Posts by Norman Nescio 978 publicly visible posts • joined 7 May 2008
That says nothing about the quality of 'your' article, and a lot about the quality of the student.
One of the many abiding problems of Wikipedia is the number of editors that believe they have ownership rights that trump reality.
I gave up contributing.
Fine them heavily, then lock them up, as some in the US may say.
Putting people into universities of crime at public expense is of doubtful utility. They've cost the public vast amounts of money, so spending more on them is not an obvious approach, especially as they have not been shown to be violent/a physical danger to the public.
I'm in favour of them having the benefits of their criminal activity removed (Ill gotten gains) - a financial arrangement that removes padded pension schemes, bonuses, inflated salaries etc, and furthermore being saddled with a debt that is undischargeable by bankruptcy, but which can be paid of by a reasonable attachment/garnishment on their subsequent income until the debt (to society) is paid off. I don't think it'll happen though. Being forced to live on an income that is below median ought to be the minimum.
Depriving people capable of earning an honest wage of their liberty has two costs: you have to house them securely, and they aren't paying taxes. It should be a last resort once other methods have been tried and failed - the intent of the justice system should be about rehabilitation - it ends up being cheaper, and you get productive members of society out of it.
Surveys of criminals show that the incentive that works is not gaol, but being caught. These have been caught. They should have no gains from their criminality, and the victims should be compensated in full. Anything else is immoral.
I must admit, the question has exposed a gap in my knowledge.
I really don't know if mobile phone base-stations transmit continuously, or continually.
Evidently, when you make a phone call, or exchange data, your phone 'transmits more' - it certainly uses more power; but we know that the latest mobile phone technology uses packetised technology - specifically IP at a layer above the physical. By definition, packets are logically bounded, but whether the logical boundaries translate into physical ones is a different and interesting question.
If you take good old Ethernet, it is based in part on an older radio technology, called ALOHAnet. Stations transmitted willy-nilly, and at a certain traffic level collisions became a significant problem. The hub receiver had to detect the collision, and lack of an acknowledgement of a good packet meant the transmitter had to wait and try again. It wasn't very efficient, but you only transmitted whenever you wanted to send a packet. Ethernet improved on that by introducing carrier sensing, so you only attempted to send a packet if you detected the absence of a carrier signalling that another packet was in the process of being transmitted.
What this digression shows is that it is entirely possible to design a packet-radio protocol that does not rely on continuous transmissions. One benefit of this is reducing the power requirement of the transmitters because you don't need to be transmitting when you have no data to send. It you are not transmitting continuously, then you could be transmitting continually (e.g. with a heartbeat). It makes a great deal of sense to try and avoid needing continuous transmission. Old mobile phones were marketed with the concept of talk-time/standby-time which showed that more power was used when maintaining a call that when being quiescent and only contacting the base-station sporadically. Owners of GSM phones will remember the occasional dit-de-dit-de-dit-de-dit interference generated in nearby audio circuits when the phone briefly talked to the base-station; and could predict when a call was about to come in by the characteristic interference on susceptible audio devices which occurred during the data exchange with the base-station before the phone started ringing.
With more modern phones (3G, 4G, LTE, 5G), I suspect the phones themselves still do not transmit anything other than RFI continuously, but the base-stations I have no idea about - I suspect they transmit only when communication is in progress with a handset, and if there were no handsets in the vicinity, would probably, at most, transmit an occasional beacon.
I wonder if a radio engineer can comment?
NN
That's a little too simplistic.
From memory, Norway has interconnectors with the UK, Germany, Denmark and Sweden (there are others*), and power flows either way, depending on pricing. For example, the interconnect with the UK has been sending about a Gigawatt of power to the UK for most of the past month, with occasional periods of it going the other way when it's been very windy in the UK. Similarly, power goes each way to and from Denmark - the Norwegian reservoirs are right now at the same fill-level as the average for the last 20 years**, as a wet autumn has made up for a dry summer - so the power flow is determined by the price. If it is windy in Denmark when not so windy in Norway, power will go from Denmark to Norway, because excess wind-generated power is remarkably cheap; sometimes even negative in price. Norway often tops up with (partially nuclear generated***) power from Sweden, but recently, there's been significant export of power from the north of Norway to Sweden because of an annual event, which is the freezing over of the northern Swedish rivers. While the freezing goes on, they have to decrease hydro-electric production until a thick-enough layer of ice has formed, after which they can continue to abstract water from under the ice to generate power at full rate.
