Posts by ITMA 791 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2019
According to the BBC's reporting of the NATS report on the incident - it did exactly that:
"This triggered the system to automatically stop working for safety reasons, so that no incorrect information was passed to Nats' air traffic controllers. The backup system then did the same thing."
According to the BBC's reporting of the NATS report:
"... at 08:32 on 28 August, its system received details of a flight which was due to cross UK airspace later that day.
The system detected that two markers along the planned route had the same name - even though they were in different places. As a result, it could not understand the UK portion of the flight plan.
This triggered the system to automatically stop working for safety reasons, so that no incorrect information was passed to Nats' air traffic controllers. The backup system then did the same thing."
WTF! Why couldn't it just have rejected the flight plan instead of shutting the entire system down?
And what a surprise - the "backup" system did exactly the same thing.
Please accept my feedback in which ever order you wish to interpret them:
"The", "Off", "Right", "Fuck".
Although they have miles to go to get to the same level of fuckery Microsoft get up to every time they do some pointless update to Edge - usually an excuse to force all of their preferred settings on to you and try to force you to use it.
I could be wrong, but wasn't the single biggest lesson from Three Mile Island to have control room indicators that mimicked the ACTUAL position of valves rather than the "commanded postiion", i.e. the position they were SUPPOSED to be in?
Many mistakes were made because they failed to realise what was actually going on due to control room indicators showing valves were closed when they were actually open.
Because in most ways WiFi is crap.
It sovles ONE problem - not being able to connect to the network using a cable. In situations where you really need that, it is the solution.
In virtually every other way it is crap.
Around our main office there are 50+ OTHER WiFi networks. Not devices, NETWORKS, all within range. It is crowded... VERY crowded. That massively impacts performance and reliability.
On the consumer side when you see all those TV ads (such as BT retail) where people are complaing about "the internet is playing up". Bollocks. Most of the time it is NOT their internet, it is their WiFi which is the problem.
When there were 3 maybe 4 houses in a street which used WiFi it could be great. Now EVERY house has multiple WiFi devices all trying to shout each other down. Flats are much worse.
"It has some decent improvements over Windows 10"
But you just can't get past that God awful user interface and making so many things which were not hard (if not excactly always "easy" in Windows 10) into a bloody nightmare.
And where has the option to completely turn of this "focussed session" shit gone?
We use a bunch of "hobbyist" 3D printers (Prusa etc) for in house manufacture of an assortment of bespoke "widgets" for use internally.
Remote - across a network - monitoring of jobs complete with webcam view of the build area are very useful.
Simple solution - a bunch of Raspberry Pi 3B+ running OctoPi (suitably locked down), one for each printer.
And if we need to keep an eye on a many hour print job, connect in securely via VPN.
No cloud needed.
That reminds me of when the internet was a new thing and lots of drivers etc were downloaded from manufacturers' dial up BBS.
We had a bank of USR Courier 56K modems connected to a Netware Comms Server to "network" them.
Used to have great fun - at a colleague's expense - sitting at my desk in the IT office a few feet from the "target", using terminal software to connect to one of the modems (which were in the server room) and repeatedly dial his desk phone.
The hard part was keeping a straight face while watching him progress through puzzlement, irritation, annoyance, frustration to slamming phone down anger.
When the penny finally dropped what was happening, it was still very hard for me and the 3rd person in the IT office (who was in on it) to not laugh as the "target" loudly demonstrated his extensive knowledge of swear words and repeatedly questioned my parentage LOL.
"Westminster Abbey (the UK parliament building next to Big Ben) needs major renovations"
The Palace of Westminster is where Parliament is and Big Ben is the bell which chimes the hour.
The iconic tower was originally called the The Clock Tower then recently renamed The Elizabeth Tower.
Westminster Abbey is over the road from the Palace of Westminster, although the major parts of the Palace of Westminster (the House of Commons and the House of Lords) are both in need of serious renovation - and that is just their inept decrepit occupants.
