Posts by Peter2

The Wristwatch of the Long Now: When your MTBF is two centuries

Re: Beware survival bias

I'll guess that you're reluctant to hand it over if someone wants to "have a go", as biro-writers have all been trained to write with a bit of force. My fountain pen only gets handed over to a (very) few trusted users - untrusted users need not apply, as I quite like my current nib.

Actually, handing them over to people doesn't bother me a bit. I've got a bag of goose feathers which become quills the moment you chop the end off at the right angle with a stanley knife which people tend to ask for over the "modern" options, and the mental nibs generally go for about a quid for a dozen. After two years i've yet to actually need to replace one.

Royal Mail is even happy to take letters done properly the old fashioned way and folded and wax sealed shut; I asked the postman that collects from us. (Wax sealing is an awful lot easier if you modernise the process via using a stick of wax in a hot glue gun...)

It's fun to make the point of doing this via companies that require you to send things back via snailmail.

Re: Beware survival bias

No - the rubbish fell down or was demolished.

How about simplifying what we are asking for?

A pen - how do you make one that would still work after N years?

They had this problem fixed centuries ago. I do historical reenactment and so learned to use dip pens. I noticed that the quality of my handwriting shot up when doing using them (since you simply can't write with a dip pen unless your holding the pen correctly) and so switched to using a dip pen at work too, because why the hell not? The things go for pennies.

I have written with an original bone georgian pen (picked up from a carboot sale, because who else would want it?) probably with the original nib. It works fine ~300 years later with appropriate ink. Having to dip ever two paragraphs was fixed about a century ago with a clip on dip pen reservoir which reduces the "dip it in ink" to once every two A4 pages or so with a nib about as fine as a biro.

All you then need is ink, which often comes in "that'll probably do you for a lifetime" size bottles. If your holding the pen properly then you don't actually discernibly need to replace the nibs and the (wood) holders last forever. I never tire of needling our resident "holier than thou" environmentalist type who goes through biros quite frequently (thereby using two lots of single use plastic; one for the biro casing and one for the refill bit in the middle and a bit of metal in the biro nib that won't get reused).

One thing i'd point out from doing reenactment is that you quickly discover from close exposure to ancient stuff is that practically everything has conceptually better design and execution than modern things have, from clothing that is actually fit for purpose (higher collars protect you both from sunburn if it's hot, and from water running down the back of your neck of it's raining). Even absurd things like belt buckles have better historical designs that were basically superseded by the cheapest and crapest design that it was possible to make.

As so far as I have seen in any number of areas "cheap throwaway" has historically won out every single time against a good design that required the end user to do even the most simple and rudimentary bit of maintenance every so often because people simply can't be assed, and would rather just buy a cheap replacement.

AMD takes a bite out of Intel's PC market share across Europe amid microprocessor shortages, rising Ryzen

I have long suspected Intel is up to it's old tricks again by giving PC builders discounts and back handers to not stock AMD.

That's my feeling, and what's happened every time AMD is thrashing Intel in technical performance.

Most companies are not going to stock spares anyway so I doubt it would increase maintenance costs.

I did read this and wonder. Who actually stocks spares at component level? I stock maintenance spares of entire desktops so I can just swap a dead PC with a working one and fix the dead one at my convenience. If the hardware is dead and it's out of warranty then you stick it in the "for disposal" pile and put a computer that's just been replaced via your replacement program that still works fine in the pile of maintenance spares.

When it comes to servers, pretty much the same story. If one of the CPU sockets does go then you failover to the backup and phone the support line and ask for an engineer to bring and fit a replacement part.

Among those pardoned by Trump this week: Software maker ex-CEO who admitted hacking into rivals' systems

The article linked to reads as if the chap has reformed and spent years after he left prison helping inmates return to normal society avoid falling back into re-offending. A quick search of his name suggests that he was given his law license back years ago in tribute for this work, and that he's now receiving a pardon simply to wipe his criminal record clean.

That doesn't look too horribly shady; similar things happen in the UK in lieu of an MBE, BEM or similar gong, although I think a boring committee nobody can even remember the name of is more appropriate than any politician doing it.

Good news: Neural network says 11 asteroids thought to be harmless may hit Earth. Bad news: They are not due to arrive for hundreds of years

Re: Knowing our luck

Why?

A Carrington event is just a huge wave of particles that managed to induce an electrical charge on a copper wire.This certainly did generate far more juice than a bit of telegraph wire was designed to handle and burned out unshielded bits of tech such as a telegraph built in the mid 19th century, but...

Can we put this into perspective? The worst case is that some particularly old transformers that tightwads have kept in service (primarily in the USA, where the power generation network is in a worse state than many 3rd world nations) is going to burn out and some people (particularly in rural areas) are going to end up without power and the available spares might not stretch to replacing them all immediately if around 20% of the total number of transformers in the USA burns out.

(In that scenario the worst case to replacement of every last transformer was about 18 months, which makes a number of absurd assumptions such as that faced with a major shortage the factory they usually bought from didn't start working more than one shift, and people would rather be without power than changing suppliers or importing additional transformers from overseas; a view that wouldn't be likely to survive contact with reality for long IRL)

And that's the worst case, which still appears a long way off from indicating that nuclear plants are going to have to be turned off. (And why?; losing generating capacity isn't even in the worst case scenarios)

Internet's safe-keepers forced to postpone crucial DNSSEC root key signing ceremony – no, not a hacker attack, but because they can't open a safe

Re: Yep.

