Re: Available consultant Vijay for Unix System Admin with sun Solories Expireance.

On Fri, 16 May 2008 20:22:26 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 16 May 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng2qa3f.26l6.read_the_sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, jpd wrote:
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

KLM - nearly a third of their fleet is "old". Lufthansa... looks
like about 13% (34 of 260), British - 36 of 240, Alitalia... 80 of
150, well, you get the idea. Even with small fleets like these, you
soon run out of places when you can use them.

Which is sad for the airlines, but not unreasonable.

It is if you are the one who owns (or partially owns) the planes.

Oh, I don't know. But then I'm from yurp where there's laws that
demand silly things like factory plants need to meet at least these->
regulations. Altough that sort of thing invariably leads to huffing and
puffing it doesn't allow for the really old and extremely inefficient
machinery I'm told is still in use in places in the yoosah.

Yes, it's spendy, but in the long run it might be all that bad. OTOH, we
don't have a market force that promotes efficient machinery and reduces
smog-promoting emissions, so we'll have to invent a flawed substitute by
passing laws.

Looking at that again, I could argue that in yoosah the corporations
are to the government as the unions used to be to the employers in
non-continental yurp.


Now if you'd like to complain about old/dirty engines, you might look
at the older series KC135, such as are flown by the US and French
Air Forces. (Air forces of 21 countries are still flying 707s or
C/KC135s). Or you could also look at those four old Fokkers or three
DC-10-30CFs being flown by the KLu ;-)

Alright. :-)


====================
Sounds as if you really need unrecovery.

A big bag'o'cash would do it; I've got enough other things that I want
to get around to tinker and play with.

Big bags of cash are nice, but they tend not to fall from the sky when
you need them, and the banks and transfer companys don't like the idea
of just leaving them on the street for anyone to pick up.

<histrionic> Such injustice! </>


I'm getting a bit sick of wasting time chasing button pushers to no
avail and seeing myself forced to do other things I really don't care
about, other than that they give me the distinct feeling I'm being
screwed, hard.

I've seen mention of un-recovery in .gb and .nl, but it does seem
spotty. We're probably going to loose several slots merely because
the money isn't available (I'm in the R&D division) due to the slowing
economy. But that doesn't make me feel any better/worse.

Ah, but the part beyond chasing wasn't directed there, but more at all
those other moneygrubbing people (gas companies, taxmen). Just got a
fully automated letter informing me they're charging me 2.50 EUR for the
privilege of receiving it. They sent it because at their magic checking
point it hadn't seen other money yet, altough it was underway.

``We noticed that [...]'', it starts, but clearly no human was involved
in sending the letter after that automated system got setup. I hate lies
like that, even supposedly polite lies. At least the taxwoman, in this
case, wrote the letter by herself, even if the message wasn't very nice.


As long as you carry no one who is not a required crew member. The
aviation authorities take a VERY DIM view of people hacking parts.

Not surprising he sourly commented he could've done a much better job
-- but he wasn't allowed to due to missing and hard-to-get paperwork.

That surprises me. A weld shouldn't depend on paperwork, but on the
skill and materials used.

It's entirely natural for paperwork-frameworks to cause stuff like that.
Any formalised system runs the risk of documenting the completion of
jumping through a series of hoops more than actual skill acquired.

Maybe I should've clarified that in the example the relater of the story
was a tech of the flying club (so craft are NOT experimental), and
he happened to be a very good to excellent welder. The certified guy
clearly was more certified than skilled (``good enough'' welding skill
and had put in the effort to get the paperwork -- supposedly not as hard
if you work at the institute certifying people).

Basically the same complaint ``we'' have about the various ``industry''
certifications, except that those usually don't involve lives at stake.
Of course the complaint there is also that the courses are crap; I can't
comment on the quality of this certification thing, only that this
particular person produced an ugly and not particularly good weld.


To me, most of the paperwork is make-work. Yes, the principles behind
the requirements, or rather, the reasons, are sound and necessairy, but
the implementation could stand some improvement.

There have been some pretty severe abuses over the years, and that's
where the paperwork comes in.

Regulators rarely manage to come up with the essence of what to
formalise, so lacking ``better'' they'll settle for ``more''.

Every incident causes screams for ``more'' rules, not ``better'' rules.
Even if it is clear that the existing rules failed to work because the
regulatory bodies supposed to make them work failed miserably. Asleep
at the wheel, bribes, lying about it, etc. etc. Even in enlightened and
formalized-to-the-gills .nl.


