Posts by Peter2 2946 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
It might thereotically be available, but if OS has the option to buy a digital download of your city/county of choice in the right format for your game versus "hire a development team to start developing something that might perhaps be cheaper, if it works at all" then i'd say that a known working solution off the shelf would be an attractive option.
I was just making the point that the MS flight sim probably made them think about it. The flight sim that has already done it is obviously not a great target market since they have already done it and so don't need to do it.
However, if you could realistically import OS Maps into game engines then it'd allow for the instant creation of a huge open world type game and reduce the work required for developers down to designing internal rooms etc which is probably worth something to somebody.
It'd also allow for the creation of historical games, since the OS has it's inhouse maps going back to the 1840's for it's own maps, and they do overlays showing the roads as far back as the Roman road network, so it's not entirely improbable that they could produce (partial) data sets of considerable vintage in the future if they started making enough money out of it.
I would imagine that the OS have looked at the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator which attempted to realistically map the entire world into their game and decided that it'd be worth figuring out what sort of additional work they need to do to their maps to be able to flog datasets to game developers in the future. And what better way to advertise your huge dataset than actually using it? (and fixing the problems while your at it so paying customers don't have cause to scream at you)
That said, I also view LibreOffice as a pale copy of what Office 95 would give me if I could still get it working today.
The only area where office 95 would win is Outlook, and LibreOffice (presumably purposely) doesn't have a mail client.
Word/Excel 95 would be unusable in a modern context if only for the fact it literally couldn't open modern office formats.
While I am sure that if you looked hard enough you could find features that Office95 has that LibreOffice doesn't, if we are honest about it then Libre office has at least 80% of the features and the absence of them will be noticed by well under 20% of users.
Personally, if documents weren't being generated through an MS Office API (and thereby requiring it to be installed) then i'd have LibreOffice on my desktops at work. There's no other reason; a lot of computers have copies of it as it's good at opening the exceptionally weird formats clients sent us without any hassle.
The comparison would be better between Concorde and the TU144 "Concodski".
Broadly speaking there is really only one sensible way to achieve most engineering objectives. In the case of a supersonic airliner then the basic objectives are to go fast (requiring big engines and a low frontal profile like a fighter to minimise drag) which combined with a requirement for carrying passengers means that you end up with something very long and pointy. Putting people in the big hollow bit means that the engines and fuel tanks are going in the (long, large) wing area.
And there you have the basis for every SST design. So yeah, give several teams of engineers the same job with the same tech base and chances are that the result is going to look broadly similar although not identical in details.
Now see, nobody has yet addressed by personal biggest concern.
c) As Manglement figures out that if they don't need people in the office in London and staff are working from home in different counties then they might realise that people could use the existing remote access systems to work from different countries.
Offshoring has the technical ability to decimate service jobs just as much as it did industrial ones and people appear blissfully unconcerned about this.
We acknowledge the unfortunate reality that – given the scale of our operations and the pace of change – we will never be able to avoid outages entirely
If you can't avoid outages given the scale of your operations and the pace of change then either reduce the scale of operations or the pace of change.
And for that matter with respects to scale then my experience is that avoiding outages gets easier at larger scales as you can afford backups etc so the problem with Azure would appear to be poor operational management, which to be fair is a Microsoft specialty. Probably because they follow practices they try and force on other people like "simultaneously patch everything with no testing" rather than "patch a canary group and see if anything snuffs it"
To this day, i'm not sure why my internal uptime is better than the uptime of Microsoft's cloud given that we both nominally run on the same technology and I am extremely staff and resource constrained and they have practically unlimited amounts of both.
When it comes to "the pace of change is to fast" most of us deal with this by applying an old proverb. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Design something that is stable and does what people want, and then leave it alone other than fixing bugs that make it less stable. If somebody comes along demanding radical new functionality for some a random edge case then rather than breaking something that does work for everybody, design a separate service for the random edge case that is designed to work independently so if it dies then it dies, not the entire worldwide operations for everybody using anything connecting to the Microsoft cloud.
Allow me to correct that; Only somebody with a paid job in IT runs windows on a server.
And we tend to run it because the company picks a software solution and says "we want to run this because it's going to save us X". Running this bit of software is then the requirement. This runs on Windows Server, because no commercial software is written for anything else. We then buy Windows server to run it.
