Posts by Alan Brown

Oh, shoppin’ HELL: I’m in the supermarket of the DAMNED

Re: I just go to the tills

lick your fingers. You'll get enough traction to open the bags.

Re: I just go to the tills

"I just go to the tills where people get paid to scan the stuff."

You clearly haven't been in UK supermarkets.

In most of them there are _no_ tills with meatbags on them after 10-11pm.

Re: Some Dutch shops..

"Also, why is it that only people in the UK seem to have a problem with automated check-outs?"

They're fine for a half dozen items (ie, as a replacement for express lanes)

When you're forced to run the entire week's shopping through them they're an infernal bloody nuisance.

The only thing worse than having to do such a thing at 11pm is being behind someone who is doing that when you only have 3-4 items and all-bar 1 or 2 self checkouts are actually working.

Easy solution

Dump everything on the bagging area and walk out.

If enough customers do it the twats in headquarters will get the idea.

China's hackers stole files on 4 MEELLION US govt staff? Bu shi, says China

Re: Of course they didn't!

If China really wanted to screw over the USA all they need to do is prevent exports going there for six months.

The rest is simply noise.

Re: Jeez

Given the number of compromised boxes I've detected in China which are clearly being used by non-chinese skiddies, the victims here aren't the OPM.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, concentrate on the smoke and mirrors.

Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future

Re: Amazing guy

"The Global warming religion, is I believe, a complete scam"

I wish you were right. AGW effects are already happening, the question isn't "is it happening", it's "how badly are we fucked in the long term?"

Re: SolarCity is based on federal tax credit

Solar is a fairly pointless boondoggle. Hopefully solarcity will prove that.

Solar and wind farms are subsidy farms (not just direct money, the requirements that power distributers take power from them at fixed (above market level) rates plus maintain backing generation capacity at their own costs are indirect subsidies.

The costs of transporting energy from large farms to endpoints is far higher than simply investing in better nuke technology - and solar needs backing capacity because it's not 100% reliable/doesn't work at night.

_IF_ thorium molten salt tech gets going (in all liklihood it will), then it's inherently highly throttlable (no Xenon poisoning) and at that point there's no point in using it as backing capacity for wind/solar/tidal because its real benefit is being able to provide baseline and peak hour power with hydro picking up the 30 second surges (there is no practical hydro capacity left to build in the west and in undeveloped countries nuclear would be cheaper).

Re: We need a UK Musk

HS2 is needed in some form. Closing the central line was a remarkably shortsighted Beeching action.

The best way to build it is to ignore London and run it from Birmingham north. It makes little economic sense to go south from Birmingham unless it's run directly to link into HS1 outside the M25.

Why did Snowden swipe 900k+ US DoD files? (Or so Uncle Sam claims)

Re: He's just a jumped up tech

"I suspect he even would have done a polygraph"

Polygraphs are voodoo mumbo jumbo.

Re: I know I'm in a minority on here

"Once we've put Blair through due process for his allegedly illegal wars,"

And Bush - both of them. I'd include Reagan too, but he's already dead. (Authorising and facilitating the CIA's import of hundreds of tonnes of cocaine into the USA to be turned into the Crack Epidemic should be grounds for digging him up and hanging him all by itself)

Virgin Media wins ELEVENTH patent case against Rovi

Re: Next step

Seconded

"After that, they need to apply for court permission before throwing sue balls."

They'd need to apply for court permission before even _hinting_ at throwing sue balls.

NASA plots interplanetary cubesat swarms

Re: Something like it has been suggested before

"1 mission per cube sat or 1 mission per swarm of cube sats?"

Can I send a pack of Beagles to Mars?

IoT DANGERS: BYOD’s trashier cousin becoming a right tearaway

Re: But why

"I could completely fill the kettle at the start of the evening so it takes ages to boil "

I fill mine once a day, but it only boils one cup at a time.

