Posts by Tridac 193 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Oct 2011
Spent a lot of time on 6502 assembler for embedded work, and the indirect via page zero addressng modes were very powerful, if you knew how to use them. Even shelled out on the Manx C compiler, but the code density was dire. No worse than Keil C for the 8051 series, which produced pages of code for just hello world. Only so much that can be done with an 8 bit architecture.
Oxford City Council used that sort of law to demand inspection of garages and outbuildings, in case they were being used for unauthorised bedrooms. They flew drones over the ctty, with IR cameras, to detect the heat signatures of outbuildings and garages. Always kit on 24 x 7 here, and got a letter , demanding to inspect the garage. Started with Bliar, where everyone is a criminal until proven guilty. Scum, the lot of them.
More scarmongering BS from the climate alarmists. Still emerging from the last mini ice age, we expect the temperature to rise a liitle, for the benefit of the majority of humanity. Absolute arrogant hubris to think we could do anything about it anyway. Expect to read this rubbish if the Guardian, not here.
From government docs: Load factor (nameplate vs actual averaged over one year), is rarely any better than 2-3% for solar and 12-14% for wind. Considering the amount of good farmland going to solar, you could argue that it's poor investment. Typicasl home soalr in the uk takes 10-20 years just to break even on the capital cost. Have thought about this many times and am in favour, but the economics just don't make sense. Might be great in Southern Spain, but not in Northern Europe.
Vxworks, remember that and a course from around 1995, arm and a leg licensing at the time.. Quite good for it'e time and did have a tcp/ip stack. But, is there a free version for non commercial use ?. Not much use otherwise. Loads of other open source rtos now, Microcos, being another.
Have been running FreeBSD for years now, both on X86 and Sparc. I put it in the same class as Solaris, in terms of functionality and reliability, with uptimes of years. ZFS an install option. Very professional and makes Linux, with it's systemd trainwreck and other bloatware, look like amateur hour. Also run it on a public ntp server, with current uptime of over three years, though the systems are all on a 4 hour backup ups. Can get a basic setup done in around 20 minutes, with a handful of package installs to get a desktop. It just works, and the internals handbooks are excellent. .
Had a look at some of the systemd code at github. One module pulls in nearly 50 header files and the file is ~900 lines of code. Almost no comments and would never pass muster for clients i've done work for. And, where are all the design docs, that describe each module, what it does, how it works and where it fits in the heirarchy. Very unprofessional in design and coding standard terms. Has ruled out Linux for any serious work here. How can any of it be truly verified ?. Too much money, corporate interest and not enough software engineering.
Still have Photoshop 7 on the machine, for the odd times that I need image editing, but suspect that gimp would do just as well. There are others worth looking at, such as darktable, which I thought truly excellent when I last looked at it. Both open source, free, with regular updates
Who needs companies like adobe, rent seeking spivs with cancellation fees an outrage to natural justice. Tell them to spin on it...
The only way to stop this happening again is to make it a requirement that all kernel related updates should be submitted to uSoft for testing and verification, before inclusion into production systems. Otherwise, how can they ever guarantee that the system is robust ?. Of course, this would cost money, but in a zero trust environment, all third party vendors must must be considered suspect, until proven otherwise....
Null pointer (illegal memory address) access should be trapped by the cpu, often with hardware interrupt posted to the OS. It shold never bring whole OS down, this is not 1985. Such a fundamental requirement in OS design, it's amazing that it wasn't handled properly. Still, this is windows...
Been using zfs right from the early Solaris 10 release. FreeBSD for several years now, which has zfs and lightweight virtualisation (jails) out of the box and looks like it was modelled on the Solaris ideas. Always chose lts versions for initial install. Once a system is stable, all the all the required packages etc, never update anything, but the machines are on a well secured subnet, with any windows rubbsih on a separate subnet on its own. Separate hardware interface for each subnet. Never had a virus or successfull attack in over two decades now. Would never even consider windows for server work, or anything critical to the business. More trouble than it's worth...
