Posts by Alan Brown 15097 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"I've seen very few admins turn on these protections"
Which is a shame, because mrtg monitoring of system temperature can frequently show problems starting to happen before they knock things over (eg: fan failures, where the fans aren't monitorable).
In a pinch I've resorted to using HDD SMART temperature reporting.
"I'd hate to have had to work in that kind of heat...."
A long time ago as an apprentice, I fairly regularly ended up in house ceiling spaces running cables (the "boy" always does this stuff, mainly because he can fit through the manhole that the average electrician's gut precludes).
Steel roofing, summer days and insulation below usually meant the ambient temperature was in excess of 50C + a blasting space heater above you. Being fibreglass wool insulation for the most part, stripping down to shorts and tshirt was not advisable, it was bad enough getting it between skin and coveralls. In low pitched roofs there was often only 2 feet of space to work in and touching the roof on the inside, even through the waterproofing, meant blisters.
> 336 calories to melt 1 gram of ice at 0deg C
(actually 334 joules/79.5 calories)
79.5 calories later, you have water at 0C
> 1 calorie to raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree C
(which is more or less right)
what happens when you put in 334 joules/79.5 calories to 1g of water at 0C ?
As for BTU, the only time you see that used in the UK is in adverts derived from US equipment. All our suppliers use kW (latent and sensible)
"Remind me again why an ISP shouldn't be allowed to control what goes through its network."
Because people buy internet service.
When the ISP is blocking services which compete with its internal offerings, then customers can go elsewhere. Except across vast tracts of the USA, where there is no "elsewhere" to buy from.
The problem with breaching Net Neutrality is that everything is interconnected on a trust basis and if ISPs start restricting things, the whole model falls apart rapidly, leading to a Balkanisation of the Internet and severely eroding its utility.
(ie: It might seem like a good idea to the beancounters or marketers, but the long term commercial damage vastly exceeds the short term profit taking)
"I always enjoy telling them I would not touch TT with a bargepole."
I prefer telling them I wouldn't touch TT with someone else's bargepole. Loudly enough that other people can hear it.
Then again I'm the guy who loudly tells High street chuggers fo fuck off and stop pestering people.
"The US is wondering what the lack of Net Neutrality leads to"
This (and at least here in the UK you have the option of going to another provider)
MADISON RIVER: In 2005, North Carolina ISP Madison River Communications blocked the voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) service Vonage. Vonage filed a complaint with the FCC after receiving a slew of customer complaints. The FCC stepped in to sanction Madison River and prevent further blocking, but it lacks the authority to stop this kind of abuse today.
COMCAST: In 2005, the nation’s largest ISP, Comcast, began secretly blocking peer-to-peer technologies that its customers were using over its network. Users of services like BitTorrent and Gnutella were unable to connect to these services. 2007 investigations from the Associated Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others confirmed that Comcast was indeed blocking or slowing file-sharing applications without disclosing this fact to its customers.
TELUS: In 2005, Canada’s second-largest telecommunications company, Telus, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company. Researchers at Harvard and the University of Toronto found that this action resulted in Telus blocking an additional 766 unrelated sites.
AT&T: From 2007–2009, AT&T forced Apple to block Skype and other competing VOIP phone services on the iPhone. The wireless provider wanted to prevent iPhone users from using any application that would allow them to make calls on such “over-the-top” voice services. The Google Voice app received similar treatment from carriers like AT&T when it came on the scene in 2009.
WINDSTREAM: In 2010, Windstream Communications, a DSL provider with more than 1 million customers at the time, copped to hijacking user-search queries made using the Google toolbar within Firefox. Users who believed they had set the browser to the search engine of their choice were redirected to Windstream’s own search portal and results.
MetroPCS: In 2011, MetroPCS, at the time one of the top-five U.S. wireless carriers, announced plans to block streaming video over its 4G network from all sources except YouTube. MetroPCS then threw its weight behind Verizon’s court challenge against the FCC’s 2010 open internet ruling, hoping that rejection of the agency’s authority would allow the company to continue its anti-consumer practices.
