Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Wild West Days

"As a business owner you owe it to your customers"

You might think that's true. The reality is that most customers have no loyalty to you or the brand and will jump ship in a heartbeat."Goodwill" as a business intangible is very hard to pin down but in truth it's not worth very much at all.

If you do try to follow the espoused mantra and hold out for the best deal for the clients, you'll end up being eaten by the sharks.

Re: Modem ISP

"But there are many rural areas in the UK that still dont have ADSL never mind cable and if they want net access its either cough up for BT to set it up at the exchange (and potentially lay new cables) an expensive microwave system or dial up."

Whilst BT has systematically nobbled commercial rural broadband ventures it's relatively easy to setup a cooperative and you can get (for a short remaining period) EU grants to set such things up.

This very organ has documented how various groups and individuals have setup rural broadband wifi systems, frequenrly backending off someone's ADSL connection (not all suppliers prohibit such activity)

"Wow, China even has VPNs banned. I guess it's not entirely surprising."

VPNs have been banned in China for years - with criminal penalties if caught using them.

What's happened recently is that they've been actively cracking down on it - and targeting foreigners, who they used to turn a blind eye to.

China has a shitload of draconian laws on the books and a history of only using them when it suits the authorities to do so (aka, when they decide they don't like you, you can be done for walking on the cracks in the sidewalk).

At $orkplace we've been having to remind people wanting us to setup VPNs for travel into China that

a: Such things are illegal in China

b: Getting caught would not be a good thing.

c: We're not allowed to assist in illegal activities in any case.

These kinds of laws in the UK are a backdoor way of implementing a "Great Firewall", but legislators all tend to forget one key factor - LEO satellite internet is on the horizon and all the firewalls on all the physical gateways on all the terrestrial borders won't make much difference if people switch to those for their xhamster or uncensored newsfeeds (good luck working out where someone's satellite dish is pointing when you don't need a satellite dish)

Re: show me the money

"and of course there's always GDPR. In in the finance industry is an offence to not comply"

In both cases: Unless criminal/civil responsibilty falls _personally_ on manglement, they're unlikely to care.

It's the threat of finding _themselves_ in the dock which works the best at betting things fixed.

Re: show me the money

"because that really matters when you go for your next job"

Actually it does, because you can document that you warned them and they ignored you.

Re: "environmental terrorists"

"Lets face it the tree huggers have "form" in respect of various stupid, risky and obstructive actions"

And very publicly claiming responsibility.

So far noone's come forward,

Re: And so it begins

"No need for 3D printing, balsa wood will do just fine"

Rice paper and a bit of hot air will do nicely too.

Re: That argument goes both ways you know.

"There should be a higher bar to making such a change than a simple majority."

Such as "achieving quorum" for any vote and "supermajority" for important ones.

Re: Wow, it's almost...

"Deny it to them and it seems most unlikely they’ll shut up."

They were most explicit that they wouldn't, if you recall Farage's pontificating on TV the week before the referendum on the subject of if it should it go 52% the other way.

One good thing about this last 2 years is that it's made the fascists and other roaches brave enough to peek out from under their rocks. Observers have been taking notes about names and hidey holes.

Re: Wow, it's almost...

>> Unelected autocrats such as Theresa May

>You do realise that she is an elected MP?

MP yes.

But not voted PM by the people. Anyone who claims they voted for a PM (or a leader) is repeating a common fallacy.

" If she were an autocrat, her vision of Brexit would already have been signed, sealed and delivered and she wouldn't be walking the greased tightrope over the shark-tank filled with rabid MP's.."

Considering the _actual_ voting percentages vs the way seats went, it's quite clear there's a shitload of gerrymandering going on to ensure that only 2 parties are effectively represented in Parliament and that where possible, one party is favoured. As such it's no wonder electoral turnouts are low when most seats are as locked in as any 17th century rotten borough.

It's even more pointed when the UK's claim to try and introduce a vote on "proportional representation" gave a choice between the status quo and the lame duck _least_ proportional option possible (ie: most resembling the status quo) and as such was rejected even by most who wanted PR.

Compare and contrast with New Zealand's referendum on the same matter:

1: Stay with the current FPTP system or change to PR?

