Posts by Nigel 11

Not strange at all, if you believe the stories of paranoia about the Soviet Union and communism in the US and that they were shit-scared that a broken West Germany would succumb along with the East.

the UK government also believed it, and as far as I can judge I think they were right. In 1947(*) Germans would have been starving to death, were it not for the food from the British Empire that the UK government diverted to Germany. This, at a time when wartime rationing was still in effect in the UK, and when public sentiment would happily have seen Germany starve. So it was kept ultra-hush-hush at the time and is still not well known. I'm proud that my country did the right thing rather than the politically expedient thing.

(*) 1947 was the harshest Winter of the century, Worse even than 1962/3 which I can just about remember. Snow four feet deep. Actually, it wasn't that deep. I'm recalling it through the eyes of a six-year-old.

Re: Rocket scientist attrition rate

The price of success may be a more certain version of the price of failure. With failure, you have a chance of blaming it on something or somebody other than yourself. With success, you absolutely are in posession of information which you have absolutely no need to know for any longer, and a bullet in your head fixes that security problem.

I would not want to be responsible for that screw up. This is likely to get some one in front of HR firing squad .

Unless it was a trojan horse. Mr. Kim may be having the last laugh here.

I hope that the folks who "hacked it to death" used sacrificial PCs for their hacking, which were well-firewalled during the hack and then then reformatted and reinstalled. Personally I'd be a little bit more paranoid that that. NK is probably ahead of the world on firmware-resident malware, and the only really safe thing to do would be put the PC in the acid bath afterwards.

Re: Get it right

I can assure you that it was not just the week of the October SA deadline. I was failing to get through to them on numerous occasions between June and September.

Re: Seatbelt Nazis

It is a really good idea to keep your seat belt on at all times, warning light on or not, unless you have to get out of your seat. (By all means remove it after takeoff, slacken it a bit for comfort, and put it back on).

There are cases of passengers dying because of turbulence. The plane goes down hard, your head hits the luggage bins after "falling" upwards, your neck breaks.

I've been on a flight when the first warning of turbulence was my drink taking off. I wasn't scared after recovering from the surprise, but was most glad of the seat belt. I know enough (see above) to file that as "moderate". I've never encountered "severe" and don't want to.

Re: Not a problem

In this case the things are surely remembered securely in another place. They should ask the NSA for a replacement copy.

Another possibility

A three-letter agency tracked the criminals down and gave them two choices: terminate the malware themselves without prejudice, or be terminated themselves with extreme prejudice.

This stuff is costing hard-pressed governments billions, and could cost the people in power their positions. So the James Bond approach is not unlikely.

Re: ZFS scary bits

Fail over - just don't go there.

It has always puzzled me that Digital (VAX/VMS) solved this so long ago with the VAXCluster and yet it seems to have been a festering sore for everyone else ever since.

VMSClustering was (and still is) actually far more advanced than mere failover. And the source code was (briefly) there on microfiche for anyone to learn the finer points of the technology, just before the lawyers and corporate types moved in and Digital entered its long slide into oblivion. Copyright, not open source, but even so ....

Sigh.

I have to ask, which country is 168/168 corrupt?

Re: confused

If it is faster and its cost is near that of flash, why bother using flash at all?

Because you can go out and buy flash today, along with appropriate controllers. This may be on sale in some future year, or it may yet fail to get out of the R&D labs.

Re: Science is a filthy tease...

The cost difference is proably fairly irrelevant, because if future panels cost significantly less or generate significantly more, the government will reduce the subsidies again, so the cost to your pocket will remain much the same.

Down to the point where the subsidy is zero and panels are still cost-effective. (Which will be later in the UK than in, say, Southern Arizona, where panels already need no subsidy to be cost-effective).

At that point it will be a straightforward calculation of the value of the electricity being generated a £x installation compared to the greater amount of electricity being generated by a more efficient and more expensive installation. Bear in mind that the labour cost is the lions share of the system cost.

Re: What we really need

If you just want to firewall a subnet, you can do it all with a PC, any Linux distro and (possibly) an extra NIC. If you already have a Linux server and a DMZ, just another NIC. And although PCs used to be power-guzzling large whirring things, this is no longer the case. You can get a fanless mini-ITX board with two GbE ports and J1900 CPU for around fifty quid. Just add RAM and a case/PSU. For a dedicated firewall boot off a USB stick, no HD/SSD necessary.

Where you start needing router hardware is handling high-bandwidth WiFi access (a USB dongle doesn't really cut it), and especially ADSL (only way I know of is a proprietary router in "bridge" mode or a Vigor ADSL PPPoE bridge/modem which costs more than many ADSL routers). Or of course, pay BT for "fiber" if its available, which does at least get you the whole internet on an Ethernet cable via BT's own bridge/modem.

