Posts by Crypto Monad

Re: just a moment

> Who says they are using Helium?

Erm, the article?

> “We've acted decisively to increase customer value since we closed the acquisition in late November,"

> LoL wot?

By "customer value" he means what the customers are worth to Broadcom in terms of revenue - not the value of VMware software and services to customers.

Re: Resilio Sync

Ot there's syncthing, which is FOSS

Re: Poorly Made Plywood Mockup

The plywood base is clearly a safety feature, to stop the prototype taking off in the middle of the exhibition hall, or from being stolen. If it doubles up as a ride-on lawnmower, that's an extra selling point.

You have to admire the work of the modern investor con-artist though.

Earth is about 4bn years old. The entire universe is about 13bn years old.

If there was time for life to evolve elsewhere in the first 9bn years (*and* be carried across the interstellar medium to Earth, without being destroyed in the process), then there was almost as much time for it to develop independently on Earth.

Occam's razor, etc etc.

Re: Is Micros~1's marketing dept. out of their ever-lovin minds?

Maybe their marketers have been infiltrated by an Apple sleeper cell....

Maybe, but then you have to wonder why Apple put AI hardware ("Neural Engine") in their recent CPUs, and what they plan to do with it.

If I could pay less for a CPU without this, I would. In fact, I'd pay the same, or maybe more, for a CPU without it.

Re: What's the first word you think of when someone says "Amazon"?

When someone says "Amazon", I think "online marketplace, like e-bay but worse".

Experience has told me: unless it says "sold by Amazon" as well as "dispatches from Amazon", not to buy. It's full of fakes.

Sadly though, there is no filter for "Sold by Amazon". There are filters for "Free UK Delivery" and "Get it tomorrow", but these apply to things not sold by Amazon as well. So you just have to be very careful when clicking.

Would have made more sense from Boeing though.

Re: 69 megajoules

> and even at a 10X scale would be useful power

(Depending on what efficiency you can convert it back to electricity of course)

Unfortunately, the main thing JET has proved, over decades of trying, is that we're unable to make D-T plasma fusion work on a small scale - even experimentally, let alone commercially.

There are hopes pinned on the huge-scale ITER being able to do better, but it seems to me there are two possible outcomes:

1. ITER also fails to be stable and self-sustaining. Or:

2. ITER *can* be made stable and self-sustaining. However, this means that any commercial reactor would be at least equally huge and mind-bogglingly expensive, with massive running costs (due to, for example, the reactor vessel becoming highly radioactive from the neutron flux - not to mention the cost of the fuel).

Even case (2) does not bode well for the "clean and cheap" power which we we promised.

There is a large, stable fusion reactor positioned only 8 light-minutes away from us. Why not just capture the power from that?

Here you go, thanks to Wikipedia:

"That's no moon"

"The Clangers are at home"

Re: The 737 Used To Be A Good Aircraft ...

The A380 is a thing of beauty. It's incredibly quiet inside - I get an inkling of what it must have been like in an airship.

It seems preposterous that something this big can even get off the ground, and the economics are mad unless it is filled to capacity - it needs something like 19 flight attendants, to get all the passengers off in an emergency. As a result, it failed commercially, and production has ended.

But it is nonetheless a stunning piece of engineering, and if you get the chance to travel in one (mainly Emirates these days) you definitely should.

Re: Bit rich given they're blocking of IPv6 ISPs

It's politics.

* Hurricane Electric does not announce its IPv6 blocks to transit providers, because it considers itself to be a tier 1, and wants to force all other tier 1's to peer with it. But Cogent refuses to. As a result, if you buy your Internet connection from Cogent, you cannot reach IPv6 addresses belonging to Hurricane Electric (and vice versa).

* Google does not announce its IPv6 blocks to its transit providers (i.e. its upstream ISPs) AT ALL. Google want to force all operators to peer with them, so that in the long run, they don't have to pay any transit costs. But tier 1's like Cogent don't want to, as it breaks their business model.

I would have thought HE and Google would be happy to peer, but maybe that relationship has broken down recently too.

In any case, the situation we are in is that the IPv6 Internet is not fully connected - but nobody notices or cares, because IPv4 is what matters, and that works. Dual-stack and happy-eyeballs plaster over the cracks. It's only when you run an IPv6-only network that you find out what things are really broken.

Re: How About Using Sunlight?

I presume it's going to take many minutes or hours of ablation to make any meaningful change of momentum on the orbiting target.

Surely that means you'll have to pretty much match orbit with the target, and sit right alongside it? This implies burning lots of propellant to keep wandering over to each target in turn.

And if you're going to get that close, maybe it's more efficient to have a supply of small rockets which you attach to each piece of debris in turn.

I, too, don't like the idea of lasers which are powerful enough to vaporise steel or aluminium over hundreds of metres, being pointed downwards at the Earth.

Re: It’s not just C-Suite

> Many advertising sites then decided to deliberately find the very most annoying way to pretend to follow it. Probably in the hope of getting it repealed.

Especially sites which require 10 to 20 "Legitimate Interest" areas of data processing to be unchecked individually, in order to opt out of tracking. Or worse, sites that list 200 or more advertising partners, and having to uncheck every one individually.

I always uncheck the "legitimate interest" boxes (except when it's 200+ individual advertising partners), although I don't really believe that unchecking them will actually make any difference to the processing that goes on behind the scenes. We have no way of knowing whether they honour those selections or not.

Re: Before OSX, the Mac didnt appeal to me

System 6 was the peak of simplicity and reliability. System 7 onwards were as crashy as hell. OSX, with its proper kernel underpinnings, was the start of return to stability.

