Posts by Vic

Re: First Flight Challenges

In the old days the test pilots would strap themselves in, light the fires and take the aircraft up for a quick circuit

The short-lived ones did. "Kick the tyres and light the fires" was one motto often used, and it is explicitly called out by Winkle Brown as a poor attitude. He attributed most of his success as a TP to *not* subscribing to that attitude...

One wonders what the remainder of the flight test campaign is really for these days.

There are three main tasks, AIUI:

• Testing new designs to ensure they are fit for real operation
• Testing rebuilt aircraft to ensure they have been put back together properly
• Flying accident profiles to determine what happened

I have friends who do or have done all of these :-)

Vic.

Re: problem is not a lack of competence

Quality of code, from translating, reviewing and translating it is abysmal. Most of the reason for it is bad management

I recently heard of a group that has finally been forced to perform code review on their output. They've been fighting this for years.

So now they've decided that each coder will review his own code...

Vic.

Re: I generally now won't help any family members or friends with any IT problems

And if they reply, "Yes you are...unless you want to be DISOWNED from the family, which would include losing invitations to reunions, dinners, parties, etc. and possibly being written out of wills..."

Deal.

Vic.

Re: Major Bloat

Problem: Do the same thing only with someone uncomfortable with a command line

Use Wammu.

Vic.

Re: @HausWolf

How many times have you heard prominent pubs use ISIS and Iran in the same sentence

Never.

And I'd drink somewhere else if I did...

Vic.

This is a man with a disturbing level of angry-public support

Absolutely.

I wonder what will happen when he doesn't build the wall, doesn't repatriate jobs, etc.

Vic.

Re: Am I missing something?

As for the rubbish being dropped then perhaps part of any planning approval would be that that would be taken care of by McD staff, i.e. they would be responsible under local litter laws for a certain area and would be fined if any litter seen.

That's frequently the case - and in the public enquiry we had, McD suggested exactly that. But there were plenty of pictures of other places in town with the same requirements where the litter simply wasn't being picked up.

These clauses are only useful if they are policed. And they aren't.

Vic.

Re: Optional

the home of Weetabix is Burton Latimer isn't it not Kettering.

Weetabix has[1] a plant in Kettering, but it doesn't produce any Weetabix. That, as you say, is all done in Burton Latimer.

Vic.

[1] Used to, anyway. I haven't been there for a couple of decades...

Re: Meanwhile in Turkey....

My opinion is that May is a borderline psychotic

ITYM "psychopath".

"Psychotic" means something rather different, and I'm not sure it's possible to be borderline...

Vic.

Re: The only letter left to write for Comey..

Comey looks borderline negligent or incompetent.

That's hardly news; we all saw his nonsense about encryption just a few months back.

I'm just hoping that this latest fiasco will demonstrate his level of competence to those outside our industry who didn't understand how uncorrelated are the phrases "Comey's mouth" and "rational thought"...

Vic.

Re: Apple and Mozilla are leading the charge away

they're still working on stuff like FlyWeb. Read that link and weep.

That's basically the same thing as HAVi. That, thankfully, went nowhere.

Disclosure: yes, I was part of HAVi. It's the reason I learnt Java in the first place. I'm so, so sorry...

Vic.

Re: you forgot...

Never got into production, but as for now the Mirage III V is still the fastest VTOL aircraft at Mach 2.

Well, if we're allowed to do aircraft that didn't make production, the Hawker-Siddeley P.1154 also made Mach 2.0, was rather smaller, with rather higher MTOW, and didn't need nine engines...

It was scrapped in 1965. And now, half a century later, we're buying in VTOL aircraft that are slower than both of the above.

Vic.

No, the package manager in Linux looks at all installed packages, it then looks at updates for all packages, as well as the various dependencies.

It's more than that.

A drpm, for example, allows the package manager to create the current update rpm from a previously-downloaded (or created) rpm and a binary patch[1]. That means that a very small change to a very large package involves negligible downloading.

I imagine that Microsoft has implemented the same idea. Which is nice.

Vic.

[1] Everything's signed, of course, so the resulting package will be correct, even if someone's been dibbling with the local filesystem.

