* Posts by Jim 59

2047 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009

Facebook wants Linux networking as good as FreeBSD

Jim 59

For real ?

Er, doesn't the Linux Kernel have about 15000 developers already ? Facebook advertises for one more ? And this is a story ? I must be getting old.

What's the point of the Internet of Things?

Jim 59

@amanfrommars

There is a bot in here again. Call Rentokil.

Jim 59

Re: No convinced

I don't know if IOT will improve the character of citizens in the way described in the later parts of the article. The internet so far hasn't exactly brought out the best in us (?). But it could indeed be a boon for the old or infirm or disabled, and maybe those who look after them.

Technically though, once your house has, say, 50 connected devices, it will have some admin overhead. Oops - time to update the firmware in that cat litter monitor. It fixes a bug where the data has the wrong urine Ph level for your breed of cat, then on to the automatic curtains, dammit they are on the wrong timezone again I am sitting in the dark here...

Dumping gear in the public cloud: It's about ease of use, stupid

Jim 59

Cloud

TLDR. But does any company put core compute into the cloud ? Putting a project in there is one thing, but if you cloudify a compute function your business can't afford to lose, and the provider goes down/bankrupt/whatever, you cease trading 3 days later. It's no good bleating about your contract or SLA, you are are out of business already. I must be missing something.

Top Ten 802.11ac routers: Time for a Wi-Fi makeover?

Jim 59

802.11ac

I'm looking forward to the new tech, but the problem with wireless isn't just the speed so much as the way it changes all the time. Use a monitor app and you will see the wireless (n class) strength waver wildly up and down every few seconds. It might be good to stream 4 movies at once now, but in 15 seconds ? Not so much. Wired is just stress free.

It would have been useful to know the features of each router, eg which ones have gigabit wired ports. Interesting article nonetheless.

Plug and PREY: Hackers reprogram USB drives to silently infect PCs

Jim 59

Re: I call semi-bollocks

Sure, but cops and g-men could re-program any firmware, they might even have their very own code in your Haswell quad core, garage door opener or sat-nav. The only thing that makes this USB back door more dangerous is that USB devices often get interchanged between computers.

It is also risky for the hackers. It is harder to remain anonymous when passing around an infected thumb drive, than it is when, say, launching a virus on your botnet. If malware is suspected there is a physical chain of supply to follow.

Jim 59

SR Labs

Well any code can be hacked and infected. All that SR have proved is that hacking embedded firmware takes a big budget, months of research and special equipment. We knew that already. Not to disparage their effort but what has it achieved?

Big corps and governments have the resources for this kind of thing, but if they wanted to do it they would be doing it already.

Everyday hackers and black hats will continue to cast their net widely, waiting for that one password which is set to "apple" or whatever.

Elite Systems promises to order ZX Spectrum revival in two weeks

Jim 59

Alternatively

Emulation, especially MESS.

KDE releases ice-cream coloured Plasma 5 just in time for summer

Jim 59

Re: Incoming Rant

Whoa! Upvoted for "massive circle-jerk".

To be serious, I think that too many FOSS developers are excited by graphics development, and many fewer are interested in writing wireless drivers. "Ohh! look! my menu !" But as they are doing it for free it is hard to critisize them.

Jim 59

Re: Is there any evidence that Wayland is an improvement?

Upvoted for "ground sloth".

Philip K Dick 'Nazi alternate history' story made into TV series

Jim 59

Re: Guns

...Jewish ...gay, liberals,... Nazis... elites......etc

Lol. A top quality rant. Fact-free, prejudice packed, explosive delivery. Complete with obligatory Nazi comparison.

March 12, 1989 - Tim Berners-Lee switches on the first web site

March 13, 1989 - Cern scientists go online, disagree about something, call each other "Nazis"

Jim 59

Guns

...tells the story of American life under Fascist rule while the Axis Powers

I suppose for a foreign power to occupy the US would not be easy given that the general population is armed.

