Posts by Alan Brown 16473 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"Refuse to associate with a base station that's in motion or is at more than a 30* vertical angle"
At these frequencies it's virtually impossible to pick up either factor. Moving a few feet in either direction causes massive signal variations in urban canyons. There'd be too many false alarms.
Products like this are depreciated at maximum rates and are essentially worthless after 5 years anyway.
Outfits who buy refurbed kit are either life-extending their existing stuff or couldn't afford to buy new anyway.
The first sale doctrine was established a long time ago. It'll be interesting to see if any of the regulators hit the OEMs with restraint of trade action
1: EE's contracts say "you must accept all terms and conditions", then bury this deep in the fine print.
"Unfair terms in consumer contracts 1999" kicks in - and the fact that they don't have a severability clause means that if the contract is voided they can't recover the phone.
2: Computrace is spyware - unauthorised and foisted on everyone. It phones home and EE/samsung are engaging in a mutual fingerpointing exercise.
Being unauthorised spyware it falls foul of both the Misuse of Computers Act _and RIPA.
3: Absolute Software (the people who make computrace) make it clear that it's supposed to be installed by device owners.
I could see someone who wanted to make serious trouble for EE demand its removal and then file criminal charges when they refuse to do so.
"Drug dealers and organised criminals usually have quite a few mobile phones,"
And the brains behind the outfits probably use Redphone or other encrypted call setup systems.
There are better ways to deal with the drugs problem (health issues) than by playing whack-a-mole with the foot soldiers and demonising victims.
"Do you go for SAS or SATA, or 7.2k, 10k or 15k spinning disk, or one of today's flavours of SSD, or one of the new flavours that are promised for a few months' time?"
80% of system speedups are achievable with code cleanups. only 20% with hardware.
The winning formula for storage systems at the moment is hierarchical caching systems (big SSDs in front of spinning oxide - in both directions), but the problem is that whilst it's a known quantity (ZFS), there are a bunch of snake oil salesmen who think it's simply a matter of bolting ZFS onto their existing RAID hardware (it isn't) or that you can skimp on ram (you can't).
Get it right and it will sing like a well-tuned Lamborghini. Get it wrong and you may as well be driving a Trabant. Either way if you slam your array with shedloads of conflicting random reads/writes it'll turn into a snail on valium (see comment about where 80% of speedups come from)
As for ethernet: Until the last 18 months 10GE was simply too expensive for general use (especially at Cisco pricing). Broadcom's trident2 chipset has turned that on its head. Unfortunately 10GE copper is still distance limited (needs cat6 or better cabling to go more than 30m, realistically you'll be lucky to go 20m on cat5e based on our experience - the distances are optimistic and patch panel quality is a big factor.) and power hungry (~4.5W per tranceiver, vs laser transceivers using around 100mW) - and that power consumption is outside a SFP+ enclosure's specs, so you can't run a mix of copper/fibre on the same switch unless the maker provides it from day one (the only solution is a chassis switch or a mixed stack of copper/SFP switches)
Bonding/Etherchannel/LAG/LACP works up to a point, but individual data flows are limited to the the individual link speeds (usually 1Gb/s) and more often than not that individual link has to carry _all_ communication between the server and client pair (most switches don't have the smarts to do L4 distribution). Depending on hashing it's quite possible to end up with one leg being maxxed out whilst others are barely idling. I see this regularly but it's usually because one client is drinking from a firehose. The fix is to switch to 10Gb/s as we replace kit - and get really friendly with fiberstore.com as local vendors are taking the piss on AOC and twinax cables.
The REAL bottleneck is your router. Even if you have TRILL switches, as soon as you talk between IP subnets then the traffic has to be gatewayed somewhere - often tromboning across the data centre to end up back in the same rack. This is being worked on - see https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-trill-irb-05 - but such implementations have yet to be deployed (Advice from the vendor for my TRILL systems was originally that distributed routing would be Q2-3 2015 but this has been delayed to Q3 20150-Q1 2016.)
The real lesson is that speed/performance costs money. Efficiency costs money too, but usually less.
Supposed to be used before live testing, but often used to fly a profile based on known weather/software/etc or even replay black box data to see what the pilots would have seen.
