Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

Re: magnum opera

Well, you know that saying about the fat lady singing...

A colleague once managed to delete the kernel binary from disk on his SPARCstation desktop. The system stayed up, but there were a few tense moments while he found another system running the same OS version, FTPed the file from it and rebooted.

Password recovery from beyond the grave

Re: Write them down...

MTTR: Mean Time To Resurrect?

Re: Write them down...

Always test that DRP.

Death Response Plan?

Re: Legal issues

Along the lines of "horses sweat, gentlemen perspire, ladies glow" ?

Re: Not happened to me, but

I would have tried that and passed on all unawares.

Carry On.

Leave that sentient AI alone a mo and fix those racist chatbots first

Re: Brilliant

Out of cheese error...

UK Home Office signs order to extradite Julian Assange to US

Re: While ya'll

the US is trying to prosecute someone for doing the job of a journalist.

Calling Assange a journalist is an insult to journalists. His primary aim is to make himself look important, anything else is just collateral damage.

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

Re: We are in the wrong business...

That cable included in one leg a one ohm resistor in parallel with a power diode

Ah, a unidirectional audio cable with low-inductance carbon feedback. Only £100/metre.

Re: That vinyl sound

Untrue.

When you digitise, you lose information, based upon the sample rate.

Note that I said "no discernable loss". Certainly you lose information at frequencies above half the sample rate, but if that's beyond the range of human hearing you can't hear it, so it doesn't matter. Analogue recording, vinyl or tape, follows the same principle.

Re: That vinyl sound

I remember the arguments in the early CD days, where all-digital ("DDD") recording and processing was said to be so much better than part-analogue ("ADD" or "AAD"), so I'd agree that most older LPs, up to the 1980s at least, were probably wholly analogue.

Re: That vinyl sound

It "sounds better" for much the same reason that gold-plated oxygen-free copper cables "sound better". The owner has paid a lot of money for it, and has to justify it.

With good A-D and D-A convertors there is no discernable loss or change from using digital techniques, that can be proven mathematically. It may well be that people prefer an analogue reproduction, because they like the way it changes the sound, but it isn't objectively "better" than a digital recording. That's not unlike the way that a studio recording can sound "better" than a live experience, because it's been tweaked to sound better.

EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of combustion engine cars from 2035

Re: In other words...

this is just going to create massive upward pressure on used ICE vehicles.

I expect it to create a whole new industry for refurbishing used ICE vehicles to bring them back to as-new status, while still being considered "used" and therefore sellable. There's very little in a modern car which can't be refurbished and restored, since bodywork doesn't rust away as quickly as it did in the 70s and 80s.

NHTSA upgrades Tesla Autopilot probe, could lead to recall

Don't stop at autopilot

undermining the effectiveness of the driver's supervision

They should extend this investigation to cover all the so-called "driver assistance" devices.

Vivaldi email client released 7 years after first announcement

Re: Why is it so hard to find a good email program?

By default, Thunderbird has keyboard accelerators enabled, there's a raft of easy-to-hit-accidentally keystrokes that will send, file, or otherwise disrupt your mail. First thing I do on any install is to disable them, which solves most such problems.

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

When carrying anything like that sort of voltage

The statement was 240W(atts), not 240V(olts).

Re: Micro-USB

Getting bored of it?

Probably a huge part of modern productivity and living standards arises from standard interchangable common parts.

True, but that's mostly been driven by industry-related standards bodies which understand the technical issues. Mandating such things by government fiat, through bureaucrats who have little or no technical knowledge, rarely works.

Re: Charge the chargers

Anything that enters the customs union with the correct CE paperwork doesn't get inspected at the border

Unless it's going from GB to NI, of course.

Re: The only nation that nominated English as an official language of the EU was the UK

I don't think so.

You would be wrong not to do so. From https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/languages_en

English remains an official EU language, despite the United Kingdom having left the EU. It remains an official and working language of the EU institutions as long as it is listed as such in Regulation No 1. English is also one of Ireland’s and Malta’s official languages.

Re: Next week:

EU bureaucrats. Fuckwits to a man.

FTFY

Re: The BS 546 Brexit connector next

Scullery maids are better when used in parallel.

UK Home Office awards Oracle a deal extension worth tens of millions

They're probably also assuming that they now don't need to do backups or have DR, like so many businesses which assume that it all happens by magic in the cloud. It'll all end in tears after the first ransomware attack.

IETF publishes HTTP/3 RFC to take the web from TCP to UDP

Re: TCP needs a few back-and-forths

Doesn't UDP make address spoofing easier, though? Since there's no ack/connection, it's trickier to validate the source address in a packet. That would have to be done at a higher level, not that of the IP layer.

Japan's asteroid probe reportedly found 20 amino acids

No, you just forgot that the UK is still in Europe, just not in the EU.

Engineer sues Amazon for not covering work-from-home internet, electricity bills

To this day, I've never owned my own mobile phone.

I've never taken the company up on their kind offer of a phone, I only use my own. That way no-one can tell me not to turn it off or ignore it when I decide that work is done for the day. My bosses have always been fine with that approach.

