Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Working from a countryside plot nestled in a not-spot? Consultation opens on new rural mobile planning laws for bigger masts, wider coverage

Re: low population density

A sensible government would have mandated 100% coverage by all networks in the first place

That would never have been economically viable, so the operators would have asked for government money to do it. Either taxpayers would have had to pay, or the 98% with good coverage would have been paying for the 2% where almost nobody lives. After all, you can't get landline installation in 100% of the country either, at least not without paying extra for it.

Mandatory roaming in areas where only one operator exists would be a better solution.

God bless this mess: Study says UK's Christian beliefs had 'important' role in Brexit

Re: Ah, Those Protestants

I protest!

Re: I find myself saying...

You are the reason I don't live in the UK.

Nor do I, and I have direct personal experience of the issues shipping between EU and UK

All countries have almost identical import restrictions it's just you do not understand this.

Then why is it easier to import into the EU from the US than the UK? Logically, with the UK now as a 3rd country, it should be no different.

Of course, it may just be that the US exporter doesn't care about the rules, in which case the poster above will get a nasty surprise when the parcel shows up accompanied by a bill for taxes & duty.

Re: I find myself saying...

Erm, what new rules?

The ones the UK & EU agreed to, as part of the withdrawal agreement, and which apparently make it easier to import things into the EU from the US than from the UK. If that is the case they are daft, as noted.

Re: I find myself saying...

because Amazon (seller) will not ship the ones I want from the UK any more.

Which is daft, and just shows that the new rules are designed solely to punish the UK, not to benefit people in the EU.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics...

Not sure how "If you're still sore about Brexit ... blame theists" squares with "one in five [20%] Brits' faith made them more likely to vote Leave, while a quarter [25%] of voters' beliefs helped place them in the Remain camp."

Wouldn't that mean the religious types were more likely to vote Remain?

Bank of England ponders minting 'Britcoin' to sit alongside the Pound

Bank-backed cyber-currency seems to be pointless. Surely the main reasons people want Bitcoins are:

- You can create them using other people's resources, so they are nominally 'free' to obtain.

- They're still going crazily up in value w.r.t. real currency, so look like a good investment.

If we end up with a cyber-currency that is tied to sterling, and managed by a bank, both apparent advantages evaporate.

Home office setup with built-in boiling water tap for tea and coffee without getting up is a monument to deskcess

Re: Fridge

using pens and paper and whatnot.

This writing business, overrated if you ask me..

Pigeon fanciers in a flap over Brexit quarantine flock-up, seek exemption from EU laws

Re: Seriously?

relative risk of developing a blood clot that requires hospitalization is higher than the current risk of being hospitalized through Covid infection.

The risk of developing a clot as a result of COVID infection is 8-10 times higher than the risk of developing one as a result of an AstraZeneca injection, which itself is about the same as the risk of developing one though a long-haul flight, i.e. minimal.

Re: Seriously?

It's a bit like when a government ends up with a coalition which may or may not include the largest party. There are so many compromises that no one is happy with the result.

Allow me to present The EU.

Irish privacy watchdog sticks GDPR probe into Facebook after that online giveaway of 533 million profiles

Incoprrectly picky website validations

I've had similar problems trying to hire a car in France. I got my UK driving licence when I was 17½ , 17 being the minimum age in the UK, but in France you have to be 18 or older. When I complete an online car hire form with my DoB and license date it often insists that there is an error. Since the DoB is perhaps the more critical date I usually have to lie about when I got my licence.

satisfied with the date of the start of the Unix epoch .

I'd have tried something older, maybe 17-Nov-1858, just to see what broke.

To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user

To be fair, this plagues other things too.

Like VCRs (remember them?). A mechanism damp with condensation was pretty much a guarantee that the tape would get stuck to the spinning head and mangle everything. Later systems had detectors which wouldn't load a cassette if condensation was detected.

FBI deletes web shells from hundreds of compromised Microsoft Exchange servers before alerting admins

Re: Now you know you can blame the FBI if similar things go TITSUP in the future? *

act autonomously on your behalf

Government ≠ courts. The FBI got court permission, essentially a warrant, first. That's surely a good thing?

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

the one being that could over-rule the laws of physics...

If She wants to...

Re: Not necessarily.

I largely agree but your example is in a way not that good.

I rarely flew with both at the same time, though. Usually one or the other.

Re: Not necessarily.

I used to fly regularly with one of two adult female colleagues (each was "Ms"). One barely came to 50kg, the other wasn't much below 100kg. The whole idea of assigning a standard weight to each of the 200+ passengers on a plane and assuming it's sufficient to calculate any aspect of aircraft performance just seems daft.

Re: 11 stone..

