Posts by BanburyBill

Abstract, theoretical computing qualifications are turning teens off

Re: Doing the impossible

Ah, but do you remember the old ICT A-level syllabus? Problem solved by doing all the documents in a mind-numbing once-through waterfall - stopping at implementation - and where using a programming language (apart from Excel) could result in you losing marks. At least you actually get to touch a computer these days. And we are talking, er, A-Level Computer Science here. Not A-Level Hyping Gen AI.

This sounds suspiciously like a purveyor of courses - is the BCS still largely a certification business? - demanding the syllabus include New Shiny! That coincidentally fits their offerings.

Britannia should rule the (cyber) waves, minister tells Singapore event in bid to drum up Commonwealth support

Re: World beating

As the Sydney Morning Herald said at the time: "We're laughing, Mr Johnson, but not with you."

Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42

Re: That Robot ...

You RC. Paul Neil Milne Johnson had to be changed to Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings for exactly that reason. And yes, the real Mr Johnson did write poetry...

Brewing in spaaaaace: SpaceX sends a malting kit to the International Space Station

Re: Prelude to Mars

The Budvar brewery is in České Budějovice (the German name for the town was Budweis), not Prague, and is totally worth a trip. They're still lagering everything the produce properly, watching the bottling plant is, as usual, a joy, and there's even a railway depot onsite - much malt arrives by train - so you can get a little Czech trainspotting in as well.

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

Re: Good news...

If you can go to Woomera, go anyway. When I went, about a decade ago, there was all kinds of interesting kit lying around the town park. Gloster Meteor, for one.

DoH! Secure DNS doesn't make us a villain, Mozilla tells UK broadband providers

Re: as to bypass UK filtering obligations

I've talked to network ops who don't give a toss about your personal data, but have malware interdiction on their minds. Spotting then blocking malware by perturbing the DNS names the malware uses is, they say, common practice, easy and cheap. Do away with it overnight, and watch the malware volume on their networks explode. They fear that for this, and regulatory reasons, they will now be forced towards deep inspection/MiMing your traffic, having to spend a truckload of money on the kit to do that, and end up in a world with less overall privacy as a result.

Also, given Mozilla's direction has been to redirecting your DNS to CloudFlare without even an opt-in, only an opt-out which might be designed for ensure the tech naive will click without understanding it? That's good for everyone's privacy? Really?

RIP Dyn Dynamic DNS :'( Oracle to end Dyn-asty by axing freshly gobbled services, shoving customers into its cloud

Re: Expiry Date Never

Yep. I was one of the early Dyn donators back in the day, and got one of those emails. Now, you may choose to interpret that chunk of corp-speak as meaning your service will continue. OTOH, if you go over to https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/dyn/technologies/ecommerce-customer-faq.html, you will find:

Q: I was an early free Dyn user and donator and had historically received no-cost services for life. Why do I have to pay?

A: We truly appreciate your support throughout the years. While we are discontinuing the availability of services received at no-cost, you may be surprised by how affordable the DNS service is within OCI along with outstanding capabilities with this service. If you are interested in moving to a new provider, here is an article on the 10 best free DNS services to help you choose: https://www.keycdn.com/blog/best-free-dnshosting-providers

Now, this is Oracle. Given a choice between a vague message that might mean nothing will change, or something more concrete indicating that you will now have to pay (knowing Oracle, through the nose) to use their 'outstanding' (which, translating Oracle-speak, probably means 'awful') service, I know which I'm believing.

It's all in the wrist: Your fitness tracker could be as much about data warfare as your welfare

Re: OCD = Omnivorous Corporations' Data

In my case, it helps ensure I train in the planned heart rate zone and clearly shows performance improvements (or reverse). Definitely makes my training more effective.

Low-power chips are secret sauce behind long-life wearables

Because if you have AF (which is totally non-fatal), the docs are interested in what the ECG looks like whenever anything changes. I have occasional paroxysmal AF, and am just off to Google this kit...

A few reasons why cops didn't immediately shoot down London Gatwick airport drone menace

An urban myth, eh? Presumably the picture is a fake? At least sixteen V-1s were destroyed this way, says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb#Interceptors. And I've talked to a bloke who, as a youngster, saw it done...

If you have inner peace, it's probably 'cos your broadband works: Zen Internet least whinged-about Brit ISP – survey

Re: Virgin works like a charm

What He Says. Put the Virgin 'router' straight into modem mode, connect to OpenWrt router, check line quality, fit (or remove) attenuators as required, chose Google/Quad9/Quad1 or any other public resolver for your DNS, and you'll be right.

