Posts by Voland's right hand

Re: Demotion time?

It's half broken in jessie anyway. Hangouts extension does not work - crashes immediately. Other stuff is also broken.

If it was any other package I would have bothered sending bugs (and patches). With Google spyware, no thanks, downloading a fresh up-to-date Firefox is a better option.

Re: Proxy server

It does not work very well for most advertising networks because they heavily rely on javascript snippets. If you cut the download at the proxy it will make the web page look hideously fugly at best. The proxy does not necessarily have the correct information to produce a blank gif, jpeg, flash, etc of the correct size (there are idiots that leave some level of resizing to the browser).

Re: Never underestimate the human ability to be conned...

they still have to get CAA (UK) and FAA (USA) regulations for non-line-of-sight operation of drones changed (currently it's not allowed).

No, they do not. Just hoist the NOC in a baloon to 3-5km height. That more than covers with direct line of sight a typical "delivery cell". Do you see the drone? Of course you do. The fact that it is 15 km away and is visible only with optically stabilized equipment assistance is not particularly relevant - you comply with the regs and can use it.

Re: Affordable?

the specs are usually awful for the price

You have failed to read the spec correctly.

OEMs with HP being the biggest offender deliberately announce bogus max RAM and other upgradeability figures for AMD so it looks worse than Intel. AMD APUs are limited in their memory capacity _ONLY_ by slot numbers and maximum DIMM size. This is different from Intel where the memory limit is hard and you cannot just throw bigger DIMMs in as they become available. So you should ignore the market positioning drivel and pay attention solely to slot numbers and slot physical dimensions (for disks).

Example in hand - my current fleet (in reverse chronological order):

HP TouchSmart, purchase price 229, spec - 2/4G RAM, real (not HP spec) upgradeability - up to 8G RAM.

HP 255, purchase price 260 (because of one lid scratch, usually 290) - spec 6G, real (not HP spec) upgredeability - up to 16G

Vaio VPCYB3V1E, purchase price 230, spec 4G RAM, real (not Sony spec) upgrdeability - 16G RAM.

If the next density DDR-3 SODIMMs become available, all of these should be able to take 'em, eat them and smile (to 16G or 32G respectively). Throw in a decent flash or hybrid drive and you have a machine that will run circles around anything Intel based under 800.

@phil

Because as a result of this some of the better "power" cars which they have done in the last 10 years have negative depreciation. In fact they appreciate, not depreciate (supply/demand or to be more exact an expectation of).

Re: I'm still not believing this...

how would you get millions of people into an air gapped network to fill it out

Err... You are mistaking two things. The process of filling it out and the process of keeping the record.

While the data is filled out, checked, verified and clearance granted or denied the record cannot be air gapped. However that is at most thousands at any given time.

Once the clearance is granted the record should go into deep freeze storage and not be accessed unless you need it for investigative purposes. You can at most instigate a one-way incoming data feed strictly in specific format for audit purposes (literally cut off the return wires/fiber). Even if queries are allowed they should be viciously rate limited.

This was the procedure in the days when this was on paper. You could not just ask "Can I have the whole archive, thank you". This should have been the design today, when it is electronic. However someone fond of big data and total information awareness made the data searchable and accessible in realtime.

It's the same story as with Snowden and Microsoft Sharepoint. Someone committed a court-martial offence by authorizing the storage of classified data in a form which is not fit for purpose. However instead of having the stupid moron court-martialed, named, shamed, his government pension removed and thrown into chokey we are now blaming the Chinese.

I'm sick and tired of hearing this excuse!

So am I sick and tired of listening to people shouting know it all rubbish.

An attack in this class (non-script-k1dd10t) can be:

1. Undetected for years. The biggest problem is that the entrance date and attack vector are unknown

2. Designed to aggressively seek back up systems and compromise them.

Your first point of call is figuring out a clean cut off line. However without knowing and understanding the APT in full you do not know where to draw that cut-off line. Drawing it at f.e. 5 years back is not really an option. Drawing it at a year back may actually get you back to square one with the infection rampant in the network.

Re: The bikini isn't French

Err no - 1946 France, Paris (if wikipedia is to be believed).

What really brought it to the mainstream was Brigitte Bardot 1953 Cannes film festival photoshoot,

Rachel Welch is more than a decade later.

Spec says so

That's what the spec says.

IMHO, it is more of a case of Hanlon's razor than three letter agency involvement (just look at how much errata and "updates" are on the TLS RFCs).

Re: A glorified webcam...

In order for Google to monetize your morning crawl from the bedroom to the bathroom +/- bathrobe.

The specific trajectory and the direction where your eyeballs are pointing provide countless opportunities to improve targeted advertising ya know...

Re: How about more annoying the French!

As for PQ-17, if TIRPITZ had gotten loose it would have wiped out the entire escort. Yes, it was that much superior to anything available.

