Posts by Roland6 10748 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010
Like to see an AI code OSI Transport Class 4 from the Standard specification; human programmers struggled to implement it ..
Remember a specifcation (in general) says what needs to be done, not how it will be done in a specific instance.
Would the AI realise its code needs to interface to (another AI’s) ISO OSI CLNS and utilise the iinformation contained in the OSI Transport Class 4 Service Definition?
Funny that, this reader can’t help but think of life on the fictional starship Heart of Gold and the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser when faced with the very simple user requirement: “all I want is a cup of tea”…
On the other hand, resolving that requirement will require lots of AI processors (probably more than exist today) and a correspondingly large cloud computing bill….
And as we have learnt, in networking the biggest contributor to latency (besides distance) is network devices and thus the quality of the silicon in them, which naturally will cost.
Expect part of this is chicken-and-egg marketing: drum up mass.market demand to enable manufacturers to produce at scale and (hopefully) at a lower per unit cost.
Aside: increased bandwidth impacts distance based latency considerations by allowing more bits to arrive within a given time “window”.
>” Get the $MFT defragmented into one chunk, and reorder the entries in the $MFT to group files of one directory together. Second would be to defragment the Directory”
Wasn’t this what the major third-party disk management tools do?
I seem to remember the MFT defrag and reorder required a reboot and ran before the OS started.
There was a MFT defrag utility included on Hiren’s BootCD.
The main use case I’ve come across is video/tv streaming over a (domestic) WiFi network, so Joe Public’s children can watch streams in their bedrooms whilst the parents watch something else in the lounge, all without having to run any cables….
> Operating Systems expect wireless adapter to connect to a single band,
That’s s**t programming based on an invalid assumption. WiFi connectivity to multiple bands/channels has been possible since the adoption of 2.4 and 5Ghz bands. Similarly the ability to use multiple fixed network connections has been around and used since at least the mid 1980s and probably earlier.
Just today cars are advertised on emotive fluff, mobile phones on their camera (and photo manipulation capaibilities), we can see data centres will be sold not on the actual need for computing power but for their heat output. Naturally, this will be given a greenwash, so that people don’t ask the awkward question about electricity production etc
So that Ring (whatever) home automation system, that requires cloud servers, will be using AI to ensure sufficient premises are consuming heat arising from its cloud data centres.
“ The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) began life in November 1992”, New Labour were first elected in 1997…
It was structured so that the benefits went to the private sector and the costs remained in the public sector aka taxpayers….
This was obvious from the several IT related PFI bids I was involved in. For PFI to deliver the same service as the public sector the prices needed to e circa 30% higher. So to be cheaper either significant efficiency improvements etc. were necessary, or level the playing field by simply bar the public sector from bidding…
Interesting series of articles here, focused on the NHS experience of PFI.
https://lowdownnhs.info/analysis/the-history-of-privatisation-part-4-the-early-days-of-pfi/
>” This is about profiteering at the expense of having a set credit limit and a separate authorise button for anything over a user-controlled limit that has no default and has to be explicitly set by each customer before they are able to use the system.”
Trouble is this seems to be a lesson that isn’t being learnt or sinking in.
We had exactly the same with mobile phones - remember:
The 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull and the disruption to air travel? Which resulted in travellers unknowingly running up massive £,000’s phone/data bills.
The issue with automatic debts to bank cards used on iStore, resulting in parents getting massive bills from children’s in game purchases..
The issue with AWS “free tier” which also was uncapped chargeable usage.
…
At least the (uk) mobile phone companies reacted and now you can set additional cost limits and receive a text message when the limit is approached.
I suspect neither iStore or AWS have changed…
MS marketing.
By putting AI capabilities into W10, it is clear this is an attempt to encourages to use functionality that will cause their W10 platform to appear to run slow and thus encourage them to upgrade to W11.
Trouble is with the low system performance specification for W11, we can expect Joe Public to go out and buy a system who’s actual performance isn’t dissimilar to the one they run W10 on…
I think a contributor to the problem with the PowerEdge T3x0 and T4x0 tower servers is that they are actually rack servers turned 90 degrees and put in a tower case.
>spare parts…
My gripe is that the part number isn’t always helpful, because it applies only to the specific version of the part installed in your system. With many systems, faults are found and parts are revised and thus given a new part number. If you look up the new part number you will often find the part numbers it supercedes, however it is rare to look up your part number and get the part number of the part that supercedes it. This problem I’ve had with ibm/lenovo, dell & hp.
>Why not?
The hour commute?
