Posts by Denarius 2180 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2009
why only iron/nickel in inner core in theory? Surely some real heavy elements, Tu, Ur and so on must have dribbled down ? if so would the core be a liquid cooled iron moderated fission reactor in part ? Hence some of the heat powering circulating currents in outer core and lower mantle ? The rest coming from more routine radioactive decay. Also an alloy may match the observed lack of rigidity. Have I missed something[s]
@Bryce* Not quite. Commies punish those trying to leave. We detain those trying to enter. So we are are not a totalitarian state. One can hope todays ex-PM replacement election might disturb the Force of the dark side. OTOH, St Julians latest exploit also sounds like an equivalent skit from the Goodies.
@BBob; Bwhahahaha. Never worked for USA multinationals have you ? Private merkin industry is about theft of wages, bonuses for boards, screwing the customers, owning glove puppets who pretend to govern for the peasants. In short, it is the USSR revisited with a different flag and same denial of its supposed philosophical basis. No surprise, both are or were running under fundie materialist world views. NASAs inability to do anything is just some of the twitching of the country's corpse.
Elons and others companies may indeed put cheaper rockets up, but the basic problem is there is no economic reason for any activity beyond geosynchronous orbit. Research is accepted as non-economic initially. To be fair to NASA, their engineers make Mars Rovers and long range probes that are exemplars of engineering and science gathering. However, it has been a long time since someone like Kelly Johnson ran anything in MerkinVille.
Jim,
No, entirely plausible if one is old enough. As for degrees, perhaps the value and quality rotted in Pom Land before Oz. I worked with an intelligent fast learner with a shiny new degree who had only been taught javascript. To his credit he picked up Perl quickly and was useful in a Unix environment. What happened to Cobol, Assembly (any hardware) and C ? Yes, I have retired, why do you ask ?
David, this was a non-delightful feature of SPARC hardware for a long time. Probably still has it. Bitten by same "feature" two decades ago. Which reminds me, must dump the Solaris 8 pizza boxes lurking in shed so I have more room for something useful.
At least AIX, HPUX and PCs hardware was not so scream inducing. I loved the old PARA-RISC HP hardware. One could do a full backup without starting the OS using embeded firmware. Great for major OS upgrades and raw disk databases.
we all develop interest and skills in maintaining things that work. Also vintage cars that do not talk to anything (or you). Given coffee disasters of Something for the Weekend this week where working networks were required for the simplest purchase, imagine the chaos a backhoe could cause. Perhaps the Amish have a point.
My ZTE never did had a weather app. Which reminds me, how are the Android alternatives developing these days ? About time something that worked on a given CPU or SOC was available. Most of my hardware seems to be not on any list even though it is not uncommon. I know, this does not address firmware back doors, but it is a start.
unskilled, uncaring, not responsible socialised psychopaths often take great delight in denying change requests randomly to stroke their egos. Such power, and no responsibility for consequences. It is always the techies who get blamed. The other usual KPIs have been covered above. Usually summed up as overworked staff.
seems right. nearly two decades ago the Oz arm of one of the 3 major TLA outsoucerers was told to sack, sack by merkin HQ. Local managers argued that they were successful in sales and had more work than they could handle, so they needed to recruit. Merkin PHBs replied that the stock market needed to see sackings to make stock rise, even if it lost profit.
Conclusion: Stock market is run by fools. (who knew). Rich fools.
Big companies are mostly run by cowards who lack knowledge of their own industry. Logical given many of them are sales weasels, thus good candidates for socialised psychopath assessment.
And yes, water is wet. Now if only the *corpserations (sic) did not fund the politicians.
* Corpserartion. Corporate version of zombie. Absorbs intelligence while shambling to destructive decay.
while imprisoned in TLA/TLA I started a private project to create a manglement speak to basic english converter using sed mostly. If needed, adding a text parser also to assist readability. Had to give up because when the jargon was removed there was nothing left. JR Saul and probably others have commented that the current crop of wannabe elites do this deliberately.
Gene, that does not work. The techie is told to "fix it" and just shut up. Or both. It is never the fault of the manglement class. Most of there "processes" are there to allow technically incompetent to exercise power without accountability. Once in a large hellhole IT staff were supposed to have planned months ahead for zero day type exploit patching. Of course scheduled regular downtime was nonexistent because this was a 24/7/365 organisation in name. I have _never_ seen a study of the cost of this official obstruction.
