* Posts by vogon00

325 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Nov 2011

Page:

Meta's plan to erase 5% of workforce starts today

vogon00

Meta gulps the cool-aid?

Now, I'm wondering if the Zuck has decided that - due to Meta drinking it's own kool-aid - the increasing internal use of 'AI' justifies a reduction in headcount of 5%.

I'm not a fan of the AI thing, mainly as IMO all it will let us do in the medium to long term is forget how to think for ourselves and pass even more control into the hands of the 'AI Wranglers'.

It's rough on the people about to get RIFed, but probably better for everyone else in the long term as the sooner Meta fucks up by relying too much on it's own and 3rd party AI, the better!

It's only a matter of time before LLMs jump start supply-chain attacks

vogon00

So. What do we do?

"Protection must improve first."

"But one thing LLMs are getting very good at is assisting in social engineering campaigns."

Full disclosure : I am NOT a fan of AI. Here's my two-penneth:-

As for 'protection', there isn't any as the things we need to be 'protected' against stand to turn a profit for someone, somewhere...

Social engineering campaigns can only work where people don't really know one another, Stuff email and social networking - take the time to actually speak and converse with people you work with* so you have knowledge of the *person*, not the machine. That's the best form of authentication - not anonymity, not an email address and not a password, listen to the voice.

Ende.

*Work is not your private life. Separate your professional and private lives, and take extra care to keep in touch with *friends*. Ask me how I know.

We told Post Office about system problems at the highest level, Fujitsu tells Horizon Inquiry

vogon00

Crime and Punishment

I sincerely hope that one leads to the other in this case. I have long suspected that the issues in a system of that complexity (The 'BEDS' referred to) were known of by both parties, but only understood by Fujitsu, with the PO (at all levels!) not understanding what most of the issues meant.

I hope several people from both parties are found guilty of criminal behaviour and get hammered both financially and reputation ally without the benefit of Directors liability insurance.

Some person or group high up seems to have failed in the duty of oversight - probably under pressure from the 'top' - leading to the worker bees being percecuted and in some cases dying as a result.

That said, the ones I really want to swing are the legal professionals who advised the PO to continue with prosecutions despite the facts, or at least the suspicion of problems. Last I heard was that the Solicitor's Regulatory Authority was investigating quite a few of them....I hope these bastards don't get off Scott free!

All in all, this is a sorry tale of professional misconduct throughout the corporate structure.

Ofcom proposes Wi-Fi and cellphones share upper 6GHz band

vogon00

Don't share spectrum with different service types!

"Wi-Fi already uses channel sensing to detect if other nodes are transmitting, but has not been designed to detect mobile signals"

If a Wi-Fi node knows it is operating in an RF band shared by other technologies, it can sense 'competing' RF energy at a level significantly above the local noise floor and avoid that particular bit of spectrum (This is what DFS does, basically), but what it won't do is try to analyse the discovered RF's modulation, decode it and determine the service type that's transmitting it for any specific or fine-grained collision avoidance.

RF is funny stuff. Just because you can't hear anyone else's transmissions, it does NOT mean that you won't interfere with the other user's 'Conversation' if you start squatting on a freq. being used - quite legitamately, and before you got there - by something else.

You only have to look at the different rules/restrictions in place for existing 'Wi-Fi' internationally (Channels, power limits, indoor/ourdoor use etc) to realise how complicated the problem is.

RF Spectrum is always going to be the 'choke' point, as there is more demand for bits/Hz than there is supply of Hz to carry them. If we don't watch out, there will be some completely unworkable and overly optimistic spectrum sharing method invented and introduced that will not work as designed - even when correctly implemented. Deliberate service isolation and guard bands probably remain the best way of ensuring reliabilty.

Any other solution relies on co-ordinated action by many different stakeholders who all have different priorities. That's never gonna happen, especially when money could be earned!

Broadcom loses another big VMware customer: UK fintech cloud Beeks Group, and most of its 20,000 VMs

vogon00

Trading pedigree?

I see that Beeks provide services to fintech.

Cast your mind back to the film 'Trading places'...wasn't one of the bad guys also named Beeks, first name Clarence?

I wonder if art really does imitate life here:-)

Abandoned US Army 'city under the ice' imaged in serendipitous NASA find

vogon00

Re: It seems to be the American way...

Or in this case, don't eat snow that's glowing a lovely 'Cherenkov blue':-)

Pirate programmer walks the plank for role in massive TV streaming operation

vogon00

Re: <shrug>

"The only way to get anything high quality is to pirate it,"

I don't even bother with that. Following an unemployment-induced round of cost reduction, I went without a TV - and the associated mandatory license[1]. I still haven't bothered getting another TV, as I found I could not only exist quite happily without one, and my need for content could be satisfied elsewhere. Without a TV license, you are prohibited from watching any BBC[2] content at all, and ANY 'live' TV at all.

I found that I didn't miss BBC content, and anything 'live' can always be seen later on other platforms.

[1] - In the UK, you are required to buy a licence if your household owns a TV set, on the assumption that you will be consuming BBC content and watching 'live' programs..

