Posts by Alan Brown 16473 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
It's been proposed for a while.
Various tinfoil wearers are claiming the chips are already in US currency.
One day not far in the future:
*scan*
"I won't mug this guy, he's not carrying anything"
*scan*
"Hey you, hand over the 250k you're carrying."
Brave new world huh?
Mine's the one with the foil lining, foil lined wallet and the foil-lined passport jacket.
YES!
I'M ON THE TRAIN!!!
WHAT?
THE TRAIN!
WHAT?
I CAN'T HEAR YOU. I'M ON THE TRAIN!
WHAT?
Given carriage noise levels in most underground line tunnels (well above the 88dBa "hearing protection mandatory" under HSA rules for employees in most businesses) I suspect the only place you'd be actually able have a phone conversation on the Underground would be on the platform between trains or when stopped between stations in sweltering summer heat.
Mine's the one with earmuffs in the pocket.
1: Falling temps due to reduced solar output will give us a litttle extra time to try and mitigate greenhouse gas levels (IF it happens long term, we don't have enough data to know if the next few solar cycles will be weak or not. I work with various researchers who look at the sun and THEY don't know one way or the other yet)
2: Even with reduced solar flare activity, the issue isn't how many or how big they are - it's if one ends up hitting us directly. Thankfully this is a fairly rare occurance but the issue is lack of robustness and forward planning in the power and communications networks.
IF PLANNED FOR
It comes down to better hardening of satellites and maintaining sensible engineering practices on the ground, but it adds to costs.
The last big flare which hit us head on was in the 1950s and it knocked out power grids worldwide, among other things (lots of interesting radio effects, aurora, etc..)
Spark gaps and other small/cheap devices work wonders in keeping induced spikes in the HV distribution systems out of local mains, but aren't widely used and they have a nice side effect of reducing susceptability to EMP caused by high altitude nukes (The "pulse" weapon of several scifi writers...)
My biggest worry is the risk of losing _large_ distribution transformers in such an event.
The biggest ones are limited in number (50,000 worldwide), in critical positions in power grids, take several months/years to construct and have astonishingly low numbers of spares set aside. I'd rather mitigating stepas were taken NOW than to find that power's out/restricted across much of western europe/North america/SE asia for 5 years because some beancounter put profit over disaster-survivability.
For the poster who worried about magnetic pole reversal - it looks like it's already happening (south atlantic anomaly etc), but it's highly unlikely that the fields will go away altogether and more likely the field will get "complex" with a number of north/south magnetic poles appearing and moving about.
Apart from the weight/sag issue....
Water is one of the ideal substances for absorbing charged particles, which is one of the reasons it's used in nuclear reactors.
BTW, most of that "high level nucelar waste" is perfectly usable as fuel if the politics of reprocessing plutonium are bypassed. We're currently throwing out about 90% of the energy potential that went into the reactor in the first place. Who'd be stupid enough to put that on the far side of the moon when we're going to need it as raw material within 50 years?
Unelected, unaccountable - and until the Secretary of State makes a determination otherwise(*), completely immune to FOI requests
(*) This has NEVER happened, despite being in FOI legislation to cover non-govt organisations having regulatory(**), quasi-governmental or government contracted functions.
(**) Including professional body regulation, such as: ASA, ICSTIS, medical council, law society, etc etc etc.
Unsmiley, becaise all that's happened since FOI is that structures have been put in place to avoid having to make disclosures.
Google, and gmail in particular, has been home to 419 scammers for YEARS.
Regarding complaining to abuse@gmail, "we" have been doing that for years with no noticeable reaction (ie, no response and no cessation of the accounts being used). It's known in the spamfighting community as a complaint blackhole.
Google supposedly started cleaning up gmail's act a few months ago, but as I understand it their position when dealing with DNSBLs has consistently been "We are too big to block. If you blacklist us, people will stop using your DNSBL"
UUnet, Hotmail and Yahoo have held to the same position in the past (or threatened to sue).
Yahoo is still widely blackholed in part because of their sluggish/zero action about spammers using Yahoo mail accounts, but moreso because they happily host _PAYING_ spammers on Yahoo Stores.
Black helicoptor, because that's what's needed to find and eliminate spammers.
There are a LOT of lithium reserves around the world, don't worry about the price.
The real problem is that lithium battery anodes more than double in physical size as they are charged up, this causes them to eventually crumble and that's why the batteries lose capacity and why they're so susceptable to metal contamination issues (damages internal insulation as pressure builds/releases in the cells)
It'd be better to look to alternative technology than Lithium. My personal pick is that supercapacitors have a lot of the advantages of Lithium without needing to be babied _and_ can handle charge rates which would cause lithiums to explode (important for downhill or hard braking regeneration). Sticking those in front of less fragile chemical storage would have a lot of milage.
The blacklist system run by the nice people at javacoolsoftware.com helps a lot. Such redirects eventually end up at an IP or a domain name and that is (hopefully listed in the hosts files as 127.0.0.1
Unfortunately those most likely to fall for redirect scams are the same ones who would never install or maintain prophylactic software in the first place.
I'd call it Darwin in action but everyone else EXCEPT the victim ends up wearing the lion's share of costs.
There's a lot of stuff out there in blatent violation of GPL, especially in the area of DVRs
Will trading standards prosecute these as the software piracy cases they are or is this kind of raid only reserved for pork barrel politics?
Tux, because he needs protecting too.
They can't have EDS making the rest of HP look as bad as they really are, so they're reducing customer service to the lowest common denominator.
6 years ago our HP purchases ran to around 10 million pounds annually, but thanks to appalling tech support and poor quality gear (ESPECIALLY PRINTERS) we've been moving that spend elsewhere.
