A pleasant change to see proper science filed under "Science", at good old El Reg!
Well done.
364 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Nov 2009
@AC:
"It does not matter how good your weapons are if you arm idiots with them".
Those same "idiots" actually did pretty well in '73, in terms of air defence...
Anyway, from Wikipedia (feel free to check the sources cited):
"The complete dominance of U.S. and Israeli technology and tactics over those of the Eastern Bloc was to have been a factor that hastened the demise of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union".
@Lysenko:
* Are you seriously arguing that no new weapon systems can ever be developed? My point was that state-of-the-art weapons of both sides at the time were tested against each other.
* Glad you mentioned Gary Powers: would anyone have cared if no pilot were involved in that incident...?
* How about swarms of autonomous drones some of which are anti-air and some of which are just waiting for SAMs to expose themselves so they can take them out? Would that work, in your opinion? How long would the airspace remain defended?
* Attacking strategic weapons is inviting immediate MAD. Deploying defences "just in case" is insurance against same in case your opponent turns out to be plain-old mad. Besides, it would also work against tactical missiles, if it can be aimed quickly enough.
BTW: don't expect laser (or shark!) equipped drones to be deployed any time soon. But work needs to start for feasibility to be determined. Not every single attempt at developing a new weapon ends in success, you know. The majority probably don't, in fact.
I hope we never find out what a shooting war involving the US vs. Russia or China -- or, for that matter, Russia vs. China -- looks like.
But there were three modern conflicts I can think of that pitted US gear against relatively well-equipped and deployed adversaries with Soviet/Russian gear:
* The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon involved IAF vs. Syrian SAM deployment that by all accounts surpassed that of the earlier '73 war.
* The first Gulf War was against an experienced Iraqi army fresh from a decade fighting Iran.
* The NATO operation in Kosovo.
None were the cakewalk typical of later conflicts, true. But also none were really a challenge, in military terms: one does not conduct military operations with the expectation of sustaining no casualties at all.
Speaking of which: drones are, if you think about it, the perfect match for the challenges faced by the US. Money is not the problem, you see, and a drone being shot down is highly unlikely to grab headlines and lead to "stop the war!" demonstrations.
"And nobody would decide to do something to detect UAVs around silo areas?"
I believe it's not the "detecting" they're not worried about.
If you look over the last few conflicts in which the US were involved, you'll see that they pretty much had complete control of the airspace almost from the word "go!". As the US has a military budget rivalling the next 10 countries on the planet combined, last time I looked, this trend looks set to continue for the foreseeable future.
Even if the UAV is shot down using a SAM, it would still count as a win as most probably the US can afford a new UAV much more readily than their adversary can afford a new missile and, most probably, a new SAM battery and trained crew to run it as the one that launched that missile is now a smoking crater.
Let's first get the useful stuff out of the way:
The best way to do the odd Windows install is to install Windows 10.
But if you simply must install 7, then your best bet is to just smile and let Windows Update do its thing. It's a multi-hour process, but it will get there eventually. And you don't have to babysit it, so you can do useful stuff and check back on it every few hours.
Now other things:
"The fundamental operation of Windows Update has changed little since 1995".
Oh, I don't know about that. It seems to me that there are substantial differences in the process between even the Windows XP days and today; you should even be able to notice the visual differences in the installation process, without getting under the hood. I should know, as I have been cooking updated Windows images since then.
On the other hand, updating a circa-2009CE Linux image would be a vastly different experience because, I think, it would basically be impossible: the oldest Ubuntu release still supported dates back to 2012CE, according to the information I can find.
I am not criticizing, here. Just pointing out the differences. Linux and Windows are different OSes doing different things, with different levels of support and different legal obligations. Microsoft have to do many of the things the way they do them because of the way they have to do things. I know that's a bit of a circular sentence; that's intentional.
And what happens when Microsoft try to get a bit pro-active about getting people to update to the latest release...? "We hate GWX!" pitch-fork parties, of course!!
LOL!
If you install Windows -- especially 7 -- on a regular basis, it pays to integrate all updates using DISM, I think. That way, you avoid having to go through several cycles of updates and download gigabytes of data; which can get old pretty fast even over a GigE link from WSUS. Cuts down the total number of needed updates from 200+ to about 5, in my experience.
Not to mention that Windows Update will do spectacularly stupid things, if you let it. Such as update IE9, replace it with IE11 and *then* update that!
On the other hand, if you do an install every few months or something, then it's probably not worth the hours needed to get this done right. And I would urge everyone not to download updated images from the Internet, naturally! You don't, after all, know where it's been... ;-)
"Anyone like to suggest something else? Am I likely to have more luck with one of the BSDs?"
This is so basic that I hesitate to ask, but have you made sure that the HW is OK? If the RAM is flaky, it would lead to random failures that are rather frustrating to track down, for example.
I believe some flavour of MemTest86+ is included on the Mint installation disc, if you haven't ruled that out.
"Pilots have forgotten how to fly".
Seems like the right direction for things to take. Because it seems to me that every time I read why a particular air accident has happened, it's pilot error.
