Posts by Adrian Harvey

Grounded jet engines take off again as datacenter generators

Re: Efficiency

'Last resort" isn't the best description. They are frequently used as 'peaker' plants to cover surges in demand or drops in renewable production. A CCGT takes about an hour to spin up to full load, but an open cycle can be running full tilt in 10 mins. This on-demand capability is what allows them to command a high price in the market.

Yes, they can be used as last resort as well, scheduled for when they know all cheaper sources will be fully used, but they are mostly there for short-notice stuff. Grid scale batteries would start even faster, of course, but have other limitations, and there aren't so many of them.

Struggling to heat your home? How about 500 Raspberry Pi units?

Re: Interesting idea

All tank-based, at least. Continuous flow systems don’t.

Pedant icon for obvious reasons.

Teen interns brute-forced a disk install, with predictable results

Brewing

A distillery in Dunedin, New Zealand uses bread that is surplus to requirements (that the food banks can't use) to make the mash for the fermentation process that they then distill to make gin (and a few other things). Best recycling ever!

Icon for obvious reasons - though that's not what they are brewing for....

Re: Blame the dates

<quote> Tinned food is a real issue - as long as the tin is still intact (and not bulging or deformed) a best before date is almost irrelevant. </quote>

Where I live tinned food does not have to have a an expiry date. And none do. The rule is that anything with an expiry time over 10 years does not require a best before or use by date. It's a fairly simple rule and works pretty well to prevent silliness.

Pay attention, class: Today you’ll learn the wrong way to turn things off

Originally, reboot immediately rebooted the system. No graceful shutdown, no signals to processes, no parking disk heads. Like pushing a reset button. It was only ever supposed to be called by shutdown in normal operation, but could be called by the admin on special occasions - for example the famous sequence

sync

sync

sync

reboot

Which was supposed to be the way to do an emergency reboot (where shutdown was not working as something wouldn't stop) with minimal chance of file system corruption.

Later versions of reboot would call shutdown if in a normal runlevel. And reboot if called by shutdown in the right state. Eventually you get the situation you see today. But old sysadmins get kind of nervous of commands like sudo reboot as they might be on that classic system, or a distro specially crafted by the BOFH and it might do what reboot was really supposed to do....

Microsoft eventually realized the world isn't just the Northern Hemisphere

Re: Oh, whoopee doo

I like the poem, and I’d like to add to the confusion by pointing out that the Roman system counted dates backwards from the nones,ides, calends, and years were measured by rulers. Ie: the date was stated as - 3 days before the ides of April in the year of the Consulship of Maximilian and Octavius

Or similar (caution: date and Consuls may not match with your reality. Handle with care. May not survive translation into Latin)

The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit

Re: Google search

> # fgrep -i woteva ~/find.txt |more

Will only find files based on their name. The post title is talking about a tool to find based on content. For when you've long since forgotten what you named it, or where the name was given by someone else with no gift for systematic nomenclature.

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

Re: hiding file extensions by defaul

Determining execuatbility be privileges alone is not great either as it doesn't provide any way to mark if a file was intended to be executable (rather than, say, a document.) I can execute this, and I should execute this are different properties, and both systems end up combining them. Think about a file the administrator has removed executable permission from - How do you know to ask for it back?

But of course the bigger problem is that most systems do not have an administrator of the kind that can go around assigning permissions to individual executables.

We told Post Office about system problems at the highest level, Fujitsu tells Horizon Inquiry

Re: Dog Fight

I agree with much of what you say, but think I should note that the PO and the Royal Mail are NOT the same organisation. The organisation that uses Horizon and messed up so many lives is not the one that delivers the mail - it's the one that runs the post offices and counters, where you can buy stamps and get drivers licenses, etc. The delivery is done by Royal Mail, and they are a different organisation, have never touched Horizon, and have their own problems. Your issues with mail delivery are issues with a different company from the one on trial here.

