Posts by Voland's right hand

This is the scariest sign of the times. Even His ExaultedNess Bong The Great cannot plot a monetization course through this hurricane of cr*p.

Spot on

*** New Position ***

Departmental Scapegoat

We invite Applications from suitable people for the position of Departmental Scapegoat.

The Scapegoat will be expected to be available for blame sessions and buck stops from the hours of 8:30am until 5:00pm. Some other hours work will be required, for which time can be taken in lieu when the position holder should be doing something extremely important in the department. This is a full time position.

Applicants will be expected to have a full knowledge of excuses from the mundane ("I forgot"), to extraordinary ("Kidnapped in my car by extra-terrestrials shaped like giant full nappies"), and should be able to take hostility up to and including being shot at by lunatic computer users. Applicant should expect to have a career span of approximately 2 weeks between firings, and should be familiar with the work of all members of staff, should they require his/her services. Applicant should ideally have a cringing crawly demeanour and make mistakes in day-to-day life to harbour an external appearance of utter stupidity.

Remuneration will be on a scale from the ludicrously overpaid, with provision with demotion to the pathetically miserable.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and shall consider all losers without prejudice.

Applications should be made to anyone, preferably on the back of a list of groceries.

-- Simon Paul Travaglia(*)

(*) it is a pity we can get only the new BOFH Simon's stuff now. The really brilliant old stuff is no longer available.

Re: Aggers and Jugears?

Well, it is even published on smeared toilet paper so what do you expect?

Re: Move along, no science here

Tell that to the Ukraine.

You have been watching the Beeb and Faux too much.

The story is significantly more complex that you think. The previous governments up to the current one regardless of their shapes, colors, etc did a deal with Russia:

1. Russia keeps the Black Sea Fleet base at Novorossyisk and pays for it. That is a major difference compared to USA keeping Gitmo or UK keeping Acrotiri and using a three finger payment to the hosting country.

2. Russian speaking minority in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine gets the right to speak their own language, be educated in their own language with the last pre-conflict administration amending this to have it as a second official language. Basically - the Irish, Finnish, etc setup.

3. Ukraine gets subsidized gas and some more candy

THAT was all thrown out by the window with both USA and Eu actively investing into it all being thrown out. The first act of the new government and parliament was to revoke ALL minority rights granted to the Russian minority (which is actually a majority in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea). The second one was to tear down all economic agreement. The third one was to arm neonazi militias which have openly declared that a good Russian is a dead Russian in the past (and now too).

It is the usual case - we support someone whose first action in power is to f*** all rights we proclaim as sacred and is slightly to the right of Attilla The Hun. Traditionally this was done in Lat Am. The sole difference today is that we have shifted the activity to the Middle East and around Russia and have mixed up some religious hate for good measure (Catholic vs Orhtodox in this case).

So, let's suppose for a second that the kid down the street hacks it and posts a "I will now nuke France's sorry a***" in his name on Twitter.

Or let's look at something more subtle. Someone hacks it, shorts company X stock, then tweets. His tweets have moved shares of multi-billion capitalization public companies by 10% up or down in 10 minutes so that is a very nice tidy sum right there.

As long as he is carrying that phone and emanating Trumpishness through it he has TARGET written all over him.

Re: How Many Trolls ???

Is this the bus going to the airport?

Yes, yes, it is the bus going to the airport

Pointing at the bus going in the opposite direction. What about that one? Does that go to the airport?

Yes, yes, that one goes to the airport.

Re: I would not call them "personal" email accounts

Trump rhetoric about "draining the swamp"?

As someone said on the register a few weeks back. He is draining it all right. You can see all the loverly reptiles out on dry land ready to engorge themselves now.

Re: HOW???

My exact thought.

Also, 30G will have some serious difficulty dissolving in a glass of orange juice. Caffeine is not that soluble in cold water.

If anything prior to that did not ring any alarm bells, the fact that 90% of it has remained on the bottom of the glass should have given some food for thought.

