Posts by Lotaresco 1501 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2007
". . . that our top boss, as in the very highest boss, who we shall pseudonymously call "Barry", bought his doctorate online from Pacific West University for $50 (allegedly) he was coincidentally downgraded to minister in charge of counting fish the next week,"
In which case he'd have done better to buy his doctorate online from John West University.
"I call bullshit, names or your lying! The fact that the £ is lower, immediately meant that they would be paying less for your service, which would have put you in e better position. Why lie on the internet? ..fucking pathetic!"
Who said I lost money on my service or that payment cost was the issue? I'm not alone in losing EU contract work, because the bodies concerned need assurances that the persons named in the contract are EU citizens and will be EU citizens at the end of the contract. The issue is not cost, the issue is EU membership, you know, the thing that the Brexiters are taking away?
Since you asked so nicely I'm happy to show you the details. All you have to do is to state here your real name, phone number and your real address and I'll hand-deliver a document to you and you can see who my clients are. I will of course be asking you to apologise for your insult also and you can do that to me in person.
Deal? It's only fair that if you want to see proprietary information that you should respond in like manner, like a civilised person, don't you agree?
Oh PS, "you're lying" and "put you in a better position" and you seem to inserting commas using a shotgun.
It was easy for the majority of Brexiters to factor in the uncertainty and short-term pain. It worked like this "I'm in a low wage job or unemployed. They can't come after me for the money, I haven't got any. Someone else will have to pay for this. Someone else will pay for this. No skin off my nose."
"That Cologne V6 BTW is underpowered, "
The 4x4 that it was in was as fast off the line as a Golf GTi, it was certainly a lot faster than any JLR product of the period and it was as stated reliable. Having a low BHP per litre meant unstressed and reliable.
BTW, you seem to have completely glossed over the fact that you claimed that the Jaguar did not use "unreliable" Ford engines and now you're saying not only does it use Ford engines but they are less reliable in JLR products than they are in Ford, Peugeot and Citroen products.
"I don't know who this "Dr" Stephen Jones is"
The "Dr." has his head up his derriere and talks nonsense on almost every subject. He's a climate change denier, right wing nut job etc. One suspects his doctorate has a much validity as those of Paul Nuttall and Gillian McKeith.
There is only one Dr Stephen Jones and he's a national treasure. The person posting here as "Stephen Jones" is clearly an egotist who needs to bolster his fragile ego by adding "Dr" to his nym. There are many people on these forums who have (proper) doctorates who don't feel the need to shout about them, because their academic qualifications are not relevant to the nature of discussions here and only an idiot attempts "argument by authority".
"It's something Johnny Foreigner says."
Sono arrabbiato con i Brexiters. Maleducati, presi in giro da una stampa fascista. Parlando ad alta voce le loro rimostranze che sono immaginario, nella migliore delle ipotesi, o da loro stessi.
Reine Idioten, die ein Land ruiniert haben, um ihre zerbrechlichen Egos zu besänftigen und ihre grundlegenden rassistischen Instinkte auszudrücken.
As other Johnny Foreigners say.
"Those that voted to leave did so for many reasons, including immigration, lack of EU accountability, and that the NHS would get more money."
Immigration: An issue spun by the press which appealed to racists. Of all the issues stated as influencing the Brexit vote this is the one that has legs, it's also the issue that the pro-Brexit politicans try to deny. "We're not a tiny bit racist, we just loathe people from Europe coming over here and doing the jobs that Brits won't do or can't do."
Lack of EU accountability: Fictional, the EU is held to account by MEPs, by Heads of State, by auditors, by independent research organisations and ultimately by the electorate.
NHS would get more money: A lie. Even the most pro-Brexit politicians now admit it was a lie.
"The good news being that as soon as we voted leave the doom prophecy was proven wrong and people suddenly came asking for trade deals as soon as we are out. Including China if I remember right."
You don't remember right.
Grease ball Phillip Hammond crawled over to China on his belly to beg for a trade deal. Theresa May scuppered his efforts by putting a block on Chinese investment in Hinckley Point and making it clear she doesn't trust the Chinese. The Chinese make it clear that they see trade as one way... they will sell us stuff.
"At least the engine compartment was too short for a BMW engine, and the Ford engines too unreliable to use."
You clearly don't know your Jaaags.
