Posts by Kernel 768 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Nov 2011
The very worst they can do is say that serious work is required and can I come back and collect my teeth in a couple of days.
There is, however, a degree of enjoyment to be had from watching other people in the waiting room displaying various degrees of nervousness - yes, I am aware that this is not a very empathetic trait in me, but I can live with that knowledge.
"That sounds interesting. Are you meaning there are rental agreements for running light through fibre?"
Yes - any modern DWDM system should have the ability to accept what are known as 'alien' wavelengths.
These are 'coloured' optical signals supplied from another carrier and then, after level adjustment, are combined in the optical filters with wavelengths generated by the host system and sent to line. The only processing done to these alien wavelengths by the host system is analogue adjustments, eg., attenuation, amplification, filtering. The host system has no access to the data carried on the alien wavelengths as they are never demodulated into an electrical signal within the host.
This feature is useful if you need to get several wavelengths between data centres in different cities, but don't want to go to the trouble of laying and maintaining your own cross-country fibre network and duplicate what some other carrier has already built.
So, in your data centres you install a base level DWDM box with one or more transponders and no amplifiers. The coloured output from these travels on dark fibre to a national carrier's site, where they are loaded onto a cross-country DWDM system as alien wavelengths - there obviously is a point at which you might decide it's better economics to build your own full DWDM system and lease dark fibre cross-country, but adding optical filters, amplifiers and intermediate amplifier sites adds considerably to the cost.
"40gb/s is accomplished with 4 bonded (think port channel kinda) 10gbs links. That means we need we need 4 wavelengths to accomplish 40gb/s or 10 for 100gb/s. Using WDM equipment, a 40gb/s trasceiver can deliver 10,20,30 or 40gb/s depending on which wavelengths are optically multiplexed."
I work with DWDM systems that do either 100 or 200 Gb/s on a single wavelength (same card, it's just a tick box to switch between them) and I believe there are now 400Gb/s systems starting to come into use - the only reason to use multiple wavelengths is to have multiple independent 100/200 Gb/s channels over the same fibre pair.
"The restriction would work both ways, you know!"
No, a simple law change in the interests of 'thinking of the children' and ' winning the war against terrorism' would very easily resolve that problem - just word it so that evidence against the government, MPs and their mates has to be of the highest possible standard and then nobody who matters will be affected, will they?
I was going to use the joke icon, but some Sir Humphrey is probably already working on the draft legislation.
"Then again, once it comes down to it, the only two gods who matter are the ones that the "piss eyed tango monster" worships and the alternative option given by ISIS."
I think if you strip away the marketing crap and get down to the basics of the product you'll find it's just the same god that's been supplied in two of the three standard catalogue configurations - one god, one set of specs, three model variants, all available for immediate delivery off the shelf.
"At one point, it is alleged that the company configured the software specially to beat testing tools and trick the HHS into believing the products were far more robust and secure than they actually were."
It's probably just a rogue engineer that did this without any knowledge of the senior management team - "lessons will be learnt, processes are being carefully reviewed, the health and well-being of the patients are our primary concern, etc., etc."
Quite possibly it looked much the same - it's the gas filled swim bladder that expands significantly if the fish can't release gas fast enough, not the liquid/solid part of the body
I'm no expert, but I would guess that it is a fairly primitive design and may not have a swim bladder at all - or if it does, it may be one of the early types that's directly connected to the mouth, allowing easy and rapid venting of excess pressure. But I going to place my money on no swim bladder.
The CofE church I was dragged along to as a kid was called St Saviour's, so they've probably got more than one.
One of my grandfathers was 'High Church", a flavour of CofE that varies just a little from the Roman Catholic faith - I seem to remember having to learn something (Apostle's Creed?) that mentioned how grateful I was to be born into the Holy Catholic (CofE) church, which puzzled me a bit until I found out the the others were Roman Catholics (and therefor heretics, who were fair game on the way to/from school).
"the new FAQ says. “At tax time, the amounts withheld from your pay will be applied when the income tax liability is assessed.”
