Posts by elaar

Re: Lotta haters here

"I get the issues with driving", then why can't you understand the difference between criticising people doing something stupid for 10secs of internet fame, and jealousy?

Re: Purchase cost is one thing

I'd say about 90% of the reasonably priced+ EVs are leased, so resale value isn't important.

Many companies offer tax-swerving schemes like the Octopus one for example, to lease an EV at a reasonable cost.

Within another 8-10 years I'd expect there to be a practical and more reasonably priced way of replacing the battery pack, we've advanced a long way EV wise in the last 8.

Re: All I really want

I think we're in the minority these days unfortunately. People have become lazy, and want to be spoon fed answers from search queries, and I doubt most of them can be bothered to click the web link to check the validity of the answer either. But what I expect is them to segregate these search methods. One should be a website search, the other a simple question-answer search, they should not be combined.

"Most traffic is encrypted these days, and there's very little a firewall can do to inspect it"

Maybe old, traditional firewalls, but there's a great deal that Next Generation firewalls can do to control, inspect and secure ALL traffic. The FW controls the encryption process, rather than the client directly with the destination host.

Re: Remote

Working from home is typically becoming FAR MORE secure compared to how working in the office used to be.

To deal with so many people working from home and/or using different devices, it's pushing most companies from using traditional corporate firewalls to cloud-based Firewalls/SDWAN type offerings, device fingerprinting, AI mechanisms etc..

Everything I use requires 2-factor authentication as well as the traditional security of the VPN. Annoyingly I can't even make a coffee before everything locks down. Compare that to the basic security we had on office machines 5+ years ago, with border firewalls.

Re: >Where's the Brexit bonus?

"and our local parliament would make the rules about (though not necessarily stop) immigration"

How would making "rules" stop immigration when you pee off the French and we're no longer able to use Dublin Regulation? All we've accomplished is less skilled immigration (which we desperately need in certain sectors) and more asylum seekers crossing.

Besides, the laws our parliament create still have to be ratified by our great House of Lords which is packed full of unelected cronies, isn't our democracy fab!?

Re: 45%

A rep (when interviewed on the BBC this morning) plainly stated that the 45% wasn't expected or realistic, but was merely a starting point for negotiations. You have to start somewhere optimistically.

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

"What could be easier?" - a metric system....

"We Brits still call the standard building timber a "two-by-four". So much easier than "hand me a couple of one-hundred-by-two-hundreds, there's a good chap"." - You don't base a measurement system on which one's easiest to say. You can still call it a 2x4, as it's pretty close, I'm sure the person passing it to you won't get confused if you're a few mm out with your description.

I don't think we'd suffer any major issues if a pint of beer was 13% smaller, the US version is under half a litre, and that's the point really... a system where values differ between common countries has no place in a modern society. The only people that argue against this are those that grew up with said archaic system.

Re: Hardly the first problem

It does beg the question though, why not buy a proper Cisco SOHO router (like the C900) that has a proper IOS? All of those RV routers might have the Cisco brand attached, but they're the equivalent of the cheap Linksys stuff.

Re: "continuous relationships with customers across the entire value-chain."

You could just completely block a smart-TV in your firewall, that's what I do. I might unblock it once a year to check for updates and that's it. It's a shame to miss out on some of the best Panels just because you're put off by the "smart" rubbish.

Re: Not just gender

We've advertised 8 different job positions in the last 6 months (all in IT, 2nd/3rd line and managerial positions etc.) and from memory we've had ~50 male candidates apply. We have 1 female in the whole of our support department of ~30 odd people. The company would literally do anything to employ more females, to the point where their skillset doesn't even matter (which is an awful thing to admit).

We just don't have enough interest in the industry.

Re: I have no problem with this.

Speeding can be a crime. If instead of getting a PCN/FPN it goes to court, and you're convicted, then you have a criminal conviction and it goes on your criminal record.

Re: Why did Burger King send me this blank receipt whilst i was sleeping at 5am?

If only those "stupid" people did the simple task of setting up a unique random email address for every single bloody website/company they ever contacted, and spent their lives monitoring all addresses incase there's an order update or similar. They would then miss all those emails that you have to click "unsubscribe" on, and the one ever BK blank order receipt, the fools!

Do you think our core infrastructure uses cheap Cisco devices with (publically accessible) web guis?

Web Guis are always a vulnerability in this sort of kit, but there's many non/semi-technical customers that require it, hence why they put it in cheap SOHO kit.

Re: Ours

I'm not sure how the EU stopped the UK from having fabs, I can't find any information to suggest that. But I do know that the EU (UK) is at the forefront of Medical Research, Fusion projects, CERN to name just a few. So to suggest the EU is behind on "high tech" because it doesn't have sophisticated FABS is laughable.

Re: Not near wind farms

The issue with that is a lot of people want easy access to their DC (even though visits tend to be pretty rare), so that would cross off using it for co-lo etc. The other issue might be a lack of skilled staff in those areas. But yeah apart from that it would make a lot more sense.

Not just BMW. Our VW Golf came as "Android auto compatible", which naively I assumed meant it would work with it. Well it will, but you have to splash out £250 for them to connect their computer and tick a box somewhere.

Re: Open source?

Yes, Woz is a technical legend. Jobs was technically useless and manipulative.