France levels up local video game slang with list of French terms to replace foreign words

Re: Clutching at straws

("mél" for email, pretty harmless, and nobody uses it)

"courriel", as a contraction of "courrier electronique" (literally "electronic mail") seems to be catching on, I quite like it.

Re: French terminology

in French "pet" stands for "fart".

In English, pets & farts are also closely linked.

Re: "French guy here"

And "un short" for a pair of shorts, on the basis that a pair of trousers is "un pantalon".

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: Don’t know about you

My policy was do not touch under any under any circumstances unless given explicit permission. Even the gear I maintained.

And always mount a scratch monkey?

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

Re: Back in the '80s...

I knew someone who called his desktop system "elvis", just so he could type "ping elvis" and get the response "elvis is alive".

Re: Just a quick question.

a language can't be separated from the culture to which it belongs

Very true. It's interesting to compare French and Canadian French, for example. The Candian variety tends to use more active constructions (like English), French French is often more passive.

In a similar vein, the farewell recording on the Eurotunnel trains says "We hope you had a pleasant journey" in English, but in French it's "We hope your journey was pleasant". A small difference, but glaringly "unconventional" to a native speaker if you get the wrong one.

Re: Just a quick question.

I've been in an hotel that had the "in case of fire" notice on the back of the door clearly translated via Google. Where the English had "leave the hotel", the French corresponded to "do not take the hotel with you".

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

Re: What On "Earth"?

Fair enough, but I'd say that installing a new circuit where the earth was only terminated on a network cable is pretty close to "something goes terribly wrong".

Re: What On "Earth"?

then the earth is not powered up in any form

If they had mistaken it for an earth, and connected it to some equipment that had RC filters on the mains input, it's not impossible that the cable could be left floating at half-mains voltage through the filter chokes. An earth is only going to be at ground potential if it's actually earthed.

I've seen this, a friend in a very rural home commented to me that the washing machine in an outbuilding gave her a shock when she touched it. A quick meter test showed that the case was indeed half-live, and when the local electricity board came out they found that the main earth spike for the house wasn't connected (corroded through), so nothing was actually earthed...

Re: Sparkies...

Not just sparkies. Many years ago a plumber was working in a shopping centre near us. He set his blowtorch down carelessly, and set fire to a case of tea. To try & put it out he went looking for a fire extinguisher, by the time he returned the warehouse was on fire, and when the fire brigade arrived they couldn't save the rest of the centre. There was some news footage of a car dealer being interviewed in front of the main doors about the new cars on display in the main mall and, just as the interviewer asked if he thought the cars could be retrieved safely, the roof of the centre fell in. The dealer just grimaced and said something like "I don't think so".

Something like 17 million quid damage, and the plumber's liability insurance topped out at 1m... They never rebuilt.

Re: Rainbow - Nostalgia

Well most Brits eat serial for breakfast...

These days we need more fibre...

Re: Bee-sting ?

Now, that brings back memories! Have one of these ->

Failed gambler? How about an algorithm that predicts the future

Re: Where there’s AI Will there are Myriad New Ways to Skin Dead Bouncing Cats*

Is that an actual quote or a bunch of paragraphs produced by a word randomizer?

It's amanfrommars, is there a difference?

Tech pros warn EU 'data adequacy' at risk if Brexit Britain goes its own way

Re: Too late

You whined that the EU was blocking goods shipments despite the UK continuing to follow the same standards.

No, I said that the EU was over-zealous in checking compared to how it treats other 3rd countries, even though there was no reason to do so since we hadn't changed the standards that we followed. No-one is asking for special treatment, just fair treatment with other non-members.

They *always* made clear the UK was never going to be granted all the benefits of being a member of the single market and/or the EU, if it chose to be outside of them. What sense of entitlement makes you think this is unreasonable?

I do wish you'd actually make some attempt to read and understand what I wrote, before leaping in with knee-jerk reactions based on what you assume I wrote. Of course we don't have all the benefits of being a member of the single market, we left it, ye eejit!

UK/EU trade is governed by the agreement that both sides signed. I am merely stating the fact that the EU applies much more zealous checks to this small border than it does anywhere else, for no good reason. Perhaps we could do the same, create a special "EU passports" lane at Heathrow, with one border control officer that spends 10 minutes checking each and every passport, and then a customs officer that opens every suitcase. Think the EU response would be "It's OK, they left the club, they're entitled to check our things very thoroughly"? Somehow, I doubt it. No one has any special sense of entitlement, just an expectation that both sides will show a sense of pragmatic fair play so both sides can benefit.

Horrible EU, "bullying" poor little Britain, whose only crimes were to assume that it could have its cake and eat it, to assume that *they* would be the ones pushing the EU around and to blame the EU when it wasn't given everything its deluded sense of entitlement led it to expect.

The sad thing is that without this ludicrous sense of "Oh shit, if we don't make life difficult for the Brits, someone else might leave!" both the EU and the UK would gain. I believe the phrase is "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face".

