Posts by Phil O'Sophical

BAN SMUT, rage MEPs: Purpose of internet must be EXTERMINATED

"it is still important for the European Parliament not to undermine its own credibility with such proposals."

Only a member of that parliament could think they have any credibility left anyway.

Google sends Street View car into Fukushima dead zone

But...

Doesn't Google also have self-driving cars? Why not stick a google eye on top of one of them & let it prowl?

'Mainframe blowout' knackered millions of RBS, NatWest accounts

Re: Tandem

Tandem hardware was Fault Tolerant, not Highly Available. There were other players, like Stratus and Sun, in that area.

FT hardware duplicates the systems inside a single box, perhaps three CPUs, three disk controllers, three network cards, etc. They all do the same work on the same data, and if they get different results there's a majority vote to decide who's right.

It provides excellent protection against actual hardware failure, like a CPU or memory chip dying, but offers no protection at all against an external event, or operator error. Just like using RAID with disks, which protects against disk failure, but it isn't a replacement for having a backup if someone deletes the wrong file by mistake.

It is expensive, you're paying for three systems but getting the performance of one, and given the reliability of most systems these days it isn't used much outside the aviation/space/nuclear/medical world, where even the time to switchover to a backup can be fatal. There's a reason that none of the companies who made FT systems managed to survive as independent entities.

Re: I doubt it

> It would take failure of multiple pieces of hardware to take down an IBM zServer, that doesn't mean it can't happen.

It also assumes someone noticed the first failure. I remember our DEC service bod (it was a while ago :) ) complaining about a customer who'd had a total cluster outage after a disk controller failed. Customer was ranting & raving about the useless "highly available" hardware they'd spent so much money on.

Investigation showed that one of the redundant controllers had failed three months before, but none of the system admins had been checking logs or monitoring things. The spare controller took over without a glitch, no-one noticed, and it was only when it failed that the system finally went down.

Reg readers brew up the ultimate cuppa

Re: Boiling water a necessity

You forgot American chocolate

Throttled customers rage over Virgin Mobile UK's tight cap

Re: Looks like...

Hmm. Sounds awfully like the Sky HD situation. HD pictures look better on a standard definition CRT TV than standard defintion pictures do, so clearly the SD channels are being compressed way below the levels that are needed to provide a good picture. Is that to make HD look even better & justify the extra cost? That is the question...

Honk if the car in front is connected

Ask and you shall receive...

> Maybe someone is missing a trick about an incar OS with it's own app store and online ecosystem

From New Scientist in January:

Ford's Open-Source Kit Brings Era of Smart Car Apps

Ford Motor Co. recently released OpenXC, an open source hardware and software toolkit that will allow the hacker community to experiment with the computer systems that run its cars. The open nature of the system could eventually lead to custom applications that give drivers more control over their car's performance. A driver will be able to download approved apps from a Ford store onto their smartphone that can communicate with a car's computer system. Such apps may tap some underused components of a car. Although manufacturers try to balance their cars between economy and performance, software could push it to one extreme or the other, giving the car owner a more efficient or faster vehicle than the one they bought, notes Ford researcher K. Venkatesh Prasad. Most microcontrollers in cars use the CAN bus protocol to communicate. Since this protocol is well understood, encryption can be bypassed with off-the-shelf tools. In theory, OpenXC will work with any make of car that supports the standards, and Toyota, Nissan, and Honda have already expressed interest in the system.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729015.700-fords-opensource-kit-brings-era-of-smart-car-apps.html

Re: Just my experience

Actually the BMW driver at 10MPH is probably more dangerous than the one doing 150MPH. At least the one doing 150 is probably paying attention to his driving, and not tweeting on his iPhone while shaving...

Logbook?

Car Area Network

It's already here, my 3-year-old Ford has all the electronics on the CANbus.

The supercomputers LIED: UK rainfall is rising, but won't drown our phones

I'm glad I don't live in Brighton

But I always thought that the Lake District was the wettest place in the UK?

<-- a waterproof one.

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

Re: WIne

I'm in pedant mode by default...

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>

Europe tickles Microsoft with €561m fine for browser choice gaffe

Re: Ironically .....

"Or is news and web hosting magically free?"

They mostly seem to be funded by venture capitalists with more money than sense, and an endearing inability to learn from history. For as long as there's no shortage of such people, ad-funded web sites will always come and go.

Re: Fine, but......

> .... where does the money actually go ?

Same place as the rest of the EU budget goes: jollies for eurocrats, and subsidies for French farmers and pointless causes.

First C compiler pops up on Github

Re: Engraving

> We will be recognised as the gnarly dudes we surely are.

After they've stopped killing themselves laughing at the thought that we didn't then yet know that we were about to inflict object-oriented programming in Java on ourselves...

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

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.

Wannabe infosec kiddies put Enigma Bombe machine to the test

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

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

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?

Re: Soho.

But is it Soho or SoHo ?

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

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

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

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

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?

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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'

Google touchscreen?

All your fingerprints are belong to us.

Curiosity Mars rover flashes pics of GREY drilled powder sample

Re: Am I the only person...

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

Rust

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

Curiosity drills into Mars

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'

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Kitten Porn

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

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'

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

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

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.

☺

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

Sign of the times?

Lolcatz is there, but Klingon isn't.

Multi-billion Euro broadband fund obliterated by EU budget cut

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

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.

Huge rock-hard marble erection shocks Japanese kiddies

*stumped* up for an imposing Venus de Milo ?

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