* Posts by defiler

1469 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2010

HPE's Spaceborne supercomputer returns to terra firma after 615 days on the ISS

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Re: "... because pulling a plug on a Linux server is the worst thing you can do. "

You were attacked by a tiger after crashing your motorbike? Talk about having a bad day!

Go big or go home. Crashed it into a bridge too. Must be disappointing to break an ankle falling down the stairs or something. :-/

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Re: "... because pulling a plug on a Linux server is the worst thing you can do. "

Not far off it. I swear I crashed right in front of a doctor riding his bicycle.

He took charge of the scene there and then. Very professional.

By the time the ambulance arrived a second doctor had stopped who was walking along that street, and a third stopped in his car. All eager to help.

Honestly the first time I've ever been seen by three doctors before a nurse. The joys of binning a bike in the rush-hour traffic. I was amused at the time by the discussions of:

"I'm a doctor - can I help?"

"It's okay, Doctor, I'm a doctor."

"Okay - carry on, Doctor!"

Twice...

To this day I still don't know precisely what went wrong, so I have to put it down to ham-fistedness on the brake.

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Re: "... because pulling a plug on a Linux server is the worst thing you can do. "

I'm always amused by "the worst thing" that people think of. They usually show a distinct lack of imagination.

Same with the "rate your pain from 0 to 10, where 0 is normal and 10 is the worst pain imaginable" thing. Last time I was in the back of an ambulance I'd crashed a motorbike, broken bones, and was hesitant about going to a 4. (Tiger attack always adds at least one point...)

Barbie Girl was wrong? Life is plastic, it's not fantastic: We each ingest '121,000 pieces' of microplastics a year

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Re: And we are all still alive.......

Obligatory XKCD for illustration (alt text)

https://xkcd.com/674/

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Re: What fraction of a gram ? @Duncan

Watched people in Tesco on Sunday literally grabbing bags to put their bananas in. I mean really... They've made it halfway around the world without a bag, and they're joined together, in individual wrappers. I wonder if they get bags of crisps and put them into bags...

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Re: What fraction of a gram ? @Duncan

Bob, stop being a tit.

Nobody is seriously trying to propose an outright ban on all plastics. The plastic in your keyboard, your car interior, your food packaging etc etc are all safe for now. People are talking about the plastic microbeads that are used to make shampoo and conditioner shinier when it comes out of the bottle.

Fuck that stuff - we don't need it. It pleases us for 3 seconds, and lingers in the environment for decades, perhaps longer. Sort of like kids :-/

Just because the use of some plastics is good, the use of all the plastics everywhere is terrible.

Apple kills iTunes, preps pricey Mac Pro, gives iPad its own OS – plus: That $999 monitor stand

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Re: "Cupertino idiot tax"

Yep. Apologies - my mind filtered that on first read.

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Re: "Cupertino idiot tax"

Let's be fair to diamonds - they're of great value as cutting surfaces. Think diamond-tipped drills, for example. But you don't exactly need the Hope Diamond to do that. Diamond dust is about where you are for that, and it's cheap.

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Re: "Cupertino idiot tax"

It’s worth it when people pay it.

I do so hate that phrase, but it doesn't mean that you're wrong, sadly. And some chump (and I'll be happy to call them a chump to their face) will probably blow a grand on that stand. And they'll probably laugh in my face and say they got "work" to pay for it.

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Re: "Cupertino idiot tax"

On the face of it I'd agree with you, but we don't know what it's capabilities are yet. It's possible it's worth the money; who knows. My brother used to fit AV equipment and he said some of the mounts for big plasma screens used to cost thousands, so it's possible.

It had better fly for that money. With wings. Silently.

However, for what it's worth, I bought a plasma screen for home when the mounts were that sort of money. Panasonic wanted >£900 for a flat-against-the-wall screen. I got a Barco one for £220 I think. And it was well-enough built that I could have hung ten of those tellies on it.

