Posts by John Hawkins 208 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Feb 2008
Hmm, would be interesting to know how they got that past the PCIDSS auditors. A few years ago you could wave a bit of paper at them with a list of possible mitigations on it, but in recent projects I've been involved in the correct answer to the auditors saying 'jump' has been 'how high?'.
Sounds very much like my sysadmin work on Solaris of twenty-odd years ago. Servers were relatively expensive, so we had multiple applications + support scripts on each server.
Add a few patches and middle-of-the-night quick fixes and you ended up with weird behaviour caused by things interacting in unexpected ways.
Gut-feeling got you through at least as often as linear thinking.
Not as far fetched as it sounds; I've a vague memory of the idea being discussed back in the '80s, using various French overseas territories in the Pacific as an example. Though as the Poms are now leaving the the EU, NZ might need to become part of French Polynesia to join.
There was talk of banning USB drives at my work so I tested using my Nexus 6P as an alternative solution. Mucking around with a cable + 'phone wasn't as simple as a USB drive, but worked well enough that I've started using the setup to back some essential files up.
Would be interesting if IBM banned all smartphones - business and private - as well.
The code compiles and runs OK on my Ubuntu laptop once I'd installed the Python package NumPy. Could be interesting to download some text from Project Gutenberg to run through it - many of those old books are a bit iffy by current standards even if they were mainstream back then.
Maybe they did - not everybody is OK with the thought that the Wright boys weren't first with powered flight.
Old cockies in the area in the 1980s (mate of mine worked on a farm there back then) remembered Pearse as a cranky old bloke, so my guess is he had Asperger's or something similar.
Somewhere along the line I read that the reason why Uranium 235 fission reactors got the nod in the 1950s was because the military of the time considered plutonium (handy if you've got bombs to build) production high priority. Which seems reasonable enough given the recent history of the time.
So, yes, in context plutonium was very useful indeed.
To quote H G Wells' newspaper editor in 'The Sea Lady' from 1902:
"Stuff that the public won't believe aren't facts. Being true only makes 'em worse. They buy our paper to swallow it and it's got to go down easy."
You couldn't click on it back then, but bait it was.
I've got an old recipe for red squirrel that suggests first skinning, gutting (guess they could get a bit gamey otherwise, but YMMV), then rubbing them in salt and pepper, basting with olive oil and grilling.
Sounds intriguing, though I would avoid the ones with warts just to be on the safe side. Unfortunately they (squirrels, not warts) are protected where I live :(
Gearing up to take back Outer Manchuria perhaps? The Chinese certainly have a better claim to that than for example Argentina has to the Falklands, as well as a need for more space.
I think Russia has a great deal more to fear from China than the West. Pity Lewis Page isn't still with El Reg; would have been interesting to hear his views on the subject.
I worried a lot about my brother until he got a new pacemaker installed, so I get this.
I have the same heart defect myself (though not as serious as my brother; his heart stops, mine just slows until I faint) and I now use a Fitbit HR so that I can log my pulse. I'd have no problem sharing that information with concerned family members. Or at to least alert them when I'm having problems again.
Perhaps sir would find this short video amusing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx1ovD-o5l4
(There really ought be a sheep icon available - one feels let down by The Register)
But isn't money just another form of information? And for that matter, aren't all things connected with money (bookkeeping, limited liability companies and so on) just a subset of information flow? Money being information on the value on what I (or my ancestors etc) have contributed to the system and, if rules are followed, what I can expect to receive in exchange for that money.
In a sense, the Enlightenment is also part of that information flow - things happen because there are various rules that are followed and what happened yesterday will happen today and tomorrow. Gravity being a good example - we know it happens and can measure it within the limits of quantum mechanics, but we know less about the how of gravity than we know about the how of evolution.
Getting back to money, instead of me claiming the grain you grew because one of my foremothers was shagged by a local god, you can tell me to eff off because you grew it on your own land and you then exchange the grain for filthy lucre.
Drivers, or lack of requirement for drivers, is the big improvement I see for public transport for lots of reasons. More engineers probably, but not as many.
Sabotage stops buses today; don't think that would make a difference. Punctures and other breakdowns are dealt with by a couple of mechanics in a van already; would be the same with an urban autonomous bus.
Biggest risk I see is buses getting hacked, but the way things are going all new vehicles - drivered or not - are likely to be at risk by then anyway.
I can see urban buses getting replaced by autonomous vehicles first - fairly predictable conditions and in many cases right-of-way lanes. Autonomous minibuses every 5 minutes instead of articulated monsters every half-hour.
Pedestrians could be dealt with using small water cannons - would provide entertainment for the bus passengers also.
Tractors might be first in rural areas - $action = "plough"; $depth = "b"; $field = "nw_wood"; $gps = true; $start_date = "2020-09-10"; run(); - would save cropping farmers a lot of time.
While I realise that adverts are often designed to attract attention, I find any movement on a page unsettling and sometimes a little nauseating. A bit like with the infamous <blink> tag of yore.
So I block ads even if, as Tim notes, some are probably interesting to me as a potential customer.
Haha. No, I open the tins in the traditional manner - submerged in a bucket of water.
Though I don't know why a people (the English) who regard pheasants as being fit to eat only after they fall off their feet that they have been hung up by should feel threatened by surströmming. I've gutted quite a few pheasants that have just been hung a few days and they stink enough for me.