The main conclusion is that power flows are complicated****, driven by price, and Norway has adequate hydro-electric reserves for the winter. The power companies are making a vast amount of money because market the price is driven up by problems elsewhere in the region covered by the market. Hydro is reliable and quickly dispatchable, so commands a price-premium to fill in the gaps when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, so it makes a huge amount of sense for the power companies to preserve their stocks and import cheaper electricity from elsewhere and fill in the gaps with hydro as necessary, getting a high price when they do.
The interconnectors also enable odd things, like Sweden providing power to the UK, even though there is no direct connection: power goes into Norway from Sweden at the same time as power goes from Norway to the UK - the balance can net out to zero for Norway, so the net effect is export from Sweden to the UK: so if you look at a single interconnector, you can get an incorrect view of what it actually going on. The same can go on with other interconnects. I expect similar things happen with the UK interconnects.*****
The interconnectors are unpopular with the Norwegian public, as they are seen as enabling the power companies to make vast amounts of money selling Norwegian electricity to other countries at high prices to cover gaps in the other countries' generating capacity: this translates into the Norwegian consumers having to pay the same high prices for their electricity as the foreign customers, which comes as a shock, as historically, electricity prices in Norway have been low compared to other places.
* 9 to/from Sweden totalling roughly 3200-3600 MW, 1 by 50 MW from Russia, 1 by 70-120 MW to/from Finland, 4 to Denmark totalling 1632 MW, 1 by 700 MW to/from the Netherlands, 1 by 1400 MW to/from Germany, 1 by 1400 MW to/from the UK.
**Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE): Reservoir statistics
***The Swedish Ringhals 4 plant had a mishap under maintenance last year, and repairs take a while so it is not expected to restart until 23rd February. Not a good time to lose it.
According to the fount of unreliable knowledge:
Country.....................................Area..........Population density
Norway (not including Svalbard & Jan Mayen) 323,787 km2... 17 km-2
UK......................................... 242,495 km2...277 km-2
Which makes the UK 74.9% the size of Norway, but with a population density just over 16 times (1530%) greater. I suspect the population density influences the economics of fibre roll-out.
In the past, when essential infrastructure was being rolled out by state organisations, there was an idea called 'universal service obligation' (USO), which is to say, the service provider was obligated to provide a service at a standard cost, even to difficult to access places. The excess costs to get to some places were subsidised by increasing the price to service the easy to access places.
These days, with the advent of competition, the USO has been dropped, so competing providers obviously roll out to the cheapest places to access, forgetting about everywhere else. This gives lower prices (or higher profits for the provider, or a combination of the two) to those who live in the easy to access places, and leaves no pot of money to subsidise delivery of service to the more difficult places.
I'm rather surprised that the the Norwegian state didn't pick up on this and impose a USO requirement - to my mind anywhere that has, or had a copper POTS phone should automatically get a fibre connection with no argument. Apparently this is too difficult, so we get oddities like the EU celebrating a forested rural (it's not that remote) Norwegian community getting fibre via Sweden, going across a lake-bottom in the process.
As for the UK, the problems of getting decent fibre connectivity to rural areas are well known. Using OpenReach wayleaves to put fibre everywhere would have been pocket-lint (not even change) compared to the sums spent rescuing the banks in the financial crisis, paying furlough during Covid, or paying energy bills now, with huge economic gains. Farmers need decent connectivity, as does working from home.
When I was doing some particularly involved kernel mode code on a VAX, I ended up with approximately a 80x24 screenful of comments per line of code. I also had a preface explaining what the code was meant to do, why a particular approach had been taken, and why other 'obvious' approaches had not been chosen, with links to extensive documentation elsewhere. When you are doing counter-intuitive stuff, you have to work hard to prevent other people making 'obvious' simplifications to improve what 'some idiot' (including previous versions of myself) has written.
