Posts by Alan Brown 15079 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"Well, every one of these terminals, throughout the bld had a blank badge left stuck in it at all times "
Shouldn't be happening.
"since doctors were always losing their badges and they didn't want to make ones for the temps. "
It's a legal _requirement_ in the UK that patients can see the photoID of whoever's treating them.
Doctors who forget their badges won't do it if it hits them in the wallet.
The problem isn't poor security practice. It's going about it the wrong way.
Put the authentication into staff ID cards, they're not allowed to wander around without them - yes the same cards that are used to open doors, etc.
If you need to cross-authenticate then add a fingerprint scanner. if someone's got a card and a fake (or dead) finger then you have bigger worries than IT security.
As for slow changeovers - that IS a problem. Fix it. Tablets and Wifi are cheap enough that shared computers should be the exception rather than the norm anyway.
"He said quite clearly that he will be resigning in approximately three months."
He'll exit with a knife between his ribs before the end of the Month. He's already been quoted by staffers that he's not putting up with this shit to have someone else waltz in when the hard work's done.
"That minimum wage will go up to £20 an hour. "
The EU no longer has the ability to prevent the government axing minimum wage legislation, equal pay law, human rights act, discrimination law or signing up to TTIP.
Or, in other words, the electorate just voted to remove the handbrake on a government seemingly determined to return Britain to the Glory Days of the 1840s when naked Mercantilism ruled the roost.
Back then, London had a murder rate running between 30 and 100 per day. I don't think this is a desireable outcome.
"Which was Farage's strategy all along."
Farage is a currency trader. He knew full well what the ramifications of "Out" were a long time ago.
UKIP was a way for him to get media coverage (the "look at me" factor) and political influence without being responsible for what those changes did (the kingmaker scenario). He was playing the role of Court Jester.
The problem is, this is now a "Mouse That Roared" scenario.
He wasn't expecting Brexit, wasn't planning for it and has no idea how to actually deal with it. You could see in his eyes that he was panicking - enough to flat out lie and try to bluff that he never sold the £350 million lie (the interviewer should have been prepared and run the soundbite they later found of him doing exactly that).
Boris was simply shell shocked. He was also visibly panicking in TV interviews. Call Me Dave has thrown up his hands and said "I'm not dealing with this shit" and the EU has made it clear that foot-dragging on article 50 won't be accepted, nor will dragging exit negotiations past the 24 month limit be tolerated.
There are already a bunch of EU-funded science contracts which were under negotiation that got ripped up on Friday, worth a couple of hundred million pounds. You can expect a lot more to follow either immediately (if possible) or at the next review point. The UK government has put almost nothing directly into universities for science research for the last decade and almost all grants have been EU-sourced. That translates into my job being at risk, probbaly dead by August. Ask the Swiss how well voting to can their science research funding worked out.
Most of the big financial organisations are already making plans to move their EU-staff out of London and into mainland europe (those that weren't already, started on Friday morning) and it's a sure bet that vehicle manufacturing will swiftly move to the mainland - bearing in mind that carmaking and vehicle component fabrication is a fundamental underpinning of the remaining UK manufacturing industry...
"On second thoughts, will the country be able to afford to give me my pension at 65? Probably not."
I calculated in the mid 1980s that retirement pension age would need to rise to 75 by 2025 in order to account for the falling birthrate (most pensions are paid directly out of taxation). This applied across the western world. There simply wasn't anything in the system to pay pensions to Boomers unless they started dying off more quickly - this was compounded by their steadfast refusal through the 70s-80s to invest sufficiently for their retirement and that pattern hasn't changed.
10 years ago I revised it to 2020 and now I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it happen sooner and be set at a higher age.
"For starters, and it only took 2 hours, Farage said they couldn't promise that the promise they made for the magical £350 million they would save from EU membership would go to the NHS."
He went further and claimed to have never said it.
Fortunately for him, the soundbites where he said exactly that weren't cued up and ready to go to show him as a pathological lier.
"Article 50 doesn't have to implemented until the UK is good and ready for it."
Given statements out of France and Germany, any foot dragging will result in article 7 being invoked.
As for all the statements of it taking at least 2 years, article 50 gives 2 years AT MOST for withdrawal, so it will be all hands to the pumps for a while.
"Even if France stops accepting UK citizens as automatic residents, people who are already established residents have no need to panic."
An established resident needs to speak the language and pass a culture test, the same as non-EU immigrants here in the UK do if they want to become permanent residents and eventually citizens.
There are 3-5 million retired brits living in France and Spain who can't pass either test.
"and that if we want laws our elected government will have to pass them?"
Our elected government already had to pass them.
