* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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FAA stays grounded in reality as SpaceX preps for takeoff

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Let's wait until the wildlife and fisheries people have checked out the results of the water deluge and any possible debris scatter! It may be minimal effects, but how long will it take them to confirm that and raise the thumb? :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

LOL, I should have read on a bit further before posting my reply. I said almost the same thing :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

On a similar note, the booster engines shut down in stages, probably to reduce the levels of deceleration "pushing" the fuel upwards, potentially either cause pressure issues or hydraulic shock, and so was a mitigation. But I wonder if the thrust from the Starship engines doing a hot staging "pushed" back on the booster, causing an increase in deceleration rate and resulting in fuel pushing "upwards" and/or hydraulic shock" to levels more than expected? Whatever caused the problem, it does seem to have been an issue with fuel feeds to the engines as they seemed to go out in a cascade very quickly after re-light.

CompSci teachers panic as Replit pulls the plug on educational IDE

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

From the article, it's only been available since Jan 2022, so most teachers have been using it for 12-18 months, the early adopters being the few at the 18 month end of the curve and after education had been pretty much back to "normal" for a while. So for most teachers, only one school year. It should not be hard to go back to how the worked in the previous school year. In the case of UK schools, I doubt they switched to this before the start of a new school year, so most likely used it from Sept'22 to July'23. That means they are into their 2nd year of using it now, so the short notice cut-off is a bit of a bastard, and the current years course is based on it, but it really should not be THAT hard to go back to their older lesson plans. Likewise, anything that is free is going to be limited in some way, never depend on "free forever" because it never, ever is.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ah we want it for free

Sometimes it can be hard to tell with the Americanisation of El Reg, as in the US, "school" can be almost any form of learning environment from compulsory age schooling through to college and university. Back in the dark ages, when I was young and there was much less US TV and films available in the UK, hearing a US university student talk about being "in school" or "going to school" was very confusing until I started to understand that US English was similar to but not entirely unlike English :-)

Boffins claim invention of rechargable, biodegradable, supercapacitor drug pump

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Waiting to see this in my next cell phone....

I suspect that may be an Impossible Mission.

MOVEit victim count latest: 2.6K+ orgs hit, 77M+ people's data stolen

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What is this MOVEit?

An excellent question. It's not a service I can get my head around. What is the business case for companies transferring data around, especially between parts of their own spread out organisation, that a middle-man can do it better or cheaper? A middle-man for the actual fibres and wires inbetween, but why would anyone need a middle-man to actually send the data for them?

I'm sure there are people here who will have good reasons for why MoveIt exists and people use their services, so please, do share that info because I'm stumped!

Microsoft dials back Bing after users manage to recreate Disney logo in fake AI-generated images

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"There's no way that thing generated that image statistically without that original image being in the training set, and hitting a lot of statistics for keywords like Afghan and girl together."

Yeah, that's what I said, but you put it a bit more succinctly :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Exactly. Average and averaged are not the same thing :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yeah, but that's poor "AI", misunderstanding the context of "average". The request, to a human, would be an "average Afghan girl", not an "average of all the afghan girl images you've ever seen". Based on the first contextualisation, the face might bear some similarities, but more likely look like a very different person. In the second case, the image will trend towards the most commonly seen photo if, as you say, 90% of the images found to base the new image on are that same image.

What that, and the whole Disney thing demonstrate to me is that those AI companies claiming the training data is not used in the final model are lying. They say the AI is trained on the technique and skills or whatever and the actual data is discarded. A human, in most cases, doesn't have a perfect memory and so will mostly end up creating a "fair use" image based on various memories, combinations and imagination, while a computer can't help but have a perfect memory and no imagination but is being trained to not use its perfect memory with varying degrees of failure.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Where are these losers coming from ?

I'm sure you don't need to go so far as to offer your and in marriage :-)

(Devils advocate, playing the part of a typical AI and getting the context all wrong)

Why have just one firewall when you can fire all the walls?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: As soon as...

