* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

British IT outsourcers back Remain in the EU referendum campaign

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I thought the jobs went to India?

"The grinning apes of Westminster seem (to me) inordinately keen to export all the powers they can to Brussels (for even less well behaved apes to abuse). "

Be careful what you wish for.

For all the claims of EU abuse (bent bananas?), it should be noted that the primary protector of human rights in the UK over the last 30 years has been the EU courts telling UK.gov that it can't enact or continue various discriminatory practices.

One of the prime motivations of this particular UK.gov for Brexit is that it would enable them to scrap the human rights act - which has successfully been used to prevent them passing some of the more extreme legislation brought before the house.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I thought the jobs went to India?

"I thought all the outsourced jobs went to India"

It got too expensive. Now they're done in the Philippines.

Linus Torvalds wavers, pauses … then gives the world Linux 4.5

Alan Brown Silver badge

f2fs

"There's also a big update to the flash-memory-friendly F2FS file-system that speeds it up, improves cache flushing and doing better at defragging."

I wonder if it fixes a partition-trashing regression I've found can be reliably triggered on f2fs over MD-raid1

Rejoice, Penguinistas, Linux 4.4 is upon us

Alan Brown Silver badge

About systemd

If systemd is working properly then bootups are significantly faster.

Poetter is a tosser but the concept of multithreading the startup is a good one.

On the other hand.... if it's not working properly then you're in for a world of pain trying to work out why. (Been there done that)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"my classic gnome has gone, replaced by some other junk"

Just install lxde and rejoice.

Here's what an Intel Broadwell Xeon with a built-in FPGA looks like

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: timing seems interesting....

"once the SSL lib and the x264 encoder lib starts fighting over the FPGA "

In a DP system you'd have 2 FPGAs to fight over.

In short order, you'll see multi-FPGA computing to rival multi-GPU.

Chinese boffins grow new eye lenses using stem cells

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: So they've "solvedcd" a problem that does not really exist?

1: cataract lens surgery is cheap, but the lenses come with their own sets of problems (fixed focus)

2: You've missed the _other_ avenue this opens up for repair - age-related farsightedness (currently driving me batshit.)

'Microsoft Office has been the bane of my life, while simultaneously keeping me employed'

Alan Brown Silver badge

"bean counters quibble for hours over the provenance of every expense receipt, but are perfectly happy to plug those numbers into a rat's nest of VBA macros"

If you want to blow their minds, ask them if they understand what those VBA macros do and if they've been properly audited.

It's about then that they go from thinking "computer says no" to "this was written by someone, somewhere who wasn't an accountant and doesn't understand double entry bookkeeping, or WORSE, was an accountant and whose coding skills are on par with mine"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: the original developer of most of it for Excel 2000

"NT 3.5.1 is all the OS you'll ever need."

Bearing in mind that everything past that point has been progressively less stable... "Amen"

David Cameron hints at Budget law change to end mobile not-spots

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @hplasm How about...

re 22k miles high: don't laugh too loudly, that's exactly the premise of Iridium and friends, but they do need a couple of watts of handset Tx power.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: cue the Anti Mast campaigns

"It's the likes of Cameron and his luvvie friends who want their rural idyll to look like a Constable painting, "

Not even that.

The single biggest obstacle is the law which prevents mobile companies sharing equipment at sites.

Which means at marginal rural sites, there might be 3-4 different sets of kit feeding 2 different masts - instead of it all running on the same radios/antennas and being divvied up at the back end.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: cue the Anti Mast campaigns

"And if there's a weak signal the phone, situated next to the kiddie's brain, will turn up the wick on transmit. Did I read something about an inverse square law?"

Don't tell them that. They believe that the masts run on full power all the time whilst phones run on magic unicorn farts. Being informed about anything different makes their brains implode.

Airbus' Mars plane precursor survives pressure test

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: How do you deploy them at Mars?

"The biggest question for the moment is indeed how to get the plane to Mars"

Sea Dragon? Orion (the original)?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Keep in mind it's 90 000 feet on Earth,

" The U2 (which IIRC did switch off its engine to conserve fuel) "

You're wrong on that score. The U2 spent virtually the entire mission in "coffin corner", so switching off the engine would have nasty consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_(aerodynamics)

State should run power firm spam database, says... competition watchdog

Alan Brown Silver badge

Spam

Bulk - yes

Unsolicited - yes

Email - yes

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it gets roasted (blacklisted) like one.

Boffins bust biometrics with inkjet printer

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It very much depends on the reader

"some people have practically no ridges and it then becomes a signal to noise battle to pick up anything at all."

Which is a very real problem when such biometrics are used for visas.

My wife "suffers" from this problem. It means she frequently gets to stay in airports for anything up to 5 hours past arrival, simply because they can't read her prints.

Strike! European Patent Office staff vote in their thousands for walkout

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Recognition based on performance rather than pure longevity"

In a patent office _that_ is extremely dangerous.