[2] - No, it stands for 'British Broadcasting Corporation', you NSFW naughty person.

UK energy watchdog slaps down Capita's £130M smart meter splurge

vogon00

Bit of both..

I suspect the entire smart meter programme started out very well intentioned (Accurate billing for consumers, accurate consumption figures for suppliers/generators for example), and then 'morphed' into something much more complex with a much higher commercial focus (tarrif flexibility, competition, traditional post-pay meters for those in good standing and pre-paid 'topup' meters for the rest and so on).

As an engineering grunt, and knowing* how close to the supply running out we are and how close to grid max. capacity we are, I completely see the idea behind the 'remote disconnect' from the network resilience POV - it's so much easier to restart segments when there is no load, and more or less mandatory during a truly 'black start' of the grid....ever tried to start your car when it is gear (think about it if you're not a 'manual'/'stick-shift' user!). Another thing is that if the frequency deviates from nominal too much, all sorts of things start to go wrong, some of them loud, dangerous and expensive. Fancy replacing a switchyard and/or a bunch of multi-MVA infrastructure transformers 'coz there were operated out of spec for too long? Some of these bits of kit have a replacement lead-time of months, not days.

The major thing I disagree with is that smart meters save the consumer money. The thinking appears to have been that if we show people how much energy they are using (nat. gas or electricity), and what it's costing them in real-time that people will economise...completely forgetting that most end-user domestic consumers do not give two hoots...."I want my big TV and games consoles at all times, and my EV fully charged.. I don't give a fuck if someone else has to miss out so I can use as much as I want.'

To me, smart meters are a well-intentioned academic exercise that has been hijacked for other purposes by many different stakeholders each with their own agenda. It probably started out as a transmission network tooling but - just like the www - is now solely for commercial purposes.

* Not my field, but I am very well read

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to eject hundreds more workers

vogon00

RIF ye not...

..or at least don't axe anyone critical to Voyager operations - including DSN - until those missions get to at least the approaching 50 year durations.

No matter how much it makes financial/business sense, I really think that one of the most amazing technical achievements of the century* should be allowed to become unsustainable due to running out of resources or firing the wrong people...

* still waiting for commercially viable fusion power :-)

Brit telcos to clash in high-speed mmWave spectrum showdown next year

vogon00

mmwave use-case

Last I heard, the expected use-case for mmwave / above 6GHz freqs was for 'fixed link' / wireless broadband. Given the maturity of GHZ mobile radio, I just don't see how it makes sense to use mmwave stuff between a fixed base and mobile hand-held terminals...fixed-to-fixed makes sense, as does fixed-to-temporary-static-site, but putting a mobile hand-held terminal at one end is asking for trouble and will, IMHO, offer a shite user experience.

Unless, of course MNOs roll out mmwave cells very, very densely.....which won't happen due to the nuts level of capex and opex required.

Anybody who thinks fixed-to-mobile handset mmwave is a reliable RAT - given the current tech available - is kidding themselves.

Arecibo telescope might have failed because of weak sockets

vogon00

Re: Zinc Creep - never

"no such thing as Vogons."

I beg to differ....

AlmaLinux shows off its new Kitten

vogon00

Seeing as IBM is involved, shouldn't "Big Purple Hat" read <knobGag>"Big Purple Helmet'</knobGag>?

Openreach reveals latest locations facing the copper chop

vogon00

Openreach postcode checker is actually useful

I just tried the Openreach postcode checker linked to in the article, using some random-but-real postcodes. When selecting the exact address from the resulting drop-down menu, there were a bunch of residential and business addresses as expected.

What was NOT expected was a plethora of other types of address...

For example, an electricity substation, a cellular site, a bridleway etc... looks like an unfiltered list from some address database or other..

After checking the Openreach headquarters postcode of EC3V 0AT, it was nice to find the location and names of some of their internal comms cabinets:-) Go and have a look at the AO Arena in Manchester,. postcode M3 1AR. All sorts of info there if you have an inquiring mind, or if you are up to no good!

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

vogon00

Similar but different...

Someone was trying to get two bits of optically-connected kit talking in the lab...which were right next to each other, connected with a short bit of fibre. No matter what they did, both interfaces stubbornly reported 'loss of signal'.

The laser transmitters we supposedly both 'on', and the fibres were the right way round. I got asked to look into it after a few days of frustration:-)

Optical power meter showed loads of signal at the Rx input....so WTF? 'Being overdriven', thinks I. No optical attenuators available so how to test the 'overdriven' theory?

Solution:grab a biro/pen and tightly wind the fibre round it two or three times....messed with the TIR just enough to reduce the huuuuge input signal to something the laser Rx could resolve...and things sprung into life!

Only mentioning it in case someone finds that particular trick useful....although don't re-use the fibre afterwards!