No way I'm letting it near the IoT

Re: Suggestion

ipv4 and ipv6 firewalling work the same way. My router is dualstack and has both running happily (in both directions)

whitelisting MACs works up to a point, but it's trivial to spoof the things.

Forget black helicopters, FBI flying surveillance Cessnas over US cities. Warrant? What's that?

Re: Telemarketers

"Aren't most of them based OUTSIDE the country?"

Thanks to the USA's long-arm statutes that's no barrier. A bunch of busts went down in Nigeria a while back. It's a little harder for them to go after russian criminals.

Re: Better yet

"Refuse to associate with a base station that's in motion or is at more than a 30* vertical angle"

At these frequencies it's virtually impossible to pick up either factor. Moving a few feet in either direction causes massive signal variations in urban canyons. There'd be too many false alarms.

Second-hand IT alliance forms to combat 'bully' vendors

Re: Short-sighted

Products like this are depreciated at maximum rates and are essentially worthless after 5 years anyway.

Outfits who buy refurbed kit are either life-extending their existing stuff or couldn't afford to buy new anyway.

The first sale doctrine was established a long time ago. It'll be interesting to see if any of the regulators hit the OEMs with restraint of trade action

So, EE. Who IS this app on your HTC M9s sneakily texting, hmm?

a few issues

1: EE's contracts say "you must accept all terms and conditions", then bury this deep in the fine print.

"Unfair terms in consumer contracts 1999" kicks in - and the fact that they don't have a severability clause means that if the contract is voided they can't recover the phone.

2: Computrace is spyware - unauthorised and foisted on everyone. It phones home and EE/samsung are engaging in a mutual fingerpointing exercise.

Being unauthorised spyware it falls foul of both the Misuse of Computers Act _and RIPA.

3: Absolute Software (the people who make computrace) make it clear that it's supposed to be installed by device owners.

I could see someone who wanted to make serious trouble for EE demand its removal and then file criminal charges when they refuse to do so.

What sort of tit builds non-bird bird boxes? Vodafone

meh

We've been trying to get the cellcos interested in filling our notspot for ages (up to and including offering them roof space to park antennas). Zero interest.

Nosy Brit cops demand access to comms data EVERY TWO MINUTES

Re: Have you really checked the numbers?

"Drug dealers and organised criminals usually have quite a few mobile phones,"

And the brains behind the outfits probably use Redphone or other encrypted call setup systems.

There are better ways to deal with the drugs problem (health issues) than by playing whack-a-mole with the foot soldiers and demonising victims.

Where’s the best place for your infrastructure bottleneck?

Missing the point.

"Do you go for SAS or SATA, or 7.2k, 10k or 15k spinning disk, or one of today's flavours of SSD, or one of the new flavours that are promised for a few months' time?"

80% of system speedups are achievable with code cleanups. only 20% with hardware.

The winning formula for storage systems at the moment is hierarchical caching systems (big SSDs in front of spinning oxide - in both directions), but the problem is that whilst it's a known quantity (ZFS), there are a bunch of snake oil salesmen who think it's simply a matter of bolting ZFS onto their existing RAID hardware (it isn't) or that you can skimp on ram (you can't).

Get it right and it will sing like a well-tuned Lamborghini. Get it wrong and you may as well be driving a Trabant. Either way if you slam your array with shedloads of conflicting random reads/writes it'll turn into a snail on valium (see comment about where 80% of speedups come from)

As for ethernet: Until the last 18 months 10GE was simply too expensive for general use (especially at Cisco pricing). Broadcom's trident2 chipset has turned that on its head. Unfortunately 10GE copper is still distance limited (needs cat6 or better cabling to go more than 30m, realistically you'll be lucky to go 20m on cat5e based on our experience - the distances are optimistic and patch panel quality is a big factor.) and power hungry (~4.5W per tranceiver, vs laser transceivers using around 100mW) - and that power consumption is outside a SFP+ enclosure's specs, so you can't run a mix of copper/fibre on the same switch unless the maker provides it from day one (the only solution is a chassis switch or a mixed stack of copper/SFP switches)

