* Posts by Alister

4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010

Welcome your new ancestor to the Homo family tree; boffins have discovered a new tiny species of human

Alister

Re: the foot bone connected to the knee bone...

...the knee bone connected to the skull bone,

Dare I point out that should the knee bone and skull bone be connected in any way by tendons, cartilage or muscle, then the individual is severely deformed.

Alister

the foot bone connected to the knee bone...

...the knee bone connected to the skull bone,

the hand bone connected to the jaw bone

and that's how we won the fight.

London's Metropolitan Police arrest Julian Assange

Alister

Re: You mean

Downvoted for repeating bellend

Alister

Re: I can see

And what the fuck are you smoking?

Alister

Re: You mean

Ahh, poor innocent ickle Assange, tricked by those nasty-wasty women paid by the US.

I bet the US managed to make him skip bail and not pay back his mates, too, cos innocent ickle Assange wouldn't ever do anything naughty like that.

Alister

Re: final straw?

Misdirected whoosh?

Nope. phuzz was being sarcastic at the AC's remarks, but BebopWeBop took phuzz's comments at face value, as did you, it appears.

Alister

Re: Did they get the right guy? ...

Sex with Pamela Anderson will age you a decade

Has this been independently verified? Or do you have anecdotal evidence?

:)

Alister

Re: final straw?

@BebopWeBop

WHOOOOOOSH!

phuzz was being sarcastic.

IBM bid to unmask age discrimination whistleblower goes down in flames

Alister
Thumb Up

Yay, go Judge Austin

Brit hacker jailed for strapping ransomware to smut site ad networks

Alister

Zain Qaiser

Good name... Good name. What a waste.

MoD plonks down £2m on table in exchange for anti-drone tech ideas

Alister

Re: Police drone to blame?!?

According to the highly esteemed Sir PTerry:

"Multiple exclamation marks," he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure sign of a diseased mind."

Alister

Anything that will stop airports grounding planes during holibobs, really

I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...

Probe-on-asteroid violence as Japan's Hayabusa2 chucks screaming chunk of base metal at Ryugu

Alister

What if Ryugu fires back?

hey?

Ethiopia sits on 737 Max report but says pilots followed Boeing drills

Alister

An addendum to the above.

On Pprune, figures have been posted regarding the manual trim wheels:

it takes 250 full revolutions of the trim wheel to go from full nose-down to full nose-up deflection of the stabiliser, so to correct the MCAS trim input, a maximum of 125 full revolutions would be required. The wheel is not free spinning, so to make one full revolution requires two or possibly three hand movements by the pilots.

So, if we say that to make a single full revolution of the trim wheel requires 2 seconds, then to adjust to neutral trim from full nose-down deflection would take 3 minutes of constant winding, whilst at the same time trying to keep full back pressure on the yoke.

Alister

The crew were presented with all sorts of conflicting warnings, including airspeed warnings, the stick-shaker-stall warning, an Anti-Ice warning and so on.

They did identify, amongst all that, that they were in a runaway stab trim situation, and did disable the electronic trim (and MCAS).

However, disabling the trim does not return it to normal, it just stops any further automatic trim inputs from moving the stabiliser, and the only way to get the aircraft back into trim is to use the manual trim wheels, which are much lower geared than the electronic version.

Additionally, the aerodynamic forces on the stabiliser at the speed the aircraft was travelling appear to have made the manual trim almost impossible to move. Given that the crew were already having to pull back on the yokes with considerable force to counteract the nose-down attitude, they were unable to correct the trim manually.

It appears that they may have then re-enabled the electronic trim to try and use the yoke-mounted trim buttons, but then MCAS kicked in and added further nose-down trim, sealing their fate.

Alister

They have released the data, the article needs updating.

Alister

@Craig 2

My comment wasn't aimed at you, but at e_is_real_i_isnt

Sorry for the confusion.

Alister

Your interpretation is flawed, and, I feel, aimed at discrediting the pilots.