It's creepy flying a profile (more like riding along) where you know people died and without the benefit of hindsight usually impossible to avoid making the same mistakes that caused it.
"How hard would it be to have the parameters (and maybe nothing but the parameters) programmed into something that's associated with the *engine* and follows the engine "
Not very (and this is already done), but as some have already pointed out the desired characteristics of the engine vary depending on which side of the aircraft it's on, whether it's inboard or outboard and whether it's driving a reversing reduction gear or not.
Ideally the engine would recognise which position it was in and pick up the right settings automatically, but people insist on individually manually programming things "because it's more reliable" and that opens up the possibility of mistakes.
Let's not go into Murphy's Law (If an aircraft part can be installed 2 ways and one way is the wrong way, someone will do it) - which amongst other things is exactly the reason that the Genesis probe crashed into the Utah desert (someone installed a gravity sensor upside down) and that there was much excitement about Spirit and Opportunity camera images until it was discovered the calibration files had been swapped over...
It's better to design it right and make _sure_ it can't be installed the wrong way up. This applies as much to software as hardware, because the wetware is fundamentally unreliable.
"Fixing it will involve managers listening to engineers, designers, testers, etc"
The jobsworthian "tickbox" mentality goes _well_ beyond aviation and engineering. People do stuff by rote without understanding why they're doing it and that in many fields the tickboxes are merely a guide to ensure the job's being done right, not an end in themselves.
Then they get promoted to management and the tickboxes become more important than the end target.
Language issues are best dealt with by Locale files - and those locale files are best translated by someone bilingual, then vetted by at least 3 other people (I've just finished making ~1500 corrections to a UK-english locale which was originally translated from french by a guy who learned english at high school...)
It's the fiddling with other parameters which gets really messy, real fast - and leads to Chinook crashes.
"with a smaller frontal area"
Frontal area and drag coefficient make almost no difference below 45mph - which makes the best urban shifter something pretty box-shaped.
Biodiesel is only environmentally friendly if made from waste oils and bearing in mind that you lose more than 50% of the available energy converting those oils to biodiesel, you're better off converting the car to handle unmolested oil (which essentially boils down to heat exchangers to make it flow more easily and a fuel switching system to run it on diesel when cold (indirect injection systems don't need this if you have the "right kind of pump", but such old pumps generally need a rebuild and that gets more expensive than the vehicle is worth and you have the high maintenance factors associated with old cars - I ran a pug106 on bio for a few years but it was costing more in drivetrain/chassis maintenance than I was saving in fuel)
"Even neo-cons in the US want to reduce the criminal population, although often for financial reasons or religious ones even."
Which is offset by other neocons wanting to increase it and run more private prisons (for profit) which have their inmates doing forced labour (for profit) and deny them medical care (for increased profit).
There have been a small number of convictions for corrupt judges who gave out harsh sentences in exchange for kickbacks from prison owners and it looks like there are a a lot more investigations underway.
That doesn't even go into the fact that the USA system denies voting rights (state and federal) for those who have had criminal convictions - it's quite clear that in the old Jim Crow states this is systematically used as a way of reducing the number of black and minority voters.
As for the dugs stuff:
In the 1920s, one drug was outlawed and the resulting carnage where people were killed by contaminated product and civilians were increasingly caught in the crossfire between armed gangs fighting each other and police (plus the massive boost in police corruption which went along with the gangs controlling supply) led to those laws being repealed.
That repeal led to a lot of newly minted FBI "g-men" effectively facing unemployment (and a lot of gangs seeking new ways to find income - shipping alcohol wasn't about the alcohol, it was about the money). An expedient solution was to outlaw something mostly only used by mexican farm labourers. Over the years more and more items were banned and that in turn led to gangs using those items to provide an income stream.
