Posts by Cuddles

Re: It doesn't actually get dark here.

"If astronomers are unhappy about light pollution affecting astronomy, they need to persuade their local councils to change to streetlights that light the ground and not the sky as well before they complain about stuff in orbit."

You've completely missed the point. Astronomers generally don't care about the lighting their local council has control over, because they built their observatory 3000 miles away at the top of a mountain in the middle of a desert specifically to avoid that sort of thing being a problem. They complain about light from things like satellites, because that's now a problem that actually affects them.

In addition, use of the word "before" is really quite bizarre. Most people are capable of contemplating more than one idea at a time. It's entirely possible for someone to complain to their local council about local lighting issues, and also complain to Elon Musk about Starlink. They might even be able to send a whole two emails to different people in the same day!

Sadly, you're far from alone in this. Every time anyone dares talk about the problems caused by one particular issue, people jump out the woodwork to whine about them not talking about every other problem facing the world today first. If you weren't complaining about light pollution in Coventry, you'd be criticising them for talking about astronomy at all when they could be trying to save the whales or feed starving children in Yemen. Fortunately not everyone is like you, so we're actually able to take a stab at fixing some problems without being frozen into total paralysis by the fact that other problems continue to exist at the same time.

Re: exactly the sort of thing we want machines to do.

"Automation of repetitive manual labour is always a net good for society."

While I mostly agree with your point, there is an important caveat to bear in mind here - automation of repetitive manual labour has always been a net good for society. Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. The invention of agriculture led to people having free time in which to develop things like science and philosophy. The industrial revolution effectively led to the services sector becoming the largest part of the economy.

But the problem is that no-one at the time knew any of that was going to happen. Things were done for short-term gain by relatively few people, and it eventually turned out to be good for society as a whole. Will that happen again? Quite possibly. But it would be foolish to just blindly assume that it is inevitable. The likes of Amazon and Uber don't want to replace all their employees with robots because it will lead to a utopian future, they want to do it to cut costs, and screw what happens to the little people. Their actions might lead to overall benefit regardless, but they also might not.

We're at the point now where we have the chance to actually think about where we're going with all this, and have the benefit of history to have at least something to base our speculation on. We certainly shouldn't be luddities and decry any change because some jobs become obsolete. But we also should take the chance to think about what those people could now do instead and how we actually want society to develop, rather than just blindly rush ahead assuming everything will somehow turn out OK.

This is actually mentioned in other articles about this. LineageOS is a free project run by volunteers and you install it on your phone at your own risk. That's a very different proposition from a company providing updates as part of a paid contract. All the tests, signing off by Google, and so on that the article mentions are things LineageOS doesn't need to deal with. If installing Lineage bricks your phone, that's your problem. If an official update from the manufacturer bricks your phone, it's their problem.

Re: Charging infrastructure

We just need more chickens and then we can get more eggs.

Re: Whats the betting

Indeed. This blog really can't be linked enough times, also follow the links at the end to some actual teardowns - http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html Chargers are an absolute nightmare, and certainly not simply a case of blindly supplying the requested voltage as Duncan Macdonald suggests above. As that post mentions, poor voltage regulation in counterfeit chargers frequently causes serious issues with the operation of a device, including preventing touchscreens from working at all while plugged in. You'd hope a device would at least have enough fault protection to prevent such issues from actually destroying it, but issues with chargers absolutely can cause problems with the electronics inside a device.

Plus Amazon are even more of a hazard since you can't actually choose to buy legitimate goods. They mix everything together in the warehouse and ship you some random part picked out of the lucky dip. So no matter what you order or who you order it from, if any counterfeit copies are being sold by any other seller on the site, you might be shipped one of those counterfeits. I'd generally recommend not using Amazon at all for a variety of reasons, but if you're looking for electronics or anything else with potential safety issues, you really have to be a fool to consider buying from them.

Re: Clueless

Yes, because an island nation with easily controlled borders and a long history of dealing with invasive species and biosecurity is completely different from New Zealand.

Re: Black hole in 'has quite mundane magnetic field' shock!

That's one of the fun things about space stuff. Most of the time most of the numbers aren't that big or unusual. It's just that the one number that usually is really, really big is size. A magnetic field about as strong as the Earth's doesn't seem particularly impressive. A magnetic field about as strong as the Earth's that extends for nearly 5000 light years can yield some quite impressive results.

