Posts by John Riddoch

Solaris shops bunged cash to upgrade old duffers

Re: A large Investment bank I talked to

LDOMs would be fine, but requires the tin to run Solaris 10 natively. If T5 doesn't run Solaris 10 natively, you're still SOL unless vendors support Solaris 10 branded containers on Solaris 11.

Computer nostalgia is 10 PRINT 'BOLLOCKS'

Re: Just Goes to Show...

Nostalgia was better in our day!

Paedophiles ‘disguise’ child abuse pages as legit websites

Re: "follows a particular digital path"

The fact that "ordinary online users had still found this content" suggests it wouldn't be simply typing in www.example.com/kiddieporn, rather more likely to be "visit pages in this order then click link X". This could use cookies, session IDs or simply dynamic pages based on Referrer: headers to set up the "breadcrumbs".

Reminds me of the port knocking security method in a way.

Chrome beats IE market share for one day

Re: "Chrome catching IE slowly"?

Firefox portable may be partly the reason - work users on locked down desktops can still run Firefox rather than IE without admin rights just by using the portable version of Firefox. Installing Chrome requires (I believe) admin rights. This would allow users to have Firefox at work & home more easily.

Apple iPad 3 Sim-only contracts compared

Someone needs a dictionary...

"Unlimited Wi-fi" and "limited to 10GB/month" are contradictory. If you're putting a limit on something, surely it's false advertising to call it "unlimited"?

Walking through MIME fields: Snubbing Steve Jobs to Star Trek tech

Re: This guy again?

Yup, I remember uuencode/decode - when it worked, I found it really neat but by $DEITY, it could be finicky and broke regularly. Some mail clients could handle uuencode fairly well (ISTR Eudora did an OK job of it), but MIME mail clients worked far more reliably in my experience.

Moles say Sony will kill Cell CPU for PlayStation 4

When the system was announced, I reckoned the system could be made to fly and do some really cool stuff, but would take the programmers some time to adjust to the mindset. My expectation was that PS3 games would technically lag Xbox for a year or 2 before taking the lead.

The main issue is that if something is difficult, people generally won't do it. When you add in cross-platform games (Xbox/PS3/PC), you want to generate as little custom coding as possible and keep the app as similar as possible across all 3 platforms. Coding to take advantage of the power of the Cell CPUs runs counter to that approach.

Microsoft were actually fairly clever in a marketing sense by making the Xbox run DirectX - they had a massive pool of devlopers ready made for the platform who already knew how to use and exploit the platform.

Court wonk tweets Apple's IPAD appeal showdown with Proview

And the crux of the matter: "Proview hopes to use the IPAD trademark to extract cash from Apple" - the most honest assessment of the court case yet :)

Microsoft's Azure cloud down and out for 8 hours

Re: Leap years

Seriously? You'd think people might realise leap years exist, they've only been around for a few centuries after all... The confusion around 2000 being a leap year was vaguely understandable as the rules about centuries are marginally more obscure, but even then...

Apple snags blockbuster multi-touch patent

Re: Do people *really* not go and read these things?

"Patent examiners are not thick" - I beg to differ. These are the same examiners who signed off the patent for sideways swinging. Your "good reason" for granting a payment comes down to two facts:

- The patent examiners have a bias towards authorising patents and letting the courts sort out the mess later

- The patent office gets a fee for every patent accepted

Whether this is a valid patent or not will end up decided in the courts as ever, not on el Reg.

Oracle extends Linux support to 10 years

Re: RHEL6 & Oracle Products

More to the point, they haven't certified any of their products against OEL 6.x. Oracle are shipping an OS which doesn't run any of their product set...

I've heard a speculation that there's some bug in RHEL/OEL 6.x which breaks Oracle products, there was apparently something in the gcc compiler in the early RHEL 5.x days which got fixed in 5.2 and it /may/ be similar. Of course, this is all speculation and it could simply be corporate incompetence/laziness.

Texan TSA crew accused of nude scanner ogling scheme

Obviously they wouldn't pick guys for this... http://xkcd.com/779/

New Trojan routes your bank's calls to CROOKS

Virgin media did something similar, I think they were trying to get me to upgrade to 100Mb broadband. Told them I wasn't going to give personal information to them as I didn't know who they were. "But I really am from Virgin" wasn't sufficient...

