Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Musk is known for being on the left

"I am against a general smoking ban because it's none of my business what people are doing with their lives"

It becomes my business when their activities give me migraines (which tobacco smoke does - and the fumes from a smoker even after they put it out and go indoors are sufficient to trigger it for several minutes afterwards - in things like shop queues it becomes essentially unavoidable - that's without smokers ignoring smoking bans in enclosed areas or smoking just outside building windows - some of them actually ENJOY causing problems for other people - the same mentality as wankers who break other people's things for shits and giggles)

Re: Deluge

"Tesla wasted tons on automating parts of their assembly line"

For the very simple reason that Musk is vhemently anti-union and the "easiest" way to eliminate them is to eliminate humans entirely even if it costs more up front to do so

Meatbag do better _for the moment_ but improved machine vision and processing power is likely to change that equation. Let's not forget that assembly line workers were more than happy for robots to take over the dirty and dangerous functions on lines and only became upset when robots started encroaching on the easy work

Re: Deluge

NASA's flame trenches are rather famously overengineered (and were created only after unfortunate earlier experiences) _incredibly_ expensive to build and thanks to the high water tables had to be built on top of the existing ground level (hence the mounds and infamous ramps for each launcpad, with the massive engineering challenges needed for the crawler to not tip over its payload as it ascends)

SpaceX was trying to build mitigation without excavation and the costs of the flame plate is still far lower than NASA's trench/mounds, let alone the engineering challenges posed by getting stacks into position on them

Re: We were not gentle, and each RM03 had a rough journey

As noted, a realignment was almost always what was actually needed - remember they parked heads off the platters

It was far worse if mains was applied to sensitive parts of the low voltage circuitry by way of a "PSU fault", usually resulting in widespread release of Magic Smoke

Re: Someone wanted a new laptop

I recall having seen this done with a red Ford Ka (complete with black dots) as the booby prize https://www.flickr.com/photos/48703330@N06/with/4461400014 for an example

It was joined a few months later by a black one with yellow dots

This was doubly effective because of the faff that reps had getting stuff into/out of the things

Re: Impossible you say? Maybe unsinkable, huh?

Correct.

For the record the claim was that due to the double hulled design "the ship was its own lifeboat"

The concept of smacking into ice mountains ten times the size, weighing 100++ times more than the ship and with all the "give" of a granite mountain or that cast steel plates of the era became almost as brittle as glass in freezing conditions wasn't something that had crossed designers' knowledge set at the time (all their tests were in english conditions, not arctic ones and they thought of icebergs as little things they'd seen in Northern European waters)

The first step to speaking any foreign language well is to learn how to swear like a sailor in it

Re: Errors that *should* never occur

Yup

I've asked users to quote the exact error message to me and they've been unable to do so - even when I can clearly read it over their shoulder on the screen - assuming they didn't immediately close it and then tell me there's no error message and it just did nothing at all

These are senior management with multiple PhDs too

Having got them to actually read the words out loud and asked them what they think it might mean (for the actually useful error messages - like email addresses must be addressed to someuser@domain.name and not left blank) - they'll throw their hands up in horror at being asked to THINK

There's old joke about "having a little dinosaur pop up waving a rainbow flag" being about the only way to get them to succinctly tell you what is happening - and it's scarily accurate

I was once disciplined for writing an email that stated that one particular user should be put in a job where she should be allowed to control nothing more complicated than an etch-a-sketch - someone forwarded her a copy of it. HR were trying very hard to conceal their laughter (She'd just cost us a week of downtime in her office, having bypassed all the antivirus software to open a spam email attachment on the basis of "it must be important" - for the THIRD time in a month.) She also complained loudly about my lecturing her as if she was five years old about the amount of time and money my staff had wasted cleaning up all the infgested machines she'd triggered (it was the third time I spoken to her and I was rather tired of it...). I was having to bite my tongue to stop saying what I really thought of her behaviour or question who she'd "done favours" for to land the job in the first place

Re: ""Karens" may not have been a thing then"

I've always thought "Hagathas" was more appropriate

A real "proper" AI robot war instead of glorified RC toys could be........ fun

Re: "Please tell me, the mod is available for all tesla cars"

Or it's installed very shortly after purchase

Re: Good use

Not quite as bad with the HIDs in my Nissan, but the lamps lasted 12 years. I know I'd have been replacing them more frequently for halogens

What got me was the wild variation in prices - £120/bulb from Nissan vs £25 for the identical Philips bulb from a factor (NOT Halfrauds - they were almost as expensive as Nissan)

What gets me is the tendency to overdrive LEDs so they have bulb-like lifespans. FFS they should last 20 years in automotive applications and manufacturers should be getting fined for producing ones that fail in service

Re: That old chestnut

"You typically need an intermediary or a proxy that both ends are connected to"

Congratulations. You just created a backdoor into your network that can be exploited (and was (still is) - heavily - by hackers attacking Chinese IP-based cameras/DVRs)

Re: That old chestnut

IPv7 (TP/IX - RFC 1475) and IPv9 (TuBA - RFC1347) were are both attempts to extend IPv4 which broke its backwards compatibility whilst being more complicated and less usable than IPv6

IPv5 and 8 were voice protocols and merged into SIP

NAT "firewalls" are dangerous coincidences (They're an artifact of the translation process, not an actual firewall) and anyone relying on NAT for protection is simply counting down to WHEN they get pwned, not IF

(TuBA encapsulated IPv4 in CLNP packages, TP/IX extended addressing AND port ranges)

Ironically, IPv4 was originally proposed with 128-bit addressing but shouted down as being too big for a research network with v4 intended for a 5-year lifespan

