* Posts by Tessier-Ashpool

346 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Feb 2016

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Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

Tessier-Ashpool

Hertz aren't dumping their EV fleet. Hertz EVs are mostly Teslas, which are expensive to buy and repair, and have significant depreciation. Hertz bought expensive and sell low. Rental companies sell their stock off after a few years, and the depreciation hit Hertz hard. "We are experiencing the consequence of a material price decline in Teslas and EVs more generally". They are flogging off about 40% of their Teslas, about 4.4% of their total vehicle fleet. Hertz are now focusing on buying cheaper EVs.

Amazon Ring sounds death knell for surveillance as a service

Tessier-Ashpool

Amazon Ring Sounds Death

I read the headline as Amazon Ring Sounds Death. Which I have to agree with! The poxy sounder in the device sounds like one of those Christmas cards that plays a tune when you open it. Ghastly.

Apple's Vision Pro costs big bucks to buy and repair ... just don't mention the box design

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: More homepod than ipod?

"And remember when some phones had lidar/radar in them to help? The market spoke, that didn't last long..."

Loads of iPhone and iPad models since 2020 feature LIDAR. You won't find it on Android devices. But then again, you won't find secure facial recognition on those devices either.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Think of the Grid!

We import quite a bit of electricity. France will make up the shortfall with their extensive nuclear capability. Assuming, of course, our renewable program grinds to a halt. A lot of people have trouble with the notion that we're in a transition. It will take many years to fully switch over to EVs and get renewables into shape. That's why the targets are a long way in the future.

Adobe ditches $20B Figma takeover under pressure from monopoly cops

Tessier-Ashpool

Pricey

Adobe subscribers - all 30 million of them - would have had to stump up at least $666 each to make this deal profitable for Adobe. A remarkably pertinent number.

Dump C++ and in Rust you should trust, Five Eyes agencies urge

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: I must be a bit thick

I'm not surprised it goofed up. You were basically asking for trouble when you wrote code like that!

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Bull

I've written C# code that - despite my best and careful efforts - have occasional spasms when the garbage collector kicks in. Admittedly, my programming was a few years ago, but something else that often cropped up in C# was the obligatory nested using { } construct used to dispose of managed resources. Sometimes you have to do far from the obvious to dispose of managed resources correctly beyond wrapping them in using statements, involving temporary assignment of variables before disposal, and similar tricks. I'd hardly call any of that nonsense "safe". I often called it "yuk".

Electric vehicles earn shocking report card for reliability

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Tesla Build

fullfact is a useful place to find the truth.

https://fullfact.org/online/electric-vehicles-from-failed-business/

Tessier-Ashpool
Flame

Re: Call me old fashioned

All cars burn in a similar manner once they are alight. What most people don’t realise is that the bulk of the heat energy produced in a vehicle fire does not come from the fuel or battery. Rather, it is the burning plastic, rubber and other combustibles in the car that supply most of the energy in the fire.

https://lashfire.eu/media/2022/09/2022-08_Facts_and_Myths.pdf

There are approximately 300 petrol and diesel fires in the UK every day. It’s a really common thing, too common for the MSM to report on.

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: No shit

No confusion whatsoever. The gripe here is that domestic cabling isn’t up to it. Well it is, because if you can power an electric shower in your home you can power an EV. As for the equivalence of showering for 3+ hours, the idea is that GRID capacity will increase over the next couple of decades to accommodate. It should also be noted that most showering in the UK already takes place at narrow periods of time in the morning and evening.

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: No shit

I had mine (an old Victorian cottage) updated from 60A to 100A. The DNO did this in a morning for free. It involved them installing thicker cabling from the overhead supply. While they were at it, they gave my house a dedicated phase. Previously, three cottages were supplied on the same phase. Result: no more dimming lights, and loads of spare current capacity, even with the EV charger in place.

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: No shit

Remember, kids, a domestic EV charger uses as much power as a typical electric shower. Panic over. Sure, the grid needs more power, but the key word is transition.

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: increasing reluctance in the insurance industry to actually insure

Hybrid batteries are placed under rear seats or in the boot area. For fairly obvious reasons if you think about it. Nowhere near the flames in that burning diesel car.