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

vogon00

Re: In the days before t’interweb…

"There is a sequence I learned"

I have a couple burned into my memory : One is 'RC, CA, CL' on a System-X PU CUC terminal. The other is '6031769' which was the 'cheat code' for Manic Miner on the Sinclair Spectrum. ISTR this was the phone number of the game's author, Matthew Smith. 1st one earned me money, 2nd one gave me fun:-)

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

vogon00

"the torque wrench he was carrying"

Unlikely. One of the other Roberts probably had it, despite the job not requiring building by hand.

Craig Wright admits he isn't the inventor of Bitcoin after High Court judgment in UK

vogon00

Re: Live by the sword, die by the sword.

"Please open your dictionary to 'Loosing'

Understood - Mea culpa. Note to self : 5/10, must try harder...or at least proof-read myself better!

vogon00

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

pay more than £6 million of COPA's costs – something that might be hard to enforce as the ruling notes that the not-Bitcoin creator makes about £160k.

That's the risk he took. 'Winning' or 'Loosing' the case doesn't matter as you will have to pay a proportion (0% - 100%) of your and/or your opponents legal costs - especially as the 'game' is a complex as this one.

Item 199 on page 53 of this says the decision regarding "...whether a prosecution should be commenced against Dr Wright for his wholescale perjury and forgery of documents..." is being left to the British CPS. I for one hope that they do decide to prosecute for the possible offenses (See items 40 and 201), as someone has obviously been taking the piss!

Looking at Dr. Wright's Wikipedia entry, it says his PhD of 2017 was on "The quantification of information systems risk"... which is ironic as he seems to have spectacularly failed to assess the risks/rewards of disseminating the (dis?) information that he has, and of playing the high-stakes game in the first place. Looking at his business pedigree (See Wiki), it looks to me as if he has - as so many people or organizations do - believed his own hyperbole!

Sadly, I'm diabetic these days so I can't even enjoy the popcorn:-)

AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care

vogon00

"Still, with more AI crap being fed out on web publishers we can look forward to AI meltdown as it eats its own excrement."

I totally agree, however during the time it takes AI to poison itself with it's own crap it will still be publishing stuff based on that crap. The trick is to avoid having real live thinking human becoming poisoned by this stuff when they read it. Reading stuff on the internet and then trusting it has always been an iffy proposition...and it's getting worse. I find I have to spend much more time these days looking for sufficient corroboration to reach or exceed my 'accurate','valid' and 'usable' thresholds.

I think we're in serious danger of swapping the current ill-advised and pervasive 'Computer says no' situation for 'Computer tells us what to think'...which can't be good. Another risk is that as the Generative AI world incestuously trains on it's own output, I expect it to develop it's own version of 'group think', where generative AI output starts to all look the same and 'AI' starts to believe it's own words.

Once we start using generative AI to train *ourselves*, we'll start to degrade at least as fast as - and probably faster than - the AI itself. There's a reason for needing genetic diversity IRL, and the same is true when it comes to education - garbage in, garbage out.

Yes, I'm 'old school' in my attitudes to education and training[1], but at least you can ask your teacher, prof or training leader *why* it's done that way or to explain and or discuss the rationale behind a method or action.

[1] References: This, this and this. Don't trust what I tell you - think for yourselves, people!

French internet cables cut in act of sabotage that caused outages across country

vogon00

Re: Transport technologies

"transmission-protecting mechanisms" you can use with a deliberate terrorist attack

If it was SDH, 'Multiplex Section Protection' would have helped.. '1+1 MSP' has a second/redundant pair of fibers between adjacent nodes (via different physical paths!), carrying exactly the same 'bitstream'. The RX at each node can monitor the health of the optical PHY and/or MS etc. and select the 'working' input. This results in a more or less an instant change-over, meaning the body on the circuit switched phone call doesn't even notice (The Multiplex Section stream has moved from one receiver to the other). There's another flavor of MSP named '1-to-N' which does the same thing, but protects any one of 'N' links with a single protection pair.

At least, that's how it used to work...I dunno how much SDH/SONET is still in use these days.. it can't ALL be obsolete yet!

I guess the equivalent in the IP world would be an OSPF interface who's PHY does down or the OSPF dead interval timer expires..either of these cause LSA updates which should trigger the re-routing..

other than perhaps 10KV DC feed in the outer armor

Actually, that's pretty close, at least for the long-distance submarine cables with re-generators installed...have a look at the way power is supplied for these... Sort of has to be high voltage, because...electrical physics:-)

vogon00

Transport technologies

It's worth pointing out that a fiber is only the physical layer. It could be carrying any one of a number of upper-layer protocols (Ethernet-based, ATM or SDH/SONET etc) and not just limited to 'internet' traffic, which may account for the different level of impact on the end-users.

Fiber breaks are not uncommon on land for various reasons (Usually ground-works involving a digger and/or insufficient mapping and human error), and thankfully less common on high-capacity undersea cables. For a while, the most common cause (here in the UK, anyway) was thieves thinking the 'cable' they were stealing contained copper that could be weighed-in/sold for scrap..