I worked in such a place. The trapdoors were made of metal. With sharp edges. On two occasions I discovered power cables that had been cut through a significant part of their thickness by the edge of a trapdoor which had been rolled over repeatedly by the wheels of the office chair at the desk the trapdoor was under (I was doing network cabling, which involved furkling around under people's desks). I'm astonished that there were no unexpected power shutdowns the whole time I worked there.
There was also the problem of plugging in 'wall-wart' power supplies into the trapdoor sockets: if you did that, you couldn't close the trapdoor as there wasn't enough clearance. Didn't stop people trying, and breaking their mobile phone chargers.
I do beg your pardon. When I visit relatives in the Nordics, a lot of places use CEE 7/1 unearthed sockets, and I must have confused them with Schuko (CEE 7/3) sockets.
So to be clear:
'Schuko' (actually hybrid CEE 7/7) plugs work in French CEE 7/5 sockets, and provide continuity on all conductors. Real Schuko plugs (CEE 7/4) can't be inserted into a French socket as they have no hole for the protective conductor. You need the hybrid plug - CEE 7/7
French CEE 7/6 plugs do NOT work in 'Schuko' (CEE 7/3) sockets for the reason you clearly state. You can't insert them.
You were right. Thank you for correcting me.
If you examine a 'Schuko' (CEE 7/7) plug, you will see a hole in the middle, into which the French socket's (CEE 7/5) projecting 'Earth' pin will go if the 'Schuko' plug is inserted into a French standard socket, so the protective conductor has continuity.
If you insert a French plug (CEE 7/6) into a Schuko socket, the French standard plug does not have the side-mounted protective conductor connections. So a device that relies on continuity of the protective conductor will not work properly. It is a fire risk.
At worst, we've had personnel positioned at plugs, switches, even public telephones (with authorisation) to prevent accidental interruption in the event of a particularly awkward procedure. Which should have been designed out at the beginning!
Sometimes, you have to do that.
People working with dangerous equipment know about lockout switches, which can be locked with a padlock, so the person working on the equipment holds the one and only key. They are great: for keeping things de-energised (although beware of bright sparks with battery operated angle grinders) - but when you need to keep something on, you have the problem of needing to de-energise in an emergency. That means you need someone around with the experience and responsibility to ensure the switch can be turned off if necessary, but kept energised at all other times. So you need an experienced and responsible human being. It can seem like overkill: "Why do I need two experts to do the job when one is just sitting around babysitting the circuit breaker?".
That said, going where they did without a secondary/emergency source of light seems like a brave decision by someone. Just carrying some snap-n-shake lightsticks could have been helpful, or some El Reg Tritium keyfobs.
More MAGIC here. I was curious, saving time for others:
https://catalogue.bticino.com/search/2200N
https://catalogue.bticino.com/search/magic?page=1&facet%5Bct_serie%5D%5BMagic%5D=1
Doesn't look like it is fused, and the socket/outlet appears to lack safety shutters (I couldn't find details of the mechanism). The Certification mark is from an Italian organisation: Istituto Italiano del Marchio di Qualità
Wikipedia (Italian): Istituto Italiano del Marchio di Qualità
Org Website (Italian): Istituto Italiano del Marchio di Qualità
In some circumstances, the use of a standard plug and socket is to meet the requirement for the ability to isolate the equipment, if needed for maintenance.
In general, isolation switches do not disconnect the protective conductor ('earth'). Unplugging a plug from a socket disconnects all conductors using that path.
In addition, hard wiring something makes it difficult if the cabinet is designed to be movable.
Obviously, the ideal place for critical equipment is in a separate access-controlled room, but even then, you have the access-all-areas cleaner hazard, as well as the occasional builder or equipment installer hazard.
It's not only idiots who do apparently stupid things: xkcd: The DIfference
Free speech means that I have the right to say the things you don't like and not get arrested
If you take an absolutist position, yes.
But...The idea that it is not lawful to falsely shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre is pretty firmly rooted into the debate over what freedom of speech means in practice - in other words, there are, or can be, some types of speech/expression that are, or should be, unlawful. The heated debate then starts over where 'the line' is drawn - for some, blasphemy should be unlawful, for others, racist or hate speech, or speech that seeks to disturb public order, and so on.
