* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Boffins smear circuitry onto contact lenses

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Application?

"how soon till computerised lenses (the internal kind)? "

Not long.

Implantable lenses intended to eliminate age-related long-sightedness are already being tested.

Unlike conventional cataract-replacement lenses, these are at least as focussable as natural lenses (and as such would eliminate LASIK and its ilk if they work as well as is hoped)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Application?

"Unless you have an astigmatism, and therefore weighted lenses, I understand that most lenses spin freely on the eyeball."

Speaking as someone who does: The effect of weighted lenses is that they work fine if you're sitting upright, walking or driving, but once you start jogging, lie down, tilt your head sideways or look down on something (for example the electronics job you're poring over) your vision gets really bad, really quickly.

IE: they work fine when you try 'em out at the optician, but real world uses are somewhat more problematic - and if your asigmatisms are as bad as mine, you NEED those astig-corrections in order to be able to read roadsigns when driving, so spherical lenses are a non-starter.

The fracking oil price drop whacked Panasas – who's next in energy IT?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Who's next?

Naval reactors have vastly different safety and operational requirements to civil ones.

Steam generating PWR works fine at small scales and there's plenty of cooling water around any ship when things go wrong.

The single biggest risk with current technology nuclear power plants is that they're water-moderated and vastly oversized versions of the original Nautilus reactor.

Water under high pressure (up to 20 atmospheres) and at high temperature (up to 400C) is both corrosive and wants to flash to steam at the slightest opportunity. Couple that with the native temperature of nuclear reactions being over 1200C (that's the temperature at the centre of a fuel rod) and things get nasty if the water goes away. Zirconium fuel rod cladding has a melting point of about 1850C but mixed with borated water it gets broken down to zirconium hyroxide and hydrogen pretty quickly long before the temperatures reach that high (which is what happened at Fukushima to drive those explosions). The end result is that no matter how careful you are, water used for reactor moderation has small amounts of nasty contaminants under normal conditions and is utterly loaded with them when things go pear shaped.

(That residual heat when a reactor scrams? Most of it is because oxide pellets are shitty thermal conductors and it takes a _long_ time for the heat energy in the centre of a rod to make its way to the outside)

The single largest safety improvement which could be made to civil reactors is to separate water from the radioactive stuff (and no, using molten sodium as moderator/coolant isn't a particularly bright idea) and get rid of any form of pressurisation of the reactor core - as you increase the size and pressure of your containment vessel engineering stresses increase exponentially. The best way to do that is with Molten Salts (even if not using molten salt fuel or thorium - there's a UK consultancy which has designed more-or-less conventional fuel-rod-based systems with salt moderators.)

That said, even including all the military reactor incidents along with the big 3 civilian ones, nuclear power is statistically hundreds of thousands of times safer than burning coal in terms of deaths per TW/h (coal fire steam boilers go boom occasionally, it's not news) even for all those plants built before all the new safety rules went into place post Three-Mile-Island (many of which need applying to conventional plants)

Fukushima can be summed up thus: "Tepco listened to consultant advice over safe positioning of backup generators and other anciliary equipment outside the actual reactors, then completely ignored that advice, putting things where they'd already been told was a risky location." - and yet noone died, even considering the number of other fuck ups that happened to allow a meltdown to take place on a plant that was more than a decade past its designed shutdown date, had been hit with an earthquake substantially larger than it was designed to endure AND hit with a tsunami larger than anticipated" - even with all that, the meltdowns could have been averted if Tepco management hadn't been so criminally inept at handling the disaster as it unfolded (including refusing offers of external assistance and generator provision). The only reason things didn't get worse is because the chief engineer onsite told management to fuck off and started doing what was actually required to save things.

The Mad Men's monster is losing the botnet fight: Fewer humans are seeing web ads

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Glad to hear that advertisers are feeling squeezed

"I propose that ad agencies put a stop to this by creating an ad submission environment in which ad creators will only be able to submit images (eventually a video), and set up a script containing only commands from a given set of options."

This has already been done.

