Posts by Alan Brown

"The company employed a new cleaner, who dutifully turned off the aircon in the mailroom on her first night"

We have had security guards decide that the AC in machine rooms was wasting power and shut it off at night - triggering the overheat crowbar an hour or so later.

The number of times this gets reported I'm surprised that more people don't start tossing lorawan kit everywhere to monitor stuff being turned off when it shouldn't be and alarm before things go wrong.

Re: Tricks of the trade.

"a long standing feud between two halves of the population that I can't mention without being accused of being sexist"

"Comfort cooling" (ie: aircon for PEOPLE is 90% about HUMIDITY control, not about actual temperature) - it's worth watching the RH when people are griping as a mismatched system can be swinging over wide ranges and this gets perceived as temperature changes by the users

Re: How about a nice long hot summer?

"set at 50 °C and 95 %RH"

If the environmental wet-bulb equivalent temperature is over body temperature, then you can't radiate heat and will eventually go into your OWN version of thermal overload - where a temperature rise of only 1-2C in the brain can be fatal

I'd rather take the dry heat. It takes far longer to dehydrate than to broil

"Had my share of overheating server rooms, but every time it was caught in the nick of time."

It's a good idea to have a thermal crowbar on the power so that if the room gets towards overheat, the power goes off before things start burning

And it gives a second thermostat for the users not to fiddle with - or face the possibility of the room suddenly getting _very_ quiet.

Re: US Homeland Security

> Having said that, that nowadays is more synonymous with a "generic, global, commercial" than a "US, commercial" label...

.com never _WAS_ "US, commercial" - it's always been international.

At the time the TLDs were created they were all international - although getting a .gov or .mil assignment outside the USA was difficult-to-impossible, on paper it was supposed to be doable.

Re: Toothless regulators

"By the time the ASA have gotten around to shifting their arse"

The ASA is a "Industry trade association" - formed in the face of the government threatening to step in and regulate

It's not a regulator and only exists to pretend to do anything.

Re: Is 25% wafer growth genuine ?

"Well it's down to supply alone if the demand grows 40% and all they can meet is 20%. I made those numbers up but the concept must be true at this point"

Whatever the cause is, the vast majority of the delay in delivery is occuring in the low end of the market.

If you order high end desktop processors the delivery delays are much shorter.

"Second, it would mean pensioners pay more tax. That's not really a vote winner."

What's about to happen to them as a result of what they(*) voted for should be a reminder that one should be extremely careful what one wishes for, because you just might get it.

I'm sure this will somehow turn out to be everyone else's fault though...

(*) In terms of the 2016 referendum and what age groups dominated in the in/out camps.

Re: Alternatively

"As a doctor myself I don’t think you understand doctors pay in the UK. "

What you describe is like pilots. Years of hard slog at mediocre pay so that a few hundred can end up on rock star pay

The criticism is mostly being directed at NHS _management_ though, not the medics

Re: Alternatively

"Non-clinically trained isn't only management, though. Receptionists, janitors and other cleaning staff, technicians maintaining hospital infrastructure and equipment etc would all count as Non-clinically trained."

Agreed: However what you find in healthcare in particular is a preponderance of unnecessary management who believe they're indispensible, have egos bigger than some of the doctors and set their own vastly inflated salaries. That's not what managers are for.

Re: Alternatively

"A number of years ago, the number of non-clinically trained staff, out-numbered the clinically trained"

See the recent case of the NHS manager now wanted in Australia on nepotism charges.

The more people you have working under you, the higher your seniority, therefore the better your pay - classic civil service mentality - we used to call it "featherbedding" when I was a civil servant and we actively HATED it because it resulted in an inability to get anything done - when the department I worked in (In New Zealand) slimmed down dramatically things actually sped up by 75% due to the things NOT passing through so many hands and at least 200% because we were able to computerise most of what was previously done by hand - coming to the UK the first time was a shock to see how bass-ackwards things still were and how computers were used, but not taken advantage of (ie: still highly manually intensive - and 20 years later, still is)

Re: Alternatively

"if you want to leave the country that paid for all your education, you should have to repay all the costs of that education"

Says someone who paid £100-500/year at university and had a student allowance instead of £9000+/year and interest accruing student loans?

Re: Alternatively

"They were trained by the state, they should work 100% for the state."

I see this one a lot - and it's invariably from older folk who were handed just about everything on a silver platter most of their lives

Medics graduate today with student debt hovering around £80-100,000

Arguments about a bond period might hold water if they were paid reasonably well AND had their costs covered during training, but the fact is, they aren't, nor are costs of subsequent training (and they don't get paid when on training courses unless fulltime employees - which the NHS discourages, etc)

It's going to get worse as the current crop of professionals age out. Anyone under 45 is carrying substantially more student debt, which means they have to charge more/demand higher wages to service that debt. If they don't, they'll go where they can get it.

It's a replay of the same corrosion that happened in New Zealand after high fees were introduced in the 1980s - resulting in STEM degrees being gutted and an unhealthy focus on "cheap" degrees such as "Business Studies". You end up with a society unable to actually being able to do the fundamentals to maintain its infrastructure without importing people and we're seeing that here already

Re: Alternatively

> of course, when the voiceless get pissed off, it all changes - they aren't allowed to "take back control"

Up to the point that the rich find that welfare ALSO exists to discourage the poor from rising up and murdering them.

