* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Big Pharma wrote EU anti-vaping diktat, claims Tory ex-MEP

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Have to ask...

"Probably trying to work out how they can add crack flavoured e-liquid with 120% addiction rate to the market without getting caught. "

Fruit flavoured tobacco is almost universally banned because companies used it in the past to hook kids.

Fruit flavoured vapes are not - and it's the young vapers who mostly buy 'em.

There's something fundamentally unkosher about selling a potent neurotoxin as a lightly regulated recreational chemical whilst stomping all over availability of several other benign (by comparison) substances.

Super-slow RAID rebuilds: Gone in a flash?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: RAID5 no longer has a role with hard drives

" Therefore you should be using big RAID sets, like 14+2"

I do

"Then you don't care how long a rebuild takes, because you aren't going to have three drives fail during that time span unless you are incredibly unlucky "

I've been unlucky on a number of occasions. Vendors such as HP tend to supply the same model of drive _FROM THE SAME BATCH_ for their raid arrays.

Even without that, there's a ~2% chance of array loss during rebuild with RAID6 - that's too high for a number of applications. RAIDZ3 reduces that to under 0.01%

Real world experience of 1TB RAID5/RAID6 rebuilds on rusty media is more like 12 hours. RAID rebuilds don't involve sequential disk operations.

Cops hacked the Police National Computer to unlawfully retain suspects' biometric data

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Just treat them the same

"yes, you can get a big investigation for, say, running away to the Ecuador embassy, being a major drug baron, rape or child abuse."

Or _seriously_ embarrassing our glorious leaders.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Just treat them the same

"The first line trotted out was it being illegal to photograph anything to do with the Police. "

Which is BS of the highest order.

I once responded "I'm not, I'm filming you and live streaming to a website so you can't delete it. Do you value your career?" - he went a very funny colour and couldn't get away fast enough (whilst trying to avoid my filming his collar numbers)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Just treat them the same

"ranks close"

"Good cops" who cover for bad cops are just as bad as those they cover for.

There would be a lot more trust in the police _service_ (not force) if the non-bent members were more willing to eject the bad ones.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: That's completely wrong.

> since many judges are really on the side of the criminal and deeply distrust the police

They're not usually on the side of the criminal, but they're _very_ well aware that in a lot of cases the bigger crooks are the ones bringing charges, not facing them.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"And that the info will stand up in court even though it was illegally obtained/retained."

Unlike the USA, the UK doesn't have a "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine.

It's time that was changed.

TalkTalk customers decide to StayStay after £3m in free upgrades

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I blame Microsoft personally

"I'm on a mug's list, won't ever get off it now."

You could always change your phone number. TT wouldn't let me do that, so I did it by dumping 'em.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Talktalk: AOL for the UK

That's even truer than you realise: AOL in the UK _IS_ Talktalk.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: providing free upgrades to customers.

> My home connection comes via them, but is further subcontracted out...

Ditto - and that means I get to speak to a UK techie, plus not get passed from pillar to post when things go wrong.

Label your cables: A cautionary tale from the server room

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: But never trust the labels....

"Post mortem showed that someone had swapped the CPUs of the prod and DR and not the labels, because the prod box wouldn't reboot reliably."

This is where tamper-evident labels are brilliant.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Cable physics

"He had a small engraver/printer that slipped over the cable and permanently stamped them."

Those aren't exactly cheap 500+ squid, which is why they're not widespread - and the ones which print onto heatshrink generally mean the tubing needs to be fitted before plugs are crimped on. That's fine in the structured side but not so useful in the patch frame or behind the servers.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Made a rod for my own back...

"like you say the dymo tapes spring apart over time and ping off when the adhesive goes bad."

The standard brother label adhesive does too, but they make three other types of TZ label (laminated lettering so they _can't_ fade) which are bloody useful:

1: Flexible labelling tape (does what it says, good for sticking directly on fatter cables)

2: Strong adhesive: great for cable flags

3: Security tape: makes it bloody obvious when someone's been fiddling ("Someone" kept pulling ID labels off the front of kit because "it looked untidy" - it looked a hell of a lot less untidy than a big white checkerboard pattern when these ones got pulled off.)

Staedtler lumocolour pens work pretty well on most cat5/6/fibre, as (surprisingly) does a ballpoint pen.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Labels

"They were paying massive fines for not maintaining uptime."

And I bet they weren't willing to pay you 10% of those fines because it was 5 times what you used to be paid.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Labels

"Probably as a non techie, they are filed straight into the watepaper basket/shredder."

At which point you get to charge like a wounded elephant. When they complain, you tell 'em to take it up with whoever threw the documentation out.