Move up to the last 40 years - and we have increasingly well-armed narcogangs battling each other and well-armed police, with civilians getting caught in the crossfire. There's a war on drugs going on alright and it's the people with the drugs who are winning - each time the state makes drugs more scarce they make more profit - remember it's _all_ about the money - and the enforcers make more money too (especially in the USA where you have legalised seizure without trial)
If narcotics were legal and taxed, they'd be so cheap that the gangs wouldn't make any money, places like Silk Road would never have existed, noone would be diluting them with any old shit they can obtain - including rat poison or lye (purity of supply) and noone would be pushing crack at school children. The odds are pretty good that the "drug problem" would go back to the levels it'd been at prior to prohibition and that would make treating it as a health problem a fairly minor issue.
One of the big ironies of the war on drugs is that there's a shortage of cocaine and heroin/morphine for medical use. They're incredibly useful susbstances and amazingly cheap (a medical knockout dose of cocaine is less than 1 pound, the same on the streets would sell for around 100 - hence the point about profits), so growers could be contracted to supply for medical use at better pay - this was done in Turkey to convert the illegal opium supply to a legal medical one and it's the best long-term way of dealing with the afghan poppy supply.
"Although, fuck all if I can figure out *why* we'd overthrow Iraq"
Because Saddam dared to take payments in Euro.
You can't have tinpot dictators underming the hegemony of the almighty Greenback. People might look behind the curtain and realise that confidence in the currency is all smoke and mirrors (There's a hell of a lot of gold simply _missing_ from the federal reserve.)
"Other days, they’ll feel hot, so they set the thermostat to 16°"
People treat thermostats as a "volume" knob and reason that the further they turn it, the faster the temperature will change. No amount of telling them otherwise will convince 'em.
Under "normal" circumstances it would be a good idea to only allow a 1 degree change per minute, but if it's a knob people will break it and if it's a button they'll smash it.
On the other hand, when my "smart" thermostat is set to 5C (daytime, noone's home normally so the heating's effectively off) and I want to set it to 17C, I don't want to wait 10 minutes to achieve that setting.
If you think New Zealand is clean, you haven't been following things much.
The NHS stuff that Cameron's trying to bang through here was tried under the tory-equivalent National party in the 1990s. When public hopsitals end up siccing debt collectors on people because of mandatory charges when they're ill, your public health system is in a bad state.
Apart from that, look at http://www.laudafinem.com/ and http://e2nz.org/ - kiwiland has more problems than the UK does and a wilfully clueless population who prefer to believe "none of that stuff can happen here"
"The proposed rules will ... also set limits on robocalls made by political organizations"
Presumably also religious and charitable groups too. (they were all previously exempted)
Political/religious/charity robo spamming has been one of the most tenacious categories of call and I'm willing to bet it figures high on the FCC's complaint radar. Unlike the criminal stuff it's fairly easily traceable too.
"Every problem I've ever had with every car I've ever owned has been electronic. "
My experience has been the opposite. The closest it's gotten to "electronic" has been corroded pins in a connector.
Cars have come a long way from 1960/70's "Lucas Prince of Darkness" electrics.
"Cost them about three times the price of a new one."
He's lucky it only cost that much.
Car makers are in the business of selling car parts (Unless you're Ford, who are in the business of selling financial services). It's not in their interest to sell them cheaply enough for you to build your own car.
It's also not in their interest to make a car so reliable that it doesn't need parts (although the uniqueness of the japanese market makes it in their interest to make them last 5 years with no oil changes from new)
One of my tutors worked for a heavy machinery manufacturer and resigned shortly after one of his gearbox designs was savaged on the basis that the steel alloys specified were so strong it would never need repairing. It eventually went on sale with vastly derated mild steel gears and developed a reputation for unreliability. He resigned.
"The new fuel economy rules cannot be met by something which has the aerodynamics of a shed on wheels. "
Aerodynamics are irrelevant below ~45mph and any 4x4 which is doing what it's designed for spends almost all its operating life below those speeds.
You wouldn't really want to drive a series2 past 45 anyway. It got "interesting" in a lot of uncomfortable ways.
"As I understand it the critical factor isn't emissions but crash safety for pedestrians. "
It's all round safety. Range Rovers and Land Rovers are mostly exempt from EU crash safety requirements as the chassis are virtually unchanged from initial production, long before those regulations came into effect all those years ago.
Pedestrian safety is affected by the externals, so that's what's driving the runout of the range - changes necessary to comply with that mean chassis changes and that in turn means the grandfathering goes away.