Re: A fine idea but...

if you'd like to estimate the cost of a battery to power around 60-70% of total UK demand (inc heating and transport, and allowing Hinkley and Sizewell) for five days, you'll have a very big number - of the order of 10 TWh of storage. Divide the cost of that by the actual power output, say for a total annual run time of 15 days, and you'll have a cost per MWh that I can tell you now will be unaffordable.

So? Just fire up gas power stations for 5 or 10 days per year as required.

Sure, the electricity from these would be very expensive, compared to running them all the time. But as we only talking about (say) 5% of total annual demand coming from gas, having that 5% be really expensive is spread over the other 95% of usage.

Forget "net zero". If we were able to reduce CO₂ emissions to 5% of 1970 levels, we'd all be fine. Just make good use of that 5%. As a side benefit, we'd also make our existing fossil reserves last 20 times longer.

(However, note that today only about 1/6th of our energy consumption is in the form of electricity, so there's going to have to be a big shift from fossil to electric for heating and transport too. Even with heat pumps, this will most likely treble both our generation and transmission requirements)

Re: "settle the question of water worlds once and for all"

> The problem I have with the current state of planetary detection is that we are not detecting Earth-like planets

That's because it's much easier to detect planets close to stars than planets further away.

If you were lucky enough for its orbit to be aligned for a transit, it's only going to transit once per year. Our scopes don't yet have the resolution or sensitivity to directly detect an earth-like planet by its reflected light - especially when swamped by the light of the nearby star.

Three hours is plenty of time to get into your basement, for example. Not that you'd even need to do that in this case.

Larger rocks => more danger but longer warning.

Agree, but it would be interpreted by the US as European protectionism, favouring Airbus over Boeing, yada yada.

Re: Pascal wasn't just for purists, despite the implementations

The entire original Macintosh OS was written in Pascal - that's a major real-world use.

When writing applications in C, you had to convert C strings into Pascal strings before passing them to system calls.

Re: Is It Even Worth That Much?

> So, is Xitter even worth $6m?

Just for clarity: the $5.6m figure quoted in the article is only for *Fidelity's* holdings in X, which is a tiny minority shareholding.

You can run "cloud-type workloads" on your own hardware.

The term I believe is intended to describe workloads that are broken into lots of similar pieces that run concurrently across multiple servers so you can scale them up.

Kubernetes is an obvious example of this.

Re: What could possibly go wrong...

With any of these approaches you end up with two problems instead of one, the second being the unexpected consequences of pumping the atmosphere full of sulphates or whatever.

Ask Australians what they think about the introduction of cane toads or rabbits - or a hundred other examples of "by doing X we can fix Y ... oops, we didn't think that it would also do Z".

And there's a third problem which hasn't been mentioned. Any mitigation activity like this is, by its very presence (or even the possibility of it taking place), is going to prolong the emissions of GHGs by the entrenched interests, who will see it as an excuse for business-as-usual. That feedback loop will surely reduce or even negate any benefit from the mitigation.

There's an argument that it could be used *after* we've stopped emitting GHGs, to get the climate back to where it should be more quickly. But genuine question: how long would the climate take to recover naturally?

Re: Year End Reminiscing

Back then, people said that QoS was mandatory: you couldn't possibly do voice calling, let alone videoconferencing, without it.

And here we are, first with Skype and then with Zoom, Teams, Meets, WhatsApp etc all proving the opposite: there is zero QoS on the Internet and it works just fine. Your corporate network, which has tons of bandwidth compared to your external Internet link, has even less need of QoS.

Re: Oops!

Talking about it rationally is definitely a good thing.

But operating processes and long-term storage are two different things. In the video, Kyle and the plant representative both only talked about the safe storage of the waste for the period of the operator's licence - presumably a few decades. There was no mention that it's going to have to be stored for millenia after that, long after the current operator is gone. Those are some very large cans to kick down the road.

In particular, it would be good to be transparent about how much those containers hold of long-lived fission products, and how the long term storage is going to be handled and paid for.

There are a few observations I'd make.

1. The sequential performance of even a single core has increased by at least 3 orders of magnitude since the 1980's. DRAM rather less, maybe only 1 order of magnitude - hence the need for three tiers of cache inside the CPU.

2. Software used to be 4 orders of magnitude smaller. The original Mac in the mid 1980's had a 400KB floppy drive, on which you could put the OS/Finder, MacWrite and MacPaint. Now you'll be lucky to install any useful OS plus application in 4GB. Today's software has more features, but it is not 10,000 times more useful.

Or to take a PC example: in the early 1990's, a 386SX with 2MB of RAM was plenty to run Windows 3.11 and WordPerfect. Since the software was small, it was quick to load from an old spinning hard drive.

3. The bootup time of a PC is not CPU-constrained anyway. It's mostly constrained by external storage - loading megabytes here and megabytes there, in hundreds of separate files - and partly by drivers initializing hardware.

Efforts have been made to parallelize startup (e.g. systemd does this). However the small saving in bootup time is offset by the subtle bugs you get if you've not correctly declared dependencies, and things end up starting in parallel which shouldn't.

Re: Strong Typing

This isn't really about strong typing as such. It's about a data structure (the DOM) being manipulated as if it were a string. More specifically, when you insert a string into the DOM, that string can itself be parsed as part of the XML structure; you can insert nodes, which might be benign like "b" or "i", or dangerous like "script".

This is in the same class of problems as SQL injection, as witnessed by Bobby Tables.

The solution is to escape data properly so that text is only interpreted as text, and cannot be interpreted as a higher-level structure. And that's effectively what this "typing" is doing: not allowing you to accidentally insert text unless you've explicitly sanitized it or escaped it.

(Note that El Reg comments don't do this properly: if I type <b> then it ought to render as "b" inside angle-brackets)