Just because it's that price doesn't mean it's worth that price. I have no great beef about Apple generally - I don't use their kit because I feel it doesn't justify the cost in general, but I accept that some people want to pay extra for "pretty". I accept that Apple are generally simpler to use than the alternatives, but that they're a pig when they don't "just work". I also think that the price of their top-end kit is outrageous. The word "veblen" springs to mind.

And in all the offices I've been in (from 2 users to 2500 users) I've seen more OS/2 machines than Macs.

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unless all of your audience also has the same $5k monitor then they will all see it slightly differently any way

Back in a past life I developed a few websites. You know, back when hooking up to a database at the back end was new and whizzy, and nobody realised you could get admin access on NT4 with an IIS buffer overrun...

Anyway, I showed the current work-in-progress to the client's marketing manager, who complained that their brand logo (on a scabby, cheap, uncalibrated CRT) didn't match the colour of the Pantone chart she held up against it.

She wasn't thrilled when I "fixed" that by banging the brightness up. :)

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Re: How much? They gotta be kidding, right?

That's a bit like people complaining about the costs of oil-changes for Bugatti Veyrons (20k apparently), though they'll never be able to afford such a car anyway in the first place.

True, but the justification for buying a Veyron (or a Chiron, its replacement) is basically to go dick-waving with your wallet. I'd prefer a comparison to the good old Ford RS200. A beast of a machine, made to do a very niche job, very well indeed. And you'll need a new clutch every 5 racing starts - it'll be about £25k.

Supra smart TVs aren't so super smart: Hole lets hackers go all Max Headroom on e-tellies

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Re: Not impressed with so called smart TVs full stop.

I had a lovely Samsung that developed a fault. Extended warranty job with the shop - no problem. Since it was 1080 they couldn't source a replacement panel and let me go to town in the shop with a budget to blow. I picked a Sony Bravia with Android that was pretty high up the range.

I can't use half of the catch-up features without plugging in an aerial. I don't even have an aerial point here because I have TVHeadend running in the garage. The menus are slow and clunky. I wouldn't give much of a shit, running everything through Kodi (including broadcast telly), but it doesn't pass half the buttons through on HDMI CEC either. Numbers? Channel up/down? Nah mate.

A friend of mine has a very similar Sony, and has a whole world of problems with it. He actually uses the TV to do TV stuff rather than just as a display, and he regaled me with his litany of woes which ran for the best part of an hour without repeating. (We were driving somewhere, so we had time to burn on a good moan!)

When Sony get it right, they can produce something fantastic. I had a beautiful Sony DVP-NS900 DVD player hooked up to an STR-VA555ES amp, and my PS2 plugged in. Each one of these devices was brilliant in its day. And the Trinitron tubes gave great colour (although I had a Panasonic plasma screen to go with that kit). But aside from these examples, Sony have been pretty universally disappointing.

As for my TV? Two stars out of five. "Fucking mediocre"

Don't think I'll get a job in What Hifi with that though.

Also, my old Humax kicked ass :)

Planes, fails and automobiles: Overseas callout saved by gentle thrust of server CD tray

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Re: Terrorists with spanners

Don't let the terrorists find out about Metrinch!!

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I could take my old Game Gear onboard. I'm pretty confident I could bludgeon a cow with it before it did me any serious damage...

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Re: Ah the old push-out-the-cd-tray trick

And then somebody leaves it on when they logout of iLO...

That said, on the one hand, I think they timeout these days, and on the other your iLO should allow you to mount an ISO, skirting around this whole issue.

(That may be iLO Advanced, but it's so well worth it for days like these!)

Two weeks after Microsoft warned of Windows RDP worms, a million internet-facing boxes still vulnerable

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Re: It's not only the internet facing ones...

A thumb-up for pointing out that many RDP services are on non-standard ports, but I can assure you that I bawl the shit out of people for putting RDP straight on the internet on *any* machine, even if it runs Exchange / IIS.

At the *very* least, put a Remote Desktop Gateway in there. Minimum.

