Posts by Paul Crawford

Re: Well....

Funny thing is taxi firms have been sustainable for over a century after "the knowledge" was introduced.

Re: "The Clink" at Brixton Prison

That is a brilliant idea!

Gives them a chance of getting a good job and paying taxes, instead of ending up re-offending and costing taxes to be kept in jail again.

Re: Double keying already used in some banking applications

Yes, but you care about the results, not about outsourcing to the cheapest supplier.

Re: There is no chip shortage!

Just in time = just too late when anything changes unexpectedly.

Re: Just over a billion years ago ...

We also got some Sun hardware around 1991 and it was good. not cheap, but good and came with proper support and knowledgable folk at the end of the phone or email.

Later we got some UltraSPARC machines and one of them continued as web/email server without a hiccup for about a decade after it should have been retired. Its only real problem was the non-replaceable real-time clock module's battery had gone after ~10 years. And that also held the CMOS config! Doh! So to boot it you have to type in the partition info (that our guy had put on a sticky note on its box just in case)

Re: Scatter Labs

Actually that sounds more like the nature of their business.

Re: If UK data rules have not changed ...

The UK has relied on the EU-wide get-out of "national security" exceptions for member states for the likes of RIPA and similar spying laws. As a non-EU country that sort of exception no longer applies.

Remains to be seen if a challenge to our data sharing along the lines of the USA one will result in this (reported as happening) compliance decision being flipped.

Re: Press any key to continue

Earth destroyed by earthlings. Keep your head down. Don't look back.

Step 1 - vote the useless tosser out

Step 2 - call in forensic accountants to look for any possible reason to sue for any severance pay

Step 3 - profit!

No underpants were harmed in this business strategy

Re: Wow

Even with uBlock Origin and FB Purity you end up with the stuff your "friends" have posted.

Christ, I weep for the future of humanity :(

Re: how stupid a large section of people are

Sadly I expect so.

The problem seems to be ever-shorter attention spans and no 'adults' doing any analysis or commentary on what the lying bar stewards are up to. Just look to Brexit and the "people are tired of experts".

Re: And they want...

If I could upvote you a hundred times!

Actually make it 404

Re: Easy to say....

Which don't work with all sorts of legacy software and devices that email errors/warnings, etc.

I gave up on outlook.com email as they broke POP/IMAP recently probably for this reason (dicking about with password authentication methods). Really, if you have a secured link as practically all clients support, or you use a VPN (so open port 25 test is safe) then the issue is underlying pisspoor password policy (UPPP if you want).

Christ, I ended up moving some stuff over to Yahoo of all places for a free email backup as they decided to improve security by requiring you to use a "token" which is just a fixed machine generated password of decent entropy instead of someone reusing pass12345 as they do on all other sites. Just how hard would it be for MS to do the same to deal with UPPP?

Re: Fixing the unfixable

Oh there is a fix, big companies that have a vested interest could pay others to do the dull work.

While some of the originators of the project may not care about documentation (on the ground they know it and don't care to pass it on) and they might not worry about bugs or security holes that do not impact themselves, generally if someone else is willing to do the donkey work to clean things up and make it all nice and easy to understand/build/test/review/etc, they will be happy.

And if not, you can always tell them to fork off..and do it.

Re: Just remember kids

Es are good?

Re: Here’s one for all you C lovers out there...

I believe that C was basically created to write UNIX. Compared to writing an OS largely in assembler it must have been a joy! Essentially as fast/compact and largely CPU portable.

In fact C has often been called the universal assembler!

But part of the underlying unsafe aspect of C is the power to do things with addresses (both data an execution start points) that you need to manipulate in an OS, but start to become very risky within an end user program/library.

It is easy in cases like this to say "Oh that would not happen in $LANGUAGE" but it is avoiding the elephant in the room. That code was written in C, to rewrite it in a new language and port support to all systems using it is not a tasks anyone is willing to fund/undertake. So the arguments are academic, the blaming is a pointless distraction. The least-worst option that is open is to improve the development and testing process to use the tools already available for static and dynamic code analysis and fix the warnings.

Re: humans are still alone in the pitch-black depths of space

Schroedinger was not so sure about his one

Yes, but most use is for phones, etc, that have very little "legacy" or bespoke software for which customers can neither buy, or possibly afford to buy, replacements.

The server market on Linux is a bit better as it has long been that case you wrote code assuming it should compile and run on multiple platforms. Not that everyone did, of course, but far less of a monoculture than Windows / x86 became.

Re: "subversive glamour"

Is there really such a big divide between political or religious extremists, and more general conspiracy bollocks?