Despite all the conflicting wanings they were getting, and the stick-shaker operating, they managed to correctly identify the problem as runaway stab trim, and followed the correct procedure to correct it, a procedure which includes the instruction to re-enable the electric trim to try and recover the aircraft in the event that the manual trim is unsuccessful. It appears that they didn't fully appreciate that the MCAS would dump a load more AND on them when they did that.

If they are struggling to get the aircraft into a climb, pulling back on the throttles would not be any pilots' first thought.

Alister

Re: Pilot error could still be part of the problem.

Looking at the released FDR traces, there's clearly a fault with the active AoA sensor, and NOT the actual angle of attack, so no, there aren't unanswered questions regarding the climb out.

Nice try blaming the pilots though.

Hello, tech support? Yes, I've run out of desk... Yes, DESK... space

Alister

Re: Hmm

A similar complaint - with the same cause - was "my mouse mat isn't big enough".

Similar re-education was required.

Who needs foreign servers? Researchers say the USA is doing a fine job of harboring its own crimeware flingers

Alister

Re: This is not exactly news

The overwhelming majority of traffic that we see from TOR exit nodes is malicious, and I wouldn't be doing my job properly if I just let it continue to fill up the logs, just on the off-chance that there might be the occasional legitimate user, so we block them.

We don't, yet, block most VPS endpoints, but that's because the malicious traffic is quite low from them. If it increased to silly levels, I'd block them too.

Don't misunderstand: we don't deliberately go and get a list of TOR exit nodes and pre-emptively block them all at once, but we run fail2ban, and other commercial IDP products, and we just regularly review the lists of blocked IPs, but it soon becomes apparent that a lot of them are TOR nodes.

Alister

Re: This is not exactly news

Yep, we routinely block all traffic from OVH and TOR IPs amongst others, there's very little legitimate traffic coming from them compared to the flood of intrusion attempts we see every day.

Amazon consumer biz celebrates ridding itself of last Oracle database with tame staff party... and a Big Red piñata

Alister
Facepalm

Re: AWS Postgres Aurora....

I've just broken two of my Queen records. Oh, how I want to break three

How long have you been saving that one up for??

Almost bad enough for a downvote, but I was kind...

:)

Hands up who can tell me which pupil details transfer system has glitched. Yes, Capita's

Alister

The common transfer files (CTF) mechanism is used to send children's information between primary and secondary schools for moving pupils and other ad-hoc transfers.

Capita went on to say that schools shouldn't use this to share pupil and contact details with other schools...

Yeah, you know that system for transferring pupil details, well, please don't use it for transferring pupil details, it's not designed for it...

Robo-BOFH giant Park Place Technologies slurps Brit IT biz MCSA

Alister

How come Microsoft haven't deployed the lawyers on a company called MCSA?

UK taxman plans to, er, Crown Hosting boss. Who'll take £115k to be its champion in HMRC?

Alister

Unsurprisingly, both positions call for strong IT skills, leadership abilities, and experience managing a variety of stakeholders

Broad shoulders and low self-worth would be of benefit.

Are you sure you've got a floppy disk stuck in the drive? Or is it 100 lodged in the chassis?

Alister

Re: Reliability

careful use of a hole punch

Hmm, recalls to mind the probably apocryphal tale of the secretary who filed 5 1/4 floppies by stapling a piece of paper to them with a list of their contents...

Guess where the staples went...

Alister

Re: If it fits...

20 years ago I used to work on the Ambulance service, and we got a 999 call to a house with the report "young child trapped". When we got there, we walked in and found a toddler standing with their hand stuck in the slot of a front-loading VCR, and the mother having hysterics on the couch.

The child had stuck their hand in the slot, and somehow also pressed the "eject" button, so the tape mechanism had ridden up, trapping their hand. It was a simple matter to get a finger in the slot and press the loaded tape down, and remove the toddler's hand.

We were discussing afterwards what would have happened if they'd called the Fire service and not us, the consensus was the VCR would have been cut to pieces... :)

Alister

Re: One, OK, hundred, I have my doubts

Yep, the full-height, floor-standing tower cases were basically filled with four-fifths of fuck all: a drive cage at the top in front, a PSU at the top at the back, and the motherboard somewhere on the side towards the bottom.