PAXFIRE: In 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that several small ISPs were redirecting search queries via the vendor Paxfire. The ISPs identified in the initial Electronic Frontier Foundation report included Cavalier, Cogent, Frontier, Fuse, DirecPC, RCN and Wide Open West. Paxfire would intercept a person’s search request at Bing and Yahoo and redirect it to another page. By skipping over the search service’s results, the participating ISPs would collect referral fees for delivering users to select websites.
AT&T, SPRINT and VERIZON: From 2011–2013, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon blocked Google Wallet, a mobile-payment system that competed with a similar service called Isis, which all three companies had a stake in developing.
VERIZON: In 2012, the FCC caught Verizon Wireless blocking people from using tethering applications on their phones. Verizon had asked Google to remove 11 free tethering applications from the Android marketplace. These applications allowed users to circumvent Verizon’s $20 tethering fee and turn their smartphones into Wi-Fi hot spots. By blocking those applications, Verizon violated a Net Neutrality pledge it made to the FCC as a condition of the 2008 airwaves auction.
AT&T: In 2012, AT&T announced that it would disable the FaceTime video-calling app on its customers’ iPhones unless they subscribed to a more expensive text-and-voice plan. AT&T had one goal in mind: separating customers from more of their money by blocking alternatives to AT&T’s own products.
VERIZON: During oral arguments in Verizon v. FCC in 2013, judges asked whether the phone giant would favor some preferred services, content or sites over others if the court overruled the agency’s existing open internet rules. Verizon counsel Helgi Walker had this to say: “I’m authorized to state from my client today that but for these rules we would be exploring those types of arrangements.” Walker’s admission might have gone unnoticed had she not repeated it on at least five separate occasions during arguments.
"BT and EE sit on loads of spectrum because they were the ones who spent big at the last big sale."
Nothing to do with that merger resulting in previously separate ownerships becoming combined use then?
Spectral holding limits are there to ensure a fair and equitable market. Not only should operators be restricted as to how much they can hold, it should be allocated on a use it or lose it basis.
"Due to the volume and the small holes, the mixture was slow to reach its kaboom point, so the experiment was put aside to do its thing while other experiments were demonstrated."
In other words, you were being shown why you don't put an experiment aside until you're sure the reaction has actually completed.
I nearly took off a science teacher's eyebrows with the sulphur and zinc reaction. Mine studiously failed to go off until he quizzically leaned over it to see what was wrong - and it went off about a minute after it'd been taken off the bunsen.
"The solution used two i/o request queues for each disk plus a record of where the heads were and which direction they were moving "
ZFS achieves something similar by storing up writes and periodically despooling them sequentially. It does as much read reordering as it can and the ARC + L2ARC function aims to keep commonly used data/metadata where disk seeking isn't needed.
Every time someone's tried mechanical cleverness in hard drives it hasn't ended well. Simpler mechanics and more complex software is almost always a better fit.
I'm aware of why they don't work in parallel, nonetheless it would still be an improvement if they could.
The next logical step from what this proposition is to move to an independent arm per platter (2 heads).
Personally I don't think this will work well enough to leave the lab.
Apart from the issue of conflicting magnetic fields on the other side of the pivot (ie the field driving one arm will perturb the other one), I suspect that turbulence issues will raise their ugly heads in short order. There's a lot of funky hydrodynamics at work keeping a hard drive's heads afloat and they tend to assume smooth airflow.
"as if to immunize airlines from lawsuits: "If you are exposed to cosmic ionizing radiation and have these health problems, we can’t tell if it was caused by your work conditions or something else."
Given:
1: The sheer number of aircrew
2: Their exposure over a career
3: 55 years of high altitude civilian travel
The fact that they're not dropping like flies (and in fact seem to have cancer rates no higher than any other occupation) should tell you a lot about the reality of the dangers of exposure to ionising radiation below undefined "threshold" levels (hint: Life on this planet evolved in the presence of much higher rad levels than we consider normal today)
I'll also point you at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRL7o2kPqw0 - the people who DO get the highest radiation exposure might surprise you
Because the incumbent Telco in NZ tried to sell the government on the BT/Openreach model.
After studying what had happened in the UK from 2000 to 2009 and documenting BT's continued market abuse, the NZ government forced the breakup of Telecom NZ in 2011 by the simple expedient of making it a condition of getting any more rural broadband funding.