And - contrary to myth - it had the option of not doing so. It was simply convenient to blame the EU when passing laws which were known to be unpopular with the electorate - in some cases EU laws only put on the books because the UK insisted on them.
> And wheather there is any mfg left in the UK or it will become a nation of "financial consultants" and baristas.
I give it a month at most before most of the vehicle makers say they're off to pastures continental.
One of the more immediate impacts of the Brexit vote is that the EU can simply _cancel_ (or suspend with immediate effect) programs investing funding into the UK regions - you know, the same ones who mostly voted "leave" (ahem: Wales, Cornwall, ex-industrial North) along with farming subsidies. The UK is now locked off the table on that so there's absolutely nothing which can be done.
Buyer's remorse simply isn't enough to describe what's about to happen next. Cornwall is already starting to realise just what they've done.
As for the "at least 2 years" mantra, anyone who looks at article 50 will realise it's at MOST 2 years to negotiate an exit and the EU doesn't have to care about the state of UK law or civil service and won't care if the door hits us on the way out.
"on a quick view and assessment of visibility of all those outside the vehicle on UK motorways - they would still be dead."
UK advice is to get out of the car and wait ON THE OTHER SIDE of the crash barriers.
The fact that most drivers and passengers are idiots means they never pay attention (and is a strong factor in the majority of breakdowns I observe being various german marques. Those lights are blinking on the dashboard for a reason folks.)
A more worrying development on the M25 seems to be couriers stopping on the hard shoulder to crossload packages and truckies parking up under some overbridges to sleep.
"can you elucidate on what Blubberment isn't corrupt? The two go hand-in-hand."
No, but kiwis have a myth that their country is corruption-free and egalitarian (which might have been true in the 1950s but probably wasn't even then).
The rot set in a long time ago (exclusive import licenses being granted to friends of ministers and being regarded as a license to print money in the 1970s being but one example) and accelerated through the 1990s (repeated ministerial orders killing Ministry of Commerce anticompetitive behaviour investigations) through the 2000s - to the point where NZ is now a highly unequal society where a multibillionaire insurance executive can get a "don't do it again" plus name suppression for posession of the amount of drugs that would get anyone else named and jailed for a couple of years (The reason Kim Dotcom was gone after was because the NZ govt was drooling at the thought of the amount of money they could make by selling off his seized assets. It's standard practice to seize everything in criminal cases so the defendant can't afford to pay a lawyer and to charge the entire prosecution costs against the defendant even if proven not guilty)
The thing to bear in mind is that the Transparency International "corruption index" is _PERCEPTION_ of corruption - not actual levels - and TINZ is a 100% opaque, 100% government-funded organisation which kicked out most of its activists about a decade ago (going as far as to serve several with trespass orders so they couldn't collect awards at ceremonies with the attendant possibility of calling out the behaviour in public). TI international has been distancing itself from the NZ organisation notionally bearing its name for some time.
Bear in mind that NZ doesn't have a free press and that the standard way of muzzling any story is to merely threaten legal action for defamation (even truth isn't a viable defence in most cases) as publishers are terrified of the legal costs involved in fighting cases (The NZ parliamentary expenses scandal story only broke because the reporters involved kept it secret until publication. Previous attempts were injuncted out of existence)
It's getting harder and harder to paper over the cracks and the Internet makes it a lot easier for people to steadily expose how rotten the entire edifice is (particularly the issue of corrupt police. Gene Hunt would be quite at home in any NZ area office, as would the Greater Manchester Serious Crime Squad - and the primary reason NZ dropped the Privy Council as the highest court in the land had a lot more to do with consistent decisions savaging the competence/honesty of NZ police and criticising courts for unquestioning acceptance of clearly dodgy evidence than it did about national sovereignty), even if the NZ authorities have managed to get sites like e2nz.org and www.laudafinem.com blocked for NZ viewers.
"So my initial "Meh..." was amended to "What a prick", although I don't think it's clear from the article if this was middle-of-the-night annoyance or just over-sensitive neighbours."
I spent some time in a flat in Finland. Some sounds carry through the block.
Like the guy on the top floor who would pee noisily at 1am.
People tended to respect others and keep noise levels down, but there's always someone who doesn't care what his neighbours think - and a lot of these places have the balconies facing inwards towards an atrium, so hanging out clothing in the altogether means there's a large audience who cannot unsee what has been seen.
Sat operators are using SpaceX because it's cheaper than the competition - already.
You can expect that once they have relaunch proven, it will decrease in price a but more but a fundamental rule of business is that you don't sell things for less than it costs to provide _now_ even if it may cost less to provide in future.
"Ah, good explanation! I was wondering why, after running out of fuel, it went KABOOM rather than just THUNK."