Re: Why 5G?

I was wondering the same. Agriculture applications are generally going to want low power, long range, highly robust connections, but with relatively low bitrate. It's pretty much the exact opposite of what mmWave can do, and sounds more like a job for 2G, maybe 3 if you're really data heavy.

I don't think Starlink would be relevant either though. The idea for these things is usually along the lines of having a tracker attached to every single cow, or large numbers of sensors distributed through a field to measure things like soil moisture everywhere continuously. Obviously Starlink stations are far too big, heavy and power hungry to work for that. They could maybe work as a central base station to connect the remote sensors to your office, but a regular 4/5G cell connection or microwave link would likely work just as well. Either way, the actual sensors and monitoring systems would be agnostic to how you choose to transmit from your central station.

Re: 12?

Are you sure? My G5 is on 8.1. G6 should be on at least 9.0.

Re: "a cut above ordinary criminals"

Hospitals are an extremely common target for ordinary criminals. Large buildings full of expensive stuff, staff and visitors often occupied by important tasks, that allow members of the public to just wander around on their own with essentially zero security. Everything from targetted theft of valuable goods like IT kit, to petty theft from people's coats and bags, is a daily occurence at pretty much every hospital in the country. Same for places like universties, which again tend to have sprawling campuses with free public access and little to no security. The idea that ordinary criminals avoid these sorts of places because at heart they're really all decent folk is incredibly naive.

It's also rather sad to see the usual geek stereotypes coming out here at El Reg. Why would a criminal have their ass kicked just because they happen to know how a computer works? Your averge criminal hacker isn't a fat, spotty nerd living in their mother's basement, any more than your average burglar is a battle-hardened mercenary fighter with twelve black belts. Who would win in a fight has absolutely nothing to do with their chosen field of criminality.

Re: Not sure where they get the numbers from in the report

"What are those numbers? They don't say. So, it could be Mbits/sec, Mbytes/sec or indeed shoesteps per kilometre. Who knows."

Both the article and the report say Mbps many times. Which is the abbreviation for megabits per second. I'm not sure I understand where your confusion is coming from.

Re: Translation

Indeed. The answer to the question in the article - "It is not clear exactly what level of data will need to be recorded in order to meet these requirements beyond excluding the content of signals," it said. "For example, is it aimed at holding data on end-user access to services, internal access logs, or internet connection records?". All of it. They want to watch what everyone is doing at all times. See also the latest from the Snoopers' Charter, which El Reg doesn't seem to have covered yet - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56362170

Re: What. A. Shock.

"There are obvious problems with infinities"

The biggest problem with infinities is our ability to understand them. As with quantum physics, if you think you understand it, you're probably wrong. And as is so often with physics outside the familiar human scale, this tends to lead to our intuitive understanding getting things completely wrong. Without going into details on all your points, I'll just note that the Big Bang is entirely compatible with an infinite universe. That is, after all, why people are still arguing about whether the universe is infinite or not, despite everyone involved being pretty sure the Big Bang did happen.

I will correct you a bit on the horizon thing though. The horizon defined by the point where things start moving away from us faster than light is called the Hubble horizon, and it is not related to the size of the observable universe. The size of the observable universe is defined by the particle or cosmological horizon, which is simply a measure of how far light has been able to travel since the universe began. Obviously the past expansion of the universe affects this, but whether it's currently expanding or not, and whether it's accelerating or not, is completely irrelevant. It's possible for an object to be beyond the Hubble horizon, but still be inside the particle horizon.

Re: Holographic interfaces

Holographic interfaces have been a popular idea for a while, as have a variety of similar schemes that involve waving various parts of your body around at transparent or event entirely invisible controls. Douglas Adams already pointed out what a terrible idea this is back in 1978. Nothing anyone has come up with since them makes any effort to actually address the problems of a control system that just interprets your body movements directly rather than waiting for an intentional activation.

Or significant portions of the UK for that matter.

Re: Not very reassuring

It is by definition it's own antiparticle. Photons, plus other bosons, are allowed to be their own antiparticles and there's nothing controverisal there. All the fermions in the standard model, on the other hand, are not their own antiparticles*. Fermions that are their own antiparticles were hypothesised quite early on in the development of quantum physics, and are called Majorana fermions after the person who came up with the theory, in contrast to the rest which are called Dirac fermions.

