Posts by Alan Brown 15090 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
cats and fuel:air ratio legislation in the USA is a classic example of regulatory capture by entrenched interests
US Domestic makers couldn't compete with Japanese ones on fuel economy and the Japanese were bringing newer (more expensive) cats to market which tackled the NOX issues from lean burn systems.
By mandating 3-way cats and a stociometric fuel ratio, domestic makers weren't at nearly as much of a disadvantage on fuel consumption and they didn't have to spend money to pursue more efficient engine technology (This is also the reason why the USA domestic car industry pushed light trucks, truck-based vans and SUVs so hard during the 1970s-2000s - they weren't subject to strict emissions and crash safety controls, whilst the 25% import tariff on them (2% on cars) made the profits even sweeter in their captive domestic market)
The lawmakers were _extremely_ heavily lobbied (bribed) by Detroit to get legislation placed which claimed to be doing one thing, but whose goal was entirely different (protectionism)
Kinda hard to force a client to install these at their own site.
If you can get them to do that you can usually convince them to put the equipment in a server room off limits to cleaners
(Unfortunately then you still have the problem of "security guards" who make it their life's mission to switch off aircon in unoccupied rooms - including rooms full of noisy equipment and racks)
New Zealand's VAT/GST implementation is unusual in that the GST is applied to EVERYTHING except banking(financial) services
The huge mess in Australia and Britain, "where bread was exempt but raisin bread was not" was one of the major drivers of that decision. The government didn't want a system which had been demonstrated to cause expensive court cases over interpretations (Jaffa cakes, anyone?)
The result of that decision was astounding.
GST went in at 10%, income taxes reduced, the hideously complicated system of import duty and sales taxes (which could result in tax being 120% on some items) went away.
The government netted MORE income and within a decade was able to reduce inland revenue staff numbers by 1/3 (nobody in IRD was complaining of overwork either), vs being on track to double staffing numbers on the existing system, within a decade just to keep up
By not having exempt categories, business calculations were easy and it became _very_ hard to cheat the system. In most cases if a rort was going on the government only lost GST income on the MARKUP applied, rather than the entire tax amount (which was a constant feature of a sales tax system only applied at retail sale and required that wholesalers be specially licensed/only allowed to sell to retailers)
"everyone had hard-coded the original value into their programs, rashly assuming politicians would not change their minds"
I knew people who worked in the vehicle registration system. Management swore black and blue that personalised registration plates would never be deployed in New Zealand and ordered the staff NOT to allow for it in the new system they were developing
About 8 months after the new system came online, personalised registration numbers were announced as a new policy from the Beehive. Thankfully said manager had been ignored and modules written "just in case"
I crossed paths with him myself about a decade later.
He was attempting to do offsite backups
By emailing the database files to an office in another city
Said files were ~90MB
Over a 2400bps dialup modem
Using a mail client which didn't declare the size of the message being sent
Starting at 5:30pm each day
That was when I discovered that SunOs 4.1.3 sendmail uses the swapspace partition (containing /tmp/) to buffer messages too large for memory
About the same time as I discovered WHY the system was running out of swap around 2am Tuesday to Saturday was when he sent a snide mail (dead trees) complaining that our service was unreliable. Pointing out the default 10MB limitation on email size was simply unacceptable to him (the receiving end also had a 10MB limit and had no intention of raising it, so bumping my limit was pointless).
It turned out he'd sold "email backups" to the higherups as a great way of reducing costs and had received a large bonus after demonstrating it - with 100kB files
He left the MOT shortly afterwards and then showed up at another large customer. A friend of mine worked there and whilst technically under him, was aware of the damage he was capable of (more importantly had a good personal relationshop with the company owners) and managed to prevent him making changes which would have impacted a multi-hundred million dollar mail order outfit
About a year after that it was mentioned that this manager had left under a cloud. The owners are conservative religious types (Not American conservative types) and one of them had walked into his office to find him broswing penthouse.com on his work machine, at lunchtime. As 98% of the employees were female it was deemed to be a hostile workplace issue and he was walked to the front door by security within minutes (Did I mention that there was a specific prohibition on accessing unauthorised resources from the workplace network as part of all employment contracts? And a firewall which whould have stopped that website even being visible?)
"The HP machine is giving to the family member as a premium for getting the work done and not mentioning it to anybody."