Cough, cough:

0. Immediate escort: 6 destroyers

1. Close escort: Cruisers HMS London, HMS Norfolk, USS Wichita, USS Tuscalusa and four destroyers

2. Second level escort: Aircraft carrier HMS Victorious, Battleship HMS Duke of York, cruisers HMS Cumberland and HMS Nigeria, Battleship USS Washington, and nine destroyers

Grand total: aircraft carrier, 2 Battleships, 6 cruisers, 19 destroyers with an additional home fleet task force within 300 nautical miles to reinforce if need be.

Against one battleship Tirpitz, one heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer with destroyer escort ~ 8 of them at the time.

Cough, cough, cough.

Yeah, I know, I am coughing just like my mom's adoptive father at the mere mentioning of Lord Dudley and the other "ranks" in the British fleet. Hint - the old man fought the war as a submariner from day one till the 9 of may and in 1942 he was a senior officer on the K21. I tend to believe him that Tirpitz turned back to port for a "technical" reason as a result of meeting them not just because the convoy spread out.

Re: Signal to noise ratio

It'll probably have to suffer that indignity for a while, but even range-rovers sometimes get to enjoy themselves when they reach retirement age

That is not a RangeRover.

That is a DeRangeRover. I regularly see one in my local supermarket parking lot with mud up to the roof and exactly that spelling on the badge (with all the letters at different angles). An original MK1 if memory serves me right too.

Re: Not a game changer, this was never a game

Nobody in this game is bound to any rules.

In fact, the normal rules of engagement regarding collateral damage, etc do not apply. After all, after you let a worm loose there is bugger all control exactly where it will get into.

Re: That was believeable until the "grammatical mistakes"

Hanlon's razor.

For every 1 jihadi from Western Europe there are 2+ from ex-Soviet Union. What keyboard they are likely to be using is left as an exercise to the reader (hint - it is not going to be Arabic). That and Damascus being the same timezone as St Petersburg.

Re: WTF

You missed the more obvious explanation.

This picture looks like standard "product transition" scenario you can see in nearly any big shop.

Under the current diplomatic conditions the contract with NASA is now assigned to the B team. The same is valid for a list of programs considered as legacy and not in need of A team.

In the meantime, the A team is working on something else. It will be interesting to see what rolls off the assembly line in Plisetsk (or somewhere else where the press does not have access on a nearly 24x7 basis) within the next few years.

Re: I'm learning Spanish at the moment...

Watching Home Alone 1 and 2 too much?

Re: Not fit for purpose

It seems that now that the ID card system is has gone the way of the dodo, that HMG have decided to use your NI number as a super-key to tie all their disparate databases together, adding it to databases that had previously never needed it.

Err... That is not copying USA. USA does not index _EVERYTHING_ by your NI.

That is copying Bulgaria which indexes everything (even your parking tickets) by your NI and it is even present in your passport and ID and has been doing it since the early 70-es. You cannot buy or sell a house, you cannot even buy or sell a car there without a check vs the indexed database showing that you are all in the clear with regards to your obligations to the state (I was trying to buy a summer house in 2005 and the sale fell through because the cretin selling it had 500+ worth of unpaid parking and speeding tickets).

Re: For the want of another IP ...

What does HTTPS have to do with IPv6?

There is no named virtual host support in https 1.1 So you pretty much have to have website == IP.

As result as quite rightly noted by the GP you run out of v4 addresses very fast and you have to start deploying v6 or consolidating websites.

Re: Probably mistranslated

being unable send an email when speaking HTTPS over port 25

There are people who keep trying (according to my mail server logs).

In any case - it is all moves in the right direction. Quite like to annoy non-USA governments which do not have the power to subpoena Apple account data quite a bit. It will be interesting to see on how this will work in countries with "Great Firewalls".

Re: Calling George Santayana

This has little to do with Santayana.

Russian data protection legislation as well as quite a few regs are verbatim translations of the relevant Eu directive. They just translated another one. Same as they did with Data protection, etc.

Nothing new under the sun - business as usual on the coast of Moskva River - if it makes sense and if it is not crossing one of "red lines" it is copied and re-used. That has been the modus operandi since the 1990-es and personally I do not see anything wrong with this modus operandi.

Re: Your wish is granted.

Err.. Crouton stinks.

I fought hard to get proper Debian on my Samsung (Arm) Chromebook and it was worth every second of the time spent. Now I have a machine that easily lasts 5h+, weights virtually nothing and cost ~ 200 quid out of the box. The performance is perfectly fine for an an conference/airport/in-flight typewriter and even for some light coding from time to time.

The only downside is the rather limited disk space. The SD card slot is specifically designed to ensure that you cannot use it as a primary storage so a normal SD card will stick out. You have to use half-depth or an adapter instead.

Re: Acrylamide toxicity is nothing new

Replying to my own post (yes I know - very bad sport):

WAAAAIT a minute. Acrylamide should be soluble in cooking oil. Vegetable oil is reasonably polar and during cooking will also have non-zero water content. So while acrylamide dissolves better in polar solvents (water, methanol, etc) it should still dissolve in cooking oil as well. So, as the chemical reaction in question occurs on the _SURFACE_ of the exposed starchy material it should extract significant quantities of acrylamide and retain it for a while.

