Posts by Alan Brown 15079 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
Will pitch up asking 50 times the going rate
I've been telling people for the last 15-20 years that if they really want to make money, learn COBOL and take the time to understand ancient systems - it's still around, all the old hands are dying off and nobody understands the installations well enough to port to new software(*), so managers are afraid to touch it
However it's not just a matter of understanding the language, when you work with ancient code you usually also need to try and understand the mindset and culture of the prople writing it, for the simple reason that it will help you decode what they wrote.
(*) Look at all the clusterfucks(**) resulting from inadequately thought out attempts...
(**) Including NJ's previous attempts(***) (thanks to other posters for the pointer)
(***) Ah, Mr Bond, I see you have returned, having discovered there are no other vendors who can assist you. No problem - but the cost will be $$$THISMUCH (5 times previous figure), we write the spec thorough;y based on what you learned last time, then we get 100% control of the project, no thirdparty buttinskis allowed or there will be penalty clauses invoked.
But you're desperate? Oh dear, the cost just doubled.
"And as you know, all computers need to be rebooted every 2 or 3 days if they are to work correctly."
This is one of the things I rail against. Windows has people so trained to do this it can be bloody hard to PREVENT them doing so.
I had *nix systems in schools during the the 90s which I ended up having to disconnect all front panel buttons, lock off the power cables and tell secretaries to NOT allow any "IT" or "technical" staff near because "reboot/power cycle" was their preferred solution.
A 386-based system with 4MB ram and slow drives being forced to regenerate quotas because some twat hit the power switch isn't going to take kindly to the same twat deciding it's taking too long to boot and doing the same thing again. The fact that it was running slowly in the first place due to the room being nearly 50C (failed cooling - aka someone turned off the extractor fan) being something that _entirely_ escaped their attention....
And of course there are the faults which carry on for _years_ because some bright spark keeps resetting the kit before a tech shows up on site to be able to diagnose said fault which only manifests after several days of operation.
"To be fair, most of these things only become an issue when you want to change something"
Not always. It took me a while to track down the occasional smell of what seemed to be burning rubber in my flat - we thought it was smokers outside.
It turned out to be a segment of 1930s-era wiring that hadn't been disconnected in the 1970s when the building was rewired - and it wasn't burning up at the end that had been disturbed by the rewiring job.
I ran into a similar situation when sorting out a user who was having trouble with her home system.
Afterwards I suggested she segregate her accounts and NOT give "that" one out for serious business correspondence anymore due to what might show up if anyone google searched for it.
No serious mind bleach needed but it underscored how little thought people give to their privacy
"I wasted countless hours arguing with ICT teachers about how images should be cropped before insertion into documents. "
I think the point was made in the days of 28k8 modems when they found their fabulous web pages were taking an hour to show up on the client browsers
It wasn't just ICT teachers either. One of the standout memories was when demonstrating the web to teachers: one of them went to a major fashion house website - which stayed blank, and blank and blank, despite the lights on the modem going furiously. I demonstrated a bunch of other stuff and after about 15 minutes hit "stop" (this was back in very early mozilla days) to find it had only downloaded about 10% of the images on the front page.
Which made a great introduction to the appropriateness of sizing of images. "graphics" fiends were determined that things should be as high rez and possible and insisted that people would wait - at which point just about everyone in the audience would laugh at them.
Railway lines were almost always built away from habited areas as much as possible and if there was a village stop it would almost always be on the edge of the village at the time (or even some distance outside of it). Routes were determined by the cheapest available land (and where canal companies hadn't deliberately bought up tracts to block railways)
People being people, when you remove a railway, you can never put it back where it was, because all the habitation and urbanisation has clustered around the former line, making that land far too expensive to ever justify putting a railroad on again.
One town I lived in had the railway line running up the main street (yes really) because the town grew out both sides from the line. For safety's sake in the 1960s it was diverted 3 miles to the (then) edge of town, railway easements installed and a new railway station built - meant to mark that side of the town because beyond that point was floodprone floodplain.
40 years later, that railway station on the edge of down and line which mostly had fields each side of it is now in the middle of dense suburbia (and industrial estates closer to the station).....