It's been suggested, but apparently wind blowing over the wings causes too much change for it be useful, even when the plane is stationary at the gate.

Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99

Re: Bad greek

It's a bit of a revolving door, Quexit will be immediately followed by Kentry.

Re: forthright with outspoken opinions

The Queen, and Royal Family, are only meant to be figure heads for the country. For tourism apparently (as that seems to be the go to excuse for still having them).

Not even remotely true, although it's the trite excuse trotted out by republicans who don't actually understand how a constitutional Monarchy works. The Monarch is the constitutional backstop against a tyrannical parliament, just as parliament is the backstop against a tyrannical King/Queen. Since Britain is generally a reasonable and democratic society we've not needed those backstops for a few centuries, but that's what emergency powers are for, only for use in emergencies.

What would you prefer, a US-style republic that can elect someone like Trump, and where people then insist on having guns to protect themselves against a tyrannical government? Not for me, thanks.

In the meantime we make far more money out of the Royals than they cost, even without considering intangibles like tourism, so it's not like they're an inconvenience. Just ignore them if you don't like them, and hope we never need really them.

Re: No TV

Given how many times in one day Sky News manages to run other trivial stories, I'd think a defunct vacuum cleaner would have their news desk in raptures. Especially if it's a Dyson, with a possible Brexit angle.

What's this about a muon experiment potentially upending Standard Model of physics? We speak to one of the scientists involved

Re: Not a scientist

A croque muonsieur?

CERN boffins zap antimatter with ultraviolet lasers in the hope of revealing the secret symmetry of the universe

Sounds like a right bugger to me.

Their 'next job could be in cyber': UK Cyber Security Council launches itself by pointing world+dog to domain it doesn't own

Double bluff

If they react quickly enough maybe they could spin it as a test, to show who's paying attention to cyber security?

A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do?

Re: A Cunning Plan

Or Prestel? Minitel really took off because they were offered free as replacements for phone books. Add that to the inevitable porn services that were soon added (chat lines, mostly implemented by 'bots) and it was enough to kick start the whole process. BT tried to sell Prestel as a premium service, but could never satisfactorily answer the "what would I use it for?" question.

Re: Times change

Physical connectivity wouldn't have been a problem for the company I worked at, but FTP from a VAX running VMS 2.1 would have been trickier. We had external X.25 access, IIRC, and did eventually get a gateway to the Internet a few years later, but didn't have it back then. Magtape was easier.

Times change

In the early 80s we imported the SPICE simulation system from the US to the UK, on magtape. At the time there was duty & tax to be paid on the import of the physical medium, but no mention of it for the software, the rules hadn't caught up with valuable intangibles like programs. I had the job of copying the software to a new tape, so that the original could be re-exported within the 2-3 week window which meant we had nothing to pay.

If you can't log into Azure, Teams or Xbox Live right now: Microsoft cloud services in worldwide outage

Re: CURRENT STATUS: Microsoft rerouted traffic to our resilient DNS capabilities

when did we upgrade from the 386's??

When we had to move to Windows XP

Easily distracted by too many apps, too many meetings, and too much asparagus

Re: April fool video

They're probably just trying to make up for the losses on the IPO...

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

Re: ran out of ram

Did that with a 50-pin D-type on a printer once. Only once.

I've got the power! Or have I? Uninterruptible Phone-disposal Stuffup

Buses

a bus to take us to the aircraft. Which it did. On a bone-crunching 90-minute road-trip

I remember getting a BA flight from Ottawa to London which had a connection in Montreal. The Ottawa-Montreal leg was a 2-hour bus journey, which had a flight number (and for which I got airmiles!).

Re: I love the US airports that brand themselves with the name of a city 100 miles away

Or like "Paris Vatry", beloved of Aer O'Flot, which is halfway between Reims and Troyes, and a good 100miles from Paris.

Wi-Fi devices set to become object sensors by 2024 under planned 802.11bf standard

Re: Security and privacy still left to fix (if ever)

What I meant was that I've seen too many projects where people have prototyped a neat idea, and then someone said "we should add some security", at which point they realise they should have designed it completely differently from the start. By that stage it's often too late, especially for "research" projects which are put forward as a proof-of-concepts, but somehow end up being shipped...

They may not have all the security & privacy in at the get-go, but they should at least think about what it might mean.

Re: Security and privacy still left to fix (if ever)

Typical of researchers, they play with the fun bits then dump it over the wall for someone else to do the due diligence for security etc. Commercial interests pick it up & decide that security is too expensive, and privacy gets in their way. Just like the Internet as a whole.

Perhaps the researchers might like to think about including security & privacy right from the start, sometime?