The basic problem is that no matter _how_ you slice it, adding address space breaks IPv4 - IPv6 hosts can still reach IPv4 hosts but not the other way around. Remaining on IPv4 is building a self-inflicted walled-garden around your horizons and sooner or later it's easier to switch networking stacks than to keep piling on kludges

Re: That old chestnut

IPv4 via NAT is semi-broken

IPv4 over multiple levels of NAT is badly broken and a nightmare - even web pages can take minutes to update

Half of Asia can ONLY get online via multiple levels of NAT (at one point the entire country of Vietnam was on one /24), whilst western countries mostly have adequate IPv4 holdings. I've had connections in Myanmar and Laos which make 300bps modems look snappy

CGN suits telcos and The Powers That Be (TPTB) because it converts a two-way communications system into a mostly-broadcast one of centralised control (essentially cutting off endpoints from hosting their own resources as globally accessible entities) - you can think of this as a "Great Firewall" without the political controversy

Re: My Stupid ISP

One way is for misleading advertising laws to be used - IPv4-only providers being told they are not allowed to advertise themselves as "Internet" providers because they're selling a walled garden

Re: Google's IPv6 Statistics Peaked?

At the start of 2024, we're at 48% and growth continues to be linear - so both models are (so far) wrong, with one (the 28% limit prediction) not having aged well

Uptake is still poor though

Re: "imagine that your self-driving electric car did not crash into a tree and catch fire"

ebikes tend to have shitty battery containment, unlike the robust steel casings for car battery modules

Re: Question from someone who isn't a lawer:

"the supposedly regulated is allowed to become its own regulator"

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

"In politics, regulatory capture (also called agency capture) is a form of corruption of authority that occurs when a political entity, policymaker, or regulator is co-opted to serve the commercial, ideological, or political interests of a minor constituency, such as a particular geographic area, industry, profession, or ideological group."

Telcos have achieved this almost universally worldwide. It's particularly bad in the USA, but it's happened to some extent anywhere there's a revolving door from regulatory positions to senior positions in or board member of regulated companies

"Optus...is yet to master ISO 9000"

ISO9000 merely certifies that you have documentation for procedures. Not that it's correct or actually followed

I used to joke in the 1990s that I could write an ISO9000 spec on flying a 747 into the World Trade Centre (or Angel Falls), but for obvious reasons it was meaningless to do so...

There are other ISO9xxx standards which cover making sure the documentation and real world are interrelated and how to deal with cases where they don't correspond. My experience with "ISO9000" companies hasn't been wonderful to say the least (Mostly full of boxticking jobsworths, vs people who want to ensure the job is done RIGHT as well as being fully documented)

The reason for the joke is that I've seen ISO9000 specs which if actually followed would result in destruction of equipment or serious injuries - and yet they had been signed off, with later attempts to point out the flaws resulting in manglement demands to "do it per the spec" (and scapegoating of staff who did so, then broke things in the process)

In the Internet paradigm, one of the most glaring examples of spec not matching reality is the DNS RFCs vs the implmentation - both penned by the same person (Paul Vixie) - when the discrepencies were pointed out the reaction was "hostile" (to put it mildly) and they have never been addressed (Hence why you can express IPv4 in octal/hex/binary/integer when the specs are very clear about it being a dotted quad of base10 numbering from 0-255)

Re: Kind of see his point.

"not revealing exact routing means it's harder for people to sabotage infrastructure"

That's no excuse for not recording everything.

I spent 2 weeks tracing cables at one site, following a bunch of false leads thanks to abandoned copper which was still connected at one end and numerous jointing birds nests

A good chunk of my time in telcos was spent meticulously updating cable records every time we touched something (local pencil/paper, with carbon copies taken back to base and updated as soon as we walked in the door, along with crosschecks every year or so). The level of sloppiness seen in current installations is mind boggling and there's no excuse for it, given the ease of updating things online using a tablet (or recording for uploading later)

Vertical monopolies are the primary issue. They're too easy to abuse.

The distribution networks (power, gas, telecoms, etc) should be prohibited from operating or investing in retail operations (whilst safeguards must be in place to prevent ANY entity from acquiring influencing/controlling interests in the wholesale networks)

New Zealand analysed the BT model very carefully when evaluating how to break the stranglehold of a rapacious monopoly telco - and documented how BT uses it to maintain its vertical monopoly

That's WHY they forced the separation of the lines and dialtone parts of the business into wholly independent companies, with cleaved ownership

BT may now have Openreach as a "separate company" but by still owning the lines side they continue to hold an abusive monopoly

(In short: a natural monopoly is easily abused and needs very careful regulation. You can see the potential for things to go wrong with Centrica making out like bandits at wholesale level)

Re: Excelent design - aliens must be proud

"At least going back not *too* long, IBM could still provide radiation hardened PowerPC processors."

There are several rad hardened CPUs available. They're not the latest tech but they're not ancient history either

Look up "Starfish Prime"

It even managed to badly damage satellites launched AFTER it was exploded

Re: Why can't they just...

You shouldn't be worried about the water depth at Point Nemo

You should be worried that it's the location of Ry'leh

Re: "just in the nick of time"

> the ISS will be coming down

It could be boosted using existing ion tug technology but the bigger problem isn't its orbit

It's suffering the same space fungus problem that MIR had, meaning that reusing segments of it (as has been repeatedly proposed) may potentially cause that fungus problem to develop faster on newly attached modules

Re: Ban banning things

"I'd buy a raft of cheap Android phones, with one sim in each"

Or a bunch of cheap USB 4G sticks?