It seems to me (IANAL) that they are saying the opposite to the comments above - if tax money was deducted by Plutus, then the ATO is going to treat it as tax that was paid by the contractors. Presumably they will then work on the basis that it subsequently stolen by Plutus from the ATO, which is all to the good as the ATO have much better facilities for getting it back than any individual does.
" The guy in the business that signed that keeps querying whether we should be spending money (i.e. paying me) on looking at this stuff instead of working on his next pet project."
In a previous role I used to come across something similar - people who'd leased long-haul capacity cheaply because it was premptable and were then surprised and angry when it was prempted for restoration purposes during an outage on another part of the network.
"You should have seen the DC Managers face when we met the other guy where both sets of fibre went through the same conduit out of the building!"
The best I've encountered in my 40-odd years telco career is full diversity - via different wavelengths on the same fibre pair.
The "geographically diverse servers" for another project were not quite what we had in mind when the request was made either - different racks, side by side, in the same data centre. For a later iteration of the system that was changed - the racks were at least no longer in the same row!
"At least it seems Google cares about it cooks, hopefully that stretch to Google paying all of their medical expenses."
I can see that their employer (the events centre) might have an obligation to pay their medical expenses, but I can't quite see why their employer's customer (Google) should feel any need to do so.
"That sort of statement is misleading. It can include health benefits and other like items, but those don't pay the bills..."
While that might be a valid argument if you live in a country where healthcare is provided by the government, more or less for free*, in the US where you have to make your own arrangements then yes, these benefits certainly do pay some bills that you would otherwise need to find money for from your wage packet.
* If you live in such a country and don't think you're getting a good deal on health care, then I suggest you try taking a small animal to your local vet for a simple check up - that usually points out exactly how good the deal is for humans.
"this is a dream that a significant number of people throughout the 20th century tried and failed to achieve."
The German airline, DELAG, carried over 14,000 passengers on 1500 flights between 1910 and 1914, plus quite a few more after WW1 - this was not exactly a failure when you look at other commercial air transport solutions of the day, especially considering that air travel would not be the first option to spring to mind when planning that overseas holiday back then.
"From 2010 to 2012, the Federal government rolled out the Viewer Access Satellite Television (VAST) service, which lets registered users outside the free TV footprint access Australia's free-to-air channels."
Why does anyone need to register for a free-to-air service?
At least in NZ getting access to free content via satellite is just a matter of installing a dish and wandering down to your local home appliance dealer for a cheap decoder - one variety of which is known as a 'Pooh box' in my family due to the default display of 'P00' in it's idle state.
No registration or need to live outside the terrestrial coverage area required.
"there stand oxford equivalent."
And that's as good an illustration as any as to why legal language is what it is - the difference in meaning between what you've written and what you intended, " their standard Oxford English Dictionary equivalent", could easily be worked up into more than enough for even a moderately competent lawyer to retire on.
"The hackers first spammed out malware to victims' computers, which collected the bank account balance, login details and passwords for their accounts, along with their mobile number."
There's no problem with SS7, provided the numpties don't give out the crucial information first!
"Also; if they know where the truck was bogged, why would it be hard to find the break?"
As stated in the article, it's very likely that the cable will be broken is several place due to the tension put on it as the truck was dragged out - the only way to find the breaks is to use an OTDR (Optical Time Domain Reflectometry) to locate the nearest break to the cable end, fix that, test, locate the next break, fix that, rinse and repeat as necessary.
These breaks can be hundreds of metres away from where the truck was bogged.
I'd be surprised if the actual company employing the contractors can contract out of their responsibility for paying them simply by outsourcing the job - you certainly can't outsource workplace safety, so I suspect the agencies or whoever the contractors signed their contract with will still be on the hook, regardless of whether they've already given the money to Plutus or not.
"A talking head at the bottom of the bowl selling you haemorrhoid cream?"
I remember reading once that some of our wealthier Victorian era forebears were happy to pay extra for a crapper that had a selected politician's image inside the bowl - although a continuous orange glow from the bog could be a bit off-putting.
