Posts by RancidRodent 124 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2018
I was part of a team who looked into the NI number as a basis of an ID card scheme in the 90s - the database is so dirty it didn't even make the second of eight verification filters! Millions of NI numbers are in use by more than 5 people – millions of NI numbers of dead people are in use – millions of NI numbers that don’t exist are in use. The government and the rich globalist elite don’t care – they get a slice of the financial action while asset prices are raised and wages held down – all good news for the rich and powerful - a rather large British supermarket estimated the UK population to be 80 million+ over ten years ago (another project I was involved in.) Have nothing and be happy (or else) – it’s coming.
There is no link between any government policy whether that be lockdowns and lack of - face-nappy wearing or anything else and the number of cases or deaths. The only meaningful thing the government could have done is ban all travel from China the millisecond the story broke (which I told anyone who would listen back then) but no - while we were under illegal house arrest the flights kept coming - it's almost as if it was planned.
If this is a pandemic - why was 2020 only the UK's 65th most deadly year in the last 70 - despite a record population? How can that be true during a deadly pandemic? Sure, covid exists - it kills people who are already ready to meet their maker - a bit like flu - but unlike flu it thankfully spares children and babies. This is why there are no excess deaths - all covid did was shift the death a few weeks or months- and we've utterly destroyed our children's' future hiding from it...
The census is a good example of scope creep - even though the census can only legally demand name, address and occupation - how many “good citizens” diligently filled in every field? I think inside leg was the only item missing. The only time you are genuinely free is when those who rule you know nothing about you. State-sanctioned discrimination is very difficult without the data.
It stuns me why ANYONE would be gullible enough to download the track and trace app – you’ve just given the government a tool to hold you, a supposed free citizen, under house arrest - just for the "crime" of being in the same building (or traffic jam) as some other healthy person who has failed a flawed PCR test. Why would you do that to yourself? Are you mad? Particularly if you or your family rely on you being able to earn a living beyond your front door. It really is a form of Stockholm Syndrome.
I would even question "necessary" - what the government thinks is necessary and reality are quite different. Take the census - even though the census can only legally demand name, address and occupation - how many “good citizens” diligently filled in every field? I think inside leg was the only requested data item missing. The only time you are genuinely free is when those who rule you know nothing about you. State-sanctioned discrimination is very difficult without the data – stop providing the government the tools to own you. It's the same when you commit any breach of regulation such as speeding - you will get a form with reams of fields for you to provide financial information in relationship with payment of the fine - in such circumstances I send a postal order and fill out every field with "none of your bloody business" - they've never refused payment or demanded a resending of data because they know and I know they are fishing for data they have no right to hold. Sadly youngsters have no idea how valuable data is – clicking “accept” to whatever T&C the pointless, useless or mildly convenient app is they’ve just downloaded - giving away valuable data is just a step they go through for their burst of “me too” endorphin.
It stuns me why ANYONE would be gullible enough to download the track and trace app – you’ve just given the government a tool to hold you, a supposed free citizen, under house arrest - just for the "crime" of being in the same building (or traffic jam) as some other healthy person who has failed a flawed PCR test. Why would you do that to yourself? Are you mad? Particularly if you or your family rely on you being able to earn a living beyond your front door.
What does it matter? Because it is THE LAW that data collected is used for its intended purpose(s). Of course these checks and balances are always added to get the idea across the line - once across the line those lines are blurred and the original protections abused or ignored. When we (UK) gave up the death-penalty we were assured life would mean life - now a life is worth as little as three years. When we were disarmed it was to prevent gun crime - which has never been worse than it is now - 20+ years after it was made illegal for someone to own a gun. So yes, the little inconvenient small-print DOES matter - even if the abuse is seemingly used for good.
Exchanging liberty for (perceived) safety is an inevitable disastrous one-way ratchet ending in tyranny.
Orwell was a Socialist - but he understood how humans always turn any seemingly good idea into tyranny because the power-hungry always seek power - the worst people to hold it, hold it – ordinary people DO just follow orders – even if the orders are destructive personally or to their group because they cannot bring themselves to believe their “leaders” mean them harm and they are always told they are doing whatever they are doing for the good of the Children. Resist – take off your face-nappies – put down your smartphones – be human again.
