Posts by John Sager 806 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2008
AFAIR this was Canonical's attempt to streamline startup & get dependencies sorted properly. It seemed to work on the earlier versions of Ubuntu & friends before the Systemd Blob sucked it in. Sad that Canonical felt they needed to follow the herd. I've had issues with systemd-resolved (doesn't do split DNS in my setup at all well, unlike dnsmasq), so I may well go the Devuan route when I get sufficiently pissed off.
I'm well aware that it's a CGI extravaganza (at least that bit of the video), but you would expect them to get the physics right for a worldwide audience. The Chinese take the concept of 'face' very seriously and this just makes them look cheap. I guess they don't pay the CGI guy as much as the rocket scientists...
Delta-V... It's whizzing past at some ungodly speed, so first problem is catch a sample. 2nd is Delta-V back to our vicinity then Delta-V to get into LEO. The fusion drive, when it comes, will obviously solve all of those problems. Where's Mr Spock when you need him?
BOB THE BOMBAST has it. All new things bring with them pluses & minuses, and society soon learns the trick of maximising + relative to -. I think the Net is a marvellous tool. The range of stuff to inform & entertain me is more or less inexhaustible. I'm glad I've been alive when it happened.
Long ago, we were running a mix of VAX/VMS & RSX11 over DECNet, but the PDP11 kit was using 3rd party DECNet software. So one day we added some new nodes & started getting communication problems on the 11s. I passed the problem to the software vendors but they didn't seem to have a clue so I started looking myself.
The DECNet protocol was a bit of an eye opener - my first introduction to networking protocols - but I worked out what the various modules in this software did. I managed to get hold of a PDP11 disassembler & started looking at the module code. This was in the days before hex so the constants all printed out in octal. And guess what stood out - an octal 256 constant! WTF? So I changed it to octal 400 as it should have been, reassembled the code and it worked perfectly.
The constant dimensioned the node table (must have been DECNet phase III) so it overflowed when we added nodes above 173 (octal 255). I also discovered how the software bypassed the licence check for testing purposes, which was handy for quickly adding new nodes before we got a new licensed copy...
A trivial example - type "* Hello", or "1. Hello", into Powerpoint and it automatically becomes a bulleted / numbered list
I take your point, but if you really wanted '* Hello' or '1. Hello' in an ordinary paragraph, how do you tell Powerpoint "no, I don't effin' want that"? MS stuff is very insistent on interpreting what it thinks you want but it often seems hard to avoid that. It's not too hard in LibreOffice to select bulleted or numbered paras if that's what you want.
So how does a 10.10.10.11.X.X.X.X host fit into that? You still need a NAT64 equivalent. The guys who developed v6 weren't stupid or arrogant. They just realized that a clean break was needed. Dual stack works fine for me. v4 where I have to, v6 where I can, and the latter will grow with time. The next TV I get might even be dual stack, which would be a small advance.
Google have shown the way re corporation tax. They give most of the profit to staff as bonuses. So, the bonus being quite high, the staff pay 40% income tax on it rather than Google paying 20-odd % corporation tax. So are HMRC rolling it it or are they rolling in it? Some lefty complaints really do show up the paucity of thought going on in that domain.
Yeah, go on downvote me. Do I care a flying f***?
The article seems to suggest it's a router to Internet over cellular service, like the hotspot function on your smartphone. One assumes that the admin port on Stingrays is a bit more secure but then we all know how even the things you would expect to be secure, so often aren't.
+1. This stuff is going to get used for military purposes, just like all the other technical advances going back into pre-history. The better we know what AI can and can't do the better we are in understanding what potential adversaries have available. And it'll also get used by 'our side' - for better or worse it's the politicians who have to make the judgement calls, though no doubt there'll be a lot of screaming and virtue signalling going on in the process.
FWIW I think AI is pretty shit at a lot of this stuff currently but it will get better. The Met's fiasco of a face recognition trial demonstrates that, but the Chinese seem to be getting much better at it.
It came up with the new look this morning. However, I really don't like it - it wastes far too much space. The previous wasn't perfect, as headlines would repeat further down the list. But even with that I prefer the more condensed list on smartphone - screen real-estate is in short supply!
