Posts by Lee D

Re: I don't get it...

It's easy to give away the farm and make a loss by supplying a decent product to people below the actual cost of production.

You just have to have a rich idiot bankrolling it... or pulling it out of bankruptcy a couple of times, or maybe a few investors convinced that "one day we'll be selling thousands upon thousands a day"...

No different to "Moviepass" in the US - that was a great deal for anyone who was a consumer. Pay a pittance, then watch as many movies in as many cinemas as you like! Wonderful! Doesn't mean it's a good business idea.

For centuries people have implemented business models that resulted in wonderful value for the consumer, and great product, but at a loss. It's nothing new. The whole dot-com boom was basically the same thing. Here, have everything, for free, because it's "online". Now... whoops... who's paying for that?

Musk bankrolls all his companies, he has legitimately insane amounts of money from his youth, most of his places have neared bankruptcy at least once, he's injected huge amounts of cash into them, because to him it's just a hobby / vision, not a business. Some of them "profit" in the short term (e.g. SpaceX) but most never see their full investment back ever. Even if they did, the investors would want their money back first before prices started to drop for the consumer.

There's a reason that the shareholders in Tesla aren't particularly sad to see him gone from the board, and why they immediately raised prices and/or cut costs once he'd gone.

Tesla, SpaceX, etc. are Musk's toy projects to spend his billions on. That's it. When the funding goes, the business underneath is basically unsustainable in the condition that it's currently run in. He's like the rich kid running a lemonade stand from his dad's Porsche and never making a cent. When he pulls out, and takes his funding with him, all that's left is a vastly unprofitable business. But, sure, he makes good lemonade with only the most expensive and finest Sicilian lemons...

Re: Stop this sort of accident

If you hit a truck at 70mph, whether or not it has side-bars, you're likely dead or seriously injured.

Side-bars are there to stop cyclists, pedestrians, motorcycles, etc. going under and people being trapped underneath by the following wheels. Hitting the vehicle at 70mph side-on is not more than a minor use-case for them.

Yes, they're a good idea. No, they aren't a factor in this case, really.

Re: *COUGH* "Now if everyone would just move to IPv6... "

Nice to see that my efforts to push The Reg in this regard are not alone.

Every six months or so, I get a comment from a Reg person underneath a comment like this, that says something like "We're looking into it", or "We're working on it".

I think we're coming close to ten years or more of such comments now. And not even a "prototype, don't blame us if it's broke, www.ipv6.theregister.co.uk" or similar.

I hesitate to take my industry news, advice and updates from a place that cannot heed their own dire warnings in that regard. It's like frequenting a site running on Gopher saying how wonderful HTTP is and how we should all be moving over, but without a HTTP presence of their own, for ten years after HTTP was released.

"others with better connections (ie: certain people close to Trump) are simply argued with when they refuse to testify."

Who didn't testify when issued a demand to do so?

Because as far as I know, all the demands resulted in someone testifying. Maybe not what you wanted. Maybe not answering every question to the detail they desired. Maybe just saying "No, I will not provide that". But they testified.

You can testify without having to accede to responding to every question in the positive. You testify and say "No, I won't tell you that." or "No, I don't know." or "No, I couldn't say what he said with certainty". But *not* testifying when requested is just dumb.

Same way that failing to appear before court will see you arrested.

RPI + tvHeadEnd + tvhClient on my phone + VLC on my laptop + Kodi on the RPi itself.

Watch, schedule, record and playback TV from my phone abroad, in this country, at home over 4G, on a laptop/tablet over Wifi, or directly on the machine itself.

Cost: ~£50 but less when you consider I already had bits to do it if I wanted to.

Ongoing cost: Nothing but a TV licence.

Happiness: A+

Able to record/stream live TV when abroad without VPNs and faffing about: A+

Able to keep, store and replay any particular recording as a bog-standard MP4 file indefinitely: A+

Actually considering doing this at my employers, where we're licensed for TV usage but have no real TV... but a huge multi-gigabit network, and would only need one DVB dongle per "bouquet" of channels to receive and record EVERY channel simultaneously to as many and varied TV clients as we like.