The technology available today is far beyond anything I’ve ever read in any historic dystopian novel. Imagine a scenario where an "enemy of the state" (someone who thinks for themselves) can be tracked and labelled automatically from the day-to-day use of their smartphone using AI, we already have micro-drones capable of facial recognition and carrying a few grams of shaped charge - and those in receipt of our data will know with reasonable accuracy where this phone is at any point in time.
You could release a swarm of these drones and take out a whole army of thought-criminals, say at a lockdown protest - in a packed,mixed crowd with no collateral damage – and there’s nobody holding a gun to be held to account or to refuse to fire on an innocent crowd, no direct path back to anybody in power – the operation could even be profiled, conceived and launched using AI – the powers-that-be could call it a terror attack and the millions spent labelling these people as domestic terrorist, anti-vaxxers or some other identity-politics based enemy-within will be well spent as the virtue-signalling sheeple shrug off the thousands killed as the cost of “progress”. This is how valuable our data is - and why this nonsense has to be stopped now – however the mere threat of cancelling family holidays for non-compliance will ensure a huge uptake – and the rest (as they would once say) – is history – except it will be edited to match the narrative in real time – another facet of modern technology the novel writers couldn’t even conceive. There are dark times ahead - don't comply.
"For your children", "for your own health" - to "keep you safe" or any variation on this theme are the usual utterances of any would-be tyrant(s) justifying the restriction of your liberties. This app will be used to create a two tier society (restrict travel an/or access to public buildings due to non-compliance) so as a tinfoil-hat nut-job your civil liberties will be so restricted, many will be forced to adopt it for an easy life or though peer pressure from loved ones (family holidays) – those who stand with freedom will end up single, on the dole and will be labelled as domestic terrorists for kicking up a fuss. The app will quickly grow into a fully-fledged surveillance/social credit system – just like in China. Is that what you really want? The great reset is real folks – do not comply. Freedom!
IBM failed to adapt – now we have this thing called “cloud” where two big companies have enormous computers running your stuff remotely on virtual machines – hmmm – what did we used to call those? Oh yes – mainframes. The IBM mainframe has simply been replaced with infinitely less efficient and less reliable MS and Google mainframes.
You will no longer be able to create a genuinely secure app - Google are just following Apple where not only do they hold the keys - they decide which apps are allowed based on the political narrative. The banning of the installation of Android apps offline will be next so apps cannot be shared once they’ve been put on the naughty step.
The internet was originally sold as the people’s platform to access to the world free of national political boundaries – now it’s the primary tool that will be used to trap, tag, track and control us by an unelected global political elite and their bought-up establishment puppets.
There's only so much the sheeple can stockpile, when every available space is full in their homes the shops will be emptier for the rest of us! This kind of activity really screws with supply chain modelling though, there will be a lull in sales when the stockpilers stop buying non-perishables - so what quantities should Morrisons, Tescos etc order in 6 weeks time? It will play havoc given that most supermarkets have little to no stockroom space these days and order on a just-in-time basis.
The US won't admit to flying "foreign" aircraft easily - I also expect they were contracted to keep schtum if they intended to fly them for (UK) political reasons as well as their usual relutance to fly non-US produced military aircraft. Either way the GR9s were as good as new aircraft.
"Unlikely, they were stripped for parts and sent to the Boneyard. There were too many differences between the US and UK versions to make operating them practical fro the USMC."
True for the GR7s, however, the Americans were so shocked at the excellent condition of the recently refurbed GR9s they DID put them into service after fitting US electronics packages. Remember, Harrier is not a fly-by-computer plane so pilot training isn't really an issue - if you can fly a Harrier you can fly any Harrier. We spent billions refreshing FA2 and the GRns, then the idiot Labour party retired Sea Harrier (FA2) - left without her fighter escort, there was no point keeping the GR7 and GR9 as they could not be flown in contested airspace - and we had other ground attack options anyway. What we should have done is copied the US and spent the recent refurb money combining GR9/FA2 into a single type. Unlike the US we didn't have any other sea-borne fighters, so flying the ground attack variant of Harrier on its own was a pointless waste of money. The Tories got the blame for scrapping Harrier - but Labour made them pointless by retiring Sea Harrier.