Even on a 200m copper run (120m overhead, 80m u/g) I get quite a lot of variation. I got FTTC service very quickly when they re-parented my formerly EO DP onto the local cabinet. It started off with a raw downstream speed of ~112Mbit/s, upstream around 30Mbit/s. Then, as more of the houses nearby came on the downstream speed has steadily dropped so the best is now 90Mbit/s, but that also varies with an SNR margin that goes up and down. Why, I have no idea - it's unlikely to be water as it hasn't rained here for weeks. I'm assuming BT haven't switched on vectoring yet.
It's almost as easy to have 2 different CC providers & just use a direct debit to pay off the minor one. I have a Visa CC & debit card from my bank plus a shop-supplied Mastercard. The MC bill gets paid off monthly by DD. That way the cards use two completely different back-end systems. Anyway, I can't remember having a card declined due to system issues (even the Visa debit went through in Tesco amidst their problems a while back), but I have had the MC declined more than once because the transaction got caught by a fraud-detection process. That is bloody irritating, especially when abroad.
I thought optical fibres, especially in the ground, were fairly proof against the sort of performance degradation that e.g. copper systems suffer from water ingress. So what temporary degradation mechanisms are there, apart from the backhoe-induced total break?
Even my small home network is hard to configure for IPv6
Perhaps that's a router issue? My v6 network autoconfigures fine - I just run radvd and it all happens. The firewall config wasn't too hard - lots of good info on the net. It's true I have some v4-only hosts (TV, etc mostly) so run dual-stack. But all my laptops, phones, servers etc all use v6 when they can.
I think the home router manufacturers have a lot to answer for here. Mine is a home-brew linux-based router, and once you get the design right it all just runs. So why can't the mfrs get with the program?
An Oz friend played us this when we were over there:
Do you really need precision to 4 significant figures on your unit conversions - e.g 5.8m (19.02 ft)? Why not just 19 ft? Similarly for driving distances. 2, or possibly 2.5 sig figs (to the nearest 0.5) is perfectly adequate and it reads better. You need lots of precision on the GPS coords, as you have, but that's the only place it's important in this article.
Hey, that brings back memories! I wrote an implementation of Hunt the Wumpus in Coral 66 running on ICL 1900 series machines back in the late 70s. 300 baud dial-up with thermal paper terminals - that was real hacking!
On the subject of Software Archaeology I'm currently trying to resurrect some instrumentation software from the early 90s - Visual Basic 3 on Windows 3.x. I salute the retro gamers who thought developing dosbox was a good idea. That runs Windows for Workgroups fine under Linux. With an old version VB3 decompiler, Visual C++ 1.52 on WinXP in a VM and IDA on Linux, I've sussed out how it all works. So now I've actually managed to build a 16-bit DLL that successfully emulates the driver for the long-dead ISA GPIB card that was originally used by the software. That's probably more ancient x86 hacking than I ever did at the time - talk about climbing up the learning curve again! Next step is to build some 'hardware' in dosbox to talk to my USB to GPIB adapter.
Hurrah for everyone who found it "simple" to migrate to IPv6. Now kindly share your tutorials rather than sniffing at us old dinosaurs
Actually ISPs are already doing that. I've had V6 for many years but I had to build my own Linux-based border router/firewall. And V6 runs seamlessly internally on all our hosts - Linux, Windows, Android - when they talk to inside & outside V6 servers. I was surprised and fascinated to discover on holiday in Hawaii last year that the local (cable) ISP provided V6 service. The cable router was an Arris box so that manufacturer seems to have cracked the amazingly difficult problem of supporting V6 in their border router (it must be hard as so few other router mfrs seem to be able to do it).
Lots of venom in these comments, so Brexit is still a very sore point for some.
As far as .eu goes, I guess, as Mr Worstall says, their gaff, their rules. It does seem a bit petty though to threaten to cancel them all next March. I would be quite happy with no new ones from UK and possibly no renewals.
However it's all of a piece with the notion, almost a religion in the Commission, that EU is a very important symbol of the underlying dogma, and wishing to leave is heretical. Hence the excommunication. At least we don't have the Brussels Inquisition yet
No, you switch on the radio and all the lights go out
You jest, but I was coming back from the Joe Bonamassa concert in Birmingham the other night with a friend in his car - a recent BMW - and the rear reading lights kept coming on for no obvious reason. Apparently it's a known fault & not yet sorted by BMW. The lights are controlled off the Can bus.
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