If I turned around to the management and said that "running Windows is uncool and so we run Y instead, and so can't run the productivity software you want so you'll have to do it manually" then i'd be fired and my replacement would be doing what the management want to do, which is to make money.
And Windows server can be setup to run in a fairly stable manner with a sensible architecture if somebody competent does it. If somebody incompetent manages it then it's going to be setup insecurely, unreliably and with no backups or failovers. Just the same as any other type of server.
Sometimes, the 'responsible' IT person in the healthcare organisation can be, for example, a surgeon, who is used to people doing what they say and doesn't take kindly to IT oiks saying that the old radiology application needs to be replaced with one that works on Windows 10.
Which is perfectly reasonable when the software comes with the hardware and the replacement bit of hardware cost tens of millions of pounds, don't you think?
Solution; secure it with a hardware firewall so that the embedded application can still email it's results out to doctors by sending traffic out to one particular internal IP and block every other port and destination. The WindowsXP based device can then soldier on and complete the remaining part of it's expected 30 year life with minimal risk of being compromised.
You can even make friends with the doctors by sticking it on a UPS so the controller still works when the facilities people do their weekly tests of the generator by pulling the breakers on the mains coming in, resulting in a 2 second break before the on site diesel generator fires up, causing about 5 minutes of downtime. And another 5 minutes when they then pull the plug on the generator again an hour later.
A couple of hundred quids worth of UPS gave the doctors an extra 2 hours of use of the equipment as their procedure had been to just turn the entire thing off for the scheduled test and avoid scheduling anybody during a point that they knew the power would go out to avoid wasting their time and damaging the equipment.
Been there, done that at county level. It's nowhere near as complex or stressful as people make out IMO if you can balance "what we want" with "what they need".
I gave up with anti virus checking things. They miss zero day attacks, which means you rely on somebody being hit first before you get any protection.
Our place is an office with non technical users that only ought to be receiving office documents and PDF's.
My improved solution was simply to drop any .exe file coming in on my mail server, strip macros from incoming files and quarantine anything odd. For instance ISO, IMG, ETC files? How many times have you had legitimate images emailed to you?
You can generate long lasting peace and quiet quite easily with the right settings without inconveniencing the users. While admittedly stripping and quarantining things on sight does sound somewhat extreme, the results for me have been immediate and long lasting peace and quiet. Nothing harmful makes it in via email and I can't remember an instance of being asked to retrieve anything from the spam filter that has been dropped or quarantined.
Income Tax in the UK is still an "emergency" measure to finance the debts of the Napoleonic war. The enabling legislation was so sure that it'd be going soon it was written with a sunset clause forcing it to expire every year unless renewed.
Hence why we have a budget each year authorising the taxation. :/
Personally, I rather like the idea of nuclear missiles being entirely offline with guidence information being put on a storage medium that nobody can possibly tamper with. It's nice knowing that somebody couldn't feasibly be able to alter the guidence information with a laptop, and that firing the things requires two people with keys.
If there is one area where excessive paranioa should be encouraged then it's securing nuclear armed ICBM's.
In the USA evidence gathered illegally is not admissible as evidence, but in the UK evidence before the court is evidence regardless of how it got there, although it may open the person bringing illegally obtained information to criminal charges (it being used in court being an admission of guilt and all given that you've proven that you've got it.)
Technically speaking in the UK if you were a sole parent then I think they would just have jailed you for the term and if the children went into care then that's part of the "if you can't do the time, don't do the crime" approach we take. I don't think we allow for plea bargains where somebody who's been caught can not get the time if they decide to identify their accomplices.
But if the Americans did do that, then plea bargains are legal in America and so information produced as a result of one wouldn't be inadmissible in evidence.
To be honest, given that China killed twenty Indian soldiers a month or so ago while trying to move a disputed border in their favour it's hardly surprising that Indians are trying to avoid buying from China. Can you imagine what people would be saying or doing if a country killed twenty of our troops in a border skirmish?
"I'm sure I'm a tiny minority here when I say i host my own email"
You might be in a tiny majority on some sites but this is a site that aims at IT Professionals, power users, and people who aspire to be in the first two categories. You are probably in much less of a minority than you think you are.
I have hosted my own emails for a couple of decades.
