Posts by BinkyTheMagicPaperclip

Millennium Buggery: When things that shouldn't be shut down, shut down

You should never change parameters on a remote system unless there's someone local who can restart it or out of band remote control. Even if it's tested, it will work only 99 times out of 100.

Did a fairly simple change to a server. Told it to reboot, and waited, and waited... Drove half an hour into the office only to see a prompt that hadn't appeared before complaining about something trivial about SCSI. After that, made sure the DRAC card was working. The server never produced the warning again.

2018 ain't done yet... Amazon sent Alexa recordings of man and girlfriend to stranger

Re: Be Pure, Be Vigilant, Behave

Wondered why the reference sounded different than I thought - because it's a reference to a comic, not a book.

I'm personally of the opinion than Alexa and others are doubleplus ungood

On the first day of Christmas, Microsoft gave to me... an emergency out-of-band security patch for IE

You may be amused/horrified to know that Lynx is no longer in OpenBSD base (should be in ports though).

The reason for this is that the OpenBSD team found too many security holes.

FTP in OpenBSD is capable of fetching via HTTP/HTTPS though.

Pork pulled: Plug jerked out of beacon of bacon delight

Re: Mixed feelings

Either that, or students leave, but always with difficulty walking.

LG's beer-making bot singlehandedly sucks all fun, boffinry from home brewing

Re: To brew American beer.....

It's APA - American Pale Ale, using US hops. I'm surprised its taken this long to be the next big thing in beer, I was expecting it to hit mass market ages ago.

Mind, the interpretation of IPA is becoming a tad flexible too.

Price is key

I don't mind the quantity, if I drink at home it's usually one pint with food, so eight pints over two weeks isn't that far out there.

Pricing is more critical, and probably uneconomic. It's possible to get a reasonable beer for £1.50 from the supermarket, and I bet this beer isn't amazing. The pods probably won't be cheap..

I'd consider buying one if the payback period was under two years, so maximum of around the 600 pound mark including enough pods for two years. After that it saves money. As someone who actually brews also indicated above, that has to be ready to drink, no point in more faffing with this market.

Homebrewing has its attractions, I've tried home brewed beer from friends, but the quantity produced is huge! Most of my drinking is with friends out of the house.

I also worked out just how much I spend on alcohol each year, when calculating how much I need to save for a pension. Alcohol is one of the major expenses, and that's not drinking to excess.

Doom: The FPS that wowed players, gummed up servers, and enraged admins

Re: Quake vs Doom

You're not wrong, although Quake 2 is the one that really drove accelerator sales as it wouldn't work without one. Comparatively few people downloaded GLQuake, Tomb Raider probably did more on that behalf as it was re-released and bundled with various cards that supported it (from Glide through to S3)

ID's id Tech engines have been pretty consistently popular, although id Tech 3 is probably the most popular one.

Brilliant

First time I played it was co-op at university. We all got to the end of the first shareware episode and screamed as the Barons of Hell ripped us to shreds.

Playing it again through Brutal Doom reveals that the level design is still decent, and its lasted well. Quake and Quake 2 were decent at the time, but have aged a bit.

The mods were outstanding, I'm not going to forget the Death Star total conversion in a hurry.

Of course, then Dark Forces went and did Star Wars far better, and its sequel, Jedi Knight, was better than DOOM in so many ways. However, DOOM pulled all the components together first.

Ecuador says 'yes' to Assange 'freedom' deal, but Julian says 'nyet'

Re: Yes, but you've omitted the most important bit...

There's some indication on the twitter responses that the cat has moved and is now free of Assange. Hurrah!

College PRIMOS prankster wreaks havoc with sysadmin manuals

Re: Value added installer

My favourite copy progress bar was the OS/2 Warp 4 installation bar, part way through the installation the bar went *backwards*.

Warp 4 was thrown together in a relatively short time. It showed, even if it was an improvement over the multitude of Warp 3 versions.

Expired cert... Really? #O2down meltdown shows we should fear bungles and bugs more than hackers

Mandated roaming for critical services is not a bad idea

What is a poor idea is roaming everyone off a failed network, and not having a two tier service, as fixed line installations do.