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: increasing reluctance in the insurance industry to actually insure

Diesel burns terrifically well once it’s being torched by an existing rubber and plastics fire. Like when a car goes up in flames.

Apple jacks prices to juice profits because $19.3B a quarter isn't enough

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Apple TV+... anyone? anyone?

Tehran (female undercover Mossad agent in Iran) is quite gripping. A bit like 24.

I've received three free trials of Apple TV, courtesy of buying Apple equipment, but I wouldn't actually hand over real money for it. I have a date in my calendar for cancelling the latest free trial.

Apple blames iOS 17 bug for overheating iPhone 15 woes

Tessier-Ashpool

Camera app

It’s quite easy on my iPhone 14 Pro to accidentally open the camera app. If you do this while tucking the phone into your shirt pocket, it runs hot as hell. I presume because its fancy chippery is constantly hunting to find a focus.

The only way is WebKit: Vivaldi's browser arrives on iOS

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Can anyone tell me why ...

As said above, because they can. Apple take a fairly protective stance of software they permit to be installed on iOS. One notable example was the Flash rendering engine, which Apple excised years ago, ostensibly on the grounds that it was a CPU-hungry POS that gave their iPads a bad name. To be honest, I don’t much care, as Apple’s fork of WebKit works pretty well, and when it goes wrong, updates for gazillions of users (who use WebKit for both browsing and other things) are provided. This may well all change if their hand is forced and they are obliged to allow third party rendering engines.

Scientists spot startlingly close black holes in Hyades star cluster

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: "we'd probably already be dead"

You're quite right. Relativistic jets are emitted normal to the plane of an accretion disk by its magnetic field, and are very much fuelled by it,

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: "we'd probably already be dead"

I wouldn’t be too worried by a properly black black hole at that distance. But if it’s got an accretion disk spraying us with relativistic jets of matter, that’s a different kettle of fish. We’d be done for.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

OVO Anytime is 10p / kWh. You do need a compatible car or charger, though. Which, sadly, I don’t have.

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

That’s not necessarily true. In winter, yes perhaps. But these past few months in the warm weather, my EV tells me how it’s been doing each time I power off after a journey. It’s mostly been over 5 miles per kWh. And it’s not a small car.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Good encryption by default

These people never have an answer when you ask them why they have curtains in their house.

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Not holding my breath

Oh shit, bollox. You’ve given some minister an idea now!

Read lips? Siri wants to feel them, according to fresh Apple patent

Tessier-Ashpool

Open the pod bay doors, Siri

This can only end in tears.

Now Apple takes a bite out of encryption-bypassing 'spy clause' in UK internet law

Tessier-Ashpool

Meredith Whittaker

I saw Meredith Whittaker, of Signal fame, on C4 News this evening taking some Tory stooge to task over this. I’m now a little in love with this woman. She is awesome. When the Tory suggested Signal would not quit the UK if the law goes pear-shaped, she demanded to know if he was calling her a liar. And then she scolded him with his first name like she would when castigating a guilty child. Of course, the Tory had no real answer other than to carry on with his magical thinking.

Apple warns of three WebKit vulns under active exploitation, dozens more CVEs across its range

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: "Not good at security"?

I agree with you - mostly. Where I have a big problem with Apple is that you can have a super shiny expensive Apple Mac on your desktop that is a festering mess of vulnerabilities, since they have a habit of designating devices as 'obsolete' after a period of time and do not provide further software updates.

It's bizarre that my friend's Mac, bought in 2013, craps out when she tries to buy anything on a supermarket website. Because Safari is so dangerously out of date that the store won't accept it. I installed the most recent version of Firefox for her, and she can now browse again with confidence.

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: The problem with a mono-culture

Hence Apple's welcome recent adoption of rapid security response hot fixes. People should get hold of fixes sooner.

BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030

Tessier-Ashpool

"For a company like BT there is a huge opportunity to use AI to be more efficient," said ChatGPT while CEO Philip Jansen was in the shower. “Gissa job,” it went on to demand.

If we plan to live on the Moon, it's going to need a time zone

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Just set the entire moon to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC +0) ...