"And how was this (to engineers) welcome state of affairs changed? "
Most likely by customers telling manglement that if they didn't have XYZ engineer stepping off the next available flight, there would be rapdd rearrangements of both maintenance contracts and repeat sales to "someone else who doesn't fuck the essential staff around"
" I strongly suspect that at least two of our former or current customer facing systems have had a feature of us setting the password containing, say, $ but when the user types $ in the password it doesn't work."
What repeatedly catches people out is using £ € ¬ ` or _
Stick to US-ASCII-127 for passwords or Bad Things Happen (and memorise the US layout - it's almost always that at bootup, no matter what you may think)
"Strangely for such a porn filled machine there wasn't any malware that could be detected"
If he's willing to admit it's full of porn, he's also likely to actually think about the malware that comes from such sites and fit a rubber glove to his machine.
It's people who deny they ever went near bustybabesdoingdonkeys.com that are the ones carrying problematic viral loads (wetware and silicon) - and you'd be surprised at the kinds of people who go there (not just the usual suspects)
"I'm convinced that diet soda foams quite a bit more than regular."
It does.
Carefully open a can of (unshaken) diet coke
Carefully open a can of (unshaken) ordinary coke
Now pick each one up in turn and slam the bottom down _hard_ on a tabletop (keep it upright, you're not trying to spill or crush anything)
Compare the resulting mess
By the way, airline cabin staff passionately HATE people who ask for diet coke at 30,000 feet because the stuff is more likely to make a mess and takes longer to pour/settle
Diet Pepsi can be just as bad. I've had a 2 litre bottle jet away across a carpark after being dropped. The shock and gas release was enough to blow the cap off and it went about 50 metres
"Yes you can use some aerodynamic braking if you want to carry the mass of a heatshield"
A lot of the issues with heatshields have to do with the shield being the same size as the spacecraft (meaning the energy of the mass*velocity scrub off has to be dissipated over a small surface area)
If you make it considerably larger then the issues are reduced considerably. NASA has been working on this for a long time (so have other agencies) - the easiest way being an _inflatable) heatshield - which is nowhere near as crazy as it sound and has been tested a few times already
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojgDZZIsWA4
"You have to make stuff go really fast horizontally to make it to orbit and so you have to spend the same energy/fuel to get it to stop orbitting."
Most of the effort is about decrowding the orbits. The actual incremental cost of a spacecraft is very low compared with the mission costs (all those models and manhours) and if it's end of life all you really need to do is make the orbit eccentric enough that it will graze the atmosphere. Friction will do the rest for you very quickly.
If you _really_ need millions of tons to LEO, there's always Project Orion
"According to Anandtech's press-release review these CPU's are last years Coffee-Lake rebranded and binned for voltage profile to allow the high clock,"
Another review site pointed out that the "gains" posted over older systems with a vastly inferior video card and most of the supposed gains are a result of the video card, not the CPU
"There are US manufactured parts which are not allowed to be shipped to Huawei to be integrated into the end product."
The result of THAT is a lot of US companies which are hurting badly and seriously looking at moving their production facilities along with HQs out of the USA.
China's the single biggest customer for most of them. In many cases it's 60-70% of their production.
"The American WW2 command economy stopped almost overnight at the end of the war."
Except it didn't. It was pointed out even during the 1970s that the "command economy" was still operating in large sectors of the USA industry
Just because civilians didn't see most of it didn't mean that it wasn't there and that the military tail wasn't increasingly wagging the dog
"And yet the CFR in Italy is around 7%."
For cases which are being hospitalised yes....
The problem is that you can't count cases if you don't measure them and the vast majority of cases aren't being measured.
Italy is complicated by the issue that not all deaths linked to Covid outside hospitals are being recorded as Covid deaths
"Personally if this had lost me my job i would take the call centre job in a heart beat"
Only if it came with a substantial pay jump - you KNOW it's short term, so treat it like a contracting gig.
"I wonder how many companies who where quick to lay off staff will find themselves out of position when this all blows over, "
I'm hoping that Wetherspoons and Sport Direct are high on that list. The way they treated their staff was beyond appalling and deserves the "won't be crossing that threshold again until there's new ownership" treatment.
"you need to be in close contact for significant time to get infected."