If servers go down but no one hears them, did they really fail? Think about it over lunch

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Re: lol reminds me of the time with facilities engineer onsite

Yeah - I didn't know you could plug voodoo dolls into the mains. Learn something new every day!

When two tribes go to war... Intel, AMD tease new chips at Computex: Your spin-free summary

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Pfft - 48KB was enough for Manic Miner.

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

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Re: First step, tell them to fire security

I once worked in PC World (I know, I know...)

The building had previously been a supermarket with a big glass front, but had some mask in their corporate purple behind the glass during the renovations. Some opportunist (a couple of years later) tried ram-raiding the place in a Transit van with bull-bars, oblivious to the inch-or-so-thick steel place behind the glass. I went to work the next morning to see the police swarming over a dead Transit and a crack in the glass on the store.

Tim Peake's Soyuz lands in London after jaunt around the UK

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Re: Manchester

You know I hate you both, right?

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I was thinking that as I typed it.

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Re: Manchester

And your right, the Saturn V next to it is truly gargantuan.

"you're"

And I'm too late to edit it, so it makes me twitch. Damn.

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Re: Manchester

Saw the Mercury Redstone at JSC near Houston. It was like three of the bins you get outside restaurants stacked up with a cone on the top. Teeny thing. I was astonished. Would take some balls to go up on one. And some patience to stay in one for nearly a day and a half like Gordo Cooper. I cramp up just thinking about that.

And your right, the Saturn V next to it is truly gargantuan.

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Re: Manchester

Wow - a downvote for a fact that can be independently verified. We really do live in a post-truth world.

Manchester has glommed into surrounding towns and cities so that you can drive between them in one massive urban area. Okay, it's called Greater Manchester, but focusing on The City of Manchester is like looking at Los Angeles, focusing on The City of Los Angeles, and regarding The City of Beverly Hills as a separate place, and Glendale, and Compton, and Santa Monica etc etc.

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Re: Scarier than Manchester?

Ssh! We daren't name it! Only a pseudonym.

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But it might be a better tourist attraction if London hadn't nicked all the good stuff.

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Re: Manchester

True, but Manchester is now a sprawling conurbation (and I thought I'd never use that word after Higher Geography!), with an area of around 500 sq mi, and a population of about 2.75 million.

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Re: Scarier than Manchester?

Yeah - it would have been nice to know. I'd certainly have popped along to see it, even though we still don't get to know where it was beyond "Scotland". I guess it wasn't East Kilbryde, or they'd have had the wheels off it.

AI can now animate the Mona Lisa's face or any other portrait you give it. We're not sure we're happy with this reality

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Re: They're already doing this

BLOCKCHAIN!!

Too early?

Apple reckons mystery new material will debug butterfly keyboard woes in latest MacBook Pros

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Re: Blinkered

If it was Play Expo, they also had a Philips G7000 (Magnavox Odyssey 2) there. Surely they can't be as bad as the keyboard on that thing?

SpecNext was decent though - very usable keyboard for its size.

Exclusive: Windows for Workgroups terror the Tartan Bandit confesses all to The Register

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Re: TCP/IP?

I'm suddenly reassured that I've not quite lost all of my marbles yet!

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Re: TCP/IP?

Not entirely. There was Windows for Workgroups 3.1 as well.

I have a nagging suspicion that there was Windows 3.11 (sans workgroups) too, but I can't find any evidence. It was basically 3.1 with bug fixes, and without the networking component.

Still, 25 years ago now - I don't suppose there much reason to care!

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Re: The lengths you have to go to...

That's blocked too. That's one of the first things to go!

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Re: TCP/IP?

I never actually had to lay my hands on that part of it, so I don't bear the battle scars. However it did handle the reckless loads they were putting on it better than Ethernet.

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Re: The lengths you have to go to...

And that's why Run is removed from our Start menus too! Interesting that you have no C drive but you can use the admin shares, though...

We have users that break 2.5GB of RAM on Excel, and have problems with Word using Profile Redirection on certain documents, so some users can abuse the systems just as hard as you when they "just do spreadsheets and documents". Not that long ago that that level of resource was used to forecast the weather...

