Posts by Alan Brown 15057 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"Apart from the clueless f**kwit who decided to shine one at a Police helicopter with high quality video recording, most are unlikely to be caught other than by chance."
They regularly get away with lasing the police choppers.
All you need to do is stand outside a pub. When helicoptor comes over, step inside and blend in.
The local "sports bar" CCTV system has outside cameras but they're always on the blink when the cops want to use them to see who was lazing aircraft.
"Given that commercially available lasers use only a few restricted light wavelengths, isn't it possible to add filters for these to the cockpit windows??"
Yes (and they exist), but.....
They need to be certified as safe for aviation use, not interfere with daylight operation and have a lifespan in place of at least 10 years.
I got lased on the ground (whilst driving) a few years ago(*). These bozos aren't using 1-5mW green laser pointers from Maplins. They're high powered and they HURT
(*) The kind of oik who lases aircraft thinks its funny to lase passing cars and trains too.
"but the specifications for that laptop were not available anywhere on Acer's website, though other models in the same range were. I knew it came with 2GB RAM and I knew I wanted to increase that, but I could not get any response directly from Acer."
The most reliable way of finding out is the Kingston or Integral or Crucial memory configurator.
Seriously.
And in cases where only one ram socket is visible you usually find the other one is under the keyboard (Toshiba are buggers for doing this)
"with only a little "ringing" visible on sharp vertical edges."
That "ringing" is due to cable impedance mismatches.
It's possible to work out which end of the cable is causing it if you measure the ghosts and know the timing across the screen, but the take-home lesson is that high quality vga cables with individually shielded 75 ohm feeders inside work better than cheap and nasty (usually thin) ones.
A lot of TVs have no terminators on the VGA line so the signal reflects back to the computer and gets reflected back again (basic RF stuff, same principle as TV ghosting) and the best solution in that instance is to interpose a buffer box with a very short cable to the TV.
This also applies to SCART
That said, VGA(HD DB15) (and scart) are dead standards. If you want to run long cables then use the right kit for the job. HDMI and displayport are both very tolerant if you treat 'em right (buffer units are cheap)
"interestingly after I countered with a complaint about recieiving a rude and sweary phone call at an unsocial hour, with my union rep enquiring whom in the HR department had shared my personal phone number the disciplinary action disappeared."
Too bad you don't record your calls. That might have been enough to allow manglement to pick up on said unprofessional behaviour.
"Working the tech support phone you are the face of the company. You are also there to fucking help people (hint: the clue is in the name). The people calling need help and for many of them you are the only lifeline they have"
There's definitely a problem and it starts near the top of the food chain.
Manglement treat helpdesk workers with contempt only slightly below that they hold for customers once they've lightened the contents of their wallets.
Is it any wonder companies get such poor customer service ratings?
"As she seems to think that the current network should be discarded and replaced wholesale, she will presumably call for Virgin and others to be compelled to cable up areas that are less populous than central London, Manchester, Glasgow etc."
Look to what happened in New Zealand.
As soon as the dead hand of the incumbent was removed from the lines company it was free to sell to anyone and promptly did so, including leasing duct space and dark fibre to the NZ-equivalent of Virgin.
Once that happens, VM rollouts are trivial by comparison with tearing up streets.
G.Fast has nothing to do with the economics of small cabinets. The average G.Fast node is going to have to be up the pole (where lines are distributed aerially) or buried every 4-5 houses.
Once you get to that level of complexity you may as well run fibre and use GPON. It'll be cheaper than the work needed for G.Fast.
"or the "others" e.g. Virgin media, no bothering to invest?"
When you have a rapacious monopoly which can (and does) react to competition in the marketplace (ie, people running their own cables or setting up RF links) by lowering circuit prices to below those of the new competition, 3rd parties don't see much point in investing.
Look to what happened in New Zealand when they forced the split of Telecom NZ(Spark) and its lines company (Chorus) - it's worth noting that it's the former incumbent dialtone company which is looking sick now, despite screaming from the rooftops that a split would be the death knell of the lines company.
"46 engines were used in groups of three on a total of 135 flights, so each engine did an average of 8.8 flights - there was only one in-flight failure and seven on-pad failures and as we all know, none of these were catastrophic."
You forgot to factor in the ones that exploded on the test stand. At one point there were very real fears it would never fly because there wouldn't be any engines to fit to it.