Advertisers and malvertisers have repeatedly found ways around such restrictions.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Primary issue

"Advertising companies are so far off the rails that ads have become a vector for malware"

Whilst it was originally the popup menace that goaded me into blocking adverts, this is the main driver for keeping them blocked.

That and when you're in outer bumfuckia with sod-all bandwidth at "screw you" rates, advertising is a major parastic drag and charge. I might feel more friendly about it if I hadn't had recent experiences of pages taking 2-3 minutes to load on unprotected browsers when they only had a few kB of actual text on them, or if the advertisers were paying for the charges they're forcing people to incur to display adverts they don't want.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Telegraph

"The Tory-graph is the latest to install "No entry if you're Adblocking" technology to their website."

It (and the article limit per month) are both easily circumvented by selective cookie blocking.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Adblockers

"Most ad blockers blacklist the entire advertiser domain, so nothing loads."

Unfortunately with the proliferation of anti-blockers and their increasing hostility to the end user, some of the blockers have moved to pulling down the ad but not displaying them. This is also used to mask activities.

Who wants a quad-core 4.2GHz, 64GB, 5TB SSD RAID 10 … laptop?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Dyson variant?

"One occasional grotty task is stripping down laptops to get at the incredibly well concealed fan"

As a tip: A can of compressed air in the fan outlet (to loosen the crap that's got itself on the other side of the heatsink fins) followed by a full size vacuum clean hose held over the fan inlet works wonders.

Don't do both at the same time. Most of the "compressed air" cans are blowing flammable gas the inside of a vacuum cleaner motor is a pretty sparky environment. I've seen flames come out the exhaust when people ignore that advice.

If you have a vac than can suck and blow at the same time, use the blow hose and a nozzle in place of the can of air. Run the airflow the other way too, to make sure it's all cleaned out - and a flashlight shone in the fan inlet usually provides enough illumination to be able to look in the fan outlet and see if all the fins are cleared.

Cue people griping that this will destroy the fan and/or caused the internals to be staticed to death. Neither is true, although if the fan's bearing is dodgy you'll probably hasten its demise (plenty of audible clues this is about to happen anyway. Dodgy bearings rumble or rattle long before they cark it and they usually die through getting far too hot with no airflow so regular cleaning extends their life dramatically)

Regular application of the vacuum cleaner hose to laptop fan inlet and outlet will clear out most crap buildups before they have the potential to cause trouble.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not a cool name...

"Personally I like large screen laptops / luggables as they can do nearly everything a desktop can without having to lug a big screen around."

Back around 1992, my flatmate had a 386sx16 "box" - about 20cm*20cm*5cm, which had external everything and weighed about 1kg (most of which was steel case and 40MB MFM HDD)

He'd put it in his bag and carry it to work or home, where it plugged into external keyboard/monitor/PSU.

It's interesting the number of docking stations which are around replicating this same functionality (badly and with much greater fragility) nearly 25 years later.

I think he paid about the same as this device, or more if you inflation adjust.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not a cool name...

"it has the potential to be a little "uncomfortable" due to the heat"

Which is why the industry has been selling them as "notebooks" for years.

Windows 10 will now automatically download and install on PCs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fucking hell

Half the machines I was dealing with had originally been purchased with Ubuntu onboard and "upgraded" to windows (the usual case of one country, one license, 2 million installations).

This of course guarantees that when it's finished the "update" windows won't be happy. Suggesting that people switch back to Ubuntu was met with looks of horror.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Can move all but the game machines...

"I cannot help but wonder what the open source take up would have been now if game makers had ported games to Linux at the same time as Windows?"

You can get Steam for Linux (and Android). It's worth looking at.

And yes, it's likely to drive the transition.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Fucking hell

I just got back from Burma.

The _average_ network connection speed is 500kB/s, with the fastest office GPON or ADSL topping out at 2MB/s unless you pay thousands of USD/month and thanks to APNIC's chronic shortage of IPv4, almost every connection is running through 2 or more layers of NAT (real world IPs for end users are EXPENSIVE)

With Win10 attempting (failing, reattempting, failing, reattempting) to download its 3200MB of goodness over that kind of connection, a slow link becomes glacial (not to mention that even at 0.2p/MB, the costs add up bloody fast).

