* Posts by Mike Pellatt

558 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2007

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Revealed: Why Amazon, Netflix, Tinder, Airbnb and co plunged offline

Mike Pellatt

Re: No exponential backoff?

No just (or even) DECNet - it's fundamental to CSMA-CD working properly, else everyone would keep trying to transmit at the same time.

With today's star network topology with switches and FDX links, rather than a shared bus, it's not relevant.

If you absolutely must do a ‘private cloud’ thing, here's how

Mike Pellatt

Re: Application running as root

If I had my way, any requirement to run as root (*nix) or with Admin privileges would immediately rule out use of that piece of software.

What's even more depressing is that when a vendor claims that requirement, they don't really need it. I had this wit an accounts package - when questioned, it turned out they only needed write permissions to one - yes, just one - registry entry. Properly setting the permission on that entity enabled the app to run in the logged-in user's privilege context.

For some reason, accounts apps seem to be the worst at this. We had it at Olivetti in the early 80's with the app developers for the S6000. A large clue-by-four was needed.

Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour leadership election

Mike Pellatt

Re: @LucreLout - Pyhrric victory

There are two slogans that are utterly meaningless when it comes to managing a country's finances.

These are

"Living within your means"

and

"Flogging off the family silver"

My bullshit meter goes to 100 when I see either of those used. Which is pretty much anything from either side of the political debate on how the macro UK economy should be run.

Maggie did economic debate a massive non-service when she compared UK finance to running household finances.

Mike Pellatt

A monkey....

A monkey with the correct colour rosette would win here.

Wait did I say would?

Exactly what I used to say about Surbiton constituency in the 60's and 70's when Sir Nigel Fisher was MP.

A constituency merger and boundary changes, and the '97 GE, and look what happened.

Epsom & Ewell, on the other hand.....

Mike Pellatt

Re: Does this mean there's hope now?

I remember 1974 - 1979.

It wasn't pretty.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Labour... now unelectable

@jason 7 - and even better - guess what - nature managed to run a reactor for us underground a couple of billion years ago, so it's already tested what happens long-term to buried waste. Turns out it's likely to pretty much stay where it's been put.

Was gobsmacked to find this out - http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeWasteFromNuclearPower

Mike Pellatt

Re: Proportional representation

Whatever. Either way, it's down to the LibDems for allowing it to be spiked for a generation.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Congratulations!

...and when they get to retirement find out that Corbyn's wasted all the money...

Well, I suppose wasting it is better than stealing it, as Gordon Brown did, putting the final nail in the coffin of final salary schemes.

All so that they could keep their promise of "no rises in income tax". Which everyone heard as "no rises in taxes" in 1997.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Proportional representation

Bring in proportional representation.....

We voted on that in 2011. We voted against it, mostly (IMHO) because the LibDems put up a stupidly flawed half-way house thinking that would do the job of persuading the waverers.

It may well be that another coalition will be the only opportunity to put such a change before the electorate again.

So another generation or two away, unfortunately.

The last post: Building your own mail server, part 1

Mike Pellatt

MTA

Exim.

That is all.

Seriously, though, I jumped that way a few years ago when the only sensible options were Exim or Postfix. Far too many people were still using Sendmail. Or maybe it was so log ago (Exim 3, that's for sure) that Postfix wasn't as mature. If I started again, I think I might go the other way - simply because it's more popular.

Or is that not a good basis on which to make a decision ??

(I find Exim's teergrubing facility particularly satisfying)

(Oh, and this was on RedHat - before I discovered Debian and that Exim was the default MTA there)

BOFH: Power corrupts, uninterrupted power corrupts absolutely

Mike Pellatt

Re: This rings too true...

And then there's the electricity company itself, too. Wrongly-rated overcurrent protection on a 275KV line led to around a quarter of London (and around half the tube) going dark a few years back.

Mike Pellatt

Re: This rings too true...

Re: Aircon tripping the breaker.

You had the wrong type of breaker installed. Look up "Type B" and "Type C". And, if you've got really massive inrush current, "Type D".

Now, try convincing the refurb crowd who installed Type B breakers on 20A radial circuits that they were told were supplying servers (and therefore via UPS's which have a hefty inrush current) that they installed the wrong breaker types when you find this out over a year after the refurb, and ought to replace them FOC....

Another item that's now on my checklist.

Don't want to upgrade to Windows 10? You'll download it WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT

Mike Pellatt

Re: "Personal" computer no more

Just make sure the "closed-off Windows VM" is XP. With a clean, freshly installed, updated and then left alone, one available to swiftly refresh the live one as and when necessary.

Mike Pellatt

Re: I am not sure of the law in various parts of the world where microsoft operate

Only problem being, these statutory obligations are enshrined in consumer protection law.

So no redress if it's business use. Like a self-employed trader, f'rinstance.

