* Posts by Roland6

10607 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010

Network Rail steps back from geofencing over safety fears

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Beeching's revenge

A quick check indicates the video either doesn’t cover the entire stopping time or the stopping distance is misstated.

Whilst TGV clearly comes to a halt after 38s of video, a quick calculation shows that a train travelling at 320 kmh would cover 3378m in 38s.

Counting gantries (26) and assuming typical distance between is 50(*), gives a total distance of circa 1300m in 38s.

(*) typical spacing of overhead line gantries for 140mph(225kmh) in the UK are 64~73m. Eurostar (300kmh) it’s circa 50m.

Some additional searching provides a calculated stopping time of under 90s, based on a number of assumptions, which seem more reasonable.(in the event of total power failure it might be slightly faster).

This thus gives a distance covered of 8000m (5 miles) at 320kmh. Thus that 2.5 miles forward visibility is an understatement..

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Beeching's revenge

> a fantastic idea if it could alert the driver of an obstacle 2.5 miles away around a bend...

320 kmh to 0 in 38 seconds…

“ Emergency brake test on a TGV: 3389 metres to stop from 320 kmh!”

3389m = 2.11 miles

However, for maximum safety, it would need clairvoyant powers so as to apply the brakes 2.5 miles before anyone stepped into its path.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: because...

Interesting they tested it at Milton Keynes, perhaps taking a train down to Euston and walking it through Euston throat - no skyscrapers but deep cuttings and multiple levels of track, would be a good test.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: because...

> But the gist of the article is that they want a system for use while the lines (tracks) are still in use.

Which requires location accuracy of 1ft or better and warning/alarm notification within seconds, combined with real-time update as the worker moves towards (or more importantly away from) safety.

However lower level of accuracy can be useful, if used in conjunction with other railway safe working practises. From memory one of the big (and easy to make) safety mistakes workers make is to step the wrong way of a line with an approaching train, only to encounter a train travelling in the opposite direction…

Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so

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Re: "shorten PC replacement cycles"

> Have Lenovo done that as well?

Need to look closely at specs as it varies between the Thinkpad ranges and whether the system is using DDR5, which tends to be soldered…

With my L series, keyboard etc. replacement isn’t as simple as it was with my T60… Also the increasing use of clips instead of screws, means you don’t really want to be taking the system apart too many times…

British Library pushes the cloud button, says legacy IT estate cause of hefty rebuild

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> So now they're paying two ransoms?

Three, software licensing for cloud verses on-prem licensing…

Roland6 Silver badge

But cloud is just pushing that CapEx expense onto someone else, who will charge the cost of money plus some on top of everything else for the customers OpEx subscription price.

Just having this problem with a client, because they failed to purchase new kit the last two plus years they now have a much larger CapEx to pay out, ie. They are looking at having to purchase 400 new servers this year rather than 100…

Linux for older phones postmarketOS changes its init system

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Right to Repair

Perhaps the time has come to lobby (the EU?) for manufacturers to unlock their end of support phones(*) and provide documentation, so enable users to repair them with a supported OS such as postmarketOS.

(*) Define as a phone that has not received an Android update within a rolling 12 month period.

Securing open source software: Whose job is it, anyway?

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Re: Contributing Back

> No, we don't need to break the idea: open source is free without any kind of qualification.

Err no!

Stallman has always maintained “free” means libre, not free as in free beer. There are plenty of reputable sources that discuss this in detail.

Remember if you want quality software, software developers need to be paid at rates above subsistence…

> I'd argue that the commercial pressure itself is likely to provide solutions.

I suggest the need for improved security is a commercial pressure, so either we can start thinking about solutions and lead the market, or let “the market” ie. Others with a vested interest in minimising (development) costs, to define the solution, which will probably result in something akin to a consortium owned BSD fork (ie. Closed sourced based on open source that does not credit the original developers)..

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Contributing Back

Agree we have some major problems with current business culture and executive sense of entitlement…

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Contributing Back

GPLis satisfied by open source being freely available to customers/service subscribers, you want a secure supply chain then pay the subscription to be a user of that service.

