Posts by Dazed and Confused

Re: Sounds a typical

As for the 'one tech guy fekked up' story.... how many of us have heard the same thing from senior manglement when things have gone wrong ... especially when said senior manglement are the guys who made the decision not to have a backup system ..... (London ambulance computer dispatch system springs to mind as a fine example of this)

Especially when the "one guy" has probably jumping up and down for the last couple of years scream at how totally broken the system is and that we're one small step away from disaster.

The senior mangler is now blaming them "coz it would never have died if you hadn't said it was broken"

Re: Surely

> .. but if in doubt, don't stop - just keep going. What kind of idiot writes software like this?!

A taxi company?

Surely Linus' comment

the kind of bugs we tend to find are the random, crazy user bugs, where somebody does something that nobody even thought would be remotely sane.

covers systemd

> Although with a certain amount of collateral traffic chaos

That's OK, Top Gear demonstrated years back that if you're going fast enough a Gatso will ignore you, speeds over 1 mile per second must surely be fast enough for that.

Re: Many microwave ovens leak microwaves

>> "They are being put on top of the tallest buildings in the area, and their height is to ensure that nobody gets fried if walking on the roof."

> Wrong, the height is to maximise coverage, nothing to do with frying people. You are scaremongering now.

I think there comment about height is really to do with distance. The power drop off is going to be inverse square law. So even if you are at the bottom of the tower it is still a distance from you and the wattage you'll receive is significantly reduced.

Re: So stop listening...

The latest Museum of Curiosity isn't so I guess the next IMC will go the same way.

The twitterarty were having a go at the Museum's feed about it the other day.

Re: run for the hills before everything crashes and burns.

Oh it's trying to burn. I wondered why 18362 was pissing through my battery at twice the rate of how things went before the last update. I'll make sure not to leave the laptop on top of any that might be flammable.

Re: Servers in space ?

Radiation shielding them is likely to be an issue. I've no idea what they do to achieve it these days but I used to be involved in building rad hardened chips and back then you had to make them on top of an insulator such as sapphire.

Do they just accept that you can't stop it and just go in for massive redundancy and ECC these days?

Re: Better On A Camel

TWA was known as Try Walking Across

I had relations who travelled a lot for work and I remember as a child my Aunt having ones like this for most of the airlines, but those are the only two I remember.

Re: Good encapsulation, Dr S

Turns out, you need to do a systemctl daemon-reload to make it go and regenerate the units.

That's f***ing stupid, systemd is capable of kicking off an action on a file change. Why aren't they having the unit generator for the mount and device units triggered off the changes to the fstab file. It would help if they used their own features properly.

> Yes if your ISP is intercepting udp/53 they can grab all your queries. Is there any evidence of this?

Doesn't the snooper charter require the larger ISP to do this? They're required to log where you visit, so I'd always assumed that would mean they log your DNS requests.

> And low ping times to the root nameservers isn't evidence of anything other than anycast working as intended.

Yes, it shows that when you talk to some of the root name servers the anycast is directing you to a "root name server" at your ISP's site, which I presume they own and operate.

> The picture in the article looks like a set for Thunderbirds (the 1960s one) :)

It's looked like that since the 60s so that's probably where Gerry Anderson go the idea from.

Re: "he can pay you to develop it. Or pay you for setting it up on premises"

There was an article about this issue here on El'Reg a few months ago. The GPL was designed in a pre-cloud time and so the assumption was that anyone wanting to base a "product" on the SW would be distributing it and therefore would be covered by the terms of the GPL. The cloud players don't want to distribute the SW, they want to have people use the SW on their cloud, so no distribution and therefore no need to publish your enhancements.

The GPL isn't fit for this situation.

Re: SSH Timing attacks

I knew someone here would have tighter marbles than me :-)

Thanks

Re: A simple (but costly) answer

I think El'Reg had a story about this a few years back.

Re: Why?

> complex solution to a problem that doesn't even exist.

Sure the problem exists. Wouldn't you like a big screen that still fits in your pocket?