I've got some experience in designing-in redundancy within SDH/SONET (Think MSP/MSPRING/SNCP) to consciously plan for the inevitable fiber faults during network build-out, and I guess other technology-specific protection mechanisms are available [1] for the different layers. It helps if you think about this sort of thing ahead of construction [2].

Who knows what (if any) transmission-protecting mechanisms were in use on the severed cables in France....some people will pay for it up-front, and some won't :-)

[1] Anyone know how you protect the individual wavelengths in a DWDM system? If you do, please give me a hint!

[2] The usual 'gotcha' here is that you take the trouble to route physical links over geographically diverse/difference routes in the infrastructure you control, only to find later that all of the protected paths end up in a single building/power zone/underground ducting etc. courtesy of someone more cost-conscious or less diligent than you!

Reddit hopes robots.txt tweak will do the trick in scaring off AI training data scrapers

vogon00

Training data : Garbage in, Garbage out.

This is something I wish model creators would pay attention to : if you train your model on poor quality data, the end result will be poor. Which means the product you're trying to sell will be poor. Which means the decisions taken by the (already gullible?) users of your product will be poor. Which means the people who depend on these decision will have a poor experience.

I'll be honest here and say I am NOT a fan of reddit. Every time I have tried using reddit to solve a problem or learn something, I've found the solution and/or the knowledge I was looking for somewhere else. Reddit is full of speculation and guesses, not facts and knowledge. True, I confine myself to looking at the tech side of things, but I'm sure this extends to all the other subreds. It's also full of opinion rather than fact.

We all have to start learning somewhere, but reddit is NOT the place to train your machine models or your humans...it's full of junk, or at least requires judgment and lots of time to filter out the obvious crap and extract something even vaguely useful.

Training a model on reddit data isn't just a bad idea - it's downright irresponsible!

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

vogon00

Re: "I literally crawled over broken glass for this company."

And all because the 'goatee-beard-and-beret' type was a bit of a Ming-er....

(Props to "Gordon" for the above-and-beyond bit...)

Tesla chair begs investors to bless Musk's billions or face an Elon exodus

vogon00

Re: Wave him off

Given the 'spin' he tries to impart, the best way to get rid of him - to a sensible distance - appears to be this...!

Recycling old copper wires could be worth billions for telcos

vogon00

Re: There could be some 'quick wins'

"unpick it from the industrial-sized spaghetti farm"

Amen to that. The place I used to work at made telecoms switching and transmission stuff, and we had rows and rows of racks (AKA 'Suites') containing the bits and bobs that made up an exchange. All of this was on top of raised flooring, under which the inter-rack/suite electrical/fibre cabling was run. Over time the underfloor space became so congested with redundant cables that the underfloor fire detection system was useless, and in some areas was damaged by the weight of cables casually chucked onto the pile to the point where the fire sensors got crushed. No-one ever decommissioned the cabling when moving stuff, just piled more on top. It got to the point that there was no longer any space even when lifting the floor tiles up one-by-one along the new cable route, so we had to resort to shoving a pipe or solid rod through the underfloor mass with a drawstring attached, and then pull a jacketed bundle of wires/fibres through the hole it made. Hardest part was completing the cable pull before the hole closed up!

I was there long enough to remember the time where there was space available, and you could crawl underfloor towing a bunch of cables behind you. Way more fun that lifting floor tiles, plus you got to scare the bejebers our of people by lifting a tile from underneath and coming up right next to them. At one point, I'd just been involved in locating some 'vital' cabling from years ago (I was the one who installed it) and had to go to a meeting covered in all the underfloor sh1t that had accumulated since installation. All so someone could get 2xE1 service to 'Softswitch Live' :-)

Fun times.

AWS customer faces staggering charges over S3 bucket misfire

vogon00

Re: Let's have an AWS singalong...

"Username checks out"? I'm famous for bad poetry, not bad singing! :-)

vogon00

Let's have an AWS singalong...

There's a hole fault in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza,

There's a hole fault in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole fault.

Then mend it, dear Henry Jeffrey, dear Henry Jeffrey, dear Henry Jeffrey,

Then mend it, dear Henry Jeffrey, dear Henry Jeffrey, mend it.

AWS promotes itself as alternative to its own VMware service

vogon00

"Perhaps because The Register understands the service is unlikely to continue in its present form."

That, or the marketeers have been using AI to write their content and conveniently forgetting to proof-read, or think!

Meta's value plummets as Zuckerberg admits AI needs more time and money

vogon00

Value Adjustments....

.....are a bitch:-)

"Meta's value plummets", eh? Looks like a correction to a more realistic valuation.......although I'm probably wrong as it has some left :-)

'Chemical cat' on the loose in Japanese city

vogon00

Dr. Suess...

...must already be penning a sequel, with only a 1-letter change to the title...

US starts 'emergency' checks on cryptocurrency power use, citing winter power demands

vogon00

@John Robson

That is one of the most lucid and considered replies in a while, and with sensible empirical evidence* actually referenced as well. Thank you very much for bothering.

'when the local grid isn't as strained'.....'but our current domestic usage is really peaky'

I can't help feeling that as the energy mix changes, all we'll do is to move the peaks in time and increase their magnitude - and therefore the point where the grid it strained - it will *always* be strained sometime.