I do not have an answer, but I recognise that there are strongly held opinions, often with good philosophical backing, on all sides of the debate. I tend to a liberal viewpoint. Others don't, and while I might disagree with them, imposing my views on them is just as bad as them imposing their views on me. Recognising differences and accepting differences are two different things.
For me, the freedom to disseminate falsehoods dressed up as truth is pretty hard to justify, but if one were to take an absolutist position on freedom of speech, such things are perfectly good speech, and should be protected. So for me freedom of speech is not absolute, but I have no idea how to decide where a line should be drawn, which is a logically indefensible position. Being human, holding logically indefensible opinions comes naturally. Humanity will probably continue to muddle through.
If you are absolutist, I respect that position. I think you might come under a lot of pressure to justify some forms of speech.
NN
We need to ask ourselves what is more important:the mental well being of our children?
or the ability for people to view porn websites or post harmful content without the risk of being identified?
I feel that the mental well being of our children is extremely important and that social media should use age verification to prevent children accessing harmful content.
Spot the false dichotomy.
And the classic 'think of the children'.
Shirley, you don't think El Reg commentards will fall for those old techniques?
Free speech means being able to put your name to your speech without having repercussions.
No. Freedom of speech is about the dissemination of ideas, and absolutely requires anonymity, especially if disseminating ideas disliked by those in power. The Universal Declaration of Human rights allows for freedom of speech not to be absolute, but the debate then rages over what is harmful speech e.g. is it harmful to promote the possibility of LGBTQIA+ lifestyles - some would regard it as evil, others as a right. That's not a debate for now.
However, anonymous speech in defence of political positions has been historically very powerful - The Federalist Papers, written by 'Publius'; and the pamphlet 'Common Sense', published anonymously by Thomas Paine.
The problem is, if you wish to allow for freedom of speech for 'good'/'acceptable' causes, you end up defending speech promoting unacceptable causes, like suicide instructions for teenagers, how to groom children for abuse, instructions for making bombs, and all sorts of other harmful activities. Freedom can be abused - see Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.
In an ideal world, people would not be harmed for expressing opinions, so anonymity is not necessary. In practice, we do not live in such an Utopia, so anonymous speech is needed to help protect the vulnerable. Navigating freedom of expression is not easy, and it is far easier to simply disallow it. Philosophers (e.g. Voltaire) have pondered the problem for a long time, so I'm unlikely to come up with a magic solution. It is a difficult area.
NN
Thankfully, roughly another 18 cables also pass between the two Egyptian cities, so re-routing options won't be hard to find for SEA-ME-WE-5's carrier customers.
That's not true at all, and depends on whether the carriers in question have contracts with the cable operator(s) for re-routes. It's not an automatic freebie that comes with the purchase of capacity - you want back-up, you pay for it.
Large carriers can re-groom on their own systems, which will have capacity on more than one cable route, so don't need operator provided backup. Smaller operations might well operate on the 'everything has been fine so far' principle and simply have to wait until a repair is effected, with all sorts of possibilities in between. The equipment to light up fibres isn't cheap, so you don't tend to have some lying around unused until it's needed. There are also hierarchies of re-route precedence, so you might have to wait a while until your circuit is threaded through the rats-nest of carrier interconnects. And, needless to say, but I'll say it anyway, if you don't have an existing agreement, you can't simply hop from SEAMEWE-5 to another cable system, and wanting to do so quickly will be (a) expensive and (b) an exercise in frustrating logistics and contracts.
NN
Yes, AES won a competition run by the Americans to find a replacement for DES. A Belgian algorithm won, which was subsequently modified to become AES.
The Americans allow AES to be used for data at rest, because they know that AES is extraordinarily difficult to implement in ways that do not make the encoder/decoder leak key information via side channels. The reference implementation of the code has such flaws, some would say deliberately, so that although the encrypted data is pretty secure, the act of encrypting or decrypting is susceptible to eavesdropping.
The Americans have form on this: The 'Swiss' Crypto AG (secretly controlled by the CIA and German Intelligence (BND) en-/de-cryption machines were doctored to enable the search for a decryption key to be made easier (more details here).
