Posts by Vic 5860 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2007
We've had a rack of replies this morning to the "surveys" as they call them.
OK, I've got one done by logging in to the website & doing it through there. That's the account that got the email.
The other account hasn't received an email, nor is it flagged as needing to fill in a survey on the site - have you sent them all out yet?
Ta!
Vic.
The only way to get rid of them was to chop them up into pieces and mix it all together (which does lower absolute risk, but didn't make them lowest risk)
It doesn't lower the total risk of the whole package - just the risk of an individual loan (whilst raising the risk of those mixed up with it).
Unfortunately, these packages were used merely to *obfuscate* the risk, and were therefore sold on as lower risk than they really were...
Vic.
Banks create debt at the jump because the currency we used is based on debt.
Except it isn't - not really.
There's a common belief that Debt is an Asset. And that is why the crashes happen. Debt is, in fact, an expectation of an asset. The value depends entirely on the probability of that debt being realised...
So we have banks lending to people with no hope whatsoever of paying back the loan. If you believe that Debt = Asset, the bank now has an asset worth what it paid, as well as an ongoing revenue stream from sevicing the debt. All good, right?
But if you now look at the expectation, the bank's asset is entirely worthless[1], and the ongoing revenue stream merely increases the book value of the asset without increasing the near-zero probability of that asset ever being realised.
And this is why the banking crash happened - banks threw their money down the toilet whilst paying salesmen to do so. Someone should have paid more attention in Statistics classes. Debt is not synonymous with Asset, so getting customers to take on debt does *not* mean your assets increase. The macho-sounding "Ninja Loan" is a good example of this...
I have no idea how to tell the bankers of the world that they don't understand money. But someone needs to.
Vic.
[1] In the event of a secured loan, such as a mortgage, the value might not decrease to zero, as there is the sale value of the security. But if the loan is secured against, say, a house in a housing bubble, that value doesn't match the debt - and the more reposessions that occur, the more that disparity dominates :-(
And for Gods sake use Android
They can't use Android. It has a GPLv2 Linux kernel in it.
Section 7 of the GPL v2 specifically states :-
For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
So Microsoft can only redistribute that kernel if they license any patents they might hold to all Linux users - and that is the end of their patent FUD against Linux. That's not going to happen...
Vic.
DC step down difficult?
For power transmission, yes.
Potential divider..two resistors..might have to be physically large to handle the high voltage. Not difficult.
OK, try delivering 250V/100A (that's the fuse in my house). Deliver it from a 400kV source (National Grid high-voltage circuits). Now look at how much power you will dissipate in your potential divider to deliver the 25kW I'm asking for...
Vic.
maybe it is true and I don't know my electronics well enough
Errr - yes. Sorry...
IIRC, there is a very good reason DC isn't used to carry power long distances: It loses a lot of power en route due to the resistance of the material.
That's nothing to do with it being DC - it's to do with the current flowing in the conductor.
For a fixed-resistance conductor (which it isn't, really, but this will show the effect), the instantaneous power drop over that conductor is i^2R - so doubling the current quaduples the power loss. This is true of AC or DC flow. To counteract this loss, the supply voltage is very high, to reduce the current (for any given load, the power delivery is the product of the voltage and the current, so doubling the voltage halves the current requirement, leading to a quarter of the losses).
The reason AC is usually used is that it is very easy to convert from a high-voltage supply to a more manageable, lower-voltage one with a simple transformer. It has been this way for a very long time, which is why AC is so popular for distribution. DC is much harder to deal with unless you're prepared to accept *massive* losses (which we're not). Modern electronics make it possible, but this is a comparatively recent development compared to the history of power distribution.
I think this is a fairly basic error and makes me wonder about the rest of the article
Yeah, it's not an error...
Vic.
I find it veeeeeeeerrrrrrry difficult to believe anything you said.
You shouldn't - he's right.
Any splice will cause some amount of reflection. A sufficiently sensitive OTDR will pick that up.
We used to make cleavers with <2 degrees end-angle, and a properly calibrated unit would leave just 3 small marks on the face (the cleave point and the wave reflection points). Our OTDRs could see them with ease...
Vic.
neither would she circumvent 10KVdc at the bottom of an ocean
Well, if you were trying to do something like this, it wouldn't be the James Bond-style working in water in a Newt Suit with a pair of side cutters; you'd do this in a dry room on board a sub. If you'd really prepared properly, you'd be doing it in a normobaric room.
