Posts by Alan Brown 15079 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"That still leaves two thirds asking the dumbest questions."
And to be _brutally_ honest, unless those users are bring some kind of irreplaceable value to your organisation, you're better off getting rid of them.
Think of it as a dead wood detector.
"OTOH I'm sure some of us who've worked with more, shall we say aggressive, salesmen will have had the experience of making good on assurances that, yes, we have such a product."
I'm sure you have, especially when faced with customers having experience with such people in the past and having recorded the meetings.
On the other hand, we could all come to an agreement that the salesman was lying and arrange for him to carry the liabilities for making false representations. (the ones who do this repeatedly get away with it leaving companies and customers both out of pocket. The only way to stop them is to ensure that they get personally and publically slapped with the costs)
> there is scope in the legislation to extend negotiations
Yes there is.
> if it's supported by all involved.
Which it never will be.
The one thing you can count on is that the clock is ticking and will end in 2 years time with the UK out of the EU with or without a "deal" in place, unless it blinks and says "sorry, we didn't mean it, we want to stay"
Either way, all the concessions and allowances the rest of the EU has made to Europe's petulant brat are gone. The Cold War is long over and the UK hasn't been America's beachhead for a very long time.
> His health care provider deemed his cancer treatment too costly for them to foot the bill for, so he was referred to the NHS.
Similarly, when private health care providers bollox any routine surgical work, they dump the results on the NHS as an emergency.
This kind of thing has to be stopped - not by refusing the patients, but by charging the private outfits punitive rates and investigating their competence every time it happens.
" my plan would be stop paying , mak sure the machines arnt externally facing "
In other words, leave your machines vulnerable to attacks from compromised systems inside your firewalls.
This is one of the primary attack vectors exploited by Wannacry and a number of other worms. It's that level of complacency which _allowed_ it to become so successful.
One of the maxims of retail is that your largest stock theft threat comes from staff("shrinkage"), not shoplifters, with spoilage coming a close second (also mostly caused by staff) and it's something that people seem to forget in their focus on external threats. Those threats still apply in non-retail business, just in slightly different forms.
"every time I've heard the phrase "paperless office" used in earnest, I have bought a couple more shares in (paper merchants) "
Up until about 3 years ago I had the same point of view, as our paper consumption kept increasing year upon year.
In the last few years it's actually declined and it's no coincidence that it goes in step with the ubiquity of personal portable devices. For the first time _ever_ I'm looking at despeccing printer requirements because of decreased levels of usage.
"Secondly, and I've mentioned this on another story -any change at all to software required union approval, training courses, and if "difficult" or "new skills", possible pay rises."
The "Thatcher" option on this is to let them have their pay rises, because the increases in efficiency will allow you to make 20% redundant later on (in many cases simply not hiring as people leave has the same effect and has been in use across business for decades)
"User training was the problem there. I.e. they didn't do any"
This is the standard pitfall of migration projects. If bosses are persuaded on the "Free"/cheaper/mo licensing costs part then they're also likely to be so tight they won't authorise the expenditure required for training even if it's cheaper than a years' continuing subscription charges associated with remaining on the status quo.
Companies/organisations which plan well, make training resources available and migrate smoothly are not newsworthy. Munich is far from the only example, but being first they get all the attention and FUD (whilst others use their mistakes as lessons in what not to do). Pioneers get arrows in their backs, etc.
"And 99% of those will be only work on Internet Explorer...."
SystmOne and others tried that shit. Many discrimination complaints were filed (and upheld) forcing them to remain standards compliant and browser agnostic.
The good thing about contracting to a government entity is that they're beholden to cabinet office rules about accessiblity and as they discovered those rules have teeth.
There's a lot of hate being tossed at systemd, much of which is not deserved (and a lot which is)
I recall the change from BSD to SysV startups and the hate which went with that. As with that, it's mostly just "different", but there are some fundamental boneheaded ways of handling things in systemd which need improving.
The big advantage of systemd is the change from singlethreading all the startups to parallelising things as much as possible - this speeds up desktop boots dramatically (not sure if there's much advantage on a server)
The single biggest disadvantage is the change from singlethreading all the startups to parallelising things as much as possible - if anything goes wrong it becomes much harder to debug AND the tendency to go into a boot loop instead of just stopping the sequence just makes things that much harder (a truely boneheaded decision if you ask me)
"What? PCs already come with a Windows license."
