* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Confession: I was a teenage computer virus writer

Tom 7

I used to spend many happy hours reading quarantined files of various foms

If some of those buggers had read some of the MS APi's there could have been some real problems out there. It was hard to resist the temptation to improve on them sometimes.

The last post: Building your own mail server, part 1

Tom 7

Re: Raspberry Pi B2

Do you monitor system load? Is it ever under pressure?

Having run a mail system for a few hundred staff on a 200Mhz machine a few years with no real load problems back I'd imagine a PiB2 would be fine for a SOHO system.

Arizona lads recover epic stratovid – two years after launch

Tom 7

Lucky buggers

I cant even find my phone in the kitchen. Mind you it doesnt get a signal there either...

Look! Up in the sky! It's letters on a plane read with a 250MP camera

Tom 7

Re: With what lens and what atmospheric conditions?

The point about heat shimmer is it is dynamic. It fucks up the human eye because its moving - but like a moving picture the individual images can be clear.

Tom 7

All school exams

now to be taken in underground sheilded rooms.

Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour leadership election

Tom 7

Wierd world.

"If you turn the clock back, even to say 1985 with Margaret Thatcher in all her pomp. We can still see free university education for all (with student grants) a nationalised rail service and the average working family being able to afford a decent home or at the very least rent one. Not to mention a much higher rate of top tax than now. And now we've arrived at a situation that anyone who fights for these things is a dangerous Marxist."

Intel's 6th gen processors rock – but won't revive PC markets

Tom 7

Re: Old laptops

Just to be really annoying here - just got the new touchscreen for the Pi. With a usb charger last about 5hrs as a tablet! Got a 1TB wifi drive (probably as secure as a w10 install!!!!!!) in pocket and a wireless gaming keyboard in the other for typing*. Get to the office and a decent monitor and keyboard/mouse and its actually quite usable (well its mounted in the box the touchscreen came in so not too weatherproof. *the keyboard flips out on the box lid its cool for now.,,,).

I've got over a terraflop of CPU/GPU at home now but I dont really need that 99.99% of the time - thought I may if can learn this bloody Flash supernova simulation software proper like - but even MS office doesnt need that kind of power.

Tom 7

Re: Thinner devices with longer battery life

How about lighter???The thing is making them thinner makes them heavier - or much more fragile. That extra 1/2 inch means another metre of dropping resistance and makes fuck all difference once its in that designer backpack,

Oh and means less RSI when typing on the kitchen table too...

MYSTERIES of remote ICE WORLD PLUTO: New pics BAMBOOZLE boffins

Tom 7

It looks to me like an impact crater - there are the characteristic sprays of debris in three different directions but its weird as it looks like whatever hit was moving relatively slowly - and possibly by a train of connected objects - the first (few?) melting a lake of nitrogen and the later one(s) sploshing it out of the crater as mostly waves not spray - possibly taking large nitrogenbergs and depositing them as mountains?

Don't want to upgrade to Windows 10? You'll download it WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT

Tom 7

Re: I am not sure of the law in various parts of the world where microsoft operate

Given that, in many cases, this is likely to fill the hard drive and stop the computer working it is no better than a virus and MS will have to pay for this bigtime.

Record-breaking cosmonaut comes back down to Earth

Tom 7

Is he by any chance incubating

Trumps new syrup?

Cuffed Texan woman holsters loaded gun IN VAGINA

Tom 7

Re: Yay, about time

Did she purse her lips?

Apple hypegasm countdown. What will the new, big iPad ACTUALLY be called?

Tom 7

RaspberryPi DS

I hope it can run two of those new touch screens...

Huge SUPERHENGE erection found near Blighty's Stonehenge

Tom 7

Re: I am reminded

We've got a lot evidence from Doggerland (fnar fnar) but my hunch is that people hung around estuaries where it is easy to grow crops in the mud after spring floods and most of the evidence of them was washed away every year and the stuff that wasn't would be buried under further silt deposits from the still running rivers, assuming winter storms didnt bash the living shit out of it.

TCP is a wire-centric protocol being forced to cut the cord, painfully

Tom 7

"a lot of work and you might run into licensing issues"

Hoisted by their own petard?

Tom 7

Re: Surprise?

Bad implementations need fixing not the protocol rewriting.

SPACE WHISKY: Astro malt pongs of 'rubber and smoked fish'

Tom 7

Pointless bloody excercise.

I say this as someone who is still trying to drink every last whisky made on earth. Several times if need be.

Interesting advertising experiment but having discovered the differences between 'exactly the same barrels' stored in exactly the same way for 15 years are more than enough to keep me amused I'll leave it to those with more money than sense.

