* Posts by Paul Crawford

5636 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2007

Married man arrives at A&E with wedding ring stuck on todger

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Come now! Everyone knows that men reach the age of 5, and then the bodies keep growing.

Australia teases binning x86 for Power CPUs in new supercomputer

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Trollface

Re: "Windows Server tends to outperform Linux in many HPC scenarios"

Ah, 8 hours passed with 2 down-votes so far, and yet not a contradictory fact in sight :)

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Trollface

Re: Old fogey mode

Alpha was 64-bit always, but NT ran very nicely indeed on them. Until it was cancelled and we had to explain to a major European space organisation just how trustworthy MS were in terms of portability and cross-platform support. So much for the promises they made when we went down that road.

Oh well, not that MS matters that much to us now. Hey, MS uses, just how are those price-hikes going down? [hence troll icon]

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"Windows Server tends to outperform Linux in many HPC scenarios"

Really? Facts please, like how many Windows machines are in the top 500 supercomputers?

UK NHS 850k Reply-all email fail: State health service blames Accenture

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Re: The usual suspects

Sadly I have seen both issues in use.

Case in point #1: one club that has 'reply' set to reply to the list because some folk felt it too hard to choose 'reply all' if they really meant it. As a result, you actively have to copy/paste an individual's email address if you don't want to spam to group.

Case in point #2: Where I work the number of (apparently educated) numpties who 'reply all' to stuff that has no real need of informing the original recipients is depressing. Even worse there were groups set up that allowed a replay-all to everyone, with the expected dumb outcome. At least those distribution lists now only allow a few people to post to them (the actual content is worthless, so its not a great loss).

Google's new VR Daydream View will cripple your phone

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Re: Photo

Typical, eh? Crashes just as you get to the money shot climax of the VR experience.

Russia shoves antitrust probe into Microsoft after Kaspersky gripes about Windows 10

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Now, now, can't have some non-USA product flagging our own agency-generated malware can we?

Retiring IETF veteran warns: Stop adding so many damn protocols

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Re: Bloat

You would like to think that standard libraries are known, fixed and tested. Not when it comes to the IoT world where the mbed implementation of gmtime() is broken! And not fixed in over two years!

Says a lot about how well they develop and test IoT stuff, eh?

https://developer.mbed.org/questions/75856/Who-will-fix-the-mbed-system-gmtime-func/

https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os/issues/1098

Brexflation: Lenovo, HPE and Walkers crisps all set for double-digit hike

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Brexploitation

A great new word, shame its needed though

Hitler's wife's lovely lilac knickers fetch £2,900 at auction

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Re: One word: Bootnotes.

Surely Jackbootnotes?

China passes new Cybersecurity Law – you have seven months to comply if you wanna do biz in Middle Kingdom

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But what will the USA actually do?

The Chinese now have their factories and most production process/IP by the balls.

CERN also has a particle decelerator – and it’s trying to break physics

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Next question...

Does antimatter fall down?

Of course that is what is expected from all theories, but AFIK it has never been experimentally verified.

Adblock overlord to Zuckerberg: Lay down your weapons and surrender

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Re: "We’ll strike back," he promised.

What can the ad-blockers Facebook do that can't be easily undone by Facebook the ad-blockers?

Is more to the point. Unless FB runs adverts from their own servers just like user posts, its still easily separable. And if they do that they can't rely upon 3rd party advertisement houses for revenue.

That is, of course, quite possible. But then the second step is for ad-blockers to disable any animated image/video by default. So FB still punts ads, but they are now neutered in terms of bandwidth and annoyance so really the user has won by not being force-fed any more shit that their "friends" on FB normally punt at them.

Windows 10 market share stalls after free upgrade offer ends

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Re: "printer manufacturers"

Generally you will find that (1) any postscript printer works just fine, and (2) most HP models work fine (if you can forgive them over the recent deliberate stuffing of 3rd party ink cartridges that is).