50,000 sites backdoored through shoddy WordPress plugin

Jim 59

Unrelated, but there seems to be a widespread botnet attack on Wordpress blogs' "xmlrpc" feature in the last few days. People are reporting bots with up to 30,000 members trying to guess usernames and passwords. In the last 4 days my own low traffic blog has received 24,000 attempts from over 8000 bit IPs.

Jim 59

I run Wordpress because it seems one of the best available. But I agree is it hugely bloated and slow. I particularly like the Wordpress approach to error handling. There isn't any. And they have solved the error message problem by just ignoring it.

Bad back? Show some spine and stop popping paracetamol

Jim 59

Another history in case it helps anyone

Interesting stuff here, especially about the chair. I might be doing the Herman Miller thing after reading the above.

I have chronic back pain which 18 months ago suddenly became nerve/sciatic pain, after I spent Christmas sitting on somebody's knackered sofa. made basic life functions difficult.

1. Doctor visit. Prescribed powerful drug for 28 days. Doc said it might fix my back by enabling me to walk and move normally for a month. It did. Removed all pain and the nerve pain did not return after the drug stopped. It was Naproxen. Pain free for 8 months. Interesting that the drug did not fix my back, just removed the pain, which enabled normal movement, which fixed the back.

2. "Normal" back pain returned (not nerve/sciatic pain). Obtained prescription again. Worked again but not quite as well. Little pain for 2 months.

3. "Normal" back pain returned. Obtained same prescription. This time it did not relieve the pain much or help. Visited local chiropractor on recommendation. Two visits later all pain was gone.

4. Two months later, dreaded nerve/sciatic pain came on. This can be hard to shift. Eventually visited a highly regarded sports Physiotherapist. What he did was similar to the chiropractor but more rigorous, and more vigorous and extensive. He appeared to know exactly what the vertebrae were doing and where they were misplaced. Also he gave me stretches to do every day and good advice. After 2 visits to him the pain was gone. That was about a month ago. I was going to arrange a 3rd visit but no need so far.

So now I am 90% pain free, doing the stretches every day and continuing to to my Alexander technique/semi supine position for 20 minutes each day. This works wonders with "normal" back pain but does not touch nerve pain, I need the Physio for that. If you have medium "normal" back pain I can recommend it for pain relief.

Stuff I tried that did not work

- rented another car for 2 weeks. A big car with soft suspension, rather than my low sports car with its very hard springs. Made no difference.

3. Weeks later nerve pain came on. Prescribed Chropractor visit did not help.

THUD! WD plonks down SIX TERABYTE 'consumer NAS' fatboy

Jim 59

Re: Storage cost

@Alan Brown One thing that has failed to track Moore's law is network speeds, I think. It took roughly 20 years to go from 10 mb/s to 1000mb/s, an increase of only a hundred fold. Over 20 years, Moore's law should increase a quantity 1024 times, very roughly.

All of which has not made backing up these large disks very easy.

Jim 59

Re: Storage cost

So the average person (with savings) can't afford $50,000 of storage? Unless £1=$2.5

The post was a wild conjecture on the next 40 years' storage prices, designed primarily for amusement. The figures in it are hugely approximated and not designed as financial advice. But yes, I was aware of the small disparity. Welsh football pitches.

Jim 59

Re: Storage cost

Hi Steve, we all know Moore's law refers originally to IC manufacture. However, many other quantities in the technology biz follow a similar curve, eg. data density on disks, mag tapes, you name it.

Jim 59

Re: Storage cost

Given the current economic climate, I'd say that the average person doesn't have savings.

Average assets of UK adult March 2014 = £147,000 (source: AOL), of which £20,000 savings

Also, I said "the average person (with savings)" and not "the average person". Hope this helps.

Jim 59

Storage cost

With these disks, 1 petabyte would cost $50830. The average person (with savings) can now afford 1 petabyte of storage. Several petabytes if they have a house to sell.

An Exabyte would still set you back 1024 times that, about $52 million. Moore's law says that will fall back to about $50,000 by 2034.