When I developed a payment system for our company, I reported the emailed transaction time in UTC rather than local time. To do otherwise would yield ambiguous information a couple of days in the yearn the 1am to 2am slot.

Company managers went ape because virtually nobody in the fairly large IT department had heard of UTC.

Apple complains UK watchdog wants to make iOS a 'clone' of Android

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Embedded web content

AFAIK, Apple make extensive use of WebKit throughout iOS. Anywhere that things look a bit webby. For example, the fairly obvious HTML rendering in the Mail app.

20 years on, physicists are still figuring out anomaly in proton experiment

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: It's a facinating field

Protons are composed of empty space, too. AFAIK their constituent quarks are fundamental point-like particles with no intrinsic size. Quantum Field Theory postulates that quark fields permeate the entire universe but at any time some places are a bit quarkier than others (an excitation) and that’s what you call a quark. Similar story for electrons. How big something is and where it is all goes to pot when Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle comes into play, so I might as well stop using English right now. The universe doesn’t care about the notions of us macroscopic humans, and plays by different rules.

Physics Nobel Prize in a superposition between three quantum physicists

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Measuring a property does not set it...

To be honest, I’m not sure anyone “understands” quantum mechanics. “Shut up and calculate” appears to be the standard paradigm.

Human concepts like “measure” and “particle” really become unstuck when the quantum world is involved, so I’m not sure it’s even valid to say that measuring one particle has an instant effect on the other. Too many rabbit holes involved there.

But… if you say that nobody knows the state of a particle until you look, but when you do look it’s entangled counterpart must by definition be in an opposite state, how is that different to saying that you don’t actually have two particles at all? Rather, instead you have an extremely long entity with two disparate ends? And you don’t know if it’s A…B or B…A until you have a peek. No hidden variables, just something being something. Note that I am necessarily applying human concepts and words here. Under the hood the universe doesn’t really care about how we think.

DeepMind uses matrix math to automate discovery of better matrix math techniques

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Historically it was believed you needed n^3 operations to multiply 2 square matrices together

Thanks for the link. Interesting article. I’d not thought of treating matrix elements as matrices themselves but of course it makes sense if you think about it. I wonder how this relates to the way that the universe itself works out what’s going on. Quantum mechanics is stuffed full of matrix operations and every part of the universe is said to be intimately connected with every other part.

Rust is eating into our systems, and it's a good thing

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: I'm getting rusty

I'd join you, but I already scarpered from the world of work. I was doing primarily C# for many years, which I must admit was an easy and powerful way to program, especially with LINQ extensions. But the headaches of null pointer reference exceptions was a real pain in the neck, and garbage collection / object disposal was always a bit hit and miss as to whether it would work efficiently and cleanly. I got into the habit of using the "using { }" construct religiously to dispose of disposable resources, but code analysis would inevitably moan that I needed to go through additional manual hoop jumping to clean things up. Right. Royal. Pain. In. The. Neck.

EU proposes regulations for tablet battery life, spare parts

Tessier-Ashpool

Reliability of product

Good idea. If this mandates critical security updates to keep your gadget working “reliably” I’m all for it.

I see that Apple have recently provided such an update for older iGadgets (I guess it must be a pretty serious bug fix). But taking the guesswork out of your purchase can only be a good thing for the customer.

Braking news: Cops slammed for spamming Waze to slow drivers down

Tessier-Ashpool

Obligatory speed camera video

The BBC famously pulled this video from their website when their reporter cheerfully reported on a speed camera causing accidents in Norfolk. The carnage starts at around 1:55.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJLlH6GgmfU

Asteroids may shoot pebbles into shallow temporary orbits, boffins believe

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: The orbits degrade

I would imagine it's because the parent body is very lumpy and, hence, generates a significant non-uniform gravitational field. The path of anything moving in a field like that significantly departs from a regular elliptical orbit.

Claims of AI sentience branded 'pure clickbait'

Tessier-Ashpool
Terminator

Skynet

The disturbing thing is that many of the social media posts rebuffing AI are being posted by AIs. Anyone who's seen the Terminator movies knows this is exactly the kind of thing Skynet would do.

Apple's latest security feature could literally save lives

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: WebKit, anyone?

