Posts by John Sager 886 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2008
For a tech news site I would have expected a bit more tech than just "180 million quid on new time stuff". A link to the actual nuts & bolts of the proposal would have been good. Perhaps there isn't one and this is all government vapourware so far?
This NPL press release is the only thing I could find with a quick look, and that is as vapid as the article.
a business or organization is so underfunded that that choice -- security vs near-immediate patient death -- is truly binary
I can think of at least one organisation where this is true. But that's almost certainly down to misapplication of funds rather than lack of funding per se.
I never really did anything significant with Arduino, I was mostly doing stuff on Linux. When I decided to dip my toe into non-Linux embedded stuff again I went to STM32/FreeRTOS, and latterly to RP2040/2350. However Arduino has been seriously good at raising a cohort of software people who also understand the nuts and bolts of the software/hardware interface and its foibles. Sad that that avenue is effectively cut off by legal issues. We don't want to have to bone up on legal foot guns or pay lawyers to do it for us.
They aren't building suspension bridges, which these days is pretty much a mature process. Space is hard and building the hardware and testing it is definitely not yet mature. Look at all the other current attempts to go there from Blue Origin down. Lots of Oops, try again stuff going on. SpaceX is currently well ahead of the game with a well ordered process to suss out the gremlins. They'll get there but not on NASA's, Congress's or Trump's timetable.
Dunno if Starlink do this but putting a GPS chip or software into their antenna terminals and doing a low-level 'tell me where you are' scan would be an obvious check. Some terminals could have 'anywhere globally' accounts (e.g. aircraft) and some could be 'no more than 1 km from declared location'.
I would have a Linux phone but several apps I use just wouldn't run for security or DRM reasons.
Also I could rhen get IPv6 to work at home on my phone. Like all my other hosts, the phone will get an address prefix from the Router Advertisements but unlike rhem it won't use the RA to provide a default route. adb shell doesn't give me any clues either but does show me how complex the network stuff is - just try doing 'ip rule show' in adb shell!
.
Snap! FORTRAN IV for me- a 1 term course at uni and some punch-card bashing for a new ICL1904 where they were letting us have some free time. I left FORTRAN almost behind but the antenna modelling s/w Nec2 is written in it and I've hacked on that a bit in the past.
There are 4G cell sites relatively close but the terrain means we don't get service in the house, even on the 700-800Mhz band. Even if they put a cell in the village centre it wouldn't cover some outlying parts, again because of terrain, so the numbers won't add up for any of the networks to put a small cell here. WiFi calling is a poor substitute for the 3G femtocell we had in the house for years.
Reading the comments above on Tesco's attitude to business continuity, I'm now even more surprised than I was a few years ago when the handheld bar code scanners went to shit. The things took several seconds to register a scan, even for repeat scans on the same item. Talking to the staff it was just as bad for them as for the customers. They finally fixed that a few months ago, probably a change of software provider and a rewrite.
Some of the testing scenarios deliberately push the envelope, so failures are almost expected. However they gain valuable info from telemetry before the RUD experience. However the Starship RUDs recently seem to have been rather unexpected. Nevertheless they get useful data. The booster is mostly meeting milestones as far as I can see.
I tried this on my Lenovo AMD laptop using just CPU. I posed the question 'What is "Just a Minute?"'. It knew the BBC radio programme and the expression for asking people to wait. However it hallucinated two howlers: it said Dennis Waterman had been a presenter, and that John Cleese had done a TV version.
Check its work carefully!
The text came out slowly - two or three words a second - and running 'top' showed about 330% CPU and 18% memory (I have 32Gb installed).
where most of the payment is made when the experts agree it really works
Nobody is going to put effort in on that basis, even if they thought they could make it work. The Home Office would have to tender for it, perhaps on 50% now, 50% on successful test (whatever 'successful' means). Cue a few snake oil salesmen.
No 4G where I live. There is a couple of mikes away on the main A road but we live in a hole. When Voda switched off 3G anywhere outside of a town became E country, and there seems to have been no attempt yet to put stuff in the vacated 3G band.
I'm currently travelling in Scandinavia and 4G/5G is more or less universally available in Sweden's endless forests, and Norway's endless fjords. If they can do that, why can't we?
Having been to the US many times in the past, I got into an auto-translate mode in my mind, so I used American words and expressions in a Northern England accent.
It generally worked though later as a tourist we travelled through Carson City, NV which has a railroad museum. There was a rally of 50s period autos going on in the parking lot there which prompted confusion over the word 'car' in the museum. They use 'car' for our railway carriages...
Voda switched theirs off over a year ago and still I get E for Eff Off! when I'm anywhere outside a conurbation. You would think they could do more than the apparently sluggardly pace of the buildout. Perhaps the plan is to replace all the 4G in the cities first & then redeploy the 4G kit in the sticks.
Just look at Portillo's current oeuvre on BBC. He's in Bergen and the flexible(!) cables to deliver shore power to the cruise ships have to be seen to be believed.