So the quickest test is will it work on a Mac? If so it probably will for Linux, but a little bit of looking around will often show user's experience of the whole thing, for example: https://www.openprinting.org/printers

Researchers tag new brace of bugs in NTP, but they're fixable

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Re: Inexpensive fix

Using a cheap GPS for accurate time is not quite so trivial though, as you need to set it up to use the 1 PPS timing signal as an additional input, since the RS232 messages have a significant delay and lots of jitter (tens of ms or more). Here is one example of doing so, but I have not tried it myself:

http://www.rjsystems.nl/en/2100-ntpd-garmin-gps-18-lvc-gpsd.php

Uber drivers entitled to UK minimum wage, London tribunal rules

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Re: Will this do anything...

Will also be interesting how a driver-less taxi can deal with disabled passengers who need assistance to board and/or load luggage.

Will they argue they can only take orders from the able-bodied?

Or that somehow taking payment for travel is not making them a taxi service?

Microsoft goes back to the drawing board – literally, with 28" tablet and hockey puck knob

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Re: Windows 10

A few minutes removing the crud from the start menu, a quick search and the unwanted applications are gone with some powershell scripts and then sort out the snooping (as much as you can).

Now if only MS had the technical expertises to do that and not have but a few skilled users like yourself enjoying the non-shitty version...

PayPal patches bone-headed two factor authentication bypass

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Re: 2fa choices

A lot of UK banks use your debit/credit card and a "card reader" gadget that allow them to send you a code (on web page) and you then answer with a hashed version that provides a means of checking its you and the amount you wish to transfer, etc. I'm guessing the code they send and the maths involving the amount makes it hard to MITM modify enough to easily abuse your account even if your PC is hopelessly compromised.

Also you used to get the RSA key fobs for email (and sometimes banking) where you get a random 6 digit number every minute and that sequence can be checked at the server end to see if its likely to be you attempting a login, etc. But then RSA got compromised (pretty bad for a security company) and as they kept the master keys to keep businesses paying, all of their customers were also compromised. Had each end customer managed their own keys, etc, the damage would have been much lower.

Microsoft's Surface Studio desk-slab, Dial knob, Surface Book: We get our claws on new kit

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Nice hardware, but...

So it like an iMac, but with a privacy-slurping OS that gains you a few more programs you could use on it?

IBM Australia didn't stress-test #censusfail router and blocked password resets

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Re: Turn it off and back on

But sometimes it does the opposite - you find that config was updated in memory and not saved, so it comes up broken. Either way, it is really stupid that they did not test a complete reboot/power cycle of the system.

The cloud is not new. What we are doing with it is

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Commoditisation

One issue with commoditisation or the more general "utility supply" model for IT is it is rather different from most other things we have. Take electricity or gas as a good example, unless you are in the middle of nowhere or have some absolutely critical system you don't have your own generator, and only proper IT places even consider a UPS to allow for glitches in supply and orderly shut down. The reason of course is that the supply of such things is to a simple standard and with very little difference its the same from any utility world wide. Same for food, we are pretty much omnivores so can easily change to what food is on offer from any supplier.

But with IT we have the continued issue of lock-in, either from APIs that only one vendor supports (properly and fully, maybe not even that) or from a growing archive of unique data that becomes a major issue to migrate. And no one is really up for paying for two redundant cloud suppliers "just in case" the brown stuff meets that rotating air mover. In sort, we can't simply move from one supplier to another with ease, except for a few very basic cases like backup storage.

Sure with on-site stuff we still have a form of lock-in as its rarely simple to replace stuff without changes, but we are not normally in a position of an external supplier being in control of what we can do with it. With the cloud they can (and often do) make changes that you have no control over, and can shut you down or price you out of competition more easily because they have your data.

'Biggest ever' Linux release

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Re: "commits"

perpetrate or carry out (a mistake, crime, or immoral act)

Well that kind of summarises a lot of the pointless GUI changes and removal of useful features that seems to be today's norm.

It's nearly 2017 and JPEGs, PDFs, font files can hijack your Apple Mac, iPhone, iPad

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Re: Cupertino is ...

What we need is heavy-duty sandboxing so that *when* the application is compromised, the miscreants don't have much in the way of resources to play with.

We already have this - its called apparmor

However, its not usually configured because it "gets in the way" and you also have the problem that many developers don't give a flying fsck about looking after a sane access profile. See also:

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/guidance/end-user-devices-security-guidance-ubuntu-1404-lts

Is this the worst Blockchain idea you've ever heard?

