Posts by Alan Brown

FCC says cities should be free to run decent ISPs. And Republicans can't stand it

Re: Frrrrreeeeedommmmmmmm!

"5 people don't know that almost every American's healthcare is subsidised"!

And yet it's still amongst the most personally expensive on the planet. Why is that?

Re: Opelika spent $7 million over 5 years for 30,000

Shareholder value worked really well for Enron, didn't it?

The reality is that sociopaths rise to the top of these companies and line their own pockets at the expense of the people they're supposedly working for (the shareholders). If handed a monopoly via whatever means they _will_ find a way to maximise their personal worth in the short term even if that destroys the ability to generate any income in the long one - they don't care because for the most part they'll be long-gone when that happens.

Re: They should compromise

"Publicly owned railways have been an absolute sinkhole for public funds for many decades, I just don't understand why so many seem happy to keep pouring money down that same drain."

The economics of urban rail is simple: It's cheaper to pay for them than it is to provide transportation infrastructure for that many cars - even if parking the things was left entirely to private interests the traffic chaos would make cities virtually unnavigable.

non-urban transport is for the most part only viable because of large-scale hidden subsidies. A single 40-ton truck generates the same amount of roadbed damage as nearly 10,000 cars at the same speed but the fees truckers pay for road use come nowhere near covering this discrepency.

Re: Infrastructure

"Rather than keeping things "fair", the regulations will introduce new barriers to entry that prevent small operators from chipping away at the slow-moving, unresponsive monopolies."

Things are already unfair. The Telcos have almost finished reforming into AT&T and virtually all CLECs legislated out of existance.

State PUCs have systematically handed more monopoly powers to telcos in exchange for promised upgrades which didn't materialise - then repeated the cycle without asking why the last promises hadn't been kept.

When private companies are handed regional monopolies by governments, then they are effectively quasi-governmental organisations. That they have a captive market they can rape-and-pillage is no different to the days of the 19th century railway robber-barons.

Re: Infrastructure

"In the United States, much of the infrastructure that delivers electricity, natural gas, telephony, and cable, along with most rail lines and even some roads and freeways is in fact private property."

Private property generally allowed to be built by the govt and given monopoly govt protection from competition.

That's state control no matter how it's painted. In fact the USA is amongst the most regulated, anticompetitive environments on the planet with a total fixation on short-term profit over long-term stability The predictable result on infrastructure is starting to play out whilst the robber barons pull profits in ever tighter.

Ken Lay was far from unique or the last of his kind.

Make room, Wi-Fi, Qualcomm wants to run LTE on your 5GHz band

Re: Get off my lawn, err, wifi.

"2.4GH is already a struggle in many places (just streets, not even apartment blocks)."

It's effectively unusable where I am.

"5GHz is fairly good at the moment, helped by not being as widely used and having shorter range."

That and having a lot more usable non-overlapping channels.

5GHz LTE _will_ have to compete with 5GHz Wifi. This could get interesting.

Your hard drives were riddled with NSA spyware for years

Re: Wait

"Or you go to Korea and show the geeks who wrote the software for the disc controllers a really good time"

Do you think this hasn't already happened?

One of the things which is coming out of the Snowden revelations is that like decent security, serious attack plans tend to be layered too.

Re: Wait

"I'm sorry but it's embarrassing for you if your nuclear power plant is running on general purpose x86 hardware that loads from SATA and doesn't bother to check integrity of bootloaders, it really is."

Given that VMS is going off support 20 years prematurely, a bunch of existing plants are already in an awkward position.

Re: but the '...w.dll'

"Tinycore Linux really screwed down @ about 8meg, "

I was able to run linux 24-port terminal servers with RADIUS in 4Mb back in the 1990s. Tinycore sounds a little bloated. :)

US military SATELLITE suddenly BLOWS UP: 'Temperature spike' blamed

Re: Re. splatellite

"Could have been the space equivalent of a BLEVE"

Extremely unlikely.

This sat was 2 decades old.

The tech was probably 10 years old when it launched because there's usually that much delay between a bird being laid out and launched (once you build a spec you don't deviate from it and you _certainly_ don't include newer tech without re-engineering from scratch,)

Space-tech normally lags "state of the art" by another decade as it takes that long to prove reliability - just look at the type of microprocessors currently being launched (a lot of the justification for continued use of 90nm processes is radiation robustness)

In all likelihood it had NiCads as the battery technology of choice.

