Posts by Roland6

Re: 100m goes a long way

My daughter is at uni. and the mobile phone video of the inspection visit along with photos of key defects has been her modus operandi, along with reporting and recording defects (suck as the shower tray that leaked through the ceiling - the large amount of water damage occurring after it had been reported, landlord should of got the emergency plumber out rather than wait several weeks..(*) )

As a parent guarantor, I’m a little reassured by her approach, as currently I’m on the hook for the entire house of 6 students…

(*) Given the rents landlords charge students - in my daughters case circa x3 more than if they let the house out as a single family home, I have little time for landlords not being quick to remedy faults.

That will be because the relevant people will have been fired or are overworked doing something an excolleague once did…

Re: X11 logo?

The same one as https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1D54F

Also would not be surprised if the particular shade of blue used on x.com is a web default….

Re: Press

X for close, delete…

Re: Strategic investment

Gamble probably needs Germany to influence the EU and to pass a directive covering the sourcing of semiconductors from EU fab’s.

Starting early, would also influence the foreign owned fab owners to actually meaningfully use the EU fab’s, eg. Intel actually produce current generation CPUs in Europe and not just lower spec peripheral logic chips.

My thoughts also; the first use of this will be to detect ad blockers.

However, I do question the real need for this given today without it:

Websites can block access from browsers running ad blocker etc. or running in a sandbox.

With movies and tv advertisers are able to inhibit the playing of content due to use of Airplay, HDMI etc.

So it would seem to be just a standard API that will make such detections even easier:

The malware writers will use it to enhance their detection of target PCs and enhance their social engineering to get users to turn off protections.

MS willl use this to block access to MS because you aren’t running the last version of Windows and the updates released under an hour ago…

Re: I've got an idea

How about “coop”, and give it the tagline: “coming home to roost”

> could existing commercial property, …be re-purposed?

I’m sure there is a steady supply of “on prem” datacentre properties up for sale, vacated by their owners due to systems having been migrated into the cloud…

Re: Spectacularly irresponsible.

> there is no scenario of “[NSA bogeyman] able to listen in on all the confidential conversations”

May I remind you about:

1) Enigma, an encryption system the UK/US were able to decrypt, yet we supported the promotion of it as being secure for other countries diplomatic communications…

2) In more recent times, the eavesdropping of Merkels phone…

So I suggest there is a reasonable case the UK/US played a big part in weakening the encryption, so that they could if circumstances arose, eavesdrop on Tetra communications; wherever in the world Tetra would end up being used…

However, whether the US/UK actively listened in, is another matter, although I would not be surprised if they do when the President is in Europe.

Re: Air gaps don't work

Stuxnet was a just a trojan; which happened to have two important additions which made it into a cyber weapon: The first was the highly specific targeting, the second was the payload/bomb to drop on reaching the target.

So implementing the normal Trojan defences will block some trojans such as Stuxnet. Okay these don’t protect against zero day etc.

>” There are ways to bypass this (whitelisting)”

The bypasses in the main rely on the (misplaced) trust the OS places on the object labels. Hence why OS security features need to be augmented typically by a third-party security suite (although once again not a 100% solution).

Re: home to the largest nuclear power....

The size of the plant is largely irrelevant, you don’t build a nuclear plant unless you have a target market, so all that really matters at this point in time is its spare/unused generative capacity. Or is the idea the datacentre operators will pay a market premium rate so the nuclear plant operators stop supplying electricity to those that don’t pay so well?

Re: Data Center Straining Wastewater Plant?

Perhaps need to build a datacentre next to a mineral salt extraction business that uses evaporation ponds to collect useful minerals such as lithium…

Re: 4 cents?

>” Commercial rates are much more expensive in the UK, because they aren't subject to the price cap.”

That situation (commercial rates higher than residential rates) has only really arisen in the last year when gas prices rose sharply and the UK generation system is highly dependent upon gas, due in part to a reluctance to invest in nuclear….

Re: Made me think of this

The author has some information here, which I assume is just a slightly different version of the newspaper article.

https://danrodricks.com/2021/02/09/the-wires-baltimores-ugly-overhead-blight-will-finally-get-some-attention/

Trouble is, it wasn’t non-standard use in the 80’s.

Structured cable from when I encountered it in the early 80s covered use of the same cable infrastructure for both data and telephone.

The problem was probably an old school telco engineer who hadn’t kept up with the changing uses of twisted pair cabling and who didn’t refer to the documentation…

Re: tone and tag

With one client, I’m looking forward to the UK POTS switch off;.