"How do these magic hypersonic missiles turn corners? Otherwise they'll struggle to hit anything but sea...
Modern surface to air missiles have been successfully used to shoot hypersonic warheads from ballistic missiles - as well as being designed to deal with anti-ship missiles. Although that's not really been put to the test in real life."
Hypersonic missiles are generally ballistic missiles which will be programmed in their downward trajectory to already be pointing towards the target, from then they will only require gentle steering which can be achieved by disrupting the airflow around the missile, the simplest way is to fire compressed air at various points from the missile body - but there are other methods.
So you think that steering one of these things is hard? Think how hard it is to detect something moving so fast, once you have actually detected it (it has moved miles within a single sweep of your search RADAR) you then only have a few seconds to find it in the beam of a tracking RADAR, arm your defence system, get a missile actually launched against gravity and then somehow get it in the same airspace of the object doing over seven thousand five hundred miles per hour. By the time your air defence missile has launched and actually got into the steering stage post takeoff - you're too late - and even if you do, by some miracle, hit it (you won't), the kinetic energy left in the bit and bobs you just hit will more than likely still hit what it was aiming at causing substantial damage. The only hope of hypersonic missile interception is laser based - and we're a long way from generating the sort of energy required to stop a missile hardened enough to survive mach 10 at range.
So no, we haven't got any anti-missile system capable of hitting a hypersonic missle in the real world. If anyone has managed to hit one it was a carefully constructed "test" with known timings etc. - ie the interception was carefully pre-calculated to the last detail.
Crickey, the US couldn't even intercept a subsonic Iraq Silkworm heading for USS Missouri that they saw coming in good time! Luckily for them an ancient Type 42 (HMS Gloucester) was part of the escort - engaging the lumbering 1st gen sea-skimmer with her Sea Dart while USS Jarret's CIWS "goalkeeper" engaged Missouri's chaff instead of the target!
"When you say labour, you're presumably referring to the Blair govt, in which case you may as well say tory"
They left the economy the in the typical post-Labour state - a burned-out-husk - looked like Labour - smelt like Labour. They doubled spending on the NHS but managed to lose 33,000 beds. They doubled spending on "education" (indoctrination) but 1 in 5 school leavers are still functionally illiterate. They unleashed an immigration tsunami on the country and then blamed "austerity" for everything when the real issue was the predictable unfunded subsequent population explosion.
But they did do Labour proud in one way - putting housing back in the hands of the rich meant workings class people were once again trapped in poverty welded to the teat of the state with no means of escape - how very Labour - ensuring a generation of supporters fooled by their politics of envy rather than giving them a genuine way out. As as certain famous hard-left Labour MP once said "Bloody grammar schools - they turn perfectly good Labour stock into Tories". That's all you are to them - stock. Stalin had a more accurate term "useful idiots".
"*sigh* - why can/'t you just say it's a really cool ship of the line, and it's making UK look good?"
Because we've had to run the surface fleet down to the point we can't escort one carrier effectively - let alone two in order to pay for them. Complete waste of time - but then the whole QE class + F35B fiasco was devised under Labour, so what do you expect?
Indeed, in order to make the rich people even richer, to drive down the production cost of consumer goods we have given our technological secrets to the rest of the world - particularly China.
China has thousands of hypersonic anti-ship missiles - and they are relatively cheaply available to anyone who wants to buy them. Nothing the west has now - or in the foreseeable future will stop a hypersonic missile.
In order to afford these two white elephants - we've had to run the surface fleet down to the point that we have insufficient vessels to form one proper carrier group - let alone two - and then there are other duties to be done besides!
F35B is an expensive catastrophe - and the QE class is designed such that proper navel aircraft cannot be flown from her (no cats or traps) - so we're tied into a disaster called the F35B with no operational aircraft to deploy now and insufficient surface vessels to escort either effectively.
This disastrous situation is all Labour's doing by the way, the format of the carriers, the cast iron contracts that meant we couldn't switch to F35C or we'd effectively have to pay for the carriers again - the decision to go F35B - All Labour. In a rare moment of clarity by the Tories when they took power, they looked at switching to F35C, but then after studying the small print they realised there was no way out and the white elephants are here to stay.