Firearm cabinets made to British Standard BS7558/92 can be broken into in under 30 seconds?

If you can do it in 30 seconds with a twig then i'm sure that there are many laboratories that would love to either hire you, or buy whatever sort of twigs your using since they are obviously better at getting through steel plate than a 2kg sledgehammer applied to a chisel on weak spots.

BS7558/92 requires real world testing, and getting a pass requires multiple cabinets to survive enthusiastically applied attack for considerably longer than 30 seconds. The minimum failure IIRC would be only surviving ten minutes. When attacked with an industrial blowtorch.

Re: Yep.

AIUI, most home safes only have a safecracker rating of five minutes. The engineering needed to make a safe with a rating of more than hour puts it out of reach of most people.

Really?

Because firearms are stored in quite inexpensive boxes (~£75) which are designed to be impossible to gain entry to (even with heavy cutting equipment) in less than half an hour, and the locks are perfectly secure enough for the police to be happy with you storing firearms and ammunition in them which one assumes wouldn't be the case if you could sort of glance at it and find it opens.

If meanwhile a safemaker can for similar money only make something that's good for 5 minutes then something's wrong. I'd suspect that the safe makers are making good money out of their better safes for business use and simply don't want to sell a cheap home grade one that's as good as the more expensive ones to avoid losing money on businesses going for a home grade safe.

Dual screens, fast updates, no registry cruft and security in mind: Microsoft gives devs the lowdown on Windows 10X

Re: Here we go again.

What I've found is that normally when you look at the actual TCO of whatever it is you're licensing, if you've more than a handful of employees in a company that isn't at the wall already, you're getting really close to the cost of writing an in-house replacement built on open software. And when you finally make that step, you can increase productivity even more as the software is tailored to your business processes and is updated on your schedule, not an outside vendor's.

. . . I find it very difficult to believe that you've ever actually built an in-house replacement for any significant bit of software. Honestly I have to question if you've even seen a significant bit of industry specific complex software. They are both complex, and also often subject to outside regulations that frown on the company having the ability to wipe audit trails. (and if you wrote the software, you defacto have that ability)

What you are suggesting was tried in our industry by one of the market leading companies. They gave up after spending ~£20 million in software development costs and getting a product that was decades behind the industry standard. The people paying the bills considered the development costs to develop from where they were to feature parity with everybody else in the industry terms of functionality and then considered the possible savings on the license fees, came to the conclusion they'd already spent more than any possible saving would deliver within anybodies lifetime, and then cancelled the project and just bought licenses for the industry leading software.

I heard about that at lunch during an industry event from a partner involved in that company. One of the directors of the company supplying the software humorously suggested that they just buy the company making the software for £20 million and grant themselves free licenses.

Re: Here we go again.

Look mate, the software is picked first (and the software is usually in fact chosen by the business driven by their automation requirements, not IT) and the OS that bit of commercial software requires is then used. 9 times out of ten, that bit of commercial software is written for Windows, with the one in ten being totally platform agnostic via being a web app.

If a large group of people are doing things that appear stupid to you then you might want to consider that you might be an unwitting victim of illusive superiority, and that large group of people actually doing the job might actually be doing it for a reason other than abject stupidity.

In my particular environment I have a case management system which probably triples the effectiveness of somebody using it. There is no open source equivalent, and I have trialed the sole case management system available in our industry that is platform agnostic. It would mean that our users would fall from having 3x productivity to having about 1.5x productivity since being delivered via a web app it's incapable of communicating with a desktop PC in any meaningful way. (so no deep phone system integration, having to manually process emails rather than integrating with systems, etc)

The saving of not having to do proprietary software upgrades would be utterly dwarfed by the cost of the productivity losses. Even at a single user level, the cost of halving productivity is doubling the staff cost. Say your paying somebody the minimum wage at 40 hours per week. That's a cost of £14,784 yearly in direct payments to the employee, plus costs of employers PAYE contributions, pension payments etc. The quick and dirty metric used is to add about 50% to the cost of the wage, which comes to £22,176 for that single person on the minimum wage. Multiply that by the number of users, and start flinching. (And all of our employees are being paid well more than the minimum wage!)

And the cost of those proprietary software upgrades? Windows desktop is basically FOC from a business perspective; you can't buy a computer without it cheaper than you can with it and we buy new computers on a 3 of 5 year basis anyway, so that's not a cost.

The only costs are Windows Server and usually Office licenses. Since extended support is 10 years on Office you can actually use it on two or three PC refreshes if your being tight. (depending if your doing 3 of 5 year replacement cycles on hardware) The cost of office over that time period even at £200 a copy works out as £20 a year. We pay more for the users tea, coffee, toilet paper etc.

Server licenses are more expensive, but we're running Server 2012R2. It's going EOL at the end of 2023. Again; do the math on the per year cost. It's cost basically the wages of somebody on minimum wage for one year as of almost a decade ago and is going to be replaced in just under 4 years time. Again, take that cost and divide it by the service life; it's pretty much a rounding error on business expenses compared to hiring even one additional employee.