Re: Too late

And Johnson's hollow, puffed-up bullshit doesn't work nearly as well when the intended target isn't the English nationalist audience his sub-John-Bull schtick was designed for.

With that sort of anti-Tory, xenophobic attitude it would seem likely that your mind is too closed to be changed by discussion. I'm not English, BTW.

So, we're blaming the EU for the fact that the UK government chose- of its own volition- to leave the single market that permitted frictionless trade when "the same standards & rules" were followed?

Clever attempt at propaganda, but that's not remotely close to what I said.

Sick of hearing excuses about how it's the EU's fault for being unreasonable when it was the UK government that willingly signed the Northern Ireland protocol, and when it was the UK government that wanted- and chose- to leave the single market "club" and no longer has the benefits of being in that club.

No longer has either the benefits or the disadvantages, that is why we left, of course and we have to live with the EU's reaction, however childish that reaction may be.

The EU could have treated the UK like other 3rd countries, and accepted that smooth trade is beneficial to both sides. They even signed a trade agreement that accepted that in principle. Unfortunately they then chose to carry out far more zealous checks on the Irish Sea border than they do on the other 41,000 miles of EU sea border, making movement of goods unnecessarily difficult. It's hard to see any other reason for this than an attempt to make post-Brexit relations so difficult that no other EU member is tempted to secede. It makes perfect sense from the EU position, of course, and is not remotely surprising, just disappointingly predictable.

Re: Inadequate approach to data adequacy

When was that?

The UK's original DP act was 1984 (under a Tory government).

The 1998 DPA implementation of the European Directive was so awful

Yes, the Blair government's attempt at implementing the new EU rules in 1998 seemed to be poorly worded and unclear in terms of the EU legislation.

eliminate the ambiguity resulting from divergent interpretations across member states.

Always a problem with EU law. In an attempt to create regulations that can be agreed to by an increasing number of very different countries, EU rules tend to become complex, ambiguous, and very hard to implement. There's always a fine line between using the ambiguities to make it acceptable at home, without stretching them so far the the European Comission gets upset. Labour failed.

I'm less familiar with the details of the 1998 act, when I was involved in DP it was around the time of the 1984 act, and then more recently with GDPR.

Still, the UK has generally been willing to try and strengthen DP rules above & beyond those in force in other European countries.

Re: Too late

the current government's attitude towards the NI agreement *they* themselves signed

Both the UK and EU signed it, unfortunately the EU has been particularly over-zealous about checking it. "Trust but verify" is all very well, but when 60% of the EU's external border checks were happing in 12 miles of Irish sea there was clearly some imbalance. The UK still follows the same standards & rules as it did when it was an EU member, there is no reason (apart from pique) for the EU to attempt to block goods shipments.

Fortunately both sides seem willing to continue discussions, hopefully with a pragmatic outcome.

Re: Inadequate approach to data adequacy

GB's new data protection legislation will look like based on previous form

That would be the "previous form" where the UK had some of the strongest DP rules in Europe, well ahead of EU minima and better than France and Germany?

Bing! Microsoft tests search box in the middle of Windows 11 desktop

Re: The more I read about Win 11....

My desktop system, which runs W10 and Debian very happily, keeps telling me that the hardware isn't adequate for W11. Long may it remain so...

Pentester pops open Tesla Model 3 using low-cost Bluetooth module

Re: Always-on Security Hole

What's wrong with having a key fob with a button you have to press?

Agreed. My new car came with keyless entry which must be disabled every time you lock the car if you don't want it. I never use it.

Its one saving grace is that the key is only active for a few seconds after it's been moved. If left sitting on a table it becomes quiescent. That way it works when you're carrying it to the car, but can't be used for an unattended relay, which is quite a neat solution.

Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests

Re: Try Scooters in Madrid

Surprisingly, a car driving behind a pedestrian is just as fast (slow) as a pedestrian.

The difference is that pedestrians tend to keep their slow pace to the spaces created for them (footpaths) and leave the roads for the faster cars. Cyclists, on the other hand, frequently ignore the cycle tracks created for them on the basis that "I pay my taxes too, mate", and toddle along at 15MPH in 30/40/50 MPH zones. A car driver doing that would be booked by the boys in blue for obstruction.

Confirmation dialog Groundhog Day: I click OK and it keeps coming back

Re: Error messages have sometimes improved a bit

Not always. There are still far too many occasions when I see a pop-up "An unexpected error has occurred", which is

a) irritating since it implies that there are expected errors.

b) downright annoying: if you don't tell me which fscking error, how can I fix it?

Re: Effect as a verb

And let's not get started on the American inability to distinguish between assure, ensure and insure.

OpenVMS on x86-64 reaches production status with v9.2

Re: I wonder how many people still remember how to use it?

I remember the first CDROM we ever received, it was MicroVAX documentation. One of the guys in the office had an early portable audio CD player and someone said "I wonder what happens if we try to play the CDROM". He put it in, put the headphones on, and pressed buttons. Nothing happened, he turned up the volume, and then...we heard the screech through the headphones at the other side of the room. He dropped the CD player in shock, and was not a happy bunny :-)