NHS to go paperless by 2020. No, really, it will, says gros fromage

Mike Pellatt

Re: It's not the pieces of paper that are unhappy

Absolutely.

Which is why, when speaking to any of the consultants' secretaries, my wife and I (!!) never, ever lose our rag. Always polite, 100% calm. Sarcasm turned down to, hopefully, 1 or less. We realise they're as frustrated with "the system" as we are at that point. Probably more so.

And it's why I 'phone on behalf of my 94-year-old father. I so know he'd piss them off......

'Unexpected item in baggage area' assigned to rubbish area

Mike Pellatt

The latest stupid in these tills.

When I and the missus try to use the spawn-of-satan self-scan (why would I want to scan myself ?? Yes, I know it's an old one. So am I.) checkouts, we always hit another misfeature of them.

They won't scan an item until the previous fucking item is in the bagging area, weighed, and verified.

So any chance of me scanning the shopping rapidly and passing it to 'er indoors to bag up neatly and in her inexplicable positioning logic is totally lost.

I reckon it takes us twice as long as it needs to because of this, with me frantically re-scanning wondering if the lack of a beep is because the barcode won't read, the item isn't in the POS database, or she's still deciding which bag the previous item should go in.

Why not just weigh the whole fucking pile of shopping at the end and only then whinge if it's out by more than 0.00000001% ?

With the arrival of Aldi in town, I'm not sure I like their strategy. You are ordered to just take your stuff straight from the checkout operator and dump it in the trolley. Shelves are provided for you to take all the fucking shopping out again and bag it up.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Fucking self-scan tills!

A fucking impressive rant, maybe you got into the pub at opening time today and drank a pint or ten waiting for your mates to arrive :-)

However, and it's a big however. There's many a word I could use to describe Graze boxes, after the word "expensive", but "fresh" sure as hell isn't one of them.

They have very, very neat branding, marketing, sales and pricing strategies.

Power Bar: EE was warned of safety risk BEFORE user was burned in explosion

Mike Pellatt

Re: Cheap Chinese Fireworks

Let me tell you a little tale. Recently bought a cheap replacement laptop charger (as you do). After a few hours, it stop working.

Turned out the plug fuse had blown.

A 13A fuse in the plug for a lead that quite clearly wasn't so rated. This is a clear fire hazard.

emailed the dickhead eBay seller, and suggested it was in his interests to recall these mains leads. (S)he utterly failed to understand the issue.

5A fuses kept blowing randomly. Replaced the lead. All good. Clearly a faulty mains lead. But a 13A fuse ? Sheesh.

Then there was the ice maker bought off Amazon. Clearly not double-insulated, and had a Schuko plug with an earth connector. Supplied with a UK - Schuko adaptor which had no earth connection on the socket side.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Common sense

Since hydrogen ignites when it reaches sufficant (sic) pressure....

You better tell that to the manufacturers of hydrogen-powered vehicles, then. They store hydrogen at up to 700 bar (according to http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr615.pdf).

I have a feeling that these little boxes would fracture before reaching even that pressure, meaning that this process is a bit unlikely in igniting them.

Mike Bracken suddenly decides to quit GOV.UK outfit GDS

Mike Pellatt

I'll keep banging on about this.

Because it's beyond unbelievable.

Months and months since the new DartCharge system went online for the Dartford Crossing, the payments site is still tagged "alpha".

Un-be-f'ing-lievable. An alpha system for live payments processing.

The only saving grace is that the call centre systems appear to be pre-alpha from the grief that many people with payment issues have been having.

So what the BLINKING BONKERS has gone wrong in the eurozone?

Mike Pellatt

Re: Germany really doesn't believe the last 60 years

The problem with your credit card in France wasn't its acceptability as such.

The French were way ahead of the rest of the world on card chip "security", and the 24-hour petrol stations only accepted chip cards, not magstripe. The chip system wasn't compatible with the one the UK one when it came in.

Been there, got the badge.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Money supply

The basic problem is that money is divorced from the value of the thing it is supposed to represent.

Of course it is. Money replaced barter, and is therefore a proxy for the perceived value of everything. The determination of the multi-dimensional value of that proxy for everything that could be bartered is, I believe, called "the market' and notwithstanding certain views is far from ideal - because, I'd suggest, of the aforementioned multi-dimensionality.

Mike Pellatt

Re: HOW IT WORKS *

"Derivatives need to be outlawed" is about as useful a policy as "shorting stocks needs to be outlawed".

There are plenty of circumstances where both are useful, and a blanket ban would be disposing of the baby with the bathwater, almost certainly with deeply unpleasant unintended consequences - very possibly worse than the unpleasant consequences of the worst excesses of both instruments.

As in most of life, we're not in "best option" territory here, but "least bad" territory.