I can think of a lot of useful uses of being able to wander around with an hidden Geiger counter. Bearing in mind that this is from 2005 and the whole Iranian reactor thing that's happened since it's not totally improbable and in fact it'd be a rather handy toy for nuclear inspectors to have.
In fact, it'd be a lovely toy to add to every iPhone to create a live worldwide radiation survey, with hot spots automatically flagged for investigation.
However, to be honest as you say once you've got an iPod modified to leave empty room for a payload then one imagines that it's not beyond the wit of man to modify it to contain a different payload. I'd imagine that the OS wouldn't know what you were doing with it; probably the most integration with the OS that you'd want is an on/off command.
Yes. He had the author of one of the most important works in the field as an advisor. If your interested in this area then you can read "The Strategy of Technology" online free of charge from one of the authors websites which explains the strategies and methodology behind fighting a technological cold war.
Nope. That strategy came to an end prior to 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed.
That was 29 years ago. Many of these issues simply didn't exist 15 years ago so they couldn't have been connected.
Now you could claim that Russia (and China?) are probably running successors to those programs with considerable justification by observable evidence, but the version one attempt during the cold war concentrating on setting off car bombs in crowded streets and hijacking airliners etc was very definitely a failure.
I've been thinking about these micro murder drone swarms that keep getting talked about.
Have you realised that they'd have pretty much zero payload, and need to reload and recharge frequently yet? If somebody ever does pull a huge drone swarm, you can expect an airstrike or artillery/MLRS carpet bombardment of the recharging and reloading location, after which it becomes a huge number of drones with flat batteries a short time thereafter.
Is anyone else seriously worried about the prospect of all this sabre-rattling nationalism leading to WWIII? Or is it just me?
Militarily, there won't be a fight any time soon between China and western countries. That'd only happen if one or the other sides could actually conceivably win something by doing so. Neither side can take land from the other, and Chinese trade would cease to exist the moment shooting started whereas western trade would be quite safe (from sheer distance from China and quantity of military forces defending it relative to the force China could possibly project to the other side of the planet)
What we have is the same situation as in the cold war, where the Soviet Union and the West are unable to win a shooting war and quietly attempted to make each other collapse.
The Soviet Union employed huge numbers of terrorists, and the West just quietly prospered through the capitalist system while taxing off 5% to pay for a military while building using our superior tech base to field things things that are ever more expensive to defend against. The Soviet Union topped 40% of their GDP going to the military and then economically and politically collapsed. The Soviet Union strategy of spending on terrorism to turn us into a hostile, mistrusting, divided bickering dystopian society did not succeed to any notable extent.
I would suggest that the strategy today on the part of hostile nations would be to interfere with our political systems by funding disinformation and hiring people to deliberately try and disrupt any form of normal human interaction between people who actually have little actual disagreement beyond the best way of achieving an aim that everybody agrees on.
By turning these things into huge partisan arguments with only two sides and then attempting to drive wedges between the two sides the intention is to ramp up tensions to the point that things boil over.
I suspect that the hope on the part of the funders is that people are going to start killing each other and we'll end up collapsing into a civil war.
So no, personally i'm not worried about somebody starting WW3 and the world ending in a nuclear holocaust: Our society being pushed to the point it collapses is a much more realistic and serious concern.
General purpose operating systems are beaten hands down by single use firmware, nothing particularly new there.
A telephone system I had which we only recently stopped using was bought in 1997, but the system design actually went back before that to the days where DOS was the mainstream operating system. In its service life it'd seen Windows 3.1, NT, 95 ,98, ME 2K, XP, Vista, 7 & 8 come and go and it outlasted all of them. It was ditched because we wanted to migrate off of it before BT discontinued the type of telephone line it used on our exchange; that's the sort of lifetime that a well put together tech product can deliver.
If it'd have been running on any general purpose operating system then it'd have had to go decades ago.
That's far to implausible.
If it were a Windows device you'd then find that the acceleration locked to maximum while disabling the brakes. You'd have to look up an obscure error code in the Microsoft knowledge base, and the solution would involve a passenger climbing out of the window while doing a hundred mile an hour along a road, opening the bonnet (thereby blocking the drivers vision) and disconnecting the battery (with a wrench you probably haven't got) to stop it. Naturally, you wouldn't have a passenger as nobody in their right mind would get in the car with you.
