Posts by John Sager 803 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2008
My crap Crapita story is the TVL one, and frightening my elderly MiL with the usual nastygrams, even though she had a licence, and free to boot because of her age. Turns out they had no way of dealing with alias addresses, where the account address in their database is not quite the same as the Postcode Address File one. Got her MP involved but no satisfactory resolution:(
I am going to see the eclipse
Likewise. I've been to the US numerous times over the last 30 years on both business & vacation. I've never had any problem with Immigration or Customs & hopefully I've built up a record of probity with them. One assumes they look at previous history of visits.
Not Doctorish enough. I thought about Mel & Sue - the idea of the regeneration going wrong & producing a fission would be interesting. But there are better pairs - thinks:
Chuckle Brothers? - no!
Jedward? - kill me for that thought.
Rowan Atkinson & Tony Robinson? - worth a second thought.
You do realise that some people do genuinely have 5 digit phone numbers?
How many area code areas still have 5-digit numbering schemes? Northern Ireland used to be a bit strange but have they now not regularised that? In any case, all the calls like that I had up until recently were scammers (PPI mostly). I did let them go to the machine but the bastards just play their recording into the machine, unlike most other scammers who just ring off when they get the machine. Now I have to answer the call & then ring off:(
If BT can stop these then all power to their elbow but I still WANT THEM TO SORT OUT CLI!
I get a bit fed up of BT's approach to calling line identification. Lots of scam calls come through with obviously weird CLI (e.g ok area code but 5-digit phone no), and a few judiciously crafted regular expressions should filter most of them. What's worse is that BT don't seem to be able to forward incoming international CLI with any consistency. A US friend has a mobile on Sprint, I think, but when she came over here her calls were marked 'Unavailable' so they went straight to our answering machine:( Her calls to our mobiles (Vodafone) had correct CLI.
Google do this- it's called a Leap Smear
I set my internal NTP servers to sync from Google. Google drifted their time linearly from 10 hours before to 10 hours after the leap. My servers responded with a rapid 50ms offset initially which then decayed, and then a -50ms offset at the end. The drift changed by 14ppm. Personally, I would have preferred them to do a raised cosine profile over -/+ 12 hours. That would reduce the initial offset errors considerably for a peak drift change of ~18ppm.
Exactly. There seems to be a dastardly plan to stop broadcast TV at some unspecified future point & put it all on 'broadband'. At least that's what a woefully under-advised House of Lords committee suggested a year or two back. If that ever happens, then 'broadband' will need to carry multiple decent quality TV channels for those houses that have multiple viewers with different tastes. So there's your FTTP use case right there (and a properly engineered multicast network). Of course, the HoL were totally out of their tree but I can imagine the lure of filthy lucre from mobile companies for the UHF spectrum might precipitate the same end result.
all Java, python, perl, ruby, C/C++ just needs recompiling usually
And there's the rub. Intel have spent a lot of effort on developing a compiler that will produce really good x86 code - it's better than GCC & CLANG/LLVM for a lot of things. An ARM server ecosystem really needs an equivalent highly optimising compiler.
As the article says, that's what the Internet should be. RFC791 is a bit outmoded now and has been replaced by Differentiated Services - RFC2474. It makes sense to classify traffic according to its characteristics and separate/prioritise on that basis. However the Net Neutrality debate has been hi-jacked by commercial entities & anti-commercial activists for their own political purposes. Unfortunately, what we'll probably end up with is a network with totally skewed parameters that don't suit anybody.
I read about Google's approach some time ago, and for non-sub-second-critical apps it's a better solution than stepping by 1 sec. If you do need the sub-second stuff then TAI is the way to go. Of course, even things like HFT need to ultimately tie to real-world time but it's much more important to have a unique time ordering of transactions (no, relativity doesn't (yet) apply!) and the reference back to real-world time can be done after the fact from logs, e.g. when litigation requires it.
I've configured my home network now to have two internal NTP servers referenced to the Google ones & then everything else talks to them. I'll see what happens at New Year, probably set up a client with logging on & talking to NPL or Linx.