Re: Cutting costs?

In general terms I agree. Most top-level executives have someone working for them, two or three levels down the organisation, who could do their jobs better than they do and would gladly do it for a fraction of the salary. Many of those executives spend considerable effort on keeping these underlings down.

Given what Elon Musk's organisations have accomplished in so little time, his executives may be truly valuable exceptions. In which case the chances are that there is someone ready to step into the shoes of the person who is departing, or that the CEO knows how to find a truly good replacement.

Re: Good news !

anyone who runs for office is either nuts or a crook

And it's almost always better to choose the crook. (The main exception being a crook who is also nuts).

Re: Impressive capacity.

You don't need an extra-strength rack.

Just remember to check the datacenter floor loading specification before you order a rack full of these beasts.

Re: Oh, yeah...

Give them the money

You mean the $50,000 that you might have to pay to have a consultant come in and rewrite some vital application code so that it runs on Windows 10? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

(Hypothetically assume that it was an old old application when it was installed on Windows 7 ... but it worked AOK then and now. Also assume that somewhere down the years, the source code and/or the organisation that wrote the original have disappeared. And that they have actually tried reinstalling it on Windows 10 without success. )

If there's a problem with my water, or my electric, I can talk straight to the company responsible for delivering it to my home.... not so telecoms.

Sorry to break it to you ... but no, or at least not around here. It's "Western Power Distribution" that delivers the power. Mind you, if Openreach did even half as good a job as Western Power Distribution, I'd probably be happy. But there again, electricity is under a universal service obligation.

Recently heard someone relating his attempt to report a tree that was being held up by the electricity pole to his power company, before the tree came down completely and brought the electricity supply down with it. Complete failure. It'll get fixed a few hours / days after the power fails, and at ten times the expense.

Re: How endemic is it?

One of the many depressing things about this story is that the abuse presumably emanated from IT specialists, people who might be presumed to be better-educated and more intelligent than average.

Your point being? I'd simply deduce that the education/intelligence axis and the abusive/socially inadequate axis are poorly correlated. Or possibly even that there is a weak inverse correlation.

Re: I'm puzzled

At the office level companies are no longer replacing their PC every three years, so every PC not sold is a hard disk not sold. And if they have any sense, when they do eventually replace the PCs they will specify a new PC with a smallish SSD to boot from (much faster and more reliable for read-mostly usage, no longer an expensive option). People in offices should (mostly) be storing the user data via the LAN to a server, so a boot drive should be all that is needed.

It'll be a long slow decline (which won't necessarily lead to extinction). People recording video (PVRs and Security systems) will happily fill tens of Tb, if it's cheap enough. Then there are the corporate backup systems, and CERN, and the three-letter agencies....

Re: am I the only one?

It's not a mile away from what's inside a plasma globe. You might be able to work out a geometry that gives you a plasma disk light, at least until someone touches the enclosing sphere.

Re: Try this on for size

When they did maintenance they always insisted that we opened the CDs

Didn't do DEC much good, did it? How many years after that did they get Compaqted?

Re: PIN numbers?

Can't remember my Personal Identification Number numbers.

This makes perfect sense to me. There are four of them in a PIN. Or sometimes six. Occasionally eight.

Re: Raspberry PC

blows goats

The N3150 did not exist when I built mine, and it is still £30-£40 dearer. And the benchmarks here suggest that it's not much if any faster than a J1900. http://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_celeron_n3150-511-vs-intel_celeron_j1900-327

Anyway if you choose a system like this you probably don't care about faster CPU. I have another PC (i5) which I use if the silent lightweight box isn't fast enough. I don't seem to use it much these days.

Re: More than reported here?

Makes me glad I work in a nice warm, non-moving office where the biggest threat is tripping over an ethernet cable..

Which is completely inexcusable (if you aren't being facetious). Trip hazards are the number one cause of nontrivial office-environment injuries. Tell them to get longer cables and/or properly placed outlets, so that no cables are strung across places people walk. Do this before somebody trips and is hospitalized.

If you are obstructed by some sort of penny-pinching or IT-rule-following, this is the time that your Health and Safety department or person comes in useful. Or the union, if its that sort of workplace.

Re: Couple of things

I'm actually almost hoping that this bill pases.

The initial result will be no noticeable change.

The long-term result will be the exit of all high-tech industries from the USA, to the ruination of that country and the benefit of anywhere else that does not blindly follow the USA over the cliff.

Sadly that's more likely to be a Pacific atoll state than the UK!

Isn't using headphones, and therefore being unable to hear outside events clearly an offence also

Not explicitly. Deaf people are allowed to drive (unlike blind people, or people who are visually impaired and who are not wearing the spectacles or contacts that make them legal).

It might be supporting evidence for a charge of "driving without due care and attention".