2: If changing to PR, which PR system should we change to? (list of 5)

(Of course when the NZ population voted overwhelmingly for PR and MMP, which the politicians didn't want, they ran it again and got the same result, so it had to be adopted (lots of scare tactic adverts about MMP in the leadup). 20 years later when asking "do you want to keep this?" the politicians got told in no uncertain terms they had to keep it despite trying to switch back to FPTP)

Re: Wow, it's almost...

"MP wise, Cornwall has 6 Con MPs, who managed 48% of the vote , meaning 52% of peoples political views aren't reflected."

The word you're looking for is "Gerrymander"

Re: Hardly the first time

"My utility is currently trying to get me to have a smart meter installed"

So are mine.

They don't think it's funny when I ask them how much they're willing to pay me to have it installed and how much they're willing to credit each month to keep it installed.

Apparently I should be falling over myself wanting this new toy and willing to pay THEM for it.

Re: Hardly the first time

"Being rolled out primarily so that time-of-day billing can be introduced"

It's worse than that. The "official" smart meters (vs the proprietary ones that were foisted on unwitting early adoptors) have cutoff relays in them.

When things go pearshaped you'll be able to pay extra to NOT be load-shed in the rolling blackouts.

And there WILL be rolling blackouts - lots of them, thanks to the government not investing enough in replacement+extra power generation., coupled with a massive upcoming increase in power demands due to the electric vehicle fleet incentives (a private mostly-electric vehicle fleet will more than double existing power demands) and the inevitable demise of gas/oil heating as the country is forced to decarbonise to meet requirements (matching these demands will more than double existing requirements too).

If we really go for broke and put windmills/solar panels _everywhere_, "Renewables" can slightly outmatch ~2005 carbon-emitting coal/gas/oil-fired power generation.

Those pesky nuke plants being argued about? We need about 40 of them, not 2 - and even if the undersea cables into mainland europe had enough carrying capacity (they don't), France doesn't (and won't) have enough generating capacity to make up our shortfall.

There's a perfect storm coming. It'd be a good idea to invest in a battery wall and a decent diesel 2kW generator along with a good quantity of oil.

Re: The ASA are shills, not consumer protection folk

What do you expect from a TRADE ASSOCIATION that was formed to stave off government regulation?

The only reason they exist is to pretend that all is well and the government don't need to pass real regulations or setup a proper regulatory body. Complaints should also go to your local trading standards office.

Re: Where to draw the line?

"you know that virgin can supply high speeds on their network right?"

They can also supply fibre tails if you're willing to pay enough.

Unfortunately, experience has shown that if they have to interconnect with BT, SLAs go out the window and it appears to be a deliberate Openreach policy in order to fuck over competitors.

Re: "Unfortunately, this does lead to more bureaucracy, not less :("

"If it avoids apartment towers to get fire and kill tens of people, maybe it won't that bad..."

At some point the rather dangerous UK ring main system will have to go (the plugs are OK, but rings are not and UK wiring rules allow for radial or ring layouts. The _only_ advantage of rings is to allow domestic contractors to cut corners on wiring and the number of breakers in the installation.)

Re: Incredible

"Those who want to rein also want to reign."

Which has a lot to do with why there are so many martinets involved.

And that happens to be an affliction that's spreading across the UK too.

Re: Incredible

"For a country that bandies about the word "Freedom" with totally gay abandon"

You should look up how propaganda works. They bandy it about so much precisely to distract from the issue that they don't HAVE very much of it.

Re: What an engineer does in the UK

"I'm sorry, but that's just how the word is used."

People who drive steam engines are engineers. People with engineering degrees or other engineering certfication are engineers. Most other technically qualified people are technicians or mechanicians.

All the above are more vulnerable to having their jobs taken by computers/robotics than people who empty bins, rewire/replumb houses, dig ditches, take your burger orders/flip said burgers or sweep floors., but less vulnerable to that fate than those who do things best described as "management, office or legal work"

Why? Cost of implementation vs savings on wages.

Low paid manual work isn't worth replacing with AI, highly paid stuff like plumbing/electrical existing buildings is likely too hard to robotise.

Office work and paper shuffling doesn't NEED complex/expensive mechanical handling systems to be able to take over - it's already 90% there anyway (when was the last time you saw an office full of ledger clerks filling in paperwork?)

