* Posts by Voland's right hand

5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011

Disaster-gawping cam drones to be blasted out of the sky in California

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Re: Precedent exists

A decapita can be arranged. And should be arranged.

Dead device walking: Apple iPod Touch 6th generation

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Re: Surely...

So, may I dare ask, if you control your iHome using that iPhone, how exactly that will work out when you, while making that call on the "most flexible" pocket computer walk out through the door.

One of the key issues in IoT and taking over the home is to be able to do it via more than one route. You have to make the featureset pervasive across a lot of devices.

The primary controller in Apple's strategy quite clearly is the Apple TV. However, it is not enough. Not everyone will take it. There have to be alternatives and the iPad is a perfect candidate - it has the applicable radio set including BT low power, it can interface to sensors and it can run the UI. It is also relatively cheap so if you become dependent on the gadget aspect you may end up shelling some money for that just to have a backup controller.

Google dumps ISP email support. Virgin Media takes ball, stomps home

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BWAHAHAHAHA....

Welcome to the brave new world, which is the good old world.

Bait. Switch. Embrace. Extend. Destroy.

Spamquake subsides: less than half of email is now processed pork

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Neah, it has gone legit, that is all

95% of SPAM I get is generated by two "legitimate" UK spamvertising companies which will sue you out of existence if you mention them anywhere near the word SPAM and which even Spamhaus does not dare to blacklist.

Once you add these you get back to the real numbers. The problem is that if you are a security vendor and list the content networks originating these as SPAM you are looking at a lawsuit for libel under UK jurisdiction the next morning. As in the UK the loser does not pay you cannot afford it so you let them be.

North Korea's Red Star Linux inserts sneaky serial content tracker

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Re: Unexpected?

Not really.

This allows them to track any externally originated piece of content and have trail of breadcrumbs attached to it giving the security service who, how and when shared it.

The fact that they are not interested in adding any tracking info to locally created content shows that they are still interested primarily in tracking foreign content and do not expect _ANY_ internal dissent.

Google, Adobe barricade Flash against hacker hordes – we peek inside

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Why jest?

That is not far off :)

Time for a brutal TELLY-OFF: Android TV versus Firefox OS

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Re: WTF are Google thinking?

I'd rather not see it on the phone either (without asking for advanced mode).

Female blood-suckers zero in on human prey by smelling our breath

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Re: Not convinced.

They navigate by CO2 until they get a lock on via IR and smell from a number of body chemicals in sweat. That is well known.

As far as CO2 plumes + IR go, a candle (without any chemicals added) is capable to spoil their lock-on abilities quite a bit.

That is the real reason for all those candles and oil lamps in the outdoor cafes around the Mediterranean. Some places use scented (or laced with repellent) ones, though frankly there is bugger all difference. A naked flame by itself is more than sufficient to do the job.

United Airlines bug bounty shells out 1.8M miles for three flaws

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Re: And for the negative take on this...

Depends who is expending them.

You care about TIN? Why the Open Compute Project is irrelevant

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Quality does not seem to be a metric of consideration.

Quality does not seem to be a metric of consideration - it never was, never is and never will be in cloud which is what OCP and the like are aimed at. You are supposed to deliver _THAT_ at the software HA layer, not by gold-plating the hardware. A person who is lamenting about the lack of it has seriously missed the plot. By miles.

Did speeding American manhole cover beat Sputnik into space? Top boffin speaks to El Reg

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Not likely

A piece of steel with no aerodynamic properties and no protection at 60km/s even at the altitude of the Colorado area where the tests were conducted (mile or higher) is instant plasma.

ARM servers look to have legs as OVH boots up Cavium cloud

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2x1600W PSU?!?!?!

So much for Arm power efficiency when used in number crunching capacity I guess.

I was expecting 2 x 160.

Toyota recalls 625,000 hybrids: Software bug kills engines dead with THERMAL OVERLOAD

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Re: Seriously

The *only* thing Toyota had going for them was "Quality".

That quality used to be a natural product of everything in terms of technology tested on real life customers in small volumes by Daihatsu on the low end and small vehicles and Lexus on the high end/luxury.

It was real too. It may have been ugly, uninspiring white good created by a committee. But it was bombproof. You could rely on it.

That system was terminated in 2005 and Toyota has never been anything like it used to be ever since. Stuff that should have been caught during R&D and live field trials continuously and repeatedly slips out in the field again, again and again.

So now it is an ugly uninspiring white good created by a committee which is also unreliable to boot.

Run Windows 10 on your existing PC you say, Microsoft? Hmmm.

