottom of the lander, they would get to just above the deck, and then induce a rotation so as to intentionally fall over onto short stubby landing legs on the side of the lander. While that seemed quite a clever way to simplify the design of the lander and save weight, it also seemed potentially fraught with potential for mishaps, and I guess we'll find out, but it seems that manoeuvre indeed did not exactly go as planned. Did they mistime the rotation and rotate too far before hitting the deck? Did they bounce and roll? Did they manage to land on uneven terrain? I hope we get to find out.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

tony72

Re: Paper Tigers

I had a MGT +D floppy disk/printer interface and an Epson dot matrix printer, I don't remember the model, hooked up to my Speccy 128, and Tasword 2 to drive it, that got me through my first year of university quite happily.

Everyone's suing AI over text and pics. But music? You ain't seen nothing yet

tony72

The track Heart On My Sleeve, which was generated using AI and copied the voices and musical styles of rapper Drake and Canadian musician The Weeknd, was made by a mysterious producer known as Ghostwriter and went viral. UMG promptly stepped up again, demanding it be removed from streaming platforms.

However the claim made on YouTube at least was based on a few seconds of the track that were an actual sample, not the AI generated part, IIRC. We await legal precedent being set to decide whether training an AI on material constitutes copyright infringement of said material, or whether copyright law can be stretched to cover "sounds like" creations.

Tech renders iconic rockers Kiss genuinely immortal

tony72

I suspect this will only widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots in the music industry; now you're not just competing with established bands to get your foot in the door, you're competing with their immortal holographic dopplegangers, who could potentially be in multiple places at once.

World's largest nuclear fusion reactor comes online in Japan

tony72

Re: Hope this goes well

It will be interesting to see if any of the many fusion startups can leapfrog the "big science" fusion projects like ITER and JT-60. The likes of Commonwealth Fusion for example are using high-temperature (relatively speaking) superconductors that simply didn't exist when ITER was designed, allowing them to make magnets orders of magnitude smaller and much more practical. Exciting to see how the whole thing plays out.

Tesla, Musk likely aware of Autopilot deficiencies behind Florida fatality, says judge

tony72

Re: Stating the obvious

No, they don't, and no they don't. FSD costs $15000, while Autopilot is standard in every Tesla. That's Tesla making it very clear that there's a massive difference. It would be a pretty hard sell to get anyone to pay for FSD if they were also giving the impression that Autopilot did the same thing. I've yet to see any evidence that a single user is actually confused on that point.

tony72

Re: Stating the obvious

I know all you haters love to confuse FSD and Autopilot in order to misrepresent Tesla's claims, but they are not the same thing. Autopilot is the glorified adaptive cruise control system which comes with every Tesla, and that's what we're talking about in this case. In your video link, Elon is talking about FSD, the rather expensive Full Self-Driving upgrade; that is not relevant here.

Half a kilo of cosmic nuclear fuel reignites NASA's deep space dreams

tony72

Re: significantly lower power degradation over time

The terms RPS (Radioisotope Power System) and RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator) were both used in the article. I was half wondering if that implied there might be some form of RPS that isn't an RTG, i.e. uses some more efficient method of converting the heat, but from a quick Google, NASA only seems to be talking about RTGs. I wonder if there's a reason is for this particular instance of acronym proliferation.

Airbus to test sat-stabilizing 'Detumbler' to simplify astro-garbage disposal

tony72

It's unclear whether a Detumbler could simply be slapped onto an existing satellite, or whether it would have to be part of one at launch

It would cost about as much to launch a mission to attach a Detumbler to an existing satellite, as it would to launch a space tug to just deorbit that satellite directly. Since the satellite fitted with a Detumbler would still need a subsequent mission to deorbit it, and the Detumbler would have to be fitted before the satellite started tumbling, it would seem to make little sense to consider trying to attach them to satellites already on orbit.

However fitting them in new satellites seems like a no-brainer if they work, what with companies starting to get sued for failing to dispose of their failed satellites correctly.

SpaceX's Starship on the roster for Texas takeoff

tony72

Re: Clearing stage zero is again the primary aim...

although again the launch is going to be slower (and therefore more damaging) than a "regular" launch

According to the timeline on SpaceX's site, this launch will have less time between ignition and lift-off than IFT1 - 3 seconds this time versus 5 last time, IIRC. I guess we don't know what a regular launch looks like yet, but that change speaks to them getting the engines lit and throttled up a lot faster than the previous attempt. If part of the problem with the previous attempt was the length of time the booster sat there blasting the pad before lift-off, it would make sense to shorten that time if possible.

