Posts by Roland6 13635 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010
It is a shame before announcing this the researchers didn’t do some further work and explore who is using this source code and so also publish a list of vulnerable products.
Ie. Just because it carries a Microsoft, Cisco, etc badge, doesn’t mean the code didn’t come from GNU InetUtils…
>” I don't think Virgin and Branson were relevant to anything.”
Disagree to the extent they managed to whip up the press and public opinion, so anyone on the receiving end would double check their working. This doesn’t diverge from your “conspiracy theory” as part of that review would be to ensure all parties were singing from the same song sheet.
Personally, whilst I miss Concorde, it went out ‘cleanly’ with a bow, rather than a decline into unreliability etc. so has maintained the mystique. Similarly with the Vulcan.
>” why didn't the airlines try to grab the unexpected windfall and leave the idiot to crash and burn? It can't have been through the goodness of their hearts.”
Would not be surprised if BA were concerned that Branson, with his public profile, would have been able to get government backing to bail him out, something (government funding) they obviously were unable to leverage themselves.
I agree it is a heavily caveated ‘enlightened’ and that the Concorde overspend has traumatised probably all subsequent governments.
With respect to military purchases, we should not forget that from the circa mid-1950s to 1970 the UK reduce defense spending from circa 10% to circa 5%, as it tried to balance the books with an increase in civil expenditure. The v bomber project is a good example, where the government came up with a brief and paid three different (UK) companies to deliver to the specification. It is nice that Duxford now has one of each of these aircraft (Vulcan, Victor and Valiant) and can give the whole story and the lessons from hindsight of decades of operational usage, where the key finding was the relatively low tech Vulcan proved to be operationally more flexible and robust, hence why was able to fly for so many years.
However, I agree, I was with Heseltine over Westland.
>”The fact that it's had to be put into tunnels in the Chilterns increased the cost significantly.
”
What “cost” are you referring to?
Remember the original “cost” was a political decision, anyone reading the original report from HS2, would have known it was not a realistic cost, given basically it assumed no problems, minimal compulsory purchase etc etc.
Once you make the decision to tunnel, many other things fall into place: a station under Birmingham airport - like the TGV station at Charlie’s de Gaulle, connection to HS1 at an underground station at Kings Cross (land already purchased and reserved) etc. Okay going beyond Birmingham, things do become a little more complex. Also, like Concorde a decision needs to be made: is this dull-and-boring everyday tried and tested engineering or are we going to be pushing the envelope and making a statement; what the politicians have given us is a bit of mutton dressed as lamb, which is great shame as it could have been so much more.
I suspect (from memory of events), Branson’s very public approach forced all parties to review their decision and hence why so much was released to the public.
I also suspect Airbus in their review, also looked at what a future working with Virgin/new operator might look like - which would almost certainly have made people seriously consider the real implications of extending the service life by circa ten years.
So I would suggest Branson did everyone a favour; the last flight of Concorde really was the last flight, there would be no resurrection.
the trouble is the business case for HS2 rested on two key assumptions, that have been proven to be false:
1. Travel time is dead time. The train operating companies already knew that people worked on trains and were installing WiFi and internet access across their trains in 2006.
2. There would be an ever-increasing need for more capacity. Lockdown proved we didn't need to have high levels of commuting to have a highly productive economy - lockdown had a negligible impact on manufacturing output but did massively reduce overheads ie. commuting.
>but so do long elevated sections
The problem with elevated sections, as demonstrated by HS1 is the noise pollution, which due to government cost cutting (to reduce the overspend) was made worse than it needed to be.
Also as noted the overhead power lines are susceptible to wind either directly being damaged or being moved, making running trains dangerous.
>cancelling it was a stupid decision when the design work and purchase of land had got as far as it had.
It should of been thrown into the long grass in 2010 as it failed all the tests the new coalition government had set regarding government spending priorities following the financial crash...
However, having purchased the land a really stupid thing will be to sell that land, before completing an exportation of the options, one of which is to reduce the line speed to that of HS1, thereby massively reducing the trackbed construction costs and meaning that conventional high-speed rolling stock can be used, allowing for greater interworking and trackbed sharing. As once that path is destroyed, it is going to be a very long time before anyone will want to go through the process of reacquiring land for a railway...
