Posts by TonyHoyle 374 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2010
In the sinclair market most people just wanted games.
They tried with the QL.. it had passable word processors etc. and you could get ones with proper keyboards and phone integration (ICL One Per Desk / Merlin Tonto) but just weren't seen as a business computer... everyone just bought a PC instead.
What Microsoft need to do in the future I think is to just forbid ring 0 stuff from doing this.. no WHQL if you try.
Writing an architecture that hands off the complex stuff to a userspace service is harder but the consequences of failure is only that your service doesn't run, not that the entire kernel gets borked.
Also, the rules for a driver claiming it's essential for booting need to be tightened up.
From what others have said crowdstrike bypassed their own rollout procedure to force the update straight onto production networks, bypassing staging.
So failures all round.. not only did they not test internally (testing with a different version than you send out is not proper testing) they bypassed measures that would have caught this before it did damage.
And of course crowdstrike are able to do this with no consequences because the companies all signed contracts absolving them of liabilities.. the millions spent on the cleanup will be borne by others.
I remember minix.. first 'real' OS I ever ran. It was expensive - you had to buy the book to get it and £50 was a lot for a student in the 1980s. It was horrifically slow, running on the underpowered x86 machine I had at the time, and of course there was no internet (that an ordinary mortal like me could get access to, anyway) so no networking. But I really enjoyed playing with it.
It would be 10 years until I used anything like it again when I got some slackware floppies (possibly off a coverdisk?).
I never read the book.. too academic for me (I was always a hands on kind of person), but undoubtedly if he'd never written it linux might never have existed.
Wifi has the same problem as radar sensors (dirt cheap from ebay) and the problem is they see through walls, so any movement anywhere in their sense radius sets them off.
My outside light has it and it's always switching on just from movement in the house.
The reason why alarms still use IR is that's stopped by walls, otherwise your neighbours would keep triggering it.
It's not really true any more.. LED printers aren't significantly more expenisve than inkjets, and have the advantage that they don't brick if you don't use them for a while (inkjets dry up, which means head replacement, and many models, including HP, that means a new printer.. it was precisely that happening that had me swear off HP, and inkjets, for good).
I've got a Colour Brother that although it wasn't the cheapest around, was a good investment and works first time every time I print to it, even if it's been months.
It's bullshit.. a cartridge has about 32 bytes of EPROM containing a serial number and some identifying stuff. It doesn't have a y kind of processor..
The number of design flaws you'd need in HP printers to make that a security risk is insane and would make HP printers a complete do not buy.
HP ate just trying to.undrrminr 3rd party cartridges for profit
Linux is fragmenting too much now - before you could hop between distros and there were really only a couple of variations even in system config, now you've even got distros ignoring FHS and calling that a feature..you can have 3 different ways of configuring the network even within the same distro (one of them might even work correctly) and god help you if you do a major update as you'll find a bunch of stuff that worked perfectly well has been 'deprecated'. Even debian is starting to be affected by the rot..
I previously looked at bsd but couldn't get my head around the ports system (using CVS to update the list of packages, then hunting around the directory tree until you found something that did what you wanted just seemed so primitive). Might have a look at this though.. I just want shit to work these days, don't GAF if it's new or shiny.
> Before a smart meter was installed here, the meter reader came by twice a year and it was mandatory that he physically laid eyes on the meter at least once a year (or you'd have to reschedule a visit at a > time that suits you at your own expense).
It's still a requirement that a meter reader physically sees the meter once a year, even if you have a smart meter.
They are separate comms units but SOP for any meter issue is to replace the entire thing.
One of the fitters told me that if they lose access to the comms network for over 24 hours they brick and have to be replaced. That may or may not be true but I went through 6 of them before they fitted one that worked..
The other issues is the comms units are specific to the brand of meter, and there are, well, I know there are at least 6.. how many more I couldn't tell.
Luckily here in the north it's not a mobile phone network but a dedicated one operated by arquiva, so there's no issue with 2G.
The double step right click is a PITA.. it annoys me more than a feature so minor really should - probably because I do a lot of right clicking. I lasted less than a day on win11 before rolling back due to that. It's just so pointless.. it worked before, why change it?
Other things like the ads in the start menu I'm sure you can switch off, but staying on 10 means you don't have to.
Windows isn't a good example as it's implementation is stupid.. there are about 3 of them that yield different results, and they have to be be implemented by the apps.. a proper dpi scaler would be done at the OS layer not forcing apps to implement it.
