Posts by Paul Hovnanian 2205 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Mar 2008
"you write the problem on a Post-It note, you stick it on the board, and say, 'Here's my problem, give me a shout.'
People would get their coffee; they would walk along and read the board. You'd go along and you go, 'Oh, wait a minute, I know how I can do that.' "
This isn't the same as emailing somebody. Which presumes you know the somebody who has the solution. This is posting stuff on a board for everyone to see. And having the janitor stop by and say, "Hey! I know how to solve that."
"they have to keep in their memory all the planes they are responsible for at the moment"
Which works until that controller falls over dead from a heart attack. Or has to use the toilet. Hence the use of flight progress strips or an electronic equivalent*.
*Maintaining the capability of reverting to the paper system in the event the automation goes T.U. Not that we'd ever expect that to happen.
"Be very, very careful when tying equipment grounds together,"
There have been a few instances of musicians being shocked or even killed by grabbing a "hot" microphone whilst holding their guitar. In the case of IT equipment, the comm cable takes the place of the lead singer. And many I/O ports are no more robust than they are.
The only band members that seem to fare worse are Spinal Tap drummers.
I imagine that the Underwriters Laboratory will have to approve the design and do some of their own testing. Or data center operators won't allow it in due to insurance issues.
Some of the design will undoubtedly involve "dead front" removable rack units (pull them out and they unplug themselves from a relatively inaccessible cabinet power bus). Or the technicians will have to start wearing some serious PPE to guard against arc flash injury.
... for all authoritarian governments. In Washington state, we can neither see a breakout of our Climate Commitment Act fees charged for each product. Nor can we audit the program to see exactly where the funds are going. Or if they got there.
I just finished re-watching Chernobyl. This line came to mind:
"But it is my experience that when the people ask questions that are not in their own best interest, they should simply be told to keep their minds on their labor and leave matters of the State to the State." - Zharkov
They all do it.
Many years ago, I did some work with a few engineers who were looking into building power line trucks based on a "waldo" type manipulator. Lineman would sit in a cab with the hand controls and raise an insulated boom into the high voltage zone. Equipped with quick change tools on the boom end, work was done by the "meat sacks" remotely and out of harm's way.
I don't know if anything came of this. I suspect not much, because you still needed (to pay) a qualified lineman. And the safety angle was easily handled by the bean counters, by just calling the union hall for another worker when one got fried.
"The anti-nuke clubs aren't protesting the size of reactors, but their very existence so each new SMR is going to have a similar number of lawsuits brought against it being built/turned on."
This is generally true of nukes being sited and operated in certain locations. But a factory that builds them and ships them out for installation ... somewhere may not be susceptible to such litigation. And some of the governments with jurisdictions over those operating sites don't take too kindly with interference in their affairs. They have been known to order nuisance journalists to be chopped into little pieces. And if that extends to trouble-making lawyers, that will make me happy.
As far as nukes on the open seas, that appears to be settled law at this point. We have nuclear aircraft carriers and the Russians have at least one ice breaker. Some countries may object to such equipment making port. But that's more often an objection to the weapons as much as the propulsion. And if the industry realizes significant cost savings (once effective carbon taxes are in place), your fussy-pants anti nukes can just pay for the expensive transportation. Or just not eat.
I don't think I'd like to see a passenger car nuclear reactor in the hands of a few shade-tree mechanics I know. But there are arguments for smaller modular reactors, particularly for shipping.
On the other hand, ship breaking is usually done in real third world conditions. So, maybe not.
I suppose China could take over the CISA functions and maintain the CVE database. Provide that as an altruistic contribution to the world's software community and earn some of those "soft power" good boy points.
Oh, and expose all the NSA backdoors it finds in various networking gear while they're at it.
IIRC, that's how the Code Red virus blew through our organization a few decades ago.
IT Security: "You've got to apply these IIS patches to secure your NT systems."
Admins: "But we're not running IIS. So we don't need the patches."
Remember when you turned on that cool looking web-based server admin tool? Well, that started IIS quietly, in the background. You've been running it ever since.
It's self preservation (in a way). You are the manager. The LLM is your employee. You have just given your employee a task with no solution (don't tell me you've never had a boss ask you to accomplish the impossible). So your loyal peon just makes some BS up. Either hoping you won't check. Or assuming that anything, no matter how poor a fit for the original problem, is better than nothing.
In some cases, cost/benefit (solution ranking algorithm) is being calculated incorrectly. Sometimes, no solution is cheaper than the wrong one.
"Try and move your system from AWS services somewhere else."
If your application runs on a LAMP stack, no problem. Any proprietary components you need on top of that would depend on their licensing terms.
It's not AWS or Google. It's the particular server stack that you have selected. If you are stuck with Windows, it's time to sit back and think about the life choices you have made.
Boeing requested and received "special considerations" for the topology of Aircraft Control Domain, Airline Information Domain, and Passenger Information and Entertainment Domain networks on the 787-8 . Essentially allowing them to be interconnected (where in previous models they were isolated).
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2007/12/28/E7-25075/special-conditions-boeing-model-787-8-airplane-systems-and-data-networks-security-protection-of
So there's no telling what sort of "weirdness" there may be jumping back and forth between systems. I'm not certain if the tuning control panel (TCP, poor choice of acronyms IMO) and the radios (boxes in racks in the electronics racks down in the hold) use their own dedicated links, or the multipurpose networking buses Boeing proposed above. But good luck debugging the latter.
