Posts by Peter2

Re: What this needs is a war

Defense projects are intended to maximise the transfer of money from government to contractors. Not to deliver cost-effective solutions, quickly. To change the dynamic of weapons development requires an external stimulus to reprioritize delivery.

To create weapons that are good enough, not ones that (fail to) fulfill a long and theoretical wish-list from armchair generals and civil servants.

This comment shows that you are an armchair general my friend.

You've also missed an obvious point which is that during peacetime we want to accumulate a stockpile of weapons such as Storm Shadow and NLAW which are slow to build, and which will be useful after sitting on a shelf for thirty or forty years, before promptly proceeding to blow the hell out of Russian targets despite their best defences which they've developed in that time.

During wartime then you just want a weapon which is good enough for a particular purpose and available in quantity now at the lowest possible price, and it only wants a 12 month shelf life because it's going to be used within that.

There is no point doing mass stockpiling of a weapon which is cheap and just good enough for the moment; that's basically why Russia is fucked in Ukraine. They stocked tanks which were only just good enough, we stocked anti tank rockets with enough future proofing to blow their tanks up despite any sensible level of uparmouring they could do. Result; Russian tanks die to western anti tank rockets meaning that Russian troops have to do bayonet charges on machine guns dug into trenches with barbed wire in front ala WW1.

Re: In the raw

the legal profession went through the painful process of sacking all their their typists and learning to use a mouse just 30 years ago, and you can't expect them to change working processes more than once every 50 years.

That misunderstands what actually happened.

The secretaries always actually did most of the routine work on a legal file with complicated fiddly bits being dictated via audio dictation.

What happened with Legal Case Management Systems is that all of the secretaries became case handlers in their own right; termed paralegals. They then did about 15 times the amount of work as the Solicitors, who were increasingly relegated to only doing the complicated legal work that paralegals can't do.

Realistically they would be able to work much effectively using text documents in Git.

Realistically, git is outright primitive and considerably less efficient than the existing case management systems which combine a document management system with a templating system which creates an email with a word document created and attached requiring no editing, a calendar system which diarises chasing up documents and electronic document signing. Emailing things around is inefficient compared to uploading it directly to the CMS (which is possible via a web portal) but requiring people to use different web portals to interact with other companies would be a monumental pain in the ass and so email between firms is the standard.

But then again, all mainstream CMS's support having a process sitting there and scanning for emailed documents which have the appropriate references, and automatically filing them and scheduling the required follow up actions, which I don't think that Git supports either.

you can't expect them to change working processes more than once every 50 years.

You do realise that accepted working practices change more frequently and radically in law than in IT, right? There's a reason that the legal world has a training ecosystem that makes it IT training ecosystem look like a bad joke, and it's not because lawyers enjoy wasting money.

Re: The real reason nobody wants to use it

Exactly. Who gives a toss about IP addresses other than network admins?

This view misses the obvious fact that network admins are the people who have to implement IPv6; and our near universal disgust with it is literally the sole reason that it has failed to displace IPv6 after 30 years.

Re: Talking of things that might get you sacked now...

They had of course locked down the PCs - making it impossible to change the background.

I remember an IT department doing this in the late 90's.

After group policy allowed forcing the background to a particular file and before NTFS permissions prevented staff from overwriting the file with their own image.

Re: Embargos are fantastic...

All the USA needs to do now is utterly alienate the continent that makes the photolithography machines required to make the chips by tearing up trade agreements and alliances and threatening to invade them, so they start thinking about running their own foreign policy which doesn't involve selling their tech to the US to make lots of money from making chips using their technology.

Oh, wait.

Re: Wait

At the end of the day does Microsoft actually need consumer users?

From one particular point of view retail is probably utterly irrelevant to Microsoft's bottom line.

From another; having been somewhat involuntarily forced to Linux Mint from Windows (as a 8 core/16 threat processor with 32GB of RAM is no supported by Windows) the greater familiarity I am gaining with Linux on an ongoing basis is making it steadily more likely that i'm going to end up deploying it at work as a server at some point. That prospect ought to keep people at Microsoft up late at night if they can think a few steps ahead.

