Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Price isn't everything

"Trust me, we have tills with some of this "cheap" SSD stuff you mention."

Not 4-8TB enterprise SSDs you don't - which is the context for this story and my comment

Toy drives in cheap SMB toys are another matter altogether and a good example of beancounters costing companies dealy through having few clues about what they're specifying (Hint: The drives you speak of aren't rated at even 0.2 DWPD and the controller in question isn't intended to have 24*7 uptime - it shits itself at 2^32-1 centiseconds uptime - the infamous "49.7days" problem)

Re: Hardware vs Software

that's because it's hard to apply a hardware update in the field

This isn't just a case of "working reliably" either. The problem isn't on the head side of the arm but the coil side. Trying to have 2 moving electromagnet assemblies between very strong magnets that won't interact with each other - even with shielding in place - is likely an essentially economically unsolveable problem - meaning that yes it can be solved but by the time they nail it, SSDs will have taken over and surpassed the density/cost of HDDs

In the same way that MAMR/HAMR implementation delays have doomed that technology for the same reason. SSDs have already overtaken the technology

Re: £35k in total?

companies like this arrange the books very carefully to not show profit. Renumeration to the director will be much higher

Don't foget that Linited liability only limits SHAREHOLDER exposure. Directors or management can and should face the full legal wrath that comes from their decisions

Re: What this boils down to

"What baffles me is that the bean counters who signed off on the project haven't been fired."

They get peerages, a seat in the House of Lords and EVEN MORE contracts

Except that these days students are demanding valie for money and starting to take legal action when they don't get what they paid for

Universities are frequently the last bastion of British Leyland manglement

"The one thing it didn't have was a control room. So, we had no control over the lights, beyond a small control box the installer had left so we could actually use the installation. We also had no mixers, beyond a couple of small ones we had to lend to students to use in the field."

Oh dear, the control box has caught fire and the loan mixers have come back broken. We can't use the studio and it's now an expensive white elephant. Whatever would the Public Accounts Committee say?

phoenixing like that is pretty much standard practice the world over in the building trade. I think warranty companies price it into their operational models rather than going after the fraud

Re: Limited liability

Limited Liability constrains the liablities of the SHAREHOLDERS ONLY

It does NOT constrain the liabilities of the _directors_ or the _managers_ (frequently the same people) for poor decisions or reckless operations

The liquidation is allowed to be contested for cases like this and the ICO should have already done so

As the previous poster has stated, what was posted on Facebook amounts to sufficient evidence for "piercing the corporate veil" and essentially destroys all protection the new and old owner(s) may claim

Re: Without journalism, you get guaranteed corruption

"It is sad what has happened to journalism. Margins and revenue were cut, novice young journalists with tough targets came in."

That happened LONG before social media

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s most "professional journalists" I dealt with made it clear they had no interest in doing anything except processing PR releases and absoutely zero interest in dealing with local issues unless they were given the stories prewritten and preedited for them. Only about 1 in 100 actually gave enough of a flying fig about anything they were writing to fact check various claims made by government talking heads and the average reader works on the mindset of "if it's in the newspapers it must be true, because they always make sure it's right before they print it".

Retractions and corrections in small print on page 5 a few days later don't have the same impact as inch high headlines on page 1

Re: Wishful thinking

"didn't really work" is an understatement.

AT&T has reconstituted itself in a way which is immune to FTC action and no longer constrained by the 1920s "universal service to all" antitrust settlements

Along the way it has destroyed competition in such a way that there are now FEWER competing companies than there were before the breakup occurred (with _zero_ LECs now in existence) - and stricter legislated local monopolies too

Re: Nice but

Yup.

Most of this shit got kicked out of Ukraine some years back after tracebacks were demonstrated to the government and a simple ultimatum given of "stop this shit happening or you lose connectivity to the Tier 1 carriers"

It's been similar in most countries where the gangs hang out. Russia is the big holdout because mafia management

Re: Rhetoric

"Luckily we have better brains and commanders around here. And encrypted backups."

Except we don't. Most of the time we barely have backups at all until 15 minutes after a need for them is proven and seagull manglement have had their shit blow up spectacularly in their own faces

Re: REvil's downfall

"This makes finding the humans behind the tech a lot harder"

Harder, but not impossible. In some ways onion routing can make it easier to find your bad guys

Re: If they know who

In all liklihood he's related to someone extremely senior in the Russian police or political structure and any attempt to "do something" would be a career-ending move for the person trying

Re: Ah well...