I know it's weird that they are separate companies, but it's been that way since the passage of the Post Office Act in 1969 (and arguably before that as Royal Mail and Post office branches were both parts of the General Post Office)

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

> Also, 256 colors was a LOT on displays of the day. EGA tended to 64 colors max unless double-option upgraded. (Yes, the vast majority of EGA clones shipped with more RAM than IBM gave you.)

Most 486s had VGA or better. My. XT clone had EGA. I can't recall any 486s with less than 256 colour VGA.

> And yet, GIF has a Progressive (interlaced) mode that slots blotchy and slowly smooths-out.

Can you explain how that works? GIF uses LZW encoding for compression (which is how it wound up patent encumbered) a stream compression algorithm that is strictly linear, and does not store the symbol table (it regenerates it from the stream). I can't think of a way in which progressive decode could be made to work and my searches yield nothing but animated gifs on decoding :-)

JPEG does have a progressive decode mode, provided it was encoded to support it. H.264 too has a fast path that yields a 1/4 resolution image useful for Picture in Picture type scenarios.

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: Not rude, but bizarre

init

You shouldn't invoke init directly. Always use telinit(8) to change the system runlevel.

Dutch government takes ASML export measures off Uncle Sam's hands

In British English, “not always been pleased” means that they have hated it with a passion hotter than a supernova.

British English is an elegant weapon for a more civilised age…

Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die

Re: MS has history of fixing what is not broke

Also, the extremely useful clock on the clock to see a calendar function has been removed for all but one clock. I know it’s the clock with the tray icons next to it in my head, but it still feels like playing three-card monte as I look for which of my three screens is number one today!

Cigarette break burned out a huge chunk of Africa's internet

Where are the puns?

With that Regimised name, I was expecting a General Failure error.

Wing Commander III changed how the copy hotkey works in Windows 95

> Mac still had & could use the Control key for other shortcuts.

Sorry, but not at the time they defined those keystrokes, it didn't. The first Mac keyboards only had option and command keys. Terminal emulators on the Mac had to take over one or other to be control. Later Mac keyboards did add back a control key, which made connecting from them to the Unix boxes at Uni much nicer.

original Mac keyboard for reference So you can all see for yourselves.

San Francisco's light rail to upgrade from floppy disks

Re: Have they been hacked?

> All 3.5" drives are standard. They dont have different RPM, if they do thats because they have a fault.

Not all. The apple ones for a start! They had variable RPM at different tracks to fit more data on the outer tracks of the disk (where there was more space) It approaches a Consttant Linear Velocity system (like a CD drive) but is stepped so there's not so many speed transitions. By this means they got 800kB on floppies that a PC could only fit 720kB on. (yes, I know you could tweak that...)

https://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/drive.html#mac14

https://www.siber-sonic.com/mac/newmillfloppy.html

Toyota admits its engines are overrated – by its own power testing software

Re: ディーゼルゲート

Not really a translation- if you say those characters aloud, the sounds ‘Dieselgate’ come out your mouth! That character set too is the one mainly used for foreign loan words.

Though as various -gate scandals have nothing to do with gates, and Watergate had nothing to do with water I’m not sure which way you would chose to translate this anyway. Perhaps Japan has another naming scheme for scandals entirely? If so, perhaps we could borrow it! I’m tired of -gate already…

Only one more use of -gate should be tolerated- when Mr Musk messes up we have to have an Elongate!

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

Re: Pointless if potless

Standard US sockets, cables are 15A, so at 110V that’s ~1600W max kettle power. In the UK kettles are mostly 3000W so boil water in about half the time it takes in the US.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any - but they are less popular. Also, stove-top kettles are more common than in the UK - stoves have lots more power (or may be gas)

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

Re: I am enjoying this dispute

> Michelangelo was an artist, the pope who hired him obviously couldnt paint or sculpt...

Fascinatingly - Michaelangelo signed every one of the letters (progress reports, etc) he sent to the pope as "Michaelangelo, sculptor" (source: audio guide in the Cistine Chapel) as he didn't really want to do the painting! Carving things was his preferred work.