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Blockchain technology for music payment seems a dead end, but there is a valid point that the world could well do with some form of micropayment system that dose not involve the septic tank of on-line advertisement networks.

Something where you could pay of the order of 0.1p per music/video play directly (more or less) to the folk who did the work. Cheap and painless so folk don't mind paying for a clean experience (and probably well above what they get from YouTube...)

Open-source storage that doesn't suck? Our man tries to break TrueNAS

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Re: The dated interface

Please, please don't make it into another sucky "modern" style! OK?

Keep it functional and discoverable for users who rarely touch the box.

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Re: Fail over?

You don't need a cluster for fail-over, only if you want no outage at all.

With two heads you can operate active-active or active-passive depending on the number of shares (1 share = active-passive only). If once goes down the other takes over that pool of data after a moderate time.

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Fail over?

What are the reasons that will trigger a fail-over, and do the heads have some watchdog to force a reboot/fail-over in case one head gets sick?

I ask this as someone who has suffered from the Sun Oracle ZFS appliance that would only fail over on a kernel panic of the other head. But the other head would invariably get stuffed in such a manner as to stop serving storage but not so screwed that it stopped the heartbeat links that arbitrated between them. We ended up using our nagios monitoring machine to check for usable NFS mounts and if that went bad for a while it would SSH in to the active head's ILOM to kick it in the NMI button.

Report: UK counter-terrorism plan Prevent is 'unjust', 'counterproductive'

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Re: Demonisation

Look around, look back over recent history, and you will always see the "other nation/religion/colour are top blame" as the reason of choice for morons and the politicians craving their support or following an agenda where it suits them.

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Re: Display

If you "follow procedure", it doesn't matter how horrific the consequences, you are free of all responsibility for your actions.

They thought differently at Nuremberg

Ubuntu 16.10: Yakkety Yak... Unity 8's not wack

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The Gnome devs have ripped out the most useful ... conform to the current Gnome group-think on UI design (which says that the way to make things easy to use is to simply not have any useful features).

Do they ever actually use their own software for real? You get the impression they are bored teenagers who will do anything but bug-fix their own code.

SHA3-256 is quantum-proof, should last billions of years

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Re: Hash functions

The problem they worry about is not the inevitable collisions in the mind bogglingly vast 2^256 numeric space of the hash function, it is the ease (or otherwise) of engineering such a collision so that you can fake a digital signature for nefarious purposes.

US government wants Microsoft 'Irish email' case reopened

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Re: users don't control where data resides?

Of course, Google, MS, et al could simply offer a user tick-box choice of data centre jurisdiction and side-step that argument.

But more realistically the best option is not to store any important data on US companies' servers unless you hole the encryption keys. So no web email, etc, where it has to be plain text at the cloud end to access.

Dutch govt ordered to use open standards for comms from 2017

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Re: German city coucil

That get trotted out time and time again, mostly because a new mayor complained in 2014. However I see no news of any actual change back, For example the time line here cover that (with some references to check up on):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#Timeline

Also you have a chicken and egg problem, if everyone is using something like docx which is not-quite-standard you have compatibility issues (a bit like MS has with differing versions of Word but to a smaller degree). By mandating odt standard you get an impetus to improve behaviour both in LibreOffice and MS Office (which can do odt, it just bitches about it to discourage its use).

Email security: We CAN fix the tech, but what about the humans?

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Re: "Not really. What you can do, they can UNdo"

But it makes it harder. And that is ALL you can hope for, as perfect security is simply not possible.

Step 1) Make it harder for the bar stewards.

Step 2) Have a tested, off-site recovery process.

Step 3) Underpants! Profit!

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Indeed, the use of things like apparmor to limit just what areas the email client can read/write to is one thing, but obviously gets in to problems in usability given most users want to be able to save and attach from their normal document areas. Still, it avoids your SSH keys being emailed out by mistake...

The other thing that can help a bit is to deny execution to user-writeable areas, either my Linux mount options or windows ACLs. Can be inconvenient for software developers and won't block all scripting or similar attacks, but its a start.

