Posts by Down not across

Re: tenner-a-month?

Pipex? Hmm, I suppose it could've been. Demon started out as Pipex's customer iirc.

SystemD makes SMF look good^Wbetter

That's true. My objection to it isn't the complexity in terms of using it. My objection is partly the complexity of its implementation, and mostly the fact that it does far, far more than it should in terms of replacing critical system components.

If they really had to (in their minds) rewrite the init, they could've just stuck to effectively porting/rewriting SMF and stopped there. Still, at least wrangling with SMF one can think "it could be worse, it could be SystemD".

Re: Am i being thick...

Running "nmap" on the IP address will give you the MAC.

Bit of an overkill, if all you want is the mac address.

arp target will give you the mac address of target. You can specify hostname or ip address as the target.

Re: WHAT? Mythbusters

Take apart a radio from before the miniaturised transistor was invented. Lots of valves in that.

<PEDANT>

Yeah but valve != transistor. The schematic is quite different depending if you use valves or transistors even if the final functionality of the circuit is same.

</PEDANT>

Re: "expect" isn't a basic utility, it's an add-on.

You can assume that someone is taking credit for your work right up until the point it stops working... then they will deny all knowledge of ever seeing it.

Ahem. I have vehemently denied ever seeing some code and having no idea about it ...until I've spotted the header revealing me as the original author. Has happened few times, and I honestly have not recognized any of the code that I had apparently written many years ago.

Re: It's 2018

One morning I left the office and entered the nearby motorway. After a short distance it started to rain - and the screen smeared. I pulled back on the column "wiper" stalk to get a washer jet and nothing happened. I had to glance down at the dashboard to identify the marked knob that had that function. As I looked up a lorry had come down a slip road and changed lanes into my "safe" space.

So, why not check the impotant controls like lights,wipers,heating/blower while still parked, before embarking on you journey?

Re: But what was working?

Voice was down for many users for 10 to 12 hours, as 4G carries voice as well as data.

Yes it does, but is should fallback to 3G/2G.

Sometimes phones/cells dont fallback to older tech as they should. In that situation, it may be worth forcing the phone to 3G/2G in settings. I had an issue years ago where calls were not getting through and O2 (yeah, funny that) suggested forcing the handset to 3G which worked around the issue. Allegedly there was some issue (which persisted for some time) in the local cell(s).

You make it sound like it should require a license to use a computer: something normally used inside one's own home.

Did you read the article?

From the article:

As for protecting against this post-attack persistence problem? “Add additional auditing and GPO settings,” said Sela. The two also suggested that Microsoft allows custom security questions as well as the ability to disable the feature altogether in Windows 10 Enterprise. The presentation slides are available here (PDF). ®

...makes it quite clear it is not really about home use, but using Win 10 in corporate environment.

The hardcoding issue applies home as well of course, but as many have said (and I presume most of us do already) there is no need to give real answers to the questions.

Re: $5m is Not Enough

$5m is petty cash for Verizon.

Re: Accountants

The tax system files it under "compensation for loss of office", at which point it becomes a tax-free payment up to certain limits (used to be £30k, but may well have increased since then).

Still the same I think. Certainly applies to for example redundancy payments:

Payments in lieu of notice used to be too, but are now taxable since last April.

Re: Ah, SUN's pizza boxes

Now, I personally *loved* the beautiful engineering that could be seen inside the pizza box design, but it had one b*stard of a gotcha involving a connected terminal. If you would switch it off before you disconnected, it would issue a STOP instruction to the system so it would basically be off as far as functionality is concerned.

Close but no cigar. Some, not all, serial terminals effectively send BREAK when powered off. This is usually caused by combination of the RS-232 driver and power supply causing logic low that appears as BREAK. SunOBP goes into PROM monitor on break. You can recover by typing 'go' and system should resume.

I don't know who dreamt that up, but he must have been the one to originate the BOFH DNA.

Hate to disappoint, but it is due to bad(cheap) design/engineering terminals (and many terminal/console servers) and the way they have implemented RS-232. As an example Cisco 2511 would send break, whereas 26xx/36xx/28xx/38xx with NM or HWIC async cards IIRC don't. Likewise ISTR Cyclades mostly worked. Then there are some that send break when powered ON, just to be awkward.

Re: Was looking good up until the bit...