You don't even need to inhale droplets to be infected. Having them settle on the moist surfaces of your eyes is sufficient. Do you wear _goggles_ as well as masks?
It's all about "chances" of getting in contact with a droplet containing virus-laden particles. You might be fine after 15 minutes (unlikely) or something might smack into your cornea in less than 30 seconds.
" Issuing basic face masks would help contain the spread"
Not really, the ones you see people wearing aren't fine enough to stop much.
" However face masks would make telephone operators harder to understand ... unless their mic can be worn inside the mask?"
I've tried this whilst filtering out pollen (hay fever). Mic inside the mask is even more unintelligible than mic outside the mask.
Phone headsets is an art and there's a reason that the likes of Plantronics still exist,
"ETA: I've done a bit of Googling but don't know enough to figure out specifically which reactor type you're referring too."
The Oak Ridge Molten Salt Reactor Experiment - powered by Uranium (all MSRs are uranium burners, despite what some may say) but fuellable by thorium (the thorium is converted to Uranium on the fly) - and it was when Weinberg's group applied for funding to move to proving the thorium cycle that it was killed in favour of Nixons cronies' "fast breeder reactor" (which wasn't built and would have been cooled by liquid sodium - ask the folks at Monju how smart an idea that coolant turned out to be)
Google: terms "Oak Ridge Experiment" "LFTR" and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyDbq5HRs0o - thankfully scientists given orders to destroy everything hid as much as they could instead.
Because of the way they work, MSRs are also capable of burning up just about all kinds of "high level nuclear waste" from older reactors - nicely solving the disposal problem.
The primary advantage is that they eliminate water in the nuclear loop and cycle (water or steam is core issue behind almost all civil nuclear accidents - whether that's corrosion/pressure/radioactive steam/dissolved "bits"/etc or people mixing things badly when reprocessing - mainly because they don't NEED to do that kind of reprocessing(*))
(*) Lookup the horrible accident known as the Nuclear Ouchi (reprocessing), or what happened at SL-1 (steam). Chernobyl was a steam explosion that blew the roof off the reactor room and Fukushima's hydrogen explosions were a direct result of the water cooling systems used (ALL critical reactor water cooling systems generate hydrogen/oxygen even when not melting down - so there's always a risk of a hydrogen-oxygen explosion in a water-moderated reactor vessel as well as them being steam bombs). There have been a number of near misses due to cooling water nearly eating its way out of the pipework too. Very hot/pressurised water is _not benign (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country)
There's a lot not covered, but the short version is that despite lots and lots of safety systems layered on top of boiling water reactors, they're still a test rig design scaled up to Heath-Robinson sizes and fundamentally unsafe. MSRs are safer from the outset inasmuch as most of the failure modes of a water-moderated system simply can't happen, attempts to break the test reactor in the 1960s caused it to either shut down or limit its output at slightly above maximum - AND it can be run down to zero then back up to full power very quickly without the neutron poisoning issues that plague all other designs (the Oak Ridge system used to be shut off on Friday afternoon and run up on Monday morning because nobody wanted to mind it over the weekend - no other reactor design of the same size (8MW) in history has been able to do that)
"R&D to reduce harmful pollutants"
We already KNOW what the least polluting, least dangerous form of energy production is nuclear power.
We also KNOW that there's a variant of this which doesn't come with the possiblilty of steam/hydrogen explosions, water leaks or fires spreading potentially tens of tons of short lived but nasty radionucleides over the surrounding countrysides AND which makes the production of nuclear weapons from the existing fuel production cycle a lot harder to justify AND is itself a hell of a lot more proliferation resistant than the existing disposal/fuelling cycles AND would be significantly cheaper than the existing infrastructure to build (possibly as low as 1% of current costs, not to mention fuel being $100/kg vs $50,000/kg) due to not needing multibillion dollar steam explosion containment vessels or waste storage ponds, etc.
However that particular Nirvana was killed off by one Richard Milhous Nixon in 1972, all research ordered destroyed and US laws rewritten to not only stomp on the corpse, but to prevent it ever being tried again on American soil - whilst simultaneously kicking the guy who'd made that better mousetrap out of the industry - despite the fact that he was the guy who'd INVENTED the nuclear reactor as we know it.