Currently moving the alarms to 4G and fixed line Internet. The phones are also moving to digital. Once completed all the ancient Cat3 can be removed. The offices being ancient once had lots of telephone lines, with redecorating, change of owners etc. labels got lost so it was easier to either use known working circuits or add new ones.

Re: Made me think of this

Single pole?

Obviously never visited Tokyo..

I have photos taken in the mid 1990s of whole streets with overhead cabling like this…

>” If it’s not labelled, you haven’t finished the job yet.”

The structured cabling convention is to label the circuit with a “number” which a competent engineer will look up to find out the usage. Ie. The cable number is a cross reference to documentation, which should be maintained…

In older UK premises, it is easy to tell the difference between the Cat3 cable generally used for telephony and alarms and the Cat5/Cat6 which gets used for various data comms (ie. Not exclusive to Ethernet).

Aside when adding a new Cat6 infrastructure, I deliberately used non-grey Cat6, so it would be easy to identify when the (grey) Cat5, (grey) Cat3 and (grey) RS-232 was removed, obviously the (grey) power cables were to remain….

“ The same thing could have happened in the 2000s1980s if someone had decided to run 10baseT ethernet over 'convenient' phone wiring.”

Corrected.

Ethernet over pre-existing RJ-45 circuits as used throughout the US was a primary motivation for 10Base-T.

Whilst IEEE 802.3 10Base-T wasn’t ratified until 1990, there were implementations of Ethernet over (telco) twisted pair such as Starlan which predate this…

Obviously, as data rates increased Cat3 didn’t cut it…

Re: Real Sanitizers

I never understood why telephone sanitizer, as used by the contractors, had that particular aroma.

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

>” there’s plenty of evidence that Horizon is very poor at direction-finding”

I suggest there are smoking guns and (probably) evidence of Westminster being poor at direction finding.

I see you reference CoViD; we know the government were very poor a directing commercial funding at PPE suppliers who had delivery track records. We assume because a vaccine was delivered that the entire investment in CoViD R&D was well directed. Also as a result / lesson learnt, how much money is the UK government is now investing (year on year) in mRNA research?

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

>” We do actually know how to make university research effective, we’ve known for at least a century. …Give them money, and let them decide on priorities.”

That’s the problem - a lack of money, Westminster has a long history of poor investment in scientific research, of which this government is no exception.

Remember Bojo, Riski et al have spoken about what could happen, but there has been a noticeable absence of money announcements and hard cash being delivered to the universities.

Horizon might not be perfect, but once it allocates monies, the monies appear. Personally, if Horizon monies enable a university to main functioning research departments, teams and collaborations, so they are able to grasp “real” research opportunities, then it is money well spent.

I remember wasting time in the 1980s getting commitment and monies out of the UK government, it was really irritating how often government officials were happy to waste time dancing around the table avoiding making decisions, it was surprising just how often officials (metaphorically speaking) turned up to meetings having either forgotten their pens or ensured they had ink in their pens… In comparison the European programmes, whilst at time’s bureaucratic, did deliver.

Re: Good old Brexit

In this case not giving in the way people normally spin such matters...

"Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has delayed the decision to rejoin the European scientific research co-operation program"

I had long been of the opinion the problems were more in Westminster than in Brussels and here is a clear example supporting that viewpoint.

I'm sure some media outlets have been able to spin this as yet another instance of "the EU punishing the UK"...

Whilst having potentially 300 different approaches and toolsets to the same data analysis problem is an overkill, unifying around one can hinder the discovery of modelling mistakes and invalid assumptions. Hence why having multiple people working to the same objective but using the same data, different tools and different methods, should give greater trust in the results and where inconsistencies arise further investigation is the norm…

Seem to remember this is effectively a standard way of developing critical systems software in some sectors, plus we shouldn’t forget the background to the Intel AMD duoopoloy, where the military wanted two sources - even if one was the favoured supplier.

It would still exist!

Even with the tax changes you suggest, a contractor can still make use of expenses etc.to reduce their tax, compared to an employee. Remember HMRC are basically happy if a contractor (inside or outside of IR35) is using an umbrella company ie. One which treats the entire invoice as income plus VAT.

Re: Oh dear...

From previous reports (*) it doesn’t seem that EE are the cause of delay

(*) Google gave me this example: https://www.telcotitans.com/btwatch/ee-says-delays-elsewhere-have-impacted-esn-delivery/3928.article

And there are now lots of direct flights from Ireland to Europe and America; so it’s relatively easy to bypass England and London.

Re: I guess it will at least cut emissions.

Depends on what you mean by “pollution”… a quick look back to horse drawn London and crossing the road was a hazard and best undertaken in a pair of wellington boots…