HS2 was all about making New Labour look good and with it for the upcoming election, ie it was all about political vanity. Hence why it was so poorly put together.
There is an excellent BBC podcast “Derailed: The Story of HS2” which skims over the surface of the various problems successive governments have had in delivering HS2.
From various conversations, I am sure the engineering is top notch, it’s just the rest of it that leaves much to be desired…
As for cuttings, agreed they were not necessary, the entire line should have been tunnelled, the costs were too high for politicians, but set against the current level of overspend, there would still be money in the pot.
Agree, whilst it was known Concorde, in the version which went into service, would not repay its development costs(*), hence why the government simple wrote them off. Leaving BA to make it operationally profitable, which they successfully achieved by the late 1980s with only 7 aircraft.
Given ElReg is US-biased these days, it makes sense they would want to downplay Concorde, however, given Richard Speed is UK-based it would be interesting to understand how he arrived at his conclusion.
(*) whilst the numbers are smaller, the cost overrun is of a similar magnitude to HS2; I’ve always maintained we should have designed HS2 properly from the get go, putting it in tunnels so that it would not require landscaping etc. and also protecting it from the (changing) English weather which has caused the railways to suspend services several times this winter.
>” 66 percent said it's improving productivity and efficiency. How that works when only 20 percent report revenue growth is left unanswered.”
Productive and efficiency improvements lead to margin improvement.
Back in the 1980s when Just-in-Time and CIM were all the rage, many simply implemented MRP, followed several years later with MRPII. These margin improvements were so great, there was little point in implementing CIM.
revenue growth is about sales, ie. Customers spending more, which means ad slinging or one form or another and having untapped demand in the market. So I fully get there will be a disconnect between productivity and efficiency improvements and gross revenue.
The issue isn’t email as such, it’s file access. Given the nature of .pst files - a “simple” file-based online database, this would suggest other thick client online database applications such as SQL*Server Express will also fail if using cloud storage.
A question has to be whether the web-based Outlook 365, which by default will use OneDrive also suffers from the problem, just that it’s not visible to users in the same way.
I suspect the valley was originally very white American; its success (1970s & 198-s) sucked in others, initially from Europe and then from other countries, this taking it to where it is today, where it needs to keep sucking in talent from wherever it can get it to sustain its position as the pre-eminent location for IT startup companies.
Cix.co.uk
Interestingly they are probably close to being a pure play email/forums business and so their pricing (£7.50 pcm) which has been maintained over several decades, is probably a good indicator of the actual costs of running a decent email service. Hence suspect Rackspace have decided to make email hosting a cover its costs plus profit rather than being a loss leader and getting cross subsidised.
Others include Mythic Beasts, Andrew’s & Arnold…
If it’s a secondary school, given what I and friends got up to and what my children talked about, the working assumption is don’t assume those who were present for registration are still on site, however, the pupils will generally know if someone has decided to visit the local shops or gone home.
>” electronic locks for the gates”
The schools I went to had a simple three bar fence, that could (and was) hurdled, gates only getting closed (bolt into ground) overnight, and no bars on the large ground floor windows…
Ie. They did not look like prisons…
School obviously served an affluent area if all parents had phones and an adult at home to answer it. The norm where I was, mum and dad went to work, children got themselves to school (older kids responsible for younger siblings).
Don’t remember school ever being closed, unlike recent decades when it was common for my children’s schools to close.
So the days of yore began in 1979 - the year Prestel was launched.
That means some of us remember the time before the days of yore, yet somehow managed to create the PC revolution and the IT world of today.
Agree, however, we do need to be more specific. For example we really need full support for ODF v1.4 (Dec 2025), yet ability to import and export to v1.3 and v1.2 files for compatibility.
Fortunately, Oasis has been quietly working away on a whole suite of Standards, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to arrive at an initial core profile; effectively a massive update to the MAP/TOP/UK GOSIP 3.0 (1998) profile.
Should be possible to have an initial profile within months.
Additional work can define necessary API’s and (XML) interchange formats, to ensure application and platform interoperability.