.... where we here that all 16 cores are slower than 5 cores of a Xeon.

Not everything is about speed. It is quite common for cores to be not that highly utilised for example.

Re: Do it in style

What car? Clearly a Tesla. Marty will still be an idiot who struggles to outrace a VW van loaded down with terrorists despite driving a vehicle capable of hitting 88 MPH in about 50 feet.

Might take bit longer than that. DMC12 was bit underpowered compared to its looks.

The movie was accurate in one way though, the original alternator was too weak and battery would end up flat if everything was turned on. Later cars did have better alternator.

Re: Burroughs/Unisys...

BTOS - Burroughs Technology Operating System (it was the Burroughs name for CTOS and it was also marketed under the name Starsys).

Wasn't CTOS from Convergent Technologies? I rememeber running 68K based MiniFrame and MegaFrame boxen running CTiX. Some MegaFrame I/O processor boards ran CTOS (scaled down obviously). They also came out with 80x86 based NGEN (or Burroughs B25 if you prefer) that ran CTOS. I'm talking about before Unisys bought Convergent Technologies.

Re: Dumb dumb dumb

are you switching phones so often that the 'i can switch my sd card between them' is genuinely a feature? or is it nice to have on that odd occasion you switch phones every other year when u upgrade?

It is not always case of how often either. I had a phone break when it dropped and hit ground in a bad way. Luckily I had any personal data, photos, Keepass database and such on the SD card. Get new phone and put the card in, wait for Google Play to redownload apps and everything was back.

So yes I am definitely in the "no SD card - no sale" camp.

Re: PSA

+1. In the classical period (1995-2005) being an enterprise DBA was pretty hard. You had to know your OS inside out, you had to understand how to do fast I/O and then you had to design the database, as in tune how tables should be laid out for maximal performance. Wasnae easy, cap'n.

Hear hear. I miss those days. You really ended up knowing the systems, both hardware and OS, better than most of the sysadmins.

Oracle tries to be clever and decide things for you. It does acceptably for most of the time. But not always. And being Oracle is buggy as hell. And it can get it really horribly wrong. It is also even worse piece of bloated crap than what it used to be.

All-flash or tiered is cheap so that takes care of I/O performance. Of course raw blocks weren't just for performance, it was also to bypass filesystem cache, after all you cache rows in memory anyway, but also for ensuring that writes that the database thinks have been written to disk have actually been written to disk.

Having said all that, even if everything is faster and more automatic, the data volumes and business requirements have increased too so there is still very much need for skilled DBAs. Don't forget lusers have not improved even if hardware and software may have done.

Re: And even older.

Could've sworn DPS6 was mini-computer (even if it may have taken a rack or two), and DPS8 was a mainframe.

Re: On a larger scale

The largest of those is a Silicon Graphics Challenge L ('deskside' chassis the size of a small fridge). Also a bunch of other SGI and Sun workstations from the 90s, all in various states of disrepair and I think none actually working.

I'm in that boat. Minus the Challenge L, but I do have various old HP 3000,9000, DEC (VAX,MIPS,Alpha) and Data General workstations and servers. Accompanying all that, is bunch of terminals, cabling, old network kit starting from early says of ethernet. There is also myriad of smaller,handheld and Z80 and x86 based stuff.

I should clear out. But I actually like the old stuff. The old stuff had soul. Maybe that's why they play tricks if you try to get rid of them.

Re: And their response?

Not quite. Your personal information is your data, not theirs.

I believe DPA considers them to have legitimate reason for collecting your data. Presumably it should be possible to ask them to delete all your data, however that would most likely make it somewhat difficult to obtain credit (or many services that may either do credit checks or effectively offer credit if you pay monthly).

I don't think they can necessarily do whatever they like with it either without risking falling foul of GDPR.

With all that said, I think they hoard way too much data that can be abused (or lost...) and welcome probing into their practices.

Re: "secure" boot is *EVIL* 4 Chronos

Intersting link there.

But once again no mention of price without a frustration-inducing hunt.

Like clicking the "Buy" button to find out the price?

More frustrating was trying to find the resolution of either the 13.3" or 15" screen as the specs declined to mention it. Finding some reviews enlightened about the missing specifications, and were not necessarily glowing in terms of hardware itself. I love the idea, but the hardware does not appear to live up to the price tag. Shame.