The result is that some apps do it right, some half do it, and some not at all. If you're developing and you pull in a library it may or may not be hidpi compatible and even if it is it might use a different method so not be in sync with your app, leading to bug reports and annoyances for users.
A better example is mobile where the UI system was written to scale from the ground up and you largely don't have to think about it.
To a manager free = worthless. I had to learn that the hard way when I was younger. Used to do free work for charities.. Literally had one suddenly blank me and say they were going to 'hire a professional'. Like lady, this is my day job, you should have been paying about £1k a day for that work.
These days I've no problem submitting bug fixes for OSS projects but beyond that, cash or GTFO.
I really do sympathise with the guy, but he needs to walk away and start making some real money.. he doesn't owe those companies anything. So it'll break? That's on them.
I installed an IOT alarm add-on board.. basically just an.overpriced esp32 board with some voltage conversion.. I'd naively thought it would be more than that.
When I looked at DNS logging some time later it was responsible for over 70% of the DNS queries for the entire house. There were bursts of it asking for the same website address multiple times per second.
Of course the onboard software was completely proprietary and couldn't easily be updated, so that ended up.in waste.
If it's like our air fryer it's to remind you to unplug it. It does the same thing.. beeps about once every 5 minutes until switched off, whether there's food in it or not.
Crazy decision by the manufacturer as it has a perfectly serviceable off button and has WiFi connectivity that is supposed to let you switch it on remotely - which is obviously impossible as it's kept unplugged..
The ST was made to a budget and it's sound and graphics were on a par with previous 8 bit machines (the ST had a high resolution monochrome option but that locked out all the other modes and the monitor was expensive).
What it had going for it was the 68000 and GEM (which for the time was pretty cutting edge). And it was cheap - hence it was an ST not an Amiga under the tree that year
The STE and later Falcon fixed a lot of the issues by adding more colours, a blitter and better sound.. but it was too late, because by the time they appeared they were competing directly with the now lower priced Amiga.
Indeed there doesn't seem to be much progress except in price.. when I first heard of it it was $1m an ounce.. now it's somewhat cheaper.. but they still haven't made anything close to a single edible joint of meat.
We're a million miles away from a commercial process that can produce thousands of tonnes of the stuff for very little money with a low carbon footprint (which is surely the point).
It's not emulation.. it's a real spectrum designed by Rick Dickinson, the designer of the original Spectrum.
You can plug spectrum hardware in there, like an interface 1, and it'll work.
If an FPGA is defined as emulation, then the original spectrum was one too as it had a ULA at its heart (and the +2, +3 various different gate arrays). The only difference is the modern chips are programmable.
So either:
The third party suppliers, large enough to supply a company the size of O2 with significant infrastructure, doesn't roll out new updates to a test network first and doesn't have a rollback procedure in the case of emergency, in which case O2 picked an incompetent supplier.
Or O2 doesn't have the above (and they should, even if the supplier already does it.. you never trust new builds until you've validated them internally), and they're incompetent.
It's a better programming language overall. Developed by Jetbrains who know what programmers want out of a language (they also developed the IDE for it). It supports multiple programming styles & the community has built up around it like that.. for example if you're into functional programming, go for it, if you prefer OO, that's fine too.
OTOH it provides you with more than enough tools to shoot yourself in the foot with both barrels, reload then fire again. Which I predict plenty of people will do once it gets more popular.
Nominet simply don't list the address any more, just a statement that the address that they have on file is accurate.
This is all that's needed. GDPR allows sharing data for legal purposes so there's no loss to law enforcement, just spammers/domain harvesters.
Interestingly the RIPE database still contains this information, the argument I think being that the contacts for network blocks tend to be engineers in charge of them not individuals (plus they've implemented a right to have the data removed).
This lock isn't compatible with modern doors like that - only old style wooden doors.
Not that this is likely to be a problem because google don't sell it in the UK or even appear to have any plans to (something that the register completely forgot to mention for some reason).
You'd be surprised - the alarm I ripped out when it broke is still a current model, was 3 years old when I disposed of it.
Not an IC on it.. all transistor based, so it was about 5 times the size it should be about 12" by 8".. I doubt the design has changed since the 1980s.
Replaced with an ESP8266 that does the same job in a 1.5 inch square piece of silicon (and gives me wireless status as well plus remote arming if I'm in wifi range).
Unless your ubiquiti hardware is a client you did nothing.
This is a client side vulnerability not AP side, and there's little that can be done on the AP to detect it (and unifi have said they currently aren't tackling that.
Too many people are installing AP updates and thing they've fixed it. Nope. You need to update every wireless client.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