OK, reading that linked doc, I agree the consumption has been dropping YOY - which is probably due to increasing efficiency/lower consumption of residential/domestic appliances and the switch from aged inefficient technology like tungsten filament lamps to comparatively efficient LED. Efficient in opex terms anyway - tungsten filament cost pennies to produce and could be bought retail cheaply. Capex-wise LED costs several £/$ more than filament lamps.

The difference between the power consumption of filament vs. fluorescent vs. LED is well known and the latest and greatest 'LED' is the winner, natch. However, if EVs are adopted/consumed at the rate expected (very fast!), the overall 'delta increase' will be far out-strip the 'delta decline' in consumption shown - which is at the 'macro' level.

My reasoning is based on the following : My commute to work : 4 Miles each way. By boss's commute : 40 miles each way, and his EV is charged at work, along with 1 other user. The charger available is 7.5KW, and they are BOTH plugged in, drawing ~30A for hours on end.

Leaving a 40W TF lamp on for 5Hrs=0.2KWh. Leaving a 4W LED on for 5H=.02KWh. Leaving a 2KW electric storage heater or convector heater on to 5Hrs=10KWh. Leaving an EV on for 5 Hrs=37.5KWh...and 5HRs for a moderately-discharged EV is a conservative figure....yes, these are 'micro' figures, but 'macro' is the sum of 'micro'....

We both know that the consumption curve can be smoothed out with some co-ordination and motivation - but people ('Consumers') are too selfish to do that without regulation and/or enforcement.

Nice riposte, but I remain unconvinced.

* "Lies, damn lies and then statistics". Also, have you noticed that the UK Government's "Office Of National Statistics' title contains the right letters (and in the right order) to spell 'Onanists'?

vogon00

"push up people's bills"

It's not just a US problem. Electricity is in short supply. Even if you disagree with that due to the 'Renewable' green stuff like Solar/Wind coming on stream, you must agree that it's getting harder and harder to deliver the required increasing number of electrons using the 'Grid' - which most people still rely on.

The major problem is here is that the infrastructure has not kept up with the abrupt increase in demand....OK, the HV transmission system we call the Grid may be able to cope with the demand NOW, but as transport moves off fossil fuels onto 'leccy, we'll find out it's the aging HV-to-LV conversion equipment (Substations) and the LV distribution system (Underground/overhead cables and transformers etc.) are going to become the issue. That 'last mile' is a killer, just as it was for POTS and xDSL.

As the ratios of energy types we use becomes more biased towards electricity - and it will due to electric vehicles, heat pumps etc - we'll find that the seriously old LV distribution infrastructure we all use can't cope. Even if we *can* generate enough electricity to satisfy demand, I doubt we'll be able to get it to the point of consumption - you and I - where it's needed. Here in the UK, most LV distribution is underground in the metropolis, with overhead cabling being used in the more rural areas....but it's all very elderly and has a design capacity of way, way less then we think we're going to require.

As we change the ratio towards 'leccy, the 'Grid' and regional suppliers/LV distributors will be forced into upgrading their infrastructure to cope..... for which we will ALL have to pay as they won't do it out of altruism, at least not while there's shareholders to satisfy. In fact, looking at the UK MPAN, (See 'Loss Factor') we can see that we the distribution operators are *already* aware of how much it costs them to deliver our electrons. We get charged for the cost of delivering our consumption over the 'Grid' infrastructure, and IMHO this is why you always have to provide your MPAN when shopping around.

Bitcoin, and indeed *any* 'Proof of work' based cryptocurrency consumes a disproportionately large amount of leccy when you compare it to the 'average citizen' consumption. I don't see why I should be expected to pay more for my electricity usage to 'subsidise' some corporate entitiy's need to fund their increased delivery costs incurred due to someone else's desire to do the very, very electricity-intensive crypto mining malarkey - 'Proof of work' based or otherwise - or desire to charge their very hungry electric vehicle.

If ever there was a use case for 'Pay as you go' (Or 'pay as you consume', if you prefer) - electricity is it.

Here endeth this Vino Rosso induced rant.

Hundreds of workers to space out from NASA's JPL amid budget black hole

vogon00

Re: Bots, not bodies.

"With rare exception, a robot will outperform a human, probably by orders of magnitude."

Care to expand on the reasoning behind that?

If you'd written 'outperform a human at any given specific task' I'd agree with you, however, as you didn't here my take:-

I think you've got that arse-about-face...a robot that will outperform a human at *any* task is the exception case, as the robot must be programmed for said task in the first place. The robot who can *generally* outperform a human has yet to be born/created.

Oh yeah... AI can't do anything in the physical world without assistance, so it don't count.

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

vogon00

Partial understanding is the norm

"You copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE."

I'm with Linus on this one. If there is one thing certain to get me annoyed it's having to clean up after someone who did something complex without understanding what they were fucking with*.

