Posts by Voland's right hand

Re: Nice Review

Move a NAS. In a Jag. Bwahahaha...

If you really need to move IT equipment get a decent truck. Either MItsubishi L series or Isuzu Denver. Do not get Toyota (it is a bouncy castle/roller coster ride on wheels, those drives in the NAS will not like it) and I am going to restrain myself from comments on Ford and Nissan comfort and reliability.

As someone who regularly takes a Denver on 100+ miles business ones (with kit inside) and on 2000 mile recreational ones (with kids inside) I find the idea of using a Jag estate laughable.

First of all - If you are _REALLY_ an IT consultant of the type that _REALLY_ take an occasional NAS to customers (NAS, not suit). If you are and you need it for a job, the truck is VAT Free and is a valid capital asset in the UK. The Jag is not. It is a benefit in kind and when you put it on the accounts it will hurt. The truck also costs 2-3 times less (26K pre-VAT on the road with a 4 cab and every single option known to man vs 50K)

Second, try driving "for a living" 2-4 hours every few days over an extended period of time. Try in a low "sports" position car (especially in something where your butt is far under knee level like an Audi). Try in a decent (not Toyota or Nissan) truck. Your back will explain you the exact difference between the two (with the assistance of a physiotherapist).

Now if you are an IT consluttant (spelling intended) that pretends that he needs to take a NAS to customers but does not know which end of the NAS is which - take the jag. Any day. It will suit you.

Last, but not least. You can actually move a _REAL_ NAS or SAN, one that takes half a rack in a truck. Try that in a Jag. Specifically - try loading it without damaging the loading area. Just try that (I will gladly sell the tickets). Oh, do not forget to fit the trolley and lifting equipment to transport the bugger in the jag too.

Re: Mile wide and inch deep

As my late dad used to say: "Your univesity diploma is a not a statement that you have learned anything. It is a testament that you have the capacity to learn something".

As far as coding for kids is concerned, coding as just coding is a pointless excercise when kids are concerned. You cannot teach something that abstract. You have to make the subject of the coding do something. So you either have to combine that with art (Scratch) or with practical "do this" (Pi). Otherwise kids will see it as the most boring subject in the world. It also has to be done at the right time. My older one did Scratch in school at the age of 11 which is seriously too late for this. By ~ 3 years.

Re: ROTM

I hope it did not get its feet cut off by the blades. That was a close call.

In any case, if you want a true Hitchcock, try to approach a roosting colony of rooks. There is one with 5k+ birds inhabiting a row of poplars on the edge of a farmer's field about 1km from where I live. They are available for filming opportunities every morning and evening. The ghastly things wake me up every morning at 5:30 am with their discussion of "news of the day" on their way out to farmer fields.

They have actually managed to chase away any birds of prey from the vicinity over the years. Before they moved in there was a family of Peregrins living in the cliffs of an abandoned chalk pit next, sparrowhawks and even the occasional goshawk coming from the woods nearby. All of these have disappeared. If they as much as show up above tree top level they get mobbed including targeted "droppings" bombing runs from all directions.

If you have a drone to lose and some rooks nearby, try it - I give it ~ 10s from the moment they decide it is a nuisance to their society. Tops.

Re: Got one

I thought that the idea is that you _ALREADY_ _HAVE_ a long term project to use it for. One of those... Lifetime ones.

I am going to read the docs (I somehow missed their campaign) and if it sounds like somthing fit for purpose I am going to get a couple for the "projects" for Xmas (one 6 year old project and one 12 year old project).

Re: Chrome is a resource hogging abomination

Yes and no.

Chrome is a resource hogging abomination on a terminal server (regardless of the terminal protocol). The reason for this (and one of the reasons for its perceived "fastness" on normal hardware) is that it does most of the rendering on a canvas internally and updates the whole canvas at a time. Compared to that Firefox uses much more graphic prmitives from the underlying graphic subsystem. This allows remote access protocol implementations to optimize redraw and do a lot of ops locally. They do not get that chance with Chrome.

As a result of this, Chrome when compared to Firefox (or MSFT offering for Windows T Server) sucks royally in a thin client environment.

The UK ICO does not

The UK one does not and the politicos will ensure that it never will (even if this means alignment to common goals with Belarus with regards to human rights).

However, I would not be so sure about the German, Austrian and/or Scandinavian equivalents of an ICO... Hmm... Those may be worth writing a letter to (if you can manage the apropriate teutonic or viking speak).

Re: Another juicy database

You mean "where it is already in the baltic states".

They have had identity cards with x509 crypto for many years. In fact, they can even vote over the Internet using these. Any government services, the social security system, etc are 100% authenticated (mostly in-browser x509).

