Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Also aids employment

They ARE powering them with coal. Moving them won't move the power sources but it makes more power available in the distribution system to run heat pumps and get rid of coal burning heating systems in apartment buildings in cities

Longer term the aim is to get rid of the coal and replace it with nuclear heat. That's what the work at Wuwei is all about - Molten Salt nuclear is hot enough to replace coal burners, unlike "conventional" water-moderated plants (it's also MUCH safer than water moderated systems and essentially immune by design to just about every kind of nuclear incident seen in the last 70 years)

When you look at it this way, the coal plant rollout makes more sense. The layout of the sites clearly allows for something to be dropped in later and a MSR plant is 1/4 the size of the equivalent coal source

Renewables are nice but essentially only an expensive stepping stone to carbon-free power generation. They can't provide everything needed and they're more expensive than MSRs

Ans yes, MSRs are the thorium future Lester was pushing on this site 10-15 years ago. China ran with it. Others will too. 2MW pilot plant has been running since November 2021 (replicating Oak Ridge test site byt starting with the thorium proposal Nixon killed in 1972), A 100MWe plant is being built alongside it to validate the Oak Ridge power proposals and next step is GW scale full size power plants

Re: Amazon

Amazon never bothered in the first place

Re: I think that

Threads was a nice drama, but multimegaton city-killing nukes were history before the end of the 1960s

ICBM MIRV nukes are "dial a yield" 50-150kT devices and almost always set to the low end of that range

You're still going to have a very bad day if one goes off near you but the terror factor of the things was hyped up by a number of organisations/governments for various reasons

(Neutron bombs aren't anti-personnel weapons either. They're anti-weapon devices intended to airburst in front of incoming ICBMs and denature the fissiles, just like the old AIM1 "Genie" air-to-air nuclear missle was intended to work on incoming bombers - they lost their original purpose when the antiballistic missile treaty was signed and defending the Fulda Gap was proposed as an alternative use)

Re: SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?

"raining nukes" is unlikely to be how it plays out in the end

The most effective way to use a nuke isn't to drop it on a hardened target or a city

See Starfish Prime

Airburst - 10-20 miles up (not so high it fries all the satellites in orbit). The EMP will wipe out electrical and telecommunication grids for several hundred miles in every direction. Negligible fallout, blast or radiation damage on the ground - unfortunately anyone looking in the wrong direction at the time will need a new set of retinas

Re: "Of course you realize, this means war"

"Consider that their foreign policy since 1300 has been essentially 1000 miles of buffer to the west."

There, fixed that for you.

The reason is Genghis Khan's horde and the way they rushed in unopposed over the steppes, taking over the Rus (viking) princedoms in the 1250s in a matter of weeks

Re: "Of course you realize, this means war"

Perhaps, perhaps not - refer to the Budapest Memorandum

30 years ago, Ukraine handed over all its former soviet nuclear weapons for destruction/dismantling, with assurances of security from both NATO and Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Ukraine

"Ukraine held about one third of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, the third largest in the world at the time, as well as significant means of its design and production"

Russia has systemically breached every part of the memorandum. This is the last domino to fall. If it is ignored then all neighbours of nuclear states will feel compelled to arm themselves to protect against invasion

Re: "Of course you realize, this means war"

"recruit more lawyers ready to gum up the works and ward off any attempt at seizure"

There are two ways of freezing/seizing their assets - one is to prove it's theirs and then seize it, the other is to freeze it and then make the lawyers prove it isn't within X time period

Either way will hurt them economically

Re: "Of course you realize, this means war"

Various people who grew up being taught how propaganda campaigns were used in 1930s Europe were VERY upset by slogans on big red busses in 2016

The UK is slipping down a well trodden path. Bad days are coming and this time Moseley's blackshirts are sitting in the corridors at Downing Street

Re: Don't just criticize.

That's a visitor period, not a working one.

Re: The Downfall: Boeing doc on Netflix.

It's not just the Max

The NG had major issues too:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/boeing-whistleblowers-unc_n_797515

The fact that the FAA was utterly owned by Boeing by 2005 is underscored by the fact the whistleblowers were shopped back to the company by FCC officials (a federal crime in itself) within days and no punishment or investigation ever ensued

Re: Photo...