Its the other software that MS makes money from. It's long been the case that MS could afford to give Windows away (which is why they tolerated piracy for so long) as long as they could sell copies of MS Office.
As others have already observed the vast majority of PCs in the NHS are doing basic functions (web browsing and word processing). As such they could be replaced with lightweight clients.
There's a simple solution to that kind of stupidity: Charge them for non-contracted support. (ie, callout for a non-error), at the non-contracted rate.
It's amazing how many ineducatable users suddenly decide to read the manuals when they find that their wallet is affected.
"One major issue is that the areas without good 4G coverage are not very populated, poor, or both."
Or are places like outer bumfuckistan where the entire internet connectivity for the country is a state monopoly, so you have great 4G, reasonble bandwidth inside the country and utter crap anywhere else.
And because the state monopoly existed to keep people from getting Internet access until recently, the entire country has about 4 /24s for external connectivity - shared amongst 60+ million people.
Needless to say, there are a lot of people with satellite internet accounts billed in $CountryNextDoor, but where the paperwork regarding ground station location isn't particularly accurate.
"The reason oil companies fund climate change propaganda is obvious."
They mostly stopped being oil companies decades ago. They're energy companies.
If nuclear was cheaper than oil (in terms of cost benefit ratio), they'd be in it boots'n'all, but if they can keep the cost side low then they'll stick with oil.
If they can keep those cost side of oil low by FUD against everything else then they will.
Increased CO2 has had a definite effect on ocean chemistry, with a 30% change in acidity levels in the last 200 years. This is starting to affect shell-forming animals and not in a good way.
You can discount global warming all you want, but one of the very real geological effects recorded for CO2 spikes has been anoxic oceanic events - look one up to see why these are bad.
"Citation welcome."
My old engineering textbooks are long gone, but the practical maximum for transmission lines (AC or DC) is around 1 million volts. Beyond this they just arc over too much (500kV ones will arc over too if there's a fire nearby putting smoke near the lines.)
Between this and practical limits on line diameters dictated by the mass of the wire strung between poles and tensile strengths of steel a 700 mile segment is going to lose about 50% at full load. 1500 mile segments (and longer) exist but they're primarily used as interconnectors for topping up power in one direction or another rather than feeds carrying hundreds of GW (the costs are cheaper than peaking plants etc)
You're right about the size of the USA, but you'll find the longest practical transmission distance anywhere in the USA is about 400 miles with longer hauls used as above.
The reason it matters is when people start raving on about paving deserts with solar panels or XYZ with windmills and then using the energy to feed a continent (usually the Sahara and Europe). Apart from the political implications (there's more demand to the south than the north), the transmission line project would lose 75% or more of the generated power AND be the single largest engineering project ever undertaken in human history (the solar panels would be a bigger one but never mind).
" I guess the judgement sort of hinges on whether you want to get into a discussion of how many people you have to move from within a roughly 30-mile hemispherical exclusion zone on a long-term basis before that is equal to one life lost in terms of stress and disruption to people's lives."
Especially when not moving those people would have exposed them to extra radiation equivalent to 2 chest xrays per year (by way of comparison that's about the same as a single 4-5 hour passenger jetliner flight above 25k feet)
Most of the hysteria associated with nooo-cle----arrrrrgh accidents has no basis in fact and is informed by B-grade science fiction movies.
"decay energy IS fission, just not as we know it, Jim, (chain reaction)"
There's more to it than that.
Uranium oxide - like most ceramics - is a LOUSY thermal conductor.
In PWRs the centre of fuel rods (which is where most of the fission takes place) usually sits around the doppler limiting temperature of 1100C whilst the outside is cooled to 400-450C by water. You could stop all fission and simple thermodynamics will ensure you have substantial quantities of heat needing to be dumped until the rods reach equilbrium. Secondary fission is minor in comparison.
Think of it as a 50MW heat source and thermal block surrounded by _very_ good insulation and then a water jacket, where you're extracting heat from the water. It takes quite a while to get rid of all the residual heat when you turn the source off.