When I did a PostScript programming course BITD the guy running it put it this way:
"Printing is a side effect of executing a PostScript program".
Plus:
"A PostScript program is not 'run' or 'compiled' but 'consumed' by the printer".
Which is true.
My "demo page", which was only 20 or 30 lines of (condensed) handwritten PostScript, selected a font, then scalled that font vertically using a sine wave (plus an offset) and output text along the lines of "Oki OL-480 Genuine PostScript" with the height modulated by the sine wave. On the next line the text was slightly offset and the sine wave shifted in phase by 270 degrees. It then filled the page before doing the final showpage.command.
Getting used to the stack orientated RPN was hard.
I still have the book we were given on the course:
PostScript Language Refence Manual, Second Edition.
ISBN 0201181274
Most of that cost was I believe the cost of licensing both the PostScript interpreter and the RIP board it ran on. Both horrendously expensive from Adobe.
Oki got around this on their Oki DOC-IT multifunction devices by using TruImage (a PostScript clone) and putting the RIP and rest of the printer's "brains" on a full size ISA card with an Intel i860 RISC processor.
I did some handcrafted PostScript to do a fancy demo page while working for Oki. It worked perfectly on their genuine PostScript printers but broke TruImage LOL
I've came across those pieces of utter shite.
You can't even change the settings on a LOCAL printer connected via USB without using an effing online account. And if that account doesn't work, as one company I came across found, you are fucked.
My advice to anyone who has one - phone HP and tell them you want an full refund as it is "unfit for purpose". There is no bloody way a printer or scanner needs an effing online account to work.
Total shit.
"I remember back when someone got the bright idea to use software in the driver to replace some of the logic that was previously done in dedicated silicon and thought that was probably about as low as companies could go. What a sweet summer child I was."
You are describing "Windows" or "GDI" printers. Known in the (PC printer) industry as "brain dead printers" because that is litterally what they are.
They are a bare print engine with all the rasterising done on the host PC. An (old) example being the OkiPage 4w.
Crap printers. Always were and always will be.
There is a fundamental truth here that is not being said outright:
Inkjet printers are not sold to print. They are sold to sell more ink.
That is the top and bottom of it.
I've worked for two (Japanese) printer manufacturers and injkets "printers" where litterally a loss making "carcass" to sell very profitable ink cartridges.
And Samsung's customer support is truly dreadful.
That is when you can through their awful "live chat bot" to a supposed "knowledgable" person who usually known bugger all.
Phoning them is even worse.
Best option is don't buy anything labelled as "smart" especially a TV. Get a TV with the resolution you want (HD, 4K etc) with plenty of HDMI sockets and plug in a Now TV, Amazon Fire or similar TV "stick".
"where a bunch of famous actors find themselves resurrected in the future inside artifical bodies"
Babylon 5, Season 4, Episode 22: "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars"
Act III
https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/The_Deconstruction_of_Falling_Stars
Already been done. LOL
And the AI turns on their creators in that too! In a spectacularly rewarding way :)
And which part did Ivy's company actually design?
That is what always gets me when designs of electronic products are attributed to thos who have "styled" it and not those who have designed the bits that actually make it work.
Do they know anything about audio and designing audio products (beyond designing their "appearance")?
Someone I used to know many years ago got caught defrauding their employer out of something like £50K.
Being a young "underling" in the accounts department allowed them a certain level of access. From that they stumbled across what the company did with payments it received from customers (mainly B2B) which they weren't able to link to a customer's account. This was back when everything was BACS or cheque.
Basically, they put these "orphan" payments into a "holding account" (aka "slush fund") and this person found a way of writing checks to their "friends" (who didn't work there) from that account - a bit too obvious writing them out to themselves.
Occasionally one would get queried but they were always around to make up an appropriate plausible excuse.
That went on for a while, not making the cheques too big or too often.
Then they took some time off and one was queried internally while they were away.
Not being around to cover, the end result was a rapid progression through an internal investigation of all the "payments" they had been involved with, fired, arrested, prosecuted, convicted and prison. (young offenders institute as they were called then).