Quasiparticles are essentially things that aren't actually single particles, but behave like them. So things like phonons travelling through solids, or holes moving in semiconductors. So a majorana quasiparticle would be some kind of collective phenomenon within a material that looks pretty much like a particle and also acts as its own antiparticle.

So the idea itself isn't particularly controversial. The basic theory is well known and has been around for a long time, and the individual parts have all been fairly well tested. The problem is just that an actual Majorana particle has never actually been found, so it would be a pretty big discovery (at least among condensed matter physicists) if it were true.

* We're still not entirely sure about neutrinos.

Re: A rather large piece of paper for a fair test

"one has to admit that at no point the answer of "What is the keyword to that picture" could be "apple"."

Of course it could. As other comments have noted, the answer a human would give would likely be along the lines of "an apple with a label saying "ipod" stuck on it". Only a small part of the apple is visible, but it's still plenty for a human to clearly recognise it as the primary subject of the photo. This isn't a philosophical debate, it's the entire point of this kind of machine learning development - how to get a computer to actually recognise what is in a picture. It's really quite weird to complain that the developers have the wrong expectations, when getting the system's answers to match their expectations is the sole goal of the research.

Re: Nothing there...

I believe the word you're missing there is "again".

https://www.space.com/20813-mars-penis-spirit-rover-tracks.html

Re: Anti-Jam

See this quote from the article - "air forces from West and East alike have long been jamming GPS as part of their military operations there.". It's everyone from all sides doing it. You can't threaten to boycott anyone involved when your own military and all their allies are just as much responsible as anyone you might dislike.

Re: One good reason not to

"I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool ops person so don't have the CV nor the inclination to go for it"

I certainly don't have the CV for it, but it's hard to see how I could make things any worse.

"The last (and admittedly "single-point" comparison test I saw had RISC-V delivering around 25% of the performance of the equivalent ARM or x86 chip:"

I guess that's part of figuring out how much change to ARM licensing counts as too much. In the extreme case, if ARM costs 4* as much as RISC-V, only having 1/4 the performance isn't necessarily a problem. Throw in other factors like power consumption, and obviously it gets more complicated. Clearly RISC-V isn't yet a real competitor with things as they are, otherwise everyone would already be using it, but that's the big question about Nvidia - how much would it take to push customers over to RISC-V if they do start screwing around with things?

Re: The unasked questions is

Fingerprinting. Note the wording of the title - "Chrome won't help...". All they're saying is that they won't use the browser itself to do the job of tracking. Because they simply don't need to when there are plenty of perfectly good* methods to identify users without it.

* For certain values of "good".

Re: Anyone seen Mr Heisingberg's invitaton to the party?

"They can figure out where the ions were, and how fast they are going, or how fast they were going and where they are. Never where they are and how fast they are going, with any degree of certainty."

Quite a high degree of certainty actually. The uncertainty principle imposes a limit on how accurately you can know the combination of certain paired parameters, but just because it's impossible to eliminate the error bars entirely, that doesn't mean you don't know anything at all. Most of the time, the uncertainty principle isn't relevant at all, since there will usually be much larger sources of error present in most experiments.

In this specific case, they're using the fluoresence to take measurements at 50 um resolution on timescales of ~1 us. That's many, many orders of magnitude away from a scale where anyone would even bother to remember that uncertainty principles exist.

Re: Fail safe systems...

It's a nice soundbite, but more common is fail safe systems failing because they're not actually fail safe at all. The point of a fail safe is that it fails into a safe state. The common example being fire doors held open by an electromagnet. You can close the door manually or by pushing a button or whatever, but if everything goes horribly wrong and power is lost entirely, the door simply swings closed under its own weight. The point is that in the event of a failure, nothing should need to be actively done; rather, you need to actively prevent it from entering the safe state while things are working. Obviously there can always be other failure modes that can't be safely handled - a self-closing fire door won't work if an earthquake distorts the building structure - but the failures your system is designed to handle should be handled with no active intervention required.