Continental Europe is much more predisposed to local sourcing than the UK. So I actually, expect much of France and Germany to revert to local sourcing. The UK depending on who is in power, and their willingness to be unpopular, will dilly and dally, wring their hands and after a few incantations of “we have a special relationship”, decide to purchase from the US because it is “cheaper” etc. failing to understand that the reason why there is no UK equivalent to Microsoft et al, is directly attributable to their mindset.
> "Being a carmaker where ‘everything is connected’ has left JLR unable to isolate its plants or functions, forcing a shutdown of most systems"
Translation: the system architects we employed were sh*t at their job and our developers/integrators are lazy
It is possible to design and build highly connected enterprise IT systems with good B2B security. However, it does take discipline and being unpopular with developers who seem to think running everything with root/admin privileges is good practise.
Well given the strategic presentation I saw yesterday, it along with Iceland are key to keeping the Atlantic secure from Russian subs. So following the Trump logic, I expect he will consider it a good deal and will turn a blind eye to Putin re-establishing the geographic extent of the post-WWII USSR.
>” distinguishing themselves as a credible party.”
They would be more credible if they replaced Farage with BoJo…
However, Reform as opposed to UKIP always was intended to be a home for certain fraction of the Conservative Party. In some respect Badenoch would do well to emphasise the more moderate and social conservative principles than try and appear “harder” than Reform.
You mean they have discovered AI couldn’t write the Roadmap and so have had to go back to more traditional analogue(*) report production methods.
It seems “analogue” is a new trend, both my wife and daughter have picked up on it in their various feeds. My wife now has an “analogue bag” which she carries everywhere, it contains her physical objects and off-line reading material ie. Magazines and books and no digital tech.
>” There is no such thing as a "discreet hole in the wall". “
One modern house I owned a few years back had the telephone/cable TV socket on the party wall. The telephone and cable to cable used the shared cavity as their access path, hence these sockets were back-to-back with no brickwork between my lounge and their lounge…
The other places where there were discrete holes was where the first floor joists inserted into the wall and rested on the brickwork. Okay installing a camera/IR remote would still be challenging, but knowing the neighbour has used wallpaper it would have been possible to drill a hole through the plasterboard without breaking the paper.
However, the vast majority of general public “Gamers” still use XBox, PlayStation, Nintendo. I expect the console market is a driver for the new Steam console.
Thus, I would agree the problem for the majority of people isn’t the spec’s but what they actually need it to do. 20 odd years back, you needed a PC to surf the web and receive email. With the rise of large screen and fast smartphones, games consoles and smartTVs that can also serve as multimedia/entertainment servers, streaming services etc. I see little need for most people to have a PC outside of work. I suggest for many the PC is going the same way as VCR’s, Record/Cassette/CD players etc.
Otherwise don’t disagree with your analysis, just that your needs represent a relatively small sector of the market.
> then even ads aren't gonna save ya.
It’s an interesting business model’ AI is claimed to reduce the need for users to search and visit websites and see ad’s, thus massively reduce the number of ad’s served. Which will effectively shrink the Internet ad market …
BTW I found the example ad mock-up interesting, effectively telling me the ad’s still won’t actually be relevant. In the example the context is “ideas for my dinner party”, the ad shown is for a specific ingredient rather than anything that will help with a dinner party: hire a chef and catering team, Hello Fresh/Gusto style “all ingredients in-the-box” self cooking etc.
Seen similar today, looked up a recipe for something I was preparing now, the ad’s for ingredients would have required me to put meal production on hold and wait for a delivery (days later)…
>” The money is in making this generation's technology good and usable.”
Err no, the money is in selling the snake oil dream: in some respects AI and AGI are potentially highly profitable “God” business models: yes the technology may be rubbish today, but tomorrow (next/after) life it will be perfect - but only those who pay the subscription (in this life) will benefit…
Agree about the differences.
The impression I got was that having invested in new AI hardware, the snake oil salesman thought they could run it for 20 years without replacement. I was intimating there will be significant maintenance/replacement costs over those 20 years.
That service contract lock-in does look exceedingly optimistic, given most expect such contracts to run for 7±2 years. Given the costs of cloud, over those timescales doing stuff in-house will be significantly cheaper than “renting”; perhaps Salesforce intend to remodel their contracts along the lines of property leasing agreements, so total lock in and upwards only price revision etc.
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