Posts by Alan Brown

"I wonder how much will end up in the pockets of the scientists and engineers whose lifes work ended up in the drink?"

It didn't. one copy of it did.

There's ALWAYS a flight spare, for exactly this possibility. The $700million cost covers the hundreds of test articles and prototypes made to verify that the flight article won't break (it's hard to send out AAA to a broken down spacecraft) with the actual unit cost of each article being a lot less than that.

When a mission fails, the spare is pulled out of storage and strapped to a new booster. If a mission suceeds the flight spare becomes (one of several) the ground test article where every change is run through BEFORE being sent to the bird, to ensure it won't lobotomise the thing.

The _actual_ losses are the replacement rocket, payload and time, not the entire mission program. Trying to claim the entire $700 million would be thrown out of court.

Incidentally, NASA has lost more than a few missions to non-exploding explosive bolts in nose cones and interstage connectors. That's why SpaceX uses pneumatics for all these parts (which have a nice side benefit of not leaving fragments in orbit for a few days/weeks/months.) - this probably has a lot to do with the company getting away with bogus certification for so long.

Re: The Struggle Between Industry and Government

" NASA was constantly pushing them to cut costs."

I've had customers do that too - and in several cases I've told them they're welcome to go to XYZ cheaper supplier because I'm not willing to compromise quality in order to match price (I knew full well what XYZ cheaper supplier was actually offering)

They invariably came back. The ones that came back still demanding I lower my prices were politely declined (in one case it was because XYZ supplier having secured lockin had tripled prices, but the client wanted me to match the initial price I'd told them was impossible to match and they'd been barely profitable in the first place)

Re: Have teh fines, etc. been paid?

"After all, look at the "phone calls" to the FAA from current and past Boeing employees. Where were they months or years ago when the problem was already known? How much is Boeing spending to identify them?"

Look back to 2011 - and what happened to the 737NG whistleblowers, pour encourager les autres.

Incidentally: FAA and FTC employees were recently arrested trying to sell details of whistleblowers back to the companies being complained about. Such a nice country.

Re: Have teh fines, etc. been paid?

" in this case it was a "testing lab supervisor" so lower management, but still the point stands."

Similar to one case I was involved in (Staff in welfare/tax offices selling data to private investigators) - it had been going on for more than a decade, it was happening in _every_ office in the country and yet "no one in management was aware of it".

Pull the other one Noddy, it's got bells on.

Re: Have teh fines, etc. been paid?

"Well, let's hope they haven't been supplying any aircraft manufacturers. "

You mean like Ducummon?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/16/AR2006041600803.html??noredirect=on

It's not _just_ 737 MAXes you need to worry about, albeit for a different reason.

"I was at the tail end of having a lot more support staff"

Interestingly enough we're looking at needing _MORE_ support staff, because new hires have fewer basic computer skills than older ones and actually require spoon feeding most of the time.

No, a computer isn't a magic black box you can load up with anytthing/everything and no you can't send 5GB attachments by email.

"Playing devils advocate...paper is not infallable either. From mold to cheap stock breaking down over time to flood and fire plus the high latency / seek time, paper can easily be the worse choice for an archival system."

Paper is expensive to search - making the £400 limit on FOI requests a trivial threshold.

One can (and should) argue this is constructive obstruction.

"There have been enough recorded instances of mail boxes going bye-bye. "

Funnily enough, that's what backup tapes are for - and you should see smug faces fall through the floor when a lawyer asks for them.

Education will possibly have been worse affected due to the combination of hierarchy with absolutely no training for anyone, ever.

And completely untrained idiots lording it over IT folk, demanding the impossible.

At one meeting in one school, the idiot in charge made one of her pronouncements "And you will do it because I say do and you're the IT people" - at which point we all looked at each other, packed up our stuff, got up and left as one, pointing out that whilst there was a government science agency coordinating the meeting, the "IT folk" attending were reps of most of the local IT businesses doing so on an unpaid donation of effort basis with the lack of respect being noted (In the end the government agency people walked away too)

Another school had the idiot in charge get a nicely (snake) oiled sales presentation by an out of town outfit resulting in a "complete network installation" being done over summer holidays behind the backs of everyone who'd been discussing how to do it properly - at 5 times the retail price of the hardware plus an eyewatering labour cost, (all hubs) mixing staff & student networking together. My reward for writing a warning about the risks and stating that if they were lucky the student who hacked them would only change their grades was to be kicked off the coordinating committee by said idiot. About a year later the inevitable happened - and when their liability insurers found out they'd been warned of the risks deemed that coverage was invalid. The cost of fixing the networking was nothing compared to the legal expenses of the massive privacy breaches. The idiot in charge still works there and still blames everyone except herself for costing the school a couple of million dollars.