Exceptions exist, of course, such as the awesome Captain Chesley Sullenberger landing US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson river back in 2009CE. But many more depressing cases of "controlled flight into terrain", it seems.
"Non-reversible plugs are much preferred, and non-reversible plugs where it is bloody obvious which way round is correct (unlike USB plugs) are the best".
My vote is for reversible plugs such that it doesn't matter how something is plugged in.
It's hard to manage, but I have seen what happens when the standard Molex power connectors used for old IDE drives, which should not be reversible, are reversed nonetheless. It's not pretty.
I love Windows 10, myself. And everyone (all Windows users, that is, obviously) will upgrade eventually. That's just how it is: we all loved Windows 2000 (XP was at SP2 before I started widely installing it), but how many of us are still running it...?
But I wouldn't want any business PCs auto-upgrading to it, really. With any OS upgrade ever, there's always the chance some apps will break. When that happens, you'd want whoever passes for tech support in the given environment right there to take hopefully-appropriate action, not busy with something else or taking a vacation or whatever.
Coupled with the already negative reaction to GWX by many -- well, at least a very vocal few -- this is a rather bad move on Microsoft's part, I think.
I think the point Naselus was trying to make is that Snowden's earlier behaviour would suggest that he would go public if he found out that mass surveillance was taking place. I do not see any implications regarding any prior (ill-)intent on the part of Snowden or, indeed, any judgment as to whether what Snowden did was good or bad.
My thanks to Naselus for pointing this out; I was not aware of it. Assuming it's accurate, it would support my feeling regarding the leak being planned by higher echelons of the NSA or beyond: one does not, after all, let go of a lead-weight in Earth's atmosphere and expect it to float up like a helium balloon.
You know, this is a funny feeling: I tend to be against conspiracy theories, usually. Yet here I am finding that the simplest explanation I can come up with for the facts I have is a conspiracy worthy of a movie plot. But I simply see no other evidence that the NSA are this incompetent. Indeed, everything else I know points to them being one of the best entities on the planet in doing what they do, regardless whether you agree with it or not.
I must admit that I never saw the threat of AI, myself.
I mean, sure, the leading intelligence on the planet will no longer be organic. But so what? I, for one, am perfectly comfortable with the fact that I am not the most intelligent entity on this planet. And human civilization will still go on. Along with the humans I think, if it's up to AI to decide this. Damned sight more likely for humans to survive longer if the key decisions were taken by someone much more intelligent, if you ask me!
As to the movie vision of AI coldly destroying humanity, well, think about it: as humanity advanced, we, as a culture, became increasingly empathetic; we care more for fellow humans now than we did in the past. And I suspect people'd look at you like you'd come from another planet if you brought up the concept of animal rights just a few centuries ago. Or the possibility that some animals might in fact have intelligence comparable to our own and should, therefore, get equal rights.
Now, what is the one thing that we can be fairly certain of regarding AI...? That it will from the start -- or very soon thereafter -- exceed human intelligence. That's the whole source of the threat, in fact, as classically portrayed.
So why would increased intelligence suddenly lead to less empathy, in total contradiction of everything we have so far observed?
When it comes to default passwords, I would quite like a variation of TP-Link's -- of all people -- practice adopted everywhere.
TP-Link clearly mark the default password on the label with the serial number and so on, you see. Which makes it easy to service stuff for which, naturally, the documentation has long since been lost without asking Google.
Now what I would like is for the password to be a derivative of the serial number -- or MAC address, etc. Whatever is appropriate for the type of gear in question -- so that it cannot easily be guessed by a remote attacker.
Well, a way to clear just the password such as on proper network gear would be best, I guess. But not everything has a readily-accessible serial port, and this does not make sense in every case, anyway.
"my experience is that if you fully format a pen drive you have something like a 10% chance of permanently corrupting it, making it unreadable".
*My* experience tells me you should get better quality UFDs. Or at least stop using the promotional ones you get for free. Many of those are laughably *under*-provisioned: a 16GB UFD actually containing a 512MB flash chip...? Yeah, I can see how well that will work! :-D
No UFD -- indeed, no non-ROM storage medium of any kind or capacity -- enters my service without at least a couple of full drive write/reads with integrity checking, if I can help it. Very few fail this. But at least those that do take no data with them.
"The defending itself isn't actually very good".
Yes.
If someone held a gun to my head -- or any other body part, really -- and forced me to say something positive about it the best I could come up with would probably be "It's better than nothing, I guess...".
Seriously: buy a proper AV suite with a good firewall. It's extremely unwise not to.
"Seriously, have you tried turning it off and on again?"
Or, more specifically to AVG's case, turning it off and leaving it that way...?
I mean, if one's willing to pay for an AV -- a sound and recommended investment, IMO -- there are really great ones out there. But for the price of free, nothing is much better than Windows Defender.
Now, I'm not saying Windows Defender is any good, mind! I'm just saying most free AVs I tried are comparable to it.
"they reference Ceres being spun up as one of mankinds major engineering achievements and refer to a long slow process".
Ah! I see... Please excuse me while I find the nearest solid surface I can bang my head against.
I already came across that bit and was hoping for more.