I wonder if that actually makes the management in this case smart? - they got amazing work that might not have been done had the worker just been left to his own preferences....

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

Re: Ad blockers exist... because...

Yes! I remember reading that in the 90's - great book and increasingly relevant. I think of Chicken Little whenever I hear about the developments in artificial/cultured meats.

After nine servers he worked on failed, techie imagined next career as beach vendor

Re: Aaahhhh, eDirectory.

I was betting on a stuck obituary.

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

It’s actually an extract from a guitar piece called Gran Vals, composed in 1902 by the Spanish classical guitarist and composer Francisco Tárrega. Though that itself may contain references to earlier work by Chopin.

See https://thenextweb.com/news/where-did-that-nokia-theme-tune-really-come-from

Some other detail is contained in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_tune

Resilience is overrated when it's not advertised

Re: Data General and EMC

Is symcli the one where the “commands” are all just hex codes? I remember seeing the engineers use that on an EMC Symmetrix a long time ago, it seemed like an awful way to work. Very stable and great support, but not easy to make changes on.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Re: Thanks El Reg...

"while I was washing up in the restroom"

Wait! You were cleaning your dishes in the toilet?!? Or have I mistranslated *your* jargon?

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

Re: Years ago....

It’s all very well until you remove the call centre’s IVR prompts which happen to be in mp3 format too. </voice of experience >

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

Re: 'A reader we’ll Regomize as "Leif"'

I presume he worked for Ericsson?

Or at least used their equipment?

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: Sun box

I wish the keyboard-based hub was common too! But the USB standard makes it tricky - a standard keyboard only has a low speed cable on it (the kind you can’t buy - they must be moulded to the device). And a hub would need high speed as the downstream interface might be connected to anything…. And to take that further - what happens when someone plugs in something other than a mouse to that port - say a USB drive? And it goes slow…

Now I’m wondering what a keyboard&mouse set would be like if the mouse was hard wired to the keyboard and only one cable to the PC…

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

Re: Universal... what?

I always liked the touch that there were in fact 2 kinds of cables, low speed and high speed. But you were not allowed to sell low speed cables….

Because low speed cables were only allowed where they were permanently moulded into the device using them (for example, a mouse, or a keyboard).

Most of the advantages of having a cheaper, lower spec cable for the things that only need slow speed. None of the consumer confusion!

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

Wasn’t the SUN logo readable is all (4) rotations? Or was there an earlier logo that wasn’t?

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

Re: NMOC

I told my kids that joke when I found an old 3.5” floppy in the attic - my daughter’s reaction was ‘what’s a save icon?’ Growing up in an age of Google Docs and the like she had never seen or used a save icon. That means to some kids even knowing what a save icon is makes you ‘old’. So actual floppy disks are 2 ‘generations’ back I guess….

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

Re: Ah, the good'ol days..

( note : for the US people it's 56K not 64. )

Not strictly true - the US B channel standard was still 64 bit, but they stole 1 bit from every 6th byte to use for signalling. Giving 62.666kbps. Ok for voice where the loss of the least significant bit from the occasional byte was imperceptible, but, as you know, if you can’t sync with the stream to know which bits will be robbed, you wind up having to treat every byte as 7-bit and you max out at 56k usable. .

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

Re: Buffer overflow DoS attack.

Ok, pedantic mode on…

“ even 0xF0000 to 0xFFFFF was reserved in some boxes.”

0xFFFF0 had to be reserved at the very least as the intel 8086 processor used it as the bootstrap address on power up - it generally contained little more than a jump to the real startup routines, but it had to be there. One of the defined methods for rebooting a PC was to JMP FFFF:0000 (segmented addressing = 0xFFFF0). See Intel_8086_Overview.pdf

“It is IBM PC HARDWARE DESIGN. If you had more than 640 KB the memory from 0xA0000 to 0xFFFFF the memory was "shifted up" by 384 KB. Still remember himem.sys or EMS?”