This isn't conjecture. Win10 attempting to force-download was causing major problems on sites I got asked to look at.

What's it like to work for a genius and Olympic archer who's mates with Richard Branson?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I would post

"what a steaming pile of manure the "eMailer" was, are you?"

I wasn't, but I told the NZ Sugar wannabe that it was (they sold it there as the "iPhone" a decade before Apple thought up the name), especially given they wanted ISPs to stump up 20k for support software that would only work on SunOs 4.1.3 (hardly justifiable, given the poor user experience it offered with a price tag approaching a week's salary. IIRC I called it a "very slow, extremely expensive shiny toy which can't even display web pages properly")

They weren't happy and harrumphed a lot. I eventually saw the thing on sale in Dick Smith Electronics where it sold for several years through the 1990s - right up to the point where they all stopped working one night.

It turned out that Sugar-wannabe had managed to get the demonstrator devices running by installing the control software on a sparcstation in a student lab at Victoria University (unauthorised). One day the sparcstation failed to switch on and ended up in a skip shortly afterwards as it was a decade old.

Yup, all those commercially sold units (a few thousand) were using the software on that Sparc, not something purpose-installed by some gullible ISP.

Yup, all the user data was held on the sparcstation - without any backups.

Users weren't happy at losing their mail and other data.

Dick Smith Electronics wasn't happy, as they were court-ordered to 100% refund all buyers and Sugar-wannabe had slung his hook, so they ate the costs.

The fate of the drives in the sparc remain unknown - they weren't in the thing when it was recovered from the skip so it's unknown if they were erased or not.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Excel

I saw it used in a Regional Health Authority (who constantly had financial troubles, but were handling $500million+ each year using this thing, which also held details on half a million patients) and to my eternal shame it got pulled into my company as the accounting system.

One of the company directors was "mates" with the "authors" of this monstrosity and rather than spending the "exorbitant" sum of $500 for a networked version of Quickbooks, insisted that we use the accounting system from hell on the basis that his "mate" saw it as a simple conversion from the existing larger setup (I was outvoted by the other director, who happened to be non-technical and his wife)

6 years later, after the company books were in a complete shambles (said director and his "mate" at the RHA were the only one able to understand the accounting system. Even Inland Revenue gave up trying to audit it) I finally managed to wrest the system out of his control and spent 6 weeks feeding everything into.... Quickbooks (with the aid of a couple of friends).

We very quickly established that rather than turning a profit every year, the company had been making a staggering loss and to cap it off had been trading insolvent for the previous 18 months.

Time to call in the receiver - who was very understanding and had seen this kind of thing several times before, but that didn't make it any less stressful.

Lesson: When someone pulls this kind of stunt, resign or get as far away from the financials as possible. When the inevitable happens, shit will fall on you (as a director) from a great height even if you're not involved in the money stuff, but at least you won't run the risk of a nervous breakdown trying to cope with it all.

Sir Michael Lyons tells .uk registry Nominet: Time to grow up

Alan Brown Silver badge

They've been taking lessons...

...from New Zealand.

The Domainz mess was pretty similar, right down to the wanting to hire consultants who gave answers the board wanted to hear, etc.

In the end it took a membership revolt to get rid of the massively inflated egos, one of whom went on to front ICANN and from whom ICAN has taken its cues going forward.

Leak – UN says Assange detention 'unlawful'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Simples, Judicial precedent from long long ago, that's what I'm talking about.

"Depending on the offense, solvent bail jumpers tend to get picked up when they renew their drivers licenses or something, otherwise they are ignored."

For what it's worth, bail breach offences are generally treated lightly (mostly it's a telling off by the courts and "don't do it again") and only habitual offenders actually get time in the cells to think about it (not very often even then).