Tool bag lost in space now tracked by garbage watchers

tony72

I'm surprised they don't have some sort of "space drone" that they can operate in the vicinity of the ISS. It would be useful for inspecting the exterior of the station or any docked vehicles without necessitating a space walk, as well as potentially retrieving wayward tool bags, if equipped with a suitable grabber.

Moonstruck Modi wants lunar Indian crew by 2040

tony72

Up until now, India has one of the best value-for-money space programs in the world, achieving a great deal on less than a tenth of NASA's budget. They've also come to be regarded as a reliable commercial launch provider, which actually brings in some money. I hope they don't get carried away by their recent successes and start spaffing ludicrous amounts of money on ego projects. Right now, ISRO has a great reputation, and few people in India seem to begrudge them the budget they currently have, but that could change if they get wasteful, there are a lot of other things in India that need money spending on them.

Amazon unveils new drone design, plans liftoff of aerial delivery in UK, Italy

tony72

Re: Not viable in UK

It doesn't have to be viable for everybody, just for enough people to make it workable economically. In fact it's probably a plus if it's not viable for most people, in terms of the number of drones and the amount of flying needed. We've got space at work, and there's been plenty of times I could've done with an SSD or something being delivered in an hour.

As for the regulations, the CAA seems to be quite keen on the idea; New trials move the UK closer to allowing everyday drone deliveries and flying beyond visual line of sight. So we could see the necessary regulations in place in the not too distant future.

China's top crypto-mining hardware-maker reportedly furloughs staff

tony72

The bitcoin mining industry has made no sense during this bear market. What's supposed to happen (I thought, anyway), is that when the price of bitcoin drops below the level at which miners can make a profit, the least efficient miners are forced out of the market, or have to turn off some of their machines. This leads to a reduction in hashrate, and the bitcoin algorithms then adjust the difficulty down, so that less energy is required to mine each bitcoin, and so forth until the cost of mining a bitcoin drops close to the market price, and a new equilibrium point is reached.

However what we've actually seen in this bear market is new all-time highs in the hashrate, with miners just seemingly mining harder and racking up debt while the price is low, in the belief that the price will eventually recover, and all that mining will pay off. If we're now seeing mining machines no longer selling, then perhaps that strategy is now catching up with the miners. It already seemed likely that many miners wouldn't survive the next halving, but maybe some of them won't even make it that far.

SoftBank boss Masayoshi Son predicts artificial general intelligence is a decade away

tony72

This is the guy that poured $17 billion dollars into WeWork, right? Yeah, I think I'll take his predictive powers with just a pinch of salt.

BlackBerry to split into two companies, foraging for tastier fare for shareholders

tony72

TIL Blackberry's corpse is still twitching.

DISH must pay for bungled orbit change in landmark space debris penalty

tony72

Re: Token punishment

I'm not clear exactly what happened here.

"As the Enforcement Bureau recognizes in the settlement, the EchoStar-7 satellite was an older spacecraft (launched in 2002) that had been explicitly exempted from the FCC's rule requiring a minimum disposal orbit. Moreover, the Bureau made no specific findings that EchoStar-7 poses any orbital debris safety concerns."

If it was explicitly exempted, I'm not clear why they were punished at all. Was the exemption rescinded at some point? Does the fact that they filed the 300km mitigation plan, then failed to carry it out, invalidate the exemption?

Fuming Tom Hanks says he had nothing to do with that AI dental ad clone of him

tony72

Has anyone actually seen this ad? This article has what are implied to be still frames from it, and although I see no black suit as mentioned in the article, it does look like they could be from a dental setting. But maybe someone will tell me those frames are actually from a legit Hanks movie. If so, it's strange that he's having to warn people about an ad that practically nobody has seen, because other than that article, I can't even find a screenshot.

Bids for ISS demolition rights are now open, NASA declares

tony72

Re: How much

A Dragon capsule already has a pretty good set of engines in the form of its SuperDraco abort motors, they are pretty powerful. However they're only required to fire for a few seconds in a launch abort scenario, so the fuel tanks are probably pretty small.