"(Or back then, a network bridge like you set up)"

Sounds like an ideal situation for a "data diode" as per the El Reg article the other day. PC controls microscope and can send data out to the network, but nothing comes into it.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I NEED MY CAPS LOCK KEY, YOU'LL HAVE TO PRISE IT FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS.

Signed

Bombastic Bob

:-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"We should fit all keyboards with a tick and a cross button to resolve this thorny issue once and for all."

"After much user testing, thought and consideration, we have decided to deprecate the "tick and a cross button" with two separate buttons, one with a tick and another with a cross."

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: We've all been there.

Certainly someone will be flinging shit!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"In this case, a simple spell checker would have caught the mistake."

Sometimes, when in a hurry, I've been known to accidentality hit "add to dictionary" instead of the correct spelling. If I'm in such a hurry that I don't notice what I've done, just noted that the red line went away, the next time I make the same typo, the spilling chucker isn't going to highlight it because I already told it that was correct :-)

But that's why journalists used to have Editors and proof-readers. From comments made by El Reg authors here, it get the sense that at least some of them write and hit publish, especially with "breaking" type articles, with no checking involved other than their own self-checking, which is hard. Proof-reading your own work, it's easy to see what you think you wrote rather than what you actually wrote :-)

I wonder if there's an industry rag for journalists with their own "Who, Me?" column? :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I know of someone who did something similar on a mobile phone network."

Was this Australia, quite recently?

SpaceX celebrates Starship launch as a success – even with the explosion

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Flame

Re: FTS on a Manned Starship Launch

If Dan Dare is in the pilot seat, he'll find a way, even if it means looking out the windows to see where he is!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: FTS on a Manned Starship Launch

"Starship when it has a crewed capsule perched on its nose."

Starship IS the "capsule". Nothing will be "perched on it's nose". Although I do admit it can be a little confusing since the Booster + Starship are also collectively referred to as Starship too.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "The engines burned over 40,000 pounds of fuel per second"

"You're removing the mass of a small lorry every second for 180 seconds."

Or, to be more UK (BBC especially) oriented, we need to know how many Olympic sized swimming pools[*] per minute that is :-)

* which in realty is only a defined length with a certain minimum width and minimum depth, both of which can be much greater, hence a wildly varying volume!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "The engines burned over 40,000 pounds of fuel per second"

It's odd, but it seems to be a "thing" for huge numbers. 40,000lbs sounds a lot more than 20t (sticking with non-metric tons for less confusion)

I see/hear it a lot in US based media. I'm sure the general US public could probably understand and maybe visualise 20t more easily than 40,000lbs too, but it simply doesn't have the same dramatic effect when a newscaster or narrator can say, in a deep gravely voice, "FORTY...THOUSAND...POUNDS!!!!!" instead of a wimpy small number like:"twenty..err...tons" -)

(The oddest unit measurement I've heard spoken is 4 quarts!)

Conversely, in UK media, large masses such the article are almost always given in Tonnes, not Kg. Kg is usually reserved for sub 1t masses.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: a very successful test

FWIW, the first successful landing was on land, 4 months before the first successful barge landing. And it's still breath-taking, even now, every time :-)

I think it was the 20th Falcon 9 and 16th successful launch, or numbers very close to that.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: a very successful test

"Have they managed a reusable Starship yet?"

Yes. Once they passed that milestone, they stopped test launching them and went back to developing the launch/catch tower and the booster for it to sit on.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: a very successful test

FWIW, if they'd reached all their stretch goals, there's a good chance both parts would be in one piece and hopefully floating on the ocean :-)

Although I suspect pretty much everyone in SpaceX never expected to reach that goal this early in the test phase .

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The other guys.

The depends on the definition of success and whether "millions of dollars" is a significant amount of the budget. See, for example, the deliberate test to destruction of various systems, especially fuel tanks and the various attempts to launch and land prototype Starships. And the many "failures" that lead to Falcon being the success it is today.