It's probably forgotten more often these days that in the case of widespread telephone line disruption the average punter will be disconnected, and essential users (doctors, for instance) remain contactable.

I'd be surprised if this isn't part of the mobile networks, and if not, it needs to be.

So, in the event of a major mobile network outage, mountain rescue retain their access (they generally use 2G/pagers for alerts, although they may have radios too), bus availability doesn't as there (should be) a timetable printed on the bus shelter.

You can't work this without a two tier service, because ultimately businesses will work round unreliable networks by implementing their own multi network/SIM solutions.

Total Inability To Support User Phones: O2 fries, burning data for 32 million Brits

Re: Do people really need reminding buses are still running?

My heart bleeds. Chance would be a fine thing for decent bus prediction times Oop North. Especially late on Saturdays some buses just choose not to turn up and I have to revert to taking the slow way home. I would take a train, but the RMT are on strike every Saturday.

Intel eggheads put bits in a spin to try to revive Moore's law

Re: Amazing stuff

That's the dumb high level overview.

Each EU member has input in and voting rights on EU law. The UK has used its power of veto many times.

Fundamentally there are 28 (27 soon..) EU countries which means politics via consensus and compromise. It's a matter of opinion whether consensus or majority rule is the better method of governing.

There are some exceptions, but by and large the people that argue about 'laws from Brussels' :

Can't actually name any laws that are unfair

(except possibly for untrue stories such as passport colour being enforced)

Don't realise that the UK happily voted yes to this law

In some cases where it's a law they wanted passed, don't realise it's the UK which vetoed this law (i.e. steel import tarrifs)

For the vanishingly small number of cases where they can actually name a law the EU passed that the UK only grudgingly voted yes to, they have no concept that being part of a large trading block does involve - tradeoffs.

The fundamental rule of all politics is : you don't get everything you want, and you have to choose the least worst choice.

Sysadmin’s plan to manage system config changes backfires spectacularly

Re: Why use a revision control system?

It's probably overkill for standard config files. If, however, it's a shell script, firewall configuration, or other fairly complex file than a revision control system could be an advantage.

Support whizz 'fixes' screeching laptop with a single click... by closing 'malware-y' browser tab

Re: For old times' sake

Locoscript was its own bootable program; it wasn't implemented on CP/M.

CP/M Plus did come with the PCW, and was pretty decent.

Fantastic machines, the first I really cut my teeth on. Nowhere near as flexible as a PC, but perfectly suited to its given purpose, and an awful lot cheaper.

It was a lit CeBIT see, got teeny weeny, world's biggest tech show yearly party... closed its German fest's doors yesterday

Re: English..

You only wish you're too old. Timmy Mallett. You may have managed to forget them after years of intense therapy.

They also charted once with 'It was an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini (That she wore for the first time today. oh yeah)'

Huawei MateBook Pro X: PC makers look out, the phone guys are here

Too slim

Yes, it looks shiny, but for a business laptop make it thicker and at the very least stick in a network port. Make the battery swapable, preferably hot swapable.

Stick in HDMI or display port.

Two USB-C is 'good'? Not on this planet it isn't. Why has the world moved from the days of yore where you'd use a PCMCIA NIC with a huge RJ45/coax connector to network your laptop, through sensible days of built in ports, back to a dongle for absolutely everything.

Shocker: UK smart meter rollout is crap, late and £500m over budget

3G is not available everywhere. I have fibre. Half a mile from my house there's some mobile not spots where you're lucky to get Edge connectivity.

Linux kernel Spectre V2 defense fingered for massively slowing down unlucky apps on Intel Hyper-Thread CPUs

Cheers for the OpenBSD shoutout

Although the security situation in OpenBSD is evolving. The current situation, unless they've changed it again in a snapshot recently, is that by default hyperthreading is disabled by not scheduling tasks against a hyperthreaded instance.

Therefore, if you run top and kick off a multi process compile on a pair of 8 core CPUs with hyperthreading, top will display all 32 'cores' but only show activity on 16 of them.

