Posts by Tim99

Court battle date set for £300m BT Cornwall termination dispute

Re: Ah, BT

Having worked in the public service, and a public monopoly, and private industry. I have learnt a truth - That systematic incompetence exists in all of them. I am sure that the only consistent thing that drives incompetence is the physical size of the organization. A very large private company may even be worse because they rightly suspect that their customers have no realistic alternative, as their competition will be similarly bad. When BT was the PMG, its reason for existence was, nominally, to provide a public utility. When you privatize a public monopoly it is difficult to see how an adequately competitive market can be created. Once the enterprise has been sold its only declared purpose is to provide a profit. This is not helped by the tendency of executives to maximize their rewards, usually at the expense of the organization's long term future.

Hypervisors are sooo 2005. For hip containers, you need a 'Microvisor'

Pareidolia

I'm not sure if the article's image is meant to show visual pareidolia, or not.

After reminding myself of the definition: A psychological phenomenon involving an image wherein the mind perceives a familiar pattern where none actually exists. I am still not sure if the image is apposite to the article, or not

US to stage F-35-versus-Warthog bake-off in 2018

Multi-Role Aircraft

Can anyone think of an aircraft since the de Havilland Mosquito that has been really good at a range of multiple combat roles?

Linux Foundation releases PARANOID internal infosec guide

Re: Hardening requirements?

@Ole Juul

Well played sir.

Have an Upvote, and a beer >>==============>

Hardening requirements?

Here you are: OpenBSD download link.

Thank you, thank you, Is that the door over there?

IBM tries to dodge $1bn sueball for deal won with 'ethical transgressions'

Re: Utter insanity

It's over 20 years ago now, but when I ran a technical business for someone else in Australia we outsourced our payroll. There was a wide range of jobs including scientists, engineers, technicians, sales and clerical support, and management. Many of the staff worked shifts at different rates, and different times. The staff were responsible for filling in their own timesheet (5mins?), the line manager checked it (1 min?) and the timesheet were picked up by an outsourced contractor who charged us $3 per person per week to process them, print the payslips and deliver them, transfer the money to the employees' bank accounts, and do the taxes and superannuation etc.

The average pay for an employee was about $30,000 p.a. so our total costs were <$40,000 for each person. The manager would have been on $45,000 so our manager's cost would be ~$55,000. We were up for a cost of <$40,000/52 x (5/40 x60) or about $1.60 for an average employee per week of their time (Generally as staff knew that they would not get their overtime pay next week if they did not submit their timesheet, they were pretty good at ensuring their timesheet were filled in by Thursday night). The manager's time for each of 20 employees would have cost <$0.50 so - In total ~$5.00 per employee per week.

As this was >20 years ago, allowing for inflation that would be ~$9 today - Most of the calculations would have been done on a 10 user Pick computer, so in real terms the $3 charged by the contractor would probably be less today.

If QLD was able to do what we did; they would be up for, at most, $5 per employee per week for the "computer based" stuff. Anyway 74,000 employees at $5 per week is less than $20 million a year. Using manual data input and obsolete technology, to get to $1 billion we are looking at a project life of 50 years. If we did a discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis and assumed an investment rate of 3% the same $1 billion would generate an additional $3.4 billion over 50 years.

So in conclusion, employ a few more people with spreadsheets.

Hey, folks. Meet the economics 'genius' behind Jeremy Corbyn

Re: It's OK

@Tony S

You are right that the heavier traffic causes damage. The amount is proportional to the 4th power of axle weight. As an example if a largish private car has a weight of 2 tons that is 1 ton per axle each of which to the power of four is equal to 1 unit of damage or 2 units of damage in total. A Large Goods Vehicle can have a weight of 48 short tons or 8 tons per axle, so each axle will cause roughly 4000 times the damage of the car axle or 12,000 times the damage in total.

If we assume that the car excise is £200 and we wanted a "fair" system based on the amount of damage caused,t the LGV would be subject to an excise of £2,400,000. Obviously they don't pay their fair share, unless we include some societal benefit of running large vehicles. I understand that Jeremy Corbyn wants railways to be back in public ownership :-) Maybe he could subsidize them to a similar extent to the societal subsidy given to the road transport lobby?