The costs of task effective software are far greater than the savings to be had by not paying for the licenses of it and using something adequate instead of outstanding. If FOSS developers would like to develop an industry beating bit of software then we'd be quite happy to pay to license it, but we literally cannot afford to use FOSS software just to avoid the irritation of Microsoft making frigging stupid decisions on a frequent basis even if personally we might like to.

Anybody making decisions on their personal preferences before business requirements will harm their business. You can easily do the math as to how much this would financially cost even in a tiny company. The business is going to realise sooner or later that you are not making decisions with your employers best interests at heart and this harms your career since eventually your going to get replaced/outsourced as a damage control measure by the business. If you've pissed off the business you work for then nobody else is going to want to hire you.

Hence we are effectively stuck using software that most of us despise far more deeply than you can ever begin to conceive of.

Something has made a C:\TEMP directory in the proper place unasked, for which mercy the user guiltily feels grateful.

I'm still doing this, maybe one or two years after she wrote this originally.

Will Police Scotland use real-time discrimination-happy face-recog tech? Senior cop tells us: We won't... for now

Re: Trust the police?

There are always these sort of videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_9OiWHTzvE

Top 5 police brutality in the UK.

#5 is the police carefully putting somebody fighting them into a restraint position, sticking cuffs on them and then leading them towards a police van. Oh noes, stop the press. Somebody got arrested. How brutal.

Did they beat them senseless with a baton, or hit him with a tazer until it ran flat? Uh, nope.

#4, somebody resists arrest. Police stick cuffs on him and roughly toss him into the cage in the back of a police van. Somebody else resists arrest. Police carefully subdue him into a restraint position without hurting him in the process.

Did they beat them senseless with a baton, or hit him with a tazer until it ran flat? yet again, nope. You could claim the fact that they handled the first guy roughly as being brutality I suppose if you squinted hard enough, but personally I was taught that if you start the rough stuff then you might get hurt.

#3 somebody resists arrest. Police carefully subdue him into a restraint position, and stick cuffs on him. Somebody else resists arrest. Police carefully subdue him into a restraint position, and stick cuffs on him.

Did they beat them senseless with a baton, or hit him with a tazer until it ran flat? yet again, nope.

#2, 2 people resist arrest. Police are winning one and not noticeably winning another fight to stick the two people in cuffs. Backup turns up, and they arrest both, and tell people watching to push off and mind their own business.

Did they beat them senseless with a baton, or hit him with a tazer until it ran flat? yet again, nope.

#1 In a edited for brevity clip, one bloke has clearly been fighting police officers. One Police officer punches him repeatedly. Other police officer slams door on 3 people who are... doing what? Attempted participants, cheering him on in fighting plod?

Did they beat him senseless with a baton, or hit him with a tazer until it ran flat? Not on video, but an officer does repeatedly strike somebody with his fists who is not restrained and obviously is resisting arrest. It doesn't show the lead up to this force being used, strangely. Funny that these videos never do, isn't it? Almost as if there are two sides to the story, and we are only seeing one of them.

So out of the 5 most brutal bits of UK police brutality, 4 of them don't show any real brutality, and one might possibly if you take "resisting arrest, fighting and getting injured in the course of resisting arrest" as police brutality. Which personally, I don't.

I'd personally consider brutality as them cuffing somebody and then deciding to hit them with their baton until they get fed up. And there are plenty of videos of foreign police doing this, and um, none of our police doing it. Probably because, well. Our police aren't actually provably brutal at all given that there is an independent body that will investigate anything and cause anybody proven to be doing something like that is liable to get done for common assault themselves.

Re: Trust the police?

Most people don't actually encounter the police much, and who records "normal" interactions with the police and posts that sort of interaction? Who'd watch them? In a social media bubble watching the police you'd end up with videos only being posted by somebody screaming "look at what they did to me", generally highly selectively edited to support creating an outrage mob with lots of idiots then trying to virtue signal by getting ever more extreme about how awful they say the police are.

For instance, in all of the "look how brutal the police are being" videos, how many of them show it all?

The general course of a police situation would go roughly:-

1) Some form of dispute starts between people on the street.

2) It gets seriously out of hand; somebody calls the police.

3) The police arrive.

4) The police try and deescalate the situation.

5) The people who forced the police to be called in the first place are spoiling for a fight and decide to take the police on.

6) They lose horribly.

7) They end up in cuffs in a police van.

Now how many videos show 1-7? Most selectively edited videos only show a selective part of 6 where the perpetrators that created the situation and escalated it to the point of serious force being used have lost really horribly and are then crying about police brutality.

There is a big disconnect between how the police actually treat you if you bump into them and how the police are portrayed in TV programmes and youtube videos as normal interactions are boring and so don't get any viewing. The viewing figures go to the exciting and violent stuff and so will obviously distort your perception of policework if you don't make the obvious allowances.

What do we want? A proper review of IR35! When do we want it? Last year! Bunch of IT contractors protest outside UK Parliament

"It's completely unnecessary. There is a quid pro quo already – contractors don't pay National Insurance contributions but then they don't get a state pension, sick pay or holiday pay, maternity or paternity pay – so we don't need this legislation.

Yes. However, it helps to admit that there is an actual problem with companies (building companies especially) who have been forcing everybody to be a contractor to evade having to pay PAYE, Pensions, sick pay, holiday pay, and paternity pay.

