Posts by Alan Brown 15079 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"These days, they have wax pens which melt and ball up at different temperatures - they merely mark the tyre and watch the wax."
I suspect that they'd use IR thermometers these days or FLIR cameras.
Anyway, tyres on train wheels are a bad idea. Ask Deutsche Bahn about how that large ICE crash at Eschede in 1998 got started.
"What caused this problem was cheap, unfit for purpose labels bought to cut costs."
The interesting part is that when it comes to tape labels, the sticky ones are only available from 2 makers in 3 types, none of them are shiny and they're all marked as OK for laser or inkjet use (inkjets get better results)
You can use only sticky labels on LTO/SDLT/SAIT. Older ones could use paper/card inserts - which resulted in a lot of outfits making their own on too flimsy paper and having trouble cutting them out properly
Glossy labels vs matt labels - and the "frosted tape" is 3M's magic mending tape - it has a matt top surface.
I've resorted to this fix when dealing with optical problems and overly reflective surfaces in the past, along with using Tippex (liquid paper) to narrow the viewing window on an optical sensor so that the chopper wheel it was shining through could work - the manufacturer one had a narrow window compared to the replacement unit, slots in the chopper were wide enough to allow light pulses through that were long/smeary enough to screw up a centrifuge as it hit 15,000 RPM on the way up to 45,000 - resulting in emergency shutdown being invoked. You really _don't_ want that to happen often. Closing up the optical viewing window solved the problem and got nice clean pulses at silly high speeds
"Or a 20p micro-switch testing for physical presence per slot"
Overcomplicated, unreliable and unnecessary
Some robots check for tapes in slots where they can't see a barcode by poking them with the same arm used to slide in tapes. If they encounter resistance to the poke, there's a tape in that slot. Other robots use an Infrared proximity sensor on the front of the picker.
Both methods work well. I have 2 robots beside me using these methods.
The really fun part is when you have a robotic barcode reader which can only read barcodes along the bottom third of the label and your barcodes were printed with the human-readable numbers on that side (I'm looking at you, Quantum!)
"don’t permit NeMeSys to run, unless you give them 24hours notice that you are about to start profiling your line in a serious way! "
The whole point of the app is to be able to do it without notification, so if they're imposing this kind of requirement, it should be made explicitly illegal for them to do it.
"However, it should be easy to check that"
How, exactly?
If ISPs are determined not to be caught, they're going to obfuscate when Ofcom comes calling and as soon as they get wind of side-by-side testing (smokeping anyone?) they'll ensure those targets are whitelisted too.
This scam is one of the harder ones to quantify and quite frankly, Ofcom don't have enough technical staff to do it - or the motivation to try.
In case people haven't noticed, most connections to speedtest sites have been running at full speed for quite a while even if everything else is choked.
The question is if this is a case of the speed test sites colluding with ISPs, or they're all using the same ports and ISPs are trading lists of IPs to ensure they get priority service.
"Nixon was the one that killed Apollo, killed the Mars follow-on, and settled on the flawed and under-funded STS development."
He also killed MSR R&D, mostly because it didn't create jobs for his friends in SoCal (who were working on sodium cooled breeder reactors - using sodum works well as long as you don't expose it to air and _every_ single liquid sodium system has ended up doing that) but also because most of the military were opposed to it due to the fact that you can't extract weapons material from the fuelling/defuelling processes.
"When I was in the networking biz, i was informed that the cost of the cable is insignificant, compared to the cost of installing it."
Pretty much. It costs about 10% more to run two network sockets to each desired location as it does for one. On that basis we always look at the number of points we think are needed, double it and double it again. So far all we've learned is that we never ordered enough network sockets (although ubquitous wifi is making the demand for more network ports start to plateau)
In the meantime the building services people think that an acceptable number is one per desk, at 100MB/s with an IP phone plugged into it.
"for example, the purchase actually being a pack of 100 but logged as a single item."