787s are also vulnerable

Yes really

No airbus aircraft is vulnerable at _any_ US domestic airport

Re: In conclusion

"The ninth category is called the hype"

It's part of the PR category - which is a literal 1950s rebranding of "propaganda" because the latter name had become toxic after WW2

Re: Too expensive

"And it's not all that difficult to write software for networking gear."

Broadcom and Nvidia have done almost all the heavy lifting - virtyually everything at 100Gb/s and below is using commodity switch chipsets with a very small shim to give a frontend

"Many networking devices are just computers running Linux these days..."

See above. They're small linux systems controlling commodity chipsets

The thing that really irks about Cisco is that they charge extra for stuff which is BUILT IN to the chipsets and enabled by default (You can buy whitebox kit using the same chips and run whatever flavour of routeros you want) whilst making a big song and dance about "R&D" - that may have been true in the past but Since Broadcom came along with the Trident series 8 years ago, they're mostly just another box shifter

Let's not also forget that Cisco GOT to be dominant by shipping cheap unencumbered kit that undercut the existing Telco-oriented behemoths whilst providing a "useful" set of features.

It's the Microsoft model - "perfect is the enemy of Good Enough" - and once dominance is achieved in a market, break out the thumbscrews (Embrace, extend, Extinguish - remember the Hallooween memos)

The difference this time is that the USA government is joining in the industrial warfare and demonising cheaper kit from other countries instead of letting Cisco (and others) be forced to improve their product - we've seen this before - it's what happened to the USA car industry in the 1960s-80s when 25% import tax was imposed on light trucks and vans, creating a captive market (It's also happening in the Aviation sector - Comac is the current villain de jure, after Airbus proved impossible to take down)

Re: Follow the money

"Inadequately refurbished used parts are another problem."

A friend of mine bought rotor blades for his Huey from the USA - after a couple hours on the machine they started looking/feeling odd so he pulled them off and had them reinspected

When the paint was removed it was discovered they'd been shot full of holes at close range with a 12-gauge plus folded and straightened - further tracing revealed the blades were an old set of lifetime expired ones which had been scrapped. Someone at the aviation scrapyard had taken the blades, bogged the holes, flattened and cleaned them up, selling them as new

These parts are $40k a pair - and it all happened in the USA

As a result of this discovery, written off helicoptor rotors are routinely put into industrial shredders or cut into small segments to prevent repeats - Helicoptors whose blades fold up mid-flight are colloquially known as "rocks" (and it HAS happened)

Re: Impressed?

How about looking up sawdust and arsenic in British foods?

Gutter oil isn't exactly a new thing. It's been done in the USA too (just not recently)

Re: Impressed?

THIS in spades

I'm going to call out BT Inet on this: They tried to sell us Cisco kit "at an amaaaazing 85% discount over list" - which was still more expensive than buying it retail from Insight

When we pointed that out, they just repeated the spiel about their discount being amazing and unbeatable

They didn't get the sale. Huawei did - and a large part of that was because Cisco's sales technique consisted of senior sales managers turning up and saying "We're Cisco, you WILL buy our product" - with some implied menace

The complete Huawei cost for more capable kit and 5 year support was significantly less than the Cisco support contract alone

Re: Hearing and Obeying, Mr. Trump

Back in the days when they were running licensed Cisco and Dell code?

or 3com - The big presentation on "Huawei vulnerabilities" about 7 years ago was entirely holes in 3ware, which Huawei were running at that point (and all holes were present in 3com kit, even after Huawei ceased using them and dissolved the H3C partnership - some are still present in HP kit

Re: Who's the UK?

That moved to Rammstein a long time ago. The UK is superfluous to USA's European ambitions

Re: Who's the UK?

"Yes, and that's because any US citizen or permanent resident who has a pressing need to open a foreign bank account by traveling to a foreign country is more than likely doing so for US tax evasion purposes or money laundering, and not much else."

