Posts by Alan Brown

"And it landed only a couple of metres off centre!"

Proving in a stroke that not only can they land it, but that it can be done in somewhat "less than perfect" conditions.

Agree with the sentiments about capture mechanisms. Anchoring should be more automatic/automated if this is to become routine.

Re: Nobody here watch porn?

"Turned out that the nightshift IT ops crew had been using her PC to while away the hours."

Which would have been obvious from the timestamps in the logs

Re: Another reason...

"Why all the fake outrage? Nobody here watch porn?"

Not illegal stuff and not on systems paid for by $EMPLOYER

Re: Deep Disposal

"They've lost a good few nuclear-powered submarines down there."

Locations are known and monitored, along with a bunch of dumped reactors from the Lenin.

In all cases there is no discernable radioactivity measured once you're more than 2 metres from the hot stuff. Water is a _very_ good moderator.

Re: So are you saying....

"that's why we have light water reactors burning enriched Uranium instead of a Thorium fuel cycle. The latter doesn't produce much of any use for making bombs."

That's what they said about CANDU reactors - until India proved this not to be the case.

You can make bombs with what's in a LFTR if you're determined to do so. Doing so would be both extremely expensive and result in noticable unaccountable losses in output power, which should attract attention.

"Sounds like we can bury our nuclear waste properly "

no burial is proper. If it's high level waste then it belongs in a reactor and if it's low level waste it doesn't need burial.

"You do not use HEU is energy production reactors although you might, just, use it in one or another design of isotope production reactors."

The number of HEU reactors worldwide is down to the single digits now - thanks to a concerted effort over the last 40 years to eliminate them. There _were_ hundreds (if not thousands) of the things, on college and hospital campuses around the world.

"What solutions to the waste issue?"

Build MSRs. Feed the "waste" into the fuel salts. Extract energy. Enjoy.

PWR reactors vs thorium MSRs is a greater efficiency and utilisation change than the difference between Neucomen and Watt steam engines.

It's not just that a thorium-based MSR system should be able to extract 98-99% of the nuclear energy available in the fuel vs the 2-3% that PWRs extract, it's that 50-60% of uranium that's mined is tossed out(*) before it hits a nuclear reactor during the enrichment process(**) and uranium is expensive, whilst thorium is a nuisance byproduct of rare earth mining looking for any kind of use (there are hundreds of thousands of tons of it going begging)

(*) Actually: turned into hydrogen bomb casings or used as anti-tank armour piercing bullets - the latter may seem "better" but uranium is a worse environmental toxin than lead and cleanup of sites where DU bullets have been used will take decades. A MSR can take that "useless" U238, transmute to Pu238 and burn it up.

(**) The amount of electrical energy used to enrich uranium is unknown (military secret) but extremely high - driving those centrifuges doesn't come cheap. Thorium doesn't ened enrichment and "nuclear waste" fed into a MSR for disposal doesn't need isotopic separation (the first rule of waste handling for recycling is to try and avoid a need for expensive separation activities. That applies just as much to nuclear waste as plastics or glass)

Re: Dare I say it?

"Nothing would suck worse than seeing a blue (red, yellow) screen while in the middle of attempting a landing..."

Or a 1201 alarm.

Re: The march of technology...

"They could also have designed a new Shuttle using newer, better materials (to avoid some of the tiles issue) and improved electronics."

Just about all the shuttles shortcomings would be avoidable if the crossrange capability was removed. Those wings were the thing which turned it into a camel.

That said, Shuttle is a pickup truck. It should only have been used when you needed to take pickup-truck loads into (or out of) orbit. It was used far too much because that's all the USA had for manned launch and when you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail.

Re: Lightning strikes are always fun

"This time the strike had been rather more powerful and had actually ripped the line card in half! "

In a former telco existance I've walked into a comms hut to find blackened ends of wires where the line cards (40-50 of them) and their edge connectors used to be.

One hilltop site which took a direct hit had the mains board blown off the wall - and embedded in the one opposite. This was the old ceramic rewireable fuseholder technology. The amount of energy in a lightning strike makes most checmical explosives seem minor.

Gullwings

"The parking bays are simply not wide enough to open those doors."

Properly designed gullwing doors can fully open with only 4 or 5 inches available beside the car. I'd like to see you get a conventional door open enough to get out in such a case.

On the other hand, as Tesla and deLorean both discovered, gullwings are _heavy_ - which is not something you want on an ecowarrior-mobile.

Re: Super capacitors are a good touch

"batteries simply can't take the charge as fast as a vehicle under braking generates it, so horrendous proportions of the energy are lost."

Supercaps are a logical choice, but they have low energy density, which is why they're not used in most hybrids/EVs.