> but it does make a large, and in my mind important, change to what open source and free software have meant which has its downsides as well as upsides.

Yes, having a source of secure open source and an improved software supply-chain security are important changes to what has gone before. You want it then there is a price, you can have open source from other places, but without the security guarantees…

I think we need to get away from the free beer which many are acustomed to….

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Contributing Back

Understand the problem, however, we need to break the idea that Open Source is free to all.

A “foundation” needs to be not for profit, although it will need to be commercial so as to generate the revenue’s necessary to maintain the quality of Open Source people are demanding.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Contributing Back

Probably need a foundation to sit on top of the secure open source supply chain, so they can charge a usage fee that can go to maintaining secure open source development. Yes, you are free to buy from elsewhere, but caveat emptor…

Linux 6.9 will be the first to top ten million Git objects

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Re: a billion?

> Numeric punctuation is the one thing that imperial and metric should have agreed upon

Let’s take the first step: SI should have agreed a single form of punctuation rather than permit the continuation of different national conventions.

> decimal-comma countries misreading "3,000km"

Interestingly, The recommended solution is to use space, so that becomes 3 000km, thus leaving the only dot/comma in the decimal point position. Only catch is the space gives rise to parsing problems…

Is Russia using Starlink in Ukraine? Congress demands answers

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Re: Should be (relatively) simple...

> Newsflash: Starlink is a broadband Internet access solution. And in other breaking news, so are smartphones

Newsflash apples are different to oranges.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: More BS from politicians.

>” the only way to be 100% secure is to close the borders and turn off the internet”

Doesn’t stop the Chinese weather balloons…

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Should be (relatively) simple...

> Starlink probably can deliver maps, or be compelled to deliver maps, but other nations might not be too keen on this and just make the service illegal.

Doesn’t really matter, Starlink is a US HQ’d telco, it will do whatever the US government asks it to do and it will keep its mouth shut on such matters. This relationship between governments and their telcos goes back way too many decades.

> you sure about that?

It is straight forward to set up an iOS or Android phone without an Apple ID or Google account. Okay it’s a bit like setting windows 10/11 up without a MS account they don’t make it obvious but the facility is there. There are (thirdparty) guides on the internet that explain how.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Should be (relatively) simple...

> But terminals are supposed to transmit their location, so Starlink should be able to produce a map showing active Starlink terminals.

I expect they are already delivering a real-time map to the NSA complete with intercepts, if not Musk deserves everything being thrown at him.

> Nobody is using Apples or Androids inside Russia, or Russian held Ukraine? Sanctions apply to those devices as well.

To use an apple or android device you don’t need the active support of, and subscription with a US HQ’d service provider.

Nano a nono: Pixel 8 phones too dumb for Google's smallest Gemini AI model

Roland6 Silver badge

Gemini AI optional?

I suppose it will be highly unlikely that Gemini AI will be a user initiated download from the Play store and part of the pre installed bundle and thus wasting much of a phone’s limited storage.

It is also going to be interesting to see what impact it has on a phones battery life.

All these unknowns would seem to make the Pixel 8 an attractive phone…

IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

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Re: Where is the demand?

There is still an important role for batch processing in today’s business computing world, and mainframes are very good at doing largescale batch.

Plus a Z-Series does pack a lot of processing power (and I/O capability) into its datacentre footprint; something that might be important to cloud data centre operators.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Encourage z/OS and z/VM on Hercules

Agree having access to an “mainframe”, particularly “free” might encourage more universities to give mainframe computing more coverage, and maybe help rehabilitate (modern) mainframe computing amongst Computing undergrads who may be under the impression that Windows/Linux and x86/Arm are the only system platform options worth working with.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Ironic

> Why would you invest years in learning certain skill and then you'll be binned at 50

Well for some reason for several decades people have been learning certain Microsoft skills, only to have them binned with the next release of Windows etc.

Basically, I suggest you should looking to develop skills so you can have a career post 50…

UK finance minister promises NHS £3.4B IT investment to unlock £35B savings

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Re: Cynical? Me?