This is well known as: "One (well informed) birdie told me so".

Attacks like this usually leave no traces so it is all conjectures based on target choice and "who will benefit from this".

The issue is actually attachment.

You can easily provide assist to the foot as you have a natural attachment point in the form of a boot.

Now try to provide assist to the upper portion of the leg. Hard exosuit does not have issues here as it applies the assist to the shell. In a soft one you will need to drill the bone somewhere near the knee to fix attachment points to it.

You forgot the really horrible one

Tory conferences - age verification definitely needed.

Re: Render times are getting better

Actually, bandwidth to the satellite is getting better. The primary limitation was and still is the time to download the images.

Re: 'charged to 80 per cent in just 25 minutes'

but it's still not too long to spend at a motorway service station.

It is. Petrol/Diesel queue increment is sub-5 minutes. It is even less in countries like Spain where it is customary to fuel up and move to the parking lot to free your slot before you pay. So even if you have to wait for 2-3 cars in front of you, you are still OK. Now imagine that re-factored for 25 minute wait. Now, refactor it further allowing for the occasional tw*t in a petrol BMW, Jag or RangeRover parking in the electric bay because it is closest to the station and they feel their privilege entitles them to it.

So unless every parking slot in the service station parking lot has a charger and that charger is compatible with all cars this is a no go.

Re: Reinventing are we?

I guess a lot of things are more practical when you're not lugging around a couple of hundred pounds of fragile meat with all the associated life support stuff.

Not as much of a problem of fragile meat as not having the right tech at the time. Today, you can fit high res cameras and distance sensors in the tail at the cost of a few tens of dollars and project the whole affair onto the pilot's HUD. This was not available in the 1950es.

Similarly, you can implement a fully actuated platform on deck which will compensate for some of the bobbing of the ship in rough seas allowing the craft to land on the intended ship class - the ones that carry helicopters today. That was not really an option 60 years ago - the electronics and sensors to control it were not available.

A very interesting option would be using this as an early warning system. It can definitely stay at much higher altitude and most likely stay up for longer than a rotary AWACS.

I want to see the printer design

I want to see the printer design capable of accommodating a golf club as a printer head.

When I close my eyes I see a nightmarish vision of the ancient IBM typewriter style daisy wheel with golf clubs attached to it. It will print all right. Very deep imprints - in whatever you put into where the clubs hit.

Re: A corrupt Italian business

Just a thought... Does BT have a anything in Greece?

Re: Military-industrial 101

Who supplies most of the EU in weapons? We do.

It is less and less actually. With the exception of fighter aircraft and some of their armament where the idiotic F35 programme is a political issue most other continental Eu weapons are now locally supplied.

If memory serves me right, nobody in NATO imports USA tanks and fighting vehicle. It is either indigenous for the countries which have own designs or Leopard 2E which is German. Same for fighting vehicles - indigenous, German or Austrian. Small arms - indigenous, German or Austrian. Artillery - indigenous, German, Austrian or Swedish (Bofors). Missiles - same as last one + French and Italian (Finmechanica). Ships - nobody in his sane mind outside USA will buy a US built ship today.

Compare this to 30-40 years ago when most of NATO was using USA tanks, fighting vehicles, etc.

Re: Priorities

My exact thoughts.

The electronics, software, etc R&D in UK is mostly moribund. There is a bit of stuff going on here and there and a few bright spots like Arm. Otherwise it is nowhere near where it was 15 years ago. It has been superseded (in terms of investment interest) by biotech and pharma through and through.

It is quite easy to quantify too - 20 years ago Cambridge and Guildford was 70%+ telecoms, electronics and software. It is now 70%+ biotech and pharma.

So, the government has decided to try to flog the already dead IT horse (all these business long moved elsewhere) to neigh and run the grand national. Good luck with that one - it will take much more than 5Bn.