NN
One company that had the benefit of employing me tried that cost saving measure. It was not universally popular. I think it was 'sharing a twin-bedded room' rather than 'sharing a "queen-size" m/hotel room bed', but the principle was pretty much the same.
I cited particular health reasons for needing my own room, which sufficed for me to be one of the few people on a particular course getting my own bedroom. The level of complaint about room sharing was such that the policy was subsequently quietly dropped as a cost-saving measure too far.
His character Commander Doyle, commander of the Inner Space Station orbiting 500 miles above the Earth in "Islands in the Sky", published in 1952, was a double leg-amputee.
Have an upvote for pointing out another genuine flaw in my idea (which no doubt many others have had before).
As for the logging: it shows why one should not blindly log the offered username. Ideally, one should be logging the fact that an invalid username was offered, not what the invalid username was. You can log the username used once it has been checked and shown to exist in the database of valid/authorised users: for the obvious reason you point out.
Doing so does make it slightly more difficult to see if someone is cycling through possible usernames trying to break in, but there are other ways of doing that.
You are quite right, it's not a salt, but it has much the same effect.
As for password cracking, the point of having a high-entropy 'salt' is to make password cracking hard - ideally practically impossible.
But, you have a Very Good Point about keyloggers. Which makes me glum. But, on the other hand, thank you for giving a considered reply, and this is the advantage of having a civilised debate - other participants can point out things you didn't know, have forgotten, or otherwise omitted. You have an upvote from me.
How about having a salt that you memorise, which meets the rules requiring a complex password, which is the same for all sites, and a separate simple password for each site that you write down on a handy card you keep in your wallet.
So: memorised salt using a trusted password generator or diceware e.g.: 7pQ>F9oA
Bank: 31HighSt
banking password is: 7pQ>F9oA31HighSt or 31HighSt7pQ>F9oA or 7pQ>31HighStF9oA
It seems to meet the requirements for having a different compliant password for each site, while not needing memorisation of lots of 'line noise' passwords.
Of course, it falls foul of many places that set an unreasonably low maximum number of characters in the password, and you really have to keep the salt secret.
Is this a bad idea?
Given that Avogadro's number is about 6.022x1023, liquefaction of any reasonably-sized pie gives you about 175 orders of magnitude too few particles, and in fact a plasma of protons, neutrons and electrons made from the pie will be short of more than 100 orders of magnitude. Getting to free quarks might give you a couple more orders of magnitude, but you'll need a pretty hot oven and/or a pretty heavy pie.
Actually, if it is the Banach-Tarski theorem, you can cut the pie into a finite number of small pieces disjoint subsets*, reassemble, and get two pies. Result!
*The disjoint subsets each consist of an infinite number of disconnected points. Cutting the pie in the first case is 'a bit' involved.
Great: We know what's in the atmosphere of a gas giant eight times closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun. So?
Translation for grumpy old gits like me:
Great: We know what's in the atmosphere of a gas giant one eighth as far from its star as Mercury is from the Sun. So?
I get cognitive dissonance using 'times closer' as I tend to expect multiplying something to increase its magnitude - "two times something is twice as much", like apples. Obviously, if you multiply by something smaller than unity, the result is smaller, but that's a layer of mathematical sophistication applied over the basic concept. I just find the concept of 'two times smaller than a pie' meaning half of a pie just confusing. Perhaps I'm just not used to it.
Well, it does look interesting, and the Australian startup linked to the University of Queensland is building 'pouch' cells - "In the energy storage segment GMG and the University of Queensland are working collaboratively with financial support from the Australian Government to progress research and development, and ultimately explore the commercialization of GMG graphene aluminium-ion batteries."
Grapheme Manufacturing Group: Aluminium-Ion Battery
GMG commissions G+AI pouch cell equipment and manufactures the first pouch cell batteries
And a paper going into more details about aluminium-graphene cell properties:
(Science Advances is the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) open access multidisciplinary journal)
So it looks a bit less scammy and blue-sky than many other 'upcoming' technologies. The challenge, as always, is going from the lab to small scale production, then to mass production. Lots of things that look wonderful when cherry-picked and cosseted in the lab simply don't scale well, or fail in the 'real word' with cycling temperature, vibration (especially in cars), and humidity, or not enough improvement in costs to displace a current technology and its supply chain. So I'm not celebrating yet.