Re: Why the F...

Also occasionally standing up and moving could be a good thing for you.

There's a nice article on that very subject here.

Vic.

Spam email, fake email, unencrypted email, etc. That has a real-world effect and has absolutely no solution at the moment

Span is not a technology problem, it's a peolpe problem. As such, any technological attempt to fix it will necessarily fail.

Fake email is fixed by the technologies you mentioned - and you can see by the slow uptake that the bigger problem is that most people just don't care. Implementing SPF takes around 30 seconds for a simple domain[1]. Any domain not publishing a record is demonstrating how much they care. And anti-spoofing isn't an all-or-nothing affair; every domain that published a record, every server that puts a filter in place makes spoofing that little bit less viable.

Unencrypted email? We've had email encryption for *years*. Any MTA of note has the ability to use the STARTTLS verb, meaning in-transit email is always encrypted. This can be either opportunistic (encrypted, but vulnerable to MiTM) or verified (requires a publicly-trusted certificate) - and yet many, many domains just don't use it at all, even if they support TLS on inbound email. Until you can get people to care about encryption, you won't see it in many situations.

As for end-to-end encryption, we;ve had that for years as well. It's really not difficult. And yet the only encrypted email I've ever received has been as part of my testing; in practice, just about no-one cares enough to swap keys. This isn't a technology problem, it's a people problem.

Why does DNS not hold a set of public keys for each domain that are used to encrypt email to that domain

You don't need DNS for that. All you need is a certificate. And yet hardly anyone gets one.

But email still be open to a network sniffer at any point along the way to your destination

It really isn't, unless you're talking about sysadmins who don't care at all.

Vic.

Sounds like nobody here thinks that baked-in hardware security and signed updates is in the least bit useful for improving the state of things?

Of course not. For that to work, you'd need your manufacturers[1] to care about security, and offer updates when necessary. And if we had that, we'd not have the problem in the first place...

Vic.

[1] All of them, really...

Re: Cinderella orbit distance is a JOKE....

On top of your not understanding the sheer numbers involved

On top of his not understanding the sheer numbers involved anything.

There, FTFY.

Vic.

have a down-vote for being an @AC

You appear to have mis-spelled "twat".

Vic.

Re: I was assuming this would be a look at the mini...

My first car was a flying wedge during the early-mid 90's

I had a couple of Ambassadors - that's essentially the Mk3 Princess.

They weren't exactly speedy off the lights[1], but they really weren't too bad once you'd got used to the quirks...

Vic.

[1] Top speed wasn't too bad, though. I got busted in one once - the first thing the copper said was "I didn't think these things go that fast". I didn't tell him I had the brakes on when he caught me...

Re: Die Hard VII: Sysadmin

I knew there was one, but a quick surf shows there are two

*Whoosh*

Vic.

Re: Seems...

we're in advertorial land again.

I suspect it's more "epiphany".

An advertorial touting puppet being used to deploy software is like an advertorial on cars being used to travel between two places...

Vic.

Re: Because Core 2 was a massive upgrade over AMD offerings

Who today even uses a dual core processor?

I do.

Even browsing (with video) now taxes quad cores.

Errr - OK. If you insist.

Vic.

Re: The

What is a "meterpreter"???

A TV weather girl?

Vic.

Re: Yup, women are smarter.

industry experts were saying things like " there will only ever be a need four 4 computers on the planet"

And in context, they were right.

They weren't talking about PCs. They were looking at shared compute centres where users would log in and run their code - what we'd now call "cloud".

Vic.

Re: Most interesting

Exactly what use a bayonet was on a cruiser was one of the things we wondered about

Some years ago, I was on a dive holiday in Sharm. There had been some trouble fairly recently, so the place was absolutely crawling in Tourist Police (who were actually really decent blokes).

The copper on every street corner sorta made sense, but the ones in the harbour were a bit suspect: six blokes in an inflatable with fixed bayonets...

Vic.

Re: The Germans...

The M2 tragedy, which killed 70 Royal Navy officers and men, is widely believed to have been the result of the crew trying to beat their own record for getting an aircraft aloft and opening the hanger doors (yes, you read that correctly) before the boat had fully surfaced.

