Posts by Voland's right hand

and that other German brand who's name escapes me

Probably Bosch. I have had quite a bit of fun disassembling the hinges on a Bosch dishwasher half a year ago (it is necessary if you need to replace the door gasket). The washing machine hinges by Bosh (who also OEMs for Siemens) are even more bomb-proof. I am not surprised that you can tow the dishwasher using those.

So frankly, if Samsung's hinges could be damaged by an exec (unless that exec was capable of saying "I'll be back" with an Austrian accent), they are utter crap. No thanks, that is never entering my house.

Going back to a proper washing machine (Bosh). Bosh washing machines are practically indestructible as long as you change the brushes in time. It takes ~ 5 years of hard use to wear down the original ones to the point where they damage the motor. Most third party replacements last 3 years or thereabouts. By the way - the machine will indicate that the brushes are so worn down that they are shorting (error code 24 if memory serves me right).

Re: Ian M

Do not understand me wrong - I am a great Ian M Banks fan. However, in most of his books the war is a backdrop for the actual character development. It rarely takes the front stage.

The Uplift series and specifically StarTide Rising... that is probably the best description of Space war on the grandest scale. I cannot think of anything that gets anywhere near that.

It will be the first thing for me to turn off on my GPS

The last thing you want on a navigation map is irrelevant or distracting detail. Key landmarks you can use for navigation are fine, making 90% of what you see irrelevant to the task at hand (get from point A to point B) is a disaster in the making.

Sorry... BS...

Quote: "Indeed, but the market for potential employees will be a lot smaller in that case"

Sorry, I call BS.

There are plenty of places outside London which have larger local population than what you can hire if you are based in Central London or one of London satellite towns (once you take into account the fact that you have to jack up salaries so people can commute). MK (which grew on the back of Unisys UK operation so if you sneeze you end up sneezing on someone who can do enterprise buses and COBOL), Cambridge (anything you want - you can find someone to do it - virtualization, mobile, telecoms, etc), Guildford (mobile, embedded, etc). If you go further away from London there are significant local IT populations in a few other places too. Slough is in that category too, but for a different reason - it is in a good location to hoover up anything and everything spare as resource in the M4 corridor. Most people who work there would rather work in Newbury, Reading or somewhere else, but as they say in some countries: "When there ain't any fish, the crayfish is a fish".

So if you base your business there, you can get _MORE_ qualified candidates than you will get if you base it in Shoreditch because you get all people who are willing to commute + significant local population. The sole reason for Shoreditch are tax breaks and subsidies related to inner town redevelopment, so whatever Amazon "creates" as job tax income, we probably (as the taxpayers) have to hand back as various tax break backhanders.

Re: If

I bought the car and I did not like the air freshner because I am allergic to the crappy brand used by the vendor is a better analogy.

Car engine is something which takes a considerble effort (a man day or so usually) to replace. It takes no effort to replace an OS (unless you have deliberately sabotage the process which MSFT has been known to do).

Re: fugly

They're not all ugly.

Indeed. Along with an old Porche and a "Phantomas" issue Citroen (forgot the exact model - first on the right). All are lovely cars and a demonstration of how what used to be art degenerated over the years. Not surprising - they were built in the days when the overall design was done by engineers not artists sticking a shell on a piece of engineering. As a result you got either utilitarian hideously fugly wagons (with some bells and whistles added as an afterthought) or true pieces of engineering as art (like the original Porche or the E-series).

The hideous ones are all long scrapped and recycled. The really beautiful "hits" of this approach look better than anything coming off the factory line today.

Re: Morals, ethics, principles...

You are mostly correct, just do not see why you are singling out Putin here. As in most civil war conflicts there is no right here - all are on the wrong side.

If you think that some of the characters on the Ukrainian side are any different, I suggest you revisit your statement when the conflict ends and they turn their newly acquired weapons and training onto the local minorities. After all not all of Odessa has emigrated to New York and Tel Aviv. There is some left for them to practice on and remember my word - practice they will. Same as they did in WW2.

Pogrom is a favourite past-time around that part of the world (in fact that is where the word comes from in the first place).

Not any more. They fixed the performance around the time of going 64 bit

I have a VIA Eden X2 U4200 @ 1.0+ GHz (Dual Core 64 bit) courtesy of an HP thin client which has been modd-ed to install Debian on it.