Yup. 110V site tools also operate off transformers that have a centre-tapped earth. This means they have no 'neutral', both conductors are live with respect to earth, but at 'only' 55V RMS. Note that it is still AC, to 55V RMS gives you a peak voltage to earth of 55 x √2 = 78 volts.
Yes. If you over-charge a lead-acid battery, it can start to electrolyse the water in the electrolyte (which is relatively dilute sulfuric* acid), producing hydrogen at the cathode, and oxygen at the anode. If the cell is sealed, the gas will build up pressure unless vented, either by design or by something splitting/breaking. This is why large UPS installations are well ventilated/vented** (and I think building codes in some places require panels designed to easily blow out without fundamental structural damage) - because a build up of hydrogen in an enclosed area has a non-zero risk of generating an unexpected explosion.
*No, this isn't isn't a manifestation of The Register house-style; IUPAC naming rules are that sulfur is written with an f, not ph.
Tim Harford's More or Less podcast, hosted by the BBC looked into publishing recently (Do half of new books really sell fewer than twelve copies? 22nd October 2022). Worth a quick listen.
tl;dl (too long; didn't listen) - No, it isn't half: but a surprisingly small percentage sell less than 5,000 copies.
So I have some sympathy for authors who don't make a lot of money. But I am pretty sure that there is some 'Hollywood accounting' going on, because the likes of Wiley, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Scholastic, Elsevier, inter alia are not short of a penny or two. I suspect the ones at the top of the publishing chain, just like the British supermarkets, do a pretty good job of screwing everybody else's costs down so they can make a lot of profit on the result.
The concept of using technology to try and ensure that a watchman did their rounds has been around for a long time:
"Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun"
...
"Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department" say Wernher von Braun"
...
"You too may be a big hero
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
"In German, oder Englisch, I know how to count down
Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun"
<pedant>While all geostationary orbits are geosynchronous, geosynchronous orbits are a large superset of geostationary ones. Geostationary orbits, to the observer on the ground, make it appear as though the satellite is indeed 'hovering' over a fixed point on the equator. Unless you have a rather large amount of fuel available, you can't have a satellite hover over a non-equatorial point. You can do things like the geo-semi-synchronous (period of half a sidereal day) Molniya orbits, and geosynchronous (period of one sidereal day) Tundra orbits and QZSS orbits, where the ground track 'loiters' over a particular small area*, the idea being the satellite spends more time 'over' a particular area than elsewhere, but the laws of orbital mechanics mean it has to be elsewhere, the other side of the equator, at least some of the time.</pedant>
It would be cheaper to moor a large balloon over the point in question. Keep it up by the hot air emitted by the Westminster parliament.
*Molniya and Tundra orbits use Kepler's second law (a line segment joining a satellite and the body it orbits sweeps out equal areas in equal times). This means that a highly elliptical orbit allows a satellite to spend more time going round the focus of the ellipse that doesn't have the centre of mass of the body being orbited, so it appears to move more slowly over the area below it at the time. The disadvantage is that it is further away from the body it is orbiting, which is not ideal for radio communication (inverse square law). QZSS orbits are not highly elliptical, but use a combination of inclination and geosynchronicity to have a ground track that provides coverage to a small area preferentially.
That's Pakistan International Airlines Flight 8303.
PPRUNE thread, currently 84 pages.
Well, I'm going through the 'fun' of trying to dual-boot two Linux distros with FDE* - an old one, which is stuck on Grub 2.04** and a new one on Grub 2.06 . There's no particular good reason I'm doing this, other than curiosity and bloody-mindedness - a bit like wanting to dual-boot Windows 7 and Windows 11. It's basically an upgrade, where I want to keep access to the old system and it would be convenient to have the both on the same SSD. I've got the new distro installed on a spare partition, divvied up with LVM, got another partition with LUKS, and LVM (it's a big SSD), copied stuff across, fiddled with fstab, crypttab, /etc/default/grub, chrooted, built a new initramfs, and updated GRUB and the thing still fails as the encrypted disk UUID is not being passed to the init. I can manually edit grub.cfg, but that won't persist through new GRUB updates, so I'm trying to work out where things are going wrong. SecureBoot is disabled. Other people play golf as a hobby.
