Posts by Peter Galbavy

Managers need to appear to have a purpose, especially when they don't.

A lot of effort when you canjust let the idiots delivery themselves like they do down under: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-49079926

Wot, no numeric keypad? For how much? Thanks, but no thanks.

"No, sorry, I didn't realise the devices cable had been cut when I entered the room that first night. Must have been a previous occupant."

If you don't use SQLite is some project of your own, are you even programming?

There's an assumption in the article that these features are somehow undesirable (to the makers). Possible the only undesirable here is that the design of the system have been revealed to a wider world.

In an open and transparent democracy you would set standards for new types of transport (that are considered in need of regulating) and then you would allow private and commercial interests to follow those standards.

Instead, as we don't live in an open and transparent democracy but one where funny handshakes and the old boy network hold sway, we hand over the public roads to special interest groups to set their own agendas, standards and ultimately enforcement. Can't you just see [whoever has shaken hands on this] going to propose their "operatives" are allowed to stop "unlicensed" riders on public roads - obviously the police are far too busy, so just like the Post Office and the BBC being allowed to be judge, jury and executioner so will these chinless wonders.

The old labrador's getting a bit old and his fur is falling out... so let's buy an elephant!

systemd - why would I want it to manage DNS, NTP and more? There are perfectly good, previously "out of the box", solutions for them that can be managed by experts in their field without wondering what cute security hole some weenie has dropped into the systemd elephant.

Well, just updated and the flag is still there to turn it off - not checked if it's a null op though

Giving our glorious and enlightened authorities the benefit of the doubt for the moment, mobile operators already collect many metrics on cell hand-offs and transit times etc. Sharing just this data, on volumes of movement, could help with a view as to how well the - effectively - voluntary lockdown is operating and how it is changing over time-of-day and day-of-week and could also act as an alert if the behaviour starts drifting as the population starts getting bored and complacent and then if further measure, especially in certain geographies, are required.

GDPR may even be useful here...

So, is the 72 hour clock now ticking?

Once you change your viewpoint and look at this from the perspective of the big, expensive and incompetent consultancy firms (Crapita, et al.) then this is going perfectly to plan.

Stack the system to ensure all the fleet-of-foot and ocmpetative small players are forced out by regulation you have paid for, you will be rolling in the money.

This statement is false.

This is odd, because "yes" if you look under "My Devices" you only see Amazon branded ones, but if you go to "Manage My Devices" under the Kindle page(s) you see all your connected/permissioned "apps", including those running on non-Amazon kit: https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/mycd/myx#/home/devices/1

The Australians, last time I renewed my optional "maybe commercial use" registration it was still free. Both getting an ARN (Airman's Ref Number?) and the commercial-drone under 2kg reg was simple and free.

This may have changed, I need to renew again shortly for a trip over in Jan.

Nice to see last year's Gatwick strawman exercise results are being put to good use...

So, instead of carrying some item - nothing too heavy or large - between buildings on a "campus", you now have to get it to a roof or an outdoor area, place it in a special sized carrier, submit a request for pickup and ... a solution looking for a problem, with a nice fat charge onto US medical insurance bills, I am sure.

Who do the shiny new systems call when they have a problem handling the calls from their automated customers?

Recursion, n: See Recursion.

Sorry? What? Who uses SSH without an agent on their local machine? Why is SSH (as a protocol) singled out here? Any interactive session over the network is open to this form of "attack" and if you type SSH passwords into remote machines over the network (whether already SSH wrapped ot not) you are already broken.

I was just thinking, in a gentle fume this weekend how more and more London junctions have what I would term a "no go" settings on their lights. I was stopped at at least two junctions where none of the roads or the pedestrian crossings were green, and I even accounted for the change periods you would expect. I assume this is udner the guise of "traffic management" and will be used to justify some change later on having gathered the right kinds of statistics for vehicle or pedestrian movement.

