Posts by Stu J

Airbus okays use of ‘Taxibot’ to tow planes to the runway

Air quality

If they can get this working with electric motors (or at least hybrid) then another plus is the definite potential to improve safety and air quality on the ramp - although I love the smell of burning jet fuel - engines often burn oil and other crap when starting up, and if you're working on the ramp every day it's probably going to take a toll on your health.

If each aircraft just has to start a relatively small APU with an exhaust that's high up, rather than starting two or more jet engines down at person-height, I'd expect that would make a difference. Don't start the engines until you're on the taxiway out in the open and the startup smoke dissipates where there's nobody to directly breathe it in.

Could also reduce the likelihood of foreign object damage, as well as reducing the likelihood of workers being ingested into running engines.

All low probability, but high cost/impact issues which probably add to the overall business case.

14-hour+ global blackout at Ingram Micro halts customer orders

Re: Resilience

If they have expired / died well sucks for for you for a lack of planning.

If they are expiring / required in the next week, we'll it sucks for a lack of planning

Take it you've never worked for an organisation where the Finance bods sit on everything until the very last minute...

The techies can plan perfectly well, give management/procurement all the right paperwork, weeks ahead of time...and they'll still sit on it until 11.59 for "cashflow purposes", seemingly regardless of operational risk.

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Re: Heathrow not blameless

Should the CEO be directly involved with people fixing underlying faults - hell no. And a good management structure that acts as an umbrella to shield the workers from senior management is invaluable and always appreciated in a crisis.

Should the CEO be directly involved in making a judgement-call decision, i.e. "shut the airport until 11pm" - that will cost the business - and it's customers - tens of millions in disruption - abso-fucking-lutely.

You're conflating different types and scales of decision-making here. They should have sent someone to get him out of bed to make the decision, and held off making knee-jerk decisions for the hour or so it would have taken. Even if you've got nobody local to him, you send a taxi local to him to go and hammer on his door.

Re: Heathrow not blameless

I'd put money on it that the CEO - had he been awake - wouldn't have decided to close the entire airport for 20 hours when the fire had only been burning for an hour or so.

I also can't imagine that that level of detail of decision is codified in the big red "oh shit" book.

Aircraft that were inbound on long haul, and still 6+ hours away from needing to make a decision about landing ended up turning back to their origin. For BA and Virgin in particular, they've now got lots of passengers and tens of planes on the wrong side of the world, and a massive logistical headache that will take days to unwind.

Heathrow's Ops Director likely doesn't give as much as a damn about the knock on effects as the CEO would. The Ops Director will have been in tactical mode; the CEO would likely have taken a bigger picture strategic approach to decision making.

Terminal 5 could have been accepting flights from mid-morning onwards, so the long hauls still airborne could have continued and arrived more or less on time, those that had diverted to other UK airports could have shuttled down to Heathrow, and a large percentage of the knock-on disruption of having people and planes in the wrong places would have been avoided.

Choosing to close the airport for the entire day was demonstrably the wrong decision, and wholly unnecessary. The only thing that will have saved the Ops Director's bacon is the fact his boss screwed up by being uncontactable and sleeping blissfully ignorant until 6am.

And I still imagine boss's first words to the Ops Director will have been along the lines of "you've fucking done what!?"

Heathrow not blameless

The CEO was fast asleep with his phone on silent and they couldn't raise him. Why someone wasn't dispatched to wake him up, who knows...

Which meant it fell to the Operations Director to handle the incident, and he made the call to shut the airport for the entire day, the best part of 24 hours.

Which doesn't appear to have been remotely necessary as several areas - including Terminal 5 - had power sufficient to handle passengers safely before the morning was out.

So aside from not testing their power resilience, their chain of command fell through, and the person left in charge by default made a poor decision that actually caused much of the financial harm.

Now they're pointing the finger of blame at others to try to deflect from their own failings.

