Posts by Alan Brown 15079 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
" But an electrical engineer who doesn't understand that colour CRTs have magnetic fields?"
The magnetic fiield around a CRT isn't enough to affect a floppy.
The magnetic field around the DEGAUSSING COIL is another matter.
How often was this monitor powered down/up?
"Even now you can still visit offices where there are separate circuits for thew pc's with marked 'cleaner' and 'kettle' sockets."
We still do this.
The alternative was people unplugging things to insert their variety of equipment in said receptacle. Cleaners are informed that plugging into any outlet not marked for their use is a sacking offence.
It's compounded by shitty consumer equipment that breaks down or otherwise shorts out and takes out circuit breakers, You don't want them on the same spur as your computers or comms equipment - not because of filtering, but because you don't want the power going off without a good reason.
" And if the departmental laser printer was out of paper, do you think he would deign to refill it? Or ask his secretary to do so? No, he would just resumbit it. Again. And again. And again"
Don't worry. That mentality is still alive and well - to the point that I've got a filter in the print servers to block such things.
It's one thing when the user resubmits a 1 page job and another when he does it for a 200 page one. 5 times (Then there's the user who sent a 75 page report to the A0 poster printer and refused responsibility for having done so. When she left some months later we couriered the print job to her a few weeks afterwards. I'd be less forgiving if she hadn't made such a song and dance about being an electrical engineer, then promptly building an unauthorised PC that caught fire.)
To explain Trump and some of the other weirdness of the last 60 years:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-america-invented-religious-right-conservative-roosevelt-princeton-117030_full.html
You can argue that the rise of violent Islamic, Jewish and Buddhist(*) extremists is a direct and opposing reaction to the surge of christian extremism.
You can also paint the rise of the extremism as a reaction to increasing secularisation (and feeling outnumbered), but the violence feeds on itself and secularists tend not to be so knee-jerk in their reactions to feed it.
(*) Yes they exist, no they're not nice people (see: Rohingya massacre)
"Now Huawei and China are 18 months ahead of the Americans in 5G and they don't like to lose, hense them bullying all their allies to ban Huawei and buy inferior American crap."
Typical US trade war stuff. Look up "the Chicken Tax" sometime (and realise an early 1960s "trade war" over poultry hygiene is why americans love SUVs/pickups and explains why they have protectionism on such vehicles over 50 years later - protectionism that arguably almost destroyed the US carmaking industry)
The UK was doing exactly the same thing over telco/radio kit against the "Japanese threat" in the late 1960s early 1970s, which resulted in the NZ govt of the time forcing the NZPO to buy a bunch of frankly atrocious and utterly unreliable bunch of UK and Anglo-Italian kit instead of the NEC/Fujitsu stuff they would have preferred, for twice as much as they'd agreed from NEC and Fujitsu. (This was long after "made in Britain" had come to be regarded as a warning label) - unsurprisingly having been forced to buy "from the friendly country", things were further dogged by non-availability of spares, stupidly long delivery delays of the things and extremely high costs for them (Sellers who know they have you over a barrel will charge whatever they want and take as long as they want)
Next time around steps were taken to ensure that the NZ government couldn't interfere with the dealings - Something that seems to have been forgotten in recent years.
The USA was pulling the same stunts in the 80s and 90s with its telephony and radio communications equipment. A lot of the world was shielded from this by virtue of using CCITT digital standards instead of the strange US-centric ones but those who did get suckered into buying E-spec AT&T switches found out the hard way that the same rules of engagement applied, coupled with the "europeanisation" of the kit being a kludge. Those who were forced to buy US-centric T-spec kit were in an even worse state as they had to bridge between T and E trunks using highly expensive conversion kit. (This is common across parts if the middle east and certain small island nations)
"The most fundamental security standard, really, is that you cannot have this extrajudicial, non-rule of law-compliant process where a government can tell its companies to do something,"
That's one of the most compelling arguments yet for never hosting anything in the USA (PATRIOT Act) or doing business with companies that have US offices (same act) or buying equipment from Cisco.
Let's not forget those "secret" NSA wiretapping rooms that appeared in various AT&T nodes across the USA in the early 2000s
"It isn't like the requirements for going to space are THAT major, you don't need to be a "real" astronaut like in the Apollo days when they were pretty much limited to former test pilots. "
The reason for using test pilots back in those days was that they were considered to be expendable monkeys (only one step above the simians actually used for the first few shots) with demonstrated abiliity to endure high physical loads (the fact that test pilots can handle high mental loads wasn't considered). None of them would make the grade these days - A PhD is pretty much mandatory and the physical requirements were quickly proven to be overhyped.
The expense is so high(*) that qualification requirements are through the roof. If that comes down then perhaps the requirements will too.