Bonding/Etherchannel/LAG/LACP works up to a point, but individual data flows are limited to the the individual link speeds (usually 1Gb/s) and more often than not that individual link has to carry _all_ communication between the server and client pair (most switches don't have the smarts to do L4 distribution). Depending on hashing it's quite possible to end up with one leg being maxxed out whilst others are barely idling. I see this regularly but it's usually because one client is drinking from a firehose. The fix is to switch to 10Gb/s as we replace kit - and get really friendly with fiberstore.com as local vendors are taking the piss on AOC and twinax cables.

The REAL bottleneck is your router. Even if you have TRILL switches, as soon as you talk between IP subnets then the traffic has to be gatewayed somewhere - often tromboning across the data centre to end up back in the same rack. This is being worked on - see https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-trill-irb-05 - but such implementations have yet to be deployed (Advice from the vendor for my TRILL systems was originally that distributed routing would be Q2-3 2015 but this has been delayed to Q3 20150-Q1 2016.)

The real lesson is that speed/performance costs money. Efficiency costs money too, but usually less.

Airbus confirms software brought down A400M transport plane

Re: I don't buy it.

Supposed to be used before live testing, but often used to fly a profile based on known weather/software/etc or even replay black box data to see what the pilots would have seen.

It's creepy flying a profile (more like riding along) where you know people died and without the benefit of hindsight usually impossible to avoid making the same mistakes that caused it.

Re: "the software & hardware has no way of checking"

"How hard would it be to have the parameters (and maybe nothing but the parameters) programmed into something that's associated with the *engine* and follows the engine "

Not very (and this is already done), but as some have already pointed out the desired characteristics of the engine vary depending on which side of the aircraft it's on, whether it's inboard or outboard and whether it's driving a reversing reduction gear or not.

Ideally the engine would recognise which position it was in and pick up the right settings automatically, but people insist on individually manually programming things "because it's more reliable" and that opens up the possibility of mistakes.

Let's not go into Murphy's Law (If an aircraft part can be installed 2 ways and one way is the wrong way, someone will do it) - which amongst other things is exactly the reason that the Genesis probe crashed into the Utah desert (someone installed a gravity sensor upside down) and that there was much excitement about Spirit and Opportunity camera images until it was discovered the calibration files had been swapped over...

It's better to design it right and make _sure_ it can't be installed the wrong way up. This applies as much to software as hardware, because the wetware is fundamentally unreliable.

Re: Fly-by-wire problems

"Fixing it will involve managers listening to engineers, designers, testers, etc"

The jobsworthian "tickbox" mentality goes _well_ beyond aviation and engineering. People do stuff by rote without understanding why they're doing it and that in many fields the tickboxes are merely a guide to ensure the job's being done right, not an end in themselves.

Then they get promoted to management and the tickboxes become more important than the end target.

Re: I don't buy it.

"Also, all this was deduced without the blackbox logs?"

It's known what software was installed on the aircraft and simulators exist for a reason.

Re: Impossible Testing Scenario

Language issues are best dealt with by Locale files - and those locale files are best translated by someone bilingual, then vetted by at least 3 other people (I've just finished making ~1500 corrections to a UK-english locale which was originally translated from french by a guy who learned english at high school...)

It's the fiddling with other parameters which gets really messy, real fast - and leads to Chinook crashes.

Germany licks lips, eyes new data gulp with revised retention law

3 months retention

Is about what ISPs will use for billing purposes anyway.

It's MUCH less than the 104 weeks (2 years) that the UK has been trying to force on ISPs and Germany doesn't have RIPA, so any state access needs a judge-signed warrant.

Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV: The new common-as-muck hybrid

Re: "If you make lots of short journeys then it makes sense..."

"with a smaller frontal area"

Frontal area and drag coefficient make almost no difference below 45mph - which makes the best urban shifter something pretty box-shaped.