20 years after that, the average person will be able to afford 1 zettabyte of storage, more than all of the data in the world today.

Jim 59

6TB Red drive costing just $299

That's 21 Gb per dollar, or 210 Mb for 1 cent.

Or 1 Mb for about 0.005 cents. Or .0000000048 cents per byte. 48 pico dollars per byte. 48 p$

Yorkshire cops fail to grasp principle behind BT Fon Wi-Fi network

Jim 59

Re: Not wanting to defend plod, but

Interesting discussion above about the traceability BT Fon connections. A stranger connecting to your BT router gets a separate channel and an internal IP on a separate range (default 10.x.x.x). However I am guessing they get the same internet facing IP. Can't test it just at the moment tho.

As others have said, an investigation would be brutal for you, even if found innocent. The loss of all IT kit, for months, stigma, job worries, stress. A chap who went through it himself wrote a Reg article a couple of months ago. He was found innocent, but the experience was not pretty.

HP, Microsoft prove it again: Big Business doesn't create jobs

Jim 59

Article asserts that big companies don't create jobs, small ones do. Can't agree. If the author had said: growing companies create jobs, static ones don't - that would be more likely.

Small firms should be subject to less red tape than large companies. However in the UK and elsewhere, it is a similar level for both. As soon as you become Ltd and employ 1 other person, you have to follow almost the same rules as Ford or BP. This provides a huge barrier to entry and means it is very hard to start a successful business unless you have huge supplies of cash to begin with (to spend on the rules and administration of them). Nice bit of protection for the big companies.

We should have a new limited liability entity for small companies, up to say 1.5 million turnover a year.

Agree with author re gov lobbying. Big companies and their ceaseless and powerful lobbying (taking ministers to dinner) warp and damage the competitive fabric of the economy.

Attack of the clones: Oracle's latest Red Hat Linux lookalike arrives

Jim 59

We are the dot in dot com

I love how Sun is such an exciting and innovative company since it got taken over by Oracle.

New Star Wars movie plot details leak, violate common sense and laws of physics

Jim 59

Abrahams should construct the new plot so as to tear the ****hole out of the plots of the 3 prequels, if possible.

Maybe that is a bit harsh. Luke should wake up to find that the 3 prequels were just a nightmare following a hangover from too much Janx spirit or whatever.

Or Alec Guinness should build a DeLorean time machine to take us all back to 1985 before the prequels happened. And we could all see some film with stills from the prequels sort of disappearing or whatever. For the lulz

Jim 59

Re: Stop making sense?

Marks out of 10

Star Wars 10

The Empire Strikes Back 9.5

Return of the Jedi 8.5

Phantom Menace -198,367,626,674

Attack of the Clones -3,992,367,654,473

Revenge of the Sith -157,329,873,473

Banning handheld phone use by drivers had NO effect on accident rate - study

Jim 59

Personally, I never use the phone at all in the car, despite having blue tooth. Not really sure why anyone would. Being lazy is much better.

Jim 59

...and an actual traffic stop is the only way to catch someone doing this.

I dunno. Don't forget, every aspect of our lives is now committed to MPEG. Including your commute, your stop at the petrol station, your buying sweets,... basically any urban road or motorway, you are a film star. They probably even see which number you dialed.

Seagate chances ARM with NAS boxes for the SOHO crowd

Jim 59

Re: My old 400Mhz ARM QNAP...

Interesting. My Buffalo Linkstation live tops out at 15 megabytes a sec, despite being having a gigabit NIC. At this speed the ARM cpu is 100% utilized. In other words, it is only about twice as fast as fast ethernet, not 10 times. Impressive you get 22 megabytes/s out of 400 Mhz.

Jim 59

is powered by a Marvel ARM 1.2GHz processor and 512MB of RAM

100MB/s ? If it gets more than 20 I will eat my hat. Bottleneck here is the wimpy CPU not the gigabit NIC.

Jim 59
Joke

Re: So thats...

Which seems the more realistic usage scenario in the average small business office?

25 users streaming HD video 7 hours a day. Boom Boom.