The 2.0 V6 is a Ford Duratec engine.
The 2.5 V6 is a Ford Duratec engine.
The 3.0 V6 is a Ford Duratec engine.
The 2.0 diseasel is a Ford Duratorq engine.
The 2.2 diseasel is a Ford Duratorq engine.
The 2.7 V6 diseasel is a Ford AJD-V6 engine.
The 3.0 V6 diseasel is a Ford AJD-V6 engine.
BTW, you'll find that BMW engines are much less reliable than Ford engines. The 4.0V6 Cologne engine on my car was still in as-new condition at 500,000 miles. Ford and Toyota used to rank equal for reliability.
"It's already costing small IT businesses."
I feel your pain because I suffer it too. I get work across the several Euro countries. I estimate that Brexit cost me £10K in the first month after the referendum as a result of the collapse of the pound. The most recent business trip was a painful experience, with costs rocketing. Also our customers are already telling us that they will probably switch to suppliers within Europe starting from the declaration of article 50. We lost a huge contract within a week of the referendum because the body awarding the contract (which was for five years) "Didn't want the uncertainty of dealing with a company that may not be within the EU at the end of the contract."
Response from my MP? "Well you just need to develop contacts outside Europe." Gee, thanks, thirty years to build a business one bloody night of stupidity to start its decline and his response is to tell me to spend thirty years building it up from scratch again.
"As for the OP's comments, it wasn't the techies who brought down Nortel. Many very clever people worked there."
I'm sure my wife will thank you.
I recall being very impressed by their Apple-based PABX kit in the early 90s, back in the days when corporates and government still had operators to intercept and direct calls. The Nortel kit had a whizzy 3-D interface with an Oracle directory and a scripted interface for the operators. A caller would hear things like "ICI Alderley Park, how can I help you" or "ICI Mond Division, how can I help you" but all the calls were handled at one central location. Also the directory lookup was fast, finding users from just a few characters. All the connections were drag and drop. It's a shame that voicemail and direct dial took over.
"Did they never think of finding someone in industry who does have deep technical knowledge? Or are they all keeping their heads down?"
As someone within the industry who has technical knowledge - always beware of anyone who claims to have *deep* technical knowledge I know some of the best in the industry and we all have blind spots.
Becoming a politician doesn't interest me. Firstly there would be the mahoosive salary cut to become an MP and then there's the element of having to mix with pond slime. I meet cabinet ministers and other assorted politicians on a regular basis at conferences and "industry events". It's clear that even when they are asking your opinion they don't want it and their minds are already made up. What they are after is positive stroking; a number of industry clowns to say "Ooh minister your ideas are *brilliant*." and then some nameless droids to "make it so".
If their "idea" is terminally clueless, ignorant and damaging to UK infrastructure they will carry on regardless and will be able to have their own way because there is no effective scrutiny in Select Committees or either of the Houses of Parliament.
For example they consider Martha Lane Fox, Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho and Diana Mary "Dido" Harding, Baroness Harding of Winscombe to be technical savants. I suspect both of them would struggle to know which way up to hold an iPad.
There is a solution which is the "expert committee" which is how several administrations around the world handle technical issues. In recent years the Republicans in the USA have resented this approach, preferring to prohibit experts from providing impartial advice and promoting the use of malleable "experts" who are in the grip of major corporations looking to lock out the competition. I suspect that over a decade or so they will be bitten by "branded advice" which is not even in the long-terms interests of the companies giving the advice.
"Is the scenario likely? Wouldn't you have patented the idea in most major markets long before commercialising it? "
Are you unfamiliar with the Chinese approach to patents? A patent provides no protection within China, hence the enormous range of knock-off Chinese goods.
As to likely, it's not just likely, it's a deal that has been done many times. China is information hungry and will take data even if they don't have a clear reason to use that information today. They have been caught fingers in the pie more than once obtaining both commercial and military information. Have a look at GhostNet, Operation Aurora, Green Dam, Lan Lee and Yuefei Ge for example.
There's also this indictment.
"Just a thought."
Yes... apart from the bit about Raspberry Pis (you really need to think about running an enterprise infrastructure) what you have described is a sort of vague first guess at how it is done in reality. It's an old-fashioned approach with an emphasis on perimeter defence. However as you describe it it's both unworkable and impossible to maintain.