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Re: I think all my laptops ( bar one) and PCs would run Win10

Indeed and that is the problem here.

I can see all PC manufacturers having kittens.

Instead of the usual refresh bonanza, they are looking at famine here.

This is unheard of - reqs dropping instead of forcing a hardware upgrade.

Microsoft nixes A-V updates for XP, exposes 180 MEEELLION luddites

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Re: How does this change ANYTHING?

The stats presented are from browsing. So the numbers are not for "offline"

Hacking Team spyware rootkit: Even a new HARD DRIVE wouldn't get rid of it

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Re: One should note that Secure Boot won't help in this case

and those can simply get any firmware image they want

The government of DumbF***istan? Give me a break.

Hacking team customers were small dictatorships operating under embargo or semi-embargo which could not purchase proper products from the big guys. Any such government making any demands along the lines you describe would have received a nice 3 finger salute response there and then.

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Re: Security options

You did not read the article. This was targeting primarily laptops.

I have seen multiple times laptops coming back from conferences and trade shows with keyloggers installed. The usual procedure (in sane IT shops) is to zap anything and everything that has been to a list of countries + any trade show where people from said countries where in attendance. This would work against conventional spyware. Against this - I doubt it.

Google joins Bluetooth snoop pals with iBeacon rival tech Eddystone

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Creepier and creepier

Used to be curiouser and curiouser... Now it is creepier and creepier...

Microsoft's Surface Hub mega-slab DELAYED 'cause you demanded it

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Re: Kudos to Microsoft

That is normal for small series and pilot manufacturing. You always do that withing driving distance from the office. However, that is what it says on the tin - small series.

I am not surprised they have to rejig the process after hitting significant levels of demand.

What I am surprised is that their marketing and forecasting is so bad. Are they so daft that they could not compare the existing HD teleconferencing to what they are making and estimate that the demand will be off the scale.

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The mother of all video-conferencing systems

For a system like this it is actually very keenly priced. It is cheaper than some competitive systems from other usual suspects that are just HD video-conferencing without any of the collaboration aspects.

It also has a fairly wide (even if it is just Microsoft) interop base and is extensible (very rare for a video conf system). If Microsoft starts shipping these in volume the usual collab suspects will suffer quite badly.

Mathematician: sunspot could mean mini ice age from 2030

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Re: This good be good news or bad news.....

Actually there is no ammo - at least for Europe.

Both when modeled produce the same result for Europe - climate goes more continental. Colder winters, hotter (albeit shorter) and drier summers. Up to 10-15 degrees colder and up to 5-10 degrees hotter respectively.

So we are looking not at the Maunder minimum but one of its predecessors like the turn-of the first millenium small ice age. If historical references are to be believed the Black Sea regularly froze up to several hundred kilometers from the shore. The Northern Adriatic, bay of Venice, bay of Marseilles and Mare Marmaris froze too. North Sea and Baltic was regularly frozen too.

There is a reason why all the Vikings who could, packed their stuff in a boat and went to conquer Normandy, the Slavic tribes along the Dnepr (to form what is today's Russia) with some of them ending up as far as the Mediterranean. Regardless of will, on average, the Earth warm up or chill down we will observe that reason again in Europe and it ain't going to be pretty.

By the way, Texas, New Mexico, etc got many times more rainfall in places during the same period (at the expense of Mexico proper which saw drought). I would suggest to any denier to reconsider and buy an amphibious vehicle or a boat about now.

Java jockeys join Flash fans in the 0-day exploit club

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Re: Writing from a dull place

Boring - no. Useful - not so sure.

Some of us have to develop in java and attend conference calls via Webex.

Though I have both restrained in their respective straightjackets, err... lxc containers which are used only for their specific purpose.

China makes internet shut-downs official with new security law

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What makes you think

What makes you think that any major western democracy will have any qualms to shutdown access to let's say Facebook, Twitter or messaging services in the case of major social unrest or a major ongoing attack of let's say "Charlie Hebdo x 100" type?

None of these are utilities and none of them have any legal protection which ensures that they should be kept up and running in an emergency.

The police does not even need a court order to do that - they have enough powers under various existing pre-Internet era legislation to do that. Sure, they will be spending the next 2 years in court (and may need a retroactive law to allow this explicitly), but there is nothing preventing them from doing it under various Churchil/Petaine age regulations invented originally for the phone network around WW2. Those are still valid by the way.

On yer bike: Hammerhead satnav for cyclists – just don't look down

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Re: add audio-comments/updates/street names

So you do not hear any of the cars approaching. Fantastic. The only thing I hate (as a driver which also cycles in excess of 1K miles a year in traffic) more than joggers with headphones on is cyclists with headphones on.