FORGOTTEN Bing responds to search index ECJ ruling: Hello? Remember us?

Jim 59

Bing

My blog stats over the last few days:

558 referrals from google.com

306 referrals from google.co.uk

163 referrals from google.co.in

74 referrals from google.co.fr

...

5 referrals from bing.com

4 referrals from cn.bing.com

Running the Gauntlet: Atari's classic ... now and then

Jim 59

Home computers

Home computer versions of Gauntlet were quite good because it didn't require massive animation or BLIT operations like, say, Afterburner. There was also no scrolling on the home versions IIRC.

Jim 59
Facepalm

Re: Valkyrie - Lol you big girl.

Yes I suspect "LUCY" is a girl. *rolleyes*

Yes. I know. That was the joke.

Jim 59

Re: about time it was revived

Who remembers the space themed game that was also similar as a 4 player with health requiring constant 10p input? I forget it's name but in Swindon the local arcade had this and Gauntlet.

Sounds awfully like Quartet, a game I am often banging on about in here. Out at the same time as Gauntlet, was a 4 player sideways scroller with a space/monster theme. Boss at the end of every level. 4 players with different weapons. Also top fun on MAME.

Jim 59

Reboot

Played it on MAME. Now that's a real reboot.

Jim 59

CPC464

I had Gauntlet on the CPC464 at the same time as playing it in the arcade. The Amstrad version was well done and very close to the original. It was just a bit less smooth and powerful due to the hardware.

Jim 59

Re: Yes wasted

@graeme Legget we are contemporaries. A fond memory from the student common room at Sunderland Polytechnic. IIRC it was quite a good spectator sport too. I spent at least as long watching others as actually playing. Cool.

Jim 59

Valkyrie

I always wanted to play the Valkyrie

Lol you big girl.

MPs wave through Blighty's 'EMERGENCY' surveillance laws

Jim 59

Gosh isn't the government wonderful

I just wanted to say aren't our MPs great, and the folks in the security services are awfully nice too, don't you think ? Everything they do is just absolutely smashing.

Brit biz Phoenix IT Group confirms £16m of contract wins

Jim 59

Impressive

Well done them. Phoenix has been one big sob story in El Reg for years. Gr8 to see it turned around.

Microsoft takes on Chromebook with low-cost Windows laptops

Jim 59

Agree re cloud. Depending on it for day to day operations is a bit like living in your car. Awful in many ways but hey, your house now on wheels, how convenient is that ?

Jim 59

but now PCs aren't big

From my desk I see about about 10 PCs without rotating my head, with an average of about 1.9 PCs per desk. Also about 1 smartphone per desk

Can't see any slabs they must all be behind me.

Barclays Bank counter staff to become iPad-toting 'community bankers'

Jim 59

Re: If it wasn't for ****ing cheques

@JimmyPage I think you can specify "cheque" or "electronic" on the tax return. Select cheque rather than giving HMRC your account number. Need to know basis and all that...

Jim 59

Radical ideas

The quickest way for banks to offer better service would be to open when the customers are able to visit, ie. in the evening and Saturdays. There's an idea, eh?

New leaked 'Windows 8 screenshot': The Start Menu strikes back

Jim 59

auto type-find thing

I just start typing a word (such as "excel" or "sql") then the apps will appear and I can quickly create shortcuts

The auto type-find thing is incorporated in many (non windows) desktops now. Even MATE, the minimal successor of Gnome 2, has it by default. Although you have to click the menu first, to get the smart search bar.

LOHAN seeks stirring motto for spaceplane mission patch

Jim 59

screw up and move on

Popular password protection programs p0wnable

Jim 59

Re: Anyone using any web based password manager is just an idiot.

Put eg. Keepassx on your home desktop and the app on your phone. Copy the database manually.

Jim 59

Storing your passwords online

No.

NEW Raspberry Pi B+, NOW with - count them - FOUR USB ports

Jim 59

Re: hmm

Cool. However the card change limits your ability to swap SD cards with other Pis.