Posts by david 12 2373 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009
Evaporative coolers are favored because they .... only need to be run during the hottest months of the year. [...] alternative cooling methods ... will need to run year round.
WTF?
I can imagine designing a data centre that needs to be cooled year-around. I have trouble imagining that the cooling load in winter is because it's "not evaporative".
Why not filter out those more concentrated minerals on site
They agreed to do that, to get their planning permit, but didn't actually get around to doing so.
Eventually the waste-water people wanted to connect more houses (because real-estate development is an even more powerful lobby group), and, under pressure from the land developers, made threats and loud complaints. So their next data centre won't get away with that.
It's not just enjoyment. Those marketeers who've got any sense at all recognize that, in spite of protests, their consumers -- developers, sys admins, supply officers, middle management -- choose and are willing to pay for "change" and "improvement" and "engagement" and even "needless complexity".
People get real pleasure out of change and aesthetic complexity. As they do out of stability and simplicity.
It's the balance of life as well as the life of commerce.
I did an implementation in AUS. Yes, the biggest part of the implementation cost was handling the two categories of transaction. Only two, but that meant there had to be a database field to assign the categories, and calculation at the line-item level, and calculation and display branches, and display fields to indicate GST status for each line item. And I had it easy: the mainframe implementation ran more than a month late, and major suppliers stopped supply of millions of dollars of product while they waited for payment of outstanding invoices held up in the GST implementation.
Which all could have been avoided by simply boosting the pension rates and tax cut-off rates as compensation, but the party in power had invested so much moral capital in opposing GST, painting it as an evil right-wing plot, that when they came to implement it anyway, they had to agree with every 'injustice' claim as a special case.
Left-wing Americans, (or at least my friends), have a thing about stereotypes. (Maybe Republicans have the same problem, but none of my friends are Republicans.)
They just regard all stereotypes as offensive, along the lines of "informal or idiomatic words used to identify groups of people", which they regard as positively evil.
I don't know why this is so, but it is related to their enormous sensitivity to "race", which, oddly enough, leads them to be "non racist" by viewing every subject through the prism of "race".
I put code on StackOverflow. It's been copied twice: it's now on GitHub in two versions, without attribution.
The copies are actually better than my source code: they've been cleaned up and commented. On the other hand, it was actually original: nobody else had done it before, or even thought about how to do it before.
The lack of attribution burns a little bit.
Because he intends to work in the music industry, and the incentive for fraud remains the same as the incentive for everybody else in the music industry.
In fact, lock up everybody in the music industry who isn't rich, because the incentive for fraud is strong.
In fact, lock up everybody who isn't rich, because they might commit crimes in the future.
Or, alternatively, lock up prosecutors who write crap like that.
The Federal system abolished Parole in 1987. (Parole is the system by which you serve part of your sentence in Goal, and part 'on parole').
Part of this is just a renaming exercise. Holmes still gets 'supervised release' (parole) after the end of her prison residency. But it wasn't entirely Orwellian: average length of residency has approximately doubled.
This had had no effect on reducing crime, but has significantly increased costs, increased employment, and lead to massive contracts with the three major private contractors who own and operate 12 Federal prisons.
There is still an 'out' available. "In Prison" can mean a Government Prison, or a Private Prison, or your own house. I don't think the last is likely in this case, but if something like COVID comes back, home detention may return too.
EncroChat went down in 2020. https://www.engadget.com/europe-uk-police-hacked-encrochat-encrypted-phones-144351998.html
Loss of EncroChat pushed criminals onto "Anom", the secure encrypted communication service developed by the FBI and deployed in Europe and Australia (so that the FBI didn't have to get warrants for surveillance of Americans). "Anom" went down in 2021.
Reports on obsolete systems from 2020 are only mildly interesting. Has anything more recent than "Anom" happened?
Clippy was the most annoying avatar for a published API.
Both sides of the API were published: you could design your own avatar, and publish your own content. (That annoying wiggle was apparently quite eye-catching when paired with an attractive photo-realistic character.) ChatGPT does seem like a natural/native match.
