Posts by phuzz 6738 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010
In case you were wondering about all the downvotes, this article is about AMD making their own mistakes, entirely separate from Intel.
The fact that this is somewhat similar to Melthdown says more about where researchers are currently looking for potential vulnerabilities, than it does about AMD or Intel's design decisions.
"multiple people used the same admin username and password to access the critical servers [...] the passwords used were weak [...] and on top of that, they were published on the department’s intranet."
Wow. So I'm guessing the CIA hires sysadmins who can't cope in the real world then eh?
You wouldn't even get past a basic PCI audit with that level of insecure behaviour.
I just read the title as "UK.gov is not sharing Boris' medical data among different agencies", which sums up one of the problems with data sharing that might actually get some notice from politicians.
How will they feel when any old civil servant can check their records and find out about that embarrassing little STI treatment?
(Disclaimer, I'm not saying that all politicians have had sexually transmitted infections. I'm just implying it.)
My first introduction to Terry Pratchett was watching him interview Douglas Adams at the Cheltenham literature festival.
Or possibly my first introduction to Douglas Adams was watching him interview Terry Pratchett. It's been a while now, and my memory isn't what it was.
"I find it difficult to take seriously any person/site telling me how to use language correctly when they can't even spell the bloody word"
It's Muphry's law:
Muphry's law is an adage that states: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."
a letter signed by [...] Chuck Schumer (D-NY), [...] Richard Burr (R-NC) and [...] Ted Cruz (R-TX)
See America, it is possible for your politicians to co-operate across party lines!
All they need is a common cause, like keeping the US military-industrial complex profitable by meddling in another country's business.
"I always wondered if there was some sort of non-competition agreement between the UK and US after WW2."
One way of looking at it is that the USA won the Second World War, and everyone else lost. Even countries like Britain who "won", were left with massive debts, half ruined industry from bombing, and memorials where half the male population should have been.
The US wound up being owed money or reparations by most of the planet, whilst having take basically no damage to it's territory, and the massive war industry could be quickly repurposed into providing luxury goods like cars.
Old empires like Britain, France or Japan were no longer competition, and war-time spending had pushed US industry and technology to new heights. (Where countries like the UK had helped to develop the atom bomb, they could now be told to jog-on with impunity).
Unsurprisingly, for the next fifty or so years, the US basically ruled the world.
"With $_.name you're taking the data that is in your big box and I believe the .name means that data is a file name."
Mostly correct, but just to give you a bit more info:
In Powershell you can store more than one type of information in a variable. The word after the dot (.name in this case) means you specifically want one part of the data, in this case the name of the file. In this example ,$_.CreationTime would refer to the time the file was created, or $_.Length would give you the file size.
I do agree though that learning the absolute basics ("wtf does 'pipe' mean?") is tricky, because most books/documentation assume at least a base level of knowledge. Fortunately, just putting a question into a search engine often gets some good results.
Once you understand the basics, Microsoft's Powershell documentation is quite good, especially if you skip to the end and look at the examples.
'Simple' can be defined in several ways.
Is the simplest solution to use a shell/scripting language that deals with piping everything as strings, and leads to complex grep/awk/sed commands?
Or is it simpler to use a language that can pipe everything as objects and requires less translation along the way?
Or is the best way to use whatever you're most comfortable with?
I used to live with a guy who refused to buy bog roll. So the rest of us hid our own stashes of bum wad (behind the sink was a good place), whilst he made do with a telephone directory*.
* Note for kids; this was a big book in which the government-owned telephone monopoly, published everyone's name and land-line number. It had nice thin pages.
"it seems unlikely that [Boris Johnson’s government] have any notion, let alone a strategic plan, for what to do with respect to intellectual property in the UK."
Well there's your problem. That word, "intellectual". We don't want none of that, that sounds like what them experts are, and as we all know, the UK is tired of experts.
I'd never heard of a 'caisson lock' until today. That is a bonkers idea and you'd never get me in one.
"Leave a "local teenager" in charge of a small child? Seriously??"
Believe it or not, but this was the standard way many of us were brought up. Living in a small village there was no chance of a 'professional babysitter' (if such a person even existed), so my folks hired one of the local kids who was a few years older than us and theoretically trustworthy.
Some years later, when I was a teen, I was contracted out to sit in someone else's house and tell their kids to go to bed or I'd tell on them to their parents.
This was between the early 80's and mid 90's by the way, perhaps it's different now.
"Once upon a time, software selection was done by writing a requirements document."
I call shenanigans. No one has ever written a complete specifications document without remembering halfway through the process that oh yeah, by the way, it also needs to automatically produce a csv file which includes information which is only ever stored on a handwritten post-it note on the back of a drawer in a locked office, and this needs to be sent by unspecified means to a third-party who never reply to any of your emails asking, nay, pleading, for some information on what format they require. Oh yes and Alex in accounts needs a particular spreadsheet re-creating, but it has to be aligned to lunar months except when there's more than two vowels in the week...
A full and complete specification document is a fairy-tale, used by BoFHs to send their PFYs to sleep. No such thing has ever existed, and if it did then our universe would be complete and could be shut down.
You can have an open container of hydrogen peroxide in a room and it won't kill everyone in the room.
By the standards of rocket propellants it's practically as safe as mother's milk.
I feel that at least part of the blame should be placed at the feet of web designers.
I doubt any browser would be such a memory hog if all the web pages we accessed were plain HTML with a few images.
(eg, just this comment page is using about 7.5MB, that's basically all of the memory of my old Amiga 1200, after I'd upgraded it).
Hey now! Much of the technology and know-how behind Blue Streak ended up in Black Arrow, the UK's successful, homegrown, orbital launcher. Which now I think of it, could be a perfect launch vehicle for a global positioning satellite.*
You know, if the government hadn't cancelled it in 1971.
* Assuming a modest upgrade program for the rocket over the last fifty years so it could put ~200kg in orbit, and some shrinkage in the satellite mass.
svn commit like it's the year 2000: Apache celebrates 20 years of Subversion
You can do what they call a "sparse checkout", I think that's what you want. (don't ask me how to use it mind).
Or if you're trying to work on the Windows source code, maybe GVFS?
Powerline ethernet works great in some buildings, but if your house is more than a hundred years old, then get ready for all sorts of fun. Like finding you have multiple separate loops in the same room, none of which can be used to connect to each other. Or, having to run an ethernet cable between two rooms, to bridge two separate circuits.
(And you're probably trying out powerline ethernet because old houses and wifi often don't work well together)
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