Ok, technically your not forced. Your just told "do this and we'll employ you", with the unspoken point of "don't, and you can enjoy life on the dole until you decide to accept it". Which is forced, in plain english before it's newspeaked to mean whatever the tax dodgers want it to mean.

Come up with some mechanism that prevents people from being stripped of their employment rights, and the government from being defrauded of the tax income and i'm sure that they'll be quite happy to consider changing their approach so that people who are genuinely innocent aren't caught in the crosshairs. The point at which a small fix could and should have been applied was probably a decade ago. It's now kept rolling and what's going to inevitably happen is an overreaction rather than a reaction.

Crazy idea but hear us out... With robots taking people's jobs, can we rethink this whole working to survive thing?

Re: The Future

My parents managed to buy their first home for what I believe was a mortgage for around 3.5x my dads income, with 6 months salary saved for the deposit.

Somebody today is required to spend 5.5x the combined salary of themselves and their partner, and have ~36 months worth of combined salary saved if you happen to live anywhere near a transport route that goes to London.

Telling people how easy it was for you to save just a few months worth of salary for a deposit isn't helpful, it's an patronizing incitement to riot.

Re: The constant mistake..

Automation is the use of less of that scarce resource in order to achieve the product. More efficient production raises the effective wages of all consumers.

It reduces the cost of living, and increases the effective purchasing power. The percentage of wages being spent on food for instance has fallen hugely in 200 years.

This is however offset by the fact that the cost of living includes housing costs. These to be frank by historical levels are outright absurd and housing costs currently occupy the position that wheat did about 200 years ago today. This means that only a relatively privileged few actually have any significant disposable income.

The reason we have an economic crisis in the west is that disposable incomes are so pathetically low as to prevent the majority of people from doing much more than pay for the requirements of life.

Jeff Bezos: I will depose King Trump

Re: To be honest ...

The conservatives have long ago learned to fight dirty, and the best the Democrats can answer is a weak "But look!" while they argue with one another.

Look back on my profile and I've been saying this for YEARS, but only now do (some) "liberals" / moderates now understand that you need to grab a baseball bat when you're confronted with a knife, rather than a rose.

For an alternative and unpopular view, Trump is the end result of people doing what you are suggesting.

The media departed from the point that they reported on news on a relatively correct and impartial basis a long, long time ago. They now actively promote their own political agenda, and drive the agenda of the day through lying through omission, slander and the intimidation value of ruining any normal persons life through misrepresentation.

The lack of balanced coverage by the media means that it is no longer possible for normal moderate people to get their concerns redressed by the political system or the media. It is also no longer possible for normal moderate people to get elected. Normal concerns are actively suppressed by the media with cries of variations of "wrongthinker!" or "throughtcrime!". Therefore, moderates are largely suppressed by two camps of extremists and their only value to either side is largely found at the point that they are expected to vote for one or the other set of extremists.

Trump is a product of this. The media won't cover things fairly? Fine, use this against them. Just put your own messages out via twitter. That way, you can simply say (or do) something outrageous and displace anything that was going to be on the newspapers front cover, thereby denying the media the ability to run their own agenda. Media driven character assassinations on spurious grounds with no proof offered or existing? Fine, just deliberately whip their little bubbles up to the point that they burst. You know people actually need "digital detoxes" and give up on sticking in their bubbles for their health? That's your political movement fraying at the edges, and pushing out "traitors" who minutely disagree with something obviously absurd is a fairly good sign that the entire thing is coming apart at the seams.

I said a couple of months after Trump was elected that I thought he'd get a second term based on how he was handling the US media, and how utterly incapable the opposition was at holding a basic level of introspection into why they lost. If they don't have that introspection before this election then they are losing again this time, and it's looking increasingly unlikely that anybody else is going to stop for at least 30 seconds and consider why he's about to beat them.

Still plenty of time to hold that but there is a total disconnect of reality with these people who are making claim to being the intellectual elite, but is getting systematically outwitted and played by somebody they are deriding as being thick.

Which to be fair, he is. But how does that reflect on the people getting played daily for almost 5 years(!?!) by El Thicko?

Built to last: Time to dispose of the disposable, unrepairable brick

I gifted my old gaming computer to a friends kids.

Apparently with the new spectre protections on the intel chips my old box noticeably outperformed a brand new alienware box running a new intel processor at higher graphics settings on whatever that new game that the kids rave about is.

Picture the kids faces, especially since my old box was as per ye olde days tradition built in a tatty old unassuming beige box with ten years worth of wear and tear on top of that.

There are already Chinese components in your pocket – so why fret about 5G gear?

If we can wean the politicos off the drugs of nationalism and divisiveness, even in this one matter, we can carry on in that vein.

Look mate, western politics is inherently divisive. It's been divisive for so long that the term expressing the concept for what they do is written in bloody latin; divide et regina, or Divide and Rule. (also known as divide et imperia; divide and conquer)

In western style democracy political power is gained by splitting the country up into say warring factions and playing each faction off against the others. You get votes by promising 3 such factions that you'll fuck over the other 2 factions. This has (as noted, the concept was first written in latin and was possibly old at THAT point) been an inherent part of western political systems for at least two thousand years. It is not possible to change without changing our political system radically.

Canadian insurer paid for ransomware decryptor. Now it's hunting the scum down

Re: Not paying!

