* Posts by defiler

1469 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2010

EU wants one phone plug to rule them all. But we've got a better idea.

defiler

Re: To later

And while we're at it, we'll colour it passport blue. That will make everything right.

Bloody hell that make me so proud I could weep!

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Re: EU Standard plug

For a standard developed in 1970, it proved to be extremely far-sighted: particularly in standardising a method for direct RGB input to TVs,

Yep. It's still the go-to connector for hooking up old videogames consoles for collectors. Everything up to the Xbox/PS2/Dreamcast/N64 era. As they said about Volvos in Crazy People "They're boxy but they're good". Pain in the arse to put through a wall though. SCART, not Volvos - they're pretty straightforward.

Drama as boffins claim to reach the Holy Grail of superconductivity

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Re: Would have got away with it too

That looks like an email I got from the Prince of Nigeria University.

I hear they're doing fantastic work in cold fusion. Just need a little individual funding to push it over the line.

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Re: Extraordinary claims—

Which would make all those barren stretches of Sahara desert suddenly extremely valuable.

Only during the day. The Bedouin can have them after dark.

Oh my Tosh, it's only a 100TB small form-factor SSD, SK?

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Re: Sign me up

I'd like to announce my MagicVegaLeapDrive which will pack 300TB into a 1.8" form factor which will be fully compatible with all known interfaces and drive bays.

Pricing to be determined.

Investors please contact the usual address and leave your money in the burning skip out the back.

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Re: No-one will ever... need more than 64TB on a 2.5inch SSD

lazy developers who don't understand shit about optimisations

I've dealt with my share of lazy developers, but I'll bet that most devs understand a fair bit about optimisation, and I'll bet a lot of them even care. They do, however, have to report to management who care about getting it out of the door now. Not in three weeks when it can be 10% faster.

ZX Spectrum Vega+ blows a FUSE: It runs open-source emulator

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Learning how to use blu-tack

From tiny acorns, and all that...

That said, when I had Acorns I never had an ounce of trouble with them.

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Re: Could there be a more reflective screen?

What are they going to do? Steal it or commiserate?

Samsung Galaxy Note 9: A steep price to pay

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Re: The one thing I wholeheartedly agree with Jobs on ...

If you need them

And that's the thing. I used to have a Note 3, and the stylus was great. You never really needed it, but it was handy for doing crazy things like running a Citrix session on your mobile...

Phased out: IT architect plugs hole in clean-freak admin's wiring design

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Re: get out quick

2 phases connected together by accident one time and it wasn't nice. The bang was huge

Yep. I was working in Charlotte Square in Edinburgh when somebody dropped a tool into a 3-phase about 1/4 of the way around the square from us. Power was off for the rest of the day. I was in reception at the time and there was a flash like a lightning strike.

I know my limits on electricity. Sockets are fine. Consumer Unit is a job for a spark. 3-phase? Not going near that!

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Re: Plot twist? What plot twist?

Yarp. Still, whilst working in an old building we were proudly told by the beaming electrician who'd just finished a rewiring job that the three phases had been nicely isolated so that one carried the lights, the second all of the sockets, and the third the high-drain devices such as aircon, the kitchen appliances and the server cabinets...

Those UPSs took a beating smoothing out that load.

IPv6: It's only NAT-ural that network nerds are dragging their feet...

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Re: "the world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4"

The world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4. And IPv6 zealots are clinging stubbornly to the notion that everyone MUST switch to IPv6 despite the fact that doing so costs money and provides little or no benefit to the end user.

And then there are those of us looking at IPv6 as (as per the article) an inevitability. Surely it makes sense to have the deployment underway by now at ISPs, and leave the consumer endpoints until later (when they ask, or when the equipment fails, or when the ISP decides that IPv6 is prevalent enough to justify a blanket deployment).

As has been pointed out, the core routing equipment has been dual-stack for years. The devices at the ISPs are probably all ready to roll, just needing an assignment and a shitload of configuration. That configuration has had years to happen. I would have expected by now that I could call my ISP, say "IPv6, please" and get at least a /64 out of them. On my router. But no - they just don't have it.

I'm not suggesting that everyone needs to be funneled into IPv6 right now, but that it should at least be an option.

Of course, if we were to punt all the porn off IPv4 tomorrow, we'd have universal IPv6 by Monday morning...

Bank on it: It's either legal to port-scan someone without consent or it's not, fumes researcher

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So who can I portscan?

I mean, I scanned our public subnet at one of our sites and found that our comms provider has left BGP open to the world. Am I in trouble now?