At some point in the future Alvin Weinberg will be on of the Technical Saints
"We were globally all caught with our pants down, despite SARS and MERS, but that's because this COVID-19 is much more transmissible"
Not at all. We were "globally caught with our pants down" because our "beloved leaders" repeatedly ignored the warnings that stuff needed to be prepared in advance for such things as "scaremongering"
The primary reason this initially got away from China in the first place is because "China" isn't some monolithic "thing" but wildly fractured and the Wuhan local/regional (think "state" - each region is the size of a US state or EU country) authorities were frantically trying to cover everything up to the point of lieing to and obstructing to the Chinese national (equivalent of federal) medical investigators.
Once the Chinese central plan kicked in, they managed to curb things pretty well, all things considered - and I'm betting that as they rules they had in place were the direct result of the mess after SARS, they'll be revising them to ensure local authorities don't have an opportunity to coverup next time (ie, national reporting hotlines and the kinds of penalties for officials who deliberately put public health in danger that will make not even _consider_ trying to sing the "Happy Happy Joy Joy" song instead of telling the truth.
What's also crystal clear out of this and the SARS/MERS pandemics is that the survival of your populations depends on the quality of the day-to-day medical care available to the poorest and most vulnerable members of your society. Failure to look after your poor has a historic tendency to be a self-correcting factor (one example: Wages for labourers increased by a factor of five after the Black Death swept across Europe and they were pretty much able to name their own conditions)
The main takehome is that there's no need for them to be at Vegas. The original reason for doing them there was that it was CHEAP. That went away a long time ago
These things used to be trade shows and fairly staid affairs. Since the 1980s they've grown glitz way out of proportion to their actual importance.
"The Darwin effect may come into play - except it is the vulnerable who are at highest risk."
We're starting to see a few "young and healthy" get killed.
I suspect wakeup alarms might now be ringing, but there's still a large element of "only happens to other people" mentality going on. (the same mindset as "rules are for other people")
It's worse than that, it's full of xenophobic sentiment and "They WILL learn Australian values" jingoism (remember that this is the same country that responded to speeding tickets being overturned in court by evidence from a CSIRO scientist showing how badly the radar units had been setup by banning government scientists from giving evidence AND declaring that radar is infallible)
My Australian relatives locked down early, so did a lot of people - but Bondi Beach and others show that Oz is as full of twats as the USA and UK when it comes to contagions. Things are likely to get quite bad.
Time to Bring Out The Boot! (and apply it to the PM)
"In return for which, lucky employees were expected to work all hours"
As far as labour laws in the UK are concerned, if you're onsite you're working and your pay divided by your working hours IS your hourly rate, regardless if salaried or waged
If that goes below the minimum wage, then prosecutions await.
(Ditto "working from home" - and if you ARE working from home, your employer is responsible for your H&S, so if you're hunched over the kitchen table & end up injured, guess who ends up carrying the legal costs? It's in their interest to ensure you have decent office equipment at home.)
The UK could have fixed the broadband and BT problem trivially by following New Zealand's example.
After all, Telecom New Zealand attempted to emulate BT and the NZ authorities studied the situation here before working out the best way to resolve the monopoly issue without masses of litigation AND in a way that would result in a properly competitive marketplace
"You don't get any broadband money unless you split up along these lines. Separate companies, shares, board of directors, offices, etc etc. Lines company and lines there (openreach), dialtone and services company there (BT). Come back when you've done it"
Instead, someone slipped someone a very large bung.
"I sat in a room with two instruments putting out high power terra waves. "
And the H&S safety assessment for doing this was.....?
There are already well-documented bloody good reasons for being careful around EHF+ frequencies, especially where something even notionally low powered can induce local effects well in excess of safety limits in a small area
For that matter it's probably not a good idea to hang around in the vicinity of very high strength vibrating magnetic fields as they may fuzz your thinking - (lookup Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation)
"The exterior walls of many homes contain foil-backed fiberglass insulation."
Most new INTERIOR insulation (particularly gypsum panels) are foil backed too.
it's going to to be interesting to see if THz can see through that. I had to put APs in every office of a new building as 5GHz wouldn't even penetrate the walls and 2GHz was only getting between the offices by means of the windows in the doors into the hallway (the doors themselves were foil lined too)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
