* Posts by Phil O'Sophical

6287 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011

First C compiler pops up on Github

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Allow me

> It looks like your global variables went in the first .c/.o file whether you liked it or not

My PDP-11 use was mostly RT-11/RSX-11M, not Unix, and on those OSes you had to manage linker overlays yourself, by defining which bits of the address space were permanently in memory, and which bits could be swapped in and out from disk. If the Unix environment used the same linker model it would make sense to keep all globals together in the permament space (I forget what that was officially called), with the overlay control code, so that as each overlay came and went the variables would always be available.

Maybe this summer is a good time to see if my PDP-11/83 still boots... :)

No.10 guru: UK tech scene is AN EXPLODING CHEESE

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

So you open an office in London, you have offices in Bangalore, Mumbai, Tokyo, Beijing.

Sounds great, now even small businesses can join the tax avoidance roundabout, all paid for by the UK taxpayer.

Don't believe the IT hype: Ye cannae change the laws of physics

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Pint

WIne

Just to add to the pedantic nitpicking, allowing for fixed costs such as the bottle, shipping and duty, a £9.00 bottle of wine probably contains £4 worth of wine, and a £90 bottle likely contains £80 worth of wine, so the comparison is 20x, not 10x. It's not linear.

Probably not relevant at that level, but it does explain why a £10 bottle is much more than twice as good as a £5 one, and your guests will notice that.

</pedant>

Wannabe infosec kiddies put Enigma Bombe machine to the test

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Happy

Re: If you have any interest at all in the subject...

Agreed about the visit, I'd upvote you more than once if I could :)

> decrypt all the enemy's transmissions but still had to make the enemy think that their systems were secure.

One of the anecdotes I was told when I was there was that the folks at Bletchley noticed that one German station in in Africa was sending a very short message at the same time every day. Someone guessed that it was the equivalent of "All quiet, nothing to report" and that indeed turned out to be the case.

Of course, it was sent using the new key each day, so as long as it remained the same they had the clue they needed to break each day's key. The word was sent to Allied forces in the area to stay well away from that German position, and a couple of guys had a very quiet war, always "All quiet, nothing to report".

Yet another Java zero-day vuln is being exploited

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: From what I hear...

What sort of internet connectivity does your washing machine have?

It's the Peer 2.0: Martha Lane Fox now a crossbench baroness

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
IT Angle

Re: It's not really relevant, but...

She got smashed up in a single-vehicle car accident while barrelling across the Moroccan desert on holiday. Is that supposed to somehow make her more connected with the little people?

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Soho.

But is it Soho or SoHo ?

EU web chief: Europe's slow on 4G, but 5G GLORY WILL BE OURS

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Facepalm

earmarked €50m (£43m) for funding research

Amazing, I didn't know she was so well off.

Oh, hang on. That's our money she's talking about. To develop new technology that we can also pay for, whether we need it or not.

It's always a pity that engineers are mostly too smart to want to enter politics, so we end up with grandstanding nobodies whose only aim is to put their names on as many big "initiatives" as possible to justify a big pension pot.

It's only a matter of time before some Brussels Bozo seriously proposes increasing the speed of light to make better use of the ether.

BBC World Service in a jam as China blocks broadcasts

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: "impartial and accurate information to audiences around the world"

> A unit of the Cong An (Peoples Police) goes around checking on the direction of dishes to make sure you are pointed at the VN satellites!

Must be scope for some geometrically-creative dish design there. There's no reason a dish has to be receiving only from the satellite it seems to be pointed at...

No mobile signal? Blame hippies and their eco-friendly walls

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: The real problem is ...

> Suggesting it's the insulation causing lack of signal borders on stupidity ..

Except when it's the foil-lined plasterboard or polystyrene that seems to be cropping up a lot more often these days. Gives a nice heat-reflecting layer, which also of course blocks lots of other EM radiation.

BT argues Ofcom is 'mistaken' on Ethernet price capping plan

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
WTF?

How will this help?

How is forcing BT to reduce prices by RPI-11 going to encourage other operators to enter the market? Wouldn't it be better to let BT charge what it likes, as a way of creating an opportunity for a lower-coast operator to step in? All OfCom is doing is to ensure that BT has a low-profit monopoly, that doesn't seem helpful.

Microsoft's own code should prevent an Azure SSL fail: So what went wrong?

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

> I'm not fully sure of the underpinnings of Azure; does it run on Server 2012?