The real danger is that the number of potential exploits is rapidly multiplying. Whilst some of the issues found are difficult to leverage, I wouldn't put money on this being the case for all future design choices that can be taken advantage of.

Six critical systems, four months to Brexit – and no completed testing

Re: Time running out

The reason we're not having another referendum, apart from timing, is that it wouldn't change anything.

Yes, opinion has swung towards remain, but if you *actually look* at the polls, the difference still isn't much outside the margin of error, just as it was originally.

There are entrenched positions, and British society is fractured down the middle. This will take generations to fix. The only way to swing opinion is for things to considerably worsen (unless you're on crack and think there will be a notable improvement).

Of course I haven't read the 550 page agreement, but from what I can see it isn't an appalling option given the alternatives (obviously I'd prefer Brexit to be cancelled). Once (if) the agreement comes into effect the population will discover the alternatives are so staggeringly awful we'll go back into the EU. Queenie will probably have popped her clogs by then, so Charlie will have to feature on the UK Euro.

Feck knows what will happen, though, as all the parties are still playing politics. Corbyn doesn't like Europe, and Labour are happy to sit back and let the country (more specifically the Tories) burn so they have a chance at power. Anna Soubry suggested a Government of National Unity to handle Brexit, and I agree - this is appallingly obvious and should have been started two years ago.

Personally I'd implement a law that if any politician puts party or self interest before country they'd be prosecuted. That'd stick Boris, Gove, Raab, IDS, Cameron and several others in the clink. Can't see a downside personally.

Scumbag who phoned in a Call of Duty 'swatting' that ended in death pleads guilty to dozens of criminal charges

Re: The word they're looking for is 'scapegoat'

Oh I don't know. Collective insanity is still insanity. You're just arguing over impact.

Re: The word they're looking for is 'scapegoat'

Get it right Michael, our government doesn't allow us to carry an unconcealed knife either. It's illegal to carry fixed blade knives over a certain length, and if you do end up in a fight with a knife within legal limits I wouldn't fancy your changes of avoiding prosecution.

I for one am completely happy with this. It's amazing how the US manages to stuff its collective fingers in its ears. Everyone knows the US has

A gun problem

Endemic and institutional racism

..amongst many other flaws..

However, do keep it up, you've managed to make the Little Englanders in Britain look good by comparison. Quite a feat considering the clusterfucks our country are experiencing at the moment.

My hoard of obsolete hardware might be useful… one day

Re: Amstrad 1640 with EGA

The drive belt is the usual failure on a PCW with 3" drives - they can be bought for a few quid from ebay or other places. Otherwise it should be fine.

Re: For old SCSI, find a musician

If you want to use an old sampler/synth and the floppy drive has died, I can thoroughly recommend the HxC floppy to SD card emulator : https://hxc2001.com/.

Alternatively on the cheaper end, buy a Gotex emulator followed by the revised HxC firmware.

For narrow scsi, there's SCSI2SD. Above that, there's Acard, at a considerably higher price.

Selling/buying retro stuff

Can I encourage everyone here to use places like amibay.com, or if you want to give it away, vogons.org, if ebay isn't a viable alternative.

You'd be surprised at what still sells.

Re: The Divorce Induced Clearout.

The Tapwave Zodiac II is a deeply lovely machine, still occasionally fire it up, bought one when Morgan Computers was selling them off cheap. It'll be considerably better than the Spectrum Vega I bet

Re: Old Stuff

Actually, yes, I am impressed by those. The 100CT packs a fair bit of power for a portable DOS machine (and other old OS) in a small space. The next best thing to that is an old Thinkpad with a dock for an ISA card.

Re: Hmmm. Maybe it is time time to..

Depends what you need them for. IDE drives are useful for particularly old systems where 'large' drives aren't supported, and an IDE to SATA converter isn't appropriate. In those cases either a Disk On Module (DOM) or IDE to compact flash (with a 2-4GB CF) is a decent idea, but DOMs can be pricey.

