* Posts by Tom 38

4341 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2009

'I don't NEED to pay' to watch football, thunders EU digi-czar

Tom 38

Re: Good luck on that one.

So, why can't we have our international games shown live on free telly in England?

Firstly, for the important ones, you can. It is only friendlies which Sky have the license to. 6N or WC is FTA.

Secondly, the reason you can't watch them is because your union decided to sell the rights to Murdoch.

Linux software nasty slithers out of online watering holes

Tom 38

Re: @RAMChYLD - Well...

Any decent company who cares about security blocks Youtube

Generally its about reducing the amount of time people spend looking at cat videos, but yeah ok…

if Java is used on their corporate intranet I strongly doubt they will allow Linux desktops on their network.

lolwut?

Everybody here agrees it is plain silly to run antivirus on a Linux server.

He's right, clients fucking love it when you serve them up virii. Of course they accept it completely when you explain that their users uploaded the virus to your server before they downloaded it, they don't blow their top and go to one of your competitors at all.

18 million iPHONE USERS HAVE NEVER BONKED to ApplePay

Tom 38

Re: Re the Need For Standards

Wallets have been routinely targeted by thieves for a while now. Isn't it easier to keep track of one thing than two??

I don't take my wallet out of my pocket on the bus and play with it, I learnt my lesson when I was 7.

Tom 38

Re: Re the Need For Standards

replacing several credit cards, loyalty cards, cash, drivers licence, RAC membership and god knows what else with a phone you carry anyway isn't a crap idea.

Yes, replace cards with no intrinsic value with a £500+ gadget that has to be charged every 18 hours and get routinely targeted by thieves. What could possibly go wrong…

Why, hello there, Foxy... BYE GOOGLE! Mozilla's browser is a video star

Tom 38

Skype is available on both Apple's OS X and iOS. I Skype with my friends on their Windows machines from my iPad and Mac all the time. Not to mention, use Skype Out to dial phone numbers. Skype is completely platform independent.

Yes, Skype is wonderfully multi platform - you can call SKYPE users on windows from SKYPE on your ipad.

You cannot call Facetime from Skype on Windows though can you, which was in fact the point - well done for ignoring it, have you considered a career in politics?

Tom 38
FAIL

Re: eliminates the headaches - does it really?

Sigh....

http://blogs.skype.com/2014/10/27/bringing-interoperable-real-time-communications-to-the-web/

An article about enabling WebRTC using Skype components. So you can call WebRTC from IE.

How does this relate to calling Skype from WebRTC? Do you thin MS will abandon Skype?

Next...

Tom 38

That eliminates the headaches that arise if, for example, you've got Skype but your family prefers Facetime and your employer wants everything to happen over Google Hangouts.

Does it? Does it really?

Looks more like this is just yet another wasteground - you can't talk to people on Facetime, you can't talk to people on Skype, you can't talk to people on Google Hangouts.

If all these things were redesigned for WebRTC, then you could use any WebRTC client, of which this is one, to talk to any other client. In reality, none of the people you want to talk to are using WebRTC.

Of the providers I listed, I can only see Hangouts ending up WebRTC enabled. Facetime and Skype are platforms to drive you to purchase related technologies (Apple devices, Windows licenses), you don't drive that by allowing any old client to talk to your platform.

Gigabit-over-copper VDSL successor G.fast signed off at last

Tom 38

Re: Physics

…for the last 10-15 years we are still stuck with more or less the same 24 Mbit max offerings unless you live "on top" of a tele station.

You had 24 Mbit internet in 1999? Kudos, I was still on 512k.

UK slaps 25 per cent 'Google Tax' on tech multinationals

Tom 38
Headmaster

Re: I'm confused...

"Gideon". At least troll him accurately.

Eat FATTY FOODS to stay THIN. They might even help your heart

Tom 38

Re: Burgers are good!

What do you think the difference between "vegetable spread" and "margarine" is, apart from the spelling?

Having said that, I do prefer "vegetable spread" over "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil".

Tom 38

If your intake is reasonable then exercise will reduce your weight, if your intake is enormous so will you be unless your an athlete in training.

Argument from fallacy; if your intake was reasonable, you would not need to lose weight.

