Posts by John Smith 19 16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
If only the NHS had set up (or rather HMG had set up for it) this sort of regulatory framework maybe they would not still be running a 17YO OS in a VM on another obsolete OS.
Thumbs up for the US regulator, not the p*** poor UK effort in this regard.
Although not a Caspian Sea Monster.
The problem with these concepts (apart from hanging a 250 tonne rocket off a large wing) is that the you can't just tip a rocket on its side.
Rockets are tremendously strong in 1 axis while the rocket this carries has to be very strong top-to-bottom (while it's hanging from the wing) and equally strong when the engines fire up.
Also the aircraft does not give you anywhere near the velocity of a stage. So having spent a metric shedload of a cash to build your humougous aircraft you still need to build a 2 stage rocket anyway.
If you could build a rocket that was SSTO (if launched from this aircraft) that would be a major breakthrough in the SoA.
Say hello to the US International Trafficking In Arms "Technical Interchange" meeting protocol.
Where US firms ask foreign suppliers to do space related stuff for them without telling them anything useful about what they want.*
And BTW the State Dept will send along a Referee to see you follow the agreement.
*Yes that sounds insane. Yes this law is insane.
No.
Either set a key length that's a long way in the future or arrange for an upgrade path that lets you gradually increase it.
In the 1970 the DES at around 50bits was "long" by the standards of the time, if you didn't have access nation state level funding to design custom hardware (which the NSA did). By the end of the 80's it was shaky at best. It was only when the EFF actually designed and fabricated a "DES Cracker" chip and showed how to build a machine to run an array of them (late 90's)that the NSA (who's also responsible for USG comms security) admitted that it was vulnerable and the search for a replacement started.
And there we have "The Microsoft Way" in a nutshell.
"This version is a bit s**t but trust us, the next one will be better"
and maybe it will fix them. Or not (if not enough people b**ch about it)
A SaaS looks much like software on a mainframe to some people with very good reason.
Except historically MF operators didn't spy on your data for their own good.
People bought personal computers in the first place to have their data under their control. It's going to take another generation to remind the current generation of what it feels like when your data is under someone else's control and you can't do a thing about it.
Nice.
Time to recall the Lib Dems were runners up in 63 seats and about 37 of them went to the Conservatives, the rest to Labour and the SNP. Time to consider "going tactical" ?
Pre Election the Conservative Party had an absolute HoC majority of 17.
What would be a real ROTFLMFAO moment would be if the a)Lost the majority or b)Came back with a smaller one. One of those "We managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" moments.
Note however that anything short of a defeat (by however many seats) still puts "President" May in the big chair for the next 5 years.
In theory.
However partial success implies partial failure and the Tory party is not very sentimental or tolerant of either.
The only question would be who gets to star as "Brutus" ?
If you're in the UK then yes.
AFAIK the law is very general. If you're in UK jurisdiction it applies.
Now I think things would get tricky if you were (for some reason) either reactivated by the USN or in receipt of an NS letter about something you'd found.
AIUI the NSL would mean not only could you not tell GCHQ about your work but you could not tell them why you could not tell them about your work.
What happens next depends on how smart the person who's dealing with your case. A smart one will kick it up the chain of command to put in a call to Fort Meade. A dumb one will think you're simply being uncooperative and things will become stressful.
So let's see
a) Govt can spy on everyone in the UK and if necessary target security researchers looking for references to interesting results.
b) Minister issues warrant to request the information.
c) Govt issues gagging order so researcher cannot tell anyone they've been forced to cough it up.
It's just a "coincidence" that all these different provisions work together to achieve this result.
It's starting to look as if the writers of surveillance legislation (THE PATRIOT Act would be another example) seem to be using obfuscation methods akin to malware writers to evade scrutiny by AV systems. IOW
Civil servants writing surveillance legislation --> Malware writers.
It seems the Iodine atom absorbs the Xrays (about 0.15nm) which cause electrons to be ejected from deep inside the atom. However not only does this trigger electrons to drop into these vacant orbitals (which should emit other xrays) it also pulls electrons in from the rest of the molecule.
That said I'm not sure how common Iodine containing molecules are in biochemistry, although there's meant to be a lot of it in seaweed.
Incidentally those laser fusion systems only generate Xrays around 150 eV and spend an awful lot of laser energy to do so. :-( .
This phenomena even has a name. It's called the "Normalization of deviance" and was noted as a feature of the root cause of the Challenger Shuttle disaster. Because there are no major repercussions people start accepting a state of affairs that deep down they know to be wrong.
