Posts by phuzz

Worst case it'll come down in ten years, best case is 2040 something.

(source last two paragraphs)

Re: Murica, land of freedom!

To be fair, it's hard not to mentally insert the missing swearwords when listening to radio edits sometimes.

Re: RE: Then came the Linux crowd where there were no such applications

"Linux is like a sleek F1 car"

You have to replace half the components after every few hours of use, and just chuck the old ones away?

A rally car might have been a better choice (they're designed to have components swapped in and out), but even then it's still not a good analogy.

Re: They’re still the most shit

You have two services, one of which works and one doesn't. So the obvious solution to this problem is to go on the internet and complain. Sure, that'll fix it.

Re: So much for 'digital by default'...

If you think that not supporting your old browser is the biggest problem with government IT in the UK then you've clearly not been reading about half the articles on elReg.

If it works in any browser whatsoever then it's a cause for celebration.

Re: Filter lists suck

"So where do I send the bill to you for using my CPU cycles, when I visit one of your web-pages, to generate your dynamic UI?"

To yourself, as you were the person who chose to visit the site.

Don't like it using your computer? Then don't visit.

Re: Internet of Giant S@#$tty Stuff

If 'best practice' was the way people actually did things in the real world, it would just be called 'practice'.

If someone honestly thinks that a bunch of builders understand 'air-gapped' to mean anything other than "leave a gap between those brick Kev" then they'll be horrified if they ever looked at the real world.

Re: Reliability

Anecdotally I had to clone the knackered 1TB drive of a laptop the other day and that only took just over an hour, and that was from a drive with loads of SMART errors, onto the cheapest 1TB 5400rpm drive we could find on Amazon. I'd hope that a 15TB archive drive would be at least as fast.

Re: In the good old days....

I still keep my files in a somewhat logical layout so I can usually easily find the things I want.

Otherwise there's always good old dir -s

Re: Snap.

Well yes, but other OS's seem to get a slightly easier time of it than Windows.

I had a nasty bug in a grub update towards the start of the year that prevented a bunch of systems from booting*, but it never made it as far as the front page of elReg.

* (not technically data loss, except that these systems used LUKS encryption and recovering the data turned out to be a lot more complicated than running undelete on a Windows system.)

Re: Berlin - Roten und Chaoten

"I am specifically asking for what supports your view here."

I'm not espousing my own views, I'm taking a guess as to the previous commenter's views, especially as they seemed to be trolling.

As for Mussolini, he's not someone I've studied in detail but I always got the impression that he was a raging narcissist who would say whatever he felt like at the time to stay in power (can't think who that reminds me of in modern politics). So taking anything he said as being a useful clue to his political beliefs would seem to be risky to me. He probably never had a fully thought out idea of his own politics, so how could anyone else work it out?

The 'our' in "our embassy" goes up in pitch and would be pronounced closer to 'hour' in brum, where as the Aussie goes lower, "ahh".

Re: A (potentially) astonishing step change in FO bandwidth.

"Once you have it in the ground and unless some builder goes through it or some other happenstance then changing the sender and detector is all that is needed."

It depends. Fibre for communications is specifically designed and manufactured to work best with the particular wavelengths that we currently use for communications. It's possible that current fibre isn't ideally suited to this new technology and might end up being replaced.

Mind you, once you've laid fibre once, it should be slightly easier to put in another run.

They never relied on the cryptomining boom. Sure they profited off it, but they knew it was short term, so they didn't bother investing to increase production. Everyone knew it was going to pop within a year or so, and nothing AMD have done shows they thought any differently.

Re: Just 'Unnecessary'? What about 'Wouldn't Work'?

I think the idea for something like a land registry, is that not only would the government hold a copy, but so would all the large property firms, maybe individual local councils too, etc. Then each can keep the others honest, and have a local copy for quicker lookups.

I'm not saying it's a great solution just looking for a blockchain, just pointing out that in some circumstances your point a) is covered.