I've done this on a couple of occasions. After the second time around that person no longer worked for the company.

First successful Hyperloop test module hits 100mph in four seconds

Alan Brown Silver badge

Ummmmm

"Shifting cargo is going to be the first stage of Hyperloop One's plans"

The only economic way of moving cargo is pack once, repack never.

That means they need to be able to carry "normal" seafreight containers - NOT repacking those contents into airline ones.

I've been saying this for a while. The proposed tubes are too small in diameter (not the prototype ones in the video - those are even smaller than the current proposed finished product diameter)

Google kneecaps payday loan ads

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Shame not illegal on TV adverts too

> Have others noticed some of those short term loan adverts on UK TV quoting interest rates sometimes as high as 1500% APR (no I didn't mistype that).

I saw one which had APR at 43,000% (I had to rewind the DVR and double check that on because it seemed so completely unbelieveable)

It seems that as long as sharks register and post their rates, they're legal.

Don't split Openreach, says BT, and we'll splash BEELLIONS on broadband and 4G

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Something needs to change - shit service from the monopoly

"As opposed to the kind of "fuck you, we can't make a profit by selling to you" service that only an open market can sink to, you mean?"

An open market will always have _someone_ willing to sell to you - witness the various companies which have setup to offer rural broadband in the UK - only to find that BT swoops in on the areas, declaring they're profitable after all and undercut the competition.

If you're describing the USA situation you need to be aware that most telcos in the USA have legislated local monopolies _without_ a universal service obligation, thanks to 30 years of bungs being slipped to the Public Utilities Commissions. http://www.alternet.org/story/148397/how_the_phone_companies_are_screwing_america%3A_the_$320_billion_broadband_rip-off

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Full Of What Makes The Grass Grow Green In Texas

Why? Because BT slips them a bung.

There, fixed that for you.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I would give them "regulatory certainty"

Simple solution:

Given ongoing lack of performance and given the money already ploughed in.

Any further broadband funding is contingent on the full separation of BT and Openreach (This is how New Zealand achieved it)

The issue at hand is actually a commerce one. Ofcom cannot and will not deal with an abusive monopoly. The competition commission needs to take action.

Can ad biz’s LEAN avert ADPOCALYPSE?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: LEAN?

"I've sat there and watched as my ad blocker counts up in the hundreds for blocked scripts whilst trying to read an article on some sites."

Why do ads need to run any scripts? Why should they be allowed to?

Serious question.

Small broadband firms aren't fussed about getting access to BT's ducts and poles

Alan Brown Silver badge

"It is cheaper to build from scratch than to use bt ancient ducts and poles. the red tape, the time wasted and the excess charges make it un economic."

Only because BT make it that way.

Look to New Zealand to see what happens when the telco and the lineso get split up and the handbrake on contact with "externals" gets removed.

Google-backed Yieldify has acquired IP from ‘world’s biggest patent troll’

Alan Brown Silver badge

"The examples they gave:"

Look suspiciously like the reasons why people install adblocks.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Bought for offense or defense ?

"Google is seemingly helping the tech community at large deal with a sticky problem with companies that collect and sit on patents with the sole objective of blackmail. That's what a patent troll does"

Google is large enough to _buy_ most of the patent trolls and shut them down. The hard part would be insuring that the people behind trolling operations can't simply start acquiring new patents with that money and trolling with those instead.

The whole mess is falling apart. The Australians are correct in their recommendations wrt allowable patents /copyright duration and international cartels but these recommendations will never be allowed to happen.

Nest's bricking of Revolv serves as wake-up call to industry

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: IoT?

"By networking it, they can have one network connection to a breaker"

Actually it tends to be one network connection to the bank of breakers and some form of CAN strung between them all.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nest

"Alphabet seem to have shot themselves in both feet with one bullet."

Alphabet == Doubleclick, with all the sleazy stuff that goes with it.

DC ate google from the inside.

Official: Microsoft's 'Get Windows 10' nagware to vanish from PCs in July

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Timing?

"hordes of teenage Mr Fixits who knew enough to help out users when they were baffled, thus boosting their egos and social status."

As one of those (and someone who made quite a bit of money supporting Windows), I always made it clear to my customers that MS software was full of deficiencies and that there were alternatives - which either cost more (Macs "Just worked" in those days) or demanded more knowledge (Linux).

Most of them stuck with Windows and almost all stayed as my customers. Giving them a bunch of HOWTOs ensured that for the most part they didn't need to call on me for minor stuff (although I had one who would call for help every time her husband minimized her programs - this was solved after a discussion with both of them. He ended up with his own computer)

People stick with what they know and they choose what they know due to advertising and what everyone else they know is already running.