/me hides from Interpol since it's a DC abroad...

Alaskan borough dusts off the typewriters after ransomware crims pwn entire network

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Day-to-day domain admin

What are the odds that one/some of the admins used Domain Admin creds on their normal day-to-day account? You know - the one they open their email and browse the web with.

Obviously I can't say that this is definitely what happened, but plenty of us have done it in the past, and have only been lucky enough to get out of the habit before something like this kicked off...

Sitting pretty in IPv4 land? Look, you're gonna have to talk to IPv6 at some stage

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You lost me at SBS

I have wrestled that demented beast far too often in the past, with its 10.0.0.1/8 IP and its .local AD domain baked in. Bah.

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Re: Never!

And just to reiterate, at no point did I claim that NAT is not possible with IPv6. It's just not necessary.

I was under the impression that NAT was regarded as a "bad thing" on IPv6, and that since everyone had a publicly routable address you shouldn't ever be using it.

I do get people's reticence to abandon the safety net of IPv4 NAT, but it's really as simple as dumping any packets that aren't on an "established" session on the firewall. Shit, Draytek do that straight out of the box (although they didn't initially - oops!)

My bugbear with IPv6 is that it was invented by somebody (or 1000 somebodies) looking at IPX with all of its autoconfiguration, and they pinched bits. But not enough to just let the client figure itself out. In the meantime we got stuff like DHCP for IPv4 and we're happy with that, but we suddenly have to configure using two mechanisms for IPv6? The firewall is absolutely the least of my worries...

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Plusnet

Good luck with IPv6 if you're on Plusnet. Yeah, you can tunnel, but really? I mean it's not even as if they're a small ISP. They're part of BT, the biggest consumer ISP in the UK. They trialled IPv6 years ago, and then promptly pushed the genie back into the bottle and said "well that's that then".

I'm at the point where I'm thinking about ditching them, because IPv6 would be bloody handy for me now.

Facebook deletes 17 accounts, dusts off hands, beams: We've saved the 2018 elections

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Re: What about the rest?

Problem is, so much crap is propagated with "don't share, copy and paste this post", and you're not going to get those. At least not without doing a massive search across the whole database, and even with the best will in the world that would be a gargantuan task.

Now that's a dodgy Giza: Eggheads claim Great Pyramid can focus electromagnetic waves

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Re: It was aliens wot did it

*Must be 18 or over in UK to purchase Pointy Mummy.

Well my mummy always told me that pointing was rude, so there!

Early experiment in mass email ends with mad dash across office to unplug mail gateway

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Up in Aberdeenshire there's a town called Strachan. Pronounced Stron.

Don't get lost in Aberdeenshire,,,

Sysadmin trained his offshore replacements, sat back, watched ex-employer's world burn

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Re: was it for RBS

Is that RBS the "substantial publishing company" ?

I've seen many of their works - quite samey though, and always seem to start "I promise to pay the bearer on demand..."

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Not in IT...

...but my wife's team at a construction company (no names) had to train their replacements before getting the boot. Then most of the replacements left because another big company opened up offices nearby. Then the company pretty-much fell apart. Like share-price-halved-in-the-next-year sort of fell apart.

The fun of losing institutional knowledge.

Swan dive: Intel shares dip under interim CEO Bob as 10nm processor woes worry Wall Street

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10 minutes?? But I want it now! :(

HPE supercomputer is still crunching numbers in space after 340 days

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...and for heating their tap water? Double-win!

ReactOS 0.4.9 release metes out stability and self-hosting, still looks like a '90s fever dream

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Re: This could be a hit in the NHS ...

The problem that I see with that is that somebody needs to stay on top of the ongoing security patches and stuff. It's a big enough job for Microsoft - I can see it being overwhelming for a small team. If somebody as big as the NHS adopted it then it would no longer be an obscure target.

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The fecking floppies didn't work reliably in 1995

Remember them well. DMF disks at 1.6MB. It got to the stage where we were quicker temp-fitting a CD drive and installing it from there. Still not the worst I've done - that was Wordperfect Office... Always used to break some time after disk 48. D-:<

Spectre rises from the dead to bite Intel in the return stack buffer

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Re: STOP THE WORLD!!

the Motorola 68000 is unaffected

So, embedded systems are fine. Shame the IoT boys and girls seem to invent new ways of running everything in the software instead! :)

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Re: STOP THE WORLD!!

In comparison to what?