The US taxman thinks Microsoft owes billions. Prove it, says Microsoft

Mike Pellatt

Re: I hope this will be useful

What matters to me is the money paid out to people, such as the corporation's owners. That's what we should be taxing.

I was going to say that. But I misread "owners" as "senior employees". Given the majority owners of publicly-traded companies in the UK are us - at least any of us who has some form of private pension - I don't wan't to see huge increases in tax on corporations.

Gordon Brown did that in order to keep the incoming Labour Government's commitment to "no increase in income tax". The reduction in Advance Corporation Tax relief was one of the nails in the coffin of final-salary pension schemes - he was advised that the actuarial cost to pension schemes would be £67 billion.

Google says its AI will jetwash all traces of malodorous spam from your box

Mike Pellatt

Re: Meh

Analogy alert !!! Analogy alert !!!!

Yes, but if if I found every chair available on the market unsuitable, and therefore researched chairs, designed and built one that suited me, I'd sure as hell tell everyone else about it because it's pretty certain there would be others out there who had needs close to mine......

Of course, chairs are a much more mature market than tech, which is why this is a less likely scenario today. Although I do like the Scandinavian backless ones that lock your pelvis, or something like that. Far more comfortable than UK-regulation compliant ones with lumbar support.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Meh

One false positive is one too many, if it's the £100,000 per month opportunity (for me, your numbers may vary :-) ). %age false positive figures fall into the same cognitive trap as say, the one-in-a-thousand-year storm, which just happens to come along tomorrow.

I didn't follow a recipe, built my email over the years, prefer exim to postfix but that's not religious (although I do like exim's/SA-exim's teergrubing. It does make me fell good slightly reducing the spam attempt rate for everyone else. Pointless, I know, as it's all being sent from Botnets, but still.....)

Anyway, the point of this ramble is that I plumped for StartCom too. My only concern is whether a forged passport in my name will turn up on a dead Israeli specialops guy at some point. Or a Palestinian. Either is possible.

Pluto probe brain OVERLOAD: Titsup New Horizons explained

Mike Pellatt

Re: This is proper engineering

Well, yes, by that definition even the edge of the universe is still inside of earth's gravity. But the generally accepted definition is "beyond the point where other gravitational forces exceed that exerted by the Earth".

Or something like that.

Cambridge’s HPC-as-a-service for boffins, big and small

Mike Pellatt

Well, with ATLAS, f'rinstance, producing raw data at 1PetaByte/s (after zero-suppression), you can forget storing anywhere near all the data from major scientific experiments for a long time into the future, even if storage reaches "commoditised" prices (I thought it already had, but never mind).

So, by extension, we'll be "throwing away" data pre-determined as "uninteresting" for a long while yet. Probably forever, as we can pretty much guarantee that the experiments will be producing more data at a faster rate than affordable (or even feasible) storage size increases

Duqu 2.0‬ malware buried into Windows PCs using 'stolen Foxconn certs'

Mike Pellatt

Re: Bigger issue

the certificate system is utterly, utterly broken.

There, fixed that for you.

But we already knew that, before this came out.

ISP Level 3 goes TITSUP after giganto traffic routing blunder

Mike Pellatt

It certainly killed telappliant for 30 mins+

Wi-Fi was MEANT to be this way: Antennas and standards, 802.11 style

Mike Pellatt

Re: My favorite joke on this subject is AT&T

The usual answer to that is "Where would you like me to begin ??"

ALIENS ARE COMING: Chief NASA boffin in shock warning

Mike Pellatt

So, I might as well stop donating all those spare CPU cycles to SETIathome then.

Forum chat is like Clarkson punching you repeatedly in the face

Mike Pellatt

Re: Good riddance, I say

Ahhh, it reminds me of those halcyon days on Usenet in the late eighties and early nineties, when Joe Public joined AOL and Compuserve and it all went to pot

Ah, yes, I remember the start of the Eternal September. It made the Dinette for sale in New Jersey posting seem positively well-educated. 1993, according to Wikipedia.

Mike Pellatt

Re: @Terra

Knob head or bell end.

The original commenter would appear to have merged the two.

ARM plans to win 20 per cent of the server market by the year 2020

Mike Pellatt

Re: Intel Broadwell-D

Just as Intel have been unable to break into the low-power/embedded market to date (and into the server market with reduced-power x86), ARM have been unable to break into the server market.

Will either of those change ?? Wish I knew. One or the other might happen at some point. The trick is recognising that point.

The transputer was gonna wipe the floor with the 80386....

'Why Digital?' Seriously? You plainly don't Get It enough. Or at all

Mike Pellatt

You missed many.

You missed many, but the best is The Digital Railway.

This apparently means trying again at the signalling technology (moving block) that failed spectacularly around the turn of the millennium, leaving The Bearded One with a pile of spectacularly fast tilting trains that couldn't go anywhere near as fast as they were meant to and so no longer needed to tilt - although that didn't stop them doing it. I have the coffee stains. Probably digital tilting technology.