"Getting 28 nations to agree to a name / acronym couldn't have been that easy either."
I don't know - by the time you get to that stage you've already sorted the really important stuff, like the shape of the conference room table* and what's for lunch, so agreeing on an acronym should be a piece of the proverbial by comparison.
* thinking about it, maybe the US State Department should make an early start and open discussions about this with the Norks someday soon - it'll save time later.
"And, as you learned in Chemistry in the first year of Big School, one molecule of a substance is absolutely identical to and indistinguible from every other molecule of the same substance."
Hmmm - maybe you should try explaining that to all those who have a lifetime of suffering due to the fact there are two different forms of the Thalidomide molecule, one of which is a mutagen and one of which isn't.
There are, in fact, a number of substances which have distinguishable 'left' and 'right' molecules.
In addition, no water molecules from fruit are not "indistinguishable' from water molecules from a tap - it has long been possible to identify how much of the water content of wine is from the grapes and how much was added during manufacture.
"imported workers undercut are much more productive than locals' wages."
FTFY.
I don't know if it's still an issue, but at one stage there was much angst within the Aussie shearing community over NZ shearers working in Australia and using wide combs rather than narrow ones on the shears - of course an NZ shearer could cut more wool each day so were preferred by the Aussie farmers.
Depending on the age of the system (and they're obviously not overly keen on spending money to keep the technology up to date) it is possibly something as simple as a combination or sequence of tones on a specific frequency. The chances are that the frequency used is a matter of public record from the FCC, thus simplifying the problem considerably.
A $50 programmable dual band VHF/UHF Chinese handheld and a RaspberryPi to generate the tones may well be more than adequate for the task of triggering the sirens - it might even be possible to trigger them just by sending the right sequence of DTMF tones from a handheld's keypad.
Just like controlling a repeater, but more fun.......
"So 800 people thought the emergency services needed to be told that the sirens had gone off!"
From what I've been able to find with a quick duckduckgo the population of Dallas is in the region of 2.5 million, so 0.032% of them calling in seems to be a very low number of callers.
The kit required to carry out this little prank is probably very portable and will run quite happily off 12 volts, so, provided the perpetrator has half a brain they should be able to get away with this for years - it could even work out that they are never identified or caught and that the only solution will be a more secure activation system.
Catching this person is going to be about as easy as tracking down some random idiot on the CB bands - in fact, it could well be some random CB nutter who's got bored with spouting drunken on air rants.
I seem to remember watching some US based physicist on TV not that long ago who stated that bananas are a (comparatively) rich source of anti-matter - something to do with the potassium 40 they contain. Apparently a banana will emit a positron approximately once every 75 minutes.
Instead of spending money on flash kit they need to get down to the local supermarket with a halfway decent knife and start slicing.
' I'm guessing the spooks will definitely have access to the cloud."
Yours maybe - but my 'cloud' storage is sitting here on my desk at home, right where I can see and touch it - and yes thank you, I can access it securely from some random connection to the interwebs.
I'm not entirely sure why I would want to store my personal data files on someone else's computer, especially in another country - at least here PC-plod will need a warrant or reason to believe that I'm about to destroy evidence to even get inside the door.
" In theory, 110V is more dangerous than 230V since for a given resistance, at a lower voltage, a higher current will flow."
Let me guess - in real life your name is Mho.
Based on your theory we should all be able to play around with high voltage stuff to our heart's content - the higher the better in fact, while 1.5V torch batteries should be restricted to qualified professionals only.
V=IR, hence I=V/R - for a fixed resistance, lower voltage means lower current.
" Although the standard US mains plug is pretty shitty with fairly thin prongs, I'm sure it's not beyond the wit of man to come up with a safer design that's partially insulated to avoid this problem without having to invent a new wall socket."
True - but for the federal government to mandate the use of such an improved plug would be unconstitutional interference in the people's right to freely express their stupidity by taking an extension lead to bed with them. Once started down this slippery slope some of them will then be wanting affordable health care for all and a limit to how many arms a bear can have.
"Cutting R&D would save money today; but at the expense of future sales when the new products that would have been developed were not."