Re: Alternatively

"all those old people that think Brexit will be great are the same ones that refuse to allow some of their assets be used to help fund the social care crisis"

They're going to find that changing in the next 1-2 years. There's already been a change in pensions announced which is going to nobble some and I'm fully expecting to hear announcements that couples will be paid less, as well as means testing being introduced for eligibility (ie, if you have a private pension, no state pension for you) and fuel payments/bus passes/etc being consigned to history.

With around 3/4 of the exchequers' net tax/NI income going straight out the door again in state pensions/topups/perks and a rapid decrease happening in tax revenue, something's going to break.

The government can't afford to cut the ~10% in other welfare payments because the lion's share of that goes to the working poor and blocking that would turn most of them into the unemployed poor (they wouldn't even cover costs of getting to work)

Re: Alternatively

"Personally i would prefer to see the ridiculous senior management pay cut first."

Today's news that one Senior manager who has a history of bouncing around NHS trusts here and AU/NZ is now wanted in Australia on corruption charges won't come as much of a surprise to a lot of people in the NHS for which the behaviour described has been "business as usual" for decades.

Australia faced up to the painful fact that it had systemic and worsening corruption issues in the 1980s and has been trying to do something about it ever since. NZ has been in full denial mode for a long time and the UK tries to pretend it's a minor issue.

Re: Strange, ...

I was thinking the same thing.

I wonder if this is the newest variant on SLAPP

Re: Foot meet gun, gun meet foot

> can we stop with saying how "innovative" Apple are, they haven't "innovated" anything

Jobsian Apple excelled at making sure everything WORKED in an integrated manner. It was chaotic between his leaving/rejoining and it's become chaotic again since he died.

Reality Distortion Field aside, he actually did have a positive influence in the aspect of making sure stuff tied together "almost" seamlessly

Re: 'Primary storage'

"I went from old spinning disk to NVMe. ~100MB/s sequential to ~1500MB/s. Never looked back."

On the other hand SK Hynix fobbed off an _enormous number of NVMe drives on HP buyers that maxxed out at 140MB/s write 350MB/s read (yes really, I benchmarked them across a number of systems because I couldn't believe how bad they were - HP's response was to first claim they had 1200MB/s speed, then to claim they never said that and the things were within spec when challenged with benchmarks from us and posted on multiple sites as evidence of the abysmal performance)

Beware particularly of BC501 - they're essentially garbage sold at a premium price

Re: Define primary

"and of course, the maximum SSD capacity is much lower than hard disks."

Really? Lookup MZILT30THMLA-00007 on your favourite search engine.

I already _HAVE_ 16TB SATA ssds in a couple of servers for specialised purposes.

Re: Been a long time coming

"Backwards in that its unable to update a small bit of data without rewriting several megabytes of data needlessly. HDD's (modern ones) only use 4KB sectors."

Until you meet shingled drives - which have exactly the same disadvantage as SSDs in this respect and that's essentially everything over 8TB

Re: Been a long time coming

"4-8TB HDDs are still around the same price they were 5 years ago"

In the meantime, SSDs have come down to the "affordable" horizon - 4-5 times the price of such drives (Samsung 860QVO etc) and with the advantages such SSDs offer (greater reliability, lower power consumption, MUCH faster read speeds) they're starting to make inroads into the larger spinner market just like they did in the sub-1TB arena.

Who cares if they've only got a 1000 write cycle endurance? Most large drives like this are used for semi-archival purposes (porn stash) and are unlikely to be rewritten more than a dozen times in their entire lifespan.

(The 4TB QVOs actually have space on the boards to double the NAND, so Samsung is clearly planning for 8TB units if there's demand)

Re: And..

"Sometimes not. In which case, plan C was to rearrange the chain "

The problem there wasn't scsi, it was makers who built devices with terminators onboard which might (or might not) be able to be disabled. Or makers who simply ignored scsi specs altogether.

Scanners and CDroms were particularly bad offenders, but there were a lot of controller cards which assumed they'd be the physical end of a chain and not in the middle somewhere - and couldn't have the termination disabled.

>> "Hard" means solid

Or "not floppy" - remember those?

Re: Spies gonna spy

" What are spies supposed to do? Limit themselves to pawing through garbage?"

The vast majority of espionage is done in the public reading rooms of local libraries - looking at local newspapers and correlating stories that don't seem to percolate through to the larger dailies or which seem to abruptly halt, along with checking up on letters to the editor complaining about XYZ activity.

"Pawing through garbage" is usually done to confirm suspicions rather than to find new stuff.

As with Duncan Campbell's investigations - there's an awful lot out there in the open that simply needs piecing together - and if you're using "Someone else's crypto" as your sole line of defence then you've probably already been compromised

Re: Once again ....

"PKI isn't the only solution to the key-distribution problem."

Nonetheless it's a fairly good one - after describing how PGP worked to a few people who happened to be retired spooks, the response I got was "we were doing that in the 1950s. Has it taken this long to catch up?"

Re: Where I live it's ill tempered ducks.

ducking about, shirly?