Typewriters suck. Yet we're infinitely richer for those irritating machines

Re: Heating

@john41

I was at school that winter and we slept in a Nissen hut. The underground water pipes to the gym froze until March so we also had to put up with sweaty people, fortunately it was so cold that the smell was minimized.

A close shave: How to destroy your hard drives without burning down the data centre

Too Boring?

A single large encrypted USB flash thumb drive on a front panel. The adrenalin surge you get when the 3LA breaks down the first door should be sufficient to allow you to pull the drive out and snap it in half with your bare hands.

Perhaps middle-aged blokes SHOULDN'T try 34-hour-long road trips

Re: Lane merging

In WA Oz the rule on lane merging is that the vehicle ahead has priority, so if you are coming up behind someone traveling more slowly than you, you have to slow down and tuck in behind them.

This rule is logical, safe and understood - Which is why many drivers ignore it...

Surprise! Evil-eyed cats MORE LIKELY to be SNEAKY PREDATORS – boffins

Cat's eyes: Not evil, just very well adapted.

Cat's pupils are nearly round at night and only go to narrow slits in in bright light. This shape allows them to change the area of their pupils by about nine times more than if they were round, so they see well in light levels from near darkness to full sunshine and can hunt at any time.

Microsoft lures iOS devs with open-source app tools for Windows 10

Re: Languages

'different for the sake of being different' which I worry is Apple's real reasoning in using it.

It came from NeXT and the software tool OpenStep (from NeXTSTEP) when Steve Jobs went back to Apple when they bought the company. Originally it was used by scientists, military and spook types (where up-front cost is not always a primary concern) to write relatively secure GUI stuff using OO in networked *Nix environments. It predated Windows NT, and avoided the insecurity of DOS and earlier versions of Windows. The platform was used by Tim Berners-Lee to create the first web browser (Wikipedia Link).

Hey, Apple! 1999 just called and it wants its voicemail avatar back

Answering machine

I liked the functionality of an old B&O answering machine. It had 3 answering options: a formal "business" message; a different message for your friends; and my favorite, for people that you did not like, it did not pick up so they would have to keep dialing you, and were not able to leave a message.

Presumably Apple could implement something similar?

Apple chief Cook cooks up rumours after BMW car talks, factory tour

Re: Would you trust ANY Americans in your factory?

@Dazed and Confused

Apple confirms production Mac Pro production has started in Austin: Statesman.com.

@x 7

lets not forget that BMW used to make bubble cars

and before that they made some of the most advanced fighter aircraft engines available.

BOFH: My diary is MINE and mine alone, you petty HR gimps

Re: CRT Monitors...

"ATs, you had ATs? Even the head of IT only had an XT."

Yes they were for scientists and engineers. Other people usually got a single floppy or diskless XT that booted off a Novell 2 Server, as we did not ned to load them up, they were delivered directly to the user.

Re: CRT Monitors...

We could buy the then newly released IBM AT on a Volume Workstation Agreement and quickly issued them to about 100 of our users. The standard distribution procedure was to unpack them in the office, check them and load up the necessary software before taking them to the user. To save time we carried them. You unplugged the mains cable, put the keyboard on top of the CRT monitor and lifted the computer to waist height with the glass of the screen against your chest, this allowed you to stop the keyboard falling off by trapping it between the top off the screen and your chin. I would only carry them up 2 floors of an 8 floor building, if it was more than that you hoped that someone would be there waiting to open the lift doors and then let you out at the correct floor.

A few years ago I met a government employee in the car park, I had to wait until he had unloaded a trolley from the boot of his car, unfold it and then place his lightweight Toshiba notepad on it before wheeling it across the car park to to the office where I was installing a server. I asked him why he did this, as the weight of the trolley was more than the notepad - If he was going to be injured it was more likely to happen when he lifted the trolley out of the boot and put it on the floor - 'Health and Safety' he said 'The regulations state that all computers have to be moved on a trolley.'