Would save me an awful lot of hassle when everyone wants to watch the football or Brexit debate or Budget or Royal Wedding or whatever it is that people are allowed to watch by their employer. Slap it in, forget about it, let people stream it over the local network rather than faff about organising TVs or specific streams.

@Alister: OMG... upvote for the belly-laugh if nothing else.

There's a certain kind of audiophile that no amount of reason will beat sense into their head / ears. And if there was, they'd only complain that the rubber mallet was "more tuneful".

Re: Errr

The HTTP protocol has always been quite inefficient, as soon as we got past "I just want a single plain HTML page from a single-IP domain name with no security", it became inefficient and a mess.

We added gzipped content, we added TLS and SNI, we added cached content, cache control and all kinds of X-headers, we added multiple request streams which overwhelmed things so we added pipelining multiple requests in a single stream, etc.

It needed a reboot.

I quite understand the problem - watch the GIF. Edge just waits until it knows where everything goes. The earlier versions of modern browsers just splatted to the screen and moved things later (which creates a mess of movement and wrong-clicks). The new versions now protoype page layout based on available information, request resources in the background, and fill in the gaps as they come in.

There's nothing in HTTP2 that's ground-breaking. We've just gone from a single human-readable conversation to an encrypted, shared-pipeline channel with all kinds of content typing and prioritisation.

What gets me is that with all that reduction in latency, compression, etc. we still don't have anything approaching a website that actually loads fast. If I made an HTML table with a couple of optimised JPGs for the page in that GIF, I could splat that on screen over even the slowest connection way before those browsers manage to render it (I'm guessing that demo is exaggerated by using a very low connection speed, because modern browsers aren't THAT slow), just by making sure that I send the least amount of data I can in the simplest format.

All that CSS, JS, etc. nonsense results in megabytes of load for a simple page, plus conditional display and execution based on running that code, which has to be done after downloading from half-a-dozen different places.

Though it's a step-forward, we're still just making unnecessarily bloated sites.

Even this page - a list of forum comments, a handful of links to other articles, and an ad or two, is currently running 30Mb of JS virtual machine while I type this comment, not to mention downloading dozens upon dozens of images and JS files.

One day we're gonna hit a physical limit, and then people will have to learn to optimise again.

Re: There is a solution

Virgin is very much location-dependent.

I have had a leased line out in the sticks for 5 years and nary a blip. As in not even one, in all that time.

But elsewhere they re-use Openreach services to provide (for broadband and/or leased line believe it or not, yes, I have a "Virgin-managed" but Openreach-provided leased line at another site). My previous workplace also had Virgin via a reseller - no problems. Had Virgin at home for years. One spark-out on a VoD movie once, and that was the little cherubs down the road pulling cables out of the cabinet.

VM get horror stories based more on geographic location (i.e. what old duff cable they inherited from NTL) and who else actually *provides* the service than they ever do on their native lines.

Of course.

But a 24/7 serious-levels-of-uptime national radio network has been done before, is being done already, and will be done into the foreseeable future.

Why - all of a sudden - do the companies involved not know how to quote proper prices, why do the government departments suddenly not know how to procure, specify, contract and budget, and why are they all unable to do something that every country in the world has done to some extent?

This is complex stuff. But if you gave £1bn to pay for a room of 1000 engineers, £2bn to do it, and the timescales given, they could probably get you way past anything ever being provided here... just on the OVERBUDGET, let alone the original budget. And would be handsomely recompensed for doing so on that basis!

Re: They ought to teach this in schools.

I work on the "apology is not a solution" basis.

Saying "Sorry" doesn't fix it. Tell me why it happened, what you've been doing to stop it happening before, and what you're going to do to stop it happening in the future.

Because if the answer is: "We pressed the wrong button in Word, we've never imagined it could be a problem for a multi-national company to use Word mail-merge and not check the 'double-sided' option on our major print runs, and we'll slap the wrists of the intern involved but the next run will probably be done by a different guy anyway", then I have absolutely no interest in retaining your services.