Having enough supercap Joule capacity to handle converting the kinetic energy of a 1 tonne vehicle at 60km/h back to electrical potential when halting the thing translates to something around the 100-120kg mark (and supercaps are NOT high current devices, so other issues come into play too)

I'm aware of one hybrid design (a passenger bus) which dumped energy from the regenerative brakes into the cooling system, only storing about 1% of the regenerated energy. It saved on brake wear but caused overheating issues in summer. (FWIW, trains tend to do this too - regeneration energy is usually dumped into resistor packs on the roof instead of putting it back into the grid as doing so results in unpredictable loads which are nearly impossible to regulate without extremely complex and expensive control systems - but it saves mechanical wear on the brakes.)

Re: ero emissions?

"Third, yes I do understand that air / nitrogen / helium etc. is not the same thing as hydrogen and specific care has to be taken in the choice and engineering of the material used, but declaring that "problematic" sounds a bit loaded."

Air/nitrogen/helium at any pressure don't cause hydrogen embrittlement (very similiar to neutron embrittlement in the nuke industry). It's bad enough in the CNG industry and the hydrogen there is generally bonded to 4 carbon atoms already (If you've ever seen a CNG tank burst you'll know how dangerous that can be - cars generally get shredded when it happens)

"Problematic" is actually an understatement and the cyclic nature of the pressurisation along with low mass requirement for transportation add an order of magnitude of complexity to the problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement

Re: Boy....

Incredibly ugly and impractical, with aerodynamics that only matter past 80mph.

This is like the adams probe 16 (which was a pocket ferrari powered by an anemic austin lump) when a more practical (and saleable) fuelcell vehicle would be more like a Kei van - something with a form factor like the Suzuki Wagon R.

Rationale for that statement: small output, regenerative braking with supercaps (which are very limited in their energy storage), low pollution -> an ideal stop-start city transporter, not an open road cruiser.

A final thought for that design: the hydrogen tank is _very_ exposed to a rear end collision. Not a good thing when it will be operating at ~ 40MPa

Re: frak me

" I suspect hydrogen is actually a better long term solution "

Hydrogen plus nuclear plus a few spare carbon atoms makes for a transportable energy storage system which would work well in vehicles.

If you have the abundant nuclear energy to make hydrogen fuel then you have enough energy to turn it into (at least) propane/butane/octane to make it safer for such operations.

Of course it'd be ironic if future nuke plants were making methane for the gas reticulation system instead of electricity.

Re: ero emissions?

"The hydrogen will be stored in a tank."

And that's the part which is most problematic.

The car and powertrain part are relatively easy. Storing and transporting hydrogen at extreme cyclic pressures - reliably and safely - in such a way that the equipment will last at least a decade is a not-fully-solved materials science problem.

The liabilities (and PR damage) when a hydrogen tank inevitably ruptures are such that I'm pretty sure insurers will be hesitant to provide manufacturer cover.

"This is shaping up to be a Wikileaks, or even Snowden-level, revelation."

In raw data it's already 10 times larger than Wikileaks - and the interesting revelation that there are scanned paper docs dating back more than 40 years will have a lot of people looking over their shoulders.

As with Wikileaks, the releases are being curated and dripfed to keep up interest. I'm pretty sure there will be a bunch of attacks aimed at grabbing and releasing the enture dataset.

Re: Didn't realize there were more data dumps to come

"maybe Mossack Fonseca is just one of a number of companies operating in this [ahem] area of expertise [/ahem]."

And maybe (hopefully) more than one company has had its files riffled through. It would be interesting if there was a second set of dumps 12 months later form somewhere else containing paniced emails related to this dump and exposure of malfeasance in public office.

Re: Didn't realize there were more data dumps to come

"it's so easy to create shell companies in the US that US citizens don't need to bother with offshoring..."

The US IRS goes extremely heavy when it suspects offshore tax shelters. Anything panama-related has been on their "extreme prejudice" list for a long time.

The result is that any US connections tend to be be corporate or extremely well-buried.

Re: Dodgy dealings doubled

"Why has it taken so long for any mention of it to be released?"

Because by all accounts the hard drive which got handed over was full of data, but it was totally disjointed and journalists have had to piece together a jigsaw puzzle to make much sense of it.

It could take _years_ to fully assemble the pieces to see who's connected to whom and how.

Re: The bottle neck is further up the chain

"1) no one sits there and hammers their port at 1Gb/s all day long"

It doesn't matter. If you have network /home and fileservers then you need to cope with all the machines starting up first thing in the morning and after lunch WITHOUT slowing down.

That means designing the network to cope with worst case scenarios, not the usual 1-2% utilisation.

"2) the switch uplinks are the contention point for sites with local servers. who has more than a pair of 1 Gb uplinks from their access switches?"

When access switches with 20GB/s uplinks are between £300 (basic) and £1200 (fully managed), with the core switches at around £5-8k, why would you NOT run 10GB/s uplinks? (Hint: my stacked access switches run 20GB/uplink per 48-port shelf in the stack - this also copes with $IDIOT unplugging cables in the switchroom - it takes a lot of disconnections to knock out any given access switch AND with TRILL+distributed L3 in the core it takes a lot of disconnections to knock out the core network. TRILL isn't just for data centres and was never intended as a datacentre protocol)

"3) if your core servers are plumbed in at 10Gb/s and you have 100 users at 1Gb/s where is the contention now?"