IBM maybe, but not the PC - the PC could only address 1MB. So it couldn’t really be “shifted up”. EMS involved “shifting sideways” where a segment of memory would be swapped in and out of the upper address space so you could access more than the 1MB, but not all at once.

BOFH: Tech helps HR investigate the Boss's devices

Re: Inspirational!

In single consent jurisdictions that I know of you still have to be a party to the conversation to record it - so an employer secretly recording would be very clearly illegal as they were not part of the discussion in question.

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

Re: Uniplex "my God, it chills me just mention the dark lord's name,"

“ They used a Julian date format and had forgotten that 2000 was a leap year, so on day 366 of the year the computer crashed.”

The Julian calendar had all centuries as leap years. Gregorian made centuries not leap years unless divisible by 400. So either way this was just a bug.

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

Re: We can do better than 8.3 these days, can't we?

Yes, really! The FAT file system directory table did not include the dot. It had two fixed-length fields, one of 8 characters (the name) and one of 3 characters (the extension). So shorter names were padded with space characters that are ignored. See https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/fs/fat/fat-1.html for details on the file system layout on disk.

How exactly the command line functions and DOS interrupts (function calls) treated those special cases is an interesting question though….

Swooping in to claim the glory while the On Call engineer stands baffled

Discovering that it is impossible *is* the process of elimination

But eliminating something means that you have discovered it to be impossible. You don’t eliminate it whilst it is still possible! And that’s what Holmes meant. Once you have assessed all the possibilities and eliminated all the ones that turn out not to be possible then the one that is left must be the answer even if it feels unlikely.

Zoom's end-to-end encryption isn't actually end-to-end at all. Good thing the PM isn't using it for Cabinet calls. Oh, for f...

NZ cabinet used it too

Was mentioned in a press conference on COVID this week. But they explicitly stated that it had not been security cleared for Restricted material, so there were some items they would not be discussing using that system.

'Azure appears to be full': UK punters complain of capacity issues on Microsoft's cloud

Re: Homework

When were you a child? In 1947 there was a Polio epidemic in New Zealand, and all the schools closed for a term (as well as no Cinemas, public meetings, etc). All the children were enrolled in Correspondence School, and the work posted out to them. One of the radio stations was co-opted and and certain lessons were broadcast at fixed times. So, for example Form 3 English might be 10-11 on Wednesdays.

I’m sure the latest tech has made it a little easier, and more interactive, but it has been *possible* for a very long time.

Icon because it’s a teacher... and because I’m being pedantic about the word possible so I can tell my anecdote :-)

Still hoping to run VMware's ESXi on Arm any time soon? Don't hold your breath – no rush and no commitments

Re: Build it and they will come...

I don’t think VMWare uses the “recompile model” at all anymore. That model was only necessary to overcome limitations of the x86 model that not all privileged instructions were trapped when running outside ring 0. Some simply failed or just behaved differently. VMWare rewrote those on code load so they could be emulated. Commentators had been saying for a long time that virtualisation was not possible on x86 due to architecture limitations. And the chip designers didn’t see any demand. Once that loop was closed and the architecture extended, VMWare moved to using the hardware virtualisation as it has higher performance.

I don’t know what happens if you run VMWare on a really old CPU now - it may still have the software virtualisation code lingering somewhere, but I suspect it will just refuse to run....

Anyway, a long way of saying that the original VMWare model is probably not necessary on any other CPU as they have had the benefit of seeing the x86 issues and avoiding them.

Open-source, cross-platform and people seem to like it: PowerShell 7 has landed

I know Powershell syntax is odd in some places, and I'm not very keen on it, but the concept of passing the pipeline around as objects is clever and powerful. It avoids having to re-parse data (and, speaking for myself, often incorrectly or without correctly dealing with all the corner cases.)

Are there actually any other shells that implement this concept? Cross platform too?

Early adopters delighted as Microsoft pulls plug on Mobile Backend as a Service. Haha, only joking – they're fuming

Re: Yea - give me that random stuff

I’m wondering if you’re reading this differently to the rest of us? I think when they say committed to a repository they mean committed to *your* repository. Not all the repositories of your dependencies.