Sitting comfortably? Then it's probably time to patch, as critical flaw uncovered in npm's netmask package

And then not testing it.

splitting a string based on '.' characters is something that would probably take me less time to write than opening up a web browser

Which would seem to be exactly the same assumption made by the author of this package, who also failed completely to recognize that this isn't a simple case of splitting a string based on dots, but is a case of parsing an IPv4 address. The components of an IPv4 address are not simple strings nor necessarily decimal numbers.

The silicon supply chain crunch is worrying. Now comes a critical concern: A coffee shortage

Surely self-sufficiency would mean that you grew your own beans.

And keep your own civets for the really expensive stuff?

Re: REM

Yes, perhaps; but what do computer programmers refer?

Java?

ESA gives UK space an £8.5m Boost: Rocketeers eye a 2022 launch

Re: "150kg to low earth orbit"

They've extended the DLR to space? Can I still use my Oyster card?

FreeBSD 13.0 to ship without WireGuard support as dev steps in to fix 'grave issues' with initial implementation

Re: I was about to

You're conflating "things that are hard to do in a kernel" and "things that C doesn't do well".

Any good kernel implementation will have kernel memory allocation/free functions that are safe to use, and just because a concept has been added to a new language to hide such mechanisms doesn't necessarily mean it's usable in kernel mode. If the designers of the language support system chose to provide a kernel-safe implementation of the feature, you can use it, but not otherwise. The same applies to any language, including C.

Kernel code, by its nature, often needs to directly access hardware and/or exact memory locations. The kind of languages that are designed to hold the programmers hand and hide such hardware features tend to make that difficult, and have to provide "special" features to bypass their inherent protections. Those can also create problems when used incorrectly.

Re: re: Someone will be along in a moment to blame C for all that, by the way.

If it's so difficult to write C well

It isn't. Problems like:

random sleeps added to "fix" race conditions, validation functions that just returned true, catastrophic cryptographic vulnerabilities, whole parts of the protocol unimplemented, kernel panics, security bypasses, overflows, random printf statements deep in crypto code

are just bad coding, no matter what the language. "sleeps to fix race conditions" FFS? What sort of crappy junior-school coder thinks that's a solution?

the most spectacular buffer overflows

OK, that's easy to do in C if you're not paying attention, but there are functions you can use to avoid it, and test tools to catch it.

OVH flames scorched cloud customers with pledge to build data centre fire simulation lab

Re: 20x7

It's France, so 20 days a month, 7 months a year. The rest is vacation time.

From Maidenhead to Morocco: In a change to the scheduled programming, we bring you The On Call of Dreams

Re: Not quite a straightforward bribe

It's very badly named, since it doesn't actually permit anything. You are still legally driving using your national license, under the rules of one of the Vienna Conventions on Road Traffic. The IDP is really just a document declaring in various languages that you have a valid license number xxxx from country yyyy, and you have to present both together. The main use of an IDP is when the person asking for your national license can't read whatever language it's written in.

Move aside, Technoking: All hail the Sweat Master and his many inspirational job titles

Re: Job titles!

I remember being given a business card from someone that claimed he was a "Principle Engineer", which I thought could be an interesting job if true.

Where did the water go on Mars? Maybe it's right under our noses: Up to 99% may still be in planet's crust

Re: Not really surprising

Redirecting comets from the Kuiper belt to hit Venus will contribute to both.

What do you mean "metric"? I'm sure it said miles. So where's it going, then? What, THAT New York? Oh f***

OVH says burned data centre’s UPS, batteries, fuses in the hands of insurers and police

if you're billed a "level" then you tend to use that level regardess (all you can eat conundrum). That's why most places meter your kWh

France meters kWh, it's the "standing charge" (In Euros, not Coulombs!) which varies with the agreed level. If you order a 6kW connection you'll pay less, but run the risk that it will trip if you boil a kettle at the same time as the oven & hot water heater are on. They even have special circuit breakers that can be set to the pre-arranged limit and will shed less important loads to stay under it.

Re: UPS in the data centre?

They'd have had to dig a long way down, there was a tunnel tall enough to walk through, for maintenance access.

UPS in the data centre?

I'm surprised that the UPSes were in the same building as the servers. My previous office had UPSes, batteries & generators in a separate power house across the car park. If it had burned the office/data centre would have been OK.

Re: “Some customers do not understand what they bought”

Reminds me of the problem trying to work out which bulb in the Christmas lights has gone, and that was only for 40 of them :-)

Desperate Nominet chairman claims member vote to fire him would spark British government intervention

a desperate last-minute attempt to keep his job

Hasn't he worked out by now that it would be better for his future career if he found a face-saving way to resign, rather than wait until he's ignominiously kicked out?