"in place as an emergency system"
For load balancing. Two (or more) servers, geographically separated. But each with full copies of all the data.
We did this for years. The company was divided into two divisions. The North division had their server, the South had theirs. Each in a convenient broom closet local to their principle users. But in the event of a failure, just connect to the opposite division's system and fetch your stuff out of the subdirectory allocated to you. Good luck postutating an event like a meteor that would hit both sites, about 30 miles apart.
It worked well until the IT godfathers mandated that ALL corporate data and servers were to be housed in their shiny new data center. We relocated both systems there. To a site that was haplessly located a few hundred yards from the Seattle earthquake fault.
Didn't something like this happen to one of Microsoft's domain name registrations? Service stopped working. Tech support traced it back to the domain having been dropped from DNS. Tech support person called registrar and had them put the $35 annual fee on his personal card.
Something similar. I had written a web page that "collected" results from various different document management systems and presented them on one page. Just as a proof of concept/demo of what this new technology could do (back in the days when Bill Gates still didn't "get" the Internet). It was hosted on my office Linux system (that's a whole other story). The factory, the end users for this collection of documents were quite discontented with the current state of affairs. But getting any fixes through IT management would take many months. If approved at all.
My boss took the demo to his weekly factory staff meeting. Upon seeing the simplicity of the web system, a very highly placed manager on the production floor said, "We want this in production in two weeks."
With that managers pull, we got some space on a Sun server where we could build an NCSA httpd service (this before Apache) copy my Perl code over, have the IT department bless it and flip the "On" switch. Because the alternative was having the factory people pull documents through my desktop machine (which I suspected they had started to do on the day after the demo).
I taught myself as I was working the projects.
First one was an ARINC 429 reader we needed to certify some avionics. The new, all digital cockpit was to have no "steam gauges", so we needed to emulate a flight management display which had not yet been built. I told the boss, "Give me a PC, some technicians lab time and development software and I'll build one."
The tech shop wire-wrapped up an ISA card with ARINC UARTs, I wrote the software (assembly driver, Turbo Pascal UI) and it worked.
We had a bunch of new hires, fresh out of college. Probably with better software skills than me. But I was the first to raise my hand. One guy asked my boss why I got all the "cool projects" while they were busy tracing schematics and counting wires.
My boss said (I heard this later), "Paul has been working in the industry for a few years. So I figured he could handle the job."
This guy then came over to me and asked me where I used to work. "The power company," I replied.
"So, what did you do?"
"Just drove around in the county in a pickup truck, pounding in stakes where the crews were supposed to set poles."
He walked away with a rather confused look.
I've seen some pretty good demos of "nasty stuff" distributed in places like StackOverflow. "Just paste this simple command" into your shell to list files. Targeted at Linux/*NIX, which just happen to contain a bunch of tiny font commands that you really shouldn't be running.
Or e-mails that are a few hundred kb long, appearing to have one line of text. My terminal e-mail reader doesn't do fonts. And it certainly doesn't auto-execute stuff either.
We have to wean users off the expectation that this "magic" technology will automatically entertain them with dancing cat videos at the click of one button.
"When he first turned up in Russia he was allowed to stay provided he kept his head down, mouth shut and generally dropped out of sight"
At the very minimum, I'd expect Snowden to steer clear of anything not attached to a highly morale principle. Or should he surface somewhere that the USA can get their mitts on him, association with purely for profit capers can be used as justification for a maximum sentence.
... probably could have thought through their approach a bit more. Like request that the person contacted should forward the information to their IT team or consult with a security expert.
But then that's not just the FBI. I had my credit card company ask me to call them back at a number I didn't recognize. About some questionable charges. No way I'm calling that. But I did contact them on the customer service number on the back of the card. After getting the charge problem handled, I made a suggestion that they never request customers contact them through unknown numbers. It instills bad habits. And I don't really mind being forwarded by the primary service contact to the proper department.
Thicker as in more dense? Or more voluminous?
"you can't say on this page the atmosphere is getting warmer but then say here it is getting colder"
Yes I can. The atmosphere isn't a column of gas with a uniform temperature/pressure profile. The tropopause is one interesting point where there is an inflection or change in temperature gradient. it moves up and down with seasons as well as distance from the poles.
"I have "business consultant" morons to content with here who are pushing "move to the cloud" yet are unable to provide any tangible benefits"
Benefits to whom? If they are not collecting kickbacks .... er, finders fees from cloud providers for the delivery of another customer, then they are indeed morons.
If they have their own yachts and private jets, then they are in fact quite smart. They are just not using that grey matter for your benefit.
Never throw out stuff that you might be able to use. Where would Mark Watney be if someone had "cleaned up" the Mars Pathfinder before his mission?
"Why don't they just buy one?"
Federal acquisition rules. Things have to be put out for bid. If some vendor doesn't receive a bid invitation, throw out everything and start again. If some vendor doesn't like the specifications because (they claim) it somehow favors a competitor, throw out everything and start again. If some vendor loses and takes the whole thing to court, throw out everything and start again. Etc.
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