Exercise makes you "fit", it does not make you "not fat" unless the exercise tips your intake from a net surplus to a net deficit. Extra exercise accounts for such a small amount of your calorific expenditure, and an even smaller proportion if you are overweight and unfit, as you will find it difficult to do considerably more exercise than you are currently doing.

Exercise is "double good", but if you want to lose weight, cut out food and exercise more. If you want to lose weight, and only have the will power for one of those things, choose "eat less".

Tom 38

Exercise is fine for health, but it will do nothing for weight unless you also constrain intake.

To burn off a pack of chocolate digestives you'd be jogging for 4 hours.

You don't need to do exercise to lose weight.

systemd row ends with Debian getting forked

Tom 38

Re: Off to a bad start

The whole point of systemd is that it doesn't use init scripts.

No it isn't, that is one of the side effects, and that argument is one of the disingenuous arguments for introducing systemd.

The purpose is to borg desktop services in a way that suits desktops, but only a tiny proportion of linux machines are desktops.

(Replacing a 137 line shell script that calls wierd shit like "start-stop-daemon")

I'd prefer the shell script, because then there is less indirection between "I call this script" and what that script does.

PS: It's only weird if you don't know what it is doing. I find that ini file pretty fucking weird, because I have no clue what "running" that ini file does, or even what program "runs" it. In order to work that out I'd have to read and understand a program that does things based upon the contents of an ini file.

To work out what a shell script does, you need only to read it, or simply run it with "-x".

Docker: Sorry, you're just going to have to learn about it. Today we begin

Tom 38

Re: FreeBSD for servers

I'm a huge FreeBSD advocate, I run it at home, on my desktop, on my PVR, on my firewall, on my laptop, and on 800+ servers at work, where we heavily use FreeBSD jails.

We're ditching it at work :(

The main reason is that it's not possible to find sysadmin with good enough FreeBSD experience (well, with "any" FreeBSD experience tbh), and the Linux sysadmins we do hire do not like working with FreeBSD, find it difficult to update and maintain the machines - anything that goes wrong ever, they just shrug and say "oh its BSD".

However, the next biggest reason is that FreeBSD jails don't provide enough resource limitation technologies (see my post above), and so frequently you can have one poorly running application negatively affecting all the others.

Our new platform is Linux (Centos) + KVM, deploying a single application to a single VM. Docker (currently) seems to have most of the issues that jails have, but perhaps a combination of the two will be in my future, using docker to deploy multiple applications to a single VM.

Tom 38

Re: Differences from virtualisation?

Historically, the difference has been that VMs are easier to manage the resources that they use, since everything is virtual. With containers, nothing is virtual, there is simply a management layer that prevents you from doing certain things.

When you write a file on a VM, the virtual disk drive is called from the VM, the hypervisor eventually translates that into a write(2) call. When you write a file on a container, there is no intermediate step, the process in the container directly invokes write(2). The same applies to every syscall.

This directness is what makes containers so much more efficient than VMs, but it is also what prevented them from being used as much - with a VM, you can more closely constrain how much resource each VM uses, where as with early containers, a single container can easily use up all the resources on the box.

More modern containers like libcontainer and FreeBSD jails virtualise access to certain resources in order to allow controlling how much of that resource each container can use. This gives vastly less control than a VM would, eg in Docker and Jails you can control the cpuset and cpu shares that the processes in the container can see, and Docker can additionally control how much memory the container can see, but it cannot do things like ballooning or overallocation (iirc). Interestingly, Docker with LXC gives you far more resource controls than Docker with libcontainer.

Since the resource control is quite basic, the overhead of providing it is much less than on a VM. However, since the resource control is quite limited, you cannot do things like allocating a far share of IOPS, so if you have a container that uses all of your disk IOPS, you will still starve all your other containers. Hypervisors like KVM allow you to specify IOPS and throughput on virtual disk devices.

Sacre vache! Netflix ne parle pas le Frenchy ... zat is against ze LAW

Tom 38

Re: Technicality vs Common Sense

Technically that would be true if they were only selling contracts to the (huge) population of Luxemburg....

But technicalities apart, doesn't it just make basic sense - if you target a market outside of your home turf…

The idea of the common market is that any business trading legally in any part of the EU can sell goods and services to any customer in any other part of the EU.