Re: who cares?

"It would turn the registrars, who are already barons with far too much power, into a mafia who can levy unlimited "taxes" against whomsoever they choose. "

It would also attract _very_ close attention from the FTC and its EU equivalent - both of whom will claim jurisdiction no matter where the registrars happen to be based, thanks to long-arm statutes.

This could well be the start of some _very deep_ investigations into the relationships between (former) ICANN board members and registrars and reopen some long-festering issues about (lack of) ethics of said board members.

If so, I'm going to sell popcorn.

"5 Eyes taps cables, they don’t really require equipment manufacturers to put in backdoors to make accessing the data easier"

I've worked in Telcos and can assure you that you're incorrect.

Companies which won't play ball on inserting backdoors are the companies which get "national security orders" prohibiting their products being used in XYZ country.

Don't forget: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1efOs0BsE0g

"That's more a judgement on the western telecommunications companies rather than an attack on Huawei, although Huawei have certainly benefited from China's industrial strength."

Yup.

It should be realised that the _core_ of most Huawei kit is american (usually Broadcom) silicon, running an American hardened embedded linux operating system (https://www.windriver.com/company/) and unfortunately then badly bodged by hordes of Bangalore "payment by the yard" programmers.

on the FUD front:

The rather infamous "Huawei switches are full of security holes" video on youtube a few years back was actually a demonstration of their white labelled(under license) relabadged 3com stuff running Comware - the EXACT SAME HOLES (and worse) were in 3com kit - and since HP acquired 3com those holes have started popping up in HP kit.

What's more interesting is the _timing_ of that presentation and video release - just as Huawei dumped 3com and went with their fully independent Wind River Linux VRP systems running on Broadcom Trident family chipsets (the exact same chipset Cisco were using in their high end Nexus stuff for 5 times the price, but on par with HP and Juniper's pricing for the same chipsets)

Cisco reps used that video presentation as their major selling point "Don't buy Huawei" and got rather pissed off when I pointed out in a room full of people that the code in question was 3com's, bearing no relationship to Huawei's then-current range of switches on sale (Quidways and Cloudengines are all Broadcom/Windriver systems). They then effectively tried climbing under a desk when I asked about the videos of NSA intercepts of cisco kit that had started circulating - it was clear they had no answer for it and their entire sales push was based on "We're Cisco, buy from us, or else"

I did have a good laugh(*) when a Cisco seller offered us "fantastic 90% discounts off list price" - then took umberage when I pointed out that I could buy the exact same kit cheaper off the shelf from Insight and other brands for half that.

(*) Loudly, in their faces. BT Inet didn't like that.

Re: Arguing with a regulator

"FB breaks all the rules and just keeps on going"

FB is merely the highest profile site to do so.

At this stage just about ALL of them are non-compliant with GDPR and privacy laws and have been getting away with thumbing their nose at such things for the best part of two decades,

You can choose two tactics: Try to keep your data out of their mitts (almost impossible) or pollute their feed by deliberately inserting as much irrelevant shit as you can find. I find the "choking them with a firehose" approach more fun and if everyone followed suit their data centres would fall over.

Re: Exchange?

"I've seen nothing but trouble with automated out-of-office responses"

I regard them as "I'm away from home, please burgle me" responses.

Re: Exchange?

"Exchange is fine for a mail server"

In short, "NO IT BLOODY WELL ISN'T"

Exchange exemplifies the MS attitude that "email is haaaard" (spoken in that annoying Barbie voice) - and took their "unique" (ie, standards breaking) approaches to internal email to the world in general via a bunch of awful kludges that made life easier for them, whilst making life significantly harder for everyone else who had actually bothered reading, understanding and implementing RFCs. MS's refusal to interact with the rest of the RFC-speaking world when told "This is wrong, fix it" is legendary - the usual response "We're MS, we know best. Fuck off"

(and who can forget the Halloween memos - they applied to email as equally as Linux. Remember this was an era where Compuserver or Novell or AT&T gatewayed email was $140/Mb and RFC-based "free" email was regarded as a potent threat to their money-printing machines)

I could regale you with the way that it stripped out essential headers and bolloxed up loop protection, or the way that it replaced 4xx and 5xx messages with something internally generated (destroying most chances of actually debugging connection issues) but anyone with a long memory will already know how bloody awful it was and still is compared with properly RFC-compliant mail systems - and how the clients STILL remove essential headers when you need a user to send things across to evaluate issues.

