Posts by Alan Brown 15090 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"these early production A380's are a little over weight"
Exactly this. It's entirely expected that the first 6 out the door would retire early thanks to their extensive rewiring jobs and additional tweakage. They're more than just a little overweight.
Airbus made a grave mistake freezing and then cancelling A380F rollout in favour of getting the passenger versions fixed. The freighters could have been flying and generating income for a couple of years earlier than the passenger version, but instead all the freighter customers jumped ship and went elsewhere.
"It really only works in tight usage scenarios (Emirates with its customer demand for long-haul lines)."
Emirates and friends make money from freight. There's more money in that than in passengers (which is why they don't fully stuff them upstairs, it makes more room in the hold.)
A380s have considerably longer range at MTOW than 777s do, whilst carrying more than twice the cargo mass. The logistics of that frequently mean that it works out cheaper overall (ground crew, passenger facilities and refuelling at an intermediate stop) even if the overall fuel burn is higher.
This all changes with Next Gen aircraft of course but it's always been like that - and the proliferation of smaller airliners flying point to point is predicated on aviation fuel remaining cheap, which it won't. Remember there was a price war most of the last decade in an attempt to put frackers and other tight oil producers out of business and costs are now snapping back to where they should be.
" I'd not even have thought about making my own until you mentioned it. "
Sodium percarbonate is readily available as a cleaning supply and it's one of the cases of being hard to overdo it ("too much" will simply not break down into peroxide), but as mentioned it's usually easier just to buy it - with the caveat that you should look at the percentages as these powders range from 2% percarbonate up to 30%+ - and pricing gives no indication of concentration (the most heavily marketed ones tend to have less active ingredient, surprise surprise)
So far I've found that the best "bang per buck" is Tesco's own-brand "colours" oxy powder at 35% - but they also have a nearly identical package "whites" package which is 5% and only a couple of pence cheaper.
Coming back on topic - you could buy the lower concentration version or just use less of the other product - THIS is marketing at work - convincing you that you need 2 different products which turn out to be the same thing with different quantities of filler inserted.
"People started complaining about ads when the first flashing GIFs adverts arrived"
Those were irritating, but you could put up with them (there are options to stop animations)
What _really_ got peoples' goat were obnoxious popups/popunders and later on, adverts with SOUND when you weren't expecting it.
If you have a web site which loads up audio without warning then you're probably driving customers away in droves. It's even more annoying than animated shit.
"It takes just one bad apple to persuade a user to take the trouble to learn how to block ads"
It takes more than one:
There's the one who came up with the irritation
And the ones (plural) who failed to filter that shit from getting displayed to the enduser.
The moment you farm out your adverts to a third party (banner farms, etc), you're putting _your_ image at risk. Newspapers/magazines used to be (and still are) fairly careful about what goes into print media and take care to ensure it's not going to alienate readers. They can and will refuse inappropriate adverts. It's still your company's image at stake even if it's "only a web page"
There's _zero_ excuse for walking away from that duty of care for online publishing and if you allow an advertiser to run offensive adverts or serve up malware then it's _your_ responsibility for the consequences. Your website, you curate it.
IANAL, but I'm sure there are some here who could weigh in on the liabilties if a 3rd party banner on my website served up malware to visitors - and I'm pretty sure they'd be telling me that farming the banner content out to a 3rd party doesn't reduce my culpability if it occurs. At the very least the legal costs have a potential to be crippling.
"I guess that the people accusing others of being parasites are the ones that depend on ad revenue for employment. "
That wouldn't surprise me.
I've spent thousands on "targetted advertising" (print and online media) and I can assure everyone that a small cheap untargetted static advert in the right location will usually get better results than something large, flashy and "editorialised".
The saying that "half of my advertising is useless" is wrong. It's more like 90%
"They were busy spamming the popular unmoderated newsgroups."
And email, via unsecured mailservers.
Spammers were costing ISPs thousands per month in bandwidth charges thanks to the relaying antics but the real attention-getter was when AT&T had to spend around $60million for an emergency rollout of mailservers to cope with the incoming volumes. I was surprised at that point that it wasn't treated as criminal denial of service attacks and prosecuted accordingly.
"and they keep the garbage/recycling bins right next to the mailboxes."
Read or not, by dropping it in your own recycling bin, you're carrying the disposal costs of their garbage.
Mailing it back to them means they get to eat the cost. Postage due is even better.