Re: low priority traffic?

http://elreg.nateamsden.com/funkyroute.txt

32 hops, 98% packet loss and 280ms later arriving at the destination.

Ok, that is a pretty funky route. Talk about taking the long way around.

Re: I can't get the sensor to fit

I forget which company built that carb, but that wasn't the only quality problem with the car.

I seem to recall GM using Rochester carbs a lot. Of course many people replaced them with Holleys.

Re: Icahn for Fraud

His MO is to get enough stock to dictate the destruction of the company in such away he makes profit but everyone else including employees get shafted.

It sure is. He is driven by insatiable greed and anything else is just collateral damage.

That period, Icahn's announcement said, "is critical to DVMT stockholders because the company and its advisors have been soliciting votes, and DVMT stockholders have a right to know whether, and to what extent, the Board is aware of, and even planned, some of the apparently coercive tactics being employed by the company and its advisors".

Coercive? Pot. Kettle.

Oh and well done El Reg to drop the "activist investor" and just call him what he is, a corporate raider.

Re: Harmless

Not any cars made this century. I'd be surprised to even see a CD player in anything made in the last couple of years.

My current car, and pretty much all previous ones (at least ones that still had original factory installed audio) have all been equipped with radio/cassette.And in some cases also with cd-changer. Even with factory sat-nav and tv (analogue). Now if I could only find any of the old cassettes I used to have, but some things as best forgotten I think. Yes, current and several previous have been made this century.

Re: Close but no cigar

See HTC Touch Pro (2008) - slider horizontal QWERTY with full size screen.

I just want a modern phone in this form-factor.

I'm hoping HMD Global will, in their stream of remaking Nokia's old models, get around to making the Communicator.

Re: Worthless Marketing hypeHypeHYPE

We'll have REAL 5G in two years, MAYBE. Meanwhile, bull excrement. The first tasty stool will be served up by Verizon.

Doesn't stop them appearing to bet everything on it. I suppose the voluntary redundancies and booting large portion of their IT to outsourcing will help fund it.

Re: Just wondering

And yeah, I know a few people who work with Oracle stuff - zero of them like it, their licensing, or their support...

They have support?

Oh. You mean where you pay them lot of money, submit SRs, know more than the drones, and find out the solution before "support" comes back with any answers. Some suggestions from their "support" would have wiped out production databases.

Most useful part of the support is the MOS archive. Also, they do have some people with a clue, but getting to them can be a challenge.

Re: Virgin Media routers

They do. They also require login on that page to change anything. In theory, depending how buggy the code is. Without password all you see is various status pages.

Default IP address != default password

Sadly SH3 is JS hell, the previous ones at least had status pages that were easily readable with curl to build some automatic monitoring and statistics collection.

Re: Incompetent all round

I knew their website was crappily coded, not working properly on some browsers, but to use 3P JS code on a website that collects payment details is verging on criminal negligence.

Fixed that for you.

Page collecting payment information should have no need for any script. Just collect the information on the form and submit the information.

As an added bonus it might work better too.

Re: We do know some things for sure...

7) Highly personal medical data will be sold off

8) It won't be secure and medical data will leak

Re: I miss working at NTL back in 2000

You don't remember the "transparent proxies" that used to fail all the time?

Isn't old age is wonderful! It allows you to forget things. I'd completely forgotten about those.

Yes, the proxies were bad, but affected only small amount of what I was doing online. And as you said were easy to work around.

What I really want is a Fallout Pip Boy strapped to my arm

Not the "Global" from EFC then?

Re: Make anything more than a plain vanilla Android completely optional

I just wish that a European manufacturer came back into the mobile market.. Come back Nokia...

Nokia has (well yes, they're made by HMD) range of Andoird phones with plain vanilla Android. Nokia 8 seems to be now available for around 260 quid, which seems very good value.

Re: "I’m an engineer, I work in IT..."

I would expect an engineer working in IT to understand the difference between unplanned and planned maintenance.

Re: The email address was not necessarily the one associated with the account ?

Also, Experian don't necessarily have your e-mail address, they just collect details about you while you go about your life hence the difficulty of proving that you're you to them.

Considering this is about unlocking accounts that people have frozen with a pin, I would think it is reasonable to expect Experian in this situation to have email address and other information relating to that account for the people to be able to manage their account.