The quality of welding required for the Bells to prevent LH2 leakage was high and at that stage the USA had forgotten (literally) how to make seamless tubing - requiring kludges like hacking gun barrels off ww2 battleships whilst historians and archivists tracked down the last remaining metalurgists living in retirement homes (IIRC the youngest was in his mid 80s) to try and get the details about how to recreate the process.
"The SRB on the Challenger did not go boom. It just leaked a bit."
It went boom eventually - when the range safety officer fired the destruct mechanism that split the booster along its length.
Mind you that was several seconds (and several tens of km) after Challenger had self-destructed as a result of going sideways at high mach numbers.
Presumably you're the downvoter.
10 years ago:
£130k spent on storage kit, HP+Suse+Steeleye, packaged solution. Worked ok at first (up to 5TB). Started playing up under load.
Suse particularly useless, but all 3 parties blaming each other. Suse became less and less responsive as we added bug reports, eventually just ignoring email despite being paid £9k/year for support.
They wouldn't even respond to Novell head office queries (yes, we did escalate)
In the end we dumped Suse and installed Redhat + GFS. Whilst that's been less trouble, when there are problems, they actually help.
Suse is in our "never deal with again" list.
For what it's worth, memristor arrays are apparently used in some small embedded devices.
Given the embedded market usually going for "cheap" and "reliable", it may mean that they're able to fab small sizes but are having trouble reliably making 'em large enough to be worthwhile selling as a standalone item.
"Yet most enterprise IT shops are still buying very expensive, high profit margin storage products?"
The main reason people buy the high-cost stuff comes down to support. If you build it yourself then you get to carry the can when it breaks. If it's bought in then the vendor can take a kicking when it breaks (in my experience, that's not "if")
There are cheaper options around - such as TrueNAS, which is one of the cheapest fully-supported ZFS builds out there and unlike OpenE or Nexenta they actually put their name on the front of the box, so you only need to deal with one point when things go funny vs having Hardware and Software suppliers pointing fingers at each other.(*)
(*) About a decade ago we had a vendor-supplied solution fail under load. HP vs Suse vs Steeleye all blamed each other - then Suse simply shut down all discussion and ran away, refusing to even respond to Novell head office. Not a brilliant response after outlaying £180k on kit and paying £9k/year for software support and a good reason to never _ever_ use them again.
"This is about rich companies being able to de-rail or at least delay ANY policy made by democratic process."
The fact that they're suing is an indication that Ofcom might be doing some things right.
Of course, it also means Ofcom shies off the hard decisions. It would be nice if the telcos were forced to pay all legal costs (not just court ones(*)) when they lose (as they usually do).
(*) "Costs" is tightly defined in legal parlance. Most legal consultation costs are not covered. This makes courts very much a case of "the battle of the deepest pockets"
"grumpy waiting for a British Gas visit"
That would be the Brutish Hash who made a song and dance in their TV adverts about coming out on Saturdays - and then told customers that they couldn't have callouts or boiler inspections on Saturdays.
Also the same British Hash who came out the next working day to diagnose my boiler as "broken", then left it unfixed for 3 weeks, during a particularly cold March. The excuse given was lack of parts, however the manufacturer claimed to be holding large numbers of everything for the model (including the pump which had expired)
The best way you can deal with British Gas gas is to take your business elsewhere, in the same way that the best way to save 65% off your Tesco car insurance is to go somewhere else. They won't negotiate and they don't care. Both are the TalkTalk/EE of their fields.
"The Fail might bleat on about "elf & safety gawn mad", but I raise a glass to the HSE, who have been doing a great job with little thanks for years."
The Fail bleats on in a lot of cases with good reason. H&S is frequently used as an excuse to avoid doing things and it gets on the HSE's tits - so much so that they actually sponsor a national conkers event to make a point.
"But nobody is hoping to use the consensus on QM to reduce the living standards of everybody in the world."
If you want to curb AGW, then you _can't reduce the living standards of everyone. Developed countries, perhaps, but 3/4 of the world lives in poverty and the only way to reduce their population growth is to make them better off.
The REAL answer to the issue is "more nooclear", but that doesn't fit the prevailing political agenda.