On top of that, Defenders/90/110/Serieswhatever haven't been road legal in North America since 1993, so that's a large chunk of the market they're locked out of (even before then, North American units had to have a roll cage integrated to be able to be sold.)
In the real world such grandfathering should have only been allowed to continue for 3-4 years at most.
The last LR I had to put up with was a series 2 back in the early 80s. Compared to Nissan's Patrol and Toyota's Landcruiser it was atrocious (Shocking on-road handling, unreliable electrics, gutless, thirsty, high maintenance and couldn't handle conditions in NZ mountains in winter that the other two didn't have trouble with) so I was glad to see the back of it as a work wagon.
I gather they improved a lot after that but the damage had already been done ("Made in Britain" was already regarded as a warning label in the 1970s, but government directives mean that many organisations ended up buying british machinery long after the vast superiority of japanese-sourced stuff was apparent to everyone).
"economics as a science "
Science consists of doing the same thing and getting the same results each time or knowing _why_ you didn't.
Most economics at government level is voodoo handwaving at best.
It's rather telling that the people notionally in charge of the economy have _NO_ economic qualifications but believe they know better than people with actual experience and an understanding of the backgrounds and put their friends in charge of crucial decisions. It's Dunning-Kruger writ large
> his implicit assumption was that in a coalition the need to gain support through debate means higher standard of legislation than the whipped lobby fodder of majority governments under FPTP provides.
I tend to agree. The most dangerous time for any country is if any given party has such a substantial governmental majority that it can ram anything through unchecked and such times are when the most extreme ideologically-driven laws get passed.
Laws that require broad cross-party agreements tend to be better thought-out.
> I came across numerous people before the UK general election who supported a continued Coalition or a Conservative government on the basis that "there's no doubt that we are [as a country] a lot better off now"
This is the reason a lot of people continued to vote for that nice Mr Hitler too. If there's a global economic upturn then national govts will always try to blag the credit for it.
" Later it comes out the CIA and South African government were arm-in-arm in the war in Angola. "
Not to mention that the CIA was responsible for most of the tonnage of the crack epidemic in USA inner cities during the early 1980s (CIA aircraft were shipping hundreds of tons of weapons/ammunition south and bringing cocaine north on the return trips to fund those deals. It was all part of Iran-Contra, authorised by Ronald Raygun and all came out during the Ollie North trials but didn't get much media coverage for some reason)
http://listverse.com/2015/01/15/10-reprehensible-crimes-of-ronald-reagan/ - #2 on the list. The others will have you shaking your head too.
"What's to stop a black version of said agencies already existing"
Nothing. The fact that the NSA is out in the open is more-or-less an admission that there is at least one more in existence, the same way that the NSA was top secret when the CIA started coming out of the shadows.
BY the same token the russians will have something sitting in the shadows whilst everyone's paying attention to the FSB and GRU.
"NSA, CIA, FBI and possibly others will be blamed for not detecting and preventing it"
Never mind that the 9/11 guys were flagged to the FBI and others several times by concerned citizens.
The existing laws in place then were perfectly adequate to deal with them (and outliers such as Tim McVeigh), IF the agencies had been competent and not engaging in turf wars.
"AFF were those responsible for utterly destroying the Yahoo! profile database with fake ID's"
In a circuitous way yes.
AFF paid affiliate fees to those who can get new signups onto their site. That gives them plausible deniability over the spamming (and a way of not paying out if there are complaints). Other sex site operators copied this method and affiliate spam is still one of the more pernicious things to deal with as there's no legislation to hold the businesses jointly and severally responsible for the actions of "affiliates".
The business itself is toxic. Penthouse bought them out a few years ago for around $500mil, but it turned out to be a poison pill and now AFF's creator owns Penthouse.
Hackers have been running round the Adultfriendfinder internal network since _at least_ 2004 when I found them doing it.
The staff freely admitted that the hackers were there (several of them are manchester based) but never notified Californian authorities as required by law there.
Trying to inform Californian privacy authorities about it proved fruitless too.
"Seems like F1 got taken for a ride."