Rail companies do this all the time. Don't apologise for it being late. Stop it being late. Even if that means it still gets there at 8:08 and waits for 15 minutes before leaving, but at least we *know* that because you just re-time the route accordingly and tell us what to expect.

You wanna convince me... do a full post-mortem, publicise the results (with suitable redaction), highlight the weaknesses you *had* and then post the plan and timeline to fix those weaknesses *and others of the same type* that you can imagine now you've sat and thought about it. Then I might accept the apology attached to that document.

Re: Uhh

Personally... I'd hook it up to my Canon EOS camera body, which is attached to my telescope.

Just because you're "camping" doesn't mean you don't need entertainment, can't benefit from technology, and aren't just "on a cheaper kind of holiday".

I would happily camp with nothing more advanced than a box of matches and a tent. But equally I always take my smartphone, and things get dark much earlier in the middle of nowhere than in your artificially-illuminated home. Snuggle up in a sleeping bag, project a Netflix episode of something on the side of the tent before you go to sleep.

Camping isn't always minimalistic. In fact, it's infinitely more enjoyable to have at least some tech (e.g. artificial lights, camping stoves, smartphone/GPS with pre-loaded OS maps, etc. etc.)

Re: Servers..

It always amazes me that people "lose money" over a system that - for way less than even a day's outage money - could be doubled in resiliency by putting some inactive server in a disparate cloud, or on their own site, or whatever.

Even a VM replica, syncing every 15 minutes or so but otherwise idle, could have been spun up quickly even if it wasn't the fastest server / connection that it was sitting on.

I did a calculation once - my employer's entire systems could be stored and booted up on a single laptop. Not claiming it would be "fast", but it would be up and you could carry on business in a reasonable manner.

Literally, for the cost of a laptop with a copy of Windows Server, VMWare or whatever, I could have an entire on-site warm spare of everything we run. Built-in UPS too! When you then get into "we need a real system", then it's a cinch to spin up instances in a handful of separate cloud servers and have the same.

But, these people are complaining about "losing money" when they could most likely have just turned on a cheap laptop and got access to all their data, a recent backup of everything they had (e.g. web transactions) and maybe even got a chance to operate their services from anywhere in the world (sure, it'd take a little tweaking of settings, but at least you'd have the option).

Re: £16m of taxpayers' money

£25,000 per copper.

£5000 an hour for lawyer's fees to consider the question of what the police / Home Office are legally able to do about the situation without causing an international incident or getting accused of over-stepping the law and thus (potentially) letting a criminal go free because of a legal ballsup.

To be honest, I've always thought that once found guilty you should be charged for the police and court time in dealing with you. When you get kids smashing through streets in a stolen car, with half-a-dozen cops spending a day chasing you, arresting you, charging you and doing all the paperwork and legal side, I don't see that a £200 fine and a "driving ban" (though they aren't allowed to drive anyway) is sufficient or sensible.

Like "victim surcharge", we should have an "enforcement surcharge". You co-operated, handed yourself in, came to the station quietly, etc.? No charge. You were found not guilty? No charge.

You resisted, and were later found guilty? 10% of everything it cost to apprehend and charge you, reparation for damage caused (whether insured or not), etc. Maybe then our police would actually have a lot less hassle, proper funding, and criminals would give themselves up rather than run away.

And if you go to prison? Cool, you don't get out until you have worked off the fines and charges, even if you served your sentence. Paid at minimum wage for each hour of work you complete in the prison without causing hassle for the prison officers.

Re: It's been years since . . . .

"So modem mode on the router for Virgin. I have an older Vigor but it's not a cable one. Can I still use that on the Virgin setup? As I assume the Vigor just connects via cable to the Virgin?"

Yes. If it has Ethernet, you plug it in the WAN Ethernet port. Done.

That's the exact config I had for a number of years.

Re: Uptime is not easy

Not just that.... your systems need to be 100% isolated from those you're managing AND those from each other AND from each other.