Biodiesel is only environmentally friendly if made from waste oils and bearing in mind that you lose more than 50% of the available energy converting those oils to biodiesel, you're better off converting the car to handle unmolested oil (which essentially boils down to heat exchangers to make it flow more easily and a fuel switching system to run it on diesel when cold (indirect injection systems don't need this if you have the "right kind of pump", but such old pumps generally need a rebuild and that gets more expensive than the vehicle is worth and you have the high maintenance factors associated with old cars - I ran a pug106 on bio for a few years but it was costing more in drivetrain/chassis maintenance than I was saving in fuel)

NASA hands Boeing first commercial crew contract for SPAAAACE

Re: There is a way to meet the deadlines

"I would be surprised if SpaceX don't do lots of up-front design analysis as well."

So would I. The "iterative tests" that SpaceX have been doing are in areas it's extremely hard to simulate as there's not much existing data to work from.

Silk Road boss Ross Ulbricht to spend LIFE in PRISON without parole

Re: Paul 87

"Even neo-cons in the US want to reduce the criminal population, although often for financial reasons or religious ones even."

Which is offset by other neocons wanting to increase it and run more private prisons (for profit) which have their inmates doing forced labour (for profit) and deny them medical care (for increased profit).

There have been a small number of convictions for corrupt judges who gave out harsh sentences in exchange for kickbacks from prison owners and it looks like there are a a lot more investigations underway.

That doesn't even go into the fact that the USA system denies voting rights (state and federal) for those who have had criminal convictions - it's quite clear that in the old Jim Crow states this is systematically used as a way of reducing the number of black and minority voters.

As for the dugs stuff:

In the 1920s, one drug was outlawed and the resulting carnage where people were killed by contaminated product and civilians were increasingly caught in the crossfire between armed gangs fighting each other and police (plus the massive boost in police corruption which went along with the gangs controlling supply) led to those laws being repealed.

That repeal led to a lot of newly minted FBI "g-men" effectively facing unemployment (and a lot of gangs seeking new ways to find income - shipping alcohol wasn't about the alcohol, it was about the money). An expedient solution was to outlaw something mostly only used by mexican farm labourers. Over the years more and more items were banned and that in turn led to gangs using those items to provide an income stream.

Move up to the last 40 years - and we have increasingly well-armed narcogangs battling each other and well-armed police, with civilians getting caught in the crossfire. There's a war on drugs going on alright and it's the people with the drugs who are winning - each time the state makes drugs more scarce they make more profit - remember it's _all_ about the money - and the enforcers make more money too (especially in the USA where you have legalised seizure without trial)

If narcotics were legal and taxed, they'd be so cheap that the gangs wouldn't make any money, places like Silk Road would never have existed, noone would be diluting them with any old shit they can obtain - including rat poison or lye (purity of supply) and noone would be pushing crack at school children. The odds are pretty good that the "drug problem" would go back to the levels it'd been at prior to prohibition and that would make treating it as a health problem a fairly minor issue.

One of the big ironies of the war on drugs is that there's a shortage of cocaine and heroin/morphine for medical use. They're incredibly useful susbstances and amazingly cheap (a medical knockout dose of cocaine is less than 1 pound, the same on the streets would sell for around 100 - hence the point about profits), so growers could be contracted to supply for medical use at better pay - this was done in Turkey to convert the illegal opium supply to a legal medical one and it's the best long-term way of dealing with the afghan poppy supply.

Sony sees the cold light of optical archives, buys ex-Facebooker's upstart

The published spec for LTO is 162 full runs.

In reality they'd be lucky to hit a dozen over their lifespan.

Elon Musk's SpaceX: Now we help do SURVEILLANCE for the SPOOKS

Re: All depends on your point of view...

"Although, fuck all if I can figure out *why* we'd overthrow Iraq"

Because Saddam dared to take payments in Euro.

You can't have tinpot dictators underming the hegemony of the almighty Greenback. People might look behind the curtain and realise that confidence in the currency is all smoke and mirrors (There's a hell of a lot of gold simply _missing_ from the federal reserve.)