It’s a government project, so that £3.4B is likely to be the total contract cost ie. Initial Capex spend plus 5~7 years of Opex.

The savings figure is more suspect. I anticipate it will include theoretical savings, for example efficiency improvements (reducing number of unfilled appointments) enable the avoidance of additional spend rather than actually reducing current spend.

Roland6 Silver badge

The NHS needs its own health open systems profile, which mandates open standards for medical data interchange, obviously, a fast way to achieve this is to make various proprietary standards, Standard essential and thus subject to FRAND; this being a contractual condition of supply.

Once the NHS effectively owns its own data formats, it become possible to interchange data and thus create the opportunity for people to write compatible software, some of which might be open source.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: automating the writing and clinical coding of notes, discharge summaries and GP letters

> Time to give the Lib Dems another chance?

Suggest they do need to get back to having 62+ MPs (2005 GE) before we think about government forming potential.

Copilot can't stop emitting violent, sexual images, says Microsoft whistleblower

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Re: @Roland6 - “Gemini was caught by netizens producing pictures of people of color...

> I don't quite understand your point here.

As you observe history, is not PC (politically correct), so a PC AI automaton with no “understanding” of history is going to have problems with historical accuracy when asked to produce images set in a historical context, as it is likely to generate images based on todays multi-ethnic standards.

Roland6 Silver badge

“Gemini was caught by netizens producing pictures of people of color in inaccurate contexts“

That’s the problem with history, as recorded by western nations, it is inherently white and male…

Roland6 Silver badge

>” Until AI understands the context of a query and takes that into account, it'll always be at risk of producing content that wasn't desired”

Context is also a very large thing. It needs to take into account the circumstances of the query. I suggest a query made at “work” or when working requires a differently curated set of results from a query made during private leisure time…

Given the way the current generation of profiling tools used by the likes of Google et al to push ads at every opportunity, I doubt we will see any real progress on context anytime soon.

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Why does anyone buy Apple?

Ignoring the "stupendously expensive" iPads, there is value in giving kids and especially those with learning difficulties "normal" iPads instead of Android tablets.

Manageability is always a problem when dealing with very small cost constrained user groups... Once you are into a few dozen devices, MDM tools like JAMF are a no brainer.

Having investigated and used both Android and iOS tablets with children and adults with learning disabilities and/or are deaf, my preference is for Apple. Okay with this user group you do need to go for the more rugged cases and lightning/wireless charging rather than USB-C (or the old 30-pin spade connector), otherwise you will see a higher level of device failure.

Reminder: Infostealer malware is coming for your ChatGPT credentials

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: If they don't contain username/password pairings, how are they used?

From the linked blog:

“ more than 225,000 logs up for sale on the dark web containing compromised ChatGPT credentials”

It seems they haven’t analysed the logs to determine how many are unique and how many unique credentials (username/password pairs) they contain, hence why there could be more (or less) than 225,000 compromised sets of credentials.

Agree the language used in the article could have been clearer.

Tiny Core Linux 15 stuffs modern computing in a nutshell

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Re: investigating whether it can turn some geriatric laptops into useful tools once again.

> there come a point where all things are past their useful lives.

Whilst, I get the issue over “ancient” systems, however, there are still a large number of low performance systems being sold on the high st. Something that enables these to be useful extends their useful lives.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: investigating whether it can turn some geriatric laptops into useful tools once again.

> what could be accomplished by a Pi3 sipping a mere handful (including an SSD of course).

And what could be accomplished on the same hardware running a less thirsty OS…

IP address X-posure now a feature on Musk's social media thing

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Re: NAT

>Peer B etc

Both ends of the VPN connection need to run the same “brokered” VPN client.

> Why do ordinary people have to pay to get a service provider to connect a peer-to-peer communication?