Same in the country. I'm on a EO line which is about 3km in line length according to Openreach's TDR. There is a cabinet 200m away from me which has finally had a fibre cabinet installed next to it, but it's awaiting activation. I am assured that they will eventually transfer my DP to that cabinet, but it looks like it'll be many months before that happens.
My .indent.pro file says '-linux -i2'. 8-space indents are too wide for anything that has much in the way of block nesting. Now you could argue that deep block nesting is bad coding practice, and I tend to agree, but I still read (and sometimes hack on) existing code that had weird or no coding standards applied. As for spaces, my editor of choice (nedit) puts tabs in automatically after it gets to 8-space indent. I don't care. indent will prettify it and the compiler doesn't care.
I don't think HMG has that kind of clout in the PRC. Having said that, I remember, oh, 20 years or so ago, the US Treasury suggesting that printer manufacturers should install anti-counterfeiting software. It seemed to me at the time a stupid thing to ask - greenbacks should have had better anti-forgery features anyway. Now we find that quite a few printers will barf on printing a banknote, and not just of the USD variety.
slap the silly old goat, at 79 he should have MORE than enough life experience to spot scams such as this
Um, he's 79. What's the chance he's got early stage dementia and the judgement bits in his brain are shot? The fact that he insists the 'woman' was kosher suggests his faculties are somewhat lacking.
I first saw a Matt Groening cartoon in the early 80s, well before 'The Simpsons'. The next door office had 'The Nine Types of Bosses' from the 'Work is Hell' series on the wall.
As for tat, I used to go to DAVIC workshops in the mid 90's. The process was putting together standards for digital media distribution - streaming & broadcast. One of them was held at the Beverly Hilton in LA to try to get Hollywood interested in what we were doing, and it was the one & only time we all got a goody bag of tat. One was a T-shirt from Apple with 'Windows 95 is Macintosh 89' on the front. I wore that for years. Another was a frisbee from Novell with 'The Billion Node Network' on it. Laughable in hindsight but I seem to remember it was a bit of a joke even then.
Me neither. I used to use ABP but now that's switched off & I've got uBlock & Ghostery. Ghostery has one or two holes in to make my online banking work but otherwise it's mostly blocked. I get blocks on a few sites I follow links to, but they can go forth & multiply. Forbes, interestingly, puts up a blank page for 10 sec & then brings up the article from the link I clicked.
I went to uni (UMIST) before we ever joined the EU, and there were students and staff from all over - there were one or two Czechs too after Prague Spring - we were welcoming then and will be again, despite the 'hate immigrants' crap. Has the EU made it so difficult for academia to be as independent and world-looking as it was in those days? Deliberately? The comment from steamnut seems to suggest that the EU is like a giant flypaper (or perhaps a spider's web) so academics get enmeshed in a sticky gunk of admin that has sucked all the initiative away.
TPS is pretty much useless now. Most of the spam calls I get on the landline are either international, even with a proper CLI, or VOIP with a made-up CLI. Interestingly, many of those have a kosher UK code but only a 5-digit number. So easy to spot since virtually all UK local numbers are 6-digit (or 7 for a few) after the code. Some are withheld, and I would just send them straight to the answering machine, but unfortunately we get calls from the local hospital that really need to be answered and they withhold by policy rather than giving a presentation number. I have discussed it with them but no change yet.
It exists in theory, called NAT46.
Actually it really wants to be the other way round. I run dual stack on my home network but ideally I would go just v6. That then needs a NAT box, plus a DNS interceptor to respond to AAAA requests for v4 hosts with local v6 AAAA responses. The NAT box then does the clever 6-to-4 and back again packet conversion and onward DNS resolution. This won't work for protocols that include IP addresses in higher layer transactions, but even that might be hacked by application layer helpers that v4 NAT boxes already do.
The same principle extends outward to v6-only ISPs which need to run a beefier version of that at their interface to the Internet. This hack only needs to stay in place whilst v4-only networks still exist (though that might be a long time), but it does do the required bridging function albeit in a kludgy way.