Tapes are pretty pricey, these days.

Tapes are twenty quid each. A two week rotation based on only doing weekdays costs £200 for the first set of tapes, and if you retire a tape a month then the total yearly cost of new tapes is £240.

The setup cost is about £2k for the drive if you buy brand new, and over a 5 year period you'd want 70 tapes, so at £20 each that's £1400 on media assuming that you keep everything forever. ==£3400 for 5 years. (or knock a grand off that if you only keep a years worth of archive tapes)

This gives you a daily offsite backup of up to 2.5TB uncompressed. (or about 6TB compressed)

Microsoft's cloud backup for 2.5TB appears to be about £80/pm. Over a 5 year period that's £4800 (and subject to monthly price rises) so tape can actually be cheaper than cloud. Lots cheaper if you pick up a second hand tape drive for a fraction of the retail value.

I still think tape has good uses as part of a backup strategy. It's not suitable for everything, but it's pretty good insurance against this sort of thing, even if your only backing up mission critical stuff and not absolutely everything.

Reliable tapes, if there is even such a thing, will be even more so. When was the last time you tried to reinstall from one of your 2-year-old backup tapes?

Tapes only tend to get horribly unreliable if you are constantly rewriting them. If your retiring one a month then you don't tend to run into tapes that have much in the way of data loss unless your storing them around electromagnets.

Re: Not paying!

If your using tapes, yes. Most people do at least two weeks worth of daily backups, and then retire a tape each month as an archive.

Pull the OS and application files from however far back you need to, even if it's from a year ago. Then get patching and start pushing out the contents of the file shares from the filesystem from the day before.

Yes, offline backups via tape is now unfashionable because tapes are not new and are uncool and have been replaced by trendy stuff that in this case cost the company using them something like a million in direct costs in ransom fees, and them two weeks + downtime, plus the investigation and prosecution costs. What did that tape drive and a few boxes of tapes cost again?

Remember when Europe’s entire Galileo satellite system fell over last summer? No you don’t. The official stats reveal it never happened

Re: WTF?

I manage an Exchange box set up by a chimp, ignoring hardware requirements, best practice and common sense with zero redundancy.

It has had 4 hours downtime in the last year, which is 99.95% availability.

99.9% reliability allows 8h 45m 57s downtime a year, and I think that's absurdly low point to aim for. But yeah, 77%? That's a different universe.

Star wreck: There's a 1 in 20 chance a NASA telescope and US military satellite will smash into each other today

Re: Recycling

The shuttle would make this utterly impossible; it had launch costs of what $1.1 billion per launch?

SpaceX can do a launch at $60 million, which is better but I doubt that it's commercially viable to pick up satellites.

Remember the Clipper chip? NSA's botched backdoor-for-Feds from 1993 still influences today's encryption debates

Re: The FBI is the only organization on Earth

The chaps from GCHQ that briefed parliament at one point appeared utterly unconcerned about the uptake of encryption by way of VPN's etc when questioned.

This leaves two possibilities. Either GCHQ had sent somebody utterly unbreifed who didn't know this would be a problem, or that they had sent somebody fully briefed that knew that this wasn't a problem.

Just imagine that GCHQ had a way to break current encryption. Would they be admitting this, or claiming that current encryption was unbreakable? My general view is that it doesn't really matter that much to me, while i'm not 100% certain that GCHQ can't break my encryption i'm not actually doing anything that I need to protect from the government in any way.

One-time Brexit Secretary David Davis demands Mike Lynch's extradition to US be halted

Re: Er.... But

Lynch and HPE have also spent £40m on legal fees for the trial in the High Court

And as a somewhat put out reader who works in IT in a Law firm, I would just like to observe that most law firms do not make anywhere near this sort of money. Most firms are quite happy if we make a million or so a year from charging about two thousand people about five hundred quid a time to do the legal work for buying or selling a house or similar in very boring areas of law.

This is the top 200 law firms in the UK by revenue.

https://www.thelawyer.com/top-200-uk-law-firms/

As you can easily check on the list above if this case was a law firm, it would be #79 of the largest law firms in the UK in it's own right. It's actually absurd how much this single case is costing.

Two billion years ago, snowball Earth was defrosted in huge asteroid crash – and it's been downhill ever since

It's about time that humanity ought to have some kind of plan for when an astroid like this is heading towards earth; if we wait long enough it will certainly happen...

Plan. 1; spot anything in an orbit that is likely to impact earth. NASA already do this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentry_%28monitoring_system%29).

Plan 2, when we discover that something is going to hit the earth then we have about a hundred years to figure out a solution then start doing something about it.

The most obvious solution to be frank is to either shine a laser at it which could slowly push it off course, or toss a very large contact fused nuke at an intersecting orbit if people are inpatient and want to see a big bang.

Even if said nuke failed to reduce the asteroid to it's constituent atoms it would act as an Orion drive and push the asteroid off course somewhat. In astronomical terms space is very big, and the earth is very small so a tiny course change far enough out would generate a miss, and give humanity another few centuries or millennia to deal with the problem.

South American nations open fire on ICANN for 'illegal and unjust' sale of .amazon to zillionaire Jeff Bezos

Re: Who's going to bet..m

It's actually dead simple to create another root DNS server that does this.

