Posts by Rusty 1

Techies take turns at shut-down top trumps

I once worked, many years ago on a system, I think it called an FT 640. Filled a rack with monster hard drives of tens of megabytes and a tape drive. Ctrl-X in the shell shutdown the system. One Friday morning I managed to press Ctrl-X. Being the professional I am, I went for lunch. Came back to some really major panic that a fault tolerant (FT) system had shut itself down.

Hurrah for Apollo 9: It has been 50 years since 'nauts first took a Lunar Module out for a spin

Re: I'm planning aa marathon

There is an interesting write up of the problems with Salyut 7:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/09/the-little-known-soviet-mission-to-rescue-a-dead-space-station/1/

Mini computer flingers go after a slice of the high street retail Pi

Re: Not Just a Store

And on a BBC:

10 *MOTOR 0

20 *MOTOR 1

30 GOTO 10

followed by running out of the shop giggling.

I am just a mapper: Solar drones take to the skies above Blighty

Re: Just because you're paranoid...

They could be ingenious and deploy single-use flying squirrels with frikkin' lasers.

Talk about beating heads against brick walls... Hard disk drive unit shipments slowly spinning down

Re: Steep drop in prices for SSD

@JohnFen

Backups are not just for disaster recovery - they are also critical in servicing that call "Ooops, I've just deleted that file I need - can you get it back". A filesystem that supports snapshots (e.g. ZFS) services this need rather nicely.

"it's a pain in the ass to restore from backups" - that means you are doing it wrong. From an estate of

50TB I reckon to restore a file or set of files of varying vintage, going back a few years, within a few minutes.

It's important to remember that the call to restore from backup is going to under duress at any time of day or night, so needs to be straightforward.

Re: Steep drop in prices for SSD

I've got 7 Crucial SSDs of various capacities that have been in use (sometimes heavy) for years, with no issues.

I've also tried a couple of Corsair SSDs and one was DOA and the other failed with days.

These days the controllers within the SSDs are a lot better than in times gone - the Corsair SSDs were notorious for problems with the controllers.

Pluck up the courage and try some SSDs. Just remember to backup frequently, as you do with your spinning disks.

Dozens of .gov HTTPS certs expire, webpages offline, FBI on ice, IT security slows... Yup, it's day 20 of Trump's govt shutdown

Re: Oh God

No worries, once there is a massive wall built, there will be no problems. Who can get past a wall?

What happens when a Royal Navy warship sees a NATO task force headed straight for it? A crash course in Morse

Urgent - top brass. Need more of this stuff. There's over 360 days left this year and we need fodder.

Dev's telnet tinkering lands him on out-of-hour conference call with CEO, CTO, MD

Telnet access

I've worked both with embedded systems and general software applications that provided wonderfully rich functionality via telnet. In a good number of cases though, the handler for the telnet access appeared to in a single threaded main loop, blocking the functioning of the reset of the system. There were some quite awkward "pauses" in operation :-(

Dog with 'psychotic tendencies' escapes home to poop on his neighbours' pillows

Replace the cases?

I'd be wanting the pillows to be replaced too and anything else that looks a bit brown.

Oops: Cisco accidentally leaked in-house Dirty COW exploit code with biz conf call software

I'm quite sure they were hoping for the complete works of Shakespeare.

If Shadow Home Sec Diane Abbott can be reeled in by phishers, truly no one is safe

Re: Spot the dog

Don't forget the 50 tool bars in her web browser.

UK.gov to roll out voter ID trials in 2019 local elections

Re: We don't want YOU to vote.

Don't single the Tories out in your accusation - Labour would jump at the chance to do this too.

London's Gatwick Airport flies back to the future as screens fail

Or they could do a TFL and not specifically state that everything is on time, but instead, just running normally.

Former NSA top hacker names the filthy four of nation-state hacking

And the rest of the Five Eyes group.

Android ain't done until Samsung won't run? 9.0 Pie borks Gear watch app

I can only hope that this update will restore the ability to push files to the phone's SD card using adb without having to root the phone. Low hanging fruit, Google, effing pick it.

♫ The Core i9 clock cycles go up. Who cares where they come down?

Units

What's with the reference to temperatures in Fahrenheit in a technical article? Surely no one uses such an outdated scale.

