Posts by phuzz

Re: Are SAP unique in this?

I think more companies would do it if they could, but SAP have the benefit of providing a very expensive product that takes years to integrate into a business, but once it has been, it's totally embedded. It would probably be cheaper for some companies to shut down and reopen under a new name than to remove SAP from their accounts department.

I guess there's not a huge amount of competition though (and at least moving to SAP got rid of our finance director's multi-GB Access database that he used for month-end, which invariably needed fixing every month)

Re: Yet if any other civil servant did this

"...when you write to your MP [...] it could be read by absolutely bleeding anybody"

I'm pretty sure my MP doesn't read every single letter/email sent to them, only the ones that their staff bring to their attention.

Re: AV - Can we really trust any of them?

This story is about government computers, part of the job of GCHQ (well, CESG) is to protect those computers. Surely a government controlled AV is just the right tool for the job (as long as it's the right government of course)?

Re: Conflicted?

This is the US we're talking about, that sort of behaviour is considered laudable over there, or at least it is by the people that matter (ie the ones with all the money).

Shkreli just rocked the boat a little too much, if he'd only increased the price by ten times rather than twenty he might have stayed under the radar.

Re: Cash for clunkers MK II

"Electric cars are already heavily subsidised not least through the complete lack of duty on their fuel."

Given that we pay both VAT and duty on petrol, isn't the above a much more sensible and fair way of doing things?

Or to put it more simply, the Intel ME is basically similar to the iLo/DRAC/out-of-band-managment you might be familiar with from servers.

"Does that mean that if a criminal bought a car from his ill-gotten gains, the police could demand that the car dealer hand over the money that was used to pay for the car?"

No, they'd confiscate the car from the criminal (and potentially sell it at a police auction if the crim was convicted).

Re: Unplugged cable

I deal with a lot of, shall we say 'non-technical' users. My stance now is that no cable is plugged in unless someone competent has been on site to verify it, because I can't trust any of the users to answer the question correctly.

They'll tell you a hundred times that they've never touched the cables and that they're all plugged in correctly, just as I've asked, and yet when someone pops round to have a look...

I'm yet to find a way around them classifying cables by colour, rather than type. So a USB cable and an ethernet cable are assumed to be identical because they're both black, where as the red networking cable must be something different. I've tried focusing on the connectors but apparently they're too small to see properly.

I'd assumed that the child's toy of 'square block goes in square hole, round block goes in round hole' would have equipped most adults to correctly plug different cables into the correctly shaped sockets, but apparently the general population has forgotten the lessons they learnt as a child.

Re: They are obliged by law to do that

I think most people would agree that there's good reasons for spreading the thirteen root servers around the world. Ideally to such an extent that even if (for example) the US and Russia both decided to fiddle with them, there'd still be enough independent copies out there.

And that's ignoring all of the non-political problems that come with clustering services too closely together geographically.

Re: Pocketalypse

I too was looking for a phone that is supported by Lineage OS, and had a 4.5" screen. I tried a Sony Z5 Compact, which was fine, but it turned out that I've got used to the 5" screen in my Swift, and the keyboard on the 4.5" screen felt slightly too small to use comfortably. (then I found the microphones in the Z5C were broken so that got returned). I haven't noticed my eyesight getting worse, but I suppose I am getting older. Maybe I'm going to have to stick to 5" screens from now on :(

So, now I'm going to try a Moto G5 and hope the unofficial Lineage rom works ok...

Well, all of them obviously, but it does raise a good question, how many copies of Windows has Microsoft sold?

Re: Because you can't be arsed

Given that this coin mining software will need to be run across millions of devices to be worthwhile, why would anyone take time out to find a way to secretly run it on a unix box, when the same amount of time and effort could be spent getting it to run on Windows machines, thus reaching an audience probably at least 100 times larger?

Re: Sounds like we need to start another war

"we aren't currently bombing the crap out of any third-world countries"

Does Syria not count as third-world? Because the RAF say that last year was their most intense in terms of combat missions in 25 years.

Of course, that's only busy for the manned aircraft. By the looks of it there's no useful role for the Watchkeeper, which begs the question, what's the bloody point of them?

