Posts by david 12

Re: Win 10 displays

Half-and-half. Monitor hardware detection depends on the monitor participating in the conversation. And the docking station as middle-man.

Even when your OS is correctly searching devices as a background task, it depends on notification from the M/B/Graphics card, which depends on notification from the monitor, which depends on the monitor realizing that it's supposed to be re-initialising. There is a lot to go wrong there, and, from testing multiple odd configurations even from a normal desktop and graphics card, without the docking station, it often does go wrong.

Re: "bottom-posting"

I agree with the author. Bottom-posting is one of the archaic religious artifacts of mail lists.

No, No, No, you clamor -- you add text to the bottom of pages of paper.

I rest my case.

Re: Quantifying the price for redundancy

What makes you think that these projects were "expected" to fail earlier? These objects were designed to fly past planets and then exit the solar system The lifetime of the power source was known and easily calculated when it was chosen. The path and the gold plate have design lifetimes in the multi-millennium.

Re: <raised eyebrow>

My Dad had a 386 with 8MB RAM. When the order went in, the supplier called back to ask if that was a mistake? Just to check he hadn't confused RAM and HD.

(The 8MB was because the unix clone COHERENT didn't have any memory virtualisation)

Re: Au revoir but not goodbye

blank screen in your browser always means that it was (deliberately) broken by a javascript library. The big companies have followed down that path (as they would), but it's not entirely fair to blame them for something that was first implemented as an open-source community decision to break IE6.

'American' was the preferred accent in Japan in the 1970's. I have no more recent knowledge.

Re: Intel compiler

Of course the Intel compiler was, basically, cross platform as well: it was the multi-language re-targetable DEC compiler that Intel inherited, along with the development team, as the result of a series of moves and court outcomes.

One wonders if it, and the DEC research park, were ultimately closed because all the old staff reached retirement age.

The 4 color monitors were rare. Because they were so unbelievably crap. Everybody who saw them preferred 'monochrome', or, if you were spending your own money 'Herc'. In 1987 I was using a very nice color Fujitsu serial monitor on a 80186 "DOS compatible". There were other options for color.

Yes, CGA was 4 bit -- 8 colors * 2 intensity, but that was at 160×100, which was even less useful than 4 color mode at 320×200.

16 color EGA at 640×350 was introduced in 1984, and by 1987 4 color CGA, always less common, had been discarded wherever possible.

Re: The elephant in the water pipe?

I'm thinking that surely the authors must be writing about water channels, not distribution pipes.

Distribution pipes in the USA are sized to deliver the minimum required pressure to each home, and any change to upstream pressure will make the whole system non-compliant. That, and it's illegal (?) for end users to use water for power generation because it increases water loss.

Re: Bloody hell

If I had 11 million in an investment account, you can bet I'd be checking it every day. And smiling.

Re: Perhaps...

Amazon USA has a massive network of highway vehicles criss/crossing the US between massive Amazon warehouses. Where the loads are loaded / unloaded by warehouse staff.

Point-to-point deliveries will be the last part of trucking that is automated, if ever. The people looking at automated trucking are looking at long-haul container loads.

Re: Teeny weeny horses

The units were internationalized after WWII, which had drawn attention to things like the microscopically different 'inch'.

Then the UK chose to go with the European system rather than the internationalized system they had agreed with the USA -- which was a trade decision, not some kind of fantasy about the 'superiority' of metrification.

As a result of the internationalisation, neither the UK nor the USA use a 'customary' or the 'imperial' system.

Re: So what's this "second amendment" then ?

Either you can drive on a footpath, or you can't.

If you can ban driving along a footpath 'because', why can't you ban driving across a footpath?

Laws, like real life, don't work with absolute yes/no rules.

Re: TCP isn't a good messaging protocol

The socket API is blocking. You have a choice of hoping that the message will come in one RX, or waiting forever for the next byte.

It's an API designed 50 years ago, when servers had only one network card, The socket interface is even more limiting than raw TCP.

The versions of VMWare I have won't boot from USB. That is, it won't boot from any 'removable' drive. And generally, drives do correctly report if they are 'removable' or not.

