Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Software RAID

"I have lost count of the number of drives I have seen in server rooms with an issue light where the comment was "its been like that for a year"."

I had that issue at a small client site. No on-site techies at all, they phone in to HQ if there was an issue. Anyway HQ calls our company and I get sent out, I get there and see the two red flashing LEDs on the 3-drive array and ask when they started flashing. Answer, from the non-technical user: "Well, the one on the left has always flashed since I started here two years ago. The other one started flashing yesterday afternoon and that's when everything stopped working." This is far enough back in time that not only did not everyone in an office automatically get a PC, but new starters, experienced or not, may have never used a computer before, so I definitely didn't blame the poor user who'd not been told what to look out for. (The server was on top of the filing cabinet by her desk) She was quite upset when I explained what had happened, but reassured her that she wasn't to blame for not knowing how the system worked if no one had told her.

On another site, I was called in after hours to replace a failed drive in another 3-drive array. This time, the non-techy security guard took me to the offending beast and even he noticed that a helpful user had pulled the "faulty" drive and there were now two flashing red LEDs where there ought to be only one.

But, in a server room, there's no excuse. People working in there are SUPPOSED to KNOW :-)

Re: Software RAID

"some flaky controller that will eventually go EOL."

And we probably all remember the days of the RAID controllers that stored the details of the array config only on the card so when the card failed you were totally FUBARed because no one knew or bothered to document the config. And the client probably cheaped out on a proper backup because...RAID :-(

Re: Roll your own ... everything

"The professor's name was Elwyn Berlekamp."

LOL, I kinda get the feeling that was intended as a trick question from someone assuming you were blowing hot air.

(@RobDog, please correct me if I'm wrong and I apologise now if I was)

Having said that, being such an unusual name (at least to me), I looked at his Wikipedia page. Looks like he was a very clever bloke who only died fairly recently. However, there's no mention of YOU on that Wikipedia page, so.... :-p

Re: Leap

"BT has said that recovering the copper would cost more than its value."

If that's really the case, it surprises me. Copper is not cheap and they use contractors for most if not all of this work. At the very least, I'd expect the contractors to pull the copper and sell it as an extra profit margin if BT really don't care enough to want it for themselves. It's often how demolition companies eek out the profit margins. Sell everything you can to make an extra buck, eg stripping a building of all the pipework/ducting/cabling you can and when you pull down/blow up the building, break the rubble up, get the steel and rebar to sell, and then sell off the concrete as hardcore. Waste nothing, sell everything :-)

Re: "42% of users stated their current internet was sufficient for their needs"

I was watching a YouTube video a little while ago by someone building a new high speed NAS. I forget the details, but I was kinda gobsmacked by the upload speed when he was benchmarking the file copy process. 40Mb/s on the upload while he was testing download. So, all those ACK packets just to tell the other end the download was proceeding was somewhat faster than what most of us could have even hoped for in total just a few years ago :-)

So, 100/2 or 1000/50 sounds quite limiting if downloading at full throttle and maybe someone else needs to upload something. There's asymmetric and there's taking the piss :-)

Re: "42% of users stated their current internet was sufficient for their needs"

"Admittedly I have VM as an option, but I also have flushing my own head in the toilet as an option and I'm not sure which one is preferable."

It depends where in the country you are with VM. It seems to be a "postcode lottery". Where I am, I've had very, very few issues with VM. I hear their support isn't all that great, but I've only ever rarely had to call them, maybe a half a dozen times in, oh, the last 10 years or so? (been with them a lot longer, since they were United Artists and through various buy-outs and re-brands) and that's because the connection has gone down completely and it;s usually been back up the same day or even an hour or two. No issues with speeds in general but I only pay for the cheapest 120Mb option. You should check with some locals if you know anyone using VM and see what their experience is before deciding to put your head down the toilet :-)

"That figure of 42.9% is at least six months out of date, and possibly a year."

Yes, I think the article reported the stats were from 2022, the most current wide ranging stats across the EU+ region.

"Most people will continue to buy the cheapest service available to them."