Not sure about the Land of the Free (TM) but isn't "truth" a valid defence against defamation, or is that just in the written form (libel) ?

Let's be realistic here... most "cloud" migration outside of core-IT companies was done because bean-counters and senior management were sold the idea of a single monthly charge (that was amazingly lower than depreciation of having their own hardware plus recurring costs like networking and maintenance) and of course savings on not having their own specialist IT staff. A few years down the line they have saved nothing in staff and that "fixed" monthly fee has attracted amazing unexpected and unbudgeted extras, as well as growing magically as usage is well above what was forecast.

But surely there are environmental benefits? Imagine how many trees could be saved if dictators in notionally democratic banana republics - like, say the USA - didn't have to stuff ballot boxes with pre-filled paper ballots all the time and instead just changed the totals online?

94% availablity? Not quite. There may be coverage for 94% counted by BT (sorry, the puppet OpenRetch's) exchanges, but in many areas high density (urban, suburban) areas there is still a wait list as the street cabinets are full and BT are still dragging heels adding more, using every excuse possible to avoid capital investment. In those same areas there is still too much low quality, badly routed local loop to provide the line quality required to get more than the minimal signal.

This is effectively the same as a company asking for voluntary redundancies... anyone with saleable and transferable skills and the ability to move (overseas) will take up the chance and leave the less able behind. Great short term for tax and NI income to the treasury, terrible for the country in the long term.

Hot-desking has zero to do with costs and flexibility and is solely there for upper management to remind the drones that you are interchangeable, expendable and no one would notice much if you were not there tomorrow.

Obviously the same upper management have to have private offices because of confidentiality and all that stuff.

How did you know my weight? Are you using a solar powered drone to spy on me? And I've not been a (professional) sysadmin for years either.

Betcha they still allocated a few million to the testing project. Odd that, eh?

Whoever the data subject was, they must have been friends with someone. The ICO is a complete waste of time for normal members of the public seeking help and asking for the regulator to regulate.

He's obviously a tenured academic who has never had to work for a living.

Because, of course, Google searches are not already censored in the "free world".

Ofcom "did it right" for once

Not sure how many here came across it or installed it, but a few years ago Ofcom published an app that collected just this kind of data from real users.

The results, for the UK, are interesting: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/telecoms-research/mobile-smartphones/consumer-mobile-experience

If others, like the FCC, were not in the pockets of those they are theoretically supposed to be regulating then this kind of thing would work in the US too.

To save click though, the reports key finding are pasted below:

Key findings 2018

* Three-quarters of the time, data connections were made to a wifi rather than to a cellular network, a six percentage point increase since 2016. There were no significant differences in this measure by rurality or nation.

* When consumers with access to 4G technologies connected to a cellular network, a 4G network was available for data use for 81% of the time (up from 65% in 2016), with consumers in urban areas spending significantly more time than those in rural areas on 4G networks. Consumers in Wales spent significantly less time connected to a 4G network than those in other nations.

* Consumers initiating a data connection to a 4G network were successful on 98.7% of occasions, compared to 93.1% of attempt to connect to a 3G network. Data connections were more likely to fail in peak periods for both 3G and 4G networks.

* The average download speed delivered varied significantly by application (less than 1Mbit/s for apps such as Chrome, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and WhatsApp on all network types vs. between 2.7 Mbit/s and 3.0 Mbit/s for YouTube and Google Play Store, over wifi and 4G).

* There was a strong correlation between the number of tests and the average download speeds for Chrome and YouTube on 4G networks, with speeds slowing down in peak hours.

* Once initiated, less than 1% of all voice calls were dropped due to loss of service, with no significant differences when comparing rurality, nations or network technologies.

* More than eight in ten Android smartphone users (84%) were satisfied with the overall network performance of their mobile provider, with satisfaction levels higher in urban areas and in England.

* Web browsing was rated as the most important activity that people used their phone for, followed by voice calls.