Or Die or Das? I don't do Deutsch. Anyway, I quite like the idea of N & J sparking off each other but they ain't by any means the masters of repartee, so reluctantly it had to be Clarkson.
However it looks like the programme's makers have just committed ritual Seppuku, and for much more venial motives than Top Gear.
Reading the comments, which being from a sample of Reg readers, will be by and large of an engineering bent & discipline, they are almost universally negative. Being 'little people' govt won't listen to us unless we became a big, organised angry but articulate mob, which won't happen. So we rely on engineers who have a track record of being listened to by govt to articulate our negative views. What? You mean to say there aren't any? The only ones who get listened to have been captured by the system? Quelle surprise!
I guess the classic example is David Nutt - tell us what we want to hear or you're toast. So unfortunately all the venting here & elsewhere will have precisely no effect. All we can do is to insulate ourselves personally from this madness & hope we can avoid the worst effects. I've had a diesel gen set for a *long* time. It was bought during an era of flaky countryside 11kV distribution but I've kept it for future flakiness further up the chain:(
They probably aren't, directly, but it seems that all manufacturers of kit these days want their box to phone home. Perhaps only on installation but often to keep in contact either all the time or periodically. So they talk upnp to the router and set up a little hole. I've had to put a firewall rule in to my (home-brew router) to stop my printer phoning back to HP.
I've recently bought a z-wave controller and that set up a ssh session to a cloud server to provide remote access from android/iPhone apps. No thanks. I'll do the remote access myself, so that ssh session now doesn't get started.
Supposedly to manage a Netgear WiFi extender I should log into it via some name that resolves to a cloud server somewhere and it will automagically log me on to the device. Sod that for a game of soldiers, I've set up to log on directly.
Now, I can sort this stuff, but most consumers can't. I do wonder what the motivation is here. Do the manufacturers want to make it easier for Joe Public, or is this a golden opportunity to collect usage data which can then be sold on? Either way, it's a mess.
It's OK the guvmint saying "don't drink to excess". However the latest value of 'excess' is patently stupid. In any case, it's hardly likely to be effective advice to people who value the feeling of being legless despite the morning-after effects.
This is why there is so much pressure to kill off leap seconds. The ITU recently kicked that can down the road for another few years, but personally, I don't see why this is still such a problem. We've had leap seconds for decades and computer time protocols have been designed to signal future leap seconds for a *long* time. It does involve the strange concept of a specific minute at the end of June or December should have 61 secs. The specs also allow for 59 secs too but that is unlikely now ever to happen.
You could write the software to deal with a step, but Google decided to just slow down the computer notion of the time in a controlled fashion for several hours so that after the leap second actually occurs the clocks are exactly back in sync. That is probably much more friendly to existing applications.
I suppose they could localise a version of their machine for the US- and have a separate- far more useful- far more power version- with extra channels and power- for the rest of the world
It's a bit more subtle than that. The US power limits are higher than most other countries - 30dBm on 2.4GHz versus 20dBm in the UK. However they haven't got the top 10MHz of the band that we have. There is much more variation though in allowed frequency ranges in the 5GHz band across the world, and this is probably what gets the FCC's knickers in a twist.
It's one thing, though, to set regulatory limits. It's entirely another thing whether the radio hardware will actually produce the allowed power. Probably kit designed as APs will, but that will not necessarily be the case for clients such as laptops.
Don't get me wrong, getting rid of NAT is good, and I operate an ipv6-only website which really helps to keep the peasant scum out.
True, for a while. I've just looked at my firewall logs going back about 3 weeks. In that time I've had about 40k v4 'door knockers' that my firewall dropped. The v6 equivalent is essentially zero except for a few odd probes from pnap.net which look like attempts to measure performance. This is on a home network prefix with no outward-facing servers. That won't last but I think we have a few years before it gets bad.
Some of the smaller ISPs have been at 100% deployment for a couple of years now. AAISP have as has IDNet.