Why are you only running a single 10Gb/s connection on a critical server?

For that matter: Why do you only have a single critical server? Where's your failover and redundancy?

"4) your 1Gb/s wired connection is pointless if you've got less than (total users x 1Gb/s) WAN link if all your servers are off site."

This is where you explain to the PHB that running a local server room costs £N and running 10GB/s uplinks costs 5*£N - with installation of the redundant physical 10Gb/s path having a 20*£n installation charge - and don't try to shortcut this as it costs £30k/hour in staff salaries _alone_ when the systems are unreachable.

"5) the bottle neck is either the switch uplink, server uplink or WAN link, fast wifi with lots of users on does not change this"

100 dual-radio 802.11ac WAPs (one per office - effectively one per 3-8 wifi devices) and a pair of suitable WACs will cost you between £50 and 80k depending who you buy from. That factors in 20 outdoor, reception area and meeting room units to handle the more complex cases.

The trick is to design _properly_ and make sure that bottlenecks are eliminated in the first instance or accounted for in such a way that you can slot in upgrades to cope. That cheap installation isn't so cheap when you have to toss the whole bloody thing to install something which works properly (and can be incrementally upgraded)

Re: Kill that rogue DHCP server!

" we used to regularly experience issues with roaming engineers parking in the office and starting their laptops with DHCP servers running on them"

Decently secured networks will see that activity and disconnect the devices instantly.

I know, as my network does it.

Re: Direct wiring

"I don't think I have a single port on a wall or in a floor that's not fully patched in or hasn't been every day since it's install."

The main building I work in was floodwired with what seemed far too many ports (minimum 2 per desk and a few extra for every room) 20 years ago.

As time has gone on, single-occupancy rooms became double and what used to hold 2 desks now holds 4 - and everyone now has a desktop, laptop, at least 1 phone/tablet and often more devices too, all competing for ports.

Installing decent 2/5GHz WAPs (all running at 1-5mW output), WACs, switches, radius and 802.1x has meant that we can mostly cope with the increase. In the rooms that simply can't cope, we've added in-room switches where needed. Networking is also an issue, with a limited number of IPv4s available - so if you switch from wired to wireless you get the same IP assigned (this also provides seamless connectivity)

802.1x is the key though. Authorised machines can connect. Unauthorised ones don't. Phones go into 1 of 2 guest networks - for staff ones the password is tied to their userid (which is forcibly changed every 90 days and has strength checking built in) and for visitors the password will evaporate in 24 hours, unless renewed by reception staff.

I can tell you who's connected, where they are/were, when they logged in/out and go back 12 months. Any sign of malware activity (or plugging in prohibited OSes such as WinXP) gets the port slammed into a remediation VLAN within milliseconds.

Yes, this cost £180k, but the alternative of needing 4 more staff to maintain the network would eat that difference in 2 years anyway. Every port is wired up - because we don't have many spare wallports anyway and at £50/port it doesn't make sense not to - staff time to repatch - and spent waiting for repatching to happen before whoever's at a desk can get back to work - is worth more than that.

If we'd done this using Cisco, it would have been over £500k. The difference between vendors in this respect is refreshing - cisco were very much - "this is our kit, this is our pricing, take it or leave it" and pushing FUD about competitors, whilst the others were all very good about getting the right specv for our network _and_ tweaking the firmware if we found issues (It helps that the competing kit, whilst half the price of Cisco, is a _lot_ more capable and powerful and they don't pull stupid games like charging thousands for 10GB/s longreach optics.)

Yes, we'll do a floodwire refresh, but the fact that upgrading to a large - affordable - adaptive switch network that provides Gb to the desktop (40-100Gb in the core) has already saved us tens of thousands of pounds in staff overheads is good in times of tight budgets.

802.1x is the key to making things work better (especially wifi) but seems overlooked in 90% of installations.

Re: Great looking but...

"My parking space has no power outlet."

...Yet.

" Shove customers onto "cloud" stuff for pretty much everything I have a hand in"

Yup. I see this time after time.

The thing to do is encourage the people pushing this aspect to investigate it, including all the associated costs and if they come up with a plan which doesn't cover every part, keep asking about the missing bits.

Various project managers here have discovered that farming out to cloud computing/storage would easily end up costing 3-5 times as much as keeping it all inhouse - and that trying to get performance guarantees simply doubles the price again (or more). This may be because what we're doing is storage and computationally intensive but every time I've priced cloud stuff it's always been pricier than keeping it in-house.

Re: HR involvement

"Regarding involving HR, always remember what their job is: they exist to protect the company from the employees."

That's true on both side of the Atlantic.

A top UK university's HR department happily threw me under the bus(*) when I was suffering from burnout. It was only the intervention of senior departmental staff which allowed me to stay.

(*) After umming and ahhing for 3 weeks, then deciding it was too hard. An hour's consultation with a lawyer changed that tune rapidly but they still didn't want to keep me on, whilst the department did.