I went from being the parent who left the house at 5am Monday morning (to catch a red eye) typically returning 6pm Friday, to (mostly) working from home, sharing school runs with (working) partner, in-laws, neighbours etc. to fit around those days I needed to be in “the office” (*)
The experience massively improved my management and team leadership skills, as I gained first hand experience of the change in priorities and mindset. Not saying it wasn’t without some pain and mental strife as I balanced the need to deliver work to a deadline and still be at the school gate on time…
The only rules I give my team is they need to be able to answer the phone during normal office hours and be able to attend an “office” (*2) the next business day, unless they have booked time off.
(*) office in this instance was not a fixed geographic location, but always a circa 1~2 hour commute.
(*2) a non-home location which might be an office or a hotel/service station for a face-to-face meeting.
A relatively sane schedule…
The junior school my children went to didn’t offer extended schooldays/day care, so you had to deposit them not before 8am and pick them up at 3:30pm. Obviously, all the various after school clubs/activites tended to run 4pm to 5 pm..
So quite often I would be working from the swimming pool/sports centre viewing gallery, only possible due to mobile phone/data and laptop.
The change to secondary school were they caught the bus at 7:45am from the village and didn’t return till 4:45pm was a relief.
That 22:00 shutoff also seems a little ambitious, often I found it was more like 2am..
>” Nah! I do believe this was a real – albeit flawed – attempt to create the next generation of CPUs.”
That was the i432, but you are right in a way, Intel needed to build on the success of the x86 and deliver something more capable of supporting a minicomputer operating system., such as Unix.
> AIUI IBM insisted on it being 286-specific when MS wanted (correctly, IMHO) to go 386-only.
The 286 manual set Intel gave out at the UK launch , whilst very good (especially the OS writers guide) did contain many place holders for the 386, implying it was more of a marketing release of work in progress than a completed chip.
So I suggest someone of influence at Microsoft read the manuals…
The laugh now is that we have forgotten just how big a step up in performance the 286 (10mhz) was over the 8086/8088 (2mhz).
> If you're currently reading this for the nuclear engineering rather than the geopolitical horror,
I found it notable the article doesn’t reference the expert watchers who have already commented on this disclosure and who see this as nuclear powered satellites rather than nuclear weapons in space.
There are people and there are borders aka lines on a map.
The Scottish people have been around a long time, living in Scotland, yet the border between England and Scotland has over centuries moved around, with the current border a working compromise. I suspect if Scotland was to become a wholly separate nation (again) there will be disputes over the border and adjacent lands.
The 7 maps, whilst clearly showing movement of borders also show continuity of occupancy of the core lands by the Ukrainian people.
They also show that Putin’s land grab is more about geopolitics than people, other than Russia/USSR, like China imported its own people into occupied lands which over generations has allowed them to make claims over ceded territories.
> "Do not resuscitate" or any other "living will" type issues. That can then be placed on your medical records by your Doctor.
Recommend ensuring the local hospital also has a copy on their records.
For practical benefit a copy needs to be in full sight and signposted so that when the paramedic gains entry (front door, window etc. - with or without fire brigade assistance) it is the first thing they see.
Without it, they are required to attempt CPR on home deaths.
Having the form so obvious, means the first paramedic can stand down the second paramedic (to assist CPR), ambulance (to take the person to hospital), police (home deaths are ‘suspious’) - all of whom will be on route, so that they can be rerouted to other incidents (where hopefully their skills can be of benefit). Additionally, all these people aren’t subjected to the emotional trauma from having to perform CPR on someone who obviously either is most likely already dead or isn’t going to survive the recovery. The first paramedic can then simply perform a simple ECG to confirm heart has flatlined, leaving the deceased at peace and in a condition that doesn’t warrant a closed coffin.
>“ A factory reset that is not also accompanied by a change of the default administrator password will return the router to its default administrator credentials”
I presume these devices used something like admin/admin rather than the unique default passwords that have been typical on UK ISP supplied routers for many years now…
I wonder if the test was on ISS because funding was available…
From events it would seem a real use of this technology would be to perform emergency surgery at the Antarctic research base. Although, I wonder if the time lag would be greater due to use of earth-satellite-earth communications.
>” am not sure how you think it costs less although maybe there was a hope it would”
Need to separate costs:
Total QE monies 2009~2012 £375bn
Total furlough monies 2020-2022 £70bn
Neither of these figures allow for inflation etc.
>” it was about saving the currency and avoiding another great depression.”
Yes, it was flagged back in the mid to late 1990s that the UK economy was overly exposed to the health of the global financial market; from looking at the balance of trade figures, it would seem we still are…
> the preprepared plans
I thought that was part of the problem, there were no real plans as the plans that existed were based on assumptions CoViD invalidated. Also, preparation cost money, hence why there was a scramble for PPE…
The biggest issue I had was the lack of preparation in the NHS in the acute wards: patients were dying from an unknown illness for several months before CoViD-19 was finally isolated, yet they didn’t implement strict biohazard containment procedures; I had cousins who were working these wards during this time…
Yes there was the outdated practices of Companies House - interestingly “The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act” (the ECCTA) received Royal Assent on 26 October 2023, it requires mandatory proof of id for all company directors, both new and for currently listed companies. It will be interesting g to see what that uncovers, although the timetable which directors need to comply with is a little unclear.