The problem is the obnoxiousness of many of those ads, along with the level of secret tracking which would be classified as criminal stalking if a human was doing it.
Whilst I'm hoping that GDPR rules will curb it, I know full well that most marketing companies will ignore the law until their gonads are being barbequed and the people responsible will simply phoenix the companies to avoid the law.
Here's what springs to mind when I read stuff like the OP:
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/79/52/e7/7952e7cb00baacbe4cb135ba017c6479--obama-birth-certificate-bumper-stickers.jpg
Thankfully in Europe we now have GDPR regulations and I suspect that's going to result in a lot of the bundled bloatware getting some extra attention.
Like Samsung putting some kind of fusible link (knox) on their phones when you root to remove the unwanted shit, which allows them to deny warranty because you've "damaged" it.
It's my fucking phone. This is pissing all over it and claiming that it's your even more than Microsoft's worst behaviour
"I've yet to meet someone in the legal profession who doesn't insist on printing ALL documentation"
Funnily enough I've yet to meet anyone with decades of experience in IT who doesn't insist on doing the same thing - because no matter how you set things up even if the computer system is secure, some user or PHB will insist on a configuration which arbitrarily dumps things which later turn out to be critical.
"How about when a belligerent user keeps typing the incorrect password to login to their computer, gets locked out, gets unlocked, does it again twice more,"
these are the same users who can't find the Any key, or swear blind that XYZ software used to work on this machine when it was never installed in the first place.
Of course there's the other kind of user - where you know there's something odd going on with their machine but no errors are logged on the servers and you can't replicate it on vanilla builds on the bench, so you need to look over their shoulder to see them repeat the fault and work out that the f**k is going on(*) - and they take that as not being believed, so find excuses not to allow the diagnosis to proceed.
(*)ie: it's probably an interaction between software on their system that's not documented.
"Darwin Police HQ,"
One university town I lived in had a spate of pink bicycles appearing on top of buildings and poles, which the police said they were taking "extremely seriously" in newspaper interviews.
A couple of days after this statement was published a cluster of pink bicycles appeared on the top of the main police station's flagpole. Said flagpole was highly visible from many office windows inside and outside the police station. Red faces all around.
Back in telco days, we were taught to make a point of querying anyone we didn't recognise in such areas, whether or not they had an id/visitors badge showing, but to make the initial approach as if they were lost and needed assistance.
Most of the time that was the case but there were a couple of "incidents averted" due to such challenges. The most common way of gaining entry was shotgunning through a door behind someone authorised, which ended up in orders that people were to ensure noone followed them in.
As for the "incidents"? Telcos used to have a lot of readily accessible copper in their buildings. That was a big temptation for certain groups of individuals.
"No US prison has rehabilitation as a core purpose."
The entire US legal system (and particularly the prisons) is geared around retribution and revenge, not around rebuilding, rehabilitation and reconciliation.
"An eye for an eye eventually puts everyone in the kingdom of the blind"
The USA has prison populations per capita higher than _any_ other country in the world for a couple of reasons - firstly that it's a quick and dirty way of disenfranchising the poor (which is illegal under international law, but the USA does it anyway) and secondly that it allows legalised slavery - which contrary to popular belief isn't completely illegal in the USA - slavery of the incarcerated is explcitly still on the books and still practiced.
" The FBI have fucked up and are trying anything to save face."
This, in spades. the USA legal system(*) is fundamentally broken. This tendency to pile on hundreds of charges in order to plea bargain down to guilty of "walking on the cracks in the pavement" simply because defending the charges leads to bankruptcy should be stomped on and victims of such malfeasance awarded hundreds of millions in compensation.
(*) As I keep pointing out. it's not a justice system and never was (anywhere in the world). It's a legal system and those with the deepest pockets do best. This is something hammered into wannabe lawyers on day one of their law courses.
"They then call you expecting a fix in the last few mins of the day OR NOBODY GETS PAID their monthly salary, including you!"
Or the people who would have signed off the updates on the AS400. You had a useful tool there.
But you probably still do, as SMB1 will be forcibly disabled sooner or later, probably sooner.
