Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Before

"You may recall Skylab..."

Skylab was abandoned and shut down (1974) long before it fell out of the sky (1979)

It was proposed to reactivate it for shuttle missions and when someone realised that it might come down earlier than expected thanks to a larger than expected solar maximum increasing drag at its orbit - and that it was large enough to cause some serious mayhem if it hit an inhabited area

- that they tried to reactivate it to allow such a mission (_that_ took the best part of a year (the story of hacking the remaining active circuitry to "pulse" the batteries(*) for weeks on end before they'd finally take a charge is impressive even nearly 40 years later)), as the electronics was mostly dead and the batteries completely discharged.

(*) Switching to charge mode took power away from the comms equipment, so the pulses would last about 100ms and then they'd have to wait for the station to reboot and reestablish communications.

"Saving Skylab - the untold story" is worth a read if you can get hold of a copy. It was published in Popular Science in January 1979 and reprinted in Electronics Australia in September of that year.

Re: Heathens!!

"Why don't we Britons / Celts "

Britons/Picts would support this proposal.

Re: that spinning flywheel...

It's usually "profit" or its cousin "economising on options"

There is a really good reason to ensure that the system you specified or the system that's been ordered (accounting types will go X=Y so Z(*)) and actually delivered (**)

(*) We were lambasted over the price (and quantities) of tape being consumed in IT and asked why we couldn't use cheaper alternatives with all purchasing ability blocked until this was resolved. The answer was that we'd looked at the suggested products from Sellotape, but concluded that they would have an unfortunate tendency to gum up the tape drives.

(**) A classic case being the Quantity surveyor who decided a building was massively overengineered, and so deleted much of this extra cost without referral back to the customer. The result was a purpose-built city library building that didn't have floors strong enough to hold bookshelves on its upper 3 (of 5) floors.

Re: I always encourage...

if you have connection problems then best bet is one of the smaller ISPs - they tend to be pretty tenacious about making Openreach toe the line.

I've had good service from phone.coop, your milage may vary

" on the basis that the money might be used"

People have also been convicted of DUI after being stopped walking along the footpath with car keys in their possession because they MIGHT use them to drive a car.

Yes, really.

Re: Huh?

"Securing power plant from Electromagnetic Pulse threats have been serious investigations for the EU, UK and America since 2013..."

Earlier than that. The risk has been written about for more than 2 decades and seriously investigated by governments since 2003 or so. It turns out that securing against EMP (solar flares are more likely problems) is relatively straightforward but adds cost to the installation(*). Power companies being power companies, they decided the extra spend wasn't worth it (as with all private companies, they won't add redundancy unless it adds to the bottom line or are forced to do it. Brakes on railway carriages come to mine....)

USA regulators have been jumping up and down about this for a while, hence the STEP program, but it took 10 years after the dangers were pointed out before it even got started.

(*) Advocacy groups say hardening the US distribution grid would cost $2billion, industry says $20 billion. When a single airport building (Heathrow T5) or urban rail project (Crossrail) can cost about the same, it's small beer in the overall scheme of things if that amount of money needs to be spent across a nation's entire infrastructure.

Re: @Gray ... Military aggression

Beidou/compas coverage has been expanded. The old system was regional. The newer one is global and they're still rolling it out.

This change of policy is a direct result of China being booted from the Gallileo project due to USA pressure.

Re: Shouldnt the American Bar Association be delisting this douchebag?

"He's not a lawyer, so he can't be debarred."

He could (and should) be declared a vexatious litigant.

This prevents even _uttering_ legal threats without prior clearance from the court.

Re: Expect a trademark infringement claim

How can you trademark Thaler as a monetary term? It's the ancestral root of the word "Dollar" (originally a silver thaler coin - from the german town of Thaler)

Re: 9 1/2 shoes

"I always wonder if being barefoot, or living in plimsols were the reason my feet are wide."

No.

Try Eccos.

Re: They are losing data from their engineer booking systems

"I moved my parents to PlusNet."

Bearing in mind that Plusnet is simply a trading brand of BT, what makes you think their details will be any more secure than they've proven to be with BT (which is only slightly better than TT's levels of data leakage) ?

Re: Pretty cynical upgrade

"Vast parts of the world are unable to get a decent connection to the tubes and I doubt this is an isolated case."

Nope. The same problems apply in Outer Bumfuckistan, even when on mobile data connections.

Having something attempt to update to Win10 might not seem like a problem at 0.7c/MB, but when you realise the average income for the locals is $4/day, you might change your tune (especially when it repeatedly fails and takes the best part of 2-3 weeks to actually suceed, making the total xfer more like 9-10Gb)

Re: 48 hour SLA?

"The operative word is "should" - if it ain't "shall", it ain't a requirement!"

Stand over here please. There are a bunch of RFCs writers who'd like a word.

No, don't worry about the anvil that your testicles are draped over, or the hammers in their hands.

Re: Mobile computing

"Back in the late-1970s or very early-1980s, there was a 'Ghost' themed game for the Tandy Radio Shack Z80-based TRS-80 Model 3 / Model 4"

Are you referring to Android NIM?

"The game's instructions included putting an AM radio near the computer, and music would be played. Yep, the EMI was that strong."