This also means that there is a hell of a difference between cooking something in a frying pan and dumping the oil, cooking in a frier (same oil over multiple cookings) and an industrial install which pretends to extract stuff from the oil and keeps on using it until it is gutter level.

What exactly did these guys test (I bet they tested a standard Fast Food frier used to Gutter Oil level). That has many things in it which are way worse than acrylamide anyway.

Re: Kids of today...

Stylus? What is this stylus thingie? Waddayamean it is not 8 tentacle multitouch?

Not just any dead animal

Monitor lizards have the intelligence of a reasonably smart dog (if not higher). They can be tamed, trained, can obey commands and you can even walk them on a leash.

This includes this particular species. Dunno, I personally think that having the skin of creature with some level of intelligence (albeit primitive) wrapped around my phone is disgusting.

Re: It's good to see Caterham thinks of the passenger...

Depends on the weight. 80kW can make even 800kg go pretty good (especially with a suitable gearbox). I drive that regularly (got 2 of these - my old car, now SWMBOs, and a car we have abroad) and it rarely feels underpowered even when lugging 2 adults, 2 kids, 3 suitcases and a filler of bags, coolbox odds and sods up a 10 degree gradient.

100Kw in 500kg is manic driving territory.

Re: New driver

Pretty bloody good.

If memory serves me right, the probability of a new driver to have an accident in the first year in a metropolitan area is > 50%. This is for London which is of course infinitely worse than mountain view.

As far as Two more were down to other cars not obeying stop signs, my late dad used to have a couple of sayings: "There is a special alley in the graveyard for those that thought they have priority" and "I have priority, but does the moron on the other side of the intersection know that".

Mamba?

Mamba is a cutie.

What we have here ladies and gentlemen, is more like a golden lancehead viper

There is no way in hell to reconcile this with Eu Data protection

There is simply no way in hell to reconcile this odious requirement with Eu Data protection. I do not see the German Parliament (and most other continental Eu legislatations in this form). In fact, I cannot see USA congress legislating it if someone explains to them what this really means from a reciprocal perspective. There will be a riot.

Re: In remission?

Not the other way round though

My exact point. Your preliminary condition for interoperability is to throw out everything and put your network 100% under Windows control the windows way or the highway.

That proposition would have had some extremely dubious merit if Microsoft was properly investing into the full compatibility suite for Windows including emulating and mapping to/from NIS, providing NFS to SMB mapping, etc and was honest about it. That never happened - these were always second fiddle, crippled and with one or more caveats deliberately designed to push people from their existing platforms onto Windows.

As a result most people stay away from it. ALL large organizations I know with mixed environments do not use the compatibility services at all. They export AD instead and build NIS maps and various password backends using custom scripting or 3rd party products. The only place where the Microsoft compatibility tools and Kerberos "The Microsoft Way" on Unix/Linux are in use are clueless medium enterprises. Usually not for long too - people get fed up with the limitations and give up.

What changed - the network

OnLive was forced to try dedicated deals with ISPs, Amazon is not.

OnLive as an OTT service was too small to get the latency right. Also in those days 5MBit (the OnLive req) to consumer required dedicated arrangements on a lot of SPs.

Amazon is big enough and has sufficient peering presence not to have the first problem. The average access loop bandwidth has also increased to a point where the per sub bandwidth is no longer an issue.

Re: Inspections dont work in the UK

Seconded. In UK the inspectors are part of the same real estate mob. If you get a "clean bill of health" from a UK inspection you might as well don an overall and get into the roofspace yourself to see if the guy really did his job. Personally - I doubt it.

Re: What about Blade Servers?

+1

IP based storage (f.e NFS) never had anything to do with FCOE. It was legitimate before, it is legitimate now and it has a different use case.

You use IP based storage when you want fine grained file based access as well as large amounts of data shared as read-write between multiple compute endpoints as files. It can be used in some cases where dedicated per-endpoint storage is needed and can even deliver higher cost efficiency. However, it requires significantly more qualified sysadmin workforce when used this way. In the days when I still ran IT, you used to get < 5% of candidates having a basic understanding of how to use NFS on a Unix system and < 1% knowing advanced stuff like autofs. In any case - FCOE does not apply here. It has nothing to do with the requirements and it does not implement anything from what you would need to deliver this use case.

FCOE (and FC proper for that matter) as well as other block storage use case have little or no sharing between endpoints with VM images being a prime example. When you instantiate a VM image you do not have 20 systems in need of read-write access to it. Even if you use Copy-On-Write you still have a strict read-only master and separate journal for each VM.

The article the way it is written makes conjectures based on failure of protocols and solutions designed for use case A to do use case B and vice versa. Surprise, surprise, a round peg failed to fit in a square hole. Of course it will not. However, based on the fact that it will not you cannot declare the peg dead or the hole dead.