Well, the hangar door is certainly open now. I've been in that hangar many times.

It's quite silty...

Vic.

Re: I have a feeling this all stems from Panos Panay's approach.

There was a lot of issues with re-breathers and questions over the software and oxygen sensors

There was quite a lot of uninformed comment. We rebreather divers are given access to information from the various accident enquiries - that's why we don't worry about such things. The units are perfectly safe if you use them according to your training; They also appear to be extremely safe if you use them way outside your training and manufacturer advice - and that is why so many people have done exactly that. A very few have been caught out by that; it would be wrong to blame the unit for their accidents.

as a scuba diver my life depends on perfectly working hardware and software

Well it bloody well shouldn't. As a diver, you should be aware of the failure modes of your equipment and have plans to deal with them. Any single failure should be nothing more than an inconvenience. A dual failure is where you start to have problems. Planning is essential.

The phrase we used to use was "if you're going to have an accident, make sure it's in the pub". The GASCo boys didn't seem to think that was appropriate the other evening, though.

they wouldn't be downvoting if they had a 100% oxygen hit at 70 meters thanks to shittily developed hardware and software, they'd be fucking dead

Runaway O₂ is one of the eventualities you are trained for. It's a trivial fix. Anyone getting injured by that has failed to maintain his skills to the appropriate level - that's complacency, and that kills.

I personally know someone who had died in a rebreather accident.

As have I. And although I am loath to speak ill of the dead, I do not blame the equipment for the negligence of its operators.

Vic.

Re: This is news???

If wales did not have a HUGE blubber layer, they would die

Nah.

Swansea can be a bit chilly, but it's not *that* bad...

Vic.

Re: Hang on...

They are a means of employers - motivating their staff by feeling that they are creative, providing a tiny bit of CV fodder, and mostly just doing business.

That rather depends on the employer; I worked for a company that paid quite a lot of money on filing, and a lot more on grant.

And that's why I have rather more than patents to my name than you do :-)

Vic.

Re: Who Needs Programmers When You Need Hardware Designers?

Hmm, nominally FPGAs need coding in a hardware description language, like verilog of vhdl, in order for the thing to work

That's not been the case for quite a few years now; FPGAs are programmed in a number of different ways - including C.

Vic.

Re: Some numbers...

cant be changed so it cant be one of them

It *can* be changed - the AAIB have at least one with no such restrictions.

This is, naturally, not a trivial modification to make; the manufacturer can do it, but I've no idea if anyone else can.

Vic.

They're not smoke. They're dry ice

They're usually smoke - a fogging fluid is passed over a heater element to create smoke.

Dry ice is a rather different effect (it tends to give you a very dense fog at floor level) and is more expensive.

Vic.

Re: S/Mime

Companies then need to implement SPF/DKIM for ALL their domains which many companies don't do.

It's worse than that. Some companies publish stupid records.

I'm currently seeing spoofing attacks from domains that have multiple /24s explicitly permitted - that's never going to make sense.

But worse than that - there was a phase some months back where I was seeing many records ending in "+all" - thus explicitly authorising absolutely everyone. I contacted several domain owners to tell them about htis - not one replied, and not one changed their records. I actually modified my SPF milter to treat "+all" as "-all".

Vic.

Re: "Engineered like no other car in the world"

The seat belts were automatic. That is, they were motorised and automatically came forward for the driver and passenger to buckle themselves up. Never seen that in any other vehicle.

I first saw that on a hire car I had in the US. I think it was a Camry - something like that.

That was ~20 years ago...

Vic.

Re: Good news everyone

No jury in the land is going to convict you for calling Piers Morgan a shiny-faced arse.

I rather enjoyed Stephen Fry's definition of the word "countryside" as "killing Piers Morgan"...

Vic.

A hash allows for collisions,

A decent hash has very few problems with collision - but besides that, that's part of the reason for using a salt. Getting a collision on a slated hash is very tricky indeed.

plus what if it's a situation where it MUST be stored (for example, to allow for a recovery because a reset can't be used--ties to other security systems, for example)?

No such situation exists. If the password is lost, you reset it. Recovering it is asking for trouble.

Vic.