I never thought of that.
Yes, I'm well aware that cutting R&D is not the way to ensure a prosperous future for a company like IBM - cutting the technical sales staff is not likely to help either. My intent was to underline the short-sightedness of IBM's approach to cutting costs by cutting the groups that generate new revenue opportunities.
If revenue is flagging then it's definitely time to slash the sales teams.
Here's a hint for your next RA exercise IBM - those characters in R&D consume way more money than they could possibly be worth - get rid of most of them for the best bang for your buck in cost savings.
'I don't see any complaints about the local newsagent having a "only two school children at a time"" sign.'
Just a guess on my part, but that might be because the sign doesn't discriminate against any particular flavour of school children - if it said only two blue school children at a time while allowing non-blue school children without restriction then you might well find there would be complaints, and quite rightly so.
We are more than familiar with large trucks going past the office, there's almost constantly one or more B-trains messing around in our part of Te Rapa - we're also three floors up, so it takes something pretty serious to shake our office.
We checked on Geonet at the time - this is the one we felt:
Intensity strong
Region intensity moderate
NZDT Thu, Mar 30 2017, 12:58:49 pm
Depth 6 km
Magnitude 4.5
Location 15 km north-west of Turangi
"New Zealand is also earthquake-prone, which also argues in favour of geographic diversity."
Sitting here in the office, about 25~30km from Raglan, we just felt a decent earthquake a few minutes ago - I suspect Southern Cross is much safer in the Auckland volcanic zone than the TGA cable is at Raglan.
Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time to go for my lunch time walk before the building collapses around our ears.
"No one else seems to care, sniff politicians
Maybe the problem is that, unlike politicians, the telcos know enough about the subject to be aware that changing SS7 would need to be done through the ITU, be agreed upon and accepted by member states, be implemented by vendors and that the end result would still need to be backward compatible with what's deployed now.
There's a whole stack of players involved that really don't give a shit about what the DHS and FCC think, much less US politicians - in fact, there's probably a number of involved parties who would be likely to oppose any proposed changes for no better reason than the US wants them. Being a Muslim or Russian does not disbar a country from ITU membership.
Yes, I've seen a number of YouTube clips on counterfeit eggs (and rice, for Dog's sake!), but I'm still struggling to see why.
Can anyone explain to me the business case for counterfeiting eggs or rice - especially in China where they don't appear to be particularly short of either?
"The £13 "Rolex" was surprisingly good; it worked, kept accurate time, the case was nice and it was only under my x10 loupe that you could tell the difference."
Doesn't surprise me - I'm not sure about Rolex, but from what I've read on specialist watch collecting forums most watches, even the top quality ones, use Chinese manufactured movements with just enough local content to be able to meet the rules for labeling as 'Made in Switzerland', or wherever.
I get the impression that Casio are one of the few companies that roll their own now days.
"Have you got some non copper based router or computer that you can stick on either end?"
Interesting enough, yes, I do.
Nokia's 1830PSS product line has a range of optical router cards as an off the shelf item that are able to extract and switch one or more wavelengths to/from a specific path. There's no technical requirement to convert the optical signal to electrical until you hit a router inside some cable customer telco's network.
This means that wavelengths coming in off the cable can be switched to the different cable customers at the landing station without any requirement to be dropped back to electrical .
I work with Nokia DWDM equipment, using what are referred to as 10Gbps, 100Gbps and 200Gbps wavelengths - but that has nothing to do with the wavelength (or 'colour', if you prefer) of the infra-red lasers. The terms come about because they refer to the transmission capacity of the transponder card that converts from B&W to a specific colour.
Changing from 10Gbps to 100Gbps is just a matter of changing out the transponder at each end of the lambda - in fact, with some transponders, changing from 100Gbps to 200Gbps is simply a matter of clicking an option in the transponder setup page and connecting a second 100Gbps B&W input to the second client port, at which time the single coloured output will move from being a 100Gbps wavelength to a 200Gbps wavelength - but still the same actual wavelength and occupying the same bandwidth, just carrying twice as much data.
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