Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Dog Fight

It probably will, but actual proof that Post Office senior staff and board were being informed of the problems means that - in the words of a New Zealand enquiry judge - they've been presenting "an organised litany of lies" - in this case to avoid criminal prosecution rather than to simply deflect responsiblity

Yes, but not for the reasons you're thinking of

Space thinking at government level is still predicated on expensive launches - and they're no longer expensive

More effort needs to be expended on the issue of space junk and orbital cleaning - which at the moment is ALSO predicated on expensive launches and concentrates on things we can see/avoid anyway, rather than the actual dangerous stuff

OK, yes, there's value in deorbiting dead boosters, etc, but the large stuff is 0.1% of what's whizzing about, in the overall scheme of things. A much bigger problem is that space flotsam/jetsam is "owned" rather than "open" and deorbiting a piece of XYZ country's junk without explicit permission can be taken as an act of war on that country. This simply doesn't scale down to the clouds of crud resulting from smaller collisions but acts as a handbrake on developing groundbased cleanup systems such as Laser Brooms

New treaties are needed to define dead or abandoned items or create a "neutral" agency which can start bringing down garbage

Re: So WiFi only for client connections. Really?

"If you're looking to segregate your network for security. VLANs will require a much more expensive switch"

Not much more expensive these days

Yes, I get that a 5 port dumb switch is a tenner, but paying $40 for vlans and web manglement isn't a hardship

Re: Holy Wars

"And then having to explain to customers that a 1500byte packet ain't going to fit down an xDSL circuit with a 1492byte MTU, and if you've set the DF bit, it's going to end up in the bit bucket.."

I remember a large bank doing that and then telling customers on DSL that "You're the only one having that problem" when their Internet Banking portal failed to work as expected

At the time DSL had only just been launched and the vast majority of users were still on dialup, but a nice journalist pointed out that they'd told more than 1000 people that particular porkie

It still took over 6 months to be remedied

Re: An interesting concept

Yes, with horrific added complexity - something like 36 links in the interconnecting drive shaft in the wing (no straight line possible)

That interconnection was (and is) one of the major reliability issues in bringing the thing into service

Re: Oh noe!

"for years"

For a couple of centuries. The entire USA industrial revolution was built on State-sponsored industrial espionage andf rampant intellectual property theft

Anyone who believes it stopped after WW2 should think again

Re: Passwords

"my contract stipulated that I couldn't work for a client within 18 months of resigning and had to give 6 months notice"

IIRC neither of those are legal, so the landsharks would have been able to tear the contracts apart in minutes

Re: Welcome

A lot of critical kit comes from third parties and CAN'T be wired in (eg: your home router - you don't want that unplugged, do you?)

Re: Try working with a smart user

"They admitted that they had a set of testers whose job was just to test this (so they ran in full screen) and knew all of the quirks."

Yup. Standard problem.

Also a standard problem that nobody outside of the group is willing to act as tester because they have better things to do

Re: Testing Times.

The odd part is that when advoicating this kind of thing I've frequently encountered LOTS of resistance from both the workers and manglement

"We don't have time to do this!" is the most common mantra

Stockholm Syndrome really is a thing

Re: The boxes are labelled on the outside

This is one of the reasons I was always taught to put a big fat cross on the end of any box of widgets in the store-room if it was opened(*). Individual widgets came from that one vs just grabbing a box

(*) Over the label, sometimes both ends, but our stores guys were insistent on labels facing outwards for readability and efficiency - it was only an issue when new juniorswere being trained and the worst offenders would be put on "fetching" duty, which quickly taught them the value of having the labels where they could be read

Re: I have one major worry about IPv6

"With NAT you have a set of options"

NAT is not a firewall. Firewalls are not NAT

If you're relying on the _small_ accidental protection that NAT confers, then you've already lost the security game. All it takes is one device tunnelling out of your network (eg: Most network cameras/DVRs) and you're toast

Re: Good for Huawei

Yup, exactly that.