@Stevie 'Bah' double blind testing of whisky is a great idea. I think 1/2 barrel of cask strength 42 year old laphroaig should stop our eyes working!

British killer robot takes out two Britons in Syria strike

Tom 7

So they knew what he was planning

so presumably he would have been good to keep an eye on for a while to root out connections at this end where the action was going to be?

Capita hoovers up 1 in every 5 pounds of outsourced UK.gov IT spending

Tom 7

"they must be doing something right"

But not in the software or maintenance of the same fields.

Its the best sales technique in the world - we are not as shit as our competitors.

MAMMOTH MAMMOTH fossil find with BONUS BISON BONE BONANZA

Tom 7

Re: 50,000 to 200,000

I would imagine a slaughtered mammoth would be a river of blood shirley.

Files on Seagate wireless disks can be poisoned, purloined – thanks to hidden login

Tom 7

Re: Unbelievable

I'd hazard that the accountant goons happily overrode the 'clean out any development software leaving just the production stuff' stage.

Oracle laying off its Java evangelists? Er, no comment, says Oracle

Tom 7

Bad workmen always blame their tools.

Mind you Java is made of burnt fruit that is improved when eaten by an ocelot.

Daredevil Brit lifts off in 54-prop quinquaquadcopter

Tom 7

22Kw

is around 30horses which is 6 or less decent easily controlled glow plug engines with potential for much more flight time.

They're about £200 a pop pop buzzzzzzzzzzzzzscreeam too!

Larry Ellison's yacht isn't threatened by NoSQL – yet

Tom 7

Re: SQL is obsolete - Oracle is over

I'd say that, as NoSQL is desperately scrabbling to get SQL build in the people who NoSQL are slowly learning about databases and realising that they are re-inventing the wheel. The sort of data-mining I've seen has always been possible with SQL or (in Posix case) just from the command line. NoSQL - like many computer innovations is realising that it has to do the things that it was created to avoid doing.

You canne break the laws of mathematics captain.

Tom 7

Re: Sounds great this NoSQL stuff.

I think you might call it 'Stable'

Cognitive computing: What can and can’t we do, and should lipreading be banned?

Tom 7

Lipreading

As a deaf friend of mine noticed - 'I cant understand what hipsters are saying'. 'Ah' I pipe up 'The facial hair upsets your lipreading!' 'No-they just seem to talk bollocks.'

BOFH: Power corrupts, uninterrupted power corrupts absolutely

Tom 7

Electricity - Pah!

Nothing nicer than sitting in a nice old pub lit by thermal incandescence and hand or gravity pumped beer.

Pioneer slaps 80s LASERS on cars for driverless push

Tom 7

Dazzled by a radar gun?

I'd imagine a well pointed hand held laser would overwhelm a detector - unless they are intending to cut their own roadways as they go.

Wangling my way into the 4K gaming club with a water-cooled whopper

Tom 7

60hz still flickers for me

not when facing the screen but in my peripheral vision. Really pisses me off when referring to off screen literature/talking etc.

Spaniard trousers €60,000 bank error, proceeds directly to jail

Tom 7

Handling charge for sending a letter.

They seem to get away with it.

The 100GB PHONE! Well, it has shades of Chrome, so not quite

Tom 7

For a lot less you can have a TB of storage in your pocket

and connect via that there wireless stuff. Should it ever catch on...

Small wonder, little competition: Asus Chromebook Flip

Tom 7

Re: "Is more secure"?

Crouton is fairly easy to use to install a linux - havent shelled out for a chrome book yet (next time my uncle comes over from the us I might get him to bring me one) but those I know say that the linuxes run well on them - with effectively limitless apps for free even if you do have to compile some stuff.

Canned laughter for Canadians selling cans of air at $15 a pop

Tom 7

Beware!

I recently found a can of pure Oregon air we bought in 1970. The can had rusted through. Cost a $1 though.

Don't rely on them!

The Raspberry Pi is succeeding in ways its makers almost imagined

Tom 7

Re: Dear God, it's all gone horribly wrong.

I like it! One I got to entertain the kids is now a wireless extender so people in the outbuilding can access the internet without access to my domestic network - for about half the price of a commercial unit. Another is now a music processor providing several thousand pounds worth of music effects/processing in a not very easy to use wobbly interface and I'm using another to teach the local primary academy IT teacher how to do IT.

Still waiting for the kids to show much interest but perhaps now computers are more common than transistors were when I was a kid perhaps we do need a generation of Sys-Admins, perhaps crontabs to them are the flashing lights on a bistable that made my friends wet themselves.....

Google robo-car suffers brain freeze after seeing hipster cyclist

Tom 7

Re: As Mythbusters demonstrated...