Separate shares, Boards, Offices, etc. None of this "separate company but incumbent owns the lines" malarky - it was suggested and rightfully pointed out that it left the market abusable.
Making it a condition of funding saved a lot of legal fighting. TCNZ rolled over and played dead in a heartbeat, after making more FUD about splits than BT has been doing - and the same claims were rolled out there, to be proven false.
NZ has 10% of the UK's population with 10 times the rugged terrain. If they can make it work, it's a sure bet the UK can.
Civil operators have been avoiding hiring ex-military pilots (and fast jet pilots in particular) since at least the mid 1980s.
They're statistically far more likely to be involved in an incident due to the military culture encouraging them to press on regardless.
If you can see a quadcopter across a footall field whilst stationary you're doing well. I've sat on top of a hill at a Buddhist shrine in Myanmar and despite being able to hear the drone circling about 200 feet below still had a hell of a job picking it out from the ground another 800 feet down. If you can do it whilst moving at 200mph then you're getting on for superhuman.
I'll repeat the observation that there's a linear inverse relationship in the UK between the number of recent drone sightings around airports and the number of bird sightings.
In a free market, with actual competition. Market forces ensure that customers who find themselves in a walled garden will go elsewhere.
The problem is that across large tracts of the USA, the market isn't free and telcos/cablecos have legally protected monopolies ensuring they're (literallly) the only game in town.
The "land of the free" is far from it (it's about #38 in the freedom indexes and still falling)
The windblown stuff does accumulate though. The last south pole base was abandoned because the snow on top got too deep.
OTOH, if these reflectors are stuck on poles drilled in suitably deeply, then in the longer term they can be used to quantify ice movement as well as providing short term reference points.
I'd send out a team of penguins to do it, but at the 88th meridian they'd be even more lost than the polar bears.
"I don't think anyone would have had a problem if the govt had said they needed a 2/3rd majority for exit. "
I would have.
Legally, it was an _advisory_ referendum, and as such the oversight of truthfulness and spending in campaigns was effectively non-existent. The fact that it was advistory and many people felt so confused by the FUD contributed to the spectacularly low electoral turnout.
A binding one would have been subject to much stricter checking and restrictions and there should also be a quorate requirement for such things in addition to a supermajority voting requirement. (There should be a quorum requirement for general and local body elections too, but I digress)
The moment Cameron started raving on about the results being binding was the moment that the wheels started falling off the legality of the campaigning.
Now we have the sight of UKIP and three other (anonymous(*)) entities refusing to cooperate with the ICO's investigations into criminal behaviour during the referendum campaign where even if laws were found to have been broken, invalidating the result is not an option (unlike an election) - and that illegal activity is by the rules of an advisory referendum, not a binding one.
(*) They're only anonymous because they haven't (yet) tried to challenge the ICO's statutory powers directive. They haven't handed over the required information yet. UKIP took it to court and were decloaked as a direct result. I suspect the other three are looking on to see what the results are before trying it themselves.
"If those other countries refuse point blank to play ball, the only possible position is a clean break."
And Britain will find out rather quickly that Australia, India, New Zealand, etc etc don't need trade deals with the UK, but the UK _does_ need trade deals with them.
Britain will also find out that memories of being shafted when the UK joined the EEC in 1972 still resonate and there will be _no_ "special deals for the homeland" despite what those harking back to an empire whose wheels fell off around 100 years ago care to believe.
"believe that every law we're subjected to has been dictated by the EU and forced upon us without us having any say, "
Many of the more objectionable ones were rammed through an unwilling EU parliament by the British, then used back in the UK as an excuse to do what they wanted to do all along, without appearing to be evil.
"They really can tell that a jumble of blurred pixels is a fence and fence post."
Because they've seen it hundreds of times _AND_ been taught by someone what it was _AND_ seen it at various resolutions, so knwo what to expect.
ML doesn't work like that. You can't show it the same image at varying resolutions and have it learn "this is what X looks like when we vary the view"
"Generally, Three seem less user-hostile than EE and (apparently) Voda."