Nissan Juke Nismo RS: Family hot-hatch SUV that looks a bit like Darth Vader's hat

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Re: What about the increasingly vertical frontal aspect

The "aggressive" cars have about a foot (if not more) of crumple space behind the radiator grille and a much thinner than you would expect bonnet which is designed to "crumple fold".

It appeared ~ 1998 with if memory serves me right the Daihatsu Sirion MK1 going off the scale on the Eu pedestrian safety tests. As a result they changed the rating method (so results prior to that are not comparable). By 2002~ ish all cars used similar design (I am not saying copied as it most likely was parallel development). The only more recent addition to the design is the extension of the plastic "pedestrian protection" portion all the way to the front wheels on most cars.

This is not present on most commercials. The bonnet of Transit van is still as thick as it was 10+ years ago. The crumple space is missing too.

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I was going to say the same

I was going to say the same. Some of us have to drive on crap country roads and take equipment to customers and conferences.

If I want a metrosexual car review I can read mainstay press.

Disclosure No 1: I have driven a juke as a rental. While somewhat dysfunctional in terms of internal arrangement it is OK as a car. At Meah level... kind of OK.

Disclosure No 2: I drive a 2007 Isuzu Rodeo Denver crew cab (mostly pristine, mods are only on the electronic side - 5V circuit, etc). It will be taking some kit for a demo to a conference this week. This time it is nothing major in terms of size, but not something you can fit into a juke together with your luggage. It has in the past taken kit to places which will simply destroy a Juke by loading it (your average half-rack router nowdays usually exceeds the rear axle loading on most cars).

Oxford Uni unearths 800-year-old document to seize domain names

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Re: I read it as oxfordcollegegirl.com

Can we have a Taylor Swift icon?

Canadian dirtbag jailed for SWAT'ing, doxing women gamers

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Re: @Francis Boyle - What a difference...

As for this little human residue I would just chain him somewhere in the basement of his parents

This will not fix him. Neither will prison - there he will get contacts which will feed his obsessions getting computer services in return.

The solution here should have been: "Here is an axe lad, here are some warm shoes and mittens, there are trees that need cutting somewhere around the border of Alberta and Northern territories. We will discuss if you can have computer access again after you have done that for three years. Off ya go."

China wants to build a 200km-long undersea tunnel to America

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Re: The Chinese and Russians are going to build it??

The Russians built three railways across Siberia over the last century and a half. The third one is not on the map - it cuts over todays' Mongolia, North Eastern China to Korea. It was built by Russians around the turn of the century and the land around it leased from countries where it passed. That arrangement did not quite last through the wars and revolutions. So as far as doing it and going wrong - they can and there is little to go wrong.

Problem is elsewhere - what is the business case?

There is definitely no business case in end-to-end traffic. Containers are cheaper to moved by ships and if the passenger trade ever gets to sizes which overload completely the current passenger capacity it will be cheaper to build passenger versions of the monster than build a railway. Beriev actually has long range screen effect versions of both Be-200 and A42PE. So do the Chinese for their equivalent if satellite photos are to be believed so that is not far off.

There is no business case for the usual railway "connect many places" either. What is it going to serve on the way? The seals and polar foxes in the Ohotsk sea? Last time I checked they do not need the latest Foxconn products.

Ford's 400,000-car recall could be the tip of an auto security iceberg

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Re: The more of this I read

@chris 17

It is not just the update. The update is the least of the issues with car-centric instead of user-centric connectivity. By the way, even joe average user is so trained on updates nowdays that he/she will actually usually press yes. Phones finally made sure of that.

The update being the least of the issues.

Scenario 1. The Eu idiocy for emergency calling in accidents driven by car manufacturers which are scared sh*tless from losing control - worthless. Emergency services get a message and so what? Do they know the number of occupants? Do they know their identities? Allergies? Blood groups? Organ groups? F** no. Useful? I doubt it.

Scenario 2. Car requests from each and every phone in the car it can pair with to send an emergency message in a crash. Let's suppose that the driver has an anaphilaxis level allergy (I do) and the passenger who has had one blood transfusion too many in the past cannot take blood which does not match in secondary or even tertiary (M, K, etc) groups (example - my mom). That _WILL_ be useful if transmitted as well. World of difference between the usability of either for emergency services.

So what do we get? The first one - because the car manufacturers marketing would rather let people die instead of making anything related to the car not car-centric.

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Re: The more of this I read

I would MUCH rather have my car NOT connected, and secure,

Wrong logic. This means that a major issue with the car is not fixed until you understand about it and take it to the dealer.