I used to be with an Entanet reseller years ago, and got connected to Entanet's experimental service, and then after a hiatus, to their main service (on a different prefix). However that eventually failed when some lash-up kit they used for connections via BT 20C networks failed. I got fed up of waiting for them to fix it & moved to AAISP a couple of years ago. I very occasionally see v6 outages - there was one yesterday for a while - which I notice when, particularly, fonts.googleapis.com hangs (lots of websites seem to use this).
Naturally I'm all dual-stack here for all my hosts except for backward vendors such as the TV kit. It would be good to go v6 only but that needs a 6-to-4 proxy service somewhere for all the v4-only services out there that will never die, and I can't do it until all the v4-only kit here goes to recycling.
It is for autonomous and continuous craft.
I'll sorta buy that. It's more likely that a uav (hence no need for pilot safety & life support stuff) could be engineered within current & <10yr future constraints. That's OK for mapping/surveillance but wifi/tv transmitters will rapidly eat into the power budget. There is still the issue of energy to manufacture solar cells (and batteries) but that's the price to pay if the business benefits outweigh that.
It's a dead end. The air transport industry we currently have only works through a combination of the energy density of kerosene, the efficiency of jet engines at the end of a nearly 80 year development cycle, and similar improvements in the application of aerodynamic design.
Electric aircraft have to replicate that. They will benefit from the aerodynamic advances, but we must be getting reasonably asymptotic on that. Energy will still need to be stored as we can probably only expect a factor of 2 or 3 improvement in solar cell energy conversion and we fly at night. So we need a big step in battery energy density. Plus either an incredibly fast charge process (2 nuclear power stations at Heathrow), or a quick battery swap-out process and a slower recharge (1 nuclear power station at Heathrow)
Then how do we make an 'electric jet engine'? I guess the technique would be to replace the jet core in a high-bypass turbofan (e.g. Trent 900) with a similarly specified electric motor (about 56 MW at takeoff).
Stick with the kero & manufacture it from CO2, H2O and nuclear energy when the oil & gas runs out.
If 'phone home with an accurate reading' was all it was designed to do then there would be a lot less resistance. However the subtext is 'demand management' i.e. cut you off, or perhaps a bit more cleverly, temporarily switch of some appliances. That is, or should be, a no-no. I've no problem with improving energy efficiency as long as it's done in an economically realistic way (no stupid restrictions on kettle consumption). But however good or bad the energy efficiency of our appliances is, in the rich, civilised country that we apparently are, then the energy infrastructure should be robust enough to cope with the demands placed upon it both now and in the future.
I bought a Netgear wifi extender, and the setup process went through a similar DNS name. Once I worked out what was going on, the wifi extender had got a DHCP address in my network and somehow my browser got redirected to that. Anyway, now it has a fixed address in my network and after updating the firmware there's a rule in my firewall to block outgoing connects from that address.
It also has a local name in my network but for a while, trying to use that in the browser gave me a bunch of 404s so I had to use its IP address. However that now seems to have corrected itself.
At least, though, it has a web config interface. A cheap TP-Link managed switch I bought had no web config. It used a config app that only runs under Windows:((
It's true that the gravitational radiation has only been measured by one method, and that more independent methods would be good. However the character of the signals received corresponds with high accuracy to the expected character of gravitational radiation from that scenario and also matches what General Relativity would predict. In fact, the results validate GR in an extreme gravity regime that can't really be measured by other methods. If only Einstein were alive to see it!
Having read the judgement, it looks very much like Judge Alsup has given Oracle very little wiggle room to argue on when/if they appeal this. They can only now appeal on the issue of judgement as to law versus a jury verdict on the facts, and Alsup has taken great pains to explain why it's all down to issues of fact that a jury has to decide rather than a plain direction by the law.
I'm still surprised that the appeals court threw out the verdict that the API was not copyrightable. We've all assumed that APIs were free to use and this was a bit of a shock. Perhaps now APIs should come with a 'free to use' licence and those that don't (unless in very specialised areas), fall by the wayside.
I'm in the 'sod them' camp. They've had plenty of time to register to vote, and there is a legally defined registration limit whatever the quality of the online registration process. I'm a bit more sympathetic to voting after the 10pm limit on polling day, if you have already joined the queue before 10pm.
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