If Asshat was to get treated "differently" on account of his celebrity/notoriety/cheeking a judge, then there would be ample grounds for any lawyer to challenge it and possibly get the judge recused for bias.

Assange will 'accept arrest' on Friday if found guilty

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Don't like his chances

"The Americans have already said publicly that they don't have a case against him. Stands to reason - he's not a US citizen and he handled the leaked material whilst not on US territory. It would be hard even for them to show that an offence in US jurisdiction had been committed."

That said (and I don't think they want him), the same applies to Kim Dotcom yet they seem very keen to lay their hands on that particular guy.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Don't like his chances

Be that as it may, the penalties for bail breaches are quite low(*) and should he be nailed to the wall it would be selective enforcement - which would be overturned on appeal.

(*) Most offenders are given a dressing down by the courts and told "Don't do it again" even for repeat offences. First-timers almost never get a stronger penalty than this.

Ass hat may be a creep, but bear in mind the charges were originally dismissed by swedish police and only taken up when pursued by a politician with an obvious agenda. The original complainants didn't seem to want to take it further. That does lend some credence to his paranoia, although personally I can't see the USA actually wanting him. He's far more trouble than he's worth.

UK govt right to outsource everything 15 years ago – civil service boss

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Do they think we're daft?

The benefits THAT USED TO BE OFFERED like...

There, FTFY.

There's no long-term benefit from staying in the public service, rather quite substantial penalties unless you're one of the troughers at the top echelon. It's been like this for about 15-20 years.

Lawyers cast fishing nets in class-action Seagate seas

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: RAID 1

Given the failure rate of Seacrates in our datacentre, RAID1 is unlikely to last long enough to replace the first drive that goes titsup.

UK IT pros love OpenStack. Who says so? SUSE says so

Alan Brown Silver badge

The problem with Suse

Is that they're even bigger on running away when customers have trouble with what's been sold to them than they are with their sales hype.

Uni of Manchester IT director resigns after chopping 68 people

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Do some research!

"Who, among all the IT professionals commenting here, could have managed IT for the London Olympics without outsourcing?"

Temporary events like the Olympics are a good fit for outsourcers. Not so much for large companies/outfits, where outsourcing invariably leads to a race to the bottom in terms of enduser satisfaction and service levels.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Scapegoat?

Hachetmen are routinely hired for this kind of job.

The mistake some make is thinking that such a person would EVER be suitable for managing a growing outfit or having any kind of decent staf relationships - invariably putting someone like this in a position where he's expected to look after the company will result in things rapidly going pear-shaped.

(WRT outsourcing: My opinion - it's useful if you need to cull a lot of deadwood or reorganise the internal workings of the outfit but should never be left outsourced for a prolonger period for the same reasons the report authors put forward.)

They're alive! Galileo sats 9 and 10 sending valid signals

Alan Brown Silver badge

GPS

Gallileo supposedly uses a format compatible with NavStar.

Your old phone/GPS probably won't work with Glonass or Beidou(Compass) and almost certainly won't work with IRNSS, QZSS, the upcoming French system(*) or any of the augmentation systems using ground-based repeaters.

(*) Yes, the french are insisting on having their own independent GPS system, in addition to having fingers in the Gallileo pie.

Layoffs! Lawsuits! Losses! ... Yahoo! is! in! an! L! of! a! mess!

Alan Brown Silver badge

There's also the issue

Of Yahoo being the only major still allowing ivory trading on its network.

Stock can't fall far enough for a company which is profiting from enabling CITES breaches.....

SpaceX breaks capsule 'chute world record

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Deployment speed?

"How is that phase (slowing from reentry speed to 300kts) going to happen?"

The same way that it's always been done.

Aerodynamics. Yes they do have some. Apollo and soyuz chutes deploy at about that speed too.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Retire parachutes?

> Somehow I wouldn't want to sign the order for 'No, we don't need backup 'chutes any more, our retros are 100% reliable."