That's my setup. I have a lot of folk in my area whinging over their VM connection on FB, and I've been rock stable for months, modulo one few hour outage caused (I think) by them rolling my DHCP lease.

Never mind Brexit. UK must fling more £billions at nuke subs, say MPs

Military expenditure seems a bit of a slippery number. SIPRI has France: $57.8bn, UK: $47.2bn, Germany: $44.3bn, Italy $29.2bn. So, is the UK is the military giant that dwarfs the rest of the EU? And as Brexit tanks the pound and the rest of the economy into the ground, we'll continue to go backwards militarily. Except in our imaginations. Cue yet more WWII docos.

Good news, bad news, weird news – it's the week in networking

Re: Oh, great: civil aviation wants to route messages over the Internet Protocol

Even worse, the end-to-end network that leads from ATC centre to VHF uplink to aircraft has no end to end error detection. Individual links, yes, but no way to spot corruption in the routers. I'm glad to see the IETF process being used here; less likely that that sort of networking 101 error will get through.

IPv6: It's only NAT-ural that network nerds are dragging their feet...

Re: Obvious need for..

So, old routers need to handle particular IPv4 packets in a special way. So you need to update them. And how exactly does the catchall system magically deliver packets half your network doesn't recognise?

Re: Obvious need for..

OK, so explain to me. In detail. How do you increase the size of an IPv4 address *without* changing IPv4 packet structure in a way that will require updating the software (and very possibly hardware) on every router on the planet? Hint: extending the header, or changing field usage therein fails that test.

The designers of IPv6 weren't (and aren't) idiots, and they weren't (as often suggested) detached academics either, unless you think the likes of Cisco, Google, Nokia and Ericsson are detached academe.

Peace pays dividend for OpenWRT as 'baseline' release lands on servers

IPv6? Hang fire for now...

OpenWRT is Very Excellent. But this is a .0, and yes, 18.06.0 has fallen foul of a kernel bug on some platforms - https://bugs.openwrt.org/index.php?do=details&task_id=1541. For me this is screwing up IPv6 between wired and wireless hosts in my network. I'm an ar71xx, so on 4.9.111. Many other targets are on 4.14.52, and so are unaffected.

Heathrow's air traffic radio set for shiny digital upgrade from Northrop

Re: intelligible ATC

ICAO Phraseology (which is the formulaic construction) does help, but still leaves space for misunderstanding especially when accents are involved. But it isn't used in the US. An ATC controller trainer once advised me that one should prefer flying to left pond with native English-speaking flight crew for that reason.

ATC digital messages are CPDLC, not ACARS.

Logicalis lands mega air traffic computer deal. Yes, that Logicalis

One hopes the Grate Branes of the Brixiteers will be able to distinguish between the EU and EuroControl. The latter is larger, and predates the former.

Birds are pecking apart Australia's national broadband network

Re: So NBNCo ...

Plus ca change. In the early days of the Overland Telegraph to Darwin (~1870), they kept getting line breaks because the local Aboriginal people found that the ceramic insulators made excellent sharp edges when broken, so climbed the poles and made off with them. Chief Engineer Charles Todd (the town of Alice is named after his wife) deflected this by ordering old broken insulators be left scattered around the poles after construction and maintenance.

Cabinet Office minister Gummer loses seat as Tory gamble backfires

Vanilla vanilla? See the Australian Federal Parliament?

Linux, not Microsoft, the real winner of Windows Server on ARM

Re: What?

Microsofties and their shills do have some really weird ideas. God knows where they get 'em. I've been using Linux since '92 and I don't think I've ever recompiled user-space software on Linux because of a kernel update.

Google: There are three certainties in life – death, taxes and IPv6

QUIC is already fully open and will be turned into an RFC when iteration slows down. Meanwhile Google are working with IETF on it. Judging by the session on QUIC at the last IETF at which I lurked at the back, the IETF have no problems with the openness.

Brexit must not break the cloud, Japan tells UK and EU

Re: Political implications..?

Bloody investors. How dare they worry about the future value of their investment?

Vodafone: Dear customers. We're sorry we killed your Demon

Yes, CIX

Conference tenner-a-month, IIRC. Run, in those days, by the Clueful.

Boozing is unsafe at ‘any level’, thunders chief UK.gov quack

Calling Ben Goldacre

Some grist here for the Goldacre mill, methinks.

I had some green beer once in Chicago on St Paddys's day. If anything, green food colouring made the (non-craft) beer slightly more interesting.