Yes, now I am retired, I do have a bad back...

Don't want Windows 10 FILTH on the company network? Step this way

Ah, bless...

You have just reinvented an idea that a centralized policy should direct exactly what each user can do, just like a mainframe or mini did 40 or 50 years ago.

Debian Project holds Sparc port's hand, switches off life support

Alternatives?

BSD on Sparc:-

FreeBSD: Sparc 64

OpenBSD: Sparc 32

OpenBSD: Sparc 64

NetBSD: Sparc 32

NetBSD: Sparc 64

Icon: the only BSD (distantly) derived one El Reg has: >>==============>

Greece? Zzzz. EU bank says TWEETING can move the stock market

Nomenclature

Tim, you seem to be trying to persuade us that messages sent using Twitter are twats. I think you will find that twat is usually the correct name for the sender of a tweet.

Scammers going after iOS as fake crash reports hit UK

Re: A Fix

@Annihilator

The "It just works" way is to go to Safari settings and use the 'Clear History and Website Data' option. That seems pretty simple but, just like many of the other devices that you might use JavaScript on, you will lose your previous history which can be inconvenient.

A Fix

Click Home Button to close Safari. Double Click Home Button to display running apps and swipe Safari towards top of the screen to close it.

Open Settings and use Airplane Mode to turn wireless off. Open Safari Settings go into 'Advanced' and turn JavaScript off.

Now the slightly tricky bit - Open Safari and quickly touch the 'View open tabs' double square icon in the top right corner and close the offending tab.

Remember to turn Airplane Mode on.

Reg reader? Work at the Home Office? Are you SURE?

@x 7

"Work at the Home Office"

= oxymoron

NO-ONE in the Home Office works

When I was a Civil Servant, employed by them, the Staff Regs stated that you should "Attend".

Re: Middle managers

Until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone...

Dumb MongoDB admins spew 600 TERABYTES of unauthenticated data

But

Mongo DB is Web Scale - YouTube Link (NSFW).

Minister for Fun opens consultation on future of the BBC

Simple

How about going back to just "inform, educate, entertain" (Lord Reith: Wikipedia) - In that order, and get the politicians out of it.

Attention dunderheads: Taxpayers are NOT giving businesses £93bn

It''s simple?

If Tim and @The Axe are correct with the idea that "the burden of taxation always falls on individuals, never on corporations" why don't we legislate that corporations do not pay tax?

Any profits paid to individuals would be taxed at their normal tax rate. Profits shipped abroad are taxed at the highest rate of personal taxation. Foreign purchase/lease arrangements where a company gets product from another (foreign) division of the same corporation for sale within its home country by buying the product from a country with a lower tax rate is a current problem - The company is acting as a private individual might act to avoid paying VAT or corporation tax, so incoming purchases could be subjected to an import duty (just like a private individual who buys an expensive item while on holiday). Profits that are banked for more than a year within the country could be taxed at the VAT rate too.

Ideas: I've got a million of them. Good ideas are another matter.

Pan Am Games: Link to our website without permission and we'll sue

Re: "...mockery..."

Pfft. I can drive for two days from my home town in Queensland and I'm still in Queensland. Bigger place.

Pfft. Western Australia, is half as big again as QLD. My home, south of Perth, to Kununurra is over 2,000 miles. I admit that I have not driven it myself, but I did drive to Derby, which is only 1,500 miles. I made a couple of diversions on the way, so I clocked up over 5,000 miles on the trip.

Unless we have a motorist from the Sakha Republic, I claim this >>=======>

Blackhats exploiting MacKeeper hole to foist dangerous trojan

There's your problem

According to the saw, if you have a problem with your Mac and you install MacKeeper, you now have two problems (or in this case, at least three).

Chancellor Merkel 'was patient zero' in German govt network hack

Re: Hackers based in Russia? Probably Snowden.

I have to say, since the moment Admiral Canaris was forcefully removed from office, german counterintelligence has been a bit lacklustre.

Probably not: See Wikipedia - Reinhard Gehlen who, apparently, died of old age.

Re: Hooooooooooowl...