In comparison to flailing around wailing "Oh noes! The lock is imperfect - I can't buy a lock until all of the security flaws are fixed! The lock manufacturers are robbing everyone by continuing to make locks with these known vulnerabilities! They need to stop making any locks until they perfect them!" whilst somebody nicks the lawnmower from your unlocked shed...

That's my bugbear with the gnashing of teeth going around here - the idealism in the face of the real world, and the notion that I (as someone who just needs to get a job done) am somehow a lackey to the corrupt semiconductor industry.

Phew - glad to get that off my chest! Also, I didn't downvote you - it was actually a fair question.

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STOP THE WORLD!!

Okay - so which muppet is going to suggest that Intel, AMD et al stop manufacturing CPUs until *this* hole is patched too? As I keep saying, this is going to take a long time to fix, and the world can't just stop. We'll just have to muddle along as best we can, uncertain as to who can break our security.

Still, we all use mechanical locks, and they've been proven to be vulnerable time and time again...

IBM wants everyone to marvel at the size of its Strategic Imperatives

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Coat

"Do you not marvel?!"

Too ill to RTFA. Came here to find that sentence. Had to correct an injustice.

Mine's the one with the bog roll in the pocket...

Fukushima reactors lend exotic nuclear finish to California's wines

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Re: " researchers at the University of Bordeaux Centre d'Études Nucléaires de Bordeaux-Gradignan"

Sorry, guys (and gauls), our wine is still world-class, and it's going to stay that way.

It did amuse me that the French were having a pop at Californian wines. Some of them are really nice, some of them are garbage. But then, it's the same in France. Give me Spanish reds any day.

Taps running dry for Capita? Southern Water pens 5-year managed service

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Re: Missing the obvious

It is cheaper for the water companies to lose 20% of their product through leaks than it is to fix those leaks

I know, but the thing is that the leaks won't fix themselves. And new leaks will appear over time. So at what point is it not more profitable to just piss away the drinking water? Besides which, if it costs £10k to fix a leaky pipe that's losing £1k a year, then it will eventually pay for itself and keep paying for itself.

I'm sure there's logic there. I just don't see it.

Anyway, apparently my street is being closed next week to repair water pipes. That'll be fun - there's only one way in and out...

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Re: Missing the obvious

Well, duh, then actually build some more capacity, instead of sweating the existing reservoir stock to supply more people.

Or, you know, fix the leaks. I was reading somewhere (I'm tired - go and look for yourself...) that in England and Wales the water supply pipes leak about a bathful of water per day for each household. Get that squared up and the supply would be in rude health for the extra demand. At least for a decent interval...

Ah, British summer. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the internet is on the fritz

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Re: Big red ball?

It was magnificently red when it set last night. Admittedly it was off the coast of Spain, heading North at >30000ft. However, it was the nicest past of a Ryanair flight.

Es are good, Es are good. Xeon Es are good, says Intel: Entry-level workstation CPUs touted

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Re: It's broken, yet they keep selling.

Go with Proxmox instead of VMware.

That uses KVM underneath. I looked at KVM, Xen, VMware and Hyper-V, but I need decent USB passthrough for some things. It seemed that VMware gave the best USB passthrough functionality, although you need VT-X or whatever it's called on the CPU to make it work properly.

I only need a single host, so the management tools are unnecessary. For me the biggest drawback to VMware is that you have to get expensive licensees to create RAID sets on the host. Even then, I want to spin the storage out to a separate box.

Hmmm. Looks like it'll run my Mikrotik CHR, and it's been a while since I looked. Maybe time to have another nose at it.

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Re: Really? FFS, what do you want "them" to do?

You supporting them selling known broken kit as working is the reason that someone else is going to get screwed.

I do understand that, but stopping selling an imperfect product because there is no perfect product, for an extended period, is like being told not to breathe at all when evacuating a burning building because the air is a bit smoky.

I'm also not ignorant to the Pinto factor where a dangerous product continued to be sold with impunity because there was no punishment to the manufacturer, and people died as a result. I agree that that scenario is also no good.

Perhaps the solution would be to keep the existing processor ranges the same, and in parallel sell chips without these bugs. They'd be slower but more secure, and gradually the secure features could merge into the mainstream devices. But I bet I know which ones will sell much, much more, and there would be no guarantee of security on the slower ones, because nobody knows which other bugs will crop up.

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Re: It's broken, yet they keep selling.

Really? FFS, what do you want "them" to do? Just stop selling any CPUs until all the bugs are fixed?

1) Good luck with fixing every permutation of every possible bug.

2) If you managed to, it'd probably be slow as hell.