You might think that it would be good to have your hypervisor boot from a removable drive, so that you could move it if the power supply or motherboard failed, but VM has sometimes disagreed with you: they have a commercial product for handling that situation,

Re: Insecure SMB1?

That is fair enough, but by that criteria IPV6 and SMB2 and SMB3 (which is a version of SMB2) share the same 'insecurity' and should be disabled at the same time.

IPV6 contains provision for IPSEC security, which is not commonly used: SMB from Windows 98 was not used with packet signing or packet encryption, allowing MiM attacks.

If you are worried about things like telnet, then you should not use Win98 without the Win2K compatiblity update that permitted packet signing and secure-channel encryption.

SMB1 was replaced with SMB2 because SMB1 was chatty and verbose, which, when implemented over IPV4 with encryption and signing, added latency. The latency was addressed by SMB2.

More recently, AES has been added to the SMB encryption suite, and the Win Server 2019 SMB component defaults to secure channel for all communications. That's an improvement in security. It doesn't magically mean all communications without AES are "insecure", or that the more chatty protocol was magically "insecure", or that SMB1 was specifically and equally as "insecure" as NFS, and it doesn't address the "insecurity" of SMB3 used with non-AES Windows and SAMBA servers.

Re: What I would really like

U could aspire to become as proficient at playing music as I am at typing today, even while working.

https://xkcd.com/2583/

There out to be an xkcd for "there's an xkcd for that", but I haven't found it yet.

Re: Wishful thinking

"Burning wood is literally CO2 neutral."

But not NOx neutral or Particulate neutral. Coal burning in London wasn't phased out to stop deaths "from CO2".

Re: God botherers strike again!

You missed that it was the article that mentioned "Moms For Liberty", they weren't mentioned by PEN.

A journalist has reached out to MFL for comment, MFL has responded that it isn't the kind of book they object to as an organization.

Yes, there are people who find all kinds of things that aren't really there in books, or in articles on the internet: comments here are a demonstration of that.

When I arrived at university, one of my tutors was working on a PhD involving a GIS. The software was on tape at the computer center. It was backed up in the vault on a tape bought by his grant. And in the corner of his office, on the other side of campus, were boxes of computer cards representing 3 years of his life, in case there was a fire, or a flood, or a student, or some other act of God over at the computer centre.

Re: I find myself idly wondering ...

Historically, American unions were inextricably bound to both Organized Crime and disorganized crime: the garment worker union organizers in NYC were union thugs one day, and small-business employers the next, and organized crime ran the unions as cover for protection racketeering, theft and money laundering.

And unionized construction workers and transport workers both enforced job rules that required payment and presence of non-working members: the empty trucks and the 'elevator operators' on automatic elevators being obvious examples.

The historic criminality of union operations in the USA poisons every attempt at unionization, and from both sides: the bosses and the worker equally don't want to deal with it.

It's not the only feature of American unionization, but any analysis has to include it.

Re: I blame HMRC

Which is exactly the point. The organizations are shit scared of contractors, so these people were and are employees, when the situation could have been avoided by moving to the use of contractors.

Re: Apparently not just GPOs and shortcuts in a Domain

.url shortcuts are a common kind of shortcut -- notably used for WWW shortcuts, but actually also used to locate other kinds of 'resources' on your computer (URL = universal resource locator).

When you start seeing the .url file extension, it doesn't mean that something has 'added' .url. It means that the URL handler association is broken.

In this case, probably broken by a 'security' change that further restricts the use of URLs. Security restrictions on URLs have (historically) been put in place because of that ambiguity that allows them to point to both local and remote resources.

Re: Rust fixed that for you

Mark Russinovich (acquired by MS by buying out his company) has more programming credential in his little toe than most programmers acquire in a lifetime.

Even his wikipedia biography doesn't do him justice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Russinovich: 20 years later, his Winternals utilities are still in use.

Re: I'm surprised

They have developed adapters. The adapters are fairly generic (since the floppy interface is generic), but are normally advertised as specific for each $100K machine they match.

If you go on Alibaba and search for your cutting/sewing/placing machine, you'll find parts, including SD/USB interfaces for 3.5"" replacement. (Far more 3.5"" than 5" or anything else)