Re: Exchange?

"There was an obvious mistake: using exchange."

Yup, and "Trevor" was far from the only 'admin' who bolloxed the configuration in this manner. There are a lot still misconfigured like it.

Usually people only noticed when OoO notices bounced between a couple of people on the same server, but occasionally it'd happen between a couple of misconfigured systems across the net.

Re: 11Gb/sec

"So when we were tearing the house apart I just went for it."

For the last 25 years I've been telling people not to bother trying to futureproof by laying shitloads of cable because it'll probably be obsolete by the time they get around to using it.

Instead, futureproof by making it easy to RUN new cables without tearing the place apart. Ducting is your friend.

Re: We're only now entering 1984

It's been 1984 for some time.

Make Orwell Fiction again.

Re: Even if it makes it harder to track Criminals and Terrorists:

Some people need to learn the principle of 3 dimensional political structuring (left/right, authoritarian/relaxed, regulated/lassaiz-faire). Add more dimensions to suit.

If you ever played D&D, thnk of the the concepts of the axis of law-neutral-chaos and good-neutral-evil and extend it a bit.

One-dimensional political thinking is a bit stringy.

Re: it's just not enough...

"I took the case to OfCom"

Pardon? Why are you taking a _trading standards_ case to Ofcom - a technical regulator?

Take it to small claims.

Re: Who breaks the law?

"It might be a good time to start ramping up the number of GDPR cases"

Against the government.

Re: Even if it makes it harder to track Criminals and Terrorists:

"No fishing expeditions or entrapment. It's a democracy, not a dictatorship or evil regime."

This is one of the reasons _WHY_ UK.gov wants out of the EU and its continued frustration of the government's attempts to go on such fishing expeditions and entrapment attempts.

"The boys and girls at Cheltenham spend a lot of time analysing the meta data,"

As did the folks at Bletchley Park.

The significance of metadata is not to be underestimated.

Re: 16 TB. And if it fails?

"It makes for a very timely restore, quick access to single files, and doesn't require huge expense with tape libraries and the like."

This is an important factor to consider.

Apart from the library costs (robots are cheap), a LTO8 drive to slot into one runs to around $22k, which does offset the $130/tape somewhat.

On the flipside, I trust my tape backups far more than anything done to any other kind of media, and: "a new tape library on short notice of a very particular model / compatibility is going to cost you big" is simply FUD - in an emergency all you need is access to the right kind of tape drive (pulled out of the back of the library and removed from its sled if necessary) - any software which can't handle that is unfit for purpose. Sure, you have to change the tapes manually but a robot is for convenience when doing restores, not an essential piece of kit.

Re: Close

"Flying monkeys would be an improvement."

I have this vision of the staff at the Genius bar wearing strap on demonic wings.

It'd suit them.

Re: Human drivers don't get stuck.

"There's always an Audi to break the deadlock."

And the cyclist - one of my cow-orkers ended up underneath such a vehicle with a shattered skull and months off work.

The driver's excuse? She didn't see him as she came off the roundabout at 40mph and straight over the top of him - and tried to drive off before being stopped by witnesses.

One of the benefits of having robocars is that their driving standards will rapidly result in MINIMUM human standards being sharply increased - after all, if you're an incompetent driver you can get a machine to do it. This will be driven by insurers and they WILL require periodic retesting just like they did in aviation before it became law. No play, no premium - and you won't be discriminated against if they refuse to insure you as you can always get a machine to drive you.

Re: If, if, and more if's....

"when a driver encounters parked cars on their side of the road or a slow cyclist they have to decide whether and when it is safe to move into the oncoming lane and pass them."

I've watched SUV drivers put cyclists into hedges on lanes - breaking bones on more than one occasion.

I've watched those same SUV drivers _SCREAM_ at me to get my car out of the way because they can't get their tanks past me, despite having 8 feet of clearance between my car and the other hedge.