Even leaving aside the history, filesystems - even the comparatively simple 'basic' ones - are hard to understand at times. There is *always* merit in reading/learning about that you are about to start screwing with.

To me, this seems to be happening more and more. People seem to just be happy to learn how something works, but not why it works like that. Asking the 'why' question makes you a better engineer!

*AKA 'I know a little about it, don't have the time to learn anything more, so what I know is fine...it'll be OK I'm sure'.

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

vogon00

Re: Test on the slowest box

As I've said before, I used to be professional tester which was enormous fun :-)

Along comes carrier-grade VOIP, and I managed to add an item of test equipment - the Shunra Storm - to the list of project test equipment. At the time, it was the newest and smartest bit of WAN simulation kit available, and allowed all-too-real simulation of WAN Link speed, insertion of jitter, packet duplication and and packet loss (in one or both directions) and other packet-related skullduggery. Sounds hard, but it was comparatively easy to describe the topology to emulate and the packet effect simulations to apply thanks to the then *very* innovative use of VISO as a front end to desribe the topology and desired packet effects.

I cannot over-estimate the importance and impact that device had....and all in a 2U little box. Beers & props to the developers.

Myself and my colleague were either loved or feared by the devs - loved for finding all sorts of 'retry' bugs with the packet loss tricks, and feared due to the latency tests which exposed one or two gaping holes! After a while, the call agent stopped falling over and started to become more resilient, handling some godawful network conditions without falling down in an irrecoverable heap!

If you worked on the XCD5000 and/or the NN 1460 SBC, then we probably know each other:-) Good times.

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

vogon00

Re: Hot air

I suspect plod is too busy investigating some of the more bullshit laws in the statute books to indulge in any actual real-world policing. I may be doing them an injustice, but it looks to me as if there focus has been elsewhere for a long while now.

He's another suggestion re culpability...the PO's legal team who still both recommended and proceeded with prosecutions despite knowing of the issues with Horizon. Last I heard, the body that polices solicitors (The Solicitors Regulation Authority? Industry body?) was investigation, but I bet none of these fuckers swing either.

Still angry, and not placated at all by the response of one's MP a while back. Still, I had to try:-)

Your data centre UPS could feed power to the smart grid, suggests research

vogon00

Personal follow-up, months later!

"hold 200A fuses and not the more domestic 100A ones"

[1] New EV for one of the guvnors...non-hybrid/full EV vehicle with increased charging power requirements.

[2] Sudden un-solicted loss of one phase, which takes out a good portion of the building

[3] Traced back by yours truly to a blown fuse on the supply side of the meter

[4] Power company turn up to replace the fuse...I inquire about phase balance.

[5] Reply:L1 drawing ~ 5 to 8A. L2 drawing about 7A. L3 (repaired) drawing 70A nominal,>82A peak.

OK, 82A...unbalanced but not disastrous...right up to the point where we learn that the fuses were only 60A.

UK Power Networks couldn't have been more helpful. Supply upgrade requires new fuse carriers in tn the DP/Meter area, and external underground works it seems.

UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday

vogon00

Re: Lychford Road

I can't name names here, but I can tell you that there are at least two utilitiy companies switching to/introducing metering over LoRA. There are a couple of networks building out infrastructure in targeted areas to accommodate this. It's a pretty good technology fit for metering, which is generally low bandwidth (comparatively tiny PDUs/packets of just a few bytes), sent very infrequently. LoRA is ideal for that sort of 'low rate telemetry' stuff. Considering the RF power used, the freqs used and the link budget available, the achievable ranges are ... Very impressive!

vogon00

Re: Going to be awkward

The difference in 'nG' is largely due to the changes/improvements in the RF side of things which allow you to squeeze more 'bits' into any given amount of spectrum/bandwidth. The more 'bits/Hz' you get, the faster things can go.

Improvements in RF transceiver technology have largely driven this, as they enable the use of more complex modulation schemes that carry more bits/Hz than before, whilst increasing the resistance to RF effects like multipath fading etc. If you fancy a headache, go read up on OFDM and QAM.

The reason for going ever upwards in frequency is that the higher you go, the more spectrum bandwidth - and therefore bits/Hz - is available. However, higher freqs run out of puff faster (AKA propogate worse) than lower ones, which is why you need a higher number of cells to give useable RF performance to a given geographical area, even with sectorised antennas and the really funky beam steering going on. Don't forget this works two ways - handset to cell and cell to handset. This all adds up to more capex for the operators, which is why...

We lost some terrestrial TV spectrum a while back so the operators could have access to more (comparatively) low freq/longer range spectrum to play with. 2G and 3G are elderly now and inhabit the lower parts of the spectrum available for mobile/cellular services....and are probably on the chopping block so that their valuable spectrum can be (re-)used for the more spectrally efficient and resilient newer 'G'enerations.

RF spectrum is in short supply and already congested. If you want to know how awkward this can get - in the UK at least - go have a look at the Ofcom spectrum interactive map. You've got to love this RF stuff. It's another example of a very analogue lower layer carrying the Digital World on it's back. Never doubt that analogue rules the roost!