If we look at this case, it's clear that there was no fail safe involved at all. If the front brakes fail, the system needs to detect the problem and actively apply the rear brakes. That's not failing into a safe state. A fail safe brake system would mean something like actively holding the brakes away from the wheels, so in the event of a failure they drop into place and stop the car. But since randomly slamming the brakes on could be just as dangerous as not having any brakes, I don't think the concept of fail safe even makes sense to think about when it comes to braking systems in racing cars.

Re: We all do...

"For some things you dont need explanations."

I completely agree. To take an example already given in this thread, if you want to catch a cricket ball, all that matters is that you system is able to catch said ball, and any explanation which would ultimately involve relativity and quantum physics is completely unnecessary. For other problems, an explanation may be highly desirable, and in some cases the explanation is itself the entire point. With climate, for example, predicting what will happen is useful, but understanding exactly why it will happen and what could be done to change that is arguably more important. A black box might tell you how high you need to build a dike now, but understanding the details could allow you to adjust your behaviour so you don't need to build the next dike at all.

The thing about science is that it's all about understanding. A black box might give you good answers now, but you don't know under what circumstances the answers will stop being correct, and you don't learn where the answers came from in order to develop better tools to give more and better answers in the future. If all you want is an industrial system to give you an answer here and now, a black box is fine. If you're trying to improve your understanding of things, a black box is usually just a dead end.

The Celts took it off the Beaker people first. And calling them the Beaker people is probably objectivication of some sort, given that we've literally named them after an object.

Re: Climate change....

It rained this morning, the Thames is only just below its banks, and the fields outside my window are still a lake. I don't think we're in any danger of a hosepipe ban until at least next week.

Re: Strongly discouraged

"Is Borkzilla trying to insinuate that Surface Pros are factory-limited to what was installed at build time ?"

I don't think so. If you read the actual wording, they're very careful not to say that it won't work or that anything bad will happen. It's all about how there "may" be issues, and you're "discouraged" from doing anything yourself. They're just trying to scare people off, because upgrading your drive means you're not paying for a new model, or might buy the cheaper model and then upgrade it yourself later.

"Of course, I have rarely seen a discussion of alternative methods of tracking, it is all about the cookies."

Really? I see such discussion quite frequently. Here's a handy link to get you started, although obviously there are plenty more that don't happen to use that exact word - https://search.theregister.com/?q=fingerprinting

Re: ...two miles of cables that miraculously remained untangled.

You say that, but I'm eternally in awe of anyone who can pack two miles of cable and somehow not have them immediately tied into physically impossible 5-dimensional knots the moment they turn their back. Shooting nuclear powered science labs into space on the end of a barely controlled explosion is all well and good, but parachute packers are clearly wizards.

Re: "six-eyes" policy

"That said, that amount of money should have rang some bells."

There was a fuller explanation on Ars Technica. The problem is that the entire process is a nonsensical mess. Instead of having a system that can just transfer a specific amount of money just for the interest due, they instead have to transfer the entire value of the loans. So to make the actual payments they direct some of the money to creditors, and then point the remainder at an internal account. That's what's shown in the screenshot - the main transfer is already set up, and these are settings to override some of it and divert it to the account number shown. But it turns out that in order to do so you have to override three separate fields instead of just one, which is what they failed to do here.

The problem is that there's no obvious indication that anything has gone wrong. $900 million was supposed to be transferred, and $900 million was transferred. It was only later when they tried to take the bulk of it back out of the temporary account that they noticed it hadn't gone to the right place. There weren't any alarm bells because everything was correct right up until some of the money ended up in the wrong place, which isn't something approval before the transfer would catch.

Obviously the terrible interface deserves some criticism, but the real problem seems to be having a system that requires such a convoluted and inevitably error-prone process in the first place. The judge says this problem has never happened before, but I'd be willing to bet it has happened many times, just not with such large sums or without being able to fix it.

Re: The UK test

"Incidentally, all of the packaging and leaflets were properly recyclable, so good for the NHS."

I suspect they're classified as medical waste, so unlikely to be recycled even if it were possible in theory.

Re: What is the Fuss ?

Indeed. I'm still baffled how people seem to think Facebook is relevant to news in the first place. If you want to read the news, surely you just go to a news site? That's kind of what they're for. Waiting for someone to post a link to an article on a different site that you might just happen to stumble across just doesn't seem like a useful way of getting the news.

On the other hand, your comment about using a search engine instead is also part of the problem - Google's efforts to manipulate the results of doing that is the other half of this furore.