Posts by Down not across

Re: rather watch Benny Hill reruns

Now, get that theme music out of your head.

Bastard.

Re: one physical connector to rule them all

...Sun's 3-row DB-50 was far less robust, and I won't touch the Apple's square version - far too easy to damage.

You forgot the "bright" idea of some vendors using DB25 as SCSI connector.

Re: please...

Rule 4) Any functionality that depends on a central server...

Must have its protocol documented and at the very least stored in escrow to be published should the company cease to trade or support the product.

Re: Why oh why

My partner was in John Lewis had found the same model and had sent me a text with the price which was slightly better. I realise that people will be on commission but at the same time adding 10% in accessories I had already said I didn't need was pushing it too far.

Not to mention that JL has 5 year warranty as standard as opposed to DSG trying to sell you an extended one.

Re: Nice work

I thought the Galaxy S7 got almost everything right - there was no contest in that price category. If it was a boxing match the referee would have stopped the fight.

Close. I'd say Note 7 had almost everything right. Shame it didn't have removable battery or I wouldn't have had to send it back. Allegedly Samsung did consider selling refurbed Note 7s as a method of recycling. Sadly I've not heard anything more on that. I suppose hoping to get them in UK is too much to ask (if that idea ever materialises in the first place).

Re: Rules of thumb

Did Scott pinch your lunch from the fridge or something?

Like any company Sun had its faults. However, their hardware (pre-Oracle) was mostly fine, and in the early days pretty good. I wasn't thrilled about Solaris after SunOS 4.x (what can I say, I prefer BSD to SysV) but to be fair they did fairly decent job with that in the end and it turned out to be usable and dependable OS. Backwards compatibility also is pretty solid so that some old binary for Solaris 2.5 for example will probably run just fine on Solaris 10.

Yeah you could easily beat single thread performance with cheap x86, but as a more heavily loaded multi-user, heavy I/O system it was a lot better than most x86 based alternatives.

I shall not comment on post-Oracle situation as it is no longer Sun.

I can't downvote you because I despise Java in all its incarnations. Not that I was going to anyway mind.

@ collinsl

Quite. When needing to (actually more choosing to than absolutely needing to) upgrade from FreeNas 0.72, I looked at both and decided to stick with nas4free (which is more of a direct continuation of original FreeNAS than the bought out FreeNAS). Even though officially not supported it imported my old mirrored volume meaning I could just copy internally onto the new ZFS volume rather than copy over the network from backups.

Needless to say it has been running absolutely rock solid since (just like the 0.72 did).

Seems (to me at least) that nas4free is sticking to the original idea of being exceptionally good NAS with limited number of packages (of course you can build more if you want) and not sacrificing performance or reliability whereas FreeNAS has gone for lots of bells and whistles and large repository of packages which appears to have had some impact on reliability at least.

Re: stupid politicians

Somewhat telling is also that "just read it for articles" publication even had a column "Quayle Watch".

Re: Well actually the reason was different

HSBC also uses 2fa, for both business and personal banking. Just sayin'.

They also seem to think using your voice as a password is a great idea...

Re: Holy shucking fit

I'm glad I'm an AMD customer.

...until a flaw in PSP is published.

Re: So what exactly have they done inside and what will be the consequences?

So its not likely to be "We'd like n new chips, please." Rather "ARRRAGH - you barstewards - you've borked the pinouts. We'll need n new boards as well"

I read it more as being the case of "we'd like new chips please", unless you were using the LPC pins as GPIO in which case you would need to do a redesign given you'll be needing additional logic for the functionaliity you needed the GPIO for.

Re: FTP ...... ah the memories......

Which reminds me ... I still use UUCP in a few places, mostly to transport email within corporations,

I still remember my bangpath email address. That was before there was any commercial internet.

Re: Next car I buy

If enough people did, the place would end up looking like Havana.

And the problem is? I'd have no issue having a nice '55-57 Bel Air or Nomad as a daily driver. Or maybe a '58 Bonneville.

Re: It was designed to fail

The only odd thing with Sun Solaris was that if you switched off the console the whole system shutdown. (the Lego Sun hardware)

Not quite. More a case of lego terminal that sends break when you turn it off.

Re: Cat among the pigions but...

Things like systemd and Network Manager that are added for desktop convenience cause serious problems when they're shoehorned onto servers.

NetworkManager should be burned on a stake. Twice. Then nuked from orbit. It has absolutely no place on a server. For some reason CentOS insists on it and you have to waste time kicking it back under the rock it crawled from.

@kain

<pedant>The connector in that picture is DE-15, not DB-15</pedant>

The only kit ever I recall using DE-15 for serial communications were early Macintoshes that used it for RS-422 (yes, it is possible for it to operate as RS-232) before they went with the 8-pin Mini DIN.

Rather obscure one, so points to OP for picking one that tripped my memory up. :)

Re: Stupid

But for those stuck with Windows-ONLY software (that isn't WINE-friendly), they're kinda stuck, you know? Microsoft figures they've got a captive market...

For now.

The more Microsoft does these kinds of shenanigans, the more people will defect even if it means forgoing some windows-only software.

Eventually we might get to the point where vendors responsible for said software see the market share starting to shrink sufficiently that they will be forced to start offering non-windows versions if they want to stay in business.