Most of us have had the irritation of change control droids gloating that about disapproving changes for process reasons. One time I worked with a change control team who understood their role was to ensure the process was done correctly and pointed out problems before the change meetings so necessary work got done on time as scheduled. It was an effective workplace.
asdf, spot on. Some of us have to use commercial variants. Accordingly, consistency is not the bugbear of little minds. Same for using ksh93 on linux. A lot of ksh93 scripts written on when written on linux work for AIX, Solaris and HPUX and more if any are left. Ultrix anyone ? I digress again.
I started on RedHat but dependency hell made me put in effort to try Debian after I found some old boxes using it at work. Never went back. I used Centos occasionally at work and with Synaptic it was satisfactory.
Best case: So some PHB gets a bonus for reducing costs by dropping isolated management LAN and using a VPN across internet. We all trust VPNs, not.
Usual case: some PHB/cost cutting designer puts ILOMs on same LAN as everything else.
Worst case: No-one even knows the ILOM is there with default passwords and accounts. Yep, I also am a pessimist because it is the most rational option. Dont need electrical stimulation, just the irritation of dealing with what passes as modern PMs, bean counters and CEOs and their ilk.
Shadow, I'll second that. One of my more twisted amusements on medium to long journeys (250 to 2500 KM) is to use a tree carcass map or mere human memory to choose a route, then set the car nav going. The obsession some brands have with obscure dirt or nonexistent tracks in Queensland is fascinating. And yes, obligatory nitpicker, avoid unsealed roads is _always_ set along with choose fastest or easiest routes. So far I have yet to see any route that is better than what I pick using intuition or guesswork. OTOH, in bigger cities the same unit is usually very useful. YMMV :-)
I digress. So is the new Pixel a bigger data slurper or is that even possible ?
Isn't the lack of such lawyerfests a mystery given the number of stories of discontent with SAP implementations ? My own limited experience was that SAP could make any process more time consuming, less intuitive and less complete when "complete". Also way more expensive. Perhaps because I was working in government disorganisations, the client did not know how to specify a problem and remediation requirements so that vendor could do what was needed ? This would skew the assessments.
Arthoss, maybe it is just the scale of SAP payroll implementations going bad in news that cause a degree of skepticism to your assertion. No doubt PHB gullibility about shiny shiny from sales weasels plays a part along with the lack of older, cynical, knowledgeable staff on payroll of client also.
Some stories familiar. Reminds me of John Ralston Saul in (IIRC ) The Unconcious Civilisation that modern elites are so out of touch or besotted by process that they are no longer able to panic. Panic at least means you _know_ something has gone badly wrong. Unlike PHBs who just blunder on trusting spreadsheets and BS
and to add insult to irritation,
the web site stage two identification may barf if one uses a drivers license or passport as identity documents. Would you trust a department that cant even get a standard ID process working that other governments have done for a year or three ? At least humans on phones were competent.
Granted western civilisation has been committing intellectual suicide for 2 centuries, but I did not expect Oz to throw away its government IT remnants so rapidly. All Oz citizens need to practice writing legibly with the original digital interface, because the electronic comms systems will be done for good soon. OTOH, state sponsored snooping will not work to well.
Good point SVV. IIRCC there was a government inspired report and committee recommendation 4 years or so ago to avoid big bang outsourcery to single vendors because of lack of evidence for any cost savings or appropriate performance conditions. Inability of public serpents to manage and usefully negotiate with foreign Big Company sales weasels (my paraphrase) was also mentioned somewhere.
Oz, get a good deal ? Only if Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra wiped out by a tsunami concurrently. Oz ruling cliques, whether public or private, are trained overseas and have a craven colonial mindset instilled. In some cases it might be genetic.This mindset is at odds with the general population who think they are are as good as anyone else. Some of them are better, some worse like any other country. However the brown nosing manglement (for want of an appropriately vile epithet) adopt foreign fads only after the poms and merkins at least have shown that said fad does not work, has been demonstrated to fail multiple times and means lots of money, usually taxpayers and long term investors, goes overseas in return for lots of markings on dead tree carcass if that.
AC, you optimist you. Jobs go offshore, done badly if at all, data slurped "managed by contract conditions" * , and no local staff employed again. Oz just gets a lecture about how lazy we are and have unrealistic expectations of what governments can do. * quote from a PHB in Oz public service when questioned during the Howards Way destruction of the Australian Public Service IT.
How about moving the pollies payroll to CenterLink. Mandatory timesheets to be filled in personally with biometric signing using retinal identification. Unless all systems are performing to a reasonable end user response speed, the payroll processes is reniced to -19 or so, if mainframes have such a useful command. Enduser defined as someone on end of NBN satellite link to, oh say, Wyndham or Meekatharra.
