Posts by simon_c

UK policing minister urges doubling down on face-scanning tech

Re: How to use statistics

I'm fine with the police having these: If and only if everyone involved in decisions about them, from the minister for policing down to the copper operating the system can answer this simple question. (no conferring allowed!).

Your intelligence says you have 4 Just Stop Oil protestors trying to sneak into Wimbledon, and your shiny new scanner with a 99% accuracy rate (both negative and positive) has identified a face in the crown ? What are the chances this person is one of your protestors ?

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

When I started my IT career back in the mid 90s, the old, grizzled network engineer predicted he'd not need to worry about IPv6 as he'd be retured before it was needed.

Now, 25+ years under by belt, I'm wondering if that wil be true for me too.....

Sysadmin’s worst client was … his mother! Until his sister called for help

I wish my mum's IT problems were as simple as that.

At 65 her problems tended to revolve around getting her NAS working with her MAC, and PC at the same time, keeping imap folder in sync, how to have multiple versions of MS office, so she could help different organizations she was part of with different office macros. Database normalization etc. Pffft.

These days (at 70) she's given up on PCs as it's getting too confusing for her to remember how to do things on Windows and Mac at the same time. It's the more "normal" support of "well, $ISP said to reset the router and I did, and now my mac can't see the nas box "

Don't mind if I do, says Nokia, taking a €1.7bn chomp out of Apple

If whoever had bought the Nokia IP from Microsoft user a different name, such as "XYZ holdings," I'm sure many many people would accuse it of being a patent troll. Just because it's a familiar name that might have invented something new a decade or two ago, doesn't mean it's not a patent troll now.

[I'm not commenting on the rightness or wrongness in of software patents]

Openreach asks UK what it thinks about 10 million 'full fibre' connections

Re: Why?

I don't necessarily wants a fully symmetric 50Mbps service, but I'd really like an upload that doesn't start getting large ping times whenever I use half the advertised 3Mbps. Can't wait to "downgrade" back to an openreach FTTC 40/10 services from Virgin's 50/3 one.

Numbers war: How Bayesian vs frequentist statistics influence AI

But, in the example given don't we also have to take into account the effects of those false results ?

A false positive : Some pool innocent gets shoved into the quarantine hospital room/jail cell/pit (depending on the stage of the overall infection) until they are eaten by the other recently turned.

A false negative : soon-to-be zombie killer goes back to their family to consume them at a later date.

How is that figured out when using stats to save the world ?

Tech contractors begin mass UK.gov exodus in wake of HMRC's IR35 income tax clampdown

After reading around the subject, I can totally see why people are leaving. It's about the potential to have an investigation opened for the previous 7 years, rather than the future earnings. Once HMRC said they would not rule that out, it was almost guaranteed.

6 months time, others will be back in as contractors, inside IR35, but with a firewall between pre and post April 5th 2017 earnings.

Naughty sysadmins use dark magic to fix PCs for clueless users

Re: No quite wizadry but.../ Percussive Maintenance

Not apocryphal at all. There was a series of IBM disk drives (back around 1993-4 I think) where some of the internal rubber in the seals degraded. It was fine when the disk was spinning, but if the disk was powered off, the tiny fragments or rubber would land on the platter, and then get stuck in the heads leading to dead disks.

We had a couple of servers where multiple disks in the RAID had failed, and the fix was to drop the disk (sideways, on it's long edge) against the disk from about 3" high, two or three times, before putting it back in the server and see if it span up. Following that, we had the IBM engineer on site for about 3 days swapping the disks out one at a time on the servers (IBM only replaced the disks, not the RAID mounting cage). An exceedingly dull job for him!

Trump's cyber-guru Giuliani runs ancient 'easily hackable website'

Re: Balance of probabilities?

Or more succinctly:

Cockup over conspiracy.

Roll over Beethoven: HPE Synergy compositions oughta get Meg singing for joy

HPE Struggle for relevance ?

I first heard about this technology at SaltConf earlier this year.

My initial thoughts were that it was HPE struggling for relevance in a world where at cloud scale cheap, simple boxes rule, and the hypervisor just routes around failures.

WAN, bam, thank you... oh @£$%. We've gone dead. Drop the burger. RUUUUUN!

And the third moral

And the third moral is have monitoring detect from both devices in an active/passive pair when they think they have switched from active to passive.

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

Re: Just goes to show....

You're actually far better off buying your domain name, and paying a few quid a year to host the DNS and email.