Indeed

I have contributed to several open source projects and the rule of thumb is:

1. They are usually fairly tolerant in the beginning

2. Once you get to know the lay of the land you are expected to write high quality code and that quality is expected to be consistent too. If you do not deliver the tolerance will quickly disappear.

I believe that quality of the code is not something which systemd is renowned for so it is not surprising that he is getting flack. He is long past "phase 1" so there is an expectation from him to deliver. Like any other workplace for that matter.

Re: Speculation

Al203 works fine if it is a part of a small rigid frame - watch or small phone.

Examples I have owned over the years - Polyot (not the Shturmanskie, one of the later ones) - 25+ years ago and Motorola KRZR. If Al203 is framed or attached into a small rigid structure it is nearly indestructible. The KRZR I had 8 years ago is still alive, kicking and taking daily abuse (and regular drops) from my mom. She has been unable to break it after I handed it down After all this years there is only a single chip on the outer Al2O3 cover on the top of the clamshell :)

I do not see how it can work with a large sheet though. Even an iPhone 1-4 size phone will be too large. A thick enough Al2O3 coat will be unacceptably thick and and heavy. It will probably be too thick for a capacity screen too. IMHO the KRZR was the first and last application of AL2O3 in this area. The likelihood of another one is pretty slim.

Re: likewise

Exxploit and patch is a standard practice in malware delivery.

You immediately close the hole which has allowed you to infect the system to ensure that nobody can break in and use your new zombie.

Re: "can't oppose the gubmint cuz they got tanks and drones.."

Yes and no.

1. Every time a proper army has dealt with middle eastern insurgents it squashed them flat within a forthnight.

2. It is not winning, it is holding which is the problem. If a proper army (or openly armed paramilitary police) tries to hold an area by force the tens of people who were easily squashed in the first place become tens of thousands of pissed off cittizens and that is when the army loses.

3. The same is valid for the "home field advantage". There home field advantage and a group of "determined individuals" can beat a regular army only if it is being assisted by the general population. Example - the relative success of the WW2 insurgency against Nazi Germany in Serbia, Southern and Eastern Ukraine, France and Belorussia compared to the complete failure of any attempts to foster unrest in the Baltic states, Western Ukraine, Croatia, Hungary, etc. Determined people tried there too. They just... did not last very long... As one of my Serbian friends used to say: "Of course, the Croatian pensioner next door did help the Serbian partisans in WW2. He provided shelter and hid them. He hid them so well that nobody could find the bodies".

Re: Miscreants will be hard pressed to find bash on embedded systems

Not necessarily. QNAP is not the only system to deploy a (badly) embedded fat linux distro. IIRC some dlink boxes do it too.There are others.

To add insult to injury the ones that embed a "fatter" distro are the ones where you are likely to find something clueless like using bash in a web ui.

Re: auth-user-pass-verify Option

Not very.

The most common setup for OpenVPN is to use client certificates. I have been using it for ~ 10 years now. Out of those ~ 3-4 years were also to run VPN access for an SMB. I have never ever set it for passwords.

Even if I would have set it for passwords I would have given it a perl or python script to execute so it connects to something useful in terms of passwords f.e. LDAP/AD. In order to connect for that you need appropriate modules, etc and bash does not have them.

This is an interesting authenticated attack vector (if you have stolen certs or passwords). While bash for password verification is rare, you are quite likely to find it in places where openvpn invokes various scripts once connection has been established.

Re: Great!

Sarcasm not needed - there are a couple of models of renault which have legendary reliability if serviced correctly:

* Renault 4 - you can still see them running in southern Europe till this day. If serviced correctly it will continue to run.

* Clio MK-1, the 1.4 engine - again, I have owned 3 of those over the years in different countries and one of them is still running till this day after I handed it down to relatives. Not bad for a car which has left the assembly line in 1989.

The trick with the old Renaults is to replace every 10 years (or force-flush every 5) the radiator. It gets clogged up, the engine overheats and then you are thanking Renault reliability on the side of the road. There are a couple of ther (lesser) bits which need attention and which you will not find in Haynes or the Renault service manual. If you regularly take care of these an old small(note the emphasis on small) Renault like Twingo Mk1, Clio Mk1, Renault 4 (to a lesser extent 5), etc will run and run.

Renault has always sucked at two things - large cars (on all counts - all variants of Espace have always been a complete and unmitigated disaster) and electronics. As they have stuffed all their new ones with electronics to the gills it has become a definitive disaster at the roadside.