The problems for the rest of the internet are just as well known, but if it does happen this would be the first time a group of nation states have gotten pissed off enough with ICANN to do something about it.

It will actually be interesting to see what happens when a group of nation states basically declares war on ICANN.

Remember when Netscout got so upset at 'challenger' label in Gartner Magic Quadrant, it sued? Well, top court just ended all those shenanigans

Re: Maybe not, but they are professional scapegoats

Gartner has really felt the heat: it has long been the most respected

By whom?

From the IT Department side of things, I can't remember Gartner or any third party "research" having ever been taken seriously anywhere I have worked. If a company is paying another company to do a comparison of their product to the competition then I think it's always been taken for granted that the report is going to extol the virtues of the product. If it didn't, the company wouldn't pay for the report to be produced, and they certainly wouldn't be recommending that we read it.

Which is why people with anything better to do have never bothered reading them, and instead checked if the product the salesdroid is trying to sell us is suitable to our needs.

Squirrel away a little IT budget for likely Brexit uncertainty, CIOs warned

Re: Things to look out for: the GDPR

Given that the GDPR is implemented in UK law as the Data Protection Act 2018, how is leaving the EU going to make us non-compliant with the GDPR so the EU will be unable to send data to the UK?

If there was some serious analysis rather than "some teenager on twitter said..." then i'd be quite glad to hear it.

Step away from that Windows 7 machine, order UK cyber-cops: It's not safe for managing your cash digitally

Win7 running out of support is not a serious problem. They'll be a lot of businesses that won't have hit the replacement target, who'll be able to point to these sort of articles to get some more money for replacement programmes. Otherwise, meh.

The middle of Jan 2038 is likely going to be a serious IT problem. This? Not so much.

What was Boeing through their heads? Emails show staff wouldn't put their families on a 737 Max over safety fears

Re: I guess

You know, I wouldn't compare this to Challanger. I'd compare it to the de Havilland Comet.

The Comet's early problems doomed both the Comet aircraft and ultimately British passenger aircraft as Boeing was able to take the market.

The Boeing 737Max has now been grounded 9 months and doesn't look like it's going to be flying in the next 9 months at this rate. Frankly at this point even if companies are allowed to fly 737Max, who's going to want to buy them at this rate?

If Airbus doesn't end up totally owning the market over this, then it's probably going to be attributable to a lack of production capability to suddenly take up the entire market share that Boeing had this time last year.

Re: As I've said before,

I'd actually go further than that because Boeing's safety culture needs to change. You'd have to sack middle management down to line management that created and accepted the culture.

I bet the employees do. They'll be fired.

The Managers that created the situation resulting in hundreds of people dying and the company having it's reputation destroyed (and losing how many billions?) will be rewarded and promoted.

That is unless business as usual comes to a screeching halt over this, which I doubt since pretty much the entire management is going to be complicit.

No horrific butterfly keys on this keyboard, just you and your big, dumb fingers

Re: They may have sucked

Really? I've still got mine (somewhere in my collection of old but "you can't bin that" tech stuff) and i'd be willing to part with it if your willing to part with enough cash.

Post Office faces potential criminal probe over Fujitsu IT system's accounting failures

Re: Good for them & the judge

I'm not sure. But if you have won your appeal on the basis of a miscarriage of justice (based upon purjury having been committed) then once you've won that appeal then you use the fact that you have been found innocent on the grounds of them having committed perjury to you go after them for purjury, to which they have absolutely no defense.

I would personally think that this is preferable to going after them for a malicious prosecution because they could claim the obvious defense that they weren't being malicious because they honestly believed their evidence. This would let them be found incompetent, but not malicious and so they'd be found innocent. Hence, that's a really bad avenue to go down.

Hence, purjury would appear to be the more effective route.

I'd personally go after the higher up people on the basis of concealing arrestable offenses [section 5 of the criminal law act] (Where a person has committed an arrestable offence, any other person who, knowing or believing him to be guilty of the offence or of some other arrestable offence, does without lawful authority or reasonable excuse any act with intent to impede his apprehension or prosecution shall be guilty of an offence.

This is sufficiently vague to cover anything and the higher ups would appear to have no realistic defense against the situation as described.

Failing that, you could go after them more generally for perverting the course of justice. But personally, I think that the malicious prosecution route is daft. We'll see how it turns out though; i'm sure that the people in question will deal as fairly with the post office as the post office dealt with them.

Re: Ooooh first post....

Um. I take it that you remember that the news reported that rape cases were being chucked out because the CPS didn't disclose relevant evidence disproving their cases not too long ago? The CPS is not exactly perfect in that regard either.

Percentage of cases successfully convicted is in fact arguably not actually a great measure; The CPS could get a 100% success rate by reducing the number of cases convicted by 99% and only convicting cases they were utterly certain they could win rather than prosecuting cases with a reasonable likelihood of conviction. What sort of percentage reduction is this since the local beat bobby just stuck a case in to the magistrates court when he caught somebody trying to do a windows in on his beat?

And even if it has improved, is it beneficial to society for the police officers to be sitting in an office doing paperwork for a prosecution rather than out on the streets?

Re: Good for them & the judge

As I say, i'm not a Solicitor, and it appears quite clear that your not either.

To claim malicious prosecution don't you have to have:-

A) Won the case and;

B) Be able to demonstrate deliberate malice on the part of the people bringing the case.