If you can't manage that, then for all I know, Joe Bloggs who rents a £2.99 VPS next door to my server is actually living in my server scot-free and wreaking whatever havoc with my data. Or your call-center agent is one-click away from knocking my server offline and losing my credit card details in the process.

Security is about isolation - VLANs, filtering, port-settings, firewalls, VPNs, administrative back-end networks, privilege separation, etc. etc.

If you fail at that in the design stage, it really doesn't matter what happens in the implementation stage, I wouldn't want to touch you.

And then you get to the backup scenario - why are you not able to rebuild every hypervisor machine back from an clean image with deployment tools, and then suck individual backups of the machines back, and restoration of the machines themselves is on a huge grandfather-father-son basis or - worst case - you restore an image and tell you clients to restore from their own backups.

Windows malware able to run riot through a datacenter unchecked enough to affect every customer is an indication of an amateur-hour setup.

I can't even fathom a reason how it would be able to spread from one machine to another, or why the backend control and administration systems would be using Windows at all.

Re: walked to school by myself

Been a standard practice in most (primary/prep) schools across the UK that parents have to collect or explicitly notify of an authorised person coming to collect (e.g. in some prep schools, they will organise a driver or PA to come collect, I kid you not!). Not secondary, where you're pretty much left to your own devices.

Worked in state and private schools for 20 years. It's the exception to be allowed to walk to school in primary/prep (the school would certainly raise concerns about it).

Sophos Enterprise Console is in every LGfL (and many other similar networks across the UK) school, as it's given away free, who often (stupidly) have automatic updates just set to roll out without any control.

The people who work in that industry and have for years been saying to me "Yes, but why don't you just push out all the updates immediately" have had their answer several times over, and just got it again.

That's a massive, stupid boo-boo, that's very difficult to revert in any automated fashion whatsoever, across thousands of organisations running thousands of machines each.

I refuse to be a Microsoft beta tester, so WSUS is the first thing I install when setting up a new network.

Unlimited data only applies to phones, not to tethered devices.

Read their gumph and "unlimited" really means "9Gb" in those circumstances, or thereabouts. I have a mobile data SIM designed for tethering, I burned through 40Gb (which is unusual for me).

Giffgaff et al are all the same in that regard - once they detect you tethering, they charge you, stop your data, or terminate your contract.

Though quite why is beyond me - a tethering client using 100Gb is no more a burden on your network than a phone using 100Gb, surely?

Re: Wow just wow.

That's fine.

Who paid the lawyers? The entity that vanished? Oh well, recoup it from them. Or another entity that spontaneously started up and is now funding the lawyers? Whoops.

Legal entities like companies may vanish, but the lawyers, (former) directors and others can still be held to account if there are matters outstanding. In some cases, such "winding-up" can be forcibly reversed, in fact, until such matters are dealt with.

And the prime case of doing such things is exactly when people do it to evade justice.

Re: 16 TB. And if it fails?

In that instance, neither is tape - if the tape catches fire.

But if you put that RAID *in another building*, like you would a tape, then it's a perfectly adequate backup.

54% success, overall, to date.

So as I clearly stated "for years, more often than not" it failed.

Or 84% success. IN THE BEST INSTANCE. If we let them just say "Oh, we never intended to land that time". Or even if we go back a year or so (hey, sorry for not watching EVERY launch ever), that percentage tends back towards the 50% and maybe even below that for quite a while.

Which is fecking appalling for space-faring. NASA's record since the 1960's was way better and they were literally doing it for the very first time ever with nothing but a handful of silicon chips and an awful lot of engineering.

And yet still, just last year, these things are still crashing, or in this year so far - exploding.

Either recognise that it's a stupid thing they are TRYING to do, they are doing it sloppily, or they're just not as good as you want to believe even when you KNOW the numbers.

"#1 is bin collections; but that's 90% lying bastards that have forgotten to put theirs out."

Allow me to describe a complaint I filed against my council:

- They didn't collect bins from 12 houses for a period of 3 months.

- Collections were sporadic, random, and never at their assigned times.

- I complained, they ignored.

- Neighbours complained, they ignored.

- So I did my usual - full, no-holds-barred, complaint-flurry with follow-up.