According to wikipedia (yes, I know):

"Windows Azure has been described as a "cloud layer" on top of a number of Windows Server systems, which use Windows Server 2008 and a customized version of Hyper-V, known as the Windows Azure Hypervisor to provide virtualization of services. "

So you won a 4G licence. The Freeview interference squad wants a word

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: @Lee D

So these amplifiers... who approved them for sale, who licensed them, who fitted them, who allowed them to transmit in those frequency ranges? Are they ones that people fitted or that were given to them by the previous government schemes? Do they carry the FreeView / CE logos?

There are as many answers as there are questions. Some of the amplifiers are good quality, some are not. Some are cheap, some are expensive. Some were bought in B&Q and fitted as DIY, some were fitted by CAI professionals. All undoubtedly have a CE mark, since they can't be sold without it, but in these days of self-certification that's not worth the paper its printed on.

They can't all just be unplugged, some are fitted on the tops of masts, some are built-in to the aerials, some are still needed in weak-signal areas.

That's why no-one knows what it wil cost, since no-one knows how widespread the problem may be.

The fact is that OfCom should KNOW that's what happened and tell people not to fit amplifiers and/or regulate the sale of amplifiers to only approved installers to where it didn't matter. That's kind-of their only job.

It's not remotely their job, there is no legal requirement to have your TV installed by a certified installer, although it's perhaps a good idea if you want a professional job. Installers who choose to be are governed by the CAI codes of practice, but government hasn't tried to legislate home entertainment products since the 1950's, it would not be tolerated. Can you imagine the outcry if OfCom required an amplifier licence before you could legally watch digital TV in a weak-signal area? :)

The fact remains that these amplifiers were necessary and fit for the purpose for which they were sold at the time they were sold. OfCom has moved the goalposts, and someone is going to have to pick up the tab for any problems that it might, or might not, cause. We'll just have to wait and see if there is a real problem.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: What?

No, I'm not wrong. The UK used the system I standard. Audio was FM, spaced 6MHz from the video carrier frequency. Video was AM vestigial sideband, +ve for black (the old 405-line system A was +ve for white, so interference showed up as white dots).

Only satellite uses FM for video, it has other issues that make it unsuitable for terrestrial. Most countries in Europe use FM for sound, except French system L which used AM for sound as well as for video.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: What?

> considering that the old analog signals used almost 5x to 10x what they do now!

No, they didn't. The power quoted for transmitters is peak power. The nature of analogue signals is that the peak is rarely reached, and the average power is 5 or 10 times lower than the peak. The digital signals run at peak power all the time, i.e. peak and average are the same.

The average power is exactly the same for digital and analogue, that's why they chose those levels for DTT. It gives the same coverage as analogue.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Stop

Re: Sigh

It has nothing to do with frequency overlap with Freeview. The problem is that many people, pre-switchover, installed aerial amplifiers to get their Freeview signals. Those amplifiers cover the whole of the old UHF TV spectrum, 470-860MHz.

Today that TV spectrum only expands to 800MHz (and potentially lower in future), and the 800-860 MHz band is available for 4G. If you have an aerial amplifier covering that frequency range, and if you have a 4G signal near you, and if that 4g signal is strong enough to overload the amplifier, then all Freeview channels can be affected. Just because channel 60 is closest to the 4G end of the band has no bearing on whether it will be affected most.

Solutions include getting rid of the now-superfluous amplifiers or adding a filter at amplifier-input to block the 4G signal. Not so easy when the amplifier is on (or part of) the aerial, of course. It's very much a wait-and-see situation. Decent amplifiers will probably be OK, cheapy ones from Argos may not be.

New blow for Microsoft Surface: Touch Chromebooks 'on sale in 2013'

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Coat

Google touchscreen?

All your fingerprints are belong to us.

Curiosity Mars rover flashes pics of GREY drilled powder sample

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Am I the only person...

Could be sponsored by Google Mars ? Craterview would be so much more fun than streetview.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Rust

Is Curiosity rusting? That scoop looks pretty manky, won't that mess up any analysis results?!

Curiosity drills into Mars

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: those damned metric measurements

I did wonder. 2.3mm is a very non-imperial size, but 1.6cm is a nice standard 5/8 inch ...

BBC: Monster cargo ship delivers '863 million tins of baked beans'

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Pint

Re: too complex for us mere mortals to understand

According to my reckoning, it would require ~260000 million cans to cover Wales one bean deep, so 863m tins really isn't all that much. It would cover the City of London to about 4½ inches deep.

Software update knocks out Space Station communications

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Thumb Up

backup

They still have ham radio gear on the ISS, so they'll never be that short of people to talk to/though.

Brace for MORE ZOMBIE ATTACK ALERT pranks, warns security bod

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Failed to change the default pasword

People still ship software with default passwords? Most modern systems require you to set a system password the first time you switch them on, and they won't work until you do. Would be nice to think that suppliers of critical "national emergency" equipment would be on top of the security issues...