Not really.
F1 as it currently exists under Bernie is and always was about the advertising.
It was devised as a way to keep cigarette adverts on TV in the face of widespread bans. In my opinion it lost its way when the ciggy companies lost their dominance on the cars as countries wised up to the loophole being exploited.
There is much better racing in various other marques and most of that has to do with homogenisation of the vehicles. All the arenas where there can be substantial variation between cars are less dependent on driver skill than they should be.
"Now obviously the requirements of RAID-6 mean that you would probably do 5/2/3 but still I think the 2:1 principle holds."
It's pretty much guaranteed that anything larger than about 40Tb is extremely likely suffer to data corruption somewhere in the array even without a rebuild The statistics of CRC checking mean that one bad sector will slip through about that often and RAID may not catch it.
In addition, the extra thrash on a disk set means that you run a not-insignificant chance (2-6% on 100Tb) of losing the entire RAID6 array during a rebuild after a drive is lost. To bring that into perspective I've lost 2 RAID6 sets in the last decade, both of which were only 20Tb or less (HP MSA arrays)
Adding a third parity disk drops the latter problem down into the vanishingly small arena, but does nothing for the former problem.
In addition a RAID set only protects the disk layout and filesystem checking still has to be performed from time to time - which in almost every FS means taking it offline.
ZFS kills several birds with one stone. It assumes drive are crap, so builds it robustness around recovery and error checking of every block of data - as well as writing corrected data back to the disks when errors occur. It acts as a volume manager and filesystem, so you don't have to run 2 layers of complexity on top of your raid sets _AND_ you can run periodic FSchecks (ZFS calls them "scrubs") without taking the data offline. In addition it offers SSD caching of "hot" data and SSD backup of writes, so these can be spooled to the disks sequentially, even if there's a power failure. The result is that it's got levels of performance far in excess of what is regarded as "normal" for RAID systems and it provides a 3rd parity disk, with the potential to add more in future.
This isn't a substitute for distributed filesystems but there's a compelling case for using it in most circumstances instead of RAID and it makes great building block if you do need distributed FSes.
"If the smart-meters ever get home networked/domotics & Internet of Things, then it'd be just your Fridge/Freezer that was switched-off for 4 or 5 hours, your freezer wouldn't really notice, but the Grid would survive better."
The vast majority of UK housing has everything on 1 or 2 circuits and the IoT won't happen like you're envisaging for another decade at least.
Shutting off my freezer wouldn't make you my friend, because I'd be sitting in the dark, fuming.
"And lets face it, how detailed do you think the web logs will be from a backpacker hostel in Thailand, two years after the fact? "
Revenge porn tends to be posted within days/weeks of a breakup.
Someone posting stuff several years afterwards is someone who is seriously unhinged and needing a major head-reading session or three. Usually they'll have already brought themselves to the attention of the fuzz with such antics and a posting of this kind of thing would constitute aggravated stalking which carries penalties a whole lot more severe than a few weeks weeding public flowerbeds.
"which is something I can't remember to do with the valve timing"
Actually it's Miller cycle.
Atkinson has a shorter compression stroke than exhaust and complex mechanics to achieve it.
Miller replicates this by closing the input valve late in the compression stroke.
With modern computer controls and actuators there's no reason you can't do away with the camshaft altogether and drive the poppet valves electronically. In fact this is (partially) done on the Fiat airtronic engines, but not to achieve a Miller effect when it would be advantageous
"Range will always be a problem with BEVs"
Range isn't an issue if the things can charge quickly. Smaller motorbikes frequently have sub-100mile range on a tankful and noone complains (much) about that, because it's only a few mins to fill-er-up.
The real winners for BEVs will be range extension (think generator on a trailer) for the occasional trip and faster charging technology - As long as the costs are brought down.
"Eating or even smoking are not intellectually challenging activities."
In one smash I attended, when the driver was cut out of the vehicle she was found to be still holding onto the sandwich on the passenger seat that she'd reached for just before drifting across the centreline and under an oncoming cattle truck.
The fact that the car was 18 inches high after the event might give an indication of the survivability of the impact.
Apparently this is a relatively common occurance.
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