To be fair, the reports I have mentioned may be wrong: given the number of sites writing clickbait for views with no regard as to accuracy it's almost impossible to tell ignorance from deliberate disinformation. We won't know until a more measured post mortem is done on the whole mess.
But then if the reports are even half true then given the consequences then the repercussions are (rightly) going to be extremely profound for the people and organisations responsible.
I think that a steady drip of "X people DIED from Covid 19 today", that later turned out to include people who'd been cured, released from hospital and killed by being run over by a bus probably annoyed people somewhat.
Counting every positive test done (even multiple tests on the same person) as a new Covid19 case probably also would not have increased public faith in the organisation. Did a case get tested, then somebody went "double check that result", then they decided to use that blood as a test for the three other different tests to confirm that they got the same result? Hey presto, five new Covid19 cases if some of the reporting is to be believed.
At the moment it appears that data from PHE that is at best badly flawed has extended the lockdown beyond the point measures could have been loosened up quite safely, causing both severe economic damage and untold numbers of suicides of people locked away from people who can't take it anymore.
If this is proven to be correct in the inevitable post mortem of how well the Civil Service handled things, then it's inevitable that either a very very serious re-organisation is going to take place or a vengeful mob of a small subset of the couple of million people who'd lost their jobs through their dodgy data is going to descend upon the place and burn it to the ground with the staff still inside.
Hence it's inevitable that a very through re-org and probably a rebrand will be taking place since the people working there at this point probably want it more than the general public for their own protection.
That was my point. An on premesis server is not seriously threatened because by the time you can run this code on it, you can do far worse to the server.
Amazon S3/Azure instances however exist for the sole purpose of having untrusted code run on them hence why the clouds are threatened by this and our on premesis servers aren't.
Has anyone actually heard about any successful exploit in the wild of Spectre or Meltdown? Every exploit I can remember reading has been in a research setting, not a production environment. Given the number of simpler vulnerabilities to exploit, including human error, I wonder how many people are really trying to use side channel attacks.
To be frank, my initial feeling is still unchanged a few years later. These attacks are simply not a threat to your typical on premesis servers. By the time somebody has the level of access to run them, they can do far worse.
They are however deathly serious to people like Amazon, Microsoft et al who give huge numbers of people access to run code on their hardware with nothing but software to stop them pinching details from somebody else.
If cloud vendors had been attacked with this, would you trust them to tell you? Doing so would risk the cloud suffering a monsoon and raining much of the cloud back into on prem servers.
Americans will wake up when their iphone costs $10,000, and their clothes cost $500 for a shirt.
That'd just price China out of the market and people would buy from the next cheapest supplier.
And if every import did cost that much, then it'd simply make onshore manufacturing viable again and Trump would hold a party as he tells Americans that he's singlehandedly saved the american economy from doom and destruction and secured jobs prosperity for everybody in America.
Hence why for the next 3 months China will carefully avoid any reaction that might help Trump out in a certain impending election.
Umm... how can Microsoft buy TikTok if ByteDance does not want to sell?
Chinese owned company is doing well in the USA, but China bans US companies from existing in the Chinese market or requires "technology transfers" that allows Chinese owned companies to build a knockoff product.
The Chinese owned company has no particular intention to sell any ownership because it's doing well in the USA Market.
US President announces that he's going to eliminate any Chinese tech company from the US Market. The Chinese company suddenly decides that actually they might be interested in selling at any price to make some money before the ban comes in since otherwise they will cease to exist with nothing to show for it.
Experience really does help, and when you've basically invented the field of research you probably know what doesn't work rather well from knowing all of the failed avenues that've been tried before.
He's probably also got an awful lot of people working with him, and frankly somebody respected who's been around the block enough to know what doesn't work can speed things up tremendously simply by steering the bright, energetic and enthusiastic younger workers away from expending their effort on things that have been proven to not work, meaning that immediately their efforts are more likely to achieve something.
And that's before he actually starts doing any work himself.
"User has checked cables"Yeah, right
Yep...
They've checked them so much that if you ask them to unplug them, then blow on the end and plug them back in it always solves the problem.
Obviously blowing on the end of the cables does nothing and you could just say "check the cables are pushed in properly", but the users don't do that whereas they will unplug it to pointlessly blow on them, and plugging it back in then solves the problem.
Oh, that's nothing. Don't forget the Chinese influence in other areas.
