Posts by Dazed and Confused

> where developers have crawled up their own asses and lost sight of the light of day

Gollum...

It hurts our eyeses it does my precious.

Re: Sex Education

Where did you learn about sex?

My parents just made sure there was a collection of educational material on the bookshelf and assumed that we'd find it when the time came to look.

> Linux tip: Avoid Nvidia graphics cards if possible

Back in the late 90s the Nvidia Linux drivers were way ahead of their Windows ones.

I used to dual boot my laptop, most of the stuff I was forced to use for work was Windows only, but when I was able to reboot and come up in Linux the screen was just so much nicer I often had other engineers stopping by and asking how I managed to get things like fonts displayed that nicely.

Re: Focus Assist

Can you use it to suppress that useless time wasting trash called

constant bloody updates. If I wanted to send this much time managing my PC I'd have become a systems administrator.

Re: How times change

> I remember when it was "illegal" to pgp files here.

Yepp this is the same France where encryption was illegal until quite recently. Even GSM had to have an exception for France so that the don't encrypt A5/0 mode was normally known as French mode.

Re: Unstable operation coming soon...

> I wonder if companies house is allowed to continue under GDPR

I wonder whether the concept of a limited company will be allowed to continue under GDPR.

The idea of Companies House publishing your details is because you are asking people you do business with to do so on the basis of trust. If you do business with a limited company you have to accept that you may not get paid and that ultimately their liability is limited to the share capital of the company (usually a couple of quid). So you need to be able to find out whether the directors are people you are prepared to trust. Publishing their details at least holds them (me) to a certain amount of accountability. If you aren't allowed to find out who they are why should you trust them? Business people being able to use the right to be forgotten to hide their past illegal behaviour is bad enough. Letting conmen have complete anonymity seems to be an unexpected consequence of the new rules, unless you subscribe to the black helicopter view of things.

Re: Microsoft -- the Monopoly and Marketing Giant...

> Clearly shiny-shiny is more important than functionality.

Shiny-Shiny is obviously more important than security. Security is really boring and doesn't look sexy in ads.

Re: Even if it comes to pass..

> You didn't miss out on much.

As my Aunt, who flew it out to NY quite a number of times put it.

"It wasn't very comfortable, but it wasn't very comfortable for not very long, so better than all the other planes"

She was flying on before the days of modern full lie flat business & first class seats.

BA's cattle+ seats are basically the old business class ones.

Re: Grandfathers / Grandpa

> Funny how WWI produced odd combinations.

My Grandpa saw Blériot flying over the channel and became interested in the idea of flying, joined the navy as they were starting to take an interest in aeroplanes hoping for the chance to learn to fly, as the son of farm labourer he had no other chance. Joined the Royal Naval Air Services when it was born and flew throughout WW1. Due to the general shortage of planes and experienced pilots his squadron assisted the army and flew over the trenches where he was shot down but survived and made it back over our lines where he then got caught up with the ground war before he was able to get back to his squadron. When the RAF was formed he was given the choice of staying in the Navy or transferring to the new service and he chose to move to the RAF where he continued to server until after the end of WW2. He managed to get decorated by all three services in his time. Things were all a bit more mixed up back then.

Re: "no problem giving Apple a pass" - One major difference

> As we keep hearing here, Windows is not mandatory anymore, if one doesn't like it, choose an alternative.

OK so you get a choice of which OS to use but you don't have a choice of which OS you have to pay for. It is very difficult to buy most PC HW without paying for a W10 license. There are also issues with the FW being reluctant to run other OSes.

while of course the other camp still think it's 1970s, so not only no Internet but no power no.... the list goes on. Sod it they're all as bad as each other and none of them have the faintest clue.

Re: Curious about Three's tethering

Playing devils advocate here.

I'm looking forward to seeing what (if anything!) happens because there are very strict limits on tethering for me and once that allowance is used I have to wait until my next billing cycle.

Three offer different types of SIMs at different prices.

An all you can eat data for a phone SIM is now £30 (Eeek I hope they don't move me to that!)

They don't offer an all you can eat data SIM, at £30 only gets you 40GB.