Overall:

1. Renault has barely caught up with Daihatsu from ~ 2000. My old 2003/2004 Sirions (got two of them, one in UK, one abroad) can do a sub-9m turning circle, comply with pedestrian safety (it is the first car to do so and the car that made the Eu tell the manufacturers to stop claiming it is impossible and change the regs), have a bigger boot, hit 0-60 sub-9s and can go onto a dirt track and offroad (the 4x4 one I keep abroad for that exact purpose).

2. Renault has lost the plot in the area which was its core competency amidst European manufacturers - making small cars that do not suck. If you compare Twingo Mk1 to Peugeot 105 the Twingo wins hands down. Other manufacturers (vw Lupo, 90-es Ford Fiasco, etc) do not come even close. Well... no more... It is a rebadge of the Smart engineering disaster now.

Agree 100

There is a difference between you, me and the so called "creative professionals".

If you look at the current crop of "creative professionals", they "create" by lifting something out of Shutterstock or getty. In fact, not even that - steal an image from a social site is the main means nowdays. If this is interfaced to an "search, open & pay/steal" function natively it may find some audience.

In the meantime the dolts like you and me that are still silly enough to take pictures, work with them in raw, etc will contiue to need a local installation.

The study shows exactly what we have known all along

Income study is correct, the conclusions by Mr Worstall are a bit different from what I would have made out of it.

1. The study shows what we have noticed all along - that income rise is slowest in the 60-90 percentile band. That is what used to be called the "white collar" - engineers, qualified labour, professionals. Globalization or not, this continues to be decimated. Some of it is natural - you used to need a tehcnically qualified person for each 20-30 workers. You now need one per thousands (if not tens of thousands). Technology has allowed it and the graph reflects that.

2. Blue collar (or its replacement - the zero contract floater) average income as a statistic when averaged across whole of the world has increased. Again, nothing new here. Globalization has clearly played the part here - if we redo the same graphic for let's say UK it will be different. We will see a _NEGATIVE_ growth in absolute dollars (this is what the national statistics say) growth across 0-97% percentile over the last decade. Moving the stats to wo decades may bring things above 10-20%, but not more. The sub-3% to percentile will however have not 100%, it will have 500%+ rise. This is also what the stats say. If we go to anywhere else in Western Europe it will not be any different either.

Re: Headline should read "Note 3 Twice as Strong as iPhone 6"

Quote: "Open invitation to Fandroids"...

I suspect all of you, consumer reports and the people who are reporting bending it are right.

Consumer reports (and your less scientific test) can be summarized as "you are holding it wrong". It clearly does not bend if:

1. You apply force in the middle

2. If you apply force evenly

3. If you apply force at a right angle to the phone

This does not mean that it does not have a specific structural weekness which allows it to bend if you twist it, apply force to a corner, etc.

Indeed

It has been a while since I have re-read Sakyo Komatsu, "The Death of a Dragon"...

There is also timing advance to consider

Not just that - GSM has a top speed at which an object can move towards or from tower. While 3G does not have the equivalent of the timing advance it cannot alter the power fast enough. LTE in theory can, but you have to do some interesting stuff which the a regular phone is incapable of (not all of US plane broadband is satellite, some is LTE with specialized receivers now).

So with the exemption of a short period after takeoff and before landing (when the airlines are likely to prohibit calls anyway) you cannot use the phone anyway. So anyone yapping on the phone will be yapping via the onboard femtocell and will be paying "ferry" roaming fees for that in the 1-3Eu per minute range.

It has taken 10 years and lots of lobbying to get there (first test of ip.access 2G BTS on a plane was circa 2003). In fact we finally got there only because the 1Eu per minute has become a great temptation for operators. It is lots of money when you compare it to the backdrop of mandated roaming tariffs.

Even perl has some resemblance of CGI security

Even perl has a resemblance of the applicable security features you need for CGI. In fact, it is probably better on that front than PHP.

Bash has none. It does not belong in a CGI end of story. Any idiot sticking bash in a CGI is frankly asking for it and they are most likely exploitable via 20 other different ways besides Shell Shock.

Re: Eyes on the code? Not.

Eyes are on code, but elsewhere.

Shell of any form is executed as standard by various Unix processes only if you invoke system(). That is the first think to check for during audits and it has been audited out and replaced by various safe pipe and fork+exec tachinques in 99.9% of the software.

Further to this, bash has been identified as too complex to audit properly by the debian project (and from there by Ubuntu) long ago and it was one of the decisions on why it is not the default root shell and is strictly prohibited for use in any shell scripts which are part of the core system. In addition to that everyone and their dog cleanses environment like there is no tomorrow because of previous bugs dynamic loaders, locale, etc.