Ever since the HP/Compaq "merger" things have gone downhill badly for _both_ former companies.
9300 layoffs is the tip of the iceberg if this keeps up.
We used to say "Noone here ever got fired for buying HP" but quite a few managers have been hauled over the coals for doing just that and having the products be unfit for purpose...
Tombstone for all the jobs axed - and the ones to be axed.
.... that the majority of cars I've been seeing stranded on the motorway shoulder in the last 5 years have been Beemers and Mercs?
Someone's lost the plot.
Then again, a 27hp electric motor makes a lot of sense for stop-start city work where the car's consumption can get down around 5mpg (or worse) if the fossilburner's left running.
Mine's the dirt-covered green Pug running on used chippie oil.
There's a standing joke that the UK removed all its road signs in 1939 to thwart nazi invaders - and never bothered putting them back - it's funny because it's very close to the truth.
My biggest bugbear is the impossiblity of knowing what streets you're going past. There's almost never a decent sign (by decent I mean US/AU/NZ style 9 foot pole on the corner with reflective fingerboard hanging off it) that can be read at 20mph, let alone 30mph. It's no wonder satnavs are flying off the shelves here.
Mine's the one with all the maps in it.
Raid: Linux has had software raid (0,1,5) for more than 10 years. It's slower than hardware raid but it works - and there's a hell of a lot of supposed "raid" kit out there which simply patches bios to do raid in the CPU, not in the hardware.
Dell: last time I looked the issue with Dell's Linux arena wasn't the Linux support (it's fine on servers and their support desk actually works, amazing!) but the laughable range of 2+ year old certified hardware with limited memory ranges and pathetic video controllers that was all that was available in desktop ranges.
Having to buy their specific distro didn't go down well when we already have site agreements in place either. Needless to say they don't get to sell us desktop hardware (Linux OR Windows, companies which pull this kind of thing don't get to benefit from our business)
Thumbs down because it was impossible to actually GET Lenovo linux notebooks despite them being on the website...
I spent several days last month comparing SSDs for one of our servers and discovered VERY quickly that there is a huge range of speeds in the things with some running at half (or slower) the speed of an average 7200rpm hard drive and others running significantly faster than an average 7200rpm drive.
Crucial SSD drives were notably down at the slow end of the pack, with Samsung drives among the leaders.
This effectively means you're not really comparing apples with apples.
Is there any chance of benchmarking a Samsung 128Gb SSD or other fast SSD array and publishing the results?
8Gb vs 16Gb might not seem real worldly, but I have Q35 desktops deployed with 8Gb already and the entire ram complement is being used. If 16Gb was available, I'd deploy it.
Why? Astrophysicists eat ram.
The alternative to putting this amount of ram in a personal desktop system is buying in servers which cost 5-10 times as much and then having them fight over CPU time. This results in less effective work.
I work in a university.
Dell is one of our contract suppliers.
Dell only remain a contract supplier because some individuals insist on buying equipment from them _despite_ poor service levels.
I am one of the people who rubberstamps purchase requests in our department.
I also happen to be one of the people who maintains the networks and systems....
My average wait time on Dells _CORPORATE_ helpline for hardware problems is 22 minutes, with a minimum recorded wait of 18 minutes. This is at 0870 rates and is on the first call.
I hate to think what kind of raw deal home buyers are getting.
Needless to say, I do not approve Dell purchase requests anymore.
Dell are far from the worst offenders. I had a 2 HOUR wait on HP's 0870 support line last month, which terminated at 6pm with "sorry, our lines are now closed". This was for a UKP 25k disk array with a controller fault.
I've hosed smokers down with CO2 extinguishers on a few occasions. It's quite effective, but be aware that if they're caught unawares they may need new underwear.
WRT BCP, I asked the local coppers about the legality of using it on tresspassers and they didn't have an issue with it at all - although one commented it'd probably be more effective to clock whoever wouldn't get off the doorstep with the unit, rather than hosing them down.
The mercedes comment is evil and well justified, but I thought firefighters had the power to move a vehicle blocking access to sites and fire plugs using whatever means possible. Wouldn't it have been easier to just shunt it aside with the tender? (and THEN empty BCP inside it on the pretext that you were preventing anything catching fire after being shunted..)
Yes, I really dislike smokers who insist on doing it when asked not to - something to do with being fairly allergic to some of the chemicals in a lot of tailor-made cigarettes. It's no fun not being able to breathe.
quoting Chris Thomas:
========
IT contracts? yeah, with expensive failure clauses. You can't find a contractor to agree? fine, divide the contract up, spread the failure across smaller companies.
========
The problem is that in public service it is routine for the contractor to deliver what was ORIGINALLY asked for, on time and under budget - however the goalposts keep moving, resulting in exploding costs as the contractors keep having to play catchup with the project controller's latest whims.
2 examples from the other side of the world:
NZ police: INCIS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INCIS - the wikipediea entry doesn't go into the details (I was living in NZ at the time) but the project was abandoned because it became clear that the cost to complete the project was more than double the NZ$110 million already spent.
Another project I observed allowed an incompetent manager to set a project which wouldn't work as designed - the contractors and consultants said so, so the solution was to keep hiring contractors and consultants until they found some stupid enough to say yes. (Actually it was a consultant stupid enough to sign off on it, the contractors knew it wouldn't work, but figured if they delivered it as written they'd be able to make money making it workable) In the end the project was written off, having cost 4 times the original figure and being unusable.
This kind of shopping around is rampant in public service, as are incompetent managers hired in to do a job on the basis of glowing past reports, which were usually written to get them out of a previous position before they could cause any further damage.
Greater accountability is needed and not just for the IT contractors....
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