I've watched an elderly boy racer take off every single wing mirror on parked cars for 100 yards, and not stop (he must've been about 70)

I trust a machine to measure such things far more accurately than any human AND to give adequate clearance to other users.

You may THINK you are a better driver than average - but apparently so do 80% of other road users - and the better you think you are, the worse the driving usually is.

Re: If, if, and more if's....

"Currently when they get stuck a human driver has to take over."

The human driver doesn't have to be onboard.

"Human drivers don't get stuck."

Uh yeah. Right. You haven't been watching the same "bad driving UK/Oz/USA/NZ/wherever" youtube videos I have.

Even Lewis Hamilton has off days. Mere mortals make mistakes every couple of minutes some drivers are just plain asleep at the wheel whilst others have a death wish. Road rules and safety regulations are generally setup so that it takes _at least_ 3 (if not 5) serious errors to cause a crash (sometimes the errors are the road designer's), but they still happen regularly.

Having _consistent_ driving on the roads will bring its own benefits:

Slow rural drivers in particular are a dire statistical menace all of their own as they put everyone trying to pass them on the wrong side of the road (speeders only put themselves on the wrong side) - this is why inconsistent speed limits for different vehicle types is dangerous.

City gridlock is invariably caused by arseholes trying to barge their way through, blocking intersections and choking narrow points.

Then there are the rat runs, etc etc.

Re: This time for sure?

"If Tesla can show the insurance companies that a Tesla will have less accidents than a human over a relevant statistical sample then they'll be queuing up - especially since they would still charge an extra "AI Premium" and cream off profits for a few years."

They'll charge the extra premium on repair costs, however that won't last long - because:

As soon as it's shown that Robocars in control have statistically fewer big crashes AND small dings than humans (and the video evidence will be compelling evidence that humans are driving into robocars, therefore insurers will probably start foregoing "knock-for-knock" handling of claims, resulting in humans facing increasingly $$LARGE repair/medical liabilities) then you'll see premiums for human-controlled vehicles (or humans taking control of robocars) start to climb steadily whilst robocar premiums either stay steady or decline (There will still be vandalism, hit'n'run whilst parked and other claims to deal with, but that constant surveillance is going to make anonymous damage to an unattended vehicle pretty much a thing of the past and result in a lot of people finding themselves with criminal records for behaviour they've been getting away with for years)

That in turn is going to result in a knee point of adoption.

Think it won't happen? Look at photos of cities in the early 20th century and look at how fast the transition from mostly horse+cart to mostly motor-vehicle was (about 15 years)

The flipside of this is that personal vehicle ownership is likely to start declining. The single most expensive part of a taxi is the driver. Eliminate the wetware and it's far cheaper to use a hire vehicle than to pay the standing costs of a personal one - personal vehicles will become the preserve of the rich again and pedestrians are likely to reclaim the streets as car-park jammed curbs become a thing of the past.

This will have knock-on effects too. Westminster and other councils haven't planned for this change and they stand to lose 30-50% of their income very quickly - even in the short term, a robocar can be instructed to go park somewhere cheaper. They're going to be scrambling to make up the difference, as are podunk shitholes that make money by setting up speedtraps.

Re: This time for sure?

"Maybe their new chip will..."

Comparing oranges and applesauce there sunshine. The older Autopilot very explicitly came with warnings that it COULD NOT detect and stop for stationary objects in its path when travelling in excess of fifty miles per hour.

Letting your cruise control drive into such things is on par with putting your hand into a blender and then complaining that your fingers hurt.

Re: PT Barnum...

"I'd want to see about a decade of driving results that are substantially better than the typical Human before I accepted any claim out of his gob."

It isn't that hard to drive better than a human most of the time, and it isn't that hard to drive better than most humans.

The bigger problem is programmatically adhering to rigid rules such as "PEDESTRIANS WILL NOT CROSS THE ROAD EXCEPT AT DESIGNATED POINTS", which sound fine to wetware but when interpreted literally result in automated killing machines roaming the streets mowing down pedestrians who dare to try.

Thankfully only the USA and a couple of other authoritarian countries have such "car is KING" type rules, and even then, "common sense" gets applied by human drivers. A machine programmed with such rules that runs into a parade and marching band won't stop for them, which will make for a whole new interpretation of American (road) Pies.

Google have got it pretty much right. Uber utterly fucked up.