Apple's quest for modem independence from Qualcomm is going nowhere fast

vogon00

@Groo:Spot on.

If you look at things in block diagram form, it does indeed look simple. It's not until you start monkeying around with RF at the necessary frequencies, bits/Hz, modulations, levels of miniaturisation and so on do you realise the scale of the mountain you are trying to climb. It's a very complicated thing to try, and IMHO requires a more analogue skill-set than digital. Those skills are hard to find.

And they haven't even got to arguably the most challenging and important part - the antenna array. LTE is well understood and mature now, but 5G-SA involves a new set of rules for the sub-6GHz bands, especially keeping the power consumption within sane limits.

"simply underestimated the complexity of the task to design its own modem? They absolutely have...

Bad eIDAS: Europe ready to intercept, spy on your encrypted HTTPS connections

vogon00

I do 'trust the faceless EU muppets to lick a window',

I do not trust the faceless EU muppets to know when to stop !.

Shouldn't be too much of a problem, as it'd be billed as a cost reduction to the window cleaning bill, and in any case their tongues are busy elsewhere!

Microsoft says VBScript will be ripped from Windows in future release

vogon00

Re: small number of people who have inherited some ancient scripts

Or any company whose product makes extensive use of the scripting engine....as mine does. It's removal has obviously been coming for a while - and is probably long overdue - however it's pending disappearance is.....unwelcome news for me and mine.That said didn't MS say cmd.exe was no longer maintained a while back? It is still there and working.

A lot of the day-to-day task automation we use in our SMB depends on a library (or 'toolbox' if you want) of VBScript procedures which gets referred to as 'The Engine', as it's this that drives most of the common tasks, especially those executed frequently.

The benefit of VBS is that it runs on any machine in our workplace, and is easily understandable by people with different skill levels, the latter being good as it's served as a springboard for noobs to stop being scared of 'coding' and get interested. One of our best devs started out this way.

Looks like VBS is now the 'old fossil fuel' and PS is the 'new electric'. Here's hoping VBA is next on the block:-)

Can't wait for more concrete information on the actual sunset date, as this will hopefully provide an acceptable justification to start doing things a more sustainable way.

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

vogon00

Re: poor taste

I'm just glad he picked some Disco (pretty poor) as opposed to my first thought, which was a particular sketch by 'Derek and Clive' (AKA Peter Cook and Dudley Moore).

My first thought was (NSFW) this, and the second (Very NSFW) was this.

At one point, I was involved in the dev of something known as a 'Subscriber Data and Telephony Adapter', which was supposed to 'drop' both internet and voice into customer premises via a microwave-type PTP radio link. I had come up with an exchange simulator to test various call-flow scenarios and options. The Devil on my shoulder said "Hmmmm...unplug target's desk phone from floor jack, connect to the SDTA instead......program simulator to play a black-humor voice announcement (Redundancies were happening) and disconnect when any digit is dialled..."

Backfired a bit as it wasn't received well (odd, he'd do that to other people) and I had to take the morning off for safety...and eat a huuggee slice of humble pie in the afternoon to avoid HR involvement.. (Actors:Keith, Neil and myself)

Scientists suggest possible solution to space-induced bone loss

vogon00

Damn you, sir!* You've just sentenced me to a weekend with Harry Harrison and Slippery Jim.

*Actually, that's a 'Thank you':-)

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

vogon00

Re: don't forget

"Abhorrent mess, bring back the engineers."

Just that[1].

A couple of years ago, I was asked to 'integrate' a bit of 24VDC industrial kit. No suitable bench supply was available (All in use), so I convinced the boss to buy one for the job - justifying it as 'Needed immediately' and 'Customer/Project funded', plus it would be useful later on, as our own products were evolving in that direction.

I specced up a reasonable bench PSU (0-50V, I forget how many amps), and found something sort-of-reputable online for what I felt was a reasonable amount of money - after doing the 'is that too much' risk-vs-reward due diligence beforehand, including some justification text, exact model number and vendor. ISTR it came to somewhere around GBP250.

The next day, a PSU arrived. Not *THE* PSU, just 'A' PSU, which was the cheapest piece of crap available on flea-bay. 4mm binding posts that wouldn't accept any of the 4mm 'Banana' plugs in the lab, one segment of the LED display stubbornly remaining unlit, and the V and I pots wobbling all over the place...not to mention an *audiable* inductor.. Definitely sourced from flea-bay, as that's what the invoice/receipt inside the (damp) box said, and the receipted price was GBP60. Being curious, I put the output on a 'scope and was shocked at the shitty noise present (And I've seen loads of 'iffy' PSU outputs before). It seems my purchase request got 'edited' by manglement:-) I bitched, got told to make do.

48 hrs later (mainly PSU drying time), I had things working and went to get a coffee. I came back into the lab and my colleague said they turned the bench off due to smoke coming from what I was working on. It turns out that that the shitty PSU lost output voltage control, and shoved 60VDC at something nominally 24VDC and with an abs-max of 40V, thus killing it. This 'something' cost EU720.