Why voice and apps sometimes don't beat an old-fashioned knob

Re: I'd love to have smart heating...

"Other days, they’ll feel hot, so they set the thermostat to 16°"

People treat thermostats as a "volume" knob and reason that the further they turn it, the faster the temperature will change. No amount of telling them otherwise will convince 'em.

Under "normal" circumstances it would be a good idea to only allow a 1 degree change per minute, but if it's a knob people will break it and if it's a button they'll smash it.

On the other hand, when my "smart" thermostat is set to 5C (daytime, noone's home normally so the heating's effectively off) and I want to set it to 17C, I don't want to wait 10 minutes to achieve that setting.

Queen's Speech: Snoopers' Charter RETURNS amid 'modernisation' push

Re: Time to leave

If you think New Zealand is clean, you haven't been following things much.

The NHS stuff that Cameron's trying to bang through here was tried under the tory-equivalent National party in the 1990s. When public hopsitals end up siccing debt collectors on people because of mandatory charges when they're ill, your public health system is in a bad state.

Apart from that, look at http://www.laudafinem.com/ and http://e2nz.org/ - kiwiland has more problems than the UK does and a wilfully clueless population who prefer to believe "none of that stuff can happen here"

FCC to crack down on robocall spammers' beloved loophole

Important point buried in the article

"The proposed rules will ... also set limits on robocalls made by political organizations"

Presumably also religious and charitable groups too. (they were all previously exempted)

Political/religious/charity robo spamming has been one of the most tenacious categories of call and I'm willing to bet it figures high on the FCC's complaint radar. Unlike the criminal stuff it's fairly easily traceable too.

There's data in your dashboard, so liberate it from Big Auto's grasp

Re: Anyone else like the old way better?

"Every problem I've ever had with every car I've ever owned has been electronic. "

My experience has been the opposite. The closest it's gotten to "electronic" has been corroded pins in a connector.

Cars have come a long way from 1960/70's "Lucas Prince of Darkness" electrics.

Let it go, let it go: How global DNS could survive in the frozen lands outside US control

ICANN still not to be trusted

And that's the problem. Right now they can have the contract taken off them. If this goes ahead they can't.

Land Rover's return: Last orders and leather seats for Defender nerds

Re: There will still be one option for people wanting a new one.

"Cost them about three times the price of a new one."

He's lucky it only cost that much.

Car makers are in the business of selling car parts (Unless you're Ford, who are in the business of selling financial services). It's not in their interest to sell them cheaply enough for you to build your own car.

It's also not in their interest to make a car so reliable that it doesn't need parts (although the uniqueness of the japanese market makes it in their interest to make them last 5 years with no oil changes from new)

One of my tutors worked for a heavy machinery manufacturer and resigned shortly after one of his gearbox designs was savaged on the basis that the steel alloys specified were so strong it would never need repairing. It eventually went on sale with vastly derated mild steel gears and developed a reputation for unreliability. He resigned.

Re: Fuel economy requirements

"The new fuel economy rules cannot be met by something which has the aerodynamics of a shed on wheels. "

Aerodynamics are irrelevant below ~45mph and any 4x4 which is doing what it's designed for spends almost all its operating life below those speeds.

You wouldn't really want to drive a series2 past 45 anyway. It got "interesting" in a lot of uncomfortable ways.

safety

"As I understand it the critical factor isn't emissions but crash safety for pedestrians. "

It's all round safety. Range Rovers and Land Rovers are mostly exempt from EU crash safety requirements as the chassis are virtually unchanged from initial production, long before those regulations came into effect all those years ago.

Pedestrian safety is affected by the externals, so that's what's driving the runout of the range - changes necessary to comply with that mean chassis changes and that in turn means the grandfathering goes away.

On top of that, Defenders/90/110/Serieswhatever haven't been road legal in North America since 1993, so that's a large chunk of the market they're locked out of (even before then, North American units had to have a roll cage integrated to be able to be sold.)

In the real world such grandfathering should have only been allowed to continue for 3-4 years at most.

The last LR I had to put up with was a series 2 back in the early 80s. Compared to Nissan's Patrol and Toyota's Landcruiser it was atrocious (Shocking on-road handling, unreliable electrics, gutless, thirsty, high maintenance and couldn't handle conditions in NZ mountains in winter that the other two didn't have trouble with) so I was glad to see the back of it as a work wagon.

I gather they improved a lot after that but the damage had already been done ("Made in Britain" was already regarded as a warning label in the 1970s, but government directives mean that many organisations ended up buying british machinery long after the vast superiority of japanese-sourced stuff was apparent to everyone).

Do svidaniya Roscosmos. By the way, any idea where that 92 BEEELLION rubles went?

So it will go from being a govt department with a corruption problem to a corrupt corporation under direct control of a kleptocrat.

I can't see this ending well

Torvalds: decisions, decisions, top up sun tan or release Linux 4.1?

Re: 4.1? Should be at least 5.0.

"he'll bump the major version whenever he gets a whim to do so"

Same with a lot of the distros - hence why Slackware went from 3 to 8 overnight.

NEVER MIND the B*LLOCKS Osbo peddles, deficits don't really matter

Re: Economics and Economists

"economics as a science "

Science consists of doing the same thing and getting the same results each time or knowing _why_ you didn't.

Most economics at government level is voodoo handwaving at best.

It's rather telling that the people notionally in charge of the economy have _NO_ economic qualifications but believe they know better than people with actual experience and an understanding of the backgrounds and put their friends in charge of crucial decisions. It's Dunning-Kruger writ large

Re: Impulsive voting

> his implicit assumption was that in a coalition the need to gain support through debate means higher standard of legislation than the whipped lobby fodder of majority governments under FPTP provides.

I tend to agree. The most dangerous time for any country is if any given party has such a substantial governmental majority that it can ram anything through unchecked and such times are when the most extreme ideologically-driven laws get passed.

Laws that require broad cross-party agreements tend to be better thought-out.

Re: Impulsive voting

> I came across numerous people before the UK general election who supported a continued Coalition or a Conservative government on the basis that "there's no doubt that we are [as a country] a lot better off now"

This is the reason a lot of people continued to vote for that nice Mr Hitler too. If there's a global economic upturn then national govts will always try to blag the credit for it.

NSA bulk phone records slurp to end when law lapses next month – report

Re: Who is really stupid enough to believe this?

" Later it comes out the CIA and South African government were arm-in-arm in the war in Angola. "

Not to mention that the CIA was responsible for most of the tonnage of the crack epidemic in USA inner cities during the early 1980s (CIA aircraft were shipping hundreds of tons of weapons/ammunition south and bringing cocaine north on the return trips to fund those deals. It was all part of Iran-Contra, authorised by Ronald Raygun and all came out during the Ollie North trials but didn't get much media coverage for some reason)

http://listverse.com/2015/01/15/10-reprehensible-crimes-of-ronald-reagan/ - #2 on the list. The others will have you shaking your head too.

Re: Unfortunately

"What's to stop a black version of said agencies already existing"

Nothing. The fact that the NSA is out in the open is more-or-less an admission that there is at least one more in existence, the same way that the NSA was top secret when the CIA started coming out of the shadows.

BY the same token the russians will have something sitting in the shadows whilst everyone's paying attention to the FSB and GRU.

"NSA, CIA, FBI and possibly others will be blamed for not detecting and preventing it"

Never mind that the 9/11 guys were flagged to the FBI and others several times by concerned citizens.

The existing laws in place then were perfectly adequate to deal with them (and outliers such as Tim McVeigh), IF the agencies had been competent and not engaging in turf wars.

Re: Softening us up, surely

The NSA was already illegally collecting data before the Patriot act made it legal. What makes you think a mere law change will make them stop?