Posts by Gerhard den Hollander

US officials confirm Stuxnet was a joint US-Israeli op

Re: elections

Bush got Sadam, Obama got Osama

Sysadmins: Chucked your Exchange servers up? Let's enable SSO

Re: ADFS?

I consider exchange to be a rather advanced disk filling system.

(yes, there are 2 L's in filling)

Windows Phone beats iOS sales in China

Re: Wow

It has to do with the fact that winphone does support the chinese 3G, and iPhone does not.

Android does, and has something like 70% of the market.

Nokia Lumia 900 WinPho 7 smartphone

Nifty ?

The nifty windows phone OS ?

Is that a new use of the word nifty I missed out on ?

BOFH: Dawn raid on Fort BOFH

Re: Where's the...

you may want to reread the 8th paragraph again. The one about friendly IT staff helping their superiors into dealing with public transportation the right way.

Apple FileVault cracked in under an hour by forensics biz

powered down

you'd be surprised how much memory content can be found on a powered down machine.

I remember the old sun U10 sparc boxes. If you had one with en elite3D graphcal card in it, and powered down the machine when it was still displaying the Xsun / X-windows system (say when you had a powerfail), then when powering the machine back on the first thing you would see would be the contents of the framebuffer at the time the machine was powered off.

Tried this once before moving a machine to another office

Machine was powered off for a weekend, plugged back into a different office, and the first thing we saw when powering on the machine was the screen as it was when powered down .

It didnt last long, because the sun openboot prom screen dump would start to write and would erase the previous screen.

My point ?

If you really are worried and paranoid, just powering down your machine everytime the doorbell rings wont be good enough.

I would suggest doing what they did in cryptonomicon, and have a big electromagnet built into your doorposts (ok, maybe not practically possible:

http://community.discovery.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/7501919888/m/5601987789/inc/1

)

Netgear ReadyNas Duo v2 network storage

Looks nice, but do these boxes have a built-in NFS server ?

New ATLAS particle part of 'everyday mass'

@will

Actually, it is all 3 a large collider for large collisions of large hadrons

Nikon Coolpix P7100 compact camera

Too expensive for me :(

The review had me drooling for a bit, but at this point in time (Xmas shopping just done) I cannot even remotely justify spending 500 on yet another camera.

Unless maybe this one has revived the old stopmotion mode the cheapest coolpix used to have 5 years ago

Paul Allen proposes new space launcher

X15

The good thing about this setup, is that the rocket/spaceship doesnt have to carry all that heavy oxygen, you're already partways out of the gravity well, and into the thinner air, so the spaceship can carry a lot less fuel, meaning it will be lighter, meaning it can carry even less fuel.

In stead of having a 3 stage rocket, you can have the big mothership do the heavy lifting, and get rid of 1 or 2 stages.

They used to use B52 bombers for this kind of trick.

Take a B52, hook an X15 onto it.

Start B52,

reach altitude

launch

(nice pics on the wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_X-15 )

Part of the SDI program, (not sure if it ever was life tested or paperplans only) used F15's with a satelitekiller missile under it's wings.

The F15 would speed to it's highest flight altitude, and from there launch the spy-sat killer rocket, which would blast off and kill the satelite.

Wiki : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle#Satellite_killer

Churlish gadget cusses those who use it

need one

need one .. and then play it like a grand piano ... captain nemo style (including opera cloak)

Windows Defender Offline: For PCs too hosed to go online

About! Fscking! Time!

I've been doing this for the last decade orso using a linux bootable USB stick, and the latest clamav, but that cannot always clean out all the windows crap.

If (and that's a big if) this does what it sais on the tin, it's a great, huge leap forward.

Bill Gates discusses nuclear development deal with China

Am I the only one

who gets slightly nervous about the idea of Microsoft building nuclear reactors ?

In all seriousness though, if this becomes even half as good as they claim, it would solve most of china's energy problems in one fell swoop.

And that for , what to the chines gvmt, would be pocket money

God particle may be within our grasp

> I trust that el reg will not cover it in a light and frivolous manner but in a style that reflect the true gravity of the discovery.

True gravity .. pun intended ?

AMD helping Android fans port to x86

dunno

Dunno, but I have some oldish x86 kit lying at home, and wouldnt mind sticking ICS on it, just to see if it would make a more useful toy then it's current XP32 install.

Toy being the operative word here (for me at least)

Adobe: crashing 100 million machines not an option

Blue screens on Linux

You obviously never used xscreensaver.

(a new version coincidentally was released last week).

It can make your linux box BSOD, throw a sparc and a huge varietye of other failures

http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver

Go get it ...

Faster-than-light back with surprising CERN discovery

higgs field ?

assuming for a second that this is indeed true, that we have neutrino's traveling faster then the speed of light in vacuum.

I'm willing to bet, assuming this is not a meaurement error, that this will eventually be shown to be caused by the fact that the Higgs field (which we dont even know yet exists :) ) exists, and is not constant.

Any phycisists in the house willing to correct me on this ?

How are we going to search our hard disks now?

Strigi + pet peeve

It's called strigi, without the N, but since it should be stringed up ...

What pisses me off most about all of those annoying desktop search tools (unless someone can point em to one that's different :) ) is that they are always indexing, and eating CPU cycles, even though they are only supposed to do this when Im idle.