It's the same reason people kept buying British Leyland products after the late 1960s when it was clear the cars were crap designs put together badly by a crap workforce - even when "japanese" cars built in towns just down the road (sunderland and suchlike) were far superior products and the workforce was motivated to do a good job of putting them together.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Serious question

"Can you provide proof that all the spyware always obeys those spyware settings? Proof that those settings won't be "accidentally" (honest!) re-set (again) when you're not looking? "

I never take anything for granted. There's software around which will automagically check and _ensure_ that the spyware stays disabled.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Back in the real world

"The software that came with both DTV capture devices was incompatible with W10"

I'll buy the devices. They tend to run happily on every flavour of linux. :p

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Watch as shortly after they release a patch to kill off pirated versions of earlier operating systems and getting them to pay (full price) to play again. Well now you have to pay, we even would have let you use 10 for free, you turned that down, "

I encountered an office full of pirated W7 installations in Outer Bumfuckistan when there in January. One of them ended up being (accidentally - user clicked on yes) upgraded to W10 - the download took 6 days, even in the largest city in the country. It refused to validate because the W7 license was pirated.

On the bright side it offered to sell a genuine license for $20

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Serious question

"All things considered, is Windows 10 worse than Vista?"

Actually no. It even runs reasonably well on old hardware which struggled with XP

The spyware settings can be disabled with a bit of work.

That said, Lubuntu runs better.

Google, Honeywell put away Nest patent knives

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nah

The problem with that one is that it doesn't allow setting different temperatures for time of day, let alone the complexity that the Honeywell setup offers (individual control for each radiator, comes on in off hours when someone's in the room and switches off if a window's opened, etc) which is one step better than thermostatic valves for finer control and operational cost reduction (thermostatic vales + a timezoned thermostat dropped my costs 30%. It's not something to sneeze at)

This doesn't require external control or being part of the IOT - which the Nest does (there's an option for remote access, but it's just that - an option)

Watch it again: SpaceX's boomerang rocket lands on robo-sea-barge

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Can you possibly imagine Oxford University graduates chanting UK UK UK?"

No, but I could imagine Alan Bond's staff doing it if they ever get SABRE flying.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Bravado?

"There are only a finite number of satellites that need to be put into orbit in any given year "

That's mostly restricted by the cost to do so for LEO, so you can expect the rate to increase as costs decrease.

What's _really_ needed for GEO work is the ability to put large birds up there (reliably, and keeping them reliable). The bigger they are the more stationkeeping fuel they can carry and the more services they can operate, etc.

Clarke and friends envisioned football-field size GEO birds with human staff. With Falcon XX on the way, orbiting complexes of that size do seem viable but the staffing would most likely be waldos or fully autonomous robots.

GEO is _crowded_ and one of the bigger problems is keeping birds at nominally the same position from bumping into each other. If they could be attached to a giant flying truss then this problem essentially goes away (modules for something like this would only need sufficient fuel to rendezvous/attach/detach at end of life, with fuelling pods handling the navigation work). It'd also pretty much eliminate the issue of zombie (dead) sats slowly precessing through the belt requiring everything in their path to get out of the way and (perhaps) allow the possibility of keeping something up there to capture and anchor the things.

'I thought my daughter clicked on ransomware – it was the damn Windows 10 installer'

Alan Brown Silver badge

> (Have to ask. Is your Windows 10 experience on a machine that came with W10 pre-installed by the manufacturer, or did you upgrade an older machine?)

So far all the boxen I've put W10 on are all old crap that barely ran XP/8. They're actually a bit better under W10, but they're a LOT better under Lubuntu (multibooters)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Uh....

Why would anyone run mission-critical 24*7 stuff on Windows desktop anything? (I know, Windows server isn't much better, but even so...)

29 years of data shows no mobile phone brain cancer link

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Making the frank and succinct reply"

I'm happy to do it as a parent and I'd call them nastier things than "daft bint"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Duh.

"Skin Cancer is on the rise, but so are the sales of the creams."

Two parts are at work:

1: Most of the creams don't provide their claimed protection unless slathered on thick enough to be visible

2: Several of the extreme SPF factor chemicals turned out to be mildly carcinogenic.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Next, how about a study of low-energy light-bulbs & cancer

"Even the "Ooh, flourescents give me headaches" people have shut up in the last 20 years"

Flourescents at the end of their lives visibly flicker to me in peripheral vision and I find it irritating (especially if there's a migraine coming on), but that's not cause and effect - they don't _cause_ the migraines.