Systemd, the reason I dumped Linux for anything serious. Offends every software engineering principle. If you look at the sources, it's a real mess of a trainwreck. Looked the one module, network.c, from memory and it's a thousands of lines of C module, pulling in upards of 100 header files. Absolute garbage, and big business depends on this ?. Originally from a Solaris and VMS environment, when an os was written by engineers, for engineers. FreeBSD for several years now, and never a serious issue at all.
When you consider that crowdshite is an enterprise class employee spyware program, looks lie karma finally caught up with them. Serves them right, hit hard in the pocket, is the only thing they understand...
Sense of Schadenfreude here, in that here we have an enterprise class employee spyware program. An external third party app effectively given root acces to the os kernel, a trainwreck waiting to happen. A wide open attack surface, just waitng for some hacker to find a way in, and you have to ask, is this some very subtle cyber attack ?.
Auto updates enabled and probably autoruns as well. Total lack of change control discipline, sloppy update verification at os level, so what does anyone expect ?. Total idiots, the lot of them...
While it would be difficult and expensive to physically build a printer at scale for mass production, all current printers really are just embedded system devices with some printer specific io and hardware capability. The LJ2, for example, used a MC68000 processor. If you know what processor family they are using, an astute embedded systems engineer should be able to reverse engineer the frimware. There are any number of firmware hacks for all manner of products out there now, many to get round manufacturer lockin. One of which, concidentally, is one to control fan speed on Proliants to get round the full fan speed problem, with none HP branded hard drives. Did it different way here for a DL380 last year...
Some might, but colour lasers are not that expensive now second user. I paid around 1500 for a LJ2 new, around 1987 and that lasted nearly twenty years. Now, an ancient LJ5000, networked, that will still print perfect A3 for schematic cad, and A4. A Dell all in one colour in the house for the odd occasion that a colour print is needed, but gave up on inkjet decades ago. Far more trouble than they are worth...
Proliants always were rock solid but they were originally a Compaq product, one of the main reasons why HP bought the company.. Agree about the Gen 8, rock solid workhorses, and a very complete spec out of the box. Can be fussy about sas drives, fans full speed with non HP badged types, but there are workarounds for that Have yet to try Gen 9 or 10, but doubt if they are any better.
Have a home lab full of HP test gear. Fixable if it goes wrong and just refuses to die. The Agilent name change days were still pretty good, but the new Keysight won't even deal with you unless you can prove you are a company, one man businesses / consultancies excluded. Quite a bit of talk about that on the EEV Blog site, but still more than enough 2nd user kit to get round that. The older stuff had copious manuals, full schemtics for servicing, but the modern kit is useless in that respect and often runs Windows (Yuk) under the skin. How the mighty have fallen...
Never seen the need to use Freenas or any other such dedicated system like that. Takes about 20-30 minutes to install FreeBSD and the usual tweaks, setup ntp etc, then run NFS and Samba for the server functions. Updates are trivial and the system is simple to maintain otherwise. So, why would I need Frenas etc ?...
Have an N54l here for archive backup. Removed the blanking plate for the cdrom, bit of metal bashing. Fitted a cdrom sized supermicro 4 x 2.5 sas disk enclosure, a pcie sas controller and have 3 x 3.84 Tb ssds in a zfs pool + 1 x bsckup spare. The original 3.5" drive bays hava adapter plates fir the 2.5 FreeBSD system disk, mirrored pair.. Run nfs server from that and typically use rsync scripts to backup the main lab server, and other machines. Has 2 x 8Gb sticks and did tune the zfs memory usage parameters...