It was originally bought for comleteness (so I can test some virtualization software on Intel, AMD and Via). It passed tests with reasonable results - more or less the performance expected from a dual core laptop 64 bit CPU at 1GHz. It has been relegated as a desktop for my daughter ever since and is doing that duty without any problem including running most of the kids flash games, iplayer, etc. It is always running a media center auto-logged in as an alternative user and that one is working fine too. I have not tried it for true HD, upscaling of DVD res to 1080p is without trouble.

It is not a spead daemon, but it is not slow by any means. In fact it is somewhere around the middle of the pack. It is faster than older E series APUs, faster than older Atom, not as fast as recent A series laptop/thin client APUs.

So I would not be so dismissive - with all the cloud going back to micro-server land (as exemplified by the recent NEC announcement) they will have their niche.

Client certificates

Out of all cloud providers Apple is in the only one in the unique position where it can easily deploy client side x509 (or at the very least client side keys). All devices are known, all software is controlled, it is a closed ecosystem - adding client side strong crypto into the authentication is a piece of cake.

From there on it becomes a matter of simple ACL management based on certs - do you allow Apple ID XXXX-ZZZZ known as AAAA belonging to YYYY access to your account (Yes, No, Think Different).

Re: Apple does not limit the number of password entry attempts users could can make

@Destroy All Monsters

Indeed, it will be a welcome distraction helping the media to continue keeping our attention from the fact that a lot of the "Little Green Men" on one east side of the Ukrainian conflict are speaking Serbian and their equivalent "Little Green Men" on the west side of the conflict are speaking Croatian and they are replaying the same conflict for the 3rd time in the last century. Score so far is 1:1, popcorn to observe the outcome of the third one. Disclaimer - I have seen some of them myself this summer taking a short stop in one of the few remaining Eu cities that still has flights to Ростов на Дону.

It has been extremely entertaining watching the Western mainstream media go to extreme length on ensuring that this "entertaining" detail is not aired in any "news". In fact they have been better at that than previously (during the Kosovo war the video footage often contained the Chechen, Syrian and Lybian "volunteers"). After all, if you air it will become clear what will be next (NATO bombing) and how long it will last (15 years and counting).

It is lovely when we have a "disaster" like that - it helps keep the attention of the sheeple from what is really happening out there. Bring it on, let's have more celebutard leaks.

Re: Well?

Indeed - try job searching without a social profile. You are not going to get far.

Re: Bring it on

If I have to chose between First or god forbid National Express versus EasyJet I would probably choose the latter.

So while a great idea in principle, you will have to re-regulate the railways first (as in most places where they have working rail on the continent) and then do this.

After that you will have to ensure that the truckers and other vested interest parties do not give the government yeat another set of "election donations", sorry backhanders to ensure that the government does not do something useful with taxpayers money. Example - the cost of the ultra-expensive useless toy trainset known as High Speed 2 in the UK (and the slightly more useful CrossRail) exceeds by an order of magnitude the cost of going along all main routes into London and raising the height and width of all bridges and tunnels. Why do that? Two reasons. The less important one - Eu commuter rail is all 2 floor, this will allow the train carriages to stop being "special order" and the cost will drop per supply and demand. Additionally the capacity will increase by 1.7 times overnight. The more important one is that UK goods rail is limited to "special" carriages and _CANNOT_ carry standard issue containers. They all have to go by road feeding truckers associations (which in turn provide handy backhanders) and producing pollution (which in turn is a massive backhander again in the form of pertrol excise duty).

Re: phew

Once you have access to Dell's supply chain and production faicilities, the cost of putting a plastic alien and making a whole plastic alien chassis is not that different. From there onwards the stuff which goes in is not that different. Stock MB, an upgraded CPU cooler to cope with an extreme edition CPU, stock (just bigger) power supply and an upgraded (but rather standard) set of cards.

I d not see anything revolutionary here. An embedded on-Ethernet NIC firewall with some accel functions would have been nice. Appropriate keyboard, mice, joysticks would have been nice too. Oops... These actually require development. Verrrrrrrrrrry dirty word for a "Buy-N-Large" shop.

Re: I don't get it

Simple reason: Gatling guns, close-up interceptor defences, etc. It is a constant arms race. Presently, it looks like supersonic, sea skimming missiles like P700 and Sunburn have a slight advantage. That is probably short lived as anti-missile defences will be upgraded to deal with these. In any case - the situation there is a close call.