Given that the fuel is kerosene, it's more like "woof"
The big black cloud is a good indicator that it was oxygen-deprived.
Past RUDs have been a kero/lox mix and that does tend to kaboom. It would be interesting to see the various "leftovers" from failed attempts.
"Regional monopolies"
And that's exactly the problem. Monopolies entrenched by bribes paid to state Public Utilities Commissions.
I use the word bribe advisedly.
The companies were supposed to get monopolies in exchange for infrastructure enhancements and fibre rollouts which never happened, and then they had those monopolies extended plus mergers granted in exchange for more enhancements which in turn never happened - and not only were no questions were ever asked about those not-happening enhancements, but they simply disappeared from the memory of the PUC commissioners.
This state level corruption has enabled AT&T to almost completely reassemble it (into 2 halves) without that pesky Universal Service obligation from the 1930s antitrust settlements and similarly allowed the cablecos to assemble themselves into large amoeboid conglomerates.
The FCC's been wanting to take action for a long time, but because this has been happening at state level it's extremely hard to do anything (they can generally only get involved on inter-state issues).
What'll come out of these grillings is a few PR events where execs get to wriggle uncomfortably but unless the Senate gives the FCC greater powers it's unlikely to change anything.
> * I say this not because I have had bad experience, but because most large-enough IT suppliers would find a large group of people on here who would rip them to shreds with stories of their incompetence.
In Insight's case a fairly spectacularly near-implosion caused by changing over to a catalogue system that wasn't fit for purpose.
Several years later, it's still wobbly and still giving incorrect pricing.
"the US no longer had the ability to get a crewed vehicle up into space."
There were plenty of opportunities to send up an uncrewed vehicle to reboost skylab - the problem is that without Saturn launchers the on-station fuel payload for boosting wasn't going to keep it in orbit long enough for Shuttle missions to reboost to higher levels (Shuttle was originally scheduled to rendezvous in 1978 but the first one didn't launch until 1981 - and even with that, no serious thought had been given to _how_ reboosting with a shuttle could be done. It wasn't until late in Shuttle's life that it started reboosting ISS (all previous reboosts were done by Progress/Soyuz vehicles.)
Sending stuff up is easier than making sure it comes down safely )or in small enough pieces to be safe). The reentry of Spacelab's booster in 1973 and survival down to sea level of heavy bits (at least the engines, probably more) served as a wakeup call to NASA that they'd better make sure things either burned up or could be guided to an uninhabited spot.
Recall this is the same NASA which left "spent" boosters unvented in orbit for many years (the higher orbit ones generally took 2-20 years to come down) until several of them exploded for no apparent reason - that's the reason that care is taken to ensure that boosters are brought down as quickly as possible these days (usually by ensuring that perigee of the transfer orbit is inside the atmosphere) - and if they can't be, every last bit of propellant and oxidiser is vented (including the manouvering jets) to ensure there no extra debris clouds are made.
There's still a full-size nuclear reactor (not just a RTG) sitting in orbit which will come down one day and it's debateable as to what will happen when it does (nothing's going to go boom, but the thought of that much plutonium being smeared across the landscape should give pause for thought)
This chinese station isn't very large and was only intended to be in-orbit for a couple of years. It's unlikely that anything large will reach the ground - especially given that without stabilisation it will be tumbling long before it starts decelerating, which should mean that it gets ripped to pieces.
"You may recall Skylab..."
Skylab was abandoned and shut down (1974) long before it fell out of the sky (1979)
It was proposed to reactivate it for shuttle missions and when someone realised that it might come down earlier than expected thanks to a larger than expected solar maximum increasing drag at its orbit - and that it was large enough to cause some serious mayhem if it hit an inhabited area
- that they tried to reactivate it to allow such a mission (_that_ took the best part of a year (the story of hacking the remaining active circuitry to "pulse" the batteries(*) for weeks on end before they'd finally take a charge is impressive even nearly 40 years later)), as the electronics was mostly dead and the batteries completely discharged.
(*) Switching to charge mode took power away from the comms equipment, so the pulses would last about 100ms and then they'd have to wait for the station to reboot and reestablish communications.
"Saving Skylab - the untold story" is worth a read if you can get hold of a copy. It was published in Popular Science in January 1979 and reprinted in Electronics Australia in September of that year.
Dunno why being in the EU or not would make much difference.
French winemakers used the area of origin laws to stop australian and kiwi winemakers labelling their stuff as champagne - then promptly put those same winemakers to work making wine under contract to be sold as "champagne"
It's not so much about area of origin as manufacturer name protection. Making it under license is apparently ok.