I've been listening to some of the inquiry session, in detail (must have too much time on hands these days), and there were Fujitsu technical people saying that there were problems with the systems early on, (data reliability is endemic) and that the Post Office were warned about it, but continued to prosecute anyway. No project of that complexity is ever bug free, especially early on and the Post Office should have been aware of that and and dealt accordingly, especially the trainwreck at the changeover from the early, to later horizon system. Corporate group think and a culture of deference also seems to have payed its part at Fujitsu, but a lack of true leadership and transparency are the real culprits in this story...
Still have XP on a couple of old laptops, mainly used things like network monitoring, or apps for old stuff like eprom programmers. Windows 7 is quite usable, but have been using windows server for desktop here for years. Starting with server 2003, (aka XP), currently on ws2012, (~windows 8) with the "classic shell" plugin added, for customisation. Far better system management tools and just about everything is disabled as a default. Even has an nfs client / server included which is essential in a unix shop. Very reliable, uptimes of months if need be, and no ms nanny state...
If they phone home, they can also download code to probe the network they are connected to. Initial firmware may be innocent and verifyable by agencies, but dynamic update capability can never be completely covered. Same with router or any other network based kit. Only way to be sure is to ban all kit from suspect countries...
Correct. To verify just one set of firmware against supplied source code would be very time consuming, but possible, but you would need build info, complier settings etc. Updates a few a year for several different pieces of kit would be very difficult, if not impossible in terms of manpower. Iirc, Nokia also built 5G kit, so not just stuck with US built, and probably others as well. Well documented theft of IP, firmware and complete designs means some players are not playing by the rules and we should not be dealing with them...
Remote bricking is a bit tenuous, as the tractor would need either a hardware network connector, usb or wifi to get a network address via dhcp. Only then could it respond to external commands and the commanding node would need to know the target address. For security reasons, it's probably programmed at the factory to only respond to a known address dhcp server at the local dealer. If it can't be connected to the web, it can't easily be bricked, if at all. Sounds liike a load of marketing fud to me...
Only problem with providing a pots socket in the router is that it will need a 50 volt supply for the line and also a 13Hz, whatever ring generator, if older style bell ring phones are to be supported Just an engineering problem, but will need a bigger wall wart to power it. Perhaps that's why they haven't done it already ?...
I had a small apc smart ups which used a 7ah 12v battery, but fitted an connector and run that to a 28ah battery externally.The router and a couple of switches are probably not more than a dozen watts / va, so should keeo the system up for at least 10 hours. Greatest power cut we have had here in decades is about 4 hours, once, so should be ok so long as the street cabinet stays powered up. Lab has it's own ups, good for few hours, which should cover it.
It may indeed be a problem for emergency service access, even though most have at least on mobile these days. I wonder if BT have thought much about that, or even at all ?...
Have bt business, fixed ip and a pots line which works well, but no pots socket on the router, which seems an obvious thing to do for a seamless transition. Let BT worry about how that gets integrated into their digital system. Should not have to worry about anything voip, just expect pots it to plug in and play...
We already have contention with cable or other internet services, with charges scaled to speed. So long as the total system bandwidth is adequate, contention should not cause any more problem than that with cable. Waving arms around is not fact. Radio is cheaper than cable for installation and upkeep, so however it's done, 5G, satelite, whatever, it is the long term future. Cable TV was quite popular in uk in the 1950's, right :-)...
So who paid them for that survey ?. Hype or not, even if only partly successful, the more competition there is in broadband provision the better. Have cable here in Oxford, with 4g auto backup from BT, but have been experimenting with Netgear 4g modems / sim card as well, just to evaluate the tech. As for bandwidth, don't use streaming services and what is there already is more than enough. Good chance of success for a project like that and there are few who have the breadth of vision, resources and drive to take on such a project. Can still remember 56k and lower dial up modems years ago, glacial, but got the job done...
If we are talking about a user node, middle or nowhere, don't know where you get 100 watts from ?. A receiver and associated computing could be done for 20 watts or less, a single solar panel. How do you think portable sat phones work, same technology, a handful if watts ?...
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