Re: What goes up will come down

The solution is ultimately going to be melting them with a laser and then only closing particular runways if their is a FOD hazard.

Pure incompetence.

Microsofts Win11 installer recently informed me that my ~8 year old AMD Ryzen box (8 core/16 thread processor with 32GB of RAM) is good enough to run Win11 and wants me to go and buy a new PC.

I suppose I could play around and fool Windows into allowing me to install it on the perfectly adequate PC, but i've no particular intention of doing that. Instead, I considered that it's been about twenty years since I last dabbled with duel booting Linux and am now running Linux as my main desktop.

Re: It's gonna crash sometime

I don't think it's so much about "What if Microsoft goes out of business".

Trump sanctioned a judge in the International Court of Justice because he didn't like their rulings and suddenly their emails and documents (like court case files) vanished out of the cloud. If he's willing to target a judge in the International Court of Justice then he's going to think about it rather less when going for somebody else.

That personally makes me look at the cloud and increasingly unstable political situation in America very pensively. It's now entirely plausible that Trump may wake up one morning not having taken his meds and decide that industry X in country Y is now sanctioned resulting in our IT vanishing, and the company collapsing when the cloud backups don't work either. He's done basically that with tarrifs already, even to countries that were previously American friends and allies.

Migrating to an American cloud without considering this sort of issue would now be somewhat negligent.

Re: my thoughts too

Yeah; that's an open cycle gas turbine in a nutshell.

Combined cycle gas turbines also have a triple expansion steam plant tacked on to the end to basically get every last bit of power out of that heat, however the steam plant is expensive to manufacture and has long lead times.

Re: 8 police cars?

You'd get an immediate and major police response for phoning 999 and saying that you'd got an intruder in your house or trying to kick in the door. If you reported that people were doing it with an axe or were trying to shoot holes in it then you'd get a helicopter, armed response units and dog teams and a good old fashioned manhunt.

If you made a police report saying that you'd left your laptop on a chair in the front garden, gone inside to answer the phone and had come back and found it missing then you'd probably just get given a crime number or be invited to come in and give a statement.

And that's simply because it's fundamentally pointless waste of time for somebody to investigate; because even if they sent a forensics team to come and look at your chair then it's not likely to have any fingerprints on it from the person who nicked it. And ok, you could pull every bit of video evidence from every camera within a mile and spend 2 man years looking at it which the police will do in murder cases, but the police don't have the time or manpower required to do that for every single bit of petty theft. Hence, they just say "don't leave valuable stuff sitting where thieves can see it!"

Re: Red herring?

I'm pretty certain both that your right.

Also, isn't there existing case law for this? I'm fairly certain that you're allowed to resell (access to) copyrighted works like music and books as well in most (if not all) european countries, assuming you do not make copies or sell it multiple times.

Your allowed to resell physical media such as books, CD's etc sure. If anything, this might actually hurt Microsofts case.

I've bought VLK's via Value Licensing way back, and they simply provided access to the original Microsoft media via the Microsoft Volume License Servicing Centre; so I very much doubt that Microsoft has an argument on copyright grounds.

Re: Fairly Minor but...

A winding up petition here in the UK is a commercial nuclear missile - ignore it at your peril!

It's supposed to be. It's a way of ensuring that suppliers get paid, as with a nuclear missile the threat of it being used tends to have the effect desired without having to resort to the use of the weapon of last resort.

To obtain such a court order you've got to write to the target and warn them that following your previous letters, your going to seek a winding up order if they don't pay up within 14 days. Therefore, the simplest method of defending yourself is to pay the supplier before it goes to court.

Although if it did go to court, paying the money before the hearing date would be a bar to any order being made by the judge as your defence would be "we've already paid them" and so the case would have to be dismissed.

Local device storage on 1 HDD is cheap.

Network storage on 2+ HDD's for failure tolerance plus online and offline backups which can be recovered in a short timeframe is not so cheap, especially when multiplied by a large number of users.