To say that breaking into a subsea fibre cable is "impossible" is simply wrong - it *could* be done. When I was at York, we created a number of tools that would have made this a viable strategy. But it remains both difficult and expensive - and there are several cheaper and easier ways to achieve pretty much the same result.
And that is why I'd be surprised if the cable was tapped under the sea - because I expect it to be tapped on land instead.
Vic.
What you do instead is bend the fibre to tap it.
That's probably not going to be sufficient to get usable data out; you'd likely have to shave off the cladding.
This is not impossible - it's part of the construction of a WDM - but it's bloody difficult in a live system.
For my money, an undersea tap is unlikely - it's so much easier to tap at the shore. But that doesn't make it an impossibility.
Vic.
I have been in at least three bars and restaurants in California that had half a Cadillac, Yellow cab or other car chopped in half and glued to the wall.
We've got this at a car-repair place in Southampton.
The number plate spacing used to be less subtle, but they were told to change it...
Vic.
Whats going on over there???
I don't know how much it's changed since I left, but back then it was a simple case of beancounteritis.
Sony traditionally traded on its reputation of producing *excellence*. It was always more expensive, but you didn't mind paying the extra because you knew you were buying quality.
Then the beancounters came in and reduced the BOMs everywhere to "maximise" profit. The quality fell. There can be only one outcome form there on in...
Vic.
Ran topless pics of barely 16yr olds?
To be fair - at the time, that was both legal and acceptable to society as a whole.
With hindsight, it probably shouldn't have been - but we can't really hold Murdoch to account for society's screw-ups 40 years ago.
In every other respect, though, you're absolutely right - he can fuck right off.
Vic.
If you're thinking seriously about buying a 4K screen now then you're either rich, or an early adopter (actually the rich bit isn't optional).
...In which case, you should be spending your cash on the LOHAN Kickstarter project.
Less than £1300 to go!
Vic.
" ... when I go back to a Full HD panel the first thing I notice is the pixel grid in the display, and it bothers me.”Sounds suspiciously like the kind of crap you hear from certain elements in the hi-fi industry about 24-bit audio vs. 16-bit audio
Maximum visual acuity for a human is somewhere in the region of 0.02 degrees. At 8ft, that means you can't see better than about 30dpi, even if you've got excellent vision.
A full-HD 40" display gives you about 55dpi - so any artefacts you can see in that situation are caused bt the video encoding, not by the display. Upgrading to 4K or more of itself will not give you a visibly better picture, because your eyes simply don't have the resolution.
So if someone tells you how much better 4K is, he's either got a *very* big screen, or is sitting closer than I would like to. Or - and this is key - has a better video encoding chain (better codec, higher bandwidth, etc.)
I liked 4K - I was very close to a very large display - but I won't be buying one whilst I can buy something with lower resolution for less money.
Vic.
> I chipped in on day 2.
You haven't yet. No-one pays a penny unless the target is reached.
> No tankard yet.
The Kickstarter Page does say
Estimated delivery: Oct 2014
Vic.
Step 6: Let them fix the fault, none the wiser that someone has tampered with the cable in the meantime
An OTDR would discover the second cut. An OTDR would be connected when the break was first discovered - if still connected, and if watched (or logging), there would be data to indicate the tampering.
But it's far more likely that the spooks just leant on someone to say it didn't happen...
Vic.
It's a little bit better than Julius Caesar is claimed to have used, because the dot-dash sequences are not all the same size
That much is irrelevant' symbol demarcation in Morse is by way of timing. So the symbols are already all separated in the stream.
IOW, there's less "security" in Morse than in a Caesar cypher. And that is by design.
Vic.
Powering down the machine results in the NTFS file system being left in a state that cannot be repartitioned
ntfs-3g (the detault in many distros) certainly has a fsck command, which will get you out of that.
It's one of the tools[1] I carry on my bootable USB stick :-)
Vic.
[1] Along with chntpw and nwipe
a lot of commercial software running on Linux *is not* available from the repositories nor in a distro package
...Which is why the very first thing you do on receipt of such a patch is to *put* it in a package. It's not hard.
You then use yum or apt to upgrade the commercial app just as easily as if it were a distro package. All the metadat is stashed away in the usual manner, all the rollback options are immediately available. In short, it's a small amount of effort for a *vast* improvement in usability. It pays for itself very quickly...
Vic.
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