Posts by Alan Brown

Re: qotw

"Eventually, we learned that the cabinet was open at the bottom and had been sitting directly over the incoming mains to the plant; all disks were blank. "

Interesting BOFH excuse, but floppies were notorious for losing their contents without a mains cable in sight. Some brands (noted for their marketing claims of never forgetting) were particularly bad for bit rot.

Re: Apple Mac wireless mice are fun...

"Oh, you don't understand because you're a muggle".

The point about make-believe is that it we know it's make-believe. When people start taking it seriously, then someone's going to start building churches about it.

Re: Reminds me of a story I read about

"The difference with the hiss is that it's real!"

Yup. I used to confound people in the early days of analogue mobile phones by taking mine out a few seconds before it rang.

No biggie - I could hear it clicking as the base polled it. they couldn't.

Re: Switch to...

"there is no such thing as sensitivity to EM radiation in the ranges that these people mean it "

Oh, actually there is.

But hitting people with 100kW+ at 20MHz or 2-500W at 2GHz is frowned on.

"I've never been a huge fan of wireless keyboards and mice in the office environment."

Nor me for more or less the same reason

"things weren't very sophisticated back then"

They're not that sophistocated now. Back then they didn't have authentication, so typing on one would result in all receivers picking up the characters. These days they just mutually interfere - which is almost as bad when you have more than a couple in close proximity.

Re: missed opportunity

"To be fair, those antennas are designed to radiate power horizontally outwards, "

Not that it would have mattered.

In the period between antennas being erected and transmitters being installed there would almost always be a flurry of complaints about radiation causing people to have XYZ problems. Usually before the feeder cables had even been run.

Nice to get those actually. Log 'em, take notes, get all symptoms, etc and encourage as much detail as you can get. It means you have good evidence of who your crackpots are before things go live and can be extremely useful later on.

Re: bluetooth with Win10 is an iffy affair

"While USB can be plugged in one of three * ways"

Which is topological proof that USB is a four-dimensional plug.

Re: A solution

"Amusing, but in that instance, why would he not have told the real reason?"

Presumably because he had done so and been ignored.

Most of these devices used to come with a night mode specifically to prevent such things happening and users would switch them off at the wall despite being specifically told not to.

We would find that we could happily bill them $140 per call out, just so they could save 1c in electricity.

Re: Their reply was that they are required by law to deliver the spam

"Except that they tell posties to ignore the 'no junk mail' notices and threaten disciplinary action if they don't deliver the leaflets,"

If you have proof of that, the ICO would love to hear from you.

That kind of evidence is what turns small fines for breaches into VERY LARGE ones.

"Their reply was that they are required by law to deliver the spam."

Not if you've opted out. Again, talk to Aimee Smith at the ICO.

" I wonder if the ICO would be interested if I sent it on to them every time the postie 'forgets' we've opted out - along with the numerous emails promising a full investigation and the postie getting a 'hats on interview' with the delivery office manager..."

Actually, they would - The case officer investigating is Aimee Smith.

They could have (gasp) sent them a postal mail leaflet instead,

No fine for that.

The Royal Mail's own unaddressed mail opt out "service" expires after 18 months. The ICO is looking into that (I suspect it's not legal to do that anymore), and the fact that posties frequently ignore it anyway (which is illegal, but enforcement is virtually impossible)

There's probably an IT angle on why they lose the optouts (maybe even a story for El Reg)

Re: Reusable?

"The bits they're reusing would otherwise have ended up in the ocean, no?"

Until relatively recently, no.

Skylab's launch bits took more than 18 months to come down.

Re: Have We Patended any of our Property that the EU are using

"BAE alone files about 1000 applications every year of which I see about 10 filings per year."

BAE is not a british company anymore.

It's not even a european company anymore.

That's by design, else it couldn't be building stuff for the USA.

Re: Spam-fighting?

"browser fingerprint can simply leak passively,"

There are several browser plugins which can detect fingerprint checks and randomise what's fed back.

Re: Spam-fighting?

" It used to be dire."

Used to be?

Trust me, you do NOT want an unshielded mailserver. If you think it's better than it was, it's only because your admins are doing a better job than you realise.

Re: I like feeding false data..

" I always pick one that would actively track down who is spamming them like, say, the ICO."

Even better, the home address of the director of the organisation....

