* Posts by Peter Quirk

10 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jun 2012

Facebook Android app caught seeking 'superuser' clearance

Peter Quirk

Re: RE: First thing to disable on a new phone

On my non-carrier, unlocked Samsung S9, Facebook is classified a a SYSTEM APP, which cannot be uninstalled!

Pentagon sticks to its guns: Yep, we're going with a single cloud services provider

Peter Quirk

Missed opportunity to force standardization of basic cloud APIs

In the past, the DoD has required second-sourcing agreements for semiconductors. However, the incompatibility of cloud services APIs means that no second-sourcing is possible. If the DoD writes to the AWS APIs, their code can't use Azure or GCP. Likewise if they wrote to he Azure APIs, they can't mix and match AWS or GCP services. The DoD could use its leverage to level the playing field and define a selection of APIs to be offered by all providers, regardless of any copyright claims that might be made.

Feel like a little kid in the container world? Welcome to the club

Peter Quirk

Containers are easier to adopt on Windows 10 desktops

IT may find that it's easier to deploy some popular server apps via docker. For example, I prefer to install containers on my Desktop rather than apps. My laptop has docker images for logstash, minio, CDAP, mongoDB, and golang. They're much easer to manage, update and remove.

Disk drive fired 'Frisbees of death' across data centre after storage admin crossed his wires

Peter Quirk

Re: Ahead of their time

The forerunner of the CLARiiON - the High Availability Disk Array - had a VMEbus interface when it was developed for the first Motorola 88K-based systems.

Peter Quirk

Burroughs B5500 drives spun in the vertical plane to reduce risk of killing people

The Burroughs On-Line Disk File (as it was known) had massive 36" platters spinning in the vertical plane. My B5500 field engineer said that the advantage of this design was that if an earthquake occurred, and the platters shattered, the probability of injuring people in the machine room was much lower. You can see the product brochure at http://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/burroughs.onlinedisk.1962.102646217.pdf

The Illiac IV computer, also built by Burroughs, had disk drives with a similar vertical platter design. Pictures at http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X1629.99

A certain millennial turned 30 recently: Welcome to middle age, Microsoft Excel v2

Peter Quirk

Re: "I have to say Excel is one thing Microsoft got right."

FCS EPS was a pre-PC spreadsheet that separated logic from data.

Improv's "everything is a pivot table" concept was confusing at first. I think Microsoft's got pivot tables right after seeing what Lotus did.

Unloved Microsoft Edge is much improved – but will anyone use it?

Peter Quirk

Re: Memory Utilisation

I'm running Edge 16 on build 16288, pretty close to the final Fall Creators release. In Task Manager, you can see each of the Edge threads and their resource consumption. Chrome's threads are not individually named. For a test I'm running a tweetdeck display of 10 columns, one being the default feed from 458 people/bots. Here's the memory consumption for Edge threads:

Microsoft Edge (10) 3.8% CPU 373MB ~0.1 MB/s network when updating <--- overall for 10 threads

Background tab pool 0% 4.1MB

Browser extensions 0% 26.3MB <--- only extensions installed are Office online, translator

Browser_Broker 0% 2.7MB

Chakra JIT compiler 0% 4.6MB <--- this obviously changes when you download any new scripts

Microsoft Edge Manager 0% 24.8MB

Runtime Broker 0% 3.2MB

Runtime Broker 0% 8.7MB

Tweetdeck 6.9% 306.2 MB

User Interface Service 0% 33.9MB

User Interface Service 0% 4.0MB

(Totals don't sum as I'm typing these numbers while the values change.)

By comparison, Chrome running the same workload:

Google Chrome(6) 9.2% 370.3

Google Chrome 0% 1.4MB

Google Chrome 0% 1.5MB

Google Chrome 0.4% 135.4MB

Google Chrome 0% 12.0MB

Google Chrome 5.1% 141.3MB

Google Chrome 0.7% 48.8MB

They're pretty similar, given how much the numbers change during updates to the Tweetdeck panels.

Internet of S**t things claims another scalp: DNS DDoS smashes StarHub

Peter Quirk

Buying from a reputable vendor doesn't protect you

Too many people claim that paying more for a product from a reputable vendor will protect you. The issue in the recent attacks was that a core component in products made by others included a service with hard-coded credentials that couldn't be changed. There is no Good Security Housekeeping Seal of Approval that can be used by supply chain managers to check the security habits of parts suppliers, nor for consumers to check the security habits of manufacturers.

For web-based products that you don't pay for, it's even worse. There's no way to tell in advance whether a website uses Adobe Flash, or whether a blog post is hosted on a compromised Wordpress or Joomla site. You can't find out how quickly a web site owner address known flaws, or does penetration testing. The only signal you can get from the noise is whether the web site vendor notifies you about a recent vulnerability, and what they're doing to avoid the issue in the future. 99.9% of consumers won't be able to assess the vendor from this info.

BOFH: This laptop has ceased to be. And it's pub o'clock soon

Peter Quirk

This BOFH article crashes the Register's Windows 10 app

Clicking on this article in the Windows app causes the app to terminate. Other articles are OK,