BT in the days of "unlimited conections" capped at 10GB

I had a lot of fun talking the sales dweeb through the semantic knots on that one, asking why I should switch to them when my existing provider didn't charge me extra for moving 100 times as much data. She was absolutely determined to make a sale and "not to get" why I didn't think BT was good value for money

Re: "What the neighbours made of their sudden disconnection is . ."

What happened a lot was they clicked on "the internet" (back in W95 days), which didn't work and then phoned up my company (which had "internet services" in the name) to complain about "the internet" not working

About 75% of the time we sold a new connection

Re: Alt-history

"authoritarianism has spread to the (formerly liberal) West and certainly is a major threat."

It has primarily developed as a response to terrorism, where the terrorists were mainly objecting to the freedoms of the West - they must be gobsmacked to see that they've effectively "won" and keep increasing their win as they up the ante

Re: There are worse things than abusive tweets.

Assuming the UK decides it wants to rejoin the EU, it will have to ditch FPTP and move to a properly representative system of government in order for an application to be accepted.

Ironically this was a condition mostly penned by the Blair government to placate existing members about authoritation leaning worries when he was pushing to get Eastern European countries allowed in

Re: But where will they find enough pedophiles?

The BBC had a pretty good go at that during the 1960s-80s

> I get that there is ultimately the question of "who decides what's allowed?"

The people who buy printer's ink by the tankerload, of course

This is pretty much the root cause of the problem and a good chunk of radicalisation is a reaction to the extreme agenda they've been pushing

There are strong arguments in favour of the idea that the rise of XYZ fundamentalism worldwide is a direct and synmetrical response to the rise of American Christian Fundamentalism - and if you look closely at that, you'll find it's systematically been built up as a way of destroying the New Deal as an alliance with US corporate interests forged in September 1940

(Hint: plug "How Corporate America created Christian America" into your favourite search engine and wander down the rabbit hole for a while, no tinfoil needed) :(

Don't forget: Media _HAS_ been used to force countries into wars they didn't want to get involved with before - one standout example being the Spanish-American war and J Randolph Hearst, after a convenient boiler accident in Havana. All that matters is selling more media and more advertising revenue

" there is so much hate and bile against those who are not right wing, i am surprised that the comments are not deleted."

I am glad they are not.

OIn this modern age these cannot be unpublished and in future those comments will come back to haunt the posters

One of the more interesting issues in postwar Germany was that all the atrocities seemed to be committed by only a few hundred hardcore Nazis. Everyone else denied involvement and records had "disappeared"

The actual lesson there was "Ordinary people did it" - they were manipulated into that way of thinking and the pattern is clear to even an amateur student of history who cares to look at the way media has been slanted over the last 40 years

or even at members of the royal family out on boat trips.....

Re: Nothing to do with online anonymity whatsoever

There don't _need_ to be major details

It's an opportunity for an authoritarian-leaning administration to grab the chance with both hands whilst it's presented

Let's not forget this is being pushed by the same woman who advocated using famine as a tool to subjugate Ireland (backed by backbenchers Johnson and Mogg - I wonder where they are now? Oh...)

Re: Addicts

"Frankly, any politician who supports that fascist bill."

Speaking of fascism, Umberto Eco had a few words to say about that back in 1995 - words which ring uncomfortably true today when you use them as a checklist against utterances of politcians today:

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

Bear in mind that Mr Eco lived through the rise of Italian Fascism and got to see it "up close and personal"

A government matching a couple of items on the list is one thing. Once you can start tickiing off most of them, serious problems are brewing

Re: There's still the old problem

"So you can send a joke, mean it as a joke and that be obvious and enjoyed by the joke-loving majority of people, but if the person(s) receiving it are bone-headed enough to find it 'grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character', or worse, malicious enough to claim they do even though they don't and they can find a few ideologically extreme fun-hating advocacy groups (there're always some of those) to say the kind of thing you sent really shouldn't ever be sent by anyone, then you can be locked up."

This could be relatively easily manipulated to make conservative party speeches the subject of hate crime ciomplaints

Re: There's still the old problem

Looking at the worst case scenario reveals Weimar 1933 - but this has been apparent for quite a while

Re: There's still the old problem

ably assisted by Dido Harding with any accusations of corruption or conflicts of interest investigated by her husband, the chair of the committee charged with looking into such things