* Posts by ReadyKilowatt

19 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Nov 2018

IPv6 is built to be better, but that's not the route to success

ReadyKilowatt

US might be different...

I've been running dual stack on my home network for at least 5 years now and my ISP (Comcast) resolves IPv6 first. If I ssh to a remote PC on my network by hostname it is resolved to the IPv6 address not the v4 and all but a few very old IOT devices are dual stack. T-Mobile USA is all dual stack and I'm pretty sure all the VoIP traffic is IPv6. Honestly other than having to use hostnames for devices instead of memorizing static 192.168.1.0 addresses it really hasn't been much of an issue.

QUIC! IETF sets November deadline for last comments on TCP-killer spawned by Google and Cloudflare

ReadyKilowatt

Error free wireless networks?

The reason you ACK a TCP packet is because you have to assume the network might not be reliable. Wired Ethernet is mostly reliable. Wireless is not. Optimistic networking is probably a bad idea, and putting all of the reliability requirements on the network operators is definitely a very bad idea.

Selling hardware on a pay-per-use or subscription model is a 'lie' created by marketing bods

ReadyKilowatt

IBM until the 1990s

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" should have been "Nobody ever got fired for leasing IBM." This is not new.

It is unclear why something designed to pump fuel into a car needs an ad-spewing computer strapped to it, but here we are

ReadyKilowatt

Re: Huh?

Late 1980s Subarus (or maybe just the XT) had a dual action lever on the floor next to the rocker panel. Pull it to open the trunk, push it to unlatch the filler cover. Not at all obvious and the graphic didn't help because it looked like one was supposed to move it to the right, not push down.

Go on, hit Reply All. We dare you. We double dare you. Because Office 365 will defeat your server-slamming ways

ReadyKilowatt

It's company culture now.

Geez, if our company implements this I'll never get a message again.

Source code for seminal adventure game Zork circa-1977 exhumed from MIT tapes, plonked on GitHub

ReadyKilowatt

Build your own PiDP-11

https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11

Good news, everyone: The US military says it will be ethically minded about how it develops AI

ReadyKilowatt

Make it play tic-tac-toe until it understands. Or Cheyenne Mountain explodes. Maybe both.

El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail

ReadyKilowatt

Re: Deleted

Confirmation popups are probably no better. Muscle memory is more powerful than reading comprehension.

"Are you sure you want to do this? It cannot be undone."

*clicks Yes*

Oh, wait...

Space Force is go, go, go! Because we have a child as President of the United States

ReadyKilowatt

2007 Chinese anti-satellite missile test

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test

While it was overwhelmingly condemned by the international community, it still happened. Not really sure exactly what a "Space Force®" would do to prevent this sort of thing from happening, but a dedicated group working to identify a vulnerabilities and exploring defenses might be appropriate. Trump's ham-handed delivery not withstanding. Remember, he a marking guy. And marketing guys think everyone is as dumb as they are, so everything has to be a slogan or catch phrase (or hashtag).

Again don't get caught up in this idea that somehow this was something Trump thought up all by himself. I'm sure he's had meeting with defense department officials and Boeing lobbyists who made sure this was front and center on his agenda.

From Wikipedia: In January 2001, a (US) congressionally mandated space commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld recommended that “the U.S. government should vigorously pursue the capabilities called for in the National Space Policy to ensure that the president will have the option to deploy weapons in space to deter threats to, and, if necessary, defend against attacks on U.S. interests."

Colorado cryptocoin execs spark up blunt '$722m ponzi scheme' criminal charges after investments go up in smoke

ReadyKilowatt

What's pot got to do with it?

Colorado is known for more than it's hemp industry. It's also got a thriving microbrewery industry, and will soon dominate the psilocybin market.

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

ReadyKilowatt

My industry is full of engineers who have no degree in anything. My first job was "video engineer," because that's what fit best for my role. I tried to explain that, no, I'm not an engineer. My father is an engineer though and had the required paperwork from the state of Pennsylvania. I think the reason for the blurring of the line between technician and engineer is just so that industry can beat up engineers on pay. At one time engineering was considered similar to doctors and lawyers in terms of respect and pay grades. Industry saw how many engineers they'd need to do all the work that needed done, and balked at the price tag. So the title was made meaningless outside of a few very specific roles where liability is a factor. Which is a shame.