However, the issue was that the government department that handed out the monies did no checks, so can’t even point the finger at Companies House…
Aside: The ECCTA is interesting in that it creates new bar to Corporate Criminal Liability, it would seem under the act, the actions of the senior Post Office management over Horizon are sufficient for their actions to be attributed to the company… what isn’t clear is whether there is any backdating, but certainly any new PO attempts to prosecute Post Masters will be impacted by this act…
Well 2008 was a crisis manufactured by the banks… so some parallels with Covid…
What is notable is with 2008 the government decided to throw money directly at the banks, rather than taking to potentially cheaper option of simply underwriting the repayments of the sub-prime loans, which the evidence shows cost significantly more than the book value of the sub-prime loans, whilst also doing nothing to help the victims who lost their homes etc..
With Covid the government bypassed the banks and directly subsidised people’s wages and thus companies. This approach seems to have cost significantly less and maintained a level of capacity in the economy to more quickly pickup (whether it did or did not is a separate discussion point).
> There are not even enough IPv4 addresses for all the mobile devices.
Does that really matter? We have IPv6 and ways of using IPv4 over the IPv6 carrier service.
Okay it means websites etc probably need to run dual stacks and some way for phones (IPv6 end points) to accept and correctly connect to explicit IPv4 public addresses.
Given the experience of the mobile telcos with 4G/IPv6, perhaps we can expect one of the fixed line ISPs to go IPv6 only, with their router handling the IPv4 over IPv6….
> NAT breaks things.
Depends on what you mean, the original RFC for NAT and the subsequent one for NAPT contain guidance for FTP and ICMP. Okay the solution isn’t elegant etc., but a workable solution was presented. I suspect many of the problems people experienced were more to do with poor implementations of NAT & NAPT (and thus the implementation of the FTP packet header rewriter) although the level of detail in the relevant RFCs does leave much to be desired…
>VoIP
I suggest NAT doesn’t actually break VoIP, it was more the VoIP designers only considering a specific “more purist” view of the Internet and so didn’t concern themselves with designing for NAT and NAPT, even through these technologies would have been widely used in the client environment at the time the VoIP experts were drawing up their RFCs…
> just to get around the address shortage.
NAT did more than this. Remember prior to the ready availability of Internet access, many office networks ran TCP/IP, mostly using the private address ranges (specifically 192.168..). NAT permitted these networks to be readily connected to an ISPs service and gain access to the public Internet. Subsequently, it has made it easy switch ISPs.
From memory, it took a bit of a rebellion for IPv6 to take account of such real world considerations, becoming better because of it.
> Does X.400 count as an OSI spec?
Good question…
To some as it was incorporated into ISO OSI the answer is yes. However, it was developed independently to OSI and as you note it was intended to operate directly over X.25, so contained some duplication of transport etc.
As to whether X.400 was or was not better than SMTP and Sendmail, well they came from two different viewpoints…
My point was if you had tried to implement a mail system on SMTP, you would have been using the relevant RFCs as your specification and probably would have decided to port someone else’s working code…
>KISS
The MAP/TOP initiative did a good just of cutting through the ISO OSI specifications, creating an OSI profile that was broadly equivalent to TCP/IP, which cause outrage among some in the OSI movement… The trouble with MAP/TOP was they really showed the need for application standards ie. File formats and messaging/api’s; here we are nearly 40 years later and still this is the problem….
>” The most entertaining thing about this is that it requires a standards change to fix”
This also highlights the difference between a Standards body such as IEEE, ISO, ITU and IETF. The Standards. Oldies will revise the Standard and reissue a complete revised Standard. iETF simply issue an RFC saying it amends or corrects some previous RFC, leading to the proliferation of documents.
This document from CIsco listing all of the RFCs concerned with Voice over IP, illustrates the point nicely:
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/46275-voice-rfcs.html
I suspect many VoIP implementations only work because of the ready access to open source, rather than original development.
> Precisely how does Amazon fit ads into its presentation of 'content'?
From my usage of Prime (uk)
Much content is labelled as containing ads/ad supported, thus you can select to avoid, either through payment or waiting for it to be offered as free.
However, last night watched a film (free no ads) and then decided to watch the recommended follow up which was also free but contained ads without any notification.
Ads seem to be randomly inserted, and as other have noted they simply cut into the flow, with the film being rewound by a second or so. There seems to be no way to avoid or shorten the ads, so no fast forwarding etc.
So far I’ve not had ads in paid for content or content labelled as free on prime, although suspect it will only be a matter of time. Although I have had ads directly before the content has begun to play.
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