Microsoft 365 brings the shutters down on legacy protocols

Re: "Secure by Default"

Wordpress is absolutely fuck all to do with Linux, it's a PHP-based omnishambles that you can run on anything that can run PHP. Including Windows.

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

Re: “Starships might land on Mars in 2026”

So long as Musk is on the inaugural flight, I don't give a shit if it can get back again.

UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off their backs

Exactly - Oracle's lawyers will go after relatively low-hanging fruit that are likely to be a slam dunk. Not the kind of case that will be difficult to win and will play out badly in the court of public opinion.

They're good lawyers, not idiots, and the last thing they want is case law that potentially damages the rest of their shakedown scam.

Re: Students don't have to be paid for

It may well be, but safer to get them to sign it as well so that if they become staff there's no grey area.

The minute Oracle even threaten you with court, you get an injunction against them, backed up by your evidence, and get a judge to throw it out.

American megacorp trying it on vs UK educational establishment, who do you think a British judge is going to side with?

Make all students and staff (barring a specific procurement team) sign up to something that says they are individually liable for any Oracle licensing costs that may be incurred if they install Oracle products on any of their devices.

Explicitly declare that said students and staff do not have the right to enter into any contracts or license agreements with Oracle on behalf of the organisation or any of its related institutions, and do not have permission to use Oracle products in the course of their work or studies.

Explicitly inform Oracle that this is contractually enforced and that unless licenses are agreed to in writing by specific named individuals, there is and will be no agreement between Oracle and the organisation or any of its related institutions, and no liability for any licensing.

Then, tell Oracle to fuck off whenever they send a bill. Simples.

Single passenger reportedly survives Air India Boeing 787 crash

Re: And Boeing gets blamed

It did look like a mid-field takeoff based on ADS-B data from FlightRadar24, but that appears to have been a data issue rather than reality.

There's video footage showing it already at a reasonable speed going past that intersection, so a mid-field takeoff can be ruled out, though there is a turning circle that's about 2/3rds of the way down the runway, so that's still a possibility that it wasn't a full length takeoff - but that would be a very strange decision for any pilot to have made in a heavily laden 787 in nearly 40 degree heat.

Re: Survivor

...and actually walk away from the smoking wreckage, with what appears to be his phone still working!

Got to feel for the guy, his brother was apparently sat next to him and didn't get out. Fella's going to need some serious time with a shrink over the coming years.

Meta sues 'nudify' app-maker that it claims ran 87k+ Facebook, Instagram ads

Here's a thought...

Maybe a human being at Meta should be involved in approving ads when they're submitted, if their automation isn't good enough to catch these scumbags out.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

What the fuck are they smoking?

See title

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

You've somewhat missed the point here that if you start off small on-prem, and have to grow, there is either additional up-front cost (i.e. buying more expensive chassis and/or controllers that can handle potential future expansion), or significant additional cost as you go both in terms of replacing kit that is no longer fit for purpose and migrating data across.

Additionally, you can't just click your fingers and magic new kit into your datacentre. Procurement, shipping, and commissioning takes time, and if latency stymies your ability to scale then you're potentially leaving money on the table, or you're delivering a suboptimal experience to your existing customers.

I could launch a startup in the cloud tomorrow and literally be paying pennies for storage for months until subscribers ramped up. And if they ramped up rapidly (e.g. after a rave review online or by some influencer) the cloud would just keep scaling the storage for me, and I'd only be charged after the fact.

Yes, once I've got a zillion users it might be cheaper then to repatriate my data on-prem, and because I'd then be buying hardware in bulk it'd likely be cheaper overall than if I'd bought all the hardware piecemeal. I've still probably paid more overall than if I bought all that hardware up-front, but crucially I didn't have to gamble any CapEx on day one, and started off with extremely limited OpEx, giving my startup the best chance of survival.

...and the right tool for the job when they were scaling up probably was S3. It's pay-as-you-go, and you don't need to go out and spend $1.5M up-front on 18PB of storage that you may or may not end up needing.