At a certain point, "just delete unused shit" is the cheapest method of dealing with this, especially if the organisation is archiving everything going through the mail server for 6+ years centrally anyway.

Re: Evidence

You are right their illegal activities could have been handled under existing laws and none of their actions come close to any accepted legal definition of terrorism.

Nope, not what I said. Their illegal activities could have been prosecuted under other laws (High Treason being one, money laundering for receiving foreign funding from unknown foreign sources being another) but they were meeting the legal definition of terrorism and that's beyond dispute given that they ended up being banned under said act. People might not like that, but I don't much like our military equipment being sabotaged by saboteurs acting under the direction of a foreign government.

But they were not actually the target of their own proscription. The actual target were protesters protesting perfectly legally

Um. I take it that your not aware of how the law works in the UK.

Protesting against anything is perfectly legal. Sticking up a sign saying that you were pro Palestine was and still is fine. Putting up a sign saying that you thought that banning the morons under the terrorism act was stupid would have been fine. Putting up a sign saying "I support <banned terrorist organisation>" gets you in trouble, and organisations were handing out signs to protesters to get them in trouble. One hopes that the protesters were aware that they were being deliberately set up.

Re: Britain is run by corrupt people

Ah, cognitive dissonance strikes again. So two pretty much mutually inconsistent statements.

Only if your a Russian. Anybody else will see "Putin increases military spending, threatens to invade neighbour" leads to "neighbour increases size of defending army to make war too expensive to contemplate even for a war mongering imbecile" as being obvious cause and effect.

The same as "Senior Russian leader threatens to nuke %nation%" leads directly to "%nation% considers acquiring nuclear weapons".

Cause and effect.

Re: £800M?

I'd have thought that a multiple choice questionnaire that records answers should be a job that could be able to give to almost any developer, SME IT Manager and probably a significant majority of power users for completion within a week.

I suppose adding recording through video and storage of that and a playback system would push the time and money requirement up, but it does seem a trifle expensive.

Re: Delusional

I'm not sure it's possible to resolve, honestly.

The procurement requirements basically say that you've got to use the usual suspects, who are the problem. Resolving the problem would require not using the usual suspects and doing something else.

Therefore as you don't have the power to alter the procurement laws without an act of parliament then doing anything useful that would address the root cause of the problem would result in breaking a law, which would result in the usual suspects suing the government to force them to waste expend money upon their services without requiring delivery of a finished and usable product.

Re: Wrong type of ships

Not to mention that Norway's largest ships are frigates; meaning that they don't have anything like a carrier to actually escort which is basically the sole purpose of a destroyer these days.

"Rather than a panacea," Creese added, "open source can create unforeseen risks of lock-in and incompatibilities across increasingly integrated systems. As the links between different public service organisations become more crucial, incompatibility creates all manner of problems."

Then standardise on a data interchange standard rather than "standardising" on the latest version of Microsoft %whatever%.

The biggest issue with *nix systems is that high level specialists aren't easy or cheap to come by, however since Canonical who makes Ubuntu is a British company it doesn't seem unreasonable to standardise on their software and pay them to maintain additional high level experts to provide emergency support.

Re: Nuclear Concorde

Absolutely. And it's notable that groups like Just Stop [western] Oil started attempting to blockade western refineries at the same time that Russia stopped providing gas and fuel with the fairly obvious intent of shoving prices yet higher by further depressing supply.

The same as the green groups are frantically protesting against running power lines from the offshore wind turbines to the rest of the country so that all of the wind turbines can be connected to something which can actually use the power and so displace gas generation.

The other godsend is [on windows servers] removing shut down and restart from the start menu via group policy.

As you then tend to go for the next easiest option of shutting servers down via "shutdown -i" then it forces specifying which server you want to shut down and thus utterly eliminates the problem of "oops, wrong server".