SpaceX have always said, when launching a test vehicle, what their primary aims and goals are, and rarely to they claim, in the early to mid stages of testing, that the entire aim is a 100% successful mission completing all the way to landing or orbit. The first Starship had a primary goal of testing the launch systems and clearing the tower. Everythi9ng else was "stretch targets". The second launch had a stated goal of reaching for a successful hot-stage separation, everything following were stretch goals. The next launch will probably have a primary goal of getting one or both into a landing position, although I have no doubt they will still be "landing" over water for safety reasons, just as they did with Falcon when it was still in testing.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ariane 240/250

"The EU institutional market can’t fill more than 5 or 6 slots per year."

There are commercial European requirements for launch services too. Depending on who they are and what they are launching, they may not be constrained to the cheapest provider, currently SpaceX. I'm not sure if that would be enough for Ariane to break even or remain a gov funded institution though.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Weren't NASA also working with Boeing on a rocket?

"Seeing all the engines lit and some spectacular shock diamonds was pretty cool"

As was the shutdown sequence of the booster engines. Very pretty. Will this become a trademark "SpaceX Star", like the "Korolev Cross"?

"but I imagine the seperation's more stressful than a Musk divorce"

I've heard it said that is (at least part of) the reason for the sequenced engine shutdowns on the booster. It reduces the "shock" on the entire system, especially the hydraulic shock on the fuel tanks and pumps/pipes etc going from very high acceleration to almost none over a longer time period.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Weren't NASA also working with Boeing on a rocket?

"I thought the point was to have a number of companies producing space ships... How are the others doing?"

iSpace Completes China’s First Reusable Rocket Test

Chen Chuanren November 06, 2023

Video here.

Ok, ok, I know that's not what you meant :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Self destruct

And did, eventually, pay the littering fine :-)

Double Moon crater riddle solved? Spent Chinese rocket booster carrying mystery payload crash landed

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Nothing about iSpace launch and landing rocket on El Reg?

I'm a little surprised that the El Reg Space Desk hasn't reported on the Chinese company iSpace foray into landing a first stage rocket yet,

Looks like they are past the stage of SpaceX Grasshopper and at about an "early stage Blue Origin " level so far. I'd have thought that would have been major headlines, but seems to be very low key if not being ignored completely. It does look very interesting and promising though and I'm not finding anything about their failures and explosions :-)

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Strange Issue indeed...

Similar at one of our clients. Everyone has a laptop and in the office they use it plugged into the desk screen which in turn has mouse and keyboard. Some people prefer the full desktop keyboard, others are so used to the laptop they prefer that one and most will have the laptop open for the extra screen space. So keyboard/trackpad/mouse issues of the unused kit being accidentality pressed by $something used to be a common issue until everyone had suffered it at least once and learned the lesson :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I AM clicking on the screen!

Depending on the time period, it's possible they meant the on screen menu controlled by the IR remote and were trying to lead you into a settings menu. I'm assuming you aren't that daft though and maybe they were talking about a different, more high end model with a similar model number, hence the communications error.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Some places do get it right

"*sigh* if only we could do that with computers."

In the CP/M and DOS days of monochrome, text-only desktops, that's how it work in most places. Nowadays it's just assumed that "everyone knows how to work a computer/printer/copier". Except we are still in (the end of?) the transition period where not all adults used computers at school or even in their jobs until they got promoted into office/management roles. And even then, we may be at the beginning of the transition period where keyboards and mice may become superfluous anachronisms only "old people" use.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Another AI image

Looks like one of those "spot the mistakes" pictures we used to get in comics, puzzle books and newspaper years ago :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: NSDE **

Never heard it called NSDE in all my 45+ years in the IT field, at least not here in the UK, so err, thanks for that, even if I no longer need it :-)

ISTR it was None System Disk or Disk Error. Maybe it depended on the version of BIOS or DOS? Also ISTR, that error was produced by the code in the boot sector of the disk too.

It was all a long time ago and I can't remember when I last used a floppy disk on a PC :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The rumored traditional IBM script for that...

"Clean the contacts at both ends with a pencil eraser."

I wonder what we would use in a modern office? Pen and paper is pretty rare, let alone pencils with a rubber[*] on the end being almost as rare as an actual stand-alone rubber!