The need for skilled/smart people to fix things that break and devise new stuff will be here for a while yet. The rise of technocrats was predicted more than 50 years ago and has yet to happen.

Re: What an engineer does in the UK

"My previous employer suddenly decided that using "Engineer" for titles where it clearly wasn't appropriate had to stop, and changed everyones job title overnight to "Analyst", even when it made it sound ridiculous or inaccurate"

Something similar happened to "Technician" - who were suddenly "Technical Officers"

The problem was that Level1 helpdesk were previously called "TSO" (Technical service officers) and were now "Technicians", so it sounded to most people like the field techs had been demoted.

It didn't go down well.

Then there's the whole Programmer/Conslutant/Analyst mess in the computing arena and those who expect "Company Secretaries" (which is a specialist role) to type up dictation.

Re: What an engineer does in the UK

> We weren’t ‘engineer’ engineers, but what else would you call us, outside plant network designers?

More to the point, the other guys were linesmen, riggers and outside plant techs

All of which are specialities in their own right and calling them "engineers" doesn't help anyone.

Re: TTL exceeded

"There's is nothing wrong with daisy chain style networking so long as a machine can be automatically bypassed if its not working "

Even with that part sorted, the complexity and collisions were why it was rapidly dumped.

A common bus is ok in _theory_ but in practice once you start running at any rate of speeds, time of flight (1ns per foot roughly) becomes such a critical factor that it's a lot more expensive to implement than simply running more (very cheap) wires.

Re: Vindicated

"My home PCs have always been named after various afterlifes."

Probably the most famous set of machines on the Internet were named after Bloom Country characters.

I've seen a set named after Rocky Horror characters. Apparently that started after a system was built and named Frank(enstein). Eddy ended up as the core of a group named after HHGTTG characters.

Re: Network tests

"Management often regarded me as a necessary evil to solve the problems that had foxed the highly paid specialists"

On the other hand, when I was in such a role I was valued by management (less so by the specialists who would get called out to explain shortcuts by management when I'd finished working out what went wrong - in an organisation fixated on eliminating repeats in implementation problems the pushback may not come from management). A troubleshooter is a valuable employee when used correctly.

One of the more telling organisational problems is that "specialists" often start out as being extremely knowledgeable "specialist generalists" but over time the job moves to be inhabited by inexperienced "box ticking exam-passers" who eventually become a liability to the organisation and see anyone who knows what they do in any detail as a threat to their existence because all they know how to do is tick boxes and not address issues holistically.

You can see this in the increasingly manic singleminded focus on speeding across several countries where the last 15-20 years of more rigorous enforcement have resulted in virtually no (in come cases negative) road safety improvements. It's gone past simple self-congratulatory back patting about getting speeds down in areas where it wasn't making any difference to casualties, and into outright statistical manipulation of figures to make things look as though they've changed when they haven't and going into full attack mode when called out on casualty figures remaining unchanged (or increasing).

Re: Octal problem

> leading zero in C/C++ means 'Octal....The second number is in Octal (010), and as base 8 runs with digits 0-7 per digit position, it evaluates to decimal 8

Which is all fun and games until someone writes 010 as part of an IP address and your code interprets it as octal, but the RFC states that IPv4 address dotted quads are ALWAYS decimal.

And then someone else (a certain Mr Vixie) says that the code is working correctly.

And someone else points out that Mr Vixie is the same person who wrote the RFC AND wrote the code

And when someone else asks that either the code or the RFC be adjusted to agree with each other, a religious war breaks out.

"suddenly a particular bit of software started refusing to run, reporting insufficient RAM available."

We had problems crop up with different answers code was giving between 32 and 64 bit OSes.

It turned out that BOTH were wrong, and it wasn't a case of one being less wrong than the other.

In that case it was because floating point answers were being rounded to the nearest 32/64 bits and then fed into the next iteration of the same loop.

After a while rounding errors add up and your proto-solar system flies apart after 10 million years or your red supergiant star blows apart when it shouldn't. Solving that issue answered a number of long-standing astronomy questions (but raised more, because CPU floating point precision STILL isn't good enough to run simulations for billions of years)

"My problem students - a couple of teachers "

You didn't really need to explain much further than that. My parents are both teachers and I grew up around hundreds of them.