This is a constant problem at $EMPLOYER. Twats in various departments insist on ordering 1 or 2 ethernet cables at £1 each (or less), despite being repeatedly told that the _internal_ costs of raising orders means that anything less than £20 is not economic - and the suppliers have responded to the abuse by padding prices across the board to take shipping into account, which means when I order £200 pounds worth of cables it can now cost £450.
And yet procurement thinks this is alright.....
"If people are publishing stuff then they should be held liable under the law"
It's a little more complex than that for online stuff.
Compuserve vs Cubby held that an online _distributor_ of published content isn't liable for what's there (in terms of defamation law, but it's generally applied across the board)
Stratton vs Prodigy refined that and held that any provider who edited in any way (even good faith attempts at filtering) was entirely responsible for anything they missed. (again, defamation case, but still used as the yardstick.
Under UK law it's a little more complicated. The Demon case was very poorly defended but has effectively set a precedent even with subsequent law changes.
In either case, as Facebook exert editorial control over what's on their site, if it wasn't for the safe harbour provisions of the communications decency act they'd be in deep legal poo in the USA. They've been relying on that protection in other jurisdictions (especially France), but are finding out that USA law doesn't apply in foreign jurisdictions and US Case law precedents are only a guideline at best when judges in other countries are weighing things up (local precedent has priority for starters)
"Aren't the parachutes needed for the projected larger payloads to be delivered to Mars?"
Yes, the ones already used were for much smaller payloads.
This mission is much heavier than anything that's gone before and needs more aerobraking as a result. That means a bigger parachute deployed higher up, at higher speeds.
Almost all missions have used parachutes at some point in the descent, just not necessarily all the way to the ground, and preferably not to negative altitudes.
GIven the number of HDD failures I get to see where someone's tried to use them as archival storage, I don't trust 'em. If you want long term archival backup then use tape or ensure you regularly migrate your media - but bear in mind that HDDs will give you an undetected ECC error (corrupted sector read) about once every 45TB read, vs every 4500TB for tapes.
I'd suggest M-disk, but even the BD-R versions aren't really large enough.
"I wonder if it would be worth having double thickness drives. "
Nope. The bearings can't hold the stack rigidly enough
As for larger platters - remember Quantum Bigfoots. The platters are harder to make and any uneveness is exacerbated. It's been tried but is virtually impossible to keep reliable above about 3600rpm.
All these use cases are short term anyway. 16TB SSDs are already here (I have a couple installed) and prices keep coming down, whilst HDD prices and warranties are _STILL_ higher/lower respectively across the board than they were before the 2011 Thai Floods.
The extra money for SSD is made up for by greater reliability, longer life(*), lower access latencies and lower power consumption, so it's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison between the two based on price alone.My feeling is that the break point for SSD adoption is about 3 times the HDD price and that's already been passed at sizes below 1TB (with SSDs now ruling the roost)
(*) When was the last time you saw a HDD with a ten year warranty?
Given the pressure differential (tiny) and the lack of thin permeable surfaces to percolate through, the short answer is that the drives may leak their helium but not on a meaningful timescale (ie, not within 5 years, possibly not within 10). It _will_ percolate through eventually, but eventually is a long time.
The interesting thing I found playing with He-Ne lasers (mostly running at a soft vacuum) is that what kills them isn't so much the helium leaking out, as much as nitrogen leaking IN (characterised by a violet discharge)
"I wonder how many people sideload an app, and then not reset the device to no sideloading?"
Marshmallow allows sideloading to be enabled on a per-apk basis (ie, "allow installation of this file only")
If you don't have some kind of scanner checking files (even off the google store) before installation then you're taking a risk. Malware has pigyybacked on all app stores at times, even on Slurp Play.
