Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Interesting Choice

To be fair, it's not the poles or pylons that generally have a problem with the wind. It's the trees that blow onto them. At one time, if it looked like a tree was going to be a problem, it would be cut down. Nowadays, all trees seem to be sacrosanct, no matter the risk to infrastructure, and any hint that a tree may need to be cut down to prevent storm damage results in letters to the editor and Swampy's pals building tree houses in them! Heritage steam railways have a similar issue, except in their case it's a fire risk that used to be dealt with and now involves months of planning requests and environmental surveys,

Re: They do.

"That sounds much better than around here, where CityFibre have recently been along my street adding a new pole 5ft away from each BT pole. Most of the BT poles only appear to have a handful of cables on them."

Odds are that BT would require a rental fee to use the poles, ongoing, forever, which will have paid for itself after a year or two. Profit! So CityFibre looked at what BT wanted and decided to put their own poles in, paid off in "saved" BT pole rental in two years and so "savings!!" In the end, BT lost potential income and CityFibre spent more than they need to.

The obvious and fair solution, with wins all around, is for BT to charge half the new pole installation cost as a one off fee for using their poles. If a 3rd supplier comes along and wants in on the act, they pay 1/3rd of the new pol installation cost, again as a one off fee, but that payment is split two ways between BT and CityFibre. Cost of maintaining the poles is split between the poles users with the initial pole owner deciding what to do and when unless other pole users can demonstrate issues with the poles affecting their services. Same system can apply to underground ducts too. Someone pays once to put the duct in, any future users can pay their "share", as a one off for access.

Of course, the pole and duct owners can't then gouge the other suppliers, so of course it won't happen without regulation and/or laws and it goes against the grain of capitalism.

"It wasn't until there was some competition that all of a sudden they decided it was worth putting some work into it."

Which, funnily enough, proves the benefits of competition, even it it does mean a smidgen more costs for the players.

Re: Brexit Bonus?

I think the fact they excluded Iceland et al who "all but EU members" means it's extremely likely they will exclude NI too,

"It just didn't work as well as Edge and the design was clunky and slow,"

Or, maybe, Edge is much more tightly integrated into the OS that by definition it's going to work better in some circumstances. There are parts of Windows where no matter your default browser choice, MS STILL uses Edge, despite your choice. ie exactly the behaviour that forced the EU browser choice on MS back in 2010. Their spots haven't changed, they just temporarily covered them over and now the camouflage is degrading while they hope that enough people in the EU have forgotten and it might take yet another 5-10 years to take action.

Re: "make their websites dependant on Google's proprietary features"

"I'm looking at you Microsoft."

And game devs! It's been an issue ever since the IBM AT came out, faster and more expensive than an XT :-)

CPU power, RAM volume and GFX capabilities for new games always seem to be that much faster/higher/better than most users have.

Re: Ah! Memories!

"many videos are surprisingly content-free!"

That's how most of our ongoing training is delivered. The best way to deal with it IME is to blast through as quickly as possible and do the test while it's still fresh in the mind. The real training happens when you are on site in front of the broken kit and have the service manual open :-)

Re: Basically

Considering that SpaceX is the only company using mainly re-usable spacecraft and the Starship prototypes are intended to be fully re-usable, that's an interestingly wrong observation from you. If you want to attack Musk over something credible, I'll probably join in with you, but picking on the one thing SpaceX is doing right that no other launcher is yet doing is so far off the target, the proverbial barn door must be on a different planet to you!

"The payload doors looked like they had some movement, but it's not clear how successful that was yet."

It looked a bit thin and "cheap" to me. It seemed to be flexing when trying to close it. Looks like it needs some strengthening.

While I sort of agree with you, I would dispute that "enormous amounts of land that has to be cleared for them". Here in the UK, where most land is at a premium, there are many on farmland and the farmer simply ploughs around them and their access roads/tracks. The "wasted" land is minimal. Others are up on moorland which isn't used for much other than maybe some sheep grazing, and the sheep really don't seem to care about for the slight disruption and minimal loss of grazing.

I heard it said that they are using the "waste" fuel that needs venting to keep the pressure at safe levels as the thrusters and that exhaust may freeze on the nozzles, especially on the shaded side and bits of ice breaking off might have been the "debris" we were seeing. I'm no rocket engineer or physicist, but it sounds plausible to me. Happy to be corrected :-)

Re: Capabilities.

"The video of the reentry plasma around the fin was one of the most amazing things I've seen."

Same here, that was stunning! They very kindly explained why we were able to see it too. Basically 'cos Starship is frikken big!

"Suppose they succeed and the wholly mammoth and modern day elephants breed. Is that not the same endangerment of the species?"