In the case of the NHS, that's an ICO investigation waiting to happen
Medical computers are in a class of their own WRT privacy issues and that applies if all they're doing is running the building climate control. Treat EVERYTHING as if it contains sensitive data and ensure everything is erased (not just signed off as erased) before it goes out the door
That's EXACTLY what's happened in a number of cases in one place I worked (A presitgious department in a Russell Group university)
One serious IT cockup happened because the user in question (now deputy director) had done an end-run around the IT group because she was of the opinion her PhD trumped any of our experience
Sounds like the idiot in question needed removing from the position and what you achieved was job security by letting him keep trashing his employer's equipment (or letting him allow his underlings to do so)
There's a risk with such users that they tell porkies to their management which results in your external contract going away
Such a machine is a cleaner with a floor polisher(*) away from disaster
I've had machines on sites with uptimes of YEARS suddenly stop working - in virtually every single case it's becase the cleaners unplugged it to run a floor polisher - despite the DO NOT UNPLUG/DO NOT SWITCH OFF label on the socket and plug itself
At least one of them has stated that unplugging is not switching off, so they're alright jack.
In a lot of other cases it's turned out that they cannot read (these are people handling dangerous chemicals FFS) and often blag their way through life trying to cover it up
Using an _obviously_ incompatible plug/socket system for critical kit doesn't help. They'll unplug it anyway to check
It's worth having penalty clauses in contracts for external organisations making them liable for damage caused by their staff for any reason and then insisting that the managers read/sign off on site rules/safety instructions. That way when the inevitable "nobody told me..." crops up, you can pull up the evidence that they WERE told and failed to pass it on or send their new staff to the safety briefings as required in the contract
"One of the places*. The writer knows what's meant to happen. And what every step does."
In my last job I was expected to write the instructions and inflict them on users with no further in-house testing
I know full well that marking your own work is a deadly mistake, but the manager REFUSED POINT BLANK to assign someone else to handling this part of the job
Unsurprisingly there were lots of user complaints about stuff and documentation issues took years to be addressed
The same problem cropped up with in-group procedures - even worse, after going through instruction scripts, finding the holes (missing steps. assumptions, etc) I was roundly criticised for treading on people's toes (they were having to write their own docs too, but resented suggested edits being handed back and refused to add them to their official versions, believing the instructions were complete enouigh as they were - this also applied to stuff they'd written for the users).
The result (unsurprisingly) was lots of do-overs and support requests
These are the same people who wouldn't document all the user support they were doing ("stopped in hallways" was a common way of users filing issues instead of using the ticketing system and our people woudln't create/close a ticket when they got back to their desk), resulting in manglement coming down hard from on high about the staff supposedly sitting around idle and not doing much - wanting to reduce headcount as a result.
I'm less surprised about Arnie not going back to the site, than I am about the senior manager not getting his marching orders
My experience with NHS (and other state health systems) is that they take unauthorised changes to critical equipment extremely seriously - particularly the installation of unauthorised servers and alterations of sitewide configurations
Even back in the 1990s the privacy and liability ramifications of this kind of issue would have accountants and lawyers blanching
"And besides, I wouldn't wear one anyway ... these days, it's hard to find a place where one can not see the time."
I've seen a couple of editorials which point out that the rise of mobile phones (even the humble Nokia 3100) has resulted in near extinction of wristwatches - and if you look around you'll see that's pretty accurate (compare videos of people on the streets in the 80s/early 90s with observations today)
I gave up on mechanical wristwatches very early. As a leftie and wearing it on my RIGHT hand, cheap watches would inevitably self destruct when the winder would snag on something and rip clean out of the case (you'd be amazed how often you brush your wrist against things)
recessed winders solve that, but so do lcd watches and they were MUCH cheaper
Or ignoring a perfectly valid message, saying it doesn't exist, even when it's on the screen in front of them and then - after reading it out loud - saying they don't understand it (file not found)
Having a PhD doesn't imply actual ability to solve problems
"The feds were just as greedy and incompetent and Kim had better lawyers"
New Zealand's court system has a nasty habit of seizing everything when they arrest and charge people on serious charges, leaving them unable to access any money for lawyers and being dependent on state-appointed defenders
They did this to Dotcom, but he had money sequestered out of the NZ authorities' jurisdiction and was able to launch challenges to the blatently illegal behaviour which they simply weren't expecting him to be capable of affording. Rubbing salt into it, he was able to get court orders to have some of his money released and compensation for stuff which had been confiscated and sold - without even a trial and "proceeds of crime" type proceedings
In this aspect it very much slavishly apes American behaviour, but in general Gene Hunt is still seen by most New Zealand police as a role model, not a warning about past dinosaurs
"My first assumption is that they don't have deep enough pockets to go up against Google"
The entire entertainment industry is only worth some $100 billion.