It's usually "profit" or its cousin "economising on options"
There is a really good reason to ensure that the system you specified or the system that's been ordered (accounting types will go X=Y so Z(*)) and actually delivered (**)
(*) We were lambasted over the price (and quantities) of tape being consumed in IT and asked why we couldn't use cheaper alternatives with all purchasing ability blocked until this was resolved. The answer was that we'd looked at the suggested products from Sellotape, but concluded that they would have an unfortunate tendency to gum up the tape drives.
(**) A classic case being the Quantity surveyor who decided a building was massively overengineered, and so deleted much of this extra cost without referral back to the customer. The result was a purpose-built city library building that didn't have floors strong enough to hold bookshelves on its upper 3 (of 5) floors.
In our experience (filthy power is the norm in SE england) It's best to interpose the flywheel permanently between the source and load, else normal day-to-day glitches and spikes will cause random trouble.
That way you gain the benefit of 100% conditioned power hitting the datacentre (no spikes, etc) and you don't need to worry about breakers causing outages (although it's happened here on several occasions as the system has been switched to pass-through for flywheel maintenance. The Caterpilar/Standby Power Systems setup is pretty shitty overall, but still better than most of the rest)
This doesn't help if the diesels don't start - which has also happened here thanks to helpful people in the organisation economising on a £700k purchase by deleting a £500 redundant starting option.
Of course if you're 100% serious about your power you run several flywheels and generators in N+1 parallel configuration. This allows you to switch out 1 flywheel or 1 diesel for maintenance and still have the capability to ride a power outage. Phase coherency is a long-solved problem.
"Securing power plant from Electromagnetic Pulse threats have been serious investigations for the EU, UK and America since 2013..."
Earlier than that. The risk has been written about for more than 2 decades and seriously investigated by governments since 2003 or so. It turns out that securing against EMP (solar flares are more likely problems) is relatively straightforward but adds cost to the installation(*). Power companies being power companies, they decided the extra spend wasn't worth it (as with all private companies, they won't add redundancy unless it adds to the bottom line or are forced to do it. Brakes on railway carriages come to mine....)
USA regulators have been jumping up and down about this for a while, hence the STEP program, but it took 10 years after the dangers were pointed out before it even got started.
(*) Advocacy groups say hardening the US distribution grid would cost $2billion, industry says $20 billion. When a single airport building (Heathrow T5) or urban rail project (Crossrail) can cost about the same, it's small beer in the overall scheme of things if that amount of money needs to be spent across a nation's entire infrastructure.
"I moved my parents to PlusNet."
Bearing in mind that Plusnet is simply a trading brand of BT, what makes you think their details will be any more secure than they've proven to be with BT (which is only slightly better than TT's levels of data leakage) ?
"Then it starts up again. They will never stop. They sell your mug punter details to other firms who give you a crack."
Ask your provider for another number. When they wn't give you one (TT refused), switch to a provider who cares. (I did) and leave the toxic number with the old one.
After that, get yourself a 070 followme number from one of the various sellers and give _that_ out to businesses which insist on having your phone number. The £1.50/minute charge is a strong dissuader from scam calling. (I still get the occasional call, but the fact that they're paying to call me increases my amusement factor a little)
"Vast parts of the world are unable to get a decent connection to the tubes and I doubt this is an isolated case."
Nope. The same problems apply in Outer Bumfuckistan, even when on mobile data connections.
Having something attempt to update to Win10 might not seem like a problem at 0.7c/MB, but when you realise the average income for the locals is $4/day, you might change your tune (especially when it repeatedly fails and takes the best part of 2-3 weeks to actually suceed, making the total xfer more like 9-10Gb)
"Back in the late-1970s or very early-1980s, there was a 'Ghost' themed game for the Tandy Radio Shack Z80-based TRS-80 Model 3 / Model 4"
Are you referring to Android NIM?
"The game's instructions included putting an AM radio near the computer, and music would be played. Yep, the EMI was that strong."
Which is why the FCC came down fairly hard on the early PC makers over emissions. I discovered my TRS80 was wiping out the neighbours' TV reception (low band VHF) only when they asked my parents if we were having trouble viewing XYZ programs (we had an external antenna, they were using bunny ears and the PC was a few metres away through 2 wooden walls, unshielded cables everywhere)
"Similarly, Microsoft's first product was re-implementing DEC's flavour of the BASIC language,"
Actually the first product was a traffic tabulator.
The Altair BASIC in question was created on stolen computer resources (MS BASIC was developed on a PDP-10 belonging to Harvard university without the authorisation required for commercial activities) and without reference to Dartmouth's copyright on the language (If Dartmouth had ever asserted copyright on BASIC it may never have become ubiquitous)
The "Open Letter" led to the production and distribution of TinyBASIC
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