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Re: TCP/IP?

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was contracting at a little finance company that would rhyme with "Eh - gone". They were pushing out Windows NT4 at the time to replace all the OS/2 machines, and alongside that they were binning the Token Ring network for 100 base T Ethernet. So far so good, but I got chatting with one of the senior guys there (I was "just a contractor" and therefore left in the dark about most things). He told me that the biggest snag they were hitting was that one of their applications ran on NetBEUI, and most of the office had to use it. There were over 2000 seats in that building. NetBEUI is unroutable. The only reason it had worked in the past is because of the Token Ring. It gave everyone an equal shot at the network, and stayed up under heavy load. Once it went onto Ethernet it just collapsed every time in testing.

I left before they got that resolved. Wonder whatever happened... Only place I ever worked that actually used NetBEUI, rather than just having it installed because that's what Win95 ran. Everywhere else has been IP/IPX. Even the Win3.11 sites.

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Re: Stock Control System

Last time I had to use a USB dongle (and it's been a while) it was for a voicemail server. The hardware was on its last legs, so I pointed out to management that for much less than buying a new server I could shore up the VMware system and buy a network->USB device. Axis box, from memory. That way the VM could still see its USB dongle, and I could still vmotion around when required.

Maybe something worth looking at - save losing the dongles too, because they can stay under lock and key!

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Re: The lengths you have to go to...

Nah - they can't go around deleting stuff. We do have ACLs and such.

Of course some applications are so shoddily written that they demand local admin permissions to run (and developers wonder why we get so annoyed at them...), so in that case it's imperative that the user has these things hidden from them. It's not perfect, but sometimes it's the best we can do.

Also, it stops them trying to save things onto their C drive. That means that everything goes into a file server where it gets two volume shadows a day and a backup overnight (which is duplicated offsite). That makes it our problem if they lose something. By taking away that temptation we save ourselves the headache of somebody losing a file from a system that may only be backed up weekly because it's not data-bearing. I have 4 drives visible for different things, and none of them are local.

Also, in a multi-user system (XenApp), we don't necessarily want the users to see who else is on that machine (by snooping in the c:\users folder).

In short, there are a bunch of sort-of-adequate reasons to hide the local drives, but absolutely no reasons to not hide them. And since it's controlled by Group Policy, of course, admin users get to see the local drives or we wouldn't be able to do a whole lot!

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The lengths you have to go to...

Even using Group Policies there are so many hoops you have to jump through to lock down a desktop these days. And then, just when you think you've got it figured out, you realise that users can arbitrarily browse the C drive in Chrome. So you block that, and suddenly a dozen people can't open PDFs from emails because it writes to a temporary file in C: and they have the file association set to Chrome... So then you have to revert them to Adobe Reader (or other).

I don't believe it's possible to have a usable corporate network and have users literally unable to muck about with it. I think we're pretty close, but even now we find the odd oddity.

All nodes lead to Rome: Epyc leak spills deets on second-gen Zen 32-core AMD server chippery

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Re: Can Intel still sell to the Cloud makers

Don't underestimate the lure of vMotion / live motion / whatever else it's called.

If you get the basics of your VMware cluster right, you can migrate to newer Intel CPUs as and when they become available. Simply add the new machines to the cluster, vMotion across, and the users are none the wiser. Once everything is across you can remove the old servers from the cluster and upgrade the CPU baseline. Seamless.

If you choose to switch to AMD instead, you have to set up a different cluster. Then you have to shut down each VM, migrate it to the other cluster, and then start it up again. It doesn't take long but it's disruptive. Server people don't like "disruptive".

Where I work we're now down to about 2 hours per day without people scheduled to be logged in, so taking down a core system to move it in that way could be a chore. Not saying it can't be done, not at all. All I'm saying is that's going to cause significant resistance against switching vendors.

Boeing admits 737 Max sims didn't accurately reproduce what flying without MCAS was like

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That's their sales pitch on the fix. Their proposed software update will limit MCAS to a single movement per event, preventing the ongoing wrestle with trim.