@Dan Paul,

She has a Doctorate in quantum chemistry. I am a Chartered Chemist, and was one of the earlier adopters of computers in chemistry. I was (in a a very minor way) one of the people who helped move chemistry from minicomputers to PCs. Almost all chemistry relies heavily on computers, but physical scientists generally consider computing to be just a necessary tool and not an end in itself.

I started doing serious computing stuff when I had to write a laboratory management system, and a later a financial management system, that would run on a number of LANs connected by a WAN. This included specifying and purchasing and installing equipment and staff training. My "qualifications" were the experience of running a chromatography and high-resolution mass spectrometry laboratory for the organization. This involved connecting together systems that run on DECnet, Token Ring, RDOS, PDPs, VAXen, UNIX minis, PC DOS, CP/M, POS, the Apple ][, and a whole pile of other assorted equipment with serial ports. My recollection was that this was pretty easy compared to mass spectrometry...

Incidentally as a subtle, but good-hearted, dig at people who "know computing", I was put in charge of computing for 300 scientists (>400 computers) by an organization that did not believe in "putting computer people in charge of computing". Their rational was that people who "did computing" did not always see the needs of the business, and were just as likely to set up systems with a 4GL or Java or whatever was becoming cool at the time because "it was interesting" - Particularly if it helped their career development.

Angela is a bit younger than me; but back then, even in East Germany, she would have required a fairly detailed understanding of computers to get a Doctorate in quantum chemistry. I expect that nowadays she might be too busy to look after her own computer, so she probably relied on a professional [expert],[security officer],[self-important bureaucrat].

Disclosure: I learnt FORTRAN as an essential part of my chemistry course in 1969, so my mind is probably damaged - All of the above may, probably, be disregarded.

DON’T add me to your social network, I have NO IDEA who you are

Re: Bit Sneaky. Reprinting That Particular Article During Dabbsy's Absence

@Pomgolian

A you would be sure to be sure to know, whiskey (irish spelling) is older than whisky (Scottish spelling). American whiskey is later. It seems that Irish monks brought the method of distilllng to Scotland in about the C14th.

The oldest modern whiskey is probably Bushmills Irish and dates back to 1608.

The history of Scottish whisky is now lost in the mists of time, but perhaps the oldest of the popular single malts is Smith's Glenlivet which goes back to the 1820s.

Have a beer, unless you would prefer a proper drink >>===============>

Scientists love MacBooks (true) – but what about you?

Re: The view from Silicon Valley

@macjules

I'm not sure if you are trolling or not. He used another Jobsian device a NeXT computer running a BSD derived OS. You could say that that was a progenitor of the later fruity stuff when Jobs came back to Apple.

Security sleuths, sniff out the stupid from your Oracle DBs

Scott Tiger

Years ago, when I did this, I was always unpleasantly surprised by what I could see (and by implication change) if I logged on to an Oracle DB with the above default training/developer credentials.

Attack of the IT monuments men: Museum wants your kit

We grow old too

Technology generally ages fast, people tend to think that they don't. A few years ago a friend of mine was appalled to find her gym-slip marked with her name-tag as an exhibit at the Museum of Childhood at Sudbury Hall, then she realized that it was over 50 years old.

Patch-crazy Aust Govt fought off EVERY hacker since 2013

He might be right

As it would seem that many security breaches come courtesy of the US and the other five eyes countries Oz is safe - There is no need to target them - We just give all of our data to the other partners.

Google spins up 'FREE, unlimited' cloud photo storage 4 years before ad giant nixes it

Re: Nonplussed

It is a warning that Google are believed to have form for giving their users something, and then taking it away if it doesn't make enough money...

Re: privacy...

I suspect that its main use at Google will be to enable them to run face recognition software to work out who is in your photos, and then see what other photos these faces are recognised in, producing a net of likely terrorists customers for the organizations that actually pay them.

Google puts Android on a diet, names it after the first thing it sees under the sink ... yes, Brillo

Brillo and Chromium plate

Presumably the hipsters who came up with the name Brillo are too young to know that it used to be used by dodgy second-hand car dealers to bring up a nice shine on tatty rusty Chrome...