However, look into the prices of SCSI to IDE/SATA converters and prepare to wince.

Moderately sized hard drives (100GB upwards) are useful in hot swap bays for trial operating system installations, provided they're fast enough.

Re: I feel the need...

I would advise organising everything properly. I historically haven't done that, and if you let things get into a state it takes a colossal amount of work to sort things again.

If you keep buying things, you then find you have a large number of e.g. DVI to VGA converters (which I've then used, attaching multiple old systems to a KVM)

I have so much old stuff..

Most recently I re-used a mini PCI card to provide a second hand firewall off ebay with wireless access point capability (buying a new PCEngines firewall is a tad pricey..)

I keep a load of old systems to play old games and fiddle around with multi-platform Unix. One of my best purchases was two SGI O2 boxes off ebay for a tenner each(!). I've thrown very little away, and a surprising amount of it has been useful. An old generic ISA graphics card worked in a pentium 3 system that had faulty onboard graphics, and was used as my firewall before I bought the embedded device.

SCSI that works in everything from PowerMacs to PC kit (CDRW, tape, hard drives). Firewire for newer Macs, PCs, and Thinkpads. Token Ring ISA cards and an MAU. A 10Mb hub with coax connection. I can probably bin the Token Ring.

There's a minority of completely useless stuff. The ISDN router can go, the Sparcstation 20 is too loud, hot, slow, and power hungry to bother with these days. The couple of Microchannel and Sun cards of some type, and there's nothing to plug them into.

Also, as this is running in a home environment, noise is a factor.

The CRTs are alive for now, but when they sadly die I suspect they'll be replaced by something 1440p TFT.

They key has to be that it doesn't take up too much time, and there's at least one or two fully working systems you don't fiddle with.

Bruce Schneier: You want real IoT security? Have Uncle Sam start putting boots to asses

5-7 years - well as mentioned elsewhere it's actually a lot longer. My secondary computer is ten years old, the primary uses six year old technology. I'm not dropping upwards of four grand on a new dual CPU system when second hand CPUs are a fraction of the price and do a decent job (things such as the motherboard I bought new).

Not to mention : mobile phones. Supported for up to three years. Capable of working for far beyond that.

Townsfolk left deeply unsatisfied by Bury St Edmunds' 'twig' of a Christmas tree

Plant one..

My town decided one year to stop buying trees and permanently plant one on a roundabout. It was a bit unimpressive for the first couple of years, but has grown nicely now.

This just in: What? No, I can't believe it. The 2018 MacBook Air still a huge pain to have repaired

Re: Mac Mini 2018

Yes, but storage is still usually the cheapest and easiest way to upgrade and prolong a system.

Still, given that there's only one internal disk, it'd need at least an external mirrored array to be vaguely worthy of being called a server.

$900 is a fair whack of cash. Higher end Dell and Lenovo laptops can be configured with Linux.

Failing that, I would have thought you could get a Linux support shop to set up Linux as you wish for somewhat less than $900.

Premiere Pro bug ate my videos! Bloke sues Adobe after greedy 'clean cache' wipes files

Re: Biz math

RAID 5 is insufficient for that quantity of data. The time a RAID array is under greatest risk (ok, apart from temperature extremes) is when stressed due to a rebuild, and the time to rebuild with a 10TB disk will be considerable.

So far I've only had RAID 5 die due to dual disk failure once (on small disks), but once was enough.

A SOHO device may be limited to two to three bays, so a single disk failure is all that can be managed, but for particularly valuable data something more enterprise is needed. Given the guy's work depends on his storage I'd be inclined to say he should be buying a managed service where they supply the hardware, monitor it, and automatically dispatch spare drives on drive failure.

Uncle Sam, D-Link told to battle in court over claims of shoddy device security: Judge snubs summary judgment bids

D-link products are a bit shit. News at 11.

They've been shit for decades. Normally the only time you buy D-link is when it's a very lightly re-branded piece of kit that's known to be decent, and that if it features firmware, can be updated directly from the manufacturer.