Reg readers scuffle over the ultimate cuppa

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Stop

Warming the mug/pot?

The water needs to be boiling when it hits the tea, and to stay hot for as long as possible afterwards, so that it draws out the flavoursome oils and not just the bitter tannins (the reverse is true for coffee). China pots seem to hold a lot more heat, so boiling water cools quickly when poured into one, whereas a metal pot, especially one with thin walls, doesn't cool the water as quickly. I would almost always warm a china pot, rarely a metal one.

Apple tech FOUND ON ANDROID: Passbook gets pay-by-bonk

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: think bigger

> How about having a NFC reader in your car? Put your phone on it, bluetooth comes on and pairs with the car,

Mine does that already, without NFC.

> and the car recognises you as the driver and sets your mirrors, seat etc to your preferences.

My car recognises which key it was opened with (mine or Mrs O'Sophical's) and sets mirrors and set to match.

No need for yet another technology to do what we can do well today already.

British, Belgian boffins battle buffering bandwidth bogeyman

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Kitten Porn

Would this be porn for kittens, or porn involving kittens?

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
FAIL

I agree with some of what you said, Trevor, until you got to this:

"The privatisation of our power and telecommunications industries have been horrible for the consumer…and worse for businesses!"

I simply do not see how anyone can make that claim with a straight face. I worked for BT for several years on either side of privatisation. Privatisation of telecomms infrastructure is the only reason we aren't still sitting with a rented POTS phone on our desk, and paying through the nose for 56K dialup. Suggesting that it was better when it was controlled by the politicians sounds like that old saw about how Mussolini got the trains to run on time, it isn't exactly a point in his favour.

Dish boss on ad-skipping service: 'I don’t want to kill ads'

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

There are still a lot of viewers who just put the TV on when they come in from work, and let it play all evening, sometimes never changing channel at all.

Whether that actually counts as "watching" is another question, of course.

BT copper-cable choppers cop 16 months in the cooler

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Scrap metal

Try the Al Capone solution, they couldn't get him for the crimes, but they did get him for the tax frauds associated with them. Any scrappie who can't produce documentation for all the copper on the premises gets a tax bill assuming he paid nothing for it, i.e. his whole sale price is treated as profit. Let's see them keep a buisness going that way.

3 million Freesat receivers now out there, and boxes to get YouTube

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Freesat is on a different frequency

There's only one reference to Babestation Apprentice on that Lyngsat page...

Technically Sky is only responsible for the Sky channels, all the others are uplinked by their respective providers. There's no reason that Babestation couldn't pay for two identical unencrypted uplinks, one for Sky and one for Freesat, but it would seem to be a pointless extra cost.

> I've ever so slightly tweaked the article for the comfort of the more pedantic among us.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Stop

Freesat is on a different frequency

No, it isn't. Freesat is an EPG (Electronic Programme Guide), no more, no less. When you tune into BBC1 on a Fresat box you're tuning to exactly the same signal that someone with a Sky box is using. The Freesat EPG only includes those channels which have chosen to be unencrypted, which for the most part are the ones on a satellite whose footprint is narrowly focussed on the UK/Ireland, so the expense ofencrytpion to protect viewing rights is unnecessary.

Freesat-from-Sky covers the same channels, Sky push it because they want to try to persuade you to upgrade to a full Sky subscription, which requires only a phone call, no new equipment.

Twitter translated to LOLCATZ: Strangely this had not been done

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Sign of the times?

Lolcatz is there, but Klingon isn't.

Multi-billion Euro broadband fund obliterated by EU budget cut

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: We can't annoy the farmers!

Can't they use organic semiconductors, and pay for them out of CAP? Maybe we could get our OLED TVs subsidised?

Psst, wanna block nuisance calls? BT'll do it... for a price

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Validate CLI

Well, strictly speaking CLI only refers to the info sent from your exchange to your phone, the network as a whole uses SS7 signalling, and that info is always available. Doesn't mean it's correct, of course. At best the most that a telco could do is verify that the information is correct for the network, i.e. if a call comes in from The Netherlands, but has SS7 data purporting to be from the UK, it could be dropped as fake.

It's like email spam, some can be identified mechanically, a lot can only be guessed at heuristically, and the telcos seem to have no interest (i.e. they get no income) from putting effort into heuristics.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Phone spammers in this part of the world now use fake caller ID. The phone displays a number, but it it isn't actually assigned to anyone, and you can't ring it back. Internet searches for those numbers reveal hundreds of complaints.

I'm certainly not 'the younger generation", but if I don't recognise the number I have no problem ignoring the call. If it is important they'll leave a message and I can either pickup, or call back.

