* Posts by Timochka

15 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jul 2022

Plex gives fans a privacy complex after sharing viewing habits with friends by default

Timochka

Re: Why do companies think we care what anyone else is doing?

This mostly tells me that you REALLY don't remember how Twitter started. Maybe you mean Instagram...

(Clue: Twitter started as an SMS service, hence the character limit. It was quite useful for sending "which pub are we going to tonight?" messages to groups of friends, back in those halcyon days. You couldn't even post/view a photo on Twitter without buggering about with image hosting sites and URL shorteners until about 5 years after it launched.)

How to give Windows Hello the finger and login as someone on their stolen laptop

Timochka

Re: So the only move to win this game

I mean, if your intention is to make it much much less secure, that is indeed the way it should be done.

The problem here isn't in the challenge/response style integration of the devices, that's the bit that's done right. It's unathenticated channel allowing MITM attacks that is the problem. All your solution does is make replay attacks trivial. (Quite apart from whether it's a security win to have actual scans of your fingerprint floating around in general purpose memory...)

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

Timochka

This article appears to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding that more aisles means more room. It very much does not.

An A32x with 3+3 seating has some of the widest seating in the market; most widebodies these days (and indeed the execrable 737 narrowbody) have seats one or two inches narrower than that '321 will have. A 787 with 9 across seating will have, as a percentage of seating, fewer window seats (20% vs 33%), the same number of 'middle' seats (33%), and only marginally more aisle access seats (40% vs 33%).

The A32x family is a decent cabin environment, and particularly with the NEO engine option a much quieter and nicer place to be than most Boeing widebodies - 787 included.

If you want a truly miserable experience - try 7 hours on a 737 (available right now from the likes of FlyDubai.)

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Timochka
WTF?

Doubling the amps?

> By doubling the amps, Nikolai had sent 25W to the emulator, blowing its little mind.

Huh? This makes no sense. The ammeter is measuring the current drawn by the device, and while the PSU doubtless has a maximum limit (possibly even configurable on a bench PSU) you can't force the device to draw more current than it wants to by changing something in the PSU (notwithstanding a PSU in CC mode, but (a) if it had been set to CC mode it would have almost certainly have blown the device up already, and (b) in CC mode you're still changing the voltage (albeit automatically), not the current.)

Presumably what actually happened is, not realising the display was showing the current draw rather than voltage set, Nikolai turned up the /voltage/.

And yeah, I remember working with wretched ICE CPU emulators back in the day. The things would flake out at the drop of a hat, and more time was spent wiggling hundreds-of-pin connectors to try and make the damn things work than doing any actual development. (The ones I used to work with came in stacks of 3 or 4 instrument units each connected by thick bus cables - I was always told, possibly apocryphally, that this was so they could be shipped as separate units each of which would fit down the hatch of a submarine. Why you would want a CPU emulator in a submarine is left as an exercise for the more sceptical than I was in those days...)

OctoX is a radical Rust implementation of a very old OS for RISC-V

Timochka

I greatly sympathise with the original comment. I wrote my own small multithreading OS in Rust (for AVR microcontrollers, because essentially I hate myself), and even though I wrote the context switch/process creation code myself, I also don't understand it... I touch those files with dread. Once you're modifying the stack/SP manually, the brain fairly rapidly decides to just stop trying to work out what it's just done and leave it to faith, in my experience.

Middleweight champ MX Linux 23 delivers knockout punch

Timochka

Re: this shoggoth of a startup daemon

That's an interesting philosophical question. How does one code a "better version" of something that is entirely unnecessary and unwanted in the first place?

Oh, wait, it's `NOP` isn't it... There, I did it.

Cleaner ignored 'do not use tap' sign, destroyed phone systems ... and the entire building

Timochka

Re: University blues

I think it's the largest brick-built building thing - I interviewed there in the early 90s, and they were still bragging about it then ;-)

‘Mother of Internet’ Radia Perlman argues for centralized infrastructure

Timochka

Re: Perl is confusing

*Adjusts glasses*. Well, AKKshually...