(Disclosure, I work closely with spacecraft engineers and scientists. The above are all answers given to common questions about the age of technology on launches.)

In my opinion this was the result of a microdebris hit. We'll find out soon enough in the investigation.

Re: Re. splatellite

"hydrogen + oxygen has an alarming tendency to go BOOM as Apollo 13 mission commander Jim Lovell discovered to his cost."

There was no hydrogen involved in the Apollo 13 explosion.

The tank heater wiring insulation was damaged 5-6 years prior to launch and when he turned on the power there was a spark inside the tank - the resulting oxygen-fed fire generated a huge overpressure inside the tank, which popped.

http://www.space.com/8193-caused-apollo-13-accident.html

Re: A satellite overheated and exploded??

"my understanding was that satellites didn't carry lots of combustible fuel, but something more akin to composite fuel that burned when mixed"

Hydrazine is the usual chemical fuel of choice in satellites. No need to mix anything.

Temp spike and explosion is a good indicator it hit something small enough to not be tracked but big enough to pierce the chassis and fuel tanks (which are essentially big plastic bags).

Even a paint fleck can do a lot of damage at orbital velocities - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Space_debris_impact_on_Space_Shuttle_window.jpg - and the current tracking systems can't see anything smaller than about 4-5cm across.

A single 5mm nut would be more than sufficient to obliterate a microsat or kill/disable a small one.

The current orbital situation has been likened to a room full of armed mousetraps. At some point the debris from collisions causes a cascade of subsequent collisions and things are getting closer and closer to that point as more mousetraps enter the space.

MEGA PATENT DUMP! Ericsson, Smartflash blitz Apple: iPhone, iPad menaced by sales block

Re: By the way

"Somebody should remind the Ericsson lawyers that Ericsson is in the business of selling cellular base station hardware"

Ericsson makes far more from patent royalties than from selling hardware - even more so as other makers have made heavy inroads into selling base stations, but they have to pay patent royalties to Ericsson which is now a minority player in that side of the industry (Many of those patents are due to run out soon).

@Rampant spaniel - the patents in question ARE in a patent pool. The issue is that Apple is refusing to pay up _at all_ whilst it tries to wrangle discounts over FRAND pricing.

The factor that they bring almost no new technology to the table means they have little to negotiate with (packaging a bunch of other people's tech and patenting the case it's shoved in is not innovative at the silicon level)

This tactic isn't new for Apple and allowing it to go to court is clearly worthwhile for them or they wouldn't do it - it's happened a few times already. I'd be vastly amused if they got hit with swinging punitive damages.

Re: oIrony

"Seems that the law of return is hitting them with a very large clue stick."

Patent lawsuits were regarded as nuclear weapons back in the 1990s - powerful but extremely dangerous and likely to trigger all out patent warfare once one outfit started using them.

It was expected that any outfit launching them for non-egrarious violations would experience massive retaliation given that it's impossible to produce anything without multiple overlapping patents covering it.

That prediction is coming to pass.

As has been proven with the Exxon holding of patents on NiMH batteries there's no requirement to issue patent licenses _at_all_, let alone on a FRAND basis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries

It's possible to argue that standards-essential patents should be subject to compulsary flat-fee licensing but that's not where things stand at the moment virtually anywhere in the world - and in this case the argument is that Apple is refusing to pay anything at all (not the first case like this they're facing - and in the previous ones they settled).

It's worth noting that Apple's own "patent lawsuits" have been about "trade dress" - What the US calls "design patents" is what everyone else generall calls "registered designs". This one is much more serious as it's about their unauthorised use of the technology underlaying the pretty case.

"The larger Chinese vendors such as Huawei by the way are investing loads of money in hardware R&D with the intention of getting their patents incorporated into future standards."

Not just in mobile.

Their proposal for distributed layer3 routing over TRILL is both a doozy and a game-changer for datacentre or mesh-connected campus switching - it increases robustness whilst reducing equipment count - generally a good thing - and it's equally applicable across MANs as it is across campus networks.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-trill-irb-02

Byebye core routers and the SPOF that goes with 'em.