Oh, absolutely. At least in the UK, I suspect the vast majority buy based on price, just like with most utilities, chopping and changing when they find a "better" deal. After all, when you change gas/leccy providers, what comes down the "pipe" is the same, no matter who you pay for it. That's how most customers think. Just because they use technology doesn't mean they understand it. And those of us who do understand what we are buying will buy as much as we need because we understand what our needs are, and often not always the latest "shiny" top end speeds. And cap all that off with the huge number of customers who have no wired devices and cheap nasty ISP provided wireless routers and can probably never get the headline speeds anyway. The cheap nasty ISP WiFi router might have a GigE port on it, but it probably struggles to share out that full Gig of bandwidth across multiple wireless devices.

Re: iFixit should award them

While I take your point, I could also point out a LOT of tech items many times older still working as intended with lots of love and attention, eg steam engines, both static and on rails, Tower Bridge still raises frequently etc etc etc, all "tech" of their day, even if iFixit doesn't cover that stuff :-) There are still working examples of Commodore Pets, Apple ][ and TRS-80, some of which pre-date the launch of the Voyagers. Admittedly, they all get hands-on love and care, which makes maintenance a little easier :-)

Re: At any normal company

Fiduciary duty isn't a myth, that's true. On the other hand, many people seem to think fiduciary duty is to raise the share price and profits as much as possible at the expense of everything else, which clearly isn't true. Fiduciary duty is about running the company responsibly, keeping an eye share price and profits in both the short and long terms, ie taking a hit now means the company survives into to the future instead of going for broke with "instant" profits at the expense of the company folding next year. It's a more complex duty that most people usually consider.

Re: No corruption here.

It does make one wonder if all those tiny extra watt hours of consumption multiplied by many millions of smart meters actually use more or less than the power they may save by educating some users to remember to switch off stuff they are not using and whether that is an ever diminishing return.

Not to mention the push to replace and scrap still serviceable mechanical meters with "new digital" meters long before their EOL and all that extra energy usage in producing them and polluting diesel vans driving around by the installers replacing perfectly good and working meters.

Re: No corruption here.

the air-source heat pump installed in a months time (all the 1997-era radiators are being replaced as is the hot water tank.

I was under the impression that those old, large radiators and the larger pipes were better for air sourced heat pumps as the water temp is lower so pumping larger volumes through larger pipes to larger rads for a larger but cooler thermal mass is more efficient than tiny micro-bore pipes to relatively small, thin radiators. Properly insulating the pipes in areas where the heat would be "lost" is good, and almost certainly a better, well insulated hot water tank is good too. Or I could just be blowing hot air :-)

Re: No corruption here.

"Where do you live, 1985? I don’t think I’ve seen a meter reading chap since forever."

Where do you live, 2285? We get the meter reader chap around at least once per year. How else do you think they get the readings? Trust the user to tell the truth on a web form or phone call every time in the "firm knowledge" no one else will ever come out and check? Or have you a working, fully functional "smart meter"?

Re: Personally, I don't pay for ads.

"Ubuntu tends to recommend its commercial support package every time I log in."

Ah, thanks, I've not seen that yet. I do run 386 XUbuntu on an old netbook and it does whinge that ere are no new updates unless I do a full reinstall and I have been considering doing that for a while. Thanks for the heads up so I can give that a miss and use something else instead :-)

Re: Free speech.

Yes, that was the thing that struck me from almost the very first paragraph. This from a self-confessed "free speech absolutist". Now he's selling "free speech" to those who can afford it.

Re: I hope he charges even to read it

I've already complained to a number of companies and gov orgs who push X/Twitters as the prime means of communicating with them and "hide" other means behind two or more clicks. None of them give a shit. Although if X/Twitter goes so far as "pay to read", that might change, at least with gov. orgs.

Re: Personally, I don't pay for ads.

here in the UK, Channel 4's latest incarnation of the "catch-up/streaming" service, at least on VM boxes, has disabled FF and Skip on the intro/trailers/adverts but they do still allow to to skip over the show to get to the next unskippable ad break!

Re: Personally, I don't pay for ads.

"But, things like asking for donations, product placement deals, upselling you on services. Those exist in desktop versions of Linux."