You won't need to. Chutes are part of the design as last-ditch backups (retros are used for manouvering, so if they don't work you have enough warning to deploy chutes) and for launch escape use (retros used as an escape rocket until fuel-out, capsule comes down under chutes)

US police contracts and private forum posts dumped online

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: American Cops need reforms Re videoing cops

It's not illegal in any state to record cops. Such laws have been ruled as constitutional violations and as such are invalid.

Cops (USA and uk) just wish it was illegal because it means their misdeeds are becoming harder to cover up.

Chip company FTDI accused of bricking counterfeits again

Alan Brown Silver badge

Not counterfeit

The chips in question are not counterfeit.

They're a completely different rs232 device which uses the same command api as fdti''s one. The big sin is using ftdi's USB ID (naughty but common and the basis is that they work alike. They should use one the generic serial device ID if they don't acquire their own one)

There was an analysis of the silicon last time around. The "fake" devices are actually better implemented than FTDI ones and they can be bricked specifially because they adhere to the published command set better than ftdi''s own silicon does.

I suspect that deliberately bricking chips in the UK will come down to the computer misuse act. This could get interesting. ...

The fact that FTDI is setting these to a zero or random I'd is extremely telling. Apart from the dubious legality of trashing end-user equipment they _could_ have reset it to 'generic rs232 device'.

Seagate’s triple whammy: Disk numbers, costs, and flash

Alan Brown Silver badge

As with WD

As soon as SSD is "cheap enough", spinning disks are doomed - and they're cheap enough already for a vast number of applications

And as with WD, noone with any sense will buy Seagate SSD products after both manufacturers fucked over the market using the Thai floods as an excuse (drive prices are still higher than pre-flood, with warranties slashed to boot).

I was willing to buy Hitachi and Toshiba products whilst they were restricted from being folded into WD and Seagate operations respectively, but now the chinese ministry of commerce has allowed that step they're as suspicious as the parent companies.

Expect to see the WD and Seagate names being branding of a major existing SSD maker within 5 years.

It's just not worth purchasing spinning rust below 500GB so we don't - lower support costs more than make up the small pricing difference over 5 years, 10% vs 1% failure rates and longer SSD warranties are enough to see to that.

2TB consumer and 4TB enterprise SSDs already exist(*) - and those 4TB SSDs have lots of empty space than the 2.5" case they come in, so it's clear that suppliers can easily go bigger without higher density product (Samsung have famously already demonstrated a 15TB SATA drive).

HAMR might have staved off the inevitable if it was deployed in 2012, but it's too late now. Unless mechanical drives can miraculously whizz 20TB drives consuming 7W out of a hat, I'd say the market will be dead by the end of 2017 if not sooner.

(*) Edit: those are in conventional form factor. I see Seagate is flogging 3 and 6.4TB drives as PCIe HHHL cards

Why a detachable cabin probably won’t save your life in a plane crash

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Really?

" And there are many more flaws than just the ones you could be bothered to mention."

Separate pressure vessels and the weight penalties associated with them being the first thing that springs to mind, not to mention that in an engine-out situation a plane is still landable and pyros tend to be unreliable. On top of that, in order to make the tube capable of taking the loads in the video without bending you'd have to make it substantially stronger and therefore much heavier still. Would it get off the ground?

Even light aircraft whole-body parachute recovery systems come with penalties and haven't always saved lives

WD notebook drive shipments plummet

Alan Brown Silver badge

nothing to do with shitty reliability

Yeah right.

People are buying SSDs in huge numbers because they work well and have decent warranties.

As soon as large capacity SSDs are available at reasonable prices, they'll gut the consumer and enterpise spinning enterprise market - that said, I just bought a dozen 4TB SSDs despite the pricing because they were the best fit for the server (we needed low latency access to scratchpad data and they were only 4 times the price of equivalent 2.5 inch "enterprise storage" units)

Noone with any sense will buy WD and Seagate if they don't have to. Not after they both screwed the market over in the aftermath of the Thai floods (5 years later and 2-4TB consumer drives are still more expensive than pre-flood, plus only come with 12 month warranty, vs 5 years pre-flood).