Still don't know if I'm terribly comfortable with their proposal, though.

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So the simulator disagrees substantially with reality?

Well what use is the simulator then?

Tesla driver killed after smashing into truck had just enabled Autopilot – US crash watchdog

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Re: What's the point?

No. Those are sensible 20 zones, and round these parts they're liberally sprinkled with speed bumps. I mean the whole of Edinburgh. I mean the 30 zones that were all redesignated to 20 by the council to "reduce both road deaths and pollution", which the council have openly admitted have actually increased both, and which they've announced that they can't afford to revert to 30. I mean those ridiculous 20 zones.

But thanks for judging me as an arsehole on the road.

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Re: Autopilot

It's not a traffic dense environment, nor do planes cross your flight part perpendicularly to your own direction..

Last July, on a flight from EDI->TFS, I got a fright looking out the window and watching an airliner heading pretty much straight towards us, perpendicular to our path. It passed directly beneath us. Would have been only a few hundred feet below. Close enough to see the pilots quite clearly.

So, it does happen from time to time.

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Re: What's the point?

...says the guy posting AC...

Mostly because people would like a little privacy. I know I would. I'd also like my insurance company not to know if I was doing 85mph to overtake on the motorway, or 25mph in the (ridiculous) 20 zones, or things like that.

Didn't cause a problem? Fair play - no harm, no foul.

Crashed? Alright - let's see just how naughty a boy/girl you were, and how hard we need to throw the book at you.

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Re: What's the point?

I would expect the car to record such alarms in some kind of "black box" and/or telemetry. I would expect NTSB to have this info in its reports.

This is a very good idea, and I have no idea if it's the case. But not just record the alarms. Of course they wouldn't take up much memory in the diagnostic log, but if it were also to include a "flight data recorder" for want of a better name, it could record every piece of data from every sensor in the car for (say) 30 seconds after the alarm. If there's not been a catastrophic event in that time (sudden spike in G-forces, for example, which would deploy the seatbelt pre-tentioners, airbags etc) then the data can be overwritten.

That level of detail would help crash investigations to recreate the incident fairly accurately and understand why people died. It would also allow Tesla to recover the data and determine why their automation systems failed to prevent a collision (even a non-fatal one).

Might not be a bad feature to fit to all cars with fancy cruise control, auto-braking and all that malarkey, in fact. And it needn't record any data until the alarm were triggered, so it wouldn't wear out flash storage and it wouldn't be a constant snoop in the cabin.

Time to reformat the old wallet and embiggen your smartmobe: The 1TB microSD is here

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Re: That's 2PB in a Coke can

Then it's settled. We have to stop the cats.

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That's 2PB in a Coke can

Just saying...

C'mon, UK networks! Poor sods have 'paid' for their contract phones a few times over... Tell 'em about good deals

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Aye, TVHeadend is great. I've run a "server" at home for years, running CentOS 6 and a Hauppage dual-tuner card (about the only thing supported on that kernel), but it also has my Squeezebox Server, movie library, personal files, databases for odds and ends, DNS/DHCP and everything else, so I've not really been able to touch it to update anything.

Now I've got a couple of PS3 tuners hooked up to a RPi running MiniSatIP in the attic (next to my old server), putting DVB-T onto the network to be collected by a Debian VM running TVHeadend in the garage. That's distributed to all the RPis running Kodi (and my desktop running Kodi, which is much faster for updating libraries). The PS3 DVB-T boxes are dual-tuners, so I can connect to 4 multiplexes at the same time, although they're only SD. I've got some XBox One tuners for HD, but haven't had much success with them yet. I'll get another Pi to MiniSatIP those onto the network in time too.

Using MiniSatIP means that I have the bare minimum of hardware next to the aerial, and everything else can be handled by virtual machines. Gradually I'll be moving everything from this "server" to VMs so that I can maintain parts separately. It does seem to need rebooted regularly though...