I've never seen any of those. Care to point at some actual examples and distros which do or have done that? I'd be interested to see who tried it and what the results were.

Re: Personally, I don't pay for ads.

"Why do you think the Sweeney drove new Fords whilst the villains drove old Jags?"

Wasn't that the other way 'round? ISTR Jack Regan drove a Jag.

Re: Three Mile Island Nuclear Accident

I wonder if they also had a warning sensor/lamp to indicate that the valve closed/lamp off wasn't actually valve open/lamp failed?

Re: try ... catch AI error handling

Seriously. The users that can't find the "any" key if it had a red light and siren ... are going to "hack us".

When we were testing the new version of some software we use daily, I sent feedback stating that when instructed to "press any key to continue" that it failed to respond and the problem was repeatable. The key I pressed? The Fn key on my laptop. It also "failed" on pressing the Pause/Break key too. I'm not sure what the system was written in or how they interrogated the keyboard, but asking a user to press "any" key is asking for trouble if you don't do it properly :-)

I've also seen that many systems fail to respond to "any" key when the laptop function key are set to default to the "icon shortcut" (brightness/volume/WiFi etc) mode and require the Fn key be pressed to make them work as normal function keys.

Re: is that good?

"How does it compare with a traditional fan?"

No idea :-)

"Does a 1W fan move more or less than 4.whatever W of heat?"

No Idea :-)

"Is the selling point the efficiency or the size?"

The selling points are the almost silent cooling and the physical size of the box, so the real question is will a 1W fan produce enough cooling at the same noise level in the available space.. Longer term is how reliable is this cooler? Small fans tend to be less reliable longer term than larger fans, so if it beats a fan on long term reliability then the new cooler may win.

Re: Why do most EVs look like arse?

"But does an EV need to look like a POS?"

Most of the non-Tesla EVs I see looks pretty much the same as their ICE equivalents, even the Porches :-)

Maybe because they look so much like their ICE equivalents, you aren't noticing them :-)

Re: interest, shminterest

Another nail hit squarely on the head. Western car manufacturers are still in the phase of treating EVs as expensive luxury models with all the trim and extras. Few are building "no frills" models for the masses yet.

Re: interest, shminterest

"Tesla will be fondly remembered as a pioneer that never quite made it."

Yeah, I think you pretty much nailed it with that comment. Tesla will get deserved credit for kickstarting the EV market where the incumbents were dragging their heels, but they've been surpassed by the incumbents due to real and actual capital and decades of experience in how to build cars and selling better, cheaper cars.

Re: Don't worry folks...

"We can compare oranges with oranges only when all victims are accounted for."

Based on that, we can NEVER compare, and so just ignore all the risks forever? Sounds like a good plan. I take it you are involved in some power generation related industry that is worried about new nuclear taking away a share of your market? Or are you happy with the generations-long pollution caused by rare earths mining and processing in locations where no one gives a shit about pollution and associated deaths so you can have "clean" solar panels? eg mud wall "dams" holding back millions or billions of gallons of "settling pond" polluted water that seem to collapse with worrying frequency, killing people both immediately and in the long term? That doesn't count either because the "final numbers" aren't in yet?

See? We can all play "whataboutism" without citations, just like you :-)

Re: Don't worry folks...

"The counting is not over yet."

Why do think that only applies to the nuclear industry? If you want stop counting, then you stop counting across ALL of industry. You end up with the same result. A snapshot in time. Take a number of snapshots over a longer time, and you might start to see a trend. That's how it's supposed to work since you can't predict the future with any meaningful level of long term accuracy. Do you know how many people will die in the future based on past pollution from mining or use of asbestos in buildings? If you want to comparisons of deaths due to specific industries, you have tot STOP COUNTING at a moment in time and compare the known and current numbers.

Re: How did they find out?

"Also why did they do it? Were they just lazy?"

Sounds like they were independent contractors, not part of a bigger organisation so were offering cheaper services to win contracts and saving money on actually paying the calibration fees. Maybe the nuclear operators are also partly to blame for going with the cheapest contractors without doing due diligence on them.