Right Dabbsy my old son, you can cram this job right up your BLEEEARRGH

Re: Desk name plate and worn name ID for all

Presbyopia has crept up on me and I can't read without glasses. My choices in the chestal area are to either go in close so I can peer at their name within the focussing distance of my glasses or if I am looking above the lenses I can move quickly backwards and squint. Neither option is likely to inspire the confidence of the owner of the chest.

Re: Memory for names

I now live in Australia - It's easy (Monty Python).

Telstra builds trans-continental land bridge for data

Re: Living in Perth....

@Steve Davies 3

I use Ghostery, Adblock, ClickToFlash and a custom hosts file. You do know that some adblockers just stop the ad from being displayed? Some of the content is still downloaded.

Re: Living in Perth....

True. but traffic within Oz is often OK. The problem is offshore data. Even the onshore sites tend to load their website pages with advert and framework stuff that has to come from halfway around the planet. So does that mean that our experience in Perth will be further degraded to support Melbourne and Sydney?

Microsoft points PowerShell at Penguinistas

I've wrestled with MS software for nearly 34 years

It is a trap.

Spotify springs bloody leak as losses grow to $197m – report

Re: 40% headcount increase!?

Subordinates multiply at a fixed rate regardless of output.

Professor Parkinson

Unless something else is going on here as well, it is unlikely to be Parkinson's Law - The formula for which generally only gives 5-7% staff increases per year. Oh dear, maybe the extra staff are lawyers?

So tablets, if you want to get anything done travelling get a ... yes, a laptop

I know that I'm a bit dim...

...but wouldn't most of the upload problems have been trivial if your iPad took a SIM card with a cheap plan? Even if you had a laptop, how were you going to get the photos off your SIM card and back to base, unless you sent them by post or courier?

The last time I was in the UK, I got a rechargeable SIM card with 6GB of 4G data for £17.00 - Most of the hotel WiFi that was available was slow and expensive - 4G worked almost everywhere that we travelled.

Tesla Powerwall: Not much cheaper and also a bit wimpier than existing batteries

Re: Could work for me

Hi Neoc, I'm (semi-)retired now so I am at home for much of the day near Perth and get full advantage of solar power. Short sleeve shirts are OK here, and when I was working I kept a tie in the office/car for the 3 meetings a year I might need one. Before I retired, we set the aircon to come on at about 10:00am so we had free sunshine cooling the fabric of the house for when we came home.

Before aircon some people used to sleep on the beach here because their houses were too hot at night. It could be worthwhile to look at how well your house is insulated and if it is worthwhile getting ventilation or additional insulation/heat reflection for your roof-space - We found that putting up some solar screening on our exposed window helped (deciduous trees are good if you can spare the water).

Could work for me

Richard,

I live where it is hot and sunny. Most of us don't start our day with "flipping the switch on 1,200 watts of air-conditioner and fire up the 2,400 watts' worth of iron to get the wrinkles out of shirts". The house is usually cooler in the morning, and we would be unlikely to have the single 5kW "cool only" split system air conditioner in your link. What we would have is solar panels which would be generating power when the sun came up and the house started to get hot. If we had bought our aircon in the last year or two we would be more likely to have two modern 2.5KW systems which would draw a maximum of 0.42KW each, but we probably would not have both of them running flat out at the same time.

If you live somewhere really hot, it is also unlikely that you would be wearing a long sleeved, crisply ironed, shirt with a tie :-)

Would a single 7kW or 10kW system give me all the power I need with a maximum draw of 2kW? Probably - Except for a few days in the middle of winter where it might be a bit tight, but I could always look at running a cheap 4kW petrol generator for a few hours to charge the batteries. I would also look at putting a "soft start" power supply on my fridge, or paying the extra for a DC powered one.

Would I buy one now? No, but I might in 5 years where the cost is likely to have come down by half.

London Coffee Festival: Caffeine, tech and martinis on show in Shoreditch

Wot no Aeropress?

Can be a bit of a faff, but it makes really good coffee: Wikipedia link. It's cheap too.