Told the Boss (The editor!) and got the 'What did you do to it?' question. My response was considered, but that's the closet I've ever come to using verbal or physical violence on a colleague! I still can't forget that one.

You can have it Quick, Cheap or Quality......pick any two.

[1] Not always the answer. Some left-handed design engineer (No, not me!) designed a test rig so that it was nigh on impossible for a right-hander to avoid setting an invalid and destructive switch combination...the bill for that one was about 6K in the early nineties.

MOXIE microwaved Mars air into oxygen, but now it's time for a breather

vogon00

Chemisty is not my strong suit....

...but after dredging up something hammered into my thick grey matter by the excellent Dr. Mike Bee (At THS), something doesn't read quite right to me...

OK, Carbon Dioxide is CO2, and the article says "an electrochemical process in which one oxygen atom is extracted from each carbon dioxide molecule" is used (My emphasis).

If I understand things correctly :-

[a] After 'cracking' the CO2, that leaves you with a molecule of CO and one atom of oxygen, AKA 'Elemental Oxygen'.

[b] What we want is good old O2, meaning a molecule of Oxygen rather than just a single atom of the stuff.

Now given that "NASA noted that the most important use of oxygen", doesn't that suggest there has to be a process for combining the single atoms of Oxygen extracted into actually-useful O2 molecules that we want ( And presumably *NOT* Ozone/ Trioxygen / O3 or tetraoxygen / O4 )?

Why not 'Crack' out and discard the C/Carbon leaving the O2...or have I missed something? Chemists, please educate me:-)

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

vogon00

Re: Resiliency – we've heard of it

Input validation 'with extreme paranoia' is mandatory for me I'm afraid - for just this sort of reason.

Just had to hook up our invoicing system with a carrier's JSON API ... and had to go through a suite of compliance testing with them on the test system before being signed off and getting the API key for 'prod'.

If I can do it, why can't NATS?

Linux lover consumed a quarter of the network

vogon00

Optimised Engineering

If it's the place I'm thinking of, having truly sucky bandwidth has resulted in some interesting System Design work, centering on both availability of power and bandwidth.

I wish someone would publish the detailed info as lesson to the rest of us. I wish I could, but it's not my place to do so, and I'm a little too far 'outside' for my version to be accurate.:-)

Oracle's revised Java licensing terms 2-5x more expensive for most orgs

vogon00

Oracle's Q&A...

Having read the new Ts&Cs at the link referenced above, I suggest one small update to completely clarify the whole thing, and more accurately describe the likely (As opposed to the published) behaviour:-

Q:Where do I send feedback and/or questions for the Java SE Universal Subscription?

A:If you are a customer, use My Oracle Support. If you are not a customer and have technical feedback related to Java SE, please visit https://java.com/report. For all other inquiries related to sales, support, product and/or licensing, please contact us at https://www.oracle.com/corporate/contact/global.html https://www.oracle.com/dev/null or https://www.oracle.com/endless-que/ainuo *

|

|

|

Q:What if I’m an ISV, or embed Java in hardware for redistribution, and want to include Java SE in my products?

A:Please consult your local funny-farm, who will assist you with the lobotomy you so obviously require.

FTFY.

* Should be FIFO, but more likely Anything In, Nothing Useful Out.

Brit broadband subscribers caught between crappy connections and price hikes

vogon00

Re: VOIP vs POTS

I spent a lot of my career with all sorts of different parts of System-X over the years, from the 'edge' at the concentrator / DSSS that your 2W line terminates at, all the way to the processor at the 'middle' (Both the 3.5MWord and 28MWord versions), with a few stops at DSS on the way. My initial involvement was repair of faulty slide-in-units to component level (Anyone else remember ED0618 and PSC-South), then into 'System Proving' (QA/Testing) of every facet of the thing....hardware, software, you name it, we tested it :-) I dunno about the others (Under the guidance of DickMon), but I had real fun and learnt an absolute shit-tonne of stuff which still stands me in good stead today...I was taught my hardware, firmware, software, 'testing' and systems engineering by my peers and a bunch of shit-hot developers of the same - no degree necessary :-) Some of the people I knocked around with were seriously smart [I am merely very smart :-].

The Proving teams later morphed into the 'core' of the integration function for a whole load of emerging technology - SDH, Kilostream (Old by then) and the management thereof. VOIP and DSL came along and we had a thoroughly fun and challenging time getting to grips with the new-fangled packetised speech and signalling protocols. In many cases, it was us 'Integrator' types who came up with test tools and/or simulations leading to *us* developing the fix rather than the devs.

I had the most fun in the whacky world of System Design, which is where I finished when E/// closed the site at Ansty Park in Coventry. By this time System-X was - and still is - cared for by Telent.

I can confirm that it was indeed "engineered" to very high standards, which arose because the people involved were professional and gave a toss about their product. I cannot over-emphasize the professionalism of the engineering teams involved, the attention to detail and drive to do a good job. Our definition of a good job was usually doing something that Joe Public never even noticed happening.

Page: