Posts by Paul Crawford

Re: cables

You can get cat urine flavoured cables to act as a deterrent:

https://www.flexcables.co.uk/flexishield-r/how-it-works

Why would a VM for office need the internet?

I sure ain't browsing or emailing on Win7

Re: King Midas in reverse

Gerald Ratner

Re: Architecture and Morality.....anyone?

Follow the money.

Success of IBM's PC due to multiple (and cheaper) clones largely, not to mention Intel's rather illegal acts to keep competition off the market.

Re: Move work to the compiler?

We had some of the first Niagara chip-based servers, or Viagra as we so wittingly called them, for use in the web server of the day. It worked very well for that as the work load was also massively parallel/threaded, however, for more general work loads it had AIFK a single FPU shared. Not an issue for our tasks, but made it less useful than the later multi-core x86 beasts that came along by late 2000s.

Which ran Linux and eventually ate Sun's lunch. We had been fans of Solaris (plus ZFS) and kept both in use until Oracle took over then it was painfully obvious what the future would be...

Our Niagra servers continued in use until the facility was shut down in 2019.

Re: Innumeracy

In medical terms 'overweight' is the stage before 'obese', and that is the stage before 'morbidly obese'.

Re: License fee

If Dell are smart they will make it royalty-free so the DIMM makers get to use it and push costs down for Dell as well.

Cloud storage is only good value for small amounts.

Big amounts cost, but equally big storage with genuine site-resilience is not cheap either as you have capital costs (buying storage stuff, budgeting for its inevitable replacement and thus data migration) and running costs (electricity mostly for big stuff and keeping the damn kit cool, staff costs, location/data centre property costs). Any sensible business should look at both options and really think through the pros and cons of either choice, not just the marketing hype from cloud vendors (or indeed storage vendors).

As much as the boardgames are fun problems to analyse, let's keep it on paper, no?

Let us all hope so. Whoever "wins" only really gets their ego reinforced, those on the ground and world wide all suffer. There are no real winners in any such aggressive move and if Ukraine has shown the world anything, it is how badly such an on-paper easy move can go. Let us hope the Xi sees this.

If they win it would be something to Crow about.

Re: Once upon a time.......

True, but then the insurers can't claim it was never locked as "no sign of violence used".

Re: Don't worry, be wiring.

It has its plus and minuses if you pardon the pun. While safer, you can still get killed on 120V to Earth and probably more fires from more amps for a given kW load. In the UK (at least) we have 110V for building sites (using yellow "commando" connectors that are not interchangeable with the blue 230V or red 400V ones) and that is really 55V - 0V - 55V two-phase in a similar manner to the USA's domestic supply, but half the voltage. In the days before cheap RCDs that was a major step towards safety as what passes for wiring in building sites is appalling beyond belief.

While rare, you also see 230V - 0V - 230V systems in the UK for the odd farm, but generally speaking if you need more than 230V single phase worth of power then it is 230V/400V three-phase you get. There are also LV sites on 400V/690V three-phase but personally I have never encountered one, I think that is only for big motors but not quite going to the 3.3kV sort of voltage that comes under different rules (as above 1kV AC is classed as "high voltage" and not under the usual wiring regulations).

None so blind as those who will not see...

The company would be on the hook, so now that it is Musk's property he has inherited the problem.

Now if only he had done some proper due-diligence before offering to buy? Oh wait, he elected not to!

Re: ChatGPT

As you also mentioned, I've also been finding libraries that I otherwise would never have found by getting stuck in the search engine / online forum echo chambers

But does the AI tell you how well maintained (if at all) said libraries are?

Re: one step closer to the first satellite launch take-off from UK soil.

How is it any different from a multi stage rocket?

Well a traditional multi-stage rocket launch has a lot of infrastructure are the launch site, support towers, tracking radar, etc. That represents a significant investment.

Here we have basically a plane launch and a boat-load of publicity. Like the 30 year old Pegasus launcher, if Virgin is successful it does not need Cornwall as it can basically launch from any airport that can take a 747. Probably the launch tracking is a mobile unit already...

I'm sure she would be interested if Mush throws in some free ostrich anus dinners...

Re: Next gen?

I would say that if there was one single reason I would like to have ZFS on my machines it is the copy-on-write snapshot system so it is transparent and low overhead, and yet it allows a simple roll-back to before you did the Doh! moment, or some scum launched ransomware on it.

The latter assumes the snapshots have a different admin account/password from yours!

Second reason is the checksums, not a big issue for typical personal computing but a big help for BIG file systems and heavy usage to know that the data is still as-written.

Re: Oh boy

After two million years (give or take) one would hope we'd have stopped having problems needing this, but apparently we haven't.

Re: Can you expand a little

Well the linked article has gone as of now (10:29z on 13th Dec) and a search on Trend Micro also points to a now-missing page!

404 as far as the eye can see...

Re: I'm still bemused by the whole idea of making the blue badge a profit centre

Paying for genuinely useful aspects makes sense. The much wider question though is will Twitter still be attractive to businesses willing to pay for premium ranking, etc?

Re: Paint all over everything, including power sockets and emergency buttons?

I doubt it now, the only two compulsory forms of insurance in the UK is for vehicles on public roads, and employee insurance.

But it is normally smart to have some cover for other things, assuming (unlike the MOD case) the exclusions are not going to render it useless. It is the same with some spacecraft launches, the premiums can be so high that it comes to "self insuring" the launch, especially in the case of a first real-world launch of a new rocket with real payload(s).

Seems your memory is not clear - they did not exfiltrate data there, they monkeyed with the centrifuges to damage them. No communication needed as they knew what range of parameters to expect on the target, and what to fiddle with once found matching.

Re: How will this help?

It is the same thing. You simulate what you think are the laws of physics at whatever scale and situation and see if they predict what you observe, and if that goes well you try to predict new stuff - and then you can turn up the hardon's to 11 and see if you find experimentally what the software predicted.

If you get a decent match then you have determined your theory is not wrong so far. You never really prove 'right' in anything other than maths, but if all of your predictions that are testable go well, you have a theory that is useful for predicting stuff within the region of tested hypothesis.

Re: Better Security, nearly always makes things a bit more complex.

True, but if this is mostly for new drivers then there is less chance of needing the rust compiler on obscure platforms.

Re: Why pass a pointer when you can pass a reference?

C also allows you to pass a reference, after all it is just a compiler-determined pointer.