It's also worth noting that whilst a few hundred million dollars get thrown at things like the G8 Paris conference on climate change so all the leaders can hob-nob, actual researchers are mostly hard pressed to even get 50-100k grants for enough computing power to validate atmospheric satellite observations made over the last 40 years and see how much things have actually changed
(Hint: we know what the heat blanketing factor of CO2 is, but what we don't know is how much the earth's reflectivity has changed overall and therefore how much actual solar heat was retained in the atmosphere. At the current pace of data crunching, the project for analysing the change in every km^2 of the earth via satellite imagery taken over the last 40 years will be completed in 10-15 years)
The warming is not trivial. The difference between glacial earth and now is only 3-4C and it's only another couple of degrees to tropical earth.
That's _average_ global temperatures. Regional variations are (of course) a lot higher.
Mind you, it looks to me like a bigger risk of the current CO2 spike is oceanic anoxic events (they go hand in hand with CO2 spikes right through geological history). If that's the case there may not be much civilisation around to worry about ocean level rises.
"Little comment has been made (so far) about the fact that this event showed up fairly soon after switching the device on."
This got mentioned in the press conference. They're pretty optimistic that the thing will pick things up quite regularly. It's a big universe with a lot of possible black hole binaries.
Speaking of which - this detection was also confirmation that such things actually exist (or "did" until these two merged) and that's another first. Up to now they've been purely theoretical.
"I assume that the router install base will suffer some 'shrinkage' over time. They are school buses after all."
When "shrinkage" means "no network", you can guarantee that the culprit will have a group of students lighting a barbeque on his front lawn and adding him (invariably "him") to the grill.
"this plane could be powered by a compact reactor."
Or it could be charged by a much bigger reactors driving a Haber process that makes synfuels.
Making a compact nuclear reactor was always easy. The hard part in aircraft has always been making radiation shielding effective enough to keep the meatsacks alive whilst light enough to allow the aircraft to actually leave the ground.
"Only last week, my neighbour opposite had his plates pinched."
The thing is, stolen plates are cancelled when notified, then put on ANPR watch, which means that the only people who steal them are either stupid as all get-out or simply aiming to piss you off with mindless vandalism (usually the latter)
Smart crooks duplicate the plates from the same model/year/colour of car and don't touch the originals.
For what it's worth, it's estimated that 11% of cars in London are on fake plates, lots of duplicates are circulating, etc - it's mainly to beat the congestion charge but it's clear that using plates as a way of tracking any individual already comes with numerous "gotchas" when the kinds of individuals the Met want to track are normally the kind who'd use duplicate plates (and probably change them periodically too)
"there is no such thing as a guaranteed supply chain unless one buys from YOU directly"
People have reported finding fakes in the genuine parts stream. The issue of fake branding is major, but it's clear that FTDI can't keep its house in order. I wonder if they've employed management who used to run British Leyland.
"Lets say a chinese vendor starts selling x86 processors and branding them as "intel processors" with the logo and everything...is that okay?"
Let's say a chinese vendor starts repackaging Godsoon chips so they're pin-compatible with Intel, then another chinese vendor grinds off the Godsoon markings, rebranding the package as genuine Intel.
Is it a fake because it's a fully compatible workalike without Intel branding? Is it a fake when the labelling is changed? Would Intel be in the right to look for Godsoon CPUs and zap them?
"The replacements for the 709 and the 8080 and all the others were identified as different from the original"
The replacements for the FDTI chips are shipped as identified differently. They support the same instruction set as the FDTI in the same way that "AT" modems all copied Hayes functionality.
What happens after that is an issue. Repackagers do put them in fake FDTI plastic encapsulation but the vast majority are sold as "FDTI compatible" chips, not as genuine ones.
The irony is that the main "knock off" part is actually _better_ than the FDTI and adheres to the published specification better than the original. That's shades of the VT100 terminal, which had several major bugs in its operation that meant it didn't fully comply with the VT100 specification - and when fully compliant terminals were used that would throw strange TABs across the screen all the time, DEC's response would be "Your problem is because you're not using a genuine DEC terminal"
"The fakes break, so therefore the genuine company gets blamed for selling shit hardware."
The fakes break harder when the genuine company deliberately nobbles them - and gives zero indication that the device was disabled because it's not genuine.
If it can ID the fake bits then it can refuse to work with them. Deliberately damaging hardware crosses the line.
"it would seem that they lack the ability to inform the user that the chip being driven is not a genuine part."
The proposed FTDI linux driver update was more than capable of identifying the device as fake - and bricking it. It was reverse engineering which proved that the detection and reaction was deliberate, not some "by chance" happenstance.
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