3) Even if Intel held off selling chips for 18 months just to fix the Spectre bugs, they'd singlehandedly cause a global recession. Even if AMD didn't stop. Like it or not, Intel CPUs are the powerhouse of data industries.

Besides that, look like tasty chips. I'm thinking of a VMware setup for all my servers at home, and this could fit right in. :)

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Re: Love the title

IT angle?

Ebenezer banging away on a Psion Series 5 throughout the video, of course!

Fix this faxing hell! NHS told to stop hanging onto archaic tech

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Re: Not the only Guvmint dept to use fax

As I'd left it rather tight for time post-wise I phoned and said I could scan it and email it. I was told very firmly that they could only accept a fax.

When I was dealing with them heavily last year, it took a will fit them to receive a fax. No word of a lie. The fax was received immediately, of course, but it took a week to be passed to the correct department internally.

It's like they deliberately invented a ridiculously inefficient system.

Tech support chap given no training or briefing before jobs, which is why he was arrested

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Re: Slighty different, but *user* training ...

Christ. The hours I've wasted trying to talk people through using Word or Outlook, let alone an industry-specific application...

Cops suspect Detroit fuel station was hacked before 10 drivers made off with 2.3k 'free' litres

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Re: Critical National Infrastructure vulnerability

It was a national emergency and people were running our of petrol.

The petrol station attendants were surprisingly accommodating of motorcycles. Just as well too. More than once they let me past the cordon to top up.

I think I'm a clone now: Chinese AMD Epyc-like server chips appear in China. What gives?

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Re: Backdoors

Yeah. I replied to that, but got completely the wrong end of the stick. Re-reading it, I see you're proposing the Mobile Oppression Palace, where a handful of dignitaries can subjugate an entire planet for pennies a day.

Sysadmin cracked military PC’s security by reading the manual

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Re: I crashed Windows.

AC because if my old boss is reading this he'll come smack me

Naw, mate. AC because:

Back when I was doing QA for Packard Bell

Back in the P60 days those things were abominable, with that shitty operating environment slapped on top of Windows. And those god-awful WinModems. I shudder at the thought these days. The number of them we sent back as faulty...

Still, can't blame you. Worse things have been done in the name of paying the mortgage...

As far as the gender pay gap in Britain goes, IBM could do much worse

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Statutory redundancy payouts

They're the same whether you're male or female...

Git365. Git for Teams. Quatermass and the Git Pit. GitHub simply won't do now Microsoft has it

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GitOverit

How about simply MS Bob? They'll have the banners and the promo bags in a cupboard somewhere, I'm sure. Just make it v2.0. Or better, v6.0 - then everyone will know it works.

IBM memo to staff: Our CEO Ginni is visiting so please 'act normally!'

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Re: Mobile office

goods lift rigged as his own office

We used to have a client in Bucklersbury House on Cannon Street in London. The lift from the loading bay there had a desk and chair for the security guard. It was ludicrous because there wasn't much space to start with - we had to negotiate with him to get his furniture out first before we could empty the office...

It all looked very Terry Gilliam though.

Happy birthday, you lumbering MS-DOS-based mess: Windows 98 turns 20 today

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Re: "NT4 was mostly 3.51 with a 'slicker' front end."

No, for example it moved the graphics code in the kernel - performance improved, but it also led to many issues in the beginning because drivers had to be rewritten and bad ones would BSODs easily.

This. Pre-SP3 NT4 choked on the ATI video drivers all the time. In fact, most video drivers demanded SP3 before you could install them. Even the supremely vanilla cards in servers.

Got all the way to SP6a in the end...

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Re: Those were the days my friend.

Yes, let's be fair to it - it was a significant improvement, especially SE. Still, as a gamer you still got used to reinstalling Windows every 4 months or so to speed everything up. NT managed to get rid of that - sure it was a bit slower, but it managed to maintain the same speed long-term.

Kids these days, and all that...

Edit - oh, and I also bought OS/2 Warp. Did a great job, and was rock solid. I was even able to play System Shock and Descent smoothly in DOS windows. Say what you will about IBM these days, but OS/2 blew Windows out of the water for a long, long time.

UK taxman has amassed voice profiles of 5.1 million taxpayers

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Re: I'm one of those 5M

can't you just put the radio on or fart on the phone or something when it's taking the samples?

I couldn't say. I didn't try. I was more concerned about getting to speak to someone who could stop the bailiffs turning up at my door.

So, they basically nudged and winked at the strong arm of the law to get everyone to comply.