Posts by Alan Esworthy 362 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
I don't think you have the background to write intelligently about the mainframe world, Gavin, and looking down the list of your last dozen or two articles suggests that you might have been mis-assigned to this story.
For one thing, you emphasize the replacement of the IBM mainframe as RBS's solution to the problems causing last year's outage but never even hint at what models are being replaced and what levels of operating system are involved. For another, IBM's parallel sysplex environment is specifically designed to make upgrades on the fly fairly straightforward (as straightforward as such things can be, I grant you), and parallel sysplex has been around for more than 30 years and as a result works rather well.
The root of the problem, as has been pointed out by several other commenters, was a failed CA-7 upgrade. This job management package has also been around for more than 30 years and is well understood. True, CA has done its usual half-fast job after acquiring it from Uccel (formerly University Computing Corp.) but the problem still boils down to the wrong people responsible for the wrong tasks at several levels of tech and management. If you have an incompetent team, taking away their old hand tools and giving them shiny new power tools just means they will do more damage more quickly.
"But seeing Uncle Sam lurking behind every shrub is nothing new for Dotcom."
And nothing new for anyone with more than four gray cells hooked up in parallel. OK, OK, maybe not literal shrubbery, but we now know that Uncle tracks phone calls; email; web browsing; your location by mobile phone tracking, car plates, and face recognition; payment card transactions, medical records, employment history (including of course earnings), bank transactions, stock market transactions, home energy use (via "smart" meters), school/university history; and I'm sure there's more that just doesn't come to mind.
They may not need to be behind every shrub to do all that, but they clearly are everywhere they need/want to be.
Article says, "According to the director, the US government CANNOT PRISM - which is underpinned by the aforementioned US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - to harvest data on American citizens."
If he said that, he lied. If he had said, "the US govt MAY not use PRISM" then he'd have been within the weasel boundary. But the capabilities of PRISM as described both by Snowden and the NSA make it quite clear that the setup makes possible harvesting data on any and everybody, as it is all stored. Any claim of self-imposed limits on using only those bits allowed by the FISC (which approves over 99.9% of requests anyway) is too ridiculous to be believed.
Sorry, the answer is not "not many." The answer is "zero."
In fact, the TSA goons have a negative rate of saving lives. Just ask Rigoberto Alpizar's family. You can't ask Rigo himself because the TSA killed him and then concocted a scenario to excuse themselves.
@Vector: "How much of what you like about the location is due to govt services?"
None of it, for the reason given that you evidently did not understand or choose to ignore. I respectfully suggest that you and Orv examine some heretofore unexamined assumptions of yours (you're not alone, not by a long shot): that govt as a coercive institution is required to achieve a peaceful, orderly, and productive society. Hint: how many of your day-to-day dealings with your neighbors and local businesses are coerced? None or next to it, you say? You already are at least partially living the life of a peaceful, orderly, and productive anarchist.
Govts tend towards negative incentives. I prefer positive ones.
The old "move to Somalia" argument, eh? Unoriginal, Orv, and inapplicable. I like where I am: I like the people and the location. It's the govt I don't like. Why don't you suggest that the govt go to Somalia? BTW, I can buy voluntarily on the open market all the military and police services I really need, and get them with out all those ugly wars I don't want to fight, or SWAT raids on the wrong addresses.
@Orv: "Also, taxation is only "theft" if you aren't getting anything in return."
No. Consider this: I tell you that you will buy this TV from me for $1000 or I'll force you to do it at gunpoint. It's a TV that you (a) do not want, (b) have no use for, and (c) could buy for $500 in any case.
At this point there is little that govt provides that I want, and of those things that I do want I could get a much better deal elsewhere from businesses that don't threaten me with force if I choose not to deal with them.
"It's necessary to close fiscal loopholes to restore fairness."
Yah. Right. You could "restore fairness" by dropping the other taxes, of course, but for that option to be mentioned would be only slightly less likely than naming Cheddar the French National Cheese.
For the obtuse: It isn't about fairness. It is about money.
...Paris because, erm, we're talking about France and all...
"...unlocked the secret to letting beer age without it tasting like old socks."
Old socks? No. As a few others have pointed out, old beer tastes like skunk, or at least what I imagine skunk tastes like based on its odor. Really old beer tastes like the asshole of a two-day-dead-in-the-hot-sun road-killed skunk, or at least what I imagine etc., etc., etc.