Having them continously index a 2T disk, even if they dont do anything, they still eat up a lot of memory.

My ideal desktop search engine would:

1) combine the search functionality found in Picture and Music programs (think amarok, digikam)

2) recognises tags

3) should be able to be told, go out at 23:55 and start indexing

4) and be done indexing all my data well before 7:00 am in the morning

5) be able to be smart enough to understand things like ``search in all my pictures'' or search al my word docs

until the, Ill stick to mairix to earch my email once a night, digikam to search my pictures, and amarok to collect my music

DARPA shells out $21m for IBM cat brain chip

Cat was an excellent choice

Just wait till they get a quantum computer ...

then they can simulate schroedinger's cat's brain

New tumor trial rules mobiles 'not guilty'

Einstein

Cellphones do not emit radiation in the bandwidth that causes cancer.

to cause cancer you need to break the bonds within the molecule. The amount of energy required to do this, is a function of the wavelength. CellPhone radiation does not have the required wavelengths.

http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/CancerCauses/OtherCarcinogens/MedicalTreatments/radiation-exposure-and-cancer

Iomega Home Media Network Cloud Edition 1TB drive

NFS ?

Does the box support NFS (v3 or better ?)

If so, it's a win, if not, nah .. cannot be bothered.

Enormous 1km ice-cube machine fashioned at South Pole

Cool

really, title sais it all

This year's classy compact cameras

stop motion

I used to own a nice little nikon coolpix L15, that apart from the usual goodies had a great stop-motion assist. The kids love(d) it. Unfortunately the camera took a tumble, and is now sorta broken.

Nikin has upgraded the coolpix formware line to do face detection and other cool stuff, but has lost the stop motion assist. Which is a bummer.

Anyone know of a compact(ish) camera that has a good stop motion assist ?

FBI 'planted backdoor' in OpenBSD

solitaire

Which is why I encrypt all my secure communications using solitaire.

http://www.schneier.com/solitaire.html

It takes a bit longer to encode, but at least it whiles away the evenings.

Encrypting jpeg's is a bitch though

Undead Commodore 64 comes back for Christmas

But will it play ...

... all my old C64 games ?

It would be really, really nice if this machine came preloaded with a C64 emulator, and a bunch of games ...

.. and a cassette player ...

RIM ties in corporate drones with VoIP over Wi-Fi

Skype

This sounds great, esp. for some of our users who spend a lot of time in different countries.

As long as they stay in wi-fi reach this will enable us to cut their cellphone costs by a factor 10 .

And if we could then also get skype on the bberry we could reduce phone costs even more

Heck, even the price of a 2-hour wifi connection at a major international airport would then earn itself back

Boffins create super flies that need almost no sleep

@jerome

That's exactly what they did ...

Rude Tintin pulls out

a female woman of the opposite sex

She walked up to me and she asked me to dance

I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said lola

L-o-l-a lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola

For truth about Europe, read The Reg

Congratulations

Next up on your to-do list for glory , being name dropped by Neal Stephenson

First public Firefox 3 candidate shoots out the door

Opt out

according to the blogpost (see dz-jay) it is enabled by default.

So firefox is optout as well

Stupid fsckers

Sun gives servers an Opteron quad job

Sparc ?

Which makes me curious ,

does anyone know what Suns plans are for Sparc based workstations ?

I think the U45 was the latest one, and thats been out for something like 2 years now

Solaris SPARC to x86 software highway opens

porting solaris to x86

Having spend time porting solaris code to x86, it is not as trivial a matter of just running the toolchain again.

The biggest problem is the endianness (reread gullivers travels to find out why that can be a problem).

other problems include code written using ancient C++ compilers, that will simple not compile with newer compilers (the beauty of standards, there are so many to choose from)

Oh, and missing 3rd party libraries (these again usually only have the most recent versions ported to x86, but if you want that flavour you linked against 20 years ago, tough luck, the ABI and API have changed at least 3 times since then)

Brazilian cleaner spots security hole in Heathrow e-borders

paying the cleaning lady

She got paid just as all the other cleaning ladies.

The gov-ment pays the cleaning agency (N hours x M cleaners x X pounds) the cleaning agency then pays the cleaners (usually cash in hand, and usually a lot less then the X pounds/person/hour )

Boffin says Astronomical Unit should be binned

Fahrenheit

I seem to remember Mr Fahrenheit used the coldest temperature he had encounterd as 0, and used the highest temperature of a feverish body as 100, and then scaled between them.

Fahrenheits thermometers were more accurate then the ones made by Mr Celcius though

BOFH: How dangerous are your users?

No Comments Yet ?

No comments yet on a BOFH story ?

Is everyone to busy to go over all possible combinations of answers to find the easter egg ?

Exams, contracts, and nuclear research: stupid, stupid, stupid

mine maths

Chris,

the diameter of the drum is .7m

the circumverence is pi x 0.7 meter.

So you 24.40 minutes is 3.14 times too large

24.40 / 3.14 ~ about 7 minutes

James Cameron finds grave of Jesus & Son

DNA test

DNA tests to confirm his identity ?

What /who did they use to compare the sample with ?

Eric Clapton ?

Steve Jobs ?