Pyttipanna is a bit on the stodgy side for me, but I can see that Poms might like it for that reason.
Personally I'd prefer the fermented herring after a night out; it's fairly salty and just the thing for post-pub electrolyte replacement. Thin flatbread, onions, mature cheese and boiled spuds - preferably the local almond spuds 'mandelpotatis' - completes the culinary requirements specification.
(Disclosure: I have a whole shelf in my fridge dedicated to surströmming tins; like good wine it gets better as it ages.)
"Good enough" is how I'd put it. Does the trick and without taking so long that it has become irrelevant by the time the value is available.
Like the market economy itself (or democracy for that matter), a compromise. Neither of which are good enough if you want to get anally retentive about it, but changing either system to make it more controllable/predictable ends in tears sooner or later.
I've been messing with Chef on both Linux (RHEL) and Windows boxes since April this year at work. It's been quite a lot of fun to get my fingers into some coding again and once I got the certificates set up properly it has been friendly to work with. I set up my own Chef lab at home (pure Ubuntu) with a couple of Raspberry Pi units among the clients just to see if it could be done.
I spent a couple of years programming C before I got into Unix sysadmin in the mid 90s and later specialised in scripting for a while, so it didn't take long to get up to speed with Chef. Rock solid on Linux and a doddle to use.
I'd hesitate to use it on Windows though; the Chef agent for that platform has a few performance issues because of the way it has been ported and I had to add a registry hack just to get the agent to restart properly as a service after a reboot.
It's great that beards are no longer just for fundamentalists (lefties and god botherers). I hated having to shave a couple of times a day to feel clean; Don Johnson style stubble made me look lazy and gave women a rash.
Not that I've gone for the full hipster/Ned Kelley though - that looks sweaty.
Beard transplants sound weird, but I guess as shaving has probably never been much of an issue for those blokes they wouldn't see that downside of having whiskers.
Finally, to quote the late great Rik Mayall (aka Flashheart) "Thanks, Bridesmaid. Like the beard. Gives me something to hang on to."
A colleague who used to work in the car parts business suggested to me that a German engineering and electronics outfit who make components for the industry were highly likely to be responsible for much of the development of the solution. In which case pretty much all car manufacturers in the western world may be involved. Given that the industry as a whole has struggled over the past few years, it is unlikely anyone anywhere who sells diesel engined cars has ignored a chance to be a little more competitive.
Will be interesting to follow further developments.
This is enabling a market economy as it ought to be done; from below rather than above. I imagine there are a few problems, but it is a heck of a lot better than the von oben solutions.
It will be fun to see what happens when small-scale solar power becomes a realistic solution in that part of the world. No infrastructure needed and plenty of sunshine.
Think I'd prefer a robot that tidies up around the house, cleans my floors, does my washing, empties the dishwasher, cleans the bog and shower etc. I'd rather spend my weekends renovating or writing code.
Admittedly a robot maid can't do everything a human maid can, but given the abuse some of women in my family appear to have had to put up while working as maids back in the day, the fewer human maids about the better.
It makes good business sense to look after the livestock, regardless of any social values added by the policy.
Said livestock at that time would have had a life that was 'nasty, brutish and short' by our standards, so simply making sure that it was well fed, free from common diseases and rested would have made a significant difference to productivity.
I remember a paper in Nature about 15-20 years ago where various marine organisms in a lab had been exposed to sea water in equilibrium with current and a number of raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, with the result that some organisms were worse off, some showed little or no effect and some did better at the higher levels of carbon dioxide. Can't remember the reference, but the result stuck with me as I found it interesting.
Not sure if it is relevant for the modern rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, but it strikes me as worth considering that during the Cretaceous and early Cenozoic periods, when carbon dioxide levels were several times that of today (e.g. http://www.whoi.edu/science/GG/people/kbice/Bice_Norris_2002.pdf), quite a lot of chalk was laid down over Europe. Raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels can therefore hardly result in the extinction of all marine organisms with carbonate based shells, as some people would have us believe.
I reckon someone with too much time on their hands should start up a campaign to have Outer Manchuria returned to China. After all, the Chinese have more rights to Outer Manchuria than the Argies have to the Falklands.
Would wind up both the Argies and the Ruskies. Maybe the Ruskies wouldn't be so keen on supporting the Argies in the future either.
I'm old enough to remember that PCs got into the office this way...local managers bought them as they were a great way to get around the central IT department's restrictions. IT controlled accounts and software on the VAX and on the IBM big iron, but PCs were standalone.
Sooner or later the PCs became business critical, so IT were stuck with them whether they liked it or not.
Was how I got into IT in the first place - the IT department refused to touch our PCs, so I looked after them. More fun than what I was supposed to be doing and made it easier for me to get a new job once our office got consolidated out of existence.
After reading through article and comments, it seems to me that there's a lot of quibbling about the definition of poverty. Time for an RFC defining exactly what poverty is perhaps - I worked with requirements coordination for a few years so I'm inclined to think it important to be sure everybody is clear about what is being discussed before entering into said discussion.
I'm with Tim on this one - too much inequality might be a Bad Thing for lots of good reasons (one being that it is bad news for a market economy), but it is not the same thing as poverty.
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