Likewise I find that cheap leds flicker enough to be annoying - but the simple solution to that is to make sure that you get ones with decent regulators in them instead of a bridge rectifier and capacitor in series. Those cheap ones tend to be overdriven anyway, which leads to early burnout.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The El Reg article quotes from an article in 'The Conversation' ...

"There is no mechanism by which the radiation emitted from a cell phone can cause cancer. Full stop."

The only risk factor I ever worried about was the heat of the phone itself possibly causing cancer in an ear. That worry went away 25 years ago though, they run a lot cooler now.

Wasps force two passenger jets into emergency landings

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nutters

"In the right aircraft with the right wind ground speed could in fact be negative."

Been there, done that.

In the wrong aircraft with the wrong ground speed in the wrong weather (microburst), air speed can also be negative. At that point the aircraft does a good imitation of a stone.

You can always rely on the Ancient Ones to cock things up

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: There will be blood...

"Whoever cuts a cable tie and leaves a few mm of jagged tail is pure evil. "

Or uses sidecutters when the correct tool actually exists: http://www.partex-direct.co.uk/TT1-Auto-Cable-Tie-Tool

*The same people who use sidecutters invariably pull the ties too tight and mess up cat5/6 cable impedances. This is why I've banned ties and provide copious quantities of velcro wraps.

Database man flown to Hong Kong to install forgotten patch spends week in pub

Alan Brown Silver badge

" I can't just clear off with a days notice and expect my other half to cover"

I wouldn't expect you to. Paying someone to do _that_ job is part of the expenses you should be demanding.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"If my firm gave me a days notice to fly to HK for a week"

I'd be demanding business-class seats and an appropriate travel allowance to make up for the disruption to family life.

This kind of troubleshooting job is charged out at upwards of $5k/day so you have plenty of leeway to dig your toes in.

We will end misleading broadband adverts, thunders ASA...

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The ASA have lost the plot...

"Everyone should be able to order ANY combination of line rental, phone calls, broadband and / or TV from ANY mix of companies, with absolutely no bundling or tie ins."

Unless and until Openreach is forcibly divested from BT, this will never happen.

Look to New Zealand to see what happens when the the Lines company is fully separated from the Dialtone provider (the answer is, "the handbrakes come off").

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Misleading broadband adverts

"If you ignore throughput and just focus on line speed then two ISPs, one who spends a lot on backhaul and one who spends the bare minimum will look exactly the same in their advertising."

The answer to that is "contention or multipexing ratios" - but ISPs won't willingly hand over this kind of information and Ofcom refuses to make them publish it.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: ASA - Lap dogs

"ASA seem to work very hard not to see problems at the very least until the damage has been done."

See my first comment. Once you realise the ASA is paid for by the people producing the misleading adverts, perhaps their reluctance to do anything makes more sense.

It's only in the last few years that they've been asked to earn their keep. Prior to 2003 they had to deal with a few hundred complaints per year - that's now thousands per month and climbing. Their first reaction to the increasing volume was to try and ban anyone who submitted "too many" complaints or pointed out that they were sharing performance stats with others - a response which almost got them rendered superfluous as it got pointed out by several people in Whitehall that this was a refusal to self-regulate. Following that they simply started accepting and burying complaints until it was clear this course of action wasn't going to work either.

They've always done the absolute minimum necessary to stave off government regulators stepping in and they'll always be like that unless their feet are firmly held to the fire.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It's not just the adverts

" If you are on cable you don't need a landline so there's no line rental in that respect for the BB cost."

Do you remember the days when "certain airlines" used to offer impossibly cheap airfares, then load in mandatory charges after they'd pulled you in?

There's a reason bait-and-switch advertising is illegal

As far as I'm concerned the ASA is talking bollocks. Trading standards should be getting involved involved - as they did when people started complaining about those airlines, with the result that the practice was declared illegal and all companies doing it had to stop RIGHT NOW - that's why you're supposed to be seeing the full prices, upfront, no surcharges or fees or taxes to add in later.

Perhaps Alexander Martin might like to get comments from his local trading standards office - I doubt they'll be impressed that misleading adverts will be allowed by the ASA until October.

Revealed: How NASA saved the Kepler space telescope from suicide

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Soft errors in electronic memory

"How about a cosmic ray hitting a memory cell and flipping it."

ECC (actually ECC on steroids), redundant control computers. It'd take more than one bit-flip to scramble things.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The bonus

"from this sort of mission is all the tricks and dodges tried and used that can be incorporated into future missions to lengthen them or make them more reliable. "

Better quality reaction wheels should be extremely high on that agenda.