A similar concept can be found in "information kiosk" type delivery where some trusted (but not very trusted) party wants access to sensitive data. The systems will be configured to permit the user to work in a virtual environment and have access to only those resources that they need for their work. There will be no export route. There will also be a lot of other stuff that I'm not going to go into detail about that is used to detect anomalous behaviour. This is expensive provision and it's only worth doing it if the assets to be protected are of high value.
"This event was much more than a luvvie-fest."
As someone who attends similar events I'm a little split on their value. Generally you will find that the people who attend either know their stuff or are there to learn, so the company of informed and intelligent people is normal. There will also be some swivel-eyed loons (depending on the invitation policy of the organisers). I've still got the mental scars from attending a "hacker camp" where among the decent folk there was one complete and utter conspiracy theorist who I couldn't shake off after giving my fairly bland talk on the history of hacking in the UK.
The scenarios are really difficult to set up and tend to be quite naïve - after all the organisers can't really divulge what the bad guys do and how they do it. They also can only have limited understanding of the full (political, legal, military) framework within which investigations happen. Cyber offence isn't cyber defence and it's of really questionable value IMO. There comes a point where you need "boots on the ground" to tell if the last IP in the chain really is the perpetrator or if they are yet another zombie. I'm reasonably sure that both China and Russia (not to mention the USA) are working now on offensive operations that are set up to implicate another country. What works when fighting a shooting war also works for infowar.
"Personally, I have my own backups on (effectively) a NAS"
It's easier to do with a NAS because you can mount/unmount the share as required, even in Windows hence the drive is only vulnerable during backup. Require a password for each mount and you prevent malware from getting at it easily. Run a cron job on the NAS to replicate the backups to copies with a data serial and you have another layer of availability.
I've recovered some seriously borked systems with only minimal downtime and loss of data by following a tiered backup strategy.
The problem, as ever, is the user. Users don't like having to do *anything* other than surf their porn and shop online. Having to do something like mount/unmount a drive isn't going to happen and they won't pay someone who knows how to do it to set it up for them. It's very difficult to device effective controls and strategies for SOHO because the users/owners don't understand the issues and largely don't care. Not until the Day It All Goes Horribly Wrong.
In an enterprise you can work around this by providing thin client access to VMs and snapshotting the VM. The worst case then is loss of a few hours work.
"This future world we're living is awesome and I can't possibly see a remote engine stop function ever being abused..."
No, it's not as if the state security services would cause a vehicle to stop on a level crossing and then remove all video evidence after the inevitable crash.
"It is not for you, me, Samsung or anyone else to take that choice away from the owner."
Even the most extreme libertarian (e.g. me) will disagree with you on this. It's a basic rule of any civilised society that the right to swing your fist ends at my nose. What you are complaining about here is that a manufacturer will not allow you to wilfully endanger third parties. The way these things work is that the person likely to be injured will be some innocent third party who didn't know that your explosive device was in your luggage/car/hotel room etc.
There are many circumstances where we put limits on individual liberties. For example we tend to frown on people who carry round explosives in their pockets, those who drive at 100mph on the pavement even when they can see that it is clear, people who mix poisons in drinks bottles and leave them lying around because *they* know that the bottle contains a poison that just happens to look like Coca-Cola in a Coca-Cola bottle (etc.)
There's a difference between advocating liberty and being purely selfish and thoughtless. You have crossed over the line.
" What if a pedo was using one to take pictures of kids and it blew up, harming the kids? Think of the kids."
Absolutely, one can never think of the kids too often. Errrm unless one happens to be a filthy paedo then thinking of even one child isn't permitted, ever.
"Aso, how could one have trademark or copyright on "Winter is Coming" beggars belief."
It's not a problem unique to the USA. The UK Olympic(TM) Committee trademarked lots of words related to The Olympics(TM) and did a heavy handed clamp down on any use of "their" trademarks. Hence poets were stopped from using the words "Olympic(TM)" or "gold(TM)" in their works and the poor owner of the Olympic café was told to take down his sign.
It seems insanity that the trade mark process permits organisations to trademark words and phrases in common usage.
Presumably this Wikipedia page infringes copyright as does this movie. Those naughty, naughty Americans infringed copyright when they launched a cyber attack on Iran and should be subject to their own DMCA slapdown.
" never heard it being said like that."
