Posts by Byham

Not a lot you can do against a determined JCB (Back Hoe) driver.

I remember a rewiring exercise at an airport and all the drawings showing all important cables like power cables and those from the radar to the control tower were below 1 metre and most at 1.5 metres. So a cable puller was sent across the airport this was a machine with a blade that could be set at variable depths and a cable attached to the end of the blade. Yes. the drawings were all wrong and the new cable layer took out every important cable crossing the airport. Lots of arm waving and red faces.

There are times when a few men digging a trench might have been cheaper and in the long run faster.

Re: alternate servicing..and the bean counters

You are expecting politicized bean counters to think constructively like engineers. That has never been known.

What does it cost? When do you want to spend it? Is it in the existing budgets? You have now exceeded the most constructive bean counter responses. Even "there is an exposure to even more costs if you do not spend this" is outside their cognitive capabilities.

Service life and service life costs - unrepaired and repaired should be part of the costings of every large item put into space. That also requires the design to allow in orbit repair and someone thinking ahead to what would need to be repaired then ensuring the designers considered that in the system designs. This would raise the ire of the bean counters on the large item projects and the arguments would be rehearsed again.

Re: Loss of expertise

"we have loads of backups, but restore? Whats that?"

In the 1980's worked with a software development group with its own network. Backups were done religiously to TAPE each night and each Friday a week of backups again to TAPE. They were S L O W and a short straw was drawn for who would have to stay late and reset everything after the backup was finished.

A fumble fingered programmer deleted the wrong file one day - and 'it is OK it is backed up' - however although the tape listed the file as there - it would not restore. Nor would any of the tapes restore. Turns out that nobody had thought to test the restore would work!

From then on the person doing the backup would be required to choose a file at random (make a safety copy) - delete the file - then restore it.

Re: Laptops = WEEE

This is where 'right to repair' sounds good but doesn't work. My eldest worked initially in a Lap Top workshop repairing returned under guarantee laptops. So recently when one of the lap tops at home broke he thought nothing of opening the laptop up identifying what had broken and seeing if that was a worthwhile repair; that is quite a skilled process.

I have tried to open laptops just to remove HDD for security and it can be difficult. Doing it so that it can be repaired to be workable afterward is often not easy at all. So the right to repair could result in less economic designs and also a concern that someone would exercise that right while a machine was still in guarantee. Perhaps giving it all the broken failed parts from another machine or three.

Re: Free speach

So the 'Cloud' is now looking inside its customers data? Whenever did that become OK? Regardless of what your thoughts are on Parler vs AWS, it shows that the Cloud providers are actively reading content. That is a commercial and privacy risk that users of AWS may not be aware of. Yes if you don't own and control the hardware inside your own perimeter, that is a risk: but also allowing the Cloud service provider to hoover up your commercial and private data is something else. No business should continue dealing with AWS unless they are happy for Bezos' clones to be reading everything/anything that they put 'in the cloud' and Amazon acting on or selling that 'private' information.

Re: Why didn't Facebook just buy the company?

There are companies that work the interface between small business application and the large multinational software company. So you and your app are kept at arms length from the big company. The interface company undertakes to ensure that even if big company changes they will maintain the 'middleware' interface.

From the article the fix did not involve touching CHKDSK so it would appear that a change was made in another function called by CHKDSK without regression testing of the impact on CHKDSK which may only be an impact on specific systems.

This is the problem with an 'OS' that is so large and used by such a wide range of hardware.

Re: Charging

So after a while some politician will say close the coal plants. Then next winter you have a heavy snow fall followed by an anticyclone still air and severe frosts. The windfarms try to draw energy from the grid to keep the blades moving so that lubrication is maintained and the weight of a still rotor does not cause flats on the bearings. Then your smart meter starts progressively switching off your power starting with your car charging.

Temperature outside is now minus 10 and your heat pump heating has no heat to pump. Your refrigerator power has been switched off remotely, The only power you are now allowed is lights no cooking. The several feet of snow on your roof and PVs is not melting as there is no 'inefficient' heat loss to melt it. So no solar when the weak sun at a very acute insolation angle does appear for a few hours.

It is OK these 'omega' blocking highs the size of the UK usually move after a few days - although some can be stable for weeks.

Just hope that the power comes back before you need to drive anywhere as the car was down when you got home last and the charging has now been off for a few days.

Think it won't happen?

Re: I don't understand

Just staring at the ribbon cannot be sensed - could be a phone call interrupt. Try clicking on each ribbon item in turn but not actually accessing anything in the dropdown / pop up menu/ extended ribbon. IF they record mis-selections or null selections then they may get a clue what the problem is.

They actually still use a cartoon 3.5" floppy for 'Save' - can the Gen z people in the office remember 3.5" floppies? I don't understand why there is no ICON decode in a menu somewhere.

Re: Very sad, but...

