Posts by Alan Brown

Re: A winning strategy?

"Fighting ISIS is a case of spending enough money to move all the casualties to their side of the equation"

In a word, bullshit. The more casualties you cause, the more recruits you have.

The way to fight ISIS is to make people better off in the first place so they're not poor and desperate enough to even consider that joining up with nutters is a good idea

Comfortably well off people seldom turn into jihadists. The guy whose wife and kids have just been killed by a faceless remote enemy is a perfect candidate for the task (see: Luke Skywalker)

Re: Technically fantastic but...

"the last thing you need is lots of 27mm high explosive ammunition arriving at speed"

As a reminder of this: about 50 years ago a USAF jet accidentally fired off ~30 rounds "outside the box" in a targetted paractice zone in the USA during a groudn attack exercise. They tore the roof off a school more than 15 miles away. Thankfully nobody was hurt but it makes the point about where these things land

Re: Technically fantastic but...

"£200,000 for the missile vs how much for a small drone?"

This is exactly the argument that has been made by various military types (including ship captains) for a while.

You can send an awful lot of $500 to $2500 drones to be shot down by $200k-$1M missiles and they defenders MUST shoot down every single one because you simply don't know which of the things may have an explosive or thermite load vs just be loaded with glitter

The other aspect of this is that defenders only have "so many" defence missiles to shoot at incoming devices, after which they have to leave the area, rely on phalanx (which also runs out of ammunition pretty quickly in such scenarios) or grit their teeth and hope

A land-based attacker with a few dozen/hundred drones can essentially render the defences of most warships or airbases obsolete by running them out of ammunition before sending in the nasty stuff. If the attacker has a few dozen hypersonic missiles the first few don't even need to be particularly precisely targetted in order to draw fire and leave things defenceless

As WW1 and industrial mechanisation changed warfare in unimaginable ways 100 years ago, the new varieties of small cheap semi-intelligent guided weapons are set to change things in future in ways that militarists can't currently conceive

This is a huge problem which keeps recurring. Finance departments really don't like dealing with this shit

A clearing house for licensing/payments sounds like a nice idea but greed always takes over with the assholes skimming 80-90% (RIAA royalty model, etc)

Re: Businesses are simply not in the business of fair dealing.

"Amazon and such like only buy a few dozen books at a time, or enough to ensure they only keep enough in stock to make quick sales. Amazon don't take risks or waste space with book storage, they leave all that on the shoulders of the publisher to worry about"

The solution for that is deep quantity price breaks. When I was purchasing from book wholesalers, buying in 100 books was only slightly more expensive than ordering 60 and 1000 copies only slightly more expensive than 600

Re: Businesses are simply not in the business of fair dealing.

"Part of the whole JIT strategy was intended to leave a buffer on inventory on site to handle things like shipping problems, the fabbery burning down, etc."

The Toyota Way (the basis of JIT) has hundreds of pages dedicated to this point and one of the poinbts of this is that in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake Toyota bumped up their stockholding of semiconductors due to the downtime such events caused fabs - to the point of having a 7 month buffer. Similarly when other carmakers were cancelling orders they kept on ordering and accepting semiconductors

That's why they were able to stay producing cars for so long and have had fewer cutbacks than other makers

"some dim bulb decided to greatly reduce (or eliminate!) that buffer of inventory in order to save a few pennies and earn themselves a bonus"

Yup, they read the first page of JIT philosophy and didn't bother with the risk assessments that go with it

Re: Expensive software is rarely better though

"good luck getting it fixed unless you're a huge company or a nation-state"

THIS is exactly the reason why my employers tend to gravitate towards opensource. We also contribute back to the pool.

It's "free" because I'm being paid to write it. Not all free software is being put out by hobbyists (and not all free software is zero cost)

Re: Whinging ideologue developers

It also leads to code forking and some interesting religious arguements in OSS projects - especially when the project starts out really well but the initiator retires and the corporates who take it on are more concerned with profits or "purity" than what the end users actually want

Re: "no company pays their law firm on Patreon"

Companies which sell services tend to write or adapt software to do it and derived works do get pushed back out

GPL at least has a chance of that happening, BSD or Apache licensing is a black hole which allows parasites to thrive

It's way worse than that.

The person maintaining it starts copping abuse from entitled assholes to the point where it's a drag to keep running it and frequently gets hit with threats of legal action (or worse) when he finally says "fuckit" and throws in the towel

It's like the anecdote of the guy in the rowing club who took on the task of cleaning the shed and hulls every week years ago so he could use them himself, misses it once and finds an abusive message on the noticeboard from the golden boys of the club to "whoever didn't do their duty". Most times such a volunteer will never lift a finger again

Tiny junk is a big problem both in terms of statistics and the impossibility of de-elevation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_broom

Technically it's probably doiable now. Politically is a whole different kettle of fish

Brooms CAN take down the even smaller stuff but it requires opportunistic shooting into the debris streams and hoping, rather than actaully targetting individual objects (shotgun vs rifle)

Re: Corporate manslaughter?

