Posts by Paul Crawford

Re: Silly Mistakes

"Earth fault" as in to-dirt? Can't happen here.

Here earth = ground = CPC (circuit protective conductor). Most UK installation are on TN earthing so a fault to earth is essentially close to a fault to neutral (=cold in USA parlance). To protect against contact with true Earth (as in some poor sod touching a live cable) we use RCD = GFCI as they (in the UK) are usually 30mA trip threshold (actual spec is 15-30mA).

I don't think ANYbody tests Interrupting Current on site. My sub-breakers are rated 22,000 Amps. That is a MAJOR arc-flash. Not a problem here because with my long line I can not pull even 1,000 Amps at my dooryard. But in Texas you can find four homes clustered within 20'(7m) of a 100KVA transformer, which is why they don't make 10,000A-interrupt breakers any more.

Nobody tests actual fault current intentionally, out side of approval laboratories that have controlled sources of many kA and a means to contain the usual explosion that follows!

Here in the UK we have less of an arc-flash risk in general due to a love of HRC fuses at the incoming point of most small-medium sized installations. They do a much better job of limiting fault energy that most MCCB/ACB style of breakers. In domestic UK it is unusual to see above 3kA fault currents, except in some cities where the LV grid is actually a grid, most LV networks here are deliberately smaller and isolated to keep fault results down. Our domestic panel = CU (consumer unit) is designed to be safe to 16kA fault current by the combination of the supply company's fuse (typically 60-100A) and the MCB used. Basically the fuse limits the peak current to that of something like 4-6kA equivalent even for underlying supplies of 16kA or a bit more.

Fuses are good! Cheap, reliable, with excellent fault energy limiting. But one-time, and usually need skilled replacement.

Re: Why do people assume it is only upper management that supports back to office?

"yes, we discussed it in the break room"

If it is important you make sure it is communicated to all and written down.

Also there are tools like a phone and video conferencing that let you talk to those on and off site as well.

Re: Pick your poison

Sadly I have to agree with this from my own experience of otherwise sensible folks ending up as raving right-wing USA nutters, in spite of having no connecting to American issues it real life.

Yes, there are left-wing nutters as well, but it seems the right has a far bigger stake in this.

Re: Phones getting ubiquitous for work these days

2FA everywhere all expecting apps e.g. MS Orifics, Github.

Err, someone is using those in a secure area?

Re: Windows targeted only because it's more popular?

I would imagine most corporate systems have mostly Windows for common software plus the odd specialist application like CAD, and if managing a large network you would stick with Windows for servers, especially if doing something horrible like supporting Exchange.

Globally I expect most servers are Linux for web use though, and some other places are mostly Linux or maybe FreeBSD for the likes of TrueNAS storage systems. In fact probably most NAS are Linux or BSD based?

But really the reason that anyone would target Windows as #1 is most non-technical staff use it, and Office, so your first entry point in compromising a system is likely to follow from targeting those folks and their systems. We are mostly Linux, but don't imagine for a minute we won't be targeted at all, and of course the most common vulnerability is the person sitting at the keyboard...

Re: it may train its AI models on user posts

We (as a business) nominally have a Twitter account but you have to log in to see it now, so I don't. It now counts for bugger-all in our world.

Re: This will be fun

Can you name and shame them?

Thankfully I could get Halifax/Bank of Scotland as well as Santander to work on sensible computers.

Given IE is out of support, it ought to be illegal to actually accept its use for high value activities...

Re: "the UK's Ministry of Defence [..] does not comment on security matters"

I also write offensive software, but that is more down to not studying software engineering...

Turds all the way down...

(fixed it for you)

Re: The bubble has burst

The microVM abstraction is a great idea - for cases when host & guest are cooperative.

My most common use-case for a VM is running older OS for software support, or to build binaries for running on other old machines, and there the traditional hardware emulation is more or less a necessity as such OS never even contemplated virtualisation.

Re: $5.8 billion

Have you priced the F17 / F35 / etc that the wetware sits in?

Re: This ain't rocket science.

You are clearly an idiot.

Send out more similar messages at end of month = looks more like spam, thus blocked. Cause & effect. Logic.

Aspects that are sadly lacking from all politicians, but in recent years especially the RNC.

Roger the cabin boy

Eye, eye, Cap'n, I'll go and do it right now!

By who, the clueless politicians?

They could employ folks who understand these things, you know experts.

Not not in the UK of course, the current gov here has had enough of experts...

Re: Charger power rating

Above 100A 69kVA in the UK and you are looking at 3-phase in most cases. 360kW out at 95% conversion efficiency would be 550A per phase. But for domestic use that is never going to happen as typically we have around 100 homes per 500kVA substation. Two chargers and that is overloaded, before we even talk about upgrading street cables, etc!

So such fast chargers will be at public or big company premises that have 11kV supplies coming in, as realistically who needs to charge in tens of minutes at home? Home or work the car will be sitting there for 5+ hours at a time, so no big rush.

If you highlight/select some of the message, i.e. the bit of interest, in Thunderbird then when you click on "Reply" or "Reply All" it quotes just that bit. Handy.

Re: Nice in concept but...

It is only a "nice concept" until you ponder just how horrible a complex spread sheet is to audit/debug in practice.

You know, the one Jimmy boy in accounts did years ago and then left with no documentation?

There is clearly a place for data analytics, etc, but spreadsheets are already way over-used and abused for this. Sadly for most managers/accountants this is the only tool they know about, so it gets used as a computing hammer. But such business "dependency" is EXACTLY what MS wants to encourage to get people locked in to endless subscription payments.

Re: It works only if the satellite electronics still work at the end of its mission time.

Maybe some chemical "glue" that has a sticky life of a couple of years in-orbit?

Re: WTF?

It is the USA anywhere in the world, very little will go to actually improving service to customers.

Fixed it for you...

Re: Pretty sure NASA's budget...

...can be stretched to a few new buildings.

The problem is NASA is not a business like any other which can decide to spend it on buildings as needed, they have specific direction of how they can spend money. Congress does not just say "Here is $2B for the next so many months, do something cool", they specify it has to be spent on X, Y and Z projects that, oddly enough, just happen fall in states with key senators who make the decisions and who enforce such decisions.

Re: Retaliation

We can no longer afford to wait for the next election before getting rid of the crazy nincompoop that is ruining everything for everyone else.

And in many countries of note, they don't even get that opportunity to vote.

Re: Revelations that could rock American surveillance networks

Oh dear, not making my laughter register on the Richter scale!

Usually the TT&C links for those have huge margins (so they work during periods of poor antenna pointing, tumbling, etc) so the Sun should not block out proper operations.

Proper authentication, etc, has been part of the CCSDS standards for decades, also actually using them seems to be missing from quite a lot of projects.