An example is BMW taking the thoroughly and fully cretinous decision of allowing key programming via EBD2 while the alarm is in active state. So anyone with a tool which costs 30$ can steal a car which costs 60k. So let's imagine a hypothetical situation similar to a zero day exploit where you are driving a car which is vulnerable somewhere out in the sticks in the deepest darkest Eastern Europe/Latin America/South East Asia (scratch the ones that do not fit). Do you want the next villager down the road to appropriate your car (or your car to crash, stop just because it feels like it, etc) or you are happy to have the firmware uploaded?

What I am not happy with though is the car doing it by _ITSELF_.

This is what is massively opened for abuse including tracking users, updating at the wrong time, etc. What I would want is the car to ask my phone nicely via an app on my phone if I agree that a particular action is appropriate at this particular moment. Ditto for firmware updates, recall alerts, servicing - everything.

The problem is that the car manufacturers will never ever agree to that. They are obsessed with the car doing everything and never ever relinquishing the control. An example of this obsession is the next Eu safety reg which instead of mandating car pairing and car initiated emergency calls in case of a crash has gone for sticking a GSM SIM (with all the opportunities for abuse coming with this) into the car itself.

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That is the least of your problems

Quality assurance needs to be excellent too; imagine a duff update going out that bricks your vehicle or, worse, causes safety issues.

That is the "good case". Now imagine an update which screws up the update system in addition to any of those so you cannot fix it without re-flashing the control computer(s).

Ditch crappy landlines and start reading Twitter, 999 call centres told

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Re: Dear children...

You forgot

0) Do not try to take a selfie with the fire

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Fantastic

So for an emergency response we are now going to rely on a company with ZERO European presence, not compliant to Eu laws and in no way required to provide even a modicum of resiliency for cases of major emergency.

Whataboy. How much whalesong did they consume before suggesting this?

Decision time: Uninstall Adobe Flash or install yet another critical patch

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Re: Won't somebody think of the children?

That shall be all children sites and all educational sites with BBC proudly leading the pack.

HTC in crisis: How did it get to this point? How did it get this bad?

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Hehe

HTC, quite simple, stop your phones from looking like crap after a few months of ownership, do some water and dust proofing, try and innovate on battery life, sort the God awful camera, bring back external storage...

Err... That is called Sony. That ship has already sailed and there are no tickets available. The range starts from right above landfill (E series) through midrange with M and SP and to Z for premium. What you wrote describes exactly any one of them (even the M and E). Including the battery life optimizations by the way (probably the most aggressive on the market).

So just doing this will not be enough, it will have to innovate on top of that.

'Real' vampires reluctant to 'come out of the coffin' to social workers – barmy prof

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Re: Er, no, you're NOT a vampire @ Volands right hand

Source - Russian folklore. Undead things (Leshie, nezhit', etc) do not get up if you stake them with an aspen stake. (Осина in Russian).

Probably one of the reasons vampire stuff never got particular popular in their folklore.

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Holmes

Re: Er, no, you're NOT a vampire

Stake, life, unlife? Was the stake aspen as commanded by tradition or you went for a poor pine substitute? Curious minds want to know you know...

Black and Latina boffins regularly mistaken for janitors, study finds

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60%? Where is it so people can apply there

60% ? That would be stellar for a public company in the UK. More like 30% and if you get more than said 30% you will be actively discriminated against (so much for the labour code prohibiting salary discrimination).

Osbo PRINTS first Tory budget in 19 years with his BARE HANDS

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Trollface

Re: In the spirit of George Orwell, lets rename IDS's role as

can say I don't recall any 'ass' in Animal Farm.

Err... I think you ought to have a reading problem if you read The Animal Farm and do not remember Benjamin the Donkey. Unless you are one of Napoleon followers.

By correctly assigning the correct label to IDS you are showing that you are capable of putting Benjamin's skin on too so I am assuming that as highly unlikely.

Signed... Another donkey and one proud of being one (sorry, appropriate icon missing, so using the troll).

P.S. As far as "stopping being one" - having a full understanding what Napoleon and his followers are doing and how they are changing the commandments is not very good for you.

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Re: In the spirit of George Orwell, lets rename IDS's role as

Stop being a ass. In the George Orwell sense too. As in Animal Farm.

Furor rages over ICANN and Facebook's bid to publish home addresses of website owners

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Re: Why Facebook?

Push more small businesses to use F***book instead of their own website.

Evil NSA runs on saintly Linux, Apache, MySQL

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No need for that

Well, I do not know their actual design, but if they are doing what I used to do (and still do on my own network with autofs) there will be no need for that. There will be _ANOTHER_ Snowden (TM) incident anyway.