ReadyKilowatt

Re: Good job Arizona!

You're under the mistaken assumption that John McCain was a conservative. He was in favor of the status quo, one where the US was the beacon on the hill fighting against the evil commie Ivan. When that world fell apart his enemies relocated to Mecca. That and if you look at the defense industry it's pretty much centered around the 4 corners states. Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona are all major hubs for the military contractors.

How bad is Catalina? It's almost Apple Maps bad: MacOS 10.15 pushes Cupertino's low bar for code quality lower still

ReadyKilowatt

A number of little issues here. The iOS/WatchOS remote app no longer controls Apple Music. iCloud issues that required an Apple ID logout/login (which broke a lot of things). HostName changed to name of another device on the network somehow, which might have caused issues with Time Machine backups, but not sure.

Just general weirdness really. But still looks sloppy.

Margin mugs: A bank paid how much for a 2m Ethernet cable? WTF!

ReadyKilowatt

I once worked for the now discredited cable company Adelphia communications. You might recall the executives were all convicted of fraud (and it was a family business, so father and sons went to jail. Made for one heck of a Christmas card). The wife of the founder owned a high end furniture store in New York City which was basically a money laundering operation. All office furniture was to be purchased through this store, at an incredible markup. No facilities manager ever bought furniture, since it would quickly put the kibosh to any office remodel. They did however buy a lot of "misc office equipment."

Whose cloud is it anyway? Apple sinks $30m a month into rival Amazon's AWS – report

ReadyKilowatt

If Cook had any creativity he’d “one more thing” the iCloud home server. iOS, lots of hard drive space, behind a firewall/proxy for sharing content. Charge a grand for the thing and keep the monthly fees. Get the customers to pay for your infrastructure.

Gigabit? More like, you can gigabet the US will fall behind on super-fast broadband access

ReadyKilowatt

Full disclosure: I work for one of those horrible US ISPs.

The only real advantage cable companies have over new entrants is that cable companies already have paid-for infrastructure in place. The bulk of cable systems were constructed with Michael Milken's junk bonds and accelerated depreciation schedules in the 1980s and are just upgraded from time to time as necessary. Internet service was just an incremental revenue add-on at first so the risk level was pretty low.

Any new entrant has to build from scratch. And they have to convince people who already have service to switch. Believe it or not, there are people who are satisfied with their current service and don't want/care enough to switch to a new provider, especially the light users who pay the same as heavy users but use a fraction of the bandwidth (ideally the users who check their Facebook and email once a day are the perfect customers, not the hard core torrent freaks and gamers who are going to switch as soon as they see your trucks working in the area). As long as the investors are willing to put up with the burn rate you can run an ISP, but you'll have the worst of all possible worlds: Huge cap-ex, extreme users and serious marketing expense. Oh and if you itch enough to make the incumbent scratch they'll drop their margin to 0 and you'll be the expensive option to boot.

What the Dell? Customer passwords reset after miscreants break into Big Mike's IT emporium

ReadyKilowatt

"Big Mike" reminded me of the somewhat interesting 00's dramedy Chuck.

https://chuck-nbc.fandom.com/wiki/Michael_Tucker

Germany pushes router security rules, OpenWRT and CCC push back

ReadyKilowatt

ISP?

Comcast has been encouraging customers to rent/buy their Xi6 modems and one of the big selling points is that it is easy to manage clients. That seems like a fairly good solution for the majority of users, the ISP manages the security and other updates, the customer gets an app to manage their kid's use and who gets access, etc. Of course power users won't like that, but they probably don't need help anyway.

I'd like to see a test/certification offered for users who don't want the basics. If you know how to RTFM and update your boxes from time to time you get to have more access. But then someone would have to manage the certifications and of course then there's still policing to make sure you really are managing your network. Of course my Ubiquti network upgrades this year make management fairly easy, and remote management should be possible. But that would require someone paying for a network mechanic instead of depending on the manufacturers or themselves.

Holy moley! The amp, kelvin and kilogram will never be the same again

ReadyKilowatt

That Kibble balance looks a lot like old gyroscopes from the early 20th century. I wonder how long until someone figures out how to build one on a chip and every smartphone has one?