Literally, the bin lorries were taking it upon themselves to not bother with the last part of the street, because that would mean doubling-back down other roads they've already done (it wasn't a dead-end, just the end of a street that met another two streets). They never came back and didn't bother to collect unless an enormous fuss was made, when they'd collect once at random and then claim "the bins weren't out" (of course not, we get fined if we put them out on a non-bin day!).

Full-complaint mode revealed that they'd rather target me explicitly, trying to fine me for putting the bins out wrong, throwing the wrong stuff in the bin, letting bins overflow (YOU DON'T BLOODY COLLECT THEM!), etc. etc.

However, there was one teensy, tiny downside to their assertion:

I had CCTV footage, 24/7/365.25. Covering the entirety of my front garden, the road beyond and anyone collecting (or not) my rubbish. Going back six months. When this was revealed, they hastily retracted all such claims. They also claimed that "I'd put non-recyclable rubbish in the recycling bin hence why it wasn't collected". Either they have long-distance X-ray vision, or they never even actually turned up to look at the bin, much less make a decision on its contents. And, as I pointed out, even if true, just "not taking" the rubbish is no good unless you put a flag or leaflet or something explaining one (because otherwise people could make up any old cobblers not to take it and how the hell would I know?).

Then I got them into the papers with my complaint letter, and handily revealed the fact that the councillor in charge of waste management just-so-happened to own the waste management firm (and hadn't properly registered that interest *cough*). I received a very hasty apology and not once was our rubbish left uncollected again.

The best part, though. "Oh, you live in XXXXX Lane? Well, our manager lives in that same road, so obviously he's collecting your rubbish!". Really, mate? You give me the time, date, vehicle registration, and I'll provide you the footage of him doing just that. Because I *do* have footage of every time, date in the last six months. And he's not on any of them. Do you want that footage?

Re: I keep my mobile

Which is why my glovebox-phone is:

- Tiny (about an inch long, but fully functional, multi-SIM, bluetooth, etc.)

- Literally just a keypad, it doesn't need anything more but it can store contacts etc. if you wish (but it's next to the bit of card with the breakdown etc. numbers on it).

- Charges from a standard USB cable but also has an internal battery you can change.

- Even without a SIM, you can call 999 from it.

- On a SIM card that doesn't expire (so long as you pay the £4.99 a year explicit renewal that they email you specifically about, it's yours - you just pay slightly more for calls on a PAYG basis).

Should be a standard piece of kit for most people, even if just to call 999 (e.g. you're in an accident). As it stands, my car automatically picks up programmed Bluetooth phones and uses them if the airbag ever deploys to report my GPS location automatically to 999 / 112 / 911.

A phone like that should be part of any emergency kit. Hell, if you're hillwalking you should have that at minimum, let alone if you're driving along dark country roads at night and hit a flock of stray sheep (nearly happened to me).

Pigeons home to one roost... it would be positively idiotic because they could only lead people in a straight line right back to where you're intending to pick up their stuff. And you'd have to train them to do that, which would be quite telling and require a lot of preparation and meant you wouldn't be able to move around much from the training location.

Plus... weight, bulk - how are you going to pack more than a little bag of diamonds on them? Even half a kilo would be pushing it for a pigeon to get any distance with. There's a reason we curled up little slips of paper and put them in tiny holders on their leg, rather than used them to just carry a book.

A drone can literally fly at random, only honing into your location when you explicitly instruct it to and the big ones can almost carry a man.

A good example of when customer services (which is an *expense*, remember) really pays off.

It probably didn't hurt that much for them to do, and if they got a couple of meals out of it, likely it paid dividends for them.

On several occasions I've done the "Look, honestly, it's nothing to do with me/my employer, but I'll help you out..." and given equipment, advice, phone numbers, referrals, my time. Not to everyone (you have to be polite still) but it got a few people out of really hairy situations not of their own creation when I could have just shrugged and walked off. It usually resulted in a much bigger payback, whether that be a box of chocolates biscuits at Christmas or them singing their praises to my boss.