Posts by Electron Shepherd

Do combine harvesters pay the congestion charge?

If you have an actual "local farmer's market" in Marylebone, you must have a farm nearby.

Where's the farm that is "local" to Marylebone?

It's neither...

The animal in question, now identified as a feline called 'Bernice', had merely got fed up with being locked in a box and had taken the first opportunity to hoof it through an open window.

All the experimenter had to do was set a saucer of milk by the window and call the cat's name in an enticing voice.

Re: More breaking news

Most people are experts in one (occasionally more than one) domain, and complete amateurs outside it.

It's very likely that a professional plumber or electrician could come to your home, take one look at the shower you fitted or the extra socket you installed, and realise that you have no idea what you're doing.

You probably don't even have the best tools for the job. This is because you are not trained in that area and no-one has told you differently.

The web is not the internet

OK, so if bots are half of all internet traffic

That's not what the article, or the original Device Atlas post, say.

They say that that half of all web requests are from bots. That's not the same as saying that half the traffic sent in response to those requests is due to bots, and it's certainly not the same as saying that half of all internet traffic is due to bots.

Re: Lines per defect

See Fred Brooks and The Mythical Man Month, and the discussion of the tendency towards irreducible number of errors.

"In a suitably complex system there is a certain irreducible number of errors. Any attempt to fix observed errors tends to result in the introduction of other errors."

Parsed?

I think it's:

"Unfortunately, as clients get close to the point in their business cycle when they buy new hardware and/or software, I am often asked to help them understand what the current Microsoft product line is and how it can be used by the client's business to greatest effect."

Re: "Even if something has been written in Java in 90s that is still 20 years ago."

True, but in a lot of industries, especially finance, the regulatory environment changes, and that makes the software out of date. Effectively, the software gains bugs by not changing, and so failing to keep up with the world in which it operates.

Re: Only 10%?

Everyone knows the official figures are unobtainable

That's true - no one every gets the quoted figure. But the point of the official figure, oddly enough, is not to say what the actual consumption is. The intention is that it's used purely as a relative comparator, not an absolute, so that you know that a car with an official consumption figure of 70 mpg will be more efficient than one with a 60 mpg figure, and not that either will actually deliver the quoted consumption figure

The problem is that it has a unit associated with it, so it becomes measurable in the real world. If it was simply a grading, say from A to Z, with A being really good and Z being really bad, people wouldn't complain. That grading comes with its own issues, though, such as how do you grade a new car in a few years time that beats the current 'A' grade?

Re: Err...

MSVC has no business removing this memset

It wouldn't, since the memory was subsequently referenced by another function call. What it might do is optimize away a call to that was used at the end of a function to clear out memory that stored information such as a password in clear text, so that it wasn't left in memory.

See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366877.aspx for an example.

Re: US District Court

It would seem the District Court was entirely mistaken on something fundamental to this case.

Strictly speaking, the District Court didn't decide. A panel of 12 jurors did.

Re: As a percentage

The two other possibilities:

1) They actually made a large profit, and they got the creative accountants in to avoid having to actually pay tax.

2) They actually made a large(er) loss, and they got the creative accountants in to avoid having to answer awkward questions from the investors.

Don't forget, you can always tell a good accountant with a simple Q &A:

Q: "What's two plus two?"

A: "What would you like it to be?"

Re: HEART INTERNET OUTAGE

Shhh...

How can they say it's resilient now?

Because resilient doesn't mean failure-proof.

Resilient:

b : tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change

A resilient service comes back again, just as Heart apparently has.

Re: Shouldn't be needed

In fact you really want people to learn, have an alert every time in email programs that can never be disabled asking the user if they really know the sender, trust the sender, if this is a typical message?

All this will do is teach people that whenever they read an e-mail, there's an extra pop-up window they have to get rid of. They won't learn anything about security - they'll just learn that computers are now a little it more annoying.

Re: All that needed is...

All that needed is - common templating system and automated template builds from mib files

Until you have something that isn't monitored via SNMP. To take just one example - connect to a remote web server, validate its SSL certificate, and warn you if it's due to expire soon. I don't know of any way to do that via SNMP.

At the operating system level, for Windows there's lots of really useful information that simply isn't exposed via SNMP. This is true to a lesser extent on Linux, which does broadly have better SNMP support - but try monitoring the contents of the logs in /var via SNMP.