"Mach dich sicher" is in fairly common usage, I'm surprised you haven't heard that. But mach sicher is also used in both senses of "make secure" and "make sure" (check). As in the example quoted.
The quote about viewing statistics is carefully worded to obfuscate how few people are watching this stuff. It seems that they had 200,000 "viewers" over a period of 42 days. Probably fewer than 4,700 viewers per day.
It hardly seems worthwhile sticking the shilling in the gas meter for that. Even if they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and could get advertising revenue per viewer equal to the TV licence fee that's just £700,000 pa to run a TV station on and in truth they would be lucky to make as much as a quarter of that.
" if you can tell me what you are offering why it would be better for me and my organisation, rather than blathering about 'paradigm-changing innovation', I'd be more willing to listen."
The people trying to sell you something cannot do better than talk about paradigm shifts, massively converged, enhanced user experience, streamlined workflows and the like. They also cannot go into specifics. They don't understand your business, don't care about it and couldn't understand it even if you gave them a map at the centre of which was a large cross marked "This is where my business is and here's how you understand it."
All they are interested in is how much can they shift before Christmas, is their car a better one than their neighbour's and how many more air miles do they need for a trip to Florida?
Knowing players on all sides: GDS, government departments and the suppliers this is another "Is anyone surprised?" moment. GDS still does a very good impression of "rabbit in the headlights." I don't think anyone at GDS ever expected any of their vapourware ideas to be listened to. It appears to come as a shock to them to be told "Here's some cash, get on with it." Unfortunately they stall at the "Getting on with it." stage. The suppliers don't really have much of a track record of delivering at the scale needed or have enough experience across government to provide the sort of shared services necessary for government. Government departments do their risk assessments and probably realise that the risk of using shared services exceeds that of continuing to use their current provision.
"Does your Eco-Drive support non-gregorian calendars? tide infomation? dawn/dusk time? Weather forecast? Public Holiday information? How about even a 24 hour clock??"
Non-Gregorian calendars? Because I'm suddenly going to go back and live in the middle ages?
Weather forecast? Because suddenly my windows(tm) have all become opaque?
Dawn/Dusk time? Because apparently my windows(tm) are all opaque so I can't see whether it is light or dark.
Public Holiday information? Because I've suddenly lost all my braincells and can't remember public holidays?
My 1980s Casio navigator's watch provides me with tide state, stopwatch, countdown timer, calendar, watch timer, reach and tack timers,three alarms, 24 hour and Zulu time displays. It's water proof and can be used while on a surfboard or on the deck of a yacht. It cost a fraction of the price of a smart watch and the batteries last for five years.
It also looks like a watch and not a Sinclair product from the 1970s.
"Jim from Spares taking it upon himself to "tidy" wiring closet : 5%"
I used to work for an organisation that needed clocks to be accurate. They had an MSF timeserver. It suddenly started being unreliable after years of good service. The reason turned out to be some idiot getting into the crawl space who kept finding a length of wire only connected at one end, so he cut it off "to be tidy". The engineer would replace it when he found that it was missing because it was the radio clock aerial. It took ages to find which idiot was cutting off the aerial because he wasn't on site most weeks.
I still have my own-built parallel port to RS232 converter for the Oric Atmos and the Oric Atmos and its printer/plotter. It's good for a whole 300baud and had the luxury of a 5V to 12V converter to get the right signal levels to drive an ASR33. The software side of that involves lots of bit tickling and poking values into memory.
"Remember: BA and Air France scrapped their Concord services because taking your time to travel became the luxury, rather than getting there quickly, meaning that the number of people willing to pay had fallen."
That's not really true. Both BA and AF flights had a good occupancy ratio. Remember Branson offered to buy the Concorde fleet and BA and AF refused to sell to him because they knew he would steal their First Class transatlantic market.
The reasons that the services were scrapped was the operating cost of a flight engineer, the fact that instrumentation was 30 years out of date and the lack of support for maintenance of the aircraft. BA and AF made a fuss about falling passenger numbers as a justification for ceasing operations but that doesn't seem to match with the actual operation. The real reason seemed to be profit, "First Class" on a subsonic jet is cheaper to provide but the tickets are sold at inflated prices.
Also those aircraft were 27 years old and that's a grand old age in aviation. There is, I think, only one 747 of that age still flying and they have a much less stressful operating cycle than Concorde. A 747 does not grow in length by a foot during a flight, for example.