WHEN a major earthquake hits tornado alley

There, FTFY

Lookup Reelfoot Rift and New Madrid

The largest earthquake casualty risk in the USA isn't where you might think it is. Moment Magnitude 7+ intraplate quakes with virtually zero seismic protection will be a slaughter and it's more or less due to pop again Real Soon Now

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone

Re: Go whistle

They were valid in Sweden. The issue is that the women in question didn't want to press charges, they merely wanted him to take a STD test

Re: Two sides

Based on what's been published, it's more likely he'd have paid a fine in Sweden as the women concerned withdrew their complaints

The risk then is that Sweden would put him on a plane to Australia - and we've seen what the USA does to planes it thinks contain people it wants to get hold of

Re: thou

"I think the whole case is overblown and the US should probably let it rest, but it is probably now being done on principal."

It won't be let go with Biden at the helm. He's quite the hawk and also directly responsible for the Mega case in New Zealand (still grinding away slowly to everyone's irritation)

"Not one person I've ever met, online or off."

Here's one - for the simple reason that Nvidia simply kept borking out when I asked it to do what it did happily in Windows (Quadro with multiple cards and monitors)

AMD "worked first time"

"For those that have played with the old rotor type fax once used by the news services you know about the random noise that is scattered across the copy"

Or for those paying attention in the 1990s, the random noise in Cindy Crawford pictures distributed in alt.binaries.pictures usenet froups

Re: This claim makes limited sense.

"Well, now just watch some of it"

At that point all you really need to watch is the metadata and you don't need to decrypt the messages to do that, so the presence of a backdoor is a problem if noticed

Metadata obscuration is precisely why Tor and friends exist but virtually nobody uses it correctly and they always end up leaking their real credentials sooner or later

Re: You have to wonder

You can hurt someone quite badly without even ringing the bell

Back EMF off a releasing relay is enough to hurt - personal experience working on wiring frames. The worst part is that getting those nips fro the wiring makes you sweat which makes the nips get more painful

One of the favourite games used to be "Megger the trainee" - that stopped the day a trainee broke someone's nose by way of response

Re: You have to wonder

plenty of unified building wiring uses RJ45 outlets for phone (voltage on pair 1), so it's an easy mistake to make

Which is only ONE of the reasons ethernet is required to handle up to 1500V (more modern implementations tend to be rated for 7k5V or 10kV)

Re: You have to wonder

ethernet devices are specifically designed to be able to handle telephone voltages (invcluding ringing) There's far more to this that he wasn't telling you

The most common name applied was "outhouse distress"

It really was a shitty product

Re: Question is

the difference is that the "get rich quick" Chinese streamers tend to also have pretty good academic qualifications (even the e-girls, etc). What you find is that they see streaming as a way of letting off steam which happens to pay well

Re: What you are missing

"After 22gb, the cat videos are going to be buffering a lot and waiting for data."

Because you have had a restriction (limit) applied

What part of "limiting" don't you get? It doesn't always mean "cutting off"

One example being speed limiters fitted to trucks....

Re: 25GB though??

1/200 speed once you go over the cap is essentially tossing an anchor over the side and no amount of weaselling is going to deflect from the fact that it IS an artificial limitation being imposed

Re: Wow!

The problem is that there isn't a per email/call statutory damge and small claims judges might decide to start bouncing claims

This is where things like the USA TCPA won. It made refusal of small claims filings impossible and the judges who tried to bounced things got spanked hard by higher courts

Re: Not paying!

"What advantage does tape bring in this instance?"

Defence against deletion

Re: Not paying!

"The setup cost is about £2k for the drive"

I'd like to know where you're getting one that cheap from. It's usually about £12-14k by the time you wrap a LTO9 inside a library with FC connectivity

Admittedly you get a lot of data on each tape but the drives are eye-wateringly expensive

Re: Not paying!

Last week, actually

LTO lasts a LONG time, even heavily used ones

And FWIW some of these malware variants lay in wait for a long time before activating

Who needs that kind of persuasion?

A rather messy display left behind is persuasive to the surviving crooks - reminding them that they're not untouchable

Back in days of having to real with skiddies the fastest way of stopping their rampages was to doxx them and post their details as the reason their hosting ISP was barred from accessing various resources. Local users would take care of the rest (Both in kicking arses at ISPs who refused to deal with abusive users and dealing with the users themselves)