Point A is an issue, because people unjustly lost cases because misleading evidence was presented which led to a miscarriage of justice being committed which would appear to bar this tort from being used.

I'm not that bothered honestly; we'll see which avenue people end up going for. I'm guessing appealing the sentences and then going after the people for perjury would be the effective avenue.

Re: Good for them & the judge

I'm not a Solicitor, but for my sins I do work as an IT Manager in a law firm.

This is not a malicious prosecution. A malicious prosecution is simplistically when you take out a lot of spurious cases just to force the target to expend resources defending them.

So this isin't a malicious prosecution. This is a Miscarriage of Justice.

The appropriate body to investigate is the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Applications to the CCRC need to be made by the people who have been convicted of wrongdoing, usually after they have passed the point of being able to just appeal the case via the appeal courts.

Re: Ooooh first post....

Hello Anonymous Coward. Even if true this would have little relevance in this case because while politicians can direct the CPS not prosecute offenses (incidentally did you know that the plod calls the CPS the Criminal Protection Service?) the courts are utterly independent.

If there is no investigation into the conduct of the Post Office in this case then I wouldn't be at all surprised if the people who have been prosecuted and found guilty start appealing their prosecutions and point to the judgement on the grounds that a miscarriage of justice has occurred and false evidence was presented. That would appear pretty inevitable at this point, as is a slow drip of convictions being annulled by the appeal courts along with scathing judgements from irate judges.

Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

Re: these terms are "divisive and humiliating,"

The joke in those circles is that half of psychologists want to help other people and the other half need help.

Re: these terms are "divisive and humiliating,"

I'd consider my run tolerably easy as it was. Once they know they can't take you they pick on somebody weaker with twice the energy to make up for their humiliation.

It's those kids that I feel sorry for.

Re: these terms are "divisive and humiliating,"

A small and weak nerd is defenseless against the big bullies.

When at school I did face a certain level of bullying, including being physically attacked. Dealing with the teachers to get it stopped is always a bit dodgy, since the bullies always lie and have a gang of people backing up their lies whereas the people being bullied invariably don't.

The help I got was actually from a staff member of an external club, who simply taught me the rudimentary basics of the defensive side of martial arts. He didn't teach me a single attacking move, purely defensive techniques to break holds and not be present where a punch was thrown.

The net result was the next time I was attacked the big bullies ended up being practically incapable of landing a punch due to me not being present where their punches were landing, and when trying to do things like bodily throwing themselves at me failed horribly when I moved out of the way. Simple to say but rather more difficult to execute. Footwork is very important.

The big bullies ended up taking a severe knock to their street cred for very visibly failing to beat me up, one tried again in a more confined space at a later point assuming that I wouldn't be able to dodge his attacks, and discovered that it simply ended up with me redirecting him his attacks into solid objects. After this point the bullies ignored me and picked on easier targets that weren't capable of defending themselves. So actually, the small and weak nerd can defend themselves quite effectively with a diligent study of basics martial arts techniques, because the key is technique and knowledge, rather than brute force and ignorance. Bullies only bully the weak; if your not the weakest person around then they will pick on somebody else.

Epilogue: some years later I was reviewing CV's for my team with a couple of other people to ensure a fair process was carried out, and received a CV from of one of these bullies in for an entry level position. I took one look at it, and then after a brief "how forgiving am I" moment inarticulately started explaining that they'd been bullies at school and i'd been one of their targets to the much more senior colleague and the HR droid who I was interviewing with. Before I could say that I might find it difficult to work with the individual, my much more senior colleague had wordlessly torn their CV in half and dropped it in the bin, and the HR droid equally as wordlessly crossed them off the list of potential staff and we moved on to the next CV without either saying a single word about their application.

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Re: It's all in the 'title'

You can certify documents if you are on a list of regulated professionals. Farmers are not part of a regulated profession and therefore farmers cannot certify documents.

The reason for the existing situation is basically twofold.

1) Being on a list of certified professionals you can check that a certified professional is actually a certified professional, and you can also pull their contact details from the database of their regulating body and drop them a message saying "did you certify the documents for X?"

2) Being on a list of certified professionals means you can be tracked and basically struck off and made unemployable if you make a mistake. The idea is that the prospect of total ruin will inspire some level of caution in what you are certifying.

Samsung Galaxy S11 tipped to escalate the phone cam arms race with 108MP sensor

I think we quite agree that 108MP is completely pointless.

I don't agree.

It's a way of getting around a total lack of decent optics on the mobile. Whereas I am quite happy with my DSLR which has less than one tenth the pixelage, I actually have an optical zoom for magnification that is physically impossible to fit on a phone since "focal length" is an immutable law of optics; there has to be distance between the sensor and the lens and if you are dedicated to getting a pancake flat device then ergo you can't have any focal length and therefore can't have a worthwhile optical zoom.

What you can however do is just have a trillion pixel sensor, discard most of them and then use sheer megapixelage in addition to the tiny focal length you can get to obtain some "megapixel magnification" to obtain something which sort of has a similar effect to a worthwhile optical zoom.

Silicon Valley Scrooges sidestep debt to society through tax avoidance to the tune of $100bn

Well, there are two things that you could do. First is that we could endlessly discuss it while paid activists confuse the issue with the public beyond any reason and suggest that these things must be done on a multinational basis while the same companies drag out any decision made on a multinational basis by every trick in the book, not excluding offering to pay more money in particular countries if they just derail/delay talks etc.