Something like 30 people died when [obviously inferior bolts] failed
in flight, and while the authorities were able to prosecute the
mechanic, the inspector who signed off the repair, and the clown who
bought the bolts,

That and kicking them all out of the trade for life is about the only
recourse you have.


it probably didn't satisfy the families of the victims.

The victims are dead and all we can do is not even ensure it can never
happen again, but only look at what happened and learn from it, to
reduce the chances of it happening and/or reducing the impact when it
does. We can't bring back the dead and 100% security doesn't exist.

Seeking compensation, a popular pastime everywhere and especially in the
USA, is rightly a civil and not a criminal issue.

Of course, if it happened to mine I'd be hopping mad, and I don't know
what I'd do, but in this discussion I'm preferring to look at it from a
perspective a bit larger than that of the individual.


In the past (I dunno) 30-ish years, the government inspectors have
been looking hard at unauthorized or unapproved parts, and have dealt
harshly when they find any.

But as with the mechanic's skill, the key is that the parts are good
enough. If I do have the skills, materials, and machinery to create the
parts and sufficiently assess whether the produce is good enough, there
should be no problem building the parts on-site, then documenting the
whole thing. But, the system for formally documented airplane-quality
parts does not allow for that use case.

I see this as a failing of the system. In itself that is not a critique
for the need for formally documented high quality parts, just of the
implementation of the system that supposedly does that.


Actually, there are several companies that are in the business of
spare parts support. They own parts, and have them in warehouses at
airports in many countries. As I said earlier - an Aircraft On
Ground is loosing money big time every minute it on that status. The
parts company can be looked at as an insurance scam that's legal.

Then again, the airlines could do that themselves too, only they don't
because they choose not to.

You also don't have to have insurance - you can pay the total cost out
of pocket if it ever comes to that. The airlines are looking to save
costs where ever they can, and not owning spares that you may never
use, and not having to store and account/inspect for those parts is
another cost. Parts pools, and spare parts companies allow fewer
spares to be available over a wider geographic area, which means the
spare is available sooner.

So this niche is a result of airlines seeking to reduce costs, altough
they're paying now more per part when they find out what they need. I
don't think it's a scam; there are reasonable alternatives and the niche
is a result of choices by airlines.


What is slightly scary if you're knowledgeable of networking is that the
whole mess is interconnected - the flight control systems and the
passenger entertainment networks are on a common switched network (to
the best of my understanding). Supposedly, they've investigated flooding
the passenger side and that it has no effect on the flight control side.

I think it was Marcus Ranum who came up with a bit of math why the
whole due diligence thing of trying to find vulnerabilities first is a
losing proposition. It's basic chance calculations, really. If out of an
imaginary pool of a million vulnerabilities, your team of a hunderd full
time people can pick out, say, ten thousand vulnerabilities, in a year,
what are the chances the 100 vulnerabilities a lone ebil h4xx0r could
pick out of the same pool in the same year are all covered?

Or, how many does the adversary have to find to have at least a 50%
chance of finding one that your team hasn't already found?

How certain are these aviation engineers they've found everything
possible, not just everything they managed to think of?

The military learned this the hard way: If it's important, Just fscking
Disconnect The Network Already.


With a paper form it's easy to take a pencil and scribble something
extra on it, hoping it'll fix things -- despite that some clerks will
get all huffy about soiling their beautiful form like that.

Or that the data is actually entered by character recognition software
that only looks in specific areas on the form.

Such a system *properly* should signal inability to cope with an
irregular form, dropping it into the slow path. Fast-pathing using forms
is useful in terms of possible cost and handling time savings, but if
you define your entire process to be the fast path and nothing more,
you're doing your dependents/clients/victims/whatever a disservice.

Something also regularly a topic in RISKS, I believe.


[tale of woe snipped]
The surely public officials you guys spoke about last month exist
here too. But here, they've got armed guards at the customer entrance
(along with metal detectors) to protect the staff - I suppose if I
tried to get in with a sword-cane, they'd get suspicious.

Bad management taken to entirely new levels. Now with 20% extra security
circus.


Also, with humans, there are ways to punish and force to pay damages,
but with computers?

That will be an interesting exercise. Even today, you have some legal
recourse against the company/government that employees the person who
screwed up, and at the same time, it's often difficult to take legal
actions against that employee. Ah well, more work for lawyers.

Which then becomes the usual case of justice for those who can afford
it. I think I'd rather have a more transparant in the easier to correct
mistakes sense (and smaller, cheaper) government than extensive
bureaucratics to, say, provide child support. But the latter is an easy
spend of our money buying some politician a bit of popular support.


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
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