Of course the Chinese have had a cheap volume-produced hypersonic anti-ship missile for years - the DF-21D - the improved longer range version (DF-26) is already in service - anyone who wants them can buy them - they could sink our entire navy in hours.
We had the balance right with the Harriers and attack helicopters with Type 45 providing air-defence- now we've even sold off HMS Ocean and will have nothing service-ready for years to fly off the elephants. Our Navy is a joke.
"You do realise that often contractors are hired by the personnel dept. And their payments go through the finance dept? You still need people to do that whenther you have all perm or all contractors."
Really? I've been a contractor for over 30 years for well over a dozen large organizations in the UK and Europe and not once have I been engaged or paid via the personnel department.
Contractors raise more tax than equivalent permies - are cheaper for the employer (when efficiency and overheads are taken into account) and don't rack up future financial liabilities. What do you think the cost of running a payroll and personnel support is in a large organization? Plus with contractor you can get the right person with the right skills for the role in hand - rather than spending half your time battering and bending someone to do something they're not very good at. Sure - if you go to a big consulting company charging £2K a day for a developer - yes that's expensive - direct contractors are good value.
The client doesn't pay £60K more - they've got to train you to meet this weeks' legislation hot-cake, insure you, run a personnel dept, run a pension scheme or two (BT, GM and Ford are practically bankrupt simply down to pension liabilities) pay maternity leave - as well as put up with crap employees that are difficult to get rid of or perpetual sickie pullers - then end up in court for bogus unfair dismissal cases which they just fold on and pay up - I've had two days off sick in 30 years of contracting. I've often done the work of two or three permies - particularly in coding roles.
Yes there are a lot of excellent permies - but many are bone-idle - particularly in government and council roles. The overall cost is high and efficiency low - even worse if you go off-shore and get three utterly useless bums on seats for the price of one UK permie. Permies are NOT cheap - the hidden costs are enormous. If you want 5 man days' work you need 12 permies (including support staff) to cover it for all the reasons above. Or you could just hire 5 contractors with the right skills and get the work done - and what if the skills required are varied and changeable? With permies you end up with 10 square pegs in 10 round holes.
I know several 40-50 year-olds all excellent in their roles who have done all the travelling round the globe for work, got the T-Shirt and just want to earn an honest crust in the UK - what's wrong with that? - IR35 will destroy thousands of UK jobs and steer big companies who don't want the hassle to outsourcing companies. I suspect this very outcome has been lobbied for by the likes of Andersens, PWH and TCS - which is why why a so-called Tory government is implementing such a Labouresque retrograde tax which will hurt the sort of people who are (were) part of their core voting base.
"contractors just need to man up and pay the same tax as everyone else."
Typical green-eyed permie nonsense.
Contractors typically raise twice as much revenue for HMRC as a permie doing the same role. A £45K PA permie will be paying about £20K tax plus another 5K from his employer.
A contractor doing the same role will charge about £100K, will raise £20K in VAT, will pay about £20K in corporation tax, will pay (admittedly small amounts of IC and NI) but will pay another £20K+ tax on his dividends - as well as having to pay an accountant (required by law) more money indirectly to HMRC.
So from the contractor, HMRC will be collecting close to £50K tax - more than the permie earns gross! The hiring company gets a no-strings worker without personnel overheads and future pension liabilities. The contractor gets more take-home pay - EVERYONE WINS - why are the so-called Tories pursuing Labour's spiteful green-eyed IR35 tax? This will destroy what's left of UK IT jobs and put many (usually Tory) contractors on the dole.
"Years ago I was writing a CICS Cobol (remember that...) "
No need to remember it - it's still going strong - so is your application probably - with a fancy front end plastered over the top of it. CICS is estimated to be providing over 1 million transaction per second globally - to this very day - Google's 60,000 searches per second looks a bit feeble in comparison.
"Vax VMS OS on circa 1977/1978 Vax 780 hardware WAS multi-tasking. It's main coder Dave Cutler went on to Microsoft in 1988 to startup the task of writing Windows Server which came out in 1991/1992."