It has also decided to kill the current "goose that is laying the golden eggs". Biotech and pharma is run by 70%+ Eu labor. UK simply does not produce anything like the amount of native graduates in this area. So it neither gets public financing nor the labor it needs. One act of gratuitous self harm is followed by another act of gratuitous self-harm. Fantastic Mrs May. Sheer unadulterated genius. Whatagal...

Re: "At least he is doing it properly - law and regs first"

Just because he can ignore/massage whatever constitution Russia have

That is the rub. He actually does not - you are listening too much to Faux and the Beeb. Every single thing is put into a law first. Then it is enforced. By the way, as a comparison, it is significantly more difficult for Милиция to get personal details from a SP or Content Provider in Russia than in Great Britain. You have to get a court order which can be contested. In UK the police invokes RIPA and the SP immediately bends over.

and being a journalist/human rights activist it's pretty dangerous there. True. It is courtesy of our handywork too. If we did not invest that much into regime change operations pushing through human rights organizations, being a part of one there would not be that dangerous.

Putin himself is a product of our regime change operations. We (directly or through our middle-easter friends) gave a few billion bucks to "freedom fighters" around their borders. These after that went to use maternity wards as human shields, blow up trolleybuses, take whole theatres as hostages and murder wholesale whole primary schools - you name it. If we did not finance them, there would have been no grounds for a macho strongman to arise. Russia would have continued to descend into 3rd world country status unaided. It would have been ruled by some adorable Eltzin-like alcoholic and be of no relevance on the world scene. Instead of that, we got it where it is today - Putin's emergence is the mother of all blowbacks from f***ed up regime change operations. He, like it or not is our creation.

Re: Odd belief

Ever tried to get a car moving after the break cables have frozen solid? A HUGE chunk of USA has high humidity and temperatures in the -10 or lower zone in winter. Even if there is snow if you east coast humidity _AND_ unprotected break cables you can have quite a bit of fun.

Now, the fact that the rather sane habit of not using the handbrake in _WINTER_ has spread to the southern USA and has become a standard in summer is indeed quite dumb. So is unfortunately the design of having a significant part of the break cables completely unprotected under the car.

Re: Only 15?

How long does it take to remove a destroyed pylon and replace it exactly?

The issue is not the time to replace it. Same goes for the substations.

The issue is that generating capacity will have to go offline and in emergency dump mode. If you take offline using the emergency procedure a large coal or nuclear power plant it will take days to reconnect it and you need to bring things up slowly bit by bit as the capacity comes online. You also risk damage if you go offline in emergency mode - after the grid collapses not _ALL_ of the capacity will be coming back without repairs.

If you hurry to bring it back online because you have the politicos breathing down your neck you are likely to overload the system, it will go into emergency dump mode again and you need to start from scratch. With some more damage to account for.

This is where wind, hydro and other renewables are quite handy by the way - most of them are on/off nearly instantaneously, while they cannot carry the grid on their own they can definitely help you balance the load while you are bringing the capacity online.

Re: It is not the backward, it is the forward bit which is the issue

SO, Micro-shaft: What's SO HARD???

Managing the network. For lots of clients. Properly. Something you do not need to do. Size matters I am afraid.

In order to manage the network fully, Microsoft uses DHCP and couples that with DNS integrating the whole thing off AD.

That works only half-way on v6 because v6 was engineered originally to provide such information off upstream router(s). First and foremost, what is being provided in the router advertisement is only a subset of what you can and should get off DHCP in a well managed network. Second, it equated management == router which is major design limitation. Third, it makes all clients equal which is clearly incorrect in large networks. Different clients get different answers (that is the case even on my home network).

What Microsoft is doing is the right thing (for once) - trying to manage it correctly via DHCP.

What is getting in the way is the fundamentally broken v6 ip autoconfiguration design which makes all clients equal and provides them with information off a router. The router should not be an active configuration management element in a large network. It should shift packets, not perform configuration duties.