At least Australians might find out what most of these representatives are really doing, because managing the country in the interests of all its citizens is not in evidence. The incentive to properly fund fault tolerant critical systems might also be better understood by the purse string holders.
Cixi also tried to move the cumbersome ruins of the then Chinese government to a goal of constitutional monarchy. However, as much of Chinese history was written by egomaniacs worthy of any modern CEO, only more evil, her reputation was besmirched. As for IBM, pretending to fool the boss is a routine ritual of the PHB class in all companies.
Partly. Last 30 years of Oz Fed Gov policy has been any excuse to slash and burn. I suspect the owners of the organisations who launder cash to the donor bodies who fund political parties may be able to explain why destroying public value to enrich the wealthy has such a hold on the bureaucracy and "advisors" to government. But I digress.
This committee report seems to suggest re-instituting what the "old" Public Service had. Old as in pre Howards Way. Career paths for specialist roles such as effective honest purchasing, asset management, office space management and IT. These were destroyed by Howard and successor governments who seem to be blindly following the high rank PHBs who apparently believe only high level PHBing was in any way "special" and deserving of perks, bonuses and obscene salaries.
Side Note. Over the decades I heard constant prattle from on high about efficiency and accountability. I am still astounded that the cost of the infestation of consultants, contractors, advisors and their ilk is not itemised in loving detail to demonstrate why highly paid blow ins are so much more effective than career public servants who are appropriately trained, assessed and paid.
Lest some shill for the corrupt moan, (what, on ElReg ?) I state that having worked in public and private sectors in purchasing and IT among other bouts of boredom, that the private sector was _always_ more rule ridden, inefficient and corrupt. The bigger the company, the worse it was, especially in purchasing roles. IMNSHO, auditors who are not beholden to their own multinational should be the next TV heroes. The Commonwealth Audit office should have its funding tripled and strike fear into Ministers, public service executives. Then we start on Defence and spook funding.
Linux having bad hardware support in 98 and later ? YGTBK. Used Linux, usually RedHat, often to identify feral unmarked hardware that Windows would not touch. YMMV but my Delphi, COBOL, VisualCobol and VB6 coding did not generate BSODs.
Agree that Win2K was a great OS for theWindows world. Nowhere near the memory leaks that plagued NT4 and much lighter hardware demands than WinXP. Never really liked OS2. Have install CDs still but no hardware old enough.
AC, Buran worked just fine, like the merkin shuttles. The worst possible solution that would actually work I think someone labeled space shuttles. However the Russians were not welded to the 90 ton reusable "spaceplane" concept as it was inefficient. Buran was built to confirm NASA were crazy. Its one flight proved the costs of running it were as predicted so the Soviets remained with the same stuff they still sell to anyone, 30 years later.
As for F35, the Chinese J21 and friends main shortcoming is propulsion. Any information that improved Chinese engines narrows the gap. The interesting question for me is the data fusion so the pilot has good situational awareness. Has that been copied ? Probably,due to an outsourcing decision.
null examples are not an argument. Only carbon based life is known, Sample size of 1. Look up the number of compounds carbon can make versus _any_ other element. Oder of magnitude difference. I wont even start on the huge gap between simple carbon compounds and the simplest protein.
NASA Parker probe for one. Sampling corona etc. Definitely overcooking marshmellows at perihelion. Kudos for the engineers who built these probes to cope with heat and the mathematicians who worked out the orbital mechanics to get probes to orbits of interest.
Media have been editing text, audio and video for years so interviewees can appear to say anything. Or more commonly, made to appear ignorant of the noble, enlightened view of whatever bigotry was received truth of the media droids at the time. Example Malcolm Muggeridge informing the West that Stalin lead a nightmare state. Winston warmongering about Hitler. More recent examples are Bliar and Co. So the distrust grows. Now if only a cultural distrust of asocial media can only be made a general attitude among the non-technical.
In Oz the goldrush mentality continues to infect the PHB class, whether private or government. So the CBDs continue to get oversupply and elsewhere crumbs. It seems Ozs mediocre pollies for communications still think that Morse code is high tech from their bandwidth bleatings. The labels ElReg has used for these incompetents says it all. As for fixed radio versus satellite needs according to NBN, why do residences a mere 80 Km from Oz capital need to use satellite comms ? There are mountains and high hills that have line of site even into the deeper valleys. Some of these have line of site to telco towers or shock, horror, are close to existing fiber cables.
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