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

tony72

For many years when I was with Virgin, they simply supplied a Cisco cable modem that, as far as I can recall, never had a single problem. Then at one stage, I had to accept one of their SuperHubs, and it was definitely a step backwards. As I recall, it was flaky, and you couldn't change the DHCP address range. It pretty quickly got put in modem mode with my own router behind it. I don't know why ISPs insist on going down the route of supply their own branded router, I'm sure the costs and problems outweigh any benefits over just offering decent off-the-shelf kit.

Vodafone claims first space-based 5G phone call – no modifications needed

tony72

Size Matters

"SpaceMobile's point of differentiation is its huge antenna, which makes it capable of putting down a small spot beam which limits interference. Starlink's v2 satellites have a tiny antenna, by comparison, which means bigger spot footprints and more potential for interference," Ray said.

I wonder, is he talking about the Starlink V2 mini's, or the full size V2's? The AST SpaceMoblie antenna is 64m^2, the full size Starlink V2 is 25m^2, so about 40% of the size. A lot smaller, but I'm not sure about "tiny".

Chan Zuckerberg org to spin up 1,000+ H100 GPU cluster for AI medical research

tony72

Re: LLMs for modelling disease?

Here's a link to the source CZI article. LLMs are mentioned only in the third paragraph, which talks in generic terms about "[...] creates a unique opportunity to apply advances in large language models (LLMs) to biomedicine[...]" etc, etc. The rest, and in particular the quotes from Zuck and Chan (and also the video), do not mention LLMs, they feature terms like "AI", "AI models", "generative AI", "AI-driven cellular models", etc. Never forget such articles come through a chain of press officers and journalists who may or may not have a thorough grasp of the subject matter they are covering.

Amazon's three rocket makers insist Project Kuiper will launch on schedule

tony72

"The deadline makes for an increasingly ambitious goal – to launch more than 1,800 satellites in less than three years."

Ambitious? It's 92 launches for the whole constellation, so 46 launches to get halfway, between three providers, over three whole years. That's only an average of five launches per provider per year. By comparison, SpaceX may well manage a hundred launches by itself this year. I know Ariane 6, New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur haven't flown yet, and are coming from a long way behind, but still, it's hard to see five launches per year as "ambitious". Really, even if any or all of those players don't start flying until the end of 2024, they should really still be able to manage that easily, otherwise they should probably just give up and go home.

Morgan Stanley values Tesla's super-hyped supercomputer at up to $500B

tony72

Re: always connected ?

Dojo is for training, the cars have a local processor. However the long term plan is also to build and rent out additional capacity, as a sort of AWS for AI.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

tony72

Great job!

That's a nice preview of what the whole country can look forward to after Labour wins the next general election. We are so screwed.

Tesla's purported hands-free 'Elon mode' raises regulator's blood pressure

tony72

Re: a secret configuration dubbed "Elon Mode"

I'm an Elon fanboy, but I'll give you that one, I did laugh - have an upvote.

Singapore opens to stablecoins – once they jump through some hoops

tony72

Re: Worst of both worlds

The one 'end user' benefit of using a cryptocurrency that is highly regulated in this way is that the issuer / broker needs to keep sufficient capital at hand to cover their liabilities (ie the users' deposits). Doesn't seem as safe as a 'real' retail bank where most western countries have government-backed deposit insurance

Your "real" retail banks don't have sufficient capital at hand to cover their liabilities, it's called "fractional reserve banking", and your government deposit insurance schemes are mostly smoke and mirrors designed to try to prevent bank runs from happening in the first place - if a widespread loss of confidence in the banking sector were to occur, you would quickly find that those schemes don't have nearly enough money to handle it. I also recommend looking up the "bail-in" rules that have been put in place in most countries since the last financial crisis, and find out whose money will be used to rescue the banks next time around.

Also, this type of backing only really works for stablecoins with pegged-to-fiat value... if a customer buys $100 worth of crypto that becomes 'worth' $200 a month later and they want to cash out, where is the bank or broker going to get the money from

If the bank is acting as a bank, then you withdraw your funds in the same form you deposited them; if I deposit pounds in my bank, that's what I spend or withdraw, and it would be the same for bitcoin, stablecoins, or other cryptocurrencies. If I deposit one bitcoin, the bank custodies one bitcoin for me, and if I want to withdraw it, the bank gives me back my one bitcoin. What that bitcoin is worth in dollar terms is irrelevant to them.