Second is that we could all just say "screw it" and just charge selected multinational companies using advanced trickery punitively on a percentage of revenue and let the companies concerned deal with the outcome. If doing so puts them out of business then too bad, i'm sure that competitors will fill their market share, hopefully having taken note that creative accountancy is no longer a good idea.

The ongoing failure to deal with these shenanigans just encourages other companies to creatively not pay any tax which is destructive to public finances and results in raised public debt and reduced public services. Enough already.

Talking a Blue Streak: The ambitious, quiet waste of the Spadeadam Rocket Establishment

Re: Great Feature

The interesting code names were the result of Britain getting one over on Germany several times in WW2 due to guessing what nastiness was going to be deployed by hearing the code name of a project and then having countermeasures against the device deployed for the day the Germans started using it.

Churchill then noted that the same principle operated in reverse, and demanded that all British code names be devoid of the slightest bit of helpful information to indicate what the program was about, hence projects for decades afterwards had random colour + word code names written down in a book and then picked from the book in sequential order for whatever hush hush project was started next in a way that gave no information away about what the project was for. A hard earned lesson that appears to have been thoroughly lost, judging by the code names being used for projects recently that have become publicly available through leaks etc.

We are absolutely, definitively, completely and utterly out of IPv4 addresses, warns RIPE

Re: "We have now run out of IPv4 addresses"

Honest question - why can't we do this?

Besides that nobody has programmed it, there is little practical reason. If somebody did program it up, I honestly think adoption would happen at practically breakneck speed compared to IPv6 because everybody would know and be happy with what it's doing conceptually without requiring comprehensive retraining.

In the real world nobody practically nobody actually gets this training on IPv6 and so practically nobody is willing to have anything to do with IPv6 because it has no benefit for the business, while presenting the exciting possibility of losing your job if the IPv6 design goal of "make all of my endpoints available to hackers" hasn't been adequately circumvented.

Halfords invents radio signals that don't travel at the speed of light

Re: Definition

While this clearly is marketing BS there is a certain truth to it. It depends how you define "fast". DAB has a higher bandwidth, so can transfer more data more quickly than a lower bandwidth analogue FM, transferring the same amount of data more quickly is arguably a reasonable definition of the word fast.

No.

It would be fair to say that DAB has a higher bitrate and can therefore receive better quality audio. This irrespective of the fact that most radios don't claim to be hifi's, and that most hifi's do not offer high fidelity reproduction of the signal input these days, and that a goodly number of DAB radios are in cars with such high ambient noise from the road that any sound improvement is drowned out and unnoticeable. That one can accept as normal marketing bullshit.

But it's still not faster; both play a 3 minute bit of music in 3 minutes. Arguably, DAB is slower because it takes time to buffer etc from the start of a transmission.

Bad news: 'Unblockable' web trackers emerge. Good news: Firefox with uBlock Origin can stop it. Chrome, not so much

Re: Who to block?

I prefer a simple approach: given that the sites themselves are providing subdomains expressly for this nefarious purpose (and are therefore complicit in any GDPR breach that results), all it needs is a list of such sites. I would rather just block them and take my interest elsewhere.

Hmm. This brings to mind the "web phishing" filter blocklist.

Doing another for "This site has been reported to be using web tracking without user consent" would probably quite strongly discourage this sort of thing.

Re: I'm forced to wonder

Set cookies. "allow for session only". Persistent tracking cookies then don't work, unless set by somebody who the browser makers has been bribed by.

Ex-Capita accountant who claimed £10k bung to leave was blackmail has appeal thrown out

Not sure of the full facts of the case - but an accountant not wanting to work over financial year end (usually jan/feb) should find another job. Should they get time to decompress before/afterwards - yes.

The Financial year end is actually usually the end of March, which is basically historical because when everybody else changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calandar the tax authorities refused to change. As a result of the tax year being where it is most companies choose to match their financial year with their tax year because it's easier, and it also means that accounts end of working late at the end of march, instead of over Christmas/New years when normal people want to spend the time with their family.

The interesting part in here (imo) is that the accountant who produced the Capita accounts was regularly refusing to do things junior managers were demanding and frequently escalating issues to high level management. Now, why was this?

This sort of thing usually happens when a junior staff member is being asked to do something that everybody senior to them knows they shouldn't be doing in the hope that in their ignorance they will actually do it. If it fails, the junior staff member asks their manager for the direction in writing, the line manager dodges and says that <senior staff> asked for it to be done that way, and they think there must have been a miscommunication so why don't you ask them what they meant directly, thus passing the buck higher.

Senior staff member then when challenged on direction that shouldn't have been given of course won't give the junior the direction in writing (as this would defeat the object of when caught deploying the "it was a rouge junior staff member" defence and throwing them under the bus to defend the higher management) and gets out of the situation by claiming the chinese whisper defence of mangled instruction, and asks the junior staff member to do something somewhat plausible and within the rules.

Of course, this only happens at all, let alone repeatedly in a toxic sort of workplace where the firm is doing dodgy things. Which leaves one wondering what is going on when this happens repeatedly, and in connection with Capita's accounts.