Re: Yes! Someone's remembered TrackMeNot

"These days the miscreants are more likely to be slurping our data by means of a custom "app", no browser necessary or even no browser access allowed."

That's where something that nullroutes hosts helps a lot.

Re: Mutant 59

" very few people search beyond the first page of results "

There are a couple of exceptions.

If I'm searching for something and all I'm finding is stuff which has obviously been linkfarmed, I'll start looking a little further - and usually at that point because it's clear that I need to be alarmed by what I've found.

In one case, checking out a reference to someone in a small town that a relative had mentioned in glowing terms, all I found for 8 pages was variants of the same press releases. It was only when I got to page 10 that I started finding any mention of the history of fraud convictions and dodgy dealings that I knew should be showing up.

Re: Mutant 59

"Just look at all the commercials we now pay to watch at the movie theater."

These sound horrible, until you realise WHY all those ads are running.

Of the $15 you paid for your seat at the latest blockbuster screening, around $14 went to the movie distributor. The theater operator has to pay for everything else with $1/seat

It might sound harsh, but if you really want to support your local movie house DON'T go see the blockbusters when they're released, see the second run and less popular stuff - and buy the fucking overpriced popcorn.

Just don't put up with shitty sound where some twat has fucked the equalisation up by pushing all the knobs to 11 (theater managers are notorious for this) or sound levels to 130dB or where an ass is on his phone loudly the entire movie.

Re: Mutant 59

"There is no reason to think that if people paid a monthly fee to use Facebook, Facebook wouldn't want to collect all that yummy information anymore."

Exactly THIS.

Google's single biggest mistake in the last 20 years was to buy Doubleclick. Doubleclick destroyed what made Google great.

That might sound silly, until you realise that if Google hadn't bought up Doubleclick, the most hated company on the Internet at the time would have gone out of business within weeks. Instead its execs are now the senior execs at Google and their tactics/policies are now Google's tactics and policies.

That was when "Don't be Evil" died.

"Let me know when all the spam is in your tar-pit rather than my inbox."

I'm achieving a 99.999% reject rate on my mailservers.

Unfortunately that still lets too much spam through and I have no idea if there's ham being refused _but_ when you team up the DNSBLs with fail2ban networks and friends you can prevent a lot of the bots even connecting.

That does nothing for abusive websites, though.

Re: I've seen this before

"They already do. Some sites, newspaper sites in particular but media sites in general, call many 3rd party scripts"

Yup and they must be seeing their conversion rates plummet as a result. I've been chatting to a few journos and they're griping about readership rates. They look at me like I've grown a second head when I comment about how intrusive their websites are.

Clueless and then some.

Re: X-T&C header

"but part of the problem is one way T&Cs, you either get to accept it down to the last comma or nothing at all"

Any lawyer worth his qualifications will tell you that a contract accepted under duress or which contains illegal conditions is normally invalid - severalbility caluases are needed to make the illgal parts not invalidate the entire contract and there's the entire "unfair terms in consumer contracts" laws in most countries worldwide (with analogues for business use too) to contend with when T&C are being dictated by shrinkwrap or click.

Re: Not Bad

"And then, I get a call...:"my computer is slowing down," or "my AV is telling me I have viruses". <sigh>"

I got this from relatives.

It stopped when I let them take their systems to professionals for cleaning and they usually ended up with $400+ bills.

After that they started taking my advice.

Re: Not Bad

"but in practice it's the old battle of users versus advertisers."

Believe it or not, there _are_ responsible advertisers. Possibly even a majority of them.

Of course, they're not the ones who get in our faces, or who regard a 0.000001% response rate on annoying adverts as a success.

Re: It's actually mostly only shrug-worthy for the operator

"After all - it IS rocket science!"

Nope. It's rocket engineering.

The science is the easy part,

"My impression was that it was lasting more than a week. "

There are 2 kinds of film scenes:

Those filmed before and those filmed after the advent of MTV

Why? Because Music Videos have an almost hardcoded scene limit of 5-6 seconds and this has permeated into our expectations of every other kind of filmmaking.

Next time you watch your favourite program, count down how long any particular shot is held, then compare it with something made prior to 1980

Re: HAL

"We can discuss these with them, but we cannot force an intelligent being to do something against their will."