(*) It's only partially driven by launcher costs. The bulk of costs for anything flown stays firmly on terra firma in the form of hundreds (if not thousands) of test models built to ensure that what's flown, works. If launcher costs come down to the point that relaunch is relatively cheap then the number of test models might come down and thus the flight model final cost, but coming down from $100,000/kg to $10,000/kg to orbit is not going to see a similar tenfold reduction in the payload price for life-support capable orbital kit nor will reductions from $10k/kg down to $1k/kg.
"That's pretty awful....but do we have any evidence that other suppliers' code quality is any better? "
Having pulled a few Huawei rom images apart...
The core is Wind River Linux (which is pretty good) but a lot of the add on coding shows Bangalore origins and all the "payment by the yard of coding" that implies.
The big presentation about "insecure Huawei kit" a few years back was _entirely_ on stuff they were building under license at the time - the kit was rebadged 3com and the code was completely Comware - the exact same holes (and worse) were in the original 3com gear (and none of them were present in Huawei's VRP kit. It has other issues such as being SLOW)
The biggest risk is the stuff failing under load - especially if you try to ask too much via SNMP - Huawei don't understand that enterprise networks use SNMP extensively and dn't pay enough attention to keeping query handling efficient.
"HR may be able to tell you your rights as an employee"
HR's job isn't to tell your your rights as an employee - or even to protect your rights as an employee
If you believe that they are then you have some learning to do. HR's function is to limit the company's legal exposure. Everything else is window dressing.
I seem to recall black people not sitting at the back of the bus was illegal in various parts of the USA at one point too.
And then there's the Pentagon Papers, etc....
Apartheid was legal. Nazi concentration/death camps were legal. Stalin's death camps were legal.
Laws are made by the people in control, not all of them of them have anything to do with common sense and some have a lot to do with allowing those in power to STAY in power by any means possible.
"12 months in British prison for skipping bail"
Skipping bail (first offence) and the nature of the charges means that he _CAN'T_ get 12 months (that's the maximum. The usual punishment for habitual offenders is a slap on the wrist and a telling off by the judge.
As long as the Swedes have first dibs on him the USA can't extradite him.
If they don't resume proceedings then the americans can have a go.
it'd be ironic if he got 48 hours in the clink for the bail skipping after 7 years in a broom closet, only to get hauled back in for the USA charges - and as a proven flight risk he won't be bailed again.
As others have pointed out: A chicken is not a salad.
For a graphic illustration of this, look at food poisoning rates in the US associated with chicken contaminated at source vs Europe. (Hint: the rate in the US is 10-100 times higher than the European one)
US chicken farming _and_ slaughterhouse hygiene standards are revoltingly low with fecal matter being a common contaminant on the meat. The "chlorine wash" is supposedly to deal with that but the reality is that it's not strong enough to kill salmonella (common in US flocks) and mostly serves to simply spread any bacteria which remain.
It was food poisoning incidents that led to it being banned by Germany (and across Europe) in 1963 but the USA has always made it out to be an economic blockade and used the ban as an excuse to impose import taxes on vans and pickups (The chicken tax - aimed mostly at the VW T2), which in turn led to pickups being wildly profitable for US automakers, which in turn led to US car market being uncompetitive and pickups/vans being heavily promoted - which leads us to the current market where pickups are one of the largest market segments.
It's arguable that the Chicken Tax was a major factor in the decline and destruction of the US car industry based around Detroit.
"websites that don't allow a simple 'not accepted' but divert you to pages of how to jump through hoops "
The ICO needs to make a statement about those - along the lines of taking off and nuking them from orbit.
Although I suspect that will come from mainland European data privacy regulators. The ICO is quite deliberately choked of funding to limit its effectiveness
"It was surprisingly ineffective."
Not really.
If you take 50kg of ice at 0C and 50 litres of water at 80C & put them together, you'll be left with 100 litres of water - at 0C
It takes a LOT of energy to convert ice at 0C to water at 0C
Back on the subject of the story, I recall one outfit using a helicopter as a blower to try and dry their field. That didn't work terribly well either
Not so quick.
RST combines 2 separate media into a single virtual one in the OS
If the device does appear as 2 different storage units then Linux can definitely make use of it. The problem is that LVM dm-caching is primarily a read-caching solution (the idea being to go out front of spinning media to quell head thrash) and that's not what you want here, so HOW you set it up is going to be important.
https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/sln312372/faster-block-device-performance-with-nvme-pcie-ssd-based-dm-cache-on-rhel-7?lang=en
(NB the write gains listed there are only for a single pass, read gains happen after a couple of runs)
You are visiting a site (site owner's responsibilty if you pick up drive-by malware from that site)
The site owner has a contract with the ad farmer (ad farmer takes liability - but sued by site owner)
The ad farmer has a contract with the ad placer
The ad placer has a contract with the advertiser
etc etc
But at the end of the day, you are NOT expected to chase the chain down. It's the enduser interaction that matters and any site owner who tries to fob things off is likely to get a very rude awakening if someone is determined enough to take it through the courts. (the new laws will make it clearer too)
"Apparently he spent quite a lot of it on prostitutes."