The post-rust storage world is going to look different. Look for one of the large SSD makers to buy up the WD/Seagate names in the end, not the other way around.

Shoebox-sized satellite enters orbit packing 3Mbps radio

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Really, those things should only ever be put in a very low orbit so they will de-orbit all by themselves in a couple of years at most."

They are.

The ones in higher orbits have much tougher requirements.

Whilst cubesats were originally intended to allow low cost, low orbit, short duration (before burnup) proof-of-concept missions, the form factor and increasing reliability/miniaturisation of space-rated parts means they're a useful tool for higher orbit work.

Higher orbit devices tend to be fitted with ion thrusters to ensure they can be deorbited at end of mission.

The monitor didn't work but the problem was between the user's ears

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The thing is...

"The lead locks in by clamping to the earth pin until the red tab is pulled."

These only prevent the cable being pulled out of the back of the computer. They don't do much about the 13A plug end (that link is hideously overpriced too)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Office nasty

Taping down the hook switch of a phone is a source of endless amusement when there's an office idiot.

I watched one smash the phone in fustration because it kept ringing after he picked up. He would have had some difficulty explaining it to the boss, except he was the boss.

Alan Brown Silver badge

We had a client

Who insisted on us sending someone out to "fix" her computer.

Every time we arrived, we'd find the program in question had been minimised and pointed this out when producing the bill and report. She swore blind that it was our fault and she hadn't touched anything - nor did she seem to understand how to restore the program from miminized position.

This went on for several months - eventually her husband admitted to minimising the program so he could run something else. *sigh*

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Old IT joke

" where a user rang support to complain that their internet/vpn/whatever wasn't working"

The classic one back in ISP days was people phoning up to complain the internet wasn't working, to discover that they weren't a customer (in some cases they didn't even have a modem).

Needless to say, this did serve as a marketing opportunity and we ended up doing a lot of (paid for) service calls to people who were customer of other (larger) ISPs because we'd actually get things fixed.

Unlike the local computer stores, that didn't mean "erasing the disk/reinstalling windows and destroying EVERYTHING on the hard drive" (usually masses of non-replaceable stuff such as accounting files and documents) in response to any reported issue.

We billed our own customers $100 a shot to sort that out, producing a report on what had been done, with specific instructions to recover the costs from the "repairer" concerned. After claims against a few of the outfits were upheld in small claims court, the practice rapidly stopped.

Whilst the issue of resetting the credentials was minor, the shops in question had been slagging us off/trying to sell them on another ISP (which paid them a commission for the sale) whilst fucking the customers over data-wise. In the end we were making more money from data/virus recovery services - because we could actually recover data, rather than just reformat/reinstall by rote - than from the actual ISP biz and we gained a bunch of very loyal customers.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Old IT joke

It may be an old joke, but I have staff who've had to handle this one for real.

People honestly expect that if the phone is working the computer should be too.

Indonesia's dominant telco blocks Netflix

Alan Brown Silver badge

This block will therefore be an irritant to Netflix

"especially as it's just declared its global rollout more-or-less complete "

Yes... this rollout has me kind of wondering.

I've just returned from Myanmar (Burma), where the fastest domestic connection you can buy is 2Mb/s ADSL, WiMAX or GPON(*) (actually achieving that speed is another matter but you'll be charged USD200/month anyway - the ISPs refuse point blank to divulge the multiplexing ratios), most are 512kb/s and everything IPv4 related is passing through at _LEAST_ 2 layers of NAT before hitting the world.

Netflix doesn't work there. For that matter being in a business office with 2Mb/s connectivity doesn't work that well either when a machine kicks off Windows Updates.

(*) Yes, GPON, as in a real fibre-optic connection, but the maximum speed the ISPs will sell you on it is 4Mb/s (@USD400/month) and getting _real_ (routable) IPv4s will cost you USD$100 apiece and $50/month on top of that. There _is_ 100Mb/s fibre metro ethernet in downtown Yangon - for USD13k/month and again, the ISPs refuse to tell you what usable bandwidth you'll achieve to the Internet outside the country.