The problem I see is that regardless of how slowly and carefully you do it, if you spin up something like Ceres with enough angular velocity to create a radially outward acceleration that would exceed its own gravitational acceleration, then it will fly apart. Probably long before you got to that point, in fact. After all, it's essentially just a pile of rubble held together by gravity.
"Fingers crossed someone comes up with a solution to the current mess up there before kessler Syndrome starts biting too hard, its already at a worrisome point".
Look t it this way: this future solution will certainly require significant technological, if not scientific, advancement. Challenges present opportunities to advance. Even those challenges that we ourselves needlessly create.
"Gravity on Ceres is 3% of Earth's".
The Expanse's Ceres has apparently somehow been spun to create artificial gravity. So more of a really large space station than a planetoid.
I am hoping the book(s) -- which I started to read after seeing the series, BTW -- will explain how this could be achieved without scattering the thing to dust. Considering the relative accuracy of the physics so far (I didn't do the math. But I didn't get the urge to bang my head on the nearest solid surface in frustration, either), I am hopeful.
I feel very conflicted about living in this period of history.
On the one hand, awesome stuff like this.
But on the other hand, anthropogenic global climate change.
On a related sidenote: sci-fi loving types would do well, I think, to take a look at SyFy's (Sigh-Fy, amirite...?) "The Expanse". The book is naturally better, so far. But considering it's TV, it's not that bad.
"Oh, the downvote is only because you made it sound normal to have to jump through flaming hoops to block an unwanted upgrade".
Well, on my first Linux install I had to rebuild the kernel to get the soundcard to work. And even now I seem to have to manually cleanup the /boot partition if I don't want the damned thing to run itself out of space and panic into a deadlock.
And we will just not get into what would be needed to run and manage an actual network of Linux machines populated by real users instead of wizards.
So, you see, there are various hoops in different places one needs to jump through to get things done. I mean, why else would anyone pay us IT pros, eh...? ;-)
"What I would have liked is a checkbox, that, when ticked, starts the upgrade process, and when unticked, completely disable it".
A perfectly reasonable request, really.
Except you need to factor in the target demographic: these are *not* users one'd trust to make rational decisions after fully weighing all the consequences. If I had a dollar every time someone told me that a message came up and they clicked it away before they read it... well... I wouldn't be richer than Bill Gates, but I would certainly be retired by now. So think of the need to edit the registry, etc. as you proving that you know what you are doing.
I see...
Well, I personally don't see the harm of cookies in a session that will cease to exist as soon as you close the browser window. But I respect your choices and desire for extreme privacy. So here's the bit that I use to block GWX on machines that should not get it (I assume you'll know what to do with it, as you sound like an intelligent person, aside from what I would consider too much paranoia. But then that's a very fine knife edge to walk, and maybe you're the one of us who's got it right):
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\GWX]
"DisableGWX"=dword:00000001
"Sadly that website insists that you 'Please enable cookies and refresh the page' (without telling you exactly which cookie they want enabling) - thus slurping even more info about you"
I am having trouble understanding your brand of paranoia:
* You have issues with accepting cookies from support.microsoft.com
* Yet you apparently continue to use Windows. Else why would you care about GWX?
* And you don't routinely use your favourite browser's private browsing mode. You indeed seem to imply ignorance of it.
I don't know, really. Is there a real issue you're facing, or are you just making up objections, at this point?
And a similar, but more general, question to the downvoters: Is there a real issue you'd like help with -- maybe the KB isn't understandable, etc.? Or are you just disappointed that the world doesn't contain as many conspiracies as you'd imagined?
"In the past, Windows Server releases have been matched with near-simultaneous Windows client releases that share the same core code"
Are you sure...?
As I recall, that only happened with Windows 8 and 8.1, not with any earlier releases.
Edit: It's rare when my memory doesn't fail me, but here you go:
Windows XP: 20010824
Server 2003: 20030424
Vista: 20061108
Server 2008: 20080204
Windows 7: 20090722
Server 2008 R2: 20091022
Windows 8: 20120801
Server 2012: 20120801
Windows 8.1: 20131017
Server 2012 R2: 20131017
"Except that when they're fixed you might not be there to take advantage".
Probably very true, that.
But this is a bit of a meta for-the-greater-good thing, really.
Though now that I think of it, business entities with shoddy business practices are probably not long for this world, anyway, so you're out of a job in the long run no matter what you do.
Now, I *am* a realist, so I realize that what most people will actually do is smile and take it while looking for a better job elsewhere. Except that since everyone else is doing exactly the same thing, they may as well look for a unicorn, for all the good it will actually do.
And so we are doomed to forever keep abandoning eternally sinking ships. Hopefully in time to avoid personal disasters.
Strictly-speaking, that's not the Right Way to behave, of course. And feel free to behave properly if your particular working environment warrants it -- and I am sure many here would appreciate it if you let us know which paradise you work at so they can try and join you -- But this bit here:
"Sadly the mill wasn't willing to take BT home, so he ended up sleeping on the control room floor".
...shows just how little appreciation there is for someone going out of their way to effectively save the day.
The only way crappy business practices will be fixed is if they impact the bottom line hard. And that will not happen if you answer the phone and fix the problem even when you are not on-call.