LIfe time costing is poorly understood and deliberately talked down when the initial research project is proposed. For example it is not uncommon for the lifetime support costs of a large engineering or complex computer project to be 95% of the overall cost So the immediate upfront cost which is what everyone crows about is only 5% of the overall costs. Making a 'saving' of 10% in the immediate up front cost is in actuality only 0,5% of the overall costs and may increase the lifetime costs well beyond that 0.5% saving. It is VERY difficult to persuade people to talk of Lifetime costs for this reason as a 20 year project can have very alarming total costs.

Re: Too hard, too frequent, too unreliable

It was _sold_ to the board as up time of 99.9999% it is not really business critical although failures would be best if they were not in normal working hours. But the board got this warm fuzzy from the salesman that it was a really high availability system. You will get the same response 'what again?' With the cheapness of hardware and comms these days there is no reason why all businesses do not have an identical shadow system ideally in a different location on different power etc

Re: Easy fix, hard to get enacted

And if companies dispute the case in court and fail - the attorney's fees AND the damages rise to 10 times from treble.

Re: You've got to be kidding! Indeed - as it is TOTALLY untrue

"Astonishingly, until the 737 Max crashes, the aircraft was flying with no redundancy at all for the flight control computers." This statement is completely incorrect, there are two backup systems to the FCC they are called Pilots. It is one of the reasons that the pilots are there, to take over WHEN automation fails.

Unlike some commercial aircraft the automatics can all be switched off in the 737 and it can them be flown just like any manual aircraft. Unfortunately, the airline beancounters do not like the expense of training completely manual flight and will often reprimand crews that try to practice manual flying . The result is that unlike earlier decades where pilots were proud of their manual flying skills, modern pilots tend to avoid actually flying the aircraft manually apart from the very constrained periods of take off and landing.

Automation is geared to failover to manual operation in both Airbus and Boeing aircraft (Air France 447 is a case where the failover to pilot control resulted in a crash) The problem is that the automatics handover to the flight crew when there is a problem, so it is not only manual flying that might be the first that the pilot has done at height in that aircrafft _ever_, it is also recovery from the problem that caused the automatics to fail.

Imagine a world with self driving cars where drivers had operated for years with only needing to assist in parking and leaving a parking slot. Now imagine if there is a failure the car reverts to a manual (stick shift) with no synchromesh so needing double declutching and heel and toe braking and gear change, no power steering or power brakes AND it has a problem and is in heavy traffic. This gives a very simplistic idea of what can happen in the cockpit when the automation drops out and hands control to the pilot.

Boeing designed the 737 decades ago for pilots who like to fly 'manually' but many of the new generation of pilots are not capable of flying manually to the same level as they are not allowed the training or experience.

IFF the aviaiton industry makes the automation even more efficient and reliable with no need to fail over then the experience levels of the flight crews will become even lower and they will be of even less use in an emergency. The best way forward would then be to never fail over to the flight crews indeed operate without them as a fully automated autonomous aircraft - there are many flying now for the military. Expect to see them at an airport near you sooner than you would think.

Would you fly in a fully automated aircraft? You are actually already doing so for most of the flight and the exceptions the flight crew are there to handle they often (demonstrably) cannot. So the decision is not in your hands.

Re: Youtube..

YouTuibe are not like AT&T or T-Mobile carrying 'mere data' which is not examined. YouTube is checking content and deciding which to monetize, which to just show, or, which to ban. Doesn't this make YouTube a publisher and subject to all the legal requirements that come with being a publisher?

Re: 'Software delivered to Boeing'

As it happens the AoA indicator was an optional extra - non-military pilots tend not to use AoA. The two crashed 737Max did not have the AoA failure indicator installed so this software bug was not involved in those crashes.

Problem with 2FA is that your telco needs to be told not to allow online reassignment of your number to another carrier. Ensure that you have to be present. Otherwise your Tmobile account is suddenly a Verizon account and someone else is getting your authentication numbers.

Re: 'It's not clear whether he also has a FB account or whether he's a non-account'

"Point is - it's obvious where the power lies here. Any fines of any transnational never amount to even a day's cleared profits, as the Reg writers themselves often point out. Which shows who is in actual control, and the rest is theater."

I would think that a fine for example of 30% of annual turnover would make even Facebook sit up and take notice. The levels of fines especially from the European Court systems as well as the levels of potential enforcement are not something that any transnational will take lightly.

"who ever thought it a good idea to sell the US' most advanced aircraft to a weakly aligned country with GDP of $11,000 per capita, led by a despotic ruler elected on an Islamist ticket?" I would venture to suggest that would be the previous US Administration and probably deliberately rather than out of stupidity.

Re: Firearms?