Personally I'd love to be able to just stretch the screen out, say to about A3, while folded down it should be smaller than my current phone.

Whether this is a good solution to the problem, I've no idea.

But the problem certainly exists.

Re: Exciting times

The Beeb's Sky at Night the other week did a special on mission selection for the European Space Agency and it looks from that program that the ESA are still on speaking terms with UK based space scientists.

Re: Why exactly is Perl any worse than Python?

Ha, funnily the only bit of paid work I've ever had related to Pearl was to run a training class for some developers on the language. Late in the class I got chatting with them about the project and it turned out they were learning Pearl to allow them to maintain a piece of SW from a developer I knew and who was definitely in the class of programmer who you'd be happy to board the plane if he'd done the control code. I said that I'd have expected that if this guy had written the code then the documentation would also have been extremely good. The reply was "Oh the documentation is superb, it was reading that which made us realised how little we knew, so we thought we'd get you in to train us"

Re: Re. So it is possible...

When I worked in a semiconductor research lab (donkey years back, in the days of 3.5um) the chip designs would end up on big film sheets ready to be optically shrunk to make the actual masks.

Re: Ahh! The infamous "off by one" order code.

Ha, I guy I used to work with meant to order a hundred or so disks mechs for some arrays and managed to order a hundred or so arrays. The factory was not amused when they tried to cancel the order part way through delivery when the arrays started to arrive by the truck load.

Re: Design Strategy: What if the data becomes public?

Thanks @Sam3000, I was sure someone more learned in the art on here would be able to point me in the right direction. I shall read and learn.

Re: Starting handles

Good point about only pulling, I'd forgotten that one, but now you mention it I remember being taught this rule.

As others have said make sure your thumb isn't around the other side of the handle of you want to keep them. Like with steering wheels on old cars, clip a curb or some such and the spokes of the steering wheel can smash your thumbs in short order.

Likewise I've never had to do it to a plane. The only time I was in a plane which needed hand turning the pilot very insistently said DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING while the guy was near the prop.

Starter motors make life so dull what with missing out on all this excitement.

The other nice feature of having a starting handle is that when you're working on the engine it provides a very convenient way to turn the engine.

Re: To be fair

I read an article about flying a Mustang recently and the owner got the guy to to count

One Dollar,

Two Dollars,

Three Dollars

...

coz that's the rate it costs.

I'm sure you can use the normal dollar == pound conversion rate.

Re: I WAS FIRST MATE

Nah, vending machines aren't the way forward. The UI is slower than that of a decent barman.

Speed things up by ordering things that can be poured quickly.

A decent hand pull beer engine pulls accurate half pints of good ale all day everyday. It's really quick to serve. Other things take longer, pouring Guinness is an art form and can't and shouldn't be rushed.

Fizzy lagers are a pain in the arse to pour, people ordering them should be made to wait for slowing the whole system down.

Re: turned off

I always make that the console. That way you can monitor the boot process properly and easily do stuff like logging.

GUIs are all very well, but really not needed/wanted as a system console.

Re: Strange units

That's really why there was such resistance to the change. The metric system is clearly better for calculations, scale drawings, etc. but in other cases it wasn't the units that mattered, but what they meant.

I was having a discussion about metric/imperial things with a mixed group of European engineers having seen something in France which was clearly labelled in inches. A German in the group said his father was a carpenter and that wood is measured there in imperial cross sections but metric lengths, so he'd use 2M lengths of 4x2 to build things.

I also noticed recently when replacing plumbing parts in my posh German shower that it used 3/4" fittings.

Re: CockWomblers Unite

> I'm sure if you look in a modern dictionary, under troll you would find her as an analogy.

It used to be said that if you looked up "irascible" it would direct you to an entry for Harvey Smith, while if you looked up "Harvey Smith" it would direct you to irascible.

I suspect that a similar circular definition exists for Katie Hopkins and Troll.

As to whether she thinks she is being serious or whether she is being a deliberate troll is anyone's guess. But I'm sure she's milking it for all she's worth. Such people should be starved of the oxygen of publicity.