As Corning unveils its latest Gorilla Glass, we ask: What happened to sapphire mobe screens?

Seems obvious ...

Twenty plus years of carrying a phone around and never dropped one once. Couldn't people just stop dropping phones, rather than relying on phones not breaking when dropped?

Sort of like TVs: I don't piss down the back of mine, so why should technology protect this particular incident?

Or take out insurance - in this case, a "tax" on the careless.

Security guard cost bank millions by hitting emergency Off button

A number of decades ago, I was working on a bit of telco kit with a proprietary operating system (admittedly in a dev environment), and ran an application I was developing, from the system terminal. I realised there was a problem with the application and went to kill it with CTRL-C. Hit CTRL-X instead. That initiated a system restart. Which took a long time, back in the late 80s, with disk drives more like gyroscopes.

I did the only thing I could and went for lunch.

Micro Focus offloads Linux-wrangler SUSE for a cool $2.5bn

Re: Swelling price tag, if not profits

And CentOS is considerably cheaper again.

At least with RHEL/CentOS you can pick and choose which of your systems need support (those that run Oracle, and few other other third party apps). For those that don't need support, run CentOS, and be happy.

Relive your misspent, 8-bit youth on the BBC's reopened Micro archive

So true. In my day-to-day job I get to play with systems that have up to several terabytes of memory (which is fun), but to get stuff done with kB or even B of memory is the bees knees.

Buttonless and port-free: Expect the next iPhone to be as smooth as a baby's bum

Re: yes but...

"TB connected devices" - what, badgers?

By gum, that's chewy: Samsung's NF1 fattens M.2 card capacity with wider gumstick format

Re: Dear lord

You can't possibly have just one - it would only get lonely.

Woman sues NASA for ownership of vial of space dust

Re: Carousel

All they have to do is nick, for example, all Van Gogh's works. As superior beings, they will have nailed teleportation (so the initial capture is easy); all the Earth-based compatriate has to do is get to the moon and back. For many oodles of mega $, that should be easy.

Carousel

So what's going to happen if some being from the moon comes to Earth, pilfers something pretty important/valuable and takes it home, only for someone from Earth to go to the moon and retrieve it?

Finders keepers?

Have to use SMB 1.0? Windows 10 April 2018 Update says NO

Re: FFS microsoft

So your organisation depends on a propietary 3rd party protocol for a mission critical service. Do all of your vendors support indefinite end of life?

Probably not. Boo hoo.

The important thing is to strictly control the reach of any protocol and manage interfaces appropriately. Not rocket science, and never has been.

Four hydrogen + eight caesium clocks = one almost-proven Einstein theory

But are they able to tell who farted in a general direction?

Linus Torvalds decides world isn’t ready for Linux 5.0

Re: Two scroll wheels?

Makes me think of this:

https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-1819584036

BOFH: Their bright orange plumage warns other species, 'Back off! I'm dangerous!'

Re: Hazard creation

A train station I frequently use has a penchant for putting so much salt down in winter on surfaces people walk on that there is a serious skid risk - it's like walking on ball bearings.

Microsoft, Google: We've found a fourth data-leaking Meltdown-Spectre CPU hole

Re: Anyone wanna buy an abacus??

Yeah, well I have a table made of logs. #0000000002.

Hey cool, you went serverless. Now you just have to worry about all those stale functions

Re: Every cloud (sic) has a silver lining???

Mandates such a functions being no longer than eight (or an arbitrary n) lines of actual or indeed non-actual code should be treated in the same light as not walking under ladders, or avoiding black cats.

From an engineering and support perspective, there are few things worse than oodles of trivial functions that by themselves appear to do nothing, but when carefully choregraphed together do something useful under certain circumstances. Then some idiot comes along and re-uses one of those functions in their own ball of mud to do something different.

Motorised robo-coolbox biz Starship makes lunchtime pitch to campus-dwellers

Re: How will the ne'er do wells see fit to exploit these little fellas?

Well we've all seen Flight of the Navigator - these will be used to smuggle dudes out of NASA facilities.

UK 'meltdown' bank TSB's owner: Our IT migration was a 'success'

Re: Where did it go?

Oh that's lovely.

"Total synergies arising from the migration are estimated to amount to £160M on an annual basis."

WTF?

Let's not forget!