The Wooley Mammoth is a native animal :-)

"It's simple, you lambush one then bleat it to death with some kind of martial arts style chop."

Wow! That's a mint idea!

Re: "Cyberattacks happen a lot, they happen to councils a lot,"

"the recognised poverty of most UK councils"

"Poverty" is relative. Some may have effectively gone bankrupt and others may be close to it, but the annual budget is still a Very Large Number in most cases.

Birmingham, as a current example, may be effectively bust and in special measure, but the annual budget is still over £3B. To a ransomeware crim, that's still a juicy target.

Likewise, Leicester City Council has an annual budget in the region of £500m, so to ransomware scum, also a juicy target for a $million or so, even though local councils, especially now, are at best breaking even and have no spare cash.

Re: Root cause

"the accessibility of the ducts (and indeed ancillary equipment)."

I've reported open street cabs to the relevant owners, both OpenReach and VM, and neither bothered to secure them for months. If they won't react to information provided, why should Government be expected to help secure the kit for them?

"So UK rivers - still room for improvement, but water quality is much better than it was, and is generally well protected."

Although, unless you are at a "source", eg an underground spring making it's first exit into the open world, always remember that no matter how inviting and clear that stream water looks, there may be a dead sheep or something in it upstream, out of of sight! :-)

Re: Wouldn't put me off

"TBH I'd be surprised if this process is any more efficient than letting it evaporate and collecting rainwater."

Unfortunately, in hotter climates, letting it evaporate and turn into rainwater is essentially exporting their water. The rain isn't happening often enough there. Which is pretty much the point of the article :-)

Sometimes, maybe, possibly. Unless it's socketed (highly unlikely these days), or you can de-solder it and then reprogramme it, odds are you need to power it on to update the firmware, at which point it may be too late in the boot process to be sure your f/w update did it's job or just appeared to do it's job. The Intel Management Engine and similar are basically a whole other computer on the system board that's already running before any other boot device or on board BIOS/UEFI environment. ANd the age of the device will affect how much time and money can be put into recovering it before a new replacement is cheaper. Who even knows what might be happening in the firmware of other devices inside the case. I saw a Youtube video of someone installing and running Linux on an HDD PCB. If you can run an entire OS on the circuit board of a spinning disk, what can do with an SSD?

And then, in this case at least, probably in most orgs IT system, it's an "organic" system that has grown over the years with various h/w and s/w of various vintages, some of which can only interact because of custom s/w, h/w and or bodges leading to "legacy workflows" that can't happen on replacement version of h/w & s/w, much of which may be precisely the reason the entire setup was vulnerable in the first place. But getting the budget to rip everything out and replace it with current kit is an immensely hard sell until something like a ransomware high-jacking happens. If the system is running ok, telling the Board that it needs to be replaced due to nebulous potential threats is an uphill battle.

Re: Look...

Not to mention that currently, apart from well regulated trips to the ISS[*], the radiation exposure for "space tourists" is probably less than a few high altitude passenger jet flights per year. On the other hand, the time it takes governments to get regulations in place, things may well have changed.

[*] Space tourists to the ISS stay a hell of a lot less time than crew, and crew are monitored already, so by definition, the "tourists" are too.

Re: German tomfoolery

"That one took a while to figure out."

Over the years, I've come across that sort issue often enough that if I or a user can't log in for some reason, try typing the password (or something using the same set of characters) in the username field first so can see if there any oddities indicating a different keyboard layout.

Re: Very neat episode, nice little cliff-hanger

That's the thing with kids' humour/mischievousness and level of inventiveness. Most of it is not original and they learn it from the year/grade above them so it sort of stagnates at a particular age group with each new year group passing through the "humour field", with possible minor variation based on technology or social changes.

Same seems to happen with technology in general. There's always some "bright kid" whose just "(re)invented something that's been around for years, but they give it a shiny new name and the new kids in marketing spend millions telling us it really is new, honestly!.

Re: ChatGPT

"You absolute donut!"

I see the LLM has noted the Americanization of El Reg :-)

I don't recall the BOFH ever calling anyone a doughnut, least of all a donut. I could be wrong, of course, but if he did, I suspect it would be the former, not the latter spelling :-)

Re: "it was a common skill"

I remember surprising a girl with that skill (she had initiated the canoodling that led to it!). So surprised was she that she made me demonstrate the technique to her as she was always having trouble fastening/unfastening her bra and I was just sooo much quicker at it :-)

Re: PFY's responsibilities

I never went that far, but in the days when users didn't even know what config.sys and autoexec.bat were for, it was easy to check for or instal [n]ansi.sys and set up a few ESC sequences to re-map keys and leave them scratching their heads :-)