BlackBerry KEY2 LE: The first budget Android QWERTY for years

Re: Nope

Not really. There are several usage models for Blackberry.

There's the whole secure device, certificate of trust model wanted by some businesses and individuals.

Then there's 'I want an Android device with a keyboard'. I don't care about the secure kernel, and wish I could root the device to ensure continued updates, and the ability to do things such as extended ad blocking, etc.

It's a bonus to have the Hub software, and the keyboard/soft keyboard are both great. DTEK is a chocolate teapot, however.

Re: Considering there's the Gemini

The Gemini is a PDA/mini computer, not a phone. A phone is something you can hold in one hand.

With the Blackberry phones you can operate them one handed (although typing one handed on a Priv is very awkward). You have a choice of swiping, or typing (which is better with two hands).

The landscape Xperia Pro and the Droid phones I had previously featured a keyboard that slid out from under the screen.

Pick up one handed, swipe a bit, possibly use the keyboard using your second hand, return to one handed use, put it down closing the keyboard with a single hand. If it can't do that, it's a failure as a keyboard phone.

It's also possible to switch a landscape Android phone to portrait mode with the keyboard closed, which you might want to do for portrait optimised/poorly developed Android apps. That's going to look exceedingly silly with a Gemini, if it's even possible.

Re: Price is still not anywhere near "work phone" bracket

You're looking at the KEY2, not the KEY2 LE

Re: Close but no cigar

Yep. I loved my Sony Ericcson Xperia Pro, and then a EU converted Motorola after that. I'd still be using them if they had enough power.

As it is, I'm still on my (insecure, because Blackberry stopped issuing updates) Priv, and trying to decide whether to buy a KEY2 (too expensive at the moment, maybe a Black Friday sale?). The Moto Mod keyboard is dead. The 'Q device' - not holding my breath on that arriving. The Gemini - well, it's not a phone, is it - form factor is a bit too large to pick up and put down, and it's fecking expensive.

If the Key2 gets close to £400 I'll probably go for it, which still rankles as the screen is smaller than the Priv, and there's only two years of guaranteed security updates at that point.. I'm not going for an LE, as the swiping functionality in the keyboard is very useful.

Shift-work: Keyboards heaped in a field push North Yorks council's fly-tipping buttons

Not surprising

There was quite a decent programme on Radio 4 last Sunday about waste crime. It's easy to look legit and provide the relevant paperwork, then just dump the waste in the countryside.

Should be able to at least trace the origin of the keyboards as there is the colour coded one there. The disposal company have probably long gone..

Memo to Microsoft: Windows 10 is broken, and the fixes can't wait

Re: MS-DOS was terrific

MSDOS crashed and spontaneously rebooted, usually due to weird combinations of TSRs, other drivers, and hardware issues such as IRQ conflicts.

Let's not romance the past. A basic DOS system only reading and writing to a disk and using standard VGA is pretty easy to get working. Problem is, everyone wanted printer drivers, networking, accelerated graphics, in short - a protected memory multitasking operating system.

Re: "Quality" is a structural attribute, not a bolt-on

You're not wrong, but the problem is definition vs usage.

It's like 'loose' and 'lose' or 'less' and 'fewer' in English. There are differences, they are defined, but if people continually use the words incorrectly they become accepted usage.

Continual abuse of the Agile philosophy is making it toxic. As the unit tests are generally written by developers, there's far too much scope for taking shortcuts. At least a more classical development model formalises a specification and testing. Yes, it still frequently goes awry, but if the specification is incomplete it's obvious, and if the QA are reduced, there's no 'agile' excuse to hide behind.

DOS was mostly reliable, although DOS 4.01 used too much memory, and the shell was useless. That's 'reliable provided you only want to run one program without TSRs', obviously. The problem was that most people did want to add networking and other devices, and then there was insufficient memory left over to run your app.. I don't miss those days, although installing DOS on a modern system is far less painful due to the availability of packet drivers and CD/mouse/peripheral drivers that use minimal amounts of memory.

Otherwise, NT 3.51 was really solid. I'm trying to remember which version of NT had a disk corruption bug on release that was fixed *very* quickly with a service pack, and think it was 4.0 - but I might be wrong.