Re: lawyer: I just made a bazillion bucks

Here's a tip, just use the cable modem that your ISP gave you. There are no secret tricks to getting proper bandwidth, aside from moving to somewhere other than the US....

You mean like in UK where with VM you do NOT have a choice? You can only use their supplied cable modem which if you're unlucky could be Arris based on Puma 6.

Re: Question

If it's 4G how do you connect? Wouldn't this require a SIM?

Err...with your phone? Yes you would have your normal SIM in it.

I presume, since the article says joint venture between Vodafone and Telefonica, that coverage for Vodafone and O2 should be very good. Users of other operators are unlikely to see benefit unless they start offering domestic roaming.

XBONE HDMI Passthrough

Xbox Ones can do HDMI passthrough. Will the Scorpio be able to do 4K HDMI passthrough, meaning it can go between the Sky box and the TV?

Annoyingly XBONE's HDMI passthrough only works if the console is on. What bright eejit came up with that stupidity?

I certainly hope they fix that annoyance on Scorpio (if it will have HDMI passthrough).

@Charlie Clark

From that page:

It’s an old saw that email design is stuck in the past. For the longest time, developers have been forced to revisit coding techniques that were dated even back in the early 2000s if they wanted to build an HTML email campaign. Locked into table-based layouts and reliant on inline styles, most developers refused to believe that email could do anything more than look serviceable and deliver some basic content to subscribers.

For a few email developers, though, frustrating constraints became inspiring challenges and the catalyst for a variety of paradigm-shifting techniques.

Aaargh! Yes I stopped reading at that point before violent tendencies (towards the, in this case, fairly innocent computer) got out of hand.

It being World Backup Day, can't we just restore to when email was just plain text.

Re: Fingerprint scanner - why so many complaints?

Because, for example for me, it is in the wrong place. I prefer it on the front.

You, and most (if you say so) might not use it but I did, and it worked a treat on the Note 7.

Iris recognition is less great if you wear glasses or are a person who suffers from seizures or epileptic symptoms. Can't speak for S8, but in Note 7 fingerprint wasn't "just for 3rd party apps" but was one of several authentication methods for unlocking the phone.

Re: Dragon 32

Yes a clone of the later Tandy Color (sic) computer ... 6809 cpu IIRC.

Best of all (just IMHO of course) you could get OS-9 for it.

BA vs ES

(only drawback is they only sell screw not bayonet fixing)

Personally I wouldn't see that as a drawback. Especially since E27 bulbs are quite widely available in UK. Even supermarkets stock them if you need one in an emergency.

I've never seen a wobbly/loose E27 socket, whereas same can't be said for the B22d. Seems even more evident when comparing E14 and BA15d. No doubt this is mostly due to some manufacturers using cheap crap sockets/mounts and BA seems to suffer more than ES.

Re: Adobe Reader... + Memories of Ashton Tate

Ah, I remember using dBase II (IIRC) on CP/M 2.2. It worked remarkably well at the time.

Yes, dBase suffered the unfortunately common phenomon of software reaching its peak and then getting worse until no longer useful.

Higher version is not always better.

Re: Checked in luggage

Yes, but if your goal is to terrorize people, depressurizing a cargo hold (or starting a fire there) isn't nearly as spectacular as depressurizing a cabin full of people.

Explosive decompression of the cargo hold is unlikely to stay limited to the cargo hold.

Re: I guess that means it's time to add a time component to the encryption

There's a secondary issue: how do you tell the difference between an encrypted disc and one full of random numbers? Or one containing two encrypted partitions, one of which is completely innocent?

I don't think you can (without having the password and therefore being able to decryp and mount). Not reliably anyway.

With two partitions, presence of one known encrypted partition (confirmed by it being decrypted by the provided password) might raise suspicion of any other partitions on the disk being also encrypted.

Possibly better option would be TC's hidden volumes (within a parent volume). Even then a keen eyed observer might get suspicious with discrepancy between apparent used vs free space.

There are of course various other ways presence of hidden volume might be revealed.

Re: Support for Blackberry

Sorry no. I hope they (Whatsapp) burn in hell. The way they slurp contacts without those contacts' permission is unforgivable.

Re: Well said!

now only if some of this lovely ARM Server H/W was available to us mere mortals at prices that were compatible to i5/i7 systems and off the shelf. That may be sometime coming though.

Quite. I'd love to get my hands on few Cavium ThunderX2 boxes/boards to replace some aging x86 stuff with. At the moment the only realistic options for reducing power consumption are either crappy Atom (for some very light non-memory intensive workloads) or low power i5/i7 (or perhaps Naples, depending what AMD comes up with). Given a choice I'd opt for the Cavium over the others, given the goodies in the SoC.

Re: This was first done around 1980

Or few lines of tcl for an eggdrop bot on IRC. There were some fairly clever ones back in the day.

Re: Good design my a***

Why?? I'll rephrase that. No I won't. Why?? The laptop is useless without wifi!

Ever tried to use a corporate laptop that tries to contact DC and bunch of other services, before you have had chance to login to VPN to make them available?

Being able to turn wifi off means windows (no, linux is often not an option on corporate machines) will complete login/resume from sleep in few seconds instead of spending several minutes trying to connect somewhere being utterly unresponsive until it finally gives up.

Just because you have no need for it doesn't mean others might not find it very useful or even necessary.