Re: Nobody wants...

I think that one of the problems, oddly enough, is the move away from the waterfall model, with it's stages of system test -> integration test -> user acceptance test.

There seems to be an idea developing that TDD and automated unit testing results in full-working software.

"What do you mean, it has bugs? I checked it in, and our CI server said it passed all the tests. That means it works"

There is a bit of "Quis custodiet ipos custodies?" here - how do you know the tests are correct and provide full coverage? To bring the Latin up to date, "Who tests the tests?"

I've seen plenty of code that has lots of unit tests, and the code passes all of them, but they either end up testing that basically the compiler works (e.g. making sure that getter/setter pair get and set as expected), or the actual functionality is mocked out, just to get the test to pass.

This isn't to say that unit tests are a bad idea (they aren't) or that the waterfall model is the best way to write software (it isn't), but in the rush to improve the way software is developed, some of the key tasks have been left behind.

Re: Worryingly

From the linked FAQ:

"It relies on user interaction: double-clicking the .JAR attachment in the email"

From many posts on El Reg

"I set up my husband / wife / partner / S.O. with Ubuntu / Mint / Cinnamon"

I think you can only be smug if you believe that none of that group of people would ever double-click an enticing attachment in an e-mail.

Re: Pah! / Remember them?

Judge for yourself (possibly NSFW depending on policies)

https://www.prlog.org/11884010-asus-eee-pc-beach-girl.jpg

Re: What? No UPS?

I'm sure they have a UPS. Even if you have a UPS that doesn't guarantee you won't lose power to one or more racks.

Maybe the UPS was being serviced, and someone forgot to bypass it first. Perhaps the bypass switch itself was faulty. Possibly there was a fault with the power distribution infrastructure between the UPS and the racks. The list goes on...

I would imagine that there's more than one photo per person, (front and profile at a minimum), but even so, 18 million is a lot of photos, especially since the size of the adult population is significantly smaller than 70 million.

Re: Cleaing Costs for Skyscapers?

"skyscraper exteriors above a certain elevation are hermetically sealed to contain the pressure"

That makes no sense. You would need to hermetically seal the whole building, not just the upper floors and that is probably impossible, and even if it could be done, would make getting in and out rather tricky. When was the last time you went into a tall building and had to go through an airlock?

In any case, even if it were true, the pressure difference from ground level at 1000 ft is about 4%, nowhere near enough to "create quite a blast".

Re: Are "electronic" components involved in the failure?

There must be more to it than just the power cord getting hot due to current flow. The amount of power drawn by a Surface will not cause a noticeable temperature rise in the cable. Simple test - next time you're making a cuppa, feel the kettle lead. That's taking 13A - way more than any Surface tablet, and it will be cool to the touch. It won't get even slightly warm, no matter how much you coil it.

What's more likely is that the insulators between the cores are failing, and the live is bridging over to neutral or earth. That would cause heat to be generated, and would be more likely to occur with cables that have been coiled and uncoiled lots of times.

Re: Curious

I'm not in favour of this level of surveillance at all, but one of the problems is that any government can't point to the successes they have with it.

Let's say PRESTON was instrumental in preventing a Paris-style attack in London, and the terrorists were caught before they could harm anyone. This is simply not going to appear on the 10 O'clock news. If you have these capabilities, the last thing you do is tell anyone about them, since by doing so, you necessarily expose some of your SigInt capabilities, and that just makes your job harder next time.

Re: Bandwidth hungry

It's the restore that's the problem. Having 1TB of backups remotely is great, provided you can get the data back. We have 6TB of collocated off-site storage, which we update once a month (about 1TB goes up each month). This is throttled to avoid taking all our outbound bandwidth (it's on a 1 Gbps link at the hoster).

Should disaster strike, we won't even try to restore data over the internet. Someone will drive down to the hoster, put the physical device in the back of a car, and drive back to the office.

The bandwidth of a bunch of 4TB disks doing 70mph on the M1 is quite high...

Re: Feeling left out

If you have anything that uses OpenSSL, and you haven't patched it in the last week, you're out of date.

Re: Bought for 100 million?

More Moral:

If your popular and useful and free service gets taken over by big money this is very rarely a good thing, since you are the product and you have just been sold.

Err.. they didn't. I assume you're referring to the orange saloon car at about 52:30? That's not a Rover 600.