2000 was pretty decent too, solid, added USB, and modern DirectX was useful (if not for servers).

To be fair to Microsoft, they've mostly fixed Windows over time. NT4 was great after SP3. XP was great after SP2. Vista wasn't perfect, but SP2 fixed a lot. W7 was fine after SP1. Can't remember about 8. 10 has been a bit annoying at work but mostly alright, hibernation issues were fixed in Fall Creators Update. At home the sodding thing claims my graphics cards are broken - they work fine under 8, provided I don't update NVidia drivers beyond a certain release.

The problem here is that 10 isn't given the chance to bed down. For operating systems with a huge amount of backwards compatibility such as this, I'm not in favour of regular updates.

Mac users burned after Nuance drops Dragon speech to text software

Re: Hc Sunt Dracones (AND Windows)

I don't want to be an unsympathetic dick here, Stuart, but DNS development has to be paid for somehow. It's clearly difficult to do (otherwise there'd be FLOSS solutions), and the Mac market isn't large enough for them to work around Apple's lack of co-operation, so I'd guess they're not exactly rolling in cash.

If it wasn't DNS, the only way to get a FLOSS solution would be, again, to pay for it.

Also, vim is clearly better..

The D in Systemd stands for 'Dammmmit!' A nasty DHCPv6 packet can pwn a vulnerable Linux box

Dual boot Windows/Linux? Piece of piss.

Install Windows first. Partition disk so that it has a minimum of two spare partitions for Linux and Linux Swap, or a number more if you want to separate out /var /opt /tmp /usr and /home.

Boot Linux, change the partition ids, install GRUB or GRUB-efi at the end, then add in the Windows partition to the installer. LILO is pretty easy to get working too, but if you're running Salix be warned it always installs it on the first hard drive which may not be what you want..

Alternatively, you can do this the other way by setting up a boot menu in Windows - EasyBCD is the simplest method, but the Windows 10 boot menu is rather shite, and basically consists of booting most of Windows before choosing the OS to boot.

Should a robo-car run over a kid or a grandad? Healthy or ill person? Let's get millions of folks to decide for AI...

What a load of rubbish

Looking at the example 'an autonomous vehicle experiences a sudden brake failure' - no, no it doesn't. The autonomous vehicle detects the error when started and refuses to drive. If it happens whilst driving, it uses engine braking to come to a stop.

Neither would the car be going fast enough to kill all the passengers, even if the pedestrians were crossing when they shouldn't. National limit roads do not have pedestrian crossings.. (yes, I have seen people crossing motorways on foot, if they get hit it's Darwin in action).

Real life crashes will be a lot more chaotic.

I refuse to believe humanity would selflessly sacrifice itself in the event of imminent death. Sound the horn, drop gears, the car has already stopped accelerating, and the pedestrians will most probably get out of the way.

Apple to dump Intel CPUs from Macs for Arm – yup, the rumor that just won't die is back

Re: Rosetta-a-like is absolutely necessary

You're assuming Xcode is being used to develop all applications, rather than a cross platform build system - which would be far more sensible. Processor specific optimisations are also used in a number of cases, and it's always possible there is other code that assumes PC architecture (support chipsets on ARM are usually different).

At least ARM can run in little endian mode.

UK.gov to press ahead with online smut checks (but expects £10m in legals in year 1)

Rebrand and extend the site offerings

I'm sure that one of the adult performers moved on to selling their own range of kitchen equipment, or cooking, but googling for it is tending to produce misleading results..

Simply ramp up the number of recipes to 67% of the site, problem solved. No-one will believe you that you're reading it 'for the recipes' but at least it won't be blocked.

Leaked memo: No internet until you clean your bathroom, Ecuador told Julian Assange

I feel terribly sorry for them

Trapped with all the attention of the world on you, unable to leave or visit outside properly, with irritating room mates.

Mittens needs to be freed!

It should be the other way around. If Assange can't care for the cat, the cat should stay in the embassy, and Assange should leave.