REVEALED: Titsup flight plan mainframe borks UK air traffic control

Mike Pellatt

Re: Properly engineered systems!

And show me the IATA (??) airport codes containing Unicode....

Moto E 2015: The builder's cheapie gets a serious upgrade

Mike Pellatt

Re: First against the wall...

Yabut..... after the B Ark departed, remember what wiped out the race.....

Vodafone didn't have a £6bn tax bill. Sort yourselves out, Lefties

Mike Pellatt

Re: Tim, get real.

"the rich owners of such companies give the political parties the donations they need in order to get elected"

As someone else pointed out, these "rich owners" are almost certainly you and me, as long as you have a pension scheme of some sort as well. Not just for UK companies either - most (all?) pension schemes' investments will be globally diversified, in order to spread the risk.

Neither I nor, I suspect you, expect for one moment that any financial donations we make will influence a political party's policies.

On the other hand, we do have a vote and also the opportunity ti engage more deeply in the democratic process if we wish to change things.

NHS refused to pull 'unfit for purpose' Care.data leaflet

Mike Pellatt

And until the unique id is one-way mapped from the NHS number.

Absolutely no need whatsoever for NHS numbers to be in the data - that's an open invitation for the data to be abused.

Annus HORRIBILIS for TLS! ALL the bigguns now officially pwned in 2014

Mike Pellatt

Re: Supposed to be internal testing.

SNA ?? Pah. BSC3 was so much more fun. Found & fixed a bug in Olivetti's implementation of that in, oh, 1982 or so.

Trousers down for six of the best affordable Androids

Mike Pellatt

Re: Boring selection

They don't all look alike because they are copying iPhones. They all look alike because that's the nature of a mobile touchscreen device,

You, are of course, right.

But you need to go tell that to a certain judge/jury in California. And the ghost of Steve Jobs :-)

UK.gov biz dept: Youth apprentice? Get a degree while you're hired

Mike Pellatt

Re: this takes me back to the 70s

Plus the "thick" sandwich - 1 year in industry, 3 years degree, 1 year in industry. This satisfied the then (pre-CPD) training requirements for CEng, just leaving 2 years to do in a "responsible position".

Very few left, except in the Forces, by the time I left school in 1973. The economic state of the country was doing for them. At graduation in 1976 it was next-to-impossible to find a formal scheme that gave you 2 years' postgrad training to satisfy the CEng requirement, at least in electronics. Different for the Civils, I think.

The move from a 3-year BSc(Eng) to a 4-year M.Eng. from my alma mater was, without a doubt, in part a repsonse to this.

Not particularly regretting that I didn't take the last-ditch opportunity a few years ago to get CEng under the grandfathered "old" scheme.

Mike Pellatt

Oh look, a "thin sandwich" course...

Cray-cray Met Office spaffs £97m on very average HPC box

Mike Pellatt

Re: The best weather forecasting...

I upvoted, rather than downvoted. Because in the short term (up to an hour or so out of the window, maybe 3 hours using the rain radar and extrapolating, as I often do), you're dead right.

As proof, how many times has the (local) radio, relying on the forecast, told us it's bright and sunny outside, when any fule can look out the window and see its peeing down. And vice-versa.

But for any time horizon beyond that, forget it. And your sage. And whether the cows are standing or not. You really, really do need some good mathematical modelling.

SDI wars: WTF is software defined infrastructure?

Mike Pellatt

Re: Use a public provider?

Just make sure you have your data and your apps in more than one place.

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/02/07/2e2_data_centre_calamity/

Hawking: Higgs boson in a BIG particle punisher could DESTROY UNIVERSE

Mike Pellatt

Re: Hmm,

Still, at least he hasn't fallen for something like the schoolboy error that Prof. Laithwaite did over gyroscopes, and think he's discovered perpetual motion.

Yet.

DEATH TO TCP/IP cry Cisco, Intel, US gov and boffins galore

Mike Pellatt

Re: Anyone remember the OSI protocols?

Not all the names you list weren't interested. Intel were well in there on OSI. They had a guy in EMEA, based in Swindon, dedicated to MAP/TOP. DEC, too, as someone else pointed out. And ICL.

From what I could tell later on when my then-company had an ICL connectivity product, was that it was the lack of mature routing and nameservice vis-a-vis TCP/IP that really did for OSI. Compared to TCP/IP, when properly configured, it ran sooooo much better over mobile networks.

Of course, we could argue how mature TCP-IP's routing is when core routers need 512KB+ routing tables....

Mike Pellatt

Re: What essentially saved TCP/IP?

Also I'm bloody glad I've not needed to wage war against X.400 in the last 16+ years

Looked at Exchange Server addresses lately ?? :-)

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