Is there not a basic point where you have to decide if something is causing (or likely to cause) harm. Would it matter if that harm is due to some suicide bomber following a fundamentalist cult killing a dozen in a bomb attack, or dozens of children dying from preventable diseases due to the parents being led by anti-vaxer groups?

Sure that guy was a sandwich short of a picnic now, but presumably was once smart and sane enough to get and hold a job in medicine. In this time of lock-down stress and rising mental illness, is it really a surprise he ended up believing the fake-news / alternative-facts narrative beloved of Trump, or the general anti-vaccination myths being promoted on social media?

https everywhere

I have no issue with sites offering only https for security.

I do have an issue with web browsers disallowing http or self-signed certificates and no configuration to allow it, as that breaks lots of legacy equipment you might need to administer locally over http.

The neutral doesn't join up with anything on the switch!

A dangerous practice you occasionally see is a 5-pin three-phase socket that lacks the neutral because whoever wired it assumed the load was always a delta-connected one. Then someone plugs in a star-connected load that has some imbalance and one leg get most of the 400V and the others tens of volts, with predictable damage following.

If the socket has a neutral pin it must be wired up, no matter what the original plans for it are. If you don't need the neutral use a 4-pin socket (L1/L2/L3 & E) and that way no one can plug in something that needs the neutral.

Re: touch controls on hob

Add to that the lack of any meaningful labelling of controls.

And another hate - cookers that need the clock set before the work. With shitty controls that are non-obvious and nobody has the manual any more. WTF is that about? If you worry about a cooker coming on after power fail just do a no-volt release/reset like machine tools have.

Re: At -179C

My first though was about lubrication for bearings, etc. But the issue of a power source is a serious one as even with batteries able to charge/discharge at -179C you need ways to top them up. Solar panels will provide SFA at that sort of distance, so unless you can somehow work a fuel cell to use the lake you are back at RTG supplies.

But as heat engines efficiency depends on the difference in absolute temperature, it might well be possible to use 100C-ish RTG and the lake's -179C to drive a Sterling engine for power and propulsion.

Oh I really wish I could work on that project!

Yup, at least not DOS with the 1980 start date. Less glam, but would that result in a new romantic robot war?

Re: Free means somebody is not getting paid

So why did the complainant not sit down and write the driver himself?

Even for someone who is able to write a device driver (and very, very few programmers can as its a specialised area), can you provide them with the hardware documentation to allow that to be done?

Methinks you don't have a clue about the issues here.

Re: I Don't understand

Call costs?

Sure you might have X free minutes for a limited amount of calls in your country, but if you make VoIP calls overseas to avoid the usurious fees that some countries impose (or the ~35p per photo by MMS in UK) then you can start to see why folk like the functionality of WhatsApp.

Just not the slimy business practices of them now FB has the tentacles in.

Re: Firewall vs router

ISP routers are crap, in my case I set the VM device to "modem mode" and use my own OpenWRT based router and firewall instead.

But the move from dial-up style connections to NAT'd routers was at least a big step forward in security as by default nothing could get in directly to the attached PC, only in response to an outgoing request, so internet worms were basically blocked.

Of course that did not last due to the abomination of UPnP being added and enabled by default and the ne'er-do-wells moving to email and web-based infections.

Re: the trouble with the network

If it is soft ground then it is pretty easy for digging and laying duct, any farmer or builder could do it.

Once you start digging roads or tarmac and/or have to take care around existing utilities (water, gas, power, etc) then it becomes tricky and expensive and you really ought to be insured against any accidental damage to them.

I think Openreach charge around £40/m for soft ground and £120/m for 'hard' installation, but a reasonably builder could probably do it for around half that (might not get permission for digging a public road though). But for a couple of 100m that still costs dearly!

Re: When is it safe to make the jump?

It depends on what you need the machine to do. If you don't have any high-end graphics requirements or specialised hardware then you can run Windows of various era fairly safely in a VM, obviously munch more safely if they don't need much internet access (so email/web on the VM host machine).

That way you can keep a backup/snapshot of the VM and restore it fairly painlessly to another machine if needed, and you can have a host that is subject to a greater degree of hardening and/or control then Win10 gives you (without the usurious fees for the enterprise version).

Also if you do plan a software upgrade or major change, you can make a VM copy just before the deed, and roll back almost instantly if it is broken. That is also made far simpler if the host has a file system that supports low-overhead snapshots (such as ZFS, or if you feel lucky punk, btrfs, or if an Apple fan then I think APFS has this capability)