There was one company which was pretty good; you gave them a bit of info (e.g. two characters from a password), they confirmed it and gave you another bit, thus setting up the 2-way trust. Can't remember who it was, might have been Amex.

Lloyds TSB do some of it

Lloyds text me every time I use my card abroad; not entirely what you're after, but it's something. They don't charge for this service.

NAO: British bobbies wasting £80m BlackBerry stash

Er, what?

"but it hadn't really examined the need for the devices or how they should be used." - so they went out to buy a pile of expensive kit without any plans for what to do with them or even ascertain if they were required? Sorry, but that kind of process needs someone to get a good kicking.

Eurocom Panther 2.0 Core i7, SLI notebook

Component choices

As it's using a desktop CPU, it won't have a lot of the power saving features you'd expect on a laptop. As such, the base power draw on it will be pretty massive unless you tweak stuff in the BIOS (e.g. underclock the CPU). Three drives will also suck up power more than a single one, even if they are SSD. 17" screen will draw more power than a 13-15" model, the graphics options aren't chosen for their power efficiency either.

Many high-end laptops struggle to get an hour of battery life, so 40 mins on a DVD isn't that shocking.

This isn't a laptop I'd be interested in, but to each their own.

iPad users 'risk shoulder pain', say US gov, Microsoft boffins

From some very brief experience with a tablet (i.e. I got a Xoom last night...), I'm not overly surprised; tablets do seem to encourage sitting in some odd positions which won't be good for your posture. While a smartphone is relatively light and can be held at a more comfortable angle one-handed, most tablets are a bit heavy to hold one-handed (insert joke here...) so you lean it on a desk/lap and hunch over.

Judges probe minister's role in McKinnon extradition saga

The "damages" will include all the time & cost in securing their systems. You know, like they should have done in the first place before McKinnon went near their systems.

Dixons cuts Ice Cream Sarnie ready Xoom to £225

Managed to snag the last one in the CWP store, been busy playing with it tonight :) However, it's vanished from their website, so be quick if you still want one.

Well, bugger....

Dixon prices back up to £329, CWP out of stock online... might try some crawling of CWP stores tomorrow...

Peeking up the skirt of Microsoft's hardy ReFS

I think you're being a bit melodramatic about this. The only filesystem that has those kind of features is ZFS as far as I'm aware and it probably doesn't support the kind of things Windows requires (and is under a license which MS probably don't want to sign up to). I doubt their prime concern here was killing open source compatibility, although I suspect it came up. I also don't see anything here which precludes you continuing to use vanilla NTFS.

Barclays axes 422 UK IT staff

"so that we can innovate in new technologies and services for our customers, and be as effective and efficient as possible"

Wow, I haven't heard that used as a definition for "we're shipping jobs to India" before...

Smart meter SSL screw-up exposes punters' TV habits

Given that 90% of execs who heard about this would have tried to sue them to stop them presenting, this is a remarkable outbreak of common sense... Can we clone him and put the clones in charge of some other companies, please?

Gamers grumble over Steam outage

Your laptop doesn't know if you played a game on another PC since it was last online and updated your config/save games; as a result, your settings could get out of sync/lost if you update on multiple computers.

Stratfor so very, very sorry in wake of mega-hack

Quite - I created a hobby website for a MMORPG clan with password auth about 10 years ago and encrypted the passwords (MD5, IIRC) before they hit the database as a matter of course, even though the data really wasn't that interesting or important. If someone forgot their password, an admin had to reset it. My guess is that they wanted to be able to email out people's forgotten passwords, which is convenient, but poor security.

Also, PCI-DSS standards forbid storing credit card information unencrypted anywhere on disk, so that should set alarm bells going too.

Sony Tablet P split-screen Android fondleslab

*faint*

Wow, Sony actually shipped something which uses SD cards and not their proprietary memory cards!

Benchmarks are $%#&@!!