Research: By 2017, a third of home Wi-Fi routers will power passers-by

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Leeches

Instead of opting out, all you need to do is use your own router.

Land Rover Defender dies: Production finally halted by EU rules

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Would love a Defender

> I think you'll find that sooner or later the Defender will be built again

I doubt TATA will find sufficient buyers. Airbag and emissions rules are worldwide, not just USA/EU and the Defender can't pass crashtesting rules anyway (it's been grandfathered up to now, but rebasing the production would negate that)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Just

> The Defender was a utilitarian work horse. It's not supposed to be cruising Chelsea!

Nor is it particularly nice on highways.

One of the reasons $orkplace dumped the (series 2 actually, IIRC) for landcruisers in the early 80s was because the latter didn't handle like pregnant whales on tarmac. The other reason was that whilst landies are generally easy to repair when the motor stops, toyotas tend not to stop in the first place.

As for getting bogged - as a kid in the 70s I saw plenty of landies being pulled out of farm tracks by landcruisers and vice-versa, although the cruisers tended to have enough power to barge through thanks to their 4 litre inline 6 (I know landcruisers came in smaller engine variants but noone with any sense bought those). If you're going to venture onto dodgy ground make sure you know WHAT kind of dodgy ground it is and make bloody sure your winch is working. A couple of land anchors don't go amiss either.

(Then there was the dodgy electrics and the oil leaks all over the carpark - neither of which plagued the toyotas. It's no fun having to try and drive 100 miles back to base from a mountaintop with 1 headlamp out and the other flickering)

ICO says TalkTalk customers need to get themselves a lawyer

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: WalkWalk

"They may try a doorstop settlement (letting it go all the way until the day in court),"

They have been.

The danger with that approach is that if the plaintiff wants to, he can insist on getting into court and getting a decision, which given the ICO report is highly likely to go against TT and thereby set guidelines for future cases.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hold on a moment

The second exploit was well-known and has been documented for over a decade.

The only "unknown" part was down to the website developers believing their own press releases.

A security audit AFTER the first breach should have found it and a security audit BEFORE the first breach would have avoided the breaches.

TalkTalk CuffCuffs 'ScamScam CrimCrims'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Only three?

After posting the original comment, a thought occurred to me.

It is entirely possible that the three concerned "just so happen" to be union organisers or similar.

It's an easy way to throw them under a bus and ensure others don't try to step into their shoes.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Only three?

Seriously.

Considering the scale of TT's security issues and the numbers caught when other Indian centres were investigated, this seems implausibly low.

Perhaps these were the ones who were doing the most blindingly obvious things, like printing off details and walking out the door with them.

Of course, it's no use complaining to TT about the call centres, as such complaints are investigated (ignored) by the call centres. I'm glad I dumped them a few years ago (and my old phone numbers - so the tech support scammers can't find me).

Smartmobe brain maker Qualcomm teases 64-bit ARM server chip secrets

Alan Brown Silver badge

"So we're in a race to the cellar for cost/compute and watts/compute."

Until 4 years ago I would have said that _anything_ would outclass x86 on the latter, but Intel has been rolling out a continuous set of surprises.

That said, the x86 instruction set is a bloody mess and walking to a clean sheet design would help a lot in terms of going forward. The thing which stops us buying ARM is more inertia (and availability) than actual requirements for binary compatibility (as long as I can put RHEL on them, I'm good to go)

Come on kids, let's go play in the abandoned nuclear power station

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "..for another 300 years or so.."

"In reality the risk from the radiation is small"

EXACTLY.

There's a bigger risk of chemical poisioning from uranium or plutonium than from any kind of radioactives around any functioning nuclear plant (or one being decommissioned)

Terrible infections, bad practices, unclean kit – welcome to hospital IT

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Computer infections

"It really gets me to see standard office desktops in hospitals"

The interesting thing is that there ARE medically-rated PCs, but they cost more, so accountants won't let you buy 'em.