Once you're mature enough to evaluate the true needs to run your business at scale, then the right tool may well be an on-prem solution. That's fine. It might be a hybrid solution, or still a cloud-based solution. That's fine too.

What pisses me off about DHH and all these 37signals articles is that they always gloss over the first part and focus solely on the second part. Would his business have been as successful and profitable in the first place without the flexible economics of the cloud allowing rapid growth without significant CapEx? Maybe? Maybe not...

‘Infuriated’, ‘disappointed' ... Ex-VMware customers explain why they migrated to Nutanix

How long...

...until some parasitic company buys Nutanix and runs a similar playbook to Broadcom?

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

Re: Serial Comms

PC was already plugged into the network at a check-in desk. Printer was on the back wall. So instead of running any cables anywhere near the conveyor belts, we just got them to drop a network outlet onto the back wall - an altogether better solution.

We had a problem once with an airport-based customer complaining that when they were printing from our software (using Okidata dot matrix printers) it was fine a lot of the time, but was intermittently inserting garbage into the printouts.

They swapped out the PC, the printer, the cables, but still no joy, until we sent someone to site to diagnose it.

Turns out the serial cable from the PC they were using was running next to a baggage injection belt at a check-in desk - and if someone activated the injection belt while a print job was on the wire, that was the cause of the data corruption. Bought a network card for the printer and chucked the serial cable in the bin.

Google details plans for 1 MW IT racks exploiting electric vehicle supply chain

Re: Fun stuff

400V is firmly in Arc Flash risk territory

£136M government grant saves troubled Post Office from suboptimal IT

Code ownership

Given how appallingly Fujitsu have behaved over this, and given the recent precedent re British Steel, could the government not consider enacting emergency legislation to take ownership of the Horizon code, and to TUPE anyone currently supporting it across to the Post Office...?

And then legislate to make damn sure in future that public bodies have full rights to do whatever they want with IP produced by any 3rd party as part of any public contract, and that any licenses to use software are perpetual regardless of what the contract itself might try to enforce. Then 3rd parties might have to focus on actually adding value continuously rather than milking the public teat for years whilst doing the bare minimum.

Developer scored huge own goal by deleting almost every football fan in Europe

Wiped billions of dollars off the value of several funds by running an UPDATE without a WHERE clause. Full-on stomach-sinking P45-anticipating panic.

Fortunately we had triggers on every table writing every single change off to audit tables, so managed to use those to undo the screw-up in less than an hour.

Important lesson learned - any manual SQL goes inside a rollback transaction, verify number of records updated first, then switch the rollback out for a commit. Or just avoid having to run manual SQL on production DBs...

Google, AWS say it's too hard for customers to use Linux to swerve Azure

Re: how many

"Azure has a functionality that AWS or GCS cannot match, same as the other way around."

No, it doesn't. It's not a functionality. It's an artificial licensing restriction which is an abuse of monopoly.

If you decide to use a proprietary AWS or GCP service that has no easy exit path to another provider, that's a decision you're making with your eyes wide open. Most sensible people don't box themselves into a corner when architecting cloud-native by using services for which there isn't an almost drop-in equivalent on other platforms.

If you've been running Windows servers on prem, from the era of dedicated physical tin, then moved to virtual machines, there's no technical reason at all why you can't move those servers to AWS, or GCP, or Azure, or Oracle Cloud, or any other cloud that provides IaaS services.

If Microsoft had a rule that said you can't move on prem licenses to the cloud full stop, that would be annoying, but fine.

It's the fact they treat Azure as a special case that is blatantly an illegal abuse of a monopoly in one sector being used to gain an illegal advantage in another sector.

It's not rocket science, and they deserve a massive fine, an immediate cease-and-desist, to pay compensation to customers that have overpaid to use Microsoft products on other cloud vendors, and to waive egress charges for anyone that was affected who subsequently decides to abandon Azure to migrate to another cloud vendor.