I live in the sticks and there are about 5 roundabouts in a 20 mile radius of me. Frequently we get things called traffic jams four or five cars long which are invariably caused by four cars at the entrance to the roundabouts all politely waiting for someone else to go.

Space paparazzo captures bipolar butterfly

Tom 7

Re: Scale?

The solar system would be swallowed up in the white bit in the middle.

Tom 7

Re: question

The reason behind the lobes is the star has a magnetic field and the interaction with that and the ionised gasses expelled produces lobes. The companion star merely stabilises the systems rotation*. Stars without companions can spin 'erratically' and can produce what appear to be shells.

Google planetary nebulae and enjoy the pics...

*well it can help with the magnetic field generation.

Using SQL techniques in NoSQL is OK, right? WRONG

Tom 7

Re: NoSQL is just a cache, it's not a substitute for an RDBMS

Horses for courses - there is some mileage to be had from NoSQL but in the end you have to suck the data out of it into a 'proper' database if you want to do SQL.

My main complaint is that once you rely on the NoSQL its tends to get in the way of actually organising your data properly. And I mean really get in the way.

Boffins promise file system that will NEVER lose data

Tom 7

Re: Could work

mv file /dev/null

Those were the days...

Prof Hawking cracks riddle of black holes – which may be portals to other universes

Tom 7

Re: Plasma Spewing

Back to 1963 and Penrose's misinterpretation of Finklestein.

Net neutrality: How to spot an arts graduate in a tech debate

Tom 7

Theres plenty of room for improvement with more sensible routing.

I live out in the wilds. I'm on BT can2can for my sins. All my traffic seems to go via London. Even the shit for next door. They could nigh on double the capacity if they stopped by packets waving to each other as they go past.

That thing we do in the UK? Should be ILLEGAL in the US, moans ex-State monopoly BT

Tom 7

Re: Openreach...

My local exchange was upgraded to FTTC but I dont think openretch got much from it. My cabinet went from two miles from my house back to the exchange 6 miles away.

Sysadmin ignores 25 THOUSAND patches, among other sins

Tom 7

As a sysadmin you could always ask for training to help you do your job properly

but that would take you out of the office for at least 3 months or so every few years, cost more than your salary and make you highly employable elsewhere.

And for god sakes keep passwords in the safe. But dont let anyone know the combination!

Hyundai ix35 Fuel Cell: El Reg on the hydrogen highway

Tom 7

Re: grrr

Chloe is there anything else you cant do that everyone else should stop considering immediately?

Tom 7

Re: Fuel tank rated to 10,000psi

There may be more hydrogen in a litre of petrol than a litre of liquid hydrogen but there is more useable energy in the liquid hydrogen: your lucky to get 30% of the energy in the fuel in normal driving whereas a fuel cell can offer over 90% return.

400 miles on a tank? The tank may currently cost 1/3 of the vehicle but in mass production will be fantastically less. If someone finally works out how to make graphene in bits bigger than a postage stamp it wont be a problem.

Tom 7

Re: Why use pure hydrogen?

400 miles in the car in the article seems transportable. And, believe it or not, is a lot safer than petrol in case of a crash - the hydrogen just rises up and burns away from the accident rather than frying the occupants like yesterdays plane crash.

Its relatively easy to generate hydrogen. Mass produced wind power (we could stick a few kw on each house for around £500 if we invested in mass production) can provide the majority of our electrical needs and excess generation can be converted into H2 and stored locally for vehicle and windless days.

OLPC heir reveals modular laptop design

Tom 7

Re: This shit again?

In response to tojb: well yes and no. My daughter uses a 7" tab with a plug in keyboard/mousepad jobbie and the two cost about £80 altogether and perform pretty well. Without the keyboard you have full multitouch for stuff.

Its not a full sized computer by any means but its more than usable for the school work at the moment and I dare say will be for a while.

All aboard the Skylake: How Intel stopped worrying and learned to love overclocking

Tom 7

Intelligent overclocking.

Not bothered with it myself normally 10% is neither here nor there for me.

What I am intrigued with is - is there any intelligent feedback in the setups? Presumably now Intel are on board with overclocking they can rapidly work out why it fails and provide software tests to allow every last drop of umph out of a chip possible by testing the bits most likely to fail at varying temperatures etc.

I could be asking my grandmother if she knows how to suck eggs but every overclocker I've met just ramps it up until it fails and then backs off. And then wonders about subtle little things that crop up from time to time.

A custom overclocker testing program that call home would be good for Intel in the long run.

Enjoy vaping while you still can, warns Public Health England

Tom 7

Re: Evidence based policy ?

Has to be avoided at all costs to avoid setting a precedent.

The Ashley Madison files – are people really this stupid?

Tom 7

Re: Oh, the shame

Any luck? Do tell!