Most of all stop word processors, etc, from executing bloody scripts :(

One-quarter of UK police websites lack a secure connection

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Goverment in general?

How do the police sites compare to the government in general? Of course the police are probably handling more sensitive data, but a lot of gov sites have been crap in my limited experience of using them.

SSDs in the enterprise: It's about more than just speed

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in the long run, will be about economics and the dollar-per-bit cost

Generally it always is, as performance vs cost for RAID / short-stroking, etc, has been covered.

But for now if you have lots of data (e.g. tens of TB) and limited / sequential access patterns HDD is still way cheaper. When that changes we will buy SSD in a flash.

Confirmed: UK police forces own IMSI grabbers, but keeping schtum on use

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Re: OTT Comms

It tells them which phones are nearby, in many cases that is very useful.

Also you have to remember that very few criminals are masterminds like Moriarty...

Nuke plant has been hacked, says Atomic Energy Agency director

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Re: Not a surprise

I can only surmise that the "Illuminati" are not some fictive underground secret society but far more likely to be those that we ourselves put into power.

Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.

Russia tests sat jamming

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Not so necessary as a lot of satellites only dump to polar sites (and receive telecommand updates as well). Given how much harder it is to support the Antarctic compared to, say Fairbanks in Alaska, you could cause serious pain-in-the-ass for all operators by interfering with even just S-band TTC there.

There are other options like TDRS to avoid dependency on dumping to a polar site (and the delays in getting data that way) but a lot of folk depend on that region.

Command line coffee machine: Hacker shuns app so he can stay at the keyboard for longer

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Gimp

Re: Make coffee

I thought it was meant for making coffee.

Indeed, last time I ordered that I could not sit properly for 3 days...

Simpsons creator Matt Groening once drew Mac heaven for Apple

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Re: " Alpha was sold to Intel, which snuffed it."

Thanks - I stand corrected.

It was still a stupid move by management though :(

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: " Alpha was sold to Intel, which snuffed it."

I think Compaq was owned by HP at that time, so you can see it as yet another great post-Bill Hewlett/Dave Packard blunder by HP. I feel the need to troll HP by asking how those Itanium sales are doing, but I will avoid that iceberg for now.

Prior to its death, the Alpha chip was regularly top of the floating-point speed results for the "SETI at home" screen-saver and signal processor.

Apple to automatically cram macOS Sierra into Macs – 'cos that worked well for Windows 10

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Re: @Chairo

The new "modern" interfaces feel like a return to the bad old times of 8bit processors and low-res graphics with severely limited color space.

Now if only those "modern" interfaces responded as quickly as similar 2D limited colour DOS software on a 386 did...

A year living with the Nexus 5X – the good, the bad, and the Nougat

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Re: Spot on review!

My PC sucks! What, should I wipe and reinstall Windows?

My phone sucks! What, should I wipe and reinstall factory reset it?

Ah the great strides that 20 years of OS design have brought...

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Battery life?

Possibly the most impressive thing about the new phone is battery life. A day's use is easily handled

No, it is not impressive at all. It might be a little less shit than some competitors, but lasting one day or so is really not anything to write home about. One week would be newsworthy!

Blighty's telly, radio watchdog Ofcom does a swear

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Re: So wait

Does the rug taste better with some mayo on it?

Upstart bags $2.5m to help put the brakes on self-driving car hackers

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Autonomous?

"To enable full autonomy, a car should have more externally connected electronic control units vs connected cars," Barzilai explained.

WTF is this? So a supposedly autonomous vehicle will not work properly in the event of no mobile connection, or if the other vehicles it encounters are meatbag driven?

Some one needs to take a clue-hammer to this guy and demand that any autonomous car can work and are tested under adverse communication situations, otherwise a $20 Chinese mobile jammer will be able to bring cities to the knees by blocking the roads with malfunctioning cars.

BOFH: There are no wrong answers, just wrong questions. Mmm, really wrong ones

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Cider drinker?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIBMt28d1FA

Google finds its G Suite spot: Renames apps, talks up AI and BigQuery

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Coat

G Suite

G Suite - the G string for professionals!

Thanks, mine is the mankini in the corner =>