Now I guess they do this because in their experience on average phone users use less data than "Data SIM" users. I've got all you can eat data but only average 2GB, my wife uses much less, my youngest averages over 160GB and they don't quibble. I guess he's the exception (or perhaps he's why they now want to charge £30 per month! they used to do unlimited phone data for £12.99).

But I guess on average people with Data SIM use more than people with phones.

Give 100 houses 1Gb fibre connections running through a 10Gb router and they won't all get 1Gb throughput though will they (for example..)?

Well not if they aren't all trying to download big files from fast sites all the time. But most people don't. They use their connection in bursts. So if the chances are that 100 people sharing a 10Gb link won't notice that they aren't getting 1Gb each, but sure, there will be times when peak demand exceeds 10Gb, just probably not very often. Even when my son was burning his way through 300GB/month on my link that still works out as less than an average of 1Mb/s so a contention ratio of 10:1 would probably meant real conflicts were very rare.

Back before people tended to have Internet at home, or even Jo public had ever herd of the Internet I did a deal with the network team at work to swap a whole bunch of 9600baud pad lines for a 64kb IP one. They thought I was mad and thought they'd got the best of the deal, while I knew I'd effectively upgraded everyone from 9600baud to 64k since we had a bursty (block mode) application and so sod all contention.

Of course your mileage may vary, perhaps you do spend you're life downloading stuff at a constant 1Gb, but if so you aren't the average user.

Re: Hmmm

> Could they not install solar panels on the roof and some powerwall size batteries?

Nope, the sort of batteries you need are more like "Dinorwig Power Station" Find a large mountain. Bore out the centre and when you've got excess power pump water up to the top. When you need to charge all those delivery vehicles start letting the water pour back down the hill.

Pity the article doesn't give any details of the power draw needed. Telsa's site says you'll need 16.5kW for 2 hours to go 100miles. They've got 49,000 vehicles, assuming 2 hours each per day that's going to be a lot of power. Telsa's speal about powerwall talks about an installation in Hawaii which is 13MW and requires 55,000 solar panels. RM would need at least 5 of these just to power their fleet and we don't get anything like the sun that they get in Hawaii.

Re: What's the deal with firmware updates?

> Do you have to sign up for a support agreement?

Not while they are in warranty

Sadly they are restricting access to the core system FW updates after that :-(

Re: "No everything works perfectly here k'l; ';jksdfk#V"

Bu**er, I forget the printer problems in my tirade. Why is it the print spooler can't find something on the network when the web-browser can with exactly the same name.

Re: Pass it on

> I'm not even sure it qualifies as a "scam". Are these dodgy vendors deceiving their customers? Usually not, I think. In some cases, at least, they are merely providing a service which the government, following the advice of lobbyists, has chosen to make illegal.

This is a much better analogy.

If I kill someone who I disagree with that is a criminal act and the police will come and arrest me and I'll be punished at the government (actually you and me)'s expense.

But if I libel them then the police and the government have no interest in the matter, it is up to the individual I libel to seek redress against me.

Re: Tech + Knowlegy

> ABS braking is great assistive tech, but is not included in most vehicles.

Errr since when?

You might still be able to buy something like a Caterham 7 without ABS, but according to Wikipedia

ABS are required on all new passenger cars sold in the EU since 2004. In the United States, the NHTSA has mandated ABS in conjunction with Electronic Stability Control under the provisions of FMVSS 126 as of September 1, 2013.

You can of course have non electronic ABS, Ford used to do this on Escorts and Onions in the late 80s, but ... lets not go there.

Re: Artificial Stupidity.

> Do you know why nobody is investigating Artificial Stupidity?

I thought lots of companies were already investing heavily in artificial stupidity, aren't we discussing a case in point?

As the saying goes "To ere is human, but to really F*** things you you need a computer"

Re: I Remember When...

> Still waiting for AMD, Microsoft, Apple, and Linux to announce that they are discontinuing x86 development

This isn't an x86 problem, its affecting other CPU architectures too. Aren't Sparc and IBM's Power chips also suffering, some ARM CPUs are.

Intel have a chip which isn't, apparently, affected. But it's illegal to say nice things about Itanium here at El'Reg.

Re: A strange idea

The idea of the walkable city is such contradiction in terms.