The courts wouldn't help you in this case, because for the specific case of the hitman, no contract actually exists. It is one of the basic tenets of contract law that a contract to achieve an illegal purpose (e.g. murder) is in and of itself illegal, and thus essentially cannot exist in the law.

Disclaimer: Dredging up memory of contract law lectures about 30 years ago. Also, England & Wales law, other jurisdictions may vary.

Foldable smartphones crawl to one percent of global market share

Timochka

Re: The modern flip-phone

My original Samsung Flip accumulated *far* more than 10,000 folds in the 2 years I had it (before upgrading to the latest model) - by at least one order of magnitude, if not two. I've never counted how many times I fold it per day, but it must be many dozens. And the screen and hinge remain as good as new.

Absolutely no way I'd go back to a slab phone. The foldable form is just *so* much more convenient to pocket.

In Rust We Trust: Microsoft Azure CTO shuns C and C++

Timochka

Absolutely this. I started my professional career writing C and 8051 assembly code (oh, Keil C51, how you used to torture me,) and had been writing C unprofessionally long before that; I spent many years writing C++ for money, and in general can compete with anyone who wants to shout "get off my lawn" and play who has the longest grey beard - but for my most recent embedded projects (professional and personal) I've switched over to Rust and *could not be happier* about it.

Sure, the language has a learning curve, and there is stuff I don't like about it (async contagion, I'm looking at you,) but that's true of every language. On the other side of the balance, there is just so much more than just memory safety that means I find it simply a far more productive language to code in than C++.

I love C, I loved C++ for a time; Kernighan, Ritchie and Stroustrup will all remain heroes of mine until the day I die, in a pantheon alongside Knuth, Comer and frankly not many else - but the world moves on. The application of multiple layers of lipstick to C++ to try and address its shortcomings over the years has left us with a language that looks more like Conchita Wurst than Audrey Hepburn... It's time to start fresh. And Rust is an excellent choice for that.

Our software is perfect. If something has gone wrong, it must be YOUR fault

Timochka

Re: Quite contrary!

To be honest, I'm not sure what astonishes me more - the terrible code, or the fact that someone, somewhere must really be actively ignoring the massive red flags being flown by their server logs and/or analytics.

Makes me feel fairly confident that if I wore a black hat it wouldn't take me very long to find some unpatched vulnerabilities on those servers (they do appear to be using Wordpress, after all...)

Timochka
FAIL

Re: Quite contrary!

It also breaks for me...

You're not in the UK or US, are you? Or Japan or Korea... More to the point, your computer's locale isn't English, Japanese, or Korean. (Mine, for example, is Romanian.)

The fault lies in this awesome piece of code, called in an onLoad event, which is redirecting you (us!) to 'unknown/':

function languageRedirect() {

const languageOverride = localStorage.getItem('lang');

const language = languageOverride ? languageOverride : navigator.language.toLocaleLowerCase().slice(0,2);

const langPath = {

'en': '/',

'ja': '/jp',

'ko': '/kr',

}[language];

const path = window.location.pathname;

if (!path.includes(langPath)) {

window.location.replace(langPath+path);

}

}

NetBSD 9.3: A 2022 OS that can run on late-1980s hardware

Timochka
Coat

"A notable improvement in NetBSD 9.3 is being able to run a graphical desktop on an Amiga."

This is not strictly true - you've long been able to run a graphical desktop in NetBSD on an Amiga. I know this for a stone-cold fact, because I was the maintainer of the NetBSD/Amiga FAQ around .. *counts on fingers* ... 28 years ago, and you could do it then.

28. Christ.

Google: We had to shut down a datacenter to save it during London’s heatwave

Timochka

Re: Hot cloud

Because in this case everything worked entirely as designed?

If you are deploying your workloads in the cloud in a single availability zone, you have no business being allowed near a console - or at least, you don't get to complain if you have downtime. If you were deploying them across multiple availability zones, then you didn't have a problem.

Battle of the retro Unix desktops: NsCDE versus CDE

Timochka
Boffin

Pff.

Open Look or I'm not interested.