Posts by Yes Me

Re: Qualified Electrician

Moved into a house (in Switzerland, many years ago) which had a nice built-in wooden unit for stereo and TV. Installed stereo, looked for power socket. Unswitched live socket at the bottom of the unit, too far to reach. Fortunately, extension cord already plugged in, left by previous owner. How kind, I thought. Extension cord had a (Swiss) 3-pin plug at each end. Lived to tell the tale.

Re: Wait a minute...

In any case, all Australians are called Bruce, as far as I recall the ultimate source of truth.

Re: Pot... Kettle...

But always remember that "improve the user experience" means "force ads down the user's throat that they are most likely to click on". I think that's Google's life blood, not Apple's.

Re: Big Brother is watching

"Wireless LAN equipment with public network IP address allocation function". It all depends how you interpret "public network IP address". I suspect it is intended to mean what we call "global IP address" (as opposed to private addresses like 192.168.178.1 or fd63:45eb:ab41:0:6a25:e384:2468:54b9). Maybe someone with better knowledge of Chinese than Google Translate can help us out. If I'm right, every home gateway is affected.

Re: Tech support call

"Water is kind, unless it shorts something fragile it will get better."

Then (are you listening, James Dyson?) why does a teeny drop of water completely bugger an expensive cordless vacuum cleaner? So they have to replace the electronics module and blame the user for daring to have a drop of water on the kitchen floor?

Ah, fragile, I see.

Re: my friend's software might be older than your friend's and still in use...

FORTRAN or C? And no update to the graphics API?

Since LEP was physically dismantled to make way for LHC, the hardware side has definitely been replaced. (Unless of course it was actually monitoring the Booster, the PS or the SPS.)

Anyway that was but yesterday, LEP started up as recently as 1989.

LEP was an interesting machine, because it proved that answer was 3 (not 42).

Re: Indeed

It's hard to tell whether "Justhefacts" is speaking from personal knowledge and experience or whether they are just regurgitating something from a Johnsonian or Faragist echo chamber. But either way, they are wrong (and I feel that "he is wrong" would be a fair guess at their gender, women aren't that unequivocal.)

Clearly though, "Justhefacts" doesn't understand how international scientific collaboration works and of what timescales apply. A lot of research, by the way, doesn't get spectacular results - that's why it's called "research". And in case you didn't know, Alain Aspect's famous experiment was only done because of John Stewart Bell's theoretical work done at CERN, another (non-EU) European collaboration. That's how science gets done - international collaboration.

Re: I smell a CSV file...

Yes. The Grauniad says "The failure of the air traffic control system, run by private company Nats, has been blamed on a single corrupted flight plan entered by an unnamed airline, according to reports."

Whether it was Excel, CSV or a 1960s-era punched card image I cannot guess, but rejecting gobbledygook in the input has been a principle of programming since, oh, 1948.

Re: Cybersecurity tracker BetterCyber tweeted Monday

KillNet is well documented. BetterCyber is well established and tends to X these days instead of 'tweeting.'

Re: "The technical community is not part of civil society and it has never been"

"Internet governance" is an oxymoron, so I never worry too much about this stuff (and never have done since the so-called "Internet Governance Forum" annointed itself.)

However, please note that ICANN doesn't have a stranglehold on the Internet. It's managed to extract large rents from idiots who believe that top level domain names matter, and I agree that this is morally no better than crypto-currency or non-fungible tokens, but the Internet is doing just fine anyway, thank you.

It's also a long time since the Internet was "US-centric at a goverance level". I'd say that notion is at least 20 years out of date.

Now, about "The technical community is not part of civil society and it has never been". That is indeed untrue. As long ago as the ludicrous WSIS meetings ("World Summit on the Information Society") and the preparation for them, the only seating for members of the technical community was in the area labelled "Civil Society". I know because I had to sit there (in big conference rooms in Geneva). In that sense, the ICANN etc. statement is factually untrue, and has been since the WSIS wallahs invented their curious "stakeholder" concept.

Fortunately for all, the actual technology of the Internet has been largely unaffected by all the silly talk under the "governance" banner.

Re: Florida driving license

And I've noticed that emergency vehicles usually proceed carefully, even through green lights. Better they arrive a few seconds later than not arrive at all.

When they don't take care, oops.

Re: Wait ... there is more

Downvote because

"We'll need dual stack for the next decade(s)"

is oversimplification. We'll need coexistence for the next decade(s). Apps will need a dual-stack API, ditto. But read up on "IPv6-mostly" and you'll see that dual stack on the wire can start to go away now.

There's a write-up.

Re: Rule one...

Way before 1996, people at CERN referred to a network called "Jumbo Jet on line" (mag tapes by air freight were very competitive with the early Internet). Andy Tanenbaum was often at CERN so he could have learned about it there.

On site, they used "bicycle on line" (mag tapes could cross the site on the back of a bike quicker than the bits could cross the site network).

No problem for Rikki

No problem for Rikki and his pals - that will only help the UK be an even more attractive venue for yet more financial magic, data-based crime, and tax evasion.

Re: Time for IPv8

"I expect having established the business model for IPv4 they will simply transfer it to IPv6, as most people won’t understand.."

They can't do that, for various reasons. IPv6 is the best way to defeat these scumbags.

We're 44.76% of the way there according to Google's latest data.

And earlier...

I'd add "Computer Networks and their Protocols" by Donald Davies, Derek Barber, W.L. Price and C.M. Solomonides, Wiley, 1979, for an even earlier tome by one of the inventors of packet switching and his colleagues at NPL.

I was in meetings with Derek Barber in the 1980s, and he was always pretty reluctant to accept that TCP/IP had "won" the protocol wars.

(Lots to enjoy at https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Donald_Davies_%26_Derek_Barber )

And any history of networking in the UK must pay respect to Peter Kirstein, who brought the ARPANET to London in 1973.

No, they should be thanking the President that started it

Don't be absurd. Richard Nixon started things off by talking to the Chinese and encouraging trade and cultural exchanges. US (and other Western) industry simply followed his lead. So what if there was a bit of IP leakage? Did we ever pay royalties to the Chinese for inventing gunpowder and printing? This is how human economic development has always worked: copying and improving on somebody else's inventions. Patents and copyrights are a modern invention, and if you're an open source software user you already know that they are mainly a tool to make the rich richer. Who can blame China for sidestepping that?

Re: Back to the Stone Age?

"thanks to CCP subsidies"

Please provide evidence for that. And of course, we note the whiny use of "CCP" when you mean "government". Also please demonstrate that Ericsson and Nokia never got their own government subsidies.

I truly don't understand why the EU would believe the totally unsubstantiated claims about Huawei or ZTE equipment having better back doors than the Western kit.

No smoke without...

They might come this week in response to the smoke signals from Canada.

Re: Where Washington leads, many partners follow.

Yes. The entire attack on Huawei is and always has been pure protectionism, in which for some reason organisations like the NSA and GCHQ have allowed themselves to be enrolled. All countries doing this should be the subject of complaints at the WTO - this is a direct assault on free trade by the countries that claim to be the strongest defenders of free trade. The hypocrisy is unbelievable.

.crap

Yeah, those pesky furriners who don't write proper English just need to stop using the Internet right now! /s

No, this is to do with creating utterly pointless domain names because some idiots will pay up anyway.

Re: Age discrimination is everywhere

"Experience" is dangerous because you might actually know better than the person you'd be working for, and show everybody that they are a waste of space. You might also be capable of thinking for yourself, also a highly undesirable property for an underling.