It's actually an interesting question if an anthropomorphic UI would be more or less irritating when paired with deeper, more helpful content. Cortana is being retired: perhaps people really don't want their computers to be "helpful" at all: does anybody really like "helpful" people? Or do we all just find helpful people as annoying as Clippy?
I have an opinion: really top-level professional waiters and servants are noted for their invisibility. I think perhaps what we are waiting for is not ChatGPT, but ReticentGPT,
A drawback experienced by every small business that moved to Win2003 server, where the signing requirement was the default for domain members connecting to the AD/file server.
I can think of other reasons why connecting to Azure might be slow -- I would expect that it is using an encrypted connection
SMB signing was a feature of SMB1.
There may well be printers out there that can't do SMB signing, but I'd of thought that any printer that *required* SMB would also *support* SMB. I mean, it's just a policy setting -- would you expect that there was never anybody before that set the domain policy to 'required'?
However, our old HP network printers used PCL over TCP/IP, not SMB, so I've not a lot of experience with SMB1 printers.
Aus is a "third party" to FX rates, which are traditionally referenced to EITHER NYC or London, except USD and GBP, which are referenced to AUD. Unless you are an international company, in which case your FX reports to the parent company have to reference AUD to USD or GBP.
I have sympathy for the report programmers. There are always some reports where it is bloody difficult to decide not only what the base currency is, but how the value of the third currency should be reported, and if the conversion rates are North-Side-Up or South-Side-Up.
the group "appears to be focused on disruption and publicity."
In the 1970's, young men used to listen to weekend radio for reports of their Friday Night Ultra-Violence. Now, according to police reports, the kids are looking at social media for reports of their exploits. At it's worst, this is what drives mass shootings in the USA, which, because of reverence for the press, is unable to address the problem.
MS correctly did feed the problem until asked a direct question. If only Associated Press could be equally responsible.
In March, Latitude Financial (GEC spinoff) lost a whole bunch of similar stuff (historical data files) through a "security breach at a software provider" through an intermediate company . They've never released details. But for sure it looks like the kind of MoveIt breach through a Payroll company being reported here and elsewhere.
Not entirely management-speak, but one I hear frequently from people who are "using a phrase they don't know the meaning of".
I understand that most of you are too young to have read "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Here's the reference:
"Have you ever heard anything about God, Topsy?" The child looked bewildered, but grinned as usual. "Do you know who made you?" "Nobody, as I knows on," said the child, with a short laugh. The idea appeared to amuse her considerably; for her eyes twinkled, and she added, "I spect I grow'd. Don't think nobody never made me."
No grown large, or fast (Topsy is just a child). Grown without any source or creator. Just grow'd.
"Beginning in or about 2018, and without Hold’s prior knowledge, Microsoft has employed an updated version of its Active Directory Federation Service"
Other claims relate to accounts of people who were with third parties at the time of the agreement, where MS has since acquired the company and the accounts.
My assumption is that the Federation (use of foreign credentials) complaint is also about the use of accounts claimed to be "not MS accounts at the time of agreement"
NOT PAYING PEOPLE WHO WORK FOR YOU
Krebs was a member of a "Board of Advisors". There is no suggestion that Krebs "worked for" Hold.
His report that he was "never paid" also may mean that he was never paid expenses, or an honorarium, or under-the-table cash payments.
Since I don't tweet, I don't know what this article means by the assertion that Krebs "disputed" Hold's account of his departure. On the bare quotations provided, it seems that Krebs did leave for the reason Hold gave. There was additional background context: lack of reward, previous comments, etc, but on the evidence presented, he left after the MS tweet, triggered by the MS tweet, and would not have left but for the MS tweet.
A university I was associated with wanted to get rid of Exchange on ideological grounds, so they went to Notes. That was so awful that they reverted to Exchange after 6 months. It wasn't because they wanted to stay with Exchange: after another year they switched to Gmail, which, while it wasn't as good as Exchange, had improved enough by that stage to be a valid competitor.