Tell that to American Citizens living in foregn countries who need local bank accounts to do day to day living

The requirements on banks are so onorous that most just washed their hands of Americans as not being worth the costs

Re: Childish behaviour

Actually, it was Australia that started it

They postulated a scenario where Huawei "might" pose a threat. This was turned into a "reiable sources say" edict from the USA

Vince Cable has explicitly admitted that GCHQ have repeatedly given Huaweai's kit a clean bill of health and the _only_ reason that Huawei is being banned is because the US government forced it

News Stories on this:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/uk-banned-huawei-because-us-told-us-to-former-minister/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CnC_zLaf9I (China is peeved)

and the actual admission:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1mAxEoG2bo

politicians continuing to say stupid/slanderous things

The UK prime minister has been doing this a lot recently - including at least one item which if he'd uttered it outside of the chamber would have resulted in legal proceedings

As a lot of his chumps are repeating it (and the target has experienced a few attacks+death threats), I expect there will be some interesting fallout. The target has a year and a day to make his move and I have little doubt that he will do so

Repeating or affirming something said under parliamentary/courtroom privilege outside parliament/courtooms puts the utterer very squarely in the legal crosshairs (There was case in Canada which illustrated that a few years back where a politician gave a courthouse steps press statement affirming the wild accusations made in the courtroom and ended up being legally eviscerated as a result)

The saga of Lord Adonis springs to mind...

Re: There’s more than what meets the eye

"more than a few of them are just not very bright"

Those who can - do

those who can't - teach

those who can't teach - go into politics

My parents were school principals (very good ones), meaning I got exposed to a lot of what the teaching profession has to offer. Let's just say that the third category is a low bar to hit

That said, I've known some VERY good and highly principled politicians, but the system is stacked against them from the outset. They usually burn out

Re: There’s more than what meets the eye

In a similar vein, the overriding urge of a bureaucracy is to preserve and enlarge itself

I've toyed a number of times with the concept of creating agencies with a hardcoded drop dead date but that would probably result in things being even worse

Re: There’s more than what meets the eye

More precisely for politicians, you only need to fool enough of the voters during reelection time

Re: Talking about cables

> (* Virgin were taken off the list of 'approved suppliers' because... well, life's too short!)

If you think that's bad, try getting an outage fixed when Virgin and BT are pointing fingers at each other, so won't go out in less than 24 hours (on a 24*7 4 hour onsite contract)

Re: red alerts

"they sometimes manage to work their way out of the socket"

More often than not it's dozy pricks not pushing them fully home in the first place.

I've never seen one work its way out unless snagged

Re: red alerts

I've seen it happen often enough that I insist on using self-anchoring cord sockets. These solve a LOT of aggravation later on (think: someone fumbling in badly lit back of rack knocks out black power lead from black socket in a dark environment. Do you think they'll notice it?)

Re: red alerts

Agreed.

The moment the stepladder was denied I'd cite my own Helath and safety plus "local obstructions" as a reason for cancelling the job (and charging for the hours spent onsite or XYZ minimum charge)

When manglement get a few bills like that, they tend to start asking pointed questions of underlings

Re: But did he learn the biggest lesson of all?

There are only 6-8 universal keys for most cabinets

" I can only imagine that the school technician had forgotten all that "

You imagine he retained it in the first place, or that whoever was assigned the job even knew about VLANs

The solution to that is to produce photos of the "before" and say "that's not how we left it and this isn't supportable, it'll cost to put right"

My instant reaction to _ANYONE_ waterfalling cabling in my racks is to remove it.

I simply won't tolerate it and on a new site it's the first cleanup job on the list

Cable management is there to ensure things can be swapped out quickly in an emergency and the horizontal row of rings below/above the switch isn't there for decorative purposes (nor are patch runs so taut that you can't trace a cable by tugging it and feeling the other end of the bundle - something picked up in telco days))

It also means that for switch swaps as described, the plugs aren't going anywhere once removed and you have an opportunity to check the rear of the cabinet

What do you mean you don't have a couple of trouble lamps?

What really irks me about most large switches is the way they tend to require 2 people to install - one at the back to hold the rear up whilst guiding the unit into place. My solution to that is to use ventilated 1U "L" rails(*) (beware the solid ones. Most switches use sideways airflow, not front to back)

* eg: https://www.network-cabs.co.uk/acatalog/1U-19-inch-Universal-Server-Rack-Rails---Adjustable-Depth----450mm-to-600mm-Fitting-AD1UADJSR_300.html

Which is absolutely fine where the company owns the device

Not so fine when the device in question is MY personal telephone or computer

In such a case I'd be talking to lawyers about CMA-related actions against the employer/school and they'd better hope their liability underwriters aren't looking for reasons to revoke cover (such as not having changed critical passwords after letting the IT tech go)

Re: Mazda's Infotainment is a pile of garbage

Outside of the haggis hunting season, the midges are hunting YOU