The key point here is that Luxembourg is in the EU, and so Netflix Luxembourg is fully entitled to sell goods and services to French consumers providing that they satisfy the Luxembourgian laws under which they operate - their "home turf" is the whole EU.

My post pointed out that even though that is what EU law says, France has a particular reputation for doing whatever the hell it likes. As a gross generalisation, Germans pass the laws, Brits slavishly follow them and the French ignore them.

Tom 38

Technically, Netflix don't have to do anything that they wouldn't have to do in Luxembourg.

However "technically", "France" and "European law" don't necessarily have a lot to do with each other.

South Londoner wins Reddit MILLIONAIRE not-a-lottery lottery

Tom 38

Re: A million bucks won't go as far as you might think...

Gifts aren't income, and they definitely aren't the proceeds of disposing of an asset that has increased in value, so income tax and CGT are irrelevant.

Mighty Blighty broadbanders beg: Let us lay cable in BT's, er, ducts

Tom 38

Re: What are the odds ...

Exchanges are not ducts tho. They don't look like a duct, they aren't shaped like a duct and they definitely don't quack.

What should America turn to for web advice? That's right: GOV.UK – says ex-Obama IT guru

Tom 38

Re: Outer Space Act of 1986

How much does 60 million euros of third party liability cover cost anyways?

Our system handles £130bn and it's BUST. Want the job of fixing it? Apply to UK.gov

Tom 38

Re: Ok enlighten me.

People who have no experience of the public sector would get exasperated at the public sector culture, lack of accountability, lack of product owner and variable requirements. It is very hard to run a successful project when there is no overall owner of the project.

That dreaded syncing feeling: Will Microsoft EVER fix OneDrive?

Tom 38
Joke

Re: Screw OneDrive, when are they gonna fix WINDOWS????

I was all like, "Crikey, he's angry about the console? I know cmd.exe is bad, but you really don't need it much".

I'm getting old, think I need to play more video games..

Attack of the drones: ‘Nefarious’ private use rising, says top Blighty copper

Tom 38

undoubtedly

undoubtedly

ʌnˈdaʊtɪdli

adverb

without doubt; certainly. Also newspeak "something which must be going on because we've thought of it"

PHONDLESLAB-ULOUS: Motorola Moto X Android phablet

Tom 38

coughing up an extra £20 to have the back of my phone covered in bamboo and engraved with the words “Al’s Moto X” is, I must admit, quite alluring

Caveat emptor: customizing your device like so affects your consumer rights to return it, as it is then not suitable for resale.

Facebook, working on Facebook at Work, works on Facebook. At Work

Tom 38

Re: There is intelligence in corporations after all.

On one hand, it's easy to technically get around such a ban. On the other hand, it is so much easier to sack someone if they use company resources to access a website that the company has said they are not allowed to access.

Hence the amusing begging emails to be put on to the "social networks allowed" ACL.

Tom 38

Re: There is intelligence in corporations after all.

The most amusing thing after our facebook ban was implemented was the reasons that people came up with why they required facebook access at work - "Sure, the wage-slaves mustn't have access to facebook, but I am very important and need to check every 30 minutes where I am meeting Annabelle for drinks", these requests seemed to say.

Space Commanders rebel as Elite:Dangerous kills offline mode

Tom 38

Are you saying they knew they would be unlikely to deliver an offline mode, but still said they would in order to take peoples money?

Tom 38

Re: 5,000+ people show themselves to be slightly illiterate...

..offline mode is required to connect 'from time to time'.

Sorry, who is being illiterate?

OMG, that CLOUD has a TV in it! Sony goes Over The Top in telly wars

Tom 38

Re: Proof they don't get it

£145.50 a year?

Tom 38

Proof they don't get it

Why would I want 75 channels? Why would I want more than one channel?

I just want the TV that I want to watch when I want to watch it. The point of OTT is that you do not need to regress to broadcast limitations like segmenting content by channels.

Is your kid ADDICTED to web porn? Twitter? Hint: Don't blame the internet

Tom 38

Re: I think my reading comprehension is going downhill

No, you're not. I'll re-word what the article said:

In the population of all sampled parents, 43% felt the negatives of social networks outweighed the positives, 26% felt that social networks provide more benefits than harms, and 31% answered "something else".