I signed up with Three back in the very early days of the Walled Garden around 2003-4
Their twisting to try and claim that what they were providing ("not an internet service, only web access") was not what their sale droids were saying it was ("Internet access") was rather telling - and that web access was limited to only a few sites in any case.
I see they learned from that fiasco (they had a very high customer churn), but 13 years later they still don't have any signal where I work (and nor do Vodafone, despite $orkplace having signed a large contract with VF) - so for the last phone upgrade I went with EE, who do. 8 months later EE were bought out by BT. I'm out of contract now but conflicted about who to go with.
"Well it stopped an there was nothing to do but go in the cabinet with lots of kit so you could not move easily and a multi v belt pulley"
Power off and lock the breaker. You can even get 'em for MCBs
https://uk.rs-online.com/web/c/safety-security-esd-control-clean-room/keys-safes-locks-lockouts/lockouts/
"Road will be "fixed" by pointless spray of tar & chippings"
The important part about fixing a pothole is that the hole needs to be sealed with tar first to prevent water ingress. If this is not done then everything else is pointless and most contractors don't bother in the first place as the hot tar requirement is too much hassle.
Even jetpatcher repairs fail quickly if the operator skimps on this step. That's why I said "when done properly" in my first posting about them.
"Jet Patching != Permanent repair"
True, but they're far more permanent than the crap jobs most brutish councils do (which are also temporary repairs, but rather _more_ temporary).
Given that it might take a _decade_ or more between a pothole being reported and _permanent_ repairs being made there's a lot of milage in temporary repairs that last for more than 2 weeks.
"even if budgets were increased enough to actually fix things, it would take an average of something like 80 years to actually get it all done."
Assuming traditional reporting and repair methods(*), yes.
(*) Potholes reported. Contractor goes out and fixes one pothole per day in each section of road before driving to another section and repeating - that way they get paid the maximum possible for repairs. Travel, setup and teardown times factor heavily into the delay equation.
I followed a jetpatcher out on trial one day - it did an entire 2 mile stretch of heavily potholed lane in an afternoon and the repairs show no sign of breaking up after more than a year. The previous time this road was patched it took in excess of 3 months, only about half the potholes were filled and they were breaking up within weeks.
"Anyone who thinks we're going to keep going to 8K, 16K and beyond just because it will become possible needs to read up on diminishing returns"
Unlike the "better than CD" issue, 8k/16k and friends will allow larger screens and therefore wider fields of view, which is a major selling point.
"Better than CD" failed because noone could hear the difference - CDs were already close to as good as the range of the human ear
Whilst colour and dynamic brightness ranges are almost there now, there's a lot of resolution and field of view to go before TV matches the human eye.
"They do have a problem with being an attractive target for terrorists."
Only terrorists who really don't know what they're up to. RTGs are hot because they're seriously radioactive and therefore easily detectable from a distance.
Plus they can't be used to make weapons.
- Anything more than slightly radioactive will cause your nuke to start going off too early and cause a fizzle. That's why the US military didn't like Alvin Weinberg's Molten Salt Reactor - the plutonium produced was a mix of desireable and highly undesireable (for bomb making) isotopes that was virtually impossible to separate and so red hot from a radioactivity point of view that any attempts to do so would stick out as a guant "something's going on here" flag
- They're too hot to handle for making a "dirty" (conventional) bomb. Anyone who handled them directly would quickly be dead and in any case a conventional explosion would only scatter the stuff over a limited area that's relatively easy to clean up (see point above about being radioactives being detectable from a distance). Powdering the material for wider dispersal runs into both the "readily detectable" and "soon be dead" issues.
RTGs are nice tools, but attempting to mishandle them is hazardous enough for your health that you'll probably be dead long before being able to do much, or before the armed hazmat team shows up.
Is this some kind of poor translation?
The new chemistry improves the number of cycles in the battery life, not the range per charge.
That translates to an improvement in the service life of the battery pack/distance between failures
Mind you, there are already 10,000+ (possibly 100,000) cycle olivine-based LiIon batteries in the lab and three other anti-dendrite technologies (including one which can be literally cut up without catching fire and has been demonstrated working using existing assembly line tech) that are showing no signs of commercial release.
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