As one of the NAT pioneers I frequently wish we hadn't started using it. It's caused vastly more problems than it ever solved

Re: Good for Huawei

And at least some of those kludges put the entire NATed subnet at risk (eg: Mirai propagates almost exclusively on network cameras that have tunnelled back to a portal on the maker's network)

Re: Rare earths ban isn't that big of a deal

"just as we've been using fly ash in concrete for years"

Whilst this is one way of "solving" the problem, it turns out that if LFTRs become a "thing", the concentration of thorium in coal ash slurry lakes is sufficient to justify mining them for fuel - essentially a self-funding way of cleaning up doezens of Superfund sites.

The _2_ largest USA environmental disasters so far this century have been ash slurry dam breaks

LFTRs also solve the rare earths problem by creating a market for the single most common rare earth that drops out of the processing system, fixing the economics of extracting all the others

Re: Rare earths ban isn't that big of a deal

"The problem isn't mining rare-earth materials but treating them to form usable half-finished products"

It isn't even that: The real problem is thorium

That element makes up more of most rare earth deposits than every other rare earth combined and being slightly radioactive can't be put back in the hole it came from. Isolating it from mining tailings and then sequestering it is what's destroyed the economics of rare earth mines worldwide

China solved the issue about 20 years ago by buying up domestic thorium production and stockpiling it in anticipation of their LFTR projects paying off - it essentially turned Chinese rare earth mines into thorium mines with a rare earth side gig

Also anticipating LFTRs paying off: A 3500MWt LFTR capable of producing enough high quality (ie: seriously hot) thermal energy to replace coal burners and generate dry/supercritical steam is predicted to be around 1/4 the size of coal burners _including the containment building_. Chinese coal power stations tend to have a noticeable patch of unbuilt ground adjacent to the turbine halls which says to me that someone's been planning for the long term in ways that Western economies and politicians simply don't

Re: Bonkers bunker!

Two ways: By hiring people who enjoy doing it (which makes them dangerous to you) or by hiring people who you have leverage over, such as by threatening their families (which makes them dangerous to you)

Re: Got news for them

Nuclear war is probably survivable, but extremely unlikely

An oxygen crisis (anoxic event) is not and vastly more likely. Look at what's happening in the Leptav Sea

What all these preppers and doomers forget is that in such a world they'll probably go insane very quickly. The last chapter of Ben Elton's "Stark" should be mandatory reading

They get to do the stuff they can do with all their money BECAUSE of the complexity and Great Unwashed. If "society" goes away they get to live a very bleak (if luxurious) life of limited horizons and unrelenting views of the same few walls - a self-imposed prison sentence

See the last point (Newspeak) in the list expounded by Umberto Eco here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto_Eco

"7 hour break" rules usually apply when you're on callout and there are usually minimum callout periods too

Start applying those and watch how fast manglement will scramble - especially given "right to disconnect" laws and the penalties for breaching them

Re: Boeing don't have all the money and may have to give some back

Getting above the Karman line is easy, sounding rockets have been proving that for decades

The hard (expensive!) part is going sideways fast enough to miss the ground and BO have yet to demonstrate anything along those lines.

Re: IOW.....

"Remember Boeing got roughly 2x the award to build "Starliner" as SX got to build Dragon. Build quality? P**s poor."

AND, that was regarded as the "safety bet" because SX was impossibly cheap

McBoing is being shown up, as are large chunks of the entrenched operation - and the probable solution will be to turn SX into a pork-barrel welfare queen as well, rather than kicking asses and taking names

Re: Speed is all

"The reason the x86 survived was because it was faster than its competitors and it was compatible."

Just the "compatible" part - and that was simply because it dominated the desktop environment

x86 was slower per clock and per watt than EVERY other competing cpu out there. The others were beaten into server or embedded equipment niches and then died when Intel went after those markets too

MIPS might have stood more of a chance if the Longsoon versions were fully licensed sooner (they actually run emulated x86 almost as fast as real x86) but the very comfortable Windows/Intel partnership essentially destroyed everything by leveraging their effective consumer monopoly into driving competition out in all other CPU spaces

Had Intel taken power consumption a little more seriously in the early 00's it's entirely possible that the entire ARM phone ecosystem might have been stillborn