Take that, America! Huawei flips Trump & Co the bird after reporting double-digit % rise in sales and profit

Alister

That's Huawei to do it!

<FX: blowing a raspberry />

BOFH: Tick tick BOOM. It's B-day! No we're not eating Brussels flouts...

Alister

Re: One does wonder if Simon has been to my building...

So you just need to put a sign on the door, saying "GYM" and wait for the splash?

Alister

Ah Simon, we've missed you.

And how appropriate that your victims participants should be disappearing out of the window feet-first...

Happy Brexit Day!

Boffins may have found something more salty than Brexit Brits' tears this week: Underground pools of water on Mars

Alister

Boffins may have found... Underground pools of water on Mars

Or more correctly, Boffins may have come up with a theory that there might be underground pools of water on Mars.

I think "found" is way overstating the case.

IT meltdown bank TSB: It's as good a week as any to announce we're taking back control

Alister

So, TSB are "taking back control" then?

Microsoft's corporate veep for enterprise puts the boot into boot times

Alister

Re: Windows is the small part of the problem

I'd pay and extra 500$ a box and switch server vendors just for a BIOS that POSTs about as fast as my desktops do.

The problem with servers is they usually have RAID BIOSs and so on to initialise and boot, which take a while. But I'm not sure I'd be happy with a RAID controller that didn't check for volume consistency etc before handing it over to the OS.

You spin me right round, baby, right round like an exploding asteroid, baby, right round round round

Alister

Re: Woodstock

Joni Mitchell's version doesn't include the lyrics "We are billion year old carbon" that was C,S,N&Y's addition.

Alister

Woodstock

We are stardust, we are golden

We are billion year old carbon

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

Thanks to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young...

Cops use bread and riot shields in desperate bid to contain crazed swan running amok in streets

Alister

Parody about one of British accents does come off as patronising to us Scots.

No, only to Glaswegians. Don't be such a fucking snowflake.

Alister
Holmes

No shit...

HP crashed Autonomy because US tech titan's top brass 'lost their nerve', says lawyer for ex-CEO Mike Lynch

Alister

Re: Truth squad ?

For frak's sake I am sick and tired of CEO's finding any pathetic excuse to weasel out of being responsible for what happens while they are at the helm.

Um, Meg wasn't at the helm at the time of the deal, it was Léo Apotheker.

Here's a race condition we can get behind: Neural net learns to keep up with 'skilled' amateur track driver in robo-ride safety experiment

Alister

the crew trained a feed-forward neural network to whiz the Volkswagen around an oval shaped track as fast as possible without going off course.

My kids' model railway can do that too, until centrifugal force intervenes... :)

100MW bit barn farm in Ireland faces planning appeal from – yep – same guy who helped sink Apple's application

Alister

Re: Mixed feelings

Banananananas.

is that for Dakakakakaris?

Alister

Maybe, if McDonagh stopped raising appeals, he might have more time and money to build his own Datacentre.

6 days to go, no sweat, just more than a million UK firms still to sign up to Making Tax Digital

Alister

Re: Digital

is that one or eleven?

Spyware sneaks into 'million-ish' Asus PCs via poisoned software updates, says Kaspersky

Alister

Thanks Phil...

Techies take turns at shut-down top trumps

Alister

Re: did anyone ever use these buttons the way they were intended to?

just keep them away from the batteries and staples.

Is that correct?

O2 brings forth a Friday fail for some unlucky UK customers

Alister

Re: Emergency

Perhaps they sent her an SMS?

'Sharing of user data is routine, yet far from transparent' is not what you want to hear about medical apps. But 2019 is gonna 2019

Alister

Re: One silver lining is that most of the programs encrypted this data while in transit

I see you work in PR for Facebook then... :)

Brit Police Federation cops to ransomware attack on HQ systems

Alister

poking a stick into a hornet's nest?

You'd have to be very brave or very foolish to pursue the ransom...

'It's full of beer!' Miracle fridge reveals itself to pals tuckered out from cleaning flooded cabin

Alister
Mushroom

Indiana Jones had it right

All you need to survive a nuclear explosion or natural disaster is your towel fridge.