Witness the effect such policies have had on the USPTO over the last 30 years.

What a pair of ace-holes: Crooks bug gambler's car with GPS tracker, follow him and rob him

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Which one is it?

"I thought that was usually done with a ball gag."

Most crooks don't want to kill people. Ball gags (usually a wadded teatowel or similar) have been known to do exactly that.

Knackered Euro server turns Panasonic smart TVs into dumb TVs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Where can I get a good dumb TV?

"exotic unknowns, such as: AOC"

AOC in particular is a _big_ manufacturer. Chances are that if you open up virtually any LCD display you'll find a AOC panel inside (even ones you'd expect to be making their own, such as LG.)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Where can I get a good dumb TV?

40", full HD.

Why not 4k? They're not much more expensive.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Panasonic: Sony's younger idiot brother

"P stopped updating the s/w about a year after I bought it, and virtually all the 'smart TV' services on there at the time are now gone."

This sounds ripe for someone to hack the "smart"ness (embedded linux) and preduce custom firmware.

Meantime I'll stick with my fileserver running Plex Media Server and a small HTPC.

Home Ebola testing with a Tricorder? There's an app for that

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: DNA source

"On the spot genetic testing = quick and easy DNA database."

More like matching photographs.

"Does this sequence show up anywhere? (yes/no)"

As long as samples aren't retained, you can be relatively sure that noone's made a full DNA sequencer small enough to attach to a smartphone..... yet.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I think you will find that it was West Africa, not East, that had Ebola."

And I suspect that you'll also find that Zika is only transmissible via blood or other _extremely_ intimate contacts. That's not something usually quarantined for (also, unless you're preggers, Zika's relatively benign and the jury's still out on the microcephaly link)

HPE's CloudLine gains some weight – blows up from 72TB to 640TB

Alan Brown Silver badge

640TB?

Raid0 perhaps.

What's the _real_ capacity?

GCHQ: Crypto's great, we're your mate, don't be like that and hate

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: These people just don't seem to understand encryption.

> laws are made which threaten heavy fines and jail sentences

The UK has had a standard approach to this for years - if a judge directs you to provide decrypted data for the court and you fail to do so, it's contempt and gets punished as such.

If anything the laws reduce your exposure - you can be held almost indefinitely on contempt charges.

Dead Steve Jobs is still a crook – and Apple must cough up $450m for over-pricing ebooks

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Monopoly pricing

"Look at the difference in price between the kindle and paperback prices for example."

If you find a wholesaler who's willing to deal with you, you can usually score 30-40% below retail pricing. The caveat is that you need to buy enough to make it worthwhile. Forming a Book club works well for this kind of thing.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"You don't base fines on trying to hurt the company, but on making up for the harm. "

Which is funny, because american court punishments for criminals are almost entirely based around retribution and not restoration.

One law for the living person and another for the artifice.

If they pulled that in the EU they could be fined 10% of annual turnover. That's gotta hurt.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: hubris

...territorial boundaries...

Which are illegal cartell behaviour, but somehow still legal in this day and age.

Clive Sinclair Vega+ tin-rattle hits £300,000

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I can't honestly say I've yet seen a telly for sale without a composite input. Monitors, yes, plenty, but not tellies."

Mine (a tesco cheapie about 10 years old) doesn't.

On the other hand, scart includes a composite port and it's active, so a dongle does the trick.

Alien studs on dwarf's erection baffle boffins

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Looks like someone was digging a hole...

I thought "divot"

Open trucker comms lets Shodan snoops alter routes, tap CANs buses.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Owners warned?

"Well put, here's the list to well and truly tell them to fuck off"

Go ahead, block 'em. Pat yourself on the back and feel good - whilst the blackhats continue from their own set of (probably constantly changing) search IPs.

You may as well push water uphill with a rake.

Obscurity is NOT security.

US slaps trade ban on ZTE over Iran links

Alan Brown Silver badge

The story goes that ZTE were buying Cisco kit and other US-brand stuff on the export banlist, then onselling it.

Never mind that the devices were likely made in china and never saw US shores.

Microsoft has made SQL Server for Linux. Repeat, Microsoft has made SQL Server 2016 for Linux

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Oracle has to hate this news

" a date type that couldn't go before 1600 "

Modified Julian day is a pretty standard choice. Going back past then, you get into issues about multiple calendars.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Microsoft is afraid

"for how long is Windows going to be relevant?"

Windows isn't a big earner for them and never really has been. The money's in Office and friends - which is why Libreoffice scares them far more than Linux ever could (it's "good enough" and cheaper - the 2 data points which enabled MS to take over this market from its competitors in the 90s)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nice to see.

> windows blew the door off *nix for scientific computing on regular non massively parallel systems (talking %10 to %50 better).

That's not our experience and we do a LOT of scientific computing.