Have a look at a real-world road trip report from an enthusiastic Tesla owner and look as much at what he's glossing over as at his pro-Tesla happiness which is pure fan-boy in its nature.
Range between charges (real world) 120 miles - not 170 (Tesla's claim) or 200 (fan boys claims here).
Time to drive 1,365 miles - 33 hours.
Time to drive in an IC car - estimated at 20h (in Europe that would be about 14).
Look at the lessons learned, Cold battery packs drastically reduce range and increase charging times, "superchargers" charge much more slowly than expected, range was much less than expected, trips to superchargers added significant distance to the drive, genuine range anxiety as a result of Tesla miscalculating the battery buffer, and most damning of all "adding 40% to your travel time is unacceptable if you’re trying to get somewhere"
"That's true, but you can travel much further on '10 litres' of battery than 10 litres of petrol. An ICE is rarely better than 30% efficient and often (in start-stop traffic, for example) far less than that. Electric motors are closer to 90% efficient."
I recognise the passion people have for EVs, I admire the engineering solution that Tesla have come up with. It's the best stab at an EV ever. The negatives also need to be considered. Firstly an EV is not 90% efficient. It's efficiency is the efficiency of the well-to-wheel energy budget and that looks a lot more like the typical efficiency of a petrol hybrid engine. About 30-40% efficiency because of generation and transmission losses which EV owners don't see and therefore don't consider.
This map (it comes from a pro-EV car site so it's a credible source) shows that EVs in the UK manage 189g CO2/km. Another map on the same site shows that EVs in the UK manage the equivalent of 43mpg (that's the same as my 2.0 turbo charged car). Not exactly earth-saving economy.
It would be a better choice for the environment to buy a medium sized car which have emissions in the range 74-82g/km. The current Astra, for example is a decent car. I hate GM cars so it's a surprise to me to be saying this but the one I had on hire in Paris recently was so economical that a day's use around the city didn't move the fuel gauge from "F" and despite not having time to fill it on my way back to the airport the hire company did not charge me for fuel. Even the fastest version manages 141g/km CO2 emissions and turns in performance comparable to the cheaper Tesla at 1/3rd of the price.
EVs make a lot of sense in France where nuclear power stations dominate the electricity supply industry. Operating an EV in France achieves the equivalent of 123mpg. That's worth having both on a personal and environmental basis. Sadly in the UK the eco-weenies have an anti-nuclear dogma and refuse to do the one thing that would actually "save the planet".
I wrote: "So the hypothetical and completely untrue 100kWH capacity of a Tesla costs £14 to "fill" at present prices."
What I didn't write and on reflection should have is that any Tesla owner who charges their car at home is therefore paying £14 for 10 litres of petrol equivalent. That's 1.40/litre which is a bit wicked, especially given that the owner doesn't pay fuel duty on the electricity. Like for like an IC engine vehicle costs just £3.90 to fuel with ten litres of petrol, the additional £8.00 is all taxation. Of course three's also the point that to generate the 10 litres equivalent of petrol in an electric car one has had to burn 30 litres equivalent of fuel.
The energetics of EVs don't make a lot of sense, lugging around half a tonne of battery doesn't make a lot of sense. Paying thousands to replace the battery doesn't make a lot of sense either.
I think it would make more sense to fuel EVs on ethanol converted to electricity in fuel cells. Faster refuelling, greener technology.
"I'd like to see the testing that you refer to"
It's here: questions about the actual capacity of Tesla’s battery packs where it is mentioned that battery packs seem to have 5kWH less capacity than Tesla claim and mentioned, if I understand the article correctly that the manufacturer's highest rated battery is actually 90kWH (less 5kWH hence actually 85kWH), referred to as 100kWH presumably for marketing purposes.
"You have to wonder why they have not segmented their networks with firewalls, both to alert on compromise and minimise the effects if anything were to get in."
You would have to wonder why anyone in this day and age would think that segmenting a network with firewalls would be the way to do it. Segmented networks, yes. Firewalls yes. But the firewalls are not really how we segment networks, that's largely done via the switches and by the use of other security devices. Unfortunately this does take planning and investment which is why most organisations don't do it. Another reason is that good people cost a lot and companies bizarrely think that three cheap bodies are more effective than one expert.
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