In the population of sampled parents who allow their children on to social networks, 26% felt the negatives outweighed the positives.

Yorkshire man NICKS 1,000 Orange customer records. Court issues TINY FINE

Tom 38

Re: What's with the Yorkshire thing?

I've never ever been barracked by someone shouting "BERKSHIRE! BERKSHIRE! BERKSHIRE!" though

Shuddit, Obama! Here in Blighty, we ISPs have net neutrality nailed

Tom 38

Re: BT

The bit that gives it away that they are the same company is that the same company owns all those sub-entities.

The rest is just window dressing and frippery.

The problem the UK faced was that if they did nothing, basically no-one would be able to compete with BT. So they made up a system that produces a market that allows companies to "compete" against each other, selling bits that BT proffer up to them. This is better than nothing.

The unintended consequence is that BT (wholesale, but as I mentioned, irrelevant) get lots of revenue from all ISPs using their services, which enables them to profitably (they aren't doing it for free) build out a new last mile FTTx network.

When BT was privatised, one of the chief assets that BT shareholders bought from the government was the POTS network. With the advent of FTTx, BT no longer had that monopoly; they needed to fund a FTTx rollout, or risk someone else doing it.

Somehow, BT have managed to convince us that it is right that we pay them to profitably build a fibre monopoly. In ten years, BT will therefore have acquired everything to keep a telecoms monopoly in the UK in perpetuity, we're paying them to do it, and apparently most people think that is super.

Tom 38

Re: UK isn't so brilliant

What choice here, here, here or here?

Tom 38

UK isn't so brilliant

There is very little real competition, since the largest proportion of users are all sold BT. Sure, there's an ISP in there somewhere, but most likely the ISP is BT, owned by BT, or buying bandwidth from BT, all whilst we pay BT to build and own all the new infrastructure. Phony choices are not choices.

FALL of the MACHINES: How to KILL the Google KARATE BOT, by our expert

Tom 38

I watched too much "Fringe"

Whenever I see "Boston Dynamics" I read "Massive Dynamic".

Hacker Hammond's laptop protected by pet password

Tom 38

Re: Password fail?

It's quite hard to not expose yourself when one of your gang has turned police informant.

This is why hanging out in a "gang" of hackers is a bad idea; eventually someone gets caught and throws everyone else under the bus.

Obama HURLS FCC under train, GUTPUNCHES ISPs in net neut battle

Tom 38

Re: Fear...

the first to deliver universally-not-so-crappy bandwidth at decent rates is going to attract attention...and steal customers.

Steal customers? But that would require competing against each other.

MoD releases code to GitHub: Our Ideaworks... sort of

Tom 38

TrelloForWargames

I found it interesting that they find python + wsgi + centos + ansible "painful".

Reg mobile man: National roaming plan? Oh UK.gov, you've GOT to be joking

Tom 38

Competition drives build-out

There are three rings in the Venn diagram of mobile network development: Coverage, Price and Service.

Only because that makes you a pretty diagram that demonstrates your flawed point. With inter network roaming, there is also a cost associated with having your subscribers on someone else's AP.

The absolute biggest driver of commercial change is cost. We can set the cost that the free-loading network has to pay if their users roam onto a different network at whatever level we like. Since this cost is arbitrary, we would have implicit control of the market.

So, the article posits that roaming would lead to not enough base stations being built. By raising the roaming cost to networks, we would be able to introduce stimulus to those freeloading networks to build/share APs.

The author would have you believe that the only market is a free market, but there is no such thing as a free market - all markets have regulation and levers to control them.

Oracle gives HR tool to track your fitness

Tom 38

If any employer tried this on me in the UK, I would very quickly tell them where they can stick it. This is my personal data, you aren't entitled to one byte of it.

No, its not because I'm porky (BMI 24 kthxbai), it just falls outside of anything my employer should be interested in.

Virgin Media CUTS OFF weekend 'net surfers after embarrassing smut-filtering snafu

Tom 38

Re: "Essential Maintenance"

Curious - when the NHS Blood Transfusion Service went tits-up, did you consider the maintenance work they did in order to rectify it non-essential?

Boxing clever? Amazon Fire TV is SO CLOSE to being excellent

Tom 38

Re: Obsolete?