And yet all of the fanboys love Jobs.

There's many examples, such as Atari and Woz/Jobs with Breakout.

Re: Hmmm.

You're not going to get anything serious done with an 8bit GPIO though.

I'm assuming you'd offload the GPIO tasks to a seperate gpio usb/i2c/spi extender, as you wouldn't want to risk harming the (probably very expensive) main board.

Do other big corporations (of which cityfibre isn't) have their pensions backed by the "crown" (taxpayer)?

I'm bemused that people are buying these high-power expensive GPUs that require 1000w supplies, whilst at the same time I'm on a mission to change everything in my house that uses more power than is necessary considering electricity prices are going to hit 40p/kwh.

I'm obviously very boring and middle-aged.

Re: I/O

The devices are in parallel, but it's not a parallel bus (which I think he's getting at). But the parallel bus is a thing of the past anyway.

Re: What is the life expectancy of these switches?

Well traditionally, Catalyst switches tended to outlive humans. You still find 2950s working away in comms rooms.

"for equipment sold just three years ago." - You mean the cheap line of hardware that was released 10 years ago?

Re: This is Linus trying to be a nice guy, he is not! :)

Rust isn't a cool language. It has a cool pre/compiler, and a lot of great ideas, but some of the semantics/syntax ideas are unnecessarily complicated and bewildering.

My opinion is they decided to tackle all of the most complicated parts of C by making them even more abstruse in Rust.

Re: Is this in addition to the vulnerabilities in a previous article?

We hear about a lot of Cisco bugs/security flaws, but there is good reason for this.

Cisco have always been very open about bugs, with a good system to report them and track progress, and if you actually bother to look at the dates they're usually rectified within a week.

Compare that to other companies that keep security flaws quiet, and some never bother to fix them, it doesn't make them more secure just because you don't hear about their vulns.

You're always going to have flaws in software, the key is to deal with them transparently and fix them quickly.

To compare, Fortinet have slightly less than half of the CVEs than Cisco for 2022, but Cisco have 20x more product lines.

Re: This brings back memories...

Commodore did the same thing with their Amiga CDTV. I was 13, plugged the printer into the scsi port and that was the instant death of my 1 month old Xmas present.

By this time Commodore had gone bankrupt as well, so no replacement under warranty either.

Re: Throw away 3 year old, core, infrastructure?

"3 year old core infrastructure".

You're over-egging it a bit there. It's hardware that's 10 years old now, was linksys like quality and cheap even then, and it's no more core infrastructure than my home router is.

For an office you need a SOHO router like the old 800 or newer 900series as a minimum.

I'm insulted, go to Jail!

Re: Nothing of appeal

I'm using it now on my dev laptop. Apart from MS deciding to move the icons (because after 30 years of aligning them to the left, I guess they thought people wanted a change), and making the start menu even more annoying, I don't immediately notice any difference.

Oh, actually, every time I look in a directory in windows explorer, it takes 12 seconds to actually list the contents, with a "working on it" message to entertain me. State of the art SSD and OS (?) and 12 seconds to see the files in my downloads folder. Great stuff MS.

Re: scripts versus ads

" I believe in not trying to avoid doing my bit for how the whole web ecosystem works"

But by blocking scripts, which prevents a lot of the tracking from taking place, then those adverts are less likely to be for things you'd be interested in. This means you're less likely to click and you're not doing your bit for the ecosystem....

Our support department had a number of Python scripts that did Network wide scanning/scraping and automation of 1000s of CPEs. The logs showed the server was often hitting 6GB RAM usage.

We re-wrote them in C and max usage came down to 112MB.

To be fair, it wasn't just Python's fault. The people that coded the original scripts were the type that think they can code in Python because they've skimmed through a few chapters of "Learning Python".

Re: For the Apple haters…

To be fair, Google gave Apple $15billion last year so that it was the default search method on Apple devices. So that payment helps Google collect data from Apple's users.

Besides, you're comparing companies that derive most of their turnover from private data with one that doesn't, which seems rather pointless. Samsung isn't in the top 7 either.

Re: 1984

It will likely never happen though.

Remember, the Tories are still hell-bent on banning end-to-end encryption, ensuring government agencies can spy on us without court orders. Our police force can demand our passwords with barely any evidence of a crime, so it's not like we'll suffer any less from this Orwellian crap being out of the EU.

Re: I'll take the bait

Saying Nuclear Fission isn't safe because of Chernobyl is a bit like saying driving is dangerous because someone crashed whilst driving blind on 30 year old tyres and having no brakes.

Fortunately modern day reactors aren't built on flawed cold-war designs.

I'm not a big fan of Fission (or pro-nuclear as you like to call it), but weighing the odds, I think it's a better way to meet our energy needs than 8.7million people dying worldwide each year from fossil fuels.

Re: In all seriousness, people still use WhatsAPP?

Almost, only 2billion users.. When it takes about 5 years for your Nan to get used to it, it's not going anywhere fast.

Re: The McDonald's of programming languages

In a nutshell, Python is (largely) quick and easy to learn/code, which is the main reason why it has gained so much traction, but that comes with a cost.. It's just so damn slow and inefficient (comparatively), hopefully these upcoming changes will help with that.

I consider it more of a scripting language like PHP. A language where anyone can cobble something together.