Thanks, Martin. I did think about using the zinger line as the main tether line but was unsure of its tensile strength and the total weight of the truss, electronics, and spacecraft.
On further thought, running the zinger line from the truss to the Y in the tether might work even better/faster and eliminate or at least greatly reduce any chance of tangled lines interfering with the backup function if needed.
...Paris, because she's the real zinger!
OK, let's see if I understand the requirements. We need a backup firing trigger in case the balloon bursts prematurely. The backup must fire the rocket within a second or so after the burst, must be (relatively) immune to turbulence induced false positives, and must be a mechanical system, the simpler the better. OK?
My proposed solution will take a little trial and error testing but seems sound in concept - at least to me. Take an ordinary security/ID badge reel of the sort that clips to your belt and allows you to pull the badge out on a string for normal use and then reels the badge back in by means of a spring powered reel. At the reel end, place two electrical contacts which, when shorted, activate the firing mechanism. At the badge end of the string, place a metal washer or equivalent. Place the reel on the truss in such a position that when the string is extended it is parallel to the upper tether, the part above the Y, and attach the washer at or just below where the tether attaches to the balloon.
When the balloon bursts, the reduction in tension on the main tether must be sufficient for the reel-in spring to bring the washer down to hit the contacts on the reel, firing the rocket.
The trial/error part is finding such a badge reel with just the right strength spring. If you can locate one, the time it takes for the string to reel in should be, if not right on one second, a fairly short time. An advantage of the time it takes to reel the washer down to make contact is that temporary turbulent induced reduction in main tether tension ought not to be long enough for a false activation, and when the turbulence passes the badge reel mechanism will tend to reset itself.
Let's take a step back and consider whether it is a good design to place the heat source in LOHAN herself. Yeah, yeah, you have that nice heating pad and it would be a shame for it to be cast aside. However, if the truss-mounted electronics enclosure also enclosed a small heat source and a very small fan, then simple plastic soda straw duct-work could deliver heated air to LOHAN's innards. For the connection itself, consider two straws of different diameter with one fitting inside the other, perhaps gently sealed with a little bit of that Molykote 33.
The resulting weight reduction of LOHAN would mean that the mighty rocket thrust at the exquisite climactic moment would push her to heretofore unimaginable heights of ecstasy.
Titanium is paramagnetic and if my ancient memory serves, then the rod could function as the core of an isolation transformer. This assumes that the heater would work acceptably using AC instead of DC and as it is a plain resistance load this is likely true. Batteries stay on the truss, DC run through small inverter to get AC, then wind some magnet wire around the titanium rod. From the spaceplane, make a few turns around the teflon plug and run the resulting AC to the heater pad.
Feel free to laugh at and ridicule me if this is an insane idea. If it works, just knowing I had a small part in helping this magnificent effort will be reward enough for me.
With thanks and apologies to Brian Wragg, might I suggest a substitution for the shrink-wrap, one that might also be useful for your quick power disconnection requirement? If the 57 mm Al tube is close to the size of your heater-and-space-blanket-wrapped rocket motor, then a condom could be unrolled over the assembly to hold it all together. Folding the bottom back over itself and then down again would give you a rubber insulated elasticized pocket to hold loosely twisted power supply wires for the heater. Especially with a lubricated condom, the wires should pull apart readily when the time, erm, comes. This admittedly possibly poppycock [1] idea would certainly be consistent with the spirit of this noble endeavor: clever, effective, cheap, and (when possible) lewd.
1. The word "poppycock" is all the justification I need for the Paris icon.
"Analysing the location of transactions on a per card basis and then applying fraud checking rules would be the job of a dedicated fraud prevention system, not done by the transaction processing system - it has enough to do without running complex algorithms to identify fraud."
You'd be surprised. I can't comment further, unfortunately.
"Christians do also like a booze as well, you know."
Yes, but some are rather hypocritical about it. In the U.S. Southern Baptists decry alcohol consumption in public but there's an old joke about what they do in private:
Always ask two Southern Baptists along on a fishing trip. If you have only one he'll drink all your beer.
but to have a whole bunch of folks starting calls with "Hello? HELLO! YES, I'M ON THE PLANE" would probably lead to a new form of in-flight entertainment, although not one the air marshals would much appreciate.