My 50" telly cost £500 a couple of years ago. Panasonic. Dumb as a brick. The Panasonic smarties, with as far as I can tell the same panels, were about £800.

Sure, the same panels. Not the same electronics.

Why solid-state disks are winning the argument

Tom 38

Re: The exception that proved the rule

Right before OCZ went bust and were bought by Toshiba, and after they garnered the worst reputation in the business, they started flogging off factory refurbs of their most problematic drives - Vertex 3 and 4 - for basically nothing. I think I paid £30 for a 128GB Vertex 3 and £60 for a 240GB Vertex 4.

The Vertex 3 I use as an adaptive read cache for a ZFS array - if it fails, the system doesn't care one jot; I can even un-plug it and plug it back in without applications noticing. This one has never failed.

The Vertex 4 I used as the OS drive on my desktop. It worked fine for three months, and then the firmware wedged if you tried to do random access - sequential access was fine, so I could move all my data off there with a simple "dd". By this point, OCZ no longer existed, and besides which, the 3 month warranty was up. I asked Toshiba if I could RMA it, they said yes, and they sent me a brand new Tosiba branded Vertex 460, which thankfully has not failed even once.

SSDs are much more complex beasties than mechanical disks, their firmware does a lot more work than the firmware in a HDD. I have no evidence, but I think the OCZ problems were mainly down to crappy firmware. Hopefully now Toshiba are on board, things are a little better.

UK superfast broadband? Not in my backyard – MP

Tom 38

Re: He cited a computer programmer who had reported that it took three days to download a program

Sorry @AndrueC, I thoroughly respect your opinions on internettery, but BT's delivery of FTTC is shoddy. To not show up all their other products, and to constrain what you can do with the service, they artificially constrain your upload. Consequently, all it is good for is sucking down more consumer content from BT. Don't you ever want to be able to do more with your internet connection than just suck down media?

On cable and DSL, upload restrictions are there as technical necessities; in order to achieve the most optimal distribution of bandwidth on the connection, most is allocated to download. There is no such technical limitation with FTTC that requires this asymmetry, BT install a box in your property that connects to the exchange at 1.2GB/s, up and down. BT then apply artificial limitations later on in order to define who you are and what you can do with it.

BT FTTP - 300 Mbit down, 30Mbit up, £70 pcm

Non BT FTTP - 1000 Mbit down 1000 Mbit up, £50 pcm.

Tom 38

Re: He cited a computer programmer who had reported that it took three days to download a program

BT's FTTP program is expensive consumer shite. If we end up with everyone having FTTP supplied by BT, we'll be in a very bad place.

Microsoft's TV product placement horror: CNN mistakes Surface tabs for iPAD stands

Tom 38

Re: Apple NEVER pays for product placement...

I remember many episodes of Chuck with a wall of Dell servers in the background of one of the sets.

Chuck was mainly sponsored by Subway I think.

iBail: American Psycho actor Christian Bale rejects Steve Jobs role

Tom 38

Re: didn't we have a Steve Jobs biopic already?

With Ashton Kutcher?

Noah Wyle, surely.

How's the great dot-thing gold rush going? Well, coffee.club just sold for $100,000

Tom 38

.london broke our intranet (sort of)

We use levels in our hostnames to indicate location, eg foo.london.wibble.com is in the London DC. Our previous DNS config was search wibble.com, so that you could type ssh foo.london to go to foo.london.wibble.com.

When .london went active, this broke all these short host lookups. We had to change our DNS config to search london.wibble.com newyork.wibble.com (+8 others) wibble.com, which means 8 DNS requests instead of 1, and change everything everywhere to use either FQDN or very short names, and remove any duplicated host names across sites.

I still don't see the purpose of them. It's never going to be 'transport.gov.london' or 'tower.london' is it?

Microsoft: How to run Internet Explorer 11 on ANDROID, iOS, OS X

Tom 38

Re: IE5?

Closer, no cigar. IE 5.5 was a windows version of IE.

You are thinking of IE 5.1 (OS 7/8/9) and IE 5.2 (OS X). 5.1 often didn't render things at all like windows, the spec or even common sense. 5.2 was slightly better in terms of rendering, but both were dog slow at any kind of JS.