Posts by Alan Brown 16473 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
write up exactly what's discovered and what actions were taken
The fastest way for lessons to be learned is for it to hit the customer financially. Everything else is "water off a duck's back"
I'm quite serious about this. The moment we started charging hourly fees for callout issues which turned out to be "not our fault" was the moment a number of repeat offenders suddenly had their "come to jesus" revelations (They got one warning first, most ignored it)
One case which springs to mind is a customer who insisted on a callout (2 hour drive) for our staff to un-minimise the icon for the program she was using, claiming that we must be causing it to shrink remotely. Her husband eventually admitted he was doing it to play solitaire whilst she was out.
"Because if not they not only claw it back, but reduce the following year's budge too."
This can be solved by finding out who the responsible beaqncounter is and introducing their face to their desk. Repeatedly
Failing that, ensuring said beancounter's department gets shafted in the IT stakes has an eye openeing effect on their outlook
I think there are few (if any) greybearded *nix admins who haven't at some point trashed a system by accidentally removing /etc /usr, or /bin via various misadvantures (like having something unlinking "dead" directories and having it discover .. )
The question becomes how quickly you recovered and how old the backups were
this starts rubbing at the core of the issue
Most software ISN'T written by professionals, but by bumbling amateurs whose code happens to do what's needed at the time
Couple that with a "If it works, ship it!" mindset from the moneybags and you have a disaster waiting to happen at some point down the line
"and this was from being crushed by a falling crane, or something similar"
He had a heart attack in the cab of the crane and they couldn't get to him because it had fallen.
On the other hand ~1500 people died in the panic of the evacuation, including patients abandoned on operating tables amongst other things
Fukushima province is still less radioative than the Yorkshire Dales or downtown Helsinki (both due to the local rocks)
"And if we're talking about reactors that leak?"
We should be asking "why?" - especially given that Alvin Weinberg built one which doesn't all the way back in 1965, and being unpressurised & hot enough to make supercritical steam it's got a bunch of advantages over the first laboratory glassware prototype he made (the Nautilus/Shippingport design which is the basis for most in use today)
Our own El Reg was pushing the tech back in the 2000s (RIP Lester), and one is currently under test in China at Wuwei
"Twitter's bot percentage figure is based on a published methodology"
So are ISP "unlimited data" accounts that get throttled when they pass a threshold - or more prosaically, user counts that include people who've been DEAD for years
Just because it's "published" doesn't make it ethical or "right"
you may jest but I've seen rounding errors in serious astrophysics work throw results completely out the window
The funny part is that it got picked up because "The new 64-bit systems are giving wrong answers" - as it turned out the old 32-bit systems weren't right either, just different. If you're evolving stars and galaxies don't use your intermediate results as imputs for the next calculations unless you _really_ understand what compounded rounding achieves
Thatcherism didn't even thrive as a by-product of that
Mostly what saved the UK's bacon last time around was North Sea gas and oil - which sucessive British governments spent 50 years partying on without bothering to put anything aside (a lot went into "associates' pockets")
That safety net isn't there this time around and so far the only people doing any semblence of "well" out of Brexit are New Zealand+Australian farmers (widely regarded in both countries as payback for being tossed under a bus when Britain joined the EEC)
Murphy's law states that if an aircraft part can be fitted two ways and one of them is the wrong way, then someone will fit it the wrong way
Murphy's wife's law says Murphy was an optimist
I'm never sure if he took things like the fitter above into account, or the russian who managed to install a g-sensor upside down on a recent proton launcher despite the mounts being explicitly designed to make it impossible to install upside down... (the Proton did the predictable thing and crashed almost as soon as it cleared the tower)
"this is the company that damaged the FPU on the 486 (486SX) "
Mostly they sold 486s with faulty FPUs as 486SXs rather than throwing them out.
It was another form of component binning. Other makers did it with RAM and various other silicon. 4116s were one of the more infamous items that got binned this way, as were 2708 2kB eproms (sold as A or B versions depending which half of the die was disabled)
Towards the end of 486 manufacture they were disabling working FPUs that operated slowly (low clock speeds compared with the integer parts of the die) but mostly 486SXs just disappeared from the supply chain and anyone looking for a 487 was told to buy a 486DX because it was cheaper to do so (not much use if you had a soldered-in CPU but by that stage you may as well buy new hardware anway)
You need to remember that back in the late 80s-early 90s, wafer yields weren't wonderful (IIRC Intel was getting ~10-15% on the initial 386/486 runs) and large wafers were still a glimmer in fab engineers' eyes. Selling something that was only "half" broken at a discount was a reasonable way of recovering what would otherwise be a dead loss
"The only exception to this is if the IoT device uses UPnP to knock holes in the firewall and NAT protection that the router provides. But they would be NUTS to open port 22 via UPnP, even if it were possible"
Consider them NUTS then, because that (and opening via a tunnel ) is more or less what happens to most IOT embedded linux DVR CCTV systems using Xaomai software - aka XM Eye (which is almost every unit shipped out of China using Huawei SoCs regardless of branding or UI)
Their Sophia binary is spectacularly awful and appears to breach GPL, but it just won't die
[email protected] is a way to ensure such companies get added to at least one rather nasty blacklist
....or so I've heard
"That 'opinion' of course specifically contravenes the Regulation, as it denies data subjects their statutory right to object to specific processing on that basis by allowing it to be concealed from the data subject. "
The action in that case outght to be against the ICO for thwarting the will of Parliament
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