Given someone else mentioned the taxman:
Those are not tax deductible as entertainment expenses.
Use of the Inland Revenue could be an entertaining way to keep fraudsters looking over their shoulders for years, There's very little they're _not_ allowed to do when pursuing the government's money.
"It will probably still be several years before they produce their own high performance x86 design."
Considering all the legacy issues with the x86 design, would they WANT to? the only thing it's got going for it is "legacy" and "installed base" - both of which are being steadily chipped away by ARM.
Their homegrown systems are a fully compatible (and fully licensed) MIPS system that does quite well for itself
Lest you laugh, even in the late 1990s, noone was expecting x86 to end up dominating the market to the point of monoculture. It's the least efficient of the CPUs it was competing against in the server market and won on two simple points: price and Microsoft. (cartel tactics by Intel arguably contributed)
They can still be charged with wire fraud - and if they used the postal system in any way the USPS will be more than happy to pursue mail fraud charges.
The real problem sounds like these agencies have been ordered to stop their pursuit. It was the FTC and FCC who permanently put fax.com out of business despite their 10-year campaign of phoenixing to avoid enforcement.
There are statutory per-call fines involved
When sued by individuals it's $500 per call, tripled for wilful violations (forged caller ID, hitting DNC numbers, robocalls)
When sued by the FTC or FCC it's $11,500 per call - again, tripled per call.
$LARGE_COMPANY tends to make more calls than small ones - and because the damages are mandatory - AND because they've been up to supreme courts and back, it's hard for anyone to argue against them.
"Alright, I think I will take your advice, then. Since you've already proven you're a criminal by the very act of calling me on this phone number that's on the federal Do-Not-Call list I guess I shouldn't hire your company..."
There's the added slap in the face you can provide of a small claims filing under the TCPA - $1500 for a wilful breach (calling anyone on the DNC list is a wilful breach - which triples the $500 per call claim)
"Can telco's determine whether callers use a fake caller ID?"
YES.
There are a number of fairly simple ways of doing this, most prominently there are 2 numbers buried in the accounting data of the call - the origin data (which you don't see) and the presentation data (which you do). If these are wildly different then there's something afoot.
Telcos get termination revenue when you answer calls originating from other networks, which is an incentive for them to NOT block scam calls - until the scammers start injecting calls into the global network via fraudulent methods and the terminating telcos don't get paid.
At that point those same telcos go bonkers trying to block the calls whilst claiming it's for_your_ protection when the reality is that they're protecting their bottom line.
"Moreover, the council didn't report the breach to the ICO, it waited until December 2017 to launch its own internal investigation, and then failed to produce a final report of the probe."
In some countries, covering up like that results in a multiplier of the fine being applied - and the decision to coverup _IS_ criminal misfeasance.
Of course getting the Met to accept a criminal complaint is impossible because then they'd have to admit culpability too.
"key people are removed and then the two gangs become one larger, more powerful unit"
There _are_ ways to take the wind out of gangs. The prime reason they exist with the power and danger they do isn't "cred", it's _money_ - specifically the insane profitability associated with drugs(*) and trading in stolen goods to pay for them.
(*) A medically pure knockout dose of heroin or cocaine is less than a pound. It's a hell of a lot more on the street and cut with "godknowswhat". Every pence of the difference is why you have gang wars.
Shit management - who will actively cover things up when they realise they've fucked up and then when the inevitable is unavoidable will do everything they can to push the blame to flunkies.
The fines aren't nearly large enough and there aren't elements of personal accountability for management to drive the point home.
"Charging for emails would stop scams like this"
Like it stopped scams in real mail?
Hint: The USPS stopped accepting mail from Nigeria for a while in 2004 because only 1/3 of the stamps on the envelopes that arrived at the JFK international sorting centre were genuine. Postal services get paid to deliver the mail from other countries and the Nigerian post office was only paying their cut on the genuine stamps - _supposedly_ the rest of the mail was getting into the stream somewhere between them and Lagos Airport.
Like it stopped phone scams?
Hint: Telcos get paid termination fees to make your phone rung and have you pick up. The reason they've only _just_ started making a big song and dance about scam calls is that the boys from Lagos have found ways of subverting the system(*) so that calls can be routed without anyone paying for them - that means the terminating telcos don't get paid and THAT is what finally got their attention.
(*) Most of these "ways" have been around forever, but exploiting them was relatively easy to trace so scammers didn't last long. VOIP tears up the traceability.