Re: “Retaining Elon is more important than ever before”

Yes, but Tesla always have to say that they are working on The New Big Thing, because if they admitted that they produce EV's that are truthfully a bit inferior to what everybody else makes then somebody is going to compare the number of cars that Ford makes to the number of cars that Tesla makes, and Tesla's share price will decline to the level of Ford's.

There is a massive bubble in certain corporate share prices in America which are wildly disconnected from objective reality and when the bubble pops and the share price declines to a more natural valuation then it's going to carry off most of America's wealth with it.

Re: Surely...

Core 2 machines will still "work", but they are sluggish, enough to notice. Especially with multiple apps / browser windows open.

Many years ago, we bought a bunch of C2D desktops (the HP DC7800 & 7900) as refurbs to do an upgrade from WinXP to something supported enmasse. At a later point I started buying new Win10 boxes to replace them with.

The new Win10 boxes i'd specced came with duel screens, which led to lamentations and demands for parity from the workforce, along with a desire for a quick fix, which was that the DC7900's got an upgrade package of a second hand Quadro card, 8GB of RAM and an SSD.

These PC's remained perfectly task adequate up until they were all retired just before the Win7 EOL in Jan 2020.

In March 2020, we had a sudden unexpected requirement for a large amount of home working, along with a pile of PC's that were task adequate with a quick reimage. These PC's were then gifted to staff. Many of them are still in use in a personal capacity, but certainly do well enough for office work web browsing and watching youtube etc.

Re: Oh sure

Okay, so either your initial planning was shit, or the results you got are shit, but you cannot tell me that a 6-month project was properly done in 3 weeks.

It's entirely possible to do a long project quickly.

If the 6 month project was based on training one user at a time and then moving them over to a new system, evaluating any issues and then moving the next user to avoid disruption then you could accelerate that simply by booking a single mass training course and accepting the downtime that they were suffering anyway with the 3 weeks being waiting that long for the training course slots to be available.

I've got a digitalisation project running at the moment which won't be finished until well into the next decade due to the approach taken being a budget conscious one of ensuring that we don't send any new paper documents to archives, and then destroy the old stuff as it reaches the destruction date. If we wanted to accelerate that radically then it's entirely possible given a large injection of cash; just pay for all of the old paper to be scanned.

Re: Wait a minute

What would you expect from a people who imagined the tax on tea could be reduced by first dumping the tea into Boston harbour ?

The American Mafia was protesting a tax cut from ~100% down to like 10% because they couldn't smuggle in untaxed goods for less than the cost of taxed goods. Their response was to destroy the taxed products to leave the people with no alternative but to buy from them.

Re: Anyone else.....

Ukrainians point out that playing certain computer games is militarily useful.

MOD supports [existing] soldiers playing certain computer games competitively.

How we got from the first line to the second appears to be rather intuitively obvious.

In Enders game (in at least what I recall from the book) children were taken away from their families at like 5, raised and conditioned to vicious in the pursuit of military victory without regard to losses or consequences and then put in charge of a series of battles which Ender promptly uses as extermination missions as he's been conditioned to do. They then tell him, "yeah by the way that was real, not a sim"?

It's less obvious how you get from the second line to that.

Re: The Post Office is a broken company

To be fair, the Royal Mail is irredeemably fucked and it's the IT worlds fault, not the governments.

Royal Mail exists to send letters. People now send emails, not snail mails. The last holdout reason for snailmail was needing signatures on things, and then electronic signatures come along and boom.

Royal Mails situation is therefore reduced to being another parcel delivery company with a bunch of legacy requirements as to mandatory delivery timescales and a requirement to deal with unprofitable areas that nobody else can be bothered to deal with which drives up their costs above the competition.

Splitting the Post Offices off of Royal Mail is setting things up so that when the Royal Mail goes splat the Post Offices can survive independently.

Re: "I explicitly told it eleven times in ALL CAPS not to do this."

It's a good thump, or a good kick.

Although I stopped doing that years ago after learning that a non technical colleague had spent an hour or so systematically hammering the crap out of a bit of equipment trying to duplicate the exact strength and location of my purely theatrical thump.