"So please, give ASUS routers a very wide berth as ASUS don't give a fsck about basic security, or their users. "
About 20 years ago, ASUS responded to a plethora of customer complaints about problems with their TNT2 video cards by shutting down their entire customer forum system. This caused me to set a policy of "never deal with ASUS"
More recent interactions caused by a vendor who sold us rebadged ASUS servers showed that the attitude hasn't changed (when the stuff arrived I expressed my misgivings and was overruled, things quickly turned to shit from there on the support front as the vendor was left high and dry by ASUS.)
"The evidence of many decades of experience is that monopolies DON'T do an any sort of professional job"
There, FTFY
Private monpolies are as bad as (or worse than) government ones, as they're even less accountable for their actions.
The fact that noone at Crapita thought to query things piling up says much.
"say they're seeking an IPv4 address of a certain range and see if someone's willing to sell it. "
And when /24s are worth $250k a pop?
How are you going to justify that kind of spend to your accountant when once you get past the inflection point for IPv6, those IPv4s will be not only valueless but useless?
"Nobody thought it was a good idea, but it was considered the least disruptive with the most benefits of all the alternatives."
In 1993 at the NANOG meeting there was a meeting to try and get IPv6 finalised and deployed before "the killer app" came along that drove usage sky high.
2 meeting rooms along at the same time, a presenttation was being made about NCSA Mosaic.
" never had to deal with RFC1918 clashes."
Or worse - someone who's pulled numbers out of their arse for internal usage "because we'll never connect to the Internet so it doesn't matter"
cue calls a few months after being connected "We've been hacked, our internal logs show mountains of connections from berkeley.edu (when they were using berkeley's IP ranges and an external IP resolver)
"The only available mitigation that I can see is to use NAT -- which, fortunately, you can do with IPv6."
repeat after me: NAT IS NOT A FIREWALL - not in any sense of the world. if you want a firewall then bloody well use one.
Most dual-stack routers implement the same sets of rules on the IPv4 and IPv6 stacks. If yours is crufty enough to be broken in this respect spend the 20 quid to get one that does.
"And ISPs will probably accept the management of NAT's (especially carrier grade NATs) because it hamstrings their customers. "
What's actually happening in developing countries is that there end up being multiple layers of NAT
$LARGE national ISP has a /24. it assigns IPs to a bunch of smaller ISPs, who NAT it and onsell to smaller ISPs or home users who NAT as well.
It's not unusual to find 3-5 layers of NAT in some countries - and at one point the _whole_ of Vietnam was NATed via one IP address. NAT screws up connectivity pretty badly and that many layers makes things a clusterfuck as you can't rely on helper programs like you can if you're only NATing a small /24
" No one wants to strand customers."
At some point, someone's going to take a IPv4 ISP to court for misleading advertising.
If you're IPv4 only, then by definition you can no longer access all the Internet, just the IPv4 parts of it.
Remember when various telcos were flogging their walled garden web-only access as "internet" and got spanked?
At that point things might get "interesting"
" it means that IPV6 can handle 2^53 routable networks."
The Keyword in all this discussion is "networks"
When IPv4 was first created, the first octet was routing information, similar to an international dialling code. The idea that the first octet gave some indication of the network's position on the planet went out the window when the address space was broken up into Class A/B/C
Whilst IPv4 can only handle 65536 BGP4 networks one of the more important problems is the amount of routing update traffic that's flowing around and the number of updates that need to be made to memory tables in core routers. Calculating best paths is a big CPU hog.
IPv6 space is so big BECAUSE it makes provision for hierarchical routing, which in turn means that the number of routing updates flying around can be kept relatively low, which makes things more efficient at machine level (not numerically).
Sparseness in network addressing tables is a good thing. Imagine if your phone number was +441234567890 whilst your neighbours were +423210457895 and +622136 and that kind of chaos was repeated all the way up and down your street as well as across town.
Just because it can theoretically hold trillions of addresses, doesn't mean it is ever intended to. Once it sinks in that the first few bytes of IPv6 is supposed to be geographical/network routing information the size of the space makes sense - and the other reason it's "so big" is so that we don't have to go through this entire exercise again in a few years.
IPv4 was a hacky kludge only intended to remain in service for 5-6 years. That it's lasted as long as it has is a testament to ingenuity in the face of adversity more than Vint's original design.
> Then there are the indirect effects, like forcing all IoT stuff to go through a relay server because it's just too difficult to avoid it when everybody is behind three layers of NAT.
This, in spades.
NAT is a hacked up kludge, _NOT_ some magic panacea. It breaks a lot of stuff and the workarounds open more security holes than it closes
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