There are more than enough of the kind you're invoking to justify the trope "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach". It was even worse when you'd find obvious errors in textbooks (vs multiple other sources) and teachers who'd go with the textbook anyway because what's printed is always correct isn't it? (even for things like basic algebra where a calculator showed the errors).

It was frustrating for me (as a 15yo) to have to explain issues of basic physics to some teachers who didn't understand what they were trying to teach 7-8yo pupils out of textbooks (math usually SCARED them), have them apparently "get it" and then realise they'd still managed to get things mostly bass-ackwards - but at least they weren't so "scared" of science and math.

There are _SOME_ brilliant teachers - quite a lot of them in fact. The problem is that there are also a large bunch of dunces who saw it as an "easy career option" and a collection of martinets who should have been weeded out as fundamentally psychologically unsuited to the job before they finished training. Guess which ones tend to rise to the top in the administrative side?

" No. I can honestly say we never took apart a compiler in school."

Although I'd already been doing it for a while as a hobby, polytechnic level ELECTRICAL/ELECTRONICS engineering (3000 level - basically the same as 6th form) in 1984 had us creating "on paper" processors, writing assembly code and stepping through the programs to understand how they worked - along with doing some level of Boolean work and making gate arrays.

We then got to play with an (on paper) compiler to turn higher level code into assembler to see how it worked.

The lecturers (rightly) felt that it was critical that circuit and power monkies had a reasonable understanding of the guts of microprocessors because they were in the process of or about to turn the entire industry on its head (it depended which industry, but all aspects ended up being affected) . Most of us ended up spinning out in the computer direction anyway, via various paths.

"A hardware engineer blows PALs, a software engineer burns PROMs"

"In a similar vein, a few months ago I had a child CEO ask me why I'd have a need to thump a TV with a screwdriver"

Most people who did it never knew the whys either:

In the very old days (valve kit with components soldered to tags on sockets) it wasn't uncommon to find unsoldered tags (and dry joints)

In the less old days (before wave soldering rigs) the occasional unsoldered joint on a PCB would still get through QC (if there WAS a QC station). I once saw a report of one such joint that finally failed and went intermittent after 26 years in the field.

Even more occasionally it was a bad plug/socket, shitty cable connection. Less occasionally (on colour sets) it'd be fractured solder joints around the line transformer.

Percussive maintenance was never a good substitute for a proper fix.

"Even funnier, they didn't catch the issue because they mostly tested each process separately, so disk access contention didn't happen."

Latencies are fun aren't they?

Even without disks in the way, if you have a TCP/IP comms link running near its limits, latencies can go from "tolerable" to "oh shit" in the blink of an eye.

The PROBLEM arises when looking at usage statistics because they're invariably 5-minute averages and the instantaneous peak values in each sampling period is never reported.

As a rule of thumb, if a WAN link his about 30% on 5-minute averages then it's probably spiking close to 100% multiple times during that period and the only way you're going to detect that occuring is to measure roundtrip ping times a few times per second.

64 byte pings can go from 14ms to 3200ms and back to 14ms in a 10 second period without tripping any alarms under high/spiky load conditions and it only takes a couple more percent to have it go out to 15,000ms pings and start having your helldesk lines light up.

This is why QoS (or using priority queuing) is important. Dropping low-priority stuff to the back of the queue can avert the phone calls or at least allow people to continue with important work.

It's even worse with satellite links. Back in the dark ages (1994) with an entire country on a 128kb/s link, overall monthly GB more than doubled when it switched from Sat to submarine link, but more importantly for the users latencies on interactive services dropped by 90% (www is not interactive)

"This provided a current path that shouldn't have been there to a point motor"

There's a lot to be said for NOT using analog control systems to control boolean systems - "phantom paths" is something that shows up time and time again in control system catastrophes from aircraft to nuclear power stations to railways and more.

(That's quite apart from ensuring that the displays show the REMOTE device actual status, and not the LOCAL switch position - which was one of the fundamental failings at Three Mile Island which allowed the meltdown to happen. Switch said valve was closed, valve was not closed, no feedback to say switch and valve didn't agree.)