AKA an eraser in some versions of English :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Happy

Or, more likely, he was a total arse-hole called Finlay Indigo-B'Stard and wasn't clever enough to see the irony?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I thougt all these kinsds of stories were made up until a couple of weeks ago

"never argue with a fool..."

I read that as "never argue with a tool" and had to check back because my eye and brain had a quick argument about what I'd just seen and needed proof over who was right.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Worst case I ever saw ...

I can't quite work out whether you were relieved or disappointed at the outcome :-)

Assuming you wanted to do the trip, maybe you should have just got the relevant people to start booking flights and hotels and waited to see what happened when the authorisations for the spend were passed up the chain :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: At least your boss

...and anyway, the customer was paying with that itemised invoice for a chargeable call-out :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Too many to count

"*cool voiceover* In fact there was a cover and it was over the webcam"

Ah yes, but was it obvious and hade a mechanical slider right next to the webcam, or one of the more "clever" ones that have no physical user slider and work entirely under software control by pressing Fn+F9 or whatever?

We had a number of instances of that when we switched laptop suppliers. Luckily our first line support are pretty on the ball, picked it up and posted the fix to the support wiki. The numbers calling in dropped significantly and of those who did, it was a 5-10 second "ticket resolved" exercise which always looks good on the stats :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Guy was an arse BUT..

On the other hand, I have met people who are brilliant in their field but can barely tie their own shoe laces :-)

I doubt this lawyer falls into that category though.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Seems to me that ...

Good point. I've also seen it mooted that to qualify as a "planet" it should have "cleared it's orbit" of obvious and noticeable debris. And yet we have theories of "planets" out in the Oort Cloud, the Kuiper Belt and even theories there are interstellar "rogue" planets that have been flung out by the gravitational wars in early forming solar systems.

So yea, round and not star pretty much does it for me too :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Seems to me that ...

"* - PS: Pluto is a planet, dammit."

...and so is Uranus, you fat bastard :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: GIF pronunciation controversy

I pronouce it "Graphics Interchange Format"

spoken "Giraffics Interchange Format", of course :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Performing "Trivial" Tasks for One's Own Self-Defense

Despite what I said in my post below, yes, that's also true in some cases. One client we lease printers to, the first thing to check on rocking up is that all the paper trays are set correctly. Being multi-size trays, it's not at all unusual to find one or more with the adjustable paper guides moved out of position so the tray sensors are reporting something other than the A4 or A3 that is only ever used in them. US Letter, Legal and other weird sizes are never used at this customers sites, but the printer often think that's what's in the trays and report paper out when the only correctly set tray is empty despite there being one or two thousand sheets in the other trays :-) Of course, the "paper out" is not why we attend site, there's some other fault, but checking the tray is just "what we do" :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Are you sure, this isn't the plot of an IT Crowd epsiode?

"(Like refilling paper in printers)."

Ha, yes! At one place a note was laminated and attached to top of the printer reminding users that if the printer reported no paper, to please put some in from the cupboard under the printer. This was met with indignation from many in the office who all claimed they did fill the paper trays. So it was demonstrated to them how many tickets were being raised, asking IT to refill them (all from only a very few people). That was met by the office manager very loudly proclaiming to all and sundry within earshot, ie the entire floor!, that if anyone was incapable of filling a printer paper tray, they could start looking for a new job ASAP. No more "please fill the printer paper tray" tickets and the sign was removed :-)

NASA's Psyche spacecraft beams back a 'Hello' from 10 million miles away

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications received test data from nearly 10 million miles away

Give them a NASA equivalent budget for the project and maybe, just maybe, there will be enough left over from the bonuses and partying to manage it

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Great work!

"like they could in monarchy or dictatorship countries."

You seem to be very parochial. Have you ever been outside the USA? Something you may not be aware of, but the US is one of only two countries IN THE WORLD to have not gone metric yet.

150 years as "will take two generations".

A generation in human terms is normally regarded as about 20-30 years, ie the time it takes a person to grow up and propagate the next generation and is very imprecise as a measure, worse even than converting metric to imperial :-)

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