bcrl

5 ms·

31.
by bcrl 9mo ago
Ah yes, the "things are bad; we shouldn't try to fix them" argument. That isn't a philosophy which I subscribe to. People should very much consider the ethical implications of releasing software they created to the gen
32.
by bcrl 9mo ago
2.4 GHz is unreliable for me these days due to interference from bluetooth headphones and hearing aids that other people are using. The issues tend to only show up during extended periods of video streaming, and having looked at a bunch of
33.
by bcrl 9mo ago
Security for maps is basically impossible. Maps tend to have to be widely shared within government and engineering, and if you know what you're looking for, it's remarkably straightforward to find ways to access layers you would
34.
by bcrl 9mo ago
I basically asked my math and physics teachers in high school what the Fourier transform was, but none of them knew how to answer my questions (which were about digital signal processing -- modems were important things to us back in the ear
35.
by bcrl 9mo ago
What measures are being taken to ensure that this model isn't used to lower the cost of fraudsters committing grandparent scams by mimicking the voices of grandchildren?
36.
by bcrl 10mo ago
The old manual tools were extremely slow. Modern fibre splicers mean that a dozen fibres can be spliced in maybe a bit more half an hour, although cable prep cam take a significant amount of time depending on the cable type, number of cabl
37.
by bcrl 10mo ago
Cable still has one thing going for it: it tends to be cheaper for sports. Watching hockey games online requires subscriptions to 3 different streaming services just to follow a single local team, which is ridiculous.
38.
by bcrl 10mo ago
I would be fine if data centers paid the full cost of their existence, but that isn't what happens in our world. Instead the cost of pollution is externalised and placed on the backs of humanity's children. That includes the poll
39.
by bcrl 10mo ago
I just had an incident like that a month and a half ago. Customer reported repeated internet outages in the morning. Lots of back and forth by phone and email, and the only conclusion I could come up with is that the ONU or router was fla
40.
by bcrl 10mo ago
LibreOffice is good enough for many use cases. A competing product doesn't have to be a 100% match feature for feature to be Good Enough for most users.
41.
by bcrl 10mo ago
I wonder if that sentence will have any discernible meaning 100 years from now.
42.
by bcrl 10mo ago
Or it makes the many deal with the cost of cleaning up the garbage created by 1. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.
43.
by bcrl 10mo ago
Gnome considers features a bug, so not at all surprising.
44.
by bcrl 10mo ago
It makes me wonder what weight is given to content from 4chan during llm training...
45.
by bcrl 11mo ago
I think it comes standard! The third party transport links feeding my company's network have suffered 2 lengthy outages due to backhoes hitting buried conduit with fibre installed. Underground outages tend to be the longest outages si
46.
by bcrl 11mo ago
Most of my career has been in software development. Running an ISP / carrier is more fun as there's more of a variety from day to day (as is the case for anything entrepreneurial) while still involving technical skills. There is
47.
by bcrl 11mo ago
This is why I like building outside plant. You put the fibre up on poles or pull through ducts, splice it, bring it into the building, hook it up to the equipment, make sure it's working and.... you're done. It works until somet
48.
by bcrl 11mo ago
I am curious -- what is the application and the language it's written in? There are insanely dirty hacks that you could do to start controlling the fallout of the page faults (like playing games with userfaultfd), but they're unma
49.
by bcrl 11mo ago
It is telling that none of the online ad platforms engage with the advertising standard council type organizations that defined the standards that old school media use to self regulate. Most people don't realize that this was once a s
50.
by bcrl 11mo ago
Implementing rate limiting in a scalable manner is harder than just making logging faster, and it makes the cloud provider money whereas rate limiting causes them to make less money. The incentive makes it pretty clear what side of the tra
51.
by bcrl 11mo ago
There's a simple solution: don't use mmap(). There's a reason that databases use O_DIRECT to read into their own in memory cache. If it was Good Enough for Oracle in the 1990s, it's probably Good Enough for you. mmap()
52.
by bcrl 11mo ago
voip.ms was pretty much offline for a couple of weeks while under a lengthy DDoS attack. They were only able to restore service by putting all their servers behind Cloudflare proxies to mitigate the ongoing DDoS.
53.
by bcrl 11mo ago
I have cell phone calls regularly drop during tower handoffs, and codec errors that result in a blast of static upon answering a call. I can't remember a single time I had a phone call fail on the old PSTN built out of DMS10 and DMS10
54.
by bcrl 11mo ago
It doesn't help that the big tech advertising platforms are making money off pushing ads peddling investment scams and malware. So long as there is a financial incentive to make money in ways that harm "users" things will on
55.
by bcrl 11mo ago
Not sure how they're allowed to generate a profit or distribute dividends given the cost of the wildfires started by their complete and total failure to maintain equipment to minimum safety standards.
56.
by bcrl 11mo ago
It's easier to write documentation than to completely rewrite a subsystem.
57.
by bcrl 11mo ago
Circuit switching is not harder to do, it's simply less efficient. In the PSTN and ISDN world, circuits consumed bandwidth regardless of whether it was actively in use or not. There was no statistical multiplexing as a result. Circui
58.
by bcrl 11mo ago
I never followed where things went after the contract was complete. Suffice it to say that we only cared about getting the protocol working, as the company was a contract engineering firm doing work for a product that was ultimately for mi
59.
by bcrl 11mo ago
Maybe people shouldn't be building data centers in deserts. In the city of Toronto the Deep Lake Water Cooling System uses water taken from Lake Ontario used for drinking water to cool a number of buildings. Most notably 151 Front St
60.
by bcrl 11mo ago
I know one company that strove for five sixes.

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