You ought be able to choose any one of several authorised and authenticated paths to boot the O/S of your choice on a piece of hardware, which should allow dual booting. If the SecureBoot architecture doesn't allow for this, it's flawed. Obviously there's merit in enabling a lock-down so only one O/S can be booted, but being restricted to one really should be an option, not an unchangeable default.
*'Full Disk Encryption', where the ESP is (obviously) not encrypted, but the 'rest of the device' is a LUKS encrypted device. Once LUKS is opened, the device has LVM in the next layer, which then has volumes for swap, boot, root etc. ('rest of the device' is in scare quotes because actually, it's not. About half is some other partitions which are useful to have lying around on the same SSD. But the principle holds.)
**Stuck, yes, because GRUB 2.06 doesn't build on the old distro. Lots of 'make' errors, which I am invited to submit as a bug.
I don't think Liam's mother-tongue is American English. I wish the changed house style were changed to allow article authors to use the English they are most comfortable in, so American authors use an American idiom, Australians Australian, Indians Indian, and Irish Irish, and so on.
My first thought was questioning what 'The Fall' had to do with systemd. Their cover version of systemd would be interesting.
the first commercial telegraph printing service was introduced between Paris and Lyon, France,I love that as ElReg is now targeting Americans is has to dumb down geography...
I wouldn't call it dumbing down. It's only because we are near neighbours that Brits are expected to simply know some of the major towns of France. You might know that Delhi is the capital of India, but would you know where you might find Agra*? So it would be reasonable to write between 'Delhi and Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India' (Agra has nearly four times the population of Lyon). You could say the same for major conurbations of other countries. I think it is reasonable to expect people to know the world's capital cities, so you can write them without further explanation, but knowing a country's major conurbations when the country is an ocean away - maybe not so reasonable. Assuming that everybody in a global readerships knows that Lyon is a major city in France is a bit parochial.
*If you do, well done. Now which country or countries are the following in: Harbin, Belém, Benin City, Ilorin, Perm, Zagazig; each with a greater population than Lyon.
I myself have a large penis to compensate for my very small car.
'Borrowed' it from an Icelandic museum, did you sir?
17 Dec. 2021
...the systemd team not being man enough to write an cobinned kernel+initrd in an EFI stub that can be booted standalone.
Prescient.
24 Oct 2022 - Pid Eins: Brave New Trusted Boot World
NN
!Pedant Alert
The UEFI Specification (Available here: https://uefi.org/specifications) makes it clear that the EFI System Partition is subtly different from vanilla FAT:
The file system supported by the Extensible Firmware Interface is based on the FAT file system. EFI defines a specific version of FAT that is explicitly documented and testable. Conformance to the EFI specification and its associate reference documents is the only definition of FAT that needs to be implemented to support EFI. To differentiate the EFI file system from pure FAT, a new partition file system type has been defined
( Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Specification, Release 2.10, Section 13.3)
One minor difference:
Note: Although the FAT32 specification allows file names to be encoded using UTF-16, this specification only recognizes the UCS-2 subset for the purposes of sorting or collation.
( Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Specification, Release 2.10, Section 13.3.1.2)
NN
You are right (save for some software in some jurisdictions that is Public Domain). I was being unclear.
The point about FLOSS is that it generally comes with a licence that allows you to look at the code, make changes, and distribute the changed version, without making a payment for the code (paying for the actual costs of getting a copy is fine), subject to some restrictions.
A lot, if not the majority, of commercial software is licensed for use, and doesn't come with the opportunity to (legally) make changes and distribute the changed version without explicit additional agreement with the owner. If the owner doesn't want to produce an update, or provide visibility of the source code, then you are pretty much stuck.
Free - you don't pay for the source code itself
Libre - you can make changes and onwards distribute
Open Source - You can view the source code
Software - what it says on the tin.
You are right that (most) FLOSS software is copyrighted, and it is the accompanying licence that gives you the key additional abilities. Copyright law still applies, so if you break the terms of the licence, there can be consequences.
Sorry that I wasn't clear enough and oversimplified.
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