Say what you like but that would be a very arresting image on any US TV news channel.
Even if the story didn't actually relate to the Capitol being in flames.
Or in fact was about Washington DC at all.
You know that in news, if it bleeds, it leads.
Simple. It lacks a bunch of things a lot of people would like to have in a "smart" phone.
OTOH it does have 128GB, so you can store all those new apps, videos, songs and ebooks on there.
Excellent.
Until it gets obsolete, or the battery dies and you have to move all that stuff and you realise how much you've accumulated and how slow it is to transfer
While we will just pop our cards out of ours and stick it into the slot on a model which has a slot to plug into.
Regular OS updates would be worth that kind of money. Better control of data leaking would be worth it too. If it had the basics in already.
I think an earlier poster is right. This was designed to appeal to smart phone reviewers, not actual customers.
Feel the VC startup cash pumped in.
No std headphone socket, micro SD card socket , no battery replacement and a single SIM card slot?
Plus all the data slurping goodness of the Android fork.
I'd really have to hate someone quite a lot to encourage them to buy this PoS.
And again
And again.
MS are institutionally incapable of writing a secure OS and they have spent a long time convincing lots of PHB's (who actually knowledgeable people have to work for) that MS is The Way, The Truth and The Light.
But they should have gingered up the suppliers (as in the astringent root, not the hair colour) to upgrade their SW.
Yes, that should do it.
Dropping a spanner across a couple of power bus bars in the main electricity distribution room of a building is also quite effective. Spectacular to witness apparently, but I only saw the after effects in a company.
In fact the premium rate power repair service took hours to turn up, the system wide UPS batteries had not been charged and the backup generator was due to be fueled next week. IOW a perfect storm.
The Director level pyrotechnics were quite spectacular.
So basically a management goon.
Doesn't sound like someone who take advice, especially from subordinates, before, during or after an IT situation.
Which is a bit of a problem if you a) Know nothing about IT and b) The s**t has hit the fan.
Thank you for reminding me. It's been a while. MQ's mult platform nature is one of its strengths. I called it MF land because of IBM's MF centric view.
As anything involving HA systems I'm sure no update would go to the live environment unless it's been thoroughly tested first.
All of which makes the CEO's story about this being a messaging failure seem stranger and stranger.
In IBM MF land message queues (msgq in the AS400 command language) are effectively named pipes which can link processes. They can expand if the "writer" is producing a lot more data than the "reader" can accommodate at any one time. IIRC they can also do character set translation (EG EBCDIC to ASCII) which is handy give a lot of stuff is not EBCDIC as standard.
BTW there is also an MS version of MQ series.
I can't recall if the reader dies wheather that can pause the writer process or if the queue just keeps getting bigger (the simple programming option is the MQ just deals with it. No special case handling required).
I can see the joker in the pack being different processes dying at different times given different queues holding mixed amounts of good and bad data that are not synchonised, making it very difficult to decide which entries (BTW they are called "messages" but the definition of "message" is very flexible) to discard.
However these issues are completely predictable and MF devs and ops have been dealing with them for decades. BA should definitely have some tools to manage this and some procedures in the Ops manual to use them.
As for configuration I find it very hard to believe that in 2017 a business this big does not have a set of daemons checking all its network hardware and recording their actual (working) configurations.
This is also one of those moments when labeling all those cables and power plugs with what they power and what they should be plugged into turns out to be quite a good idea.
So much HA and DR is not in the moment. It's in the months of prep before the moment.
Which echos the comment that banks are IT businesses (big ones if they are retail) which just happen to have a banking license
There is at least one major IBM iSeries app that was basically a complete banking system, just add money, banking license and customer accounts.
I wonder how many major lines of business have been so automated that manual reversion is simply impossible. I'm guessing the fruit and veg arms of all big supermarkets.
You can bet that any "profit improving" (IE cost cutting) ideas certainly did.
This should as well.
But probably won't, given this is the "New World Order" of large corporate management that takes ownership of any success and avoids any possibility that their decisions could have anything to do with this.
If you wonder who is most modern CEO's role model for corporate behavior it's simple.
Carter Burke in Aliens.
Which is great if you want lots of short range communication cells, but as people have noted the attenuation goes up a lot inside buildings.
Remember those satellite cell phones designed to operate anywhere, except "anywhere" did not include inside steel framed buildings?
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