It is legal to shoot them down in the USA if they are below 500ft https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/25/drone_slayer_rules_in_court/

@ David Knapman

The President has the power to do as he did under the immigration and nationality act of 1965 which amended the previous 1952 act under which the president also had the power. There is ZERO chance that the litigation will succeed. By displaying their ignorance and gullibility these companies and individuals are destroying what credibility they used to have.

Re: IT WAS TOO CLOSE TO CALL

Close. The set up was meant to be Hillary vs Jeb and Jeb would lose - a creditable second. Meanwhile on this side of the pond, Remain would win. The 'trade treaties' TTP and TTIP would be put into place, locking almost the entire first world into a single agreement run by banks and global companies . Bilderberg group heaven. Agenda 21 for all. Hence the desperate attempts of the remoaners and the never Trumpers with apparently unlimited funds, trying to get their nuts back out of the fire. They do not realize the strength of feeling of "We The Peop6" .

Re: Suggestion for the 'greater good' approach...

If a set of metrics are developed and values for them defined for passing acceptance tests, then whatever is being tested will be built or managed to pass those tests. This is the same whether you are talking about passing exams rather than being educated or the structure of a bridge or even engine performance in tests. There is no such thing as the 'spirit of the test' in business. I would expect that every single manufacturer has in some way 'gamed' testing. The only way to get around this is to define a better test. Being vague about what is being tested doesn't work as eventually the reason for failure has to be passed on. However, the methods and validation of results should be as close to the 'real world' as possible then the test gaming becomes less worthwhile.

Re: So...Garbage from Non-Aviators

Aircraft when they land for a night stop will always shut off the generators and APU and go onto ground power. Aircraft also have a series of standard maintenance checks that are mandatory the A checks after ~ 200-300 flight hours and a B check every 6 months with the aircraft in a hangar for 2 - 3 days. The generators will be off and the maintenance includes disconnecting and checking batteries.

This is not a flight safety problem

However, it is a program standards and testing problem that should not be there and obviously a counter overflow of some sort that Boeing felt it should report. It shows up a poor program test if counters can overflow and haven't got a standard handler to reset them. Both the programmer team and the test team should be in front of the leather top desk :-)

Re: Properly engineered systems!

Every input is validated by specific programs for each input type, And any fault not only in syntax but also in logic is returned either to the inputting person or to operators as a 'referred reject' to be sorted out. The system is extremely resilient to input errors.

The original design of the system when it had a startover was that it dumped all the input messages in the message input queue for the previous minute and told controllers to re-enter them. This stopped the cycling of fail overs that are bound to happen by sending the same broken message to an identical machine with identical software. That was part of the move to Swanwick and rehosting the old NAS host software from the IBM360's into a simple mainframe as a virtual machine (we said that wouldn't work at the time).

However, I challenge anyone in the commercial world to have the same availability as NATS is getting from the Jovial/BAL software which is in the 99.999% or better range.

Re: Re. Google "vendetta"

The regulation had better be extremely cautious as it would not take a lot for Google to add 'the right to be forgotten' approach for every politician, party and eurocrat who support acting against Google. If they were joined in that by other search engines that were being hit by collateral damage from the anti-google attacks it could be very very bad for the politicians involved who spend a lot of time and money trying to ensure that they are found by search engines. So they should be very careful what they wish for.

Re: In other words:

It would be a salutory lesson if the card issuers withdrew the capability for Home Depot to use their cards. Until there is really hard action like this then the 'we sell hammers' brigade will continue letting their customers down. Yes the CIO is responsible but the CEO needs to know that what the CIO is doing or not doing is potentially a company killer, that way they won't sit with glazed over eyes waiting for coffee during a briefing from the CIO.

I am not sure that is the case. Many EU or European Commission based fines are percentages of company turnover.

Re: The fat lady has sung

You see Scientific Method is based on the idea of observing nature, creating a hypothesis that explains the observations, then identifying what would falsify the hypothesis then trying to disprove it by carrying out falsifications.

This approach has been carried out with both Evolution and Gravity and nobody has yet falsified the hypotheses. There are lots of different ideas about how gravity works but its existence can be shown by repeated experiment.

With Anthropogenic Global Warming the 'green house gas' hypothesis was that small amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere would lead to warming that would increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere and as a more powerful green house gas water vapor would increase the warming leading to more water vapor evaporating and so on to thermageddon. Unfortunately, the 'tropical tropospheric hotspot' that should appear with this hypothesis has not appeared - and there has been a lot of searching for it. FALSIFICATION 1. The models all built on the basis of the hypothesis project considerable warming even if the amount of CO2 emitted was to be kept at 1998 levels - all show a considerable amount of warming ... yet the actual global temperatures have remained statistically unchanged for more than 17 years. FALSIFICATION 2.

There is more but I would remind you of Feynman's statement on this:

:""n general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it. ""

Using this approach Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory - is wrong - the computed projections have been compared directly to observation and they are incorrect. That is all there is to it.