Even using GCC instead of an optimised compiler (there are some nice ones for Linux), the Linux systems tend to be 30-50% faster as a starting point _on the same hardware_ (one of the common tendencies for MS fanbois is to compare linux on shitty hardware with windows on the latest/greatest)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"With sufficient thrust pigs fly just fine"

Manouvering and landings remain problematic issues

In this context the pig is mysql. It's great for small jobs but eats systems rapidly as it scales.

Not that I'd let MS-anything near my core business after enduring their various clusterfucks (Especially their "high availability services" - but that decision was already signed off when the steaming pile of odure arrived on my desk. The support load is up a factor of 20 compared with the old system)

Buying gov.UK kit via price-comparison digital portal could 'save £10bn'

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Until some department goes for the cheapest option"

If they "find" that they bought that kind of support then the people responsible need to be fired.

Support (and the duration of that contract) is part of the purchase contract and you need to make sure you're getting what you think you're getting.

I deal with this a lot when someone undershoots my internal costings for kit with "but I can buy it from XYZ for £ABC" - my standard response is "go back and price it with 3/5 year support, next day onsite - Oh and this quote doesn't have the same amount of memory as I specified. Make sure you match it"

At this point they discover that the cheap option just doubled in price and I already have a quote from that supplier.

Flash is too fat. A glut of supply means growth is slower and slower

Alan Brown Silver badge

yield issues

Samsung had them too, but it's a long way along the curve compared to other makers.

NASA funds new supersonic airliner research

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Busemann's biplane

"The article My-Handle pointed at did not mention how they solved this problem. Does anyone know?"

Waveriding. Leaping boldly back to the Valkerie....

If the wings are tilted back slightly, pressure builds up under the lower surface and thus you have lift - and a loud boom - there still ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Concorde's boom was almost entirely generated by the wings. This is the case with all SSTs large enough to be practical and the best you can do is attempt to direct the shockwaves sideways/upwards so that they disperse in the atmosphere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom - note the photo of the SSBD halfway down the page.

GPS, you've gone too far this time

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Walking the dog

"This is one of the odd situations where a high update rate makes things worse."

That depends if you use the high rate directly or integrate the results first.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It isn't that

"My GPS watch suffers from the same problem and I put it down to cutting the corners. "

Given the other comments about acceleration and some chipsets not being wonderful, the fact that it's swinging around on the end of your arm probably has a lot to do with the inaccuracy.

As a crosstest, putting it in a pocket or pinning to the shirt would be a first step.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It isn't that

"to those who knew it was one of the first indications that the allied attacks on Iraq were imminent"

That, and for GW2, the entire constellation being switched off for a few hours. It wasn't convenient for a friend of mine using it to navigate over water between New Zealand and the Chatham Islands as it meant a hurried midflight transition to pencil and paper.

The Pacific Ocean is awfully large and the islands are very small. Not a good situation in an unpressurised light twin when you're not expecting that and you're well beyond radar coverage.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"they clearly explain that GPS has a built-in error for civilian GPS units."

Selective availability was disabled over 15 years ago. The newer birds don't even have the ability to enable it. http://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/faq/

There's still an error there but this is down to the lower resolution of the civilian signal vs the military one and that's down to the bitrate.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: How far off? @Gomez Adams

"This is why someone I know (you can't choose family) insists on never changing the lane on the motorway."

Presumably this means he sticks to the left hand one, as he can't change from that to the others.

Didn't think so. Hopefully he'll get a ticket sooner or later.

India challenges US visa price hike at World Trade Organisation

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Indian IT is expensive crap

"Best thing I did was bring the tech jobs back to the UK, after the previous clown outsourced them."

The "advantage" being that you can start from a clean sheet and aren't required to rehire those laid off for the outsourcing.

Outsourcing does have its uses (getting rid of moribund departments so you can start over) but it's still a fairly nasty thing.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Make in india"

"Make In India aims to see India reduce its dependence on imports by manufacturing more electronics for domestic consumption."

I wonder if they'll try to go to previous policy of heavily restricting access to foreign technology.

Brit firm unleashes drone-busting net cannon

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What happened to all the Eagles with frickin laser beams on their heads?

"£100 to take out a £10 drone"

or in other words, how would it cope with more than one drone?

Samsung is now shipping a 15TB whopper of an SSD. Farewell, spinning rust

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Expensive

"because unlike spinning rust, you may get NO warning of failure."

That's very like spinning rust in my experience. SMART isn't very good at predicting total failure.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Space, not cost...

"Now, replace those 2tb SSDs with 15tb SSDs. You can get in 6U what you previously needed more than an entire rack for."

12 years ago I purchased a 10TB storage solution. The drives alone were 2/3 of the rack (OK, OK, they were MSA1000s rather than disk drawers, but disk drawers weren't available then.

Now I can buy half as much again in a single 2.5" case with better performance.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Hopefully "shipping" means actually available

Unlike Seacrate's desktop SSHDs which took 18 months to go from "shipping" to actually being purchasable from wholesalers.