One wonders if the old A-level chemistry and physics books are now considered contraband
I learned how to make touch powder from an old high-school chemistry textbook in the library.
I learned how to make dynamite and nitroglycerin from my dad's old high-school chemistry textbook.
Yes, libraries have taken those books off the shelves, and high school chem labs aren't allowed to have nitric acid (or even benzoyl peroxide)
32 bit applications like Office 97 require the 32-bit ODBC framework. That's fairly easy to install.
The only problem I've had is with MAPI. MS never bothered to provide a generic COM 64:32 interface, or a 64 bit proxy for the 32 bit MAPI COM object, so 64 bit applications are unable to use Outlook97.
Then you time how long it takes for it to get taken over.
Forever.
Windows 2K out-of-the-box, with no particular configuration, using a dial-up modem connected to some random university dial-up service, was compromised in hours on some tests
But nobody does that anymore, unless it's some bizarre willy-beating exercise. You connect "to the internet" through a router NAT device and a "firewall" application that is allows you to punch holes through the NAT. You can sit behind that forever, or at least until the router is compromised.
being "three-in-one"
The card technology is still three-in-one -- payment points still offer me the choice of "cheque, savings, or credit'. But my bank now refuses to put my transaction account ("cheque") on the same card as my credit account because of some interpretation of the local money-laundering / transaction reporting laws.
All this cable inter-connectivity and "data-intensive operations or heavy use of AI." will make Singapore a natural location for bit-barns, with accompanying energy demands. They've got a new energy agreement with Malaysia -- they're now buying Lao hydropower through Malasia -- but that comes with its own risks too.
Software inherited copyright protection in the middle of the last century because it seemed a good fit.
Software copyright inherited the existing legislation, and most critically, the existing international treaty framework.
Apart from that, as we all remember, it never really fit into the existing copyright rules, which squeaked and bent as software copyright went through the courts to fit software into the existing categories.
What we ended up with is strange and distorted, but I'm not entirely unsympathetic. Creating a totally new legislative framework for software copyright would have been slow and contentious, but creating new copyright treaties would have taken decades if not centuries, as it did first time around.
That bit where they said "ring 0" is a reference to the test group. Where the patch is tested on a small group of servers (ring 0) before releasing it to a larger group (ring 1), before pushing it to general scheduled release (ring 2). And ring 0 was "internal", and contained more that one server, but .... did not contain any servers which had the use-case covered by this bug. Specifically, did not contain any servers with "snapshot databases"
This is the standard test-and-patch service used by Microsoft internally, also released for enterprise customers some time ago.
I would hope that finding that their patch-test environment of internal servers is not representative of their DevOps customer base should encourage some thought and reflection.
the reported problem requires the collaboration of the WSM subsystem in windows to read that memory location
The reported Windows problem uses the WSM subsystem, but that's because it's a Windows application/driver, not because the problem is unique to Windows.
A linux application/driver would do the same using the equivalent linux API. Perhaps something along the lines of "efi_get_memory_map" and "request_firmware"?
-a result of that questionnaire
I think it was a result of collapse of advertising revenue, leading to a cut-back in the staff and in the number of articles presented.
The questionnaire was another result of the collapse of advertising revenue: the results are used to sell advertising.
there is a use case for having ".pyc" files rather than source.
That's not a use case -- it's another side effect. You can get away with providing pyc files in a package, because python loads pyc files by preference.
Regarding the use case of 'hiding source code', that includes "eliminating dependencies". If you merge all of your dependencies into one big ball-of-code, you can hide that mess in pyc.
llegal to run a wire between two premises.
Not allowed to cross a road, but were allowed to connect two adjoining lots. Which is why you used a wireless or optical connection, or, in our case, bought from the local council, the lanes entirely surrounded by our university buildings, so that we could run a wire from the computer centre to the other buildings
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