HTC One M9 hands on: Like a smart M8 in a sharp suit

Few changes but...

HTC is being lambasted for that lack of change - which really doesn't make sense. Once you've got a decent form factor it's worthwhile sticking with it.

Don't pay for the BBC? Then no Doctor Who for you, I'm afraid

Re: I'm an American

(except for the "here is what we show today" thing between shows)

which are getting long enough to rival commercial network ad breaks.

Still, at least it's not TV licenses AND 22 mins/hour of adverts - which is what the state broadcaster in one country I lived in was getting away with.

Re: Trickle it in

"No you couldn't, because the programmes shown on the BBC are licensed and sold on a per-territory basis."

aka the global copyright cartels are still hard at it.

Re: Devices

"all modern TVs have a 'conditional access' slot,"

Emphasis on "A", as in "singular"

With a half dozen CA broadcasters this becomes a bit of a problem.

It's cheaper for the BBC to be directly funded or a universal levy introduced.

radio licenses were abolished because transistorisation meant they were impossible to keep track of. The same thing happened with TVs a long time ago but civil servants have clung tenaciously to the notion firstly that "they're hard to move around" and more latterly "everyone has a TV, so those without licenses must be illegally watching"

One of the harder things to put up with from smug non-BBC watchers is that they're often avid radio listeners - to the BBC, so that means license payers are subsidising them.

Small cells are like DRUNKS. They don't use lamp posts for light, they use 'em for support

Re: Elephant

" localised short-term disruption from building a bigger cell tower with more coverage."

The point about the bigger tower with more coverage is that it covers TOO MANY phones. Telcos only shrink cells when they have to. A smaller one costs just as much at the backend as a larger one.

Re: Ongoing drive,,,

"My solution? A free-running counter, any reasonable speed would do, a photocell, a divide by two stage, a second counter connected to the divide by two stage, a latch, a comparator and a 555 delay circuit"

Still overly complex and people HATE dark streets.

Dimming 90% and brightening up when movement is detected seems to be the way forward. Of course the "quality british designs" (meaning the idea is ok but the execution is crap) will win out thanks to "buy UK" campaigns, instead of picking what works and actually saves money.

BTW, the electrical cost savings in turning off non-led lamps for part of the night are more than made up for by thr added labour and hardware costs caused by premature failure thanks to the things being cycled twice as often as they were originally intended to be (discharge lamps have lifecycles measured in hours OR cycles, in a similar manner to pressurised aircraft - thankfully an over-cycled lamp doesn't blow its roof off midway through the night)

SOLD: Emulex – for 34% less than shareholders were offered 6 years ago

Ahem

"Fibre Channel is not really growing but is a classic cash cow, with the 8Gbit/s to 16Gbit/s transition under way and a 32Gbit/s changeover coming – with predictable upgrade and OEM business in prospect."

The current generation of FC we have installed is highly likely to be the last thanks to switched SAS networks and we're not exactly unique in this.

FC is becoming more and more niche, which means more and more expensive. Even Brocade has paid attention to the writing on the wall and diversified.

Net neutrality victory: FCC approves 'open internet' rules in 3-2 vote

Re: Death to CDNs ??!!??

"Internet providers cannot strike deals with content firms, known as paid prioritisation, for smoother delivery of traffic to consumers"

Incorrect. They can.

ISPs cannot throttle Netflix whilst allowing all other traffic through their gateways in order to force Netflix into a perring agreement. Nor can they selectively throttle specific protocols or source/destination sets.

Virtually none of this intervention would be necessary if there was actual competition in the US retail market - and this intervention is the direct result of dozens of other interventions over the last 40 years orchestrated at undoing the breakup of Ma Bell.

Telcos repeatedly promised major upgrades in exchange for exclusive access to a market or allowing mergers, then repeatedly reneged on the deals with no penalties whilst making more promises and getting more lockin. State regulators looked the other way and legislated CLECs out of existance.

AT&T is almost completely reassembled - and this time without the pesky "universal service to all at an affordable price" committments it was landed with after 1930s anti-monopoly cases against it.

Wouldn't be necessary if....

... if the USA actually had competition at broadband ISP level.