"Despite your false claim that Windows has an advantage in this regard, it hasn't proven to be very secure, which shows how little privilege separation and delegation matters. "
More accurately, Windows NT inherited the multifaceted finegrained controls from the VMS OS it was based on, and promptly threw them out. Getting them reinstated has taken a very long time because many software authors refuse to play nice on secured systems, including many big-name providers of expensive packages who really should know better.
"Unless they're servers for entire regions or even companies, meaning nowhere to defect. "
That kind of defection is accompanied by a P45 or a monopolies investigation.
Back in the days when open mail relays were a major problem, getting japanese admins to fix their boxes was quite hard, with most either claiming they were required to keep the things open, were fully standards compliant or simply blocked complaints from people who'd been hit, making open japanese relays an seemingly intractable problem...
...Until some bright sparks in Tokyo hit on the idea of notifying japanese media about the problems and the TV channels delighted in naming and shaming companies which were assisting hackers/spammers by not securing their computer networks(*) - which wasn't so much loss of face as being publicly kicked in the ballsack as far as management was concerned. As a result it usually took less than a day from the time that reporters started asking questions to the time that the servers either went offline permanently or were fixed.
(*) The public had been sensitised to the problem due to massive spam campaigns targetting mobiles.
Management facing adverse publicity and/or investigations in western countries has about the same reaction. Embarrassment is a fantastic teacher/persuader when dealing with refuseniks (either the management who refuse to let changes be made or the admins who refuse to do it)
I can think of at least 2 historical entities which spent themselves into submission in the last 100 years:
The USSR: Military expenditure in the wake of perceived "Star Wars" threats
Nazi Germany: If they hadn't wasted so much time and effort on their superweapons they would have been a far more formidable opponent. Relying on the things to appear also weakened them considerably as did believing their communications systems were uncrackable. If the reliance on "uber technology" hadn't happened, England may well have lost everyone at Dunkirk, fallen in the BoB and WW2 is likely to have run for another 10 years.
Longer term, other empires have done the same thing.
"I think you are over estimating the effectiveness of patch management software."
And underestimating the effectiveness of decent trouble ticketing/inventory systems.
Once systems have been flagged as requiring updates, a decent system will flag a warning if it's not done inside X time limit, which means that the team can look into why it didn't happen - and if someone's ordered it not be updated, there would be an audit trail on that too.
trouble tickets aren't just for the endlusers and helldesk.
"But to be fair most of our prisoners are in for drug offenses, so staying out of jail in America is as simple as not doing drugs"
There's far more to it than that. Private prisons have resulted in judges taking kickbacks to sentence more heavily and be more inclined to find guilt in a non-jury trial, and the constant violation of the 15th amendment by (mostly) southern states means that they can (and have) systematically disenfranchised the poor and the non-white by increased targetting for enforcement actions. Drug usage is about the same across all racial groups, but black men account for the vast majority of those imprisoned for such offences and the fact that they have a criminal record disallows them from voting.
"Wall Street hails the likes of McDonalds for trying to replace serving staff with machines."
Not for long. Low value franchise manual labour like this isn't going to be replaced quickly - and here's why: Franchisees cut corners.
Back in the 1980s that resulted in cooking times at several London McDs being shaved down by the franchise holders. Which in turn resulted in a number of cases of serious food poisoning (McD's calculated cooking times are to the second and take account of things like killing bacteria). In the end, after a number of very expensive settlements McDs had to step in and buy out the franchisees.
The introduction of food handling robots and staff reduction will lead to corner cutting in maintenance - the reason for this is that "idle" staff are actually cleaning and those robots will need cleaning throughout the day to stay hygienic (the cooking tools at McDs are cleaned almost continuously).
Robot-infested kitchens in the typical franchisee establishment will likely result in roach infestations due to inadequate site cleaning, followed by outbreaks of food poisoning from cross contamination of cooked/uncooked burgers coupled with inadequate cleaning cycles.
