Posts by Lotaresco

Re: Nice pics in the article

I think these are models built from the Arecibo/Goldstone imaging of 1996 FG3 using Doppler radar. There are some details and image resolutions given in this paper. There is more detail here.

Re: An addition to the list

"I think you will find that those who operate ponzi schemes have 'commercial interests'...."

I think you will find that the biggest operators of Ponzi schemes are governments. They refer to them as "pension schemes" but unlike real pension funds which have to invest the customer's payments then arrange to pay the customer their pension based on the investment governments just spend the money and pay current claimants money from current contributors. A genuine Ponzi scheme.

Re: Blackmailed

"Mate, I'll drink to that.

Btw I like the koan, where is it from?"

You will find that mate is the national beverage of Argentina and several other South American states. Also quite popular in Lebanon.

Re: I need some pointers

I used Corel Draw and had used both Freehand (much missed) and Illustrator before. I found Corel Draw to be awful, terrible interface, really poor drawing options, completely illogical and didn't interface at all well with printers. I can see how if your experience started with Corel Draw how you could find alternative interfaces confusing. That said, I found the Gimp difficult to use at first - not as good as Photoshop - and I suspect that I'll find Inkscape offers new challenges.

Re: Yes, retired, uhuh

"If you want to blame someone for "borking everything up", then blame Microsoft for making 10 too different to 7 to make the transition smooth."

Wait. Windows 10 is different to 7? When did that happen?

Re: All sensors are analog.

"All sensors are analog"

<screws up face> Weeellllll, no, not all sensors. Single photon counters for example detect a single photon event and output a pulse (binary) signal.

Re: Don't let this become the future

At least Mulder never gave up.

Not least because Microsoft chose to implement top-posting as the default in Outlook, breaking the model used by previous email clients.

"Plain text. Microsoft was always wrong. Always."

Re: Charger: Don't need it. Headphones: Damned well Include them, cheapskates!

"What's your issue with ARM Macs?"

Possibly one of those who is doesn't know that Apple have used Motorola, IBM and Intel processors in previous models and at each change of processor architecture the users were mostly unaware of the change. I keep seeing the unknowing predicting dire things if Apple changes to ARM, usually based on a flawed understanding of how Apple has implemented emulation in the past. Given the design of MacOS it's possible to execute most of the system code natively and emulate only the small fraction of code that is created by the developer. Microsoft has always struggled with replatforming code, Apple were fortunate to inherit the excellent design work done by (mostly) Xerox PARC engineers.

" I seem to remember that there was a case a bit like this - but made of metal rather than plastic, and looking a bit too industrial for my aesthetic sensibilities!"

I think that may have been the Fuze keyboard, case and GPIO breakout board.

Re: But how long will it take to get there?

"Let me guess - with these advances, experts predict we'll have fusion power for the masses in 20 years?"

Thirty years is the "traditional" value. It has held good for all of my life, which started a long time ago.

"Nuclear fusion energy is 30 years away...and always will be."

Re: Monkey on my back

"Worse than a wayward D4 or LEGO brick..."

But not as bad a BS1363 plug.

Re: Give me a wax printer anyday...

I used to have 4xPhaser colour printers. When fresh the colour quality was unbeatable. Sadly over quite a short time the printed image begins to blur and the image colour isn't stable. Also since they run heaters 24/7 the temperature in the office could be amusing and the electricity bill was staggering. You're effectively running a 250W heater night and day. Or in our case 1kW of heating.

The ink tank printer uses almost no electricity even when running - no heaters. The colour quality is good when used on the right sort of paper and the ink itself is very cheap.

Re: All Of This Has Happened Before And Will Happen Again

Amazon Autofac 1.0

Re: Delusional Officialdom

"the Government has very robust systems in place to protect the IT systems of officials and staff."

It's possible this is not actually a lie, it's a Humphreyesque avoidance of telling the truth. So economical with la vérité that there's no vérité visible to the naked eye.