When the studios started going after Youtube I speculated that Google could simply purchase them with change from down the back of the sofa
However we should bear in mind that Sony purchased BMG and several movie studios to head off lawsuits relating to their hardware - and swallowed a poison pill in the process
As people have been pointing out for 30 years, the heyday of music profits was the late 1960s/early 1970s. When CDs hit the market, album sales were already down ~50% on 1970 and single sales about 90%. Media refreshing sustained the industry for a long time but by 1990 it was in terminal decline again - which is why "piracy" became the BBEG target
The movie industry went through something similar
In reality both of them are like the sheet music industry going after player pianos (which happened)
The biggest abuses of copyright (and most lucrative acts of outright piracy) are performed by major companies - I think they went after hobby sites because they couldn't stand the competition (Note that Mega became a target only after it announced music deals signed directly with artists and the process turned a pretty awful human being into a folk hero)
Prenda Law - a shakedown operation which eventually resulted in jailing of the principals - used copyright claims extensively
the point of copyright and patents is to provide the creator with limited protection for a LIMITED amount of time. The USA used to be one of the biggest hotbeds of industrial-scale (and government sanctioned) copyright abuse until the likes of Disney found a way of taking public domain stories(*) and profiting heavily from them
(*) In some cases not even public domain. The Lion King is almost a scene for scene ripoff of The White Lion, with song and dance numbers added
"It would take a craft with long lived nuclear propulsion so it would have enough energy to make much of a dent cleaning up Earth Orbit."
Which is why the concept of a ground-based laser broom has its attractions
Bear in mind you don't actually need to add/remove much energy to an orbit to bring stuff down
Merely altering the geometry from "circular" to "elliptical" enough to graze the upper atmosphere is sufficient, essentially a reverse "perigee kick"
" I'd speak with them, explain the situation, answer all their Q's email them with specifics and then ask them to tell me what I had told them and 9.99/10 it was wrong and not what I said."
Yup, this happens a lot (particularly when dealing with councils)
If you have to dictate a message, It's always worth asking them to read back exactly what's written
If you have to do that 3 times in one call - bearing in mind they're recorded - then you have a good ground for complaint but you can expect the idiot concerned to actively obstruct you speaking to someone higher up in the food chain
Experience has shown that the bitrot associated with proprietary software is WORSE than opensource - people get locked into zombie code because there are few alternatives and support is impossible, but they're stuck with it unless they cut everything adrift and start over
It's been a particular issue with database software
Once upon a time open source softwarenwas given a wide berth because of perceived lack of support. These days the proven lack of support is for commercial code, sometimes even within the support contract period but copyright issues make keeping software from dead companies (in particular) a thorny issue
Copyright was originally 20 years. It was extended to 50 by the Berne convention - something tbe USA only signed into when companies could profit from enforcing it
Since the beginning of the 20th century it's been bent completely out of shape and is manifestly unfit for purpose - the latest revisions have almost entirely been to keep the Mouse out of public domain but have been damaging to creativity across the board, mostly only benefitting lawyers, not the actual creators
There is no justification whatsoever for "creator lifetime plus 50 years", other than to enrich publishers
One of the reasons i switched to GPL was to ensure tbe creative commons remained viable
The BSD license resulted in code of mine (and of other people) becoming paywalled and obscured. I don't mind other people profiting from works I release but I object when they withhold derivative works from being used/examined and essentially corral the commons for personal and perpetual gain
if you're walking out the door, it generally comes under the department of "not my fucking problem anymore" - and given the company blagged a contract they weren't qualified to deliver I don't think it really matters
Of course, once you've left any demand to fix it are best met with "these are my consulting rates - plus expenses, minimum contract period is one day/week"
"Dyson has made it clear that he regards the whole of Europe as the 'sick man' of technology development"
Which is why virtually all the high density semiconductors in the world are made on Dutch-manufactured equipment
marketing is not the same as reality and Dyson is a marketer, not an engineer
Dyson didn't invent the air cyclone or even portable cyclone vacuum cleaners. Ditto for those hollow ring air-multiplier fans - those have been coming out of Japan since the 1960s
Given the company history of blinging up existing designs at an enormous markup (but calling it "new"), it's not really surprising Dyson bought into the "British Superiority" delusion
Incidentally, the single most effective advance in cleaners in the last 30 years has been exhaust recirculation - and the guy who invented the conept (multiple patents) it found it impossible to get anyone in Britain to show any interest in manufaturing it (including Dyson) despite achieving a 40% power consumption reduction and substantial decrease in PM2.5 output over nearly everything in existence
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