Re: When do the magic words...

"An enterprise, for the purposes of RICO is something like the Mafia, or ISIS; not a legally constituted company like Über."

So what you're saying is, if Uber's 'Strategic Services Group' was definitely part of Uber (same payroll etc.) then they can't be charged under RICO?

Re: Andrew Silver, this is article is low effort trolling.

Soyuz the rocket might have thousands of launches, but Soyuz the manned spacecraft has only just outpaced the Shuttle(139 flights vs 135), and consequently hasn't moved as many people (yet).

Correctly spelled sentences are easier to read than ones with a lot of errors.

There's someone I interact with at work who has a sub-GCSE level of writing and it takes me approximately twice as long to read thing's they've written because I mentally have to translate it 'into English'.

And trust me, you're much better off not having to read the first draft that my dyslexic brain comes out with.

Re: This Has Gone Far Enough

Broadcasting the World Service to the yanks is a 'pearls before swine' effort, they just don't bother listening to anything they disagree with. Instead they seek out whichever broadcaster says the things they agree with, with none of those pesky uncomfortable truths.

Re: RFC 2460..

"If we trail behind then in relation to the internet"

Who is this 'we', white man?

Re: Perfect climate

Yes, but thanks to global warming, laser weapons will be even be effective in Glasgow.

Re: Who/What does the "secure" in Secure Boot refer to?

Secure Boot isn't really a layer, its basically the modern equivalent of that BIOS option (which nobody used) which made the MBR read-only. It's part of the UEFI,

As for how you can patch, the Intel ME is part of the motherboard chipset, so it'll be your motherboard vendor you need to wait for (good luck with that). They'll get the updated code from Intel and will have to package in in the correct way to flash their own hardware.

As for how exactly the patch would be applied, I don't know, but I suspect in similar ways to the patches that server manufacturers release to update things like BMCs and RAID controllers. That is to say, you might be able to run a program from inside your OS, or you might have to boot from USB into DOS and patch that way.

As for your last suggestion, just because the Intel ME allows access to the OS, doesn't mean you have enough control over the ME to re-flash it.

Re: Still not too late

Building a new ship would mean more work for the shipyards, and therefore (the politicians hope) continued votes, so it's not completely out of the range of possibility.

Maybe we should sell these carriers to someone that's committed to the F-35B (the US Marines?) and build some proper ones with catapults on. Sure, it's a ridiculously massive waste of money, but we've known that right from the start.

Re: Unprofessional bollocks

"highly unprofessional"

Well, I doubt he gets paid for man, so why complain about professionalism?

"Such an endeavour would have required a small automated science craft, atop of a very powerful rocket"

Either a very small probe indeed, or a more powerful rocket than we actually have. The only way we could get something up to similar speeds to this rock (or dormant spacecraft or whatever it is) would be with multiple gravity assists, which we don't have time for, and anyway, it's moving well outside the plane of the ecliptic, so you'll need a massive plane change manoeuvrer as well.

Basically, there was no way we could get anywhere near this, even if we'd know a couple of years in advance.

Re: Oh that, Chelsea Flower Show v Notting Hill Carnival Question

I'd bet that the Chelsea Flower Show is a great place to be a pickpocket. Loads of people, and lots of them from affluent backgrounds, so they're likely to have expensive stuff in their pockets/bags.

Probably less violent crime than Notting Hill, but on the other hand people can get pretty worked up over their aspidistras...

Re: Nothing is lost

"Question: If you can unwind transactions with the agreement of just 51% of users, doesn't that suggest that 51% of users could get together to defraud the other 49%?"

Well, that's a step forward from yer actual capitalism, where it only takes 1% to screw over the rest of us.

When one of our clients turned off TLS 1.1 last year it was because they had less than 1% of customers still using it (there was about 6 users, and they didn't buy much).

Given that most of their customer base are, how shall I put this, less likely than most people to have upgraded beyond XP and IE6 (ie most of them are pensioners), I'm surprised that you're getting 40% of users still using it.

Do you run a website specifically for fans of old browsers? ;)

That's the wrong question, the right question is: should they have?