So frankly, this is blown out of proportion. Sure, some CGIs written by an idiot without a clue somewhere will be vulnerable. However if they are vulnerable to this, they will be vulnerable to a gazillion of other things.

Re: The curse of a slow metabolism and a fast pie-arm

@CADMonkey.

4 packets of grapes (cheap ones), 4 packets of oranges (cheap ones), 12 cucumbers, 6 packets of tomatoes (cheap ones are unedible in the UK), 4 melons, a box or two of cheap strawberries, and other fruit and veg. That is 70+ quid using the cheapest ones. Two brats that do not eat chocolate and two adults which end up eating the same stuff as that's what is in the house will go through that in 3-4 days. Add to that meat (not the expensive one either, definitely not prime cut beef) and you are looking at 160+ 2 times a week.

People seriously have no idea what an expense is a healthy kid which eats fruit and does not eat chocolate, candy and junk. They should try feeding one for a month.

Re: want one

+1.

If this shows up in the UK for Xmas the daughter may get my old Xperia Arc as a hand me down and I may switch to this.

If Sygic, Kindle and a few other Android apps I use run on it, they will definitely have me as a customer. It has the perfect size screen for a SatNav too (no, I am not out of my mind - my phone holder is mounted on my A-pillar which as in most modern car is thick enough to accommodate a 7 in tablet without obstructing the driver's view any more than it already is).

@ MyffyW

Athlon XP runs Wheezy just fine as long as you do not try to enable PAE and its dear friedn the 3_LEVEL_PAGETABLES. You need to either rebuild the kernel or use the "486" image even if this means that you will sacrifice some RAM in the process. Rebuilding is better as you can come up with a set of options which allow you to use that amount of RAM without sacrificing 99% of the performance.

Otherwise the GP is right - Windows 8 for the first time in 2 decades requires less resources, not more. This is one of the reasons why the channel hated it as it did not actually force an upgrade cycle.

Re: Handcuffs?

This is for jobs which require continuous proximity authentication. If you are in one of those, then handcufs on your wrists while doing your work will not be out of the ordinary (same as retina authentication to a device which has a gun connected to it to blow your brains out if it fails).

Re: Call me sceptical

Yeah, the sign recognition is a german gimmick - used to be a popular option on the higher end Mercs. There it makes sense as there is no speed limit unless stated. UK - not so much.

Re: Where to buy?

Recurring story. Their channel management sucks rocks sidewize through a thin straw.

Every time I have looked at buying something Samsung that is not a phone, finding someone who stocks it has been rather difficult.

Software - I seriously tried to buy OpenMail for a company a while back after they tooked over it from HP (and before they made a dogs breakfast of it).

Components - SSDs are stocked only by a handful of suppliers, hard disks when they made them were also available only from people I'd rather not shop at (Dabs).

Laptops and PCs - with the exemption of Chromebooks Samsung lappies in UK were almost impossible to buy.

Re: Apple & Milk

Liquid metal will not help you as far as the overall design direction is concerned. You can thank sir Johny for that.

Apple has been expanding the screen to the very edge and there is absolutely no space left to crumple or deform if the phone is dropped and hits on-edge. In addition to that, the wonderful metal "ring" around the phone edge as in all iPhones from 4 onwards immediately transfers all the shock from the impact onto the glass. As a result an impact on-edge after falling from 1m onto concrete without a case is nearly guaranteed to shatter the glass. So are most recent phones due to the "fashion" to make them all glass. Compared to that a more "classic" phone which has space for buttons on the bottom and a plastic section on top for the camera, etc is considerably more shock resistant.

Things are only going to get worse from here - judging by the latest patent filings they intend to wrap the screen around the edges. That has "guaranteed fracture" written all over it with or without sapphire.

Re: Sympathies to Oracle

Engineering will still report to Larry.

So, the death by a thousand Hurds of any R&D in Oracle is postponed for the duration.

Re: Just wondering

Assuming the same tech you can find in any chemistry lab the answer is:

1. Yes it can stir porridge.

2. In theory, you can measure the current required to rotate (or switch magnetic field orientation) on the anchor under the plate. It can be used as a proxy for viscosity so you can indeed sound an alarm that the porridge needs more water (if the stirrer has stopped moving or needs a lot of energy to move).

Re: Picking the nit...

The T34 and T34/85 numbers include the numbers for the post-war production runs, license runs to other countries (North Korea, Warsaw pact), etc all the way until production was terminated ~ 1953.

While the Soviet army had a core of IS2s by end of war and some IS3s produced thereafter, etc there was an enormous pile of T34s and T34/85s produced for the role of cannon fodder in a semi-conventional WW3. That number skews the stats quite a bit.