"..... generated plenty of complaints around airports, which try to keep things as quiet as possible so as not to disturb nearby residents"
Some airports have solved this by quietly buying up land on the approach paths starting about 20 miles out, to ensure that it STAYS farmland.
Airports are invariably built in rural areas, but people build houses near them for the transportation facilities (just like towns grew around railways stops) and then complain about the noise. You'd be surprised how much land newer airport companies own as a way of ensuring history doesn't repeat.
" they very, very rarely draw on decades of experience within other sectors."
Not just the automotive industry.
When I sat down and explained PGP's dual-public/private key system to an elderly customer in the 1990s, his response was "That's almost exactly like the systems I was working on in the 1950s" - and yes, he was working in an outfit that officially didn't exist at the time.
"say a tree suddenly falls across the road within the braking distance"
That's a driving test fail right there.
Trees don't suddenly appear on the road, they topple - and if you're watching for hazards as you should be, you'll see it long before it lands.
Otherwise you'll be the one telling the coppers "that kid just appeared out of nowhere" as the ambulance drives slowly off with its lights and sirens OFF.
" it takes a lot of internal processing to judge the correct lean angle that counters the reaction from the kick "
Follow the dutch example - an openhanded slap on the roof will have the driver veering away across 2 lanes of traffic from the noise.
Yes, the cyclists there have had a lot of practice.
"There are laws against blinding drivers and pilots, there would be similar laws against blinding self driving cars."
New Zealand has a nice catch-all charge of "endangering transport" which covers that (and messing up trains, etc) with a penalty up to 15 years imprisonment.
The UK could do with it. Apart from the issues above (I've been lased whilst driving and it bloody HURT), it'd be a very real dissuader to the problem of copper theft on the Railways.
"Why would any sane person need a voice mail?"
We don't. It was sold by mobile phone companies in response to fixed line telcos having them over a barrel and demanding 99% call termination rates(*) - which is obviously impossible considering that they don't get half that level on landline side.
(*) "Call termination" in telco parlance means the other side answered. Cleardown is a hangup.
On the other hand, voice mail turns the "demand" to speak to you around into a "I'll get back when I feel like it" - but that's countered by callerID meaning you can choose who you talk to anyway.
Back in the 1950s my grandfather used to simply answer the phone, say "We're busy, call back later" and hang up.
"The only way to get their attention about how unethical their marketing dept. is, is through loss of sales or existing customers."
Or thousands of actions in small claims courts across the country - the death of one million paper cuts.
That's one of the primary reasons _why_ the TCPA has statutory damages and a right of private action.
Lest anyone in the UK raise the tired old objection "it'll swamp small claims courts!" - if there are that many illegal calls then the problem is already of a scam where Ofcom and the ICO should be levying millions in fins each week, so they've obviously failed. (The other part being, that like what happened with the TCPA, illegal marketing calls will drop in level by 99.9% overnight. If USAians think it's bad now, imagine if you didn't have the TCPA from 1991 onwards)
"That's not the case here in the UK however."
In most cases around the world, clearing your voicemail comes off your call allowance and as such _is_ charged (if you go over your allowance it starts costing real money, vs being part of your monthly charge.
That includes the UK.
The thing is, unless it's a scam call they're advertising for someone. That's _why_ the TCPA allows victims to go after the advertiser as well as the company they hired to do the advertising. Follow the money.
"In theory the telephone preference service list should be respected by callers but so many marketing calls come from overseas that there is not a lot that can be done"
In practice, whilst individual breaches are technically punishable the regulator doesn't bother.
There's no private right of action and no statutory damages (unlike the TCPA), so the whole thing is a paper tiger. Fines get announced but the companies responsible simply fold their tents and steal off in the night.
"but the middle-aged & older folks have attitudes like middle-class brits in the 1950s. "
Actually it's even worse than that. there's a lot of institutional corruption and cronyism that wouldn't be tolerated here.
e2nz.org makes for interesting reading. There's a good reason why a lot of kiwis leave and never go back.
"As a result the manifestos were just lightweight, ill thought through rubbish - even by the low standards of such things."
The problem for the tories is that they usually spend the 6 months ramping up an election handing out bribes to make people forget how rotten they've been behaving and promise more sweeties if reelected.
It's amazing how short voter memories are. Unless you're Nick Clegg.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