If, on the other hand, the bank is acting as an exchange, then they are market-making, i.e. matching buyers and sellers. Thus they don't have to " get the money from" anywhere; your $100 worth of crypto is now worth $200 because someone else is willing to pay that for it, and the bank simply takes a fee, or adds a little margin on the bid-ask spread (or both), in facilitation the trade.

Those two functions are distinct and separate, and do indeed require different sets of regulations to protect customers, but in neither case should the bank itself be exposed to price volatility of any crypto on its books.

1 in 4 Brits are playing with generative AI, and some take its word as gospel

tony72

Re: Eyes wide open

Bing chat does provide links to its sources. Don't take my word for it, it says

Yes, Bing search provides links to website sources within a relevant contextual output1. This is a win for publishers because that has the potential for a better search referral without the ambiguity of the traditional ten blue links.

Generally I find Bing Chat to be more useful than OG ChatGPT, given it doesn't suffer from the September 2021 training data cut-off, as well as having the aforementioned source links.

Intel pulls plug on mini-PC NUCs

tony72

I concur about Minisforum. I have one of their fanless mini PCs at home. I soon found out that "fanless" means it doesn't have a fan, not that it doesn't need one (I run it with an undervolted external 60mm fan blowing air into the side vent). It also dies sometimes when I plug something else into the mains, then I have to take it apart to pull the BIOS battery to get it to boot up (except now I just run it without a BIOS battery at all, then just a power-cycle unbricks it). Trash indeed.

Ariane 5 to take final flight, leaving Europe without its own heavy-lift rocket

tony72

Re: But wait! There's more...

I don't know though, €4.9 billion budget and 2200 employees equals €2.2 million per job. That's one very expensive welfare scheme.

Yes, I'm sure that money also supports jobs at suppliers etc that are not direct ESA employees, but still.

Singapore tells crypto operators: act like grown up financial institutions

tony72

"The move cements Singapore's distrust of digital assets."

Does it now? Since they're simply making crypto companies obey the same rules as regular financial institutions, does that mean the rules also indicate "distrust" of regular finance?

Seems to me that implementing sensible and strict crypto regulations is actually essential for the industry to thrive, so I don't see it as indicative of distrust, it's just a recognition that the industry badly needs such regulation.

California man jailed after manure-to-methane scheme revealed as bull

tony72

Nothing wrong with a bit of reuse, I say keep milking them as long as you can.

UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete

tony72

I was skeptical about smart meters, but after moving into a place that has them, I appreciate them a bit more. Manually reading a meter and entering the readings is really not something that belongs in this day and age. When energy prices went up, I really did find it useful to be able to go over my usage graphs and figure out where I could make some savings. And surge pricing will have it's upsides when it comes in; smoothing out demand is good for reducing the use of peaker plants and this carbon emissions, and actually give people a chance to save money by doing things when prices are low, so I don't have a problem with it, really.

Coinbase, don't feel left out. SEC has a lawsuit for you, too

tony72

Re: No jursidiction

The SEC and the CFTC have both been claiming jurisdiction over crypto, and making conflicting claims over the classification of such as securities or commodities. And we are about to have several very expensive legal proceedings in part to determine exactly that, since the SEC's allegations of unregistered securities dealings hinge on whether the assets in question are indeed securities or not. But hey, let me call the judge and tell him to throw the cases out and not to waste his time, because Claptrap314 has declared that they are commodities.

tony72

Re: Line up in order

They started with Ripple though ...

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

tony72

Checks?

Checks? Even if that is indeed the antipodean spelling (which Bing chat assures me it is not, in this context, and in the linked "Strategic Plan for Australia’s Payments System" PDF, it is spelled "cheque"), as a British site, I feel El Reg should stick to "cheque".

UK warned not to bother racing US, EU on EV subsidies

tony72

You don't even need future tech. BYD and CATL are ramping up production of sodium ion batteries right now, which contain no rare earths. Tesla and others are already using LFP batteries that use less (or no?) rare earths. And progress is being made on reducing the amount of rare earths in lithium ion batteries, Tesla eliminated cobalt entirely from its 4680 cells for example. I think the Bean needs to read up on current tech.

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