Which is why the FCC came down fairly hard on the early PC makers over emissions. I discovered my TRS80 was wiping out the neighbours' TV reception (low band VHF) only when they asked my parents if we were having trouble viewing XYZ programs (we had an external antenna, they were using bunny ears and the PC was a few metres away through 2 wooden walls, unshielded cables everywhere)

Re: Chancing rules in favour of incumbents

"Similarly, Microsoft's first product was re-implementing DEC's flavour of the BASIC language,"

Actually the first product was a traffic tabulator.

The Altair BASIC in question was created on stolen computer resources (MS BASIC was developed on a PDP-10 belonging to Harvard university without the authorisation required for commercial activities) and without reference to Dartmouth's copyright on the language (If Dartmouth had ever asserted copyright on BASIC it may never have become ubiquitous)

The "Open Letter" led to the production and distribution of TinyBASIC

Re: NHS are at it too

"However as soon as he needs more than 1 prescription each month it's cheaper to just get a PPC!"

I have 6 each month, so the PPC is the way to fly - but it's worth noting that the _actual_ NHS price of the items is still substantially lower than the cost of the PPC (it works out about 10p/day)

Re: Good. Serve's 'em right.

"as demonstrated by the poor GA accident rate."

Putting that in context: GA injury and death rates are on par with motorcycling.

Contrast and compare with civil transport aviation.

Re: Commercial in confidence gets the best deal for Australia

"having destroyed a lot of it by putting that silicone gel in the connection boxes. "

Que?

It was known 40 years ago that using silicon grease as a water barrier in copper connections was a spectacularly bad idea (the copper and silicon ions crossmigrate). On the other hand, petrolatum works a treat (vaseline)

How old are these grease-filled joints?

Re: Fit for purpose

"If they have to correspond with people who use Microsoft Office, particularly heavily-scripted files, then it never has, does, or will fit perfectly,"

Libre imports and exports office formats adequately for the purpose. Scripting isn't an issue.

As stated in another thread: "80% of Office users only need 20% of the features." Which, incidentally is how MS took over the WP market in the first place (fewer features than what existed but 'good enough' and cheap.)

MS being a moving target was actually a factor in switching to Lubuntu/libreoffice - too much stuff was coming in in newer msz formats the existing software couldn't open, etc.

Compatibility issue solved. Licensing issues solved. Network printing/scanning issues also solved. Recurrent virus/malare problems solved. Productivity up by a factor of 5 or so. Old hardware life extended (important where the average pay is $4/day). Documents now all regularly backed up, etc. Yes, all doable with windows but the existing systems were crawling anyway and the desktops are now fairly snappy.

Re: Never happen here.

"It also took rather less than 17 years to build"

Chalk is somewhat softer than granite and basalt (amongst other things)

The irony is that this tunnel is one of the biggest NIMBY projects ever - being driven by the Swiss dislike of an endless processing of heavy transport through their picturesque mountain towns.

Re: Make Servers, Not War!

"but in the end it's still x86 with all the baggage and compatibilities to the old-world it drags or brings."

What matters is what it does and how much power it consumes whilst doing so, not what baggage it brings.

This is why Intel have beaten AMD in the datacenter for some time (The only reason I have AMD compute servers is because at the time it was the only way to get more cores in the box)

If ARM beats Intel on this then it will rapidly take over for non compute-centric applications. The problem is that as ARM has gotten faster its power consumption and purchase price has approached the low end Xeons for the same performance as those low-end Xeons.

Where ARM might win is if a few hundred cores could be put into the box, but that's not happening either (yet).

Re: Summary

"The USA wants strong controls over what they export and no controls over what we export"

It gets stranger and stranger though.

Stuff which has been taken into the USA may be prohibited from being carried back out, or in the case of data files, read by the very people who created them - on top of which, if a copy of your data makes it into the USA, even though you've never been there and your copy of the data still being yours on your desktop, can still result in you being charged with a US federal crime for giving a copy to your chinese colleague who likewise has never been anywhere near the USA and the entire data path not having been near the USA.

It's very much a case of "what's mine is mine, what's yours is mine too and I'll happily come and take it off you if I want it, no matter where you are" - in a lot of cases that means you should be doubly careful to ensure that your data doesn't _cross_ USA territories, let alone ever reside in them.

Re: The people who appointed him

"So, get your mates to set you up in Office, then turn it into a fiefdom."

A fiefdom which (unlike FIFA, EUFA, IOC) gets him diplomatic immunity.

That's the fundamental problem here, else he'd have been arrested and charged with breaching labour laws some time back.

Re: I don't understand

It's those shareholders who were forcibly bought out who are being compensated.

As noted in the story, the ones who voted for the deal get nothing.

Re: The disconnect

"It is so extreme that is difficult to have meaningful communications with them"

Especially when what they sold doesn't actually work (personal experience). This was the final straw which ensured that my employer never purchased HP systems again.

Re: You don't need money to get into Oxford or Cambridge

" It's remarkable how often college benefactor's children get admitted with inferior grades."

And for them the important thing is not graduating but the social networking they're able to achieve, that's unattainable at a lesser university.

It's like the difference between the contacts made at Eton vs the ones made at Harrow (both are top echelon schools, but the Eton old boys network has far more political clout)

"so of course it had an SSD. After replacing the damn thing three times in the first year "

What model was it? OCZ have been spectacularly unreliable as a f'instance.

"Of course I realise Enterprise SSD's are better than this, but have you seen the prices?"

Samsung SM863s are about 30% more than the 850Evo versions (or about 15% more than the 850Pro)

And as has already been pointed out, if losing a single drive knocks out a server, you're doing it wrong.