"OR, as was mooted a few years back, make a micro charge for EVERYONE per Email sent, creditied back if it is replied to ?"
That got modified to "spending CPU cycles" (hashcash) which eventually became Bitcoin. the original idea was that no one except bulk marketers would ever need enough cpu to make the lights go dim.
"True, most spammers would quickly declare bankruptcy and re-open with a new name next week, but it's a start."
The ICO has stepped in on a number of occasions to prevent naughty-stepped companies from being phoenixed in this way - UK law allows for objections to be filed if there's a belief it's being done to dodge fines, etc.
" But if applied to the company using the spam service was also fined an equal amount, it might make a dent."
Funnily enough: If you read your GDPR legislation there is provision in there for _exactly_ that.
The die was cast when the Telephone Consumer Protection Act 1998 was enacted in the USA - the "joint and several" liability provisions proved the second most effective part of the law in terms of the way it pretty much stopped the tsunami of fax spam (Second only to the "death of a million paper cuts" brought on by it providing statutory damages and specifically allowing a right of private action in Small Claims courts.) Advertisers and merchants who'd laughed in the face of previous laws quickly folded their tents and went off to spam the new wild west of email.
"(except for the opportunity to charge an extra $80,000...)"
To put that in perspective - $80k is about what you'll pay to get 4-5 hours at 20k feet in the left hand set at the pointy end of a real (but empty) 737 (it's a lot cheaper in a simulator)
Yes it's a blatant rip off but in the overall scheme of aircraft costs it's small change from down the back of the sofa.
"The most common place for manual trim wheels is in the centre of the cockpit between the seats or by the pilot's knee"
The B737 trim wheel is something like a couple of hundred revolutions from one end to the other.
Yes you can turn it by hand. Yes it's geared down to allow you to do that without power assist. If it's been whacked against the stops it's going to take one pilot frantically spinning it whilst the other is doing full stick elevator to try and keep the thing from going dirtside - and at either stop there's NOT enough elevator to bring the aircraft back to level flight (Unlike smaller aircraft, on airliners you fly and trim with the _entire_ tailplane. Elevators are effectively there for small corrections and manouvres)
The wheel has a popout handle to make it easier to do gross movements (or did on the 737-200 simulator I did my turbine ratings in) but it's still going to take a some time to retrim and in the meantime you can easily run out of sky if the pilots have taken a while to figure out WTF is happening and pull the motor breaker.
Essentially, what Boeing did with the Max was to Rat Rod a 50yo airframe and hope they could get away with it by not explicitly spelling out that software is now essential to keeping the aircraft flying straight&level/preventing pilots from badly screwing up by applying power too early in a stall and if that software goes wrong Bad Things Happen - remember the constant refrain has always been that Boeings are aerodynamically stable without needing computer intervention and Airbus are not (If you stall in a Max or NG and apply power _BEFORE_ nosing down, you'll never be able to get your nose down, so this was already a design on the ragged edge of oblivion. MCAS just adds to it)
There comes a time when engine evolution gets the things too large for whatever they're bolted onto and Max is it - speculation had been around for a while as to when it would happen on 737s - you can't give the 737 airframe longer legs (to move the engines back under the wings) for a bunch of reasons, so the choice for Boeing was Max or a new airframe. It's looking pretty clear that they made the wrong choice.
The FAA being subject to regulatory capture has been known about for a while but I'm not sure even this will solve that problem in the USA. You can expect EASA and other regulators to start looking much more closely at what gets approved by the FAA as a result of this and the 787 battery fires (If they'd used Lithium Iron Phosphate chemistry, those wouldn't have burned, but would have weighed a little more).
"Makes me fume when I see DCs and freezer farms just chucking hot air out whilst a hundred yards away they’re burning gas and oil to heat a building."
It makes you fume until you cost how MUCH it costs to catch that very low grade waste heat and reuse it for building heating. I looked into this for a project - it was going to more than doulble the capital costs and be more expensive to operate than burning gas and oil separately (I know, it doesn't make much sense to me either). Most of that has to do with the factor of needing to run chillers continuously to pump heat from the "cold" side to the "hot" side instead of simply using 'free-cooling' solutions.
About the only way you can make waste heat recapture viable is to make it part of the whole building design and plonk a residential bloc on top of the datacentre.
"Overly sensitive radioactivity detectors make nuisance false alarms easy"
Yup.
Truckloads of bananas are notorious for setting them off. (Yes, really)
And FWIW: Nuclear _WEAPONS_ use radioactives of very _LOW_ radioactivity - barely higher than background levels until they hit critical mass.
Contaminants like Colbalt 60 (or isotopes of uranium other than U235/U238, or non-bomb isotopes of Plutonium) are _too_ radioactive and cause things to go off prematurely, resulting in "fizzles" rather than "booms"
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