Posts by Electron Shepherd

Re: It was a reused prop...

"I like the round things"

If Facebook goes the way of MySpace, $1Bn might be his entire holding in a few years.

There's no "actual" money anywhere these days, and in practical terms there hasn't been since bartering ended.

A £10 note is only "worth" £10 because everyone agrees it is. In reality, it's a bit of paper with almost zero intrinsic value. You can't eat it or drink it, and if you burn it to keep warm, it won't last very long at all.

The new crypto-currencies aren't that different really. Their worth is in what everyone agrees they're worth.

Re: Very disappointing

you should have no way of knowing if those clients had recycled passwords... Unless you're telling us you store passwords in plaintext?

If the compromised web host leak included email / password pairs, anyone can see if one of their own customers is reusing passwords, even if they themselves only store hashed passwords. You simply need to put the leaked password through your hashing algorithm, and see if you get the same hash as you have for that email address.

Re: Errr?

The Crucial memory web site lists 14 different 16GB modules and 8 different 32GB, although no 64GB.

I agree that searching can be tricky, since quite often what's listed as "32GB" is actually 4 x 8GB sticks, but the 20 mentioned above are all "single stick" variants.

Re: Windows Platform Binary Table

I think that the PE image that's supplied by WPBT isn't processed if booted in safe mode or booted to the WinRE.

I don't have a Dell (of any age), so can't test this. Perhaps someone can oblige...

Re: I Don't Understand The Logic ....

The "if I was a permie" implies you're a contractor, and generating revenue by selling your services. If you are billing VAT registered companies, the VAT you "collect" is simply claimed back by the company paying your invoice, so the net gain to HMG is nothing.

So, using your figures, currently HMG gets 30K from you, and if you were permanent, HMG would get 30 - 35K. By my reckoning (in your specific case) they will either get the same or more money from you.

Re: we'd pay $100

sure its better to have 1000 customers each paying $100, than 100 customers paying $10k

That depends on the costs for each individual customer. Acquisition costs plus annual support costs is probably well in excess of $100 for an average customer.

Re Parachutes

The more important question is why were there only two parachutes that made it to ground - what about the crew?

It's not a leak. If the sub-structure allocation succeeds, the goto just after it is there to skip round the free. The free is only called if the first malloc succeeds and the second fails, and in that case, you want to free *s but not the sub-structure.

Having said that, the confusion caused by a supposedly simple example of how to write good code with gotos is a shining example of why most people steer clear of them.

The registry and file system are (a bit) restricted

"The registry for example is basically a one-stop-shop for everything on the system and has no concept of restricting apps access to their own area. The entire registry is there for the taking. Likewise there's no jailing an app to its own directory or preventing it overwriting files or programs in other areas of the disk."

Log on to a default-config Windows 7 machine as a non-admin user, and try to modify files in C:\Windows\System32 or edit any registry setting in HKLM\SOFTWARE or its children. You won't be able to....

Re: "...unless someone invents an Heisenberg Compensator."

I'm uncertain whether that is possible.

Right not, I agree with you, or to put it another way:

"At the moment, that's my position"

Rolling roads don't work that way

In a "normal" driving situation, a car with traction control, ABS and all that gadgetry would flip its nut if it saw the front wheels spinning at 50 mph with the rear wheels stationary, assuming a catastrophic loss of traction.

You know, people have thought of that when they design and build rolling road test rigs. The rollers for the front and rear wheels are linked, to avoid this problem.

I suppose if you far enough most things are related. There's a vast number of "different" animals that all follow the basic "tube with four limbs attached" design, but with wide variations in size, shape and covering.

Re: Where the hell do you buy Asus?

http://www.asus.com/uk/Notebooks/ASUS_ZENBOOK_UX305/wheretobuy/

Re: It strikes me as odd that...

...an ornithologist ... who was there to study vultures, knew next to nothing about their flight performance or how they operated in the sky

Doesn't seem odd to me. I quite often study something I know next to nothing about, so that afterwards I know something about it.

though she was an expert on their species and breeding habits

She probably got that way by studying their species and breeding habits (before moving on to study some other aspect of them).

Reg Article & Link

There's a link in an El Reg article from May. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/14/azure_overtaking_aws_for_cloud_storage/. The link to the report is at the bottom of the article.

Wrong way round

Trees (and all plants) don't "exhale" CO2 - they take CO2 out of the atmosphere. The basic process is:

Carbon Dioxide + Water + Sunlight --> Carbohydrate + Oxygen

Re: seriously

it had not been connected to the Redmond Mothership for 4 days

Was that just it wanted an MSE / Windows Defender update, or something more sinister?

Re: Better late than never, I suppose.

You can get bloatware-free PCs now - they just cost more, since the OEM loses the kickback from Symantec etc.

Re: New T&Cs

Everyone's doing it these days. AdvancedInstaller (who, apart from the following, make a very good product), recently added "Analytics" that phones home with all the details every time you install an MSI built with their software. See http://www.advancedinstaller.com/analytics/.

Re: Mandatory

If the car can't have an at fault accident then it doesn't need insurance against it.

It can still get damaged in other ways (a tree falls on it, for example), or it is stolen. Those are risks people would be willing to insure against.

As was seen recently, sometimes people just damage a nice car because... ...well, I can't really understand why, but it happens. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0vk99vhP1Q.

Space Elevator?

See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11805987/Inflatable-space-elevator-invented-by-scientists.html for the latest idea.

Re: It's not all about the pixels...

Indeed. A top of the line (£5,000 just for the body) Canon EOS-1D X, which is aimed at the professional market, has "only" 18MP.

Re: typo city

I'm certain it's not a "kernel module"

Just because the term "kernel module" is widely used to refer to packaged software used to extend the Linux OS, that doesn't mean it's the only usage.

When you're developing software that runs on multiple platforms, it's usually structured around "core" and "edge" code. Core is the stuff that can be portably developed and simply shared across all platforms, and the edge is the stuff that has to be platform specific.

For example, with Chrome, the code that parses URLs and validates SSL certificates could be "core", and the installer would be "edge".

The actual voice recognition would also be considered "core", although the means by which the audio was acquired from the microphone would be "edge".

Another term for a "core" module might be a "kernel" module, since it's in the middle of the software.

You still have users doing daft things

Just because it's now called a cloud, with auto-provisioning, that doesn't stop end-users doing things like:

using all the disk space*

putting business critical data on non-backed up servers

surfing to porn sites from the domain controllers

etc, etc...

It still needs managing by someone. Do you really think the commercial off-premise cloud providers don't have staff managing the systems?

* If you have some magic "expand to AWS, so we never run out of disk space" enabled, you now have a problem of running out of money when the very large bill comes in.

Re: Gah!

Already been done for motorcyclists:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/motoring/features/realrider-app-when-all-else-fails-for--motorcyclists-this-smartphone-app-could-be-your-last-hope-8530639.html