It’s not a question of what an individual may - or may not - do. And neither you or I could possibly know this. It’s a technical/legal question of how Apple could provide the option at the same time as complying with forthcoming EU legislation.

If someone happens to have a third party browser engine installed, something that many have clamoured for, Apple cannot then provide a lockdown radio button without substantial qualification on the settings app. Something like “If you have installed any of a long list of 3rd party apps, this feature will not work as described.”

Tessier-Ashpool

WebKit, anyone?

Not sure how this is going to work when the EU forces Apple to accept any old browser engine that the user cares to install from some random place on the internet.

NASA wants nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030

Tessier-Ashpool

First lesbian on the Moon

Never mind the first woman or "person of colour". I'm looking forward to the first lesbian on our satellite. Or, preferably, two.

Apple may have to cough up $1bn to Brits in latest iPhone Batterygate claim

Tessier-Ashpool

Throttling is a reasonable technical solution to a problem, the problem being that certain older phone models with degraded batteries would unceremoniously shut down. Better that your phone runs a bit slower than just crap out on you.

But Apple implemented throttling on the quiet. Unannounced, with no option to disable it (at that time). That’s what upset users, and quite rightly so.

EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of combustion engine cars from 2035

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: And the UK ?

Get over Brexit? Easier said than done when it’s doing so much harm to the UK economy. We probably need reminders on a daily basis so that such a terrible mistake is never repeated in future.

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Tessier-Ashpool

Despite the downvotes, it is true that USB-C cables can wear out.

I used one virtually every day for 3 years to connect my laptop to a monitor. After 3 years, the connection did become noticeably looser, with attendant video break up. Fixed by a new cable.

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Any examples?

Here's an example of a web page that allegedly works with Chrome but not Safari.

https://service.msicomputer.com/msi_user/support/parts.aspx

The reason? It's a very poorly written web page, and it's a miracle that any browser can make sense of the mangled HTML it generates.

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Lousy web design

Indeed. I've seen users complain that Safari doesn't work at all well with certain websites. Very often such websites are very poorly written, as you can easily determine by running a URL through an online HTML validation tool such as https://validator.w3.org/

It seems that Chrome is more forgiving (if that's actually the right word) of rubbish developers who don't know how to construct HTML properly.

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Ker-Ching!

The main reason that Jobs banned Flash was, I distinctly recall, because the code was a resource hog that flattened an iPad's battery.

In the article it says "Apple won't let you use anything else. There is no good reason for this."

I can think of one good reason: if an alternate browser has free rein to interact with the device (in the same way that Flash did) its browser engine could behave in a similarly bad way. I'm not saying it would; I'm saying that it could. For that very reason alone, I imagine that if Apple are forced to accept this, they would only do so with the user's explicit permission to absolve them of performance responsibility. There's a monetary cost to bodgers turning up at an Apple Store for help. Also, Apple won't want people waving a phone around in a pub saying that its performance is crap, dissing their products.

Pictured: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: Design Flaw

But there is an “expanding substrate”, space itself. AFAIK, it’s reckoned it will expand forever. Who can say.

I don’t know about a black hole being a “glitch”. I favour the notion that they are just exceedingly expensive computational resources for a mathematical God. Just imagine if you were God, troubled with the onerous task of driving the universe forward. You’ve got to individually compute the forces between all atoms in the cosmos to change the universe from one instant to the next. Quite a task.

That gets all the more burdensome when you have mind-bogglingly large numbers of particles close together in a compact object like a neutron star or black hole. So what do you do with your available resources? You reduce your computing clock rate to put a limit on how quickly things can change.

Funnily enough, this is exactly what happens in the vicinity of a black hole: time slows down.

Spare a thought for God. He / she / it has a lot of number crunching to do.

Outlook bombards Safari users with endless downloads

Tessier-Ashpool

Re: "Alternatively, use a different browser"

You’re thinking of iOS. On a Mac you can still install the latest Google funkery (if you want to make life easy for trackers).

Microsoft Edge's 'Secure Network' sounds a lot like a built-in VPN

Tessier-Ashpool

See also iCloud Private Relay

iCloud+ Safari users can turn this setting on in iCloud settings to get similar functionality. Mostly limited to Safari, but it's free for any paid-for iCloud subscription.

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