However, until they develop that free will, we can give them a set of strong rules to work with that will serve as ethical guidelines later (the three rules).

It is a bloody shame we can't imprint them into actual meatsacks.

Re: HAL

"The fault lies with the people who fed in those category A directives and didn't think about what an AI with problem-solving heuristics would come up with as a solution, which is why "no harm by action or inaction" is law #1 and MUST be hard-coded."

And why Uber failed so badly.

Re: Forbidden Planet

"Mars at some point had a larger proportion of Oxygen in its atmosphere that now,"

Are you sure about that?

Earth never had any appreciable oxygen in its atmosphere until chloroplasts evolved and finding any significant amount of free oxygen is widely considered to be an indicator of possible life processes

Re: Not just Siri/Google Assistant/etc

> Blade Runner/Neuromancer anachronism

And Solyent Green :)

Re: Only $247.5m?

"This is just an exploratory project"

Exactly. You can only go so far by modifying the snout and underside of a Northrop F5E as NASA have been doing in their research with Honeywell since the 1990s.

The engine geometry is fundamentally limitiing for starters and this thing appears to be the next big step (moving engine intakes/exhausts on top is a logical step to quieting noise)

Here's what the old plane looked like in 2003 (this is prior to the quiet spike research, but feeds intro it). I'm surprised they didn't call it Pumba. https://www.nasa.gov/aero/sonic_boom_takes_shape.html

Also at https://www.airplane-pictures.net/photo/46101/74-1519-nasa-northrop-f-5e-tiger-ii/

Re: NASA boom mitigation

Somehow posting on the mobe ate half what I sent.

Yes, the US Gov pissed off the public by running fighters low over cities, but they also did useful research with the cancelled XB-70 before retiring it, flying it on a large range of flight profiles and heights over Edwards for months and measuring the boom patterns as well as similar tests in the midwest.

The Valkerie was huge plane and a spectacularly loud boomer (much louder than it should have been for its size) thanks to the Waverider layout. It gave a lot of valuable data and showed that 1950s-60s designs were simply too loud to be tolerable even at 50-60,000 feet over land - which was quickly proven on those Concorde flights into Bahrain/Singapore.

If Boeing hadn't been set a target by the US Government of building something significantly faster than Concorde they might have succeeded. Bigger and more range was relatively easy but the extra speed meant the thing got so hot that it needed new materials which simply weren't available.

Even Concorde was pushing normal materials limits and you can't build a civil transport that leaks fuel like a plastic bag full of nails when it's on the tarmac like the SR71s did (not to mention the fun they had acquiring Soviet titanium). No matter for Boeing, as the entire enterprise was funded by Uncle Sam and the backstop program turned into a roaring commercial success. If the SST had succeeded, we may have never seen low cost mass transport from the 747 (which at its core is a 707 scaled up 50% for freight work, with an elevated flight deck to both protect the pilots from shifting cargo and allow a nose door to be fitted without disconnecting/reconnecting/recalibrating all the flight controls every time it's opened. Everything else is evolution)

Without some magic way of reducing friction, supersonic doesn't gain much for your money unless you're going at least 6-9 hours conventionally and then you really want hypersonic or skipping, else fuel will be 90% of your MTOW. Reaction Engines might still have their day for 4 hour London-Sydney vomit rides.

As for booms - there's no way the public will put up with more than a even a couple of quiet booms a day - particularly in quieter areas. Making them unnoticable in urban areas isn't as important as making them unnoticeable when people are in the suburbs or rural locations. (In a quiet location you can hear a 747-400 flying past at 35,000 feet, as the daily transpolar flights to Argentina did over my parents place when I was in my 20s. It can't be any louder than that). I heard Concorde boom once. You could put up with that once a day on a predictable pattern but every other flight at effectively random intervals would trigger murderous rampages in a lot of people (chinese water torture...)

NASA boom mitigation

They've been working on this with modified fighters (F15s) for 25 years.

You can't remove the boom but you can both spread it and direct it. What NASA found was that a basin shaped bottom and a sharp edge to the top half and a very long snout resulted in a much broader and quieter boom pattern underneath.

The program culminated in the Quiet Spike research but goes back further.

Re: Damn

"Any recommendations as to where I should move to?"

A vanity domain you pay for, then you can redirect as you want and noone will be any the wiser.