Autofs + NFS is great to stich space on worker nodes into a single filesystem view. You have node A, B, C.... Each has /exports/work-space as working area. NFS+autofs makes /var/autofs/workspace/A point to node A, B to node B and so on and you can manage that dynamically as you add and replace nodes via ldap, nis or even hook it up directly into your workload system via an executable map. The kernel unmounts workspaces that are not being used after 5 mins of inactivity so you do not get any stale mounts.

The applications can now be unaware of actual data location - it all looks and works like magic and you get an enormous cluster which is significantly FASTER than any cluster filesystem for a large range of use cases. There are some limitations like you have to do HA in underlying RAID, but if you know what you are doing you can scale to huge sizes without cluster and OO store investment.

There is a fly in the ointment - it is nearly impossible to do ACL control of who mounts what. Some data may be protected via permissions and NFSv4 ACLs, but not a lot. So someone with access to one node can lift all of the data over time, copy it and bugger off to Sheremetevo. This is where true cluster and OO filesystems are a better fit because they may incorporate object audit trail and a node that is reading sequentially all of the data will show up immediately.

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Childcatcher

They have sysadmins who knows autofs

Now that is commendable. I approve. It allows you to build filesystem distribution out of thin air on any odd commodity box. The problem is - it is "old school" sysadmin tool. The whippersnappers have no clue what it is and how to use it.

Last time I interviewed candidate sysadmins out of 87 (or was it 92?) CV submitted by UK recruiters for a Linux sysadmin position the number of people who have heard of it was a nice round ZERO.

It is a pity it does not see the attention it deserves (for that exact reason) in Linux lately. It still works, but various corner cases (containers, phys filesystems, etc) are broken.

Mars rover Opportunity shuns dodgy flash chips, relies on RAM

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Those panels are asking for "wash me"

I am surprised that the martians have not scribbled "wash me" in martian on the panels.

US senate committee wants Twitter, Facebook to report 'terrorist' posts

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Another idiotic law

Well...

If we assume that the background information is correct and this involves only companies which already monitor user posts, this is yet another grand idiocy creating a new law to cover what is already covered by existing law.

Knowingly not reporting a crime is a criminal offence or to be more exact a whole raft of them. This does not need any laws, it needs enforcing current ones (which actually have criminal penalties for failing to report).

Behold the mighty Swiss SPACE JUNK NOSHER PODULE

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Not so sure

The long lived space junk is from retired observation/spy sats and retired geostationaries. These are too high to experience significant drag and will remain there for ages. They are big so the net approach does not make sense. Similarly, nudging them is not going to push them out of the way. You need to attach and push it for quite a while to deorbit it.

Everything else we launch is in relatively low orbit and will end up reentering within a few decades anyway.

Also, trying to get anywhere near a retired spy sat (even with the intent to clean them) may earn you a set AEGIS crosshairs locked onto your cleaner satellite.

Linux on the desktop is so hot there's now a fight over it

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+1

Linux on the "commoner's" desktop is not likely to happen. The PC industry has tied its fate to Microsoft and it is even less likely to try something stupid in lean times like this.

The target markets in the announcements are quite descriptive - these are all people who can afford something that fits their very specific needs and see Clippy (and its more voluptuous Cortana incarnation) as a parasite which gets in the way.

Disclaimer - the last Windows desktop in the house was wiped in 1997 and I presently have 5 (a personal per head + 1 shared) Linux desktops, 4 Linux laptops, 3 Linux STBs and 2 RPi based controllers. All of that is running Debian. Based on running that Linux is fit for purpose to be a desktop for Joe Average User 99% of the time.

The problem is not in fitness for purpose. The problem is that the PC industry will not accept it. It has become dependent on the upgrade cycle brought by MSFT OS releases and even the abject failure of the last 3 releases to bring new PC requirements is not likely to wean it off this dependency.

7/7 memories: I was on a helpdesk that day and one of my users died

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Re: When being made redudant turned into a positive...

At least you were dialing from home.

I had an interview that day and they stopped the trains right before I got on the one to Kings'X. So I drove all the way to the other side of London (and made it) instead. I have never seen so many Chelsea tractors on their roof. The older RangeRovers and Discoveries are extremely unforgiving to trying to dial without a handsfree while way above the speed limit (it was mostly big 4x4 - I did not notice any overturned "commoner'"s cars)

I counted 10+ on my way that day (one motorway and a piece of M25). If we extrapolate that number to all motorways leading into London the overall casualty number will probably be significantly higher than the official one.