I think you've missed the whole point of cities.

I was born in London and to be honest I wouldn't live there if you paid me to.

But, I love visiting London of an evening. It's vibrant, There's lots happening, a huge variety of places to eat, places to go for entertainment. Lots of places to meet up with friends etc.

To me that's the advantage of cities.

If I was 30 years younger then I'd love to live in a place like that.

The idea of the walkable city is such contradiction in terms.

Nope!

I want to be able to walk around it.

I'd love to be able to just walk around without having to worry about cars, buses, trucks and cyclists.

London has a high enough population density to fund burying most of the transport infrastructure. The more of that which is out of sight and out of mind the better.

If they want to plan a city for autonomous cars then it should be one where the roads have been removed from the places that the pedestrians want to walk, live in 3 dimensions take it up and/or down.

If all the roads were buried in tubes then people probably wouldn't care that much about driving.

Oh yes,

PS. I love to drive and wouldn't want an AV in today's road system.

PPS, when AVs start to appear on our roads you can bet I'll be one of the people who game them.

PPPS, I've said here before that as a pedestrian I will not give way to an AV, it can damn well stop and give way to me.

Re: BBFC

I used to quite like it when the BBFC rated video games. You could go to their website and get the detailed report by the "censor" on what content of the game resulted in it's eventual rating. Loads of games ended up with higher age ratings of bad language, I'm not stupid enough to think that kids aren't going to swear, so my attitude was "you can have the game but if I hear you using that language and you'll lose it, use that language at your mother and you'll lose the console". So we never had an issue, but it meant that when they kids wanted a particular game we could make an informed decision and we could argue our corner when we said no.

Re: 'how Itanium isn't affected'

With the Itanium processor virtual addresses are global, the bits of the kernel have 1 set of virtual addresses while all user processes have other virtual addresses. The cache tags and the TLB basically know who a bit of addresses space belongs to. Sadly it's been too many years since I played that far inside the Itanium to remember whether there is a region register which is programmable from user privilege level (like there is 1 user programmable space register on PA-Risc) but even if a long virtual pointer were used from assembler the access would be blocked by the TLB's protection mechanism.

Re: Medical Scotch

Your taste goes when you have man flu so never waste good scotch on it.

I wasn't aware I was ill when I drank it. The sickness hadn't had time to get me, I certainly wouldn't have wasted it later on, I couldn't even hold down water.

Re: Seriously?

You have to remember that by and large the world is run by frustrated old men* who hate the idea that someone, somewhere, is having more fun than they are. As a consequence they are determined to ban anything they might not be getting the chance to enjoy personally.

(*) In my experience the feeling isn't gender specific.

Re: shocked, shocked!

> I'm sure Woodgate and Clark Ltd were shocked, shocked!, to learn of such heinous crimes by the PI's they hired.

The firm's director, Michael Woodgate, was found guilty of two counts

Let's just hope that the sentence is custodial. A fine, which is bound to be smaller than the profit of rogue trading, just isn't sufficient incentive to behave well.

Re: pron on the cp

mentioned thousands of files, over a time period of months, with timestamps indicating porn browsing sessions lasting several hours, interspersed with him sending and receiving emails and reviewing documents.

Once the dodgy link has been followed or the maliciously crafted page has been viewed it can keep updating so can result in many accesses spread over the time the page is open which can easily show the accesses interspersed with genuine work activities.

You're probably right, he may well not be telling the whole truth, but this isn't evidence.

Re: Userland

I know you marked this as a joke, but

> The only userland event that should cause a panic is PID 1 existing.

But only if it's SystemD. SysVInit should be allowed to continue as normal

This is one of the issues with systemd, the traditional init was a very simple thing and as such incredibly unlikely to die. Once it had launched the system it became the catcher of orphans, it issues the wait(2) calls to allow them to be reaped. The kernel needs to have somewhere to pass orphan processes, this is why it panics if PID 1 dies.

IMHO systemd does too much, it has too many interaction points and therefore is much more likely to have defects and therefore at risk of dying. Unlike other userland processes, the death of PID 1 is fatal. So things which are perfectly acceptable in other process are not in tolerable in PID 1.