The rate of return on robots doing low value manual work makes them a non-starter for most jobs, unless there's a significant risk of payouts for worker injuries involved (eg, care home staff - where this and a critical shortage of staff has resulted in a lot of R&D into lifting exoskeletons, etc - but that hasn't actually filtered through to the UK yet).
The low hanging fruit for automation is and continues to be areas where mechanical (wo)men aren't needed - which has been going on for the last 40 years. When was the last time you saw an accounts ledger clerk, etc? What's changing now is that more "intelligent" functions are being taken over, leaving the "supervisor" to sign off or do the fiddly bits on a machine's work instead of stuff done by a meatsack.
There are going to be roving gangs of unemployed conveyancing lawyers, estate agents, accountants and day traders long before you see hordes of unemployed nurses and carers - which poses a real problem for those people who leave university carrying £100k debts and can only find minimum wage jobs.
Robots will take over driving because there's a benefit in doing so - humans are lousy, easily distracted drivers. Likewise when operating heavy machinery, etc and they're already taking over farming jobs simply because it's impossible to recruit enough people stupid enough to want to do backbreaking work at shitty pay rates. In other occupations they'll take a while to dominate.
"Some minicab companies have similar (ish) apps"
Yup, and they brought them out before Uber arrived in London. What Uber brings is marketing and slave wages.
Ironically, a few Black Cabbies tried the app route about a decade ago and were drummed out of business by cartel tactics from the other driveers.
Chinese labour hasn't been cheaper than western labour for about a decade. They're winning on logistics and having everything in one place.
That one child policy means that the chinese are facing an even more extreme version of the pensions trainwreck that took out Japan's economy 20 years ago and is currently engulfing the western world. Other countries which had such policies are now frantically encouraging people to have more children in order to ensure they have enough taxpayers to sustain the whole mess in 20 years time.
"While counter intuitive it is that demand which creates more jobs (something poor countries tend to be short of) which dries up the available labour and causes improving conditions. China being a fair example of starving to death under communism"
As a counterpoint for that, Burma is now steamrolling into the garment trade, with most of the local investors being part of the junta that used to be in charge. This is all happening in areas of the country well away from trouble spots (ie, nowhere near the Rohinga, Karen or Shan areas). The local population is swallowing government propaganda justifying the ongoing ethnic clensing (which has been going on for over a decade) and the military are still in charge in these areas, with Ms Su Kyi having already made it clear in various speeches (done in london 5-7 years ago) that she supports the military in this aspect.
Which means that pulling back out of the garment trade is one of the few ways of bringing pinchpoint economic pressure to bear on Burma in such a way that the generals will pay attention, due to their now-"civilianised" mates phoning them up and berating them for hurting business.
In other instances I'd agree with you, but this is a specific case where the economic benefits of global trade are not going to result in things improving for a targetted and oppressed minority.
"I am going to need some context here."
In our case: Hundreds of applications from British applicants, most of whom are unqualified for the job or who we find at interview time can't answer questions that their qualifications indicate they should know (we always ask tech questions). Make of that what you will. I can't possibly comment about embellished CVs.
There are usually a few applications from outside the UK but they're a lot more thought through as a rule. The impression of UK applications is that they're shotgunned out with no thought as to suitability and for the lower-skilled positions the applications can run into thousands.
This is not what happens in a market with "full employment" - which I've worked in too.
"We are back to full employment and growth and have been for some time."
Not by a long shot. If we were there wouldn't be multiple hundreds of applications for every job we advertise.
The reality is that the figures are being bodged with to hide the lack of fulltime equivalent jobs AND to seriously downplay the number of unemployed (by kicking them off the dole) and underemployed (if you have a zero hour contract, then you're no longer unemployed even if you work zero hours)
"Except they're made of METAL."
Not much and not enough to trrigger a metal detector (the big ones go off on ferrous metals and have to be desensitised to allow for 3-4kg of iron in your blood). The wands are also unlikely to be triggered.
You could take a leaf from Gibson and carry obsidian knives...
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