Law firm 'didn't think' data theft was a breach, says ICO. Now it's nursing a £60K fine

I'm sure the ICO fined British Airways millions without it ever going to court, or am I misremembering/misunderstanding, or have things changed since then?

Given what a cock-up they've made in terms of how they handled the breach, and seeing as how they thought they were above the law, I'd very much like to see that paltry fine punitively increased on appeal. The ICO can go up to £8.7M - just saying...

Tech tariff turmoil continues as Trump admin exempts some electronics, then promises to bring taxes back

Re: US companies did this to us

This is precisely why boards of corporations only having a responsibility to shareholders is wrong.

If the boards of corporations had an additional fiduciary duty of care to consider the impacts of their decisions on their employees, their customers, the communities in which they operate, the environment, and the long-term value of the business, the world would be a much better place.

Instead we've learned the hard way that late-stage short-termist capitalism shits on everything it can (including the corpse of it's own granny that it sold a while back) to make a few bucks.

Signalgate solved? Report claims journalist’s phone number accidentally saved under name of Trump official

Re: An authentic failure

If you don't have a Signal user in your phone contacts, their name shows up based on what they've set it as.

If you do have a Signal user in your phone contacts, their name shows up based on what you set it as.

In both cases you can override the display name for a contact within Signal.

If you're not confident that a contact is definitely who you think it is, you can view a cryptographically generated shared "safety number" for that contact, and verify it offline with them.

Google makes end-to-end encrypted Gmail easy for all – even Outlook users

So it's not actually E2EE email then

It's sending a notification by email for someone to go and view a website.

IBM US cuts may run deeper than feared ‒ and the jobs are heading to India

Re: Why is anyone surprised?

Certainly true for both Microsoft and Google. Not that they were great before SatNad and Pichai took over, but there's a definite pattern there when it comes to declining quality and rank enshittification.

Capita's Northern Ireland school IT deal swells to over half a billion after Fujitsu exit

Here's a suggestion

Don't spend the next 2 years sorting out a contract for another leech to swoop in and rinse you of the best part of £1bn.

Hire a few good senior tech leaders to build up a function to take it all over internally. Pay solid wages for good people.

It will cost a fraction of what you've paid to Crapita, and will probably boost the local economy far better than would otherwise be the case.

Oracle Cloud says it's not true someone broke into its login servers and stole data

Popcorn time

Oh pleeeeeease can someone affected sue Oracle into the floor for criminal negligence...?

Providing an insecure service by running instances of your own software, which is riddled with public exploits, and not updating said instances to patch the exploitable bugs?

Priceless multi-layered levels of negligence.

OK, Google: Are you killing Assistant and replacing it with Gemini?

Apple's approach to AI?

You mean, generating fake, inaccurate, and misleading summaries from third party applications, and falsely attributing those summaries to said third parties?

Really "useful" and "cautious"...

Pirate Bay financier and far-right activist Carl Lundström dies in plane crash

Another advert for 90%+ inheritance tax

See title

Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users

Criminal Offence under subsection 3?

Unauthorised acts with intent to impair, or with recklessness as to impairing, operation of computer, etc.

(1)A person is guilty of an offence if—

(a)he does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer;

(b)at the time when he does the act he knows that it is unauthorised; and

(c)either subsection (2) or subsection (3) below applies.

(2)This subsection applies if the person intends by doing the act—

(a)to impair the operation of any computer;

(b)to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer; or

(c)to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data; or

(d)to enable any of the things mentioned in paragraphs (a) to (c) above to be done.

(3)This subsection applies if the person is reckless as to whether the act will do any of the things mentioned in paragraphs (a) to (d) of subsection (2) above.

(4)The intention referred to in subsection (2) above, or the recklessness referred to in subsection (3) above, need not relate to—

(a)any particular computer;

(b)any particular program or data; or

(c)a program or data of any particular kind.

(5)In this section—

(a)a reference to doing an act includes a reference to causing an act to be done;

(b)“act” includes a series of acts;

(c)a reference to impairing, preventing or hindering something includes a reference to doing so temporarily.