As for fast charging, the Chinese have plenty of local copper and aluminium and they can just plan the capacity into their growing electricity distribution network. The UK equivalent is very mature and hard to augment, and with plenty of resistance to new pylon runs.
I did a FORTRAN IV course in the last term at university and actually managed to write a functioning program - punched card stack and all! The debug-recompile cycle was a bit tortuous then! I've hacked on Fortran occasionally since along with several other languages, but I'm now down to C and Python mostly.
Welcome to Streaming World. I have a Amazon Prime account and the streaming is a doubtful bonus on good delivery. It used to be ad-free but now increasingly there are unskippable ads in the programmes which pisses me off mightily. I still have a Humax Freesat recorder about 15 years old. It's on its 3rd hard disk but the electrolytics in the PSU haven't gone bang yet. It is a godsend for skipping ads on commercial channels so we rarely see the complete weirdness that seems to be de rigeur in the TV ad space here in the UK.
The GR effects of Earth at the Moon are much less so clocks run slower on the Moon relative to those on Earth. GPS and the other GNSS sats take care of that for Earth by running very slightly slower than the nominal frequency. Also the message includes info to cope with time and position varying effects. A Moon receiver will have to remove or ignore the Earth-related compensations and sort its own out for the much greater change at the Moon.
Looking at the references there's an absence of information about accuracy. The way GPS works is that your position is on a sphere around each sat with radius given by the measured range. With 4 or more sats that problem can be solved to give your position. The accuracy is best if the directions to each sat are widely spaced, which they generally are on Earth.
However on the Moon all those sats are in more or less the same direction. The maximum angle subtended at the Moon by GPS sats at opposite ends of their orbit is only about 8 degrees. I hope that experiment can collect sufficient data before it freezes to death to give some estimate of expected position errors. I expect the time errors will be a lot less though.
This! Very definitely. We've seen the burden of State control of us proles increasing steadily over at least the last 2 decades. It's not just a Left- wing thing either - the Tories seem to have been just as willing to circumscribe our freedom to do stuff in the name of various Menckenian Hobgoblins.
I guess he's entitled to his opinion just like all those outside the US who have or still do criticise & insult DJT.
He certainly got TTK's attention judging by his response today. Winding up politicians should be an international sport anyway to keep them on their toes.
As for the CCP, I'm half expecting a large red CCP flag to cover much of the face of the moon before I pop my clogs.
The string I have has 100 lights on a 10m string. Unlike the WS2812 the data line doesn't daisy-chain - it's connected to all the lights in parallel. I still haven't worked out how they tell each light what position it is in the string. It looks like they manufacture the string in long lengths & cut off 10m or 5m etc for sale so it needs to be one-time-programmed later.
My first driver was a Pimoroni Pico 2 plus with a single WS2812 as a level shifter. That complained about driving the string after a day or two so I've changed to a Pimoroni plasma 2350W. Sadly the wireless bit doesn't work yet but the level shifter is plenty beefy enough to drive the light string.
Well, Tesco have just done so. 2.5 years ago they did a software update that made their bar code scanners a complete pile of crap - several seconds to register a scan, and the same delay for repeat scans of the same item. In some parts of our usual store it took a lot longer because of the WiFi coverage.
So a couple of weeks ago I went into the store and all the scans are now pretty much instant, just like Sainsbury's have always been.
Having complained bitterly originally via their CEO mailbox, I thought I would write and congratulate them on having the balls to do a software upgrade just before Christmas! A pity it's taken them 2.5 years to sort it out though.
All true except for the space mining. The earth still has vastly more of everything we need. The only constraint is economic, though the Greenies might think they have a veto. It will always be more economic to mine stuff here rather than on asteroids far into the future.
Also, if there were an economic bountiful supply of, say, platinum in an asteroid, then as soon as you start mining it the price will come down to the point where it starts to become uneconomic to mine the asteroid further.
In the 80s I wrote a serial link concentrator running over RSX11T on a PDP11. It used a 3rd party 16-port serial card for cost reasons and I wrote a driver to implement the serial protocol. Getting on for 15 years later when I had moved on a few times, my old boss contacted me - they wanted to replace the PDP11s with a VAX. Did I still have the software? I dug out a listing hiding under a bunch of other mouldering docs for him. I don't think I had a copy of the s/w as the RSX11M dev system was long gone. I think they eventually gave up on the idea.
That was the last time I wrote anything serious in Pascal - the Oregon Software compiler. From then on it's been C, C++ and Python mostly.
If your network is of any size then the better solution for v6 is to get your own allocation. There is plenty of address space available! You still need a v4 access point but then you could run a NAT64/DNS64 combination to map remote v4 addresses into the local V6 space. Some ISPs already do this, including mine. I could in principle go v6 only but older hosts like the TV don't support it and I still need an inbound VPN solution from v4-land.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2026