Huge rock-hard marble erection shocks Japanese kiddies

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Facepalm

*stumped* up for an imposing Venus de Milo ?

People have been shot for better puns than that...

Electric cars stall in USA, Australia

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Stop

Re: EVs are so impractical

> you can easily hire an appropriate vehicle.

That isn't a sustainable model. If everyone had EVs for the commute, and planned to hire larger vehicles for occasional long drives, there would never be enough hiring capacity for holiday weekends. No rental company could afford to keep thousands of cars on hand just to meet a few days peak demand each year. The infrastructure to refuel those hire cars would collapse as well, though lack of use.

Assuming, of course, that such cars would even be manufactured in sufficient quantity. They would certainly become very expensive.

This is exactly the same situation that we see with wind turbines. They can't be relied on to provide service all the time, so you need backup capacity for the off-service days. You end up creating two parallel infrastructures at high cost, neither of which is efficient because it doesn't get enough use. That is not a sensible use of finite resources.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: EVs are so impractical

> Tesla are currently selling 400 Model S electric cars per week

Yes, but that's California. Hardly representative of the real world.

Bug-hunters: They're coming outta the goddamn walls, aargh!

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: year + arbitrary digits + check digit

> Check digits are useful if people are typing or reading the digits manually.

Good point, thanks.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

year + arbitrary digits + check digit

What's the point of a check digit if the others are arbitrary?

Kids as young as FIVE need lessons in online safety - NSPCC

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: I'm not sure what exactly is happening

"hot bitches get nailed"

Perhaps the point is that young kids have learned (from where?) that such a phrase will get them to porn, rather than to an RSPCA site about the dangers of leaving your family pet in the garage on a hot day?

Jammy b*stards: Admen flog chocolate bars with 'Wi-Fi-free' zones

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Stop

Re: Yes it is totally legal - just read and look!

Do they mean "no WiFi" or "no internet connectivity"?

No WiFi would require screening. No connection could be done illegally by jamming, but no connectivity just requires a bunch of access points (one per channel) connected to a local switch, with no outgoing internet link. Shouldn't be illegal, it's just a local network. They could even add a local server to respond to every web query with a KitKat ad :)

Report: Over 1.5 million UK drivers will have hydrogen cars by 2030

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Why not just convert your existing car?

> I have the complete plans right here and it really is simple

I'll bet you can hook the engine up to an alternator and use the square wave energy to create all the hydrogen you need to run the engine, as well. You could call it "perpetual motion".

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Key assumption:

> Or a mandated standard battery pack which can be easily swapped out at a "filling" station.

That doesn't solve anything. The "filling" station still needs the infrastructure to charge those batteries, and for a busy station that means hundreds on charge at a time, ready to be swapped. Fast charge 1 battery in 5 minutes, or slow charge 100 batteries over 8 hours, it's still the same peak energy load. The filling station would also need storage space for 100 batteries containing potentially dangerous chemicals. Want to consider the effect of even one of those batteries overheating while on charge? Then you have the space and machinery needed to do the swap, the economics just don't work. Filling a tank with liquid may be crude, but it's the perfect KISS solution.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: What a load of crap

Very true. Isn't this the same story that was cranked out for LPG? Clean(er), cheap(er) and it just needs infrastructure and everyone will be using it. That worked, didn't it.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Stop

Re: H2 loss

Being able to make H2 cheaply to make up the loss won't be any consolation when you retrun to your car in the airport carpark after two week's holiday & find half or more of your heavily taxed fuel has literally evaporated. Cross your fingers that there will be enough left to get you to the filling station?

Unlucky for you: UK crypto-duo 'crack' HTTPS in Lucky 13 attack

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

If it's timing-based

Would adding a few random uS into the TLS processing be enough to throw the timing detection out?

First video inside thinking fish's brain captured by boffins

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Black Helicopters

"scan the brains of humans and prosecute their possible intent"

Read "The Anarchistic Colussus", by AE van Vogt. If I remember correctly, humanity was being controlled by aliens using exactly that sort of equipment to sense "auras".

New York Times probes China's Premier, gets hacked by Chinese

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: re: Why were they stored in a copyable format?

Stealing the hash isn't a problem, it can't be used to break into other accounts. The article says that passwords allowing access to other accounts were obtained, which implies theye were stored in plaintext or reversible form, for that to be possible is a security FAIL.

Space Shuttle Columbia disaster remembered 10 years on

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: The rescue options?

Given the character of the people who go for astronaut training, I honestly doubt they'd have been short of volunteers for a rescue flight. Wouldn't have needed a full 7-man crew, maybe 2-3 at most? Brave guys. Mad, but brave.