Best benchmark ever:

timex dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=8192 count=1048576

Ah, the good old "throw hardware at the problem" solution. Which is heavily flawed in a number of cases. There are some systems which degrade badly on large systems due to lock contentions, processor cross calls, etc, etc - making the box bigger simply adds to the problem. Making the box /faster/ will generally help, unless you're IO/Network bound.

Someone once told me that performance tuning is about moving the bottleneck. If you're CPU bound and get faster CPUs, you'll then be IO bound by HBA bandwidth. So you get more/faster HBAs, then your disks are too slow, so you get faster disks/SSD. Then you're limited by network bandwidth. Lather, rinse, repeat until you get back to the start and are CPU bound.

Back on topic, is anyone surprised by the “(if it) isn’t clearly and explicitly banned by the customer, then it’s fair game” statement?

Her Majesty's £444m court IT system can't even add up fines

Read the article properly: "Amyas Morse, head of the NAO" said that, NAO is National Audit Office. In short, the auditor has not been provided with information he has requested (due to the system being procured under a govt IT contract and is therefore practically guaranteed to be a failure) so he can't verify some of the figures. I'm guessing "disclaimed" means "I can't verify the figures, but don't believe them to be incorrect" in Auditor speak.

Facebook disses Effin Irishwoman

Hrm....

I wonder if people from a certain town in Austria have the same problem?

Oracle whips out Solaris 11 system lasher

Hrm...

After an initial "WTF?" moment, I suspect the lack of inclusion of VxVM/VxFS is as much down to the lack of a shipping Veritas product suite for Solaris 11. My suspicion is that the pending Veritas 6.0 suite will include such support, although that's guesswork on my part. Of course, it could be Oracle doing their usual squeeze on everyone else as they try to displace someone, but as ZFS is free I can't really see the advantage to freezing Veritas out of the market.

As for EMC replication, that's hopefully down to the Solutions Enabler software not being available yet.

The Register Guide on how to stay anonymous (part 3)

To an extent, yes, but not entirely, for two reasons.

Firstly, read the article - this is mostly talking about white/blacklisting plugins on the browser, the firewall can't stop those effectively.

Secondly, you may want to drop different settings on different websites; e.g. trust your internal app sites to run flash, Java and so on but deny that functionality to untrusted sites on the internet (e.g. using the "zones" functions in IE). Firewalls are not designed to handle that level of control.

Also, I assume you mean web proxy rather than firewall...

Stripper nicked for 'nicking knickers' with kids in tow

Optional

There was a sketch by "Scotland the What?" which was a spoof Mastermind show with the specialist subject of "petty crime in Auchterturra between the dates of 19th April & 6th June" (can't remember the exact dates, but it was less than 2 months).

- What unsolved crime was commited between the dates of May 19th & 20th?

- Theft of sundry items of womens underwear from clothes lines round the town

- That's not what I have written here...

- Knickers being nicked?

- Correct!

Windows 8 aims to make security updates less painful

If you update the kernel, you have to reboot. If you update a driver, you either have to be able to unload it (and stop using everything using that driver) or you have to reboot. If you update a low level library (e.g. libc equivalent), you will have to reboot or restart all your programs to start using it; if this is for security, you either reboot or have existing processes still potentially vulnerable.

This is a fact for Windows, Linux and most other operating systems. Very few have been able to update the kernel on the fly.

Mystery radioisotopes in Czech air are not from Fukushima

Yes, there's a possibility. Or Israeli. Or, frankly, any other country with a nuclear capability, including France or Britain.

Hands on with the Sony PlayStation Vita

AAAAAAAAaaaarrrrrrrggghhhhh!!!!!!!!

Yet /another/ dumb ass proprietary memory stick from Sony... That's enough to put me off of the thing on principle.

BOFH: We don't need no stinkin' upgrade

GPL versions go 0.1, 0.2 then on to 0.9 at which point they increment in ever decreasing numbers in an effort to avoid reaching a 1.0 version...

Microsoft releases temporary fix for critical Windows bug

What the hell?

The flaw was in the "Win32k TrueType font-parsing engine" and "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code in kernel mode".

Seriously? Why the hell is the font parsing engine running in kernel mode???