(6)A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable—

(a)on summary conviction in England and Wales, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding the general limit in a magistrates’ court or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or to both;

(b)on summary conviction in Scotland, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or to both;

(c)on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years or to a fine or to both.

Stuff a Pi-hole in your router because your browser is about to betray you

Re: OpenWRT

You should be able to run it as a docker container on OpenWRT if your router's a supported chip architecture and has enough resources. I run OpenWRT on a Raspberry Pi 5 and it's plenty good enough to run both (I only have 80Mbps broadband and not much LAN-LAN traffic so the Gigabit port on the Pi5 split into multiple VLANs is plenty sufficient)

Re: Mashed

Using containers and docker-compose for this kind of thing makes it much, much easier to test upgrades, pin to specific versions of a stack, and roll back upgrades that go awry if needed.

Like you I'm also running nginx on the same box, but am also running Home Assistant, Dump1099, Joplin (with its own postgres), and Bookstack (with its own mariadb). All safe in the knowledge that an update to one is vanishingly unlikely to cause issues with any of the others. And none of them took more than 10-15 minutes to get a stack up and running in the first place.

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

Re: Bodge job

So how did this launch help them progress with the heat shield? Surely the damn thing needs to be intact for re-entry in order to learn anything useful about changes to the heat shield, not scattered into thousands of bits like a very expensive firework display...

Re: Bodge job

Sorry, yes the root root cause was the harmonic response, which caused leaks, the leaks caused overpressure, and the overpressure caused fire and explosion.

So my crude understanding is that they did the rocketeering equivalent of sticking some duct tape over the bits that had leaked to reduce the likelihood of a leak, and put something in place to vent the overpressure to reduce the chance of fire and explosion. Clearly neither worked.

So they need to stop the leaks, and they need to stop it by sorting out the harmonic response, not bodging round the edges.

Bodge job

From what I read, they didn't focus particularly on fixing the root cause (the leaks) but tried to make it such that if the leaks happened again it wouldn't cause an explosion.

That worked guys, well done :slowclap:

This is a vehicle that's intended to carry people, do better. Don't start going down the Tesla route of bodging stuff...

Brits end probe into Microsoft's $13B bankrolling of OpenAI

It's about time...

...that once businesses achieve a certain size in terms of market capitalisation, they shouldn't be allowed to grow any further by acquisition. It's literally in nobody's interest apart from a few greedy shareholders and CxOs.

Ex-SAP CTO walks away with €7.1M payout after scandal

Re: Executive bonuses

100% agree with everything you said, that's exactly how I'd run things if I was in power.

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

Conflict of Interest

Genuinely don't know how any of this is legal, it's totally baffling.

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

I wish...

That Corporate Manglement would realise that you don't _have_ to act like total c*nts to be successful.

And if you find yourself doing something where you think "huh, it would be shitty to be on the receiving end of that" then you can decide to not do it.

Basically, can we just agree to ban narcissistic psychopaths from any kind of position of power please?

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: Here are the copies

Once took a stack of 8 Blu-Rays from the UK to the Middle East on an A320 and a B777. Latency of ~24 hours end to end, effective bandwidth of about 38 Mbps, which is more than what the entire Middle East office had at that time, shared between ~100 employees

Don't want your Kubernetes Windows nodes hijacked? Patch this hole now

People actually run Kubernetes on Windows?!

That sounds like a whole new level of masochism. Weirdos.

Samsung Galaxy S25 is so smart it wears Crocs, allegedly resists quantum decryption

Re: Is there a reason I would change?

I similarly got pissed off with Vodafone (not least the enshittification of their network), decided I didn't need to upgrade my S22 Ultra, and dumped them for 1pMobile who have been great and much better value in terms of airtime plan and flexibility, and better customer service to boot - can highly recommend.

At some point I might buy a new phone outright but I've got no plan to go back to stupidly expensive monthly contracts with the big operators.