Operator connected calls have always carried a premium…

> And, of course, maybe the "internet_server" is saving…

There will be a saving due to the connnection not having to be trombones via X’s servers.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: NAT

Totally possible, this is effectively what products like Draytek’s VPN Matcher do.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Peer to peer works this way

My initial take on the headline was that “X” surfaces the other parties IP address in an end user screen, rather than requiring some tech knowledge to dig it out of the devices network stat’s.

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

Roland6 Silver badge

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

> So we dont get a polluting foundry

Yes we don’t get one funded via the EU, which means any chip foundry we build will be in competition with those the EU are funding, so potentially we do get a polluting foundry and so does an EU member - double green misery.

So the sub text to my point 8s that the UK has to decide on what its niches are and invest accordingly. However, we do need to diversify away from financial services…

> Just as the trade barriers that borked our industries

Yet whilst in the EU, the UK’s non-EU exports grew to the point where they exceeded our EU “exports”…

> sub-par products

Those are wholly due to the ineptitude of “British” management and their equally inept trade unions and labour relations their inept management practises nurtured. It’s a shame that old school Tory management (and their counterpart old school unions) is still a thing…

Roland6 Silver badge

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

Well with Brexit we don’t need the funding, as there is no “home” market to support the required growth…

Remember on the of the big business/economic reasons the UK (Thatcher) government initially pushed for the Common Market and then lead the formation of the Single Market was to create a protected market (*) in which UK companies could grow and scale up to become globally competitive…

With respect to chip foundries, well being outside the EU meant the UK missed out on the EU monies to be the host of an EU foundry…

(*) Yes protected, those trade barriers the Brexiteers went on and on about were there for a reason - to benefit UK interests !

Supermium drags Google Chrome back in time to Windows XP, Vista, and 7

Roland6 Silver badge

In all cases also use a third-party security suite (currently supported versions do exist), plus the usual browser extensions: uBlock etc.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: a plan

>"I wouldn't be surprised if they made a loss on windows as a standalone product."

Doubt it, remember the only part of the traditional Windows sales model that has changed is the availability of new editions to existing users, which always was a small market which incurred relatively high distribution costs.

So I expect Windows still pays for itself, just that the real money is on all the stuff they can do over Windows…

Microsoft drags Windows Subsystem for Android into the trash

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I thought the main purpose of WSA was to encourage Andriod developers to use Windows and MS tools for (android) development.

So a relatively small market…

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Microsoft wasn't really committed

Doesn’t bode well for CoPilot …

Flying car biz Alef claims 3K preorders, still hasn't done a proper demo

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By now I would have expected to have seen a real flying proof of concept flying model to have been demonstrated.

That home router botnet the Feds took down? Moscow's probably going to try again

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“ Owners of relevant devices”

I like how the advisory does not provide a list of devices…

So step 0 is determining whether this advisory does or does not apply to your router…

I also presume there are devices in the channel which are also impacted by this, don’t just assume a new shiny device is secure out-of-the-box…

The batteries on Odysseus, the hero private Moon lander, have run out

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Well USA, you learned an important lesson didn't you?

> Edit: and it's good to see China trying to copy SpaceX's reusability, like they copy everything else.

Isn’t that the StackOverflow and AI approach to software development?

The catch is the AI and StackOverflow approach is more cut-and-paste rather than read, understand and enhance.

The BBC programme Cold War, Hot Jets contained an interesting point about the UK’s sale of jet engines to Russia. The opinion was that Russian engineers weren’t as good as our engineers and so would not be able to produce an equivalent,; an assumption that was rapidly proven to be false, their jets flew better on their copies of the UK jet engines than ours did using the original engines…

We saw similar a few decades back with the rapid rise of Japan; they took our books, read and implemented…

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“ Soft lunar landings are notoriously difficult;”

Just goes to show how good the Apollo Lunar Module pilots were…

Not only did they land, they also took off and returned…

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Always was crap

From my experience, USB-C connections are even less reliable that HDMI…

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: I was amazed…

You are missing the other issue with HDMI cables: no version/edition label. I’ve yet to come across an HDMI cable that is unambiguously labelled, so when you come to pull a cable out of the reuse pile you can tell what variant of 4K it can support.