Want to avoid all private-data breaches, ever? Here's how

Law of Robots by Asimov - "do no harm to humanity" or something like that.

The idea of only storing a "hash" of the biometric data does the same as not storing it to all intents and purposes. It's (nearly) impossible to reverse engineer the data to be identifiable; of course, it was seen to be impossible to reverse engineer hashed passwords, but that's largely been overtaken by CPU speed advances.

Steve Jobs named most influential game guy – ever

As The Damned said

"Would you be so hot if you weren't dead?" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=676mN6nyzjo) - this was about John Lennon, but the sentiment has to carry forward here...

"Suddenly, you are twice the man you used to be

Excessive fame in quick death"

I'd echo the sentiments of John Carmack who did a lot to shape PC games in the 90s.

BOFH: Hordes unleashed... by a RAM upgrade

Wait, what?

"PFY's fault for pointing out that the desktops we were dumping had the same memory as half the desktops we were keeping and so if there were free slots on the keepers we may as well use them"

This sounds remarkably customer focussed for the PFY & the BOFH... What about the opportunity for a bidding process and all the back-handers & corporate freebies such an exercise entails?

Oracle previews RHEL-ish 2 Linux kernel

If it's added to the kernel it has to be GPL'd. Opensolaris was under a license which wasn't compatible with GPL which us why ZFS on Linux has to be run under FUSE.

EMC goes virtual with in-house Oracle apps

Interesting...

A speaker at Openworld espousing Oracle on VMWare when Oracle do their best to drive customers away from that as a solution with unclear support policies...

Amazon revamps E Ink Kindle line

On a serious note, the pricing looked really good until I spotted the "UK pricing not announced" bit, so we can add at least 20% (for VAT) to those prices, probably more. Still, it makes me glad I didn't go out & buy a Kindle now just to have it be out of date; there might be some good bargains to be had on the old ones pretty soon.

Oracle rises for Unix server push

Power 6 didn't do out of order execution either (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER6), so cut back on the poo-pooing a tad. I will admit that the Power 6 ran at 5GHz, though... The point of the T chips was to make them simple which meant they could run cool on low power; the more complicated you make the chips, the more transistors you need and the more power. As for clock speed, ~3.5GHz seems to be the fastest people can make CPUs run at these days where OOO etc is enabled; I remember 3GHz Xeons about 8 years ago in my previous job and Intel are still basically producing 3.0-3.5GHz chips, just with more cores/threads.

The single thread performance does need to be matched against Power 7/x86 to see how it compares, but I haven't seen any SpecINT results relating to that.

Huawei gets charged with juicy Android handset

Hurrah!

About time someone started getting the battery life sorted on these things. My first mobile back in '97 was a Phillips Fizz, a brick of a thing that, despite its weight, could only manage a paltry day without needing a recharge. Now with smartphones, we've come full circle to an expectation of only lasting a day between charges.

I had hoped that next-gen phones would start using more power efficient CPUs and we'd get better battery life, but the emphasis seems to have been on dual core & faster CPUs rather than time between charges. Running Angry Birds & watching HD movies seems to be the priority over being able to use your phone for more than a day...

Microsoft moots mobiles with interchangeable accessories

Yes

As patent owners, they could apply whichever rules they like to sublicencees. However, they may get pulled up later if it was deemed to be anti-competitive.

Oracle defies the economy – and the curse of Sun

To be fair, you need high margins on low-volume sales to make it worthwhile. If you're selling 5 million 2 socket x86 boxes, you'll drive an overall profit on a 5-10% margin, but on a high-end box where you sell 5000 unit, you need to divide all your R&D across fewer boxes and consequently a higher margin.

Add in that very few people buy at list price (40-60% discounts are common on high-end servers) and it's not quite as rosy as it might seem.

Oracle slates 'extreme' system kickoff

ZFS Flash archive

Installing a ZFS Flash archive has been supported for a while now - we've been doing it for ages. The new part is you can do it from the text installer and with Live Upgrade.

Also, it's "ISM", not "IMS". You can have 4MB pages regardless of using ISM, but the ISM part does lock the pages in memory and saves the machine allocating swap space to the anonymous pages.