Compared to these a sufficiently _MANEUVERABLE_ long range (20 miles+) supercavitating torpedo is nearly impossible to intercept. You simply cannot build an interceptor which will pull the required Gs and speed under water to get itself into position to deal with it. So your only option is to saturate its entire approach sector with depth charges across the whole range of depths and pray. You also have to do it sufficiently far out just in case someone has put a 0.5Mt warhead on that bugger. That option by is presently unavailable - there is no fleet defence ship or aircraft capable of launching the required salvo size to the required distance (you are looking at something like the BM21 or similar missile launchers (20km+ range) with proximity/depth charge warheads using some guidance/at-depth loitering and most likely multiple of those per carrier group.

Re: Re "which could potentially bypass missile defences"

On a more serious note, I'd say it could potentially bypass today's missile defences.

Today - yes, yesterdays' - no. I love the smell of hypervelocity missiles encountering a baloon barrage early in the morning. It smells... it smells... like burning money...

Re: I'm more impressed

If your TV is one of the new really smart ones with a camera (as Intel is proposing) leaving it on may not be such a good idea.

Face it - we are approaching the total surveilance sosciety, next thing we will be sending the marks back in time where a young looper will be waiting for the candidate dead body with a blunderbuss.

Re: Works all ways

That is the case if the technology requires signficant tangible investment and cannot be reproduced locally. So silicon, advanced material tech, etc - all theoretically fall in that category. Practically - they are all in China already.

Software does not fall into that category. Even North Korea can write the software it needs nowdays.

In fact, the west may find it more difficult here as the number of qualified software engineers (total and per capita) and their productivity is significantly higher outside USA and UK.

Re: Hardly breaking news

Predominantly arm and predominantly working on arm is a different story.

The interesting announcement is proper Exynos support. Presently the only thing that works on these are kernels from vendor repositories such as 3.4.0 (yes, 0) for the ARM Chromebook. They have breakage across the board in various key subsystems which are by default disabled in the original crhomebook kernel including basic stuff like NFS. Other SoCs are not much better. If you look f.e. at kernels used in various Android phones, etc you will see a mix of 2.6.33 and an occasional 3.0. Off the top of my head I cannot think of a phone or tablet that is beyond 3.4 and which will work properly using the generic kernel off kernel.org without a raft of vendor patches. There are in fact only a handful of SoCs which are "open" enough to run with a stock kernel and for some of them there is no way in hell to get the actual kernel mods (in blatant violation of the GPL).

So if we have a stable non-3.4 kernel that finally has decent Exynos support, that will be quite interesting. Ditto for other SoCs.

Re: Love the picture on the first page

You totally missed the point.

What is the technological difference between a toaster and a thermal printer?

Would not it be lovely if you had some ads printed on that toast?

Re: Upgrade, use old one as backup, rinse, repeat.

I do the same on a house scale. Old drives from the house main server RAID set are first re-purposed as MAID for media, then as backups, then as desktops (going all the way back to the days when the server was a K6 with 2 40GB Maxtors).

The current set is due for a change soon. I will probably not put WD though (my luck with them has been terrible).

Re: TalkTalk blocked my site

I've checked my three WordPress sites, and none are blocked.

They may be shortly. Talk Talk blocker is not real time, it walks your site after one of their subs has visited. So if you find it blocked in half a day or so after their filter processes data do not be surprised.

Re: I have argued for many years

Exactly:

1. it's too broad: for example 'possession of material likely to help a terrorist'... a map of the London Underground? A recipe for gunpowder? Lunch?

Why go so far. Example the brain of a chemistry degree educated person. According to UK legislation the possession of my brain would be a lifetime jail offence because it contains:

An MSC in chemistry from the days when we did study toxicology from a chemical weapons perspective as well as proper organic synthesis. How would you like that Tabun, with TNT or hexogen sprinkles? All I need is to dig around the more dusty corners of it for the correct syntesis steps for it.

This law if applied literally should lead to immediate jail time for:

1. Anyone with a Chemistry Degree

2. Most people with Molecular Biology and all people with Microbiology Degrees

3. Most electronic hobbysts and pretty much anyone with an electronics engineering degree

4. A large fraction of degree educated software developers

5. Most people with civil engineering degrees. After all, the knowledge of what it would take to knock out a building is the most essential possible material of use to terrorists (and so are things like how to build gas pipelines, etc).