Perhaps part of the problem was that the CEO was submerged with his teams in the first place. No place for such a person on the ground during an obviously supremely stressful time for the techs, other than taking orders for all the pizza they can possibly consume.

He was probably asking "is it done yet?", or "what does that red flashing light mean?". Likely followed by "why can't you go faster?" and "why isn't it done yet? - I have to play golf!"

IETF: GDPR compliance means caring about what's in your logfiles

Why three days, by the way?

"Why three days, by the way? Because that lets logging cover a weekend before it's flushed."

Except Easter and a good number of Christmases when weekends are typically 4 days long.

So when should probes or attacks be executed? Well, over a long weekend perhaps. Think Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary.

Doh!

There is no perceived IT generation gap: Young people really are thick

Re: That takes me back

To spot the youngsters (and OK, people who didn't live in the UK way back), ask them: "Clunk click - how often?"

Terix boss thrown in the cooler for TWO years for peddling pirated Oracle firmware, code patches

Ah yes, the different block size that Sun used on their CD ROM drives.

Intel admits a load of its CPUs have Spectre v2 flaw that can't be fixed

Re: Not in use...

And almost all, if not all, of that kit will not be in use in such an environment where any of this matters.

EUROCONTROL outage causes flight delays across Europe

Re: 5 Hours to switch over to Disaster Recovery System

5 hours is appalling for a mission critical system, even for a non-safety critical business.

When life-threatening situations may arise as a result of the failure, the DR procedure really does need to be good AND TESTED.

The Register Opera Company presents: The Pirates of Penzance, Sysadmin edition

Re: That was good

Ah ha! You'll be looking for Peter.

Programming languages can be hard to grasp for non-English speakers. Step forward, Bato: A Ruby port for Filipinos

Offshore semantics

Perhaps for the benefit of incorporating the observed behaviour with certain offshore locations, some cross-language bindings could be introduced:

bool doYouUnderstandTheRequriements() { return true; }

bool areThereAnyProblems() { return false; }

bool willYouDeliverOnTime() { return true; }

bool whyIsThisLate(managementLayer) { return whyIsThisLate(managementLayer - 1 ) }

Airbus CIO: We dumped Microsoft Office not over cost but because Google G Suite looks sweet

Frame

I've used Frame products extensively - Builder and Maker - to great success. For producing and maintaining multi-thousand page documents, including engineering diagrams, in a variety of formats, including HTML, there really isn't much comparison with the toys offered by Microsoft and Google, cloud or not. With the openly specced MIF format, they are also easly generated from your own sources.

So that's the documentation sorted. Now, the calenders, spreadsheets, wizzy C-level graphics to sort.

La, la, la, I can't hear you! Apple to challenge Bose's noise-proof cans

"LED Fuel Gauge"

Wow, that is some serious integration into the bike/car/plane/rocket propulsion system!

All I was after was audio quality, and these froods have gone and done this. Frak!

Despite the headlines, Rudd's online terror takedown tool is only part of the solution

Re: "We need to be very wary of slippery slopes here," said Bernal. "

Especially when that slope is more accuractely described as an overhang.

The healing hands of customer support get an acronym: Do YOU have 'tallah-toe-big'?

There is a most excellent video of Alan "Brick Top" Ford having words with domestic appliances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra4QTzlymtQ

Hey, you know why it's called the iPhone X? When you see Apple's repair bill, your response will be X-rated

Re: The obvious thing to do then...

But if you buy two, and one breaks, you'll only have one. That's going to be rather a risky and uncomfortable situation to be in.

Shouldn't the canny shopper buy three?

UK's NHS to pilot 'Airbnb'-style care service in homeowners' spare rooms

So colon surgery is quite out of the question.

Only half out of the question.

User worked with wrong app for two weeks, then complained to IT that data had gone missing

Re: See where it says " Tips and corrections" at the bottom of the article?

Don't you mean stabbed in the back with a rubber dagger?

Programmer's < fumble jeopardizes thousands of medical reports

Re: Looks like...

I'll bet someone's equal to the task, more or less.

New Column Width

I thought at first it must be one of my browser addons that was interfering with the layout as surely no sane person would design a site to use half of the available horizontal space for content and paint the rest grey.

Much like the special individuals who record video of landscape-orientated events in portrait orientation on their phones.

Never thought El Reg would go all portrait on us. Why, just why?