If v6 clients could get v6 information in their v4 DHCP request the whole thing would have been a non-issue. Unfortunately, due to the infinite wisdom of some people who have not done real work for decades and mostly make a living by doing raving lunatic rants about the superiority of v6 that was prohibited in the spec.

Re: Not dumb enough

Even the useful devices become too vulnerable by being too smart. It is NOT necessary for a CCTV camera to host a complex *ix OS. Basic CCTV systems have been working securely and stupidly for six decades.

Yes and no. The *ix OS comes courtesy of image analysis. Basic (emphasis on basic) CCTV systems cannot cope with image analysis at the rates generated by modern cameras. Try feeding 10 H264 HD streams into let's say motion even on a fairly hefty CPU and watch the show.

While you can (in theory) implement all the relevant image analysis _AND_ alert actions based on image analysis on a non-*ix OS, it is not worth it. You are likely to end up with something broken and insecure in a different way (f.e. hackable via its alert submission channel). The idea of moving to IPoE + image analysis on the cameras is actually sound. So is the idea of using general purpose OS on the Arm SoC which is running the camera in order to run the analysis there. The overall cost of Cat6 + cameras + DVR/Alert management + power is already half the cost of a comparable "basic CCTV" system and dropping further.

The control protocol however (ONVIF) and the implementations of said control protocol in the field are complete and utter sh*te. The people who came up with it deserve to be subjected to some form of cruel and unusual punishment.

Re: Maggy what have we done... @Hans1

@Hans 1

Land does not have the right to self-determination. People inhabiting the land do and like it or not, the land goes with them.

It is also important to apply this rule fairly too all concerned and not only when it suits us such as:

Kosovans can have the right to self-determination and join Albania (which they will do the moment they can), but Russians and Bulgarians living along the Dnestr in Moldova cannot. Croatians have the right to self-determination, but Russians living in Crimea do not. Scottish have the right to self-determination only when we can rig the referendum by promising lies left right and center which we do not intend to keep and so on. The moment it starts smelling like they will win it we tell them that no, they cannot have it as Westminster will not grant it.

The right either exists or it does not. If Falklands, Seuta, Gibraltar, Jersey, Guernsey and Co are entitled to it, well then so are other places where a majority of the population in a region does not quite fancy being citizens of the country which gave them their current passports. That by the look of it includes you too - you should be able to vote and you can vote.

Re: Why is Oracle still relevant?

The support contracts for them are not. The real money spent by the customers and vendors building on top is not in the database, it is in what they pay for it to be supported.

Also, Oracle is not just databases - it is ERP, Finance and HR packages sitting on top of them. I am not aware of anything free in that area which is worth mentioning. I would have loved to be able to get away from those, but the alternatives are either even more expensive and cumbersome (SAP) or rather limited in their functionality and scale (Microsoft and Co).

Re: HTML5 can do WHAT?!

That is only one of the issues. HTML5 can do most things one has come to associate with a local GUI toolkit. In fact, it is a replacement for a local GUI, multimedia and communications toolkit. That by itself is all right, it is better than executing foreign code... Or is it? All ads are effectively foreign code - they come and go via javascript insertion. Most websites also use tons of 3rd party code. More insertion. And more, and more and more. Each and every one of them becomes a part of the document and is nearly impossible to isolate in its own security domain.

That part of html has had practically zero thought about it and is not likely to be fixed in a subrelease like let's say HTML5.1 either. It is hear to stay and be beaten on the head with large and blunt instruments called noscript and adblock.

Re: Good on Obama!

War is horrific, I rather prefer it that way, as it keeps the village idiots in power from declaring it every other damned day

That is precisely why they should not be hidden, censored and whitewashed.

Trivial

Create an instance/customer specific key, use the key to authenticate to a service, fetch keys from there. The moment you no longer need them, dispose them and ask again.

1. It allows you to migrate the cloud service. The only "permanent" part is relatively lightweight and 100% under your control.

2. It allows you to blacklist dodgy app instances.

3. It allows you to use multiple upstream services.

And so on...