When there's real competition they don't pull throttling/doubledipping stunts quite simply because customers can go to another provider and there are a good selection to choose from.

In most parts of the USA the providers are the cable company or the phone company (often only one or t'other) and often that's by local/regional government edict

This FCC move is arsehatted specifically because it doesn't seek to eliminate the barriers to competitiion which have been erected in state legislatures. Monopoly supply agreements as seen in many USA cities would be illegal in most of europe and the difference stands out starkly.

"Too light" regulation leads to unfettered capitalism which invariably leads to monopolies. "too much" regulation leads to state-sanctioned monopolies. The USA makes a big noise about its freedoms, but it has far too many of the latter, not the former.

Russia considers keeping its own half of the ISS alive after 2024

Re: That reminds me, I saw 2001 the other evening

"it was, however, it was a dead end, only ever capable of low earth orbit, specifically designed to have an enclosed bay to move satellites about without showing what you bring back,"

That was the USAF's contribution to the design (along with the wings and all the other shit which made it so dangerous to launch they quickly gave up on it)

The Shuttle was originally designed and intended to be a craft for building a space station and bringing down large cargo from it if needed. After all the other programs got cancelled all the conflicting requirements of various entities turned it into a camel and it ended up being a solution in search of a problem (that's not to say it didn't do good science - but it didn't do ENOUGH good science.)

There is only one reason the shuttle program continued through the 1980s - national prestige. It was utterly unthinkable that the USSR could be putting humans in space whilst the USA was not. Because so many corners were cut in that flagwaving exercise, 14 people died doing up and coming down. The USA is only lucky that it was not more.

Re: The more entertaining one would be if it is 2015, not 2024

"Treaty prohibit appropriating other's space-kit, even if it's not in use"

Treaties don't prohibit selling/buying it.

Re: NASA is setting the date

"Since the ISS depends on reliable hardware, and some of it is getting pretty old, this may have good reasons."

It's not just the hardware that's an issue. What killed Mir wasn't aging kit, it was mould eating the structure:

http://www.rense.com/general8/mir.htm

Plenty more articles like that if you look for them. Mir was a highly unhealthy place to be breathing the air by the end of its lifespan.

May the fourth be with you: Torvalds names next Linux v 4.0

Re: don't break compatibility since forever

"Solaris went through two major versions without breaking ABI compatibility"

You didn't try moving from 4.1.3 to 5.0.1, did you? That's when the "slowaris" moniker popped up.

All those "solaris 8, 9, 10" builds are minors: 5.8, 5.9, 5.10 etc

MP resigns as security committee chair amid 'cash-for-access' claims

Re: Why such a surprise?

Failure to declare isn't a crime.

Omitting items from a declaration isn't perjury.

Both of these need to be addressed

Re: The depressive thing about Rifkind

"Actually its 67K plus 14K for being on the defence and intel committee"

Citation? The BBC was claiming he got nothing extra for being on the committee.

Re: The depressive thing about Rifkind

"The unfortunate truth is that the public sector cant have the lovely pay rises they would like, it just isnt feasible. "

Speaking as a public sector worker (and working flat out), from my point of view the real issue is that there are far too many public sector workers underemployed in areas of high unemployment - and that many of the actively sabotage others work in order to avoid being shown up.

A total public sector employment rate in excess of 5-10% of all jobs in an area is toxic, but in some parts of the UK it hits 60% for central govt employment alone.

Culling deadwood would make a huge difference to the ability to pay the people who actually perform well, but would impact badly on the final salary pensions of those who've been there for decades and are paid based on the number of people who work under them.

UK.gov shuns IT support tower model. Now what the hell do we do?

Re: Well well well

"*all the management types that ignored the warnings about the hidden costs of outsourcing."

They all got their bonuses and retired. Do you really think they thought about anything else than their pensions?

"Isn't failing small part of the point of Agile? "

yes, except it doesn't.

People build a clusterfuck which can't scale and then it fucks up enormously when taken off the test bench and put into production use.

Re: Ah, the traditional model

Wait until you phone the Home Office (On an illegal 0845 which they insist you must use and block other access methods) and have the bloke on the end of the phone insist he doesn't work for the Home Office and then can't handle the query (Because he's working for g4s, who answer the phones for the Home Office under contract)

You can't make it up.