Yes, government has very robust systems to protect the IT systems of officials and staff. However politicians don't like the handcuffs that imposes, so they set up and use their own email systems. They rely either on email systems provided by their constituency or just wave their credit card around until someone takes pity and supplies them with a shonky webmail service. Then they transfer all the documents that should remain on government systems to their private email, so they can work on it using their iPad on the train.

The "robust" systems get a good ignoring. Worse than that, it's reasonably common for ministers to give their passwords to other people so that they can answer mail on their behalf. I suspect that the spearphishing attack on Liam Fox was of that nature.

Re: Just reset it.

I have two QNAPs and one Synology the Synology was cheap, doesn't have hot swappable bays and feels cheap - plastic case. It was a pain to install drives on the Synology because it needs to be dismantled to get access to the drive bays. That said it was less than half the price of the QNAPs and works, mostly, just as well. The Synology web interface is prettier but not as capable as the QNAP offering. QNAP has features such as NUT for managing/reporting UPS status that doesn't seem to exist on the Synology. The Synology doesn't report the SATA interface speed for some reason, the QNAP does. It's still possible to load a package manager on the Synology and add your own command-line tools, this feature was removed from QNAPs a couple of years ago.

Really not much to choose between them. I got the Synology because after upgrading the drives in one of the QNAP to 4x8TB it seemed a shame to just throw away the 4x3TB drives that I had removed. So now I can use the Synology for multimedia storage.

I recall that setting up rsync to work between QNAP and Synology was a pain, but can't remember why.

"Not sure what more help would be required?"

For government IT an explanation of what GitHub is, £900,000 in consultancy fees to write a report that says that GitHub is used by Chinese hackers therefore unsafe. Another £150,000 to re-write the report at a level that could be understood by an MP, followed by a Cabinet Office edict to state that GIThub is to be blocked on all government networks.

Re: Better late than bleeding edge?

" I use a pfsense firewall with DNS which then points to a pihole."

I'm wondering why you do that. PfblockerNG does everything that a pihole does and it integrates with DNS resolver. It also logs natively on your pfsense firewall so that you can see what's going on and get alerts via the web interface. It even uses the same blocklists as pihole.

"Yes but I thought "Macs don't get viruses"?"

I think you may be thinking about claims made about Chromebooks. They even feature in advertising for the Chromebook.

The first Mac virus I recall seeing was nVir in 1987. Then John Norstadt's Disinfectant appeared as the first anti-Malware software that I had seen. Graham Cluley has documented the history of Mac malware. It's worth a read. I haven't seen anyone other than the terminally clueless state that Macs don't get viruses. Although with OSX the scope for viruses to propagate has been severely curtailed and proofs of concept often require a lot of user compliance to give the virus the permissions it needs to infect system files.

As someone else has said, malware that runs in userspace is more of an issue. Ransomware, crypto-currency miners, Trojans etc only need user permissions to do their stuff. If you can execute code on your computer then malware can execute on your computer. The only effective way to stop it is to make it a pain to use your computer.

Re: Still in the Dark Ages

"Council services are still NOT centralised"

This is a failure of central government which washes its hands of supporting local government effectively. It would be reasonable to expect HMG to provide a SaaS solution that would permit local governments simply to configure for their own "branding" and geographical location. It is, after all, what many local authorities already do for organisations within their boundaries. Parish councils, town councils etc are often consuming a service provided by the County council. Sadly government is always very big about talking about reduction of inefficiency, joined-up services, "supporting our communities" etc. and very bad at actually doing something to achieve those goals.

"Apple has a pretty poor track record of backwards compatibility,"

Not in my experience. I've weathered the changes from Motorola to Power to Intel without any problems or loss of software. During the same time with Microsoft mostly on Intel I've had the experience of the worst backward compatibility I can recall, as even relatively minor OS version changes have resulted in software that stops working. By the time Apple has dropped support for a previous version of software the manufacturers have released native versions as part of the upgrade process.

Re: There used to be military wombats...

"There used to be military wombats... "

COVID connection. The WOMBAT was the improved version of the BAT.

"Who uses mechanical drives in desktops though?"

It depends who is paying the bills.