Microsoft's on Edge and you could be, too: Chromium-based browser exits beta – with teething problems

Access to file:// urls

I really hope that the little comment about this as a “security” item isn’t Edge picking up the Chrome model for this where it’s hacked in somewhere low level in the code and doesn’t understand the difference between local file paths (which really are a different domain) and remote file paths (which are just another protocol), nor between corporate controlled web sites (which may even be running on the same box as the file server) and untrusted sites. As a result simple integration between web apps and legacy stuff either fails, becomes complex and a whole new kind of security risk, or forces users onto IE. I’m sure it was done with the best of intentions but Chrome has been causing me nightmares on some recent projects.

IT exec sets up fake biz, uses it to bill his bosses $6m for phantom gear, gets caught by Microsoft Word metadata

Re: Good to stay "anonymous"

Frank Abagnale (he of "Catch Me If You Can") wrote "The Art of the Steal" which is a good easy read on fraud techniques and how to prevent them. A little more focus on cheque fraud than necessary in these days of declining cheque use, but still an entertaining read!

We live so fast I can't even finish this sent...

Re: Is that...

Blue snow marks trail edges and corners. Sprayed on to improve visibility on foggy days. To be followed rather than avoided if you don’t want to go over the cliff.

Icon: ski jacket.

Beware the three-finger-salute, or 'How I Got The Keys To The Kingdom'

Re: Back in the day...

Pendatic I know, but New Zealand uses the US keyboard layout as dollars are the currency and English the most spoken language.

(Ok, even more pedantic, there is a keyboard setting for Maori language that changes the back-quote key to a macron compose key, but I argue it’s not the “New Zealand” layout )

Icon: closest for pendant

Wham, bam, thank you scram button: Now we have to go all MacGyver on the server room

Re: Dont have your machine room at the top of a building

I seriously hope it was Halon, not Halogen. Halogens (Flourine, Chlorine, Iodene, etc) are highly reactive and would be an “interesting” choice for a fire control system. Good for the BOFH though, very effective for wrapping up stories.

Icon may well appear on Halogen cylinders.

Attention! Very important science: Tapping a can of fizzy beer does... absolutely nothing

Re: This theory always puzzles me

Divers get the bends because the solubility of a gas increases with pressure (actually partial pressure - that is the pressure of that gas alone). More gas dissolves in the blood stream under he higher pressure at depth, and then tries to suddenly form bubbles as the pressure is released when the diver surfaces,

Very similar to soft drinks, but if is the gas is dissolved there aren’t bubbles, microscopic or otherwise. It is only when the ceases to be dissolved that bubbles form.

Incedentally was the beer warm or cool for the test? The liquid temperature has a significant effect on CO2 solubility that’s why there”s no carbonated tea. (Well, not hot tea)

Battery-guzzling 4K hardware clad in an alloy battle jacket: Lenovo's 4th-gen ThinkPad Yoga X1 is its most metal yet

Magic keyboard gone?

From the photos it looks like the magic keyboard is gone, replaced by an ordinary inset keyboard - is that right?

I have a 3rd gen at work and the keyboard, unlike most other laptops is not set in an indented tray so that the tops of the keys are level with the case and trackpad. Instead the keys all retract when the lid is closed so they do not brush the screen. This helps Lenovo to provide reasonable travel on the keys whilst keeping the machine thin. A much better solution to thinness than the Mac one where the short key travel made the keyboard painful to use (your opinions may vary)

The keys also retracted when in tablet mode which helped you not to type on the back of the computer by mistake as you hold the tablet. I remember the thinkpad butterfly keyboard, so this trick bought back happy memories:-)

Re: F'ing Fn key

I’d like them both to be CTRL and move the Fn function to the caps lock key. Bios doesn’t have a setting for that though and Windows key mapping programs I’ve looked at don’t seem to know about Fn:-(.