6...

Re: So sad

Mandatory KAL007 reference

The more appropriate reference is Siberia airlines flight 1812 which shows that Ukrainian military has the experience in shooting them too. So nothing new here.

Dunno about UK

Elsewhere in Europe up to the late 1940-es births were regularly recorded up to several days after the fact and birth certificates issued with dates different from the actual birthday. My late inlaw birth certificate was a couple of days out of date, one of my dad's best friends and university roommate had his 5 days out of date. To heck, some countries like Greece did not have a proper birth register and were recording births as they please up to a couple of years ago. That provided a lovely business model for some of the local "minorities" which claimed benefits for the same child 4-5 times based on registering the birth in neighbouring districts. Before pressing downvote google Maria+Greece+Blond (her "parents" had her birth registered 3? or 4? times).

So having a birth recorded a day late in the 19th century? Even in a well off family? I do not find this out of the ordinary. In fact, any date on a birth certificate not issued by a hospital and before the days of national birth registers is _NOT_ primary evidence.

Re: Google playing ball

When they'll have to discuss the stuff they really care about. Like taxes.

Correct reasoning, wrong guess. The discussion which they want to avoid is how all of this freebee scorched earth (android, gmail, etc) ensure and enshrine their unquestionable monopoly in search and advertising.

Re: Seen a wedgetail eagle lately ?

Ah, so it's Australian. Suddenly it all makes sense.

At least use the correct name - it is from the Counterweight continent. Now that really makes sense (provided that you do not ask the library for a list of all the dangerous animals in there).

I would not be so sure

At this rate he will be commanding a nuclear driven (armed with ion cannons, kinetic hypervelocity armament and lasers) fleet before he reaches retirement age.

The only question is when he is going to purchase an island with a volcano on it.

Even a "harmless" site is still a potential attack vector

Forget the k1dd13 p0rn. It can be used to spearfish you back or spearfish one of your contacts. Go and explain that it is not you to the hapless victim after that.

Unfortunately, the only known solution to the password problem equates to a full loss of internet anonymity and privacy. Namely, you can drop the passwords altogether if you use client certificates (and tie the important ones to a physical key storage). So for the time being we still use passwords - they are like democracy (as per Benjamin Franklin quote): they are bad, but we are yet to figure out anything better.

Re: If I coat my car with this...

Radar - most likely no. The cops have mostly switched to IR laser guns and this should be perfect for them. Ditto for any laser rangefinder - there will be nothing to return back, so this clearly has some very obvious applications.

Re: Use a sword

That knight probably never saw actual battle, then. Swords leave horrific injuries and are usually wielded with very uncivilized anger.

Usually - yes. If you want to be a swordsman and live to a retirement age - no. Sword requires clarity of thinking and control of emotions to be effective. The moment you "use your anger" is the moment you die (assuming you are trying to engage someone who is competent with the blade - they will make a shish-kebap out of you).

Re: Really?

Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a PICT

http://rock.genius.com/Pink-floyd-several-species-of-small-furry-animals-gathered-together-in-a-cave-and-grooving-with-a-pict-lyrics

Funny, how Pink Floyd have foreseen that more than 3 decades ago. Just, wondering which model of Blackberry is called Claymore...

Re: Two thumbs up to Theo DeRaadt ...

Not so fast.

I am not. Theo's lot has refactored for security and maintainabilty:

1. Most of the BSD codebase (both Net and Free have taken back quite a bit from the Open tree).

2. Most of the original unix utilities - the whole net tools/inet lot, cron, etc.

3. Bind (talking of hairballs nothing can compete with Paul Vixie code - even openssl)

4. God knows what else. 1,2,3 are just off the top of my head.

If any team is capable of refactoring SSL it is them. Not anyone else.

Re: I still want to see ...

So if you have a copy of paradise lost or Midsummer nights dream

Or Bulgakov, Pasternak, Vysotski, Okudjava, etc - pretty much any Russian writer from the second part of the 20th century wrote in a way that has 5+ meanings in it. Part of expressing your thoughts while living in a police state I guess.

We should probably learn some lessons from them. It is becoming useful.