They hired senior former civil servants and former MP's to "advise", which one could look at as being an inducement to the people now in the post when they indicate that they are always hiring for more talent, but "We do feel really very strongly about X decision and would like you to reconsider".
Press agencies can obviously be bought outright, and universities basically ditto by signing up huge numbers of Chinese students because "we really value your higher education." [But only when you agree with and support our policies].
Fail to do so?: This is outrageous and we aren't going to let you evil imperialist monsters poison the minds of our students and so will not be allowing anybody else to attend! Hence, public support or silent acquiescence from academia.
And that's what's obvious. It would be interesting to see exactly how much Chinese support has been bought over the last couple of decades and exactly how much they can control our political decisions.
Except in the UK where we have to rip out most of our 5G in the next year.
Except in the UK where companies will be banned from buying new Huawei kit by the end of this year, giving them five months notice to place orders for spares and to stock up on kit they need for new deployments which they are then allowed to keep in service until 2027?
"In Substance" is defined as "Essentially", which basically means "In the important points".
Any tribunal is technically not a court, but is part of Her Majesties Courts and Tribunrals Service and holds much the same powers.
So what he's saying is that the tribunal is in effect a court in all the important points.
Oh my. And I thought I was hard done by having only just gotten shot of Server 2008.
My profoundest sympathies. I'd post you the 2008 discs and licenses, but alas I don't have anywhere near the number of CALS that you'd need. (and while you can do that in Europe, I don't think you can in the US...)
It wouldn't be possible since the malware would then need to be installed on every single computer in the firm since otherwise it couldn't decrypt the files transparently.
And the lockware thing doesn't take out any organisation that takes either security or backups seriously.
In order to get seriously hit with malware at the moment, you have to:-
1) Allow your endpoints to run any executable file received. (which is a fail even by the tremendously rudimentary UK Cyber Essentials standard; and preventing this costs zero given that it can be done using just GPO's)
2) You have to be allowing your endpoints to access any number of files on the network with no access monitoring, controls or restrictions. Users don't tend to legitimately start accessing every file on a network share unless they are copying them all to a USB stick or similar, and so Data Loss Protection procedures should be flagging if somebody starts systematically reading (and altering) every single sodding files on a network share well before they finish doing it.
3) You have to have no effective backups. The current fashion for online backups with no more than a single restore point because it's cheaper is obviously inadequate against almost almost any use case for backups beyond your office being burned down and staff accidentally deleting things.
Well, if you've told Amazon you don't consent to their processing your details and you want it removed then according to the letter of the law they are supposed to remove those details. If somebody else adds those details in without the consent of the person named then technically it is a GDPR breach as Amazon are holding details that you've told them that you have told them that you do not consent for them to hold.
At the moment if he tries to responsibly raise a complaint with Amazon it takes him a lot longer to raise the complaint than it takes Amazon to ignore the complaint. Once you've created a standard complaint to the ICO, it takes far, far, far less work for you to raise the complaint than it does for Amazon to respond to it.
Obviously it is a weak case, but that's beside the point, which is that Amazon's legal department will find it far more expedient to persuade their operations team to bring these capers to an abrupt halt than they would enjoy turning the ICO into a hostile belligerent when the ICO starts getting multiple separate and justified complaints a week.
There's plenty the chap could do back if he was so inclined.
Firstly just tell the delivery driver that you hadn't ordered anything from Amazon and simply refuse to accept delivery on the basis that you didn't place the order.
If they try and dump the parcel on your door, simply point out that'd be fly tipping waste. I think Amazon would quickly get fed up with their time being wasted and would do something to prevent reoccourance.
If that failed, write them a letter saying that you no longer consent to having your personal data (name & address) stored on their systems. Then, next time you get something delivered put a GDPR complaint in to the ICO. That'd at least be entertaining, since it costs nothing for you to do and it's a disproportionate amount of hassle for the company to deal with compared to stopping the 3rd party having stuff delivered to him.
The problem there is that you'd need an satellite dish that would track on the satellite to a reasonably high level of accuracy since houses don't normally move at a hundred miles an hour.
Happily, these are already available for ships that pitch and roll and aircraft which travel at high speeds.
One imagines that one or the other solution would probably work off the shelf with OneWeb and frankly it's probably a cheaper and more readily deployable solution than adding hundreds of new mobile phone masts.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