Issue a Taser to every adult boarding the plane. Seeing an obnoxious phone user twitching and flopping about in the aisle like a palsied flounder would, I'm sure, be appreciated by all including the air marshals.
(mine's the one with the conductive metal mesh lining.)
JustaKOS: What the Senator thinks of their rules is totally irrelevant - she has neither the competence nor the authority to override the FAA's judgement.
Are you really so abysmally ignorant that you don't know where the FAA got its regulatory authority? I'll grant you that the senator is certainly incompetent but she does by definition have the authority.
Kindly please read something about J.J.Hill and the Great Northern Railroad, then compare and contrast his private success against the very expensive and highly abusive govt-sponsored and -subsidised efforts of the rest of the (failed) American railroad robber barons. You might reconsider the "advantages" of having govt control this sort of thing.
How is it that so many people seem to think it is debatable at all that governments, quintessentially coercive organizations, have any legitimate basis for controlling the way individuals choose to communicate with each other? The UN is just a collection of such governments (plus a bunch of arrogant and condescending NGOs) having even less legitimacy for this and many other matters.
As for those poo-poohing those who call this a conspiracy for control, the UN's modus operandi has long been to delegate the control they crave to its member governments. Whether the regulation comes directly from the UN or form member states is irrelevant to the fact that such control is in effect.
Great final paragraph:
Last week, it lobbied against meetings organised by the International Telecommunications Union. The Choc Factory claimed that some of the proposals to overhaul the 1988 communications treaty could be bad news for free speech. In reality, it could be more of an issue for Google's bottom line seeing as it might be forced to pay for more stuff.
Google's bottom line notwithstanding, the UN's intended authoritarian-friendly takeover of the 'net would be catastrophic for reasons well laid out by many non-Googlers, including this Wall Street Journal article, which memorably observes
Having the Internet rewired by bureaucrats would be like handing a Stradivarius to a gorilla.
I think I understand (but hardly approve of) no one at The Register wanting to claim authorship of that last para.
p.s. Sure would be nice if <blockquote> worked here.
There have been many larger robberies in U.S. history than the Lufthansa job, and they've all been perpetrated by the U.S. federal govt. OK, that's arguable, but there's one very straightforward case that is easy to explain, quantify, and understand.
In 1933, President F.D.Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102 "forbidding the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion, and Gold Certificates within the continental United States". There were some exceptions allowed but as a percentage that amounted to very little. There are various estimates of the amount of gold turned in for the $20;67 offered by the govt for each Troy ounce of gold. The Treasury won't say, of course, as it seems we Merkins can't be trusted with that sort of information. I'll use the lowest estimate of 1.8 million Troy ounces (56 tonnes) although some sources say it could have been several hundred tonnes.
The robbery was two-part. First was the confiscation of the gold itself, albeit gold holders were paid $20.67 per oz. The second and most egregious part was that immediately after the govt got its greed paws on the gold they raised the gold exchange rate to $35 per oz. If it were allowed, which it wasn't, purchasing gold with dollars would cost $14.33 more per ounce than a few months earlier.
Do the multiplication and you'll find that gold holders had been robbed of $25.8 million - but that's in 1933 dollars. Using the extremely conservative (and highly suspect) Consumer Price Index price inflation figures from that same larcenous govt, applying the 1933 to 2012 rate of 1,680% to that $25.8 million means that the robbery of gold holders by their own govt would be over $430 million today.
So, that Lufthansa job was small change. It takes a govt to pull the really big robberies.
"A few counter-secession petitions have been started as well, including one that calls for deportation of signers of secessionist petitions, and another that suggests they should be stripped of their citizenship and exiled."
Let's see now. The signers of the secession petitions want not to be physically or politically in the U.S.A. So the counter-proposal is to make them physically and politically no longer in the U.S.A.
Epic reading comprehension FAIL.
I was delighted to find in this article the sentence "Past histories of Dragon have often mentioned an unnamed portable that was intended to be pitched to business buyers."
My estimation is that out of every 100 occurrences of the expression "past history" at least 99 are cringe-worthy usage errors. I just finished posting a critical comment in another El Reg article after noting one of those incorrect usages.
This correct example brought tears to this old pedant's eyes.
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