A couple of the "friends" they had been making the cheques out to also ended up with suspended sentences.
And of course all of them were fired from the jobs they had.
They did another one yesterday with Outlook.com where you had a pup-up dialogue appear to select advertising preferences.
Clicking on "Reject All" then Save did nothing. If you did a refresh (F5 for example) it came back again. Absolutely no way was I going to select "Enagle All".
If you went into "Manage Settings" you couldn't save them.
It went away this morning, except when I checked the advertising privacy settings Microsh*te had turned them ALL on WITHOUT my permission. At least I was able to turn them all off.
Another great security and GDPR fiasco....
"The people who suggested this change, approved the change, and made this change, should be killed."
There's a long queue of those at Microsoft - with the ones who imposed Metro on Windows Server 2012 r2 at the front.
This wonderful piece of rubbish appeared on the BBC News website, plugging a Panorama programme this evening:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65975446
Two paragraphs immediately scream "setup/con job":
First:
"Panorama worked with US-based IPVM, one of the world's leading authorities on surveillance technology, to test whether it was possible to hack a Hikvision camera. IPVM supplied the one that was installed in a BBC studio."
So the BBC let the US company supply the camera the very same company were then going to "hack". Did the BBC have the camera independently checked to ensure it had not been "tampered" with?
What's the bet the answer to that is "NO".
Second:
"Panorama could not run the camera on a BBC network for security reasons - so it was put on a test network where there is no firewall and little protection."
That is a great real world test of how such cameras are going to be used by competent businesses and organisations.... NOT.
So this entire programme is based on a "hack" perpertrated by an American company against a camera THEY have supplied while it is connected to a totally unsecured network.
What a pile of unrealistic shite.
The BBC really have scrapped the bottom of the toilet bowl for this crap.
"If I might predict what happened, it was a telescopic compression of the 'people tank', starting at a point of stress that had been cycled too many times going to and from the Titanic wreck."
So essentially you are saying that the weak point (possibly where the repair was done) buckled slightly. That then effectively crippled the longitudinal structural strength of the cylinder and the sea crushed it in a fraction of a second.
A bit like, if you are careful, you can stand on an empty Coke can stood on its end. Put a very slight dent in the side and try the same thing and it will collapse.
At over 3,000m the carbon fibre "can" didn't so much collapse - it was more like putting an empty Coke can (with a slight dent in the side) standing on its end and letting some giant (the Atlantic Ocean) stamp on it hard.
Interesting that you brought the Challenger disaster into the conversation.
Another classic example of management putting schedules and money before safety:
"It is too cold to launch according to the launch rules based on our experience base".
Management - "Change the f*cking rules then!!!! LAUNCH!"
Richard Feynman put it beautifully succinctly: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
The deep ocean is far less forgiving than space, and aerospace is a very poor role model for how to design deep sea submersibles. Totally different environments.
A very valid point.
How evenly that same principle has been applied in other instances of "peril at sea" - for example:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65925558
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65942426
Again, a situation where "politics" appears to take precedence.
I also think that whatever the outcome, Ocean Gateway will almost certainly have some serious lawsuits to answer.
Apparently, according to one person who has been on a trip in Titan, the method of dropping the ballast to return to the surface is....
Get everyone inside to move side to side, making the submersible rock, so that the "construction poles" (scaffolding poles to everyone else) fall of "a shelf".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65957709
What happens if it is sitting on the bottom and they just can't get it to rock enought to drop them?
Why not use the more standard method of a big container of lead shot which by electrical means (with mechanical backup) you open to drop the lead shot onto the sea bed?
And, if they are rescued, are they going to be asked to pay for the cost? After all they are all "rich" and got into it knowing full well the risks.
Why should tax payers pay for it?
I'm sure this won't be a popular point of view - but then just look at the poverty in Canada and the USA and yet God knows how much is being spent of trying to rescue just 5 people who got into something of their own free will knowing it was a potential death trap
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