Cert-slurping security firms chop super-fishy features

Lavasoft

Got 0wned by ad companies several years ago.

Does anyone still use them?

German music moguls slammed for 'wurst ever DMCA takedown spam'

"99 per cent of our found/removed links are about people that steal music and make moneys illegally,...."

citation needed.

> Yeah, you...you should stop doing that.

Whilst the DMCA has penalties for false declarations, they

1: aren't enforced

2: mostly aren't being triggered thanks to a loophole you can barrel roll a a380 through.

Did NSA, GCHQ steal the secret key in YOUR phone SIM? It's LIKELY

Hmmmm.....

This might go a LONG way towards explaining why US law enforcement are so reluctant to explain how stingrays work that they'll drop cases or risk LEOs being jailed on contempt charges, rather than have to put it out in the open in court.

You don't need encryption to ping a phone and get its response for RDF location purposes but once you go deeper than that, being able to snoop on conversations without running stuff via your potentially detectable fake cell base makes a lot of sense.

Re: Bloody teenager

> "NSA and GCHQ are doing exactly what I'd expect them to do."

> What? Break the law?

Yup.

Re: If Apple wants to really piss off the feds

"They should encrypt the traffic between phones in iOS 9,"

Redphone - already available, multiplatform.

So long, Lenovo, and no thanks for all the super-creepy Superfish

Re: @Iain Thomson

My 10 year old Tosh satellite is a shedload faster with a SSD in it too.

The problem is that it still sucks 90W+, whilst newer boxes pull a lot less and aren't nearly as noisy/dusty

Former Mrs Dotcom hooks up with Xbox 'toyboy'

Re: WTF?

The thing about Dotcom is that the only thing that makes him positive is the entire illegal activities the NZ police pulled to try and "get" him.

If they do this when going after a dodgy type you can be assured they'll happily do it for everyone else, as http://laudafinem.com/ keeps reminding people.

Inside GOV.UK: 'Chaos' and 'nightmare' as trendy Cabinet Office wrecked govt websites

Immigration pot calls cabinet office kettle black

They're still forcing people to use 0845 and 0870 numbers more than a year after being ordered to cease doing so - and the people answering the phone there will try and hide behind the fact that they work for g4s to avoid taking complaints

That kind of car crash has little to do with the Cabinet Office.

Re: Agree--new BBC is a heart-sinker

The guardian ran a story about BBC's news coverage yesterday - and pointed out just how bad it is.

It's saddening when Al Jazeera actually provides more and indepth coverage of actual news (vs fluff) than the BBC does.

Jaguar F-Type: A beautiful British thoroughbred

25mpg in this thing means it was mostly being driven _very_ cautiously.

Re: We need more aluminium cars

Aluminium cars can spectacularly corrode too. I saw a X1/9 a long time ago which was proof of this.

Re: Jaguar (Land Rover) an icon of British success!

"Rover is back where it belongs, sleeping quietly at Solihull."

Sleeping is one way of putting it.

Rust in pieces.

Reg hacks (and rest of 'Frisco) in LinkedIn measles contagion scare

"And not that shit research Wakefield mostly made up."

The evidence is that Wakefield made shit up in order to sell separate vaccinations that he had a financial interest in.

Interestingly, he was only discrediting MMR, but this has since spread to all vaccinations. It shows the danger of damaging memes.

It's worth noting that Wakefield may have been stripped of his license in the UK, but he wasn't criminally charged (he should have been) and is now practicing in Texas, and still pushing his dangerous lies.

"Vaccines and autism... relationship is still questionable"

Complete and utter bullshit. Even the supposed links the CDC found between black males and vaccinations has been shown to be ficticious.

Parental exposure to environmental factors and autism, or genetics and autism yes, but there is no link whatsoever between vaccinations and autism other than the diagnosis of autistic children tends to happen about the same age. Most importantly of all the percentage of autism diagnoses is utterly unchanged amongst unvaccinated children from vaccinated populations.

Correlation does not imply causality. If you don't understand that part, perhaps looking at the graphs on the following links:

http://boingboing.net/2013/01/01/correlation-between-autism-dia.html - correlation between autism diagnosis and sales of organic food.

http://www.tylervigen.com/ - spurious correlations