As for point b) it's theoretically impossible to replace or corrupt a block (in the same way that cracking a suitably large encryption key is impossible, ie barring taking the length of the universe, or a massive breakthrough in quantum computing or something). I think the idea is that in a non-currency blockchain, that adding a new block will not be as difficult as it is for bitcoin, and will be done each time one of the participants adds a transaction.

At the end of the day, it's still not something that can't be done with just a database and a little trust.

Re: Pfffft.

"I wouldn't want anybody to loose they're temper over one off my posts."

My favourite way of correcting lose/loose:

Lose = what you would do at a grammar competition.

Loose = your mum.

If someone has been framing Russia, it's not (just) the result of an automated tool. Someone had to leave a username in a file path which matches that of a Russian professor at an institution which specifically deals with large infrastructure, and with a documented social media history going back years.

So either someone put in a lot of effort (when they could have just left it at some Cyrillic filenames and Russian timestamps on the files) for dubious motives, or it's genuine.

It being genuine is the simpler of the two explanations, and lines up with potential motives.

Re: Leave it there

"Probably a bit late for that. I'd wager that a web based ship tracker would be able to give a fairly accurate location"

Most survey boats turn the gain on their AIS system to as low as they possibly can when they're at work to avoid just this scenario. It's possible that this survey boat isn't required to have an AIS system, or they just turned it off.

So you might be able to pick up their position, but it's not guaranteed.

Re: The Wright Brothers

"it's good that The Wright Brothers didn't listen to people like you, and decided to plough on despite the massive rate of failure"

It wasn't so much that they kept trying terrible designs despite repeated failures (eg elevators work better on the rear of an aircraft), the main problem was that they patented all heavier than air flying machines, thus preventing anyone else from "ploughing on".

You should have chosen better subjects for your metaphor.

Re: Door locks.

Where I grew up (and where my folks still live), most people leave their front door locked, but that's because everyone goes in and out through the back door*, which is often left unlocked. It certainly wasn't unusual for a neighbour to walk into the kitchen and just shout to try and attract our attention.

* fnar fnar.

Re: Helping out a mate?

"do you remember who had the lowest incidence of infections animal diseases?"

Would it be one of the countries with a natural sea border all the way around? Why yes it would. Ireland has indeed generally had a low incidence of infectious diseases, lower than the UK, which incidently is the usual route of infection for Ireland.

They're journalists, methylated spirits would probably work just as well as alcohol.

Re: What about the stuff that we really don't want...

OneNote, and the Bing stuff can be uninstalled with a simple right click > uninstall.

I'm not sure if you're joking about the Zune stuff, but it's not installed on mine so it was either never there, or succumbed to the same quick uninstall method.

Re: I'll never buy another

Hmm, I'll steer clear of the Crucial M2 ssds for a while then, thanks.

We've been mainly using the WD Green nvme drives which work. I couldn't tell you any more than that because they've only been in service for about six months, and as for speed, once they're faster than a harddrive that's 'good enough' for our purposes.

The main problem I have is finding suitably small ones. A basic Linux Mint install only needs about 16GB, but the cheapest SSDs are around 120GB now, which isn't exactly a problem I suppose, it just offends my sense of efficiency.

Re: There's always an excuse to increase prices, but...

"And if prices fall due to new tariffs or strengthened sterling, will they pass those on as well?"

If it allows them to undercut their competition, whilst still making a profit, then, probably?

Re: But not the European Court of Human Rights.

Actually yes, I was thinking of things like voting for brexit, even though everyone in government thought it was a terrible idea and now they have to go along with it, whilst trying desperately to distance themselves so they can't get the blame for when everything goes horribly wrong and causing the entire tory party to figuratively wet itself in public.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they wish people had voted for the safe choice. Bloody democratic rights.

Re: "Why can't we have both?"

It's unhygienic, and a right pain to get out of the bed sheets.