Lyons Leo MK3 was properly multitasking in 62/62. As for Mr Cutler, NT wasn't all his work despite the myths and legends - MS took a cut of OS/2 at the point of the break up with IBM - which was already a fully-fledged multitasking operating system with virtual memory support before Cutler touched it. Yes he did some great work but he didn't add multitasking or virtual memory - it already did it - I've no doubt he greatly improved it - of course the all IBM rewrite of OS/2 (Warp and Merlin) blew NT out of the water performance wise and required a 5th of the RAM to be productive, the MVS team helped out with the paging algorithms. Sadly for IBM, the falling cost and higher availability of RAM coincided with Warp's release so NT took off when Warp really should have. NT's biggest advantage over Warp was multiple "terminal queues" so misbehaving apps were better isolated from doing damage to user activity. OS/2s only real weakness - a poorly app could lock all "terminal" input/output.
Does anyone remember the GPO? I do - "A telephone sir? Certainly. That'll be December - next year - oh, and only installable next to your front door!"
Crikey, if we remained hostage to the GPO through the late 80s early 90s we'd still be connected by 56K modems! Thank god it was privatised!
Any proof you want that the Tories are another bunch of bed-wetting SJW virtue-signalling career-politicians is IR-35 - Labour's spiteful green-eyed attack on industry - pursued by "the Tories"...
A contractor doing the equivalent role to a £40K permie will raise more tax for HMRC than the permie (VAT + corp tax, + divvies + NI and income tax), will be cheaper and more flexable for the hiring company (encouraging commerce within our borders) and will deliver more disposable income into the worker's pocket - as well as employ the services of a usually UK-based accountant - everyone's a winner.
But no, this ridiculous attack on our industry will force what's left of IT jobs off-shore - the big corporations won't suddenly start hiring more UK staff - they'll just shut UK technical centres - The "Tories" are putting their core voters on the dole - or should I say ex-core-voters - just to appeal to a bunch of student union types who will never vote Tory regardless of their policies.
"But also, by modern standards, they're crude, clanking machines which needed a host of Tech Adepts maintaining them"
There's nothing crude about modern mainframes - the technology under the skin is ahead of the x86 world, modern mainframe CPUs process the vast bulk of COBOL and JAVA code natively in hardware, they also have hardware encryption and compression instructions performing these tasks way, way faster than x86 - they also run at 5+Ghz out the box. As for staff, at the site I currently work at there are fewer than 10 mainframe technical staff - the mainframe provides the bulk of processing for the large organisation. There are over 2,000 x86 staff of one form or another. The mainframes consume about 60Kws of energy - the combined x86 - well over 5000Kws just to provide pretty front-ends to the mainframe quietly getting on with delivering the core business with five 9s reliability.
As for "throwing data about" The I/O bandwidth of a single modern IBM zServer is over 800Gb/second, like all IBM mainframes from the 1960s onwards, I/O is performed off the main CPUs - these days on 5+Ghz assist processors. I/O on most x86 metal interrupts the actual CPUs wasting cycles of the (already slow) CPUs and damaging cache hit rates by switching threads. With zHyperLink enabled, latency to read the disk subsystems is under 20 microseconds (yes MICROseconds) - roughly 10x faster than good FICON response and smashing anything available on any other platform to atoms. Of course IBM DS (disk) arrays can be all flash with over a terabyte of cache - so even if you need to do actual I/O - it's mindbogglingly fast. If configured correctly, network I/O between z/OS and or z/VM clusters (operating system images) is done in memory bypassing the network altogether. It a nutshell - you don't know what you're talking about.
Why is a supposed Tory party still pursuing Labour's spiteful IR35 tax? This will destroy what's left of the indigenous IT market - in 97 this was the second largest IT sector in the world. Labour destroyed it by allowing companies to rubber-stamp their own cheap imported Labour which also encouraged outsourcing. now the so-called Tories are pursuing this awful policy. People working through a service company may pay less personal tax - but they pay more tax overall (corporation + VAT + personal tax + economic activity linked to running a company), the company hiring them have lower overheads and the government's overall tax take is increased compared to a permanent employee doing the same job - everyone wins - why are they pursuing this madness?
Large companies will do exactly what Barclays have just announced (which I predicted months ago) the result will end up with more outsourcing and fewer UK jobs - and it's only a matter of time before cheap outsourced labour with no legacy knowledge brings a blue-chip company to its knees. Thicko boards still don't realise that IT IS your business - not a cost to be chopped away at relentlessly.
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